Before I close the chapter of MONSTER FUN COMIC weeklies
and call this mission completed, I thought it would be interesting to take a
look at the adverts which appeared in the paper.
IPC in-house advertisements can be found in nearly
every issue of the paper. They promoted free gifts and special features in
sister publications such as Whoopee!,
Whizzer and Chips, Jinty, Tammy, Battle, Tiger and Scorcher, Shoot!, BUSTER, LOOK AND LEARN and others.
They also advertised Annuals and Holiday Specials of various IPC comics; here are some of the countless examples:
During its short lifetime MFC celebrated the arrival
of quite a few new sister publications in a variety of genres:
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| From MONSTER FUN COMIC No. 15 |
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| From MONSTER FUN COMIC No. 19 |
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| From MFC No. 36; MFC Issue No. 35 had 4 pages of ACTION adverts |
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| From MONSTER FUN COMIC No. 68 |
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| From MONSTER FUN COMIC No. 71 |
It is impossible to imagine an IPC comic without those
small post stamp offers and ads aimed at stamp collectors. They can be found in
nearly every issue of MFC:
Very
often post stamp ads appeared in the same block with Whimsies from Wade or Whoppas from Wade:
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Toys
companies formed another group of commercial advertisers. One can’t help
noticing that the vast majority of products were boys’ toys. There were quite a
few ads of North Pacific line of flying craft models from Hales.
The black and white adverts promoted Delta
Dart Glider, Sky Flyer, Sleek Streek, Drifter, Skeeter, etc:
Atlantic
UK Distributors Shard (Sports & Toys) Limited
with their ATLANTIC big new range
of scale models in full detail was another big advertiser of boys’ toys.
Their adverts with red spot colour made several appearances on the back page of
MFC towards the end of the run:
The
full-colour full-page advertisements of Minic
Ships range of scale models by Hornby also fell within battle and
warfare category:
These adverts of Timpo
adventure club from Timpo Toys, Kung Fuey Dragon Kite from Golden Wonder, Prehistoric monsters scale models and
Kellogg’s Rice Crispies were also
targeted at boys:
..not
to mention these Norvic Man ads:
Here's an untypical
Norvic advert promoting something specifically
for girls:
These
were not gender-specific:
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Unhealthy
foods and sweets formed another major category of the adverts. Cadbury’s
was a regular advertiser. Their Curlywurly
Bar ads came in a variety of designs and free gift promotions but always
featured this poorly drawn bloke:
Cadbury’s
also advertised their Freddo competition:
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TreborLand
and Trebor
Blobs candies appear to have been big in the mid-70s; they were a
frequent guest in MFC:
...and sometimes even paid for two pages to
promote their competitions:
Bessett’s
Sweets were after kids’ pocket money as well:
Kellogg’s,
Nestle,
Nesquik
and Weetabix were also there:
There
were four adverts of cinema films: one for the musical Mister Quilp of the Old Curiosity Shop:
… two for At
the Earth’s Core:
… and one for Future World:
Adverts in comics were often presented in the form of
comic strips, and there were several examples in MFC; all can be viewed in the gallery
below.
This concludes the series of blogposts about MONSTER FUN COMIC weeklies
and I will now proceed to Holiday Specials and Annuals.
All Images 2014 © Egmont UK
Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with
permission.