What Dandy Character Would You Like Back?

[SID]

(Sorry if this has been asked before).

As I sit in my dimly lit study just after midnight (my grandfather clock just finished chiming), the question just popped into my head:

"What character would I like back in the Dandy"?

For me, simples.

Cuddles and Dimples.

A brilliant strip with its own brand of humour (poor old Dad) and not to mention the very sexy mum.

[booksandcomics]

I can't quite recall if one came from Hoot or from Nutty, but, in the early issues of the combined Dandy and Hoot/Nutty, both the parents of Cuddles and Dimples appeared! After a while though they just vanished! I assume one was adopted?
Funny thoughts when looking back at these comics!

I would actually like to see Blinky being reprinted or Molly. Particularly Blinky though as when I started reading the Dandy around 1994 and 1995, I had just started wearing glasses myself! I remember in one annual they had a whole two page spread entiled what you see and then what Blinky sees through his glasses!

[Digifiend]

Wish granted. They ran a Blinky reprint recently. Seems to be on a rotation, as we've also seen Cuddles and Dimples, Sneaker and Beryl the Peril in the last couple of months.

[booksandcomics]

Great! I really should look at buying new ones again...

[tony ingram]

For me, either the Smasher, Brassneck, Black Bob or Dirty Dick. I'd have said Bing-Bang Benny, but without Ken Reid there'd be no point.

[alanultron5]

I would like to see `Big Head and Thick Head` back as unlike `Bing-Bang-Benny` they carried on to 1967 after Ken Reid had moved on to Odhams, so for me it wouldn't be too big a change!

[Jonno]

Hia all . I reckon they should bring back Harry Hill .

[Digifiend]

That isn't going to happen. http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID ... 4090226371

[Gilly]

I have already got my wish with Bully Beef and Chips returning but another strip I would like to see return would be Winker Watson as I always enjoyed that strip.

[WizzKid97]

Cuddles and Dimples seems to be ending this issue - note the "Like Cuddles and Dimples? Tell us about it - editor@dandy.com" rather than the normal "Next Week - [insert plot here]"

Also, this is a good thread - I definitely have a few I'd love to see back:

Winker Watson - I would love to see this wangler back - maybe by Steve Beckett or Wayne Thompson to get that classic feeling. Will Dawbarn is also a good choice.

The Smasher - I would love to see Smasher back but my only cause of concern is that I can't imagine anybody's Smasher being as good as Brian Walker's was so if it returned, it'd sadly have to be a reprint.

Corporal Clott - Clott's great - I've always liked Clott! Although there's only one man for the job and it has to be Nigel Auchterlounie to give that strip its much-needed laughs.

[swirlythingy]

Winker would be top of my list, although I didn't like Stephen White's post-2004 version - not just for the art style (although I much preferred the very different and much cleaner style the exact same artist used immediately prior to the 2004 revamp), but also because I didn't like the direction in which the scripts were taken.

In one such series (it may even have been the very last one), he spent several weeks battling an invasion of space alien doppelgangers. That's pretty much a textbook example of a much-loved character being dragged by profit motivations across the line from necessary evolution to gruesome mutilation.

The problem with Winker, which I'd guess also weighed heavily on the mind of the architect of the aforementioned wacky sci-fi derailment, is that posh kids in an all-male boarding school nicking 'scrummy tuck' from the 'pantries' under the noses of mortar-board wearing masters is just... so... 1960s. How can you ever sell that to 21st-century children who bought the comic with Bananaman and Arena of Awesome? Wilbur Dawburn certainly knew this in his recent less-than-serious revival of Greytowers in his Mr Meecher strip, in which the comedy arose from precisely how different a culture, from the very modern Meecher, the archaic Creep came from - both were the butt of kids' jokes, but in such different ways.

I always enjoyed the strip, but my head tells me that it really should be quietly filed alongside such aged delights as Spadger's Isle as something which really is irredeemably irrelevant to the 21st century, and would take the use of such a sledgehammer to be appropriate to the modern Dandy that it wouldn't even faintly resemble the original strip which everyone was so keen to bring back in the first place.

In fact, I reckon that if you bashed Winker around enough, and scrubbed off the last of the lingering stench of antedeluvian elitism which is, if anything, becoming even more unpleasantly pungent in the current political climate, you would end up with something very like Mr Meecher. And I also reckon that, if you tried to pass it off as the same strip as Winker Watson, even if you fobbed off the readers with some tale about a 'descendant' (Lord Snooty III anyone?), you'd just end up driving away anyone who might otherwise have appreciated the strip as an original creation on its own merits, while doing nothing to attract readers who knew nothing of its ancestor.

In summary: I reckon Mr Meecher is the closest thing the Dandy has to a classic school story like Winker Watson at present, and it's probably for the best if we just remember Winker for the brilliance it once had rather than trying to dig up its rotting corpse yet again and dressing it up as another self-consciously 'modern' yet strangely anachronistic strip, sullying all our memories of its original greatness.

It's either that or more space aliens.

Cuddles and Dimples seems to be ending this issue - note the "Like Cuddles and Dimples? Tell us about it - editor@dandy.com" rather than the normal "Next Week - [insert plot here]"

I wouldn't read too much into that - it's more likely they're doing it to give them more flexibility with the order in which they reprint the strips. After all, no other strip ever had such a box underneath the last panel telling you what was going to happen next week. (Don't mention Harry Hill.)

I noted with some amusement that they've completely ceased printing the exhortation, "Tell us what you think about this strip!", replacing it with the subtly yet tellingly different, "Did you like this strip? Then tell us!"

Now I wonder why that could have been...? *whistles innocently*

[Raven]

The problem with Winker, which I'd guess also weighed heavily on the mind of the architect of the aforementioned wacky sci-fi derailment, is that posh kids in an all-male boarding school nicking 'scrummy tuck' from the 'pantries' under the noses of mortar-board wearing masters is just... so... 1960s.

Actually, it's more 1910s!

[swirlythingy]

The problem with Winker, which I'd guess also weighed heavily on the mind of the architect of the aforementioned wacky sci-fi derailment, is that posh kids in an all-male boarding school nicking 'scrummy tuck' from the 'pantries' under the noses of mortar-board wearing masters is just... so... 1960s.

Actually, it's more 1910s!

Yes, but the character started in the 1960s, so I couldn't say that! (I was originally going to say '1950s', thinking of Jennings books and the like, but I thought I might get castigated by pedantic comics nuts...)

It's an interesting thought, though, the Dandy being 50 years behind its time even in 1962.

[Raven]

It's an interesting thought, though, the Dandy being 50 years behind its time even in 1962.

But that seems about right for D C Thomson! The first of the famous children's books I can think of to specifically try to break away from the long-stale, unrealistic boarding school story tradition and feature modern day school children was Geoffrey Trease's No Boats on Bannermere, and that was 1949.

It goes back long pre-Jennings, with a kind of peak, probably, around the 1910s to 1930s: that Gem, Magnet, Greyfriars, Boy's Own Paper school story era.

[Digifiend]

I wouldn't read too much into that - it's more likely they're doing it to give them more flexibility with the order in which they reprint the strips. After all, no other strip ever had such a box underneath the last panel telling you what was going to happen next week. (Don't mention Harry Hill.)

They did in 2004, they only kept it to fill the gap. It was also commonplace on adventure stories until the 80s (until 1960, this was the Bellboy's role).