Oh Calamity

In 1986, the editor of the Beano, Euan Kerr, had an idea for a new story for his comic. It was going to star a character who was, quite simply, the unluckiest boy in the world. This character was dubbed Calamity James, an artist was assigned to him, and a test page was produced. That page was reproduced in the 2008 book The Official History of the Beano:

Which may not have been what you were expecting.

Originally assigned artist Henry Davies' take on the character had a serious problem: its tone was felt to be depressing, rather than darkly funny. Several other artists in the D. C. Thomson office had a go after it was decided Davies' work would not be used,¹ but they were also unable to thread the needle, and the character was on the verge of being scrapped when someone decided to let Tom Paterson have a go.

Paterson was a very new hire to D. C. who had only started that year -- in fact James would be his first strip for one of their titles -- but he had been drawing comics for rival publisher Fleetway since 1973, aged just nineteen (perhaps most famously drawing the ultimate enfant terrible Sweeny Toddler for most of his tenure); he was one of several Fleetway artists to start working for D. C. in the late eighties as Fleetway's comics empire started to dissipate. Paterson managed to find the tone they had been going for, and James duly debuted in the 01/11/86 edition of the Beano:

The concept of James perpetually having a literal cloud over his head was carried over from earlier designs, but it became rather less perpetual and was eventually dropped a few years in. If you're wondering, it was before his first month in the comic was out that he gained his less-than-faithful companion, Alexander Lemming:

James really needs to be seen in the context that he replaced Biffo the Bear. It wasn't just that this was a new character from a new artist. This was something totally unlike anything else in the comic. Over time, the rest of the comic has changed, and it's hard to imagine what a shock to the senses it must have been for readers in 1986. Even after the work it took to strike the right balance, James instantly became the comic's most divisive character. As the Official History puts it:

Readers, however, were split into two camps -- some loved the story and thought it the best thing in the comic -- and others could not stand it at any price. There appeared to be no middle ground.

For the first few years of James' life, Tom Paterson was still drawing for Fleetway alongside his D. C. work -- indeed, he was drawing the cover story for Buster until April 1990. Fleetway had been planning to bring its comics up-to-date with a series of new titles, but they were bought out by Egmont in 1991, who had no interest in continuing with their humour titles and cancelled all the in-development comics. One such planned comic, Oh No!!, got as far as a test issue being produced circa '91 which featured quite a bit of work by Paterson. This seems to have been amongst the last new material Paterson drew for Fleetway.²

Anyway, all of that probably accounts for why an unusually high proportion of early editions of Calamity James are ghost-drawn by Bob Dewar:

There's also one or two strips that don't exactly look ghosted, but just a bit odd, as if someone else did the rough sketches but Paterson took over at a later stage:

Paterson's gag-heavy style added much to the scripts (written for many years by George Cobb, whose other contemporaries included Billy Whizz and Pup Parade), and included running jokes such as eccentric background characters, his dislike of Australian soap operas, nonsense poems, captions which pushed quite hard on the fourth wall, and two specific to James: large bags of money and other untold riches lying in the street (which always went unnoticed by the hapless boy), and the Little Squelchy Thingies.

Many variants appeared over the years, as well as the occasional game of 'Spot the Squelchy':

The LSTs started appearing in late '88, and quickly became a cult part of the comic, with readers' drawings of their own Thingies often appearing on the letters page. Paterson even sparingly let them take centre stage:

(The Squelchies have many finer hours than this, including several in the Christmas annuals, but you can see one of them from an October 2003 weekly issue here thanks to Peter Gray.)

Having always been prone to being dropped for the week if another strip needed extra space,³ James became quite intermittent over the course of the noughties, more ghosted strips (this time by Steve Bright) and reprints started appearing, before he was retired in early 2007. Whilst part of the reason for this was Paterson's growing workload for D. C. Thomson -- he took over Minnie the Minx from Jim Petrie in 2001, and also had a stint drawing Dennis the Menace which started the year James was retired -- it seems that Euan Kerr departing as editor and being replaced by Alan Digby, who was less keen on the character, was the biggest factor. (Kerr remained editor of the monthly spin-off BeanoMAX, and James reprints continued to appear in that after his departure from the weekly comic.)

However, James reappeared in the comic as soon as late 2009 for some sporadic runs (some of these are definitely reprints, but I can't definitively say if they all are), and was eventually permanently reinstated near the end of 2012 (coincidence or otherwise, the year after Digby left). With Paterson having departed from D. C. that year -- his work has since appeared in Viz, and he has revisited some of his Fleetway characters for Rebellion Publishing's revivals of titles such as Monster Fun -- from 2013 new stories for James were drawn by Northern Irish artist Leslie Stannage, who closely followed Paterson's style:

This Funsize strip is credited to Bananaman artist Wayne Thompson, but either Thompson is really really good at making his ghost work look indistinguishable from Stannage or it's a mistake. (Note the appearance of 'fizzy milk', which is a Jamesism unique to Stannage's strips.)

With the introduction of the 'Funsize Funnies' page, James has in recent years vacillated between having a full page to himself and appearing there. In early 2026, Nick Brennan started drawing the strip; Brennan was a regular fixture in the Beano and the Dandy in the nineties and noughties, illustrating stories such as Blinky, Sneaker and Crazy for Daisy, but his work for D. C. has been less frequent since then, and although he's done a few short-term strips, this is seemingly a return to him regularly drawing a story for the publisher after many years (with colours done by his wife Fran).⁴

Thus far Brennan's version of the strip has only appeared in Funsize format, but he is reportedly due to illustrate the character for this year's Beano Annual. In spite of everything, James remains a mainstay of the comic 40 years on from his introduction, gave an arguably undeserved nickname to one of the Premier League's most-capped footballers, was analysed in GCSE Media Studies textbooks, and has even starred in a live action short film. Maybe he's not so unlucky after all.

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1. A lot of Davies' work for D. C. Thomson (and Fleetway) appears to have been ghost-drawing strips when the usual artist was unavailable, which makes a picture difficult to build up, but he was still working for them by 2003 at least. He has also drawn cartoons for Private Eye for many years, including The Broon-ites and Mr Milibean. ^↩
2. Reprint material by Paterson continued to appear in Buster until the end of its life. Some sources claim that some Watford Gapp ("He's the King of the Rap!") strips published after 1991 are new, but I'm doubtful they are. ^↩
3. James also has some noticeable gaps around 1993-94, at which point Paterson was not only producing two pages of The Numskulls each week but also drawing about four or five different stories for the Dandy. ^↩
4. As a child, when Paterson and Brennan were working for D. C. at the same time, I don't think I actually got them confused. But there are certain similarities to their styles -- their stories always seemed more offbeat to me than anything else in the comics -- that made the initial sight of Brennan drawing a character originated by Paterson rather surreal. ^↩