The name of the next strip - Shiver
and Shake - will probably sound familiar to many fans because later it was lent to a new IPC children’s humour comic. In COR!! Shiver was a spectre
cavalier with a detachable head, a ball and chain on his leg and a sword driven
right through his chest who got his pleasure from scaring mortals. His
companion Shake was a spook whose main obsession was food. The two inhabited an
empty house and were desperate for people to move in. Both had their own
reasons: Shiver was anxious to have someone to scare, while Shake saw tenants
as providers of grub. This represented a conflict of interests of sorts and
Shake usually tried to stop Shiver from scaring the tenants off. Their combined
and often clashing efforts inevitably drove everybody out and the two had to
wait a whole week for someone new to show up.
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| From COR!! issue dated 2nd September, 1972 (No. 118) |
The story was given a proper
ending in the last installment when the old house was demolished. Shiver moved
to a ghost train set-up where he could scare people all day long, not just once
a week; Shake landed in a kitchen of a posh restaurant to stay as the resident
ghost.
IMHO the strip had strong potential and the main reason why it was
discontinued was probably because the title as well as the characters were
earmarked for the new comic launched merely one month after the last
installment in COR!!
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| From COR!! issue dated 30th December, 1972 (No. 135) |
A strange thing happened to Shake the
COR!! spook when Shiver and Shake
comic was launched in 1973: his spooky self was renamed Shiver and became the
cover star as well as the main character in a new strip called The
Duke's Spook. In the SHIVER AND SHAKE comic (but not in the Duke’s
Spook strip) he acquired a new companion in the shape of an elephant carrying
the spook’s old name – Shake…
Shiver the COR!! spectre cavalier was also
revived in the SHIVER AND SHAKE comic under the name of Suffering Sam in the
long running IPC feature Scream Inn. His other two (nameless)
incarnations in the SHIVER AND SHAKE comic were in the strip called Adrian’s
Wall where he appeared in the role of a cavalier bricked-up inside a
wall, and later in The Ghost's Revenge where he starred as a proper spectre. Quite
confusing, isn’t it?..
The COR!! Shiver and Shake was illustrated
by Arthur Martin. It started on 29th July, 1972 (No. 113) and continued for merely
half a year until 3rd February, 1973 (No. 140), having missed just one week (it
did not appear in the issue dated 20th January, 1973 (No. 138)).
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| Two sample covers of the new comic SHIVER AND SHAKE |
