He must be Joe King!

If you buy today's Mail on Sunday with its free 32 page all-new Beano you won't find any strips by me in there unfortunately BUT you will find a series of little vignette head drawings that I did, running along the foot of several pages. It's the return of Joe King to The Beano, and recently I was commissioned to supply numerous head shots of the character to accompany the joke strips that now appear at the end of each story. 

They use six of those drawings in the free issue, and I presume you can expect to see the others over the coming weeks in the regular Beano. I've noticed that reader surveys often show they'd prefer more jokes in the comic so this is a good way of including them without taking up a page. Reminds me of the gags that would run across the foot of some pages in the early issues of Wham! Sure, some of those jokes aren't exactly new to us, but for The Beano's young readership they'll be as fresh as a daisy.

As an aside, it reminds me that I can still clearly remember the first joke I was told, 50 years ago at infant school. Yep, it was the old "Why did the chicken cross the road" gag. Told to me by classmate Dave Gadsby, in the playground. I was five years old. I thought it was hilarious. Like most of us, I soon took jokes for granted, especially when the same ones kept rolling around, but the memory of that first one still remains. That gag was ancient even by 1964, but I guess when you're that young, every joke is someones first!