A LOOK AT SHIVER & SHAKE STRIPS: GHOUL GETTERS

If you’ve got a spook you want shifted, call for the Ghoul Getters, Ltd. - read the caption above one weekly episode of this nice strip by Trevor Metcalfe. The ghoul-getting service was a small family business run by Dad and his lad Arnold.  When called, they would arrive in their ghost-proof van, sometimes use their ‘spookometer’ to detect the ghost, put one of their letter-coded plans into action and send the ghost packing. Plan A was the one that never failed – it involved the use of the ghost sucker, or the super ‘spook-sucker-inner’ – a device that would suck the ghost in. The Ghoul Getters would then drive it away and drop it off someplace where the ghost wouldn’t be such a nuisance. In the first episode they rid a lady from a noisy one and dropped him off at an all-nite disco where visitors couldn’t care less about noise.

The Ghoul Getters started in SHIVER AND SHAKE issue No. 71 and was a strong addition to the lineup. The strip occupied 1 ½ pages in the spooky SHIVER section of the paper. All but one episodes were illustrated by Trevor Metcalfe who signed a number of his sets towards the end, and the episode in issue 75 was by Tomboy artist. Seven episodes were self-contained stories but the Phantom Piper tale (the last story in SHIVER AND SHAKE) was serialised over two weeks. You can read both parts in this post, here is the first:

SHIVER AND SHAKE was merged into WHOOPEE merely 9 weeks after The Ghoul Getters first appeared. It was considered to be good enough to deserve a slot in the new combined paper and continued there for nearly two years until the end of February 1976 (exactly like Blunder Puss).

One can’t help noticing similarities between The Ghoul Getters and the famous Ghostbusters film, although the strip predates the movie by a whole decade so it wasn’t a spoof but rather the other way round. Could it have been that the American writers of Ghostbusters were familiar with this little strip published in a British children’s comic?