downthetubes: You then moved on to The Beezer. Were the humour titles a different department to the adventure titles and how different was it to work on a humour title to an adventure title?

Bill: All the staff were under the same umbrella and it was common practice to move people around to gather experience. It was a completely different way of working on comics. On the Wizard, the stories were scripted by authors and then we subbed them before sending the stories to artists. Once drawn, it was our job to tell the story in captions and speech balloons. With comic script writing it was a blank sheet of paper, certain parameters and a weekly deadline.

downthetubes: Were there any particular Beezer stories or characters that you regularly wrote and did you have a favourite amongst them?

Bill: I did The Numskulls on a regular basis and enjoyed that. Little Mo and Hairy Dan were others I did as well.

Some panels from an episode of The Numbskulls as featured in The Beezer

downthetubes: As a script writer, did you find humour scripts more of a challenge than adventure scripts, or did you write the junior adventure strips for the title?

Bill: Humour was definitely more challenging. We did features in the Wizard and it was all research...we did a series of boyhoods of famous players for instance.

downthetubes: The Rover and Wizard titles had been aimed at older boys, while Beezer was specifically "For Boys And Girls" of presumably a younger age. Did you find a difference writing for a younger more androgynous audience and was it initially easier or more difficult?

Bill: I never really thought about it. Obviously, the humour was more visual then verbal and that in itself is very restricting. It wasn't any more difficult, just different.

downthetubes: Sparky began in 1966 and so was well established by 1975. How was it different to the other humour titles such as Beano, Dandy, Topper and Beezer?

Bill: The difference here was that the humour was both verbal and visual...more adult.

downthetubes: Again were there any particular stories or characters that you regularly wrote and did you have a favourite amongst them?

Bill: I did Keyhole Kate and Hungry Horace, which I hated... they were so, so restricting. But Some Mummies Do Have ‘em was great. Okay, it was restricting as well, but the whole set up was surreal and the scope for humour much greater.

ThingummyBlob was also great....thinking up more and different ways of annihilating a piece of animated jelly!

downthetubes: Sparky had a humorous strip, Sparky People, set in its own editorial office with a never seen editor who was simply referred to as "Sir". Was there a real "Sir" and were any of the other characters based on anyone in particular?

Bill: "Sir" was Ian Chisholm! Olive the tea lady was Olive the tea lady but she wasn't the harridan portrayed in the comic. The strip was drawn by Jim Petrie and the resemblance between him and the artist in the strip is, well...identical!!! The others were amalgams of colleagues in other offices.

downthetubes: Sparky survived through the early to mid-1970s when the two short run humour titles Buzz and Cracker did not, yet in 1977 Sparky, like those other two titles was amalgamated into Topper.

Was Topper weaker sales-wise than Beezer and were these amalgamations an attempt to increase sales of Topper?

Bill: In all probability the reason to amalgamate was to take the best of both worlds and promote a newer version of the Topper. It was probably more of a plan to consolidate sales rather than increase them.

downthetubes: Sparky readers remember the title as having a more anarchic sense of fun to it that the other humour titles of the time. Is it surprising to you that some of its characters, such as Puss'n'Boots, outlived it and are still in use?

Bill: No it isn't. Nobody really knows just how a character will go down. I've no doubt the editor of the Beano in 1951 had no real idea of what Dennis would become. Puss'n'Boots was by Jon Geering, the artist. John was a larger than life character with a surreal sense of humour and this spilled over into the strip!

downthetubes: Sparky originally had adventure style stories, albeit in a humorous view, such as Invisible Dick. Was there a reason that these latterly fell out of favour?

Bill: As with most stories that are dropped, it is really all down to popularity. I can only presume that stories such as Invisible Dick had ceased to be popular.

downthetubes: Invisible Dick was an update of a character originally created in text form in 1922 for The Rover and later turned into a comic strip in the Dandy in 1937. Was there an appreciation that there were some characters with long histories in the title?

Bill: Perhaps. Some stories are timeless and the invisibility theme is one beloved of kids.

---

Interview Continues: Talking Topper and Starblazer
• 1 • 2 • 3 • 4
All images © DC Thomson and Co Ltd. Image research by Jeremy Briggs