welcome and enjoy!

Hi and welcome to my blog about comics from other people’s childhood! It is dedicated primarily to British humour comics of the 60s and 70s. The reason they are not from my childhood is simply because I didn’t live in the UK back then (nor do I live there now). I knew next to nothing about them until fairly recently but since then I’ve developed a strong liking for the medium and amassed a large collection, including a number of complete or near complete sets. My intention is to use this blog as a channel for sharing my humble knowledge about different titles, favourite characters and creators as I slowly research my collection.

QUICK TIP: this blog is a sequence of posts covering one particular comic at a time. The sequence follows a certain logic, so for maximum results it is recommended that the blog is read from the oldest post up.

Copyright of all images and quotations used here is with their respective owners. Any such copyrighted material is used exclusively for educational purposes and will be removed at first notice. All other text copyright Irmantas P.



Wednesday, April 2, 2014

A LOOK AT MONSTER FUN STRIPS: GRIZZLY BEARHUG… GIANT



Grizzly Bearhug… Giant was a variation of the classic beanstalk tale. In the opening episode we meet the Shorts who are driving in their car with a caravan in tow. The car runs out of petrol so the parents go looking for some and leave their two kids and the dog beside the car. When they return they find out that a crooked witch has stolen the car but left the caravan and some beans behind. The dog buries the beans under the caravan and the next thing the Shorts know they are above the clouds atop a giant beanstalk. Their caravan rolls through the gates of a castle and then somehow straight onto the table of the ugly giant Grizzly Bearhug who lives there:


The sloppy and untidy giant is an ogre who hates ‘those rotten tichy people and midget menaces’. He is very eager to have them for tea but the Smiths take refuge in a hidey-hole behind the skirting board and spend the next 15 episodes trapped in the castle, living the life of mice. They make several failed escape attempts, outsmart Grizzly Bear a few times when the ogre plots to catch or exterminate them, survive one or two attacks by Grizzly Bear’s giant cat and raid the ogre’s larder. 




They finally manage to escape from Grizzly Bear’s castle in No. 17 but it takes them another two episodes to break completely free from the kingdom of the ogres and make it safely to the ground where they meet the evil witch and recover their stolen car.


The story lasted for 19 weeks in issues 1 – 19 and probably wasn’t a hit with the readers because it was dropped very quickly (and rightly so, IMHO). The illustrator was Andy Christine (as confirmed by signature in the third episode). The artwork was rather crude, especially in the first few episodes. The feature started as a three-pager in No. 1, then continued as a two-pager until becoming 1 ½ pages long starting from No. 14 which also marked the point when it was moved from the front of the paper to pages 30 – 31.



2 comments:

  1. You've successfully introduced me to an IPC strip that I’d never heard of – a rare thing indeed! I looked at issues of MF in the now sadly closed Colindale Newspaper Library a year ago, but didn’t spot this character no matter how big he is. I think the problem was his name was silly – Grizzly obviously makes one think of bears, such as Teddy Scare. I suppose some credit should be given for originality of name, but he was really just a hulking ogre like any other. No great loss when he went.

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  2. Never liked this strip at the time, as you say it was too crudely drawn. And lets face it not patch on March of The Mighty Ones.

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