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).

The one and only cover star of Hoot was the terrifying toddler Cuddles, who had already been running in Hoot's direct predecessor Nutty since 1981 (Nutty having ended a month before its replacement launched). An extremely similar strip about a terrifying toddler called Dimples had been running in the Dandy since 1984. When the two comics merged, the strips were also combined to become Cuddles and Dimples, which is how the two boys are best known. The first Cuddles and Dimples strip featured Cuddles and his parents moving to Dandytown, but after a few weeks one set of parents suddenly vanished and the boys were retconned into siblings. D. C. Thomson later said they did not receive a single piece of reader correspondence asking about the change.

The full-page single-frame illustration The Hoot Squad by Ken H. Harrison did not survive the merger, but was reprinted as The Riot Squad in the Beano for a while in 2007.

Polar Blair continued in the Dandy post-merger, but doesn't seem to have done so for terribly long. (Nutty had also featured a strip featuring a polar bear, Blubba and the Bear, the difference being that in that strip the bear was in conflict with the titular eskimo as he tried to steal his fish.)

Sam's Secret Diary (drawn by Jerry Swaffield, who had first drawn for the Beano aged just 15 and these days is better known as a contemporary artist) was phased out shortly before the end, not appearing in the last five issues.

L-Plated Ella's gimmick was indeed that every strip appeared in an 'L' shape; all the issues of Hoot I have fill up the rest of the space with a 'cartoon spot' very similar to the Dandy Cartoon Books. Both Ella and Blair were drawn by Robert Nixon, and Ella bears quite a close resemblance to a female Roger the Dodger. Whilst Nixon is strongly associated with Roger, he wasn't drawing him at the time Hoot started: he took a break of over a decade from the Beano between 1973 and 1986, returning to draw Roger at the request of editor Euan Kerr. There was probably some period where Nixon was drawing both Roger and his distaff lookalike, but I don't have an exact date for when he became the artist for Roger again.

These quickies featuring characters from across the D. C. Thomson universe (some long retired, some still appearing in the weekly Beano, Dandy, Beezer or Topper) also survived the merger for a time, latterly referred to as "Comic Cuts" (and, post-merger, focused more on stories from its new home); all were done by George Martin and not the stories' usual artists. A similar feature also appeared in the Beano in the nineties, but only using that comic's characters, and with some kind of unifying theme around the mini-strips each week.

Dogsbody is instantly recognisable as having been drawn by my favourite comic artist, the late, great John Geering. You may note that Sid's character design is basically identical to the original design of Eric in Geering's most famous creation, Bananaman. Shortly before the debut of the animated series based on Bananaman, Eric's design abruptly changed over to the one used in the cartoon. Geering had no known involvement in the TV series, and it is tempting to assume that the change in design was mandated for the show, Geering was asked to use it for the strip as well (Bananaman's original backstory that he came from the Moon, which is of course really the biggest banana in the sky, was ditched around the same time), but he liked the original design and decided to reuse it for a later strip that also spoofed superheroes (whilst Bananaman started life specifically as a parody of Batman, Dogsbody's concept is a mash-up of Spider-Man and The Incredible Hulk).

There's a perfectly consistent internal logic to whether I put them in italics or not, you know.

Piggles was reprinted in the Dandy for a few months circa 2004; like cover star Cuddles, he was drawn by Barrie Appleby (who is still working for the Beano today, and is the current artist for Roger the Dodger).

Snackula artist David Mostyn illustrated several other horror-themed strips, including Ed the Ghost, Strange Hill School and Hector Spectre.

Steve Bright, artist for Super Fran (and also the earlier Want a Job Bob), had a keen interest in spoofing superheroes: he was also the co-creator and original scriptwriter of Bananaman.

Spotted Dick also carried on after the merger, and proved to be the comic's biggest success story after Cuddles by lasting well into the nineties, albeit with successive artists providing significantly different takes on the character (in fact the artist does not seem to have been consistent across even Hoot's short run, although this could be attributed to other artists standing in when the usual one was indisposed).

One strip not represented in this edition is Charli, a half-page story by Minnie the Minx artist Jim Petrie (the Football advert fills the space where she'd normally go here and in some other cases -- perhaps Petrie didn't always have the time), so here's an example from another issue:

Obviously if they brought the character back now, they could combine her strip with Minnie's and call it Charli MNX. (No?)

All Hoot's other strips debuted in the last month of its life, and two of them only appeared in a single issue (The Young Ones spoof The Old Ones, and the self-explanatory Space Cop). The comic is also unusual for not having a letters page at all, and in The Ultimate Book of British Comics Graham Kibble-White attributes this -- as well as the decision to devote two pages of each issue to better-established characters from other comics -- as part of the reason why Hoot never really managed to establish its own identity. None of the material here is bad (and it would be remiss of me not to mention the comic's one and only Christmas issue, which devoted the entire edition to a pantomime starring all its characters), but there's quite a lot of overlap with things D. C. Thomson were already doing.