It
appears that creators of Monster Fun
Comic wanted as many as possible of their strips and features to have
titles starting with the letter ‘M’ (to go with the title of the comic and the
monster theme in general). It may be just a coincidence but IMHO Martha’s
Monster Make-Up, March of the Mighty Ones, Major
Jump, Brainy and his Monster Maker, Master Ugly Mug and Miss Funny
Face, not to mention Monster Hits and Invisible
Monster, make a lot of M's for a comic with a relatively small number
of strips.
Martha’s
Monster Make-up was a strip about a girl whose
Dad was a caretaker at Mallet Horror Films Studios. He gave her a jar of
make-up that he found sweeping one of the dressing rooms. Martha soon realised
it was a special “monster” make-up that transformed people’s faces, hair and
limbs into something monstrous. Luckily, the effect of the make-up was only
temporary and didn’t take long to wear-off. The illustrator of the strip was
the excellent Ken Reid who was also drawing Faceache in Buster at the same time. Initially
Martha’s face –pulling antics were a lot like Faceache’s in the sister
publication. Differently from Faceache whose ‘scrunging’ didn't go beyond his own face and body, Martha’s cream worked on other people
too.
Whoever
was the writer of Martha’s Monster Make-up, he soon realised that the two features
were becoming very similar so he left humans alone and gave the strip a new
twist by focusing on objects. A few weeks into the run Martha started using her
cream to ‘monstrify’ all kinds of things, including a sculpture, a bicycle, a
X-mas tree, a brick wall, a car, an umbrella, a mirror, a piano, a grandfather
clock – the list goes on and on. Some of the weirder things she transformed
included wallpaper, scaffolding, golf course green and even a sea
wave. The reason she did this was to teach meanies and bullies a lesson and have
some fun at their expense. Drawing those sour-faced unpleasant types with a bad
attitude was one of Ken Reid’s specialties so it was good for Martha that her
small jar contained a never-ending supply of the cream.
Martha’s Monster Make-up started in the first issue and didn’t miss a single week. As I mentioned it before, the illustrator was Ken Reid (who is known to have disliked drawing female characters). Frank McDiarmid stepped in on three occasions in issues 26, 30 and 62, and the episode in No. 15 was drawn by a ghost artist whose name I don’t know but he also substituted Mr. Reid on Faceache in Buster a few times around the same time. The strip was a one-pager and had a prime slot on page 4 and later page 6.
Surprisingly,
Martha’s
Monster Make-up survived merger with BUSTER. I say surprisingly not
because it was a poor strip but because the transfer was at the expense of Faceache
that IMHO was better, but was rested nontheless starting from the first combined issue of
BUSTER AND MONSTER FUN. Martha’s Monster Make-up continued
in the combined paper for nearly 4 months but justice was restored starting
from issue dated Feb. 19th, 1977 when Faceache returned by popular demand
(as confirmed by the caption under the last episode of Martha's Monster Make-up the week before).
