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.



Saturday, June 13, 2020

WHOOPEE! PULL-OUTS AND FREEBIES IN 1984



Compared to the year before, 1984 was a lot more generous in terms of WHOOPEE! pull-outs and free gifts... 

The four issues of 10th, 17th, 24th and 31st March, 1984 contained Sweeny Toddler's Naughty Booklet and confirmed that Sweeny Toddler had re-established his unshakable status of WHOOPEE!’s number one star. 



The booklet was given both sides of one page in all of the four issues, so it was 16 pages thick when fully assembled. It had colour front and back covers and centre pages, the rest was in black and white. The illustrator was the one and only Tom Paterson:





The issue with the cover date of 5th May, 1984 had a free Heinz Invaders badge:


… and carried this advert on one of its pages:


The next four issues of 12th, 19th, 26th May and 2nd June, 1984 had the Creepy Comix pull-out booklet.


The 16-page booklet was drawn mostly by Nigel Edwards or maybe Ian Knox, with a few pages by other artists:





The first of the four issues with the Creepy Comix booklet (12 May, 1984) also had a little extra and arrived with a pack of Free Fryers Phantom sweets, not present with my copy.

The next cut-out booklet came after a short break of just one week. The four issues of 16th, 23rd, 30th June and 7th July, 1984 carried Whoopee TV pull-out booklet:


It was another 16-pager, drawn exclusively by J Edward Oliver:





The first issue with the Whoopee TV pull-out booklet (16 June, 1984) also had a Free Gift from Weetabix - Shrinkies - Make me into BADGE… KEY FOB… PENDANT. I don’t have the gift but here is an image that I found online:


In August 1984 IPC launched Shoot! Football Magazine, and ran four-page adverts of the new periodical on the centre pages of WHOOPEE! issues cover-dated 25th August:



...and 15th September:



Whoopee Comic Turns Quiz and Jokes Booklet was that year’s fourth cut-out booklet and was presented with the issues of 22th & 29th September and 6th & 13th October, 1984:






Besides the page of the booklet, the issue of 29th September carried an advert of Christmas Annuals on its four centre pages. The layout of the first page looks shockingly familiar, doesn’t it? 



The centre pages of the next issue (20th October, 1984) advertised the arrival of the first issue of Big K computer magazine:



…followed a week later by the indispensable Guy Fawkes mask by Brian Walker in the issue cover-dated 27th October, 1984:



Finally, the four November issues (3rd, 10th, 17th and 24th) came with the second Sweeny Toddler booklet that year. The issue of 13th November also had three Free Stinky Stickers that are not present with my copy.


All four cut-out booklets offered earlier in 1984 followed the same uniform design: they had 16 pages, with colour front and back covers + colour centrespreads. This one, however, was different:  it was named Sweeny’s Baby Comic and purported to be the World’s Smallest Comic. After detaching the cut-out page from the comic, one was supposed to cut it in half again before folding, and after four weeks the result was a 32-page booklet that was four times smaller than the page of the comic:




The mini-comic was the last pull out in 1984, and also the last one in WHOOPEE! The days of the comic were already numbered: after the issue of 30th March, 1985 it was merged into WHIZZER AND CHIPS, and ceased to exist as such…

This blogpost concludes the long series of 13 yearly overviews of the posters, free gifts, pull outs and other goodies that came with WHOOPEE! during its exciting lifetime, spanning the period from 1974 till 1985. You can revisit the series by clicking Whoopee pull-outs at the bottom of the ‘Labels’ column on the right.

Characters are © Rebellion Publishing Ltd

4 comments:

  1. thanks Irmantas really enjoyed these Whoopee post and the early 80's brought back a lot of memories.....

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  2. It’s off-topic, but I can’t help looking at the issues from late June to August through interlocked fingers, as this was the period of the IPC strike that killed off Scream, Tammy and, briefly, 2000AD. I know Whoopee’s run wasn’t interrupted but this doesn’t necessarily mean it was unaffected. The 30/6/84 cover seems a little ‘thrown together’; there’s no background colour between the logo and Tom’s artwork as often happened. I don’t recall anything in the issues themselves to indicate anything was amiss, other than the removal of Tammy’s logo from the KP Skips coupons sometime in July. Made any observations of own on this front? I’d be keen to know.

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    Replies
    1. Funny I didn’t realise there was another strike in 1984, or at least I somehow didn’t link it to Whoopee!.. I haven’t noticed anything wrong with the comic in the summer of 1984, but I have to admit I didn’t look very carefully, as the paper’s good era had already ended for me – for me it did with the cancellation of Scream Inn, Scared-Stiff Sam, World-Wide Weirdies and the host of comical horror strips. I am not saying the rest of the strips weren’t good – what I’m saying is that I think a lot of things in the comic took a turn for the worse at about 1980/81; my impression is that many of the artists lost their inspiration and were merely churning out their weekly pages like factory workers... I don’t know if those who were of the comics-reading age and bought WHOOPEE! at the time will agree, but to me the comic was at its prime in the first few years of its run. Mind you, I might be an impartial ‘judge’ here, because I am immune to nostalgia factor because I didn’t read the paper when I was a kid…

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  3. We should just be grateful that Whoopee survived this period, and as I've said, some didn’t, to continue for several more months. I started reading comics at what you've nearly called the cut-off point, and having read earlier issues since I realise I did miss the glory days of comics. DCT's Nutty was a notable exception, but the likes of Wow, Mask, and the (for me) nadir, Hoot, just didn't work and aren't worth rereading. Let's appreciate the high points – oh, you are!

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