Not too long ago I chanced upon no other than issue #500 of Whoopee, a landmark issue for a comic that sadly by this point was slowly drifting towards its untimely demise. Number 500, which doubled up as the fireworks issue, came out dated 5th November 1983 and, as you can see on the image above, cleverly used the number '500' in its logo. The strapline 'Whoopee Celebrates' may have been slightly exaggerated though, as you will soon see.
Moving on inside, and the first mention that this is even a special issue doesn't appear until page nine, where Frankie Stein announces it as part of a competition to win, you guessed it, 500 prizes!
The achievement was mentioned just once more, on the letters page where the solution to the 500-clue crossword that had appeared over the previous four issues took up the bottom half of the page.
But fear not, for I shall not be ending this post without a couple of comic strips, even if they weren't celebrating or even mentioning this landmark issue or, as a matter of fact, fireworks (the only fireworks related things were the mask on the centre spread and the fireworks safety code on the letters page). First up, is Calculator Kid, which I am showing simply because the Charlie's Dad has got to be the owner of the finest moustache in comics! As always Terry Bave illustrates it, and it is followed by Calculator Corner by Jack Edward Oliver.
And finally, I leave you with this - a nice two-page Bumpkin Billionaires strip neatly illustrated by Mike Lacey.
4 comments:
One interesting thing about this issue is that it is in fact not the 500th but 494th edition of the comic!
To add to Irmantas' comment.
Because IPC counted the weeks the comic was not available as a result of industrial action, that is where they got the the issue number.
Technically No. 500 was actually the issue dated 17/12/83
Whoopee! missed 10 weeks by the time so if they counted the issues that didn't come out due to insudtrial action the date should have been October 8th, 1983...
Well I was aware of this short break but I would have thought that they would have counted the issues not the weeks. Maybe the staff who were around during the industrial action had gone and they'd all forgotten about it. Or maybe they needed something to "celebrate" (not that it was much of a celebration).
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