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, June 29, 2013

TOM PATERSON'S CARTOON WORK IN SHIVER & SHAKE



The previous post on Grimly Feendish contained a number of examples of early work by Tom Paterson. In addition to the weekly strip about Grimly, Tom contributed illustrations to a few reader participation features, namely Cackles from the Cave, Mirth Shakers and Jokes section of Shake’s ‘editorial’ page. Since I am on the subject of Tom Paterson, it is a good excuse to say a few words about the features and show a few more examples of Tom’s early IPC work.

Cackles from the Cave started in the first issue of the paper as a half-pager in which Shiver promoted the reader participation features of his section and where some of readers’ jokes and other contributions were printed with illustrations by the paper’s artists. I am unsure about the name of the artist who was there from the first week (possibly Alf Saporito), and another one who joined in towards the end, but Tom Paterson started doing these illustrations from issue 24 (August 18, 1973), a few weeks before the appearance of his first Grimly Feendish set, and continued drawing them more or less regularly until the end of the paper’s run. This is the first installment of Cackles from the Cave with Tom's drawings:


Time for change came in the beginning of the 1974; in issue 48 (February 2, 1974) the feature was renamed Cackles Corner, but only for one week; starting from issue 49 and right up to the end of the run Cackles shared a page with Creations Runners Up, at first on a fifty-fifty basis, later as the dominant feature (in terms of space). Here are some examples:





The 'editorial’ page of SHAKE had as many as three columns crammed into it and jokes sent in by Shake fans was one of the elements. Some of them were text jokes, others were gag cartoons. Tom Paterson started drawing them in issue 25 (August 25, 1973) and continued pretty much regularly until the end:






Last but not least, Tom Paterson’s cartoons can be found in Mirth Shakers feature that appeared in full colour on the back cover of Shake section during 4 weeks in issues 28 to 31 (September 15 – October 6, 1973) and then in black and white from issue 63 (May 18, 1974) until the very end of the run. Here are some examples:






2 comments:

  1. Some of these examples (particularly the crime on television one) look like the work of the W&C Super Dad artist. Could it have been him, or was Tom imitating his style?

    Although I love Tom's imitation Bax, I was never too keen on his Buster and School Belle style, if I'm honest. Not sure why, but it just didn't ring my bell. (Awful pun.)

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    1. If I remember correctly, Super Dad was illustrated by Graham Allen and although the styles look a bit similar, I am positive that all the examples included in this post were by TP. It looks like his style was shaping itself very quickly in that period and he was under many influences then.

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