Kid Crusaders and Eco Kids were done back in 1995 for Spit 'n' Spat's TVC which was a comic put together by cartoonist Joe Matthews with the hope of gaining the interest of one of Britain's mainstream publishers. Several other artists were also involved and a packed 32 page dummy issue was produced. The theme of the comic basically being two aliens Spit and Spat observing the strips on their TV giving the impression of a children's TV schedule. Unfortunately none of the publishers were interested as they preferred to focus on licensed properties with a built in recognition factor. (The truth is that if original characters are strong enough they can be developed for other media anyway - as The Beano now does with its characters - but that takes time and on the whole publishers tend to prefer to buy into an existing property these days.)
So.... TVC was never published beyond the dummy issue shown to potential clients. A great shame. Anyway 18 years later here's your chance to see the strips I did for it. I'd even forgotten about these myself until Joe Matthews put them on Facebook last week. I did the artwork but I'm not sure about the scripts. Some bits 'sound' like my writing but I think I was either working from a plot Joe supplied or I was allowed to alter bits of his script. At any rate Joe definitely created the concepts character names and names of the strips. Apart from references to Pogs and the like I think they still stand up pretty well. I hope you enjoy them!
My thanks to Joe for sending me these scans (as I've mislaid my copy of the comic). You can follow Joe Matthews on Twitter.
Wow, another comic about Pogs!
ReplyDeleteSo along with that one from Pro Slammer magazine, I'm now wondering how many other comics featuring Pogs are out there. I know Dennis never had any, the Bash Street Kids might've at some point though. Betting that Buster would've had a go as well.
I was too old for the Pogs fad but I'm guessing you were into them? I don't recall them being used in other strips but I didn't see everything so they may have.
DeleteA bit of an understatement to say I was "into" them - they were my LIFE, ho ho! Still got thousands of the things now, all organized into folders and everything.
ReplyDeleteDestroyed a Dandy annual once by cutting it up to make my own Dandy Pogs too, that was fun. Follies of youth and all that.
thinking about Pogs since they are pretty old-ish.. I think even the name 'POG' dates to about the 20s? 30s maybe? but it seamed to have been based on older games.. but since they game back into fashion in the late 80s, till early 2000s, they will probably be back in fashion again in.. 10 maybe 20 years? So I don't really think the term is very dated ^_^
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