feeling listless

Nostalgia Sometimes you find something and you don't really know where to begin. A few weeks ago, you may remember I reminded you of Zzap! 64. Well, something else from my past has just jumped up and bit me on the botty. OINK! was a racier version of IPC stablemates Buster and Whizzer and Chips (a reaction to The Dandy and The Beano) -- it was a sort of nursery comic for future Viz readers, cleaner but with a slightly more scattological agenda. Which is interesting because many of the people who worked on it eventually ended up at Private Eye, Viz and The Guardian. Charlie Brooker was an artist on it.

So we had Pete's Pimple, Combat Colin, Tom Thug, Nice-man (a nancy version of He-man) and the spoofs of the kind of photo stories which would turn up in teen mags and the original Eagle revival (remember 'The Collector'?). Suddenly I find that Not BBC have been posting each issue online in sequence over a number of weeks. Reading back through the stories, I can see what attracted me -- the creators took the conventions of the single character one sheet and twisted them slightly. In this strip for example, Tom Thug is the protagonist even tough he's the school bully -- the one who would pick on the kids at Buster's school. And whereas there the baddie would be bested by the hero, here he is overcome by his own stupidity. It's not actually that funny, but in some ways you wonder if that was ever the point ... for people who are grinning wildly now, here is a list of links to related sites, Lemon, were you can download and play the official computer game, and Gruntster giving access to the songs from the flexi-disc which came with Issue One, in Mp3 format. Some of Frank Sidebottom's best work.