1977 SHIVER & SHAKE ANNUAL

1977 SHIVER AND SHAKE Annual came out in the Summer of 1976. It cost a pound and was 144 pages thick. Here’s what was inside (red marks the strips that weren’t familiar to readers of SH&Sh weeklies, earlier annuals and holiday specials):

Spot the Spooks puzzle; The Ghost’s Revenge (2 episodes, one in full colour); Ghoul Getters Ltd. (5 episodes, some by Trevor Metcalfe, one in full colour), Scatty Bat (3 reprints from WHIZZER AND CHIPS, one coloured in); Demon Differences (2 spot-the-difference puzzles, one with Scream Inn and the other one – with Horrornation Street gang); Grimly Feendish (3 episodes, possibly reprints from SMASH!), The Hand, Frankie Stein (3 reprints from WHAM!, one coloured-in), Cackles…by Crocker; Horrornation Street (2 episodes by Tom Williams); Creepy Car (2 episodes); Spooky Puzzles by Les Barton, Phanto – The Phantom of the Panto by Alf Saporito; Shake by Mike Lacey (2 episodes in full colour); Sweeny Toddler by Tom Paterson (2 episodes, one in full colour); The Desert Fox (2 episodes by Terry Bave in full colour); Blunder Puss by Jim Crocker in full colour; Tin Tramp and Tinker (4 episodes, two in full colour); Wizard Prang and Demon Druid (4 Mike Brown reprints from SMASH/POW); Sports School by Jim Watson; Tobby’s Timepiece (adventure serial, 15 pages); Lolly Pop (2 episodes by Sid Burgon), Webster (4 episodes by Terry Bave, including one in full colour), The Forest Legion (9 pages); Mirth Shakers (2 pages of gags by Mike Lacey); Tough Nutt and Softy Centre by Norman Mansbridge in full colour; The Duke’s Spook (2 episodes, one in full colour); Scream Inn (a 4-pager by Brian Walker); The Hand; Happy Haunts (2 pages of gags and stuff by Les Barton); Marshy Maze puzzle; The Ghost Train Game by Nick Baker.

The 1977 Annual still followed the format of Sh&Sh weeklies with SHAKE section inserted into SHIVER and separated by blocks of colour pages on both ends.

The distinctive feature of the 1977 Annual was the inclusion of two new stories with quite an impressive page count – one was 8 pages and the other one as many as 15 pages long. 

The first is Phanto the Phantom of the Panto – a comedy tale in which Mr. Knowe Goode, manager of a no-good theatre company, picks an old theatre as the venue for his troupe. Actors disturb the sleep of Phanto the Great Illusionist who starred in the theatre a hundred years ago and is now the resident spook of the dilapidated building. Frustrated, the spook tries his best to disrupt the theatre’s Jack and the Beanstalk performance and take the stage over but the actors outsmart him by sucking him up with a vacuum-cleaner and imprisoning him in a bag that becomes what a magic lamp had once become to a genie… The story was in the spooky SHIVER section of the book.

The second and the longest story was Toby’s Timepiece. It was the adventure ingredient of the package. It looks somewhat dated to me and I suspect it may very well be a reprint. Spread out over 15 pages, it tells a weird and unconvincing tale about the adventures of Toby Todd who separated from his group during the school visit to the ruins of Headingford castle and mysteriously slipped into a time warp. On his way to explore the dungeons Toby has a surprise encounter with a boy dressed in mediaeval clothes. The two start squabbling over a watch that the strange boy drops as he rushes past Tobby. The chain of the watch snaps and they find themselves in mediaeval times where Headingford castle stands intact.

Brutal and sadistic baron makes the two boys wrestle on a greased pole above a snake pit to decide the ownership of the watch. In the midst of the fight the magic timepiece makes the baron vanish, the guards start panicking and the two boys run away. Toby helps the other boy escape from the castle but realises that he must stay behind and try to recover the watch because it is his only way to get back to his time. The baron reappears. It turns out he has just been in the future where he saw Toby’s classmates walking in the ruins of his castle so he concludes that Toby is an enemy spy. The baron is about to smash the timepiece to smithereens when the castle comes under the attack of rebellious peasants led by the escaped boy’s father. The peasants prevail but the Baron takes the other boy hostage and tries to make his escape. Toby saves him once again and the boy returns the favour by giving Toby the watch that he found on the ground.  Toby grabs the timepiece as it is about to vanish and gets transported to a strange world of giant insects where he meets a tall and lean bald bloke with pointed ears who introduces himself as Caal. 

Caal is the true owner of the timepiece (or the time transfer unit as he refers to it). The two team up as they fight monster ants, spiders and beastly beetles. Caal uses the timepiece to take both of them to his time in a distant future and gives the watch to Toby as a gift for saving his life. Toby safely returns to the 20th century and the story comes to a close, but the ending promises more adventures in the future. Let’s wait and see what awaits us in later SHIVER & SHAKE publications. In the meantime, would anyone know who the artist was and whether it was a reprint? The story was in the SHAKE section of the Annual.

Speaking of long stories, the Annual also contains a new 9-pager of The Forest Legion in which the familiar posse of small forest animals foil another criminal plot of two loopy crooks Boss and Butch who print 50 thousand forged fivers in an abandoned hut deep in the woods. The story was illustrated by its regular artist but I am not sure who. Here is how the tale began:

Another new aspect about the book was the inclusion of 4 pages of horror-themed puzzles and gags by Les Barton. Les Barton’s style may have not been perfect for strips like the Fixer or Ghoul Getters Ltd., but it was ideal for the comedy horror genre, as illustrated by numerous brilliant episodes of Fiends and Neighbours in COR!! annuals or the puzzles and gags pages in this Sh&Sh book. Here is an example:

One thing I find odd about the book is the two pages of Cackles by Crocker. The mid-seventies was the time when IPC no longer exercised a strict policy of artists’ anonymity and many artists signed their artwork but the size of Jim Crocker’s logo on this double-pager dwarfs anything I’ve seen in an IPC comic before…

Now let’s take a quick look at some of the good old Shiver and Shake regulars. In the three Grimly Feendish sets the villain tries to steal a valuable football cup from football museum; then he tries to rob the waxworks and in the third episode the police decide that Grimly has got to be caught. I haven’t checked so I can’t be sure but something about the layout (empty spaces in panels, strange cropping, etc.) suggests that all the three sets may be reprinted from SMASH! Here is one:

In the five episodes of Ghoul Getters Ltd. Dad and Archie take care of a haunted tree who hates kids after some carved their initials on it, a haunted blackboard and a haunted hay stack that keeps tickling everyone; they also visit a café run by a ghostly cook, and in one episode a ghost has the upper hand for a change:

It’s Christmas in Horrornation Street and Santa is worried because last year he got it all wrong: he brought a first aid kit to the Mummy who wanted a new suit of bandages, he gave cricket and ping-pong bats to Herr Raisin the vampire who wanted live pet bats, Hoodoo Yoodoo got a spelling book instead of a book of magic spells and Headley Deadly got a manicure set instead of a manacle set of a new light-weight ball and chain. Eager to do better this time, Santa lets them pick their own gifts.

In the second episode of Horrornation Street the Mummy and Headley are not happy with the cold weather so they ask Hoodoo Yoodoo to do something about it. Herr Raisin is the only one who prefers it cold as the grave..

Below is one of the two episodes of Sweeny Toddler. It appears that Tom Paterson had already taken over illustrator’s duties from Leo Baxendale by then:

It looks like none of the regular Frankie Stein artists were available to draw something new for the Annual so the editor included as many as three reprints of Ken Reid’s old Frankie from WHAM! The sets are from WHAM! No. 111 (30th July, 1966), No. 116 (3rd September, 1966) and No. 143 (11th March, 1967). As usual, all original one-pagers were cut up and re-arranged to fill more space in the Annual. The first episode appears to be complete with nothing dropped or altered; the one from issue No. 116 was slightly doctored by cutting out a couple panels. The third episode suffered the most: they added a new masthead (a really ugly one, if you ask me), dropped four panels and had someone colour the rest in. Here is the original from WHAM!

… and here is what became of it in 1977 Sh&Sh Annual:

 

The Annual also includes a bright and cheerful Christmas episode of Scream Inn in which a nice little lady who writes verses for X-mas cards comes to visit. In the end the good-humoured lady doesn’t seem to be too upset that the Innkeeper’s trick prevented her from winning the million quid but the spooks still feel bad about it and decide to make it up to her with a slap-up Christmas dinner. The last panel of the set is probably the nicest in the whole Scream Inn file:

Scream Inn also features in one of the two Demon Differences puzzles in the Annual (Horrornation Street gang star in the other one). The panel used in the puzzle is from Whoopee! dated 6th September, 1976 (the Carpenter episode).

I will sign off with the image of a busy game of The Ghost Train by Nick Baker: