Who Drew It?

I am going to take it as read here you don't need me to tell you which popular television series the British comic strip Junior Rotter took inspiration from.

Junior appeared in IPC/Fleetway Publications' Whizzer and Chips from around mid-to-late 1980, shortly before the fourth season of Dallas -- which promised to resolve the mystery of "Who Shot J.R.?" to a global audience -- began airing; by this point, UK viewers were able to see episodes air on the BBC just two days after their CBS transmission, and Larry Hagman, firmly established as the show's star, had made a well-publicised visit to England in the break between seasons where even the Queen Mother had asked him if he knew his character's assailant. A story parodying Dallas in a Fleetway title was pretty much inevitable.

In fact, Fleetway's big rival D. C. Thomson trod on very similar ground with Jay R. Hood ("He's Anything But Good!"), who launched in Nutty around the same time -- Nutty being an attempt by D. C. to produce a comic that was more anarchic and off-the-wall than their other publications, and a bit more like Fleetway's titles. D. C. Thomson's strip also featured a girl called Sue Helen as the character's main target, the difference being they were unrelated in the Nutty strip.

Blog Questions Challenge

There's a set of questions about blogging going around which originated here and turned into a chain letter type thing, and the existence of which I was made aware by John J. Hoare the other day.

What the hell.

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

It's something I'd meant to do for years, but the actual impetus was seeing Andrew Ellard asking on Twitter about an adventure gamebook he'd owned as a child, and if anyone remembered who the author was.

The book in question was one of the Horror Classic Gamebooks, The Curse of Frankenstein, and I was also able to let him know there was a second book in the series, Dracula's Castle, which I'd had as a child and still owned. This ended up with me tracking down a copy of the Frankenstein book, to which Andrew replied when I let him know this "Excellent! Please report your progress?" And so, needing a place to stick my review of them, this blog was born.

(At the time it wasn't called Ludicrously Niche, but had some placeholder name. I'm still not entirely thrilled with the name I settled on after a few more posts, but at some point the blog attracted a genuine following and I think I'm stuck with it now even if I could think of a better one. I have a vague idea I might commission an artist to design a logo depicting a literal reading niche at some point. But I haven't yet.)

It's So Bloody Nice!

The comic strip It's a Nice Life, drawn by Reg Parlett, originated in IPC Magazines' (later known as Fleetway Publications) weekly comic Jackpot. It was a mainstay throughout the comic's modest run of just over two and a half years from May 1979 to January 1982, and regularly finished near the top of reader polls during that time. It survived Jackpot's merger into Buster, where it lasted for over six further years, finishing in the issue dated 30th April, 1988; a pretty decent innings for a story that originated in another comic.

Let's acknowledge the elephant in the room. It wasn't (and indeed isn't) unusual for strips in weekly humour comics to parody or take inspiration from current films and TV shows; other strips that ran alongside this story in Jackpot include Angel's Proper Charlies, The Incredible Sulk, The Teeny Sweeney and Jake's 7. But It's a Nice Life, a strip about Stan and Babs Nice attempting to live a sustainable and self-sufficient lifestyle whilst their next door neighbours, snooty social climbers Ollie and Maddie Jones, watch on in bafflement, seems to take things a step away from finding inspiration from or spoofing The Good Life, and a step closer to, well, just being a comic strip version of The Good Life, down to not only the very similar title but also one of the characters having the same name as their equivalent in the series; that said, there were some notable differences, perhaps the biggest being that both families have children in the strip.

It's tempting to imagine that IPC might have had some kind of arrangement with the BBC in this instance; such a thing would not be without precedent, as they ran several strips based on licensed properties or even real people over the years. Perhaps most pertinently, a strip starring the Goodies had run in Jackpot predecessor Cor!! earlier in the seventies, and the short-lived School Fun (33 weekly issues, October 1983 to May 1984) featured both Coronation Street School and Grange Hill Juniors (the latter of which has a copyright notice expressly crediting Phil Redmond). Officially licensed stories continued to feature right up until the end, with a strip based on the animated series Dr. Zitbag's Transylvania Pet Shop being one of the last new stories to appear in Buster near the end of its life from 1994-96.

You might also notice that It's a Nice Life debuted nearly a year after the final episode of The Good Life was broadcast in June 1978, and continued for almost a decade after that. This seems unusual for a strip referencing a specific TV show; similar strips generally began whilst their inspirations were still on screens, and if their inspiration were to drop out of the zeitgeist they tended to be lucky if they lasted a year afterwards.

A thought comes to mind: what about repeats?

Gold Rush

The Dandy and the Beano -- Fifty Golden Years was published in 1987 to mark the golden anniversary of the Dandy (its sister publication the Beano having begun just a year later). It was I believe D. C. Thomson's first publication devoted to reprints of classic material from its weekly comics, and a popular one; demand far outstripped supply, necessitating several republications (the book was offered as a competition prize in weekly editions of the Beano and the Dandy for a while afterwards!), and its success led to the creation of the quarterly reprint comics Best of Beezer and Best of Topper the following year, showcasing classics from two titles which got left out of Fifty Golden Years.

In 1996 those two publications were superseded by the monthly Classics From the Comics, which as you can probably guess featured a variety of strips from across most of D. C. Thomson's humour titles (generally mixing big hitters such as Dennis the Menace and Desperate Dan with a rotating selection of more obscure characters). CFtC had an impressive run of nearly a decade and a half, lasting until the end of 2010. The success of Fifty Golden Years also prompted a follow-up book, More From the First 50 Years, in 1989, and that began a tradition that continues to this day: a new hardback book of classic reprints has been published every year.

(I suspect the fact that by the time I started reading comics, there was a 64-page publication of assorted D. C. Thomson archive material available from my newsagent every month, and no equivalent for other companies such as IPC/Fleetway, is a big part of why I've always gravitated towards it more than any other comic publisher... but we can leave the amateur psychoanalysis for another day.)

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.