Blog: New Year! New Series! Old Comics!

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Let joy be unconfined amongst all those who like listening to podcasts in which me and John Dredge talk about old comics, for LO! a new series of The Funny Comics Fan Club is upon us!

To be honest, we're only calling it a new series because that gave us an excuse to a) have an extra week off and b) send out press releases to various Media Organisations saying "we've got a new series, please mention it in your outlets", but the general idea remains pretty much the same i.e. we look at a specific issue of an old British kids' humour comic and talk about it, utilising a mixture of INSIGHT, vague memory, and occasional OUTRAGE at the other person's opinions. Obviously I am biased but I think it is QUITE GOOD - you can judge for yourself though by having a listen to tge latest episode HERE:



This first episode of the new series (AKA the eleventh episode overall) is about "Cheeky Weekly", which turned out to be a surprising and REVOLUTIONARY comic entirely unlike anything else we've looked at so far. As you will hear if you listen in, Cheeky Weekly is literally about what the character Cheeky does over a week, with his wanderings around his local town linking directly into each of the other strips, so it's sort of like one continuous story. I don't think there's ever been another British comic that does this - I do remember 2000AD doing something similar in Trifecta a few years ago, and I understand the recent Beano Christmas Special had lots of linked stories, but Cheeky did it every single week for months and months.

On top of that it was absolutely RAMMED with jokes, with them crammed into pretty much every panel and feature. As you'll know if you've listened to some of our previous episodes, that was not the NORM for a lot of British kids' comics, some (though not all) of which often felt like they were just going through the motions. Cheeky Weekly is a whole THUNDERSTORM of invention and extra LARFS!

I could go on but then you wouldn't need to listen to the podcast, so I will simply say TUNE IN and also READ ALONG on our various SOCIALS (e.g. BlueSky, Facebook, instagram or twitter) where you can also see some of the strips we're on about. It's dead good, honest!

posted 13/1/2025 by MJ Hibbett

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