More on the Mr. Hill Mystery

I have previously posted about the artist who coyly signed himself  'Mr. Hill', and my efforts to identify his first name, having seen him referred to variously as Bob, Gordon and Len. Mr. Hill's connection to Cheeky was mainly through his long run on The Krazy Gang, who made their debut in the relatively short-lived Krazy and numbered among them our toothy pal. Mr Hill took over the Krazy Gang artwork duties from Ian Knox in 1977. Ian's surrendering of the strip was presumably because he had begun drawing the 2-pages-a-week 6 Million Dollar Gran in Cheeky Weekly. The mysterious Mr. Hill, whose artwork I've always found very appealing, continued to draw the Krazy Gang when the strip transferred into Whizzer and Chips following Krazy's 1978 cancellation, and the semi-anonymous artist drew the antics of the titular group until the strip came to an end in 1986. The enigmatic Mr H also drew our grinning hero in one issue of Cheeky Weekly.

I first broached the perplexing subject of the artist's first name back in 2013, when the consensus seemed to be that Bob was the appellation he went by outside of his comics work. I further considered the conundrum 2 years later, having discovered an item on a Whizzer and Chips letters page which confirmed that Bob is indeed his name.

However I recently lighted upon some further information which reintroduces the confusion because in Buster dated 16 February 1991, for his entry in the series 'Meet the Artists', Mr. Hill lists himself as Gordon, although giving his full name as Gordon Robert (from which we of course derive the 'Bob' by which he seems to be most frequently known).

Despite this latest revelation, I'm going to continue to refer to him as Bob Hill.

Later the same year, Bob placed an advertisement on the Buster letters page in the 19 October edition, announcing the publication of his book, Mr Hill's Mirthquake.

The address given in the advert would appear to be that of a house in a residential street so I felt it prudent to obliterate some of the details to avoid the present occupants being pestered by hordes of Mr. Hill fans.

I have been able to find very little information about Mr. Hill's humorous volume (he is evidently as reluctant to reveal his first name in his book publishing endeavours as he is with his comic work), but copies are held by a number of reference libraries, the author being known in the corridors of those august repositories of printed works as Gordon Hill.

Whizzer and Chips - The Cheeky Raids part 10

New readers start here... After Cheeky Weekly folded and was incorporated into Whoopee as of February 1980 six strips that had originated in the toothy funster's title survived the merge and continued to appear in the amalgamated comic. Whoopee itself foundered in March 1985 and was merged into Whizzer and Chips. Three of the surviving Cheeky Weekly strips successfully negotiated this second merge and went on to appear in the newly combined publication, rather inelegantly titled 'Whizzer and Chips now including Whoopee'. The survivors were Mustapha Million, Calculator Kid and (appearing only twice) Stage School. Cheeky continued to appear, but as a member of The Krazy Gang, who had moved into W&C when Krazy, the comic in which the Gang originated, expired in April 1978.

Whizzer and Chips had a long tradition of sending characters from the Chips section into Whizzer and vice versa. These cross-comic forays were known as 'raids'. In this series of posts I'm chronicling the raids involving the ex-Cheeky Weekly characters who made the transition into Whizzer and Chips, all of whom were allocated to the Chips section. For the purposes of this series, although this particular manifestation of the toothy funster didn't directly descend from Cheeky Weekly, I'm including Cheeky's Krazy Gang appearances as those of an 'ex-Cheeky Weekly character'.

Late Summer 1985 - it's time for sun, sea and snake as chief Whizz-kid Sid and his reptilian associate head to the coast. But who is the interloper? Scroll down for the answer should you require it - this is a blatant incursion.

Whizzer and Chips 24 August 1985
Art: Mike Lacey

Whizzer and Chips 31 August 1985
The Chip-ites section also included an enquiry
about the Mustapha Million artists

This sortie into the pages of Whizzer was perpetrated by an uncharacteristically glum-looking Cheeky, clearly not enjoying his aquatic raiding experience. The depiction of our toothy chum looks to me to be the work of Bob Hill, who was of course drawing Cheeky as a member of the Krazy Gang at the time. My first suspicion was that the image was copied-and-pasted from a Gang strip, but I looked back through a year's worth of KG stories and was unable to find the pic in question. I therefore assume that Bob was asked to draw this bare-chested version of our usually-grinning pal specifically for the purposes of this raid.

Ex-Cheeky Weekly characters had by this time perpetrated 4 raids during the subject period while suffering 7.

Whizzer and Chips Cover Date	Raider	Raided
06 April 1985	Mustapha Million	Super Steve
04 May 1985	Bloggs (Store Wars)	Mustapha Million
11 May 1985	Joker	The Krazy Gang (Cheeky)
18 May 1985	Calculator Kid & Calc	Odd-Ball
01 June 1985	Animalad Mustapha Million	The Krazy Gang (Cheeky) Boy Boss
08 June 1985	Odd-Ball	Calculator Kid
06 July 1985	Toy Boy	Calculator Kid
13 July 1985	Pa Bumpkin	The Krazy Gang (Cheeky)
27 July 1985	Joker	Mustapha Million
24 August 1985	Cheeky	Sid's Snake

Artist's Wives

We're all familiar with strips including an artist self-portrait - always good fun although some depictions are more accurate than others, I suspect. Irmantas did a good series of posts on this subject a while back.

A subset of this category is the 'artist-and-wife self portrait'. Here's Mr and Mrs (Bob) Hill appearing in a Krazy Gang story from Whizzer and Chips, 15 September 1984.

Whereas in some artist self portrait stories the relationship between the character and their illustrator is quite relaxed, it would appear that Bob is undergoing some sort of breakdown as he clearly didn't expect to encounter the gang in 'real life'. I like the panel where Bob flees in terror, while the gang look on in surprise and Mrs Hill is shown to be up to her elbows in domestic chores. The bottle on the table would appear to be significant but the meaning of 'KG' eludes me.

UPDATE: The answer to the KG riddle has been supplied by Peter and Andy in the comments below (kicks self for missing it - ooyah!).

There's further fun to be had with the 'Merry Christmas, Dear' on the toolbox, reinforcing the fact that life in the Hill household is less than idyllic from the female perspective (wonder if Bob wrote the script himself?). By the end of the strip, Bob appears to have surrendered to his psychotic delusion and is settled in the Krazy Gang's world.

The only other husband and wife comic portraits of which I'm aware are those featuring Terry and Shiela Bave, covered by Irmantas here. However if anyone knows of any others, please get in touch.

No doubt you spotted the raid perpetrated on the above strip by a Jim Watson version of Bloggs from the Store Wars strip. Good job Bob didn't see that, I don't know what it would have done to him.

UPDATE 2: Peter has sent a link to a Krazy Gang strip which opens another category, 'stories containing caricatures of real people but who are they?'.

We care that you care

Whizzer and Chips 17 November 1984. The Krazy Gang have been running in the comic since Krazy folded back in 1978.  It's now over 4 years since Cheeky Weekly's demise. A Cheeky strip is still appearing in Whoopee, but it's been reduced to a single row of panels.

This week's Gang script requires artist Bob Hill to depict some of the gang's parents.

A lesser wielder of the pen would just bung in some generic parent types in respect of Cheeky's mum and dad. But oh no, Bob gives us proper likenesses of Cheeky's progenitors.

Bob, we salute you and your fellow artists who show in these little ways that you actually care about your readers.

Whizzer and Chips 17 November 1984

...here's the same week's Cheeky strip from Whoopee, showing the definitive version of Cheeky's mum from the pen of Frank McDiarmid ...

Whoopee 17 November 1984

...and here's Dad's first proper appearance, in Cheeky Weekly's debut issue dated 22 October 1977 (Dad first appeared in a single panel in Krazy dated 23 October 1976, but that was at a distance and in silhouette, although his flat cap was in evidence)...

Cheeky Weekly 22 October 1977
Art: Frank McDiarmid

In case anyone's confused (and I certainly am), this post is not part of the Whizzer and Chips - The Cheeky Raids series, as the issue of W&C from which the first image above was extracted predates the merge of Whoopee into W&C, the starting point for that series. So although Sid raided the strip above, I'm not going to mention it.

There will be more Bob Hill funnies soon.

A Post About Bob

The late 1980s letters pages of Whizzer and Chips quite regularly featured reader enquiries as to the identity of the artist on a particular strip. Thanks to Lazy Bones fan Helen Dennis, whose question appeared in Whizzer and Chips dated 04 July 1987, I can finally lay to rest an uncertainty that has bugged me for some time - what was the first name of the artist who signed himself Mr. Hill?

Irmantas reported some time back that Denis Gifford in one of his volumes on British comics referred to the artist as Bob Hill, but I recently read an interview online in which a colleague referred to the person in question as Len Hill.

Not only do we now know without doubt that he's named Bob, we're aware of his previous occupation.

Let's enjoy Bob's work on that week's Lazy Bones episode.

Bob took over the artwork on Lazy Bones from Colin Whittock when Colin began drawing the 2-page-per-week rural whodunnit strip Mizz Marble. As mentioned above, Bob would often sign his work 'Mr. Hill', but none of his Lazy Bones strips that I have so far seen have been signed. Colin did sign his Lazy Bones work, so maybe the Whizzer and Chips editor didn't want to alert readers to the fact that artwork duties had been reassigned. Bob certainly did a good job of ghosting Colin's style

More on Mike Lacey and Jimmy Hansen (plus a few treats)

Art: Mike Lacey

Following my earlier posts about Mike Lacey and Jimmy Hansen, I thought I'd post this page from Whizzer and Chips dated 30 May 1987 since, thanks to reader Matthew Blaken's enquiry on the Whizz-kids page we know (as if there was any doubt) that the cover story is drawn by Mike Lacey.

Although Sid doesn't mention it (possibly because the strip in question is located within rival comic Chips), Mike also drew Phil Fitt in that issue.

Jimmy Hansen was responsible for the artwork on Shiner...

...and the Bumpkin Billionaires...

..I like the security guard with club and slavering hound, and it's always good to see Miss Wobblethrope get a namecheck.

Referring back to the Whizz-kids letters page, you may be wondering what Sid's 'bigger and brighter' remarks referred to. Here's a clue from the same issue...

Yes, that same week IPC stablemate Buster had undergone a 'bigger-brighter' transformation. Now, I haven't got many copies of Buster and I certainly don't have the issue referred to above. However, if it's anything like the 13 June 1987 issue of Whizzer and Chips (the first supposedly bigger issue), I think IPC were flirting with a somewhat fluid interpretation of the word 'bigger' as, while the pages of the new-style issue were slightly taller than those which preceded them, they were also narrower. The number of pages remained the same at 32, and although there was more colour, not all of the colour pages were in full colour. The paper quality was slightly improved resulting in clearer printing.

Anyway, all this excitement lay in the future for readers of the 30 May 1987 edition of Whizzer and Chips, which was a nice issue with a number of interesting happenings (in addition to those I've posted above) which I thought I'd share with you.

I like Tom Paterson's choice of pseudonym on this Sweeny Toddler page...

...good to see Cheeky getting a mention even though it is just the punchline to a botty joke.

Here's Sweet-Tooth, including an artist self-portrait wherein Trevor Metcalfe is seen accepting a bribe!

Up next is some manure-based merriment with Winnie, drawn by Ian Knox. This must be the only IPC strip to depict a rectal examination...

Let's see what our pecunious pal Mustapha is up to, still going strong 7 years after Cheeky Weekly folded...

...I really like Barry Glennard's work on Mustapha, it livened the strip up nicely.

I'll round off with Lazy Bones, in colour on the back cover and drawn by Bob Hill, who had taken over artwork duties on the strip from Colin Whittock when Colin started drawing Whizzer and Chips' two-pages-a-week Mizz Marble...

As if having the Lacey/Hansen uncertainty to contend with wasn't enough, an old controversy that I thought had been resolved has just re-emerged - in this interview, Colin Whittock refers to the artist above as Len Hill! I thought we'd solved the riddle of 'Mr' Hill's surname back here. I'm sticking with calling him Bob!

UPDATE - For the definitive answer regarding Mr Hill's forename see here.

Further posts in The Mike Lacey and Jimmy Hansen Crisis series...

• Part 5
• Part 6 - Resolution!

 Or

• Back to Part 1 

We Wish You A Cheeky Christmas

Our toothy pal didn't only feature in an episode of The Krazy Gang in the Christmas 1982 edition of Whizzer and Chips - he was all over this festive issue, as the usual Whizz-Kid and Chip-ite rivalry between Sid and Shiner was forgotten in the spirit of the season.

Our cheery chum's on the cover hitching a ride with Santa, Rudolph and his W&C pals...

Art: Mike Lacey

And he's back, on the centre pages, at the W&C staff party...

Art: Bob Hill

Not entirely in the spirit of the festive truce, a Whizz-Kid versus Chip-ite rivalry is encouraged in the associated game...

Cheeky returns among the characters from the Chips section as they gather on the Shiner's Chip-ites letters page, where the Christmas armistice is clearly not being observed by a couple of readers who are keen to unload their best anti-Whizz-Kid funnies...

Art: Jim Watson, with cut and paste elements?

Finally, the Cheeky Annual 1983 is given a plug on page 31. The cover of the toothy funster's end-of-year publication is somewhat obscured on the back row of titles, but that rear rank includes two of IPC's flagship annuals, Whizzer and Chips and Buster, so I don't think Cheeky can complain too much about the placement of his book.

Mr. Hill - Bob or Gordon?

Some time back, when I was preparing this Other Cheeky Artists post, I needed to find the artist's first name. I recognised his style, which I mainly associate with the Super Store strip from Whizzer and Chips (although more relevant to this blog was his work on The Krazy Gang which he took over from Ian Knox in issue 48 of Krazy and continued to draw after Krazy folded and the strip transferred into Whizzer and Chips), and knew his surname was Hill because he sometimes signed his work as 'Mr. Hill'. I did a search and found this page, which suggests his first name was Bob, as does this.

However, I have subsequently seen him referred to as Gordon Hill by a number of people who are far more knowledgeable than I am in the field of British humour comics. Here are a couple of examples;

Peter Gray, whose blog is one of my go-to sources of British comic artist info has this;

http://petergraycartoonsandcomics.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/happy-easter-from-whizzer-and-chips.html

(note the Mr.Hill signature on the Krazy Gang poster in the above link)

George over at Wacky Comics posted this, and it looks as though, despite having a wealth of knowledge of British artists, George was originally also confused about the name of the artist in question - see the comment from Andy Boal, whose knowledge of British comic artists is extensive, at the foot of the page...

http://www.wackycomics.com/2013/02/this-week-in-1978-whizzer-and-chips.html

Yet Lew Stringer who is without doubt one of the most knowledgeable members of the British comic community refers to the artist as Bob here;

http://lewstringer.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/this-week-in-1989-buster.html

And just to confuse things further, Peter Gray also has this...

http://petergraycartoonsandcomics.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Bob%20Hill

Does anybody know definitively which is the correct first name of the Super Store/Krazy Gang Mr Hill?

UPDATE: Many thanks to Irmantas who has confirmed in his comment below that according to Denis Gifford, this artist's name was Bob Hill.

Having revived fond memories in the course of investigating this comic conundrum, I thought I'd treat myself to a look at the very first Super Store strip (I hope readers of this blog will allow me to go a little off-topic here), and I embarked on a trawl through my Whizzer and Chips collection to locate it. I'd forgotten that Super Store was one of the winners of Whizzer and Chips' Comedy Choice feature, in which six new strips were tried out in the issues dated 29 May to 03 July 1976, and at the end of the series readers were invited to rank the prospective features in order of preference. This wasn't the first time this idea had been used in IPC's comics.

W&C's editor engendered a friendly rivalry between those readers who preferred the contents of Whizzer (who were dubbed Whizz-Kids) and those whose tastes gravitated more towards the features in Chips (Chip-ites). It wasn't revealed when the voting coupon was printed that two strips were going to get a regular slot in the comic. The winners were announced in Whizzer and Chips dated 11 September 1976. Chip-ites who had listed Super Store as their top strip would have been disappointed to find the following week their strip of choice had been allocated to the Whizzer section.

It was never revealed which of the two winners garnered the most points.

Art on all the Super Store strips below is by 'Mr' Hill.

The first appearance of Super Store,
Whizzer and Chips 12 June 1976

Whizzer and Chips 10 July 1976

Whizzer and Chips 11 September 1976

Super Store's first appearance in its own right.
Whizzer and Chips 18 September 1976

Aside from the artwork, it's hard to see the appeal of the strip in that first Super Store appearance on 12 June 1976 - the tone of the story differs quite markedly from those I remember from later in the run. Certainly the 'store which sells everything' element of classic Super Store is present, but the other appealing aspect of the later strips - the fact that nothing retailed at more than a few pence - is absent. While the bogus customer is certainly out to cause a bit of mischief, does he really deserve having £300.00 (the equivalent of almost £2000.00 today) extracted forcibly, not to mention the physical assault? Maybe readers wanted to see more sham shoppers get their comeuppance but, as if to atone for the brutal treatment of their first visitor, Uncle Rich and Willoughby give away a human chess set with real horses to another cocky customer in the first episode of the series proper.

The Other Cheeky Artists - Bob Hill

Bob Hill's work on Cheeky's Week was limited to a single issue late in the run.  He provided 4 pages in the 105th comic dated 10 November 1979.

One page of Bob's non-Cheeky art had earlier appeared in the issue dated 12 May 1979, which featured a 'Star Guest' feature devoted to Super Store, a strip Bob drew regularly in Whizzer and Chips.





Bob Hill's Cheeky's Week pages in Cheeky Weekly

Cover Date	Page	Element
10-Nov-1979	19	Thursday
10-Nov-1979	26	Friday
10-Nov-1979	30	Saturday
10-Nov-1979	31	Saturday