Timeframes II

A short while ago, I looked through some old issues of the Dandy I found in a charity shop, and highlighted some things of interest in them. As you may be able to tell from the above image, I'm now back with another selection of DC Thomson comics I found just last week; these range from around 1990 to 1992, and there's Dandys, Beanos and even some issues of Beezer and Topper.

First up, please brace yourself for quite possibly the ultimate example of a story where someone thought of the title first...

Other sources on the Internet describe Wendy's Wicked Stepladder as "short-lived", and it appears it wound up in the same year it debuted (1992); this is its only representative in the sizeable stack of Dandys I have here. (The artist for this strip was Keith Robson, and you may find this interview with him of interest.)

I cannot be certain, but what appears to have happened here is that there was a stock image being used as a placeholder that accidentally got left in. (This issue is dated April 28th, 1990, and the picture comes from Gorbachev's visit to Downing Street one year earlier, in April 1989.)

This is showing off, quite frankly.

An advert for Dennis and Gnasher's first TV outing, which I looked at a few years ago.

One of these reader-submitted jokes was sent in by someone interesting -- Kjartan Poskitt, who already had a profile as a children's television presenter around the time he wrote in, and later went on to write the Murderous Maths books seven years later. He liked this joke so much he reused it in the first MM book:

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A rare example of a splash of colour in an otherwise black-and-white strip. (Just an odd little note, but there's a period where the name of this strip is simply given as Tristan, and "The Vicar's Son" appears to have been hastily removed from the title panel. The result of complaints from actual vicars? Who can tell?)

One of editor Euan Kerr's tabloid-riling publicity stunts as editor sees Dennis take on a bold new look...

Which naturally doesn't last to the end of the strip!

A coupon for Dennis-branded dairy desserts (which came with free stickers).

An advert for the old Simpsons Collection VHSes (from December 1992, with nearly five years still to go before the show reached the BBC).

This is a seemingly quite short-lived redesign of the Dandy's longest-serving character, Korky the Cat; at first they don't update the title panel (and when they do it's to a generic title card), and Korky remains in his usual form on the front cover's masthead, which makes me think this was a temporary deal when usual artist Robert Nixon was unavailable?

I can't be certain, but this strip looks like the work of Gordon Bell, who worked for just about every DC Thomson publication in his time: he was also the regular artist for animal-themed strips such as Pup Parade (mostly associated with the Beano but transferred to the Topper and the Beezer later on), The Wabits in the Beezer, Doodlebug in the Nutty, Harum-Scarum in the short-lived Buzz and Hugh's Zoo in the even shorter-lived Plug, and had also been a ghost artist for Dennis the Menace and The Bash Street Kids when the regular artist was indisposed in the 60s and 70s.

One of the occasional reader surveys shows off all the Beano's incumbent characters (decisions over which strips to retool or drop entirely were informed by these polls); most of the ones in this period are pretty well-known and many are still running in the comic to this day, although Lord Snooty and the short-lived Emlyn the Gremlin seem to have been dropped not long after this survey was run.