The Hunt for the Flinklegloop

Presented here is a fun, silly story by a fun, silly man called Jimmy Glen. It concerns James, the World's Worst School Boy, and in this strip from a 1990 Dandy, James is on a nature ramble. He gets pestered by his strange "friend", Hazel the Nut, who speaks in her own odd dialect. Turns out she's hunting for something called a "flinklegloop" (which is poolgelknilf backwards, obviously!). Let's see how she does:

Ah, of course! She can't find one, because she doesn't know what they look like. Nobody's ever caught one, because nobody's ever seen one before. That's where the Dandy readers come in. Nice way to get the imagination stirring, yes?

Fast forward twelve weeks, and we get to see what several kids think a flinklegloop might look like!

They all got a prize there (I'd've given a bigger prize to Anna-Marie Knott for that nutty deer-headed mothman... thing). And they got to see their artwork in a (then) massively popular comic too! Those wonderfully weird designs were done having been given just a single nonsense word. Not a description, not a given number of limbs or eyes or whatever, just a word. And who knows how many other entries there were? Never stop a youngster from doodling is the lesson here, I suppose. Or beware of flinklegloops, because they're mad.