About Oink!

Oink!

Oink! was a British children's humour comic published in London, England, from 3 May 1986 to 22 October 1988. In a run of just 68 issues it earned a reputation out of all proportion to its short life: deliberately anarchic, pig-themed from cover to cover, and repeatedly in trouble with adults who thought it had gone too far for a children's paper. It was published by Fleetway, the comics arm of IPC, and was devised as a children's counterpart to the adult humour comic Viz, with the American magazine Mad also cited by its creators as a major influence.

Oink! is now remembered both for the controversy that dogged it and for the remarkable list of young contributors who passed through its pages, several of whom went on to prominent careers in British comedy, broadcasting, cartooning and journalism. It remains one of the most frequently discussed British comics of the 1980s.

Creation and Editors

The comic was devised, launched and edited by Patrick Gallagher, Tony Husband and Mark Rodgers. Husband was a regular contributor to the satirical magazine Private Eye, and the founders drew contributors from well beyond the usual pool of British comics professionals, bringing in people from satire, music, stand-up and small-press cartooning. That breadth of recruitment was a large part of the comic's character.

Inside the fiction of the paper, Oink! was presented as edited by Uncle Pigg, a pig character in the tradition of fictional editors such as 2000 AD's Tharg the Mighty. Uncle Pigg's staff were known as the Plops. Following the lead of 2000 AD, the comic credited its writers and artists by name, which was still a rarity in British children's comics at the time and helped make its contributors individually identifiable to readers.

Format and Schedule

Oink! began as a fortnightly comic, publishing every two weeks from May 1986 to December 1987. It then became weekly from January to May 1988, before dropping to monthly from June 1988 until its final issue, cover-dated November 1988 and published on 22 October 1988. In total there were 68 issues. A free preview issue had been given away with other IPC titles including Whizzer and Chips, Eagle and 2000 AD before the launch, and the first regular issue came with a free flexi-disc single featuring songs credited to Uncle Pigg and the Oinkletts, largely the work of Marc Riley.

After the main run ended, a summer special and a winter special appeared in 1989, and a final summer special, made up almost entirely of reprinted material, followed in 1990. The changing frequency in the comic's last year — fortnightly to weekly to monthly in quick succession — reflected a title under commercial pressure despite its high profile.

Strips and Characters

The comic's recurring cast was built around its pig theme. Uncle Pigg battled his arch-enemy Mary Lighthouse, a transparent parody of the morality campaigner Mary Whitehouse, usually in strips written by Mark Rodgers with artwork by Ian Jackson. The Street-Hogs, written by Rodgers and drawn by Malcolm Douglas under the name J. T. Dogg, were anthropomorphic crime-fighting biker pigs. Celebrities were routinely caricatured as pigs with punning names, horoscopes were parodied as Russell Grunt's Hogoscopes, and even established strips were reworked with pigs, as in a Dan Dare parody about a pig hero of the future.

Other popular strips included Tom Thug, Lew Stringer's school bully who spent much of his first six months in the comic simply trying to tie his bootlaces; Pete and His Pimple, also by Stringer, in which Pete's pimple was larger than Pete himself; and The Secret Diary of Hadrian Vile, a parody of Adrian Mole written by Rodgers and drawn by Ian Jackson. David Haldane contributed Billy's Brain, Rubbish Man, an inept superhero, and Hugo the Hungry Hippo, while Jeremy Banks created Mr Bignose and Burp the Smelly Alien, who conversed with his own internal organs. Tony Husband drew Horace "Ugly Face" Watkins, Marc Riley created Harry the Head, a character who was only a head, and David Leach created Psycho Gran.

Beyond the strips, Oink! carried spoof news items, fake advertisements, parodies of films, television programmes and other comics, and regular photo-stories photographed by James Gallagher, often featuring the character Snatcher Sam, played by Marc Riley. For most of the run each issue had a unifying theme, which the editors used for stunts such as an issue in which everything in the fictional Oink! office went wrong and strips appeared upside down or drawn by the wrong artist.

Contributors

Few British children's comics can match Oink!'s contributor list. It included Chris Sievey, who appeared as his character Frank Sidebottom; former Fall member Marc Riley, later a BBC radio presenter; Private Eye cartoonist David Haldane; Lew Stringer, creator of Brickman; future Beano writer and artist Kev F Sutherland; David Leach, who went on to work for Marvel and edit other magazines; future Financial Times cartoonist Jeremy Banks; and Charlie Brooker, who was still at school when he contributed strips and later became a well-known satirical writer and broadcaster. Davy Thorp and Chris Donald, founders of Viz, contributed one-off strips, as did Beano artists Tom Paterson and John Geering, and illustrator Steve McGarry drew covers for three issues.

Brooker's contributions, strips with titles such as Freddie Flop and The Adventures of Death, were not individually long-running regulars but recurred in loose rotation. The willingness to publish a schoolboy contributor alongside established professionals summed up the comic's open-door approach to talent.

Controversy

Oink! was controversial from early in its run. Conservative groups and a chain of newsagents branded it offensive and unsuitable for children, and some shops demanded that it be shelved with top-shelf adult magazines. The most serious episode followed a parody of the Janet and John reading books, titled Janice and John and the Parachute Jump, in issue 7. An official complaint was made to the Press Council; the council ruled in the comic's favour, and Oink! reprinted the strip alongside an editorial about the affair.

The publicity nevertheless damaged the title commercially, because newsagents including WHSmith placed it on top shelves away from the other children's comics, reducing its visibility to the young audience it was meant for. In a lighter episode, a joke item about the poll tax and parrot owners was read out in the House of Commons in July 1988, an indication of how far the comic's humour had travelled beyond the playground.

Closure and Transfers to Buster

Oink! was wound up in the autumn of 1988 after 68 issues and merged into Buster. Three of its strips transferred with it: Weedy Willy, Pete and His Pimple and Tom Thug. Tom Thug proved especially durable in his new home, continuing in Buster until that comic's final issue in 1999, more than a decade after Oink! itself had closed.

The three founding editors went on to create the CITV programme Round the Bend for ITV Yorkshire and Hat Trick Productions, carrying the comic's anarchic, pig-inflected humour into television. Archive material relating to Mark Rodgers and Oink! is held by Archive Services at the University of Dundee, giving the title a formal archival afterlife unusual for a short-lived humour comic.

Spin-offs and Merchandise

In 1987 Oink! was adapted into a computer game of the same name, extending the brand beyond print at a time when British comics were increasingly licensing their characters to the growing home computer market. The free flexi-disc with the first issue, the specials that continued into 1990, and the game together show a publisher attempting to build the title into a small multimedia property for children, even as the parent comic struggled to keep its place on newsagents' shelves.

Reputation and Legacy

Oink! is consistently cited in histories of British comics as the boldest attempt of the 1980s to reinvent the children's humour comic. Its mixture of satire, gross-out humour, photo-strips and parody, pitched at slightly older children than the Beano and Dandy traditionally served, anticipated the direction of much later children's media. Some of its jokes were aimed knowingly over its readers' heads, including a Weedy Willy strip in which the shadowy figure following the character and noting down his complaints was revealed to be the singer Morrissey collecting lyrical ideas.

Its legacy also lies in its people. The comic functioned as an early showcase for Charlie Brooker, Marc Riley, Lew Stringer, Kev F Sutherland and others at the start of their careers, and its insistence on crediting contributors helped readers and historians attach names to that work. For a title that lasted only two and a half years, Oink! left an unusually deep mark on British popular culture.