A LOOK AT MONSTER FUN FEATURES: BADTIME BEDTIME BOOKS - Part ONE

Badtime Bedtimes Books is something what Monster Fun Comic is probably best remembered for. They were centre-page pull-outs which were meant to be removed from the comic, cut up and arranged into eight-page minibooks. Each book was a self-contained whacky story. Here is an example from MFC No. 3. Unfortunately, IPC printing presses often failed to do them justice (click on the images to enlarge):

Leo Baxendale wrote about Badtime Bedtimes Books at length in his book A VERY FUNNY BUSINESS, and that’s how we know it was Bob Paynter who created the concept and gave it to Leo Baxendale to develop. Mid-70s was the time when Mr. Baxendale had grown disappointed with the comics industry and was looking for an opportunity to quit because he felt it was in for a decline. He realised that times had changed and that comics humour should follow suit. Although he was excited about Badtime Bedtime Books, he had planned from the very start to use them as a “test bed” for his new ideas and a vehicle to manoeuvre his way out of the comics industry.

The first Badtime Bedtime Books received glowing reader feedback which Leo Baxendale compared with reaction to his very early Bash Street Kids, and he immediately knew he was on the right path.

As could be expected, pressing deadlines prevented Mr. Baxendale from working at a leisurely pace and producing a quality “vintage” book every time. He gradually divested himself from other strips he had still been drawing for IPC and concentrated single-mindedly on the BBBs, but he still didn’t have enough time to do them as he thought they should be done. As a consequence, he adopted a loose sketchy style, producing a vintage set only once in a while. This was also the time when Mr. Baxendale started contemplating a series of his own Willy the Kid annuals. He no longer had the time to write the BBBs, and eventually stopped drawing them too, leaving Bob Paynter with a huge challenge of finding first the writers and later the illustrators who could match Mr. Baxendale’s talent.

In all likelihood the original idea was to have a BBB in every issue (with the odd poster of a MFC star character squeezed in), and Mr. Baxendale was somehow able to keep the schedule, although we know from his book that he was working at a leisurely pace and preparing his first Willy the Kid annual at the same time. All but three of the 25 Badtime Bedtime Books that came out in 1975 were illustrated by Mr. Baxendale but the decline of the feature was very much on the horizon.

By the time he had to prepare the first MONSTER FUN COMIC issues of 1976, Bob Paynter had run out of Badtime Bedtime Books supplied by Mr. Baxendale, so he tried experimenting with a few other artists. IMHO, three of the illustrators (Artie Jackson, Leslie Harding and even Terry Bave) weren’t really up to the task, and the five BBBs that appeared in the first months of 1976 were particularly poorly drawn. Things improved considerably when Bob Paynter gave the artist’s duties to Mike Brown who was able to imitate Leo Baxendale's style to perfection, adding his own twist to it. The Editor must have been satisfied, as confirmed by the fact that towards the end of the run the frequency of BBBs was restored to its previous levels. Mike Brown proudly initialled or signed most of the sets, so he must have been pleased with his work as well.

The MONSTER FUN COMIC run of Badtime Bedtime Books falls into three “periods”: 1) the Leo Baxendale period, 2) the “grey” period when they were drawn by other artists, or when Leo Baxendale’s simplified style or ghosters’ efforts make one wonder who really illustrated them, and last but by no means least 3) the Mike Brown period.

I will cover the three periods in my next posts. In the meantime, here is the Badtime Bedtime Book poster from MFC No. 36 dated 14th February, 1976. Drawn, I believe, by Leo Baxendale.

 All Images 2014 © Egmont UK Ltd.  All rights reserved. Used with permission.

WHOOPEE! BOOK OF FRANKIE STEIN 1976

The first WHOOPEE! BOOK OF FRANKIE STEIN was chronologically the second Frankie Stein publication and came out for the Christmas of 1975. The advert in MONSTER FUN COMIC dated 27th September, 1975 announced it was due to go on sale on 1st October. The softcover book had 128 pages and cost 75 p. Apart from bright front and back covers it was all b/w, printed on coarse pulp paper prone to heavy browning (hence the weird colour of the majority of images included in this post – the result of my efforts to make them look better…).

WHOOPEE! BOOK OF FRANKIE STEIN 1976 followed the pattern set in the first FS Summer Special: some content was Frankie Stein-related and some wasn’t. I have counted 61 pages of the former variety – that’s less than a half of the book. This is a Frankie Stein publication so let’s deal with that part of the content first. Less than one third was puzzles, mazes, gags or other features named after Frankie (e.g. Frankie’s Personal Disaster Diary):

Just like in the first FS Summer Special, both spot-the-difference puzzles were in fact pieces of Bob Nixon’s artwork taken from Shiver and Shake weekly comics (Seeing Double was the front cover of Shiver and Shake No. 61 (4th May, 1974) and Double Trouble with Frankie swinging a tank holding it by the gun was a panel from the episode in Shiver and Shake No. 53 (9th March, 1974)).

One thing that I find interesting about those Frankie Stein publications is that artists who’d never had anything to do with the friendly monster were often asked to draw something for the specials or books. We’ll see a lot of this in later publications. In WHOOPEE! BOOK OF FRANKIE STEIN 1976 it was two pages of Frankie's Funspots by Jim Crocker and this contribution of Cliff Brown:

Enough about puzzles, let’s look at Frankie Stein strips which occupied 39 pages (42 if we count both covers and the “this book belongs to” page). There were four brand new Frankie Stein tales, all drawn by Bob Nixon, and Frankie Stein in Funtastic Voyage (6 pages) is first in line. Contrary to what the title suggests, it was not Frankie but Prof. Cube who went on that voyage. He accidentally swallowed some shrinking pills which he had hoped to use on Frankie, and Frankie ate him up with his bun. That’s how Prof. Cube found himself inside Frankie’s body. Looking at these panels I can’t help thinking about Ken Reid’s The Nervs in SMASH!:

T.V. Frankie Stein was a two-pager in which Frankie went through a lot of trouble to visit the girl of his dreams but got bitterly disappointed in the end. Quite an unusual set, IMHO:

Frankie Stein Time Traveller was the third new tale (an 8-pager) in which Prof. Cube persuaded his troublesome creation to try out a time machine in hope that he’d get lost in time. Frankie’s first stop was in the Wild West where he accepted Sheriff’s position and rid the town of some nasty red Indians and then Black Jake the robber:

His second stop was in the times of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table where he took part in a tournament and jousted against the evil knight Sir Vile before making it home safely.

1976 Winter Olympics were near so a Frankie Stein winter sports story was an appropriate proposition. Frankie Stein in Winter Sports was a 6-pager in which Prof. Cube came up with an idea that entering Frankie in the Olympics might be a good way to get rid of him for good:

Bob Nixon redrew the last panel of the second page shown above for the back cover of this book:

There were three pages of Freaky Frankie – a strip without speech balloons by an unknown artist whose drawing style I don’t find very appealing:

There were also 12 pages of reprints of Frankie Stein episodes by Ken Reid from WHAM!, but I’ll discuss them further down in this post.

Frank McDiarmid contributed one new Frankie Stein tale - Professor Cube – Inventor! (a 6-pager) in which Frankie Stein played a minor part opposite Dad. It was a story about Prof. Cube’s inventing misadventures in his pre-Frankie days:

…which of course were now over and long-forgotten:

Mr. McDiarmid was also the only contributor of new non-Frankie-Stein strip content in this book. Weird Wolf was a tale about a ghost wolf whose most favourite pastime was howling at the Moon, much to the annoyance of the population of the town of Dullton who tried different schemes to get rid of the pest. Two episodes (a three-pager and a two-pager) were included in this book. Here's a taste:

The second new non-Frankie-Stein strip by Mr. McDiarmid was The Movie Makers, two 4-page episodes can be found in this book. It is about daft International Film Studios who had no clue how to make movies. Their first one was so horrible that it became a blockbuster as the ‘World’s Most Horrific Film’ and made them believe they could do more of the kind:

The rest of non-Frankie-Stein comic strip content was reprints. The strips they chose to reprint were already familiar to readers of the first FS Summer Special: Ghost Ship (3 episodes, originally from SMASH!), The Haunts of Headless Harry (3 episodes, originally from SMASH! as well), Crabbe’s Crusaders (adventure tale, one episode spanning 8 pages, originally from BUSTER) and best of all - Mervyn’s Monsters. Drawn by Leo Baxendale, the strip originally appeared in BUSTER in the late 60s and was a tale of the epic struggle between two opposing secret services – M.U.M. (Mervyn’s Undercover Monsters) and C.R.U.S.H (Crafty Rascals’ Union of Saboteurs and Hoodlums, headed by Oscar Mush). The original run consisted of a number of serialised stories, and the 18-pager reprinted in this book was Mervyn’s Monsters Starring in the Incredible Abominable Snowmen Adventure that started in Buster AND GIGGLE dated 16th March, 1968 (note that this is not the first episode of the original series). Check out the opening pages in Buster and WHOOPEE! BOOK OF FRANKIE STEIN 1976:

Getting back to Frankie Stein but keeping on the subject of reprints, the book contains quite a few  episodes by Ken Reid. Originally they are from WHAM! Nos. 43, 46, 54, 47, 75, 68 (listed here in the order of appearance of reprints in the Book). As always, the original one-pagers were tampered with and converted into two-pagers, therefore the total page count of Ken Reid artwork comes to 12. Check out an example from WHAM! and compare it with the doctored version in the Book. They certainly took liberties with the original…

From WHAM! No. 68, 2nd October, 1965

Reprint in Whoopee! Book of Frankie Stein 1976

WHOOPEE! BOOK OF FRANKIE STEIN 1976 also had a fair amount of ‘monster’ and ‘horror’ non-comic strip features that weren’t related to Frankie Stein, e.g. Man Made Monsters (photos of giant machines and structures with some factual details), Screen Scream (screenshots from horror movies with humorous speech balloons), Spot the Star (mugshots of contemporary stars with Frankenstein forehead, hairdo and neck-bolts attached) and Monsters of the Screen (screenshots of monsters from various films). As you can see, this book was very much in the horror comedy genre so it was a suitable substitute for MONSTER FUN COMIC annual 1976 which IPC didn’t have time to put together in the first year of MFC. It is probably not by coincidence that IPC ran a series of adverts in MFC weeklies, and Frankie mentioned the book on a number of occasions in his letters section.