King of the B-Movies by Rocky Gallbladder (part one)

"King of the B-Movies" sprang by accident from the loins of The Rev. Ignatius Pubes (Mrs.) O.B.E.'s Cosy Corner a couple of years into its run and eventually came to supplant it. Whereas the Cosy Corner was sort of a topical mish-mash with a bit of an obsession for Stanley Baldwin and Muffin the Mule and its adverts for Whizzo the Wonder Duck-Whitener "King of the B-Movies" was an unholy mess of film, comics and radio references.

The basic premise of "King of the B-Movies" was that sense of being cheated when you came to watch the next episode of a Republic serial and found that far from the hero having to cheat death by inches as the car plummeted over the cliff he's gotten out, gone home and made himself a cup of tea long before the car had even started rolling down the hill. In the first few single strips there'd be a storyline of sorts, though with glaring continuity breaks between panels. When the strip became a full-pager continuity flew out of the window, with panels from entirely different stories barging in and upsetting the flow of what little storyline was going on.

This didn't last long. In fact, it didn't take long until I'd completely extinguished any continuity even within individual panels. By the time the first eight-page collection was issued my method of putting it together was to have the pages there and add art or lettering almost (but not quite) at random - sometimes an art panel with word balloons or captions left blank for future inspiration; sometimes a word balloon and/or caption just waiting for some art to be drawn around it.

As will be evident with these early examples, I'm not a good enough artist to really get away with this sort of nonsense and certainly not a good enough creative artist to not have to rely on swipes of other people's work. I didn't get any better, and "King of the B-Movies" got considerably dafter.