Great Pop Things

Great Pop Things was a

New Musical Express in 1991, and was also published in LA Weekly, Chicago's New City and very briefly The Onion. ^[1]

The strip was a

Rolling Stones. ^[2] One of their most featured characters was David Bowie, invariably referred to as "Dave" and depicted (even as a child) with a lightning bolt design on his forehead, similar to the make-up he wore on the cover of his Aladdin Sane LP. Unlike the real-life Bowie, "Dave" was shown to be particularly proud of his early single "The Laughing Gnome", which was described as "a mod

anthem" and referred to at every opportunity.

The history presented by the strip was hugely inconsistent (even from one panel to the next), though one unchanging "fact" was that

Bill Haley, though as one strip notes, "he wasn't very good at it".) Other running jokes in the strip included a blanket denial that anyone involved in rock music had ever taken illegal substances, the conflation of all progressive rock bands into a single group with an ever-changing line-up, and the oft-made claim that punk rock originated in the writers' home county of Gwent

.

Colin B Morton, otherwise known as Carlton B Morgan, is still based in Newport and contributed to Sound Nation magazine from 2003 to 2004.

In 1998, a complete collection of the strips was published with an introduction by rock critic

Pitchfork.^[3]