As I mentioned in the previous entry, Smash! and Wham! each had two Christmas issues for December 1966. Here are the ones for Wham! beginning with issue 132 and its Mike Lacey Tiddlers cover. The Wham! art editor has converted the logo into a rooftop which is a nice effective touch.
The Tiddlers continued on the back page. By this time Wham! had lost its glossy expensive photogravure printing and was on newsprint. To save even more money, the front and back covers didn't use black ink. A navy blue was used for the linework instead. (Same for Smash!, Pow! and various other comics over the years.)
Inside, Ken Reid presented us with a fantastically detailed Frankie Stein Christmas page...
Over the page, an early Sammy Shrink strip by its original artist, Dave Jenner...
The following week, another Christmas Wham! which once again used the rooftop logo but with a different topline...
The Tiddlers continued on the back page again (once again drawn by Mike Lacey). Note the "Guest Tiddler" in these strips. Readers were invited to send their name and photo to the Long Acre offices in the hope they'd be put into the strip. A very nice idea that must have pleased many lucky winners.
Inside issue 133, The Wacks indulge in pop-related mischief drawn by Gordon Hogg...
...whilst further on in the comic, The Pest of the West actually shoots at someone in a scene you'd be unlikely to see in a kids' comic today. Art by Stan McMurtry...
As reprints of The Fantastic Four had been taking up several pages in Wham since the summer, some of the other characters had to take turns to appear. Sometimes strips would share a page, as with the seasonal episodes of Biff and Danny Dare, both drawn here by Artie Jackson...
More Christmas comics scheduled to go live soon!
ah your yearly retrospective of old Christmas comics. Lovely jubbly! Keep them coming.
ReplyDeletePaul
I love this blog. I decided to google some of the artists names I see in my comics and see what they were up to online.
ReplyDeleteI found your name from a Suicidal Sid strip in which our poor hero tried to end it all by leaping off a pier into the crashing sea below, only to land on a large bouncy castle.
Yes that's me. I haven't had time to do any stuff for Viz much this year but hope to do something for the February issue.
ReplyDeleteTake a look at my website if you want to see more of my own stuff:
lewstringer.com