THE BEST OF FRANKIE'S FRIDAY FUNNIES

After over 200 installments of FRANKIE'S FUNNY BONES (aka FRANKIE'S FRIDAY FUNNIES), regular readers of WORLD OF MONSTERS might know that this series began way back in 2012 when this blog was known as MONSTER MAGAZINE WORLD. I'm sure you also 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 were 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 or so times, chuckling at the mostly average jokes (there were some good ones), but mainly slavering over the movie stills. MTLW published three issues, from 1964-1965.

For some reason, Stan got the idea to change the title to MONSTERS UNLIMITED, which continued the numbering from MTLW and ran for four more issues from 1965-1966 before it petered out.

While other monster joke fumetti one-pagers followed in other magazines, with a few exceptions I patterned FRANKIE'S FUNNY BONES after MTLW, right down to the speech balloon style and 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.

Here's a claw-full from "the early years". I hope you enjoy them. If not, well thanks for allowing my indulgence.