Cruel Summer

It can't hurt to give you a quick recap on the history of Cuddles and Dimples.

The two terrifying toddlers started out as separate stories -- Cuddles first appeared in Nutty in 1981, then upon that comic's closure in 1985 he transferred over to a new title, Hoot, and served as its cover star for its brief existence. Dimples had first appeared in the Dandy in 1984, and when Hoot merged into the Dandy in late 1986 the strips were themselves combined to form Cuddles and Dimples.

Initially, the boys were next-door neighbours, with the first combined strip featuring Cuddles and his parents moving in to Dandytown. However, Dandy editor Morris Heggie decided the characters would work better as brothers. Rather than suddenly retcon things, one set of parents (Cuddles') were slowly phased out over a period of several months; more and more focus was put on Dimples' parents, Cuddles' parents were moved into the background before disappearing altogether, and strips implying the two were now brothers started appearing. By October 1987, at least one strip that doesn't really make sense unless they're siblings had run.

However, because the various spin-offs of the main comic were produced on different schedules, stories where the two were still unequivocally neighbours continued to appear in offshoots such as Christmas books and the digest-sized Comic Libraries for a while after that. The last of these appears to be a Dandy Comic Library that was not published until 1989, but appears to have been drawn at a point where Cuddles still had his own separate strip! I've noted a couple of previous publications from 1988 that were drawn before the retcon but not released until afterwards... and I have one more to add to the list.

Bigger Than the Whole Sky

This seems like news worth bringing to the widest audience possible: as reported by friend of the blog Wesley Mead, it appears that Sky One will no longer be broadcasting The Simpsons at all as of the 1st November. This leaves E4 (plus the occasional weekend lunchtimes on Channel 4) as the only place to see Our Favourite Family on linear television in the UK going forwards.

It's not been the noblest of ends to the channel's 36-year relationship with the show, losing the rights to first-run episodes two years ago and being stuck with repeats from a slowly dwindling pool of seasons, but the final episodes will be a Treehouse of Horror marathon, which seems like as good a way to go out as any.

One would assume that sooner or later, E4 will be able to show more or less everything bar the season currently premiering on FOX (plus of course the Disney+ exclusive episodes); it seems likely to me that Seasons 34 and 35, the only two seasons left that originally premiered on Sky and are yet to air on E4, will be subject to the same conditions as before, and we'll see similar scheduling to this year (where Season 36 got its free-to-air run at the start of the year, immediately followed by E4's first run of Season 33). I'll continue to keep an eye on E4's new airings.

Vampire Time

At 33 seconds into the above video of BBC Two continuity from the 29th October 1999, we get a trail for something rather interesting: the first late-night showing of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, airing at 11.10pm on Sunday, which was a repeat of the episode premiered the day before at 6.45pm (season 2, episode 6 "Halloween", original US TX almost exactly two years beforehand on 27/10/97).

The early-evening showings had been subject to heavy censorship, whereas obviously these post-watershed airings would be completely intact. Although the trailer starts with the words "after dark" and offers an opportunity to "see [Buffy] in a completely new light", with the announcer also branding it as "late-night Buffy", the trail has a slight air of skirting around what it actually is. It feels a little euphemistic, as if the BBC did not want to admit that the earlier showings were being heavily cut; even the Radio Times listing for the premiere refers to the late-night airing as an "extended repeat" (although later on they would drop any such pretences and expressly brand them as 'uncut').

The Case of the Phantom Comic Library

The back page of Dandy Comic Library #53 (published around early 1985) advertised the next two issues that would be on sale the following month, one of which was scheduled to be Violent Elizabeth in "Very Cross Country Runner".

If you remember my look at Plug, you'll probably recall Violent Elizabeth was one of the stars of that comic; the Dandy Comic Libraries often featured interlopers from other titles, even ones that had been defunct for quite some time. However, when Comic Library #56 was published the following month, she was not to be seen.

A Funny Girl

When I scanned in a full issue of the short-lived School Fun not long ago, I promised a closer look at its great survivor, the Tom Paterson-drawn School Belle -- who continued after the merger with Buster, obviously, outstripped all the other stories in the comic by several years and appeared in its new home until near the end (although much of Belle's appearances in the nineties were reprints).

The above strip is from the 20/04/85 edition of Buster, at which point School Fun was still being presented as a separate pull-out section. Belle's arch-nemesis Grotty Glenda is present and correct at this point, but we were still a while off from the addition of a classic piece of Tom Paterson humour.

Trail of Fear

I have rhapsodised at some length about the superhero-themed Fighting Fantasy book, Appointment with F.E.A.R., on several previous occasions: a loving homage to superhero comics, down to the cover art provided by 2000 AD artist Brian Bolland, the book gives you the choice of four superpowers, namely Super Strength, Psi-Powers, Enhanced Technological Skill and Energy Blast.

The adventure will play out completely differently depending on which superpower you choose, for on each possible playthrough, the clues you need to locate the titular meeting of the Federation of Euro-American Rebels will reside with different supervillains, and the location itself will also be totally different, leading to four distinct endgames.

I've tried to reverse-engineer this enormously complex book without melting my brain, producing something totally incoherent, or just typing out the solution reference-by-reference. And I'm pretty pleased with the solution I've come up with. (Hopefully it leaves a decent amount of mystery, but if you have any ambitions of beating Appointment with F.E.A.R. unaided, it's probably best to stop reading now.)

Davy Gets Dared

All strips in this article are taken from the Internet Archive's uploads of Pow!

Dare-a-Day Davy appeared in every edition of the short-lived Pow!, which notched up 86 issues between January 1967 and September 1968. Pow! was part of a strand of British comics I've not looked at before, but in short it was published by Odhams Press, who started out in book publishing and women's magazines before expanding into children's comics, most of which featured a mix of original comic stories and reprints licensed from American publishers. Pow! was one of Odhams' "Power Comics" -- a range of titles which had superhero stories from Marvel alongside their new content.¹

D-a-D D was drawn by Ken Reid, a legend of British comics who started out drawing Fudge the Elf for the Manchester Evening News, and later originated stories such as Roger the Dodger and Jonah for D. C. Thomson -- the latter of which became particularly notable for Reid's love of the scripts leading him to, in his own words, "get carried away" and cram up to 30 panels onto a single page -- prior to moving over to their rival publishers, where he became perhaps best known for Faceache, which he drew, predominantly for Fleetway's Buster, from 1971 up until his death in 1987.

The scripts were written by Walter Thorburn, but the strip had a unique selling point -- Davy was pathologically incapable of resisting a dare (personifications of his willpower and "bad self" quickly became supporting characters), and readers were to write in and set dares for him (winning £1 if their suggestion was used; the first two strips, an Easter-themed dare in issue #66, and Davy's appearances in the Christmas annuals were the only ones with dares not set by readers). The strips almost invariably ended in Davy's spifflication and him swearing revenge on the reader whose idea had been used. A further point of interactivity was later introduced by depicting the Hyde-esque "inner self" of the reader who sent in that week's dare, which the strip itself claimed caused the rate of submissions to sharply reduce!

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 -- not only their own titles, but several published by rivals such as D. C. Thomson. Nevertheless, the answer to the question in the above paragraph would seem to be a resounding "no": School Fun lasted for just 33 issues and seven months before it went the way of eight previous Fleetway titles (and three future ones) when it merged with Buster.

The very first issue included a fictionalised account of how the comic came to be on its first page, which is apparently not all that far from what really happened (although as per Graham Kibble-White in The Ultimate Book of British Comics, in real life a class in Cannock were asked by Exton what they'd like to see in a comic all about school). I think you can sense a little element of movement away from this over School Fun's short life -- the first issue's tagline "The Happiest Read of Your Life!" did not reappear, and later issues seem to promote things such as, well, children bringing a lion to school more on their front cover, such as the one under discussion today. It's issue #26, just two months from the end, which I've scanned in.