In October 1983, a new weekly humour comic for children was launched by IPC/Fleetway. Conceived by former schoolteacher turned comics writer Graham Exton, who had previously written scripts for strips such as Sid's Snake and Faceache, as its name suggests School Fun had the unifying concept that all of its stories were set in schools.
I can already sense eyebrows arching, and, yes, this concept does beg the obvious question: Would children really want to spend their precious time outside of school reading a comic full of stories set there, when there were about a dozen more escapist titles on the humour shelf alone? Most of them had at least one story primarily set in a school, from The Bash Street Kids to The Four Marys, but an entire comic?
You can put together some defence of School Fun as an attempt to create a comic with a cohesive theme. By this point Fleetway had seen a number of short-lived titles quickly sputter out due to a failure to establish a strong identity of their own -- not only their own titles, but several published by rivals such as D. C. Thomson. Nevertheless, the answer to the question in the above paragraph would seem to be a resounding "no": School Fun lasted for just 33 issues and seven months before it went the way of eight previous Fleetway titles (and three future ones) when it merged with Buster.
The very first issue included a fictionalised account of how the comic came to be on its first page, which is apparently not all that far from what really happened (although as per Graham Kibble-White in The Ultimate Book of British Comics, in real life a class in Cannock were asked by Exton what they'd like to see in a comic all about school). I think you can sense a little element of movement away from this over School Fun's short life -- the first issue's tagline "The Happiest Read of Your Life!" did not reappear, and later issues seem to promote things such as, well, children bringing a lion to school more on their front cover, such as the one under discussion today. It's issue #26, just two months from the end, which I've scanned in.
Junior Ed, covering the exploits of School Fun's editor and, in a blatant case of nepotism, his son who he appointed co-editor, is reminiscent of We Are the Sparky People in D. C. Thomson's, uh, Sparky, although fictionalised versions of the comic's staff appeared in many other ways in different titles.
Softy Sir is an uncommon appearance in a Fleetway title for Minnie the Minx artist Jim Petrie. Although the character is plainly visible on the cover of the first issue of Buster incorporating School Fun, his own strip was not carried forward -- instead he migrated to another School Fun strip, which we'll get onto later.
Coronation Street School is one of two licensed properties that appeared in School Fun; drawn by Colin Whittock, it is effectively the adult cast of Corrie meets Muppet Babies. (An inaccurate comparison, since Muppet Babies did not even debut in America until late 1984, but it'll have to do.) Whittock had a long career as an editorial cartoonist on the Birmingham Evening Mail -- his cartoons are often credited with raising the public profile of Spaghetti Junction -- as well as work for titles such as Private Eye and The Oldie, which makes him an appropriate choice for a strip that relied heavily on caricatures such as this, but he did do other work for Fleetway such as preteen detective Mizz Marble and Lazy Bones.
Teachers United by Jim Watson is the first strip we come to that survived the merger in its own right, but only notched up thirteen months in its new home. It's quite a fun teachers-versus-pupils strip, but perhaps there were already too many of those around.
When the merger happened, School Fun was initially presented in Buster as a pull-out section; interestingly (if totally logically), existing Buster stories that were set in schools were reclassified to appear in the pull-out, with long-established stories such as Top of the Class and Faceache featuring there. The majority of post-merger issues of Buster noted the presence of School Fun within on the cover, some were branded as Buster and School Fun, and some didn't even mention it at all; this indecisive state of affairs continued until the name was permanently dropped in March 1985. The pull-out section was also discontinued, with the SF survivors freely mingling with the other strips for the remainder of their time in the comic.
Anthony Hutchings' Walt Teaser is the second strip that survived the merger, lasting until March 1987. Softy Sir initially appeared as Walt's teacher in the Buster years, although it seems he was phased out later on.
Although there was limited opportunity for reshuffles, Willy Wonty was a mid-run arrival, added after a reader poll to decide which of six characters should join the comic.
B. Ware: Caretaker by Steve Bright survived the merger and ran for just shy of two years in Buster.
Top Class Comics is a really fun point of reader interactivity, and a similar concept has appeared in the Beano as an annual event to find Britain's funniest class recently.
Creepy Crawler is instantly recognisable as the work of Junior Rotter artist Trevor Metcalfe; as with Softy Sir, he was merged with another School Fun story when it arrived in Buster.
The School Team shed its definitive article upon arriving in Buster, where it served as the cover story for the pull-out section, and lasted just under three years in total; this strip is Vic Neill, as are some of the Buster stories I have, but apparently later on it was done by Anthony Hutchings.
E. T. T.: Extra Terrestrial Teacher was drawn by David Mostyn, who often drew strips influenced by horror and the supernatural, and is perhaps best known for the Dandy's Strange Hill School. (There was some level of serialisation to the story, with early editions covering how Mr. Freeky came to Earth and started work as a teacher; the 'next week' caption at the end seems to be a remnant of this. The scriptwriter was seemingly given enough notice to end the strip properly, as the final issue of School Fun saw him return to his home planet.)
The Gasworks Gang is a reprint from Cor!! in the 1970s. (Reprints of the Whizzer and Chips story Slowcoach from the 1970s were used in other issues, and later appeared in Buster too. School Fun also had a single Christmas annual in 1984, and four Summer Specials published annually until 1987; the latter in particular featured reprints of many other school-based stories from various Fleetway titles, including Old Boy, Spy School, Dogsbodies Academy, Knight School, Son of Sir, Space School, Teacher's Pet, Sports School and The Scareys of St. Mary's... given just how many variations on a theme Fleetway got out of school-based strips, I guess you can see why they went for a whole comic on the subject.)
Okay, I wasn't sold on the timetable of contents, but the 'school' theme works pretty well on the letters page.
Another licensed story (note the credit to Phil Redmond just below the title banner): Fleetway had already been publishing Grange Hill material for some time, including a Christmas annual which was published between 1980 and 1987, and a short-lived (two issues) magazine in 1980, so presumably the infrastructure was already in place for Grange Hill Juniors, drawn by Mike Delaney. Grange Hill comics would later appear in BEEB magazine in 1985, the Radio Times from March 1989, and Fast Forward across its six-year run from September '89; in the latter two the strip was drawn by future Dennis the Menace artist Nigel Parkinson!
He doesn't seem to have had a regular strip in School Fun, but the illustrations here are the work of Nigel Edwards.
I can probably get a full post out of School Belle at some point, but she was by some distance the biggest success of School Fun, as well as a lesser-spotted female character drawn by Tom Paterson. Surviving the merger with Buster, following Paterson's departure from Fleetway in 1990 she was drawn by her former scriptwriter Keith Reynolds for a year or two (giving her such a radical change in appearance an explanation was written in); when her strip changed from new to reprints they reverted to Paterson material. Although an intermittent presence in Buster for much of the nineties, the Reynolds strips were used for a final full-time stint from late 1996 before she was retired for good in September 1998, just over a year out from the end.
Speaking of which, Time Bus is the work of Reynolds; he did various strips for Fleetway and D. C., working for the latter into the noughties, but is perhaps best known for drawing the Beano's Tom, Dick and Sally for most of its run.
The next story is Schoolditz, which covered the adventures of a class of schoolchildren being held in a German POW camp during the Second World War.
No, really. (Most editions end with the headteacher screwing up the latest escape plan in a way that has been compared to Gilligan's Island, but that seems likely to be coincidental given the show's lack of impact here.)
Girl was the second incarnation of a publication that had originally run from 1951-1964; this version lasted from 1981 to 1990. Scream! was a horror comic that lasted a paltry fifteen issues.
The Minder-inspired Young Arfur by Pete Dredge was the final story to survive the merger in its own right, and also incorporated the title character from Creepy Crawler at the start of the Buster years; it appeared there until late 1987.
Most people who spare the time to have a look at School Fun seem to come to the same conclusion: That it was actually a pretty good comic, populated with high-quality stories and a decent level of variety which its title may not have seemed to offer. Maybe the concept of an entire comic about school was genuinely an impediment to finding an audience (I can certainly find some evidence of people who thought this would be the case at the time). Maybe there just wasn't the appetite for a new weekly humour comic at this point; discounting Oink!, Fleetway would make only one more attempt to do so after School Fun closed, in the form of Nipper. But it seems right that SF at least managed one character who was still present in a Fleetway title until near the end of their comics empire.
I would like to finish off by pointing out that "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" was released as a single in the same week as the first issue of School Fun, which I would love to claim was deliberate, but I thought of the title for this post first and found that out later.
With thanks to Steve Williams and Paul Hayes
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