Today's edition of The Independent features a five page tribute to The Dandy on its 70th anniversary. The feature takes the form of a comic strip by Ken Harrison, kicking off the newspaper's Extra section with a full colour cover.
The strip, by "the writers behind Britain's most famous comics" tells the story of The Dandy and The Beano in a fast paced slapstick story including classic characters such as Desperate Dan, Lord Snooty, and Rodger the Dodger, right up to relative newcomers such as Cuddles & Dimples and Ollie Fliptrik. A few artists are mentioned by name along the way, such as Ken Reid, Dudley Watkins, Davy Law and Leo Baxendale. In an analogy to the comics' survival in modern times, the characters are shown fighting off "a computer games army" (somewhat ignoring the fact that BeanoMax and Dandy Xtreme feature computer game reviews and the like in order to appeal to the modern reader).
It's a bright and breezy strip and The Independent (who often champion graphic novels) are to be congratulated for giving so much space to traditional British comic fare.Thanks to philcom55 of the Comics UK Forum for bringing this to my attention.
(Incidentally, there's currently a glitch on Blogger which means that new images uploaded cannot be seen larger in another window. Instead, clicking on them either downloads them to your desktop or gives you an option to open them full size with other software. Apparently Blogger are working on fixing this.)
That whole Independent feature is lettered using my Comicraft computer font, I was amused to see.
ReplyDelete(Less amused that they'd used the upper case "I" everywhere instead of reserving it for the first person pronoun...)
Sorry for the delay in uploading your comment Dave. Some glitch on Blogger is not alerting members to some new comments.
ReplyDeleteYes it's irritating that Thomsons keep using your upper case "I" within words. They also use it (or rather misuse it) in the topline of Classics From The Comics.
I remember you mentioning this to a DCT sub-editor a few years ago, but wheels turn slowly at Thomsons so expect things to be put right around 2012. :)
Lew