welcome and enjoy!

Hi and welcome to my blog about comics from other people’s childhood! It is dedicated primarily to British humour comics of the 60s and 70s. The reason they are not from my childhood is simply because I didn’t live in the UK back then (nor do I live there now). I knew next to nothing about them until fairly recently but since then I’ve developed a strong liking for the medium and amassed a large collection, including a number of complete or near complete sets. My intention is to use this blog as a channel for sharing my humble knowledge about different titles, favourite characters and creators as I slowly research my collection.

QUICK TIP: this blog is a sequence of posts covering one particular comic at a time. The sequence follows a certain logic, so for maximum results it is recommended that the blog is read from the oldest post up.

Copyright of all images and quotations used here is with their respective owners. Any such copyrighted material is used exclusively for educational purposes and will be removed at first notice. All other text copyright Irmantas P.



Wednesday, September 17, 2014

A LOOK AT MONSTER FUN FEATURES: BADTIME BEDTIME BOOKS - Part ONE




Badtime Bedtimes Books is something what Monster Fun Comic is probably best remembered for. They were centre-page pull-outs which were meant to be removed from the comic, cut up and arranged into eight-page minibooks. Each book was a self-contained whacky story. Here is an example from MFC No. 3. Unfortunately, IPC printing presses often failed to do them justice (click on the images to enlarge):






Leo Baxendale wrote about Badtime Bedtimes Books at length in his book A VERY FUNNY BUSINESS, and that’s how we know it was Bob Paynter who created the concept and gave it to Leo Baxendale to develop. Mid-70s was the time when Mr. Baxendale had grown disappointed with the comics industry and was looking for an opportunity to quit because he felt it was in for a decline. He realised that times had changed and that comics humour should follow suit. Although he was excited about Badtime Bedtime Books, he had planned from the very start to use them as a “test bed” for his new ideas and a vehicle to manoeuvre his way out of the comics industry.

The first Badtime Bedtime Books received glowing reader feedback which Leo Baxendale compared with reaction to his very early Bash Street Kids, and he immediately knew he was on the right path.


As could be expected, pressing deadlines prevented Mr. Baxendale from working at a leisurely pace and producing a quality “vintage” book every time. He gradually divested himself from other strips he had still been drawing for IPC and concentrated single-mindedly on the BBBs, but he still didn’t have enough time to do them as he thought they should be done. As a consequence, he adopted a loose sketchy style, producing a vintage set only once in a while. This was also the time when Mr. Baxendale started contemplating a series of his own Willy the Kid annuals. He no longer had the time to write the BBBs, and eventually stopped drawing them too, leaving Bob Paynter with a huge challenge of finding first the writers and later the illustrators who could match Mr. Baxendale’s talent.


In all likelihood the original idea was to have a BBB in every issue (with the odd poster of a MFC star character squeezed in), and Mr. Baxendale was somehow able to keep the schedule, although we know from his book that he was working at a leisurely pace and preparing his first Willy the Kid annual at the same time. All but three of the 25 Badtime Bedtime Books that came out in 1975 were illustrated by Mr. Baxendale but the decline of the feature was very much on the horizon.


By the time he had to prepare the first MONSTER FUN COMIC issues of 1976, Bob Paynter had run out of Badtime Bedtime Books supplied by Mr. Baxendale, so he tried experimenting with a few other artists. IMHO, three of the illustrators (Artie Jackson, Leslie Harding and even Terry Bave) weren’t really up to the task, and the five BBBs that appeared in the first months of 1976 were particularly poorly drawn. Things improved considerably when Bob Paynter gave the artist’s duties to Mike Brown who was able to imitate Leo Baxendale's style to perfection, adding his own twist to it. The Editor must have been satisfied, as confirmed by the fact that towards the end of the run the frequency of BBBs was restored to its previous levels. Mike Brown proudly initialled or signed most of the sets, so he must have been pleased with his work as well.


The MONSTER FUN COMIC run of Badtime Bedtime Books falls into three “periods”: 1) the Leo Baxendale period, 2) the “grey” period when they were drawn by other artists, or when Leo Baxendale’s simplified style or ghosters’ efforts make one wonder who really illustrated them, and last but by no means least 3) the Mike Brown period.

I will cover the three periods in my next posts. In the meantime, here is the Badtime Bedtime Book poster from MFC No. 36 dated 14th February, 1976. Drawn, I believe, by Leo Baxendale.


 All Images 2014 © Egmont UK Ltd.  All rights reserved. Used with permission.

10 comments:

  1. I've been looking forward to this...

    The Punch and Chewday is one I have and my claim to fame is Leo Baxendale read this on the BBC 4 program on comics...if I had the foresight I should of left a note in the comic please sign it Leo...

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    1. I hope the b/w pages look better in your copy that they do in mine. It's such a shame they were not printed propertly. The lettering is very cluttered as well...

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  2. I think it was more a case of not being paid for reprints, Irmantas, than sensing comics were in decline, that led Bax to resigning from weekly periodicals and pursuing other options. The typeset lettering was terrible - they should have been hand-lettered.

    You been away on holiday? I keep having to visit your blog to make sure I haven't missed a new post, because the link doesn't always renew itself in my blog list.

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    1. Kid, Leo wrote about growth and dominance of television which made comics look pretty slow stuff and believed they had to change to survive. Not being paid for reprints certainly played its part too.

      I haven’t been away but was busy both at work and at home, etc. Besides, I got involved in one comics-related project that I can’t talk about at this stage, but it is very exciting and quite time-consuming.

      It’s good to know folks miss blog updates and check for new posts!

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    2. Well, I'm going from memory, and he's probably expounded further on the subject since he wrote A Very Funny Business, but my overriding impression when I first read the book in 1978 was that it was not getting paid for reprints of his work that was his main bugbear. Looking forward to that comics-related project when you can talk about it.

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  3. Great stuff, never known anything about the history of the things. Finding Monster Fun comics has been, in my own experience, hard enough in itself, but finding ones with the Badtime Bedtime books still intact is even MORE difficult. Kid Robson's sent me a facsimile of a Baxendale one, and I've got a few of the Mike Brown ones from eBay...

    A book collecting the lot of them would be a wonderful thing! Wonder who "owns" them?

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    1. I was lucky to win a near complete set of MFS as a joblot on eBay, but nearly all had no pull-outs. On another occasion I won a joblot of the pull-outs arranged into booklets. I bought the few remaining complete copies on eBay and 30th Century Comics, and some of those were quite expensive.
      A book of all BBBs would be an interesting thing, although some editions were really poorly drawn and the stories weren't as great as the early ones.

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    2. As regards the ownership of the books, I assume Egmont UK is the copyright holder.

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  4. Another excellent post - I missed these books first time around as had all but given up on UK comics, and pretty much stopped buying humour titles (my loss) so great to see these now. This new venture sounds exciting will we be getting an update as things unfold?

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    1. I very much hope that the new venture materialises but there are other people involved so I am not the only one on whom it depends. I will share the details as soon as I can :)

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