Trail of Fear

I have rhapsodised at some length about the superhero-themed Fighting Fantasy book, Appointment with F.E.A.R., on several previous occasions: a loving homage to superhero comics, down to the cover art provided by 2000 AD artist Brian Bolland, the book gives you the choice of four superpowers, namely Super Strength, Psi-Powers, Enhanced Technological Skill and Energy Blast.

The adventure will play out completely differently depending on which superpower you choose, for on each possible playthrough, the clues you need to locate the titular meeting of the Federation of Euro-American Rebels will reside with different supervillains, and the location itself will also be totally different, leading to four distinct endgames.

I've tried to reverse-engineer this enormously complex book without melting my brain, producing something totally incoherent, or just typing out the solution reference-by-reference. And I'm pretty pleased with the solution I've come up with. (Hopefully it leaves a decent amount of mystery, but if you have any ambitions of beating Appointment with F.E.A.R. unaided, it's probably best to stop reading now.)

Davy Gets Dared

All strips in this article are taken from the Internet Archive's uploads of Pow!

Dare-a-Day Davy appeared in every edition of the short-lived Pow!, which notched up 86 issues between January 1967 and September 1968. Pow! was part of a strand of British comics I've not looked at before, but in short it was published by Odhams Press, who started out in book publishing and women's magazines before expanding into children's comics, most of which featured a mix of original comic stories and reprints licensed from American publishers. Pow! was one of Odhams' "Power Comics" -- a range of titles which had superhero stories from Marvel alongside their new content.¹

D-a-D D was drawn by Ken Reid, a legend of British comics who started out drawing Fudge the Elf for the Manchester Evening News, and later originated stories such as Roger the Dodger and Jonah for D. C. Thomson -- the latter of which became particularly notable for Reid's love of the scripts leading him to, in his own words, "get carried away" and cram up to 30 panels onto a single page -- prior to moving over to their rival publishers, where he became perhaps best known for Faceache, which he drew, predominantly for Fleetway's Buster, from 1971 up until his death in 1987.

The scripts were written by Walter Thorburn, but the strip had a unique selling point -- Davy was pathologically incapable of resisting a dare (personifications of his willpower and "bad self" quickly became supporting characters), and readers were to write in and set dares for him (winning £1 if their suggestion was used; the first two strips, an Easter-themed dare in issue #66, and Davy's appearances in the Christmas annuals were the only ones with dares not set by readers). The strips almost invariably ended in Davy's spifflication and him swearing revenge on the reader whose idea had been used. A further point of interactivity was later introduced by depicting the Hyde-esque "inner self" of the reader who sent in that week's dare, which the strip itself claimed caused the rate of submissions to sharply reduce!

Schools Just Wanna Have Fun

In October 1983, a new weekly humour comic for children was launched by IPC/Fleetway. Conceived by former schoolteacher turned comics writer Graham Exton, who had previously written scripts for strips such as Sid's Snake and Faceache, as its name suggests School Fun had the unifying concept that all of its stories were set in schools.

I can already sense eyebrows arching, and, yes, this concept does beg the obvious question: Would children really want to spend their precious time outside of school reading a comic full of stories set there, when there were about a dozen more escapist titles on the humour shelf alone? Most of them had at least one story primarily set in a school, from The Bash Street Kids to The Four Marys, but an entire comic?

You can put together some defence of School Fun as an attempt to create a comic with a cohesive theme. By this point Fleetway had seen a number of short-lived titles quickly sputter out due to a failure to establish a strong identity of their own -- not only their own titles, but several published by rivals such as D. C. Thomson. Nevertheless, the answer to the question in the above paragraph would seem to be a resounding "no": School Fun lasted for just 33 issues and seven months before it went the way of eight previous Fleetway titles (and three future ones) when it merged with Buster.

The very first issue included a fictionalised account of how the comic came to be on its first page, which is apparently not all that far from what really happened (although as per Graham Kibble-White in The Ultimate Book of British Comics, in real life a class in Cannock were asked by Exton what they'd like to see in a comic all about school). I think you can sense a little element of movement away from this over School Fun's short life -- the first issue's tagline "The Happiest Read of Your Life!" did not reappear, and later issues seem to promote things such as, well, children bringing a lion to school more on their front cover, such as the one under discussion today. It's issue #26, just two months from the end, which I've scanned in.

Dwarfing Through the Decades... Again

At the moment, BBC Two are repeating the fifth series of Red Dwarf. These repeats, which have been ongoing at the rate of one series a year since the first two were repeated in 2023, have given something of a second life to the Red Dwarf BBC Broadcasts Guide, one of the earliest and most genuinely useful things I ever wrote.

The continuity for these episodes have also had a lot of fun to them; "Holoship" opened the run with the same ident used for the original 1992 broadcast, and a continuity announcement based on the original, and something similar was done with "The Inquisitor" a week later, with the opening continuity riffing on a line from the original 1992 trail.

Something quite wonderful from 1997 also resurfaced the other day: a clip of some overrunning snooker coverage from 1997, with presenter David Vine confirming the scheduled episode of Red Dwarf will be broadcast following the conclusion of the match, after which the following immortal line is spoken by Dennis Taylor, in reference to Steve Davis: "From the Red Dwarf to the Ginger Magician..."

A quick check of BBC Genome dates this to 9 February 1997, and the Sunday repeat of "Duct Soup", which was already scheduled for 10.30pm, and (obviously) broadcast even later. Back in 2016 I went with the scheduled times in absence of any other information, but some of those narrative repeats were on the same day as live coverage of other events which makes it hard to be sure they went out exactly as scheduled. The continuity announcement for the repeat of "Blue" (erroneously described as being from the premiere) also describes it as airing 'a little later than planned' -- presumably due to, of all things, a live broadcast of the BBC Symphony Orchestra playing Stravinsky immediately beforehand.

Concluding the run, the 9 March repeat of "Nanarchy" was scheduled on the same day as coverage of the World Indoor Championships in Paris and Crufts, so it's quite possible that one was delayed too. But anyway, I've modified some of the footnotes to reflect this.