Christopher Wickham
@cwickham
Quite a fast reader. cwickham.blogspot.com
In a display of questionable forward thinking, a series of articles on D. C. Thomson's more obscure comics concludes with the one that contains one of their most racist characters. cwickham.blogspot.com/2026/08/crac...
An unnecessarily close inspection of the maps used for a role-playing game from 1984. cwickham.blogspot.com/2026/08/song...
This post will not appear for a few weeks, but I am confident it meets the expectations set by its title.
Another mayfly of British humour comics is pinned and mounted to the wall. cwickham.blogspot.com/2026/07/buzz...
No gamebook author does 'trolling the player' quite like J. H. Brennan.
Childhood memory inexplicably stuck in my head #86: "Frogs were never good at spelling"
Annotated fourth and final map of the GrailQuest book "Gateway of Doom": All asterisked rooms are teleport traps, and entering them will immediately teleport you to the room indicated. (184, 176 and 167 all teleport you back to earlier levels.)
An interactive fiction puzzle which gives the player the option of needlessly slaughtering seven entirely innocent people. cwickham.blogspot.com/2026/07/coac...
Similar deal with the penultimate issue the week after, which reuses the cover from the 1987 annual...
L: Front cover of the Dandy Book 1967. R: The antipenultimate issue of the Dandy from December 2012, reusing the same artwork (down to lack of time to produce an original image, perhaps?)
"Football Picture Story Monthly" *feels* like a fictional magazine used in a joke in Red Dwarf, somehow
"Okay, Barrie, we're not certain which page we're putting the competition on yet, so just leave that bit blank and we'll add it in later... don't worry, it'll look totally seamless."
A genuine submission to the Dandy's letters page from November 1988.
The Dandy cunningly gets around restrictions on product placement.
Also: Just noticed how baffling the dialogue changes are between the 1973 and 1999 versions of this strip...
A history of a comic strip published by D. C. Thomson, about a pair of postman-hunting hounds. But perhaps not the one you were expecting. cwickham.blogspot.com/2026/06/hot-...
A look at an imaginatively titled comic strip about a haunted wood. cwickham.blogspot.com/2026/06/knoc...
Did you know that when writing about comics, I write the entire post and mark out the places where I'm going to put examples before scanning them in? No? Now you do.
I'm not saying "The Haunted Wood" was quite a formulaic comic strip, but... I can't think of a way to finish this sentence.
Something I happened to notice just now: In very early editions of Ali's Baba Ali has a 'G' on his chest, presumably meant to stand for 'guardian', although this seems to get dropped quickly.