Buster was still going in the late '70s. I started getting it when Monster Fun, which I'd liked, merged with Buster, with a few of the more popular Monster Fun strips being put in the back of the comic.

I was surprised to find Buster didn't fold until 2000, just short of its 40th birthday.

I buy both Beano and Dandy every week. I also have a copy of the book The History of the Beano, and plan to get it's recently released Dandy counterpart, The Art and History of the Dandy. Comics UK is a good website. If you need to know something, asking on the forum there usually yields the answers.

You're right about shelf height, Tesco keep putting them out of reach of kids!

I definitely agree that Classics from the Comics shouldn't have been axed. By the way, Max isn't The Beano, it's a monthly spin-off. The weekly Beano still exists.


It'll still be printed until December. I have no idea what they have planned for dandy.com, which is currently counting down the days until the anniversary.

Pacific, perhaps Buster wasn't available on the south coast area? I only ever found an annual or two..that's how I remember Buster. How about TV Comic? : ) I liked that, I got it on a Saturday, it had an episode of 'UFO' in it. .from the tv show with 'Ed Straker' and the moon girls with the purple hair. My brother had a little model of Eds gull wing Mercedes.

Beano , Dandy, Topper , Beezer, W and Chips, TV Comic, all bought for me by my Mum. I left school in '76 and never got them again but I loved them.

Lots of kids read comics. Seriously, its a small minority of kids who spend their entire time playing video games. It cuts into the 'watching telly' part of the day, not the 'playing with toys and reading comics and eating sweets'. Sure, arguably less kids read for pleasure, but a lot of videogames require kids to read in order to know what to do, haha.

I think part of the Dandy's closure is due to price hikes.

I'm personally a huge X-men fan, but I stopped buying comics when they went up from 2.50 to £3 a one. Now I can just get collections from the library or Amazon for much, MUCH cheaper.

Blaming it on videogames is a poor excuse.

I think another factor might be lack of oppurtunity for kids to buy them. Its very well marketing to kids, but kids hardly ever run to the shops by themselves to buy sweets nowadays compared to years ago. Young kids anyway. So its really mum and dad that are buying the comics for them a lot of the time.

Anyway, what parent in today's PC society would encourage their kid to run to the shops by themself, risking paedo abduction, to buy some E-number-filled fattening sweets and a comic featuring naughty children, when they could be at home playing with virtual pet in sight of mum and dad.

Lots of factors to consider. Still sad from a nostalgic point of view though, and the market definitely has shrunk. I think also the rise of superhero Hollywood blockbusters and the associated merch has given the upper hand to action-oriented comics over comedy ones.

I've just googled this and check out the final ever page where they reveal the fates of all the characters and Buster finally reveals why he never removed his hat:

http://comicsuk.co.uk/Forum/download...1391&mode=view

Really sad, but a sign of the times

OMG Buster...I used to buy that the most, but haven't thought much about it till now. I loved that haha.

I used to occassionally buy the dandy and beano along with buster. I didn't love it as much as the other 2 but I was fond of it. I just remember thinking cow pie with the horns sticking out was the funniest thing.

I wonder if the Dandy would have been more popular today if it had kept to similar storylines of the 70s and 80s?

Maybe all this political-correctness nonsense led to it's demise? - I also wonder if the Beano will have the same fate?

Both comics are unrecognisable from their wacky and wonderful days of about 30 years ago.

I remember getting The Beano and Dandy annuals in my pillowcase at Christmas as a kid.

You must have had an uncomfortable sleep

What political correctness nonsense? Are you suggesting Dandy would have remained current if stories still ended with naughty kids being hit as punishment?

The times, they are, a-changing.

The Beano is not that unrecognisable. Did you know that the Bash Street Kids are still drawn by the same artist who was drawing them 30 years ago? In fact, David Sutherland has been drawing them for 50 years!

And don't worry, Beano sells around 38,000 copies a week. It's safe for a while yet.

Would it really give the kids of today nightmares if they saw stories like that?


Incidentally, I found that out a few days ago; thanks for jogging the memory

I thought it was Leo Baxendale btw (not Mr Sutherland).


Good to hear but I still prefer the Beano of the 70s and 80s.

No, but they might find it a bit weird and wrong. While kids may take all sorts of strange comic characters in their stride, the concept of adults openly hitting kids and being "in the right" is at odds with virtually all modern culture.

Who gave Softy Walter a log in?

Leo drew it from 1954 to 1962, when he defected to a rival publisher. David's drawn it most weeks ever since. Leo is still alive, but doesn't do comics any more.

If only you wrote for the Dandy, they might still be in business.

All those comics had a sort of cheerfully exaggerated,
"Tom and Jerry" quality about their violence.

Having said that, the idea of parents/teachers hitting children with wooden canes or shoes (which I remember happening in Dandy, Beano and Topper when I read 'em in the early 80s) does make me somewhat uncomfortable.

These days it would be better to get Danny on a electric book, Still like to buy the original comic collection someday

Explains why I'd been thinking that the "Dandy Xtreme" redesign was a spin-off rather than replacement for the original Dandy format- I was getting it confused with the "Beano Max".

I never saw the Dandy Xtreme, but my brother apparently did and said it was basically the Dandy in name only. Have to admit that the name struck me as very "Poochie-ish".


Could be. I remember The Beano being *10p* when I started getting it in 1983. (Here's confirmation that my memory wasn't deceiving me!). General inflation has increased around 3 times since the early 80s, but that's still about 30p in today's money. The Dandy was generally around the same price.

The *actual* current price of The Dandy in 2010 was apparently £1.50- and they'd reduced that from £2.50 when they ditched the "Dandy Xtreme" format!

(I vaguely remember someone saying the high price of the Dandy Xtreme was due to the "free" gifts it regularly included?)

I suspect that kids have more disposable income (in real terms) than they did then, and they're printed on higher-quality paper with more colour than they had back then. Still a big increase.

Another bit of my childhood fades , very sad

I love the Beano and the Dandy. They were part of my childhood. They, along with the works of Charles M.Schulz and Richard Scarry, taught me to love reading, to love books, to love illustrations.

What I hate is what they've become.

The Dandy was doomed from the October 2010 revamp. Readers deserted in droves and the people involved with the comic couldn't see why. It was because the new look they'd given the Dandy was terrible. Much of it looked as if it had been hastily drawn by twelve-year-olds during a boring history lesson. The level of humour had been dumbed down to fart / burp / snot / bogeys / poo 'jokes' - fine for toddlers but not much fun for older readers. It was as if someone thought the Dandy didn't look modern or 'hip' enough any more and in making such a sweeping change threw the baby out with the bathwater.

Progress, for its own sake, is bogus. Different is not necessarily good. A lot of things that were praised as being "different" at the time have not aged well; the new-look Dandy seemed out of date the moment it rolled off the presses.

I tried to point out the obvious shortcomings, but all I got from the contributors was "the old formula wasn't working" (maybe not, but it had a lot more than eight thousand readers) and accusations that I was frightened of change. One of them even intimated knowledge that I was a "bitter failed cartoonist, crying salty tears into your own p*ss poor efforts", regardless of the fact that the Dandy was losing readers faster than the Royal Bodyguard lost viewers. In fact, the readers themselves were criticised for not "cheering on a bold move". Well, when someone makes a bold move, I'll cheer it on, believe me. I know what a bold move is, and making the Dandy look like a webcomic doesn't constitute one in my books!

They just didn't know their cause and effect. Poor comic = poor sales.