Ghouldilocks was one of the four ‘Super fun features’ to join SHIVER AND SHAKE lineup from the issue dated August 4th, 1973 (alongside Charlie Williams, Wizards Anonymous and Grimly Feendish). In the advertisement a week before her premiere in SHIVER AND SHAKE she was introduced as Shiver’s own little ‘ghoul’:
Ghouldilocks, aka
Ghouldi, was a girl spook who could go through things like walls, people’s
bodies, etc. and had a detachable head (after Shiver the ghost, Suffering Sam of
Scream
Inn and Sir Headley Deadly of Horrornation Street, she was the
fourth character in Shiver and Shake
who could juggle her head around). Towards the end of the run she also
developed the ability to turn invisible at will. Ghouldi’s adventures usually
involved playing tricks on people who mistreated her, or dealing with bullies
and crooks. I liked how a UK Comics forum member once described her as ‘The
Minnie the Minx of the afterlife”.
The strip ran
in Shiver and Shake issues 22 –
67 (August 4, 1973 - June 15, 1974, except in No. 54 dated March 16, 1974) and
was part of SHIVER section. At first Ghouldilocks had a permanent slot on
page 8 after Scream Inn; later on it got transferred to the back of the paper
and appeared regularly on page 30 (overleaf of Horrornation Street). The
artist was the excellent Stan McMurtry.
Ghouldilocks originally appeared in the late sixties in JAG comic where it enjoyed a short run of only 18 weeks from October 19th, 1968 until the last tabloid-sized JAG dated Feb. 15th, 1969 and was also illustrated by Stan McMurtry. The second series in SHIVER AND SHAKE used the original masthead and reprinted 5 episodes of the JAG run (the reprints were in Shiver and Shake issues 22, 23, 24, 25 and 46).
