Like most comics fans we were saddened to learn that after a 75 year run the final issue of The Dandy will be released tomorrow.  It was always a point of pride that the longest-running comics title in the world was a Scottish product, something not well-known beyond these shores.  We were big fans of The Dandy‘s relaunch a couple of years ago which turned it back  into an unabashaedly silly but brilliantly drawn comic after a few years as an “Xtreme” kids’ magazine.  Alas this wasn’t enough to save it, at least in print.  It’s clear The Dandy will live on as a web-based title and we can’t wait to see what DC Thomson do next.

We had a brush with The Dandy ourselves in the early days of the Studio.  Back in 2000 we were approached by DC Thomson managing editor David Donaldson  (who has since had great success with a series of books based on The Broons) and Dandy editor Morris Hegie (now writing Oor Wullie) as well as Alan Digby (then in charge of various titles, later editor of The Beano, Alan has since retired).  Through the nineties  The Dandy had come to be perceived as a poor cousin  to The Beano.  A relaunch was in the works and there was talk of going monthly rather than weekly with smaller dimensions but a bigger page count to make it an easier sell on the international market.

Their biggest problem was the comic’s cover star, Desperate Dan, a victim of political correctness and a pale shadow of his fomer glorious self as penned by Dudley D Watkins.  Brilliant things have been done with Dan since, especially by Jamie Smart, but at the time he was on a shoogly peg.  Donaldson and Heggie wanted to reinstate the title’s original main attraction,  Korky the Cat.  In order to do this they devised a post-modern take on the character where he was constantly at odds with a nosy neighbour who had pre-conceived notions on cats and even sabotaged Korky’s life on that basis.  The scripts read like a sitcom with Korky in the role of an upwardly mobile urbanite exasperated by a racist, or at least felinist, NIMBY.  It is interesting to note that one of the Korky stories featured comedian Harry Hill, a decade before he would become a regular fixture in The Dandy.

As well as these reimagined Korky strips the various artists at the Studio got to play with character’s from DC Thomson’s A-list (Desperate Dan, Bananaman, Gnasher) as well as those less familiar (“Send for Kelly”) and a few that appear to have been one-offs (Little Wyn, Caprio).  We also provided artwork for a Dairlea Mice campaign that ran across the comics for a couple of months and a 56 page adventure strip about an island lost in time.  All in all we worked for Thomson for about nine months, producing well over a hundred pages of comics in various formats, the majority of which were never published.

We visited DC Thomson’s Dundee headquarters and saw first hand that they had a habit of stock-piling artwork as a contingency.  For all we know the pages could yet be used in an emergency.  Feedback on the pages was very positive while they were being submitted to the editors but before long the scripts dried up.  Perhaps we were being tested?  In any case our run with Thomson gave as a boost in our earliest days for which we’ll always be grateful and there can’t be a cartoonist in the country who wouldn’t want to be paid to draw these characters, however briefly.

Presented here are some never-before-seen pages from those days.  Colour and lettering would have been added in Dundee before printing.  Needless to say, all the characters portrayed are the intellectual property of DC Thomson & Co. Ltd.

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