The second and the last Frankie Stein annual – WHOOPEE! BOOK OF
FRANKIE STEIN 1977, was 128 pages thick and cost 85 p. – an increase of 10
p. since the previous year. The soft-cover volume had colour covers with the
same drawing by Robert Nixon used on the front and the back, and was all b/w
inside. 70 pages were filled with Frankie Stein material and 58 were
non-Frankie Stein content.
The first story that one finds on opening the book is This is Your Life – Story! – a
10-page spoof of This is Your Life TV programme nicely drawn by Robert Nixon.
Unexpectedly for himself, Frankie becomes a special guest of a TV show hosted
by Raymond Andshake, the sneaky TV interviewer. The show is a mix of documentary
footage about Frankie’s life and his surprise ‘live’ studio reunions with
people from his past, such as the local electrician who has aged prematurely
through having to work day and night trying to repair the damage caused by
Frankie, his school football team mates some of whom are still suffering from
the injuries they received playing with Frankie and finally his Dad who comes
to regret being on the show because he gets bashed by other studio guests for
creating Frankie. Mr. Nixon did a great job drawing the strip, and I have
included it in full at the bottom of this post for you to enjoy and appreciate.
The covers and This
is Your Life – Story! was the only new material that Mr. Nixon
contributed to WHOOPEE! BOOK OF FRANKIE STEIN 1977. As had become a tradition in those Frankie
Stein publications, the editor re-used some of Mr. Nixon’s Frankie Stein
artwork from Shiver and Shake
weeklies, turning it into spot-the-difference puzzles (two of them in this
book) and even putting it on the title page:
It seems that none of the better IPC artists were
available to draw the other two new Frankie Stein stories, so the job was given
to an illustrator whose name I don’t know and who IMHO wasn’t really up for the
task. In Robinson Frankie (a 6-pager) Prof. Cube has an idea to get rid
of Frankie by dumping him on a desert island and making him Robinson Crusoe. In
Frankie
Stein Super-Freak (an 8-pager featured on the front cover) we find out
that Frankie is a fan of Superman TV programme and likes to play at being
Superman. This gives Prof. Cube an idea to make him a Frankieman suit with a
pair of rockets attached to his boots, so that with a bit of luck they would
take him to another galaxy. As could be expected, the plan misfires and causes
big trouble for Dad. The first panel of the first page shown below is the other
illustrator’s poor sketch of the bright front cover artwork by Mr. Nixon.
The 8 pages of Frankie Stein by Ken Reid reprinted in
the annual are taken from WHAM! issues 50, 72, 83, 84, 109, 31, 152 and 53
(listed here in the order of their appearance in the book). It was nice of them
not to tamper with the artwork or the text, although they had to extend a few rows
of panels to fill the pages. They also used a drawing of Prof. Cube’s head by
Ken Reid from the episode of Frankie Stein in WHAM! No. 76 and turned it into
this puzzle:
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| Original drawing in WHAM! |
The book has 9 pages filled with themed Frankie Stein
gags by Jim Crocker: Frankie’s Fun Spots (signed), Frankie
at Work, Frankie in Uniform, Frankie Stein Film Star and Frankie
Abroad (all unsigned).
Two pages of Professor Cube – Inventor! gags (also
illustrated by Crocker, I believe) shared the title with Professor Cube – Inventor! ‘Relatively
Speaking’ - a nice 6-pager drawn for this book by the excellent Frank McDiarmid. The brand new story introduced us to some of Prof. Cube’s
relatives from around the World. I showed the strip in full not so long ago,
you can view it HERE.
The book also offers a selection of nice Frankie Stein
fun features, such as three 2–pagers of Frankie Puzzles by Les Barton that
look very much like Ticklish Allsorts in MONSTER FUN COMIC:
… a 4-page Frankie’s calendar by Sid Burgon,
here are the first 6 months:
… The Frankie Stein Book of Knowledge (a 2-pager) by the artist whose name I don’t know but
I believe he also illustrated Mum’s the Word in the early issues
of Whoopee!:
… and Frankie Job References:
Frank McDiarmid was responsible for most of new
non-Frankie Stein content. He drew two instalments of Monster Movie Makers, 4 pages long each. In the first story Carlo
Monte, the head of the now famous film-studios, decides to make ‘The Ghost of
Cleopatra’ and uses some real ghosts who volunteer to join his cast. The film
turns out so scary that it frightens off all the customers and the ghosts are
the only ones enjoying it in the empty theatre during the premiere… In the
second story Carlo Monte and his crew go to the Himalayan Mountains in Tibet to
make a documentary film of the abominable snowman but after many hours of
searching the project ends in fiasco because of Carlo Monte’s idiot assistants.
Frank McDiarmid also contributed a 4-page episode of Weird
Wolf in which the howling ghost wolf is so sick and tired of being an
outcast from society that he decides to stop himself from howling at the moon.
Easier said than done…
Together
with 6 pages of Professor Cube – Inventor! ‘Relatively Speaking’ which was
mentioned before, the contribution of Mr. McDiarmid to WHOOPEE! BOOK OF FRANKIE
STEIN 1977 amounted to 18 pages.
Draculass (a two-pager) by Terry Bave and Creepy Car (a two-pager) by I’m not
sure who but definitely not by Reg Parlett who at the time was the regular
artist of the strip in WHOOPEE!, were included in a Frankie Stein publication for
the first time and may very well be new material.
The
House on Hangman’ s Heath was another new addition to
the package. It was a 12-page one-off chilling mystery yarn about an orphaned
boy named Roddy Mason who inherited an old deserted mansion from his deceased
uncle and went to inspect the property without listening to his lawyer Jabez
Kane who advised against going there. While exploring the mansion, the boy and
his new friend Nick Damon from the local newspaper experience a series of
strange life-threatening events and encounter a hooded ghost figure that is
determined to send them to their death. The two think the villain is Jebez
Kane, the solicitor, but in the end it turns out to be Roddy Mason’s uncle who
hadn’t died but pretended that he had to escape his problems with the law. Why
the uncle wanted to kill the boy and the journalist both of whom he had never
seen before remains a mystery unsolved, so it’s a case of suspense for the sake
of suspense – not a very rare thing in comics. The story looks like new
materia. Reader of this blog Briony C says the artist was Tony
Coleman (also known as George Anthony). Thanks, Briony!
The
House
on Hangman’ s Heath was not the only adventure strip in WHOOPEE! BOOK
OF FRANKIE STEIN 1977 – there were also two 6-page episodes of Crabbe’s
Crusaders, both reprinted from BUSTER where it ran in 1969. Like in the
previous three Frankie Stein publications, there were also some reprints of The
Haunts of the Headless Harry and Ghost Ship from SMASH! (3 original
one-page episodes of each strip have been converted into two-pagers). One two-page episode of Harry’s Haunted House by
Reg Parlett was included for the first time; the caption at the top of the page
said it was ‘a freaky Friend of Frankie
from Whizzer and Chips’.
 |
| Ghost Ship crew |
And
now, as promised, here is THIS IS YOUR
LIFE – Story! in full. I’ve said it once and I will say it again – wouldn’t
it be great if Egmont put together a collected
edition of Robert Nixon’s Frankie Stein from the seventies before the artist adopted
a simplified drawing style!
Images 2014 © Egmont UK
Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with
permission.
