Specky Hector, Comics Collector had been a character I'd created for one or two issues of Oink! so I thought I'd revive him for Buster. I suggested the idea of a History of Comics feature to the editor Allen Cummings and he approved it. Basically I wanted to give the young Buster readers some awareness of the rich history of British comics, presented in a fun way. I hope it worked.
As Buster was a Fleetway comic, the series focused heavily on the comics the company owned of course, but I was still allowed to briefly mention some of the rival comics, such as Warlord, for their importance in comics history.
I wrote, drew, designed, lettered, sourced all the reference material, and even coloured all the History of Comics pages. This was back in the pre-Photoshop days when flat colouring like this was physically done on acetate overlays; one overlay each for Cyan, Yellow, and Magenta, with the original art being the Black "layer". Plus all the panels from old comics had to be photocopied and literally cut and pasted onto the page... and if by magic, Tom Thug met Hookjaw in an official Fleetway comic!
I'm just showing one of the chapters here today, in case Rebellion (hopefully) reprint the whole series one day. Specky Hector will in fact return, in a colourised remastered reprint of one of his mini-strips, in one of the specials from Rebellion this year!
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Funnily enough Lew I’ve always thought that the Specky Hector strips would make a great volume combined with archive material - particularly the one page funnies. Treasury of British Comics - are you listening? I still wish I’d grabbed the page that was up on EBay a few years ago.
ReplyDeleteThat's not a bad idea, Christopher. It would be nice to see some really old archive stuff back in print in a collection selecting strips from the 1890s to the present. I'm sure David Roach's upcoming book Masters of British Comic Art will have a good selection though so that's a start.
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