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.



Thursday, March 31, 2016

SWEENY'S A WINNER!



Sweeny Toddler, the demonic baby who brought lots of fun to generations of children in the UK over a number of decades, first appeared in SHIVER AND SHAKE in 1973. I covered the SHIVER AND SHAKE period of the strip in an old post HERE.

This time let’s retrace Sweeny’s path from SHIVER AND SHAKE to the new comic with the clumsy title of WHOOPEE! AND SHIVER & SHAKE.

WHOOPEE! AND SHIVER & SHAKE was 32 pages thick at the time. It seems like a lot of space to fill, but Whoopee! had a strong lineup of characters as it were, and it had to accommodate quite a few refugees from SHIVER AND SHAKE who were too popular to be discontinued with the demise of their home comic (Frankie Stein, Scream Inn and a few others), so re-arrangements were inevitable and competition was tough.

Sweeny Toddler didn’t make a straightforward leap to the new comic – it had to prove its strength by participating in a poll. The Editor selected 8 strips and invited readers to vote in a Pick-A-Strip competition. Most of the entrants were either WHOOPEE!’s own (presumably less successful) features – Pop Snorer, Little Miss Muffit, Snap Happy and The Upper Crusts and the Lazy Loafers, or those from SHIVER AND SHAKE - The Desert Fox, Grimly Feendish and Sweeny Toddler. This is what Sweeny’s entry looked like in WHOOPEE! AND SHIVER & SHAKE cover-dated 23rd November, 1974:




Results were announced in the issue cover-dated 22nd March, 1975:




… and Sweeny Toddler proudly returned to the spotlight a week later in the Easter issue of WHOOPEE! AND SHIVER AND SHAKE cover-dated 29th March, 1975:




It would have been interesting to see the vote count. Perhaps it was a close call for Sweeny? Was there a chance that he would have faded into oblivion, had the runner-up received a few more votes in its favour?.. 

All Images 2016 © Egmont UK Ltd.  All rights reserved. Used with permission.

Friday, March 25, 2016

THE WHAM! EASTERS OF FRANKIE STEIN



Let’s take a look at all three Easter episodes of Frankie Stein in WHAM! comic. Those from 1965 and 1967 editions were by Ken Reid while the one in the middle (1966) was by someone else because Ken was too busy with The Queen of the Seas at the time and had to give up drawing Frankie Stein temporarily. Which is a pity because the period when Ken was substituted by another artist coincided with Frankie’s days at Madam McAbre’s Academy for Frustrated Freaks (or Monster Manor) inhabited by fiendish characters of all sorts. One can only imagine how brilliant the episodes would have been, had they been illustrated by Frankie Stein’s original artist.

Happy Easter!