Vital Statistics

In the very first Fighting Fantasy book, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, if you reach the battle with the titular Warlock and choose to fight him at his strongest, then he has SKILL 11 STAMINA 18. However, there are multiple ways of approaching this final encounter, including one that significantly weakens him to SKILL 7 STAMINA 12, and one where you can even bypass fighting him entirely. The book was co-authored by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, but Jackson was responsible for writing the last battle.

Ten years later, though, Livingstone was the sole author of the sequel, Return to Firetop Mountain...

...and he remembered to give the resurrected Warlock the same statistics as his strongest possible version from the original book. A nice touch I'd never noticed before now.

My Way or the Driveway

Which is the first episode of The Simpsons to use the short version of the opening sequence, the one which goes from the title in the clouds straight to the driveway?

If you watch the episodes in sequence on DVD, or on Disney+, or on any other format you may care to think of, or look at any online reference list, then that will say it was "Lisa's Substitute" from late in the second season, originally broadcast in the US on 25 April 1991.

That episode was certainly the first one that was always intended to feature that intro. It was not, however, the first time it had been seen by those watching the episodes when they first aired.

Home Video

I usually save pictures from gigs for other parts of the internet, but these photos of Lucy Dacus' acoustic set at the Trinity Centre (matinee show) last Sunday turned out quite nicely, it was a fun show that really cheered me up, and, hey, they break up all the posts on the minutiae of British comics.

Fool If You Think It's Over

This is the April Fool-themed Desperate Dan story which took up the cover and first two inside pages of issue #2837 of the Dandy, dated April 6th, 1996. There are two very strange things about it, and one thing which turned out to be less strange than I first thought.

First of all -- how did the scriptwriter apparently forget about the existence of the month of March? Is this a deliberate mistake tying in with the nature of the story? That is a question I can't definitively answer, but the second very strange thing is: what is Dennis the Menace doing in this story, why does he disappear right after the front cover, and why does he look decidedly out of place with the rest of the strip, as if he was drawn in later? Obviously, yes, the explanation is that it's also April Fool-related, but if we look at the cover story of issue #2803 of the Beano, dated April 6th, 1996, all becomes clear:

A Major Milestone in Ludicrously Niche's History

I discovered this evening that this blog is now cited on the Wikipedia page for adventure gamebooks, and I would like it on record that it wasn't even added by me

Like a Goddamn Vampire

Dracula Dobbs enjoyed a stint of just over four years in Buster, launching in May 1987 as part of a major revamp of the comic which retired several long-serving characters and introduced some new ones. It is notable as making a permanent change to its status quo at one point, and it is an alteration which really tickles me for some reason.

The setup of the strip seems pretty self-explanatory: every night at sundown, Dennis Dobbs turns into a vampire and roams the streets looking for not blood, but food (the term 'food vampire' was later created), usually from his local takeaways and street vendors. No explanation was ever given for this transformation beyond a mention in the first strip that he was 'born at midnight' (implying this has been happening since the day he was born, which if anything seems like an even more interesting idea for a comic strip); in that introductory instalment Dracula Dobbs is already an established terror of his neighbourhood. In the very first strip (which can be seen here) Dennis appears to be fully cognisant of his double life, and it's implied it doesn't happen every single night, but both of these were retconned pretty sharpish; by late '87, only Dennis' parents know his secret, and he transforms every night.

A question which I don't in any way have the answer to: is it possible the strip was originally conceived as a boy who turns into a werewolf, and got changed to a vampire without anything else about the setup being altered? People don't generally only turn into vampires at night, and there does seem to be some insinuation in the first strip that the change only happens at the full moon which might be a hangover from an earlier incarnation.

In any event, DD was drawn by Nigel Edwards; I like Edwards' work, but it seems to be particularly suited to the fantasy-horror setup of this story, and it's a shame he didn't get to do more strips on similar themes. As mentioned earlier, in the issue of Buster dated 22nd September 1990 the strip got a bit of continuity -- unusual in a British humour comic, but maybe not that unusual -- when something changed about the setup. Before reading on, see if you can guess what.

Timeframes III

Sometimes, when I find a pile of old comics in a charity shop, I like to go through them and pull out a few things of interest.

This particular pile of Dandys from the dawn of the 90s was a particularly lucky find, as they clear up a few mysteries from the previous times I did this.

The Life and Times of Milly O'Naire

This is the very first edition of The Toffs and the Toughs, which appeared in IPC/Fleetway's Knockout across its 106 weekly issues from 1971 to 1973. It is one of many, many, many Fleetway strips based around class war, a few more of which we are soon to encounter.

I am not absolutely certain, but I think this very first instalment of TTatT is the only one in which the names of the individual toffs and toughs are ever given -- certainly I've read quite a lot of other strips and none of the characters are named in them. The artist was Reg Parlett, although some sources claim it was Joe McCaffrey; possibly McCaffrey ghosted some strips further down the line.

When Knockout finished in 1973 it merged with Whizzer and Chips. It appears The Toffs and the Toughs was carried forward to Whizzer and Chips incorporating Knockout (as it was known for a little over a year post-merger), but -- like several of the other strips that made the leap forward -- didn't last in its new home for more than a year or so. (Perhaps the most famous survivor of Knockout was Fuss Pot, who survived another merger later on and continued to appear in Fleetway's last comic standing, Buster, until it ended.)

However, the Knockout Christmas annual continued to be issued until 1984, and the toffs and the toughs continued to wage their wars against each other in that; additionally, later in the 70s the characters had a relaunch of sorts in a W&C strip called Smarty's Toffs and Tatty's Toughs (a sample of which can be seen here), which made the two groups supporting characters to the pre-established leads of Smarty Pants and Tatty Ed, although they seem to have disappeared from the pages of Whizzer and Chips for good by the late seventies.

Meanwhile, in 1979 Fleetway launched another new comic, Jackpot, which featured another class war-based strip in all 141 issues over a run of just under three years: Milly O'Naire and Penny Less (drawn by Sid Burgon), recycling the name of the female toff in The Toffs and the Toughs -- most likely unconsciously, although the two Millys do have some interesting similarities in their character designs.

And that is how Fleetway had two concurrent characters with the exact same name, without anybody noticing.

The Disappearing of Dimples

If you have enjoyed my recent writings on Cuddles and Dimples, and trying to pinpoint the exact moment at which the two tyrannical toddlers were retconned from being next-door neighbours to twin brothers, I am sure you will find this, by the excellent regular commentator Zoomy, of interest: a look at a Dandy Comic Library starring a solo Cuddles which was published after the retcon happened but had clearly been written before then, and has a bit of difficulty writing around the absence of Dimples (as well as clearly featuring the set of parents who were eliminated from the strip when the retcon happened).

A few months before that Comic Library was published, there had already been a joint outing for Cuddles and Dimples in the same range, no. 145 "The Holiday Horrors"; they appear to still be neighbours and not siblings in this one, as Cuddles' father (one of the set of vanished adults) is visible on the cover. The fact that the solo Cuddles story, seemingly written even before the two strips were combined, was released a few months after that is a real curiosity, almost as if it was sitting on the shelf for a while.

I did have a look through my Dandy annuals, and can report that by the 1990 book the boys are very clearly siblings (one story is a day at the beach and the other is set on Christmas Day; there can be no doubt these were produced after the retcon happened).

The 1988 annual still features a solo Dimples; when it was published, the neighbours-to-brothers changeover was happening, but the long lead times the annuals had meant that at the time it was being put together the Dandy and Hoot merger would not yet have happened. The Dandy Book 1989, which I don't currently have in my collection, may have featured stories where they were still neighbours, but that would probably be the only other publication at odds with what was happening in the weekly strip.

A New Contender for "Weirdest Thing Found in Charity Shop"

I mean, I'm assuming it's genuine, but if it isn't that would be if anything even odder.

The Twin Dilemma

Precisely eleven days ago, I took a look at one of the shortest-serving British comics on record, Hoot. Of particular interest was Hoot's cover star, the tyrannical toddler Cuddles; when Hoot was merged into the Dandy after just 53 issues, Cuddles was merged with a very similar strip about a tyrannical toddler called Dimples which was already running in the Dandy.

When the combined Cuddles and Dimples story began, the boys were presented as neighbours after Cuddles moved to Dandytown in the first strip. After some period of time, they were retconned into twin brothers and one set of parents vanished without trace.

The Dandy Summer Special 2022, as pictured above, is principally reprints of old material, profiling eleven different stories from across the comic's archive, with a little introduction to each set of repeats giving information about the character's history. The introduction to the section on Cuddles and Dimples states this:

Cuddles and Dimples are very odd brothers. Yes, we all know that they are super-wild and made of mischief, but they're even odder than you'd think, because they weren't brothers to begin with. Cuddles first appeared in The Nutty and Dimples arrived in The Dandy a little later. Cuddles moved to the short-lived comic, The Hoot, before joining The Dandy when the two comics merged. For two weeks the boys were neighbours and on the third week, they had become brothers and one set of parents had disappeared. The strangest thing is that not a single letter was ever received in the office about it. Nobody noticed.

Between publishing that earlier post on Hoot and now, though, I came into possession of a book I'd been after for some time: The Art and History of the Dandy, published to mark the title's 75th anniversary (and not long before it finished completely as a weekly title). And that publication has this to say:

When he left Hoot to join The Dandy, Morris [Heggie, editor of the Dandy from 1986-2006] took one of his favourite characters with him, a naughty tot called 'Cuddles'. The Dandy already had a mischievous toddler named 'Dimples', so Morris decided to have them join forces as next-door neighbours -- it was going to be double trouble.

In 1987 Morris decided the story would work better if Cuddles and Dimples were twins with the same parents. But he got a shock one Monday morning when Barrie Appleby sent in the first new strip with Cuddles' dad and Dimples' mum as the parents! He had no need to panic though, it was just Barrie playing a prank on Morris and it was quickly changed.

The combined Cuddles and Dimples debuted in the first Dandy branded as Dandy and Hoot: issue #2345, dated the 1st November, 1986. Both of these sources cannot be right. The change happened either almost straight away, or after a few months.

Extreme Deadlines

On 25 October 2001, Robot Wars Extreme: The Official Guide was published, tying in with the broadcast of, not unreasonably, Robot Wars Extreme (the first episode was broadcast on BBC Choice on the 8th, and received a terrestrial outing on BBC Two on the 26th).

Of the three Robot Wars publications aside from the Robot Wars Technical Manual, none are particularly great examples of TV tie-in books, but the one for Extreme is probably the strongest. Most notably, it learns from the similar book published for Series 4 by giving each robot two pages for its statistics, so it doesn't, for example, have to reduce a robot's previous battle history to 'Series 3: Overall winner'.

There is one particularly interesting thing about this book, and the series it accompanied. The bulk of filming for Robot Wars Extreme took place between 27 June and 1 July, 2001 at Earl's Court in London, as part of Tomorrow's World Live. However, filming fell very badly behind schedule, and a significant chunk of bouts had to be filmed alongside Series 5 from 26 August to 3 September at Elstree Studios. The book quite clearly had to be at the printers between these two filming blocks, as it is missing some key information about fights, or even whole events, which hadn't yet been filmed when it went to print. The introduction acknowledges this rather well:

All this incredible action guarantees the most extreme robot battles ever seen. Not all the competitors will live to fight another day. A robot that's scheduled to do battle might be annihilated by its archenemy in an earlier event. This makes for mega-exciting, adrenaline-fuelled viewing - but it also means that some of the listings in this book may differ from what you see on the screen.

Give a Hoot

Hoot was, to date, the final attempt by D. C. Thomson to launch a new weekly humour comic for children, and proved to be the shortest-lived of all their titles: it lasted for exactly one year and a total of 53 weekly issues (the first dated 26/10/85, and the last dated 25/10/86) before it was merged into the Dandy. So short was its run that the tagline "Britain's Bubbling New Comic!" was used for all its life. (A few titles by rival publisher Fleetway can claim an even shorter run; the record may be held by Nipper, which managed just 16 issues.)

Hoot is arguably the most obscure of all D. C.'s titles; not just because of its short run, but very few characters survived the merger and, as we'll see, its best-known star joined the Dandy in a rather unusual way. It was not featured in the publisher's reprint titles such as Classics From the Comics for a long time, although they eventually relented near the end of CFtC's run. (Plug was also excluded, but that at least had its wacky concept to make it memorable.)

Although a few new strips were added in the last few weeks (including one that only appeared in the final issue!), the comic's lineup was pretty static for its all-too-brief life, and you can get a pretty good sense of it just from one edition... so here we go. The issue I've scanned in is number 43, hailing from near the end (there would be just ten more instalments after this one).

Chicanery

In Part Eleven of the Doctor Who story The Trial of a Time Lord, original TX 15/11/1986, the evidence in the Doctor's trial is at odds with his own memory, as the footage has been twisted by the prosecutor, the Valeyard, to show him in a worse light than reality:

THE DOCTOR: I didn't do that!

THE INQUISITOR: Stop the Matrix!

THE VALEYARD: Are we to be subject to more chicanery, Sagacity?

In the fifth episode of the third season of Better Call Saul, "Chicanery", original TX 08/05/2017, Jimmy McGill has just provided the courtroom with proof his brother's electromagnetic hypersensitivity is all in his mind, hoping to provoke him into exactly the unhinged rant he ends up delivering:

CHUCK: No, no, no. No no, it's a trick, it has to --

ALLEY: Enough is enough. I submit that Mr. McGill's mental illness is a non-issue. If he were schizophrenic --

CHUCK: Schizo--!

ALLEY: -- it would not take away from the fact that the defendant --

CHUCK: I am not crazy! I am not crazy! I know he swapped those numbers, I knew it was 1216! One after Magna Carta, as if I could ever make such a mistake! Never! Never! I just -- I just couldn't prove it! He -- he covered his tracks, he got that idiot at the copy shop to lie for him --

ALLEY: Mr. McGill, please. You don't have to go into --

CHUCK: You think this is something? You think this is bad, this -- this chicanery? He's done worse! That billboard! Are you telling me that a man just happens to fall like that? No, he orchestrated it! Jimmy! He defecated through a sunroof, and I saved him! And I shouldn't have! I took him into my own firm! What was I thinking? He'll never change. He'll never change! Ever since he was nine, always the same! Couldn't keep his hands out of the cash drawer! "But not our Jimmy! Couldn't be precious Jimmy!" Stealing them blind! And he gets to be a lawyer?! What a sick joke! I should have stopped him when I had the chance! And you, you have to stop him! You --

And that is how Pip and Jane Baker foreshadowed one of the most iconic scenes in one of the most acclaimed dramas of the twenty-first century.

Fun and Games

So, there you have it, should anyone ever ask you then you can answer with confidence from this day on: Garfield's favourite game is this one I found in a charity shop today, which is remarkably similar to Ludo but with the added twist of having certain 'safe' squares which you can't be bumped back to the start from.

Curiously, Dennis the Menace's favourite game is this one I found in a charity shop a few weeks ago, from the same company, which is also remarkably similar to Ludo but with the different twist of an additional token representing Dennis' Dad, which patrols a section of the board and can also send pieces back to the start.

Funny how that works.

32 on E4

It has been a weird, strange, sick, twisted, eerie, godless, evil time to be a British fan of The Simpsons over the last few months, and I want in. The first clue something was up was when we hit mid-November and there was still no sign of Season 32 making its premiere on Channel 4, but nobody could have guessed the multitude of bombshells that would come our way in December. Disney+ would become the exclusive home for new episode premieres in the UK beginning with Season 36. Sky would be cut out of the picture entirely as far as new episodes were concerned, although they retain repeat rights for now. Channel 4 would move their airings of the show to E4 in the New Year, becoming the only place to see new episodes on linear television, beginning with the long-awaited arrival of the 2020-21 season on free-to-air TV.

Any fears that this would be a sideways move or demotion were quelled when we finally got a look at how the show would be scheduled in its new home: episodes were plentiful, with up to seven a day running between 4pm and 9pm, and the newbies were given a prominent slot not dissimilar to how Sky used to schedule them (and, it must be said, a far more convenient one for me): a double-bill every Sunday at 8pm, starting on the 12th January (with 7pm repeats on Thursday and Friday) and running until the Sunday before this post was published. The show also retains a presence on C4 with the daytime repeat block on weekends.

With the new episodes airing later than usual, you might expect them to be more lenient with regards to censorship (Season 31 having already been significantly less cut on C4 compared to the previous few years). Some things I'd warned about in my preview of the season back in September suddenly seemed like they might not be issues at all. (For effect, try reading back the fourth paragraph of that post with "The Eve of the War" playing in the background.) Was that to be the case?

Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey?

Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey? was the ninth title in the Choose Your Own Adventure series, authored by the range's creator Edward Packard and first published in 1981. Its premise is exactly what the title implies: millionaire Harlowe Thrombey (president of Thrombey Plastics Company) is scared that someone is out to murder him and hires you (despite the fact the text heavily implies you're still a teenager), but before he can explain things further, he is fatally poisoned, leaving you to interrogate the four suspects -- his wife Jane, nephew Chartwell, niece Angela, and Angela's fiancé Robert.

Robot Wares

The images in this article are all nicked from eBay listings, I'm afraid to say.

At the height of its powers at the turn of the millennium, Robot Wars was one of the most merchandising-friendly shows on television, and shortly after the third series concluded in early 2000 the BBC duly obliged fans with a set of action figures -- generally referred to as "pullbacks", after the friction motors they used which meant the toys would move forwards on their own when pulled back then released (which would also allow for rotary weapons to really spin as they did so).

These toys came in three distinct waves or phases, but just to be confusing, the first wave was in two halves released over 2000 and 2001. Phase 1A, as we'll refer to it, featured all the House Robots with Hypno-Disc as the sole competitor robot. Each toy came with an accessory, and for these first figures the accessories were based on the popular Pinball trial -- the intention being that when you collected all six toys, you could recreate the entire Pinball arena and have Hypno-Disc run it against all of the House Robots (the accessories were, respectively, a stack of barrels with Dead Metal, a breezeblock wall with Hypno-Disc, the car door with Matilda, tyre targets with Sgt. Bash, the multiball release with Shunt and the see-saw ramp and sphere with Sir Killalot). These figures also featured swappable components not found on the real-life machines -- for example, Killalot's lance could be switched for a hammer. (The spiked back featured on Hypno-Disc from Series 4 onwards was specifically inspired by the interchangeable one included with the toy!)

Who Drew It?

I am going to take it as read here you don't need me to tell you which popular television series the British comic strip Junior Rotter took inspiration from.

Junior appeared in IPC/Fleetway Publications' Whizzer and Chips from around mid-to-late 1980, shortly before the fourth season of Dallas -- which promised to resolve the mystery of "Who Shot J.R.?" to a global audience -- began airing; by this point, UK viewers were able to see episodes air on the BBC just two days after their CBS transmission, and Larry Hagman, firmly established as the show's star, had made a well-publicised visit to England in the break between seasons where even the Queen Mother had asked him if he knew his character's assailant. A story parodying Dallas in a Fleetway title was pretty much inevitable.

In fact, Fleetway's big rival D. C. Thomson trod on very similar ground with Jay R. Hood ("He's Anything But Good!"), who launched in Nutty around the same time -- Nutty being an attempt by D. C. to produce a comic that was more anarchic and off-the-wall than their other publications, and a bit more like Fleetway's titles. D. C. Thomson's strip also featured a girl called Sue Helen as the character's main target, the difference being they were unrelated in the Nutty strip.

Blog Questions Challenge

There's a set of questions about blogging going around which originated here and turned into a chain letter type thing, and the existence of which I was made aware by John J. Hoare the other day.

What the hell.

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

It's something I'd meant to do for years, but the actual impetus was seeing Andrew Ellard asking on Twitter about an adventure gamebook he'd owned as a child, and if anyone remembered who the author was.

The book in question was one of the Horror Classic Gamebooks, The Curse of Frankenstein, and I was also able to let him know there was a second book in the series, Dracula's Castle, which I'd had as a child and still owned. This ended up with me tracking down a copy of the Frankenstein book, to which Andrew replied when I let him know this "Excellent! Please report your progress?" And so, needing a place to stick my review of them, this blog was born.

(At the time it wasn't called Ludicrously Niche, but had some placeholder name. I'm still not entirely thrilled with the name I settled on after a few more posts, but at some point the blog attracted a genuine following and I think I'm stuck with it now even if I could think of a better one. I have a vague idea I might commission an artist to design a logo depicting a literal reading niche at some point. But I haven't yet.)

It's So Bloody Nice!

The comic strip It's a Nice Life, drawn by Reg Parlett, originated in IPC Magazines' (later known as Fleetway Publications) weekly comic Jackpot. It was a mainstay throughout the comic's modest run of just over two and a half years from May 1979 to January 1982, and regularly finished near the top of reader polls during that time. It survived Jackpot's merger into Buster, where it lasted for over six further years, finishing in the issue dated 30th April, 1988; a pretty decent innings for a story that originated in another comic.

Let's acknowledge the elephant in the room. It wasn't (and indeed isn't) unusual for strips in weekly humour comics to parody or take inspiration from current films and TV shows; other strips that ran alongside this story in Jackpot include Angel's Proper Charlies, The Incredible Sulk, The Teeny Sweeney and Jake's 7. But It's a Nice Life, a strip about Stan and Babs Nice attempting to live a sustainable and self-sufficient lifestyle whilst their next door neighbours, snooty social climbers Ollie and Maddie Jones, watch on in bafflement, seems to take things a step away from finding inspiration from or spoofing The Good Life, and a step closer to, well, just being a comic strip version of The Good Life, down to not only the very similar title but also one of the characters having the same name as their equivalent in the series; that said, there were some notable differences, perhaps the biggest being that both families have children in the strip.

It's tempting to imagine that IPC might have had some kind of arrangement with the BBC in this instance; such a thing would not be without precedent, as they ran several strips based on licensed properties or even real people over the years. Perhaps most pertinently, a strip starring the Goodies had run in Jackpot predecessor Cor!! earlier in the seventies, and the short-lived School Fun (33 weekly issues, October 1983 to May 1984) featured both Coronation Street School and Grange Hill Juniors (the latter of which has a copyright notice expressly crediting Phil Redmond). Officially licensed stories continued to feature right up until the end, with a strip based on the animated series Dr. Zitbag's Transylvania Pet Shop being one of the last new stories to appear in Buster near the end of its life from 1994-96.

You might also notice that It's a Nice Life debuted nearly a year after the final episode of The Good Life was broadcast in June 1978, and continued for almost a decade after that. This seems unusual for a strip referencing a specific TV show; similar strips generally began whilst their inspirations were still on screens, and if their inspiration were to drop out of the zeitgeist they tended to be lucky if they lasted a year afterwards.

A thought comes to mind: what about repeats?

Gold Rush

The Dandy and the Beano -- Fifty Golden Years was published in 1987 to mark the golden anniversary of the Dandy (its sister publication the Beano having begun just a year later). It was I believe D. C. Thomson's first publication devoted to reprints of classic material from its weekly comics, and a popular one; demand far outstripped supply, necessitating several republications (the book was offered as a competition prize in weekly editions of the Beano and the Dandy for a while afterwards!), and its success led to the creation of the quarterly reprint comics Best of Beezer and Best of Topper the following year, showcasing classics from two titles which got left out of Fifty Golden Years.

In 1996 those two publications were superseded by the monthly Classics From the Comics, which as you can probably guess featured a variety of strips from across most of D. C. Thomson's humour titles (generally mixing big hitters such as Dennis the Menace and Desperate Dan with a rotating selection of more obscure characters). CFtC had an impressive run of nearly a decade and a half, lasting until the end of 2010. The success of Fifty Golden Years also prompted a follow-up book, More From the First 50 Years, in 1989, and that began a tradition that continues to this day: a new hardback book of classic reprints has been published every year.

(I suspect the fact that by the time I started reading comics, there was a 64-page publication of assorted D. C. Thomson archive material available from my newsagent every month, and no equivalent for other companies such as IPC/Fleetway, is a big part of why I've always gravitated towards it more than any other comic publisher... but we can leave the amateur psychoanalysis for another day.)

The Perils of Cliff Hanger

The above is a typical specimen of Cliff Hanger, the British comics character who enjoyed a four-year stint in Fleetway Publications' Buster from 1983 to 1987 with a strip that was part comic, part adventure gamebook. Trust me, I'm just as surprised as you that it's taken me over eight years to write about this.

When readers first encountered Cliff in June 1983, he was watching his favourite television show, Now Get Out of This (a parody of the genuine gameshow Now Get Out of That) and unwisely proclaimed that if he could get on the show, he bet he could get out of anything -- which two agents of the Mysterious Evil Spies Society, who happened to be overhearing him at the time, took as an invitation to zap him into various traps they wanted to test to see if they were good enough to use against genuine secret agents.

Every week, Cliff would thus get teleported into a situation of catastrophic danger that frequently had some relation to what he was doing when the Evil Spies blasted him with their matter transmitter ray (or any of the other different rays they had access to, leading to the running joke "Don't call me Ray!"), and at the end of his page there would be three options as to what he should do next. The reader should tick one of the boxes and then turn to elsewhere in the issue (usually a boxout included on the letters page) to see if they chose the right option. The possible resolutions to the above strip are as follows:

But He Didn't Get Far

The Beano Super Stars was yet another spin-off of D. C. Thomson's most enduring weekly humour comic, published monthly for a full decade between January 1992 and January 2002. It was very similar to the bite-size Comic Libraries and Fun-Size Beanos, with each issue telling a single long-form story over its 32 pages, but with the obvious added selling points of being in full A4 size, on glossy paper and in glorious technicolour.

They also evolved out of a very similar series that were simply branded as "Beano Specials", which were published quarterly between 1987 and 1991 and alternated between featuring Dennis the Menace and the Bash Street Kids; during this time a few Dandy Specials were also published, featuring Desperate Dan and Bananaman. For most of their existence the Super Stars alternated between Dennis, Roger the Dodger and Minnie the Minx, with the Bash Street Kids also in the mix but only for the first two years; beginning in late 1998, however, only Dennis was featured, and a few issues later the Super Stars rebranded to effectively be Dennis the Menace Monthly.

Not only that, but many of these later issues were direct adaptations of the 1996-98 Dennis the Menace CBBC series; in fact, every episode of that series was adapted into an issue of Super Stars. Having a page count ten times greater than Dennis' strip in the weekly Beano was desirable, obviously, but the wackier, offbeat take on the characters of the TV show fitted in pretty well with what the Super Stars were already doing. Clearly adapting the animated series was a popular idea, as not long after the Dandy ran Bananaman strips which adapted the series of shorts from the eighties, which were enjoying one of their final runs on CBBC at the time. When I eventually relocate the pertinent Dandys from 1999, you can bet that I will have something to say on those, but thanks to Comic Vine having a complete database of covers, it's much easier to work out which issues of Super Stars adapted episodes of the TV show and when.