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In 1996 those two publications were superseded by the monthly Classics From the Comics, which as you can probably guess featured a variety of strips from across most of D. C. Thomson's humour titles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.