Just to be fair

 Boots started it in both the big Puss and Boots stories I shared yesterday, so I thought there really should be one on here where the cat is the provocateur and gets his well-deserved comeuppance at the end of the tale. So here's an interesting one from the 1974 Sparky Book:

A full splash page with the title is something Puss and Boots seem to have often got. There are three others in this annual, one for I-Spy, one for the Kings of the Castle and one for the lengthy "Bushboy" story that takes up the last eight pages (all full-colour, too) of the book. A couple of others (Pansy Potter and the other Puss n Boots) have a big picture and two small panels beginning the story on the first page. I think it works best with this one - it doesn't feel like a waste of a page that could be used for more pictures, but an eye-catcher with still enough detail and reading to entertain the reader. That Boots wears braces with his football kit is brilliant.

The tongue-lolling enthusiasm of the first-aider is another high point. And see, this time it's Boots who's innocently going about his everyday business and Puss who torments him just for the fun of it!

I like the way Boots just carries on, still not expecting any more booby-traps.

You have to feel a bit sorry for Tich. The worst he's done to deserve that is a bit of pointing and laughing. Well might he say b-b-baggle!

And it's another Sparky crossover of sorts! Sir, the boss of the Sparky People and by implication the person in charge of this whole annual, intervenes to protect the readers' delicate sensibilities from the sight of the climactic duffing-up. Which is unusual - "We are the Sparky People" did supposedly represent the people who created all these stories, but they tended to live more in a world of their own. They also have a cat called Puss, but I don't think he's any relation to Tich's loving uncle.

Anyway, the most fascinating thing about the safety curtain there is that it's blue. Half of this Sparky Book's pages are full-colour, and the other half are duotone red, black and white. But this final Puss and Boots page and the title page, if not the middle two, are actually on the colour pages - they just use no colour other than red, except for the title and the curtain!

If it's a deliberate technique, it's very clever. It really reinforces the idea that Sir's interruption is on a different level of reality from the events of the comic story. The L-Cars story on the next three pages does something similar - it's all sepia-toned except for the sound effects lettering, which is very big, bold and all the colours of the rainbow! The story is about Frederic and Cedric driving the Inspector mad by making a lot of noise, and all the colours really make the point clearer. Someone at the Sparky was really doing creative things with the materials available!