Today in Comics History, January 13: Happy birthday, Suggs!

Happy birthday to one of my favorite musicians, that nutty boy Suggs (Graham McPherson), out of the British pop-ska group Madness! I bet 'round now you're saying, "Hey, Bully, Suggs never appeared in a comic book!"

YOU ARE WRONG.


cover of Look-In (1971 series) #3/1983 (ITV, 15 January 1983)
Look-In was a British companion magazine ("for young people") to TV shows that ran on the ITV commercial TV channel — only the third channel in the United Kingdom and its first commercial station (the fourth, the aptly named "Channel 4," premiered only a month or so before this magazine). It ran celebrity spotlights, pop star interviews and bios, comic strips and features on the stars and shows that they broadcast. Their "Madness" strip had been running about a year and a half by this point. Spring of 1983 was when my Pal John was studying in London for the semester, so he bought a lot of these (20p! Cheap!) including this very issue, but sadly lost them in one of his many moves before he adopted me. But I was able to find a few scans of one Madness strip online. Here's some excerpts.



from "It's Madness" in Look-In (1971 series) #5/1983 (ITV, 29 January 1983), script by Angus P. Allan, pencils and inks by Harry North
Sadly, the Madness strip was replaced by one about Bucks Fizz later in '83 (boo!), but there's at least one other place to find Madness Comix...within the pages of Nutty Boys, an official Madness fanzine that circulated for two issues in 1981.



from Nutty Boys: Madness Comix #1 (Madness Comix, 1981), creators unidentified
Learn all about those cheeky blokes of Madness! Say, Chas. Smash's birthday is tomorrow! Well, just read this post again.


And that's all of the Suggs I can find in comic books, 'less'n you count that one Ditko story where he was a low-down dirty yeller-bellied varmint in the Ollllllllld West.



from "Bonanza" in Outlaws of the West #81 (Charlton, May 1970), script by Joe Gill (?), pencils and inks by Steve Ditko, letters by Charlotte Jetter
Happy birthday, Suggs!