DANDY to ( info- ) highway , man ?????????

...Did you notice , Figs , that at least the Denver Post deemed it important enough to put under the National Politics classification ?????????

Maybe the Mile High City's journalistic contingent describes some expatriate Brits there ??!!??!!??!

It was pretty much you I was aiming this item at , given outrast conversation when I found a vintage 1982 Dandy - or Beano - annual in the SF Library's little books-for-sale concession , and reported upon it as the first-ever example of that Limey stuff that this Yank had ever held in his hand ?????????

I don't know what you thought of my rather convoluted Adam Ant-punning opener there...Would Herman's Hermits/Ray Davies have been preferable ?????????

Maybe this is answered elsewhere , but where The Dandy and Beano both owned by the same company then ?

Was Bunty , I suppose , more an " older girls' " comic , with , say , romance and dating and " UK sorta-equivalents of Nancy Drew " and the like ( Probably no Buffy , however . ) in it ??? Twinkle a " equivalents of Strawberry Shortcake/My Little Pony "-type rag ???

Was Beano a little " older " in its style ?

I also found a more written-to-native knowledge of the comics story in the UK's " Torygraph " national daily ( Telegraph - Especially when , when I looked for it again , I came upon the Austrailan national?? Telegraph paper's version of it I was reminded that...)about it , which linked to some other stories about it that I'd like to read when...Including a " Comics too PC ? " one ( Isn't that more the Daily Mail's department ? )...

Sorry, been meaning to reply to this for a while. Life has been very full.

Your interest in the cultural touchstones of non-Yankee nations does you credit EKDJ.

You mean you didn't buy that Dandy annual? For shame! Was it very expensive?

Adam Ant strikes no bells with anyone unless they were exactly 10 years old when he 'burst on the scene'. Which describes me exactly so you hit your mark there. Herman and his Hermits are museum stuff to me.

Yes, Beano and Dandy were very much stablemates from the same company - DC Thompson (no relation!). Beano was a tiny little bit more zingy and modern-feeling than the Dandy, and thanks to the Limey Dennis the Menace and the legendary Bash Street Kids (google Leo Baxendale), was all told a better comic. How stuck the comics were in the past cannot be over-stated. When I was a kid no-one my age would be seen dead in shorts. They just weren't worn. I was surprised when young men started wearing them in the 90s! But in the Beano all the boys still wore shorts and there were lots of jokes about knobbly knees. (That describes the humour too)

Also the kids were obsessed with getting food anywhere and 'scoffing' it, as if society hadn't moved beyond the depression/wartime austerity/rationing era.

Bunty seemed to be the 'older girls' comic as far as our house was concerned, but I'd say 12 was the far edge of its readership. It was probably the most middle-class and inoffensive comic ever produced. A strip called 'The Four Marys' was its most exciting feature. Think about that for a moment.

Yes, Twinkle was for little girls. The front cover always had a picture of the little girl with a version of Twinkle twinkle little star adapted to the cover image. Inside the most memorable strip was about a little girl who ran a doll's hospital with her grandfather.

It's all coming back to me now!

What you really should read up on, although it was too ghastly for our house, was a groundbreaking comic called Misty. I heard the legends behind 2000AD give a talk on British comics and they were the professionals on that comic too. It had strange unsettling disturbing stories for pre-adolescent girls.

It didn't take the comics' (usually male) editors long to work out that girls just loved wallowing in misery. The story titles flaunt their heroine's sufferings: Tears of a Clown; The Girl the World Forgot; Bridey Below the Breadline; No One Cares for Cora; Lisa – the Lonely Ballerina; The Sadness of Happy Jones; Merry at Misery House. There were Slaves of, variously, the Mirror (orphan girl is hypnotised into destroying her sister's boarding house), the Candle (Victorian candlemaker enslaves girls and tries to steal the Crown Jewels), Form 3B (meek girl is hypnotised by scheming classmate), the Clock (reluctant ballerina is forced to dance whenever she hears a clock ticking), the Dolls (girl is turned into servant for the inhabitants of a Victorian dolls' house) and the Swan (amnesiac girl is forced to work for injured ballerina).

Beloved animals were threatened with death. Miscarriages of justice saw girls ostracised by their schoolmates and innocent fathers put in prison. Girls were forbidden to do the one thing – music, swimming, horse-riding – that meant everything to them. Dystopian futures were rife (and occasionally prescient – Jinty's Fran of the Floods saw civilisation "almost brought to an end by gigantic floods and freak weather", while Land of No Tears showed a world where the disabled were treated as second-class citizens). Homeless orphans (often with sick little brothers in tow) dealt stoically with obstacles that would horrify even Tess of the d'Urbervilles.

And, like Hardy's heroine, these girls didn't always get a happy ending. Consider Karen Chalmers, Tammy and Misty's The Loneliest Girl in the World, who after many traumatic episodes finally discovers that she is the only survivor of a holocaust – and, knowing this, goes to her certain death in order to see her parents one last time. We'd waited weeks for that revelation, only to be given shrieking nightmares.

From this great Guardian article.

Staying with the Guardian, here's a great article on the demise of the paper version of the Dandy, from the wonderfully unashamed Geek Charlier Brooker. (This guy is a fantastic satirist of his age too btw)

Here's Charlie:

Of course rather than standing up for the artists and writers of the comic itself, they're simply bemoaning the death of something from their own childhoods, the narcissists. Insulted by progress, affronted by change, they prefer everything kept just the way it was when they last saw it.

Anyone mourning the death of the print edition of the Dandy, even for half a second, is a staggering egotist who earnestly believes him or herself to be a supreme deity whose every belch and fart should be bottled for posterity. Jail the scum. Jail them hard. Jail their heads off. Throw the jail at them. Jail.

Finally here's a nice peice from one of the current Dandy artists on the Dandy's place in modern culture.

(The Guardian is probably one of my favourite sources of news, EKDJ, do you ever check it out?)

Is there anything we can call you if Emerkeith Davyjack seems like too much effort to type?

Why did you pick the name anyway?

Replies

Figserello August 14, 2012 at 11:27pm

I was a Dandy kid back in the before-time. My Mum bought 4 comics every Saturday to entice us to bed at a reasonable hour. Bunty for the big sister, the Beano for the older brother, Dandy for me, and Twinkle for the baby sister.

When I switched over to Marvel UKs Hulk Weeky for a short while I felt really guilty or something to be leaving the Dandy, and felt that I was crossing some kind of threshold.

This is sad news indeed. We want the stuff of our childhood to continue forever, even if we've grown past them.

It seems that the quality of the strips in the Dandy have really improved lately too, as sometimes happens when a company's back is against the wall!

Line from the article:

"There are many challenges within the industry at present, but we're excited that the digital revolution has also given us an opportunity to innovate and develop," the publisher said in a statement.

That's one way of looking at it I suppose...
Emerkeith Davyjack August 15, 2012 at 2:11pm

...Did you notice , Figs , that at least the Denver Post deemed it important enough to put under the National Politics classification ?????????

Maybe the Mile High City's journalistic contingent describes some expatriate Brits there ??!!??!!??!

It was pretty much you I was aiming this item at , given outrast conversation when I found a vintage 1982 Dandy - or Beano - annual in the SF Library's little books-for-sale concession , and reported upon it as the first-ever example of that Limey stuff that this Yank had ever held in his hand ?????????

I don't know what you thought of my rather convoluted Adam Ant-punning opener there...Would Herman's Hermits/Ray Davies have been preferable ?????????

Maybe this is answered elsewhere , but where The Dandy and Beano both owned by the same company then ?

Was Bunty , I suppose , more an " older girls' " comic , with , say , romance and dating and " UK sorta-equivalents of Nancy Drew " and the like ( Probably no Buffy , however . ) in it ??? Twinkle a " equivalents of Strawberry Shortcake/My Little Pony "-type rag ???

Was Beano a little " older " in its style ?

I also found a more written-to-native knowledge of the comics story in the UK's " Torygraph " national daily ( Telegraph - Especially when , when I looked for it again , I came upon the Austrailan national?? Telegraph paper's version of it I was reminded that...)about it , which linked to some other stories about it that I'd like to read when...Including a " Comics too PC ? " one ( Isn't that more the Daily Mail's department ? )...
Figserello September 12, 2012 at 10:17pm

Sorry, been meaning to reply to this for a while. Life has been very full.

Your interest in the cultural touchstones of non-Yankee nations does you credit EKDJ.

You mean you didn't buy that Dandy annual? For shame! Was it very expensive?

Adam Ant strikes no bells with anyone unless they were exactly 10 years old when he 'burst on the scene'. Which describes me exactly so you hit your mark there. Herman and his Hermits are museum stuff to me.

Yes, Beano and Dandy were very much stablemates from the same company - DC Thompson (no relation!). Beano was a tiny little bit more zingy and modern-feeling than the Dandy, and thanks to the Limey Dennis the Menace and the legendary Bash Street Kids (google Leo Baxendale), was all told a better comic. How stuck the comics were in the past cannot be over-stated. When I was a kid no-one my age would be seen dead in shorts. They just weren't worn. I was surprised when young men started wearing them in the 90s! But in the Beano all the boys still wore shorts and there were lots of jokes about knobbly knees. (That describes the humour too)

Also the kids were obsessed with getting food anywhere and 'scoffing' it, as if society hadn't moved beyond the depression/wartime austerity/rationing era.

Bunty seemed to be the 'older girls' comic as far as our house was concerned, but I'd say 12 was the far edge of its readership. It was probably the most middle-class and inoffensive comic ever produced. A strip called 'The Four Marys' was its most exciting feature. Think about that for a moment.

Yes, Twinkle was for little girls. The front cover always had a picture of the little girl with a version of Twinkle twinkle little star adapted to the cover image. Inside the most memorable strip was about a little girl who ran a doll's hospital with her grandfather.

It's all coming back to me now!

What you really should read up on, although it was too ghastly for our house, was a groundbreaking comic called Misty. I heard the legends behind 2000AD give a talk on British comics and they were the professionals on that comic too. It had strange unsettling disturbing stories for pre-adolescent girls.

It didn't take the comics' (usually male) editors long to work out that girls just loved wallowing in misery. The story titles flaunt their heroine's sufferings: Tears of a Clown; The Girl the World Forgot; Bridey Below the Breadline; No One Cares for Cora; Lisa – the Lonely Ballerina; The Sadness of Happy Jones; Merry at Misery House. There were Slaves of, variously, the Mirror (orphan girl is hypnotised into destroying her sister's boarding house), the Candle (Victorian candlemaker enslaves girls and tries to steal the Crown Jewels), Form 3B (meek girl is hypnotised by scheming classmate), the Clock (reluctant ballerina is forced to dance whenever she hears a clock ticking), the Dolls (girl is turned into servant for the inhabitants of a Victorian dolls' house) and the Swan (amnesiac girl is forced to work for injured ballerina).

Beloved animals were threatened with death. Miscarriages of justice saw girls ostracised by their schoolmates and innocent fathers put in prison. Girls were forbidden to do the one thing – music, swimming, horse-riding – that meant everything to them. Dystopian futures were rife (and occasionally prescient – Jinty's Fran of the Floods saw civilisation "almost brought to an end by gigantic floods and freak weather", while Land of No Tears showed a world where the disabled were treated as second-class citizens). Homeless orphans (often with sick little brothers in tow) dealt stoically with obstacles that would horrify even Tess of the d'Urbervilles.

And, like Hardy's heroine, these girls didn't always get a happy ending. Consider Karen Chalmers, Tammy and Misty's The Loneliest Girl in the World, who after many traumatic episodes finally discovers that she is the only survivor of a holocaust – and, knowing this, goes to her certain death in order to see her parents one last time. We'd waited weeks for that revelation, only to be given shrieking nightmares.

From this great Guardian article.

Staying with the Guardian, here's a great article on the demise of the paper version of the Dandy, from the wonderfully unashamed Geek Charlier Brooker. (This guy is a fantastic satirist of his age too btw)

Here's Charlie:

Of course rather than standing up for the artists and writers of the comic itself, they're simply bemoaning the death of something from their own childhoods, the narcissists. Insulted by progress, affronted by change, they prefer everything kept just the way it was when they last saw it.

Anyone mourning the death of the print edition of the Dandy, even for half a second, is a staggering egotist who earnestly believes him or herself to be a supreme deity whose every belch and fart should be bottled for posterity. Jail the scum. Jail them hard. Jail their heads off. Throw the jail at them. Jail.

Finally here's a nice peice from one of the current Dandy artists on the Dandy's place in modern culture.

(The Guardian is probably one of my favourite sources of news, EKDJ, do you ever check it out?)

Is there anything we can call you if Emerkeith Davyjack seems like too much effort to type?

Why did you pick the name anyway?

This reply was deleted.