OGRI’S ORIGINS
If you’re a proper biker of a certain age, you will have heard of Ogri, the comic book hero who appeared in Bike Magazine, Back Street Heroes and even the Daily Telegraph. Let’s delve into his history and meet the man behind him.
Ogri’s creator Paul Sample reveals all
This is the man responsible: do we see a hint of remorse? No. We see a sense of peace; contentment, even. Paul Sample may be retired, but this is still a man ‘having a bit of a think’. A man also observing the world as it passes outside his window, while he absorbs every facet of human character, all of which can be used, processed, ready as the next little figure about to spring from that hovering, ever-ready, well-kept pen. Paul Sample has no regrets over an impressive career and a ‘jojob well done’. He’s not just been the fatherr of Ogri, but his work has been seen on the cover of Tom Sharpe novels, on a Blaack Sabbath album cover, in (ahem) Men Only and countless newspapers across the land. But Ogri is his best-loved creation and one that has appeared in more than just magazines and the Daily Torygraph. Oh no,, our most beloved biker has appeared on ccups, plates, birthday cards, a board game annd even on our television screens…
But wwhat of Paul himself: clearly it’s a bbackground in bikes that inspireed his finest creation? Speakking to Bike magazine back in 19997 he said: “My first bike was a Sunbeam S7 D Luxe and I’ve still got it. I had a bit of a love/hate relationship with it – it’s been in bits for about 20 years, I crashed it on the way home from Hackney Speedway one night when it was raining.” My, what
would have Ogri himself said? You’ll be pleased to learn that Paul still has that Sunbeam and a garage full of bikes, all of which go round the block in their turn. Alongside the S7 he has an Indian Enfield 500 Bullet, the 2006 Bonnie and a lovely
2014 Thruxton.
So how did Ogri flow from Paul’s vintage nib? Well, vintage nibs… as Paul reckons he gets through a fresh nib roughly every couple of weeks. The dip pen and ink was what he used when learning to write at school, and the best are nibs from Birmingham firms William Mitchell and Leonardt, and he uses cheap and cheerful Quink, if you’d like to know…
For creation you need inspiration and that keen eye for the world around him immediately dumps the information into his brain, which is like an oldfashioned Rolodex, or as Paul says: “Like a picnic basket of cress sandwiches.” Anecdotes from friends are all logged, with tiny random incidents in the street and personal experiences similarly noted. His sketchbooks are full, but his brain is even fuller, and in the pages of his sketchbooks the material recorded is generally more about nailing down the details than inching towards the seminal idea.
Creating a strip seems to be like maths: you may instinctively know the answer, but you still have to do your working out. The end result often shows that Paul probably has as much disdain for many of the ‘establishment’ and those in power (any power) as his creation Ogri has. And that’s no bad thing.
To get from blank canvas to finished article means knowing the eventual page size, then plotting out a sequence of events. Oh yes, Paul is both writer and artist and his full-to-bursting notepad is always to hand, ready for some jolt of inspiration to be jotted down. Paul also has his all-important ‘digestive chair’ where he sits and cogitates all the ideas to
boil them down into a single, brilliant strip. Check out the pictures of his notes to see where such inspiration comes from…
Then it is frame plotting time; some frame sequences need tweaking, but often they stay as is. Detail is missing from the first sketch, but then the flesh is added. Paul says: “I pencil it all in, with the lettering first. The characters come after, and then all the details come as I’m doing it – the background comes as I’m drawing the final version, as do the characters. The sub-plot always just comes as I go.”
And what detail… Paul’s work on Ogri was full of it, and often lurking in the corner of the frame. You’d see incidental mice and snails, the hairy spider families lurking up the abandoned exhausts – even the bricks, bottles and nails of outrageous fortune are given the opportunity to live full and happy lives in a cartoon which would take around 10 days for Paul to complete.
Paul readily acknowledges the huge influence of Marvel Comics on his own superhero creation, though in both detail and humour Ogri makes Captain America look like a right boring old git. Being born in 1947, we would also say that Ogri owes not a little to the malign influence of the notorious 1950s’ Beano anti-heroes such as Dennis the Menace, Minnie the Minx and, of course, The Bash Street Kids.
So where did it all start for Paul himself? Following a foundation year in his native Yorkshire, Paul landed in London at 18, having won a place to study graphics at Central St Martin’s School of Art. Even before he’d graduated, he’d traipsed the pavements of Fleet Street and its environs, cleaning up on all the available illustration work. His first published commission was in the pages of Management Today, but even as he was laying the
foundations of a career in illustration that’s impressive by anybody’s standards, Paul was also filling his sketchbooks with ideas drawn from his own biking mishaps, gobsmacking incidents, and observations of the world.
These bits and pieces of drawings made over the course of 1966 and 1967 would soon develop into a full-blown world – a world which we still know and love today.
Ogri’s name, which Paul says is a kind of an exclamation, started off as Rorgan – although he told Bike Magazine something different when celebrating 25 years in that august organ (see boxout!). Oh, and his hapless side-kick was George, not Malcolm.
But just as Ogri’s face quickly developed from the noble chiselled jaw of your average admirable superhero type into the stubbly haggis we’ve now become accustomed to, so the names and the nature of the strip quickly transformed as London life chipped away all hint of Paul’s own youthful nobility and left the best kind of defiant bloody-mindedness in its place, the same bloody-mindedness shown by Ogri himself, of course.
In 1968, Paul produced a full strip based on the delightful experience of having to fend off the tender caresses of Stoke Newington’s notoriously anti-biker ‘skins’, and here Ogri appears in his nearly-final form. Or was it? On Paul’s own entry in Wikipedia, he says: “The first strip cartoon was based on my own experience of driving up the M1 at 90mph on a Rocket Goldstar and wondering what the rattle was. Most people think Ogri is about biking but it’s not, it’s about life in general. The inspiration for the stories comes from riding my bike, talking to people in the pub or seeing things on the news.” Either way, in time, Paul had a full set of storyboards which, naturally, he started offering to magazines.
The first ever Ogri strip published appeared in Chopper magazine in 1972 and then things took a turn. The legendary (and former CMM columnist) Mark Williams was tasked with producing the one-off Bike ‘special magazine’ for Car magazine in 1971. It wasn’t long before Williams and Ogri tracked each other down. It turned out that both Bike and Ogri had legs
– and so began the monthly publication in 1972 of a comic strip which was to continue almost unbroken (and almost in the same title) for the next 40 years.
Almost unbroken? Well, yes. There was a brief break in the early 1980s when Ogri was dropped by the then editor of the magazine. Up in arms, the readers ‘flocked away’ and made it clear they wanted Ogri back. It’s rumoured Paul named his price when the powers that be at Bike Magazine came humbly cap in hand… Either way, Ogri appeared in Bike Magazine until January 2009, making it almost (and an unrivalled) 37 years in a single mag. Yes, sadly, ‘post-crash’ Bike could no longer afford Ogri, but he did find a home in BSH (Back Street Heroes), where he carried on until 2013. In addition, Ogri found a home at the Daily Telegraph of all places, and even became a cartoon back in the late 1990s.
And now we come to the raison d'être of this ’ere article. The book ‘Ogri – Everybody’s Favourite’ came about thanks to the amazing Ogri Cartoon Facebook page, where in 2014 it was announced that Paul was properly retiring and flogging off all his stuff. The sheer popularity of both Ogri and Paul meant that something had to be done to celebrate Britain’s favourite biker!