Webcomic Weekly: Lew Stringer’s ‘Barmy Comix’
by Richard Bruton
Webcomic Weekly – it’s so simple, every week we show you something great available online and go read it cause it’s fabulous. This week, Lew Stringer’s Barmy Comix… 32 pages of downloadable funny comics…
Okay, slightly different this week for Webcomic Weekly. This one’s a free downloadable comic instead of something to read online. But here in Webcomic Weekly we don’t discriminate against comics just because they’re not what we’d typically think of as a webcomic.
Frankly, we’re up for featuring anything that’s available online in whatever form, and it’s our game so we can make all the rules we want!
Okay then, now to Lew Stringer’s Barmy Comix.
Lew Stringer‘s been a name in Brit comics for nearly 40 years now and I’ve read his work right from first seeing it in the pages of the Marvel UK comic, The Daredevils. Over the years his work has featured in many different places, many different comics, but it’s always, always, always been funny as all heck!
He’s worked at Marvel, Oink, Beano, Dandy, Dr Who Magazine, Buster, Sonic The Comic, Toxic, Viz, and plenty more over the years, creating the likes of Tom Thug, Pete and his Pimple, Robo-Capers, Suburban Satanists, Combat Colin, Brickman, Derek the Troll, and Pedantic Stan. And you’ll hopefully have seen his work recently on strips for the Cor!! Buster Specials, The Daft Dimension in Dr Who Magazine, Pup Parade, Big Eggo and Ellis’s Great Escapes for Beano, with new strips, Sgt.Shouty in The77, and Wiz War in the new Treasury of British Comics Monster Fun Halloween Spooktacular coming later in the year.
Pedantic Stan fact time… that bearded gent in the bottom row? That would most likely be Phil Clarke, one of the unsung heroes of British comics, who set up the first UK Comic Con in 1968 with Steve Moore, and who opened and ran Nostalgia & Comics, Birmingham UK – the shop that gave me my first job and set me off in this whole comix biz! Cheers Phil!
Barmy Comix acts as a showcase for his creator-owned characters, Combat Colin, Brickman, Derek the Troll, and Pedantic Stan, but it’s also a great bit of funny comics reading for you whether lockdown is still going on or not! And there’s also an exclusive nine-page preview of Combat Colin #5, the next of Lew’s new collections that was meant to be out a while back but… well, Covid, y’know?
Barmy Comix is free to download from Lew’s site here but you can always send Lew a donation to keep things going and help fund the next round of print comics once we’re out of this lockdown. Send it via PayPal paid to Lew Stringer at lew.stringer@BTopenworld.com
You can find more from Lew Stringer at his website, Lew Stringer Comics and Twitter. His old Blog, Blimey, used to be an incredible source of knowledge on all things old Brit comics – it stopped updating at the end of 2019 but it’s still there as an incredible Brit comics archive.
As for getting hold of his work, there’s a Redbubble store for merchandise, but Lew’s put his self-publishing on hold during the pandemic – but he will be back with more great comics soon, including the delayed Combat Colin #5!
Bonus time… remember I mentioned having seen his work back in Daredevils in 1983? Well, here it is…
And here’s Lew to talk about it (grabbed from his Facebook)
“I’m sure I must have posted this before, but anyway, if anyone missed it, this was my first professional sale, back in 1983. The first of a series of ‘What If’ cartoons I did for Marvel UK’s The Daredevils comic. I’d been trying to break into comics for years with no luck, then Alan Moore suggested I try Marvel and introduced me to his editor Bernie Jaye. I sent off some ideas and she accepted them. Exciting times!”
