welcome and enjoy!

Hi and welcome to my blog about comics from other people’s childhood! It is dedicated primarily to British humour comics of the 60s and 70s. The reason they are not from my childhood is simply because I didn’t live in the UK back then (nor do I live there now). I knew next to nothing about them until fairly recently but since then I’ve developed a strong liking for the medium and amassed a large collection, including a number of complete or near complete sets. My intention is to use this blog as a channel for sharing my humble knowledge about different titles, favourite characters and creators as I slowly research my collection.

QUICK TIP: this blog is a sequence of posts covering one particular comic at a time. The sequence follows a certain logic, so for maximum results it is recommended that the blog is read from the oldest post up.

Copyright of all images and quotations used here is with their respective owners. Any such copyrighted material is used exclusively for educational purposes and will be removed at first notice. All other text copyright Irmantas P.



Saturday, July 21, 2012

A LOOK AT COR!! STRIPS: WHO'S AFRAID OF THE BIG BAD WOLF?


Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf? was a violent strip in the vein of some of those old Looney Tunes animated cartoons. Big Bad Wolf forever tried to get Granny but she always beat him down in all kinds of violent ways. In the opening episode she unleashed a herd of bulls on the poor Wolf and they trampled him to pulp. Every week the hungry Wolf would drool over his fantasies of how he will feast on Granny. His two regular props included a copy of Granny Cook Book and a bag of disguises.  He used a different disguise every week in hope to delude the crafty Granny and persuade her to open the door of her cottage for him. The Wolf’s weekly disguises and excuses prompted to the old lady the ways of dealing with him, e.g. if he pretended to be a Council Rat Catcher, she politely declined his services by saying she’d already got a cat in the house and unleashed a lion who crushed the plotter. Or if he disguised himself as a plumber who wants to have a look in her tank, the Granny rolled out a tank that bashed the Wolf with its gun. The Wolf always looked very menacing and aggressive in the beginning of the episode but inevitably ended up in miserable condition. 

From COR!! issue dated 16th June, 1973 (No. 159)

Here is the list of the Wolf’s disguises and Granny’s violent responses over the weeks: door to door salesman – twister; TV rental man – Tube (underground train); interviewer from radio bore – huge rolling rock; the gasman – electrical discharge; fly spray salesman – giant spider; furniture salesman – Knights of the Round Table; salesman offering light romantic novels – heavy oversized books; greengrocer – a few cannon shells; ladies’ hairdresser – a swarm of bees;  keep fit instructor – a caravan of cartwheels; all-round sportsman who brings tickets to ten-pin bowling – draught; film director – stage coach; St. Louis Joe, the riverboat gambler – monster-size crocodile; ladies outfitter – kangaroo; Famous French chef – banging cannons; local MP – air balloon; Joke book salesman – a pack of howlers; Beevon with lots of lovely make-up for the mature lady – handgun with a lot of powder.

From COR!! issue dated 7th July, 1973 (No. 162)

The artist’s name is unknown to me. The strip ran for 24 weeks from 21st April, 1973 until 29th September, 1973 (Nos. 151 – 174) and made one front cover appearance in full colour in COR!! issue dated 12th May, 1973 (No. 154).

From COR!! issue dated 4th August, 1973 (No. 166)

3 comments:

  1. Murray Ball - same artist as Thor Thumb, Ghastly Manor etc!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Looks like a bit of a repetitive strip to me - at the start they always say the same things, and the storyline is pretty much unchanged each episode! The readers probably got bored of it and that resulted in it having a short run.

    ReplyDelete