A few months ago, I published a history of Ivy the Terrible which went down spectacularly well. (Thanks again if you reposted it or said something nice about it.) This is a deleted scene which I realised very quickly should probably be spun out into its own piece.
This is, once again, the first ever Ivy strip, as published in the edition of the Beano dated 04/05/85:
In (approximately) May 1988, Ivy made her debut in the Beano Comic Library range, with an issue rather unusually titled simply Ivy the Terrible:
The reason for this name is because this issue is essentially a revised and heavily expanded version of that very first strip... and, since I've separated it out into its own post, I may as well give you the entire issue.
Once you've seen her escape from her playpen in this version, I would suggest that panel 2 of the original strip starts to look a little peculiar. The Comic Library's version seems to be far more in keeping with the character's concept as someone who wants to be as tough as Dennis the Menace or Minnie the Minx, but doesn't yet have the maturity or strength to carry it off. Note that Ivy being unable to reach the door handle is the same gag as her being unable to reach the handle for Dennis' front door gate in the strip.
It is also rather unusual that Ivy's parents are nowhere to be seen in the original; I suspect some shorter version of this opening sequence was intended for her debut in the Beano itself, but had to be cut to fit it onto a single page.
When might the Comic Library have been done? The production schedule means this issue could have been done at any time between Ivy's debut in May '85 and shortly before publication three years later, as some of the Libraries were left on the shelf for years -- but something that narrows the field is about to come along.
(It also wasn't unusual for the release order to be changed at the last minute and issues to be bumped back months -- Comic Libraries #35 and #36 advertise Lord Snooty in "Castle Capers" as being released next month, but it was switched out for another story and eventually released as issue #50.)
Robert Nixon became the artist for Beryl the Peril in May 1986, taking over from John Dallas. At the same time, Beryl was promoted to become the Topper's cover star, and also received a costume change that was probably to better distinguish her from other D. C. Thomson cover stars: until then she'd worn a black dress over a red shirt, but Nixon's version swapped this for a red dress over a blue-and-white striped sweater. This, and the fact that Beryl is the first of the four comic stars Ivy goes after, would indicate that Nixon was already drawing Beryl at this point and hence this Comic Library was done at least a year after Ivy started appearing in the Beano.
There were only four other Comic Libraries featuring Ivy -- #229 "Poison Ivy!" (approx mid-1990), three-way crossover #311 "The Three Belles" (late 1993), #352 "Terrible Tails" (approx mid-1996), and #363 "Ivy the Terrible versus Nanny Gote!" (the suprapropreantepenultimate Comic Library, released mid-1997). That last one definitely isn't by Nixon, and based on their covers (which were usually but not always drawn by the same artist who did the rest of the issue) I'm undecided if the others are; this may be the only Ivy Library drawn by Nixon.
A lot of Roger the Dodger and Beryl the Peril Libraries also don't look like Nixon's work, and this trend continues into the Libraries' successor series, the Fun-Size Beanos and Dandys; in fact the only other Comic Library definitely drawn by Nixon is issue #100, Lord Snooty in "King of the Castle", which must have been done not long after he returned to D. C. Thomson.
All the gags from the original one-page strip turn up here, dotted around and often in different contexts, but "Ivy can't read" is swapped for "Ivy can't count".
Although Ivy came up against Dennis and Minnie several times in the early months of her strip, I have read an awful lot of old Beanos and have concluded that her encounters with them here are original ideas and not recycled from weekly strips.
The Beezer is the only D. C. mainstay not represented here, likely because it lacked a truly iconic "tough guy" character. (Scrapper, which it actually inherited from Cracker, is probably the closest they had.)
The fact that they went with "Ivy falls asleep" twice perhaps backs up the idea that much of this was indeed only written for the Comic Library. (Quite a lot of Comic Libraries resort to obvious repetition or other padding to tell a 64-page story. Some Fun-Size Beanos and Dandys, which featured two or three shorter stories per issue instead of one big one, are reportedly reprints of Comic Libraries with the padding taken out, but that's another post.)
Nixon's take on Desperate Dan is a pretty good one that's very close to Ken H. Harrison's, and perhaps only his existing D. C. workload stopped him from ghosting the story when Harrison was busy with Oor Wullie and The Broons in the nineties.
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My presumption is that, as Ivy was replaced on the back page by the membership form for the newly-launched Beano Club, this was to reassure any readers she was still inside the comic (and that the comic's new extra 8 pages wasn't just ad space, perhaps).
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