GUEST APPEARANCES AT SCREAM INN – GHOUL GETTERS LTD. AND FUN FEAR

The next episode of Scream Inn with a guest appearance of fellow WHOOPEE! characters can be found in the issue cover-dated 8th February, 1975 (No. 46). This time the guests were Dad and his lad Arnold, collectively known as Ghoul Getters Ltd. The strip, drawn by Trevor Metcalfe, had originated in SHIVER AND SHAKE. I covered it the SHIVER AND SHAKE series a couple of years ago, the article can be found HERE.

The not-so-easily-intimidated duo gave the spooks a hard time and it took another guest appearance to save Innkeeper from losing his one million quid. Brian Walker didn’t waste time redrawing the creepy merry-go-round from the masthead of Fun Fear – he simply glued a photographic reproduction to his artwork – just as he did every week with the Scream Inn sign in the first panel (I know this because I have an original page which I once showed HERE). 

Here is the episode, followed by Ghoul Getters Ltd and Fun Fear from the same issue of Whoopee! and Shiver & Shake

 

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):