Break Up, Break Free, Break Through, Break Down

‘Let the trial commence!’ commands a mighty voice, filling the hall with clamouring echoes. As one, the robed spectators rise from their seats as a shaft of light pours down upon the pinnacle, illuminating the outline of a man, white-haired and gaunt, seated on a massive throne of solid, gleaming gold. Suspended in the air above his head are two crystals: one as clear as a polished diamond; the other as black as the grave. A crackling arc of energy travels between the two and its flickering blue light sheds a ghostly shadow on the face of the seated lord.

‘Intruder,’ he says, his voice soft yet chilling, ‘you have come to Kazan-Oud with murder in your heart. Have not the cowards of Elzian promised to reward you for my destruction?’

A drone of dissent surges from the crowded tiers, drowning any answer that you offer in your defence. The lord rises slowly from the throne and turns to his baying minions, his hands outstretched as if to receive the adulation. As their ghastly drone grows louder, your eye is drawn to the clear crystal that hovers above the throne. A golden light now glows at its core. In a flash of understanding you recognize the object of your quest: here is the Lorestone of Herdos.

‘Your verdict, my children?’ cries the wild-eyed man, his voice now harsh and angry.

‘Guilty, Lord Zahda,’ the crowd howls in reply.

‘The sentence?’ retorts their master.

‘The maze!’ they scream. ‘The maze!’

So it comes to be in the seventh Lone Wolf book, Castle Death, that Lone Wolf is thrown into the Maze of Zahda. The maze cannot be escaped by playing it 'fairly', and attempting to do so will only result in Lone Wolf's death... something the player should probably guess from the kangaroo court that gets them thrown in there in the first place.

A Re-Run of the Comedy Series Set in Space

On the 7th January 1994, the very first episode of Red Dwarf, "The End", was repeated on BBC Two -- the first time it had been broadcast since its premiere on the 15th February 1988, something that has been attributed to Rob Grant and Doug Naylor's embarrassment over the quality of that series compared to what was to follow.

This run would not only continue past the first series, it would comprise 35 of the then 36 episodes, "Psirens" being skipped on account of Craig Charles' legal situation at the time; barring a couple of breaks for sports coverage, the show was transmitted weekly until the 28th October 1994 and the repeat of "Out of Time". So epic in scope was this all-encompassing repeat season that it was nicknamed "From Here to Entirety", although the name does not appear to ever have been used in listings magazines or onscreen.

Oh, you want to be more specific than 'a couple of breaks'? There was a break on 25/02 between "Kryten and "Better than Life" for Winter Olympics coverage; a two-week break between the broadcast of "Marooned" on 15/04 and "Polymorph" on 06/05 for snooker; the jumbled repeat order of Series IV was interrupted on 17/06 and 24/06 for World Cup fixtures, including the opening match of the whole tournament, and again on 15/07 for the first night of the BBC Proms; and the similarly-scrambled run of Series V also took a break on 19/08 for Proms coverage, and on 09/09 for athletics coverage.

Papers, Please

After the defeat of Vashna, the Sommerswerd had been bestowed upon the allies of Durenor as a mark of trust and allegiance that exists between the two kingdoms. In return, King Alin of Durenor gave Sommerlund a magnificent golden ring bearing the royal arms of Durenor. This ring is known as the Seal of Hammerdal. At that time, King Alin vowed that if ever the shadow of the west should rise again to threaten Sommerlund, Durenor would come to the aid of her ally.

The King has given you the Seal of Hammerdal. Your quest is to travel to Durenor to fetch the Sommerswerd back. But meanwhile the enemy have broken through the outer defences to the capital and are preparing to besiege the city wall. As Captain D’Val of the King’s Guard leads you to the Royal Armoury to equip you for your mission, the King’s words keep coming back to you:

‘Forty days, Lone Wolf. We have strength to stand against them for only forty days.’

So goes the introduction to the second Lone Wolf gamebook, Fire on the Water. If you lose the Seal of Hammerdal on your journey to Durenor -- which can be accomplished either by having it stolen from you and subsequently failing to recover it, or selling it to a pawnbroker -- then the entire book becomes unwinnable. But perhaps not in the way you might expect.

Oh Calamity

In 1986, the editor of the Beano, Euan Kerr, had an idea for a new story for his comic. It was going to star a character who was, quite simply, the unluckiest boy in the world. This character was dubbed Calamity James, an artist was assigned to him, and a test page was produced. That page was reproduced in the 2008 book The Official History of the Beano:

Which may not have been what you were expecting.

Originally assigned artist Henry Davies' take on the character had a serious problem: its tone was felt to be depressing, rather than darkly funny. Several other artists in the D. C. Thomson office had a go after it was decided Davies' work would not be used,¹ but they were also unable to thread the needle, and the character was on the verge of being scrapped when someone decided to let Tom Paterson have a go.

Paterson was a very new hire to D. C. who had only started that year -- in fact James would be his first strip for one of their titles -- but he had been drawing comics for rival publisher Fleetway since 1973, aged just nineteen (perhaps most famously drawing the ultimate enfant terrible Sweeny Toddler for most of his tenure); he was one of several Fleetway artists to start working for D. C. in the late eighties as Fleetway's comics empire started to dissipate. Paterson managed to find the tone they had been going for, and James duly debuted in the 01/11/86 edition of the Beano:

Nip and Tuck

At the end of January 1987, Fleetway Publications launched what would be their last new humour anthology comic for children. Apart from being published on a fortnightly schedule, Nipper had a gimmick of being printed in A5 size, compared to the A4 used by every other comic at that point (allowing it to claim it contained 48 pages), and it continued this theme by having most of its strips feature protagonists younger than those of other titles.

Just six issues in, the 'pint-sized' ploy was dropped, and henceforth the comic would be printed in A4 size. Another ten editions on, and it would all be over -- the sixteenth and final issue was on newsstands before August was out, after which it met the fate of so many of its stablemates when it merged into Buster. Although it managed to squeeze in a Summer Special and even a Christmas annual, Nipper is the ultimate mayfly of its genre's short-lived titles. This is perhaps best summed up by the fact that there were nineteen issues of Buster branded as Buster and Nipper -- three more than Nipper itself.

Beyond being stuck with the dubious honours of being the final and shortest-lived Fleetway title of its kind, did Nipper retain any kind of legacy? It's time to scan in an entire issue and find out.

36 on E4

06/03/26 update: If you viewed this post before that date, please check the end of the cuts section for a fairly important addendum!

Cast your mind back, if you will, to December 2024. In one fateful press release, Channel 4 destroyed all we had known about British broadcasts of The Simpsons for the last few decades. Sky would no longer be the home for new episodes of Our Favourite Family, for Season 36 would be the first season to debut exclusively on Disney+; henceforth, Sky would only carry repeats. Channel 4 would move their broadcasts of the show to E4 in January, becoming the only place to see new episodes on linear television.

And so it came to be that on 28 December 2025, Season 36 became the first season to make its linear debut in the UK on E4, a little over nine months after it started being added to Disney+ on a weekly basis (and almost exactly fifteen months since the season started on FOX). Obviously a longer delay between the episodes' premieres in the US and Sky than we were accustomed to, but -- disregarding BBC Two's special dispensation to air "The Trouble With Trillions" on Cuba Night back in 1999 -- a record for an episode making its debut on free-to-air television in the UK.

As with their premiere of Season 32 at the start of last year, E4 ran the episodes in double-bills on Sunday nights at 8pm. In week 4, "Treehouse of Horror Presents: Simpsons Wicked This Way Comes" and "Convenience Airways" were pushed to 5:30pm by live sports coverage.

As we might have expected, this run did not include the four Disney+-exclusive episodes (the double-length "O C'mon All Ye Faithful", "The Past and the Furious" and "Yellow Planet") -- it seems pretty certain that these, and future Mouse-trapped instalments, will indeed remain exclusive to the platform. With S36 running to just 18 episodes that premiered 'normally', this meant the entire run was over and done with in just nine weeks.

But enough of all this. What about the cuts?

Say My Name

When I started this blog in December 2016, there wasn't really a huge amount of planning involved. I needed to write something about (of course) an adventure gamebook from the 1980s in reply to someone, Blogger was there, for the first few days of its life it had some placeholder name I can no longer remember. Then about a week or so later I wrote another 'proper' post and it took on its current name, chosen because it seemed amusingly self-deprecatory,¹ and without any expectation that it would ever find any kind of widespread audience.

I've mentioned this before, but -- even without the fact that I was proven wrong and, after a bit of time working out exactly what I wanted it to be, the blog has evolved into something with a bit of a following -- I've never been hugely thrilled with the name I ended up with. I've considered having some artwork depicting a reading niche commissioned before. I think maybe it's too late to change it altogether now.

Except writing about comics has made me reconsider how appropriate the name is at all. When I am writing about Dennis the Menace, Desperate Dan, The Numskulls, Bananaman or Ivor Lott and Tony Broke, am I not writing about the history of characters who have made a significant cultural impact? Surely that's something with definite mainstream appeal? Is the name of the blog actively handicapping it? Am I not even doing a disservice to the people involved in the making of the thing I'm writing about?

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.