As you know, these days Toxic magazine reprints my old Team Toxic strips that originally appeared in its pages years ago. All randomly chosen by whoever's in charge now, and without reprint payment as is unfortunately the norm with some UK publishers. I really should have more sense than to buy it but as the latest issue is bagged I was curious to see which one they'd reprinted this time. 

The story is The Haunted House of Horrible Horrors that originally saw print in Toxic No.262 exactly ten years ago in 2015. That was the Halloween issue so I'd decided to do a suitably spooky story. The punchline being that the villain (Frankendrac) is caught because some spooks scare him, but they turn out to be kids doing Trick or Treat. 

However... in the reprint in the latest issue (Toxic No.409) the dialogue has been changed into "This house looks so haunted they THINK it's Halloween!". Huh? That doesn't make sense, and why bother changing it when the reprint is on sale during this year's Halloween?  

Also, again for some unknown reason, they've changed the title box. I'd designed a hand drawn Team Toxic logo that I thought looked effective but they've replaced it with a font for the reprint. I can appreciate that the sight of bat-winged bum-creatures flying around the logo might offend 2025 fragile sensibilities but they could have easily been deleted without redesigning the logo and story title.  

If you feel like spending a staggering £7.99 on the latest issue, it comes bagged with a few gifts; an actual small size Rubik cube (pretty good), 15 Glow Sticks (good gift), and a plastic gun. These days they call them "Blasters" because they don't want to use the word "toy gun" on a comic, but it has a trigger and it shoots plastic discs. It's a toy gun. So if you want a toy gun, there you go. Just don't call it a toy gun. (But that's what it is.)

The Glow Sticks are quite impressive but perhaps I'm easily pleased.

Here's the whole package so you know what bag to look out for amongst the shelves full of plastic bagged kids' mags. Looks like some sort of Lego Boris Johnson on the front but it probably isn't. That'd just be too scary for Halloween.

Happy Halloween, Readers!

Launched by Egmont in September 2002 and originally edited by Matt Yeo, Toxic set out to be a new style magazine for boys, featuring news of the latest genre films, TV shows, game cheats, puzzles, jokes, and also brand new comic strips containing "gross humour" that always goes down well with schoolboys. Like a modern-day Oink! but with more features and activity pages.

From the outset the magazine featured the comic strip adventures of Team Toxic; Doc Shock, Kid Zombie, Krunk, Kid Zombie, and Bog! Initially visualised by the artist John Rushby I was assigned as the scriptwiter on the strip from issue one. Its popularity soon upgraded it from mini strips to two full pages and I became the artist (as well as continuing as the writer) with issue 15. Over my 16 years on the strip I created a multitude of super-villains to clash with the Team including Frankendrac, Sick Squid, The Sand-Witch, Buttface, Antimatter Hari and many more.

During the magazine's early years, more comic strip content was added including work by Jamie Smart, John F. Short and Laura Howell. Although very popular with its target audience of 7 to 11 year old boys, Toxic was mostly ignored by the adults of online comics fandom who assumed it was just a feature-based magazine with "plastic tat" (toy gifts). 

Nevertheless, 23 years later, Toxic became one of the most successful magazines of the 21st Century and is still thriving, now being read by a new generation of kids! Sadly, the strip content was diminished several years ago and now only features reprints of Team Toxic (which I don't get paid for) and sometimes imported strips such as Team Titans Go. 

How the mag appears in shops in its packaging.

The magazine itself.

Toxic No.400 is sub-titled a "Special Edition" although there's no mention inside of it reaching its landmark 400th issue. (Sometimes publishers think that revealing the age of a mag will make kids think it's "old".) However, for an eye watering £7.99 you get the regular 36 page magazine plus a bound in 8 page Gaming Guide, several plastic gifts including a "blaster" (or gun as comics used to call them), all inside card packaging that has a cut out mask of The Rock on the back. (Do kids want to run around pretending to be Dwayne Johnson? Perhaps so!) 

The Team Toxic story in this issue is a reprint I did several years ago called Snot Funny and features the Team against the super-villain Mr.Nostril! While I feel sad that I don't get paid for the reprints I knew what I signed up for, and I'm pleased that my work is reaching a new generation of readers.

Toxic No.400 is avaiable now from WH Smiths, Asda, Tesco and various other supermarkets and newsagents. £7.99 

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I did Team Toxic for 17 years for Toxic right from issue one in 2002 to issue 317 in 2019 so there's a lot of material they could use if they wished. (They already reprinted several stories a few years ago.) There's no reprint payment of course. Standard policy in British (and American) mainstream comics is they can reprint as much as they like and we don't get a penny. (Viz was an exception as they did, and hopefully still do, pay for reprints.) I can't complain as I knew the score going into this business thanks to reading Leo Baxendale's It's A Very Funny Business back in the 1970s. Sadly it was this "no fees for reprints" policy that made Leo quit mainstream comics in 1975 and who can blame him? 

It's hardly a surprise though. Remember that the British comics industry was founded on unpaid reprints, when Alfred Harmsworth created Comic Cuts in 1890 and filled issue 1 with cartoons nicked from other publications. In that instance, he had no rights to the art and had to commission new material pretty quickly going forward. Even so, he made sure that the publishers held the rights to material commissioned and that policy hasn't changed since.

It really should though, shouldn't it? No wonder today's new creators opt for self publishing or working with book publishers who offer a better deal.

Anyway, if you're interested, you'll find that Team Toxic strip in Toxic No.399, out now. It's the only story in the magazine, despite the publishers now calling themselves 'Story House Egmont'. The rest of the 36 page mag is taken up with brief features and activity pages relating to the latest games, genre movies etc. 

And it comes wth a cover mounted toy 'Archery Set and Fidget'. All for £5.99. 

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When I have time I'll dig out some Team Toxic strips and post them on this blog. 

Toxic's I-Spy was not related in any way to the Sparky's I-Spy of course (although I did draw that too, for one issue of Fun-Size Dandy). The I-Spy spreads in Toxic were busy crowd scenes and the readers had to find various characters or items hidden in the picture. The editors of Toxic would supply me with the idea (such as "make this one a football game") and tell me what should be hidden in the image, but the rest of it was up to me. 

There was another remit though. As it was for Toxic magazine, I was required to put "gross humour" in there. Snot and farts etc, but I didn't go overboard with it unless asked to. 

All of the examples here appeared in Toxic about ten years ago in 2012. In fact the Wrestling Ring one is from exactly ten years ago this week. (It came up in my Facebook memories today, which inspired me to write this post.) These are the images as I sent them, so they don't have the logos and list of things to spot that the designers on Toxic would add on before publication. (You'll have guessed that the less busy areas in the images are where logos and typeset would go.)

These spreads required a lot of work, sometimes to a short deadline, so I used a quicker, more shorthand style on the characters at times. Hopefully it worked OK.

I miss working for Toxic. Sixteeen years on a mag is a long time, and it followed straight on from previous work I'd done for Egmont / Fleetway / IPC going back to 1986! At one stage I was the only cartoonist they were still employing, but nothing lasts forever of course. A few years back the inevitable budget cuts axed my work for Egmont completely. Toxic is still going, but its "gross humour" and traditional style of comedy is gone, replaced by U.S. reprint such as the modern style Yogi Bear of all things! 

It was good while it lasted though, and I'm focusing on artwork I'm currently doing rather than pining for the past, but I thought that followers of my blog might like to see some of these spreads from 2012. As always, click on the images to see them at full size. (Best viewed on a laptop or desktop.)

Pencil rough of the Wrestling one. Finished version below.

Facebook reminded me today that three years ago it was blazing hot and I was sitting on Blackpool promenade roughing out the script for a Team Toxic story. 

Holidays! Clear blue skies! Working for Toxic! How times have changed in just a few years. 

I made a few revisions when I wrote the finished script and drew it so the opening scene was different to how I'd first envisioned it in my notes. Here's the published pages next to my original art...

I enjoyed working on Toxic for 16 years but those days are gone now sadly. The mag now uses U.S. reprints of Teen Titans Go and suchlike as it's cheaper than giving work to UK artists. 

As for holidays.... maybe next year. 

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Click to enlarge.

When I was working for Toxic magazine I was often called on to draw activity pages in addition to my regular two page Team Toxic strip. These could range from spot illustrations to more complex spreads, the latter being the "I-Spy" features. 

(Yep, this isn't the Sparky's I-Spy, although I did draw his final adventure as featured here:

https://lewstringercomics.blogspot.com/2014/09/fun-size-fun.html  )

The I-Spy features for Toxic were double page spreads where the readers had to find certain characters within a crowd scene. The one shown above featured a street party for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee in 2012. I was given a brief by the editor which mentioned some things I had to include but it also included stuff I'd come up with too.

The image above is my finished art but I thought you might be interested in seeing my rough sketch for it as well...

In case you're wondering about the empty areas at the left of the images, that is where the logos and suchlike would go. These spreads usually had to be turned around fairly quickly considering the work involved so I developed a simplified version of my usual style.

Here's another one I drew, which is also from 2012...

Click to enlarge.

These were enjoyable to draw and I miss them. Over time, budget cuts on Toxic meant that such fun features were dropped. Then more budget cuts led to all my work for Toxic being dropped, initially temporary in theory, but since the pandemic affected sales of magazines that became permanent. (Toxic now uses licenced strips such as Tiny Titans, presumably at far less cost than originating UK material.)

I had 16 years on Toxic which is the longest I've ever freelanced for one title. (Although my years on Viz must come close.) Still, onwards and upwards to whatever comes next! 

Here's a creation of mine that you may not have seen before. Back in April 2011, Toxic magazine No.137 had a 16 page comic bagged with it. Toxic presents Crazy Comics was full of brand new humour characters from creators such as Jamie Smart, Laura Howell, Paul H. Birch, John Erasmus, John Freeman, Paul Harrison-Davies... and me!

The idea was for readers to vote for their favourite new charcter, and the winner would then get its own regular strip in Toxic. In the end, Jamie Smart's Count Von Poo won, although sadly it was a short lived victory due to parents complaining about it being about poo with a face drawn on it. (As if kids would imitate that!) 

My contribution to Crazy Comics was a character called The Clump! This lumbering purple monster had previously appeared in my Team Toxic strip but I thought I'd give him a chance to break out on his own. With this being for Toxic it contained the elements of "gross humour" that readers expected of the magazine. 

In hindsight, The Clump probably wouldn't have had much longevity as a regular strip, but I didn't mind not winning as I already had two regular pages in Toxic every issue!

Anyway, ten years on, I thought you might like to see the full two pager of The Clump's one and only solo adventure! 

You can read more about the other strips that were in that Crazy Comics special in this old blog post of mine at this link:

https://lewstringer.blogspot.com/2009/03/crazy-comics-is-coming.html

They were good days for Toxic magazine, when it contained several pages of originated strips. Sadly these days the only strips it features are bought-in ones such as Teen Titans Go! and its Unique Selling Point of gross humour has been excised from the mag. 

One of these days I'm going to do a blog post about all the artwork I did over the years for various free gifts in comics. It'll take a while because I've forgotten half of them! For now though, here's one of my favourites. 

Above is the "Bat and Eyeball" as Egmont called it which was given away in an issue of Toxic in 2008. I preferred my name for it, the Skull-Bat, but as it was based on the old Bat and Ball toy it made more sense for them to call it the Bat and Eyeball! 

It was the editor's idea to do a gory variation on the old Bat and Ball. I had to work to an existing template to design the art for this. It was an odd shape, not very much like a skull, which is why I put a few spiderwebs in places to fill it out. 

I was pleased with the result. Even more so when I saw the great colouring job that Chris Watson had done for it. I remember buying this issue on holiday in Wales and a friend's little girl really enjoyed playing with the gruesome toy. Kids love monsters!