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.



Showing posts with label Faceache. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Faceache. Show all posts

Monday, December 24, 2012

FACEACHE CHRISTMASES: PART TWO




In Buster and Monster Fun with the cover date of Jan 14th, 1978 Dad got the news that he’d won £ 75,000 in the pools and immediately decided to go on the World cruise that he has always dreamed about. Realising they’ll get kicked out of hotels all over the Globe because of Faceache’s scrunging hobby, Dad takes Faceache to the Belmonte School for Uncontrollable Young Whelps and leaves the boy for good in the iron hands of Mr. Albert Thrashbottom, the Headmaster, and Mr. Snipe, the Teacher. The episode marked the beginning of Belmonte School era that lasted until the strip ended.

Here is the 1978 Christmas episode, the first one at Belmonte School:



As a Christmas gift to my readers, below are some close-up scans of the original artwork. I am puzzled about ‘No. 262’ and ‘FLY’ written in pencil at the top left corner of the original page – I just can’t make any sense of this. Also, you can see the title of an earlier episode (The Pied Piper) underneath the glued piece of paper with the text ‘at Belmonte School’. The artwork page is four times the size of the printed page in the paper. Enjoy! :)





 




 

Sunday, December 23, 2012

FACEACHE CHRISTMASES: PART ONE



FACEACHE was Ken Reid’s longest-running creation that premiered in the first issue of JET in 1971 and found itself in BUSTER after the titles merged later that year. Since then it appeared regularly (more or less) in BUSTER until Mr. Reid’s death in the beginning of 1987. 

In the first episode Faceache was introduced as Ricky Rubberneck ­– ‘lad born with a bendable bonce’. Later his real name was forgotten and he became known as Faceache - ‘the boy with a thousand faces’. Ken Reid took it easy at first and Faceache’s talent was limited to pulling scary faces, but quite soon the character developed the ability to change his whole body into any form and size. This was called ‘scrunging’ – the term was first used more than a year after Faceache started.

Let’s take a look at Faceache Christmases and see how the character developed over the 17 years of its run.

JET comic didn’t last until Christmas of 1971 so the first Faceache Christmas episode was in the pages of BUSTER. One might get an impression that Faceache’s Dad was the second main character of the strip in the early years but in fact he was not. He first appeared almost three months after strip was launched and showed up from time to time during 1971, 1972 and most of 1973 before becoming a regular. We don’t meet him in this first Christmas episode:


And here’s how Faceache celebrated Christmas in 1972, 1973, 1974 and 1975:





An unthinkable development took place in 1976: when Monster Fun was merged into Buster, Faceache was dropped and replaced by Ken Reid’s Martha’s Monster Make-Up. The strip was similar to Faceache but had a girl as the main character. Faceache didn’t appear for nearly 4 months but returned in February 1977 by popular demand. This explains why there is no Christmas episode in 1976.

Let's see Martha celebrate her 1976 Christmas. Theres is something wrong with Ken Reid's artwork in this one:


The Christmas of 1977 was the last that Faceache spent at home in the company of his bad-tempered Dad (who sometimes looked a bit more cheery and emotional in those Christmas episodes):