1976 COR!! COMIC ANNUAL

1976 COR!! Comic Annual cost 95 p. and was 160 pages thick. It was the last COR!! annual with Gus Gorilla on the front cover. One more thing that it had in common with early COR!! annuals was that newly drawn strips still made up quite a large portion of the contents. Speaking of early COR!! annuals, those of you who have been reading the blog since the very start may remember that I didn’t cover the annuals of 1973 and 1974 when writing the respective yearly reviews  because I didn’t have copies then. Well, now I have filled the gaps and included details about the two books. You can read about 1973 COR!! annual here. Click here for the post with details of 1974 COR!! annual.

  

Here is a summary of the contents of 1976 COR!! Comic Annual: Willy Worry (4 episodes, one in full colour), Whacky (in full colour), Tricky Dicky (2 episodes, one in full colour), Gus Gorilla (4 episodes, two in full colour), Stowaway Steve (5 episodes, one in full colour), The Slimms (3 episodes, one in full colour), Aqua Lad (4 episodes), Jack Pott (3 episodes), Ivor Lott and Tony Broke (3 episodes), Jelly Baby (3 episodes), Val’s Vanishing Cream (3 episodes), Give A Dog A Bone (4 episodes), Andy’s Ants (3 episodes), Hire A Horror (3 episodes, one in full colour), Fiends and Neighbours (by ghost artist), Teacher’s Pet (2 episodes, one in full colour),  Tease Break feature (3 instalments), Jasper the Grasper (2 episodes, one by Trevor Metcalfe and one by Alf Saporito), Night Mare (4 episodes, one by Tom Paterson), The Gasworks Gang (2 new episodes and one reprint), Big Bad Butch, Soldier Spoon (3 episodes), Tomboy (3 episodes), Super Spook (8 pages), Peril in Pantoland (8 pages), What do You Know feature (by Alf Saporito), Jest For A Laugh feature (by Alf Saporito).

One offs: Big Bad Butch – a cowboy comedy feature set in the Wild West. I am not quite sure but it looks like the work of Alf Saporito to me:

Peril in Pantoland. The story was about young Dick Whittington and his sister Jill who went looking for their cat and found themselves in the weird world of mechanical fairy-tale monsters manufactured by the crazy scientist Demon-King. The kids encountered Caliph of Baghdad and his rubber servants, Long John Silver and a shark, Aladdin’s wicked uncle, Mummy and a giant before the police came to their rescue. I wonder who the illustrator was?

Robert Nixon did an excellent job on all of his sets in the annual (Hire a Horror and Ivor Lott and Tony Broke). Hire a Horror instalments were paricularly scrumptious:

Frank McDiarmid contributed two new episodes of The Gasworks Gang. Here is one in its 4-page entirety:

Alf Saporito drew quite a few pages for the annual: Gus Gorilla (all new sets as far as I can tell), a 4-pager of Jasper the Grasper and two features – What Do You Know and Jest For A Laugh. I believe he was also responsible for the Big Bad Butch set. Here is a panel from Jasper the Grasper: