The Sickest Character in Comics

In January 1988, the Beano strip chronicling the adventures of Dennis the Menace's pet pig, Rasher, was retired... and since its replacement was being drawn by the same artist, David Sutherland, there was a rather unusual handover, with The Germs and Ill Will appearing in the last strip before taking over the page completely the week after.

(Both strips shared not only an artist, but also a writer -- John Kemp, who also wrote Minnie the Minx, Ball Boy and Gnasher and Gnipper at the time. Kemp is a fascinating character who began writing for D. C. as an 18-year-old¹ in the 1980s and departed in the early 90s to become a mature student at Dundee University, during which time he was also elected to Dundee City Council and served as education convener.)

The first 'proper' strip, initially titled The Germs, was afforded two pages:

From the following week, it was a one-pager, with early editions carrying a rather unsettling title panel:

The strip would be rather inconsistently named, variously being known as just The Germs, or The Germs with Ill Will, or The Germs and Ill Will, or The Germs also starring Ill Will, or The Germs also with Ill Will.

With Sutherland already drawing Dennis himself and The Bash Street Kids for D. C. Thomson, it would not appear every week, until at some point in the early nineties Vic Neill took over as artist.

(It's difficult to tell, because Neill was remarkably good at ghosting Sutherland's style, which in addition to its spotty appearances under Sutherland makes the crossover point hard to detect; a bit more of his own style seems to be injected into the strip later on.)

Here's also a bonus strip ghosted by Terry Bave, just because:

In late 1993, though, the Beano inherited The Numskulls from the Beezer -- and I don't think it can be a coincidence that with such a conceptually similar strip now running in the same comic, the adventures of Ugly Jack Bacteria, Jeremy Germ and Iris the Virus soon fell away to almost nothing. The strip was never totally retired, though -- Neill continued to draw new strips sporadically up until his death in December 1999.

When Neill died, as was often the case there was a buffer of unpublished material still to run, and new editions of the two stories he had been regularly drawing at the time of his death, Billy Whizz and Tim Traveller, continued to appear for quite a ways into 2000. A few posthumous editions of The Germs also appeared, such as this one from January 2000:

It must also be said that this strip from February 2001 looks an awful lot like him:

Following this, the strip continued to make very occasional appearances under new artists. This one from June 2001 looks like Barry Glennard, who curiously enough would start drawing The Numskulls not long after:

There was purportedly at least one edition drawn by Keith Reynolds, who took over from Neill on Tim Traveller, but I haven't been able to locate it yet, and it seems the strip was, even by its own standards, only a very fleeting presence in the comic by 2002.

There was one more artist for the strip in 2004, Nigel Parkinson, but his version ran for just three editions scattered across the year, and would be the final time the story appeared as new material:

Reprints were used for a full-time stint from late 2011, initially of Sutherland strips, and later Neill ones, retitled Totally Gross Germs:

Or sometimes Totally Gross The Germs, apparently:

Before reverting to the original title, not long before the reprints stopped around mid-to-late 2012:

I suppose it's appropriate that a strip about germs should be -- on a number of levels -- one of the most irregular stories in the comic's history.

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1. Regards to John himself for clarifying how old he was; most sources describe him as being "a teenager" when he started writing for D. C. ^↩