Old sweeties

[Sergio Mendacious]

Don't know if anyone would be interested, but if you order £20+ of old tuffees from A Quarter of, you get a free reprint of the first ever issue of Whizzer and Chips — I'm definitely getting this, talk about an opportunity for (some genuine, and some spurious) nostalgia!

[Scott Malbranque]

Whizzer and Chips, Buster and Oink!
Staples of my youth! I'm in!

I was only looking at my Buster 1991 Annual a couple weeks back. It wasn't Christmas without a Buster or Whizzer and Chips annual.

Die Hard took their place as I became more aged though

[Sergio Mendacious]

i was reading about the last issue of Buster, and it sounds proper depressing, with the final page revealing the outcomes of many of the stories — It's like the Dandy ending with Desperate Dan getting botulism from all of those manky pies, Bully Beef doing Chips up the arse, and Corky the Cat having a roman candle tied to his tail by Winker Watson :

 

 

• Benny Bones of Lazy Bones tells the doctor that he is suffering from insomnia.
• Joker reveals that his real name is Jeremy Beadle.
• Chalky is arrested for vandalism.
• Captain Crucial has a bad hair day.
• Odd Ball bursts because he hides inside a thorn bush.
• Sweet Tooth suffers from tooth decay because of all the sweets he's eaten.
• Tom Thug now possesses great intelligence because he has passed an exam with flying colours, much to his disappointment.
• Bernie Banks of Memory Banks dies because he forgets to keep breathing.
• Junior Rotter becomes the Prime Minister.
• Tony Broke is happy because his parents have won 90 squillion pounds on the National Lottery, making Tony and his family mega-rich. Ivor Lott has broken down in tears because his father has lost all of his money investing in the Buster comic, making Ivor and his family very poor. Thus, Ivor Lott and Tony Broke have swapped places, with Tony being rich and Ivor being poor.
• Melvyn of Melvyn's Mirror breaks the mirror, resulting in seven years' bad luck, but in Mirrorland, it's the opposite (seven years' good luck), but unfortunately, it also means that Melvyn will never see his family again and will be stuck in Mirrorland forever.
• Bobby of Bobby's Ghoul has grown old, so his ghoul-friend (who never ages because she is a ghost) breaks up with him.
• Watford Gapp can't think of a word rhyming with "oblige", so he cannot finish his poem.
• Fuss Pot is too fussy to appear in the comic.
• Ray of X-Ray Specs has his specs taken back by I.Squint, the optician because he says that he only lent Ray the specs in 1975, and that he couldn't keep them.
• Jon and Suzy of Double Trouble have started to like each other. Also Sweeny Toddler says that he is going to like everyone from now on.
• Buster takes off his cap to reveal a Dennis the Menace-style haircut.
• The Millennium Bug affects Vid Kid's remote, resulting in the entire universe being turned off.

[Scott Malbranque]

The Fuss Pot one is either sheer laziness or sheer brilliance!

I want to know what happened to Faceache!

[Sergio Mendacious]

The Fuss Pot one is either sheer laziness or sheer brilliance!

I want to know what happened to Faceache!

 

I'd forgotten about Faceache, but I got these gems from his wikipedia:

 

"Reid continued drawing Faceache until his death in early 1987" — so, Faceache died, due to a dangling participle.

 

Or:

 

 "Adult Faceache appears in the 2005 comic Albion, as one of a number of comic book characters who have been imprisoned by the British government."

 

That's fucking weird.

[freaky]

I donated about 6 Buster annuals and a few years of the comics to a friend's son a couple of months ago - they had spent around a decade under my grandparents' bed as part of an extended storage.  He's too young to read them by himself but he's enjoying looking at the pictures and having the stories read to him.

[Scott Malbranque]

Alan Moore managed to squeeze The Ache into a comic? I'm going to buy Albion now on Ebay!
 

 

Faceache, Frederick Akeley has the ability to change or "scrunge" his face and body into a vast variety of different forms, many quite monstrous in appearance. He is a trustee in the prison and does impressions of Bruce Forsyth for the guards. He is dating Martha of the Monster Make-Up.

I'll take that over his dying any day, Billy.

 

Slowcoach was great too.
Actually, looking at it, saying “Slowcoach did not appear in the final comic due to him being late” would have been better than Fuss Pot being a trite fussy.

[Sergio Mendacious]

Ever read any of the Moore Captain Britain stuff? He managed to get the likes of Robot Archie in there (and in Albion — he's obsessed!)

[Devon Malcolm]

I was a Whizz-Kid. I loved Whizzer & Chips, it was a great idea for a comic. I collected them all, including the miniature monthly ones that the Beano used to put out as well.

 

I didn't read half of them though. Too busy playing on the C64.

[Sergio Mendacious]

I was mental for Oink! — what a comic that was, in my probably-way off memory.

[Devon Malcolm]

I knew I was going to like Oink! when they used the word 'pillock' in their first issue.

[Surf Digby]

Oink! came out not long after I was told by my Dad that "pillock" was technically swearing, and so wasn't to be said. Thus Oink! became even more daring and anarchic.

 

Somewhere I still have the holiday special, with a really well drawn Ham Dare strip running through it, and The Pop-up Toaster of Doom.

[Thunderplex]

The main 3 were the IPC titles, Whizzer and Chips, Buster and Whoopee. Others appeared, but after a year or so would get merged into one of the main titles (eg Buster and Monster Fun' Whoopee and Cheeky). After a month or so, the lesser titles name would get smaller and smaller on the cover until it disappeared.

[Devon Malcolm]

I think the full line-up of comics I used to get on a weekly basis were:-

 

Beano

Dandy

Topper

Beezer

Whizzer & Chips

Buster

Oink!

 

I also used to get the occasional Action Man, Roy Of The Rovers and 2000AD. Plus Fun Size Beano and Dandy when they came out, and all the annuals at Christmas.

 

Then in 1990 my mum took them all to the tip when I was at school because she said they were a fire hazard.

[Surf Digby]

I was never a regular comic reader. Like with everything else, my short attention span meant I'd go through phases with various titles.

 

The earliest was definitely The Beano. For some reason, I developed a WWF vs WCW mentality almost immediately and wouldn't read the Dandy or Topper.

I had a resurgence when the massively underrated Calamity James was introduced.

 

After that was probably Battle: Action Force, which for a considerable while I was too thick to realise was two separate comics combined. This led to a brief phase of pretending I was Dutch and calling people "mynheer".

 

The first/preview issue of Oink! came free with something, if I remember correctly. Whatever it came with was bought for us to read on the journey to wherever we were going on holiday. The first issue proper came with a flexi-disk (for all you youngsters, that was the equivalent of a free mp3 download), with "Poo poo tinkle tinkle parp parp Oink!" and "The Oink! Rap" on it.

 

My first forays into Marvel were through the Zoids collected comics, and then the Spiderman and Zoids combo. Due to the wonders of the internet, I finally finished reading the Zoids story about two years ago.