4 December 2008

This day in history:
When D.C. Thomson's, The Dandy Comic, was released on the 4th December 1937, it broke the mould on the way comics were to appear forever more. Prior to The Dandy Comic, childrens comics were broadsheet in size and not very colourful. The most notible difference between the Dandy and other comics of the day was it's use of speech balloons instead of captions under the frame. This was seen as crude to tradionalist, but wonderful to children. Although The Dandy Comic is renowned for adopting this new way of telling a story, it was still very tentative in the early days. In fact, just 6 of the 28 pages of the first issues were exclusively using this radical new approach. But it was a start and as the years passed, more and more stories were using the speech balloons. read more