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.



Wednesday, January 8, 2020

WHOOPEE! GIFTS AND PULL OUTS OFFERED IN 1974





















WHOOPEE! is my favourite IPC comic, and covering it in the same manner as I did COR!!, SHIVER AND SHAKE and MONSTER FUN is still on my to-do list, but given the long run of the paper (567 weekly issues), I will have to postpone it until I have more time. 

Last year I made a few inroads into WHOOPEE! territory by covering Scared-Stiff Sam, and doing a short series on cut-out Xmas labels and cards. In one of the posts I mentioned I might do a year-by-year overview of the various pull-outs and freebies that came with the paper, so let’s start with 1974 – the first year of WHOOPEE!


No. 1 came out for the week of 1st March, 1974 (there was no date on the cover, as you can see above). It came with the free gift of Super Squirt Ring that looked like this:




I suspect a similar gift also came with JACKPOT No. 2 in 1979:


WHOOPEE! No. 2 came with 4 gifts - when you bought the paper, you could get a Joke Spider, a Joke Soap, a Joke Nail or a Joke Biscuit.   


Here’s what the Joke Bar of Soap looked like:


The copy in my collection comes with the Joke Chocolate Biscuit, still sealed in its original packaging:


Finally, WHOOPEE! No. 3 had a Super Set of 36 SPOOKY Snap Cards.


The cards are still uncut in my copy of the issue, so probably worth a zillion today :) :



No. 10 came with a free Lone Ranger Mask. Lone Ranger was a cowboy strip printed in full colour on the centrespread, and looked somewhat out of place in the paper. 


Here’s how the free gift looked:



Nos. 11, 12, 13 and 14 had the WHOOPEE! QUIZ BOOK – the first of the many pull out booklets to follow:


The idea was to pull out the centre pages from the staples, cut them along dotted line and fold them in half to make an eight-page booklet. Once collected from all 4 issues, the booklet was 32-pages thick! Readers were encouraged to have fun answering the various questions, but as it wasn’t a competition, they were not asked to send their answers to the magazine to enter for a prize. All answers were provided in part 4. Here’s a random selection of pages – some were in coulour, some were not:






Starting from No. 24 (17th August, 1974) WHOOPEE! changed its format to a larger size, keeping its 40 pages for the time being. No pull-outs or freebies were offered to mark the occasion.

The next pull-out booklet (the last one for 1974) – or rather the first part of the booklet was in No. 32 to celebrate the merger of SHIVER AND SHAKE into WHOOPEE!, and it was appropriately named after the big SHIVER AND SHAKE star who was Frankie Stein. 


The 4-part Frankie Stein’s Mini Monster Comic was printed in WHOOPEE! AND SHIVER & SHAKE issue Nos. 32 to 35 (12th October – 2nd November 1974), and once composed together formed another 32-page booklet. 


It featured Evil Eye, The Ghost’s Revenge, The Hand, Hire-A-Horror, etc. but most importantly it had a new 5-page story of Frankie Stein by Robert Nixon - here’s a taste: 


…and two Mini-Monsters by Ken Reid – the last ones he drew for the Creepy Creations feature in SHIVER AND SHAKE, but as the paper was cancelled, the editors decided to use them in this minibooklet. Here’s one:


WHOOPEE! editors came up with an idea to see 1974 off with a giant three-part super poster of Frankie Stein:


Part 1 of the poster came with the issue of 14th December, 1974 (No. 41), and part 2 – with the next issue cover dated 21st Dec., 1974 (No. 42). Then things went wrong because IPC printers went on strike and WHOOPEE! missed what would have been its first Xmas number. The paper didn’t come out until 18th January of next year and, as a result, part 3 of the 'Super Poster' wasn’t published as planned. Readers must have been disappointed because all they got was this:


IPC made it up to the fans next year, but let’s leave this for another post in which I will cover WHOOPEE! pull-outs of 1975.

Characters are © Rebellion Publishing Ltd


And while you’re here, I would like to remind you that although 2019 is over, my promotion for the POWER PACK OF KEN REID is not. Get your copies of the books and BONUS FREE PRINTS on eBay or from my online shop HERE!




4 comments:

  1. Very useful info has some of my Whoopee's have missing pages...and nice seeing the free gifts... love Whoopee too..thanks for your blog posts on whoopee..

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    1. It took me quite an effort to collect a full set with no pullouts missing. I don't have all free gifts though. The pictures of Squirt Ring and of the newsagents promo poster at the top of the post are from eBay or someplace else.

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    2. The images of Lone Ranger mask are also from the web, probably eBay.

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  2. Although I was older than the target audience I found Whoopee to be the most interesting of the new IPC humour comics. It had a good bunch of characters and felt value for money.

    ReplyDelete