Dandy 😃

The Dandy was a British children’s comic magazine published by the Dundee based publisher DC Thomson. The first issue was printed in December 1937, making it the world’s third-longest running comic, after Il Giornalino (cover dated 1 October 1924) and Detective Comics (cover dated March 1937). From August 2007 until October 2010, it was rebranded as Dandy Xtreme.

One of the best selling comics in the UK, along with The Beano, The Dandy reached sales of two million a week in the 1950s. The final printed edition was issued on 4 December 2012, the comic’s 75th anniversary, after sales slumped to 8,000 a week. On the same day, The Dandy relaunched as an online comic, The Digital Dandy, appearing on the Dandy website and in the Dandy App. The digital relaunch was not successful and the comic ended just six months later.

Dandy comic strips

There were 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 would 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 was expressed that Dandytown and Beanotown are rivals, The Dandy did a drastic format change when 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 storylines often revolving around how each of the characters acquired his or her vehicle.

Extract from The Dandy entry on Wikipedia