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!

366 Days with J. Jonah Jameson, Day 178: YOU ARE WRONG

Panel from Peter Parker: Spider-Man (1999 series) #36 (December 2001), script by Paul Jenkins, pencils by Staz Johnson, inks by Wayne Faucher, colors by Transparency Digital, letters by Richard Starkings

Let's take a moment to point out that YOU ARE WRONG.

Hey, guy calling David Mazzucchelli's artwork in Batman: Year One "atrocious...trash...****..."


From the letter column of Batman #408 (June 1987)

YOU ARE WRONG

Tom Jones (from Scotland, not the more famous Tom Jones from Wales) thinks the art of Bob Brown is better than Jack Kirby:


From the letter column of Challengers of the Unknown #36 (February-March 1964)

YOU ARE WRONG

Here's a reader who appears to think Cable>Doop.


From the letter column of X-Statix #10 (June 2003)

YOU ARE WRONG

Guy who wrote into Starlog thinking he's being all clever about Alien:


From the letter column of Starlog #29 (December 1979)

YOU ARE WRONG

So, remember:


Panels from "The Malay Penguin!" in Detective Comics #473 (November 1977), script by Steve Englehart, pencils by Marshall Rogers, inks by Terry Austin, colors by Jerry Serpe, letters by Milt Snapinn

YOU ARE WRONG

We now present a public rebuttal

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Edited segment of a full letter from a reader in Thor #160 (January 1969)

This has been a public rebuttal to a viewpoint previously expressed on this blog. We at "Comics Oughta Be Fun!" welcome conflicting viewpoints to ours and will feature some of them publicly in this blog with the express purpose of making fun of them. We now return to your regular internet, already in progress.


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