Fruitcake

Well, I've managed to get a Sabrina Carpenter reference into the title of a post about British humour comics from the 1980s, what more do you want?

Ahem. Nutty -- often described as D. C. Thomson's attempt to create a more anarchic comic, more like some of those published by rivals Fleetway -- racked up a pretty respectable run of 292 issues over five and a half years, and birthed one of D. C.'s most iconic characters of all time. In The Ultimate Book of British Comics, Graham Kibble-White dubs it "arguably the best-ever contender for becoming that elusive third 'big' humour comic", alongside the Beano and the Dandy. Even if its other characters were somewhat overshadowed by its cover star, many of them lasted for quite a while after the comic merged with the Dandy in September 1985, and of course Bananaman himself survived not only the closure of his original home, but also that of the Dandy in 2012, becoming the only strip from that comic to move to the Beano. (If the characters need to visit another town, or Beanotown United are playing a football game, then very often the scriptwriters will go for "Nuttytown".)

The issue we'll be dissecting today is number #49, hailing from January 1981; should it prove possible, it'll probably be worth scanning in one of the final issues to compare at some point down the line, but we are at the mercy of the big pile of comics in the local charity shop for that. But here we go.

This issue, as it happens, was precisely the ninth to feature Bananaman as its cover star; for the first 40 issues, the front cover featured a large splash panel of one of its characters. The publishers eventually realised who the breakout star was, and expanded the Big B's strip from the back page to the front and back; further down the line, with issue #100 in January 1982 the strip grew again to take up the front cover and the centre pages, meaning he monopolised nearly all of Nutty's colour pages.

Bananaman's appearance had been steadily mutating ever since the first issue, and here he isn't a million miles away from the version used for the CBBC series (which has, broadly speaking, remained much the same since then), but with the notable difference that his mask is black and not blue -- a remnant of the character's original concept as a specific parody of Batman. (Little Eric, however, is still a skinhead -- the character design abruptly and dramatically changed shortly before the TV show began airing.)

So, when D. C. sought to make a comic a bit more like Fleetway, they perhaps didn't intend quite this much overlap. Around the same time Nutty launched with Jay R. Hood (artist: George Martin), Fleetway's Whizzer and Chips debuted Junior Rotter, a strip also inspired by one of television's greatest villains, and the two would co-exist for several years.

Peter Pest is the second character who survived the Dandy merger; I'm not sure of the character's exact history in his new home, but he was definitely still around as late as 1997. (This strip is drawn by Tom Williams, who initially drew the character in the Dandy too, but Trevor Metcalfe took over later on.)

Before the next strip, I must warn you that we're about to encounter some racially unfortunate material.

Dick Turban was the work of Martin Baxendale, son of Leo, who was better known for his work for Fleetway.

Doodlebug (artist: Gordon Bell) was originally intended to be the comic's mascot -- as we'll see later on in this issue, the character was also in charge of the letters page, and he regularly appeared on the cover for the first few months promoting free gifts and £2 postal orders -- but Bananaman quickly took over that role.

Often compared to St. Trinian's, but also remarkably similar to the 70s Beano story The Belles of St. Lemon's, The School Belles of St. Onion's were drawn by the wonderfully named Evi de Bono.

Another mark of Nutty's inspiration from Fleetway titles, John Geering's The Snobbs and the Slobbs is inspired by class warfare (as many, many Fleetway stories were, not so much D. C.'s), but has been accused of being rather more negative in its depiction of working-class life. This was the third and final strip to survive the 1985 merger, but only ran in the Dandy until 1987.

Blubba and the Bear was reprinted in the Dandy for several months in 2007, and again near the end of the comic's life in 2012. The strip was scripted by Roger Kettle and drawn by Andrew Christine, who did a few other stories for D. C. over the years but are probably more strongly associated with newspaper dailies such as Beau Peep and Horace (notice Christine's own lettering, instead of a typeface).

Sports Fan is a strip about an, er, sports fan, although not the best-known one to appear in Nutty. Although many people have read that strip without even realising it started in Nutty. We'll come to it in a bit.

The Wild Rovers would be demoted from appearing in full colour to monotone when Bananaman replaced them on the centre pages. They were usually drawn by Ken H. Harrison -- including this one -- but D. C.'s resident anthropomorphic animal artist Gordon Bell understudied him on occasion, and you may find this direct comparison between Harrison and Bell of interest.

Samuel Creeps comes from the brush of long-serving D. C. artist Bob McGrath; he also did Pig Tales for Nutty, which was (with one hopefully obvious difference) remarkably similar to the Beano's Three Bears (which McGrath drew for most of its original run from 1959 to 1985), but that seems to have already been dropped by this point.

Wacky the Crackpot Inventor was one of several stories scripted by Garry Fraser, who was in later years the editor of D. C.'s monthly reprint title, Classics From the Comics.

Steevie Star reportedly appeared in Topper after Nutty closed, but I can't find exact dates for this. An unrelated character with the same name (but spelt 'Stevie') appeared on the Beano's 'Funsize Funnies' page in 2022 before being one of several characters to be transplanted into The Bash Street Kids to increase the story's diversity.

Scoopy is another of D. C.'s many anthropomorphic animal strips drawn by Gordon Bell.

The comic tried out traditional 'adventure' stories for a time (including a new run of General Jumbo, formerly of the Beano), but it appears they were dropped not long after this.

Whilst Doodlebug is the face of the letters page at this point, Bananaman would also take over that later on.

Big 'n' Bud was another Garry Fraser-scripted story; this interview with him touches on a lot of his time on Nutty.

As you can see, Bananaman is still a gag-a-week strip at this point, but it started experimenting with serialised stories around six months after this issue. (I am struck that many of the Nutty-era strips could be printed in the Beano today without looking hugely out-of-place. Bananaman started appearing in the Beano in the form of Geering reprints from the late eighties and early nineties whilst the Dandy was still going, in January 2012, and I'd always assumed one of the reasons for that was that someone at D. C. could see the writing on the wall for the Dandy and was making plans for one of its most marketable characters to survive in a weekly comic, but there is a certain timelessness to the strips that might also have been a factor.)

After Bananaman was expanded to three pages, his spot on the back cover was taken up by the terrifying toddler Cuddles. Upon Nutty's closure, Cuddles did not join the Dandy, but instead became the cover star of D. C.'s next (and final) new comic, Hoot. Then of course he ended up in the Dandy (merging with that comic's Dimples to form Cuddles and Dimples) when Hoot closed a year later. (The twosome are still appearing in the Dandy Annual to this day. When the Dandy was closed there was talk that other characters such as Desperate Dan might make the leap to the Beano, but in the end -- apart from a brief attempt to transplant Corporal Clott onto the 'Funsize Funnies' page in 2019 -- Bananaman would be the only defector.)

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There are many other Nutty stories not represented here, including the adventures of a giant panda in Bigfoot; Horace Cope, a boy who relied on the advice of his astrologer grandmother; Micro Dot, a girl who relied on the advice of her BBC Micro; Nip and Rrip, a story about a boy and his violent cat; Ron Brown's Schooldays; Snoozer, a story suspiciously similar to Whizzer and Chips' Lazy Bones; the unfortunately named food-obsessed boy Nosher; Starship Lollipop; Lucky Ducky, a strip remarkably similar to Blubba and the Bear but with a fisherman and a duck instead; the scatterbrained Tweet William; Pearl Potter, the Producer's Daughter, an anticipation of the term 'nepo baby' who debuted in the first issue, but was gone within six months; and the mischievous Whoops-A-Daisy. You can find a selection of scans featuring several of these characters here, which also includes the special Bananaman strip from the final issue (drawn by the scriptwriter Steve Bright and not Geering) which announced the merger with the Dandy.

There are a few more characters I want to give you examples of, though, taken from Classics From the Comics. First up is the Norse preteen Ethel Red:

It seems this strip only appeared for the first few months of Nutty, and was probably dropped in an early shake-up, but I'm rather fond of it; I detect the influences of Asterix.

The next strip is Mitey Joe, primarily because it's another John Geering joint -- there was a point where Geering would have been responsible for an entire quarter of Nutty's page count:

Finally, another sports-based strip which was added later on (and co-existed with Sports Fan for at least a time) was the football-mad boy Cannonball Kid, drawn by Rob Lee:

If Cannonball Kid looks familiar to those of you born well after 1985, it's because in 1998 he was reprinted in the Dandy, renamed Owen Goal. At the end of 1998, the strip switched from reprints to new strips, now drawn by Nigel Parkinson, but if I manage to get some examples of original Cannonball Kid strips I can directly compare to their Owen Goal versions, there's a whole other post I can get out of that... (As Owen Goal, the character enjoyed a long second life, and was still featuring in the Dandy Annual as recently as 2019, but I think he's retired now.)

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The decision to close Nutty has attracted a certain amount of curiosity, as Bananaman was a big talking point; when it closed the third series of the cartoon had yet to even air, and the strip was billed as "Your TV Star". Post-merger, the Dandy continued to promote him as such on its front page well into the 90s.

Whilst there was never a Nutty annual, there was a Bananaman annual published between 1983 and 1986 (as well as a Summer Special from 1984 to 1989, with two more in 1992 & 1993)... which is perhaps a sign of just how much more popular he was than anything else in the comic. The first annual did not have the involvement of D. C. Thomson and consisted merely of text adaptations of the TV episodes with framegrabs, but the other three were made up of original comic stories. The second annual notably appears to have been drawn, in its 96-page entirety, solely by John Geering, and perhaps unsurprisingly, it looks a bit rushed in places. (The last two annuals seem to be a 50:50 split between Geering and his regular understudy, Barrie Appleby.)

But here's an interesting thought which was supplied by Paul Hayes some time ago: Desperate Dan only took over as the Dandy's cover story in November 1984, less than a year before the comic merged with Nutty. If they'd held off from that change a bit longer, is it possible Bananaman could have ended up as the cover star of the Dandy?