Coach and Horses

The second Lone Wolf gamebook, Fire on the Water, is quite heavy on setting up the series' lore, and features an expansive plot where Lone Wolf must travel halfway across the Lastlands to retrieve the fabled Sommerswerd. Perhaps because of this, there are a few moments where it seems to struggle to fit everything into 350 sections.

During one sequence, you travel by coach to Port Bax, with five other passengers -- Ganon and Dorier, two brothers who are knights in the Order of the White Mountain; Halvorc, a merchant; Parsion, a priest; and Viveka, a young adventuress for hire. The journey is interrupted by your discovery that one of the five is an assassin in the pay of the Darklords; after you survive an attempt to serve you a tray of poisoned food during a stopover at a tavern, you storm into the bar where they are all waiting, are asked which one you think is your would-be killer, and do battle with them. (Take a look at the illustration that accompanies this section, and you should be able to spot the vital clue as to who the Darklord agent is even without the context of the rest of the book. Even the picture above might be enough.)

Hot to Go!

Snip and Snap, D. C. Thomson's original duo of postman-pillorying dogs, enjoyed a stint in the Sparky for just shy of two years, from October 1972 to August 1974.

As you may have immediately guessed from other posts I've done on this subject recently, for a brief spell beginning in the summer of 1999, the twosome were dusted off, colourised and reprinted in the Dandy as the Red Hot Chilli Dogs:

Knock on Wood

This is the very first edition of The Haunted Wood, a strip which appeared in Fleetway's Knockout across its two-year run from June 1971 to June 1973. Like some other Fleetway strips of the time, it does not appear to have had a terribly consistent artist; some sources say this first strip was the work of Reg Parlett, other strips were apparently by Sid Burgon, and other editions have artists who cannot be identified. (Another Knockout strip, Beat Your Neighbour, is notorious for being so inconsistent it can be difficult to find two editions which were definitely drawn by the same person, but that's another story.)

To cut to the chase: The Haunted Wood is not renowned for experimentation or breaking its format. Every subsequent edition follows a very familiar set-up: someone takes wood from the Haunted Wood, doesn't listen to the unnamed boy's warnings that this will lead to disaster, and the haunted wood, no matter what form it has been sawed, nailed or whittled into, comes to life and wreaks havoc until it returns to its home.

Red Lines

This is a very early example of Ali's Baba, a strip which appeared in D. C. Thomson's Sparky from January 1970 up until the comic's end in July 1977; it was drawn by Malcolm "Mal" Judge, better known for D. C. stablemates such as The Numskulls and Billy Whizz. This particular strip is taken from the Sparky Book 1971; the Christmas books were usually finished at least a year before publication, and Baba and his guardian angel must have just sneaked in before the deadline to debut in the weekly comic and the accompanying annual in the same year.

In this particular strip, Ali's invisibility to the other characters is represented by making him transparent. Which seems fair enough. However, it appears very unlikely this method was used in any other strip.

For the vast majority of editions (this example is from the 1973 book),¹ they did something more interesting -- having the outline of Ali and his speech balloons appear in colour:

Fight! Fight! Fight!

In March 1983, the very third Fighting Fantasy gamebook, The Forest of Doom, was published in the UK.

I'm aware it's a story I've told several times now, but the range's co-creators, Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, had jointly written the first book in the series, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, which was an instant bestseller. To produce two new books in the same time it had taken to write Warlock, they divided their efforts, and Livingstone's first solo gamebook, Forest, was published the exact same day as Jackson's offering, The Citadel of Chaos. Four more books would be written in this way before Puffin Books realised that if they were going to keep up with public demand, and the copycat series by other publishers that were beginning to crop up, they were going to have to open things up to outside writers.

As you might expect, Livingstone doesn't have everything down pat at this point, and Forest is a bit different to his later books. It's generally a bit easier, especially when it comes to combats. The basic plot is still on the simple side, and an excuse for a classic dungeon crawler (albeit one that takes place outdoors). One of the most notable curiosities is that if you reach the end of the book having failed to find both parts of the fabled Dwarven warhammer you're trying to retrieve from Darkwood Forest, you can loop straight back round to section 1 and continue playing (provided you can pass a Test Your Luck roll to escape some Wild Hill Men); presumably Livingstone took it as read that the player would follow paths not taken on the second time round, but there's still going to be some overlap with areas where the forest apparently magically resets itself between visits.

The Many Faces of Rubidium von Screwtop

One of the newest strips in the weekly Beano, Rubi's Screwtop Science, started life in CBBC's 2016 series Dennis & Gnasher: Unleashed; Rubidium "Rubi" von Screwtop (daughter of Professor von Screwtop, a re-imagining of a mad scientist who originated in Lord Snooty and His Pals all the way back in 1939) was one of several new friends for Dennis created for the TV series who was subsequently transplanted into the weekly comic. She started out as a supporting character in Dennis' own strip, but also made some appearances alongside Dennis' other two best friends from the series, Jemima "JJ" Jones and Pie-Face (a new take on Dennis' friend from the nineties and noughties) in a strip known simply as Rubi, JJ and Pie-Face, then in 2017 she got a strip of her own.

JJ and Pie-Face also had their own stories for a while, but Rubi's has proved by far the most popular, and the other two only seem to appear as supporting characters these days. (Pie-Face's pet potato Paul also briefly had a strip of his own, which is the only strip ever to be headlined by an inanimate object; certainly in D. C. Thomson's history, and quite possibly in any comic, anywhere, ever.) Rubi's Screwtop Science began as a half-page Funsize Funny in early 2017, and was notable as the first strip in the comic's history headlined by a disabled character.

"Happy to Sign This!"

The author was delighted not only to see a copy of this edition again, but also to learn that the entire series is now on YouTube.

Which may be the closest this saga ever gets to a nice, neat ending.

By Gordon's Beard

Recently, I have written a few things about editing on the BBC's 2006-09 version of Robin Hood. These posts feel a bit like they've come from a fansite in a parallel universe where the show survived the departure of nearly all of its original leads, ran for a few more series and left a bigger cultural footprint than it actually did, so I've been quite pleased with the audience they've found.

One of the most famous stories about the series, though, concerns the August 2006 theft of some master tapes. Although the majority of the material was apparently recovered later on, there is some reshot material in the broadcast episodes. But nowhere tells us exactly what.

Here is Little John, as played by Gordon Kennedy, when he makes his first appearance in the final moments of the first episode, "Will You Tolerate This?" (original TX 07/10/06):

Here he is in his first scene of the second episode, "Sheriff Got Your Tongue?" (TX 14/10/06), sporting a beard which looks much the same for most of the episode:

(Episodes 1 & 2 were filmed in the same block, and on the DVD commentary for episode 2 showrunner Dominic Minghella identifies the scene where Marian tries to rescue Robin from the dungeons, half an hour into episode 2, as the very first to be filmed.)

But when we get to the castle scenes later on, Kennedy is visibly close to clean-shaven in the scene where the other outlaws arrive to help Much with his rescue attempt (apart from this shot, he's only seen in wide shots for the rest of this scene, and the lighting also suddenly changes at the point the others arrive, as if it's been put together from two different takes):