The Slimms. This was the last long-running IPC strip originally created for COR!! by
Sheila and Terry Baves. In the second part of his article in the Summer 1986 edition of GOLDEN
FUN Terry Bave recalls that slimming was a popular theme of the day, so his
wife Sheila suggested that there might be makings of a good fun feature with
slimming as the central theme. After some thought and some sketches, they came
up with what they believed was one of their most successful features – The Slimms.
It proved very popular with COR!! readers. The Baves supplied scripts for many
weeks until other IPC writers took over; Terry Bave continued to draw The
Slimms week by week until the paper folded.
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| From COR!! issue dated 19th January, 1974 (No. 190) |
Little boy Sammy Slim has a problem and it’s his
parents who are obese and Sammy is always ridiculed by other kids because of
this. So he finally decides they can’t go on eating like this and will have to
go on a diet, starting immediately. But Mum and Dad always manage to outwit
Sammy and stuff themselves silly because they like being fat and enjoy grub too
much to slim. Sammy is very persistent and schemes all kinds of plots to get
his parents to diet or exercise. From what we can tell, Mum and Dad are
unemployed so Sammy even tries to fix some jobs for them so that they can work
off some of their weight
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| From COR!! dated 16th February, 1974 (No. 194) |
The feature premiered in COR!! issue with the cover
date of 1st January, 1972 (No. 83) and continued until the last edition of the
paper dated 15th June, 1974 (No. 211). A
good share of the episodes were in colour, besides, The Slimms made as many
as five front cover appearances on 23rd June, 1973 (No. 160), 10th November,
1973 (No. 180), 5th January, 1974 (No. 188), 20th April, 1974 (No. 203) and 18th
May, 1974 (No. 207).
Such was the popularity of the feature that after the
demise of COR!! Terry Bave didn’t find it hard to persuade Bob Paynter that The
Slimms be transferred to WHIZZER AND CHIPS where weekly appearances of
the strip continued through to mid-1979.
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| From COR!! dated 1st June, 1974 (No. 209) |
The Slimms were one of the go-to strips back in my Whizzer & Chips reading days - consistently funny and Terry Bave's strips always had that extra attraction to me. I was a little too young to read Cor!! during it's heyday, but collected all the annuals after its demise.
ReplyDeleteDue to where I lived at the time, my exposure to British comics was extremely limited. In fact, it was limited to one single issue of Whoopee! from 1974 but Terry Bave’s Toy Boy still stuck in my memory very vividly.
ReplyDeleteLooked up Whizzer & Chips today and the Slimms are in evidence till the Last W&C of 1979, 29/12. If you want me to check 1980 onwards say the word! It was interesting to see a Timothy Tester from shortly before the 10th birthday issue that I remembered from Best of W&C. It featured Flatfoot having a nightmare about the many times he'd come a cropper through one of Tim’s tests! Stuck in my mind because the tests were unfamiliar to me, and I wanted to know what happened!!
ReplyDeleteTimothy Tester is one of my favourite strips in Whizzer and Chips. From what I've seen, the strip enjoyed quite a long run.
DeleteI’m man enough to admit when I’m wrong! The Slimms did indeed end in 1979, the last original strip being 29 September and it was reprints thereafter for a time. They just missed out on a slice on the 10th anniversary birthday cake!
ReplyDeleteIf you’ve ever wondered what the (adult) Slimms' first names are, they can be found in W&C 22/1/72, in Me and My Shadow. This was only 3 weeks after the strip started in Cor, and pleasantly foreshadows (ho, ho) their W&C tenure. If it’s not them, it’s their doubles!
ReplyDelete