The second Shiver and Shake
Special was 80 pages thick and cost 20 p. It must have been published in August
because the first advertisement in the weekly paper was in the issue cover
dated 10th August, 1974.
Here is the summary of the contents: Ghost’s Revenge, Frankie Stein (4 episodes), Ed (3 episodes), Screen Scream
(2 pinups), The Hand, The Shiver Givers
(2 episodes), Spot the Difference puzzle (featuring characters of Horrornation Street), Webster (2 episodes,
one in full colour), Mirth Shakers feature (2
installments), Hire a Horror (2
episodes, one in full colour), Grimly
Feendish (3 episodes, one in
full colour), Shake, Sports School (2 episodes), The Desert Fox (3
episodes), Tough Nutt and Softy Centre, Scatty Bat (2 installments), Stirling Steel and the Terror Train (adventure story, 6 pages), Blunder Puss, The Fixer, The Wiz War (2 episodes), Lolly
Pop, Moana Lisa, Harry’s Haunted House, Scream Inn, Ghouldilocks, Sweeny Toddler, The
Duke’s Spook.
The features marked in red weren’t familiar to readers of the weeklies or
of the first Special and the 1974 Annual.
In tune with the horror comedy genre of the magazine, the Screen Scream pinups were screenshots of
old horror movies, enhanced with humorous speech balloons. Here is one example:
Harry’s Haunted
House was a star guest from WHIZZER AND
CHIPS. At that time Star Guest was a
regular feature in Shiver and Shake
and other weekly IPC sister publications in which popular characters from one
comic made guest appearances in other titles.
Terry Bave contributed as many as 12 pages of art, including some
features that were usually illustrated by other artists (one story of Hire a Horror and the Shake strip). Blunder Puss was by Les Barton. Brian Walker was substituted by someone
else on Scream Inn – that’s one of only two cases I am aware of when the feature was illustrated by a substitute artist. Here
are both pages of the story:
As far as I can tell, all other stories were drawn by their regular
artists. The episodes of Grimly
Feendish were reprints from SMASH! where the strip was illustrated by Leo Baxendale:
As was the
case in Shiver and Shake 1973
Christmas Special and 1974 Annual, all 4 episodes of Frankie Stein were
reprints of Ken Reid’s work from WHAM! comic of the sixties; original stories
had appeared in WHAM! issues 52, 55, 44 and 56. Here is an example, originally
from WHAM! No. 56:
Same as in the 1973 SHIVER AND SHAKE Christmas Holiday
Special, the Stirling Steel story (Stirling
Steel and the Terror Train) was a reprint of Maxwell Hawke’s adventures from
BUSTER. The original story (Maxwell
Hawke and the
Phantom Express) ran in BUSTER between 24th October
1964 and 2nd January 1965. Here are opening panels of both versions:
“Adorning”
Maxwell Hawke with a beard and redrawing (poorly) his pretty
girl assistant Jill Adair as teenage boy Mark Tyne weren’t the only atrocities against
the original story: it was also cropped from its original page count in BUSTER to
merely six pages in the Holiday Special by dropping more than a half of the BUSTER
tale. Whoever constructed the Stirling Steel story, merged the first three and
the last three instalments of Maxwell Hawke from BUSTER and discarded more than
5 episodes in between. This was a serious cut-and-paste exercise, as can be seen
from the scans below. Here is page 4 of Stirling Steel and the Terror Train from the Holiday Special:
… and here are the pages from three different issues
of BUSTER that were used to construct the page shown above:
The last thing worth mentioning about the Special is
the nice back cover with most of the paper’s characters enjoying themselves at
the seaside. I would credit Tom Paterson with the artwork but I’m prepared to
stand corrected:
