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.

The Loss of a Friend

Losing a dear friend you’ve known for many years is a sad and painful experience, and many of us know what it's like. It’s bad enough when you know what’s happened to them and the reason for their disappearance, but it’s worse when they suddenly drop out of your life and you’re left completely in the dark. Worse still if you try to get back in touch with them and, try as you might, your efforts come to nothing and you're none the wiser.

Such a situation is not unknown, it happens. But today, owing to the spread of the Internet and the making of online friends, it is something that can and does happen more than ever before, much more. We meet and get to know people online and some of these people we get to know intimately and we become used to their regular online presence. We may go a step further and speak to them in a live chat environment, an instant messaging program, see them on a webcam, talk to them on the phone, and even visit them in person, whether in our own country or abroad.

If we get to know them personally, the inexplicable loss of that friend is felt so much more acutely, even without having had personal contact, thanks to modern technology which enables us to communicate by voice and even to see each other, with the result that we can get very attached to that person, though we never have been in their physical company. Habit, friendship and companionship transcend the physical separation that distance creates between us, and should the person we have come to know and like and perhaps even love through the Internet suddenly disappear without trace we may feel the loss as acutely as if that person were a friend of ours in the more conventional way.

I know what it’s like to lose a friend in such circumstances. It was a person I had met online in the early years of the Internet and we began communicating through instant messaging programs. The conversations we had became a daily thing and we gradually became addicted to our regular chats, to the point that any absence, be it for only one day, became a cause for concern and had to be explained by the absentee on their return. We then supplemented this by phone calls to each other and eventually it progressed to personal visits. And, over time and inevitably I suppose, we became lovers and sweethearts.

This was all some time ago. The relationship eventually broke down, for reasons that I will not go into as they are not pertinent to this post, but nevertheless we remained friends and we kept in contact, mainly online but sometimes by phone. And then one day my once-friend and lover and now just friend, though a dear one, vanished! She stopped coming online. She wasn’t answering her e-mails or the phone. She had, to all intents and purposes, disappeared for good and left me not knowing what had happened to her. Though I had her home address, the question of visiting her was impracticable. She lived in another continent, thousands of miles away, and I could not embark on a trip that would take me half way round the world to visit a person who might not even be there to receive me.

And that is how things have remained to the present day. It has been over a year since I last had any contact with her and, after having tried to get hold of her by one means or another and failed, I fear the worst for her. I imagine that she may not even be with us anymore, that she may have sickened or had an accident and.... I dare not even say the word, as it saddens me greatly to think of her like that. She would be in her late forties now, so she’s still relatively young by today’s standards. I’ve racked my brain in an effort to imagine what may be preventing her from communicating with me and the answer that comes back is always a bleak one.

I’m still hoping that one day I will succeed in getting in touch with her or, failing that, at least in finding out about her, though I fully realise that the news may not be good, and this is my worst fear. But the anguish of not knowing is probably worse than knowing the truth, terrible as it might be. Either way it’s very sad, especially when I think back to when I first met her and how our relationship went on to develop into a close friendship and then bloomed into a romantic liaison which lasted several years. Those were our halcyon days, even though there was many a storm that tested us.

My life will not change if and when I find her or find out about her. We have gone our separate ways since we split up, though we kept in touch. But at the very least I need to know what’s happened to her. “While there’s life there’s hope”, they say, but as the years go by with no news of her, it all begins to look rather hopeless. But I’ve not given up all hope yet. I still feel there’s a chance I will at least find out about her and my ignorance of her circumstances, whatever they may be, will finally come to an end. It may be hoping against hope, but it’s the way it has to be for the moment. For the moment, I live in hope...


P.S. - Since posting the above, I have located the person in question and I now know the truth, though it might have been better if I had not known!