By and large, I've resisted the temptation to give the strips in the modern Dandy a good going-over, firstly because I thought natural selection would do its stuff sooner or later, and latterly because I felt the comic needed all the support it could get. The first anniversary, however, seems long enough to wait.
If the strips in the modern Dandy do have a fault, it's that they've recruited a large band of great writers and great artists, but all too rarely do these two groups overlap. While simplistic styles can work, and have worked, there are some whose work edges over the line from 'abstract' to 'childish' (although these are getting fewer), regardless of the often excellent quality of the scripts. Similarly, there are a few too many extremely talented artists producing great drawings which could have been that much better if only they'd had the attentions of an equally talented comic strip writer for my liking.
I've never been a fan of Alexander Matthews' artwork, although his writing is impressively bizarre (the Napoleon one was one of the Dandy's funniest recent strips, which is saying something), but others are starting to grow on me - I had doubts about Wilbur Dawburn when Mr Meecher started, but I've since got used to both writing and art and I now think it's now one of the comic's strongest strips, the second series being even better than the first.
Andy Fanton's stellar successes in both writing and art are well-documented, both by Dragon's almost weekly appearances on the reader page and by the large extent to which his style appears to have directly inspired those working on the Wizzo comic. Jamie Smart remains in the unfortunate position of being highly popular amongst those at whom his work is aimed (children), and highly unpopular amongst those at whom it is not (adults), with the latter group exercising total control over its fate, which (judging by other accounts on this forum) sums up the whole comic's problems, really.
On the flip side, one thing common to all of Nik Holmes' work is the frequent total absence of anything resembling a punchline, although some have been better than others - Clown Wars brought a lot of inherent humour along with its concept, which was largely absent from Stan Helsing; his version of Fiddle O'Diddle, meanwhile, was the worst I have ever read, although I have heard people say the exact opposite, which perhaps proves once again that all I loved about the previous (in this case Tom Paterson's) version was simultaneously all others hated. Perhaps peculiarly, my favourite page by him was his recent Madvertisement showing Yoda in the bath, which I thought was one of the best advert spoofs in the comic so far.
Bone-O was another one which was visually sumptuous, but lacking in the script department; it could have been a successful strip if only it had been a two-man job (although I have found it improves on a second reading). A disquieting proportion of (the also excellently drawn) Yore's punchlines seemed to rely merely upon ludicrous quantities of slapstick gore, although this was nevertheless amusing to a certain extent, particularly when one imagined Paul Dacre's face if ever he caught a glimpse of the 'Real ladies go SQUISH!' page. Chris McGhie's work might be tolerable if only it didn't all eventually turn out to be an excuse to print pictures of celebrities, and I don't think he'll ever get over the bad feeling over both those summer covers and rebranding Phil's Finger, which lost the poll by a country mile, as Cheryl's Mole, which was more of the same but even worse.
Harry Hill seems set to become a new generation's Calamity James, with battle lines cleanly drawn between those who love and hate him. I've always found myself in the former camp with both stories, in this case simply because of the sheer gag density which gives the Harry Hill pages more laughs per square inch than almost anything else. (Yes, you can say they're all looked up on Google, but you can go a long way to find the same joke executed in a half-decent fashion. Probably 90% of the jokes in the strip have appeared on the reader pages a minimum of five times, but were they ever funny then? There may be no original puns left in the universe, but conventional context-free question-and-answer jokes stopped being funny a century ago when humans evolved beyond finding something they knew they were expected to find funny funny. Harry Hill puts them into new contexts which succeed in catching you off guard and making them funny again, and that's what you're paying for.) I hate celeb-worship as much as the next man, but at least the situation has improved since the early strips and at least it occasionally features people who - shock! - have never had anything to do with the X Factor. In fact, this week's strip doesn't have
one celebrity in it, apart from Harry himself - albeit with half of the last page taken up with hanging lampshades on this fact.
If there's one other strip which can rival the per-page LOL value-for-money of Harry Hill, it's the comic's other licensed property - the Bogies. The number of panels on this page (or even two pages) just keeps creeping up and up, and the scripts are at an all-time high (with the usual caveat that the quality of the art remains questionable). Nigel Auchterlounie's other great work was, perhaps strangely, on Corporal Clott in the 2012 Dandy Annual - I wouldn't mind seeing that back in the weekly comic. He's had his misses too, though - his version of Puss'n'Boots in the same publication was jarringly awful, mini-strip Jibber and Steve is floundering after a relatively strong start, and then there were regrettable experiments such as the Gleeks. (Night of the Living Glee in the 2010 Christmas special was very good, but ultimately a bit of a single-gag concept which should have been allowed to go out on a high.)
I feel the mini-strips are going through a bad patch at the moment, what with 'Knock! Knock!', 'Are you ready for the question, Noel?', and similar dross dominating. Earlier in the year there was a much superior pool of comics visible, but all the best strips, such as 'Saint Evil's', 'Off the Vine' and 'Newsblast with Rocky O'Flair', seem to have disappeared.
Stu Munro's been a bit of a mixed bag. Justin Beaver was good rising to excellent; Tiny's Temper was, erm, not; as for the mini-strips, Bear Behind started bad and ended relatively good, and Turtle Wipeout seems set to follow the same trajectory. Steve Beckett has been even more mixed. I seem to be highly unusual in disliking his artwork - I find his character layout leaves much to be desired, often obscuring the action in strips like Daredevil Dad. Possibly because of the more restricted environment (and the absence of that enormous in-house lettering), his first mini-strip, Ray Fears, looks somewhat better than Sea Dogs.
As for Lew Stringer's strips, of Postman Prat and Kid Cops, I slightly prefer Kid Cops overall, but only slightly - my absolute favourite strip of his was the Prat finishing with the 'this way up' punchline, which ranks highly in the list of my favourite comic gags of all time (and it's quite telling how many other entries in that list also come from the post-2010 Dandy). Almost unusually among the Dandy's new artist intake, he was already well-established in traditional comics (and had already made it into the Beano two years earlier), and has one of the most representative (by humour standards) and least off-the-wall styles among them; however, I do get the distinct impression, looking at some of the later Prats, that the artwork quality is slowly getting worse and more rushed-looking, but it could be a peculiarity of this strip (never exactly typical of his style) as his work elsewhere doesn't seem to have suffered. Along with Steve Beckett, he was the most recent artist to switch to lettering his own work, with the usual noticeable improvement in layout. I think he's one of the few remaining artists never to have been represented on the mini-strip pages, and I'd be quite interested to see this remedied.
Have I missed anyone? Probably. The number of characters, scriptwriters and artists that the new Dandy has gone through in its first twelve months is probably a lot more than some other comics managed in their lifetime, but I fear the pace of change is slowing down - time was when every issue contained at least one new strip, even if it was just a mini-strip, but the much-heralded experimental revamp seems, if anything, to be getting stuck in a rut. High-risk, high-reward commissions from complete or relative unknowns have slowed dramatically, with new characters (when they do appear) prejudiced towards either second series of previously successful characters or new creations by artists proved previously successful.
It's not as if there isn't enough talent out there, but shortly after the floodgates opened one day a few months short of October 2010, it seems they slammed tight shut again. Experimentation, the message goes, is over. What we need now is a stable roster of characters appearing each week ad infinitum, with regular cancellations and ever so slightly less regular new commissions, because it seems to have worked for the Beano. Yes, of course the Beano has Dennis the Menace to prop it up and we don't, nor do we have the Bash Street Kids, Minnie the Minx, Roger the Dodger, Billy Whizz or any of those other pop-cultural icons, but we're going to treat the comic as if we do anyway and hopefully reality will mould to fit our expectations.
The Beano and the Dandy aren't the same, and I sincerely hope they never will be. There needs to be a venue for experimentation, because otherwise the comic will cease to renew itself and gradually sink further and further into obscurity. And it
has memorable and amusing characters who are quite capable of taking over the world, but they both aren't being given the chance and never will be if the revamp fails. It's sadly telling that the only characters the
Dandy Shop (itself almost impossible to find, being linked from neither the comic website nor the DC Thomson corporate website, unlike the Beano in both cases) mentions - Desperate Dan, Bananaman and Korky, discounting Black Bob - are also the only ones considered even vaguely iconic enough to survive the chainsaw taken to the cast list pre-revamp. You can say all you like about DC Thomson not having the gigantic market saturation budget of Ben 10 and the Simpsons, but you can't deny it's not even trying.
All the difficult market conditions in the world can't force the Dandy to willingly destroy itself if it so desires, and if it doesn't want to be an experimental comic, it'd better hurry up and learn to love those characters which have already made it onto its pages. Where are the Dragon plushies? When will we see Postman Prat-branded stationary? What about Mr Meecher hoodies, Yore board games, Dave the Squirrel car accessories and and Pre-Skool Prime Minister cake mix? Why has the comic's own annual hastily distanced itself from the innovative goings-on at the very comic it is supposed to help sell? Why is the whole comic in denial about its own nature, and deeply embarrassed to admit it isn't like it was in the 1960s any more? Why are conservative parents allowed to buy the comic, read it, and ditch it because it's different, while more open-minded ones are put off by the thought of a crusty old publication which hasn't moved with the times?
So, in conclusion: the Dandy needs to be more experimental, like it was in the first place, otherwise it'll stagnate; everything else associated with the Dandy needs to promote the Dandy and not a half-remembered rose-tinted vision of a couple of Dandy characters, which is just counterproductive in the type of person it persuades to buy the comic; and regarding the comic itself, I'd like to see complementary sets of comic creators who are each better at one side of the business than the other paired off to give us the best of both worlds. Mike D and Nigel A's Bone-O, anyone?
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