Monster Fun Summer Special 1976
It's coming up to the summer holidays, and it would be around this time that the Summer/Holiday specials would be hitting the stores (well, back when they were making them anyway)! This is the second and final Monster Fun special, coming out in 1976 for 25 pennies(the title, which cost 8p at the time, would fold a few months later, in October). The cover starred Gums (a parody of Jaws, obviously), by the excellent Robert Nixon! The cover was a frame of a Gums strip inside redrawn by Nixon, although I can't identify the artist of the original strip as it looks like a ghost artist.
The cover star if the previous special was Kid Kong (also based on a famouse movie monster), and he was still a popular choice with readers, appearing as the first strip inside the comic. In this episode, all Kid want's to do is cool down, but is that really too much to ask? Well yes, if your a 50ft tall gorilla! Illustrated by his regular artist - Robert Nixon!
Also movie based is this three page advert for Monsters From An Unknown Planet! It was put in comic strip form, and wasn't brilliant, but was pretty funny to read! Has anybody seen this movie?
Sometimes in summer specials you can find a board game across the centre spread, sadly not in this one though, instead there is a two page Teddy Scare strip by a ghost artist, but the usual artist for this strip is Barry Appleby.
Inventors from the stone age are a bit of a common theme in comics (I might even do a post about this soon), and Monster Fun had Stoneage Brit - Ancient Nit (I still think this would sound better as 'The Ancient Nit')! Brit is actually a reprinted strip from Cor!, where it was illustrated by Tony Goffe.
A nice holiday feature in the comic were Frankie Stein's wish you were here Postcards! Illustrated by Sid Burgon, these were cards sent to people who were probably more than pleased that Frankie had gone. The postcards seem normal enough, but the images show that everything is not quite as it seems!
I'll be looking at some more Summer/Holiday Specials soon!
5 comments:
Teddy Scare is definitely not by Barrie Appleby this time around. No clue who it though, sadly.
Damn! Another ghost artist! I can't tell who it is either, but they have a very nice style - defiantly worth the centre spread!
The film is actually called Terror of Mechagodzilla (you can see Mechagodzilla's head in the background). I had taped the film off TV when I was a kid and I watched it so many times that the VHS tape started to degrade to the point my mum threw it in the bin.
I take it it was good then - if you watched it so many times!
Pity you no longer have it - maybe somebody uploaded it on youtube (a quick search revealded a few adverts but I don't really know what I'm looking for or even if it's the same film)!
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