Excavating The Cave Kids

 

First episode of original run -
Buster 03 June 1967
Art: Leo Baxendale

Many thanks to Stephen Archer who has been researching the original 1967-68 run of The Cave Kids in Buster. This is relevant to the world of Cheeky, as the strip was resurrected to help fill the Cheeky Holiday Special of 1980, and went on to feature in a total of 6 Cheeky Annuals and Specials.

The original Buster run spanned the following issues (thanks once again to Stephen for this data)...

Title	Cover Date	Feature	Synopsis
Buster	03-Jun-1967	The Cave Kids	Rocky’s homework
Buster	10-Jun-1967	The Cave Kids	The sabretooth tribe attack
Buster	17-Jun-1967	The Cave Kids	Rocky holes the school wall
Buster	24-Jun-1967	The Cave Kids	The greedy mammoth
Buster	01-Jul-1967	The Cave Kids	The cheeky young mammoth
Buster	08-Jul-1967	The Cave Kids	Rocky’s tiddlywinks
Buster	15-Jul-1967	The Cave Kids	Follow-my-leader
Buster	22-Jul-1967	The Cave Kids	The lost football
Buster	29-Jul-1967	The Cave Kids	Rocky’s switchback railway
Buster	05-Aug-1967	The Cave Kids	Rocky and the croc
Buster	12-Aug-1967	The Cave Kids	Unfair play by Bill Boulder
Buster	19-Aug-1967	The Cave Kids	Rocky takes a dip
Buster	26-Aug-1967	The Cave Kids	Egg trouble
Buster	02-Sep-1967	The Cave Kids	The greedy pterodactyl
Buster	09-Sep-1967	The Cave Kids	Rocky’s dad’s car
Buster	16-Sep-1967	The Cave Kids	Big Bad Boulder raids
Buster	23-Sep-1967	The Cave Kids	The pole-vaulting contest
Buster	30-Sep-1967	The Cave Kids	Chiefy vs. the greedy mammoth
Buster	07-Oct-1967	The Cave Kids	Bob-a-job week
Buster	14-Oct-1967	The Cave Kids	Rocky’s stony letter
Buster	21-Oct-1967	The Cave Kids	Rocky’s weapons
Buster	28-Oct-1967	The Cave Kids	The sleeping mammoth
Buster	04-Nov-1967	The Cave Kids	Rocky’s conker
Buster	11-Nov-1967	The Cave Kids	The nesting pterodactyls
Buster	18-Nov-1967	The Cave Kids	Rocky’s roller-skates
Buster	25-Nov-1967	The Cave Kids	Bill Boulder the delivery boy
Buster	02-Dec-1967	The Cave Kids	The stampeding dinosaurs
Buster	09-Dec-1967	The Cave Kids	The marauding mammoth
Buster	16-Dec-1967	The Cave Kids	Rocky’s old toys have to go
Buster	23-Dec-1967	The Cave Kids	Rocky’s sledge
Buster	30-Dec-1967	The Cave Kids	Rocky’s New Year resolutions
Buster	06-Jan-1968	The Cave Kids	Rocky learns to fly
Buster	13-Jan-1968	The Cave Kids	Rocky’s snowball

It seems the 33-episode original run of the Kids was brought to an end due to the need to accommodate incoming features from Buster's failed stablemate Giggle as of the 20 January 1968 merge issue.

It's not inconceivable that some readers of the 24 Cave Kids episodes that were selected for reprint in the Cheeky titles some 13 years after those adventures originally appeared, were the children of parents who, as youngsters themselves, had enjoyed the strips on their original outing...

Published	Title	Feature	Episodes
Apr-1980	Cheeky Holiday Special	The Cave Kids	3
Sep-1980	Cheeky Annual 1981	The Cave Kids	4
Jun-1981	Cheeky Summer Special	The Cave Kids	4
Aug-1981	Cheeky Annual 1982	The Cave Kids	5
Jul-1982	Cheeky Summer Special	The Cave Kids	3
Aug-1982	Cheeky Annual 1983	The Cave Kids	5
		TOTAL	24

The individual reprinted episodes are listed below. Based on evidence uncovered while examining various reprints used in the Cheeky titles, it would seem that publisher IPC had a policy of discarding the first episode when selecting strips for reprint, and of ignoring the original publication order when recycling stand-alone episodes of this type. The original Cave Kids strips were all single-pagers, but in the 1983 Cheeky Annual, the final Cheeky title to include the neolithic nippers, the editor, clearly keen to wring out the maximum budgetary benefit of employing recycled material, specified that 4 episodes were to be expanded to fill 2 pages each.

Published	Title	Feature	Artist	Episode Start Page	Reprint Elements	Reprint Origin	Origin Date
Apr-1980	Cheeky Holiday Special	The Cave Kids	Leo Baxendale	24	1	Buster	05-Aug-1967
Apr-1980	Cheeky Holiday Special	The Cave Kids	Leo Baxendale	38	1	Buster	15-Jul-1967
Apr-1980	Cheeky Holiday Special	The Cave Kids	Leo Baxendale	52	1	Buster	24-Jun-1967
Sep-1980	Cheeky Annual 1981	The Cave Kids	Leo Baxendale	9	1	Buster	29-Jul-1967
Sep-1980	Cheeky Annual 1981	The Cave Kids	Leo Baxendale	45	1	Buster	02-Sep-1967
Sep-1980	Cheeky Annual 1981	The Cave Kids	Leo Baxendale	64	1	Buster	23-Sep-1967
Sep-1980	Cheeky Annual 1981	The Cave Kids	Leo Baxendale	121	1	Buster	16-Sep-1967
Jun-1981	Cheeky Summer Special	The Cave Kids	Leo Baxendale	16	1	Buster	28-Oct-1967
Jun-1981	Cheeky Summer Special	The Cave Kids	Leo Baxendale	25	1	Buster	06-Jan-1968
Jun-1981	Cheeky Summer Special	The Cave Kids	Leo Baxendale	53	1	Buster	16-Dec-1967
Jun-1981	Cheeky Summer Special	The Cave Kids	Leo Baxendale	64	1	Buster	30-Sep-1967
Aug-1981	Cheeky Annual 1982	The Cave Kids	Leo Baxendale	8	1	Buster	26-Aug-1967
Aug-1981	Cheeky Annual 1982	The Cave Kids	Leo Baxendale	17	1	Buster	23-Dec-1967
Aug-1981	Cheeky Annual 1982	The Cave Kids	Leo Baxendale	43	1	Buster	21-Oct-1967
Aug-1981	Cheeky Annual 1982	The Cave Kids	Leo Baxendale	88	1	Buster	19-Aug-1967
Aug-1981	Cheeky Annual 1982	The Cave Kids	Leo Baxendale	110	1	Buster	12-Aug-1967
Jul-1982	Cheeky Summer Special	The Cave Kids		20	1	Buster	14-Oct-1967
Jul-1982	Cheeky Summer Special	The Cave Kids	Stan McMurtry	43	1	Buster	02-Dec-1967
Jul-1982	Cheeky Summer Special	The Cave Kids	Leo Baxendale	49	1	Buster	17-Jun-1967
Aug-1982	Cheeky Annual 1983	The Cave Kids	Leo Baxendale	10	2	Buster	10-Jun-1967
Aug-1982	Cheeky Annual 1983	The Cave Kids	Leo Baxendale	34	2	Buster	18-Nov-1967
Aug-1982	Cheeky Annual 1983	The Cave Kids	Leo Baxendale	58	2	Buster	04-Nov-1967
Aug-1982	Cheeky Annual 1983	The Cave Kids	Leo Baxendale	85	1	Buster	09-Sep-1967
Aug-1982	Cheeky Annual 1983	The Cave Kids	Leo Baxendale	98	2	Buster	08-Jul-1967

 

I must admit that the alterations to the original Cave Kids artwork were much more sensitively achieved than a lot of the resizing evident across IPC's Annuals and Specials...

Original

Cheeky Annual 1983

Further evidence of a respect for the original material on the part of the compilers of this Annual is the fact that the reprint which was not expanded to 2 pages is the strip presented as being drawn by Rocky himself, which can be seen here, and would probably have lost the border had the artwork been resized.

Below are the episodes from the original run that were not reprinted in the Cheeky titles. The editor's reason for not using these strips is hard to guess. It's clearly not the case that it was felt Cheeky fans were becoming bored with Paleolithic pranks, since another stone-age-set strip retrieved from IPC's repository of former fun folk would feature in the next Cheeky Annual, dated 1984, as would a feature depicting an ancestor of the toothy funster himself in a prehistoric predicament. A similarly baffling reluctance to reprint the entire original run of strips emerged from Stephen Archer's research into Ringer Dinger.

Buster	03-Jun-1967	The Cave Kids	Rocky’s homework
Buster	01-Jul-1967	The Cave Kids	The cheeky young mammoth
Buster	22-Jul-1967	The Cave Kids	The lost football
Buster	07-Oct-1967	The Cave Kids	Bob-a-job week
Buster	11-Nov-1967	The Cave Kids	The nesting pterodactyls
Buster	25-Nov-1967	The Cave Kids	Bill Boulder the delivery boy
Buster	09-Dec-1967	The Cave Kids	The marauding mammoth
Buster	30-Dec-1967	The Cave Kids	Rocky’s New Year resolutions
Buster	13-Jan-1968	The Cave Kids	Rocky’s snowball

Reprints were an inevitable hazard of IPC Annuals, but I'm sure there are few comic fans who would complain about the recycling of material by the great Leo Baxendale .

Which brings me to one piece of unfinished business regarding The Cave Kids' Cheeky outings - only one of the 3 episodes reprinted in the 1982 Cheeky Summer Special was by Leo. I was unable to identify the illustrators of the other 2 strips, but Andy Boal kindly identified one of them (the stampeding dinosaurs episode originating from 02 December 1967), from which I posted a sample here, as Stan McMurtry (thanks, Andy!). Because I didn't post the whole of the other non-Baxendale strip ('Rocky’s stony letter' from 14 October 1967), Andy was unsure about who the artist might be. I'll post the whole thing now in the hope that someone may be able to identify the illustrator.