Best of 2024

Well, here we are at the end of an incredibly productive year where, barring two short holiday-related rests, I kept this very stupid blog more or less continuously updated throughout, produced some personal favourite pieces, even made a few steps towards professionalism with some tweaks such as sorting out the post tags and adding a proper(ish) "About" page, and now have a bumper selection of links to all the at-least-readable things I wrote across 2024 to share with you.

Much of the year's writing came from the perennial subject of "adventure gamebooks from the 1980s", particularly Fighting Fantasy. Right at the start of the year came a little trilogy of articles looking at the 'demo' versions of some of the books that were first published in Warlock magazine and how they compare to the full-length versions of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, House of Hell and Caverns of the Snow Witch -- a set of pieces which remain quite probably my favourite things I've ever written.

They also inspired some shorter pieces that took a particular interest in anti-cheating traps built into the books, spotlighting Starship Traveller, The Citadel of Chaos, Curse of the Mummy, Kharé -- Cityport of Traps, Masks of Mayhem and The Crimson Tide, as well as an article extensively covering how various different entries in the series included a "time" mechanic, and a comparison of Ian Livingstone's riffing on Mad Max with that of Joe Dever. For more miscellaneous gamebook writing, I also looked at the second of two somewhat lacking adaptations of The Famous Five to the format, a Choose Your Own Adventure book with a surprisingly metaphysical ending and, perhaps a little more tenuously, The Crystal Maze tie-in books.

Last of the Beezers

In September 1990, the Beezer published its 1809th and final weekly issue, ending a run of nearly 35 years that made it one of Britain's longest-running comics. This was the end of the Beezer as a weekly comic in its own right, but not the end of the story overall: it merged with DC Thomson stablemate the Topper to form Beezer and Topper, which lasted for another three years. B&T was an unusual case of a Comics Merger where both titles were given equal billing in what was considered a separate publication, with the issue numbering starting back at no. 1. During the time it was in print, both the Beezer and Topper continued to have separate Summer Specials and Christmas annuals issued; when B&T ended, the Topper books and specials also stopped immediately (the very last Topper publication to feature new material being the Topper Book 1994, published just days after the final issue of Beezer and Topper hit newsstands).

The Beezer, however, continued to exist in the form of Summer Specials and Christmas books for a whole nine years after that. It wasn't odd for a defunct comic to continue to publish an annual for a while after it ended, but this was an unusually long run, and I believe at the time it might have been the longest ever, certainly for a DC Thomson title -- one or two titles by their big rival Fleetway managed longer runs, but the way different Fleetway titles effectively all merged into each other over the years can make their relationships a bit tricky to disentangle, and various characters from defunct comics were still appearing on a weekly basis in others for many years afterwards. (The Beezer could have lasted even longer in this way -- the Beezer Annual 2003 was the last, but some work had been done on a 2004 annual before DC Thomson decided to cancel it, with the stories that had been prepared being recycled or refitted for use in their surviving titles.)

An interesting thing about these final Beezer annuals is that they had very little editorial oversight, and the writers and artists seem to have been mostly left to their own devices. This resulted in some strange and surreal strips which frequently featured one-off characters who would not have worked if they'd gone on any longer.

Here, then, is a selection of some of the oddest DC Thomson comics ever to make it to print, taken from the last years of the Beezer.

Dystopian Fiction/Double Feature

In 1985, the thirteenth Fighting Fantasy gamebook, Freeway Fighter, was published, the seventh entry in the range to be written by its co-creator Ian Livingstone. The book is a significant departure from the swords-and-sorcery Livingstone (and the range in general) is usually associated with, taking place in a post-apocalyptic America which clearly takes its cues from Mad Max.

Between 1988 and 1989, the four gamebooks in the Freeway Warrior series by Joe Dever were published; Highway Holocaust (published as Freeway Warrior 1 in the US), Slaughter Mountain Run (published as Mountain Run in the US), The Omega Zone and California Countdown. The series is a significant departure from the swords-and-sorcery Dever is usually associated with in his better known Lone Wolf series, taking place in a post-apocalyptic America which clearly takes its cues from Mad Max.