No Cigar

In late 1979, the Dandy Book 1980 was published in time for the Christmas market. This was the 42nd straight year such a thing had happened, and I don't have much to say about the event itself. But contained within the book is a Desperate Dan story where, put off at the prospect of paying 50 dollars for a box of six Christmas crackers (where he found a shop in the Wild West selling Christmas crackers is another matter), he decides to make his own super-crackers and, to cut a long story short, the punchline of the whole thing involves him smoking a cigar.

We must now leave 1979 behind for 1990, and the publication of the Desperate Dan Book 1991. Dan was actually relatively recently installed as the Dandy's cover star, taking over from Korky the Cat in November 1984, and this was the first of three 90s annuals he received, following one-offs in the 50s and 70s; Dennis the Menace, the Bash Street Kids, Beryl the Peril and Bananaman were also on the hallowed list of DC Thomson characters popular enough to receive their own dedicated annual.

With the exception of the Bananaman ones, which were all-new (as they tied into the TV series and not the comic strip, but that's another kettle of fish), these character-specific annuals featured a smattering of new material but were principally made up of reprints from past years and various sources, recoloured and with the speech bubbles redone to bring them up to date but otherwise unaltered. And for the first latter-day Desperate Dan Book, the aforementioned story from the Dandy Book 1980 was recycled.

But here the book runs into a problem. Smoking has seemingly become a bit more of a taboo, at least in children's comics, in the eleven years since then, and the original version of the story isn't going to be acceptable. The offending object only appears in the last page and a half, and it seems a shame for a perfectly good, Christmas-themed story that will take up twelve pages to be rendered completely unusable when you only have to alter a few panels. So the cigar is going to have to be changed to something else. Something that looks like a cigar (since the last panel in particular really boxes you in), and allows you to come up with an alternative punchline. But what?

(A pause where the jump break goes, where I sincerely invite readers who have followed a direct link here to guess precisely what before reading on. You may even like to post what your guess was in the comments or on Bluesky.)

You've got to give points for effort, but suffice to say I don't think it works. There is, however, one other case of cigar censorship in the book which happily does work, not least because you're not affecting the punchline of a very lengthy story. In a strip originally taken from the Dandy Summer Special 1971 (the picture here comes from its reproduction in 2002's The Beano and The Dandy: Funshine and Laughter, one of DC Thomson's annual books of classic reprints):

And the bowdlerised version from 1990: