The Real Ghostbusters’ cover by Brian Williamson and Bambos Georgiou doesn’t stand a chance this week when compared to the epic nature of that for Transformers and Action Force. They even had Geoff Senior render the scene for the front page! A shame then that it refers to next week’s issue instead.
Inside, Starscream does appear as a yellow ethereal being but for the most part he keeps to his normal proportions so he can get up close and personal with his victims. It’ll be next week before he’ll appear like the cover in some of the best artwork the US comic imports had before the UK team made the transfer. There are plenty of Starscream victims though with the death toll increasing exponentially, while Cobra Commander shows his softer side when he finds his long-lost son.
Across the way, some of toy company Kenner’s original ghost creations made their first appearances in this week’s issue, something they never did in the US comic or the cartoon series. Spengler’s Spirit Guide made me laugh with its details about Egyptian Pharaoh Halitoses Nuff, and a haunted cinema brings to life Mr Stay Puft (again), a vampire Charlie Chaplin and even Howard the Duck is spoofed, which he deserved after that movie!
The editorial in Transformers broke the sad news of the cancellation of Dragon’s Claws so it’s surprising to see it wasn’t given the ‘Don’t Miss’ slot on this week’s checklist. In fact, that honour isn’t given to any new comic, instead going to last week’s Thundercats again. You’ve got to start wondering what that slot is even for by this stage.
The description of the Transformers story, that Starscream is taking on not only the Autobots but all Transformers makes it sound unmissable too, so it could’ve got the top billing and I’d have been happy. Death’s Head #5 was also released this week but is for some reason completely absent here to make room for yet another repeated listing for Action Force Monthly.
Hopefully more thought is put into next week’s checklist. What I do know is that new comics adverts return in seven days. As promised previously, they’ll make up for being absent these past few weeks because there are no less than three to transport you back to 1989 in The Mighty Marvel Checklist: Week 34. See you then!
Finally Brickman #2 is here. After the brilliant first edition of collected strips from the character’s past I’ve been eagerly awaiting this (the middle issue of a three-issue mini-series) and it comes with four extra pages, a Combat Colin strip and even some extra features. Taken from the pages of Lew Stringer’s own Yampy Tales comic and the Brickman Begins book, the 27 pages of strips are again packed with enough gags to fill multiple issues.
It may be reprints but the new cover brings things bang up to date, especially that “moron cap” on one idiot’s head. Little gags like this are hidden away on every page throughout, and where the first issue aimed its social commentary jokes at Thatcher’s 80s Britain, here 90s culture is very much in the crosshairs. As a teenager of the 90s I was much more aware of the world around me and so a lot of these gags were even funnier to me than the previous issue’s.
We kick things off with a four-page Combat Colin serial from Transformers and it’s one of the most memorable of his entire run. Anyone who read the comic at the time will remember Colin and Semi-Automatic Steve ending up in a very Portmeirion-esque village along with a large collection of heroes and villains. Lew is a huge fan of the original The Prisoner TV series and this works as both a spoof and a love letter to it. It’s also how I was first introduced to Brickman as an 11-year-old reader.
It wasn’t until decades later I found out he wasn’t just a funny creation for this one Combat Colin strip. The main bulk of this issue sees Brickman returning to Guffon City after his adventure with Colin and Steve brought him out of retirement. But it’s been many years since he revealed his identity and left and his return sees a somewhat different city, filled with crime. But this is a Lew Stringer comic and the abundant crime problem isn’t anything like you’d expect, as you can see.
Anyone who has seen the Christian BaleBatman trilogy will know how hated the hero was when he returned and here, many years before those films Brickman (aka Loose Brayne) is met with hatred and fear, even from Commissioner Moron. We also get a funny recap of the character’s origin story without rehashed gags and with cameos from Colin and Steve, which are always going to be funny!
Lew takes plenty of opportunities to poke at the conventions of superhero stories, with a particular slant towards the already silly 60s Batman, as seen here in The Mad Cobbler’s overly elaborate and very slow, tedious death trap. As per usual, nothing is safe from Lew’s satirical pen. Sidekicks, last-minute escapes, villain reveals and of course comic book violence are all ripe for the Brickman treatment.
While there is a “Mature Readers” label on the cover there’s nothing overly inappropriate for slightly younger readers out there if you wish to share the laughs with your kids. As Lew explains in the editorial, “Although the story doesn’t quite venture into Viz territory, it is aimed at an adult readrship”. That adult audience will most likely get the most from it, but it’s also an excellent introduction to slightly more grown up humour for any teen readers out there.
Just like when I reviewed the previous issue I don’t want to give away too much. Some of my favourite moments are so good I’m gagging to share them with you because I just know they’d convince you to rush out and buy this. (Or, since this is 2026, rush to Lew’s online shop and click on it.) But if I did that I’d ruin the surprises and it’s the sudden jokes that come right of nowhere that happen to be my favourites.
So I guess you’ll just have to trust me. The panel below did make me laugh out loud though, particularly that 90s cultural reference. You might need to explain the occasional moment like this to your teenagers but for those of us who were around at the time the comic also succeeds in taking you right back with its gentle ribbing and/or outright mockery. So, despite never having read the bulk of this before it still made me feel like a kid again with the surprising amount of reminiscing I did about that rather strange decade.
The ending is also well thought out and turns an evil scheme on its head in an original, funny way, and for a moment I wished that things in today’s world could be fixed just as easily and enjoyably. There are also a couple of special features, the one about fanzines in the 1970s being my favourite because it took me back to the 90s again, to a time when I was creating a monthly fanzine on my Commodore 64 computer. Lew’s good times reminding me of my own.
All-in-all I’ve giggled, I’ve guffawed and I’ve finished the comic with a huge smile on my face. Does that sound good to you? It should, and you can get your own grubby little mitts on Brickman #2 for just £5.00 plus p&p via Lew’s own KoFi shop. While there, don’t forget to sign up for regular updates via his KoFi blog too. One more issue to go then and with promises of more colour and even brand new material, it sounds like Brickman #3 will be even better! What are you waiting for? Go and get caught up now.
This week we’ve got two covers that really made me feel like a big kid again. My two favourite characters on Anthony Williams and Bambos Georgiou’sThe Real Ghostbusters image and fond memories of the fantastic story inside Transformers and Action Force are portrayed by Andrew Wildman.
In The Underbase Saga the Autobots finally entered the Decepticon civil war and the casualty list was vast! Towards the end of this week’s chunk of story Starscream absorbed the Underbase, the millennia-spanning knowledge base drifting through space and everything was building to all hell breaking loose. On the editorial there was another appearance of the teaser for The Sleeze Brothers, still three months out from their comic arriving, although they did pop up in Doctor Who Magazinethis month, not that this is mentioned anywhere.
Across the way, in a strange Spengler’s Spirit Guide the Ghostbusting jargon stuck to that used in the film rather than the cartoon, perhaps giving it away that writer Dan Abnett maybe didn’t watch the series. It was still very funny though, as always. There was also an interesting story that explained how ghost energies actually hold up old haunted houses, as the team find out when one collapses after a bust! How about the rest of the Marvel UK range?
The only other new addition this week is Thundercats #94 and after the descriptions on some recent checklists made it sound like they’d gone back on their promise of a “new, younger look” (which they’d hyped previously), here it’s clear that wasn’t the case. Hand puppets, posters and jokes pages? How the mighty had fallen, and yet another new look? I thought cats liked routines and detested change.
No new adverts this week again. In fact, it’ll be a couple of weeks before we get some more but we’ll more than make up for it when we get there! In the meantime, can I just say I’m thrilled with how popular this series has proven. Across socials it’s been great fun conversing with people about their memories of the specific issues highlighted every week and their memories of their childhood trips to the shops, of reading their comics with family and friends, and more besides. So come and join in the checklists conversation here or on:
I began this series two years ago, believe it or not. It doesn’t feel like it, yet it’s almost to the day, on 23rd February 2024 I posted the movie advertisements from throughout OiNK’s run and I’ve really enjoyed writing each entry since (for food and drink, toys and games, comics and books, and 80s electronics). I’m always surprised how much the adverts in all the comics covered on this blog take me right back, sometimes more so than the comics themselves.
But now it’s time to wrap it all up and we’ll do so with a little random selection of the miscellaneous adverts that didn’t fit into the previous five categories. There are some here everyone who ever picked up any IPC or Fleetway comic in the 80s will instantly recognise, especially these first two mini adverts. These seemed to be squeezed into every letters pages or any tight space that needed filled up.
The practical jokes one even popped up in the Classifieds ads that Marvel UK ran for a while. They were so ubiquitous in the pages of our comics that I quickly began to ignore them, thinking “oh, those things again” and not paying them any heed. Did anyone actually send off for a catalogue of practical jokes? Personally, any gag gifts from joke shops were always a huge letdown and never worked properly. But they must’ve sold enough because they were always there on the high streets and in our comics!
In #9 of OiNK we received a little folded leaflet that tried its very best to hype up stamp collecting. For any younger readers of the blog this was a hobby that even I was confused with as a child. I was watching new and exciting types of high-tech TV shows like Knight Rider and Airwolf, home computing and computer games were exploding in popularity, and I was also reading a truly anarchic comic. Stamp collecting felt like something from the past even then.
That little girl is really trying to sell it though, I’ll give her that! I had one or two friends who shared a stamp collecting hobby with their dads and none of them had half the excitement for it as this girl has clearly been told to have. I did reply to an advert on the back of one of my mum’s magazines that offered a giant starter kit with a load of stamps and things to do, much like the one in this next advert from #50.
I can remember when it arrived my dad and I sat down to see if it was something we’d like to do together. I think it took us less than half an hour to lose interest. Instead, I went back to collecting Panini stickers for my Real Ghostbusters album. Another advertising leaflet came just three issues after the stamps one, in #12, although it’s an even worse fit for the piggy pink publication.
Don’t get me wrong, the Humpty Dumpty Club was well regarded at the time and a quick read of this leaflet shows why. It looks like it would’ve been great for the pre-schoolers it was aimed at, although that’s why it’s a strange fit. It’s not like pre-schoolers were reading OiNK. Of course, there’s every chance it was found inside all of IPC Magazine’s comics and the readers could easily have had younger brothers or sisters. I have to say though, some of those kids in the photos are definitely not pre-schoolers!
Betting isn’t something you’d expect to see advertised in a children’s comic and it’d certainly be outlawed today, and rightly so. Same with those competition telephone lines in the pages of Jurassic Park that could easily have led to extortionate phone bills. It’s unbelievable such things were ever allowed in comics, but back in the 80s both of OiNK’s first two Holiday Specials had tiny little adverts like this below, right next to those practical jokes and stamps.
If memory serves me right my dad would play the football pools every week and I think I used to play the spot-the-ball competition on the piece of paper he filled out. He’d fill out the form and take it down to the local sweet shop where he could place his bets. It really was a different time, wasn’t it? These adverts were easily ignored by us kids of course but it’s still insane to think they were included in the first place.
Do you remember joining a bank when you were young? Where I lived we had one bank in the town, and mum and dad thought it was important that I had an account early in life. Not that I ever used it, I spent my pocket money far too easily and that attitude carried over into my teens and any money earned from part-time jobs, unfortunately. I did get a large blue plastic elephant however, to keep all of my parents’ 1p and 2p coins in. (When using their coins I seemed to be able to save up, no bother. Funny that.)
This Supersavers Club advert from #13 may sound familiar if you’ve seen any ad breaks on TV the past few years, but this particular club was formed long before money saving websites existed and you wouldn’t have been getting a visit from Dame Judi Dench. This was a basic incentive the likes of which many banks used in order to get kids through the doors. Although, living in Northern Ireland I doubt the in-person activities would’ve included us. Back then we were used to being reduced to small print at the bottom of adverts as an exception to any special offers.
Well, that’s yer lot, pig pals. I’ve really enjoyed putting together this series. It’s been an unexpected window back to the 80s and the world in which some of us lived throughout our formative years. For some of us it’s been a trip down memory lane and for others I’m sure it’s been a look into a strange past. It’s really hit home to me just how much the world has changed and just how long ago OiNK actually was!
So yes, it’s been fun but now I have to go and lie down.
It’s Predacons versus Pretenders on Lee Sullivan’sTransformers and Action Force cover, while Anthony Williams and Bambos Georgiou’s cover for The Real Ghostbusters was one of a handful of British covers that got used by NOW Comics’ monthly in America.
The Transformers story was full of of icy alliances, double-dealing and back-stabbing amongst the Decepticons, and it was fantastic! It also ends with the reveal of The Underbase, a collection of vast knowledge that previously lay dormant inside Cybertron and was now roaming the stars… and Starscream wanted it! You can check it out at the link below. Then in Action Force that 80s staple the evil twin popped up. Although, there were two Destros so is “evil twin” the correct phrase?
In The Real Ghostbusters one of the strips is only one page in length, which sounds like it shouldn’t work. However, while the main strip every week was usually five pages, the rest could be of any length. This was the idea of launch editor Richard Starkings and when the creative team stepped up and produced the goods it led to Marvel UK’s brilliant one-page strip adverts which you’ll see throughout this Checklist series (I’ve already shown you some).
No new comics ads this week but at least we have our checklist back after a week’s hiatus. To the uninitiated, having one of the smallest Transformers toys and one of the largest as leaders of two opposing forces might sound silly but the comic really made it work. One of the artist credits for The Real Ghostbusters caught my eye here after I was just introduced to their work on the cover of Aliens#21 eight days ago on the blog.
Dragon’s Claws and Action Force Monthly are the same as two weeks ago (although the latter removes the reprint reference) and The Marvel Bumper Comic makes its first appearance since #3 in week 12 (and an advert in week 19). You’d think it would’ve been on the checklist regularly given the variety of content that could’ve appealed to a wide audience. That feels like a huge missed opportunity for Marvel UK to promote it, and given the fact so many listings have been repeated they could’ve used it instead.
Every time I see the Bumper Comic’s rather random-sounding contents I’m intrigued to find out how it reads. Thanks to this checklist series I’ve decided the comic will be coming to the blog in its own real time read through, although a quick search on eBay shows it could be a while before that collection will be complete and ready for review. For now, I’ll sign off and see you back here next Wednesday.
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