THE OFFICIAL WEBSITE OF THE BOOK
The story of the WHIZZER and CHIPS annual 1971
an essay by Roger Hartopp
Please note: copyright of all images used here is with ©Rebellion. Any such copyrighted material is used exclusively for educational purposes and will be removed if requested by the copyright holders.
SATURDAY 18 OCTOBER 1969: The US federal government bans use of cyclamates artificial sweeteners, Jefferson Airplane's Paul Kanter was arrested for marijuana possession, and Soyuz 8 returns to Earth. In the charts, The Beatles’ Abbey Road was at the top of the UK album chart, and ‘I'll Never Fall in Love Again’ by Dionne Warwick was the number one single. Not that I particularly remember these events, but there is one that I do – the first issue of the new weekly humour comic - Whizzer and Chips.
TOTALLY IGNORING – or rather, not even being remotely aware of the aforementioned events – I remember that Saturday morning focussing only on going down to the newsagents to buy a copy from a large pile of Issue ones that were placed on the main counter with the free ‘Sid Says’ stickers inside.
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THE ONLY OTHER TRULY HUMOUR PAPERS around at the time were DC Thomson’s Beano, Dandy, Beezer and Topper, and to a degree IPC’s Buster, so this was definitely something new.
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IT WAS SOLD ON THE PREMISE that it was ‘two comics for the price of one’ – Chips being the comic inside Whizzer. (Incidentally, Chips bears no relation to Illustrated Chips, published between 26 July 1890 and 12 September 1953, by Harmsworth Press, but coincidentally both comics would eventually merge into Buster, with Illustrated Chips initially merging into Film Fun, which joined Buster in September 1962.)
PRICED AT JUST 6d (two-and-a-half-pence in new money!), Whizzer and Chips was arguably cheaper than DCT’s Dandy and Beano, which were separate 16-page comics at 4d each!
YOU WERE EVEN ENCOURAGED to separate your copy of Chips from inside the pages of Whizzer – the instruction on the spine of the comic stating ‘Grip whole of “Chips” in right hand and pull away from staples’ - was, by issue 3, quickly changed ‘to separate “Chips” from “Whizzer” open up staples in centre pages’ – particularly as very quickly the comic’s editorial decided to create a rivalry between the two in which you were either a ‘Whizz-Kid’ or a ‘Chip-Ite’.
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YES, I EVEN SEPARATED THE COMICS, naïve boy that I was! (I made sure I didn’t do that when I got the first issue of Shiver and Shake, another two-in-one comic, but that's another story. )
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INCIDENTALLY, THE IDEA OF SELLING TWO COMICS FOR THE PRICE OF ONE was not some kind of brilliant marketing idea (even though it was) but came by accident.
ACCORDING TO IPC’s Editorial director John Sanders, there was a debate whether the comic should be called Whizzer or Chips, so he took the dummy home and showed it to his 13-year-old son Richard. “Call the first 16 pages Whizzer, then turn it over and, reading from the back, call the last 16 pages Chips,” he suggested. “That way you can sell two comics for the price of one.” And that was how the comic came to be named.
NOW YOU CAN FIND OUT much more about the weekly comic online (for example, among many others, whizzerandchipscomic.blogspot.com, which has been useful for much of the information here): this is all about the annual, and this particular annual, which came out some ten months later. (A complete list of all the sources accessed in compiling this article will be listed at the end.)
The very first issue of Whizzer and Chips. ©Rebellion.
THE WHIZZER AND CHIPS ANNUAL 1971 was basically the book version of the comic which was a regular feature of all comics published by IPC, DCT and other publishers of children’s comics. It was a favourite Christmas gift for children – after all, it was aimed for the Christmas market – but it was quite lucrative for the comics companies, being priced much higher than the weekly comic when comparing the number of pages in each. For 32 pages, the weekly comic was 6d – 2½p in decimal currency, or about 40p in today’s
money (June 2025).
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THE FIRST WHIZZER AND CHIPS ANNUAL – like all the other annuals – was issued around the end of August/early September of 1970, and its 160 pages was priced 10/6; that’s 52½p in decimal currency, or about £9.57 today (June 2025). The Beano 2026 annual is £10.49, and all in full colour, so pricewise that’s pretty comparable.
HOWEVER, PLANNING FOR THE ANNUALS – which involved commissioning scripts, artwork and booking a printing slot at a busy printers – would have started pretty much 12 months earlier, a few weeks before the comic first came out), so effectively all the strips featured in the first issue would all be featured in the annual.
INTERESTINGLY, THE SUMMER SPECIAL, which came out in May/June of that same year and so before the annual, must have been planned later because it included three strips that were added later in the comic (for example, Superdad) at the expense of two others (For example, Hetty’s Horoscope), which were still in the book.
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AS MENTIONED, the original Whizzer and Chips Annual 1971 contained 160 pages (including front and back covers), 17 in full colour (if we include the front and back covers), and 16 adding a shade of red. I assume that, like the weekly, it was edited by Bob Paynter, who a short time later would become the group editor of the IPC humour comics group.
UNLIKE THE COMIC, Whizzer and Chips was not split into ‘two’ books – strips from each of the comics were all mixed together, although this would be rectified from the 1972 annual onwards. However, I’m not aware of anyone trying to separate Chips from Whizzer, like they were ‘encouraged’ to do with the comic. :-)
The annual was published by IPC Magazines, and printed by the Dutch firm Vlasveld Ltd in Rotterdam.
DURING THE SEVENTIES, this firm shared the Annual printing duties with Chapel River Press in Andover, UK for the Boys’ and humour titles for the company (I would speculate that this was part of an arrangement with IPC and a Dutch publisher to publish IPC strips in their magazines), but I felt the latter was the better company as regards its book stitching (Vlasveld’s books would fall apart quite quickly; my copy of Whizzer and Chips Annual 1971 would do likewise).
SHORTLY AFTER GOING ONTO THE NEWSAGENT SHELF, I picked up the annual in September of 1970 (finding some extra cash to buy it using my school dinner money).
Ginger's Tum by Terry & Sheila Bave. ©Rebellion.
THE ATTITUDE TOWARDS PRODUCING ANNUALS between the two main comics companies – IPC and DCT – contrasted greatly, with DCT committed to all original material to be included in their books, often all in part or full colour, and saving the best stories for the annuals. IPC, however, would commission enough strips to fill about 60% of the annual, with the rest being five-year-old (or older) reprints taken from other comics or, in some cases, showcasing some artwork that was commissioned for the dummy copies of the comic but never published.
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THE Whizzer and Chips Annual 1971 is a little better, but there are a number of reprints included which I have listed in the second part of this feature.
AS I GO THROUGH THE BOOK, I’m amazed to discover how much I recall – well, had initially forgotten – with memories being stirred as I remembered key strips and stories.
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BUT WHAT AMAZED ME THIS TIME AROUND was how much of the artwork was contributed by artist Terry Bave. With his wife Shiela, who wrote several of the scripts, out of 158 pages of cartoon strips Terry produced 32 of them. This reflected in his output in the regular comic where he could have as many as nine strips in one comic! (Issue 3 is the example I’ve taken this from.)
IN FACT, THE COUPLE WERE INSTUMENTAL in creating 13 ideas that made it to the introduction page stages of the comic. Those that didn’t make it to the final comic were Pluto Dogs (see It’s a Dog’s World later in this book), Bob-a-Job (which eventually appeared in Buster, 1970, drawn by Arthur Martin), Eager Beaver (appearing as Eager Beavers in Buster, 1970, by the Baves) and Stowaway Steve (appeared in COR!! 1970, drawn by several artists).
BAVE'S ARTISTIC STYLE IS ECONOMIC BUT EFFECTIVE when compared to, say, Leo Baxendale and Ken Reid, brilliant cartoonists who would spend many hours or days working in detail on each strip.
Steadfast McStaunch by Denis Gifford.
©Rebellion.
THE OTHER NOTABLE ARTIST in the annual is a name most comics enthusiasts will recognise – Denis Gifford.
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GIFFORD WAS A HIGHLY-RESPECTED was a highly respected historian, comic artist, writer, editor and publisher who had written nearly thirty books, including the Encyclopedia of British Comics, from which I reference often in compiling these notes.
DENIS WAS ALSO NOTABLE for possessing the largest collection of comics in the United Kingdom. (When he passed away in May 2000, his entire collection was auctioned off to various buyers.)
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WITH THIS BACKGROUND, it appears that Gifford had the fame and gravitas to persuade Paynter – or perhaps Paynter was immediately keen on the idea of a high-profile name – to be
credited in the Steadfast McStaunch strip both in the weekly and annual.
THIS WAS UNUSUAL because artists and writers at the time were actively discouraged from signing their names on their art, and in many cases – not all – saw their signatures whitened out, a policy that would not officially change until 1977, although signatures started appearing on humour art quite often before then – (R.T.) Robert Nixon perhaps the best known example.
DENIS CONTRIBUTES A GENEROUS ten pages of art to the book, equal third behind Terry Bave and Mike Lacey in humour strip contributions! His style is somewhat anachronistic – he mostly drew humour strips for British comics in the 1940s, 50s and 60s – and as a youngster I even thought it looked amateurish, but fifty years on I think the style is absolutely brilliant.
A SHORT TIME LATER, the Steadfast strip was retired in favour of the character hosting Scatty Scrapbook at the end of Chips. Along with KooKoo Club at the end of Whizzer, Gifford seems okay not to be credited.
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OF COURSE, THERE HAVE BEEN OTHER NOTABLE ARTISTS in the annual such as the aforementioned Mike Lacey, along with Mike Higgs, Frank MacDiarmid, Tom Kerr, Graham Allen, Norman Mansbridge, Ron Turner and many more, but they only really became well-known much later, as the generation who grew up with these comics would recognise their importance in the industry and sought to ensure they would not be forgotten. I have put together a biographical list of many of them (but not all) in part 3.​​​
AS WELL AS THE ANNUALS, Whizzer and Chips also had holiday specials – special editions of the comic with up to 96 pages specifically issued for the summer. The first came out in 1970, the last in 1993 (with a page count, I believe, of 64).
IN ALL, 24 ANNUALS WERE PRODUCED (along with a very-hard-to-get 45th anniversary of the Best of Whizzer and Chips annual issued in 2014 by Egmont, a 72 page hardback collecting old annual strips, even using the 1971 annual cover. However, this book was exclusive to Sainsbury's, and not all branches were stocking it!
BUT BACK TO THE REGULAR ANNUALS... the first five all had 160 pages, which dropped to 144 up to the 1980 edition, 128 to the 1987 book, after which it was relaunched as the ‘new big size’ for 1988, but its page count was now only 112.
IN 1990 THE COMIC WAS MERGED with Buster to become the last surviving humour comic from the original IPC stable, but the annuals continued to be produced.
1992 brought it down to just 96 pages, and the last in 1994 had a measly 80 and cost £4.50. But after this time, Egmont – who
were now publishing the comic – seized printing any more annuals from those comics that had originated from IPC’s Youth group and its humour group.
THE UK COMICS MARKET OVERALL HAD DRIED UP, and the company wanted to focus only on books and comics linked to licenced products. Eventually the rights to these comics were bought up by Rebellion in August 2016, with all pre-1970 titles in 2018.
WHIZZER AND CHIPS IS A UK COMICS LEGEND. In terms of longevity for IPC (later, Fleetway Publications again, and then Egmont), it is second only to Buster, the comic into which Whizzer and Chips would merge in 1990.
BUT FOR MANY, it remains the ultimate in humour titles, perhaps even better than DCT’s Beano and Dandy.
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- Roger Hartopp, September 2025
Part 2: The stories behind many of the strips in the Whizzer and Chips Annual 1971.
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