Friday, March 28, 2014

Joker's Missing Gift

The cover advertising the replacement gift. Does this mean
that there is a Whizzer and Chips front cover that was never seen?

The issue of Whizzer and Chips dated 8th March 1975 came with a free Superjet Joke Camera. A great promotional piece - except that it was actually supposed to come with Joker's Plate-Wobbler. The editor claims that there was simply a delay but no plate wobbler was ever given away in the title's run so I suspect they simply ordered it wrong or got an incorrect delivery. That week also came with part one of the Slippy Measuring Chart, which was given away as a pull-out on the center pages over four weeks. The Sid's Snake strip below the letter advertises this poster.



The replacement gift for the plate wobbler was, as the name states, a joke camera that squirted water when you pressed the button to pretend to take a photo.


Joker used the intended free gift in his strip on the back page. If you look closely you can see that a few words have been wiped out in several panels. I suspect the words "free gift" or something similar have been poorly erased from the top right panel.

Art by Sid Burgon.

2 comments:

Kid said...

Stories were usually prepared up to eight weeks ahead and the comic published a week before the date on the cover (that date being the week after it went on sale), so at least they had enough time to delete a few words and substitute a new cover.

Raven said...

Well, I suppose those plate wobblers ended up being given free in issue 1 of Monster Fun, three months later, instead.