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.
