#desperate dan

Along with Minnie the Minx, Gnasher and Oor Wullie he made short work of the Caped Crusader. Superman could have helped but he's too busy paling around with his new friend Desperate Dan.

So, after drawing the characters from the front of a COR! comic I saw on the internet, I started to research British comics. It seems to me, from the outside looking in, that humor comics are the more popular genre there which I think is kind of cool. I've always liked humor comics and the British have created some funny characters over the years. I still haven't read a lot of these British comics but I have enjoyed looking at the various characters. Pictured here are a few of them I've drawn in my sketchbook. Please forgive me if I get a name wrong as I'm still learning. The big drawing is Frankie Stein from a comic called Monster Fun. If you've been following my Tumblr then you know I love to draw the Frankenstein monster and this was no exception. The guy in the cowboy hat is Desperate Dan who is a Popeye type character. The cat below him is Korky the Kat. The superhero type next to Korky is Bananaman, a long running spoof of the caped crusader genre. Above Bananaman is Buster who was the namesake of the classic British comic Buster. From what I read he's supposed to be the son of Andy Capp the great British comic strip character. I also read that the creator of Andy Capp, Reg Smyth, didn't approve of the character beforehand. Andy Capp never appeared in a Buster comic but a facsimile of his wife Flo did. Speaking of Andy Capp that's him in the flat cap and black suit. Andy was one of my favorite comic strip characters when I was growing up which I know is odd for an American to say. He appeared in our local newspaper and we bought the small paperback reprints of the strip that were common back then. They had them for all of the great comic strips, Mad magazine, and others. I liked the character so much that I ripped him off to make my own character that I called Joe who was a former boxer who owned a bar. It was fairly odd territory for ten year old to be exploring. The bald Joe (hair was hard to draw!) made it into a few strips drawn on strips of paper before I lost interest. I never lost interest in Andy Capp though and he's still a favorite. BTW I'm pretty sure that I thought he was Irish back then. It also took me far longer than it should have for me to realize that his name was a play on "handicap" for his proclivity for betting on the horses. The Pirate next to Mr. Capp is Captain Pugwash of which I know very little other than he was around for a long time. Above the good Captain is Beryl the Peril, a female version of Dennis the Menace (the British version). I don't know who the mutant baby is above Beryl but he was on the cover of Wizzer and Chips from November 7, 1987. The guy above that is Cheeky, the mascot and title character for Cheeky comics. The final drawing, the kid with the big head and wild hair is perhaps the most famous of all British humor comic characters, Dennis the Menace (British version), the star of one of the longest running comics of all time Beano. Dennis first appeared in 1951, the same year as the American Dennis by Hank Ketcham so he's not a rip-off but more of a coincidence that resulted in simultaneous creation. Anyway, that's what I have for now. I hope you have enjoyed my adventures in drawing British comic book characters. This concludes my presentation.....

Post-apocalypse Dundee

June 1983 ad for The Dandy Comic Library No. 5. DC Thomson.

Desperate Dan was the original gigachad