My apologies to those of you I was hoping to catch up with this weekend. Hopefully I'll get this sorted and will be active again this summer. I hope that those of you who are attending the Blackpool con will have a great weekend. Sonia Leong, Tim Quinn and Adrian Salmon will be there so check out their tables and say hello to them.
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Oink is back... but probably not the one you were expecting!
I'm very pleased to hear the Stingray Blu-Ray boxset from Network is finally out and I can now talk about the comic strip I did for the exclusive new official STINGRAY COMIC SPECIAL that's one of the extras in the set! I was commissioned to write/draw a new page featuring Oink the Seal, a comedy character that appeared in a couple of the TV episodes back in the 1960s. It's just a one-off but it was an absolute pleasure to do as Stingray was a favourite show of mine when I was a child (and it's still an impressive show even today).
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| Cover art by Steve Kyte. |
There were a couple of Oink the Seal strips in a TV21 Stingray Special back in 1965 drawn by the marvellous George Parlett but I doubt he was given appropriate photo reference as he drew Oink as a standard seal, not the distinctive furry puppet as seen on TV. I've attempted to make Oink look more like his television version.
My Oink the Seal page is just a part of the 32 page Stingray Comic Special and you can read more about the comic and the impressive box set over at John Freeman's Down The Tubes blog at this link: https://downthetubes.net/stingray-stingray-a-new-comic-part-of-upcoming-network-blu-ray-release
I don't know how many issues of the Beano I've contributed to now but I've done various strips for the comic since 2008 or so including Super School, Rasher, Ivy the Terrible, Joe King, Lord Snooty, and a revival of The Beano's original cover star from 1938, Big Eggo.
I've certainly not been a contributor as long as David Sutherland though, who's been drawing The Bash Street Kids since 1962! However, I enjoy writing/drawing their canine equivalents in Pup Parade! This is the fourth series with the Bash Street Dogs that I've worked on. They're always fun to do and I'm currently working on the strips for early July.
Here's a link to an old post I wrote about conventions...
https://lewstringercomics.blogspot.com/2020/09/conventions-of-past.html
Here's an enlargement of a very small part of my next Daft Dimension comic strip. If I show too much it could give away the joke (or worse, inspire you to anticipate a funnier joke and then you'd be disappointed. :))
The full version can be seen in Doctor Who Magazine No.577, in shops this Thursday, 28th April!
Here's a sneak preview of a bit of next week's Pup Parade strip. You can see the full version in Beano No.4133 when it goes on sale on Wednesday 27th April. (Or if you're a subscriber you may already have it!)
Want to hear a little bit of background information on this strip? When I was drawing it, I wasn't happy with the second panel. For one thing Bones' face wasn't quite right, but mainly I felt that the composition looked too similar to panel 1. A comic strip should have variety, using different angles and close ups once the setting is established, so I stopped part way through inking it...
...and drew a different panel on another sheet of paper. I felt this one worked much better, focusing on the character who was speaking (Blotty) and the close up brought the readers more into the action. It also provided the much-needed variety for the strip's layout as a whole.
Happy with that, I scanned the panels into Photoshop and assembled them to replace the unfinished panel. (The ball was also a separate illustration that I added afterwards.) Solid blacks and colouring were done with Photoshop too. (Speech balloons would be added by the Beano designers, based on my script.)
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Changing panels isn't something I do that often but it does happen from time to time. As comics creators we're our own biggest critics, and these are the sort of changes we make before we send the job to the editors. Usually no one in the world sees these amendments but I thought I'd share this one with you. One of the key elements of comics is to keep them lively and entertaining (and funny if they're humour strips) so tweaking bits here and there is all part of the job.
Toxic's I-Spy was not related in any way to the Sparky's I-Spy of course (although I did draw that too, for one issue of Fun-Size Dandy). The I-Spy spreads in Toxic were busy crowd scenes and the readers had to find various characters or items hidden in the picture. The editors of Toxic would supply me with the idea (such as "make this one a football game") and tell me what should be hidden in the image, but the rest of it was up to me.
There was another remit though. As it was for Toxic magazine, I was required to put "gross humour" in there. Snot and farts etc, but I didn't go overboard with it unless asked to.
All of the examples here appeared in Toxic about ten years ago in 2012. In fact the Wrestling Ring one is from exactly ten years ago this week. (It came up in my Facebook memories today, which inspired me to write this post.) These are the images as I sent them, so they don't have the logos and list of things to spot that the designers on Toxic would add on before publication. (You'll have guessed that the less busy areas in the images are where logos and typeset would go.)
These spreads required a lot of work, sometimes to a short deadline, so I used a quicker, more shorthand style on the characters at times. Hopefully it worked OK.
I miss working for Toxic. Sixteeen years on a mag is a long time, and it followed straight on from previous work I'd done for Egmont / Fleetway / IPC going back to 1986! At one stage I was the only cartoonist they were still employing, but nothing lasts forever of course. A few years back the inevitable budget cuts axed my work for Egmont completely. Toxic is still going, but its "gross humour" and traditional style of comedy is gone, replaced by U.S. reprint such as the modern style Yogi Bear of all things!
It was good while it lasted though, and I'm focusing on artwork I'm currently doing rather than pining for the past, but I thought that followers of my blog might like to see some of these spreads from 2012. As always, click on the images to see them at full size. (Best viewed on a laptop or desktop.)
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| Pencil rough of the Wrestling one. Finished version below. |
