Death of a comic book

And so it is that on its 75th birthday the Dandy comic, which saw the light of day in 1937, has now passed away as a tangible palpable paper publication and has migrated to the Internet to exist only in the ether, in cyberspace, for those who are still interested in its brand of humour.

Its sister publication, the Beano, born a year later in 1938, ironically on the eve of World War II, still hangs on for dear life, having recently been granted a reprieve, whilst the Topper and the Beezer, later arrivals, also issuing from the DC Thomson stable, in 1955 and 1956 respectively, long gave up the ghost and were consigned to the comic book graveyard in the sky in 1993. I doubt that it will be long before the Beano goes the way of the Dandy. Still, unlike their two former bedfellows, they will still be available online, for now, and it remains to be seen what their eventual fate will be.


For me personally, these four humorous comics (for, despite their name, not all comic books are humorous, witness many of the American super-hero publications and others), accompanied my childhood and played an important part in entertaining me. Every week I would traipse off to my local newsagent's to collect them, but, as they did not all come out on the same day and I was impatient to have them as soon as I could, I often did not wait for all of them to be saved for me by the newsagent and would have to make more than one weekly trip before I had them all. But I did not mind and even relished the trip to the newsagent's and the anticipation that built up inside me.

These were the comic books that injected laughter and mirth into my childhood years and that preceded in my life such DC Comics as Superman, Batman, Green Lantern and The Flash, to name a few, which engrossed my early adolescent years. I would spend many a moment chuckling to myself as I read the antics of such iconic characters as Dennis the Menace, Minnie the Minx, the Bash Street Kids, Roger the Dodger, and Lord Snooty. Some of the others worth a mention were Desperate Dan, Biffo the Bear, The Three Bears, Little Plum, Ball Boy, Ivy the Terrible, and Billy Whizz. No doubt there were others which do not come to mind at the moment.

By the time the Beezer and the Topper were in financial straits and had to be merged into one between 1990 and 1993, the year of their demise, I was very much grown up (!), and I don't now even recall hearing about the merger at the time. Given my 'advanced' years, I had long ceased to read any comics and, as it was still the pre-Internet era (indeed the pre-desktop pc era), I was busying myself in my spare time reading factual books, composing poetry and trying my hand at painting. The comics of my childhood were reaching the end of the line and I was no longer part of their world, and it seems the children who were buying them were dwindling rapidly, as they defected to other publications more in tune with the changing world. They had become too innocent for the 1990s generation of children who now needed more realistic comic books to feed and fire their imagination... I guess. 

I suppose these developments and demises were to be expected and had been on the cards for some time. Very few things last very long in our modern world of constant change and renewal, where tastes and fashions come and go as swiftly as they never did before in this society of the fleeting and the transient. Now we live on a diet of instant impressions and overnight successes, and the thirst for more and bigger stimuli to keep us from getting bored consumes our lives. And yet, I can't help thinking that the simple comics of my childhood left a more lasting impression and a deeper mark in my psyche than all the wealth of clever novelties, gimmicks and innovations ever will before I too check out of this life.  

The Dandy, the Beano, the Topper and the Beezer, became my constant companions as soon as I was able to read, and together with such other pastimes as marbles, picture cards, toy soldiers, yo-yos, train sets, and stamp-collecting (philately), they filled my out-of-school hours and provided me with the stimulus and fun that I needed without all the mad intensity of today's electronic games and the vagaries of computers that seem to complicate our life today rather than simplify it in spite of all the nonsense spouted by their purveyors. And all these pastimes and hobbies were all the more important as the monochrome television of the time was still very much in its infancy and did not provide the interest, variety and stimulation which it now does with its multiplicity of channels and the huge flat-panel screens that try to mimic the big cinema screen experience.

My childhood world was one consisting of hands-on experience and I interacted directly with the tangible environment around me, not with a cyber world that can only be experienced indirectly. Was this better? I think it was for me the child but I will not press the point. In any case, it is now an academic one in this world of electronic this and electronic that which promises everything but which delivers much less. What I can say for sure is that in the grey post-war world of my tender years, these four comic books introduced a good bit of colour and laughter and amusement which made all the difference, and for that at least I am forever grateful to them and saddened at their demise or banishment to the Internet.