Buzz Words

In January 1973, D. C. Thomson launched a new weekly humour comic for children into a market that already looked pretty crowded; they were already producing the Beano, Dandy, Beezer, Topper and Sparky at the time, and to introduce a sixth comic into this mix seems ambitious. Like its stablemates the Beezer and Topper, Buzz was published in A3 size, making it twice the size of many other comics of the time, but this didn't mean it would be a big hit: just two years and 103 issues later, Buzz would become the publisher's first mayfly when it closed.

A mayfly which I am now about to pin and mount to the wall. (I don't think that's what you do with mayflies, but just go with it.) The issue I have scanned in is from just over halfway through its life, number #59.

The cover of Buzz was, at least, quite distinctive: other A3 titles usually prioritised space for their cover story, but Buzz instead went for a large masthead which often loudly promoted free gifts, opportunities to win £1 postal orders or, in this case, pictures of the Osmonds. It's perhaps only obvious when physically holding a copy, but it does give the comic quite a strong resemblance to a tabloid newspaper.

The comic's one and only cover story was Hop, Skip and Jock, drawn by Malcolm Judge. Many earlier HSaJ stories were made up of one or two small panels followed by a large splash panel filled with action (which seems to make it look even more like a tabloid), but a few months before this issue it had been retooled into a more conventional strip. Being the front-page story, you can see every single edition of Hop, Skip and Jock here... for when Buzz closed, very unusually its cover stars did not survive the merger with another D. C. title.

Even Wikipedia's article on Buzz describes Nobby (artist: Bob McGrath) as 'generic', and he is perhaps representative of why the comic's time was so short: It failed to establish a distinctive identity. Nevertheless, Nobby survived the merger and lasted another four years in the Topper (which was branded as the Topper and Buzz for some nine and a half months following the merger).

A serialised comic detective story, George Martin's Top Tec had only been added to the comic two issues previously, and would survive to the end of the run; similarities with Send for Kelly (the Topper's cover story at the time), down to also being drawn by Martin, probably played a role in it not being carried forward.

The Whiteys and the Stripeys (Tom Lavery) is highly reminiscent of The Hillys and the Billys, a story about feuding hillbillies which ran in the Beezer from that comic's start to finish; this strip was markedly less successful and only lasted about nine months, appearing between issues 30 and 65.

The Buzzies and the Fuzzies -- one of many 'creature'-based stories drawn by Gordon Bell for D. C. -- had debuted in issue 5 of Buzz, so it is The Whiteys and the Stripeys that seems curiously similar to it, not the other way round. Phil Millar's Big Fat Flo (suspiciously similar to the Beano's Big Fat Joe, who appeared in its first 35 issues in 1938 and later appeared as one of Lord Snooty's pals) survived the merger, but only managed around ten months in the Topper.

Another George Martin joint, Calamity Kate was one of five stories to appear in all 103 issues of Buzz, but did not survive the comic's closure.

Sleepy Ed (John Aldrich) was introduced around the midpoint of the run, survived the merger with the Topper, but had the same lifespan as Big Fat Flo.

One of the more innovative stories in the comic, combining a convential strip with puzzles and other features, Sammy's Scribbles (yet another Gordon Bell story) was introduced a few months in, survived the merger and managed a run of just shy of two years in the Topper.

A well-told slice of slapstick drawn by Tom Lavery, Fred the Flop was one of Buzz's two big success stories: he appeared in the Topper until 1986, notching up over eleven years there. (That was probably as good as he could have hoped for: when the Beezer and Topper merged in 1990, all strips starring grown-ups were either dropped or had their protagonists de-aged into children, but attempts to modernise were already beginning to show even before the merger.)

We now come to some material that is, as best, racially insensitive. (A warning I am very lucky not to have to give more often in these posts, frankly.)

Some sources identify Arthur Martin's Wig and Wam as a reboot of a story that had appeared in the very first issue of the Dandy in 1937, but it appears this one was thought of independently and the name is just coincidence: the characters in the earlier strip were siblings (the strip was subtitled "The Skookum Twins") constantly playing tricks on their father. Although the strip had appeared since the first edition of Buzz, this was in fact the very last issue it appeared in.

The Twitz of the Ritz, drawn by Bill Ritchie, was also not long for this comic: it appeared in just two more issues after this one.

The well-stocked letters page was occasionally complemented by the newspaper-daily-esque Good Knight by Bill Ritchie, which appeared in slightly less than half of the issues overall.

Near-universally considered the high point of Buzz, and an early showcase for the talents of future Desperate Dan artist Ken H. Harrison, Jimmy Jinx and What He Thinks is a cut above much of the rest of the comic in terms of innovation and creativity, as well as willingness to experiment with the format. Other characters' angels and demons would sometimes appear; for one week, the strip was even rebranded as Jimmy Jinx and What His Rabbit Thinks!

Jimmy achieved an even longer run in Topper than Fred the Flop, ending in early 1989, just over eighteen months before it merged with the Beezer. It's easy to imagine a world where the strip lasted a little longer and made it to the Beano or the Dandy when Beezer and Topper closed in 1993, and could even still be producing new material today. Indeed, some time around the late nineties/early noughties Jimmy appeared in at least one Fun-Size Dandy, which feels like a pilot for a run in the full-size comic (several other stories from defunct comics, and some original characters who never appeared again, also featured in the FSDs around the same time -- it was a very peculiar title compared to the Fun-Size Beano, which only featured characters currently in the weekly comic), but sadly such a thing didn't materialise.

Sometimes suggested as being derivative of The Bash Street Kids, Skookum Skool (also Ken Harrison) did not appear in Topper after the closure of Buzz; it instead transferred (in a slightly revised format) into another new comic, Cracker, which launched two weeks after Buzz's closure... and would go on to have an even shorter run, notching up just 87 issues over twenty months. But we'll get onto that in the inevitable post on Cracker.

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In an ideal world, there would be an issue that was as representative as possible of the entire run that I could scan in, which was the case for Hoot and Nipper because they were so short-lived there wasn't time for the editorial team to attempt any reshuffles. Even in its two short years, quite a few new strips pushed out the old in Buzz's lifetime, but there are three in particular I would like to highlight (taken from D. C.'s reprint title Classics From the Comics).¹

Nero and Zero's stint in Buzz (which lasted for the first 40 issues) is identified by some sources as its third incarnation: a strip with the same name appeared in the boys' weekly The Wizard from 1930 to 1940, drawn by Allan Morley. Morley's version of the strip also appeared in the early years of the Beezer; it's possible those were reprints from The Wizard, but I don't want to jump to conclusions before I've seen any examples. As you can see from an example of a Wizard-era strip, the Buzz era (drawn by Tom Bannister) is recognisably the same basic concept but with the twosome drawn completely differently. Similar to Wig and Wam, I'm not entirely certain how strong the link between the different versions is.

A spin-off of Skookum Skool, Spookum Skool launched just one issue after the one I've scanned in, and continued for the first six months of Cracker. Cracker also featured a further addition to the Skookumverse, but we'll get onto that in the relevant post.

The Rooky Racers debuted in issue #62, and, yes, it's clearly taking inspiration from Wacky Races. It would seem unfair not to note that rival publishers Fleetway had a very similar strip in Whizzer and Chips for a few months in 1977, Rotten Egghead ("He's Just GOT To Win!"), which at least had the sense to come up with a title which might have made Hanna-Barbera a little less inclined to consider legal action. Both stories were even drawn by the same artist, Alan Rogers.

But The Rooky Racers leads us back to the initial point: with derivative material like this, Buzz struggled to distinguish itself in an already crowded market. When the time came for it to close, D. C. did a pretty good job of working out which stories were distinctive enough to survive.

So, next up is Cracker, the last mayfly of D. C. Thomson's humour anthology comics for me to stick a pin in... which includes one of the most appallingly racist characters in the publisher's history. What a hook for next time.

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1. Classics From the Comics was printed in A4, of course, so all material from A3 comics was scaled down. (There was a longer tangent here about why you don't really notice unless you're directly comparing with the original publication that was... probably a bit too long for a footnote.) ^↩