THE COMIC ART OF REG PARLETT...

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You Crivvies will be glad to know that there's a new guest post by Barry Pearl waiting in the wings, but in the meantime, here's a book I received today about one of my favourite cartoonists - Reg Parlett.  It has loads of great examples of Reg's work, and the book was published in 1986 when he was still a working artist at the age of 80.  (Altogether, he had a career spanning 66 years.)  Alan Clark, the book's author, was the organiser of a campaign to get an official honour (O.B.E. I think) for Reg, but sadly it never happened.  Reg died in 1991, but his art lives on in back issues of the many comics he worked for, and in books like the one pictured above.

Reg was replaced on the Buster strip in the comic of the same name by Tom Paterson, another brilliant cartoonist.  However, the change in style from Reg's gentle-but-hilarious depiction to Tom's somewhat more 'manic' interpretation wasn't as popular with readers as had been anticipated.  I remember saying to Bob Paynter (Group Editor of IPC's humour division) when I was down in King's Reach Tower one day that I wasn't too keen on the new look, and Bob admitted that it'd probably been a mistake to make such a pronounced change in art style.

However, Reg continued to draw the Buster strip for Scottish newspaper The Sunday Mail afterwards, so he still maintained a connection to the character, which he'd been writing and drawing since the early '70s.  Along with Angel Nadal, he's probably the artist most associated with Buster by a certain age group.  Anyway, if you're a fan of Reg, this is a book that's well-worth having in your collection.

Posted in: Cartoons