When I scanned in a full issue of the short-lived School Fun not long ago, I promised a closer look at its great survivor, the Tom Paterson-drawn School Belle -- who continued after the merger with Buster, obviously, outstripped all the other stories in the comic by several years and appeared in its new home until near the end (although much of Belle's appearances in the nineties were reprints).
The above strip is from the 20/04/85 edition of Buster, at which point School Fun was still being presented as a separate pull-out section. Belle's arch-nemesis Grotty Glenda is present and correct at this point, but we were still a while off from the addition of a classic piece of Tom Paterson humour.
"Know Your Nurks", identifying the various less-than-desirable boys in Belle's school, started appearing in mid-1987; the numbering on each one is accurate, so even without every single relevant issue of Buster in my possession, we can trace the very first one to the 23rd May of that year (curiously enough, the week before a major revamp of the comic). This system is remarkably similar to the one used in Cliff Hanger, down to only the regular strips in the weekly comic using it (in the 1989 Christmas annual, the two Belle strips label their Nurks as "Nurk of the Year" and a "Christmas Nurk").
Although he'd stopped drawing Buster himself, and signed the last one off "ta-ta!", new editions of Belle that were probably still drawn by Paterson continued to appear until June, now dropped back down to one page. Here are the very last two (all strips from this point are from the Internet Archive), which finished off a loose story arc:
In the 28th April 1990 issue, Paterson drew that week's "Crazy Character"1 -- a two-page feature, launched earlier that year, which starred various guest characters, many of whom were too ridiculous to appear full-time or were parodies of current films and TV series. Examples included the underwater soap opera Coronation Stream, Beverly Chills 666, Crook: The Pirate Who Couldn't Afford a Hook, Crimebotch OK, Teenage Mutant Turnips, Baywitch, Nigel Manxell the Formula 1 Feline and It Could Be Ewe, which was about a pair of sheep obsessed with the National Lottery.
I know people describe Oink! as "Viz for children", but I think Buster in its "we're not sure how much longer the comic has" years is more than capable of outdoing it.
The last Paterson edition of Lucy is in the 01/09/90 edition (only her fifth appearance overall), and he signs it "ta-ta!", the same as he did with his last adventure for Buster himself; this was certainly the last new strip by Paterson to run in Buster, and may very well have been his final work for Fleetway altogether.
With all this in mind, I'm pretty confident that the School Belle strips that ran after he'd stopped doing the cover story are indeed by Paterson; I did previously wonder if they might be a very good ghost-artist. (Paterson's Belle strips from the last few years of his run don't seem to be signed; perhaps because he was also getting credit for Buster on the cover, although there are Belle strips from as late as 1987 which are signed.)
In any event, the first edition of School Belle definitely drawn by Keith Reynolds, who had previously written the scripts for the strip, ran in the 7th July 1990 issue:
There is quite a lot to unpack here, not least the fact that the last panel doesn't paint Reynolds himself in the best light. The strip had started offering readers the chance to come up with their own Nurks a few months previously; coincidence or otherwise, the edition the week before Paterson's last Buster was the first to ask for submissions, and the first reader submission was used in this strip. (If used, your submission netted you £2.) The comic had genuinely been receiving a lot of correspondence from readers who didn't consider Belle pretty enough, and between this and the change of artist she received such a radical redesign that it had to be written into the strip itself (in a thoroughly meta way).
The Reynolds era was destined to be very short-lived, though; an influx of characters from Buster's merger with Whizzer and Chips in late '90 meant she no longer appeared every week, the last new strip by him ran in the 7th September 1991 issue, and the week after the strip reverted to Paterson reprints. Which made one notable change.
Is it really necessary to remove the numbers? Are you not robbing us of a fun little link between strips in the name of pretending this isn't reprint material?
Reynolds started off continuing the Nurk numbering, but later stopped; the last numbered edition was #176, in the 27/10/90 edition of Buster, which was also the week before the Whizzer and Chips merger which reduced her to 'every-other-week' status. The next few editions of Belle after that also look like they've had the numbers erased -- they have the same conspicuous gap the Paterson reprints do -- before we get to ones that were never numbered in the first place. All of this definitely feels connected, but I can't quite figure out how.
Belle remained an intermittent presence throughout Buster for much of the nineties, but had one final full-time stint from 1996 to 1998; this run started out with Paterson strips but later switched to reprints of the Reynolds stories, which they would've had to wait to use under Fleetway's rule that reprint material should be at least five years old.2 Given she hadn't existed as new material since 1991, it's not a run to be sniffed at.
The edit jobs are rather inconsistent in this final run: some of the Nurk numbers right at the end are kept (in a story arc set on Belle's summer holiday which had to be reprinted in the original order), others have them erased as per all the Paterson reprints, and most of the occasions where the ideas were submitted by readers have had their names even more obviously removed, although in one case (the 04/08/98 edition, if you're curious) it gets left in!
There are, however, even more dubious edits in the last years of reprints.
(The last first-run School Belle strip in the weekly Buster appeared in September 1991 -- although there may have been new material in the Christmas annuals published after that. In the same month, Disney's Beauty and the Beast premiered... a fact I was unaware of when I titled this post after the song "Belle", which was in fact one of the few sequences completely animated in time for the film's premiere. This is getting spooky.)
1. "The Craziest Characters Are Always in Buster Comic!", to give the feature its full title. ↩
2. It seems very, very likely to me that when they switched from the Paterson strips to the Reynolds ones, they would've started with the first Reynolds strip to explain the change of appearance all over again, but unfortunately this is one of the few late-90s issues not available on the Internet Archive; it should be the issue dated either 18th February or 4th March 1997. ↩
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