SOME VERY EXCITING NEWS FOR FANS OF KEN REID!

I said I was going to break the news a while ago, but things tend to take longer than one plans… At long last, here they are: 

I AM ABOUT TO PUBLISH THE OFFICIAL COLLECTION OF KEN REID’S COMPLETE ODHAMS WORK!

More details will be revealed soon…

GUEST APPEARANCES AT SCREAM INN – FRANKIE STEIN

When SHIVER AND SHAKE merged into WHOOPEE! in October 1974, Scream Inn and Frankie Stein were among the strips that confidently made it to the combined paper. A few weeks after the merger Frankie Stein stopped by at the spooky inn and tried to win the million quid. Brian Walker was a very good imitator and his Frankie looked very much like that by Robert Nixon. It’s a shame the printing presses used by IPC at the time often failed to present beautiful artwork decently. The episode is from WHOOPEE! AND SHIVER & SHAKE cover-dated 23 November, 1974 (No. 38). Followed by both pages of the Frankie Stein strip from that same issue, by Robert Nixon, of course.

GUEST APPEARANCES AT SCREAM INN - SERIES INTRO

I like it when characters make guest appearances in other features. I may be mistaken, but Scream Inn may very well be the champion in this category, at least as far as IPC comics are concerned. The general setting of the strip with Innkeeper welcoming a fresh guest every week offered a perfect frame for including virtually anybody and anything into the story.

A quick look through my notes tells me there were at least 13 episodes with such guest appearances, so I thought it might be fun to do a series of blogposts and show them all! I will start it in a few days, but until then here’s a nice exchange of visits between two Whoopee! star characters – Scared-Stiff Sam and Frankie Stein from the issue of Whoopee! & Shiver and Shake cover-dated 5th April, 1975:

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!