Ludicrously Niche

Sunday, 15 February 2026

Fruitcake

Well, I've managed to get a Sabrina Carpenter reference into the title of a post about British humour comics from the 1980s, what more do you want?

Ahem. Nutty -- often described as D. C. Thomson's attempt to create a more anarchic comic, more like some of those published by rivals Fleetway -- racked up a pretty respectable run of 292 issues over five and a half years, and birthed one of D. C.'s most iconic characters of all time. In The Ultimate Book of British Comics, Graham Kibble-White dubs it "arguably the best-ever contender for becoming that elusive third 'big' humour comic", alongside the Beano and the Dandy. Even if its other characters were somewhat overshadowed by its cover star, many of them lasted for quite a while after the comic merged with the Dandy in September 1985, and of course Bananaman himself survived not only the closure of his original home, but also that of the Dandy in 2012, becoming the only strip from that comic to move to the Beano. (If the characters need to visit another town, or Beanotown United are playing a football game, then very often the scriptwriters will go for "Nuttytown".)

The issue we'll be dissecting today is number #49, hailing from January 1981; should it prove possible, it'll probably be worth scanning in one of the final issues to compare at some point down the line, but we are at the mercy of the big pile of comics in the local charity shop for that. But here we go.

The Simplest Puzzle in Gamebook History

Lone Wolf #9, The Cauldron of Fear, there.

Sunday, 8 February 2026

Like a Circle in a Spiral

In the second book of Steve Jackson's Sorcery!, Kharé -- Cityport of Traps, you can find a wishing well in the city centre. As you do.

A little further up the road, you come to a well. A rope hangs down from a pulley deep into the well. You walk up to it and, as you approach, you can hear a woman's voice singing. It seems to be coming from the well itself and to be directed at you:

'My dear, your fortune can be told

If you will cross my palm with gold.'

Do you wish to toss a Gold Piece into the well? If so, turn to 217. If you'd rather not bother, continue by turning to 319.

If one does chuck in a Gold Piece, then they will be met with this:

You throw in your coin and wait for several seconds before you hear it plop into water at the bottom. The well is evidently very deep. The voice sings out again:

'If you'll toss one more coin to me

Two wishes will I grant for thee.'

Do you want to throw in another coin? If so, turn to 152. If not, you may continue (turn to 319).

As you may have already guessed, you will never get anything of use from the well: throwing in a second coin, and then another, and then another, will send you to further sections on very similar themes, and eventually loop you back to 152. This can get the player to waste four Gold Pieces (or even more if they don't keep track of section numbers carefully), but is otherwise harmless. But this is an early prototype for something else.

Sugar and Spice

In January 1985 (the 29th, if you want to be really specific), the recently appointed editor of the Beano, Euan Kerr, and his sub-editor Alan Digby, had an idea for a new character -- a little girl, aged about 3 or 4, who wanted to be as tough as Dennis the Menace or Minnie the Minx, but didn’t have the strength or maturity to carry it off. To draw this strip, they enlisted the services of Robert Nixon -- recently returned to D. C. Thomson after over a decade working for Fleetway/IPC, at Kerr's request.

Nixon had started out at D. C. in 1964, most notably drawing Roger the Dodger amongst several other characters, but in 1972 he departed to work for rival publishers Fleetway, where he specialised in comedy-horror stories such as Frankie Stein, Hire a Horror and Jaws parody Gums, but also lighter fare including Kid King and Six Million Dollar Man spoof The 12 ^1/2p Buytonic Boy. When Kerr first became Beano editor in late 1984, he contacted Nixon about the possibility of returning to some of his old D. C. stories whilst also continuing to work for Fleetway -- an arrangement which became very familiar over the next decade as the amount of new material published by Fleetway shrank, but did not appeal to Nixon.

A week after he turned Kerr down, though, Nixon learned he was to be moved off of several of his current Fleetway strips,¹ and -- perhaps guessing what the next few years would bring for the publisher -- decided to return to D. C. (although he continued to draw for Fleetway until early 1986), where he would resume drawing Roger the Dodger and also take over big hitters such as Korky the Cat and Beryl the Peril, but this new character would be the first of several he originated on his second time round, by far the best-loved,² and Nixon's personal favourite of all the stories he drew for D. C.

Nixon’s early designs for the character (modelled on Alan Digby’s daughter Jane) went down a storm, and just over three months after he was first sent the details of what she should look like, Ivy the Terrible made her debut in the 4th May, 1985 issue of the comic.

This scan rescued, via the Internet Archive, from the sadly now-defunct old Beano website.

Numbers Game

The Crown of Kings is the fourth and final book of Steve Jackson's Sorcery!, Jackson's four-volume epic, arguably the pinnacle of the solo gamebook format, and Jackson really goes to town on making it as difficult as possible. One of the author's favourite tricks for cheat-proofing his books is reference modifiers -- at certain sections, there will be a nonstandard action you can take if you have a certain item or piece of knowledge by modifying the number of the section you are on to discover a secret, otherwise unknowable section. Players not in possession of this will not have a clue the option is even there.

Jackson had been developing this idea across his Fighting Fantasy books House of Hell and Appointment with F.E.A.R., as well as the second and third Sorcery! books, but The Crown of Kings is where he really perfects the idea, and the book is stuffed with them. But there are three I want to highlight in particular.

There is a special bonus if you killed all of the titular tuataras in the preceding book, The Seven Serpents. As the Serpents were bringing the Archmage of Mampang a message warning him about you, laying waste to all of them means no word of your mission has reached the Fortress and you have the element of surprise on your side.

This is deployed with the following mechanic: if you ever reach a reference where a character refers to you as 'the Analander', you should deduct 40 from the number of that section and turn to the new number for an alternate version of the encounter where you are not recognised. This is largely very cleverly realised; I particularly enjoy one scenario where you accidentally give the game away by telling someone where you come from and have to stop using the modifier. (This is even more devious than it first appears: there is a secret order of rogue elements elsewhere in the Fortress whom it is a good idea to tell you are from Analand.) Several encounters in the book can be simplified or bypassed entirely in this way, although there is one rather curious part where crucial information you need to win the game can only be found in a way that makes logical sense if you have the not-recognised bonus.

After you have gone so far in the adventure, you meet a character that calls you 'the Analander', and duly subtract 40 from the current section's number...

Every Dog...

In the issue of the Beano dated 13th March 1999, a new story debuted, Dog's Breakfast TV. Chronicling the goings-on at a breakfast TV show staffed by anthropomorphic dogs, it would prove to be one of the shortest-serving strips in the comic's history; just eleven editions appeared in total, over three months (there were three issues near the end of the run where it didn't appear).

I'm not sure why this strip stuck in my mind as strongly as it has. Maybe it sparked my interest in the nuts and bolts of television production. Maybe it's because it looked like nothing else in the comic -- it was the one and only D. C. Thomson commission for artist Stephen Baskerville. Maybe it's the sense that someone came up with the name first and worked backwards from there. Maybe it's because someone had the foresight to realise the joke wasn't going to last much longer and retired it so promptly. Maybe I just find anthropomorphic dogs really funny.

Whatever the reason, it's a strip I fondly remember despite its brief tenure (and, as we'll see, a couple of other reasons), and its short run means I can scan in and post every single edition of DBTV there ever was. For the most part, enjoy.

Sweet Potato

I've been looking for this for a while. The fabled repeat of The Simpsons episode "Two Cars in Every Garage, Three Eyes on Every Fish" from 25 June 1992, which switched out the usual blackboard gag in the opening sequence for "'Potato' not 'potatoe'", in reference to Vice President Dan Quayle.

And, thanks to commentor Bax for hooking me up with a copy of that repeat -- for which I am immensely grateful -- we can enjoy a joke unseen for over 33 years.

Sunday, 11 January 2026

What in the Very World?

According to BBC Genome, on 13 August 1998 at 11pm, the very first of what would be many, many pun-heavy Radio 4 series starring Milton Jones began airing, with the opening episode of The Very World of Milton Jones.

13 August 1998, 23:00 on BBC Radio 4 FM