Monday, December 24, 2012

FACEACHE CHRISTMASES: PART TWO




In Buster and Monster Fun with the cover date of Jan 14th, 1978 Dad got the news that he’d won £ 75,000 in the pools and immediately decided to go on the World cruise that he has always dreamed about. Realising they’ll get kicked out of hotels all over the Globe because of Faceache’s scrunging hobby, Dad takes Faceache to the Belmonte School for Uncontrollable Young Whelps and leaves the boy for good in the iron hands of Mr. Albert Thrashbottom, the Headmaster, and Mr. Snipe, the Teacher. The episode marked the beginning of Belmonte School era that lasted until the strip ended.

Here is the 1978 Christmas episode, the first one at Belmonte School:



As a Christmas gift to my readers, below are some close-up scans of the original artwork. I am puzzled about ‘No. 262’ and ‘FLY’ written in pencil at the top left corner of the original page – I just can’t make any sense of this. Also, you can see the title of an earlier episode (The Pied Piper) underneath the glued piece of paper with the text ‘at Belmonte School’. The artwork page is four times the size of the printed page in the paper. Enjoy! :)





 




 

7 comments:

  1. What an amazing original art to own!!

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  2. That title box certainly is strange! Thanks for sharing the amazing artwork!

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  3. Amazing stuff there - thanks for that! Is it yours?

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    1. It is. I won it in a postal auction this year.

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  4. Wow! It's really nice to see those original art scans, thank you. You must be pleased as punch with that. And what a great scrunge, too.

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  5. To me one of the most endearing things about Faceache was his common-as-muck pronunciation. He’d drop aitches all over the place, and would pronounce words like window as ‘winder’, to rhyme with Belinda (the Bewitched version, if you wish!). I’ll have to do some more research to see when his speech was corrected; it certainly lasted for quite a while after he went to Belmonte School in early ’78. One wonders if these days he’d be considered a negative influence on young children as they learn to talk. “That wouldn’t happen”, you say? Well, ask the Teletubbies...

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