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!

The editorial staff of Pow! frequently cameoed in the strip, giving an interesting touch of the metaphysical.

Over the strip's lifetime, dares sent in ranged from the well-worn ("be sawn in half by a stage magician", "go over Niagara Falls in a barrel") to the oblique ("come and get me", "paint the town red"), from those wanting to see how horrific Thorburn and Reid's fates for their character could get ("jump off Blackpool Pier wearing lead boots", "count the stripes on an underfed tiger"), to even some meta ones ("change the colour labels on the printer's inks for this issue", which did indeed lead to a strip with mismatched colours for everything). With Marvel reprints appearing in the same comic, one reader even dared Davy to spend six rounds in a boxing ring with Nick Fury!

With Davy being at the mercy of the imagination of every preteen in the country,² combined with Reid's love of comic horror, it was perhaps inevitable that the strip would go too far at some point. An edition drawn circa early 1968 featured a dare submitted by Vance Gledhill of Blackpool, Lancs: "dig up the remains of Frankenstein's monster and bring it back to life". The result was deemed too frightening and was never published in Pow!; however, Reid's artwork was retained by Odhams employee Steve Moore -- yes, that Steve Moore -- and published in the comics fanzine Weird Fantasy at the end of 1969. (Fair warning if you're at all squeamish: I can definitely understand why it was pulled.)

When Pow! ended, Davy's strip was not one of the ones carried forward to the merger with Smash! (which would later merge with the Fleetway/IPC title Valiant following Odhams' closure, which would merge with Battle Picture Weekly, which merged with Eagle, and when that ended it was 1994 and there was nothing left for it to merge with); it had already been moved from the back cover (and hence no longer appeared in colour) when Pow! absorbed Wham! a few months before the end. I told you comics mergers were complicated.

Reid did draw several more 'reader participation' features where they would send in their concepts for monsters for Fleetway titles, including Creepy Creations for Shiver and Shake and Wanted Posters and World-Wide Weirdies, both for Whoopee!, although his stories for Odhams were probably the least fettered examples of his work. An extremely similar concept to Davy, Challenge Charlie, would also appear in Valiant from 1974 to 1976; although some sources claim Reid initially drew the strip and was later replaced by Frank McDiarmid, it appears the latter was the artist from the beginning.

The last Dare-a-Day Davy strip was up front that it was the end for Davy, and concluded on a suitably bleak note: the dare of the week was "stow away on the first British moonshot", and Davy ended up orbiting space in a water tank, noting that this time it was unlikely he'd get back in time for the next edition.

They don't make them like that any more.

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1. Odhams were bought out by Fleetway Publications in 1961, which led to the formation of the International Publishing Company in 1963; in 1968 Odhams closed, and its remaining titles were either retired or transferred to IPC Magazines Ltd. ^↩
2. A single dare from an Australian reader was also used ("climb Mount Everest" in issue #57, if you were curious). ^↩