Gad, Sir! Comics!

As a random purchase this week, I picked up a copy of the current issue of The Dandy (no 3439, 31 January - 15 February 2008, D C Thomson), and was pleasantly surprised to find that it was almost entirely restored to being a traditional comic, with only half-a-dozen pages of non-comics material. However, it’s described on the cover as an “Awesome Mega-Comix Special”, so this may not last. This issue is only on sale for another day or two, so rush out now and inflate the sales figures!

The highlight is a two-page guide to drawing comics by Jamie Smart.


A slightly less rigorous analysis of the form than that offered by Thierry Groensteen, but fun nonetheless.

“Best of the year” lists have been mushrooming, but, understandably, most of them tend to emphasise longer, more substantial works: graphic novels, collected editions and ongoing series. Here, by contrast, are some of the shorter pieces of comics I have enjoyed through the year, none of them long enough to fill a single issue. (But you can, at least, click the pictures below to make them bigger.)

”You’re A Good Man, John Stuart Mill” by Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey. Not all of van Lente and Dunlavey’s Action Philosophers (Evil Twin Comics) worked for me, either as entertaining comics or as potted accounts of the thought of major philosophers. But this spot-on Charles Schulz pastiche hit both targets perfectly.


Mark Waid’s super-hero origin stories from 52. As superhero comics sank into a congealed mass of stodgy continuity, Waid performed small miracles every week by boiling down the essence of each of DC’s main cast and presenting it in just two pages. It didn’t hurt that the series attracted artists like Brian Bolland and Adam Hughes, long lost to the more lucrative field of cover illustration, back to telling stories instead. Here are Waid and Hughes on Wonder Woman, from 52 issue 12.


My Own Genie by Jamie Smart. British children’s humour comics have long been refreshingly free of moral didacticism. If My Own Genie was a TV series, Lula, after wishing for something selfish and irresponsible, would have to put it right, while learning a Valuable Life Lesson. In The Dandy, she can just compound the mayhem, while having a good time. It helped that the once-staid publisher D C Thompson is willing to publish artwork as wild as that provided by Smart. This example is from The Dandy Summer Special 2007, as the strip was sadly missing from the regular title for most of the year.


”Maggie La Loca” by Jaime Hernandez (Love and Rockets Vol 2 Issue 20, Fantagraphics). If brother Gilbert is the Gene Kelly of comics, all flash and effort, Jaime is the Fred Astaire: he makes it all look so simple that it’s easy to underestimate the amount of talent, skill and craft he employs. Plus, I’ve got a soft spot for long-running fictions that age their characters in real time.


Tom Gauld’s letter column illustrations from The Guardian. Weird little flights of fancy that brighten my Saturdays. This one is from 1 December.


Eleanor Davis’s pieces in Mome (Fantagraphics) are often the highlights of this consistently interesting and well-produced anthology. Their unsettling charm makes me wonder if this is how the first generation of comfortable burghers felt when reading the earliest, unbowdlerised Grimm folk tales. These panels are from “Stick and String” in Mome issue 8.


Bryan Talbot’s 3-page History of British Comics, using his Alice in Sunderland style and published by The Guardian to accompany the BBC’s Comics Britannia TV series. I missed this when it came out. For the next few days, my every conversation began, “You didn’t happen to buy The Guardian on Saturday, did you?”


The Mini Marvels, by Chris Giarrusso, appear seemingly at random and often unheralded in various Marvel comics. Really, they should get the cover every time, because Giarrusso’s kiddy versions of the Marvel superheroes are a charming delight, matched only by Jeff Parker’s occasional short X-Men strips with Colleen Coover. This panel comes from “Hulk Date”, which appeared in Spider-Man Family issue 3.


Jack Black from Viz comic. Of all Viz’s parade of grotesques, nothing quite captures the true, vindictive, self-righteous, Daily Mail-reading face of modern Britain quite like Jack Black.


And a Merry Christmas to you, too

The first issue of The Dandy was published a little over 70 years ago, cover-dated 4 December 1937. To mark the anniversary, publisher DC Thomson has provided UK newspaper The Independent with a history in comics form of The Dandy and its younger sibling, The Beano.

I couldn’t find this on The Indy’s web-site, so here are scans. Click to enlarge, of course.






It’s good to see that Dudley D Watkins, Davey Law, Leo Baxendale and Ken Reid (and The Dandy’s first editor, Albert Barnes, for that matter), are all credited. It’s a pity, though, that the people who wrote and drew this particular strip are left anonymous.

Update, 11 December Lew Stringer identifies the artist on the anniversary strip as Ken Harrison.

How on Earth did this get published in a comic for small children?



Panel
Blinky’s Mad Movies “King Kong”, art by Nick Brennan, The Dandy Annual 2007, DC Thomson, 2006 (yes, I’m a year late in noticing)

The Dandy issue 3426, 2 August – 15 August 2007, DC Thomson, 16 pages of comics out of 36, £1.99
Features: Jak & Todd; Captain Hookless, The Nice Pirate; Ollie Fliptrik; Red Hot Chilli Dogs, Snip 'n' Snap; Smasher, The Boy Blunder; Blubba and the Bear; Bananaman; Agent Dog 2-Zero; Cuddles & Dimples, The Terrible Toddlers; Desperate Dan

So this is the big relaunch: frequency halved, comics content halved, price up a third. It’s simplest to carry on calling this The Dandy, as the indicia do, though the masthead may possibly now read The Dandy Xtreme (or it could say “The Dandy - Xtreme New Look!”, it’s too muddled to be sure). The comics material is now a 16-page pullout section in the middle, called The Dandy Comix and confusingly labelled “No. 1”, though the publication as a whole retains the old numbering.

The appropriation of the old underground spelling of Comix doesn’t signal any great change in the comic strip content, which is much the same in style as recent issues of the old comic. The most noticeable difference is the absence of the revamped version of Desperate Dan, itself a much-ballyhooed element of the last relaunch. Instead, there is a reprint of a vintage episode by Dudley Watkins, whose premise – a meat shortage – is probably incomprehensible to young readers, and whose art style seems antithetical to the simplification, exaggeration and sugared-up hyperactivity of the rest of the comic, which reach a peak with the incoherent narrative and panel sequences of Agent Dog 2-Zero.


Though, having said that, the whole thing seems oddly old fashioned. Words like “Xtreme”, phrases like “Eat my goal!”, Ollie Fliptrik and his skateboard vocabulary (“totally tubular”) are surely dated by now. Where are the Wiis and PS3s? The mobile phones? The annoying trainers with wheels built in? (Smasher has in-line roller blades. How passé!) If The Dandy had to be revamped because kids are "too busy gaming, surfing the net or watching TV, movies and DVDs" to find time to read a comic, why are none of the characters featured in these strips doing any of these things? Surely, this is the world of 1993, not 2007?

Some of the plots and jokes are even older, of course. Sadly, so is the sexual stereotyping. Here are the Mum and Dad from Jak & Todd, for example.



Since neither Beryl the Peril nor Class Act appear this issue, none of the strips has a girl as a protagonist (unless either Cuddles or Dimples is a girl - does anyone know?).

I wasn’t going to comment on the magazine section, but one thing in it did disgust me. No, not the emphasis on farts and shit, but a section called “Kangaroo Court”. This features a reader’s accusation that his sister has BO – complete with her name, the county where she lives and her photograph. How shameful and irresponsible of the editors to publicly humiliate a child like that.

Update, 7 August Lew Stringer has produced a handy round up of reactions to the relaunch (as well as his own, considered thoughts). I've expanded this review a bit since joining in the discussion in the comments section of Lew's blog.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Beryl the Peril is …

Panel
Beryl, art by Steve Bright, Dandy Summer Special 2007, DC Thomson

Lew Stringer has spotted that the subscription page for The Dandy - home of Desperate Dan and Beryl the Peril - now lists it as appearing fortnightly, down from weekly.

Presumably, publishers DC Thomson plan to sell more of each issue by keeping it on sale twice as long. The risk, of course, is that The Dandy will lose visibility and momentum, leading to falling sales. Let’s hope that the former is the outcome.

It’s a sad state of affairs. The Dandy is due to turn 70 this December, and is Britain’s longest running comic still in production. Indeed, even globally it is, I think, beaten only by Detective Comics in the USA (first published earlier in 1937) and by TBO in Spain (first published in 1917) – if the latter is still going. The Dandy had a major revamp in 2004 aimed at aligning it with the tastes of modern children while keeping it as a comic, rather than turning it into a children’s magazine. It would be a pity if that turns out to have been in vain.

Sean Kleefeld recently asked what comics he should look out for when visiting Britain this August. I started jotting down some thoughts, but it quickly became clear that there was too much for a simple comment, so here it all is as a blog entry, you lucky people.

A quick disclaimer: I make no claims to expertise, nor to be a definitive arbiter of taste. I would welcome additions and alternative viewpoints. But I hope this post will be of use to anyone taking a holiday here.

Background
If you want to swot up before arrival, there is nothing better than Paul Gravett and Peter Stanbury’s book Great British Comics: Celebrating a Century of Ripping Yarns and Wizard Wheezes. As the title suggests, this is a big, lavishly illustrated history of British comics , actually stretching as far back as the creation of the first continuing comic strip character, Ally Sloper, in 1867, and beyond.


If you are globe-trotting this summer, you might prefer The Essential Guide to World Comics by Tim Pilcher and Brad Brooks, which has a good chapter on British comics, and other chapters on US, Japanese, South East Asian, Franco-Belgian, European, South and Central American, Scandinavian, and Australasian comics, plus one on a miscellany of other countries (it’s quite an eye opener, particularly revealing how comics sales are falling everywhere, even in Japan and Mexico).


For history on the web, start with Comics UK.

For the current British Comics scene, John Freeman’s Down the Tubes is indispensable. Among other things, it features a news section and listings of all current professional comics periodicals and books. The Forbidden Planet International Blog is also well worth checking. For British small press comics, try Bugpowder.

The magazine Comics International used to be highly valuable, not least for the directory of comics shops in Britain in the back. Unfortunately, since changing publisher a year ago, only one issue has appeared. Perhaps it should change its title to All-Star Comics International?

Periodicals
If you read all that history, you’ll get the impression that the dominant form of comic in Britain is the weekly anthology. Once, this was true, but no longer.

The twin giants of the children’s humour weekly comics still stand: The Beano and The Dandy, published by D C Thompson. Each contains a mix of 1 to 3 page-long stand-alone strips featuring continuing characters. The target audience is under-10s. The Beano has recently spawned a spin-off monthly, BeanoMax, aimed at 8-12 year olds, and containing a mix of strips and magazine features.


D C Thompson also publishes small-format digests featuring Beano and Dandy characters, and Classics from the Comics, a monthly reprint magazine mostly containing material from the 1950s through to the 1970s: I reviewed an edition here.

Of the boys’ weekly adventure anthologies, only 2000AD remains, though it might now more accurately be described as a nostalgic men’s weekly adventure anthology. I reviewed some recent editions here and here.


2000AD also has a monthly counterpart, the Judge Dredd Megazine, which mixes strips with articles (though in this case the articles are all about comics, and not just those from the 2000AD stable), and a reprint magazine, 2000AD Extreme Editions, which generally gathers together serialised weekly strips into a single lump.

The other great remaining anthology is the monthly Viz comic, the Geordie masterpiece of scabrous humour and topical satire, which mixes the classic children’s comic style of humour strip with outright filth and mock-articles in the style of the British tabloid newspapers. I reviewed an issue here, but be careful – it is marked “not for sale to children” for good reason.


The other long-standing comics format, the boys’ adventure comics digest, containing a complete self-contained story told in one or two panels per page, is now represented only by Commando (sometimes referred to as Commando Picture Library), which specialises in war stories – mostly, but not exclusively – about the Second World War.


Specialised girls’ comics have vanished, so far as I know, replaced by magazines.

So are British comics dying out? Not at all, but they have mutated. What you will find by the dozen in the Down the Tubes listings are children’s magazines based on a single franchise – anything from Tellytubbies to Thunderbirds, from Lazy Town to Shaun the Sheep - which mix a minority of comic-strip pages with puzzles, articles, posters and readers’ drawings. I have reviewed a couple that I rather like - Wallace and Gromit and Doctor Who Adventures – and one that I don’t - Action Man ATOM.

There is also the occasional children's magazine featuring a minority of comics pages but which is not tied to a particular franchise, such as Toxic.


Those seeking variant additions of US comic-books will also find a number of super-hero comics on the shelves, generally reprinting the contents of two US comics in each.

A couple of other periodicals are worth mentioning.

Private Eye is a magazine that mixes investigative journalism, political muckracking, and topical humour. It contains a lot of cartoons, including some in strip form. Two of its current political strips draw their inspiration from old British comics, satirising the Conservative Party in the style of Lord Snooty and His Pals, a long-running Beano series, and Prime-Minister-in-waiting Gordon Brown and his faction within the Labour Party in the style of Scottish classic comic-strip The Broons.


Spaceship Away is a semi-professional publication that started as a Dan Dare fanzine. It is notable for containing a brand new Dan Dare comic strip drawn by Don Harley, the long-term assistant to original series artist and creator Frank Hampson. It is also reprinting other 1950s SF strips, such as the adaptation of the radio series Journey into Space shown here.



You will also find comic strips elsewhere - for example, Fortean Times, a magazine about unexplained phenomena, ghosts, UFOs and all that jazz, features a one-page strip every month by the magnificent cartoonist Hunt Emerson. He might also still be drawing Firkin the Cat for the soft porno magazine Penthouse, but I wouldn't know about that ...


Buying periodicals
You won’t find many of these titles in comics shops in Britain – for the most part, those concentrate on American comics, graphic novels, and translations of manga. You might find 2000AD, the various Doctor Who titles and, if you are lucky, Spaceship Away and possibly some locally produced small-press titles.

For the rest, your best bet is the newsagents, particularly the big branches of W H Smith on the high streets of town and city centres. I recently counted about 90 comics titles on the shelves of the central Newcastle branch.

Most will be grouped in a section of children’s comics, which will be immediately recognisable because it is so untidy. Most British comics these days come with some cheap toy or novelty sellotaped, gummed or polybagged to the front, which makes shelving them difficult (and restricts browsing).

But look around the shop too. The three different Doctor Who titles might be in different places - Doctor Who Adventures with the children’s comics, Doctor Who Magazine with film and TV magazines (where you will sometimes find 2000AD and its spin-offs too), Doctor Who Battles in Time with partworks.

Private Eye will normally be shelved with current affairs magazines, and Viz either there or with men’s magazines like Maxim or Loaded.

Update, 6 June: added request for other views, expanded material on Private Eye, added mentions of US comic book reprints and Hunt Emerson.
Update, 7 June: added reference to Toxic.

Next – Part Two: Books (graphic novels, reprint collections, annuals and children’s albums)

Pictures and panels
Paul Gravett and Peter Stanbury Great British Comics: Celebrating a Century of Ripping Yarns and Wizard Wheezes, Aurum Press, 2006; cover shows Korky the Cat by Charles Grigg

Tim Pilcher and Brad Brooks The Essential Guide to World Comics, Collins & Brown/Chrysalis Books, cover by Roger Langridge, 2005

The Beano issue 3383, 2 June 2007, published by D C Thompson. Cover shows Dennis the Menace and Gnasher; interior panel from Minnie the Minx, both drawn by Tom Paterson

The Dandy issue 3417, 2 June 2007, published by D C Thompson, interior panels from Ollie Fliptrick, art by Dixon

2000AD prog 1539, 30 May 2007, published by Rebellion, interior panels from Nikolai Dante “Thieves’ World” part 2 by Robbie Morrison (script), Simon Fraser (art), Gary Caldwell (colours) and Annie Parkhouse (letters)

Viz issue 165, May 2007, published by Dennis Publishing, interior panels from Sting and the Riddle of the Horse’s Arse (uncredited)

Commando issue 4007, May 2007, published by D C Thompson, “Wolf Patrol” (uncredited, reprinted from 1993)

Toxic issue 94, 6 June-19 June 2007, published by Egmont Magazines, interior panels from Team Toxic "Getting to the Bottom of It", art by Lew Stringer

Private Eye issue 1186, 8 June-21 June 2007, Pressdram Limited; strip The Broon-ites drawn by Henry Davies

Spaceship Away issue 7, Autumn 2005, published by Rod Barzilay; interior panels from Journey Into Space episode 1 “Planet of Fear”, written by Charles Chilton, art by Ferdinando Tacconi, reprinted from Express Weekly, 1956