Thursday, March 7, 2013

Crackers Issue Two


I'll take a short break from the series of Buster front covers and instead cover the second issue of Crackers (I covered issue one here). There's no point in me showing the text stories as when I take a photo of them the words are too small to read, so for this post I'll focus on the comic strips. The first comic strip to appear is on the very bright front cover - Artful Aubrey. I'm not sure of the artist, but I do recognise the style. At first I thought it might be Tiger Tim's artist because of the parrot, Julius Stafford-Baker, but comparing the two styles they just don't seem the same. Does anybody know who did draw it?


Most of the comic strips appear on the centre spread, you can find five there in total. The first is Sammy Smiles in fun at Folly Farm.


Sitting next door is Monty Mixup and His Happy Outlaws. I have no idea how the salesman didn't notice his watches hanging right in front of him, but a story's a story!


Next up is Wopsy and Popsy in Lively Larks Out Of School.


And the remaining two are Winkle and Binkle The Jolly Boys of Tophole College and Sunny Jim and Jolly Jeff The Merry Zoo Boys. All the titles these strips are given are way too long and wouldn't stick in mind like Dennis the Menace does.



There are two adventure strips, both of which are quite well drawn. The first is Trooper Tex on the Lone Trail...



...followed by The Call From The Wild!



The final strip appeared on the back page, and went by the name of Tubby and Trot, with the subtitle "Tramping The World for Fun!" As I said last time I covered Crackers, this was catching in on the popular fat and thin tramp theme started in Chips, with Weary Willy and Tired Tim.


If you're interested, Bruce Laing has covered a few pages from a later issue of Crackers over on his blog:


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