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...
Kicking off the year very much as I meant to go on, an in-depth look at which episodes of the 1990s Dennis the Menace TV series were adapted into comic strips, and (perhaps more pertinently, since they all were) when.
I have always been more interested in D. C. Thomson comics, which is surely attributable to the fact that by the time I was old enough to start buying comics from my newsagent, Fleetway -- the other big British comics publisher of the day -- had almost entirely disappeared, and only one of its titles, Buster, was clinging to life. Nevertheless, it remains baffling to me that it took me over eight years to write about a strip that was part comic, part adventure gamebook, and the resulting piece is probably my favourite thing I've ever written.
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I've also been working on an episode guide, which is still a bit of a work-in-progress, but does at least accurately cover when nearly every strip originally ran and when it was reprinted, and includes some fun notes on Fleetway history and the like.
Keeping on the subject of Fleetway, a look at It's a Nice Life, the Jackpot strip which took... really quite a lot of inspiration from The Good Life.
A look at Whizzer and Chips' homage to Dallas, Junior Rotter, and how its fortunes rose and fell with that of its inspiration.
A brief history of Robot Wars action figures.
A look at one of my very favourite Choose Your Own Adventure books, which contains a classic example of interactive fiction trolling its player.
A look back at a baffling few months to be a British fan of The Simpsons.
(Something that seems important to note: E4's premiere of Season 36 -- the first season to make its linear debut in the UK on free-to-air television, and not Sky -- gets underway this evening with a double-bill. For various reasons, there wasn't a preview post, but rest assured a look back at the run will be coming once it's concluded.)
A history of Hoot, the last attempt by D. C. Thomson to introduce a new weekly humour comic to the market, which lasted exactly one year.
This then led to an attempt to work out the answer to that age-old question: "When exactly were Cuddles and Dimples retconned from being neighbours to brothers when their strips were combined after Hoot merged with the Dandy?" The answer to which is, in a nutshell, "there wasn't really a specific point, one set of parents just slowly got phased out", but you can find the full story here, here, here and here.
A cautionary tale about what happens when filming on your gameshow gets severely delayed and the tie-in book has to be at the printers' before everything is in the can.
Once you've started writing about Fleetway, it's probably inevitable you'll write a piece about the many, many strips based around class war its various titles featured, and this one looks at the four distinct incarnations (spread across four different comics) of a spoiled young girl called "Milly O'Naire".
The most notable thing about Buster's not-especially-friendly neighbourhood vampire, Dracula Dobbs.
A thing about the opening sequence to The Simpsons which has gone virtually unnoticed for the last 35 years.
The importance of the number 400 in Fighting Fantasy.
A classic example of an adventure gamebook allowing the player to voluntarily do something incredibly and lethally stupid.
The latest efforts to track down a piece of Simpsons miscellany that has been missing since 1992.
A brief history of the little men who live inside everyone's heads and control all their thoughts and actions.
Another of D. C. Thomson's more obscure publications, Beezer and Topper, goes under the microscope.
Another classic example of an adventure gamebook allowing the player to voluntarily do something incredibly and lethally stupid.
What turned out to be the start of a trilogy of pieces looking at the final work published by my favourite comics artist, John Geering, beginning with the Bananaman strips from the late nineties adapting episodes of the eighties cartoon series.
Yet another classic example of an adventure gamebook allowing the player to voluntarily do something incredibly and lethally stupid. (Readers have sent in a few more examples of these, which will hopefully get written about next year. Keep them coming!)
The middle part of the aforementioned trilogy, and another piece that's up there with my favourite things I've ever written, being as it is about quite possibly my favourite comic strip of all time, Puss 'n' Boots; it ended up as a sort of overview of the strip's entire history, but has a particular focus on the strip's final run in the Dandy from 1999 to 2000.
Pretty much as the title suggests, this piece is definitely adjacent to the whole "adventure gamebook allows the player to voluntarily do something incredibly and lethally stupid" strand.
The final part of the trilogy (...so far), concerning the Beano's answer to The Munsters and The Addams Family, which ends in a THRILLING MYSTERY which YOU may be able to help me with, provided you have some Beanos from the late nineties or early noughties somewhere. (I made a bit more progress on said mystery here, but am still on the lookout for the third and final post-1997 strip.)
On rediscovering a childhood memory concerning The Bash Street Kids.
Everything you could possibly want to know about unique statistics in Fighting Fantasy books.
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Happy New Year, and hopefully I'll see you again before too long. (Well, actually I know I'll see you in about four or five days. Providing you come back. But who could blame you if not?)
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