welcome and enjoy!

Hi and welcome to my blog about comics from other people’s childhood! It is dedicated primarily to British humour comics of the 60s and 70s. The reason they are not from my childhood is simply because I didn’t live in the UK back then (nor do I live there now). I knew next to nothing about them until fairly recently but since then I’ve developed a strong liking for the medium and amassed a large collection, including a number of complete or near complete sets. My intention is to use this blog as a channel for sharing my humble knowledge about different titles, favourite characters and creators as I slowly research my collection.

QUICK TIP: this blog is a sequence of posts covering one particular comic at a time. The sequence follows a certain logic, so for maximum results it is recommended that the blog is read from the oldest post up.

Copyright of all images and quotations used here is with their respective owners. Any such copyrighted material is used exclusively for educational purposes and will be removed at first notice. All other text copyright Irmantas P.



Saturday, April 20, 2013

A LOOK AT SHIVER & SHAKE STRIPS: LOLLY POP


The first inside pages of SHAKE section were reserved for Lolly Pop, a strip named after one of the two main characters – billionaire owner of countless factories and businesses of all kinds, forever anxious to make more ‘brass’. Pop was the perfect miser and penny-pincher as far as other people were concerned and he’d never spare a penny for the modest needs of his lad Archie. Judging by his own words, Pop had lived a rough childhood of deprivation and was reluctant to share his wealth with anyone, not even his son.


Weekly episodes usually followed the same basic pattern: Archie would ask Lolly Pop to buy him something he desperately needed (like a pair of new shoes so that he could go to a friend’s party because his old pair leaked) but skinflint Pop would refuse, telling him that he’d never had the luxury when he was a lad. Archie would then try to do without the goods or secretly help himself to tiny bits of Pop’s wealth but would inevitably find himself in situations that resulted in disproportionate damages to Pop. The damages could have been easily avoided, had the meanie forked out at the very start. In the end Pop usually bought Archie a lot more than he had initially asked for, in hope to avoid trouble in the future.






Archie never caused trouble deliberately: he was kind of jinxed with bad luck and could always be trusted to accidentally pull the wrong lever that put factory machinery in some crazy mode, etc. Pop didn’t take long to realize that allowing Archie to set foot in any of his factories and business premises was a sure recipe to disaster. Therefore he tried to prevent Archie from getting anywhere near by using alarms, hiring private detectives and even the army to keep the lad away. Since his precautions usually led to nothing, more and more weekly episodes ended with enraged Pop’s attempts to get physical on Archie.

 
































As can be seen from the three examples shown above, Lolly Pop was illustrated by as many as three different artists. Reg Parlett (although initially I assumed it was Arthur Martin but the comments below and some further research confirmed I was mistaken), Robert Nixon and Sid Burgon took turns drawing the strip for nearly a year until issue 43 that marked the point from which Sid Burgon took over as the sole illustrator (except for one occasion when he was ghosted by someone else in issue 62). Among the things that I like about Sid Burgon’s Lolly Pop are the large detailed panels depicting the catastrophic effects of Archie’s meddling. They became an attribute of the strip later on in WHOOPEE! but some early examples can also be found in SHIVER AND SHAKE:


Lolly Pop belonged to the category of class warfare strips that were so common in IPC comics of the 70s. The feature occupied the first two inside pages of SHAKE section (except in issues 53-56 when the regular order was upset by Frankie Stein Mini pull-out booklet and Lolly Pop suddenly found itself in SHIVER section towards the end of the paper), so presumably the editors had high expectations for the strip. They proved to be correct: Lolly Pop continued throughout the run of SHIVER AND SHAKE and migrated to the combined WHOOPEE! AND SHIVER & SHAKE where it appeared regularly until 1985 when WHOOPEE was absorbed by WHIZZER AND CHIPS which then became its third home, although I don’t know for how long.

I will sign off with a couple of oddities from the SHIVER AND SHAKE run of Lolly Pop. The lovely set from issue 71 is unusual because Archie proves to have inherited some of Pop’s entrepreneurial skills: 





... while the fragment with the rude finger from SHIVER AND SHAKE issue 47 speaks for itself:

8 comments:

  1. The title banner was drawn by Reg Parlett - so he didn't draw any of the actual strips?

    Dick Millington took over from Sid in 1983 when Wow joined up with Whoopee. The theme changed, as Mr Braithwaite, whose name I had never seen in the strip had given up being a businessman and just hoarded his money - he obviously decided to cut his losses!

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    1. I'm afraid I am not really good at distinguishing Reg Parlett's style from that of his imitators in the 70s but to my eye both the logo and the strips look as if they aren't by Reg...

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  2. Reg did draw some Lolly Pop he drew the first one for example...its in the comic art of Reg parlett book with the first pages as an example..maybe you could put it up..

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    1. I seem to be suffering from Reg Parlet's artwork blindness - I just can't tell him from his imitators during that period... I will check that book tomorrow.

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  3. The Art of Reg Parlett indeed confirms that the first episode was by Reg. The index of his work in the Winter 1979 issue of Golden Fun also says he drew Lolly Pop in 1973, so perhaps it wasn't Arthur Martin but Reg all along, including the episode that I have shown on the blogpost?..

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  4. Yes the first one is by Reg...change the label of Arthur Martin to Reg Parlett on this post..

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    1. What about the later episodes? The one I have shown, for example? Is it Parlett's or Martin's work?

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  5. I mean't to write the first picture shown on your blog is by Reg Parlett..

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