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As I've said on Crivens several times before, memory is a funny thing. Case in point: I remember FRANKIE STEIN as one of my very favourite comic strips in WHAM! periodical back in the 1960s. However, I didn't start purchasing Wham! 'til after it began reprinting MARVEL's FANTASTIC FOUR adventures, having first discovered the group in my regular weekly comic, SMASH! (which had presented FF #1 in weekly instalments, simultaneously with Wham!).
Wham! #112, cover-dated August 6th 1966, was the issue that debuted the Fabulous Foursome, and it probably took me a few weeks to discover that the team I'd first encountered in Smash! were regularly appearing in Wham!, so I'd have missed a few issues - though I acquired some of them from a neighbour in one of the rows down the street a few months afterwards. But what's the point of all this you're no doubt wondering (if you're still reading).
Simply this. Starting from around when the FF tales started (three issues later to be precise, as he was missing from #s 112 & 113), there were only another 34 Frankie strips until his final appearance in issue #166, cover-dated August 19th 1967 - and one of them was drawn by another artist, not KEN REID.
I find it amazing that one of the most fondly-recalled strips of my youth was present for such a brief part of it, yet I recall it as having quite a significant presence over what seemed like a lengthy period. It feels like I was reading Frankie for years before he vanished, not just (at most) 34 strips over the course of a year.
I suppose it just goes to show how impressionable we are as children, and to what extent things that flit through our lives for such a fleeting span can leave such a disproportionate sized footprint in the pathways of memory. As I said - funny, eh?
Are there any comic strips that you recall as being around for a seemingly large part of your childhood, only to find, when you look back, that they weren't around for very long at all? Feel free to tell us all about it in the comments section.
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(Oh, and I should add, I now have every Ken Reid Frankie Stein episode that was ever published in Wham!, so I finally got to read them all in the end. Well done me!)
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| From WHAM! #114, cover-dated August 20th 1966 |
6 comments:
Not a comic strip but I'm often amazed, when I think back, that Marvel UK's experiment with landscape comics lasted a mere 20 months from October 1975 to June 1977. At the time those landscape comics seemed to be around for years but they weren't,
Much like most things from childhood, CJ - they always seem to have lasted longer than they actually did. Funny that, eh?
Frankie is one of me nyvallvtimexfavourite kids characters especially Reid's version.
Reid's is definitive, McS, but I have a fondness for Robert Nixon's version as well. One represents the '60s to me, the other the '70s. Nixon's is more 'cute' compared to Reid's maniacal lunacy, but it's nice nonetheless.
My favourite version is Robert Nixon's. I think it depends when you grew up and what you read. I read Whoopee! and it's that familiarity thing of seeing the same thing week in week out. It's instilled in your mind as a child and therefore becomes your favourite. Curiously, I adore Ken Reid's Creepy Creations, World-Wide Weirdies and Wanted Posters, they are so creative. Going back to the 'cuteness' thing, my favourite Dennis the Menace is from the 1970s and 80s. I didn't like it when he was altered to become more cute so there again it depends what you are/were used to. I liked Ian Ogilvy as the Saint whereas Roger Moore viewers probably didn't. Probably why my favourite Doctors are Pertwee and (Tom) Baker as I grew up with them. Familiarity breeds contempt apparently, a good reason to broaden the mind. I don't dislike Ken Reid's Frankie, just prefer Robert Nixon's.
I suppose, as you say, it depends what you first see and when you see it, M. If I had never known Reid's version of Frankie until after Nixon's, it maybe wouldn't mean anything to me, whereas because I saw Reid's first, it represents that period of my life and where I was living at the time, etc. I must admit that Moore's portrayal of The Saint is the one I prefer, as Ian Ogilvy, to me, looked like Moore's less good-looking wee brother. Dennis in the '70s & '80s wasn't too different (if at all) from what he'd looked like in the '60s, but I just do not like the current look.
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