SERIALISED FACEACHE STORIES – PART 17: THE SNOW BEAST

The first Faceache story arc of 1980 was three weeks long and was printed in BUSTER issues cover-dated 1st, 8th and 15th March, 1980.

Mr. Snipe’s class are off to the moors to photograph animals’ footprints. Faceache has an idea to scrunge into all sorts of whacky creatures and fool Mr. Snipe by taking snapshots of his own footprints. 

All goes well until Faceache comes across something strange:

…He follows the tracks to try to get a photograph of the creature. Suddenly a fiendish monstrosity comes charging a Faceache...

It turns out that the monster is an electronic robot operated by a kid: 

Faceache tries to comfort the sobbing lad by volunteering to stand-in for his robot till the filming is over. He demonstrates his scrunging talent to the boy who runs away screaming: 

Faceache has always fancied himself as an actor, so he decides he’ll find the film set and act as the Snow Beast. He walks on to the set without even realising it. He spots some kid and asks him about the whereabouts of the film unit: 

It turns out that it is not a kid but a dummy stuffed with TNT. According to the script, it is to send the fiendish creature to its doom. Film director detonates the bomb and Faceache goes flying into the air with a boom:

…A week later he sees himself on screen and finds it very surprising because he didn’t realise he was being filmed...

 

Characters are © Rebellion Publishing Ltd

I am celebrating Ken's 100th birthday by offering free prints of his original artwork with every purchase of THE POWER PACK books! Press here and claim your copies now!

A LOOK AT MONSTER FUN FEATURES: BADTIME BEDTIME BOOKS - Part ONE

Badtime Bedtimes Books is something what Monster Fun Comic is probably best remembered for. They were centre-page pull-outs which were meant to be removed from the comic, cut up and arranged into eight-page minibooks. Each book was a self-contained whacky story. Here is an example from MFC No. 3. Unfortunately, IPC printing presses often failed to do them justice (click on the images to enlarge):

Leo Baxendale wrote about Badtime Bedtimes Books at length in his book A VERY FUNNY BUSINESS, and that’s how we know it was Bob Paynter who created the concept and gave it to Leo Baxendale to develop. Mid-70s was the time when Mr. Baxendale had grown disappointed with the comics industry and was looking for an opportunity to quit because he felt it was in for a decline. He realised that times had changed and that comics humour should follow suit. Although he was excited about Badtime Bedtime Books, he had planned from the very start to use them as a “test bed” for his new ideas and a vehicle to manoeuvre his way out of the comics industry.

The first Badtime Bedtime Books received glowing reader feedback which Leo Baxendale compared with reaction to his very early Bash Street Kids, and he immediately knew he was on the right path.

As could be expected, pressing deadlines prevented Mr. Baxendale from working at a leisurely pace and producing a quality “vintage” book every time. He gradually divested himself from other strips he had still been drawing for IPC and concentrated single-mindedly on the BBBs, but he still didn’t have enough time to do them as he thought they should be done. As a consequence, he adopted a loose sketchy style, producing a vintage set only once in a while. This was also the time when Mr. Baxendale started contemplating a series of his own Willy the Kid annuals. He no longer had the time to write the BBBs, and eventually stopped drawing them too, leaving Bob Paynter with a huge challenge of finding first the writers and later the illustrators who could match Mr. Baxendale’s talent.

In all likelihood the original idea was to have a BBB in every issue (with the odd poster of a MFC star character squeezed in), and Mr. Baxendale was somehow able to keep the schedule, although we know from his book that he was working at a leisurely pace and preparing his first Willy the Kid annual at the same time. All but three of the 25 Badtime Bedtime Books that came out in 1975 were illustrated by Mr. Baxendale but the decline of the feature was very much on the horizon.

By the time he had to prepare the first MONSTER FUN COMIC issues of 1976, Bob Paynter had run out of Badtime Bedtime Books supplied by Mr. Baxendale, so he tried experimenting with a few other artists. IMHO, three of the illustrators (Artie Jackson, Leslie Harding and even Terry Bave) weren’t really up to the task, and the five BBBs that appeared in the first months of 1976 were particularly poorly drawn. Things improved considerably when Bob Paynter gave the artist’s duties to Mike Brown who was able to imitate Leo Baxendale's style to perfection, adding his own twist to it. The Editor must have been satisfied, as confirmed by the fact that towards the end of the run the frequency of BBBs was restored to its previous levels. Mike Brown proudly initialled or signed most of the sets, so he must have been pleased with his work as well.

The MONSTER FUN COMIC run of Badtime Bedtime Books falls into three “periods”: 1) the Leo Baxendale period, 2) the “grey” period when they were drawn by other artists, or when Leo Baxendale’s simplified style or ghosters’ efforts make one wonder who really illustrated them, and last but by no means least 3) the Mike Brown period.

I will cover the three periods in my next posts. In the meantime, here is the Badtime Bedtime Book poster from MFC No. 36 dated 14th February, 1976. Drawn, I believe, by Leo Baxendale.

 All Images 2014 © Egmont UK Ltd.  All rights reserved. Used with permission.

MONSTER FUN COMIC - IT'S A WILD, WEIRD, WHACKY WEEKLY!!

When MONSTER FUN COMIC arrived on the newsstands across the UK in the beginning of the Summer of 1975, it joined its senior IPC sisters in the children’s humour comics family, consisting at the time of Buster, Whizzer and Chips and Whoopee!     Shiver and Shake had already folded by then, as of course had COR!!

Edited by Bob Paynter, it was yet another attempt at the comedy horror genre by IPC. Shiver and Shake had played the theme half-heartedly so to speak because only a part of the comic was supposedly spooky. With MONSTER FUN COMIC, IPC went all the way and the paper was chock-full of funny horrors. Not that they were genuinely scary, of course, but monsters nonetheless – Kid Kong (banana-obsessed son of King Kong), Draculass (daughter of the infamous count of Transylvania), Creature Teacher (monstrosity manufactured by desperate teachers in a chemical lab and put in charge of the unruly class 3X), thy mysterious Invisible Monster, Martha’s Monster Make-Up, Brainy and his Monster Maker, Major Jump Horror Hunter, Tom Thumbscrew the Torturer’s Apprentice, March of the Mighty Ones (adventure serial that continued throughout the run of the paper), Terror TV, Freaky Farm, Teddy Scare, The Little Monsters and others. There were a few traditional strips too, such as X Ray Specs, Art’s Gallery, Dough Nut and Rusty (very much like Tough Nutt and Softy Centre in Shiver and Shake) and Mummy’s Boy.  The most interesting strip of the non-horror variety was probably S.O.S. (Save Our Stan) – a very clever combination of a comic strip and a puzzle, a lot like an interactive game where the main character couldn’t do without readers’ help. As is the custom on Kazoop!!, every strip will receive a dedicated post in due course. 

'Honorary Editor' and host of the comic was none other than Frankie Stein the friendly monster. Thanks to Bob Nixon’s brilliant art and the efforts of IPC script-writers, the character had formed a solid fanbase in the days of SHIVER AND SHAKE during 1973 – 1974 and continued to do very well in the combined WHOOPEE! AND SHIVER AND SHAKE. That’s probably why Bob Paynter decided that putting him (notionally) in charge of the new magazine would only be good for the paper. I find it quite surprising how much of Frankie there was in MFC: in addition to contributing the odd ‘editorial’, running the Letters to Frankie section and making a few front-cover appearances, he featured regularly in Frankie’s Diary and Freaky Frankie strips and was the host of the brilliant Ticklish Allsorts feature; he even had a pull-out poster and one of the booklets was dubbed Frankie Stein’s Pull-Out Book, never mind that he did not even appear inside.

MONSTER FUN COMIC had quite a few innovative reader participation features of which Master Ugly Mug and Miss Funny Face face-pulling contest was surely the most hilarious one. Readers could embarrass themselves to their hearts’ content by sending their funniest and silliest mug shots to MFC in hope to win £2 if their picture was published. 

What made MFC stand out amongst other IPC sister publications was the ceaseless supply of pull-out booklets (most notably Badtime Bedtime Books), posters, games and other things to cut out. Only a handful of the 73 issues did not have them, making the quest of building a full set of complete issues a collector’s nightmare (unless you are very lucky and win the whole run (minus only two issues) with the posters and pull-outs, and a bonus of both MFC Summer Specials, for just £31.00 on eBay, like someone did a few days ago!!).

With the large variety of pull-outs, including as many as 43 Badtime Bedtime Books (each a self-contained 8-page short-story in its own right), MFC had a surprisingly small number of strips – only 26 all in all. In comparison, the 79-issues run of another short-lived IPC comic SHIVER AND SHAKE managed 40+! The paper did not go through major revamps – any strips that were introduced or rested, came and went one by one without much ado. That said, the comic still underwent two notable developments – one was the rise and fall and rise again of Badtime Bedtime Books which had to do with Leo Baxendale’s decision to bid his farewell to comics, leaving Bob Paynter with a major challenge of finding new writers and artists to create the BBBs; the second was the drop of the adventurous practice of rotating cover stars and giving the cover permanently to Gums. Both will be covered in greater detail when I do yearly overviews of the comic in the next two posts.  

The stellar team of artists who worked on MFC included two giants of UK comics – Leo Baxendale whose Badtime Bedtime Books were his swan song in comics, and Ken Reid who illustrated Martha’s Monster Make-Up. Experienced humour artists like Robert Nixon, Mike Lacey, Trevor Metcalfe, Terry Bave, Sid Burgon, Norman Mansbridge and Les Barton were also part of the team, as was Mike White who was put in charge of March of the Mighty Ones, the only adventure serial in the paper. Mr. White continued to draw it nearly until the very end of MFC when the brilliant Ron Turner took over. MFC also recruited a few young artists who later became regulars in UK comics. I am referring to Tom Paterson, Tom Williams, Jim Watson, Barrie Appleby, Nick Baker, Ian Knox and Vic Neil. There was also one artist whom I don’t recall seeing anywhere else – the name is Andy Christine, illustrator of Grizzly Bearhug… GIANT and Tom Thumbscrew the Torturer’s Apprentice (until Norman Mansbridge took over).

Well, so much for the introduction. Here are the bare facts: 

• The run of Monster Fun Comic consisted of 73 issues, the first issue was cover-dated 14th June, 1975 and the last – 3oth October, 1976. It did not miss a single week.
• Printed by: Fleetway Printers, Gravesend, Kent.
• Pagination: 32 pages.
• Priced: 6 p (issues 1 – 30); 7 p (issues 31 – 64); 8 p (issues 65 – 73).

Only two Monster Fun Comic Summer Specials were published (1975 and 1976). Monster Fun Annuals outlived the weekly by a good margin: the last one came out for the Christmas of 1984 and carried the date of 1985.