The Dandy - Dandy Comic Strips

Dandy Comic Strips

Over its almost 75-year run hundreds of different comic strips have appeared in The Dandy, many of them for a very long time. The longest-running strips are Desperate Dan and Korky the Cat, who both appeared in the first issue. Following mergers with Nutty and Hoot, the Dandy inherited a number of their strips, most notably Bananaman from Nutty and Cuddles from Hoot, who teamed up with a Dandy character to form a new strip entitled Cuddles and Dimples. Both have been quite long-running, having been in the Dandy since the 1980s and each having appeared on the front cover of both The Dandy and the comics from which they originated. After the closure of The Beezer and The Topper, The Dandy inherited some of its strips as well, including Beryl the Peril, Puss 'n' Boots (who had been in Sparky before being moved to The Topper) and Owen Goal (who appeared in Nutty under a different title).

The comic has had a number of different cover stars (comic strips appearing on the front cover), firstly Korky the Cat, who was on the cover from 1937–1984. Desperate Dan, long since the comic's most popular character, then took over the cover, a position he retained until 1999 when he was replaced as cover star by Cuddles and Dimples. However, they were not on the cover for very long and Desperate Dan had been restored to the cover by the end of 2000. The comic revealed that Cuddles and Dimples were thrown off the cover for "being too naughty", though in reality the comic's readers wanted Dan to return as the cover strip. In 2004, following a major revamp, Desperate Dan was replaced on the front cover by Jak, a character created for the cover, slightly based on an older strip with the same name, although other characters, including Dan, also made occasional cover appearances. The front cover also had a subtitle, for example, "Better than the Beano". During the Dandy Xtreme era the comic had no cover star, and covers were often given over to celebrities or current trends, but after the comic returned to its weekly, all-comic format in October 2010, the popular British comedian Harry Hill took over the cover spot.

There are frequent fictional crossovers between Dandy characters, as most of the characters lived in the fictional Dandytown, just as the characters in The Beano were portrayed as living in Beanotown. Many of the comic strips in The Beano are drawn by the same artists, and crossovers between the two comics occur occasionally. Quite often, one comic will make a tongue-in-cheek jibe at the other (e.g. a character meeting an elderly lady, and stating that she's "older than the jokes in The Beano"). In the strips, it is expressed that Dandytown and Beanotown are rivals, The Dandy did a drastic format change Dandytown had an embassy in Beanotown, which many of the town's citizens unsuccessfully attempted to overrun – the embassy was never referred to in The Beano. This rivalry inspired the spin-off computer game Beanotown Racing, in which various characters from both comics could be raced around points in Beanotown, including the embassy. The game was given a great deal of advance publicity in the comics, with story lines often revolving around how each of the characters acquired his or her vehicle.