Sugar and Spice

In January 1985 (the 29th, if you want to be really specific), the recently appointed editor of the Beano, Euan Kerr, and his sub-editor Alan Digby, had an idea for a new character -- a little girl, aged about 3 or 4, who wanted to be as tough as Dennis the Menace or Minnie the Minx, but didn’t have the strength or maturity to carry it off. To draw this strip, they enlisted the services of Robert Nixon -- recently returned to D. C. Thomson after over a decade working for Fleetway/IPC, at Kerr's request.

Nixon had started out at D. C. in 1964, most notably drawing Roger the Dodger amongst several other characters, but in 1972 he departed to work for rival publishers Fleetway, where he specialised in comedy-horror stories such as Frankie Stein, Hire a Horror and Jaws parody Gums, but also lighter fare including Kid King and Six Million Dollar Man spoof The 12 ^1/2p Buytonic Boy. When Kerr first became Beano editor in late 1984, he contacted Nixon about the possibility of returning to some of his old D. C. stories whilst also continuing to work for Fleetway -- an arrangement which became very familiar over the next decade as the amount of new material published by Fleetway shrank, but did not appeal to Nixon.

A week after he turned Kerr down, though, Nixon learned he was to be moved off of several of his current Fleetway strips,¹ and -- perhaps guessing what the next few years would bring for the publisher -- decided to return to D. C. (although he continued to draw for Fleetway until early 1986), where he would resume drawing Roger the Dodger and also take over big hitters such as Korky the Cat and Beryl the Peril, but this new character would be the first of several he originated on his second time round, by far the best-loved,² and Nixon's personal favourite of all the stories he drew for D. C.

Nixon’s early designs for the character (modelled on Alan Digby’s daughter Jane) went down a storm, and just over three months after he was first sent the details of what she should look like, Ivy the Terrible made her debut in the 4th May, 1985 issue of the comic.

This scan rescued, via the Internet Archive, from the sadly now-defunct old Beano website.

The character quickly became hugely popular, and for a time in the late eighties and early nineties even enjoyed a recurring spin-off appended to the main strip, Ivy’s Favourite Nightmares. This allowed Nixon to dabble in the sort of comedy-horror work he did for Fleetway, but also gave the main strip a bit of room to breathe:

You can see some more Favourite Nightmares here. (A few strips from this period don't have IFN but use the full two pages; space was clearly a valuable commodity for a story about a hyperactive toddler.)

The scripts were written for some years by Al Bernard, also known as "Uncle Al, the Kiddies' Pal" (a nickname it feels like you could not get away with today, Laugh-In reference or not), who also wrote Dennis the Menace, Roger the Dodger and The Bash Street Kids at the time, but although Bernard was still writing for the Beano and the Dandy by at least the late nineties, scriptwriters are much, much tougher to research than artists. Unless of course they helpfully all line up and say exactly which strips they currently write for an episode of Arena. (I'd be pretty certain the above one is by Bernard, at least.)

In October 1993, the Beano went full-colour. Up until that point, Dennis the Menace ran on the front and back pages so the entire story could be in colour -- but now that was no longer necessary, there was a high-profile vacancy on the back page, which Ivy duly took up:

The plum slot probably offset the full-time return to one page; with the same overhaul that brought everything into glorious technicolour, the Beano inherited The Numskulls from the now-defunct Beezer and Topper, revived those stateside stalwarts The Three Bears for another series, and Dennis the Menace grew from two pages to three. Sometimes in this era, though, Nixon seems to struggle to fit an entire script on one page, leading Ivy to be moved inside so her story can run over a page and a half:

It wasn't unusual for overspill to be accommodated like this, but Ivy seemed to need it more frequently than other one-pagers. When the Beano was next revamped in September 1998, as well as introducing Dennis the Menace's little sister Bea, it gained an extra eight pages, and Ivy's strip was permanently expanded to two pages:

In October 2002, Robert Nixon died. However -- as was often the case when a long-serving artist passed away -- there was a buffer of unpublished material still to run, and new Ivy stories drawn by Nixon (alongside Roger the Dodger, the only other story he was drawing for D. C. at the time) continued to appear until mid-January. After that point, Tony O’Donnell took over -- in fact I think this is the very first O'Donnell strip, from the issue dated 18th January:

Although O'Donnell worked for D. C. Thomson for some 15 years, he was better known for his work on Football Picture Story Monthly, and also drew for Marvel Comics. He did work on spin-offs such as the Fun-Size Beanos and Summer Specials, but his tenure as Ivy's artist is his only known story for a weekly humour comic.

It was during the O'Donnell era that Euan Kerr departed as editor in 2006, and was replaced by Alan Digby. Whilst the character remained very popular with readers, having such a strong supporter who was involved in her creation remain in charge may have helped Ivy navigate a bumpy couple of years that were coming up.

In 2007, Tony O’Donnell left D. C., and Ivy went into reprints of one-page Nixon stories primarily from the mid-to-late nineties for a time -- here's a direct comparison of the story from issue #2866, dated 21/06/97, and its reprint from issue #3405, dated 03/11/07:

Curiously, a single new page by former Fleetway artist Lew Stringer appeared amongst these in April 2008. (Stringer -- a highly prolific cartoonist also known for his work for Panini, as well as drawing Derek the Troll for Warlock magazine -- was one of the few Fleetway artists not to put a foot in the other camp as the publisher's comics empire neared its end, but he did do quite a bit of freelance work for D. C. further down the line.) New material returned full-time later that year, but with a twist: Ivy’s strip was combined with that of Menace junior Bea to form Bea & Ivy, drawn by veteran Nigel Parkinson (who had been illustrating Bea's solo strip).

This was a short-lived incarnation, however; a year later, Dennis the Menace was revamped to bring the strip in line with the new CBBC series, which had the knock-on effect of Bea and Ivy being split up. Bea got her own strip again, but what happened to Ivy was a bit more complicated: There were one or two solo Ivy stories (titled just Ivy) which appear to have been in development around the time of the reshuffle, as the first such strip has a note in Nigel Parkinson’s handwriting beneath the title panel which reads “Bea’s not allowed out this week!” (and in fact the second may not have ever been published); after that, Ivy returned to Nixon-era reprints, this time of the two-page stories from 1998-2002. (We can do a history of Roger the Dodger another day, but Nixon reprints were also used for that story for several periods between 2005 and 2012; Nixon had been replaced there by Barrie Appleby, who is still drawing the story today, but Appleby's growing workload for D. C. Thomson necessitated the reruns.)

During all this kerfuffle, Ivy continued to feature in the Christmas annuals drawn by a succession of regular D. C. artists, but new material in the weekly comic next appeared in October 2010, now drawn by Uruguayan artist and D. C. newcomer Diego Jourdan Pereira; this run at least was scripted by Alan Digby himself. Unfortunately, Digby retired in early 2011, and the change of editorship led to Ivy being dropped by his successor; Pereira’s version of the strip ran for just five months.

This brief span means I don't have an example of a Pereira strip in my own collection, but these were (with a bit of help from the Internet Archive again)³ available on his own website:

A notable feature of his all-too-short tenure is DJP continuing a fine tradition of drawing custom title panels for each strip, a few more of which he posted to Comics UK -- the bottom one, also seen on one of the above strips, is a homage to Ivy's Favourite Nightmares:

Pereira did other work for D. C., including drawing Dennis the Menace for BeanoMAX (a monthly spin-off aimed at a slightly older audience than the weekly comic), and has gone on to have a varied career which includes illustrating Sesame Street activity books, drawing issues of DuckTales for Boom! Studios, translating Spanish poetry, prose and graphic novels into English, and contributing to Reader's Digest. He is also quite possibly the only Beano artist in the comic's history to have previously drawn for any version of MAD magazine (the Australian localised edition).

In 2012, the Beano introduced the 'Funsize Funnies' section, featuring a handful of mini-strips per page; this feature initially revived characters from years gone by, and Ivy enjoyed two stints there in 2014 and 2017, on both occasions drawn by Lew Stringer:

The 2014 series was predominantly written by John Anderson, who has been the Beano editor since 2016; Stringer scripted the 2017 ones himself. The latter run was her final appearance in the weekly comic to date, but she appeared as a young adult in a story from the 2024 annual, celebrating the comic’s 85th anniversary:

Also, as per this early strip, her mum is only meant to be about 24 years old.

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1. Whilst nowhere states this in black-and-white, it seems highly likely that the catalyst was the closure of Whoopee!, the final issue of which was published in March 1985. Nixon drew quite a few long-running stories for Whoopee!, but none of them were carried forward when it merged into Whizzer and Chips. ^↩
2. With honourable mention to The Yeti with Betty, which is still around in rebooted form today. ^↩
3. These are still on the site but have been shuffled off the front page in favour of more recent work, so I just needed the Archive to find the URLs. The page numbers in the bottom-left corner indicate these are direct reproductions of what was printed in the comic. ^↩