Tom Thug - on the scrapheap

Back in 1987 the fortnightly Oink! comic celebrated its first anniversary with issue 26, but how do you get nostalgic about a comic that's only a year old? I decided I'd go back a bit further, several decades in fact, and feature cameo appearances by a load of characters from classic comics of the previous 90 years.

This was published by IPC, but several years later the rights to IPC's characters were divided between them and Egmont. Not to mention Dan Dare being sold off elsewhere. Consequently these characters can never appear together in a comic again. 

The above scan is from Oink! No.26. Here's a close up taken from my original artwork. See how many characters you can identify:

Thankfully Tom's fears of ending up on the scrapheap of forgotten characters wouldn't come true for a long time after this was published. His strip ran for ten years, and another three years as a reprint, ending with the final issue of Buster at the very end of 1999.

(Click on the images to see them larger.)