Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Character Profiles - Beat Your Neighbour

Beat Your Neighbour was an ongoing battle between two neighbours, which originally began in issue one Knockout comic on 12th June 1971! It was a very popular strip, so when Knockout merged with Whizzer and Chips in June 1973, this set of neighbours went with it (moving into the Whizzer section)!


Naturally, one pair were skinny and had dark hair, whereas the others were fat and bald, or maybe sometimes illustrated with 3 or 4 strands sticking out the front! The kids always wore the same clothes as to what their dads wore, except they wore shorts whereas the adults wore trousers (except for a few examples, i.e. when they went to the beach - but they still wore matching trunks)!
[This is actually a page from a Knockout comic.]
Also you may notice that the neighbours are on the opposite houses in the title box as to what they are in the actual strip! Of course, it wasn't all based at home, but most of them were!


Here's a few examples of title boxes. The neighbours are always on the wrong side!


The whole concept behind the story was very simple: to beat the neighbour! Here's an example from the 1983 annual. One person got some skates, so the other got some ski's. Jealous, they responded with a sled, who responded with a sled and a dog team! They got a snow scooter, so the others responded with a snow plow. Only there's no snow to play with all these things! You can see where this is going...


And that's all I've got - for now anyway! I plan to get the rest of the annuals and several hundred comics over the next few weeks so this profile should be updated soon - just keep your eyes on the Character A - Z page! -->


Also - can anybody identify the artist for the weekly strip?

2 comments:

  1. The artist in the colour pictures with the snow is Vic Neill, who drew Peter Piper for SPARKY from the late 60s right through to 1977----dunno about the regular artist, there sems to be about four different artists depicted above on this strip!

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    1. It does seem like a different artist on pretty much every picture I've scanned! Maybe nobody liked drawing the strip? Seem's strange though - it looks like a fun and crazy strip to draw!

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