The Fudge Comic

I missed out on the above comics on eBay this morning which I was a bit disappointed about but I came across a downloadable copy of The Fudge Comic over on Comic Book Plus, so I thought I may as well take a look at it. Both The Bang-On Comic and The Fudge Comic were one of the many one-shot wonders that appeared during and after World War Two as a direct result of both the paper and publishing restrictions. Fudge & Co. Ltd published both of them and the eBay seller believes them to be from the 1950's, but this is unlikely as restrictions were lifted in early 1950. I would date them at around 1947 or 1948. For 2D they were 1D cheaper than most of the one-shots that I've seen and still had the same number of pages - eight, with blue and red ink on the covers and centre spread and just blue ink everywhere else. David Williams drew everything in both comics and they were companion papers so they were both on sale at the same time. Sadly I can't show any more from The Bang-On Comic other than the front cover above (I'd liked to have compared the two), so let's concentrate on The Fudge Comic from now on. You should be able to read the cover story from the front cover above but if not here's the scan from the download. Sadly the colours are offset on this copy making it a bit blurry but it's still readable. The cover strip is Bob Tanner and his Taxi.

Moving inside and we see that half of the eight pages are given to text features. I'll be sticking to the comic strips here but for sake of completion those text stories were 'When the Redskins Ruled' (2 pages, credited to Arthur Whyat), 'Muggsy's Wishbone' (1 and 1/2 pages, credited to Allen Walters) and 'Strange But True' (1/2 page, credited to Brian Gerard). These three stories are credited to three different authors but I suspect they were really all the same person under various pseudonyms to make the comic look more professionally made. The first comic strip inside is The Shipwrecked School, which reminded me of Mike Lacey's Shipwreck School many years later from Wow in 1982-3. This story is, quite frankly, awful - it isn't made clear that the ship is sinking and why it did sink, and it seems too cramped for just two pages. I think they should have gotten rid of one page of text story and spread this comic strip out over at least three pages.

And finally, the back cover is given to The Ghost of the Haunted Pre-Fab, although really that should be ghosts - as there are three of them. For those of you that don't know pre-fabs were houses built with large panel pieces (for example - an entire wall would be one panel) for soldiers returning from the war (another indicator of the comic's date). They were only meant to be temporary with an expected life expectancy of 10 years but many of them are still standing today. Anyway, this strip is certainly better than The Shipwrecked School on the centre spread.

Overall, this is a fun comic that was better value than most of the one-shot wonders of the time. To download the full comic click on the link below:

http://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=29130