"Whizzer & Chips" and "Whoopee!"

[dem]

Fleetway Classics

... The best girlfriend you never had

the corpse bride kindly granted me temporary access to her stash of Whizzer & Chips and Whoopee! comics. Making the most of this once in a lifetime opportunity, i've scanned a stack of supernatural-tinged sample strips to drift up over coming weeks. To get us under way, the late Reg Parlett's 'Bewitched Belinda', the best girlfriend you never had, in a football themed adventure from Chips.

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[Craig Herbertson]

I wasn't a regular reader of Chips - 'Oor Wullie' and 'The Broons' being stock fare in Edinburgh - but Belinda brings back a few memories. I presume a take on the American series 'Bewitched'?

[dem]

yeah, right down to the trademark nose wiggling. Whizzer & Chips went in for a lot of that - Strange Hill, Beast Enders, a Jaws rip off (Gums), etc. The supernatural was a constant from the first issue (1969) which ran, among others, Harry's Haunted House, later reproduced as part of their eighteenth birthday celebration.

Anyhow, here's Belinda again, enjoying a Carry On Up The Jungle moment. Excuse the cig burn - it was an exciting scan.

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[jamesdoig]

Bloody hell, I used to get the Whizzer & Chips annual every Xmas for years and years in the '70s. Another English import was Shoot magazine, with those division 1 cardboard tables inserted. The first one I bought (or had someone buy for me) had a full page colour photo of Billy Bremner on the back, which is why I've always gone for Leeds, stupid hopeless bastards that they are.

[dem]

Just as i'd began to despair of a flimsy excuse to round off the Euro 2012 extravaganza .... I can't help you with Score, James, but Roy Of The Rovers was also big on League Ladders, and i've scanned part one of the 1987/ 88 version for you to download, read and destroy here.

Meanwhile ...

Another Reg Parlett' Whizzer & Chips masterpiece. Young Davey Doom was the boy your mum wished you were, but then she wasn't to know that this clean cut, polite young man had a collection of enchanted horror mags. Here we join master Doom and friends at the Mummy's birthday party.

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[dem]

i'll not hear a word against Bewitched Belinda and Davey Doom, but they are essentially NICE kids. Time to introduce a thoroughly BAD girl, Terry Bave's diminutive bloodsucker Draculass from yet another Fleetway classic,Buster.

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[erebus]

Bloody Hell. I used to get Whizzer and Chips every week as a kid. I preffered it before it merged with Whoopee but thats just me.
I had a massive pile of them over the years and still kept them as I became an adult. Saying I was reserving them for my kids . But alas when we moved home a year ago these along with all my Eagles, 2000ad, Beano , Dandy, Buster and loads more other comics became part of a big cull Wish I Still had them. Although some annuals may be in the attic.

For the record I was a Whizz Kid, not a Chipite . I mean I know in a fight Sweet Tooth and Joker would be rubbish. But Odd Ball could turn into a big dragon or something and eat them all up .

Ah the essence of youth.

[dem]

Fleetway's Shiver & Shake comic took it's name from an earlier strip in "Cor!!". The perpetually famished Shiver was recycled as The Dukes Spook and his friend/ sparring partner, Shiver the headless cavalier went solo for Adrian's Wall and The Ghost's Revenge.

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[dem]

First of a Whoopee! double bill. A little early, but this one seemed appropriate for Halloween and any other day of the year you care to mention ...

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[dem]

There was even a time when the adverts got in on the act ....

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[ripper]

Talk of "Whizzer and Chips" brings back happy memories of visits to the newsagent on saturday mornings in the early 1970s with a 10p coin in my hand and getting the latest copy of the comic and splashing out the residue on a 5p mix or a super moose (remember them?). I must have collected the comic from about 1971 to 1974 or so, before moving on to such fare as "Warlord," "Action" and occasional forays into "The Victor" and its ilk. If I was lucky, my dad would also buy me a comic, often Cor!! with Gus the Gorilla. Perhaps I am wearing my rose-tinted glasses, but the 1970s seemed to be a great time to be a comics reader. By the time that I was buying comics for my nephews and nieces in the late 1980s, many of the traditional titles had been usurped by comics spawned from toys or TV series, such as Transformers, Alf etc. Wish I had kept my comics collection intact. I still have a few varied titles somewhere in the attic but most were either thrown or given away...ah, the folly of youth.

[weirdmonger]

Getting the BEANO in the 1950s helped make me forget - for a while - the outside toilet and the tin bath. Seriously.

[jamesdoig]

Nov 27, 2012 12:42:30 GMT ripper said:

I must have collected the comic from about 1971 to 1974 or so,

Ripper, we must be around the same vintage - I used to get the annuals every xmas around that time.

[ripper]

James, I received annuals each Christmas from relatives, but I can't remember ever getting a "Whizzer and Chips." Around November each year, a great pile of annuals would appear in the newsagent's and I would gaze at them, wondering which Santa would bring me :-D. My relatives seemed to go for the short-lived TV series annuals rather than old faithfuls like "Beano," "Dandy" and "Whizzer and Chips." So I would get annuals like "The Aeronauts," "The Double Deckers" and so forth.

There used to be a character in one of the comics, possibly in the late 1960s, called Grimly Fiendish, which I used to enjoy reading, but for the life of me I can't remember which comic it was in.

[jamesdoig]

Nov 28, 2012 9:23:22 GMT ripper said:

James, I received annuals each Christmas from relatives, but I can't remember ever getting a "Whizzer and Chips."

I'd get Whizzer & Chips every year, and maybe a Beano. I always coveted annuals like The Saint, but they weren't easy to find here. I wonder if there was a Persuaders annual, my favourite show in the mid '70s? That would have been something.