A LOOK AT MONSTER FUN STRIPS: FREAKY FARM

Advertisement in MFC No. 39 the week before the premiere

Freaky Farm was a tale about a farm with an evil reputation run by the froight’ning Freaky Farmer – a monstrous humanoid who spoke with the West Country accent and had a hat instead of a head. Everything on Freaky Farm was predisposed against ‘pesky visitors’ and worked to scare them away and off the farm. Everything includes literally everything – from the Freaky Farmer:

… to farm animals, poultry and crops:

… to agricultural machinery and appliances:

… to buildings and structures, such as the freaky farmhouse, the barn and even the rocks of the stone wall:

… to wildlife, trees and plants growing on the farm:

… to the farm-hand:

… and of course the scarecrow:

Every week a new ignorant trespasser or adventurer would turn up at the unwelcoming Freaky Farm and the farm community took a concerted effort to make him/her/it/them run away in shock and terror. Here are two nice representative examples:

The horror show put up by the monsters of Freaky Farm never failed to produce the desired effect on the poor visitor(s), except in the very first issue when a reader of MONSTER FUN COMIC dropped by:

The 2-page strip ran in issues 40 to 73 and didn’t miss a single week. In the last frame of the final episode in MFC No. 73 Freaky Farmer told the readers he was retiring:

The main illustrator was Jim Watson who signed the majority of the episodes starting from No. 49. The first two sets were signed Elphin, although the first one in No. 40 looks very much like Jim Watson’s work to me. The episodes which followed in issues 41 – 48 may have been drawn by someone else but Elphin’s signature in No. 41 makes things quite confusing... Was Elphin a nom de plume of Jim Watson and it was him all along, experimenting with different styles before settling on the one he was satisfied enough to put his signature to?

The episodes in MFC issues 71 and 72 were drawn and signed by the excellent and universal Les Barton who IPC editors could always rely upon whenever their main artists weren’t available:

IMHO, the strip wasn’t very original or imaginative so it is probably not a big surprise that it did not make it to the new combined BUSTER AND MONSTER FUN. 

ADVERT FOR WHAM! NO 1

Joining other bloggers in celebrating 50 years since the first issue of WHAM!, I thought I might add my penny’s worth of trivia by showing the advert for WHAM! No. 1 which I found in EAGLE AND SWIFT with that same cover date (20 June 1964, Vol. 15 No. 25).

There is also an ad in the next week’s issue but it is the same that you can find in WHAM! No. 1, only larger and therefore more impressive (EAGLE was a tabloid sized paper then), check out both versions below:

A LOOK AT MONSTER FUN STRIPS: GUMS

JAWS the blockbuster Hollywood movie was released in 1975. Gums the MFC strip was a clever and funny tie-in with the film and started in MFC No. 35 (7th February, 1976). Check out the famous poster of the movie and the advertisement of Gums in MFC issue No. 34 (the week before its premiere) side-by-side:

The scene was set on the sunny coast of Australia. The strip was about a toothless shark with a set of false choppers and the young Bluey who lived in a coastal town which the beast chose to terrorize. The shark was a dangerous and aggressive predator. The only way to render him harmless was by removing his false teeth – the mission which Bluey took upon himself. That’s the basic idea of this highly successful and long-running IPC strip which originated in MONSTER FUN COMIC.

The early stories were serialized and often spanned a period of two weeks; in the first week Gums usually lost his choppers:

…and won them back a week later, thanks to his own cunning and smartness, or through sheer luck or coincidence:

Bluey prevailed in the majority of the episodes but sometimes the shark got the upper hand. Typically, this involved the use of munition from sunken ships:

I really like the feature and I think it very well deserved to appear in full colour on the front cover for most of its run in MFC issues 35 to 73 (except in Nos. 48, 50, 51, 52, 66 and 67 when it was inside in b/w), besides, more than a half of the two-page sets occupied both front and back covers. Gums got its own poster very early on in issue No. 38 (28th February, 1976). After MFC ended, the strip was transferred to BUSTER and appeared there until 12th May 1984.

Initially the illustrator was Bob Nixon who, according to his own words in the interview for GOLDEN FUN, also designed Gums to the idea suggested by the editor. Mr. Nixon continued to draw the strip until issue 59 when Alf Saporito took over from him on a permanent basis (Alf Saporito’s first episode of Gums was in MFC issue No. 52). It is interesting to note that Mr. Saporito signed a few of the early sets:

Alf Saporito remained in charge of the strip in BUSTER for the rest of the seventies and during the early eighties when he was succeeded by John Geering.

The episode of in MFC No. 71 was illustrated and signed by Les Barton:

A LOOK AT MONSTER FUN STRIPS: TEDDY SCARE

Teddy Scare was the second new strip (alongside Save Our Stan) to be introduced in MFC issue No. 20 (25th October, 1975). This is how the arrival of both new features was advertised in MFC No. 19 the week before:

In the opening episode little Eddie Bailey visited an old curiosity shop run by a strange old man and bought himself a second-hand Teddy Bear:

Eddie soon found out that his Teddy was a toy with a BIG difference because it could transform itself into a live giant-size scary bear. From then on the boy always carried Teddy around and unleashed it on evil-doers, meanies, crooks and bullies by telling the toy to ‘do its stuff’.  Teddy could also activate itself on its own initiative, if it saw a need to do so. With very few exceptions, weekly tales always followed the same pattern: some bully or meanie tried to take advantage of Eddie (or someone else), Teddy came to his aid by ‘doing its stuff’ and scaring the pest into a gibbering snotty wreck. Teddy then transformed back into its old toy-self and the bully often ended up looking foolish in the eyes of others.

Using this simple formula, the feature continued till the last issue of MFC and only missed one week (No. 47). The popularity of Teddy Scare secured it a regular slot on page 2 or 3 starting from issue No. 35. All sets were in b/w except for the episode in issue No. 26 which was in full colour. Teddy Scare got its own pull-out poster in issue No. 40. The first 35 episodes were illustrated by an artist whose name I don’t know (see two examples above). Starting from issue No. 56, Barrie Appleby took over and continued drawing it to the very end. Here are two examples:

The strip survived incorporation of MFC into BUSTER and continued in the combined paper until 10th December 1977. 

Teddy Scare pull-out poster from MFC No. 40