WHOOPEE! is my favourite IPC comic, and
covering it in the same manner as I did COR!!, SHIVER AND SHAKE and MONSTER
FUN is still on my to-do list, but given the long run of the paper (567 weekly
issues), I will have to postpone it until I have more time.
Last year I made a few inroads into
WHOOPEE! territory by covering Scared-Stiff Sam, and doing a short series on cut-out Xmas labels and cards. In one of the posts I mentioned I might do a year-by-year overview of the various pull-outs and freebies that
came with the paper, so let’s start with 1974 – the first year of WHOOPEE!
No. 1 came out for the week of 1st March, 1974 (there was no date on the cover, as you can see above). It came with
the free gift of Super Squirt Ring that looked like this:
I suspect a similar gift also came with
JACKPOT No. 2 in 1979:
WHOOPEE! No. 2 came with 4 gifts - when you bought
the paper, you could get a Joke Spider, a Joke Soap, a Joke Nail or a Joke
Biscuit.
Here’s what the Joke Bar of Soap
looked like:
The copy in my collection comes with the
Joke Chocolate Biscuit, still sealed in its original packaging:
Finally, WHOOPEE! No. 3 had a Super Set of 36
SPOOKY Snap Cards.
The cards are still uncut in my copy of the issue, so probably worth a
zillion today :) :
No. 10 came with a free Lone Ranger Mask.
Lone Ranger was a cowboy strip printed in full colour on the centrespread,
and looked somewhat out of place in the paper.
Here’s how the free gift looked:
Nos. 11, 12, 13 and 14 had the
WHOOPEE! QUIZ BOOK – the first of the many pull out booklets to follow:
The idea was to pull out the centre pages from
the staples, cut them along dotted line and fold them in half to make an
eight-page booklet. Once collected from all 4 issues, the booklet was 32-pages
thick! Readers were encouraged to have fun answering the various questions, but
as it wasn’t a competition, they were not asked to send their answers to the
magazine to enter for a prize. All answers were provided in part 4. Here’s a
random selection of pages – some were in coulour, some were not:
Starting from No. 24 (17th August, 1974) WHOOPEE! changed its format to a larger size, keeping its 40
pages for the time being. No pull-outs or freebies were offered to mark the occasion.
The next pull-out booklet (the last one for 1974) – or rather the first part of the booklet – was in No. 32 to
celebrate the merger of SHIVER AND SHAKE into WHOOPEE!, and it was
appropriately named after the big SHIVER AND SHAKE star who was Frankie Stein.
The
4-part Frankie Stein’s Mini Monster Comic
was printed in WHOOPEE! AND SHIVER & SHAKE issue Nos. 32 to 35 (12th October – 2nd November 1974), and – once composed together – formed
another 32-page booklet.
It featured Evil Eye, The Ghost’s Revenge, The Hand,
Hire-A-Horror, etc. but most importantly it had a new 5-page story of Frankie Stein
by Robert Nixon - here’s a taste:
…and two Mini-Monsters by Ken Reid – the last
ones he drew for the Creepy Creations feature in SHIVER AND SHAKE, but as
the paper was cancelled, the editors decided to use them in this minibooklet.
Here’s one:
WHOOPEE! editors came up with an idea to
see 1974 off with a giant three-part super poster of Frankie Stein:
Part 1 of the poster came with the issue
of 14th December, 1974 (No. 41), and part 2 – with the next issue
cover dated 21st Dec., 1974 (No. 42). Then things went wrong because
IPC printers went on strike and WHOOPEE! missed what would have been its first
Xmas number. The paper didn’t come out until 18th January of next
year and, as a result, part 3 of the 'Super Poster' wasn’t published as
planned. Readers must have been disappointed because all they got was this:
IPC made it up to the fans next year,
but let’s leave this for another post in which I will cover WHOOPEE! pull-outs
of 1975.
Characters are
© Rebellion Publishing Ltd
And while you’re here, I would like to remind you that
although 2019 is over, my promotion for the POWER PACK OF KEN REID is not. Get
your copies of the books and BONUS FREE PRINTS on eBay or from my online shop
HERE!
