The Case of the Kidnapped Celebrities

Oink! was an excellent comic. For the readers it offered a refreshing change from the relatively rigid formula of other comics of the time, and was wildly unpredictable. For those of us who were lucky enough to contribute to it, the comic gave us the opportunity to develop our abilities and at the same time have a great deal of fun with its flexible format of varying themes and one-off stories. 

One of those one-off strips was The Case of the Kidnapped Celebrities which I scripted and Mike Higgs illustrated. I'd been a big fan of Mike's The Cloak in Pow! in the late sixties, and was fortunate to become his assistant for a year or so in the 1980s. Mike had left children's comics for a while because he'd refused to conform to the restrictive formula of the IPC weeklies of the 1970s. He'd been constantly busy though, producing numerous children's books, commercial illustrations, and his Moonbird newspaper strip for his local paper and abroad. 

Mike liked Oink! because it was fresher than its contemporaries. I felt it was high time Mike's talents were seen in British comics again so I suggested to him that we could collaborate for the comic. We worked on a few strips that were published, and I think Mike did a few of his own things for it too. (This later led to him drawing Thundercap for Buster in the 1990s.) 

Anyway, here's one of the strips we did. The Case of the Kidnapped Celebrities was good fun to write, and Mike did a fantastic job on the artwork in his own distinctive style. Even Mike's lettering is great!

This strip is from Oink! No.34, dated 8th to 21st August 1987. If you'd like to see a few other pages from this issue, head over to Phil Boyce's fantastic Oink! Blog now!