On this day, 17 May 1986: Oink! — GREAT NEWS FOR ALL READERS!

May 17

May 17 On this day, 17 May 1986: Oink!

Cover artwork: Steve McGarry (royals), Ian Jackson (Mary Lighthouse)

Remember that blog post I put together last year, reviewing IPC comics’ obsequious celebration of the Di and Charles wedding? Trot forward just five years, and things were starting to pork up. Oink! comic was launched a year after the final issue of Whoopee! and at a time when the publisher’s traditional humour section had reduced to just two comics – Buster and Whizzer and Chips. Oink! captured the disquiet and dispirit of the age – inspired by Mad magazine, Viz and Spitting Image – and was raw, messy, iconoclastic and scatologic. It ran for two and a bit years (before being merged into Buster), and its creators included Mark Rodgers, Patrick Gallagher, Tony Husband, Charlie Brooker, Marc Riley, David Haldane, Malcolm Douglas, Banx, Tom Paterson, Ian Knox, John McCrea, The Beano’s Lew Stringer and Kev F Sutherland, and Viz’s Chris Donald and Davy Thorp.

The free gift in this second issue was a make-your-own badge sheet of letraset. I don’t have it, but you can see a picture of it and read so much more about this issue and the history of one of Britain’s most unique comics on Phil Boyce’s The Oink Blog.

Edit: a note from Phil Boyce on the Facebook entry for this post:

Thanks for the link! Great to see the comic still so fondly remembered. Interestingly, even though everywhere seems to describe Oink! as a "junior Viz" the creators have never cited it as an inspiration and today say it never was. Mad Magazine always was, as well as their own feelings about what they saw as a stagnated comics market of course. So kudos for mentioning Mad, not many do!