IPC's weekly Monster Fun Comic only had a short run (73 issues from 1975 to 1976) before merging with Buster. The combined Buster and Monster Fun dropped the 'Monster Fun' part of its masthead after a while but the company kept it around in the form of the Buster and Monster Fun Holiday Special. This was in addition to the regular Buster Holiday Special.
Here are a few pages from the 1990 edition, (published by Fleetway after IPC had sold off their comics division to Robert Maxwell). It featured a fantastic cover (above) by the great Jimmy Hansen. A cracking piece of comic-horror art.
The special had 64 pages on good quality paper, mostly in black and white but with some colour pages. Many of the contents were reprints but the ones I'm showing here were originated for the special.
Dracula Dobbs was a great fun character, very nicely drawn by Nigel Edwards...
Terry Bave's work had a clear, enjoyable feel to it. Here's a busy activity page he did for the special...
Comics veteran Reg Parlett had been a mainstay at Amalgamated Press / Fleetway / IPC / new Fleetway almost throughout the history of British comics! An incredible talent whose pages were a joy to see. He was 85 when he drew this Beastenders strip and although his style had loosened up over the years it's still absolutely top rate...
I thoroughly enjoyed writing and drawing this Tom Thug in Monsterland story, at it remains one of my personal favourites 25 years later. I couldn't resist giving a cameo appearance to Grimly Feendish on the second page...
Mark Bennington was another Buster regular with a lively, fun style. Here's one of his Horrorday '90 strips from the special...
On the back page, Chalky, drawn by Gordon Hill rounded off the special...
I also did a two page Vampire Brats strip for that issue, which you can see over on my other blog:
http://lewstringercomics.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/monster-fun.html
For the record, Lew, Monster Fun Comic ran for 73 issues before it was absorbed by Buster.
ReplyDeleteThanks Irmantas. I got my info from one of Denis Gifford's books which sadly tend to have some errors when it comes to the numbers of issues published.
ReplyDeleteThat could be the last piece of comic work Reg did...or close to it..
ReplyDeleteAmazing detail and good fun..love the busy crowd scenes and humour..
1992 was when it went wrong..two years later...then 1995...1998..then 2000 Buster ended..
It shows Buster 1990 was still very good..
I'm not sure about that, Peter. Remember that summer specials are drawn months ahead of publication. I think we were working on this issue around the previous December so Reg would have drawn a few more pages after this.
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