Does anyone remember Giggle?
Posted: 07 Mar 2009, 12:29
More adventure titles like Valiant, Hurricane, Champion, Jag, Jet, etc. followed in due course - not to mention the drastic conversion of Odhams' Smash! in 1969 - and apart from the short-lived experiment of The Big One in 1964 (lasting only 19 issues! ) it could be argued that Giggle was the first example of a whole new generation of self-consciously 'funny' comics that were to proliferate under the IPC banner during the 1970s and 1980s.
However, unlike Whizzer & Chips, Corr!!, Monster Fun etc. surprisingly few people remember Giggle today. Launched on April 29th 1967 and lasting for exactly twice as many issues as The Big One before it merged with Buster in January 1968 it seems to me that the main problem was a desperate lack of new, home-grown material (a failing that it shared with its oversized predecessor). Looking at the contents today it's astonishing to see just how many consisted of European imports (eg Lucky Luke as 'Buck Bingo', 'Tammy Tuff', Captain Swoop, Herlock Sholmes, etc.) and straightforward reprints (eg Deed-a-Day Danny as 'Danny', The Gremlins as 'The Chuckles', Sandy Dean's Schooldays as 'Tales of Tollgate', Niblo Nibbs, etc.); even strips that I don't personally recognize, like Reg Parlett's 'Helpful Hettie', had clearly been resized from somewhere!. In fact, apart from Alf Sarporito's eponymous cat who appeared on the cover I can't be sure that anything else was entirely original (though I'd guess that The Wild Bunch and Cruncher may have been, as well as at least one standard Fleetway adventure strip).
What to make of this? Could it be that by 1967 Fleetway had let go of so many of their old humour artists that there simply weren't enough left to produce significant amounts of new material? If so this might put the acquisition of Odhams into new light as a ready source of such creators rather than simply a collection of failing titles like Eagle.
Did Giggle prepare the ground for the success of Whizzer & Chips?
- Phil Rushton