SERIALISED FACEACHE STORIES – PART ONE: FACEACHE FINDS HIMSELF AT BELMONTE

Broadly speaking, the whole Faceache saga consisted of two long periods – the first 292 episodes showed Faceache in his home environment in and around the village of Puddleditch, with Faceache’s Dad (first seen in episode 13 (24 July 1971)) as the second main character. The second period (episodes 293 – 695) depicted Faceache’s antics at Belmonte School for Uncontrollable Young Whelps where the lad was looked after by Mr. Albert Thrashbottom (Headmaster) and Mr. Snipe (Teacher).

All serialised stories that are the topic of this series fall within the second period, and the first one tells readers about how and why Dad committed Faceache to the special education establishment. The two-part story can be found in BUSTER AND MONSTER FUN dated 14 January 1978 and 21 January 1978.

Faceache has a diabolical dream about a headmaster welcoming him at his ghastly establishment. Next morning he’s woken up by Dad who has won £ 75,000 in the pools. 

At last they can go on that World cruise Dad has always dreamed about! Faceache is delighted because now they can live permanently in a posh hotel. Dad realises that because of Faceache’s scrunging hobby they’ll get kicked out of hotels all over the Globe, and announces that Faceache’s future home will be Belmonte... 

Faceache thinks it is the name of a posh hotel. In fact, it is Belmonte School for Uncontrollable Young Whelps. Dad is off, leaving Faceache in the iron hands of Mr. Albert Thrashbottom.

In the second part of this story Faceache scrunges into a Fangy-Faced Floogoe-Bug and tries to follow his Dad driving off in a taxi, but suffers an accident involving an airplane...

Mr. Snipe canes him for breaking the school motto – “Cleanliness and Truth”

Characters are © Rebellion Publishing Ltd

Click on the POWER PACK banner in the right-hand column and get your copy of the POWER PACK OF KEN REID - the deluxe two-volume set of Ken’s strips in WHAM!, SMASH! and POW! comics of the ‘60s.

SERIALISED STORIES OF FACEACHE BY KEN REID

Faceache was Ken Reid’s longest running strip that began in the first issue of JET cover-dated 1 May 1971, and ended nearly 17 years later in BUSTER, cover-dated 14 March 1987. After Ken’s death the strip was continued by others, but I am talking about the run illustrated by the original artist only.

In the period between 1971 and 1987 Ken Reid drew as many as 695 pages of Faceache’s adventures in the weekly comics. The majority were self-contained stories, but some tales continued for two weeks or more, and I plan to start a long string of posts covering every single one of them, with synopsis of the plot, illustrated with a few panels from each. The stories were between 2 and as many as 6 weeks in length, and I have counted 34 of them, the first one starting in BUSTER AND MONSTER FUN of 14 Jan., 1978, and the last one (34th) ending in BUSTER AND JACKPOT of 26 June 1982. Come back soon for the first one!

… And while you are here, and provided you are a fan of Ken Reid, why not click on the POWER PACK banner in the right-hand column and get your copy of the POWER PACK OF KEN REID - the deluxe two-volume set of Ken’s strips in WHAM!, SMASH! and POW! comics of the ‘60s.

FACEACHE VOL. 1 FROM REBELLION

Last week I received my copy of Ken Reid’s Faceache published by the new copyright owner. I am proud I had an opportunity to make a small contribution to the preparation of the book, and I am pleased that the editor included a special thank you to me in the credits.

I like nearly everything about the book: introductions by Alan Moore and Ken’s son Antony are an entertaining read and offer some fresh insights; I like the endpapers and the back cover (not so thrilled about the front one); reproduction quality is impressive, considering that the stories were scanned from newsprint comics; it is nice the book is printed on plain paper rather than the glossy stock used for Marney the Fox collection published earlier this year.

The sub-title says “The Ken Reid Years”, so I would have preferred if they had left out the poorly-drawn pages by the substitute artist (16 altogether) and filled the book with Ken Reid’s art from cover to cover. 

That aside, it’s an excellent volume, a must for every Ken Reid/Faceache fan! I very much hope it does well in the bookstores and Rebellion find it worth their while to release Vol. 2, 3, etc. of this great character that happens to be one of my favourites in British comics.

P.S. - Have you noticed that the actual front cover differs from the version used in the various online articles and blogposts that promoted the book when it was first announced? Amazon and eBay sellers are still using the first version of the front cover. I am glad Rebellion changed it because as many as five scrunges in the first version were drawn by the substitute artist, while those appearing on the actual book are all by Reid! 

KEN REID AS IPC SCRIPTWRITER

Ken Reid is widely recognised as one of the great UK comics illustrators but he is sometimes overlooked as a brilliant scriptwriter. In this post I will focus on Mr. Reid’s IPC work.

He only wrote two strips for the publisher – the first one was SUB in SCORCHER (the first of Mr. Reid’s eight soccer strips that he drew in 1970 - 1974). Ken wrote scripts for all but the first two of the 31 episodes of this hilarious feature. Here is an example:

The second was of course Faceache – the long-running strip that began in JET and transferred to BUSTER when it absorbed JET. The first two episodes were written by Ian Mennell (I think they were episodes one and three in the JET run of the strip) before Ken took over as the writer and continued for more than a decade until BUSTER became BUSTER AND JACKPOT. The last episode of Faceache that Ken drew to his own script appeared in BUSTER cover-dated January 30th, 1982. Here’s an example of an early one from JET:

I contacted Dez Skinn who was the BUSTER sub-editor in the seventies and asked him how he remembered Ken as scriptwriter.  Here is what he had to say: “… as the Buster sub-editor I dealt with Ken on a weekly basis, sometimes chasing him for his finished artwork, which would arrive with the pencilled lettering that he wanted. Sadly he was deemed to have overwritten his work (invariably his narrative panels) making it too detailed for little 'uns so we usually had to cut it back by at least 25%. Like Alf Saporito on Cor!!'s Gus Gorilla, Terry Bave, Leo Baxendale, Reg Parlett and many other writer/artists, his scripts were drawn up full twice-up size on thin paper for the editor’s approval... Given that IPC considered his work dark, they'd never give him - of all people - carte blanche!“

Faceache was a big success, as evidenced by its spectacularly long run. After 8 years of writing and drawing Faceache, Mr. Reid was presented with two awards for the feature by the Society of Strip Illustration. One was Cartoonist of the Year and the other one – Humorous Script Writer of the Year. The ceremony took place at the Y-Hotel in London on Sept 23rd, 1978 where Ken’s prizes were handed to him by Michael Bentine. Untypically, IPC celebrated Ken’s achievement and recognition by including this short article in BUSTER cover-dated Nov. 18th, 1978:

When researching for this blogpost, I remembered Peter Gray’s old website where he showed Ken’s letter to his penfriend Chris. In the letter Ken tells Chris about the S.S.I. awards ceremony and his misadventures at the Y-Hotel. Here is the first-hand account by the man himself (click to enlarge):