The Bumpkin Billionaires was a long-running humour strip which first appeared in Whoopee! #1, dated 9th March 1974, and hung around for the duration of the comic's run before eventually migrating to the pages of Whizzer and Chips in 1985. When Whizzer and Chips, in turn, was cancelled in 1990, the strip moved over to Buster, where it continued to run (though in later issues as a reprint) until Buster's demise in early 2000. It was drawn for almost the entirety of its very long run by Mike Lacey, aside from its last years in Whizzer and Chips when it was drawn by Jim Hanson.
The plot[]
The basic premise of the strip was a very simple one, ripped off unashamedly from the old American sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies: Ma and Pa Bumpkin and their kids Billy and Daisy are a family of straw-chewing country yokels who come into a fortune, and don't want it. For reasons best known to themselves, they spend much of their time thereafter thinking up improbable new ways of ridding themselves of their cash, much to the horror of their permanently stressed-out bank manager, but something always seems to go wrong, leaving them richer than ever. My heart bleeds for them...
