On this day in 1987, Oink! No.33 was published which was a personal milestone for me as it featured the first cover I'd done for a mainstream comic. A bit rough and ready but it suited the subject matter.
A few years ago I wrote an article on the process behind the cover so here it is again...
Back in 1987 I was commissioned to draw the cover to Oink! No.33 featuring my Tom Thug character. This was the first time I'd drawn a cover for a mainstream comic, so it felt quite a privilege.
As with any cover for a comic, the editor wanted to see a rough first, to make sure it had the impact they were looking for. You can see my pencil rough above, and all the notes and suggestions added in blue biro by editor Mark Rodgers. Mark wanted the cover to be less "Whizzery", a reference to the comparatively pedestrian humour of Whizzer and Chips, and suggested the kids piling out of school should be "less cute" and "more punky / revolting". Mark also suggested barbed wire on top of the school wall, and a squashed teacher behind the gate that Tom Thug kicks open.
Bearing Mark's notes in mind, I set to work producing the finished art, and here it is...
Now, you'll notice that there are a couple of blobs in the sky. This photo is of the art after it was returned to me. What happened was that the Oink! studios had a leaky roof and after a torrential downpour one day some of the artwork got soaked! My cover was one of the pages that was fortunately salvageable, as the water damage would be covered up by the logo and topline (which were added onto an acetate overlay as shown below)...
...and here's the final result in print, from 35 years ago today...
in retrospect my style was still developing and there's parts I'd do differently now (and I think Photoshop colouring would improve it) but I was very proud to see my first cover on the shelves of newsagents all those years ago.
Contributing to Oink! was a very happy and productive time for me and I was in every issue. At the same time I was also doing Robo-Capers in The Transformers and Combat Colin in Action Force. Life was good back then.
If you want to see a peek at some of the other contents for this issue, then hop over to Phil Boyce's OiNK! Blog where he's reviewed this comic today...
https://oink.blog/2022/07/25/oink-33-summer-thug-life/
9 comments:
Thanks for the plug Lew, I'll reciprocate of course. So the orange line across the top wasn't to salvage any of the water damage? I don't know where I picked that up from, maybe by mis-reading the original post of yours. My bad, if so I can fix that in my post.
Good stuff. Love it!
I'd already added the orange, Phil. Admittedly I didn't achieve the graduated orange to yellow gradient that I'd hoped for but fortunately the logo covered it up anyway. Yeah, the white areas were where the water hit the page. In effect they created a sort of cloud effect so I'm sure readers didn't notice anything amiss in 1987.
Thanks Peanut!
love seeing the different stages....funny not to be Whizzer and chippy!!
I never read Oink! Whizzer and Chips was the comic i bought from first to final issue. Love the Oink! cover though
"Less cute kids - more punky revolting. Barbed wire around top of wall ?"
Wow - I know it was the eighties, Pink Floyd's the Wall, Viz, Spitting Image etc. And menacing crowds of pupils were already a tradition since Giles or Baxendale. Still it takes some guts to bring it to such level ! Oink definitely seemed to be unusual. In a good way of course !
Hey Lew.
Thanks for the show and tell, it was very informative!
Personally, I prefer the hand-rendered colour of your page.
I picked up a copy of the Beano recently and found that the colour throughout the issue seemed very samey.
Not a dig, just an observation.
Have you ever looked at Painter or Art Rage?
I haven't seen that software, no. I enjoy Photoshop though. Regarding the Beano, we have to follow a style guide that instructs us on what CMYK to use as they want a uniform look throughout (as the characters interact and live in the same town). There is some leeway but on the whole they prefer a consistency through the comic.
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