For the Scottish laddies!
Straight from my box of childhood memories! My grandparents are Scottish and of course they want their grand-children to remember the 'old country' which resulted in my 'Seanair' (Grandpa) sending me lots of these Scottish comic books to me in NZ. Many didn't make it through the harsh wet, cold winters in Dunedin but some survived in good condition - this is one of those 'survivors'
Fairly easy to find in the regions of 'origin' i.e United Kingdom but not so easy to find 'Down Under' or over in 'The Land Of The Long White Cloud'
I have a couple of other comic books in a similar vein (The Broons) HERE
'OOH WULLIE' HISTORY IN BRIEF:
Wullie (William) is a comic character created around 1937, published weekly by the The Sunday Post located in Dundee Scotland. The creator of the principal character Wullie was R.D Low, editor of the newspaper and the cartoonist was Dudley Watkins.
So what was special about Wullie?
He is a bit of what we would call a larakin, a bit bored with school, always dreaming up 'get rich quick schemes' and often being watched carefully by the local policeman to ensure Wullie isn't up to no good. Notice the spiked hairstyle, a precursor to the punk rock days of the 1970's!
Very relevant story lines for young laddies!
The original cartoonist continued drawing until his death in the late 1960's, after which the newspaper 'recycled' previous cartoons for a period - up until around the late 1980's and since then various writers and cartoonists have been involved in the comic strip production.
This book is a collection of Oor Wullie cartoons gathered together into one book. Keep in mind that the intended market was the local Scottish readers so if you are not familiar with the 'Scottish language' you will need to think about some of the sentences to understand them!
In brief, some examples are:
Cheerio - Bye, See Yah
Ta-Ta - similar to Cheerio, bye!
Tae - To (I'm goin tae the shops)
Wee - Small (Such a wee laddie)
Whaur - Where (Whaur is he goin'?)
Lassie - (no, not the dog in the American TV show, it's a reference to a young girl)
OOR WULLIE - Annual Book (Not Numbered or otherwise identified on the front cover)
Front cover features the standard tag line from the original cartoons 'Oor Wullie - Your Wullie - A'Body's Wullie!' with the iconic Wullie sitting on an upturned bucket
Published by D.C Thompson (owners of the The Sunday Post)
1986
Original price is indicated: £2.20 (thats UK Sterling Pounds in '1986 money' - pretty expensive in the day)
ISBN: 0-85116-383-1
Cloth 'stitched' spine
Reasonable quality paper stock used, little signs of foxing (brown marks or spots)
Pages are NOT numbered but I have manually counted 94 pages in total
All cartoon drawings are monochrome
Front outside & Rear outside cover are full colour print
Inside cover page is two colour print, Red & Black
I have looked carefully at many of the cartoons and amazingly I can see no credit to anyone! Neither the writer of the strip or the cartoonist are indicated on the front cover, inside front (there is no true index or page of contents) and within the cartoons themselves - surprising!
COSMETIC CONDITION:
First, on the front cover you may notice a mark just below the word OOR, near the R. I didn't notice that when taking the photograph and it has now been cleaned off easily - no more mark!
Corner curl is not a problem
One small mark (perhaps a past liquid spill) can be observed on the front cloth spine, central area. I have not attempted remove this for fear of damaging the spine.
NO personal writing on any pages
NO tears to the pages
NO significant foxing or other page discolouration observed
My only concern is the page count. Although the pages are securely held into the spine, the first couple of pages have separated slightly. Meaning that you must 'turn the page' with care otherwise you COULD pull out the whole page. I find the lack of page numbering very frustrating, I am not able to reliably detect if any pages are missing, particularly at the front. The format is normally one page = one complete cartoon strip and looking through the cartoon storylines, I could not see story's that appeared to have pages missing.
To the best of my abilities I can confidently declare that NO PAGES ARE MISSING.
Since taking this out of my 'childhood box of tricks', looking through it one last time, it is now sealed in cello wrap (NOT shrink wrap which can damage the covers) and placed on stiff card to eliminate bending on the bookshelf while waiting for a new owner.
