Check out the caption
at the top of the front page of WHOOPEE! above. Indeed, in 1975 (and later on) readers
of the comic were rewarded with more than just a bundle of laughs – they could
also win themselves quite a bit of cash!
I randomly picked the
issue cover-dated 17th May, 1975 and checked how much prize money was up for
grabs in a week.
£1 was offered for
each letter published in the ‘Letters’ column:
£1 was paid for each
joke used (readers were asked to send jokes in a variety of subjects (School,
Animal, Spooky, All at Sea, Police, Historical, etc.):
A prize of £1 was
paid to the sender of that week’s Knock Knock joke:
There was a prize of £1
for every good suggestion for a script of Scream Inn:
That’s in addition to
the joy of seeing your name included in the strip, usually in the first panel:
Last but not least, a
kingly reward of £2 was offered for each World Wide-Weirdies idea used (not to mention
the extra bonus of seeing your name in print at the top of the page):
Theoretically, if a
resourceful reader was successful on all 5 counts, he or she could collect £6
in a single week!
Moreover, the
adventure strips included in WHOOPEE! at that time encouraged readers to take
note of the various clues in the weekly episodes, and enter for a cash prize at
the end of the story. They were asked to write the clues on a coupon provided,
stick it on the back of a postcard and send it to IPC Magazines. Fifty senders
of the first all-correct cards were rewarded with £1 each, and saw their names
printed in the magazine! Here’s an example from Island of Suspicion, followed
by the coupon included in the next week’s issue of WHOOPEE!:
Besides, WHOOPEE! had
all kinds of goodness offered by its advertisers. Here’s what was advertised in
the issue of 17th May, 1975:
IPC children’s comics
of the 70s competed for the young readers’ pocket money with well-established
DCT titles. The Beano and The Dandy were 20 pages thick and cost 3 p., they had
a stellar lineup of strips such as The Bash Street Kids, Biffo the Bear, Dennis
the Menace, Minnie the Minx, Little Plum, Desperate Dan, Black Bob, Corporal Clot, Roger the Dodger, etc. – all fondly
remembered by parents and grandparents who now bought comics for their kids and
grandchildren. In this context, IPC had to make an extra effort.
In the case of
WHOOPEE!, the price of 5 p. (2 p. more than The Beano or The Dandy) was a
drawback, but the page count of 32 (12 pages more than The Beano or The Dandy),
the excellent lineup of dynamic fresh-looking characters and strips (particularly
those exploiting the hot new theme of horror humour – which DCT tended to completely
avoid at the time), the quality of the art, the abundance of colour pull-out
posters and fun booklets (hardly ever found in the rival comics) made WHOOPEE!
a very appealing package. Involving the young readers into the process of
creating the comic (by asking to send strip ideas, etc. and printing
contributors’ names in the paper) was a particularly clever move of
the editorial team, as was the generous cash-reward policy.
To put my findings
into context, I checked my copies of that week’s issues of The Beano and The
Dandy to see what their cash prize offering was. Somehow, I was not surprised to
discover it was just £2 per week in The Beano (£1 for each letter printed, and £1
for each printed drawing of a reader’s pet):
…and an unspecified
cash prize for each ‘little funny story’ printed in The Dandy (the top story of
the week received a Practical Joker’s Fool Outfit):
