1970: A LOOK AT THE FIRST YEAR OF COR!!

30 issues (Nos. 1- 30) of the comic were published in 1970.

Important issues in 1970:

6th June, 1970 (No. 1) – first issue, free gift

13th June, 1970 (No. 2) – second issue, free gift

20th June, 1970 (No. 3) – third issue, free gift

12th September, 1970 (No. 15) – bumper issue, 40 pages, SCORE 'n' ROAR adverts

10th October 1970 (No. 19) – first double-priced issue

17th October, 1970 (No. 20) – bumper issue, 40 pages, THUNDER adverts

7th November 1970 (No. 23) – Firework issue + 5 new features inside

26th December, 1970 (No. 30) – Christmas issue

Front page of the second issue of COR!! dated 13th June, 1970

The first three issues of COR!! came with free gifts: the first one had a sachet of GULP fruit drink mix; easy to follow instructions were provided on page three. The second issue had a double gift – Super Anglo Bubble Gum and 2 instant picture sheets of Letraset Dry Transfers – eight figures in full colour. No. 3 came with a Super Mystery gift. What is it? – Squeeze Gently and See – said the text on the gift. It was one of those cardboard sleeves with a rubber band and a metal hoop inside that made a rasping sound as it spun around inside the envelope. I am not sure if this was the first time that FLEETWAY or IPC used it for a free gift but it surely wasn’t the last: they even re-used it with the same comic only some two and a half years later (Cor!! issue dated 6th October, 1973 (No. 175)).

Front page of the third issue of COR!! dated 20th June, 1970

Here is the full line-up of characters who appeared in the first issue (6th June, 1970):

Eddie – by Graham Allen

Whacky – by Mike Lacey

The Gasworks Gang – by Frank McDiarmid (2 pages)

Hire a Horror – by Reg Parlett

Tomboy – by Brian Lewis

Donovan’s Dad – Terry Bave

Percy Puffer

Football Madd

Harriet and her Horse – by Les Barton

Ivor Lott and Tony Broke – by Reg Parlett

The Robot Maker – by Frank McDiarmid

Tricky Dicky – by Cyril Price

Stone Age Brit

Kid Chameleon – by Joe Colquhoun (centre spread in full colour)

Wally and Olly

Andy’s Ants – by Terry Bave

Spoilsport – by Graham Allen

Freddie Fang the Werewolf Cub – by Reg Parlett

Barney’s Brain Box (2 pages)

Little Geyser

Jeannie and her Genie

Dogsbodies Academy – by Nadal

Four Alone on the Abandoned Island – by Mike Noble (2 pages)

Stowaway Steve

Mike’s Magic Mould

Teacher’s Pet – by Norman Mansbridge (in full colour)

This was quite a strong line-up from the very start. A number of the features such as Gus Gorilla, The Gasworks Gang, Hire a Horror, Tomboy, Football Madd Ivor Lott and Tony Broke (of course!!), Andy’s Ants and Teacher’s Pet survived the entire 4-year run of the comic; three of them – Ivor Lott and Tony Broke, Football Madd and Tomboy even survived the demise of COR!! Quite a few others such as Kid Chameleon, Spoilsport, Eddie (who was always bored), Donovan’s Dad, Freddie Fang, Tricky Dicky and Whacky enjoyed long runs in COR!! Individual strips won’t be covered in this post because I plan to devote a separate one to each and every one of them in the future (hopefully).

There was an anonymous welcome message on page three of the first issue. Starting from issue 3 the column got the name of COR!! MENT and was signed by the Editor. In the early issues the Editor mostly used the space to build the hype by telling readers how great the comic was doing and how much reader mail they were getting, always urging to send in more. The Editor also addressed some practical issues, e.g. he explained why there was not going to be a Holiday Special in 1970 and apologised for not having enough time to prepare a 1971 annual; on more than one occasion he explained how due to production process it was not possible for readers to send in jokes and letters one week, and have them published in the NEXT issue; in the issue dated 3rd October, 1970 (No. 18) he broke the bad news that the price of COR!! was to be increased by one penny to meet the rising costs of production; in Firework issues he urged to follow the Firework Code and pointed out the most important rules to be observed. He dropped hints about new stories in the making and plugged next week’s extra-special bumper editions.

Editor's page from COR!! issue No. 24 dated
14th November, 1970

But let us get back to the first issue. In the welcome message (that would soon become the COR!! COMENT Editor’s column) readers were encouraged to join in the fun by sending their entries in the NUTTY NOTICE BOARD – jokes, riddles, puzzles, limericks, tricks – anything amusing. Contributors were offered cash prizes if their submissions were published. Surprisingly, the NUTTY NOTICE BOARD feature premiered in the very first issue of the paper, complete with names of the lucky readers who collected £1 pocket money each.

The welcome word in the first issue also introduced KIDS’ COMIC PROBLEM COLUMN – “another great fun feature” earmarked for the second issue. Readers were invited to send in their problems while Cor!! promised to offer some advice… and even if the advice doesn’t help, the cash prize for the published items will! – said the call for contributions. Each week the Editor would choose one Problem of the Week and offer “counselling” in illustrated form. One or two (sometimes more) deserving problems would be addressed in the Quickies section in a simple “question-and-answer” format, always showing how witty the Editor was and never missing an opportunity to plug the name of the comic. Due to lack of space, the Editor would occasionally skip Problem of the Week, leaving just Quickies. Illustrated Problem of the Week continued until the issue dated 17th October, 1970 (No. 20), afterwards illustrations were dropped and the feature became simply Kid’s Problem Column or Problem Quickies.

Examples of Kid's Problems Column
from the early issues

There was a voting coupon for writing down your three favourite features and sending them to Cor!! It’s a shame that editors never shared information about how different strips were faring. It isn’t difficult to guess that the strips which were dropped quickly weren’t doing well in the popularity charts. On the other hand readers’ letters and the Editor’s comments printed in the Postbag section left little doubt about who the favourites were, but I for one would have loved to follow a Top 10 chart and its developments over time. In fact, one reader whose letter was printed in the Postbag feature told how she was doing a graph of the stories liked best by COR!! readers, taken from letters she read in POSTBAG.

Nutty Noticeboard from COR!! No. 12
dated 22nd August, 1970

Postbag reader participation feature was promoted in the first four issues and made its debut in the issue dated 4th July, 1970 (No. 5). Again, pocket money prizes were offered for every item published. The first prizes went to readers who wrote in to tell how much they liked the comic, how fantastic and side-splitting fun it was, what their favourite features were, how they placed a regular order or how their friends or relatives were like Cor!! characters. Soon, however, readers realized more effort was required to get their letters printed. Several ardent fans wrote in to tell how they named their pet after a favourite Cor!! character or compiled lists of words that started with COR. Others pointed-out mistakes they had spotted in Cor!! strips (e.g. drawing a MIDI-coat and calling it a MAXI). But a new and truly weird trend started in the issue dated 14th November, 1970 (No. 24) with a contribution by Andrew Morris of West Bridgford who counted all exclamation marks in an earlier issue of Cor!! The overall stats were 776, with Gasworks Gang having the greatest number of 62. WOW!!!!!!!!!!! – was all the Editor had to say in response and Andrew collected his pocket-money prize of 5/-. Other readers joined in and before long they were counting and re-counting exclamation marks (with two readers coming up with considerably different sums for the same issue – but presumably both pocketed their prizes), sound effects and noises, ants on the Andy’s Ants page, fireworks in the Firework edition, presents in the Christmas issue and Easter eggs in the Easter issue, stars framing the POSTBAG page, words printed in the comic and the number of actual letters in all and even the number of letter “C”s in an entire issue. One reader bothered to count the number if characters’ legs in the comic (1,350 legs).  Phew!.. Counting mania remained prominent in readers’ mail during the entire run of the comic. POSTBAG section was apparently proving a big success, some readers even mentioned it as their most favourite feature, demanding that it be given more space. The Editor always seemed to be keen to devote as much room as possible to Postbag, but ½ or 2/3 of a page was the maximum he could afford at that stage.

TEASEBREAK feature from COR!! No. 28 dated 12th December, 1970

Further two reader participation features were added in 1970. TEASE BREAK! debuted in the issue dated 17th October, 1970 (No. 20) with as many as two pages of puzzles. In his COR!! MENTS column the Editor said the feature was included because so many Cor!! readers had written in and requested it. TEASE BREAK! became a regular one-page feature (with an occasional extra page) from the issue dated 7th November, 1970 (No. 23) and continued to appear in Cor!! on a semi-regular basis until the end of the comic’s life.

Firework issue 1970 (7th November, 1970)

In issue 24 (14th November, 1970) the Editor announced plans to launch a new feature called Picture yourself and provided a detailed description of how it was going to work. Cash prizes were offered again. The first winner in the brand new Cor!! participation feature was announced (and had his portrait printed) in the issue dated 28th November, 1970 (No. 26). Form that issue onwards the feature stayed on the pages of Cor!! until the demise of the comic in 1974. 

Editor's page from COR!! No. 29 (19th December, 1970)

Strips that ended in 1970:

Stowaway Steve – 12th September, 1970 (No. 15)

Mike's Magic Mould – 26th September, 1970 (No. 17)

The Robot Maker – 17th October, 1970 (No. 20)

Wally and Olly – 17th October, 1970 (No. 20)

Dogsbodies Academy – 24th October, 1970 (No. 21)

Harriet and her Horse – 31st October, 1970 (No. 22)

Jeanie and her Gennie – 31st October, 1970 (No. 22)

Four Alone on the Abandoned Island – 31st October, 1970 (No. 22) (ended by reaching its natural conclusion)

Stone Age Brit Ancient Nit – 7th November, 1970 (No. 23)

Strips that started in 1970:

Swopper Stan – 12th September, 1970 (No. 15)

Tease Break! feature – 17th October, 1970 (No. 20)

Nobby's Hobbies – 7th November, 1970 (No. 23)

Tell-Tale Tess – 7th November, 1970 (No. 23)

Jack Pott – 7th November, 1970 (No. 23)

Robby Hood and His One Man Band – 7th November, 1970 (No. 23)

Sporting Sue and her Trainer Prue – 21st November, 1970 (No. 25)

COR!! Christmas Issue 1970 (26th December, 1970 (no. 30))

COR!! FLYERS AND ADVERTISEMENTS IN IPC COMPANION COMICS

The arrival of Cor!! was advertised in other IPC comics of the time, such as Whizzer and Chips, Buster, Smash! and even Scorcher. The campaign began in the issues with the cover date of May 23rd, 1970. They carried a half-page teaser to wet readers‘ appetites, urging them to watch out next week for more exciting news.

Cor!! teaser in Buster dated May 23rd, 1970

The news came a week later in the form of a 4-page pull out in which Gus Gorilla announced that the super new laughter weekly was due to be out next week.

Cor!! promotional flyer in Whizzer and Chips
dated May 30th, 1970.

A week later most companion comics came with another 4-page flyer – “COR!! OUT TODAY” proclaimed the sign on the front of the pull out. Centre pages showed a number of characters from the new comic and invited readers to guess their names by choosing from the list.

Cor!! No. 1 promotional flyer in Whizzer and Chips
dated June 6th, 1970

The launch of Cor!! coincided with a rough period for some IPC comics because their publishing schedules were disrupted by industrial action. It affected Buster, Smash! and Valiant that all came out with a double cover date of June 6th/13th, 1970. In effect this meant that there were no issues on 13th June and no ads for the second issue of Cor!! were published.

Scorcher wasn’t affected by the action and the issue of June 13th, 1970 had a full-page ad of Cor!! issue No. 2; so did Whizzer and Chips, but the ad was only ½ page in size.

Cor!! No. 2 ad page in Scorcher dated 13th June, 1970

Cor!! No. 2 ad in Whizzer and Chips dated June 13th, 1970

Next week things came back to normal, and Cor!! issue No. 3 was presented with a full page ad in all companion comics.

Cor!! No. 3 ad in Buster dated June 20th, 1970

The promotional campaign ended a week later with a half-page ad urging readers to place their regular order now.

Cor!! ad in Buster dated June 27th, 1970

Valiant appears to have run a somewhat scaled-down advertising campaign of Cor!! There was no teaser in the issue dated May 23rd, nor there was anything in the week preceding the premiere (although there is certainly a possibility that the pull-out was removed from my copy of Valiant, can anyone confirm please?). The double-dated issue of June 6th/13th, 1970 was different from other IPC comics of that week in the sense that it only had a single-page ad of Cor!! No. 1 rather than the full 4-page flyer as in other comics.

Cor!! No. 1 ad in Valiant dated  June 6th/13th, 1970

WELCOME TO COR!! THE LONG-LAUGH COMIC THAT IS TOO GOOD TO MISS!

Cover of the first issue of COR!!

COR!! arrived on the newsstands in the early summer of 1970. Edited by Bob Paynter, it was the second weekly humour title after Whizzer and Chips published by IPC Magazines. The premiere issue had an eye-catching cover drawn by Mike Lacey and came with a sachet of fruit-flavoured lemonade powder for a free gift, enough to make 10 glasses.  “Have a drink on us!” read the sign beneath the screaming masthead. Check out these pictures of the free gift as it looked glued inside the paper. Thanks to Phil Shrimpton (a.k.a. phil-comics on eBay) for the images! A fine copy of COR!! No. 1 with the free gift fetched a whopping amount of £659.00 on eBay in April 2014!

In his excellent website Dez Skinn, the then sub-editor under Bob Paynter, explains that for IPC that was known for its strict “offend nobody” policy the choice of the title was quite controversial: the Cockney slang word “cor” – as in “cor, blimey!” – derives from “God, blind me” so, unbelievably, the puritanical and mighty IPC was actually launching a nationally distributed comic named GOD!! Dez Skinn recalls that they were so tickled by this that a private mock-up was produced with GOD!! as the title logo, the free lemonade powder cover mounted gift receiving the revised text of “Have a drink on God”.

Like Whizzer and Chips launched merely a few months before, Cor!! contained a mixture of traditional British children’s humour strips and some adventure stories with the former outweighing the latter considerably in terms of page count. The combination was common in other Fleetway/IPC comics of the period but titles like Smash! and Valiant presumably were aimed at a slightly older audience and had more adventure strips, while in Buster the ratio was approx. 50 : 50 at the time.

Story ideas of the majority of humour strips in Cor!! weren’t very original: Gasworks Gang exploited the well-familiar theme of a group of naughty school-boys and their teacher (talk about Bash Street Kids, The Tiddlers, etc.), Tomboy was a mischievous boyish girl who was a headache to her parents and pretty much everyone around her (sounds like Beryl the Peril or Minnie the Minx, doesn’t it?), Parallels can be drawn between Tricky Dicky and The Beano's Roger the Dodger.  Another large group of strips could be described as stories about kids with something special about them, be it their peculiar friends, talents, obsessions or hobbies; titles of the features spoke for themselves: Andy’s Ants, Chalky, Football Madd, Swopper Stan, Jelly Baby, Zoo Sue, Jack Pott, Jeanie and her Gennie, Val’s Vanishing Cream, Wally's Weirdies, etc. They must have been quite a strain on writers’ imaginations.  Hire-A-Horror was one of those horror-themed comic features that were so popular throughout the 70s; it was in more ways than one like Rent-A-Ghost in Buster. Ivor Lott and Tony Broke was a new concept in the sense that it exploited opposition between the rich and the poor. The theme later became a recurrent one in many IPC strips elsewhere. The Slimms was quite a clever parody of dieting. Jasper the Grasper was another fresh idea that hadn’t been used much before in UK humour comics. 

Adventure strips weren’t plentiful, but they surely were very appealing to the eye: Kid Chamaleon painted and printed in full colour occupied the centre pages for nearly two years; Rat-Trap was also popular with the readers and appeared in nearly 100 issues. Then there were The Goodies – a strip that is somewhat difficult to categorise: it was adapted from a popular TV comedy series and was another great addition to the package.

The team of artists who worked on Cor!! consisted of IPC's top talent including Terry Bave, Reg Parlett, Frank McDiarmid, Joe Colquhoun, Mike Lacey, Graham Allen, Trevor Metcalfe, Robert Nixon. etc. In many strips the quality of art and the level of detail was outstanding, and IMHO Cor!! must have been a very appealing package to the young reader back in the day. Listing through the pages and looking at all the fine artwork, I can’t help admiring the high regard that the editors and artists had for their audience of 10-or-so-year olds; IPC firmly upheld this attitude towards its junior readership throughout most of the 70s.

And now for some bare facts.

The first issue of Cor!! had a cover date of June 6th, 1970. A total of 211 unnumbered issues of the comic were published, the last one with the cover date of June 15th, 1974. The run wasn’t interrupted by industrial action that affected some other IPC titles during the period.

Cover price:

• issues 1-18 (June 6th, 1970 – October 3rd, 1970) – 7D
• issues 19-43 (October 10th, 1970 – March 27th, 1971) – 8D / 3½ new pence (double-priced issues)
• issues 44-183 (April 3rd, 1971 – December 1st, 1973) – 3½ p
• issues 184-211 (December 8th, 1973 – June 15th, 1974) – 4 p

Format: 20.5 x 29 cms; in other words the format was more like that of a DC Thomson comic rather than a traditional IPC publication.

Printers:

• Morrison & Gibb, Ltd. (Web offset division), Carlisle – issues 1-5 (June 6th, 1970 – July 4th, 1970)
• Carlisle Web Offset, Ltd., Newton Ind. Estate, Carlisle – issues 6-135 (July 11th, 1970 – December 30th, 1972)
• North Riding Publishing Co., Ltd., Middlesbrough, Teesside – issues 136 and 137 (January 6th and 13th, 1973)
• WW Web Offset, Middlesborough, Teesside – issues 138-211 (January 20th, 1973 – June 15th, 1974)

Page count: 32 pages (except issue Nos: 15 (September 12th, 1970 – Score 'n' Roar ad pages), 20 (October 10th, 1970 – Thunder ad pages), 49 (May 8th, 1971 – Jet ad pages), 54 (June 12th, 1971 – Knockout ad pages), 145 (March 10th, 1973 – Shiver and Shake ad pages), 172 (September 15th, 1973 – Football Star No. 1 ad. Pages) and 177 (October 20th, 1973 – Goofy and Also Pluto No. 1 ad pages); all these 7 issues had 40 pages.

Glued: issues 1 – 122 (June 6th, 1970 – September 30th, 1972), 125-127 (October 21st, 1972 – November 4th, 1972), 129-135 (November 18th, 1972 – December 30th, 1972)

Stapled: issues 123 (October 7th, 1972), 124 (October 14th, 1972), 128 (November 11th, 1972), 136-211 (January 6th, 1973 – June 15th, 1974).

Merged into Buster. First Buster and Cor!! had a cover date of June 22nd, 1974 and the last one was  dated October 11th, 1975.

Cor!! Holiday Specials continued until 1983 (at least that’s the last one that I have)

Cor!! annuals continued until 1986.

Two Cor!! soft-cover books of gags were published, one in 1976, and the other one in 1977.