Statistically Speaking

In the year 1982, Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone devised the basic combat system for the very first Fighting Fantasy adventure gamebook, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. This system would require the player to keep track of three statistics which measured their combat SKILL, STAMINA, and LUCK -- whilst the 'luck' statistic could be used to decrease the stamina the player lost, or increase the damage done to their enemies, it would also be used in situations outside combat where the player had to Test their Luck to see if the gods of fate were smiling on them or not.

As the range went on, and was opened up to other authors once it became apparent new titles were needed faster than Jackson and Livingstone could possibly hope to write them by themselves, the basic system held, but many writers wanted to add more to it, and a common way of innovating with the format was an extra statistic which measured something unique to the book. The most common of these was a stat that kept track of the passage of time, which has appeared in around a fifth of the books published to date. But here is a look at some of the other things various authors in the franchise have required the player to keep a record of.

Ghost Light

Last month, I was investigating Number 13 -- the British comics answer to The Munsters and The Addams Family, which was drawn by John Geering and ran in the Beano on an increasingly irregular basis from 1987 to 2002. Going back and reading that is... pretty much vital to this follow-up. But the short version is that, as per the sometimes frustrating publication The Official History of the Beano, the strip appeared just three times after 1997, and the book only gives a date for the last of these; namely the 14th December 2002. This is particularly notable because that happened to be some three and a half years after John Geering died.

I had that very last strip, but didn't even know when the other two ran, and wasn't able to make a more informed guess until I'd seen them. Well, we're halfway there, because I've located one of them in the issue of the Beano dated 19th June, 1999:

Take Me Back

Some not-awful photography from the HAIM concert in Cardiff last night.

The Drawing Board

The following board game, which could probably not be published today, appeared in The Bash Street Kids Annual 1995:

That last page in particular has been really stuck in my head for the better part of three decades. I found "the spinny thing that rarely works", and advising the reader to just buy a dice instead, incredibly funny, have always referred to them as such since, and was very pleased to rediscover its origin when I bought this book in a charity shop the other week. I wondered why this childhood memory lodged itself in my mind so firmly, and I think it's because it was probably my first experience of a work taking the piss out of its own idea.

The Shadow of Death

Holding the Spear of Doom up high, you shout your war-cry and charge. The Spear is not meant to kill Voivod; as the Horned God said, it returns life to the dead. But Voivod is death itself, so the Spear may not have enough Life-force to affect him. Fight each Attack Round of combat as normal; but once, at the end of each round (whether you win the round or not), you can attempt to give Voivod life. Roll two dice: if the total is equal to or less than the Spear's current Life-force, turn to 400; but if the number you roll is higher, you have failed. If you fail, deduct 1 from the Spear's Life-force, then fight another round of combat, and so on. Because you are trying to wield the Spear, you fight Voivod only in defence: if you win a round, he loses no STAMINA; on the other hand, Voivod thrives on your death, so if you lose a round, you must add any points of STAMINA that you lose to Voivod's current total. If the Spear expends its Life-force, you must try to defeat the Voivod in normal combat -- only then will your telling blows cause him to lose STAMINA points.

VOIVOD        SKILL 10        STAMINA 10

Should it be that you win in normal combat, turn to 303.

So goes the final combat of the 44th Fighting Fantasy gamebook, Legend of the Shadow Warriors by Stephen Hand (published 1991). It's around this point you can tell that the authors are aiming the range at adult collectors as much, if not more, than the series' original target audience of teenage boys. This eventually came to be seen as a problem by Puffin Books, who felt the series had become too unknowable and needed to get back to its roots, but a planned 'back-to-basics' relaunch in 1995 blew up on the launchpad and no revamped books were ever published, despite the fact the first one had been completed.

And maybe they had a point there, and maybe the new 21st-century books thread a needle which the range didn't manage to in the nineties, innovating with the format whilst keeping in mind who the target audience is. But Legend of the Shadow Warriors boasts a rich backstory, an immersive writing style, high replay value, experimentation with the series' basic rules including an innovative system for equipping different weapons and armour, and possibly the best-written 'boss battle' not just of the range, but of any gamebook.

The Monsters Are Due on Beano Street

According to The Official History of the Beano, the above strip -- from issue #2346, dated 04/07/87 -- is the first appearance of Number 13, a story about preteen vampire Boris and the rest of his family, as drawn by John Geering. Well, that book at least considers it the first official appearance. This begins our look at a comic strip with a rather confusing beginning and end.

The Most Esoteric Game Over in Interactive Fiction

In the superhero-themed Fighting Fantasy book, Appointment with F.E.A.R., you can get mugged whilst in your civilian identity.

The cool air is refreshing and allows you to gather your thoughts. You must anticipate the F.E.A.R. meeting if you are to prevent their master-plan from succeeding. If only you knew where it was to be held, and... Thump! You feel a heavy blow across the back of your head and you drop to your knees. A rough accent says: 'Just get the money and let's get going. Quick!' A hand searches through your pockets for your cash. Though groggy, you know what is happening. You are being mugged! You could, if you wished, fight back, but that would mean you having to reveal your secret identity. Or you could let them think they have knocked you out -- you have very little money on you, anyway. Will you fight back (turn to 230), or let them rob you (turn to 279)?

Triple Dog Dare

Last time, I was looking at Bananaman strips from the late 90s adapting episodes of the 80s TV series, which were drawn by John Geering -- who had created the strip and drawn the vast majority of it up to that point, but had no known involvement in the series. It would be worth going back and reading that piece if you haven't already, as that way this one will make sense.

But in short: the last strip adapting a TV episode is from the issue of the Dandy dated 3rd July 1999, and a week later a wholly original strip appeared for the Dandy's world-record-breaking 3007th issue, dated the 10th July. On the 20th July, John Geering died. (Some sources list his death as the 13th August, which is the date his obituary appeared in his local newspaper, the Warrington Guardian; I am presuming the date given in the Independent's obituary is correct.) However -- as was often the case when an artist passed away -- he had a buffer of strips built up, and new stories by him continued to regularly appear in the Beano and the Dandy for around two months after his death.

In issue #3004 (19/06/99), another strip drawn by Geering had started appearing in the Dandy: a revival of Puss and Boots, the very first characters he had created for D. C. Thomson in 1969.

The Crystal Ship

As you enter the harbour square, you pass a line of wagons laden with heavy machinery, which are queueing to enter a dry dock. There, illuminated by the glare of huge oil lamps, is the largest ship you have ever seen -- a monstrous ironclad juggernaut bristling with awesome weaponry. You stop to stare at this terrifying vessel, and overhear two Drakkarim engineers talking about their work. Your blood runs cold when you hear one of them reveal why this juggernaut is being built. It is to be used to destroy Holmgard, your country’s capital city.

If you enter the harbour at Argazad in the twelfth Lone Wolf gamebook, The Masters of Darkness, whilst infiltrating the Darklords' base, and so discover this terrifying juggernaut, you are given the option to enter the dock and find some way of sabotaging the ship. Sensible players will reason that the aim of your mission is to destroy the Darklords before the behemoth can ever set sail, and thus this is an unnecessary risk, and their suspicions should only rise if they attempt sabotage anyway:

A group of slaves are at work near the stern, hoisting into position a strange spherical tank made of a sparkling orange metal. As soon as it is secured, the Drakkarim engineers begin coupling heavy springs and thick copper cables to the tank, linking it to a massive propeller at the rear of the craft.

Carefully you study the complex machinery, soon realizing that if the orange tank were destroyed, or damaged beyond repair, the vessel would be unable to propel itself. However, the shell of the tank appears to be constructed of super-hard metal, and the only way you can think of destroying it is by using your Crystal Explosive.

Bananamanrama

In 1983, Bananaman -- at the time appearing in D. C. Thomson's weekly humour anthology comic Nutty -- made his onscreen debut in a series of animated five-minute shorts on Children's BBC. As explained in this interview with Steve Bright, who co-created the character with artist John Geering and wrote many of the scripts for the comic strip over the years, the animation executives had originally thought they'd make a series about a more iconic character such as Dennis the Menace or Desperate Dan, but during a focus group at the publisher's headquarters they happened to catch sight of the relatively new Bananaman and decided they'd rather focus on him; hence, the Big B became the first DCT character to appear in animation less than four years after his strip debuted.

The shorts were repeated many, many times on the BBC over the years, and in late 1998, during one of the final runs, someone at the Dandy (where the crime-fighting hero had resided since the Nutty ended in 1985) had the bright idea of adapting the TV episodes into comic strips to tie in, beginning with issue #2975, dated the 28th November 1998:

The Harbour of Lost Ships, helpfully labelled as the very first one.

The publisher had gotten a lot of mileage out of Bananaman's status as a TV star over the years, and it's possible someone at the BBC tipped them the wink that these were likely to be the final broadcasts and the adaptations were intended as one last hurrah. (In the event, they would be reprinted circa 2007, tying in with the series' DVD release.)

Sub-Optimal

The six Transformers Adventure Game Books were released between 1985 and 1987 by Corgi. Gamebooks based on licensed properties are rarely high points of the genre, and whilst these don't plumb the depths of Dick Tracy: A Catch-a-Crook Adventure, they're not especially remarkable: each runs between 67 and 72 pages, and can have as few as three possible endings. They were authored by Dave Morris, who also wrote the Knightmare gamebooks and The Crystal Maze gamebook, as well as other series based on Enid Blyton's Adventure Squad, LEGO, James Bond Jr. and HeroQuest, but is best known for his work with Jamie Thomson on their own original ideas, most notably the incredibly ambitious Fabled Lands series.

The second book, Perils From the Stars, is the one that only has three possible endings -- one good, two bad. One of those bad endings, though, is a stunning example of one of my favourite ways to die in interactive fiction: The game allows you to voluntarily do something incredibly, lethally stupid. (Much thanks to regular commentator Ed Jolley for putting me on to this.)

You look to JAZZ, but he is still too groggy to act. STARSCREAM's homing beacon, which is attracting the falling weapons pod straight towards it, lies on the floor beside the telescope.

If you want to get the homing beacon and hurl it at STARSCREAM, turn to page 44

If you want to put it in your pocket, turn to page 46

B&T

In 1990, two of D. C. Thomson's remaining weekly humour titles, the Beezer (running since 1956) and the Topper (running since 1953) merged to form a publication which was called, not unreasonably, Beezer and Topper. The nature of the combined comic was a little different to other comics mergers -- usually the 'junior' title would merge into the 'senior' one, but these two titles got equal billing in a publication which was essentially considered a new comic in its own right, starting the numbering back at issue 1.

The Topper and the Beezer had arguably not moved with the times in the way D. C.'s other publications, the Beano and the Dandy, had, and this joining of forces saw several long-serving stories -- some of which had been running since the beginning -- get quietly retired. Amongst the stories not carried forward were Ginger, who had been the Beezer's cover star for some 28 of its 37 years, The Badd Lads, The Hillies and the Billies, Hungry Horace and Figaro, whilst several others would be retooled to better appeal to a modern audience, and a variety of entirely new strips also appeared.

Beezer and Topper would last for 153 issues and just under three years, and then both titles disappeared from weekly newsstands for good, although the Beezer Summer Specials and Christmas annuals would continue to be issued until 2002 (and the quarterly reprint titles The Best of the Beezer and The Best of the Topper until 1996 when they were supplanted by the all-purpose monthly Classics From the Comics); several of the 'legacy' characters moved over to the Beano and Dandy, but for others B&T would prove to be their last chance saloon.

The original plan here had been to scan in one issue from early in the run, to cover all the characters who'd crossed over from Beezer and Topper (some of them were phased out later on, whilst other new stories were chopped and changed). It wouldn't have been anywhere near as representative of the whole run as our look at Hoot was, and it'd probably have been worth scanning in one of the final issues later on to compare.

However, upon unearthing the issues in my possession I discovered that B&T had such a large roster of stories that most of them didn't appear every week, so I went for a different approach: from across five different issues, here's one example of each 'legacy' character, and a selection of notable strips that were unique to the merger.

Just Ask For International Broadcasts Of South By South East

You remember that thing that sort of took over this blog for a period of several years where I was looking for (and eventualy found) the missing Children's ITV serial The Diamond Brothers: South by South East, don't you? Yes? Marvellous. If not, go here, go to the oldest post and work your way forwards from there. I promise you it's worth your while.

Anyway, I have some newly unearthed information on international broadcasts which you may as well have, as these airings would have used the original version of episode 3, and anything that could possibly help me find it is worth a try.

American viewers would have seen the show on the Disney Channel weekly from 7 April to 12 May 1993; the broadcast of episode 1 was preceded by a showing of Just Ask for Diamond, under its international title of Diamond's Edge.

The other thing is a bit more esoteric, but an Indian viewer got in touch to say they recall the show being broadcast on Saturday afternoons on a channel called StarPlus; they can't recall the exact year, but it may have been somewhere between 1992 and 1994. Anyone able to point me in the direction of some archive Indian TV listings?

Check, Please

Goodness Gracious Me was a groundbreaking sketch show that popularised British-Asian comedy and helped make household names of people like Sanjeev Bhaskar.

In the fourth episode of Series 1 (TX: 02/02/98), in the "Bhangra Muffins" sketch, Kulvinder Ghur is reading a copy of the Beano.

We get a nice close look at it at the start of the sketch, so through the magic of iPlayer it's pretty easy to tell it's issue #2882, dated 11/10/97:

A valuable clue as to the recording dates of Goodness Gracious Me, to be sure, but this issue was originally sold with a free lolly, and the issue seen onscreen appears to have had the sticky tape attaching the free gift to the issue very carefully removed to avoid ripping or damaging the cover.

So we can figure that a production runner sent to the nearest newsagent's had an interesting afternoon, if nothing else.

Numskull Valley

The Numskulls, a comic strip about the microscopic humanoids everyone has living inside them who control all your bodily functions, launched in the Beezer in 1962, some six years into the comic's run. (The above strip hails from the Beezer Book 1975, but you can see one of the very first editions here.) If you've picked up a copy of the Beano at any point in the last thirty years, you'll probably be aware that the strip is still running there to this day -- indeed, it is the only strip to originate in the Beezer that has survived to the last of the weekly humour anthology comics still going. The route it took to the present, however, isn't exactly straightforward.

Potato Man

On the 15th June 1992, then-Vice President of the United States Dan Quayle, on the campaign trail for that year's presidential election, visits Muñoz Rivera Elementary School and commits one of the most famous political gaffes in history when he "corrects" a 12-year-old pupil's spelling of 'potato' to 'potatoe'.

Ten days later, on the 25th June, Fox airs a repeat of The Simpsons; appropriately enough, the episode is "Two Cars In Every Garage, Three Eyes On Every Fish". The blackboard joke in the opening sequence is usually "I will not xerox my butt", but for this repeat, a new joke is hastily added: "'potato', not 'potatoe'".

This alternate blackboard -- seen on that repeat, and that repeat only -- has become one of the few pieces of Simpsons miscellany completely lost to time. It's frustrating, because the joke was reported in advance in newspapers, and you'd expect someone to have their VCR switched on for it. I've made more than one attempt to track it down in the past, but as of yet things haven't gone anywhere.

One thing I did think to do, though, was check alt.tv.simpsons for any contemporary posts regarding the joke. Multiple posts describe the blackboard as looking very last-minute, saying that the text visibly shimmered or moved around:

Great bit on the Simpson's tonight....
For those of you who don't watch the show, a running joke in the opening credits involves Bart writing something on the blackboard over and over. Past sentences have included "I will not expose the faculty's ignorance.". Well, though tonight's show was actually a repeat, they did change the sentence on the blackboard. Looked like a last minute thing, since the blackboard portion of the shot shimmered badly.
Tonight's slogan: "Potato" not "Potatoe".

Something Stupid

You pull the lever down -- the fatal connection is made. The red lights begin to flash with a strobe-like rapidity, a screaming siren starts up and a great rumbling goes through the ship. From all around you a deep machine voice booms out:

REACTOR CORE NOW UNSHIELDED

TERMINAL MALFUNCTION IN T MINUS TWO MINUTES

DESTRUCTION OF VANDERVECKEN WILL FOLLOW IN T MINUS SIX MINUTES

Realizing that you've really done it this time, you run from the room, throwing yourself through the hatchway into the tunnel beyond. Will you take the left tunnel (turn to 21) or the right tunnel (turn to 281)?

* * *

Space Assassin is not one of the most highly regarded Fighting Fantasy books, even for one of the science-fiction titles in the range, but I've always had a soft spot for its sense of humour and flairs of creativity. I am also really drawn to game overs in interactive fiction which allow the player character to do something really stupid, and Space Assassin devotes a not insignificant number of sections to letting the player character enter a maintenance hatch deep in the bowels of the Vandervecken marked "WARNING -- EXTREME DANGER -- ENTER ONLY WITH AUTHORITY" and muck about with a control panel until they accidentally unshield the reactor core of the spaceship's engines (red lights pulsing and menacing tones sounding as you do so, basically making it as clear as possible without actually saying so that this is an unbelievably ill-advised course of action). The ship's reaction when the hero first starts messing with the controls is so ominous that they pause in fear for several minutes, and they're still given the option to carry on!

Drugs on E4

At the moment E4's Sunday-night Simpsons block, rather than running episodes in order like they do the other six nights of the week, is a theme night, with five episodes connected by something. Thus far they've had a Treehouse of Horror night, a night of Homer episodes for Father's Day, a Lisa Night, next Sunday is based around musical guest stars... it's a cute little touch, especially since each night has a name given to it which shows up in the EPG.

I was quite late to notice this, though, and only spotted yesterday what they'd run on 8th June.

Uh. Did they seriously run a theme night based around drugs? It's hard to see any other line of logic that could connect those five episodes. The Internet Archive to the rescue...

Riiiiiiiight. The theme is "weird and far out episodes". Nothing to do with drugs at all.

Sure.

Your Quest is Over

In 1982, the first Fighting Fantasy book, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, was written, marking the birth of a series that would popularise the concept of adventure gamebooks in the UK. The book was co-authored by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone; this was accomplished by literally having Livingstone write the first half of the book and Jackson the second. After the two sides were bought together, Jackson noted that, quite by chance, there were 399 numbered sections in the book in total, and quickly added in an extra section to bring it up to a more aesthetically pleasing 400. This number immediately became the standard for all future books in the series, more or less, with the phrase "turn to 400" becoming synonymous with victory for readers.

Section 400 of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain has one more interesting thing about it.

The Warlock of Firetop Mountain is no more and you are now the owner of the Sorcerer's riches. At least a thousand Gold Pieces, jewellery, diamonds, rubies and pearls are in the chest. Hidden under these you find the Warlock's spell book and as you leaf through the pages, you realise that this tome is probably more valuable than all the treasure. Instructions are given for the control of all the secrets -- and the creatures -- of Firetop Mountain. With this book, unlimited power is yours and the safety of your return to the village is assured. Or, if you would prefer, you could remain as master of the domain of Firetop Mountain...

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.