Once upon a time, long long ago, in 1991 to be precise, there was going to be a brand new Fleetway humour comic called Oh No!! A trial issue was printed, not for general release but for a select audience of kids. It tested very well with the target group, and it was all systems go for contributors to start work on the regular issue. Oh No!! was fresh, different, and funny, and we were sure it'd work.
Then things went wrong. Badly wrong. Like a divergence in the timeline type of wrong. Egmont took over the company and put a sudden halt to it. They preferred licenced titles connected to toys and TV shows, not all-new originated comics.
Those of us who were geared up to work on Oh No!! felt crushed. However, one of the important things about Oh No!! is that the strips would be creator-owned, not owned by the publisher.
Guess what I found amongst my old artwork recently? Two uncompleted pages of the strip I was going to do for Oh No!! No.1. Lance Boyle, Secret Agent!
The story is all pencilled and lettered. I just need to ink it. One of these days I'll find the time to do that, and this strip from 1992 will finally see print. Perhaps I'll use it as a back up in Combat Colin or in another self-published venture.
I did do a Lance Boyle strip for the back page of the Oh No!! trial issue (and you can see that here) but I felt that this two-pager was a better depiction of the character. I might actually change his name, as Lance Boyle sounds more like a doctor than a secret agent. We'll see. Interested in seeing the finished result one day? Let me know!
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Do you remember Lance Boyle, Secret Agent from the pages of Oh No!! comic? Probably not, because Oh No!! was cancelled before it was launched, with only a few copies making it to selected schools for test marketing purposes.
Oh No!! was the brainchild of cartoonists/writers Dave King and Ian Ellery, who wanted to produce a new style UK humour comic for kids. In 1991 they took the idea to Fleetway, who gave them the green light to produce a 'dummy' issue. I was one of the artists they contacted for a contribution and I created Lance Boyle, Secret Agent, - a sort of podgy James Bond but with the halfwit intelligence of Combat Colin. The full page strip ran on the back page of the 32 page dummy issue. I've mislaid my copy, but my thanks to 'Alfie Large' on the Comics UK forum for sending me a scan...
The last panel is chopped a bit here because the scan is slightly askew, but the punchline makes more sense if you know the dog has the villain's bum in his jaws.
Back in 1997, in my Combat Colin Summer Special, I wrote an article about Oh No!! and other comics that never made it beyond the dummy stage. Here it is. Click on the images to see them full size...
If you wish to see the rest of the Oh No!! issue zero, Alfie uploaded it at the Comic UK forum here:
http://www.comicsuk.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=5258&start=15
