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! 

FRAMED KEN REID PIECE

I have a few pieces of original comic artwork that are well-worth to be framed and displayed on my wall but so far I’ve only got round to mounting one – a World-Wide Weirdie by Ken Reid.  I thought it would be nice to put the original and the printed version side by side, so here’s the result:

Ken Reid inscribed the name and address of the author of the idea on the back of his drawing. I asked the frame shop to cut a hole in the mounting board so as to expose the hand-written text on reverse :

In the image below I have pasted the two versions ‘shoulder-to-shoulder’ to give you an idea about the size of the original (assuming you are familiar with the size of WHOOPEE! comic :) )

GHOSTLY GO ROUND FEATURE

Ghostly Go Round was an interesting feature in WHOOPEE! comic. As young readers gradually lost interest in the once-popular horror comedy genre (as confirmed by cancellation of such brilliant WHOOPEE! features as World-Wide Weirdies and Scream Inn/Spooktacular 7) and the Editor needed to clear space for new material, he came up with an idea of bringing four strips under one umbrella and rotating them in sequence. The strips that formed Ghostly Go Round were Evil Eye, Fun-Fear, Creepy Car and ‘Orrible Hole. The feature was launched in the first issue of 1979 and continued for slightly more than a year before all the four strips were put to rest one by one.

Ghostly Go Round required a new logo that could be used with all the 4 strips and the job was given to Ken Reid. He used the idea of Bob Nixon’s original Fun-Fear logo, made it spookier and squeezed the four main characters into the bottom left corner. The result wasn’t so great, IMHO. I think Bob Nixon’s old version was much better. Below are both logos side-by-side.

Here are the first appearances of the 4 strips in the heyday of WHOOPEE! comic. Evil Eye started in the very first issue of the paper:

… followed by Fun-Fear in the issue cover-dated 17 August, 1974:

… then Creepy Car on 12th October later that year (UPDATE: the strip was in fact an immigrant from SHIVER AND SHAKE where it had started nine weeks before the paper folded. The episode shown below is the first one in the combined Whoopee! and Shiver & Shake, hence the recap of the origins):

… and finally ‘Orrible Hole in the first issue of 1975 (cover-dated Jan 18 because the comic missed a few weeks due to industrial action at the junction of 1974/75):

AGHHH-IT'S-'IM-JONAH: THE REMAINING TWO EPISODES OF MINI SUB

Below are the remaining two installments of the “Mini Sub” story of Jonah by Ken Reid which ran in the Beano Nos. 985-988. This time I’ll show them exactly as they were printed in June 1961 because as you have seen in the two previous posts, those reprints in Buddy in the eighties were rather awful.

(Remember to click on the images to see them even larger) 

All Images 2015 © DC Thomson, Ltd.