Nigel Edwards biography

Nigel Edwards (flourished 1970s - 1980s)

Nigel Edwards produced the strip Good News/Bad News for Jackpot, He's yet another in the looser, Baxendale mode – his hero is a cheerful grotesque, and the liberal use of sound effects (“PONG! REEK! WAFT! GASP!”) shows the desire to cram as much comic detail into the strip as possible. Edwards would become a major contributor to OINK!, the last doomed triumph of the Baxendale style, a scatological “Junior Viz” of the mid-80s which goaded the censorious elements in British society and quite swiftly fell to them.

Back in 1979, Good News/Bad News was one of the more unusual Jackpot strips, a formalist conceit, with a twist in every panel. Good news and bad news alternate – each situation is either complicated or resolved one panel on. The result, inevitably, is a strip that's much denser than the average, with no panels wasted. A perfect fit for Edwards' style, and it was a favourite of mine at the time. But it’s also slightly exhausting, a rigid fever pitch of action, laying bare the principles of rapid comic development that every one-page humour strip is discreetly obeying anyway.

Nigel Edwards was more prolific in the 1980s for IPC, and was a stalwart artist for Buster, including his accomplished work on Dracula Dobbs and Top of the Class.

At Buster he worked alongside Tom Paterson, Jack Edward Oliver, Terry Bave, Reg Parlett, Frank McDiarmid, Reg Parlett, Ken Reid, Mike Lacey and Sid Burgon.
Source: Illustration Art Gallery; freakytrigger.co.uk

See NIGEL EDWARDS ART ('page not found' if no art currently listed).