So, Tom Dare was The Boy Fish and Tom Davis was the Lord of the Underseas so Inky and Ingy Roob were....?

Is Inky actually Ingy? Orto be more precise is Inky actually Ingy Roob? Both drawn by John McCail for Gerald Swan the problem we have is that most of the creators -if not all- are now dead. There was no interest in cataloguing first apprearances or name similaries. 

We have The Boy Fish named Tom Davis as well as Tom Dare who was Lord of the Underseas confusinf at times especially in strips where both are just "Tom"!

But what of Ingy and Inky? Well, one took pills to become large or small ((yes, I should have written that better but be an adult!!).  While Ingy and his sidekick dog, Stretchy, could....stretch. Both look the same and the name "Ingy Roob" I have looked up and asked about but nothing. My first thought was it was a play on Indian (Ingy)  Rubber (Roob) but....

Inky was a nickname for a printer so there might be that option that McCail knew the term and wanted an unusual name so chose that one.  Here -it's official:

 Ing = Family land (-ing means that the first element is definitely someone's name. It's often compounded to -ington or -ingham or somesuch. So Birmingham is Beorm's family's home)

• Inky, slang for a printer

• inky (comparative inkier, superlative inkiest)

  1. Of the colour of ink, especially black ink; dark. quotations ▼
  2. Spattered or stained with ink.
  3. (obsolete, literary) Dark-skinned; black. quotations ▼

  Synonyms[edit]

  • (dark coloured): black, dark, murky
  • (dark-skinned): black, dusky, sable, sooty, swarthy

  Antonyms[edit]

• bright
• clear
• whitened

There is the old Norse meaning of Inky is "Meadow; to extend" (to stretch?) and there are similar variant names such as Inga, Ingaberg, Inger, Ingerith, Ingrede, Ngrid, Inguanna, Inge and...Inky.

My guess is that they are meant to be the same bright and cheeky schoolboys who has special abilities -one via pills that we do not have the origins of; perhaps he made up the formula? The other ability to stretch but so does Stretchy which seems to indicate that this ability was created so...by Ingy himself?

The problem is that Gerald Swan picked and mixed contents from his regular comics and so Ingy and Inky both appear in the same albums but based on art style I think Inky was first and that creates the confusion again as to whether this is the same character but unless someone out there has a complete run of Swan titles from the 1940s I guess we will have to decide for ourselves

Was Ingy Roob really Inky or was Inky in fact Ingy Roob?

And, yes, I do understand these are just comic characters.