Knock on Wood

This is the very first edition of The Haunted Wood, a strip which appeared in Fleetway's Knockout across its two-year run from June 1971 to June 1973. Like some other Fleetway strips of the time, it does not appear to have had a terribly consistent artist; some sources say this first strip was the work of Reg Parlett, other strips were apparently by Sid Burgon, and other editions have artists who cannot be identified. (Another Knockout strip, Beat Your Neighbour, is notorious for being so inconsistent it can be difficult to find two editions which were definitely drawn by the same person, but that's another story.)

To cut to the chase: The Haunted Wood is not renowned for experimentation or breaking its format. Every subsequent edition follows a very familiar set-up: someone takes wood from the Haunted Wood, doesn't listen to the unnamed boy's warnings that this will lead to disaster, and the haunted wood, no matter what form it has been sawed, nailed or whittled into, comes to life and wreaks havoc until it returns to its home.

Only YOU Can Save Cliff Hanger!

Last year, I published one of my favourite things I've ever written -- a history of Cliff Hanger, the part-gamebook part-comic strip that ran in Fleetway Publications' Buster from 1983-87, and was then reprinted from 1992 until near the comic's end in 1999. Here's a thing that's been bothering me about the strip for a while. Or possibly two things, one of which isn't bothering me any more.

One of the many interesting quirks of Cliff is that almost every single strip is numbered in a unique way: which number strip it is appears on Cliff's jacket. (Or occasionally somewhere else if artist J. Edward Oliver can't put it there for some reason.)

The number in the final regular strip in 1987 was 197. (Thanks to Great News for All Readers for the scan of the original strip, rather than the colourised reprint.)

The rules surrounding this numbering system seem pretty clear: Only the 'regular' strips in the weekly comic count. Cliff's jacket appears unnumbered in Christmas annuals or Summer Specials, or other nonstandard strips such as the Cliff Hanger Adventure Book, a cut-out-and-keep Choose Your Own Adventure story which appeared over five issues of Buster.

Nip and Tuck

At the end of January 1987, Fleetway Publications launched what would be their last new humour anthology comic for children. Apart from being published on a fortnightly schedule, Nipper had a gimmick of being printed in A5 size, compared to the A4 used by every other comic at that point (allowing it to claim it contained 48 pages), and it continued this theme by having most of its strips feature protagonists younger than those of other titles.

Just six issues in, the 'pint-sized' ploy was dropped, and henceforth the comic would be printed in A4 size. Another ten editions on, and it would all be over -- the sixteenth and final issue was on newsstands before August was out, after which it met the fate of so many of its stablemates when it merged into Buster. Although it managed to squeeze in a Summer Special and even a Christmas annual, Nipper is the ultimate mayfly of its genre's short-lived titles. This is perhaps best summed up by the fact that there were nineteen issues of Buster branded as Buster and Nipper -- three more than Nipper itself.

Beyond being stuck with the dubious honours of being the final and shortest-lived Fleetway title of its kind, did Nipper retain any kind of legacy? It's time to scan in an entire issue and find out.

Like a Goddamn Vampire

Dracula Dobbs enjoyed a stint of just over four years in Buster, launching in May 1987 as part of a major revamp of the comic which retired several long-serving characters and introduced some new ones. It is notable as making a permanent change to its status quo at one point, and it is an alteration which really tickles me for some reason.

The setup of the strip seems pretty self-explanatory: every night at sundown, Dennis Dobbs turns into a vampire and roams the streets looking for not blood, but food (the term 'food vampire' was later created), usually from his local takeaways and street vendors. No explanation was ever given for this transformation beyond a mention in the first strip that he was 'born at midnight' (implying this has been happening since the day he was born, which if anything seems like an even more interesting idea for a comic strip); in that introductory instalment Dracula Dobbs is already an established terror of his neighbourhood. In the very first strip (which can be seen here) Dennis appears to be fully cognisant of his double life, and it's implied it doesn't happen every single night, but both of these were retconned pretty sharpish; by late '87, only Dennis' parents know his secret, and he transforms every night.

A question which I don't in any way have the answer to: is it possible the strip was originally conceived as a boy who turns into a werewolf, and got changed to a vampire without anything else about the setup being altered? People don't generally only turn into vampires at night, and there does seem to be some insinuation in the first strip that the change only happens at the full moon which might be a hangover from an earlier incarnation.

In any event, DD was drawn by Nigel Edwards; I like Edwards' work, but it seems to be particularly suited to the fantasy-horror setup of this story, and it's a shame he didn't get to do more strips on similar themes. As mentioned earlier, in the issue of Buster dated 22nd September 1990 the strip got a bit of continuity -- unusual in a British humour comic, but maybe not that unusual -- when something changed about the setup. Before reading on, see if you can guess what.

The Life and Times of Milly O'Naire

This is the very first edition of The Toffs and the Toughs, which appeared in IPC/Fleetway's Knockout across its 106 weekly issues from 1971 to 1973. It is one of many, many, many Fleetway strips based around class war, a few more of which we are soon to encounter.

I am not absolutely certain, but I think this very first instalment of TTatT is the only one in which the names of the individual toffs and toughs are ever given -- certainly I've read quite a lot of other strips and none of the characters are named in them. The artist was Reg Parlett, although some sources claim it was Joe McCaffrey; possibly McCaffrey ghosted some strips further down the line.

When Knockout finished in 1973 it merged with Whizzer and Chips. It appears The Toffs and the Toughs was carried forward to Whizzer and Chips incorporating Knockout (as it was known for a little over a year post-merger), but -- like several of the other strips that made the leap forward -- didn't last in its new home for more than a year or so. (Perhaps the most famous survivor of Knockout was Fuss Pot, who survived another merger later on and continued to appear in Fleetway's last comic standing, Buster, until it ended.)

However, the Knockout Christmas annual continued to be issued until 1984, and the toffs and the toughs continued to wage their wars against each other in that; additionally, later in the 70s the characters had a relaunch of sorts in a W&C strip called Smarty's Toffs and Tatty's Toughs (a sample of which can be seen here), which made the two groups supporting characters to the pre-established leads of Smarty Pants and Tatty Ed, although they seem to have disappeared from the pages of Whizzer and Chips for good by the late seventies.

Meanwhile, in 1979 Fleetway launched another new comic, Jackpot, which featured another class war-based strip in all 141 issues over a run of just under three years: Milly O'Naire and Penny Less (drawn by Sid Burgon), recycling the name of the female toff in The Toffs and the Toughs -- most likely unconsciously, although the two Millys do have some interesting similarities in their character designs.

And that is how Fleetway had two concurrent characters with the exact same name, without anybody noticing.

Who Drew It?

I am going to take it as read here you don't need me to tell you which popular television series the British comic strip Junior Rotter took inspiration from.

Junior appeared in IPC/Fleetway Publications' Whizzer and Chips from around mid-to-late 1980, shortly before the fourth season of Dallas -- which promised to resolve the mystery of "Who Shot J.R.?" to a global audience -- began airing; by this point, UK viewers were able to see episodes air on the BBC just two days after their CBS transmission, and Larry Hagman, firmly established as the show's star, had made a well-publicised visit to England in the break between seasons where even the Queen Mother had asked him if he knew his character's assailant. A story parodying Dallas in a Fleetway title was pretty much inevitable.

In fact, Fleetway's big rival D. C. Thomson trod on very similar ground with Jay R. Hood ("He's Anything But Good!"), who launched in Nutty around the same time -- Nutty being an attempt by D. C. to produce a comic that was more anarchic and off-the-wall than their other publications, and a bit more like Fleetway's titles. D. C. Thomson's strip also featured a girl called Sue Helen as the character's main target, the difference being they were unrelated in the Nutty strip.

It's So Bloody Nice!

The comic strip It's a Nice Life, drawn by Reg Parlett, originated in IPC Magazines' (later known as Fleetway Publications) weekly comic Jackpot. It was a mainstay throughout the comic's modest run of just over two and a half years from May 1979 to January 1982, and regularly finished near the top of reader polls during that time. It survived Jackpot's merger into Buster, where it lasted for over six further years, finishing in the issue dated 30th April, 1988; a pretty decent innings for a story that originated in another comic.

Let's acknowledge the elephant in the room. It wasn't (and indeed isn't) unusual for strips in weekly humour comics to parody or take inspiration from current films and TV shows; other strips that ran alongside this story in Jackpot include Angel's Proper Charlies, The Incredible Sulk, The Teeny Sweeney and Jake's 7. But It's a Nice Life, a strip about Stan and Babs Nice attempting to live a sustainable and self-sufficient lifestyle whilst their next door neighbours, snooty social climbers Ollie and Maddie Jones, watch on in bafflement, seems to take things a step away from finding inspiration from or spoofing The Good Life, and a step closer to, well, just being a comic strip version of The Good Life, down to not only the very similar title but also one of the characters having the same name as their equivalent in the series; that said, there were some notable differences, perhaps the biggest being that both families have children in the strip.

It's tempting to imagine that IPC might have had some kind of arrangement with the BBC in this instance; such a thing would not be without precedent, as they ran several strips based on licensed properties or even real people over the years. Perhaps most pertinently, a strip starring the Goodies had run in Jackpot predecessor Cor!! earlier in the seventies, and the short-lived School Fun (33 weekly issues, October 1983 to May 1984) featured both Coronation Street School and Grange Hill Juniors (the latter of which has a copyright notice expressly crediting Phil Redmond). Officially licensed stories continued to feature right up until the end, with a strip based on the animated series Dr. Zitbag's Transylvania Pet Shop being one of the last new stories to appear in Buster near the end of its life from 1994-96.

You might also notice that It's a Nice Life debuted nearly a year after the final episode of The Good Life was broadcast in June 1978, and continued for almost a decade after that. This seems unusual for a strip referencing a specific TV show; similar strips generally began whilst their inspirations were still on screens, and if their inspiration were to drop out of the zeitgeist they tended to be lucky if they lasted a year afterwards.

A thought comes to mind: what about repeats?

The Perils of Cliff Hanger

The above is a typical specimen of Cliff Hanger, the British comics character who enjoyed a four-year stint in Fleetway Publications' Buster from 1983 to 1987 with a strip that was part comic, part adventure gamebook. Trust me, I'm just as surprised as you that it's taken me over eight years to write about this.

When readers first encountered Cliff in June 1983, he was watching his favourite television show, Now Get Out of This (a parody of the genuine gameshow Now Get Out of That) and unwisely proclaimed that if he could get on the show, he bet he could get out of anything -- which two agents of the Mysterious Evil Spies Society, who happened to be overhearing him at the time, took as an invitation to zap him into various traps they wanted to test to see if they were good enough to use against genuine secret agents.

Every week, Cliff would thus get teleported into a situation of catastrophic danger that frequently had some relation to what he was doing when the Evil Spies blasted him with their matter transmitter ray (or any of the other different rays they had access to, leading to the running joke "Don't call me Ray!"), and at the end of his page there would be three options as to what he should do next. The reader should tick one of the boxes and then turn to elsewhere in the issue (usually a boxout included on the letters page) to see if they chose the right option. The possible resolutions to the above strip are as follows: