Whither The Dandy?…. And Does it Have To?

Since the announcement, in its 75th year, of the imminent Yuletide cancellation of the venerable Dandy weekly, Britain’s longest-running comic, there have been many outcries in the media – inevitably by people who haven’t read it in the last 20-40 years – of “What are we coming to”, “A sad reflection on today’s world”, and, most often “Can it be saved?”

Well, of course it can be saved. If anybody was seriously interested. Hell, give me the budget and I could turn that puppy around in six months!

But the pertinent question nobody’s asking – or at least not often enough – is not “Can the Dandy be saved?”, but “Does the Dandy deserve to be saved?”

And in its current form, the answer is a resounding “no”.

Because it has become desperately lowest-common-denominator formula garbage, without imagination or genuine humour. You know how civilians frequently assume that all comics are crude and moronic?  The Dandy, sadly, has become the epitome of that popular misconception. And while I don’t claim to be the world’s biggest fan of rugrats, I know they don’t like being patronised or talked down to.

In my review of the Dandy relaunch, issue 3508, in 2010, I was cautiously optimistic; there were several series there with genuine verve and energy,  even if I did think it was overly keen on lame celebrity tie-ins, not only with the Harry Hill lead, but also the later Little Celebs series. (Heads-up? Just sticking the word “Little” in front of a celebrity’s name does not automatically bring the funny. Didn’t work for the Coronation Street Kids in School Fun back in the 80s, doesn’t work now.)

However, for the most part, that promise fell away pretty rapidly. In a bewildering switchback ride, only Desperate Dan, Bananaman and the repulsive Bogies remained constant ; others came and went, often with as little as two or three weeks’ run, with no chance to catch an audience and an impression of flinging anything at the “wall” of the readership in the hope that something would stick.

Even the new hits were inconsistently presented. One of the early front-runners, Jamie Smart’s Pre-Skool Prime Minister, started stuttering and appearing irregularly – admittedly replaced with (and occasionally running alongside) other Jamie Smart strips such as My Own Genie or Arena of Awesome, but that’s missing the point. Younger readers get attached to characters or series, not, at first, to creators, so the disappointment factor that there was no Pre-Skool Prime Minister  in a given issue would not be offset by the presence of another, different Jamie Smart strip. (’Specially not if it was the plodding Space Raoul… but I digress…)

Jamie Smart’s Pre-Skool Prime Minister, one of the Dandy’s saving graces – when it actually shows up!

The weekly became a total crapshoot, readers not knowing what they were going to get any given week, with the exception of the three lynchpins, and that degree of inconsistency eroded “brand loyalty”. Yes, failing strips should be phased out, and new ones encouraged – but not on so rapid a rotation that the customers can’t form attachments!

Plus, the creators seemed to run out of steam very early on in the run; even series which began with some invention and wit rapidly fell back on the snot, pee, puke and fart trifecta (quadrifecta?) which had characterised the previous Dandy Xtreme iteration, and which the reboot had made such a strenuous effort, initially, to break away from.

With issue 3596, the first released after the formal confirmation of the comic’s cancellation, even the minimal effort being put into the comic seems to have been abandoned. In the 36 pages, only eight of the regular features appear, sometimes in as many as three or four separate episodes, a presentation that screams “We’re doomed! Get all the already-paid-for shit out of the inventory cupboard!”

The special barrel-scraping edition of the Dandy…

The remaining pages are filled with four-to-a-page “newspaper” style short strips, limp and crude puzzle/joke pages, and self-promotion material – oh, and two pages of actual ads.

Jamie Smart’s My Dad’s A Doofus! offers a couple of genuine chuckles, and Andy Fanton’s newest, Rocky Roller, Pest Controller  shows promise, but we have double Bogies – yum – and four instalments of the leaden and morose Grrls, a Powerpuff Girls for the glue-sniffing set (though that makes it sound far more entertaining than it is). Mainstay Lew Stringer is AWOL and much missed this time round. Even for people who’ve become used to the Dandy’s low standards of late, this is a shoddy offering, demonstrating contempt for its audience.

So if the Dandy was to be saved, how would one go about it?

Keep Jamie Smart; keep Lew Stringer; keep Wilbur Dawbarn’s Mr. Meecher, The Uncool Teacher (though FOR THE LOVE OF CTHULHU, change the font size and style so it’s actually legible! ).

Throw out pretty much everything else, and solicit contributions from Woodrow Phoenix; Donald Rooum; Lee Kennedy; Craig Conlan; Sina Shamsavari; Ed Hillyer; Bob Lynch; Ian Carney; Andi Watson; Paul Grist; people with a proven record of turning out short, self-contained humour strips, from ’zines, from indie comics, from alternative and political comics, people who evidence intelligence as well as wit!

Go to Viz – recruit Simon Thorp, John Fardell, and Simon Ecob on a faux-adventure parody strip in his Famous Five/Black Bob style. Yes, I know there’s bad blood between Viz and DC Thomson over the whole Wanker Watson deal, but face it – Viz, despite its gleeful crudeness, “does” the Beano and Dandy better than the originals are doing these days!

Or, in this day and age, who’s to say the contributors have to be British based? Rope in Dan Parent; Roberta Gregory; Evan Dorkin; Trina Robbins; Howard Cruse; Anne Timmons; Tania Del Rio; Amanda Conner; Gisele Lagace! Funny is funny, not all the strips have to be set in the UK, and any linguistic glitches could in any case be sorted out by a stern editorial hand.

I have no idea if all or any of those people would be interested; not knowing what DC Thomson pays, I doubt that some of them could be afforded. But reaching out to them, or to similar talents, would inject a much-needed infusion of new hearts and minds into a tired workhorse.

Tone down the crude; expect and require contributors to come up with a punchline that doesn’t involve bodily emissions or secretions; try for some cross-gender appeal; have strips that might attract female readers, rather than insulting and repulsing them.

And most of all, schedule “blocks” of content, so that the popularity of strips – and the consistent performance of creators – can be correctly assessed. Order up twelve of a given series, run the twelve, stagger the launch of new series so that something is new most issues, but not almost everything all at once! Give strips a fair chance to build a following, re-up the hits for further twelve-blocks after a rest, and let readers feel secure that their favourites are, apart from scheduled “breaks”, going to be there every week, rather than the current “lucky-dip” of mucoid flatulence that characterises the present setup.

Needless to say, all this is rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic; the decision has been made, and DC Thomson is rubbing its hands in anticipation of the digital version, having achieved – much as they did with the “Dennis Gets A Makeover” or “Desperate Dan retires” scares of previous decades – a maximum of publicity with a minimum of effort.

By Christmas, the print Dandy will be a thing of the past, and its 75-year history consigned to the nostalgia market. And it all ends, not with a bang, but with a final, long-drawn-out fart.