A LOOK AT MONSTER FUN STRIPS: CREATURE TEACHER

After the success of Bash Street Kids in the BEANO, every self-respecting UK children’s comic had to have a strip that was based on a conflict between an unruly class and a teacher. In MFC it was Creature Teacher. Meet Class 3X of Massacre Street School in Monsterville:

The pupils of Class 3X (Blotchy (3X spokesman), Tich, Disaster Doris, Podger, Litterbug Len, Greasy Gus, Evil Steve, Dangerous Dan and others) gave their teachers a really hard time:

The situation seemed desperate and called for some drastic measures. This is how the story started in MFC No. 1:

Creature Teacher stood out from all other school mayhem comedy strips because in MFC the Master was a grisly monster – a real creature of a teacher so scary and ruthless that he (it?) was able to control Class 3X and bring them to heel. Created in a lab with the formula invented by Science Master Mr. Fume, Creature Teacher had a ghastly spongy body that could expand or contract at will, scrunge into any shape and form, sprout any number of limbs and tentacles and melt into a great sickening mass of purple-green gunge (it was a b/w strip but that's how Class 3X described it). Check out a few of CT’s transformations:

Creature Teacher’s hulking, wobbly, throbbly, bulky body was wrapped in padlocked chains to prevent it from spilling out. The walking-talking nightmare had hairy, scaley, fishy fingers and yukky, pongy feet with warts and things like that… His only horrible great bulging, beady, bloodshot eye which could stretch away from his body earned him the nick-name of Eagle-Eye.

Creature Teacher’s only weaknesses were that he couldn’t stand being tickled, and he needed his monthly bath in monster tonic (Mr. Fume’s special formula for the creation and sustenance of Creature Teacher) to restore his ghastly strength and powers. He fed on fungi and other slimy stuff and was probably the greatest monster in MFC. Thanks to Creature Teacher’s super-power to manipulate his body, he was always in the right shape to deal with Class X, subdue the little horrors and handle their endless booby traps, pranks and cunning schemes to do away with the dreaded Master.

Creature Teacher ran in MFC issues 1 – 73 and missed issue 69. Save for three occasions, the weekly episodes were self-contained stories. By coincidence, all three serialised stories were sport-themed: football match against Highbrow Hall in issues 20 – 21, training for school sports in issues 33 to 35 and the annual cricket match against Highbrow Grammar in issues 54 – 55. 

Creature Teacher was a two-pager except in the first edition where it was three pages long, and in No. 31 where the story occupied only one page but the issue had a poster of Creature Teacher. The monstrous instructor made a front-cover appearance in MFC No. 12. The regular artist was Tom Williams whose drawings were so detailed that IPC’s newsprint machines sometimes failed to do them justice. 

Frank McDiarmid stepped in for the regular artist in MFC issue 64. Here is a sample frame from that episode:

Creature Teacher didn’t survive the merger of MFC with BUSTER and was not given a proper ending in the last issue of the paper, but it lived on as a regular feature in MONSTER FUN annuals, so we’ll be seeing more of Creature Teacher’s antics on KAZOOP!! in due course.