Thursday 6 September 2007

Big and Brassy

They may have lost a comic, but it seems that Wallace and Gromit will gain a statue, in animator Nick Park’s home town of Preston, Lancashire.

Putting up statues of cartoon characters is something of a trend. There’s an Andy Capp in Hartlepool (Reg Smythe’s birthplace) and Desperate Dan and Minnie the Minx share a metaphorical plinth in Dundee (headquarters of publisher D C Thomson).


Round here on Tyneside, the local heroes are the characters created by Chris and Simon Donald and their cohorts for Viz. So, who do you reckon should be immortalised in the Bigg Market? The Fat Slags? Sid the Sexist? Buster Gonad and his Unfeasibly Large Testicles? Or perhaps Finbarr Saunders and His Double Entendres would provide a suitably impressive erection.

Fnarr, fnarr.

Oh, and if you doubt that the Viz folk are of suitable character to be immortalised in bronze, remember that, as Lew Stringer reminds us, Andy Capp was not just a drunken layabout, but also a wife-beater.

Pictures
Photo of Andy Capp statue by Stan Laundon
Photo of Desperate Dan and Minnie the Minx statues by Stonefaction

5 comments:

Siskoid said...

How to make Blink a lot scarier.

Steve Flanagan said...

Hm. Better make it a statue of Johnny Fartpants, then: it'd be easy (if unpleasant) to tell that it had come to life ...

Jeff_Grubb said...

Here's another statue for a cartoon character, from Lake Geneva, Wisconsin:

http://www.lakegenevawi.com/fun_facts.htm

Anonymous said...

Hey Steve - you'll know, of course, of the Lobby Dosser statue on the edge of Kelvinggrove Park in Glasgow. Sadly, didn't take a picture of it when we were still living there. And sadly, I don't imagine Lobey Dosser will feature much in the Comics Britannica history running on the Beeb at the moment.

Phil

Steve Flanagan said...

Wikipedia has a good photo of the Lobey Dosser statue.