According to The Official History of the Beano, the above strip -- from issue #2346, dated 04/07/87 -- is the first appearance of Number 13, a story about preteen vampire Boris and the rest of his family, as drawn by John Geering. Well, that book at least considers it the first official appearance. This begins our look at a comic strip with a rather confusing beginning and end.
Earlier that year, the strip had made two appearances on the "Reader's Request" page. The rules concerning this feature seem rather hazy, but as best I can tell it featured a mix of retired stories readers had been requesting to see again, and new stories which were the sort of thing readers had been saying they'd like to see. The Official History mentions these, but seems to consider them some kind of broadcast pilot separate to the 'proper' run, and does not give dates for when they appeared. No matter: the Beano Wiki states the first of these was in issue #2333, dated 04/04/87, and that means there's a fairly short window where the second one could have been. (Issue #2338, dated 09/05/87, if you're curious.)
The first one looks a bit off-model, but definitely still Geering's work; perhaps the nature of this feature meant there was less time than usual to draw it. Oher "Reader's Requests" which went to series, as it were, include the self-explanatory Little Monkey and the adventures of Dennis the Menace's gran in Go, Granny, Go!
Most sources seem to compare Number 13 to The Munsters, but I think you can see the influences of The Addams Family as well, particularly in the design of Boris' mum, having the Frankenstein's monster-esque character as the butler, and a grandmother who's a witch. The other key players were their sabre-toothed cat Tiddles, Boris' bat Fiendish, Frankie's pet brick Sabre, The Screaming Skull, and Uncle Wolfie. (You go ahead and quote that Simpsons episode, I'll wait.) Although Boris was typically the strip's main focus, it was a little unusual for its time in that it gave each member of the ensemble their own day in the limelight at some point, and experimented with pairing the characters up in different ways.
Whilst Geering was the main artist for the strip, a number of episodes were ghost-drawn by Bristolian artist Terry Bave. Bave is more strongly associated with the comics of rival publishers Fleetway, but was one of several such artists to start working for D. C. Thomson in the late eighties and early nineties as Fleetway's comics empire started to wind down. For reasons that will become apparent later on, it is quite important I found an example of a strip ghosted by Bave.
After several hours of sorting through old comics whilst listening to Soccer Mommy, here we go (this is a pretty early one, and there are others further down the line where it's still visibly Bave but he's... relaxed into the style, for want of a better word):
Just to keep up the pretence that this blog is some kind of professional enterprise, here's an example of one of the strips Bave drew for Fleetway from around the same time to compare -- a personal favourite, Double Trouble, about the endlessly warring twins Jon and Suzy (look at Boris' mouth and cheeks in the splash panel in the above No. 13 strip, and compare them to the twins' here, that's the giveaway):
(A lot of Bave's work for D. C. was ghosting other artists -- most notably Winker Watson, which he revived after it had been running as reprints for nearly a decade following the death of original artist Eric Roberts -- but I do have a soft spot for one of his original strips for the Beano, Inspector Horse and Jockey, which concerned an anthropomorphic horse detective and his human sidekick. You can find a selection of his other Fleetway stories here.)
One curious thing about the design for Dad in Number 13 is that it wasn't the first time Geering had used it. This is issue #132 of the Beano Comic Library range (the story within is drawn by Geering but the cover isn't -- I think that's by Tom Williams), "Dracula Spectacula":
The Comic Libraries are all undated except for a copyright year, which requires a little reverse-engineering; at 24 double-monthly issues a year and the first issue being January 1982, that would put this issue at June 1987. The Libraries had pretty long lead times, which probably explains why Geering's Dracula looks identical to Boris' dad; he'd already drawn a vampire for this one-off, liked the design and decided to use it again... perhaps not expecting the Library would be released so close to the beginning of Number 13.
Whilst I thought it might be funny to mention The Screaming Skull as a member of the ensemble and not provide any further context, he does seem quite literally an important part of the story's Addams Family heritage as a member of the family who's a dismembered piece of anatomy. (It may be a coincidence, but he only makes his debut after the early nineties Addams movies.) It's also good to have a further example of the strip in glorious technicolour from after the Beano went full-colour in late 1993 -- note the monotone panels, which became a signature element of the strip:
Number 13 became quite sporadic later in its run; the Official History states it only appeared three times after 1997, but it seems it had only been appearing intermittently since at least 1995. The Official History only gives the date of the very last of these; issue #3152, dated December 14th, 2002.
Um. Those of you who've read my previous writing about John Geering's work may see the question here. Geering had died in July 1999, but his buffer of strips meant stories by him continued to regularly appear in the Beano and the Dandy for a few months after his passing, and a few more strips appeared even later than that. A strip that appeared in the June 3rd, 2000 edition of the Dandy had previously been thought to be most likely the final new work by him to appear in a weekly comic. Was there really another one in an issue published over two and a half years later?
Quite possibly, yes, because I do think this may well be a previously unpublished Geering strip -- it's certainly not ghosted, and I don't think it's a reprint. (It lacks the monotone panels, but so do the last few strips from 1997; as against that, the gradient colouring is new.) Notice the "A Rave From the Grave" tagline? A lot of later Geering stories include some kind of Couch Gag in their title panels, even if it's just a caption, and it's similar to the ones used in the title for Dean's Dino, the last new story from Geering which ran in 1999:
I have, however, not yet located the other two post-'97 strips, and knowing exactly when they ran and what they look like would help me make a more informed guess. (The Beano traditionally goes all-out to celebrate Halloween, and had really gone to town in 2002 with a full month of Halloween-themed issues across October, which makes it even odder this strip ran just before Christmas.)
Number 13 was reprinted beginning in October 2011 under the amended title of Number 13 Beano Street (and the above example, which would have originally been black-and-white and has been colourised, does an excellent job of not looking at all out of place with the rest of the comic despite being over two decades old); this led to a limited number of new runs, drawn and written by Alan Ryan, from 2014, and the family still show up occasionally, but mostly just for Halloween.
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