number 1 16th October 1976
number 2 23rd October 1976
number 3 30th October 1976
number 4 6th November 1976
number 5 13th November 1976
number 6 20th November 1976
number 7 27th November 1976
number 8 4th December 1976
number 9 11th December 1976
number 10 18th December 1976
number 11 25th December 1976
12 1st Jan 1977
13 8th Jan 1977
14 15th Jan 1977
15 22nd Jan 1977
16 29th Jan 1977
17 5th Feb 1977
18 12th Feb 1977
19 19th Feb 1977
20 26th Feb 1977
21 5th March 1977
22 12th March 1977
23 19th March 1977
24 26th March 1977
25 2nd April 1977
26 9th April 1977
27 16th April 1977
28 23rd April 1977
29 30th April 1977
30 7th May 1977
31 14th May 1977
32 21st May 1977
33 28th May 1977
34 4th June 1977
35 11th June 1977
36 18th June 1977
37 25th June 1977
38 2nd July 1977
39 9th July 1977
40 16th July 1977
41 23rd July 1977
42 30th July 1977
43 8th August 1977
44 13th August 1977
45 20th August 1977
46 27th August 1977
47 3rd September 1977
48 10th Septemeber 1977
49 17th Septemeber 1977
50 24th Septemeber 1977
51 1st October 1977
52 8th October 1977
53 15th October 1977
54 22nd October 1977
55 29th October 1977
56 5th November 1977
57 12th November 1977
58 19th November 1977
59 26th November 1977
60 3rd December 1977
61 10th December 1977
62 17th December 1977
63 24th December 1977
64 31st December 1977
65 7th January 1978
66 14th January 1978
67 21st January 1978
68 28th January 1978
69 4th February 1978
70 14th February 1978
71 21st February 1978
72 28th February 1978
73 4th March 1978
74 11th March 1978
75 18th March 1978
76 25th March 1978
77 8th April 1978
78 15th April 1978
Last one before it merged with Whizzer and chips.
Thanks to Gordon McWilliams for so many Krazy covers-
Thanks Richard C for some of the Krazy cover scans.
Mike Lacey (Sid's Snake) drew most of the covers..
John M. Gilheany said...
It's great to see the complete set.
Krazy was among the first bunch of comics that I bought at a school jumble sale and seemed almost 3-D in comparisson to the other rather slab-like IPC titles.
I kept getting Whizzer and Chips after the merger and started getting a bit wistful by 1983 after Krazy had become entirely absorbed into the homogenous style of the older title. 'The Krazy Gang' themselves became quite ordinary after 'Freaky' drifted away during a rather sly spot of editorial bodging (and yes, I wrote to them at the time!)
In fact, over a decade later, I still felt a bit hard done by and the following appeared in the 'Q & A' section of 'Comics International under a slight psudonym with an illo. of the character at his best (reading half a dozen copies of Krazy on the go!):
The Krazy Gang
Q: I would genuinely like to know why it was decided to surreptitiously nudge Freaky out of The Krazy Gang, when Krazy was engulfed by Whizzer & Chips.
He was the only character I liked.
A: That's more like it. Critical issues of the day to be discussed!
IPC's Krazy was meant to be the next step forward in juvenile humour titles. So it took (marginally) bigger chances. But it failed, and was merged into the more traditional Whizzer & Chips after only 79 issues (1976-1978)
While the namesake characters, The Krazy Gang, survived the merger, Ed, Blue, Liz, Brainy, Sporty and Cheeky's alien pal, Freaky (a three-eyed, toothy flying saucer) was obviously considered too radical for IPC.
A moment's silence please.
26 January 2009 16:31
Peter Gray said...
thanks for your comments...yey I noticed that as well...Freaky got more replaced with the parrot...also the stories got more boring...hunting burglars all the time...liked it more wwhen they did other things in the gang..
I'll be putting up more Cheeky covers soon thanks to helpful comic fan..
26 January 2009
SteveJailbirdMatt has left a new comment on your post "Krazy comic covers":
I was preschool age when I was first introduced to IPC comics, thanks to an older sibling! I therefor studied the artwork (my first memory is 'Corr!') and from the age of 6, all I wanted to be was a cartoonist for 'Fleetway Publications'.
After meeting up with Lew Stringer (It's not what you know...) I finally realised my lifetime ambition and contributed a couple of strips to 'Buster' in the 90's and ghosted for J Edward Oliver and the great Leo Baxendale (who's birthday is the day before mine). Winning the 'Young Cartoonist of the Year' award at 'The Daily Star' in 1985 certainly helped!
I still have 5,000 comics in my collection (I was never a 'DC Thompson' kid) and my favourite was the radical 'Krazy' comic. I still remember seeing the first issue advertised on TV featuring the animated Krazy Gang with Cheeky (my fave) appearing from a manhole cover. I can still remember a wonderful week when I received a huge backlog of comics after an industrial strike had been settled! (sigh...)
How the British comic industry has changed since then...
My time with IPC was short lived thanks to a reduced budget at the time due to a slump in sales (I blame play stations, computers etc...) and have always felt cheated - having invested my whole life up until then in working for IPC but I still contribute a weekly strip for my local paper.
As a child, reading approx 6 comics a week - I never dreamed the industry wouldn't be there once I was an adult. Terribly frustrating...
These days I also post on 'GoComics.com' under the username of 'Number Six'. Most of last week I filled up the comments section of 'Andy Capp' with info and images of his son Buster as most of the readership are American and have never heard of him.
I can still remember being amazed that they were related when 'Buster Comic' reproduced the front cover of the first issue for their 15th Anniversary. I was aged 8 and was also a fan of 'Andy Capp' (I was a strange child!) and suddenly my whole world made sense! From then on I realised the significance of Buster's cap and saw the likeness (even though she was a lot slimmer) of Buster's mum to Flo. It's fitting that the longest serving Buster artist was another 'Reg'! My favourite cartoonist and biggest influence was Robert Nixon. Trevor Metcalfe was a close friend of Robert's and they had a lot in common with their style. What Nixon did to Ken Reid's 'Frankie Stein' was amazing. He made him his own!
I'm taking a break from 'GoComics.com' for a while as I'm planning to relocate, but I hope to be back soon. My current strip 'Oscar & Wild' can be seen at 'Frog Applause' as a guest spot - dated 29th Jan 2012.
Be seeing you..?
Moderate comments for this blog.
Posted by SteveJailbirdMatt to Peter Gray's Comics and Art at 19 May 2012 19:31
THANKS STEVE FOR YOUR THOUGHTS PETER!
14 comments:
Wow - awesome post, though I can't work out the picture puzzle on the cover of 1 April 1978.
I was just a little too young to get into Krazy when it came out but loved the annuals - kinda wished I'd had the comics.
It's interesting to note that Krazy debuted not that long after Action, so was hitting the shelves at a time that IPC were really looking to take risks with the format of comics and I think that's one of the reasons what I've seen of it has appealed to me. I guess Oink in some ways was a influenced successor.
Robert
I can't work it out either..
Dinner..Linner
Bee..Be
Monkey.. monky
footprints...tracks..I'm not sure its too difficult..:)
Worked it out..
Beware of April Fool tricks..:)
Be
Ape Food Track
I'm the master..;)
Thanks for posting these. Mike Lacey certainly drew a lot of these covers, with a handful by Nick Baker and Robert Nixon. Many Krazy covers feature a cover-within cover, which I always enjoy.
Wow! There's so many - all very funny! I cant decide which I like the best!
Ultimately I preferred comics having a different picture on the front page, rather than a comic strip, each week, and the inventive, eye-catching Krazy covers showed how enjoyable that approach could be. It was a big part of the fun, waiting to see what the image would be each time.
I like that space cover (UFO visituing newsagent). I'd forgotten that one. Same with the King Kong cover.
The colour of blue for those Cheeky strips was a bad one, though!
Thank you for posting these covers. I vividly remember the 'break glass in case of misery' cover - thought it was wonderful. Krazy comic was very different to other comics around at the time and much funnier.
Also, for me as a 7-year-old girl, it was a great improvement on Bunty and the like.
My most favourite 'Krazy Comic' cover was the very first one by the brilliant Mike Lacey (I loved the way his cover Cheeky strip merged into Ian McDiarmid's style on the inside.) In my earlier comment, I described 'Krazy Comic's' launch in a TV ad and the excitement of that time always jumps out at me when I dig out the first issue. Let's not forget that Ian Knox was the original Krazy Gang and Pongo Snodgrass artist!
My other favourite is from Feb 1977 with the cover featuring Robert Nixon's gorilla. It harks back to his proudest creation - 'Kid Kong' and I wished he'd done more covers. He mainly did annuals and I just adore his cover illustration for a 'Monster Fun' Summer Special featuring Kid Kong on a big wheel!
My least favourite 'Krazy Comic' cover was the last one, and it was the one I was dreading...
Already, I'd seen beloved comics merging with either 'Buster' or 'Whizzer & Chips' (Buster & Monster Fun etc...) and when I saw Mike Lacey's cheerful characters looking at the cheerful vendor standing over the 'Important News' headline I immediately worked out that the comic was reaching its inevitable conclusion! I felt like tearing it up. (Fortunately I didn't!)
The comic was so radical, it couldn't survive in the regular format of 'Whizzer & Chips' or any other comic and, alas - it was never the same again.
The following week we were treated with the nauseating image of all the characters from both comics meeting and shaking hands at a big party. IPC did this every time during a 'merger' but this time it really sucked! That and the inevitable tag line "Twice the fun at half the price!"
Oh no it wasn't. Mergers were arranged due to budget restrictions and so you had to say cheerio to half the characters! (sigh...) No wonder I've become such an old cynic - "Chuckle!"
Other favourites were 'Monster Fun', 'Shiver & Shake', 'Whoopee!', 'Corr!', 'Wham!'(where Frankie Stein was born), 'Cheeky Weekly' - oh let's face it - THE WHOLE BLOODY LOT OF 'EM!
Be seeing you. );oB
That "But It" one's just plain "cheeky", ha!
A lot of these got re-used (and slightly altered) for Funny Fortnightly. I missed out on Krazy initially, due to not being alive at the time, but have been steadily acquiring them (and the annuals) through various means.
Great post overall!
Krazy was the only comic I bought and read regularly as a child. I even collected all the parts of the Krazy Game and had my mum mount it on some big sheets of cardboard, and I'd play it with my brothers.
After the merger I read a few issues of Whizzer and Chips, and then lost interest in UK comics and ended up reading MAD Magazine instead.
So I suppose IPC had the right idea, but there just weren't enough kids as warped as me.
Terrific post, thank you so much. I have the original artwork for issues 6 and 51, very much cherished.
hi
I'm looking for 3 editions of Krazy comic. I thought I'd double-check if you or any of your readers have any of these for sale:
12 March 1977
8 April 1978
15 April 1978
Thanks
Ed.
I've managed to track down 12 March 77 and 15 April 78...just 8 April to go!!!
I wanted to ask though if anyone knows if there was a Krazy Comic Holiday Special in 1980?
Thanks
Ed.
...well it's 8 years since my original comment here and l'm delighted to say l now have all 79 issues again including the 8 specials and 10 annuals! Thank heavens for ebay!
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