Look behind you and all that

Six more sleeps till "the big day", and somehow, despite all my efforts, I'm not feeling "Christmassy" in the slightest. I'll be blaming recent real-life events for that, but am still endeavouring to get at least a BIT festive. This might help:

Yeah, a pantomime! The Hoot pantomime no less. I've talked about Hoot before, and I'll be talking about it again - it's far too good a comic to be as neglected as it is. It was completely left out of the otherwise excellent Classics From The Comics (it's not even mentioned on the cover), and last year, when DC Thomson put out a book collecting several pantomime-themed stories from their archives, Hoot was left out once more.

In my ongoing heroic quest to right such wrongs, here's the whole thing, in full...

Give a hoot - read Hoot!

It was "Britain's bubbling new comic" in 1985, and 364 days later it was merged with the Dandy, but DC Thomson's short-lived comic had its fun. Most remember it as being too childish, but from the dozen or so issues I've read, I'd disagree. Mostly. Granted, it had a baby on the cover in the form of Barrie Appleby's Cuddles (a survivor of the similarly short-lived Nutty comic, and the same Cuddles who'd later team up with Dimples from the Dandy), but the inside pages were mostly fun fun fun in a way that today's comics would never allow!