Film Fun was a British comic book that ran from (issues dates) 17 January 1920 to 15 September 1962, when it merged with Buster, a total of 2225 issues. There were also annuals in the forties and fifties. It was renamed Film Fun and Thrills in 1959. As the title suggests, the comic mainly featured comic strip versions of people from films from the 1920s to the 1960s. Pre-war circulation at its peak was around 800,000 copies per week.
The cover of the first edition featured Harold Lloyd but named as “Winkle”, the screen name by which he was known in Britain at the time.
Frederick George Cordwell was better known to Film Fun fans as Eddie the Happy Editor. Cordwell edited the comic until his death in 1949, aged 62 in Richmond, Surrey. Cordwell wrote many scripts for the strips as well as text stories for Film Fun. He introduced the idea of characters receiving huge plates of bangers and mash, giant Christmas puddings, pies and such from grateful beneficiaries of their efforts. Cordwell even made it into the stories himself, meeting Laurel and Hardy a number of times, Joe E Brown, Wheeler and Woolsey and other characters.
Picture Fun merged with Film Fun soon after its launch in 1920, followed by Kinema Comic in 1932, Film Picture Stories in 1935, Illustrated Chips in 1953 and [[Top Spot] (comics)|Top Spot] in 1960. In 1962, sales of Film Fun dropped below 125,000 a week, prompting IPC to merge the comic with Buster.
Strips included…
“Abbott and Costello” (G. W. Wakefield, Walter Bell)
“The Adventures of Winkle, The Pathe Mirth Wizard”
“Buck Jones”
“Bruce Forsyth”
“Bud & Lou”
“Buster Keaton”
“Donald Duck”
“Harold Lloyd”
“Joe E. Brown”
“Laurel and Hardy”
“Lucky Luke” (Maurice de Bevere and René Goscinny)
“Lupino Lane”
“Niblo Nibbs” (Eric Roberts)
“Old Mother Riley”
“Popeye” (Elsie Segar)
“Schnozzle”
“Scoop Donovan” (Geoff Campion)
“Sydney Howard”
“Tim McCoy”
“Tommy Cooper”
“Tony Hancock” (written by Nobby Clark)
“Wheeler & Woolsey”
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