That Cannonball Kid Sure Scores a Mean Owen Goal

This is an example of Cannonball Kid (drawn by Rob Lee), a story which appeared in D. C. Thomson's Nutty from around the midpoint of its 1980-85 run to its end. If you remember my earlier look at Nutty, you may notice this is the exact same strip I used as an example of the Kid there... but there's a reason for this. (Apart from the fact it's the only Cannonball Kid strip I have.)

In April 1998, the Cannonball Kid was dusted down, colourised and renamed for use in the Dandy, and as it happens, this strip became the very first edition of Owen Goal:

Following on from a feature the previous year that ran to mark the comic's 60th anniversary, Comic Cuts, which reprinted various examples of stories from the comic's history, Owen was the first of several strips from long-defunct D. C. titles such as Nutty, Cracker and Hoot to be upcycled in the Beano and Dandy from 1998 until the late noughties; others used their original names, and Owen is probably the most extensive rebranding of the lot.¹

The question that pops up, and which I don't really have the answer to, is: to what extent is this material trying to be passed off as "new"? (You go ahead and quote "Another Simpsons Clip Show", I'll wait.) This is a good colourisation job (it's tempting to compare it with similar jobs in Buster at the time, but that comic was less than two years from its end and had a budget of practically zero, so it hardly seems fair), they've redone the speech bubbles and renamed the character to better fit in with the rest of the comic... there's a lot of effort that's gone in and I don't think we should be too cynical about reuse of material here.

It's also worth noting that Owen Goal started less than two months before France '98, which seems unlikely to be a coincidence, especially since Michael Owen (who surely part-inspired Mr. Goal's name) had made his debut for the England senior team as their youngest 20th-century player not long before and fans had been campaigning for him to be included in the World Cup squad; maybe they wanted a new football-based strip, there wasn't time to get new material up and running, and the reprints were a stopgap of sorts?²

(Owen's predecessor as the Dandy's football fan was Barney the Wonder Winger, who ran from 1991 to 1995. I don't think I find it the funniest strip, but Brian Walker produces some really beautiful art, for Barney in particular he rarely felt bound to any kind of format, and he drew minorities and disabled people into his stories years before other artists tried.)

Overhauled Cannonball Kid strips appeared in the Dandy for some eight months. This is the very last Owen Goal strip that was a rework, from the issue dated 19/12/98:

The fact that they went with a strip depicting corporal punishment does suggest they'd run out of editions of CK that didn't look too dated, and maybe makes the 'stopgap' theory seem less likely. One week later, in the Christmas issue, the story switched over to new material (drawn by Nigel Parkinson, who named the strip as perhaps his personal favourite to draw).

It was pretty common for strips to break their usual templates in Christmas editions, and this being the switchover point might have been an attempt to, if not hide the join, at least not make it too jarring. (Owen still has his previous incarnation's football strip and hyperactive tendencies at this point, but both were phased out quite quickly.) Once Parkinson got his hands on the story, he quickly introduced a whole range of supporting characters, including the rest of Owen's team and his coach:

Whether or not it was always the plan to switch from reprints to new material, they were probably coming up to the point where they'd have to make a decision -- putting aside the fact that they may have run out of usable archive strips, there was never a Nutty Summer Special or Christmas annual, so if they wanted Owen to be a permanent presence they couldn't rely on reprints for much longer.

Owen wasn't the only story to be hauled out of the archives and later change to new material (the other was Fred's Bed, which originally appeared in the Beezer and Topper in the early 90s, was reprinted in the Beano in 2007 and then enjoyed three or four years of new material, originally mixed in with the reprints but later full-time), but he enjoyed a long and successful run for a revived title; although his history gets tricky to track over the course of the Dandy's multiple identity crises in the noughties and early 2010s, he appeared in the final issue in 2012 and was a regular presence in the Dandy Annual until the end of the decade. (The title of "resident football-mad character" in the Beano is currently held by Mahira of the Match, who had her own Funsize strip for a while in 2022 before being one of several characters transplanted into The Bash Street Kids to improve Class 2B's diversity.)

A 2004 strip, from shortly before the Dandy's controversial revamp.

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1. Although there's definitely more examples in the Dandy than the Beano; budget matters? Or perhaps they felt this material looked less dated when it was appearing alongside the likes of Desperate Dan, Korky the Cat and Winker Watson? ^↩
2. For that matter, it also seems unlikely to be a coincidence that Cannonball Kid debuted in Nutty not long after England qualified for Spain 1982, the first time they'd reached the finals since 1970; indeed, his football strip bears quite a close resemblance to the England strip for that tournament which the colourised versions seem to play down! ^↩