This weird little strip was set in the dark Middle Ages and offered the
readers of MONSTER FUN COMIC a weekly helping of dungeon humour. The main
character was young Tom Thumbscrew who worked as a torturer in the King’s caste;
the title of the strip tells us he was the torturer’s apprentice but actually he was
the master of the dungeon and answered directly to the King.
Tom wasn’t much of a torturer: he tended to side with the prisoners and
was generally on friendly terms with them. He spent more time playing cards
with the captives than actually trying to make them ‘talk’ and tormenting them
with his branding irons, stretching rack and iron maiden. Sometimes he even helped
them escape. There were usually at least two or three prisoners chained to the
wall of the dungeon but they seemed to be quite happy in Tom’s custody. The young
torturer did his job only when the King imperatively commanded him to, and even
then he preferred soft methods, such as feather tickling, telling
lame jokes, making a dirty robber wash, telling the offender to eat both of the
apples he has pinched or shaving off a guy’s hair and beard to dissuade him
from escaping because he knew the guy preferred not to be seen like that in
public.
The other
regular character of the strip was the King (or Kingy). He was the one who was really
violent and always eager to keep Tom busy. Kingy was often worried that Tom wasn’t torturing his prisoners properly
so he liked to check on him in the dungeon. The King was a willing participant in
the torture sessions and liked to experiment with new methods. The honey-on-buried-prisoner
torture must have been his favourite - he tried it as many as four times. Besides,
the King liked to entertain his noble guests by inviting them to do some
torturing together or watch his prisoners being branded and stretched on the
rack. Obviously, the King was the baddie in the strip and often
found himself at the receiving end of the various torturing schemes gone wrong.
All this sounds worse than it looked in the strip which was in fact quite jolly and bright. Tom Thumbscrew ran in MFC issues 1 to 73 and missed issue Nos.
14, 24, 48, 51, 56, 58, 62, 70, 71 and 72. The regular artist was Norman
Mansbridge who took charge of the strip starting from issue 12. The opening story
in MFC No. 1 was by Trevor Metcalfe who would have made an excellent job as the
illustrator of the entire run, on par with Norman Mansbridge:
The episodes in MFC Nos. 2 – 11 were by the less-excellent Andy
Christine – the illustrator of another concurrent MFC strip Giant Bearhug… GIANT, who signed his sets of Tom Thumbscrew in issues
2 and 4. Here is an example from MFC No. 9:
