Nip and Tuck

At the end of January 1987, Fleetway Publications launched what would be their last new humour anthology comic for children. Apart from being published on a fortnightly schedule, Nipper had a gimmick of being printed in A5 size, compared to the A4 used by every other comic at that point (allowing it to claim it contained 48 pages), and it continued this theme by having most of its strips feature protagonists younger than those of other titles.

Just six issues in, the 'pint-sized' ploy was dropped, and henceforth the comic would be printed in A4 size. Another ten editions on, and it would all be over -- the sixteenth and final issue was on newsstands before August was out, after which it met the fate of so many of its stablemates when it merged into Buster. Although it managed to squeeze in a Summer Special and even a Christmas annual, Nipper is the ultimate mayfly of its genre's short-lived titles. This is perhaps best summed up by the fact that there were nineteen issues of Buster branded as Buster and Nipper -- three more than Nipper itself.

Beyond being stuck with the dubious honours of being the final and shortest-lived Fleetway title of its kind, did Nipper retain any kind of legacy? It's time to scan in an entire issue and find out.

As it happens, the edition I have scanned in is the first 'normal' size one, issue #6. The A4 issues are far easier to track down for the purposes of posts such as this than the A5 ones; given how quickly they switched over, I suspect there was some kind of distribution issue with newsagents being reluctant to stock an unusually-sized publication, or perhaps it just got lost on the stands behind bigger comics and this rapidly showed up in market research.

The title star, Nipper, was drawn by Gordon Bell, better known for drawing a wide variety of anthropomorphic animals for D. C. Thomson. Nipper survived the merger and lasted for just over two years in Buster, vanishing from its pages in October 1989.

Strongarm: Command Kart also survived the merger, and eked out thirteen months in its new home; it was drawn by Mike Lacey, who drew a whole host of characters for Fleetway (and was one of the few artists not to draw for D. C. further down the line), but is probably best known for X-Ray Specs.

It's three for three for 'characters who survived the merger' so far; Steve Bright's Brad Break managed exactly a year and a week in Buster.

Unbelievably, here's yet another strip that survived the merger; due to the high volume of characters coming in, Terry Bave's Double Trouble didn't appear until the second issue of Buster and Nipper. All the Nippers I have only give Jon and Suzy half a page; perhaps this is a hangover from the A5 era, but they had a full page by the time they reached Buster. It's a strip I've always been particularly fond of; it's a familiar concept, but carried off very well.

Double Trouble flourished in the pages of Buster (and the twins became increasingly more violent), and lasted until Buster (and with it, Fleetway's comics empire) concluded in December 1999. But if you know anything about the final years of Buster, you know we need to caveat that sentence a bit.

Over the course of the nineties, Buster slowly went from being all-new (or almost entirely new) material to consisting nigh entirely of reprints, as its budget was repeatedly cut and artists were let go one by one. In late 1995, a fan reference book titled The Buster Index was published; we know from that which strips were still publishing new material at that point, and Double Trouble was one of them. I've had a look at some Busters from after that date and I think the last new strip ran in the issue dated 9th July 1996 (the logo changes back to an older design in the following issue).

Despite the fact Buster was operating with an ever-decreasing skeleton staff, readers were still surveyed on their favourite stories and unpopular ones taken out of rotation even when the comic was almost 100% reprints, up until a few months before the end. Double Trouble is one of two Nipper stories that survived the merger and went on to appear right up until the very end in its new home, and as you'll see, from a structural point of view it's quite fortunate for this post that it appears first in this issue.

Frank McDiarmid's Will and Bill seems exactly what it says on the tin -- The Prince and the Pauper with Prince William. It did not continue after the merger, which in retrospect may have been for the best.

Ricky Rainbow was the other story that survived the merger and carried on right up to the end. At a point where comics were not yet printed in full-colour, the nature of the story meant it always had to occupy one of the colour pages, which may have helped it win readers' affections.

Ricky was drawn by Jimmy Hansen, a man whose role in British comics cannot be overstated, and by all accounts was one of the loveliest people you could ever hope to meet. He was the final artist to draw Buster himself for the eponymous comic, later had a stint drawing Dennis the Menace for the Beano, and also drew strips including Marvo the Wonder Chicken, First Class, P5, Jak and Dreadlock Holmes once he started drawing for D. C. in the early nineties.

Jimmy was the last artist to be let go from Buster before the end in February 1999, which left J. Edward Oliver as the only artist providing new material for the comic for most of its final year. Jimmy was drawing three strips for Buster which, according to The Buster Index, were still new beyond the end of 1995: Ricky Rainbow, Buster himself, and The Winners. At the point he stopped drawing for the comic Buster was the only one that was still new, and the other two had switched to reprints at an earlier point. Based on the logo changing, there may have been new Ricky strips appearing as late as May 1998, but this is probably something that requires a post to itself at some point.

I see what you were trying to do, but did you have to call it a 'register'? Not a fan club? Really?

Flapper also survived the merger, but only as a half-page strip, and was gone by February 1988. (For the initial months after the merger, three Nipper strips were presented over a two-page spread in an odd format: half a page of Flapper, Ricky Rainbow split over the two pages, then half a page of Nipper himself. Once Flapper was retired, Nipper was increased to a page and Ricky got a sheet of A4 to himself.)

I'm not sure how much comics work Blaster and Bignoise artist Clive Manning did -- he didn't draw anything for Buster, it seems -- but he's still working as an artist and printmaker today.

Here's an interesting one: Handy Andy had appeared in another short-lived Fleetway comic, Krazy, from October 1976 to April 1978, and I'm 99.9% certain its appearances in Nipper are reprints from that. It's only a theory, but I wonder if they had some empty space when they switched from 48 A5 pages to 32 in A4 and a reprint was needed to fill the gap. (Andy reprints also featured sporadically in Buster from 1988-89.)

No, really, I don't think you needed it to call it a register.

School Funds (or, more correctly, SCHOOL FUNds) -- about the tribulations of a group of students trying to raise funds for their cash-strapped school -- also survived the merger, and continued for some two and a half years afterwards (its conclusion coincided with artist Sid Burgon departing Fleetway for D. C. Thomson).

The slightly clunkily-titled My 'Dad' Mum (drawn by the highly prolific Anthony Hutchings), about a single mother trying to prove to her son Sam she could do anything his absent father could, is one that really seems to split opinion. Some people admittedly not well-disposed towards Nipper seem to strongly dislike it -- in a less-than-glowing write-up for The Ultimate Book of British Comics, Graham Kibble-White describes it as the publication's 'nadir' -- whilst others seem a bit more charitable towards it. In any event, it was yet another strip that survived in Buster, and was phased out at the exact same time as School Funds (coinciding with a major revamp of the comic).

Kelpie's Kingdom represents one of the last gasps of 'serious' adventure stories for Fleetway.

Terry Bave's Mighty Mouth was yet another strip that survived the merger and was phased out with School Funds and My 'Dad' Mum.

(You may be wondering what made way for all the Nipper strips when they landed in Buster. The merger was an opportunity for Buster to shed several stories, some of which it had inherited from other Fleetway mayflies, including Young Arfur, Mummy's Boy, Blub the Sub and Sqworm, and several more were phased out over the next year or so, most notably Faceache, which had suffered the death of its originator Ken Reid in February 1987; the strip carried on for a while drawn by Frank McDiarmid, but Reid was simply an impossible act to follow.)

The Savers also survived the merger (albeit with a retool early into their Buster run to focus more on environmental issues), were still appearing in the comic at the time The Buster Index was published, but disappeared at some point in 1996.

Tom Paterson's Felix the Pussycat is a specific spoof of the Beano's more 'serious' Billy the Cat, which becomes all the more amusing with the knowledge that Paterson was already drawing Calamity James for the Beano at this point.

We now hit quite a big seam of strips whose artists I'm not certain of or don't seem to have done much else for British comics...

James Pond shares his name with a Buster story that ran from November 1965 to June 1967, about a human spy, "Agent 008 1/2: Licensed to Laugh". The art for this one looks like Barrie Appleby, and it may well have been the last new strip he drew for Fleetway if so (1987 seems curiously late for him to still be doing work for them!)

Hit Kid is also an almost-certain-reprint with an identical history to Handy Andy, down to the later repeats in Buster. (Another issue of Nipper I have only gives Nursery Crimes a single page, and fills the space with yet another Krazy reprint, Duck Turpin, which concerned the adventures of a talking duck who was also a highwayman. No, really.)

Another Sid Burgon joint, Roy's Toys regularly occupied the back page, and also managed to last another two years in Buster.

* * *

I knew quite a few Nipper stories were carried over to Buster, and that Ricky Rainbow and Double Trouble were amongst the last Fleetway stories to exist as new material. I wasn't expecting it to be the case that nearly half the comic folded into Buster, and most of the strips got pretty respectable runs for survivors of a merger. Was Nipper primarily hobbled by its opening gimmick and fortnightly release schedule rather than the quality of the material? Realistically, given how things panned out for Fleetway, it was probably only two or three years Nipper missed out on if it hadn't been axed so soon. But maybe it should have had the chance.