Dan and Out

Like this cartoon about the closure of The Dandy? Good because there’s a few of them knocking about!

I drew this up when the sad news broke that The Dandy was set to disappear from newsagents after a record breaking 75 years. So off it went to Private Eye totally unaware that they had in fact bought the same gag from top cartoonist Royston Robertson the previous day! (In my first draft I had the same placard wording as Royston and even used his hat to catch coins.) Unfortunately his version was shelved due to two other similar cartoons in the press just before Private Eye went to print. You can read Roystons blog post about it and see his version here. Seems Andrew Birch also submitted the same gag, I’d like to see that one. Wonder how many more they got?

On the subject of The Dandy closing as a print comic….
I must say I’ve never heard such absolute uninformed rubbish spoken in the news by 40 year old experts who haven’t clapped eyes on the comic since the 70’s.
” It’s not as good as it was“ ” It’s PC gone mad” “Children don’t need to read or laugh they have the interweb and  i-Wiis!”

Outdated? Relic from a bygone era? Maybe it was when I was a kid but since it’s 2010 revamp, The Dandy has been the most creative funniest comic on the newstands, perfectly pitched to the humour of today’s kids (I know, I’ve got two of ’em) .

The content really wasn’t the problem, exposure was. Lost in in a sea of TV tie in polybagged/landfill free gift/clip art filled ‘comics’ made it buried treasure. Another problem is the perception of value by adults who do the buying these days. I’ve actually seen parents take The Beano out of children’s hands “Put that one back, This one has a toy!”. The fact that the content is substandard, costs twice as much and the toy breaks in 5 minutes seems to have been wiped from the memory during the previous week.

I’ll stop there because I could go on for ages really I could. But if you are a parent why not pick them up a Dandy while you still can and see what they’ve been missing?