A LOOK AT MONSTER FUN STRIPS: FREAKY FARM

Advertisement in MFC No. 39 the week before the premiere

Freaky Farm was a tale about a farm with an evil reputation run by the froight’ning Freaky Farmer – a monstrous humanoid who spoke with the West Country accent and had a hat instead of a head. Everything on Freaky Farm was predisposed against ‘pesky visitors’ and worked to scare them away and off the farm. Everything includes literally everything – from the Freaky Farmer:

… to farm animals, poultry and crops:

… to agricultural machinery and appliances:

… to buildings and structures, such as the freaky farmhouse, the barn and even the rocks of the stone wall:

… to wildlife, trees and plants growing on the farm:

… to the farm-hand:

… and of course the scarecrow:

Every week a new ignorant trespasser or adventurer would turn up at the unwelcoming Freaky Farm and the farm community took a concerted effort to make him/her/it/them run away in shock and terror. Here are two nice representative examples:

The horror show put up by the monsters of Freaky Farm never failed to produce the desired effect on the poor visitor(s), except in the very first issue when a reader of MONSTER FUN COMIC dropped by:

The 2-page strip ran in issues 40 to 73 and didn’t miss a single week. In the last frame of the final episode in MFC No. 73 Freaky Farmer told the readers he was retiring:

The main illustrator was Jim Watson who signed the majority of the episodes starting from No. 49. The first two sets were signed Elphin, although the first one in No. 40 looks very much like Jim Watson’s work to me. The episodes which followed in issues 41 – 48 may have been drawn by someone else but Elphin’s signature in No. 41 makes things quite confusing... Was Elphin a nom de plume of Jim Watson and it was him all along, experimenting with different styles before settling on the one he was satisfied enough to put his signature to?

The episodes in MFC issues 71 and 72 were drawn and signed by the excellent and universal Les Barton who IPC editors could always rely upon whenever their main artists weren’t available:

IMHO, the strip wasn’t very original or imaginative so it is probably not a big surprise that it did not make it to the new combined BUSTER AND MONSTER FUN. 

A LOOK AT COR!! STRIPS: THE SPECTRE INSPECTOR

The Spectre Inspector was one of the two winners of COR-medy Choice competition, second series. It was introduced as a regular weekly strip in COR!! issue dated 20th April, 1974 (No. 203) and ran for 9 weeks until the last issue of the paper. It migrated to BUSTER and continued there until September 1975.

In the first episode the Spectre Inspector disguises himself as a tourist and checks on the ghost at the ruins. The Inspector finds the ghost in a miserable condition and doing his job poorly so he shows how it should be done. The Inspector overdoes it when demonstrating a proper howl and reduces the ruins to a pile of rubble. In the further episodes the Inspector puts on different disguises and carries on with his job as a ‘mystery client’ making sure that members of the Ghouls Guild keep up their bad work in a proper way. Illustrated by Jim Watson.

From COR!! issue dated 27th April, 1974 (No. 204)

From COR!! issue dated 8th June, 1974 (No. 210)