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| Advertisement in MFC No. 39 the week before the premiere |
Freaky Farm was a tale about a farm with an evil reputation run by the froight’ning Freaky Farmer – a monstrous humanoid who spoke with the West Country accent and had a hat instead of a head. Everything on Freaky Farm was predisposed against ‘pesky visitors’ and worked to scare them away and off the farm. Everything includes literally everything – from the Freaky Farmer:
… to farm
animals, poultry and crops:
… to
agricultural machinery and appliances:
… to buildings and structures, such as the freaky farmhouse, the barn and even the rocks of the stone
wall:
… to wildlife,
trees and plants growing on the farm:
… to the
farm-hand:
… and of course
the scarecrow:
Every week a
new ignorant trespasser or adventurer would turn up at the unwelcoming Freaky
Farm and the farm community took a concerted effort to make
him/her/it/them run away in shock and terror. Here are two nice representative
examples:
The horror show
put up by the monsters of Freaky Farm never failed to produce
the desired effect on the poor visitor(s), except in the very first issue when
a reader of MONSTER FUN COMIC dropped by:
The 2-page
strip ran in issues 40 to 73 and didn’t miss a single week. In the last frame
of the final episode in MFC No. 73 Freaky Farmer told the readers he was
retiring:
The main
illustrator was Jim Watson who signed the majority of the episodes starting
from No. 49. The first two sets were signed Elphin,
although the first one in No. 40 looks very much like Jim Watson’s work to me.
The episodes which followed in issues 41 – 48 may have been drawn by someone
else but Elphin’s signature in No. 41
makes things quite confusing... Was Elphin
a nom de plume of Jim Watson and it
was him all along, experimenting with different styles before settling on the
one he was satisfied enough to put his signature to?
The
episodes in MFC issues 71 and 72 were drawn and signed by the excellent and
universal Les Barton who IPC editors could always rely upon whenever their main
artists weren’t available:
IMHO, the
strip wasn’t very original or imaginative so it is probably not a big surprise that
it did not make it to the new combined BUSTER AND MONSTER FUN.
