Low cost school trip, Ramraid Oxfam, "Christ that sun's hot", Yes that's right sir

I'll admit - it's been too bloody hot to be sitting in scanning comics and then writing about them. And somehow I've got a more active social life than I did this time last year, so that's why there's been nothing here for the past five weeks. I am (slowly) working on a "thing" about Zit, one of the more successful (as in, long-running) Viz clones, but I couldn't let this week pass un-noted, oh no. It's been 368 days since I started this blog thing, and in that time it's gotten thirty-four more "followers" than I was expecting, and around 28,000 more "views" than I was expecting, so thanks a lot to everyone, even if you've just stumbled across here whilst looking for something else.

If we all went to the same pubs, I'd happily get a round in, happily!

Meanwhile, just to tide things over (a weird bit of news last week led a handful of people into believing I had died), here's the Beano from the week I was born, in its entirity. Once the rain makes a return, I'll get back to "archiving" all those smutty comics.

A slightly delayed look at the last ever Dandy, Part 3 - who was missing!

Here we go, the reason this post was so long in producing. It's...

25 Dandy Characters Who Perhaps Should've Had A Place In The Top 75 Dandy Characters Ever

And that's shouting! Admittedly, this lot are mostly from 1988-2001 or thereabouts, but this is my list and those were my years for the Dandy.

So, in no particular order, here we go:

Minor Dandy Obscurities

Just one more quick Dandy thing before it's all over (not to say there won't be Dandy-based stuff here in the future - it's just I like to work with loose themes). Here are several things that appeared in the comic during the late 1980s and early 1990s - and they don't seem to be remembered by most people. I like them anyway - and if you DO remember them, good for you!

First up is James, the World's Worst Schoolboy, by Jimmy Glen. I've talked about him before, but this one's worth seeing:

It's the complete lack of sense that's amusing with this one, and also the bit with the teacher crying. Really it's just nine funny pictures, but it's fun.

Richard's Snitch (by... Gordon Bell?) is just plain odd. A boy with a big nose, and that big nose has a face. And a mind of its own.

From the 1986 Summer Special is this Kath & Mouse, a set of characters I've never seen anywhere else. Reading this one as a seven-year-old stirred up a variety of confusing new feelings, so there's that.

Why is there a tentacle under the bed?

And finally, another nice bit of Tom Paterson-based joy. The World's Daftest Discoveries with David Chattenborough was a series of splash pages packed with all sorts of jokes, silly words and strange things to look at. The third of these featured "The Hairy Highland Haggis Hatchery of Glen MacHyooch":

One day, some sensible person will collect the complete works of Mr. Paterson and put them into a massive heavy book. One day.

A quick plug for Plug

Here's another short-lived DC Thomson comic (there's a lot of them!) - this one based around the sporting adventures of Percival Proudfoot Plugsley, aka. Plug from the Bash Street Kids. I only have the one issue (they seem to be scarce), so everything I know about it is based on this one here, and Graham Kibble-White's mostly excellent Ultimate Book of British Comics. What I do know is that it lasted from 1977 to 1979, it was expensive for the time, and it eventually got swallowed up by the Beezer.

Let's have a mug...

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.