Comic oddities: FUN AND GAMES (1997)

In March 1997 a company called Nexus Media ventured into the traditional British humour comics market with a fortnightly called Fun and Games. It was a twist on the 'two-in-one' format originated by Whizzer and Chips in that Fun and Games were separate titles. In this instance, Fun was a 24 page A4 size comic and Games was a 24 page half-size A5 mag wrapped around the parent comic. (See photos). 

It may come as no surprise that the editor of Fun and Games was Bob Paynter, who had been the original editor of Whizzer and Chips (and the group editor of the IPC humour comics). The cover artist of Fun was Tom Paterson, a familiar name to readers of UK humour comics.

Another great UK comics stalwart was Terry Bave who provided the artwork for pages 2 and 3 of Fun, with a new strip, Big Baby across a spread announcing the prizes on offer. 

On the back page was a brand new Tom Paterson strip; The Invisible Family. Excellent stuff, unfortunately interrupted by a 'PRIZE CHANCE' blurb pasted into one panel. These were tenuous links to puzzles in the Games magazine.

The rest of Fun were reprints of old humour strips licensed from Fleetway. Again, marred by big PRIZE blurbs added to the pages. 

Some of the reprints were resized and redesigned to turn a single pager into a double pager, as with this Wear 'Em Out Wilf strip.

Some strips appear to be taken from annuals, and split across two weeks. For example this Frankie Stein story seems to end abruptly, with a tagline added telling the reader they'll have to wait until issue 2 for the outcome.  

As you may have noticed, for some reason the reprints had their original logos removed and replaced by bland typeset ones. It didn't exactly benefit a comic that already looked like it was done on the cheap. 

Overall, Fun and Games was an interesting experiment that perhaps could have succeeded on a higher budget with material designed for the purpose rather than reprints with 'PRIZE' blurbs added. I've no idea how long it lasted as I only bought issue 1, but I don't recall seeing it around for long. If anyone knows the number of issues it ran for, please let me know and I'll update this post.