Puss 'n' Boots survived the comic's merger with the Topper, where they appeared for a good two-and-a-bit years until late 1979. John Geering's madcap scripts and action-packed visuals meant the story would continue to recur in various incarnations over the next thirty years, with the twosome long outlasting their creator. However, after they vacated the pages of the Topper, they would not get another run in a weekly comic until they arrived in the Dandy in 1987 under the name Mutt and Moggy, a significantly different take on the concept sometimes described as the Muppet Babies version of the strip. Mutt and Moggy later evolved into something a bit closer to the original version, and they returned to their original names, and designs, for another run in 1993. You can find a fuller history of the strip, written by some idiot, here.
However, despite not having a home in a weekly comic, they made several appearances in the Dandy Comic Libraries from around 1984. One issue in particular is of interest: number #176, Puss 'n' Boots in 'Tee' for Two! A quick estimation puts this issue's release date in early 1990, but the Comic Libraries tended to be done quite a way in advance and it's possible it had been on the shelf for a year or two, if not longer (a Comic Library released in 1989 starring a solo Cuddles, before his strip was merged with Dimples, must have been done at least three years earlier).
In any event, after sixty-odd pages of the characters repeatedly beating each other up whilst both being employed at a golf club, we get an atypically happy ending for both of them:
Is it possible that Geering intended this as a grand finale for Puss and Boots, written at a time when it looked like they might not have become ongoing characters again? They were not only the first ever characters he created for D. C. Thomson, but his first ever published work -- isn't it easy to imagine he'd want to tie them up properly?
The next few Comic Libraries featuring the characters also transplant them into other settings: A Right Pantomime seems self-explanatory, The Bantam of the Opera casts them as Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, and A Fridge Too Far places them in a send-up of war movies. It's almost as if Geering wanted this to stand as the characters' definitive ending for a time, and had to find other things to do with them...
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I was riffling through old issues of D. C. Thomson's monthly reprint title Classics From the Comics to find a Puss 'n' Boots strip to illustrate this article; I wanted to find one from as near the end of Sparky's run as possible, and in the event the one I went with is from September 1976. The date '11.9.76' is visible near the bottom of the last panel, and that pins it down to issue #608.
The issue of CFtC I used actually has two Puss 'n' Boots strips, rather like a chicken egg with a double yolk. So I see no reason whatsoever not to give you the second one.
Despite being billed as 'Classic Sparky', close inspection of the penultimate panel on the first page reveals this to actually be a strip from January 1978, early in the Topper run, specifically issue #1301. (Some of the P'n'B strips in Classics appear to be sourced from what Geering submitted to the publishers, rather than -- as was usually the case -- what was printed in the comic; those hand-written dates and tags identifying which publication it was for wouldn't have appeared in the strip as originally run. It feels like there may be a connection between this and the fact that one of Geering's strips apparently wasn't published until three and a half years after his death, but I'm not sure exactly what.)
CFtC was generally pretty solid at correctly identifying where a strip had originally appeared in cases where a story ran in more than one title, but at that point Sparky was presented in Topper as a separate pull-out section (although clearly Geering considered it to now be a Topper story).
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