Cracked

Some scans in this article contain racist caricatures.

Shortly after the closure of Buzz, D. C. Thomson decided to have another go at launching a new weekly humour comic for children. It would do things a bit differently from its immediate predecessor: whereas Buzz had been in A3 size, the new comic would be A4, allowing it to boast 32 pages of comics and features. Although it didn't have a regular cover star, instead featuring a large splash panel promoting the characters within, it would feature a character that did not really have a strip of his own, but rather served as the comic's host, not dissimilar to some titles by rival publisher Fleetway of the time. It would prioritise gags, and lots of them, and include several points of reader interactivity.

The first issue of Cracker was on the shelves in January 1975, just two weeks after the conclusion of Buzz, but this title was destined to have an even shorter run: just 87 issues, across twenty months.

I have an issue from just after the halfway point here, number #51, and -- along with some examples of stories that had already been phased out by this point -- I'm going to well and truly scan it in.

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.

Hot to Go!

Snip and Snap, D. C. Thomson's original duo of postman-pillorying dogs, enjoyed a stint in the Sparky for just shy of two years, from October 1972 to August 1974.

As you may have immediately guessed from other posts I've done on this subject recently, for a brief spell beginning in the summer of 1999, the twosome were dusted off, colourised and reprinted in the Dandy as the Red Hot Chilli Dogs:

Red Lines

This is a very early example of Ali's Baba, a strip which appeared in D. C. Thomson's Sparky from January 1970 up until the comic's end in July 1977; it was drawn by Malcolm "Mal" Judge, better known for D. C. stablemates such as The Numskulls and Billy Whizz. This particular strip is taken from the Sparky Book 1971; the Christmas books were usually finished at least a year before publication, and Baba and his guardian angel must have just sneaked in before the deadline to debut in the weekly comic and the accompanying annual in the same year.

In this particular strip, Ali's invisibility to the other characters is represented by making him transparent. Which seems fair enough. However, it appears very unlikely this method was used in any other strip.

For the vast majority of editions (this example is from the 1973 book),¹ they did something more interesting -- having the outline of Ali and his speech balloons appear in colour:

The Many Faces of Rubidium von Screwtop

One of the newest strips in the weekly Beano, Rubi's Screwtop Science, started life in CBBC's 2016 series Dennis & Gnasher: Unleashed; Rubidium "Rubi" von Screwtop (daughter of Professor von Screwtop, a re-imagining of a mad scientist who originated in Lord Snooty and His Pals all the way back in 1939) was one of several new friends for Dennis created for the TV series who was subsequently transplanted into the weekly comic. She started out as a supporting character in Dennis' own strip, but also made some appearances alongside Dennis' other two best friends from the series, Jemima "JJ" Jones and Pie-Face (a new take on Dennis' friend from the nineties and noughties) in a strip known simply as Rubi, JJ and Pie-Face, then in 2017 she got a strip of her own.

JJ and Pie-Face also had their own stories for a while, but Rubi's has proved by far the most popular, and the other two only seem to appear as supporting characters these days. (Pie-Face's pet potato Paul also briefly had a strip of his own, which is the only strip ever to be headlined by an inanimate object; certainly in D. C. Thomson's history, and quite possibly in any comic, anywhere, ever.) Rubi's Screwtop Science began as a half-page Funsize Funny in early 2017, and was notable as the first strip in the comic's history headlined by a disabled character.

Toddler of Terror: The Director's Cut

A few months ago, I published a history of Ivy the Terrible which went down spectacularly well. (Thanks again if you reposted it or said something nice about it.) This is a deleted scene which I realised very quickly should probably be spun out into its own piece.

This is, once again, the first ever Ivy strip, as published in the edition of the Beano dated 04/05/85:

In (approximately) May 1988, Ivy made her debut in the Beano Comic Library range, with an issue rather unusually titled simply Ivy the Terrible:

The reason for this name is because this issue is essentially a revised and heavily expanded version of that very first strip... and, since I've separated it out into its own post, I may as well give you the entire issue.

That Cannonball Kid Sure Scores a Mean Owen Goal

This is an example of Cannonball Kid (drawn by Rob Lee), a story which appeared in D. C. Thomson's Nutty from around the midpoint of its 1980-85 run to its end. If you remember my earlier look at Nutty, you may notice this is the exact same strip I used as an example of the Kid there... but there's a reason for this. (Apart from the fact it's the only Cannonball Kid strip I have.)

In April 1998, the Cannonball Kid was dusted down, colourised and renamed for use in the Dandy, and as it happens, this strip became the very first edition of Owen Goal:

The Strangest Yeti

In the issue of the Beano dated 2nd January 1993, a terrible monster made its debut. No, it wasn't Hot Foot, it was the first edition of a story that was, for its first week only, called The Yeti, drawn by stalwart artist Robert Nixon:

This was the only edition to run to two pages (at least in the weekly comic), and with the status quo set up, future editions carried the full title of The Yeti with Betty:

Unplugged

No, it wasn't some weird dream you had, D. C. Thomson really did produce an entire comic based around the ultra-homely Bash Street Kid. Plug ran for just 75 issues between September 1977 and February 1979, after which it merged into the Beezer; its demise is often blamed on its considerable production values such as use of gravure painting, higher-quality paper, and more pages in technicolour than other D. C. titles, which made it almost twice as expensive as other comics of the time. (The paper used did seem to make this an easier scanning job, at least.)

Plug has been considered an attempt by D. C. to ape the style of the wackier comics published by rivals Fleetway (something they would later manage more successfully with Nutty), which probably accounts for the use of an existing D. C. character; many Fleetway titles had a character serve as the comic's 'host' (the most salient comparison being the eponymous Buster). I suppose the exact sequence of events that led Plug to be the lead is lost to time, but it's easy to imagine D. C. wanted the role to go to a pre-existing character, it made sense to promote a member of an ensemble, and Plug was the most distinctive character in that window.

The issue of Plug I have scanned in today to add to my growing collection of mayflies is one of the final ones -- the Christmas 1978 issue, number #67. So let's go!

Oh Calamity

In 1986, the editor of the Beano, Euan Kerr, had an idea for a new story for his comic. It was going to star a character who was, quite simply, the unluckiest boy in the world. This character was dubbed Calamity James, an artist was assigned to him, and a test page was produced. That page was reproduced in the 2008 book The Official History of the Beano:

Which may not have been what you were expecting.

Originally assigned artist Henry Davies' take on the character had a serious problem: its tone was felt to be depressing, rather than darkly funny. Several other artists in the D. C. Thomson office had a go after it was decided Davies' work would not be used,¹ but they were also unable to thread the needle, and the character was on the verge of being scrapped when someone decided to let Tom Paterson have a go.

Paterson was a very new hire to D. C. who had only started that year -- in fact James would be his first strip for one of their titles -- but he had been drawing comics for rival publisher Fleetway since 1973, aged just nineteen (perhaps most famously drawing the ultimate enfant terrible Sweeny Toddler for most of his tenure); he was one of several Fleetway artists to start working for D. C. in the late eighties as Fleetway's comics empire started to dissipate. Paterson managed to find the tone they had been going for, and James duly debuted in the 01/11/86 edition of the Beano:

Fruitcake

Well, I've managed to get a Sabrina Carpenter reference into the title of a post about British humour comics from the 1980s, what more do you want?

Ahem. Nutty -- often described as D. C. Thomson's attempt to create a more anarchic comic, more like some of those published by rivals Fleetway -- racked up a pretty respectable run of 292 issues over five and a half years, and birthed one of D. C.'s most iconic characters of all time. In The Ultimate Book of British Comics, Graham Kibble-White dubs it "arguably the best-ever contender for becoming that elusive third 'big' humour comic", alongside the Beano and the Dandy. Even if its other characters were somewhat overshadowed by its cover star, many of them lasted for quite a while after the comic merged with the Dandy in September 1985, and of course Bananaman himself survived not only the closure of his original home, but also that of the Dandy in 2012, becoming the only strip from that comic to move to the Beano. (If the characters need to visit another town, or Beanotown United are playing a football game, then very often the scriptwriters will go for "Nuttytown".)

The issue we'll be dissecting today is number #49, hailing from January 1981; should it prove possible, it'll probably be worth scanning in one of the final issues to compare at some point down the line, but we are at the mercy of the big pile of comics in the local charity shop for that. But here we go.

Sugar and Spice

In January 1985 (the 29th, if you want to be really specific), the recently appointed editor of the Beano, Euan Kerr, and his sub-editor Alan Digby, had an idea for a new character -- a little girl, aged about 3 or 4, who wanted to be as tough as Dennis the Menace or Minnie the Minx, but didn’t have the strength or maturity to carry it off. To draw this strip, they enlisted the services of Robert Nixon -- recently returned to D. C. Thomson after over a decade working for Fleetway/IPC, at Kerr's request.

Nixon had started out at D. C. in 1964, most notably drawing Roger the Dodger amongst several other characters, but in 1972 he departed to work for rival publishers Fleetway, where he specialised in comedy-horror stories such as Frankie Stein, Hire a Horror and Jaws parody Gums, but also lighter fare including Kid King and Six Million Dollar Man spoof The 12 ^1/2p Buytonic Boy. When Kerr first became Beano editor in late 1984, he contacted Nixon about the possibility of returning to some of his old D. C. stories whilst also continuing to work for Fleetway -- an arrangement which became very familiar over the next decade as the amount of new material published by Fleetway shrank, but did not appeal to Nixon.

A week after he turned Kerr down, though, Nixon learned he was to be moved off of several of his current Fleetway strips,¹ and -- perhaps guessing what the next few years would bring for the publisher -- decided to return to D. C. (although he continued to draw for Fleetway until early 1986), where he would resume drawing Roger the Dodger and also take over big hitters such as Korky the Cat and Beryl the Peril, but this new character would be the first of several he originated on his second time round, by far the best-loved,² and Nixon's personal favourite of all the stories he drew for D. C.

Nixon’s early designs for the character (modelled on Alan Digby’s daughter Jane) went down a storm, and just over three months after he was first sent the details of what she should look like, Ivy the Terrible made her debut in the 4th May, 1985 issue of the comic.

This scan rescued, via the Internet Archive, from the sadly now-defunct old Beano website.

Every Dog...

In the issue of the Beano dated 13th March 1999, a new story debuted, Dog's Breakfast TV. Chronicling the goings-on at a breakfast TV show staffed by anthropomorphic dogs, it would prove to be one of the shortest-serving strips in the comic's history; just eleven editions appeared in total, over three months (there were three issues near the end of the run where it didn't appear).

I'm not sure why this strip stuck in my mind as strongly as it has. Maybe it sparked my interest in the nuts and bolts of television production. Maybe it's because it looked like nothing else in the comic -- it was the one and only D. C. Thomson commission for artist Stephen Baskerville. Maybe it's the sense that someone came up with the name first and worked backwards from there. Maybe it's because someone had the foresight to realise the joke wasn't going to last much longer and retired it so promptly. Maybe I just find anthropomorphic dogs really funny.

Whatever the reason, it's a strip I fondly remember despite its brief tenure (and, as we'll see, a couple of other reasons), and its short run means I can scan in and post every single edition of DBTV there ever was. For the most part, enjoy.

Shock Horror

Back in September, I wrote a brief history of Number 13 -- the comic strip that was in many ways a British take on The Munsters and The Addams Family which appeared in the Beano, drawn by John Geering, between 1987 and 2002.

There was one little mystery I couldn't clear up at the time: according to The Official History of the Beano, the story only appeared three times after 1997 (and, from my own research, had only been appearing sporadically since around 1995). The Official History only gives a date for the very last strip -- the issue dated 14th December 2002. Which was kind of noteworthy as it was almost three and a half years after John Geering died. Having a specific date meant it was easier for me to track down that final edition:

But I didn't know when the other two post-1997 strips ran at that point. A month and a half later, though, I tracked one of them down to the 19th June 1999 issue:

And, as you might have already guessed, my time searching through boxes of comics in charity shops has not been in vain: I have the final post-1997 Number 13, and am prepared to make a guess about what happened.

Nine Lives

On 9 July 1977, the 652nd and final issue of Sparky was published. The comic in question was the home of many memorable strips such as Spoofer McGraw, We Are the Sparky People, L-Cars, Thingummyblob, Superwitch and Ali's Baba, but arguably its most famous story -- and quite possibly my favourite comic strip of all time -- was Puss 'n' Boots, the adventures of an eternally warring cat and dog.

Puss 'n' Boots survived the comic's merger with the Topper, where they appeared for a good two-and-a-bit years until late 1979. John Geering's madcap scripts and action-packed visuals meant the story would continue to recur in various incarnations over the next thirty years, with the twosome long outlasting their creator. However, after they vacated the pages of the Topper, they would not get another run in a weekly comic until they arrived in the Dandy in 1987 under the name Mutt and Moggy, a significantly different take on the concept sometimes described as the Muppet Babies version of the strip. Mutt and Moggy later evolved into something a bit closer to the original version, and they returned to their original names, and designs, for another run in 1993. You can find a fuller history of the strip, written by some idiot, here.

However, despite not having a home in a weekly comic, they made several appearances in the Dandy Comic Libraries from around 1984. One issue in particular is of interest: number #176, Puss 'n' Boots in 'Tee' for Two! A quick estimation puts this issue's release date in early 1990, but the Comic Libraries tended to be done quite a way in advance and it's possible it had been on the shelf for a year or two, if not longer (a Comic Library released in 1989 starring a solo Cuddles, before his strip was merged with Dimples, must have been done at least three years earlier).

Sticky Situations

Back in April, I took a look at perhaps D. C. Thomson's most obscure weekly humour comic, Hoot. This led me down a bit of a rabbit hole as to the terrible twosome of terrifying toddlers, Cuddles and Dimples, whose strips were merged into one when Hoot folded into the Dandy. If for some reason you don't care to read back through the three or four posts I've written on this subject, the story so far is:

In October 1986, the Dandy and Hoot merge. Cuddles, the cover star of Hoot, is carried over, but his strip is merged with the very similar one featuring Dimples which has been running in the Dandy since 1984. This creates Cuddles and Dimples; the two boys are originally depicted as next-door neighbours, with the first strip depicting Cuddles moving in next door to Dimples.

It was later decided that the strip would work better if the boys were brothers; however, contrary to what certain official sources published by D. C. Thomson claim, they were not suddenly retconned in a single strip. Instead, the process was subtly done over a period of several months, with Cuddles' parents slowly being moved into the background. By around October 1987, only Dimples' parents were featured, and strips strongly implying that the two are brothers (whilst not directly saying so) started appearing.

However, owing to the different schedules they were produced on, a few strips where the two are still intended to be neighbours appeared after this in various spin-off publications. Most prominently, the Dandy Book 1988 (released for the Christmas 1987 market) still features a solo Dimples, and the one published a year later features a strip where they are clearly intended to still be neighbours (alongside two others where they're brothers), with Cuddles' dad (nicknamed the "Teddy Boy Dad") appearing. A Dandy Comic Library with Cuddles by himself (with an explanation for Dimples' absence hastily written into the first panel) was released as late as 1989.

In 1988, a Panini sticker album celebrating the Beano/Dandy golden anniversary was released. I was sent some images of a completed album by Joseph Begley and Sam Page, and am very grateful to them for this, as I believe the album contains the very last appearances of Cuddles' dad after the retcon not already featured on this blog.

Ghost Light

Last month, I was investigating Number 13 -- the British comics answer to The Munsters and The Addams Family, which was drawn by John Geering and ran in the Beano on an increasingly irregular basis from 1987 to 2002. Going back and reading that is... pretty much vital to this follow-up. But the short version is that, as per the sometimes frustrating publication The Official History of the Beano, the strip appeared just three times after 1997, and the book only gives a date for the last of these; namely the 14th December 2002. This is particularly notable because that happened to be some three and a half years after John Geering died.

I had that very last strip, but didn't even know when the other two ran, and wasn't able to make a more informed guess until I'd seen them. Well, we're halfway there, because I've located one of them in the issue of the Beano dated 19th June, 1999:

The Drawing Board

The following board game, which could probably not be published today, appeared in The Bash Street Kids Annual 1995:

That last page in particular has been really stuck in my head for the better part of three decades. I found "the spinny thing that rarely works", and advising the reader to just buy a dice instead, incredibly funny, have always referred to them as such since, and was very pleased to rediscover its origin when I bought this book in a charity shop the other week. I wondered why this childhood memory lodged itself in my mind so firmly, and I think it's because it was probably my first experience of a work taking the piss out of its own idea.

The Monsters Are Due on Beano Street

According to The Official History of the Beano, the above strip -- from issue #2346, dated 04/07/87 -- is the first appearance of Number 13, a story about preteen vampire Boris and the rest of his family, as drawn by John Geering. Well, that book at least considers it the first official appearance. This begins our look at a comic strip with a rather confusing beginning and end.

Triple Dog Dare

Last time, I was looking at Bananaman strips from the late 90s adapting episodes of the 80s TV series, which were drawn by John Geering -- who had created the strip and drawn the vast majority of it up to that point, but had no known involvement in the series. It would be worth going back and reading that piece if you haven't already, as that way this one will make sense.

But in short: the last strip adapting a TV episode is from the issue of the Dandy dated 3rd July 1999, and a week later a wholly original strip appeared for the Dandy's world-record-breaking 3007th issue, dated the 10th July. On the 20th July, John Geering died. (Some sources list his death as the 13th August, which is the date his obituary appeared in his local newspaper, the Warrington Guardian; I am presuming the date given in the Independent's obituary is correct.) However -- as was often the case when an artist passed away -- he had a buffer of strips built up, and new stories by him continued to regularly appear in the Beano and the Dandy for around two months after his death.

In issue #3004 (19/06/99), another strip drawn by Geering had started appearing in the Dandy: a revival of Puss and Boots, the very first characters he had created for D. C. Thomson in 1969.