If you’ve
got a spook you want shifted, call for the Ghoul Getters, Ltd. - read the
caption above one weekly episode of this nice strip by Trevor Metcalfe. The
ghoul-getting service was a small family business run by Dad and his lad
Arnold. When called, they would arrive
in their ghost-proof van, sometimes use their ‘spookometer’ to detect the
ghost, put one of their letter-coded plans into action and send the ghost
packing. Plan A was the one that never failed – it involved the use of the
ghost sucker, or the super ‘spook-sucker-inner’ – a device that would suck the
ghost in. The Ghoul Getters would then drive it away and drop it off someplace
where the ghost wouldn’t be such a nuisance. In the first episode they rid a
lady from a noisy one and dropped him off at an all-nite disco where visitors
couldn’t care less about noise.
The Ghoul
Getters started in SHIVER AND SHAKE issue No. 71
and was a strong addition to the lineup. The strip occupied 1 ½ pages in the
spooky SHIVER section of the paper. All but one episodes were illustrated by
Trevor Metcalfe who signed a number of his sets towards the end, and the
episode in issue 75 was by Tomboy artist. Seven episodes were
self-contained stories but the Phantom Piper tale (the last story in SHIVER AND
SHAKE) was serialised over two weeks. You can read both parts in this post,
here is the first:
SHIVER AND
SHAKE was merged into WHOOPEE merely 9 weeks after The Ghoul Getters first
appeared. It was considered to be good enough to deserve a slot in the new
combined paper and continued there for nearly two years until the end of February
1976 (exactly like Blunder Puss).
One can’t
help noticing similarities between The Ghoul Getters and the famous Ghostbusters film, although the strip
predates the movie by a whole decade so it wasn’t a spoof but rather the other
way round. Could it have been that the American writers of Ghostbusters were familiar with this little strip published in a
British children’s comic?
