Film Fun Facts

[stevezodiac]

I think the one before Oliver Hardy is Max Miller and the one next to Lou Costello is Bud Abbott.

[-MikeD-]

I think the one before Oliver Hardy is Max Miller and the one next to Lou Costello is Bud Abbott.

Absolutely...the one before Hardy has Max's hat.

[philcom55]

(nb - At my request the following posts have now been merged with Kashgar's earlier Film Fun thread. Thanks Andy! )

My Mum's kid sister Auntie Una is now the only surviving family member of my parent's generation and, as she was born in 1935, she's the only one young enough to have read Dandy and Beano as a child. Consequently it came as something of a surprise when I recently asked her about her favourite comics that she immediately said 'Film Fun' with a big smile, while DC Thomson's upstart publications barely registered on her memory. In particular she loved the cartoon antics of Laurel and Hardy which were a fixture on the cover from 1934 right up to 1957 - drawn throughout in the same tried-and-tested style by George Wakefield and his son Terry.

In some ways this goes against the received wisdom that Dandy and Beano instantly blew their competitors out of the water from the moment they appeared in 1937 and 1938 respectively. Instead, my Aunt's experience suggests that the relative decline of Film Fun was rather more gradual - and this view tends to be supported by the fact that AP waited right up until the late 1950s before they bit the bullet in making significant changes to the comic's appearance.

Looking at this cover from November 9th 1957 one could be forgiven for thinking that nothing had changed since 1934 with Terry Wakefield depicting Stan and Ollie in much the same way that his father had done. Unfortunately the real Oliver Hardy had died three months earlier and it was decided that the next issue would feature the famous duo's very last appearance in Film Fun.



It was the end of an era - or at least the beginning of the end for, although Terry-Thomas replaced Laurel and Hardy from the issue dated November 23rd, the cover itself continued to be drawn in the traditional style by Terry Wakefield for a little while longer.



Much more startling was the appearance of Roy Wilson as the new cover artist some months later, along with a brighter, orange colour scheme which - to my eye at least - was a big improvement on the rather dull blue it replaced.



In some ways the final break with the past came in 1959 when Terry Wakefield, who'd continued to produce interior strips such as Tony Hancock, was suddenly and brutally informed that his services would no longer be required: it was a day that he remembered forever afterwards as 'Black Tuesday'. I have to admit that subsequent issues of Film Fun were very much more to my taste - though the changes seem to have come far too late to restore sales to anything like their former state. In particular Reg Parlett's version of Hancock (now promoted to two pages) was a revelation.

I just wish Terry Wakefield (and fellow old-timers like Albert Pease) could have been treated more generously after so many years of faithful service - possibly with a pension that reflected the healthy profits their skills had regularly generated in happier times. Unfortunately the days of easy profits were long gone, and new brooms were sweeping down Fleet Street with a vengeance...!

- Phil Rushton

[Tammyfan]

Didn't Film Fun merge with Buster in 1962? Oh yes, it was the second one to merge after Radio Fun. I wonder what strips Buster took on board from Film Fun.

There was also a Laurel and Hardy strip in TV Comic. Not the same artist as in Film Fun.

I like the orange makeover too.

[dishes]

Didn't Film Fun merge with Buster in 1962? Oh yes, it was the second one to merge after Radio Fun. I wonder what strips Buster took on board from Film Fun.

There was also a Laurel and Hardy strip in TV Comic. Not the same artist as in Film Fun.

I like the orange makeover too.

According to bustercomic.co.uk, the strips that survived the merger were Squad Car 13, Nick Shannon and Bruce Forsyth.

The Laurel and Hardy strip in TV Comic was based on how they appeared the Larry Harmon animated cartoon rather than the films (I think)

[Lew Stringer]

I just wish Terry Wakefield (and fellow old-timers like Albert Pease) could have been treated more generously after so many years of faithful service - possibly with a pension that reflected the healthy profits their skills had regularly generated in happier times. Unfortunately the days of easy profits were long gone, and new brooms were sweeping down Fleet Street with a vengeance...!

- Phil Rushton

They wouldn't have received pensions under any circumstances unfortunately, being freelancers.

[ISPYSHHHGUY]

Great Historical Interest in your generous postings/illustrations as ever, my Good Mr Rushton.

Every time I see this sort of work, it always reminds me of a 'mechanical' method of creating comic-strips of this type; the best artists with the most expressive styles drew up 'identikit' model-sheets of the faces of the cinema stars of the time, and these were used as paste-ups so lesser artists could draw in the bodies and elementary backgrounds, etc, to 'create' a 'new' strip---I assume many of the exact same expressions were re-used ad-infinitum:


----this sounds like a terrible, non-creative 'comics-art' job for any artist, but presumably it must have been pretty cheap to produce, and used as 'filler' material---I don't have a lot of respect for this approach myself, though---just too mechanical-sounding.

I was pretty appalled when I discovered this method.

[Lew Stringer]

Great Historical Interest in your generous postings/illustrations as ever, my Good Mr Rushton.

Every time I see this sort of work, it always reminds me of a 'mechanical' method of creating comic-strips of this type; the best artists with the most expressive styles drew up 'identikit' model-sheets of the faces of the cinema stars of the time, and these were used as paste-ups so lesser artists could draw in the bodies and elementary backgrounds, etc, to 'create' a 'new' strip---I assume many of the exact same expressions were re-used ad-infinitum:


----this sounds like a terrible, non-creative 'comics-art' job for any artist, but presumably it must have been pretty cheap to produce, and used as 'filler' material---I don't have a lot of respect for this approach myself, though---just too mechanical-sounding.

I was pretty appalled when I discovered this method.

Well, it's all part of the factory system of getting comics out on time I suppose. I can't really see any harm in another artist drawing the heads if the rest of the strip is of the same high quality, - which I think it was in the case of Film Fun. Better that, than having an artist not so good at caricatures spending hours trying to get it right.

I don't think I'd heard of that particular method before, Rab, but I had heard of how Film Fun reprinted old strips and added new heads on the stars to reflect whoever was in vogue at the time. Now that was being cheeky!

[Kashgar]

I just wish Terry Wakefield (and fellow old-timers like Albert Pease) could have been treated more generously after so many years of faithful service - possibly with a pension that reflected the healthy profits their skills had regularly generated in happier times. Unfortunately the days of easy profits were long gone, and new brooms were sweeping down Fleet Street with a vengeance...!

- Phil Rushton

Hi Steve,

Albert 'Charlie' Pease certainly wasn't summarily dismissed or treated harshly by
AP/Fleetway. In fact they considered him one of their best artistic assets and treated him as such.
When AP/Fleetway where in such a state of flux towards of the end of the 1950's
Charlie Pease had the misfortune, in 1958, to suffer a heart attack and was not able to supply work for several months but the company still held his strips open for his return (Tommy Cooper, Ronald Shiner etc) rather than see it as an oppurtune moment to put him out to pasture.
And then, when work did dry up for Charlie in Film Fun he was simply transferred to the pages of Knockout to begin work on his run on the Billy Bunter strip. A run which proved so popular that Knockout, for over a year (June 1961-July 1962), became known as Billy Bunter's Knockout with the Fat Owl, as drawn by Charlie Pease, appearing not only on the front cover but on pages 2,3 and 4 as well.
Even after this period was over and Knockout became a more adventure strip orientated paper Charlie still drew the two page Bunter strip for the last 7 months of the comic's life and then on into the pages of the merged title Valiant and Knockout, where he was still drawing the strip at the time of his untimely death of a second heart attack, aged only 58, in Feb 1964.
In fact next Monday, the 10th Feb, will see the 50th anniversary of Charlie's death.

[Kashgar]

As for any other artists who 'suffered' under the Film Fun's 'night of the long knives', the only other obvious candidate would be Bertie Brown. But unlike Terry Wakefield Bertie didn't have all his eggs in the same rather precarious basket, he was still providing work for Radio Fun and had been until recently doing similar things for TV Fun. Also, and more importantly Bertie was a much older man, 72 to Terry's 48, which allowed him to happily retire in 1961 after he's completed his last Jimmy Edwards Whacko strip in Radio Fun while Terry had to find other employment, in his case, as a driver for the Middlesex Hospital.

[philcom55]

Thanks for clarifying that Kashgar. I thought I'd read that Pease had also fallen out of favour with some editors who felt his style was 'old fashioned' (which rather surprised me as I always found his art to be perfectly fine). Upon checking my sources it turns out that I had actually misremembered a Lambiek entry for Frank Minnitt instead!

In the final years of his career, several AP editors didn't care for Minnitt's old-fashioned style, and he found himself out of work, except for the 'Billy Bunter' comic.

Presumably it was the Billy Bunter connection that caused me to mix them up.

...Still, at least I didn't suggest that the Buster character Charlie Peace was named after him, as the UK Comics Wiki currently does!

http://ukcomics.wikia.com/wiki/Charlie_ ... 05-1964%29

In fact next Monday, the 10th Feb, will see the 50th anniversary of Charlie's death.

Now that makes me feel really old...!

- Phil Rushton

[ISPYSHHHGUY]

Great Historical Interest in your generous postings/illustrations as ever, my Good Mr Rushton.

Every time I see this sort of work, it always reminds me of a 'mechanical' method of creating comic-strips of this type; the best artists with the most expressive styles drew up 'identikit' model-sheets of the faces of the cinema stars of the time, and these were used as paste-ups so lesser artists could draw in the bodies and elementary backgrounds, etc, to 'create' a 'new' strip---I assume many of the exact same expressions were re-used ad-infinitum:


----this sounds like a terrible, non-creative 'comics-art' job for any artist, but presumably it must have been pretty cheap to produce, and used as 'filler' material---I don't have a lot of respect for this approach myself, though---just too mechanical-sounding.

I was pretty appalled when I discovered this method.

Well, it's all part of the factory system of getting comics out on time I suppose. I can't really see any harm in another artist drawing the heads if the rest of the strip is of the same high quality, - which I think it was in the case of Film Fun. Better that, than having an artist not so good at caricatures spending hours trying to get it right.

I don't think I'd heard of that particular method before, Rab, but I had heard of how Film Fun reprinted old strips and added new heads on the stars to reflect whoever was in vogue at the time. Now that was being cheeky!

Lew: I am sure you remember there was a spate of specialized books on UK comics History out on the market in the mid-late 80s---I certainly used to trawl the bookshops searching for such material in those pre-internet days.


Other than the usual Denis Gifford output, Alan Clark also put out some worthy tomes, and it was through one of his comics History books that I gleaned the info about the 'identikit' personality- driven strips, 'filled in' by 'lesser' artists over photostats of stock caricature faces.

It might have been the book detailing the 'Best Comics Artists in British History' ---the ten included Watkins and Reid naturally.I certainly remember a detailed passage on this subject, explaining the technique, which I found both intruiging and off-putting [!]

If it wasn't in this book, it was in something similar from around the same era.

[philcom55]

Every time I see this sort of work, it always reminds me of a 'mechanical' method of creating comic-strips of this type; the best artists with the most expressive styles drew up 'identikit' model-sheets of the faces of the cinema stars of the time, and these were used as paste-ups so lesser artists could draw in the bodies and elementary backgrounds, etc, to 'create' a 'new' strip---I assume many of the exact same expressions were re-used ad-infinitum:

----this sounds like a terrible, non-creative 'comics-art' job for any artist, but presumably it must have been pretty cheap to produce, and used as 'filler' material---I don't have a lot of respect for this approach myself, though---just too mechanical-sounding.

I was pretty appalled when I discovered this method.

...Other than the usual Denis Gifford output, Alan Clark also put out some worthy tomes, and it was through one of his comics History books that I gleaned the info about the 'identikit' personality- driven strips, 'filled in' by 'lesser' artists over photostats of stock caricature faces.

It might have been the book detailing the 'Best Comics Artists in British History' ---the ten included Watkins and Reid naturally.I certainly remember a detailed passage on this subject, explaining the technique, which I found both intruiging and off-putting [!]

If it wasn't in this book, it was in something similar from around the same era.

Thanks for reminding me of Alan Clark's 'The Best of British Comics Art' Rab - as you can see your memory is spot-on in this instance:



Editor Fred Cordwell sounds as though he must have been a real character!

To be fair though, it seems highly improbable that this process would have ever been applied to the work of either Terry Wakefield or Roy Wilson. Also, I think that Cordwell was more concerned with maintaining a kind of 'corporate image' for his titles rather than saving money with substandard artists and production-line methods.

I agree that the faces in the first Terry-Thomas cover shown above tend to look pretty interchangeable, but I think this technique is comparable to the way in which impersonators rely on key expressions and catch-phrases when imitating famous stars - sometimes to the extent that their formularized version actually becomes more recognizable than the original! Having said that I do feel that Terry was rather less of a natural artist than his father, even though he mastered certain aspects of his style almost to perfection.

I confess that when I originally acquired Alan's book I hastily skimmed through the sections on Bertie Brown and Billy Wakefield, wondering why he'd wasted so much space on such old-fashioned, 'amateurish' artists instead of promoting 'superior' talents like Leo Baxendale. Now, of course, I'm older and wiser and am only just beginning to appreciate the qualities of those outstanding pioneers!

- Phil Rushton

[matrix]

And on that note Phil, I also enjoyed that Terry Thomas page, is there any chance that we could see whether Mr Wun Fang got to see the famous Liver?

[ISPYSHHHGUY]

Many thanks for your very welcome visual assistance regarding my earlier point about 'identikit' caricature-strips, Phil....it's a technique I never would have imagined myself, and I suppose the idea is 'creative' in it's own way, curiously enough.....if handled with delicacy, [like in the George Formby example you aded above] it looks fine, and probably undetectable to many readers.


I fancy digging this book out on e-bay now---it was really interesting for buffs like us, and I remember the book very well.