Best of 2025

A lot of this year was taken up with writing about old British humour comics.

Which isn't at all a bad thing. I feel like I've discovered the thing I'm better at writing about than anything else, and it's providing potted histories of British comics and their characters. It's a fun subject to write and research, often throwing up really interesting things nobody has ever noticed before. The resulting posts are often very popular. It puts the massive pile of comics in the spare room to good use. I get to scan in some classic examples of my very favourite strips -- some of which have fallen into obscurity or are unsung heroes of their genre -- and share them with you. Maybe it's just me, but midway through an article you are liable to find something that contradicts a large chunk of your previous research, which is at least a way of honing your writing skills.

It isn't all I wrote about, of course. But it is quite a significant part of the highlights of the last year. Speaking of which...

Sticky Situations

Back in April, I took a look at perhaps D. C. Thomson's most obscure weekly humour comic, Hoot. This led me down a bit of a rabbit hole as to the terrible twosome of terrifying toddlers, Cuddles and Dimples, whose strips were merged into one when Hoot folded into the Dandy. If for some reason you don't care to read back through the three or four posts I've written on this subject, the story so far is:

In October 1986, the Dandy and Hoot merge. Cuddles, the cover star of Hoot, is carried over, but his strip is merged with the very similar one featuring Dimples which has been running in the Dandy since 1984. This creates Cuddles and Dimples; the two boys are originally depicted as next-door neighbours, with the first strip depicting Cuddles moving in next door to Dimples.

It was later decided that the strip would work better if the boys were brothers; however, contrary to what certain official sources published by D. C. Thomson claim, they were not suddenly retconned in a single strip. Instead, the process was subtly done over a period of several months, with Cuddles' parents slowly being moved into the background. By around October 1987, only Dimples' parents were featured, and strips strongly implying that the two are brothers (whilst not directly saying so) started appearing.

However, owing to the different schedules they were produced on, a few strips where the two are still intended to be neighbours appeared after this in various spin-off publications. Most prominently, the Dandy Book 1988 (released for the Christmas 1987 market) still features a solo Dimples, and the one published a year later features a strip where they are clearly intended to still be neighbours (alongside two others where they're brothers), with Cuddles' dad (nicknamed the "Teddy Boy Dad") appearing. A Dandy Comic Library with Cuddles by himself (with an explanation for Dimples' absence hastily written into the first panel) was released as late as 1989.

In 1988, a Panini sticker album celebrating the Beano/Dandy golden anniversary was released. I was sent some images of a completed album by Joseph Begley and Sam Page, and am very grateful to them for this, as I believe the album contains the very last appearances of Cuddles' dad after the retcon not already featured on this blog.

Hello!

Thanks if you got in touch over the last few weeks. I do appreciate it.

I'm not sure this ridiculously titled blog is the right place to write about my dad dying. Even if I maybe didn't appreciate quite how personal some of those posts about old comics and British scheduling of The Simpsons in the 1990s were before now. But I hope writing will spark back up here the other side of the New Year. There's a few leads and follow-ups in my inbox and the comments that shouldn't take long to do; maybe one or two of those will appear a bit earlier. We'll see how it goes.

One thing I can do here, though, is bring you his appearance on an obscure BBC Two gameshow with Harry Enfield's dad.