Hot to Go!

Snip and Snap, D. C. Thomson's original duo of postman-pillorying dogs, enjoyed a stint in the Sparky for just shy of two years, from October 1972 to August 1974.

As you may have immediately guessed from other posts I've done on this subject recently, for a brief spell beginning in the summer of 1999, the twosome were dusted off, colourised and reprinted in the Dandy as the Red Hot Chilli Dogs:

The new title panels are interesting -- it looks like they've taken art of Snip and Snap from some other strip and composited them in, taking care to ensure the newly-done logo matches the original art. I think the strip looks a bit too out of place with the rest of the comic for the illusion of newness to be totally effective, but it's a nice piece of work. They even come up with a few more variants:

(I don't have the original version of this strip, but it appears it was the fifth in the original running order. This will prove to be important in a few paragraphs' time.)

It was probably the case that some people who didn't realise these were reprints thought the strip was derivative of the Beano's Gnasher and Gnipper, although it preceded that strip by over a decade, and even its predecessor Gnasher's Tale by about five years! There are certainly similarities between the two, especially in strips where they're going after the poor postie, but I think Snip and Snap has a very un-Beano-like element of malevolence to it.

The Chilli Dogs incarnation of the strip was short-lived, and seems to have vacated the comic by the start of 2000. However, it was rerun again in the Dandy Xtreme in 2007; I don't have any of those, but it seems highly likely they were just reprints of what was done in 1999 and didn't have any 'new' strips. (In the Xtreme era the Dandy was effectively a 20-page magazine with a 16-page insert of comics... inexplicably including Desperate Dan reprints from the 1940s.)

I believe this edition, from the Christmas '99 Dandy, to be the last reprint (originally from the Christmas '72 Sparky).

The artist for Snip and Snap was Michael Green -- a man who simultaneously has a not terribly distinctive name, and a name which is distinctive for all the wrong reasons. It's tricky to build a complete picture of his career, but he drew another 'anthropomorphic animals' story for the Sparky, Jumbo and Jet, and also did work for Fleetway later on, including two truly memorable strips for Whizzer and Chips: The Loony Martians, chronicling the titular extra-terrestrials' attempts to steal Earth's food, and The Drips, the adventures of some anthropomorphic water droplets determined to drive the hapless Mr. Smith insane by any (plumbing-related) means necessary. He also contributed stories to the anarchic Oink!, including Weedy Willy, which eked out another seven months in Buster following that comic's end. Snip and Snap certainly seems to have been amongst his earliest comics work, and may even have been his first full stop.

Whilst I don't have a huge amount of original Snip and Snaps, and what I do comes from D. C.'s reprint title Classics From the Comics,¹ some have been uploaded by Peter Gray. This includes another one I can directly compare to the 1999 version, and it's nice to be able to do so with a Sparky original:

Peter's uploads also contain the first ever Snip and Snap strip. Before you see it, take another look at the title panels in the original Sparky versions. Maybe in the first one (seen in the strip directly above) the dogs look a bit off-model, and its replacement looks a little uninspired? (I appreciate you probably need the context of a full issue, but it does stick out a bit compared to other stories of the time.)

The Sparky had started out aimed at a younger audience than other D. C. titles, and slowly evolved into something not only closer to its stablemates, but with a distinctly wackier streak. It was somewhere at the tail-end of this process that the strip made its debut, but Green seems to have started out aiming for "absolutely terrifying", and the new title panel seems to be the result of a general attempt to tone things down a bit (although the old one stayed for a few strips after the designs were changed).

Whilst I don't have the relevant issue of the Dandy myself, the very first Snip and Snap strip was in fact also the very first Red Hot Chilli Dogs strip, as you can see here; I guess there wasn't an alternative edition that was felt to work as well as an introduction, and it seems that none of the other strips featuring the original designs (which appear to have only lasted a couple of weeks, if even that) were rerun.

Although all the reprints look like they come from pretty early in the strip's lifetime, they definitely weren't rerun in the same order as they originally appeared; the second RHCD strip was originally the seventeenth edition of Snip and Snap, and it's followed by the twenty-fourth, then the fifth (although I'm not quite capable of providing a complete list... yet). It is also worth noting that in the final months of the strip (for at least its last seven months in the Sparky), for some reason the lettering switches from being typed to hand-drawn, which seems like it would have made them harder to re-edit if they no longer had "clean" versions.