It's fun to wander through the alphabet with you

 I hope you've all been reading "Ludicrously Niche" since I linked to it a while ago. And especially the recent posts where he talks about Hoot and then about exactly when Cuddles and Dimples mysteriously transitioned from next-door neighbours to twin brothers. It's a fascinating subject.

Now, back in the days of old, I was a Beano reader. By 1985 I was much more interested in the Transformers comic, but I still continued to get the Beano every week. And I only took a passing interest in the Dandy - there wasn't really a rivalry between Beano readers and Dandy readers beyond a few half-hearted jokes in the comics now and then, but I still felt it was right to be either one or the other, and so always pitched my camp firmly on the side of the Beano. When we got into the 1990s and the rivalry between Sega and Nintendo, that was a whole different story, which is only natural - most people would only have one of the latest generation of video game consoles unless they were annoyingly wealthy, while even an average bit of pocket money could stretch to more than one comic a week if you wanted to enjoy both the DC Thomson headline titles!

All of which is to explain that even now, when I find old Comic Libraries on sale in charity shops, I'm much more likely to pick up the Beano ones than the Dandy ones. But nonetheless, one of the few Dandy Comic Libraries in my collection is very relevant to this discussion!

This is Comic Library No. 153, which must have come out in 1989. By this point, Cuddles and Dimples had been merged into one strip for around three years, and they had been twin brothers with one set of parents (the ones who originally belonged to Dimples) for two years or so. So this Comic Library, clearly written and drawn as a solo story for Cuddles, must date back to his days in the Nutty, many years earlier, and been intended as a guest appearance in the Dandy or Beano collection!

The first page tries to handwave the absence of Dimples away...

... but since the story spans two days, in which Cuddles goes to bed twice without any trace of an ailing Dimples, new Dandy readers who only knew them as brothers (sharing a bedroom) must have found this a little confusing. And that's not the only confusion for people who only knew them in the 'brothers' era!

Those are, of course, Cuddles' parents. Nothing like the ones who were now taking care of both terrible toddlers in the weekly Dandy! This might have been the last appearance of those two, unless there was an equally outdated story in the Dandy Book 1990 or later. Which there might well have been - Comic Libraries always tended to lag a way behind recent developments in the weekly comics, but the annuals with their ludicrously long lead times were always trapped even further in the past!

But I shared these pages because the last of the four really intrigues me. Cuddles' bedroom has been reoriented so the door's on the other side! And it's drawn with much less extraneous detail than the previous three pages, too - was it added in later, once the artist had tallied up the page count and made the story fit the right length? The hand-written "9" at the top of the page suggests the pages weren't all drawn in order, and the sequence of sight gags in pages 8-10 coming to an end before page 11 seems a bit weird. It's brilliant work, though, isn't it!

And here's another sequence that makes me think about last-minute revisions:

"Another smack?" says Cuddles, although the closest he's come to being smacked so far is Mum repeatedly dropping him on his bum over the last few pages. Corporal punishment was phased out of the Beano and Dandy over the eighties, and although I've never studied it in detail, I've always had the idea that our heroes were more likely to still get a whacking over the course of a Comic Library than in the weekly comics, for a lengthy period. Maybe Cuddles did originally get a smack or two in this comic when it was first written, and something was changed before it saw print!

Or maybe I'm just thinking about this silly little comic a tiny bit too deeply? No, couldn't be. Let's just have one more critical analysis of the final scene...

I find it hard to believe someone as athletic as Cuddles couldn't get out of that cot without needing to saw his way free. Indeed, unless Dad tucked him in with a sharp bladed tool, Cuddles probably had to climb out of the cot to get the saw, climb back in and then escape!

Really, this is a hilarious story all round! Maybe I SHOULD buy more Dandy comics!