When was the first dandy comic

Over the years, the Dandy has taken in characters from other defunct titles, including Beryl the Peril, a female counterpart to stablemate the Beano's Dennis the Menace, Bananaman and Cuddles and Dimples. But Desperate Dan, who can lift a cow with one arm, is probably the cartoon strip most closely associated with the title.

There was a national outcry when Dan, immortalised as an 8ft bronze statue in DC Thomson's home town of Dundee, was briefly "retired" in a storyline involving the Spice Girls in He was also forced to give up his favourite food, cow pie, during the BSE outbreak in In the revamp a raft of celebrity-based comic strips were introduced, featuring celebrities such as Harry Hill, Cheryl Cole, Simon Cowell, Jamie Oliver and Jeremy Clarkson, in a bid to target new readers.

December Dundee-based publishing group DC Thompson launched the Dandy as a weekly comic aimed at boys and girls. September Desperate Dan became a wartime hero in Britain, sinking German U-boats and fighting enemy plans with a peashooter. Wartime paper shortages force the Dandy to switch to fortnightly publication.

April The Dandy became the world's biggest-selling comic with a circulation of 2 million. We're actively filling the gaps in our holdings of British comics and annuals.

They tell us so much about the social mores of the time. However, significant gaps of 'The Dandy' in the national collections remain, particularly from — when the first 'Dandy' was published — up until the s. The first edition of 'The Dandy Comic' was published on 4 December It was edited by then year-old Albert Barnes, who remained as editor until he retired 45 years later in He had a large chin, which led many to speculate that his was the inspiration for Desperate Dan's jawline.

Then in Desperate Dan sailed off with the Spice Girls after striking oil and was temporarily absent from the pages of The Dandy. There was such an outcry, including a Bring Dan Back campaign, threats of boycott, and protests from as far away as Australia, Saudi Arabia and the United States, that our hero was swiftly restored.

The growth of The Dandy was slowed by the war, when it shrunk in size and was only published every other week alternating with The Beano. The end of the war ushered in a golden age for British comics. The Dandy reached its highest ever circulation in , when sales averaged an incredible two million copies a week.

The next decade saw gradual changes to the comic, with the disappearance of all-text stories. The most popular of these were converted to picture strips, including Black Bob, the champion sheepdog whose adventures with his master Andrew Glenn had started in the story was inspired by the success of the film Lassie Come Home. In the Sixties and Seventies The Beano and The Dandy became cool, read by university students and enthusiastically endorsed by alternative comedians; Eric Clapton was pictured reading The Beano on an album cover.

Changes in social attitudes and behaviour meant though that the violence in the comics had to be toned down, with the disappearance of canings and parental spankings. In more recent years The Dandy has had to respond to dramatic changes in the childhood environment. The addition of features on video games, films and television shows culminated in with a re-branding of the comic as Dandy Xtreme, published fortnightly.

The first edition had Bart Simpson on the cover, much to the horror of traditionalists. DC Thomson were fighting to maintain their position in a very different marketplace, but in they accepted that the experiment had failed, reverting to a weekly comic simply called The Dandy. Today the comic looks very different from 75 years ago, but Desperate Dan is still hanging in there, as are other long-running strips including Bananaman, Beryl the Peril and Bully Beef and Chips.