I've covered the issue of Whizzer and Chips dated 21st February 1970 on this blog before, when I wrote about the free gift it was presented with (see this post here). It is time now to return to it once again, not for the free novelty but the strips inside it, for this issue gave birth to not one, not two but four new characters! Two of these characters appeared in Whizzer and the other two in Chips, and since Whizzer is the first half of Whizzer and Chips we'll look at those characters first.
And first up is Monkey Nutts, a half pager that followed Kings of the Castle. I'm unsure of the artist on this one, it may perhaps be Graham Allen but I'm not so sure.
The next new Whizz-Kid appeared on the other side of Chips, and was Jimmy Jeckle Master Hide. Illustrated by Terry Bave, I think the title is rather self-explanatory - it's about a kid called Jimmy who develops the potion and (for some reason) drinks it, which turns him into Master Hide.
The Chip-ites retaliated to the new Whizzer characters with two new full-page characters. The first would go on to be a very popular and long running strip - Super Dad. "The Kid" looks very much the same at the start of this run as he did at the end of it, but Dad changes considerably when Mike Brown illustrates the strip later on. This first strip doesn't look like Mike's work though, the background characters suggest it was drawn by Norman Mansbridge.
The other new Chip-ite(s) would endure an even longer initial run than Super Dad; The Scareys Of St. Mary's would last all the way until 1977. Illustrated by Terry Bave, the Scareys are a group of Witches that attend St. Mary's, a school of witchcraft - something like an early Harry Potter, in a way.
