I definitely need to update this blog more. It's only a few blog posts ago that I last read something good on Ludicrously Niche and had to chip in with a comic from my own collection, and it starts to look like that's all I do here. But he's talking about Puss and Boots, and I felt I just had to share this. There are a few Sparky Books I've owned since time immemorial - the ones dated 1976, 1977 and 1978. And the 1978 one (which I think might have been the first one I read, though it was so long ago I'm not sure why I think that) contains an all-time favourite comic adventure of that cat-and-dog duo!
Yes, it's not in mint condition. Like all good comics, it's been read a lot over the years. It's a little strange that the cover focuses on Ali's Baba, but the Sparky books of the seventies rotated their cover stars, and just crammed a few extras into the margins. Peering through the kitchen window here, we've got Throgmorton, Babbymummy, Superwitch, Peter Piper, and just barely visible at the edge of the window there's Boots. I wonder what he's done with Puss. Anyway, one of their stories inside is the all-time classic...
You see, the thing about Puss an' Boots is that they don't just fight like cat and dog. They fight like cartoon characters who know they're indestructible, and they revel in it! A quiet start like this is always going to escalate quickly...
The distinctly proletarian dialogue was a real treat, too. For someone whose main comic of choice was the Beano, where everyone's just that little bit more middle-class, this was like a glimpse into a different world! I also love the way one of Tich's friends has a much more advanced vocabulary than the others. Tich communicates solely by means of the word "baggle".
Over the years, I've acquired a few more Sparky Books, including what was apparently the last one, dated 1980.
The choice of characters is interesting, too. Notably, Thingummy Blob and the Prof are sitting on top of the S, but they don't have a story inside the book. Mr Ackroyd (the short-sighted silly-billy) takes up a lot of the interior pages, but he doesn't get a look-in on the cover. And Baron von Reichs-Pudding (the flying hun from world war one) is shooting a machine gun at Mr Bubbles, which seems a bit drastic.
But this annual does have a new four-page Puss and Boots, and four old one-page adventures too:
Cartoon violence is definitely the best kind.
1 comment:
I think I mentioned this before, but owing to how far in advance the annuals were put together, the Sparky Book 1979 was probably being worked on around the time the weekly comic was being wound up and the people working on it may well have expected it to be the title's last hurrah. The 1980 book was indeed the last, although the 1981 Topper book was branded (I think uniquely) the joint "Topper and Sparky Book", so maybe the Sparky name was still considered to have some selling power.
Geering was a very difficult artist to ghost-draw, which might account for why Boots is only partially visible on the cover of the 1978 book, although there's a We Are the Sparky People strip guest-starring Puss and Boots where Jim Petrie makes a pretty good fist of it.
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