welcome and enjoy!

Hi and welcome to my blog about comics from other people’s childhood! It is dedicated primarily to British humour comics of the 60s and 70s. The reason they are not from my childhood is simply because I didn’t live in the UK back then (nor do I live there now). I knew next to nothing about them until fairly recently but since then I’ve developed a strong liking for the medium and amassed a large collection, including a number of complete or near complete sets. My intention is to use this blog as a channel for sharing my humble knowledge about different titles, favourite characters and creators as I slowly research my collection.

QUICK TIP: this blog is a sequence of posts covering one particular comic at a time. The sequence follows a certain logic, so for maximum results it is recommended that the blog is read from the oldest post up.

Copyright of all images and quotations used here is with their respective owners. Any such copyrighted material is used exclusively for educational purposes and will be removed at first notice. All other text copyright Irmantas P.



Wednesday, May 7, 2014

A LOOK AT MONSTER FUN STRIPS: TOM THUMBSCREW



This weird little strip was set in the dark Middle Ages and offered the readers of MONSTER FUN COMIC a weekly helping of dungeon humour. The main character was young Tom Thumbscrew who worked as a torturer in the King’s caste; the title of the strip tells us he was the torturer’s apprentice but actually he was the master of the dungeon and answered directly to the King.



Tom wasn’t much of a torturer: he tended to side with the prisoners and was generally on friendly terms with them. He spent more time playing cards with the captives than actually trying to make them ‘talk’ and tormenting them with his branding irons, stretching rack and iron maiden. Sometimes he even helped them escape. There were usually at least two or three prisoners chained to the wall of the dungeon but they seemed to be quite happy in Tom’s custody. The young torturer did his job only when the King imperatively commanded him to, and even then he preferred soft methods, such as feather tickling, telling lame jokes, making a dirty robber wash, telling the offender to eat both of the apples he has pinched or shaving off a guy’s hair and beard to dissuade him from escaping because he knew the guy preferred not to be seen like that in public.


The other regular character of the strip was the King (or Kingy). He was the one who was really violent and always eager to keep Tom busy. Kingy was often worried that Tom wasn’t torturing his prisoners properly so he liked to check on him in the dungeon. The King was a willing participant in the torture sessions and liked to experiment with new methods. The honey-on-buried-prisoner torture must have been his favourite - he tried it as many as four times. Besides, the King liked to entertain his noble guests by inviting them to do some torturing together or watch his prisoners being branded and stretched on the rack. Obviously, the King was the baddie in the strip and often found himself at the receiving end of the various torturing schemes gone wrong.


All this sounds worse than it looked in the strip which was in fact quite jolly and bright. Tom Thumbscrew ran in MFC issues 1 to 73 and missed issue Nos. 14, 24, 48, 51, 56, 58, 62, 70, 71 and 72. The regular artist was Norman Mansbridge who took charge of the strip starting from issue 12. The opening story in MFC No. 1 was by Trevor Metcalfe who would have made an excellent job as the illustrator of the entire run, on par with Norman Mansbridge:


The episodes in MFC Nos. 2 – 11 were by the less-excellent Andy Christine – the illustrator of another concurrent MFC strip Giant Bearhug… GIANT, who signed his sets of Tom Thumbscrew in issues 2 and 4. Here is an example from MFC No. 9:




Friday, May 2, 2014

A LOOK AT MONSTER FUN STRIPS: CREATURE TEACHER




After the success of Bash Street Kids in the BEANO, every self-respecting UK children’s comic had to have a strip that was based on a conflict between an unruly class and a teacher. In MFC it was Creature Teacher. Meet Class 3X of Massacre Street School in Monsterville:


The pupils of Class 3X (Blotchy (3X spokesman), Tich, Disaster Doris, Podger, Litterbug Len, Greasy Gus, Evil Steve, Dangerous Dan and others) gave their teachers a really hard time:


The situation seemed desperate and called for some drastic measures. This is how the story started in MFC No. 1:



Creature Teacher stood out from all other school mayhem comedy strips because in MFC the Master was a grisly monster – a real creature of a teacher so scary and ruthless that he (it?) was able to control Class 3X and bring them to heel. Created in a lab with the formula invented by Science Master Mr. Fume, Creature Teacher had a ghastly spongy body that could expand or contract at will, scrunge into any shape and form, sprout any number of limbs and tentacles and melt into a great sickening mass of purple-green gunge (it was a b/w strip but that's how Class 3X described it). Check out a few of CT’s transformations:


Creature Teacher’s hulking, wobbly, throbbly, bulky body was wrapped in padlocked chains to prevent it from spilling out. The walking-talking nightmare had hairy, scaley, fishy fingers and yukky, pongy feet with warts and things like that… His only horrible great bulging, beady, bloodshot eye which could stretch away from his body earned him the nick-name of Eagle-Eye.


Creature Teacher’s only weaknesses were that he couldn’t stand being tickled, and he needed his monthly bath in monster tonic (Mr. Fume’s special formula for the creation and sustenance of Creature Teacher) to restore his ghastly strength and powers. He fed on fungi and other slimy stuff and was probably the greatest monster in MFC. Thanks to Creature Teacher’s super-power to manipulate his body, he was always in the right shape to deal with Class X, subdue the little horrors and handle their endless booby traps, pranks and cunning schemes to do away with the dreaded Master.


Creature Teacher ran in MFC issues 1 – 73 and missed issue 69. Save for three occasions, the weekly episodes were self-contained stories. By coincidence, all three serialised stories were sport-themed: football match against Highbrow Hall in issues 20 – 21, training for school sports in issues 33 to 35 and the annual cricket match against Highbrow Grammar in issues 54 – 55. 

Creature Teacher was a two-pager except in the first edition where it was three pages long, and in No. 31 where the story occupied only one page but the issue had a poster of Creature Teacher. The monstrous instructor made a front-cover appearance in MFC No. 12. The regular artist was Tom Williams whose drawings were so detailed that IPC’s newsprint machines sometimes failed to do them justice. 


Frank McDiarmid stepped in for the regular artist in MFC issue 64. Here is a sample frame from that episode:


Creature Teacher didn’t survive the merger of MFC with BUSTER and was not given a proper ending in the last issue of the paper, but it lived on as a regular feature in MONSTER FUN annuals, so we’ll be seeing more of Creature Teacher’s antics on KAZOOP!! in due course.