One of the Oink! covers I drew/designed featuring Tom Thug. I was always sure to make Tom look foolish in his attempts to be threatening. That was the whole point of the character of course; he's 100% the bad guy, never a hero. A character for kids to laugh AT, not with. In real life bullies often get away with it unfortunately, but I wanted to create a strip where the villain got his just deserts every week. My hope was that it'd provide some catharsis for readers who were victims of bullying; a chance to laugh at the morons who commit such cowardly deeds. Tom Thug proved to be very popular in Oink! and in Buster so maybe it worked. The strip ran for ten years and another four years as a reprint.
Would the strip work today? I dunno. Schools clamp down on bullying quicker now so there'd be less potential to tell such stories. Publishers also get a bit nervous now of showing characters being too aggressive, or the consequences of the violence backfiring on kids. Strips would often end with Tom looking bruised and battered, purple lumps protruding from his head (a visual exaggeration I'd taken from Ken Reid's work) but it might not be acceptable in a kids' comic today.
Who knows? As far as I know there's no sign of Tom Thug ever returning. If Rebellion did bring him back I hope I'd be given first refusal to write and draw new stories considering I created him. Perhaps we could do it for older readers, with Tom aged up, as was the scenario in the last few issues of Oink! before it merged into Buster and Tom reverted to a schoolboy again. Time will tell, but at the moment it's all speculation.
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