Monday, November 2, 2015

GHOSTLY GO ROUND FEATURE



Ghostly Go Round was an interesting feature in WHOOPEE! comic. As young readers gradually lost interest in the once-popular horror comedy genre (as confirmed by cancellation of such brilliant WHOOPEE! features as World-Wide Weirdies and Scream Inn/Spooktacular 7) and the Editor needed to clear space for new material, he came up with an idea of bringing four strips under one umbrella and rotating them in sequence. The strips that formed Ghostly Go Round were Evil Eye, Fun-Fear, Creepy Car and ‘Orrible Hole. The feature was launched in the first issue of 1979 and continued for slightly more than a year before all the four strips were put to rest one by one.

Ghostly Go Round required a new logo that could be used with all the 4 strips and the job was given to Ken Reid. He used the idea of Bob Nixon’s original Fun-Fear logo, made it spookier and squeezed the four main characters into the bottom left corner. The result wasn’t so great, IMHO. I think Bob Nixon’s old version was much better. Below are both logos side-by-side.


Here are the first appearances of the 4 strips in the heyday of WHOOPEE! comic. Evil Eye started in the very first issue of the paper:


… followed by Fun-Fear in the issue cover-dated 17 August, 1974:


… then Creepy Car on 12th October later that year (UPDATE: the strip was in fact an immigrant from SHIVER AND SHAKE where it had started nine weeks before the paper folded. The episode shown below is the first one in the combined Whoopee! and Shiver & Shake, hence the recap of the origins):


… and finally ‘Orrible Hole in the first issue of 1975 (cover-dated Jan 18 because the comic missed a few weeks due to industrial action at the junction of 1974/75):



at

6 comments:

  1. KidNovember 2, 2015 at 10:17 PM

    Quality stuff, Irmy. You can't go wrong with Reg Parlett and Robert Nixon.

    ReplyDelete
  2. TwoHeadedBoyNovember 2, 2015 at 10:26 PM

    Evil Eye always gave me a bit of an uneasy feeling... Perhaps being described as "Evil" was a bit of a give away there. Creepy Car though, always loved that one. I like how in a lot of the strips, everyone seems to regard him as an accepted part of everyday life - "Bah, it's that Creepy Car again" and so on.

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousNovember 2, 2015 at 11:56 PM

    the final Ghostly-go-round page appeared in the final pre-merge with Cheeky issue of Whoopee! dated 2/2/1980. I have that issue, but I cannot find it at the moment.

    ReplyDelete
  4. STEPHEN ARCHERNovember 3, 2015 at 5:02 PM

    Ghostly Go Round was a precursor to the Merry-Go-Round feature which began in 1980 after the merger with Cheeky. True, it wasn’t the same as having the same consistent core set of strips week after week, but it beat the spots off losing old friends to make way for the Cheeky newcomers.

    ReplyDelete
  5. RavenNovember 10, 2015 at 11:15 AM

    I'm not sure if readers really did lose interest in the horror comedy genre, so much as the industry maybe started to grow less comfortable with those areas, as ideas about what was suitable for children's entertainment started to change as the '80s hit in.

    All strong strips. Hard to see children becoming less interested in these or this kind of subject matter - but there definitely seemed to be a turning away from the more abrasive horror type characters and from "morbid" subject matter in the following decade.

    ReplyDelete
  6. AnonymousDecember 4, 2015 at 7:43 AM

    I'm looking for a old Fun Fear strip where a kid looks for a ride and finds his way to the pottery wheel and the monster in charge of it molds him into a vase.

    ReplyDelete