Cow pie off the menu as The Dandy sadly bites the dust

When I was younger and used to devour comics and what were called at the time “Educational Magazines” there was one phrase on the front cover that would strike fear and despair into your heart: “The editor has Important News for you inside!”

The “Important News” was always that your favourite publication was either shutting down or merging with another comic. It happened to Treasure: I got the first issue in 1963 and I saw the last issue in 1971 when I was really far too old for it but I couldn’t let it go. I even bought the binders, and faithfully filled them.

I decided to start buying the Boy’s Own Paper in 1967, two weeks before the editor’s Important News. Pow merged with Wham in 1968 and I shed a little tear.

Now, in December of this year, my grandson Thomas will have to read the Important News: The Dandy, his favourite comic, is closing down.

Desperate Dan will no longer wreak havoc unshavenly. Bully Beef and Chips will stop shouting “YAROO” and Beryl the Peril will hang up her proto-feminist catapult. Well, they might stagger on for a while in The Beano or online but really it will be their final bow.

Thomas will be upset and I will be too. The first issue of The Dandy, then called The Dandy Comic, was published in 1937 
and at its height it sold and impressive two million copies 
a week.

Imagine that, in these days of falling print circulations: kids in short trousers and pinafore dresses counting out their pocket money and standing on their tiptoes to buy their Dandy from a kindly newsagent who looked a bit like Desperate Dan’s dad

Imagine these same kids running back to their houses and reading the comics over and over until bedtime when they carried on reading them under the blankets with flickering torches. Imagine the way that the characters formed a huge part of their cultural and artistic life in a way that seems impossible now, although followers of Peppa Pig may disagree.

Desperate Dan was always my favourite, with his huge stubbly jaw that could be seen from space.

He was originally a Wild West character, living in an unidentified frontier town with his Aunt Aggie and his Native American girlfriend Little Bear. He ate Cow Pie, a vast concoction with horns sticking out of the side which always looked really tasty to me, 
although recently somebody pointed out that Cow Pie has 
a very different meaning in the USA.

As well as Dan and Beryl, the Dandy has given us Korky the Cat, Bully Beef and Chips, and 
the great Black Bob The Border Collie, a kind of tartan version of Lassie, wonderfully parodied in Viz as Black Bag the Faithful Border Bin Liner.

Over the decades the Dandy has published other strips that are now forgotten: Addie and Hermy from the 1940’s, a satire on Hitler and Goering; Hungry Horace who made a comedy career out of eating, and his 1980’s replacement Tom Tum, and his alter ego Greedy Pigg.

It’s no use pretending, The Dandy these days is a pretty thin shadow of what it once was. Dan is now drawn in a cross between a kind of Manga style and an infant’s drawing that you might stick on a fridge; there are lots of fart jokes and a shakily un-PC strip called, appallingly, The Chav Olympics.

It also only sells a mere 8,000 copies a week and I often have to hunt for it on the shelves of the paper shop.

I’m probably gazing at the past through rose-tinted specs, but I recall that the Dandy was such a talismanic must-read behemoth in my childhood that me and 
a girl called June Bowley spent hours making our own version called The Dandee, which we drew on her kitchen table.

It featured Desperate Dave, Beryl the Daring Girl and a brave cat called Stuart.

Maybe that’s where my literary ambitions began, making versions of the adventures and comedy routines that filled my life.

The graveyard of British comics is pretty full these days, I’m sorry to say, all those bright 
and optimistic comedy titles having bitten the dust, no doubt going “UNHHH” as they did so: Beezer, Topper, Sparky, Cracker, Bimbo, Buzz, Hoot, Nutty, Eagle, Valiant, Tiger, Bunty, Mandy, Hornet, Nipper, Cor!, Scorcher, Cheeky, Whoopee!, Wow, Jackpot, Krazy, and Terrific... there are more, but I’m running out of commas and exclamation 
marks.

And now we can add The Dandy to that sad list. Important News, indeed.