Harry Hill in Toxic AND the Dandy?

[kevf]

The Dandy has featured Harry Hill as its star attraction for nearly a year now, and very good it is too. They even proudly emblazon on the cover phrases like "Exclusive" and "The Only Comic With Harry Hill In". So how does that explain this week's Toxic, and its big cartoon Harry Hill on the cover?



Now I like the Harry Hill cartoon in The Dandy and I like the Harry Hill cartoon in Toxic, but which is better..? Well, you can see where that's going.

[Peter Gray]

That Dandy cover is so much better than Toxic which is all over the place..

[WizzKid97]

I don't like Harry Hill and never will, he seems so annoying and his jokes aren't funny at all in my opinion.

ON TOPIC AGAIN!
The Dandy's Harry Hill drawings are a lot better than Toxic's efforts. The Toxic front covers are always awful. The Dandy is good, it's front covers and big, clear and to the point. The Toxic front covers are like Dandy Xtreme front covers with a bunch of stuff going on and silly speech bubbles and sound effects everywhere.

And as for the packaging, lying much? Claims to have 'Lots of new stories', more like one new story replacing an old one. And Gorilla Kid was a lot better than Captain Gross...

[MikeC]

There's no comic strip inside, though - just a crap photo feature with Harry in it. No permission needed for those, so I doubt if the man himself is involved?

[kevf]

There's no comic strip inside, though - just a crap photo feature with Harry in it. No permission needed for those, so I doubt if the man himself is involved?

Do you need permission to feature someone in a strip? Given that that's the Dandy's big thing at the moment, I'm assuming not. So what's to stop Toxic running Simon Cowell, Bruce Forsyth, Ant & Dec etc strips, just like the Dandy?

Also I've noticed that some copies of this week's Toxic have a photo of Harry Hill on the plastic bag, but some have a cartoon, the rest of the cover being identical. An odd move. Maybe the cartoon was a last minute change?

[-MikeD-]

And as for the packaging, lying much? Claims to have 'Lots of new stories', more like one new story replacing an old one. And Gorilla Kid was a lot better than Captain Gross...

Hah...yeah, there still isn't much love for Toxic around here is there?

btw - The Toxic Harry looks like an almost line for line swipe from NP's strip....

[swirlythingy]

So what's to stop Toxic running Simon Cowell, Bruce Forsyth, Ant & Dec etc strips, just like the Dandy?

Nothing - not that the Dandy says they're exclusive to it. (And Toxic is welcome to them, thank you very much.)

Those two cover scans brought about conflicting nostalgia. The first one because it reminds me how well-designed and eye-catching the Dandy's covers used to be, and the second because it reminds me how atrocious they were before that. (From what I've heard, Dandy Xtreme basically imitated Toxic to grab a slice of its market, and failed miserably.)

[Digifiend]

Yeah, the Dandy only claims Harry Hill is exclusive, not the other celebs - and I'm afraid I agree with Mike, Toxic's cartoon cover seems to be plagarism.

[felneymike]

Plagarism means taking somebody else's work and claiming it's your own, creating work yourself which is very similar is just imitating.
I should think the Dandy has a "deal" with Harry Hill (remember all the "it took a phone call and the deal was done" stuff from around the re launch?) to feature him in a 3-page strip every issue, but all of the other people are probably just put in as "parodies". Like the various strips in Viz.

[Digifiend]

That's correct. Except that it's a two-page strip.

[felneymike]

Oh yeah, oops. I was still counting the cover as a "page" like Dennis on the late 90's Beano... seeing as he's almost always on it