FILM FUN

More on the British publication FILM FUN.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Film Fun was a British comic book that ran from (issues dates) 17 January 1920 to 15 September 1962, when it merged with Buster, a total of 2225 issues. There were also annuals in the forties and fifties. It was renamed Film Fun and Thrills in 1959. As the title suggests, the comic mainly featured comic strip versions of people from films from the 1920s to the 1960s.
The cover of the first edition featured Harold Lloyd but named as "Winkle", the screen name by which he was known in Britain at the time.

 Eddie the Happy Editor

Frederick George Cordwell was better known to Film Fun fans as Eddie the Happy Editor. Cordwell edited the comic until his death in 1949, aged 62 in Richmond, Surrey. Cordwell wrote many scripts for the strips as well as text stories for Film Fun. He introduced the idea of characters receiving huge plates of bangers and mash, giant Christmas puddings, pies and such from grateful beneficiaries of their efforts. Cordwell even made it into the stories himself, meeting Laurel and Hardy a number of times, Joe E Brown, Wheeler and Woolsey and other characters.

 Mergers

Picture Fun merged with Film Fun soon after its launch in 1920, followed by Kinema Comic in 1932, Film Picture Stories in 1935, Illustrated Chips in 1953 and Top Spot in 1960.^[1][2] In 1962, sales of Film Fun dropped below 125,000 a week, prompting IPC to merge the comic with Buster.

 References

1. ^ http://lewstringer.blogspot.com/2011/01/top-spot-clint-of-1958.html
2. ^ http://www.dandare.info/history/TopSpot-notes.htm

1932, Harold Lloyd. At the top of the page: Laurel and Hardy, Harold Lloyd, Jackie Coogan, Buster Keaton, Joe E. Brown

1950, Laurel and Hardy. They have the names with the pictures of the characters at the top of the page. "Old Mother Riley" was Arthur Luncan: he did an act dressed as an old woman.

1953. Th same characters depicted at the top of the page, but without the names.

1956. Laurel and Hardy. Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis as well as Red Skelton are depicted at the top of the page.

Laurel and Hardy. The blonde in the first panel of the third row looks like Marie Wilson as "My Friend Irma", but the resemblance could be coincidental. The supporting cast in Laurel and Hardy's movies didn't usually seem to make it into the team's comics, although Jack Kirby put Jimmy Finlayson into a JIMMY OLSEN story.

Oliver Hardy fantasy. Amoung the caricatures at the top of the page are Laurel and Hardy, Red Skelton, Old Mother Riley, Joe E. Brown, and Abbott and Costello.

 

Laurel and Hardy. At the top of the page: Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Old Mother Riley, Red Skelton

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