Ghost Light

Last month, I was investigating Number 13 -- the British comics answer to The Munsters and The Addams Family, which was drawn by John Geering and ran in the Beano on an increasingly irregular basis from 1987 to 2002. Going back and reading that is... pretty much vital to this follow-up. But the short version is that, as per the sometimes frustrating publication The Official History of the Beano, the strip appeared just three times after 1997, and the book only gives a date for the last of these; namely the 14th December 2002. This is particularly notable because that happened to be some three and a half years after John Geering died.

I had that very last strip, but didn't even know when the other two ran, and wasn't able to make a more informed guess until I'd seen them. Well, we're halfway there, because I've located one of them in the issue of the Beano dated 19th June, 1999:

Despite the fact it uses the old logo, I do think this is also a new strip and not a reprint. It just looks like the Geering of the late 90s to me, not the early 90s. I still don't know when the other post-1997 strip ran, but it's not in any of the six issues after this one, or the three immediately before it, and I don't know of any instance of a D. C. comic running a one-off reprint of a retired story -- reprinted series ran for at least a few months. There's very little, if any, reprinted material in the Beano around this period anyway -- it's a hugely ambitious era for the comic, with the story arc introducing Dennis' baby sister Bea and the first of Mike Pearse's feature-length stories inspired by European comic books also appearing around this time.

It also wasn't unusual for several of Geering's stories to appear on an intermittent basis. The most pertinent example is one he also drew for the Beano, Smudge, the dirtiest boy in the world. Smudge appeared regularly from April 1980 to May 1986, but then cropped up infrequently for over a decade; the Official History says he appeared once in 1989, once in 1990, five times in 1991, ten times in 1992, thirteen times in 1993, five times in 1994, once in 1996, and made one final appearance shortly before Geering's death in the issue dated 23rd January, 1999.

I still don't want to theorise about why a previously unpublished strip by Geering apparently wasn't run for more than three years after his death until I know when that other edition of Number 13 ran, and what it looked like. But that's one piece of the puzzle.