The Perils of Cliff Hanger

The above is a typical specimen of Cliff Hanger, the British comics character who enjoyed a four-year stint in Fleetway Publications' Buster from 1983 to 1987 with a strip that was part comic, part adventure gamebook. Trust me, I'm just as surprised as you that it's taken me over eight years to write about this.

When readers first encountered Cliff in June 1983, he was watching his favourite television show, Now Get Out of This (a parody of the genuine gameshow Now Get Out of That) and unwisely proclaimed that if he could get on the show, he bet he could get out of anything -- which two agents of the Mysterious Evil Spies Society, who happened to be overhearing him at the time, took as an invitation to zap him into various traps they wanted to test to see if they were good enough to use against genuine secret agents.

Every week, Cliff would thus get teleported into a situation of catastrophic danger that frequently had some relation to what he was doing when the Evil Spies blasted him with their matter transmitter ray (or any of the other different rays they had access to, leading to the running joke "Don't call me Ray!"), and at the end of his page there would be three options as to what he should do next. The reader should tick one of the boxes and then turn to elsewhere in the issue (usually a boxout included on the letters page) to see if they chose the right option. The possible resolutions to the above strip are as follows:

But He Didn't Get Far

The Beano Super Stars was yet another spin-off of D. C. Thomson's most enduring weekly humour comic, published monthly for a full decade between January 1992 and January 2002. It was very similar to the bite-size Comic Libraries and Fun-Size Beanos, with each issue telling a single long-form story over its 32 pages, but with the obvious added selling points of being in full A4 size, on glossy paper and in glorious technicolour.

They also evolved out of a very similar series that were simply branded as "Beano Specials", which were published quarterly between 1987 and 1991 and alternated between featuring Dennis the Menace and the Bash Street Kids; during this time a few Dandy Specials were also published, featuring Desperate Dan and Bananaman. For most of their existence the Super Stars alternated between Dennis, Roger the Dodger and Minnie the Minx, with the Bash Street Kids also in the mix but only for the first two years; beginning in late 1998, however, only Dennis was featured, and a few issues later the Super Stars rebranded to effectively be Dennis the Menace Monthly.

Not only that, but many of these later issues were direct adaptations of the 1996-98 Dennis the Menace CBBC series; in fact, every episode of that series was adapted into an issue of Super Stars. Having a page count ten times greater than Dennis' strip in the weekly Beano was desirable, obviously, but the wackier, offbeat take on the characters of the TV show fitted in pretty well with what the Super Stars were already doing. Clearly adapting the animated series was a popular idea, as not long after the Dandy ran Bananaman strips which adapted the series of shorts from the eighties, which were enjoying one of their final runs on CBBC at the time. When I eventually relocate the pertinent Dandys from 1999, you can bet that I will have something to say on those, but thanks to Comic Vine having a complete database of covers, it's much easier to work out which issues of Super Stars adapted episodes of the TV show and when.

Best of 2024

Well, here we are at the end of an incredibly productive year where, barring two short holiday-related rests, I kept this very stupid blog more or less continuously updated throughout, produced some personal favourite pieces, even made a few steps towards professionalism with some tweaks such as sorting out the post tags and adding a proper(ish) "About" page, and now have a bumper selection of links to all the at-least-readable things I wrote across 2024 to share with you.

Much of the year's writing came from the perennial subject of "adventure gamebooks from the 1980s", particularly Fighting Fantasy. Right at the start of the year came a little trilogy of articles looking at the 'demo' versions of some of the books that were first published in Warlock magazine and how they compare to the full-length versions of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, House of Hell and Caverns of the Snow Witch -- a set of pieces which remain quite probably my favourite things I've ever written.

They also inspired some shorter pieces that took a particular interest in anti-cheating traps built into the books, spotlighting Starship Traveller, The Citadel of Chaos, Curse of the Mummy, Kharé -- Cityport of Traps, Masks of Mayhem and The Crimson Tide, as well as an article extensively covering how various different entries in the series included a "time" mechanic, and a comparison of Ian Livingstone's riffing on Mad Max with that of Joe Dever. For more miscellaneous gamebook writing, I also looked at the second of two somewhat lacking adaptations of The Famous Five to the format, a Choose Your Own Adventure book with a surprisingly metaphysical ending and, perhaps a little more tenuously, The Crystal Maze tie-in books.

Last of the Beezers

In September 1990, the Beezer published its 1809th and final weekly issue, ending a run of nearly 35 years that made it one of Britain's longest-running comics. This was the end of the Beezer as a weekly comic in its own right, but not the end of the story overall: it merged with DC Thomson stablemate the Topper to form Beezer and Topper, which lasted for another three years. B&T was an unusual case of a Comics Merger where both titles were given equal billing in what was considered a separate publication, with the issue numbering starting back at no. 1. During the time it was in print, both the Beezer and Topper continued to have separate Summer Specials and Christmas annuals issued; when B&T ended, the Topper books and specials also stopped immediately (the very last Topper publication to feature new material being the Topper Book 1994, published just days after the final issue of Beezer and Topper hit newsstands).

The Beezer, however, continued to exist in the form of Summer Specials and Christmas books for a whole nine years after that. It wasn't odd for a defunct comic to continue to publish an annual for a while after it ended, but this was an unusually long run, and I believe at the time it might have been the longest ever, certainly for a DC Thomson title -- one or two titles by their big rival Fleetway managed longer runs, but the way different Fleetway titles effectively all merged into each other over the years can make their relationships a bit tricky to disentangle, and various characters from defunct comics were still appearing on a weekly basis in others for many years afterwards. (The Beezer could have lasted even longer in this way -- the Beezer Annual 2003 was the last, but some work had been done on a 2004 annual before DC Thomson decided to cancel it, with the stories that had been prepared being recycled or refitted for use in their surviving titles.)

An interesting thing about these final Beezer annuals is that they had very little editorial oversight, and the writers and artists seem to have been mostly left to their own devices. This resulted in some strange and surreal strips which frequently featured one-off characters who would not have worked if they'd gone on any longer.

Here, then, is a selection of some of the oddest DC Thomson comics ever to make it to print, taken from the last years of the Beezer.

Dystopian Fiction/Double Feature

In 1985, the thirteenth Fighting Fantasy gamebook, Freeway Fighter, was published, the seventh entry in the range to be written by its co-creator Ian Livingstone. The book is a significant departure from the swords-and-sorcery Livingstone (and the range in general) is usually associated with, taking place in a post-apocalyptic America which clearly takes its cues from Mad Max.

Between 1988 and 1989, the four gamebooks in the Freeway Warrior series by Joe Dever were published; Highway Holocaust (published as Freeway Warrior 1 in the US), Slaughter Mountain Run (published as Mountain Run in the US), The Omega Zone and California Countdown. The series is a significant departure from the swords-and-sorcery Dever is usually associated with in his better known Lone Wolf series, taking place in a post-apocalyptic America which clearly takes its cues from Mad Max.

Digest This

The Beano and Dandy Comic Libraries were digest-sized spin-offs of the two full-size comics, which were published at the rate of four per month (two Beanos and two Dandys) from 1982 to 1997. Each one was 64 pages long and told a single, long-form story starring one or more of D. C. Thomson's main characters, often pairing them up in unusual crossovers. In 1997 the Comic Libraries were supplanted by the Fun-Size Beano and Fun-Size Dandy, which were extremely similar but featured two or three stories per issue plus a selection of other features such as puzzle pages and cut-out-and-keep guides; they continued in this format until 2010, slowly featuring more and more reprinted material, until being discontinued due to low sales.

In the days of the Comic Libraries, however, there were two spin-off ranges: the Beano Puzzle Books, which are hopefully self-explanatory, and the Dandy Cartoon Books.

The Cartoon Books were the same format as the Libraries, but with a different cartoon, usually a single frame, on each page (with the occasional two-pager); despite all being published under the Dandy banner, they featured a wide mix of characters from across DCT's humour comics, often featuring characters which had been defunct for years. They were published monthly for some seven years.

It's worth emphasising that the team putting these together would have had to come up with sixty or so different gags every month for all that time. Given that, the hit rate was surprisingly high, and it seems only fair to provide you with some of my favourites before moving on to the other side of things:

The Adventures of Some Kids Who Happen to Live on the Same Street in Toronto

Degrassi is a long-running franchise which spans several different Canadian children's television series, all broadly linked by the adventures of children or teenagers living on the eponymous street in Toronto.

The first entry in this series was The Kids of Degrassi Street, which evolved out of a 1979 standalone short film entitled Ida Makes a Movie, based on the 1974 picture book of the same name. This was followed by three more specials, which were broadcast roughly once a year, after which it became an irregular series, with four more weekly episodes broadcast from December 1982 to January 1983, another one-off in September '83, an eleven-part series shown from November 1984 to February 1985, and a final six episodes from December 1985. You may wish to consult this page for a more thorough look at the show's history, but in short, the early films were absorbed into the full series and came to be known as a single 26-episode season which makes up the first incarnation of the franchise.

On 9 July 1984, the show reaches British shores when the BBC air Ida Makes a Movie as part of their children's programming block at 5.15pm:

First of seven programmes
The adventures of some kids who happen to live on the same street in Toronto - Degrassi Street.

1: Ida Makes a Movie
Boring! That's what Ida thinks of the school holidays, until she decides to make a film...

35 on Sky

Between January 14th and June 2nd of this year, Sky Showcase brought the abbreviated 18-episode Season 35 of The Simpsons to British viewers... with one exception. Yes, for the second year running, the annual Treehouse of Horror -- number XXXIV -- was held back to Halloween, specifically October 27th at 7.30pm. I have to assume the only reason for this is, after they had no problem with airing the first thirty-two Halloween specials out of season, Sky want to make sure they'll be seen on Halloween itself or near enough. Heaven knows how they will cope with Season 36, which has two spooky specials, the usual Treehouse and "Treehouse of Horror Presents: Simpsons Wicked This Way Comes", a trilogy based around the works of Ray Bradbury.

There were two scheduled repeats: Wednesday 30th at 10pm, and Halloween itself at 7.30pm. I would be 99.9% sure that late-night repeat on the 30th reinstated all of the material cut from the earlier screenings, but in testament to my professionalism I forgot to make a recording of that one. Because, yes, there were cuts, all of which were to the second segment, "Ei8ht":

• When Nelson and Lisa enter the slaughterhouse, Nelson is killed by the unseen murderer right after his line "Hey, meat hooks, hook meat much? Haw-haw!"; in the uncut version a meat hook then bursts through the back of his head and out through his mouth, but Sky cut away just as the impact is beginning, so we see a tiny bit of blood but no more
• When Lisa plays this back on the security footage about half a minute later, a similar edit happens, so the viewer gets the gist but there is no actual impact.
• When Lisa gets thrown into Sideshow Bob's cell about a minute later, there's a montage of all the other murders she committed; Martin's death seems to be trimmed, and the Spuckler kid and Sherri's removed entirely.

Whilst these edits certainly reduce the amount of violence, this is an incredibly graphic segment and a huge amount of blood, gore and lingering shots of corpses were left in, with only the actual killings getting censored! This was the only episode of Season 35 Sky cut at all, with even the dreaded word "bastard" being left in on multiple occasions in other episodes that premiered at 6.30pm. Whilst Sky dealt with this specific episode pretty well, I find their red lines and approach to scheduling more than a little baffling.