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.

This Korky the Cat strip is drawn by Gordon Bell, subbing for usual artist Robert Nixon, who seems to have been unavailable for an extended period of time. Whilst Bell would later put his own spin on the characters (as seen in previous editions), here he is trying to hew closer to Nixon's designs.

In a previous look at The Laughing Planet, I noted that a strip not in the issues I had ended in David Chattenborough's death, and he was portrayed as an angel continuing his wildlife programme from Heaven for several weeks thereafter -- so here's the strip where he actually gets killed off!

This just seems to be a printing error I thought was kind of odd?

Another WH Smith ad aimed at promoting summer reading.

There are a few Korky strips in this batch where he's reduced to a single line across the bottom of a page (possibly related to Nixon's hiatus) and, erm, sometimes they seem to struggle to fit in a punchline.

I really like this short-lived title panel for Bananaman from 1990, for whatever reason.

The first ever appearance of the environmentally conscious story Billy Green and his Sister Jean.

Another strip from Gordon Bell's temporary stewardship of Korky, but by this time the title panel had been updated!

This is, I think, quite a clever piece of marketing to announce that the day the comic came out was changing from Tuesday to Monday in the New Year.

Whilst D. C. Thomson artists got no credit and were not allowed to even sign their names, here is one of many examples of  John Geering making an oblique little reference.

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One little addendum concerning my ongoing ramblings about Cuddles and Dimples. To recap: the terrifying toddler twosome started out as separate characters in their own strips, but when Hoot merged with the Dandy, the strips were also merged. Initially they were neighbours, but from about mid-1987 one set of parents was slowly phased out, and then strips implying, then stating, they were now siblings started appearing. However, owing to the different schedules on which various spin-offs were published, some appearances outside the weekly comic featured the old set-up for some time afterwards.

I did not previously have the Dandy Book 1989 in my collection, but owing to the long lead times the Christmas books had, I knew it would have been in the process of being put together at the time Cuddles' parents were slowly vanishing. So I figured it was worth tracking a copy down. Whilst there are two C&D strips with one set of parents who are expressly stated to be the parents of both boys, there is another story featuring them which clearly predates the retcon, as Cuddles' dad (nicknamed the Teddy Boy Dad) appears in the title panel:

(Polar Blair, one of a handful of initial survivors from the Hoot-Dandy merger, is not present in the 1989 book. This would appear to confirm my suspicions that he wasn't in his new home for terribly long, no more than a few months, and Cuddles and Spotted Dick were the only long-term survivors of Hoot.)