“Oh Mr Belpit, your legs are so swollen…”
We hadn’t been around in 1970, but we weren’t missing out in 1987. At 10.40pm on Saturday 4th April, sandwiched between a new episode of Cagney and Lacey and a replay of the afternoon’s Grand National, BBC1 began a full repeat run of the second series of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. It had been over a decade since the series had been re-screened in earnest, and this cavalcade of Saturday night surrealism quickly spawned a new generation of obsessive teenage fans. Suddenly, sixth form common rooms and Student Union bars alike resounded to catchphrases coined almost two decades earlier: “Dinsdale!”, “The Tax on Thingy” and “I didn’t expect the Spanish Inquisition…”
Amongst their number was John Dredge, who – aged 19 in 1989 – finally combined his new-found love of D.P. Gumby and Ethel The Frog with the aesthetic of the classic British comics he had read throughout his 1970s childhood. The result? One single issue of Dredge Comic, a lovingly-crafted compendium of decidedly Python-esque daftness. The photo below shows John at almost the exact moment this splendid non-periodical was launched upon an unsuspecting circle of friends and fellow students.
“I have no idea what I’m doing,” he comments today. “So very little has changed…”
Over to you, John…
“I was always fascinated by comics, mainly the silly ones such as Krazy, Whizzer and Chips and Cheeky Weekly, which I believe came out every week – although I’ll have to check. Duncan Curry used to come over when I was about eight and we’d sit there all morning, doing nothing but read comics. This still strikes me as a morning well-spent.
As the years went by, I got more interested in pop music and television, but then in my late teens I stumbled on the work of one Robert Crumb. I suddenly realised that comics could be an authentic form of expression. It could be an outlet for my bonkers sense of humour, influenced as I was by Spike Milligan and Kenny Everett. So I began to write and draw my own comic book. I thought back to people like Charles Schultz and Roger Hargreaves and decided there was value in drawing simply. In other words, I wasn’t very good. But no matter, I was a punk cartoonist. Or something.
With thoughts of fame and fortune – in that order – I started work on my forthcoming masterpiece. After about a day I got tired. I couldn’t believe just how much work it took to draw a whole comic book, particularly as I was not a natural illustrator. I named it Dredge Comic, because if I was going to spend a lot of time on something then I wanted people to know exactly who had done it.
The first page concerned one Ken Sinister and the annoyance he caused at his local post office. This was based on the Hooded Claw character from the cartoon series The Perils of Penelope Pitstop, although I didn’t realise it at the time. A pretty good start.
Next came The Unusual World of Brian Blnolonolynsns – a character unable to spell his own name, which was hardly surprising. Looking back at it now, this was very influenced by the absurdism of Monty Python, to an embarrassingly obvious extent.
This was followed by The Bison Bit, which centred around various poor marketing concepts created to promote a rather unexciting bison character to the masses. I must admit it still makes me laugh.
There are some good ideas in Dredge Comic, such as Professor Plinn and Royston The Accountant, both of which stand up pretty well with their silly jokes and reasonably effective drawings. There are also some ideas that don’t work, but then what did I know? I was only nineteen at the time and suffering from terrible acne.
Once I had made the 16-page comic, after months of sustained effort, I had no idea what to do with it. I think I gave one to someone at my college and also showed it to a few friends, but I was never very good at PR, there was no internet, and the project never led anywhere.
I found the only remaining copy of Dredge Comic when I moved house recently, and it reminded me just how important this project was to me at the time. I really wanted to make something that expressed my strange sense of humour, and there are definitely some funny ideas here, along with a fair amount of other stuff which we need not concern ourselves with. Despite the hit-and-miss results, I showed it to my thirteen-year-old nephew the other day and he started laughing, so perhaps that is reward enough.
Forty years later, I have just completed the third series of a podcast called The Funny Comics Fan Club, in which comics expert Mark Hibbett and I discuss those anarchic publications of times gone by. Their effect on me remains profound all these years later. And whoever thought Whizzer And Chips could be profound?”
Thanks John! The Funny Comics Fan Club is podcast is here…
https://thefcfc.podbean.com/
Felt Trips is a collaborative effort. If anyone wants to contribute their own childhood drawings from the era, I would be utterly delighted – please drop me a line using the “Contact” link at the top of the page. A good quality scan would be perfect, but – if not – then a clear photo of your artwork, lying flat, is fine. And maybe a few words of explanation, too: when the drawings were done, how old you were, what inspired you to tackle those particular subjects? Thanks so much.
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