Nobody cares about Oink anymore, but it still makes me feel sick to think about it. It was a weekly British kids comic that lasted a couple of years in the 1980s, and I had a really visceral reaction to it when I got my hands on a couple of issues in 1988.
After years of comics like Buster and Whizzer & Chips, Oink was a little bit edgier. While still very much a kid comics, it pointed more towards the glorious depravity of the hugely succesful Viz comic, which ladled lad culture jokes onto the old format. The art was a looser and wavier, with a putrid colour scheme and way too many strips featuring pig-based parodies.
Oink had the earliest work by Charlie Brooker, long before Black Mirror, and occasionally highlighted the charming insanity of Frank Sidebottom, but I'll always remember it for the weird nausea I felt when I read it. I can't even remember what strip set me off, it was the tone of the thing that just felt off, and disorientating to actual physical degree.
I haven't read an issue of Oink in years, and couldn't tell you a single thing about the strips it contained, but that queasiness that comes whenever I think about that comic isn't going anywhere. It was just too much comic for me.
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