welcome and enjoy!

Hi and welcome to my blog about comics from other people’s childhood! It is dedicated primarily to British humour comics of the 60s and 70s. The reason they are not from my childhood is simply because I didn’t live in the UK back then (nor do I live there now). I knew next to nothing about them until fairly recently but since then I’ve developed a strong liking for the medium and amassed a large collection, including a number of complete or near complete sets. My intention is to use this blog as a channel for sharing my humble knowledge about different titles, favourite characters and creators as I slowly research my collection.

QUICK TIP: this blog is a sequence of posts covering one particular comic at a time. The sequence follows a certain logic, so for maximum results it is recommended that the blog is read from the oldest post up.

Copyright of all images and quotations used here is with their respective owners. Any such copyrighted material is used exclusively for educational purposes and will be removed at first notice. All other text copyright Irmantas P.



Friday, June 22, 2012

A LOOK AT COR!! STRIPS: THE SLIMMS


The Slimms. This was the last long-running IPC strip originally created for COR!! by Sheila and Terry Baves. In the second part of his article in the Summer 1986 edition of GOLDEN FUN Terry Bave recalls that slimming was a popular theme of the day, so his wife Sheila suggested that there might be makings of a good fun feature with slimming as the central theme. After some thought and some sketches, they came up with what they believed was one of their most successful features – The Slimms. It proved very popular with COR!! readers. The Baves supplied scripts for many weeks until other IPC writers took over; Terry Bave continued to draw The Slimms week by week until the paper folded.

From COR!! issue dated 19th January, 1974 (No. 190)

Little boy Sammy Slim has a problem and it’s his parents who are obese and Sammy is always ridiculed by other kids because of this. So he finally decides they can’t go on eating like this and will have to go on a diet, starting immediately. But Mum and Dad always manage to outwit Sammy and stuff themselves silly because they like being fat and enjoy grub too much to slim. Sammy is very persistent and schemes all kinds of plots to get his parents to diet or exercise. From what we can tell, Mum and Dad are unemployed so Sammy even tries to fix some jobs for them so that they can work off some of their weight

From COR!! dated 16th February, 1974 (No. 194)

The feature premiered in COR!! issue with the cover date of 1st January, 1972 (No. 83) and continued until the last edition of the paper dated 15th June, 1974 (No. 211).  A good share of the episodes were in colour, besides, The Slimms made as many as five front cover appearances on 23rd June, 1973 (No. 160), 10th November, 1973 (No. 180), 5th January, 1974 (No. 188), 20th April, 1974 (No. 203) and 18th May, 1974 (No. 207). 

Such was the popularity of the feature that after the demise of COR!! Terry Bave didn’t find it hard to persuade Bob Paynter that The Slimms be transferred to WHIZZER AND CHIPS where weekly appearances of the strip continued through to mid-1979. 

From COR!! dated 1st June, 1974 (No. 209)

6 comments:

  1. The Slimms were one of the go-to strips back in my Whizzer & Chips reading days - consistently funny and Terry Bave's strips always had that extra attraction to me. I was a little too young to read Cor!! during it's heyday, but collected all the annuals after its demise.

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  2. Due to where I lived at the time, my exposure to British comics was extremely limited. In fact, it was limited to one single issue of Whoopee! from 1974 but Terry Bave’s Toy Boy still stuck in my memory very vividly.

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  3. Looked up Whizzer & Chips today and the Slimms are in evidence till the Last W&C of 1979, 29/12. If you want me to check 1980 onwards say the word! It was interesting to see a Timothy Tester from shortly before the 10th birthday issue that I remembered from Best of W&C. It featured Flatfoot having a nightmare about the many times he'd come a cropper through one of Tim’s tests! Stuck in my mind because the tests were unfamiliar to me, and I wanted to know what happened!!

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    1. Timothy Tester is one of my favourite strips in Whizzer and Chips. From what I've seen, the strip enjoyed quite a long run.

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  4. I’m man enough to admit when I’m wrong! The Slimms did indeed end in 1979, the last original strip being 29 September and it was reprints thereafter for a time. They just missed out on a slice on the 10th anniversary birthday cake!

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  5. If you’ve ever wondered what the (adult) Slimms' first names are, they can be found in W&C 22/1/72, in Me and My Shadow. This was only 3 weeks after the strip started in Cor, and pleasantly foreshadows (ho, ho) their W&C tenure. If it’s not them, it’s their doubles!

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