Real
Name: Tiny Mosshead TINY MOSSHEAD
Real
Name: Tiny Mosshead
Identity/Class: Magically-animated scarecrow
(straw golem? homunculus?);
British
(but not a citizen)
Occupation: Scarecrow
Group Membership: Crowman's scarecrows
Affiliations: Crowman, Worzel Gummidge
Enemies: Crows
Known Relatives: Crowman (maker)
Aliases: None
Base of Operations: Worzel's garden, near Scatterbrook Farm, England, U.K.
First
Appearance: Rupert Weekly with Worzel Gummidge#57/3 (16th November
1983)
Powers/Abilities: Tiny Mosshead was presumably a capable scarer of birds, at least when he could be bothered to do his job. He knew several riddles with pun answers.
Height: 12" (by approximation)
Weight: 4 oz (by estimation)
Eyes: Unrevealed
Straw: Yellow
History:
(Rupert Weekly with Worzel
Gummidge#57) - Deciding to make a small garden of his own the
living scarecrow Worzel Gummidge asked his maker the Crowman to make a
little scarecrow to stand guard over it. The Crowman obliged, producing
a miniature scarecrow called Tiny Mosshead. Worzel set the new arrival
in place to ward off crows from his freshly planted seeds, and learned
that Tiny shared his penchant for riddles with bad puns for answers, but
annoyed Tiny by anticipating the punchline before Tiny could get to
deliver it. The next day Tiny abandoned his post to visit the Crowman
and pose a new riddle to him, "What fruit can you find in a newspaper?"
The Crowman was stumped, and Tiny didn't want to return to the garden
until Crowman figured out the answer. A short while later Worzel showed
up looking for Tiny, accompanied by his human friends, the children John
and Sue Peters. Hearing the riddle Sue correctly answered "The date."
However, while everyone else found this amusing, Worzel remained annoyed
at Tiny, and decided to watch over his garden himself thereafter.
Comments: Created by John Cooper (I think) - no credits are listed, but he drew other Worzel strips, and it looks a lot like his art to my admittedly untrained eyes.
Worzel Gummidge is a fictional scarecrow created by author Barbara
Euphan Todd. He first appeared on BBC Radio in The Children's Hour on
Tuesday 10th December 1935 (surviving credits do not specify which actor
involved played the character), and his success appearing in a number of
episodes of that show led to a collection of prose stories being
released in 1936. He made his TV debut in the four part Worzel Gummidge
Turns Detective on the BBC in 1953 with actor Frank Atkinson playing
Worzel, but the show is now lost media, with only a handful of
promotional photos remaining. Then in 1979 Worzel returned to
television, this time portrayed by Jon Pertwee, who a few years earlier
had been the third
Doctor. The show was very successful, running for four years (and
later being revived for two more years at the end of the 1980s), and
unsurprisingly this resulted in him being adapted into comics too, first
in the British weekly Look-In
starting in 1979, and then in first a Marvel
UK monthly
in 1981 and then a Marvel
UK weekly in 1983; during this time Look-In was still publishing a
Worzel strip, so the license must have been non-exclusive. When Worzel
Gummidge Weekly ended the Worzel strip transferred to Marvel UK's Rupert
Weekly (starring the long-running newspaper character Rupert Bear) for a
few months before finally and unceremoniously ending. While in Look-In
the Worzel strip was a traditional comic strip with speech balloons, in
the Marvel issues was formatted as an illustrated story, i.e. individual
panels with text beneath each describing the actions and dialogue.
Could Worzel Gummidge's strip be set on
Earth-616? Conceivably, especially given the option of placing him in
the 1980s, outside the sliding timescale which has moved the debut of
the Fantastic Four and other heroes into the 2010s. The tales are very
much geographically isolated, almost all set in and around one farm in
rural England. It should be noted that in Worzel's world all scarecrows,
or at least all the ones made by the Crowman, are living beings, as are
many other objects that were made to resemble humans (such as ships'
figureheads or fairground figurines); they just don't normally move if
humans are around to see, somewhat like the toys in Toy Story. However,
if this was to be considered an isolated phenomenon related to the
mystic powers of the Crowman, who may be either a magician or the guise
worn by some mythical being of English lore, and perhaps a few others
like him, then that wouldn't pose too much of a problem in terms of
integrating the whole Worzel mythology into Earth-616. After all, he'd
hardly be the only
living
scarecrow.
This profile was
completed on 08/11/2026, but its publication was delayed as it was
intended for the Appendix 25th anniversary's celebratory
event to represent Worzel Gummidge.
Profile by Loki.
CLARIFICATIONS:
Tiny Mosshead has no known connections to:
images: (without ads)
Rupert Weekly with Worzel Gummidge#57,
p8, pan6 (main image)
Rupert Weekly with Worzel Gummidge#57,
p9, pan1 (close-up)
Rupert Weekly with Worzel Gummidge#57,
p9, pan5 (size comparison with Worzel and Crowman in back)
Appearances:
Rupert Weekly with Worzel Gummidge#57
(16th November 1983) - John Cooper (art), other credits unknown
First Posted:
09/28/2026
Last updated: 08/11/2026
Any Additions/Corrections? please let me know.
Non-Marvel
Copyright
info
All other characters mentioned or pictured are ™ and © 1941-2099
Marvel Characters, Inc. All Rights Reserved. If you like this stuff, you
should check out the real thing!
Please visit The Marvel Official Site at: http://www.marvel.com
Special Thanks to www.g-mart.com for hosting the Appendix, Master List, etc.!