Count the Ways

In 1982, Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone wrote the first Fighting Fantasy gamebook, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. To cheat-proof the book, Jackson devised a puzzle based around the various keys you need to find in order to unlock the Warlock's chest and steal all his stuff: Scattered throughout the mountain are six keys, each of which has a number engraved on it. You need to choose three of the keys, add their numbers together, and turn to that number section. Only by finding the correct combination of keys can you win the book.

This sets the template for other authors seeking to ensure their book can only be completed by those playing fairly, but over time their methods get more and more meta. The numbers associated with the items become more subtle than just having them written on for no readily apparent in-universe reason. Or the player can spell out a secret message telling them when to take a nonstandard option, with the number being found via a brainteaser. Jackson himself pioneered reference modifiers, where at certain sections you must add or subtract a given number from that of the section you are currently on in order to take an action not offered by the text; if you don't have the item or knowledge that permits you to use the modifier, you won't even have a clue the option is there!

But there's one other tactic, which basically eliminated the need for items to have numbers associated with them at all.

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).

Best of 2025

A lot of this year was taken up with writing about old British humour comics.

Which isn't at all a bad thing. I feel like I've discovered the thing I'm better at writing about than anything else, and it's providing potted histories of British comics and their characters. It's a fun subject to write and research, often throwing up really interesting things nobody has ever noticed before. The resulting posts are often very popular. It puts the massive pile of comics in the spare room to good use. I get to scan in some classic examples of my very favourite strips -- some of which have fallen into obscurity or are unsung heroes of their genre -- and share them with you. Maybe it's just me, but midway through an article you are liable to find something that contradicts a large chunk of your previous research, which is at least a way of honing your writing skills.

It isn't all I wrote about, of course. But it is quite a significant part of the highlights of the last year. Speaking of which...

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.

Hello!

Thanks if you got in touch over the last few weeks. I do appreciate it.

I'm not sure this ridiculously titled blog is the right place to write about my dad dying. Even if I maybe didn't appreciate quite how personal some of those posts about old comics and British scheduling of The Simpsons in the 1990s were before now. But I hope writing will spark back up here the other side of the New Year. There's a few leads and follow-ups in my inbox and the comments that shouldn't take long to do; maybe one or two of those will appear a bit earlier. We'll see how it goes.

One thing I can do here, though, is bring you his appearance on an obscure BBC Two gameshow with Harry Enfield's dad.

Pilote Lights

In 1964, Pilote magazine ran a one-off, one-page Asterix strip intended as a teaser for the forthcoming story Asterix and the Big Fight, which saw Chief Vitalstatistix hold a press conference homaging those held by Charles de Gaulle at the time. (This is taken from its reproduction in the short story collection Asterix and the Class Act, so some of the text has been changed so it works as an introduction to that.)

Sixty-two years later, adverts for Asterix in Lusitania take a not dissimilar approach... but Asterix and Obelix are now participating in an Instagram Live discussion. (This one has been taken from this week's Beano, as it happens; I'm sure it appears elsewhere, but I just really like that the new Asterix is being promoted there.)

Statistically Speaking

In the year 1982, Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone devised the basic combat system for the very first Fighting Fantasy adventure gamebook, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. This system would require the player to keep track of three statistics which measured their combat SKILL, STAMINA, and LUCK -- whilst the 'luck' statistic could be used to decrease the stamina the player lost, or increase the damage done to their enemies, it would also be used in situations outside combat where the player had to Test their Luck to see if the gods of fate were smiling on them or not.

As the range went on, and was opened up to other authors once it became apparent new titles were needed faster than Jackson and Livingstone could possibly hope to write them by themselves, the basic system held, but many writers wanted to add more to it, and a common way of innovating with the format was an extra statistic which measured something unique to the book. The most common of these was a stat that kept track of the passage of time, which has appeared in around a fifth of the books published to date. But here is a look at some of the other things various authors in the franchise have required the player to keep a record of.

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: