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.

Junior Rotter quickly became a mainstay of the comic, far outstripping his DCT rival (although the two co-existed until at least 1983), and was arguably the most famous creation of his artist, Trevor Metcalfe; he regularly finished at the top of reader polls to find the comic's most popular story. In 1985, Dallas made headlines in the UK again when it was announced that the BBC were unwilling to pay £40,000 an episode for the rights to the forthcoming ninth season, and ITV's London weekday service Thames Television stepped in to meet the asking price -- in the process breaking an agreement between the BBC and ITV that prevented one outbidding the other for a show they already had.

This sparked off an escalating war, with the BBC threatening to delay transmission of the Season 8 episodes they still had the rights to and air them opposite Thames' broadcasts of Season 9; other ITV franchises were also unhappy with the deal, and ultimately Thames were forced to back down and sell the rights back to the BBC at a loss.

The year after that saw the publication of the Junior Rotter Holiday Special. Fleetway producing a single publication devoted to just one of their characters wasn't unprecedented, but it was rather unusual, and it may well have been inspired by the recent furore over the TV series (the prequel Dallas: The Early Years had been broadcast in the US not long before, but would not air on the BBC until early 1987). The 64-page Holiday Special was mostly reprints of old stories with a smattering of new material (including the cover, which is a stunning piece of work, possibly one of the highest-quality front pages for a British comic).

In November 1990, Whizzer and Chips met the fate of many other Fleetway publications when it was merged into Buster, the last of their weekly humour titles. Junior Rotter was still running in W&C at the time of the merger, but was not one of the stories carried forward, at least at first. Perhaps due to popular demand, it arrived in the issue dated 2nd March 1991 (shortly before the final season of Dallas began transmission in the UK, shifted out of primetime and into a 3pm slot), but like several other Fleetway stories, JR only ever appeared in Buster as reprints from its old home (Trevor Metcalfe having moved over to D. C. Thomson by this point). A month later, it was announced that Dallas had been cancelled.

Junior Rotter, however, continued to be rerun (with the occasional break) until the final issue of Buster in December 1999; it was still enjoying its second life when the Dallas reunion specials aired in 1996 and 1998. (Neither of those saw broadcast on the BBC -- despite the fact daytime repeats of the show continued until 1995 -- but never mind.)