philcom55 wrote:...I do think that last episode has a certain 'Stringeresque' quality to it though.
I wasn't, of course, suggesting that your own style was any less distinctive in its own right Lew - nor that you aren't capable of varying it depending on the subject matter.Lew Stringer wrote:...Thing is, IPC required a certain house style at the time, (to a certain extent anyway) so a lot of us have similar elements to our work in parts. I never based my style on Tom Williams' but both of us would have had the same influences.
I confess that I've been as critical as anyone of that homogenizing tendency in the look of IPC's post-1960s humour comics - particularly for the way in which it imposed limits on natural mavericks like Ken Reid. In spite of that, however, I have to admit that it did result in a house style that radiated an overwhelming impression of sheer happiness (something that was noticeably lacking in that grey era of three-day-weeks and power cuts!) - so much so that it was almost impossible to read some of their strips without developing an unconscious smile.
While it's dangerous to generalize in these matters (and there were plenty of exceptions) I do think that there was a recognizably different genealogy in the general house styles adopted by DC Thomson and IPC during that period - particularly in the depiction of children. Whereas Thomson specialized in a special kind of anarchistic juvenile malevolence that had its roots in the 1950s cartoons of Giles, via Law, Baxendale and Reid, it seems to me that IPC's kids more commonly expressed an air of exuberant joy that owed far more to the tradition of Reg Parlett and Roy Wilson. And while different readers may have preferred one style or the other I can't help feeling that they were immensely lucky to have the two to choose between!
- Phil Rushton
That said, his comics did convey a happiness and fresh faced joy, as you said. I was ten years old when Whizzer and Chips was launched, so I was moving out of the target age group when Cor!!, Whoopee, Monster Fun, etc came along. (I still read them though, until I left school in 1975 anyway.) So I couldn't appreciate them on the same level as its target readership but from what people who were the right age have said, those comics were obviously very dear to their hearts, so job done, Bob! 
