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.

Old Misery appeared once a year in the final Beezer annuals (and was promoted to the traditional "big illustration featuring all the comic's characters interacting with each other" in the very last one).

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I should warn you I've read this next one several times and I'm still not sure what's meant to be going on.

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Neighbourhood Witch was another once-a-year character who only ever appeared in the annuals...

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...As was the relatively grounded Christmas Carol, who did get a shot at having a weekly strip: In early 2005, the Beano ran one of its recurring "Comic Idol" competitions, where several different strips would be given trial runs and readers would vote for which one they wanted to be added to the comic permanently. Carol ran in that competition (slightly reimagined as a girl who tries to celebrate Christmas every day), but didn't win.

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I'm really quite fond of Neighbourhood Witch; it seems like an obvious idea that none of DC Thomson's titles had ever really done before, and she might have worked if given a shot at a weekly run in the Beano or the Dandy in a way most of the other annual-only characters probably wouldn't.

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The final two Beezer annuals were noticeably different to the previous few years. The weird tone was still there in places (a few of the above strips, such as the second Neighbourhood Witch story, are taken from them), but the one-off characters were gone, replaced with new strips resurrecting characters from the Topper who had not been seen since Beezer and Topper ended, or even further back than that; these feel very much like they're aimed at adults who remember the weekly comic from their childhood, in a similar way to the current Dandy annual. Christmas Carol also survived, but in a very different version that feels more like something out of Bunty:

The very last thing I would like to share with you is the Colonel Blink story from the final ever Beezer annual. The Colonel had been running in the Beezer since the late 1950s, and this strip takes on a new dimension with the knowledge that it ended up being the last ever story to feature the character: