SWEENY'S A WINNER!

Sweeny Toddler, the demonic baby who brought lots of fun to generations of children in the UK over a number of decades, first appeared in SHIVER AND SHAKE in 1973. I covered the SHIVER AND SHAKE period of the strip in an old post HERE.

This time let’s retrace Sweeny’s path from SHIVER AND SHAKE to the new comic with the clumsy title of WHOOPEE! AND SHIVER & SHAKE.

WHOOPEE! AND SHIVER & SHAKE was 32 pages thick at the time. It seems like a lot of space to fill, but Whoopee! had a strong lineup of characters as it were, and it had to accommodate quite a few refugees from SHIVER AND SHAKE who were too popular to be discontinued with the demise of their home comic (Frankie Stein, Scream Inn and a few others), so re-arrangements were inevitable and competition was tough.

Sweeny Toddler didn’t make a straightforward leap to the new comic – it had to prove its strength by participating in a poll. The Editor selected 8 strips and invited readers to vote in a Pick-A-Strip competition. Most of the entrants were either WHOOPEE!’s own (presumably less successful) features – Pop Snorer, Little Miss Muffit, Snap Happy and The Upper Crusts and the Lazy Loafers, or those from SHIVER AND SHAKE - The Desert Fox, Grimly Feendish and Sweeny Toddler. This is what Sweeny’s entry looked like in WHOOPEE! AND SHIVER & SHAKE cover-dated 23rd November, 1974:

Results were announced in the issue cover-dated 22nd March, 1975:

… and Sweeny Toddler proudly returned to the spotlight a week later in the Easter issue of WHOOPEE! AND SHIVER AND SHAKE cover-dated 29th March, 1975:

It would have been interesting to see the vote count. Perhaps it was a close call for Sweeny? Was there a chance that he would have faded into oblivion, had the runner-up received a few more votes in its favour?.. 

All Images 2016 © Egmont UK Ltd.  All rights reserved. Used with permission.

MORE BUSTER COVERS BY BAX

Below are the remaining two Buster covers by Leo Baxendale from 1967, followed by examples of The Cave Kids and The Pirates by Bax from the same period. It appears that the artist also did the lettering throughout the runs of both strips.

By way of a teaser for the next post, I can say that I decided to check if I can find more examples of cap-less Buster. Come back soon to see some results of my quest. In the meantime, here’s an image of Buster-less cap from 1985:

BUSTER COVERS BY LEO BAXENDALE

The Spanish artist Angel Nadal was responsible for the vast majority of BUSTER covers in the period from 1962 till 1974. The few exceptions included six episodes of Buster's Diary by Leo Baxendale in 1967 (the issues cover-dated 6th May, 15th July, 5th Aug, 26th Aug, 23rd Sept and 21st Oct).

My speculation is that the Editor wanted to have insurance in case Nadal’s artwork didn’t arrive on time in the post from Barcelona, so he asked Leo Baxendale to draw some and kept them “in reserve”. Here are some of the covers. I prefer Nadal’s version of Buster’s Diary. 

ACCIDENTAL RUDENESS

I recently received a small joblot of the Beano from the mid-fifties and found this early episode of When The Bell Rings in issue No. 630:

I decided to show it because of something I spotted in the first panel:

I remember reading somewhere that publishers had an internal directive warning against the use of certain innocent words in comics because they tended to look rude when printed, and ‘flick’ appears to have been one of them. It seems that in this case DCT realised it before it was too late but they were more careful when reprinting the episode in the Dandy Beano Magic Moments book nearly 40 years later:

All Images 2015 © DC Thomson, Ltd.  All rights reserved.