Schools Just Wanna Have Fun

In October 1983, a new weekly humour comic for children was launched by IPC/Fleetway. Conceived by former schoolteacher turned comics writer Graham Exton, who had previously written scripts for strips such as Sid's Snake and Faceache, as its name suggests School Fun had the unifying concept that all of its stories were set in schools.I can already sense eyebrows arching, and, yes, this concept does beg the obvious question: Would children really want to spend their precious time outside of school reading a comic full of stories set there, when there were about a dozen more escapist titles on the humour shelf alone? Most of them had at least one story primarily set in a school, from The Bash Street Kids to The Four Marys, but an entire comic?You can put together some defence of School Fun as an attempt to create a comic with a cohesive theme. By this point Fleetway had seen a number of short-lived titles quickly sputter out due to a failure to establish a strong identity of their own…