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As The Harry Hill Dandy Strip Ends… The Truth Is Revealed

Published Thu, 15 Dec 2011 09:35:57 -0600

Nigel Parkinson, artist on the Harry Hill strip currently coming to an end in the British weekly comic The Dandy, has revealed what we all kind of knew anyway. That he was writing it as well.

He writes;

As I'd never written anything for DC Thomson, let alone Harry Hill before, I had initially hoped someone (a writer perhaps?) would write the scripts, but after writing the first episode myself, the general consensus was that obviously a writer wasn't required as the pictures and my word balloons seemed to work out just fine. So, partly as a 'selling point' and partly to obscure the true credits in case the strips were thought a bit second rate (not having been written by a writer!), I made up the fiction that Harry Hill wrote them and I just drew them, but, dear reader, as we are now at the end of the line, I can exclusively reveal that I wrote most of them as I went along- quite literally, drawing a bit, writing the word balloon- drawing a bit more- changing what I'd done in the word balloon- and so on, until after two or three days real effort, as if by magic, out came a finished two page set. It was really was 'as if by magic' because usually I found it very very difficult to come up with an idea and make it work, let alone pepper it with jokes and such, and many times I felt like giving up, spending hours and hours trying to get one line written right. And struggling to think of a new way to get 'FIIIGGHHTT!' or 'What are the chances of that happening' into the dialogue often seemed beyond my capabilities. Yet somehow I managed to churn out two (or four – or, on one memorable occasion, TWELVE-) pages a week. After investing so much time and energy into them, I was glad that a lot of people seemed to like them, and, although at least one odd little clique of protesters will be delighted to see the end of the strip, I know some readers will be saddened to hear it's all over.

The final Harry Hill Strip appears in this week's double sized Christmas special.