Cheeky Monkeys!

Twenty years ago in 2002, Toontastic Publishing launched Lucky Bag Comic. The novelty was that it was a comic bagged with gifts and sweets and you didn't know what you were getting until you opened the bag! 

Little were we to know it'd soon become the industry norm! It worked for Lucky Bag Comic because that was its USP but when everyone started doing it, the shelves just became a mess of bulky plastic bags.  

Anyway, back to 2002, and the 32 page Lucky Bag Comic featured all new content every issue by a variety of humour creators including Mark Bennington, Joe Matthews, Nigel Kitching and Ian Rimmer. Plus me! My contributions were The Horror Bags (a family of gormless monsters) and, for the eaerly issues, The Cheeky Monkeys! I didn't create the characters. I think they were the invention of the editors James Hill and Rob Sharp. They were fun to do.

Above is the Cheeky Monkeys strip from issue No.1. I think I wrote the script but I'm not sure. Someone else coloured and lettered it, but I definitely drew it. You might recognise the security guard. Yes, he bares a striking similarity to a grown up Tom Thug from Oink! and Buster. Could it be him? I couldn't possibly say, considering Toontastic don't own Tom Thug. :) Just a bit of fun to imagine that's one of the jobs Tom would do when he grew up. (Although any job of Tom Thug's would be short lived due to his incompetence.) 

I didn't do Cheeky Monkeys for long. Another artist took over after a few issues. I carried on with The Horror Bags for about 25 issues or so as I recall. I think the comic itself lasted about three years.  

You can read more about Lucky Bag Comic in this blog post of mine from a couple of years ago:

http://lewstringercomics.blogspot.com/2020/10/remembering-lucky-bag-comic.html

 

Remembering LUCKY BAG COMIC!

Lucky Bag Comic was pretty much the first of its kind, but its innovation is something that's resented by many people today. To explain, Lucky Bag Comic was launched in 2002 by Oldham-based company Toontastic Publishing. Its inventive gimmick was that it was a monthly 32 page full colour humour comic sealed within a plastic bag full of mystery gifts including toys and sweets. (The contents couldn't be seen because the bag featured artwork too.) "Lucky Bags" had been aound for decades of course, consisting of a closed bag of sweets, cards, and cheap toys, but Toontastic cleverly paired the idea with a comic too.

A bagged comic with gifts was a novelty 18 years ago when other comics featured gifts that were enclosed within the comic or cover-mounted with sticky tape. However it soon became commonplace with other publishers wanting to imitate the successful format. It's now resulted in the shelves being stuffed with bagged comics and "plastic tat" with magazines sliding untidily into a mess, obscuring each other and spilling onto the floor. The other huge disadvantage is that potential readers can't browse the comic before buying! This air of mystery worked for Lucky Bag Comic but it's not ideal for every title! Such bagged comics now mainly sell on the attraction of their "gifts" rather than the excitement of the reading matter. (Fortunately The Beano is very rarely bagged with gifts, instead selling on the strength of its content.)

Lucky Bag Comic did well initially. I think it ran for three years in all but I'm not sure because I quit after a couple of years but it was a fun title to work for. I was assigned to draw (and often write) the two page strip Horror Bags, - a team of monsters inspired by a range of crisps of the same name! Other contributors to the comic included Mark Bennington, Joe Matthews, Nigel Kitching, Paul Palmer and more.

The cover shown above was done in 2003 and is the only one I drew for the comic (although I did illustrate one of the plastic bags too, which I'll show when I find it). Editorial suggested I made it look like a torn cover showing the Horror Bags looking at a page inside, which was a nice effect.

Here's the final Horror Bags strip I did (script, art, colours) which appeared in issue 23 in 2004. (The comics didn't have cover dates so I can't be more specific.) I thought the "game over" panel was appropriate as I was leaving the comic. The artwork used for that panel was something I created using a landscape generation software called Bryce.

As Lucky Bag Comic was hidden within a bag every issue it's likely that a lot of you have never seen it before so I hope you found this post interesting!