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:

It seems most likely that there was an earlier version of the Dandy story where Dennis' place was taken up by Danny and Katey, Dan's nephew and niece who fill his role for the rest of the strip. Once the Beano April Fool strip was completed, someone probably recognised the opportunity to take the joke further by actually having Dennis appear on the cover of that week's Dandy, and the Dan story was altered to include him. (The odd crop job of the Dandy cover as it appears on the Beano raises the possibility it may have replaced a mocked-up cover.) There's a bit of guesswork here, but something along those lines probably happened. (The issue of the Dandy would have been published on April Fool's Day itself, and the Beano three days later on April 4th, which seems worth noting.)

The other thing is a bit subtler. Let's narrow the field a bit for you.

It's that the strip is signed by the artist, John Geering. At the time, D. C. Thomson artists were not permitted to sign their work. This was not a completely hard and fast rule, and exceptions had been made for certain artists, but up until around the turn of the millennium it was mostly in full force, and of the many pages of Geering's work I've read (which probably runs into four digits), this was the first time I'd seen one of his D. C. strips signed; his 1999 obituary in the Independent (following his tragically early death, which robbed the comics world of one of its greatest talents) notes that he was not permitted to do so.

My initial thought was that this was Geering playing another April Fool's joke, on his editor, by signing one of his strips... but that's sadly (because it would be an amazing joke), or gladly, not the case.

Whilst Geering created and co-created many of his own stories for D. C. T over the years -- most famously Bananaman, Puss 'n' Boots, Smudge and Number 13, but also P. C. Big Ears, Monkey Bizness, The Domes, The Snobbs and the Slobbs, Sherman Tortoise, Herb's History, The Nutters, Dean's Dino, Antchester United, Beefy Dan the Fast Food Man, Twitt Hall, Dogsbody, Paw, Maw and Porky, Mitey Joe, Robohog, Birdbrain, Baby Blue, Sam the Slam, Bogeyman, Tommy's Toybox, The Ozzies, Stavros, The Tyme Twins, Splursh, Battywoman, PXQZTKLE! and Brainless amongst others -- he also regularly filled in on other strips as a ghost-artist when the regular one was unavailable, often producing strips indistinguishable from the usual style. Indeed, his four-year stint as artist for Desperate Dan from 1993-97 arose from an extended period of time where the usual artist Ken H. Harrison was unavailable whilst he worked on Oor Wullie and The Broons for the Sunday Post (Harrison later returned to the role and drew Dan for another decade).

But anyway: several more of Geering's Desperate Dan strips from around this time are also signed. Some starting from around September 1995 just have his initials, but his full name appears on a small handful of editions including this one; it's not consistent, though, and this period seems to last for well under a year (in fact the April Fool's story may have been the last to carry his name). So I must conclude that his level of output meant he managed to get an exemption, but maybe he wasn't so concerned as to sign it every single week, or it was just a short-term arrangement.

Geering is also credited with ghosting Dennis the Menace, but Dennis' appearance on the cover of the Dandy is the first appearance of Dennis I've definitely been able to say was drawn by him. Once you've got something to compare them with, some Dennis stories from the nineties look a bit more like they might have been drawn by him, but it's still hard to be sure.

By the by: Geering also drew strips for the other major British comics publisher, Fleetway, which did regularly allow artists to sign their work, and I include the below example of Jaws parody Gums just for comparison (Geering's signature is at the bottom of the very last panel):

You can also see an example of one of his political cartoons (with signature), mentioned in his obituary, here.

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If you think that John Geering sounds like a pretty remarkable man, then you're absolutely right, obviously. We haven't even gotten into his work in animation for Cosgrove Hall, where he worked as an artist on episodes of Danger Mouse and Count Duckula, as well as their 1989 adaptation of The B.F.G., and only indirectly touched on things like his previous lives as an actor, nightclub manager and special constable, or the fact that he designed the original costumes for Ken Dodd's Diddy Men.

Oh, and whilst the policy against artists signing their strips seems to have been relaxed over the course of the late nineties and noughties, it was not until the issue dated 5 March 2016 that all strips in the Beano carried credits for both illustrators and scriptwriters.

2016. Bloody hell.