THE BEST OF FRANKIE'S FRIDAY FUNNIES . . . SO FAR

After 150 installments of FRANKIE'S FUNNY BONES (aka FRANKIE'S FRIDAY FUNNIES), I decided to take a look back at some of the earlier posts. As a regular reader of MMW, I'm sure you know by now that I have a soft spot (not in my head!) for monster humor. After all, as far as I can recall, my first exposure to "monsters" in general was the FUNNY MONSTERS cards from 1959. The fronts featured Jack Davis cartoons with an unknown writer's gag line at the bottom. The backs bore the title, "You'll Die Laughing" with jokes that were mostly of the typical "Q&A" format type. As a not yet fully developed Monster Kid, I thought they were all pretty funny, and the Jack Davis art certainly helped.

Then, in 1964 along came the full-size magazine, MONSTERS TO LAUGH WITH, published by Non-Pareil (aka Marvel Comics). This time the cartoon art was replaced with full-page monster movie photos. The gags were written by Stan "The Man" Lee, and were in the style of "fumetti", that is, dialogue that was enclosed with a speech balloon. MTLW was the first monster mag that I ever bought -- or was allowed to buy -- and if I flipped through those 36 pages once, I flipped through them a hundred times, chuckling at the mostly average jokes (there were some good ones), but mainly slavering over the movie stills.

While other monster joke fumetti one-pagers followed, I patterned FRANKIE'S FUNNY BONES after MTLW, right down to the Times Roman typescript.

Over the life of this feature, I've had a blast coming up with gags from various photos that I have come across, both from my private collection and from the 'net. I rarely get a comment from these posts, but I figure at least some of you get a chuckle out of 'em. If not, well thanks for discreetly allowing my indulgence.

Today, I've gathered here a butcher's dozen from FFB, "the early years". I hope you enjoy them. C'mon, I know there's a belly laugh in there somewhere!