Timeframes

If you go into enough charity shops (thrift stores or opportunity shops to my non-British audience), then sooner or later you will find a box of old children's humour comics. They'll generally range in date from the 70s to the 90s, and mostly be old Beanos and Dandys, those being by some distance the longest-lived titles, with the occasional wildcard -- a Beezer, a Topper, maybe a Fleetway title such as Whizzer and Chips or Buster. It's just the way of the world.

Whilst I am always grateful for what I can find in these boxes, I do find more of interest when the comics are from the early nineties, give or take a few years each way. These are issues I was a bit too young (or a bit too not born yet) to have read at the time, but they're very similar to the ones I did read as a child, with many of the same characters and much the same tone. These are also the earliest issues to feature adverts, which makes them of even greater value as a look into the past.

Here, then, is what I got from the above stack of a dozen more-or-less consecutive Dandys from 1991 I picked up a few weeks ago.

A promo for three new strips starting in the following issue (one of which, Winker Watson, was an old strip returning after a hiatus -- original artist Eric Roberts had died in 1982, the strip had been in reruns for a few years after that and this marked the debut of new strips with a new artist). The excitement of new characters is something almost totally unknown to the current generation, with even the Beano being pretty static these days.

This is Mutt and Moggy, the nineties incarnation of a story that appeared in various guises across various DC Thomson publications over the years -- the twosome started life as Puss 'n' Boots in the Sparky in the 1960s, moved over to the Topper when Sparky was folded into it in the late 70s, then had four or five different runs in the Dandy across the nineties and noughties (a very similar concept, Meebo and Zuky, has also run in the Beano more recently) -- I believe this is the first such spell, running under the new name of Mutt and Moggy (they reverted to the original title in the noughties), which was the last to be drawn by the original artist John Geering.

Here we have one of the lesser-known strips, The Laughing Planet with David Chattenborough, which we find in somewhat unusual circumstances -- a strip not in the issues I have here ended in David's death, and he was portrayed as an angel continuing his wildlife programme from Heaven for several weeks thereafter. Whilst many strips have more continuity and serialisation than you might think, this is a somewhat odd choice, especially when you consider how they get around it a few weeks later...

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A surprisingly highbrow joke, there.

A very specific pop-culture reference, using the actual Neighbours and its theme song and not a parody. (The strip also hinges on the fact that at the time Neighbours was shown at lunchtime and repeated in the early evening, a decision made by Michael Grade because his daughter complained about not being able to see the earlier showing at school.)

An advert for the very first issue of the merged Mandy & Judy, which would run for six years.

Bananaman risks a call from DC Comics' lawyer.

Many of the advertisers had the bright idea of running the adverts as faux-comics. Whilst these were generally quite obviously not written by professional comic writers, the SodaStream Team are one of the stronger efforts, and had several different adventures over the months and years.

This, on the other hand, is an utterly terrible advert for the bubblegum-flavoured soda Captain Bubble, which attempts to force the pictures on the bottles' labels into a coherent narrative.

Was this how computer dating worked even in 1991? (This is from near the end of the run of The Jocks and the Geordies, as the artist had retired around this time and it became sporadic before disappearing for good, and by this point its title had been shortened to Jocks and Geordies.)

A WHSmith advert promoting summer reading gives us a look at what books were hot holiday reads at the time, including the latest attempt to make the Famous Five appeal to the current generation, one of the first American monthly mass-market paperback series to hit the UK, The Baby-Sitters' Club (giving us a look at its appalling British cover art, of which you can see more here), Dick King-Smith and Terry Pratchett.

A reader suggests casting for the Dandy Movie.

The comic is quite close to the one I remember, but some older strips with more of an emphasis on physical violence over slapstick are still around, some big hitters such as Blinky and Beryl the Peril (which it would inherit from Beezer and Topper two years later) are missing, and the tone in general is recognisably that of the previous millennium. Individual strips are evolving too -- Bananaman was more serialised in the eighties, with stories lasting over several weeks, but by this point many of his stories are self-contained with the occasional two-parter when the writer wants to wring a few more jokes out of this week's villain.