Dandy 3000

The publishers at DC Thomson like any excuse for a good old knees-up. Any time one of their comics reached a landmark issue or anniversary, the entire edition would very often be given over to celebrating the milestone, usually in an epic feat involving all the different strips running at the time, and sometimes this would even extend to the anniversaries of specific strips (such as the Beano marking fifty years of Dennis the Menace with one of their occasional special stories that took up the entire issue, or Roger the Dodger's 40th by having him guest star in every single strip in the comic). These special issues would often feature cameo appearances from celebrities ranging from Ken Dodd to Adele down the years, as well as characters and strips from times gone by. The Beano is now the last of their weekly humour titles still going, and it continues this proud tradition to this day, most recently running a special six-part story to mark seventy years of the Bash Street Kids.

In early 1999, the Dandy was rapidly closing in on a perfect excuse for one of these parties in print -- its 3000th issue. But less than eighteen months beforehand, the comic had marked its 60th anniversary with arguably DC Thomson's most elaborate celebration of all; cover star Desperate Dan had gone on a six-week story arc where he struck oil and retired from the comic to enjoy his newfound wealth (and the company of the Spice Girls), only to be persuaded to return when he saw the publishers about to go bust without him. Having generated a massive amount of publicity, the storyline was concluded in the anniversary issue itself, which was twice the usual page count and printed on what was, to my mind, slightly nicer paper than usual.

Not only was that still pretty fresh in the memory, but just a few weeks away was a nonstandard celebration: With its 3007th issue, the Dandy would become the longest-running comic in the world, surpassing the 3006 issues of Comic Cuts that were published between 1890 and 1953. Perhaps because of all this, for the big three-treble-zero the comic decided to go in a very different direction to the traditional star-studded big bash, seeking inspiration from an unlikely but highly topical source: Y2K.

Yes, following a few weeks of foreshadowing on the front cover, when issue 3000 hit the shelves in May the comic was hit by the Dandy Bug, which rampaged through the issue bringing doom and despair to all the regular characters. I have scanned in this entirely unique edition beneath the jump cut (barring a few pages which are just adverts), with sometimes not particularly relevant commentary. (All pages can be clicked on for larger versions.)

The Bug itself is a great design -- just the right blend between creepy and cartoony.

Dandytown News was a regular feature where readers sent in spoof news articles, and you got a notebook, pen and 'reporter card' if your story was used. These sorts of features tended to be suspended in special issues, and this is a rare example of one actually contributing to an overarching theme.

A tangent I couldn't really find a place for but which the format of this post makes it remarkably easy to drop in randomly: The Millennium Bug was also used as inspiration on the very last page (and indeed the very last panel) of the final issue of Buster, the last of IPC/Fleetway's weekly humour titles; the release date of that issue straddled the end of 1999 and the beginning of 2000.

Blinkenstein was not unique to this issue; he also appeared in two of the digest-sized Fun-Size Dandys. (Issue #32 is undated on Comic Vine but I believe would have been a few months before this.)

Owen Goal was a relative newcomer to the comic, having been running for slightly more than a year... but for much of its first year, the strip was in fact decade-plus old reprints of Cannonball Kid from the defunct Nutty, now renamed, colourised and with the speech bubbles redone. Near the end of 1998 they started running new strips drawn by Nigel Parkinson (the original artist, Rob Lee, would not have been available as he had moved over to animation, and Parkinson's take on the characters was noticeably different). Given Owen was thus technically the newest character, it's interesting we get such a totally format-breaking strip for his contribution.

I've scanned this in for the sake of completeness, but these spoof film posters were a regular feature of the comic at the time and were unaffected by the bug.

P5 (as it usually was) was also pretty new, having started the previous year, but it essentially replaced First Class, a very similar story from the same artist that had started in 1993 -- the differences being P5 had a slightly larger and more diverse cast (increased when a character of Asian descent, Kim, was added not long after), with more fleshed-out personalities. (If it's not apparent, the story was usually about a class of unruly schoolchildren and their teacher, and the strip has gone haywire by having them all turn into adults. And yes, Noel and Liam were indeed named after the Gallaghers.)

P5 ended in 2002, but was also reprinted as Class Act from 2006 to 2007 -- whilst reprinting old stories with a new title was a regular tactic, doing so at a point when children reading the comic might still remember the characters from first time round was a little odd!

Even given such an abstract concept to include, Growing Paynes remains the most grounded story in the comic.

Whilst Winker Watson was regularly running stories that would not have been out of place in boys' weeklies well into the noughties, flights of fancy such as this weren't unusual. Remind me to upload the story where he strands Mr. Creep on the Moon at some point. (This is presumably meant to be the bug's origin story, and for reasons we'll see later, the final panel of the above Growing Paynes strip might have been meant to come last chronologically? It feels like the brief here was more complex and co-ordinated than asking each writer to come up with a story where the strip went 'wrong' somehow.)

A nice throwback to the adventure stories the comic used to run; perhaps added because it was felt proceedings needed a little more celebration, as it's the only non-regular strip in this issue.

This is a thoroughly nonstandard layout for Duane, who usually had two pages and far more panels.

Now, here's an interesting one -- this looks very strongly like the Korky the Cat strip had been completed before the idea for the milestone celebration was settled upon, there was no time to produce a new one, and they had to find a way of forcing a 'normal' strip into the Dandy Bug narrative. The fix they settle on isn't a bad idea (in fact it seems like the only workable idea), but is let down by the joke being entirely visual. In other issues with a recurring element across all the different strips, it wasn't unusual for some of them to seemingly not get the memo -- the 60th anniversary Dandy has a few strips that aren't related to the birthday at all apart from a special title panel -- but presumably it would be too noticeable here.

As to why Korky was the odd cat out? It seems relevant that Robert Nixon, who had been the regular artist for Korky since 1986, had left the comic at the beginning of the year, and the strip rotated between several different artists in a very short period of time before settling on a permanent replacement. (Nixon had also been the previous artist for Beryl the Peril, but that seemed to settle on Karl Dixon as a replacement without any musical chairs.)

The Dandytown News update seems like a quick way of bringing the concept back if the writers came up with any further ideas for strips gone haywire; I don't know if they ever did but haven't had a thorough look at the issues published after this one yet. (The translated version of the Korky strip would appear to back up my earlier theory.)

It feels like this page and the previous one should have been the other way round to me (the news update seems like it should come right before the final strip and there's the oddity of the translated Korky strip appearing directly opposite the original), but perhaps their hand was forced by the Sunny Delight advert which had to run on every other page.

If you were wondering where Bananaman is in all this: the very, very short version is that artist John Geering worked on a large number of strips, both for DC Thomson and other publications, and that workload probably accounts for several pauses his best-known character took across the nineties. One such pause seems to have coincided with this issue, but has a very sad ending: Bananaman returned to the comic not long after, but a few weeks later, Geering suddenly died. The full story is... a bit more complex. Something for another day.

Good luck winning that T-shirt, kids!