Thursday 17 November 2016

Comical continuity

Continuity has never been a major issue in humour comics. Characters rarely age and can stay static throughout the entire run of a strip. I always aged my Brickman character in "real time", and Tom Thug grew up, and left school in the later issues of Oink! (only for that to be retconned and have him to become a schoolboy again in Buster), but usually, humour characters are frozen in time.

In recent times however, Nigel Auchterlounie and Nigel Parkinson had fun with that by showing that the Dennis the Menace of the past is the father of the current Dennis in the Beano. More recently, I thought I'd suggest a similar thing in a Smasher strip I did for The Dandy Annual 2017 (in the shops now). Yes, Smasher's "grandad" is The Smasher of the early 1960s (as far as I'm concerned anyway).  

A few years ago, in The Dandy Annual 2015, when Keyhole Kate travelled back to 1937, I also showed that the original Keyhole Kate of the 1930s/40s was the Great-Great-Grandmother of the current Kate. Of course, such things can be retconned by future writers in an instant, but it's all a bit of fun for readers past and present. 

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