Ludicrously Niche: Knock on Wood

This is the very first edition of The Haunted Wood, a strip which appeared in Fleetway's Knockout across its two-year run from June 1971 to June 1973. Like some other Fleetway strips of the time, it does not appear to have had a terribly consistent artist; some sources say this first strip was the work of Reg Parlett, other strips were apparently by Sid Burgon, and other editions have artists who cannot be identified. (Another Knockout strip, Beat Your Neighbour, is notorious for being so inconsistent it can be difficult to find two editions which were definitely drawn by the same person, but that's another story.)

To cut to the chase: The Haunted Wood is not renowned for experimentation or breaking its format. Every subsequent edition follows a very familiar set-up: someone takes wood from the Haunted Wood, doesn't listen to the unnamed boy's warnings that this will lead to disaster, and the haunted wood, no matter what form it has been sawed, nailed or whittled into, comes to life and wreaks havoc until it returns to its home.

The strip was one of several 'horror anthology' stories found in Fleetway titles, focusing on a different victim each week. Other stories on a similar theme include Whoopee!'s Evil Eye, where the titular disembodied eye went around zapping people to turn them evil; the same title's 'Orrible 'Ole, where the titular disembodied hole¹ went around attaching himself to surfaces; and Whizzer and Chips' Mystery Museum, where anyone stupid enough to touch one of the titular museum's exhibits found themselves instantly transported back to the period of history it came from. The overwhelming majority of the wood's victims are men -- the only case of a woman being the unwise woodcutter that I've found is a witch taking branches for her broom -- and this does also seem to be the case for other strips of its genre.

THW also spawned a spin-off, Ye Haunted Lake, which appeared in sister Fleetway title Shiver and Shake for the first few months of its run from March to June 1973, and whose format allowed for a bit more variance:

You can see some more editions of Ye Haunted Lake here.

When Knockout folded into Whizzer and Chips in 1973, The Haunted Wood was not carried forward. However, the Knockout Christmas annual continued to be published until 1984, and new adventures of the all-too-sapient forest continued to appear there.

It was not unusual for even quite short-running Fleetway titles to continue as Christmas annuals and Summer Specials long after they'd ended as a weekly comic -- Shiver and Shake and Cor!! also notched up eleven years in this 'specials-only' format, and Monster Fun ran for just 73 issues from June 1975 to October 1976, but lasted in the form of the Buster and Monster Fun Holiday Special (published separately to the Buster Holiday Special) until 1995.

The Knockout Annual 1985 was the final hurrah for the title as a whole, and for the trees of terror, although other characters who had originated in Knockout that had survived the merger, such as Fuss Pot and Joker, would continue to have new material appear in Whizzer and Chips for a few more years. (Whizzer and Chips merged into Buster in 1990, the last of the Fleetway mergers; all W&C strips that appeared in Buster only ever did so as reprints from their old home.)

There are three THW strips in this annual, and... if you look at the first panel of each one in particular, it is hard not to think that someone, perhaps aware this was the last time the story would appear, was actively taking the piss out of the strip's formulaic nature.