The Leopard from Lime Street

It's an interesting mix of Stan Lee and Charles Dickens: "Lorks oh lordy, bless 'ee young hero me lad. With great power, comes great responsibility. Cor blimey..." Or something along those lines...
I was never much of a fan of Buster, but I do like Mike Western's work. This is from Buster dated 27th March 1976.

Toxic

Mike McMahon provides the cover for this issue. Interestingly, the strip doesn't actually appear inside the comic. Maybe a missed deadline? I quite liked Toxic: it's a shame that it crashed and burned so quickly after 31 issues...

More info here.

Sinister Island

Bill Lacey illustrates this adventure from Lion, December 18th 1965.
I quite like BL's style it's: solid, appealing and dependable. Urm, if that makes sense?

Marney the Fox

Greetings! I've been a little busy of late: what with work and moving house.

Having given the kids an audio book version of Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mister Fox for Christmas and having to listen to it several times a day since. I thought it'd be appropriate to start the New Year with Marney the Fox from Buster dated 27th March 1976. Beautiful work by John Stokes. I'm assuming he enjoyed drawing it because he puts an insane amount of detail into this strip.

Fantastic Four

Alan Davis is always one for having comic cameos in his crowd scenes. I love this one. I can see a Dalek and the Mekon and someone wearing a Spacefleet helmet (Dan Dare?). And standing to the right of the Mekon, Gatecrasher and Yap from Captain Britain.

Fantasy Express

Way back in the day, Lew Stringer produced some really cool fanzines. Here are a couple of covers from that time. Check out the Joe Colquhoun interview here.

José María Jorge

Sometime in the 80's, back in the day when I were't but a slip of a lad, I sent a letter to DC Thomson's Commando comic. I think I said something along the lines that I thought Commando was bostin' and one day I'd like to be an artist and have my work appear between those illustrious covers. The editor, Ian Forbes, kindly sent a reply and included this photostat of some José María Jorge art sans lettering. I can't remember the story the page is from. I think it's a prologue to a WW2 story. It has something to do with battle between the British army and Zulus. The guy leaning over the body is an Africaans who buries the soldier on his farm.
A bit more about JJ here and visit his own website here.

I was trying to track down the issue the art appeared in so asked over at the Comics UK Commando forum. There was a message from Commando HQ that also explained some of their working methods in the office:

Not sure what the story is, but it will have been one that was under construction when you wrote. In those days there was no "naked" artwork in the office for any length of time as it was ballooned (straight on to the artwork) pretty much as soon as it arrived from Argentina or wherever. This also means it's unlikely to be from a book reprinted at that time as that artwork would have balloons and panels on it from its earlier publication.

With our electronic ballooning, these days the artwork isn't touched at all; simply scanned and dropped into a Quark template to have the text overlaid.

If you wrote in the early 80s, the man in the hot seat was Ian Forbes, George didn't take over until the end of the decade when Ian retired.