Comic Oddities: The Monkees Crazy Cartoon Book (1967)

Back in 1967, when there was a Daily Mirror Books department producing various paperbacks for Andy Capp, The Perishers, and so on, they capitalized on the Monkeemania fad by publishing this item. The Monkees Crazy Cartoon Book was a standard pocket-size paperback full of humour comic strips featuring (you guessed it) The Monkees pop group.

The book was actually a British edition of an American one published a year earlier. (The US version didn't have the 'Crazy Cartoon Book' added to the title.) It was written by Howard Liss and illustrated by Gene Fawcette. The contents were a mixture of four longish adventures and three short (3 page) strips, plus four pages of portrait photos of Davy Jones, Micky Dolenz, Mike Nesmith and Peter Tork. Presumably the book was one of the first items of Monkee memorabilia created as Mike is only referred to as 'Wool Hat' in the strips, which was his name in the pilot episode. 

As you can see from the random examples I'm showing here, the approach the comic strips took was to try and mimic some of the surreal comedy of The Monkees TV show. It could prove to be a bit silly in places.

Anyway, it's an unusual item that may have passed you by so I thought I'd show a few pages from it here. I've had the book since 1967 so my apologies for it being a little dog eared and tanned around the edges now.