Posted in: Comics, Current News | Tagged: dandy, Jamie Smart

When Jamie Smart Was Desperate Dan, Now Collected By The Dandy

When Bunny Vs Monkey's Jamie Smart was Desperate Dan, now collected en masse in The Dandy 2025 Summer Special...

Jamie Smart is by far the biggest-selling comic book creator in Britain, with his Bunny Vs. Monkey graphic novels, which spun out of the Phoenix Comics Weekly. But he wasn't an overnight success; he worked in the trenches for many years, not without controversy.

He was instrumental in designing the 2010 revamp of one of the longest-running comics in the world, The Dandy, which ran from 1937 to 2012. For the revamp, Smart drew Desperate Dan, Pre-Skool Prime Minister, Arena of Awesome, and My Dad's a Doofus, with reprints of My Own Genie and Space Raoul later being used. His work followed over into the sequel project, Digital Dandy.

But it was his work on the Desperate Dan strip in the Dandy that was considered most controversial. His style was at odds with the original Dudley D. Watkins's take on the world that inspired Frank Quitely. Instead of the quite considered curves and distant camera, it was all sharp, bouncy angles and in your face, and a very different-looking Desperate Dan indeed.

But even though the Dandy stopped printing, and the digital version also went away six months in, The Dandy title continues as a yearly Summer Special and an unbroken run of Dandy Annuals, up to and including the 2026 annual. But it's this year's Dandy Summer Special that's most of note. Because it collects a large amount of Jamie Smart's Desperate Dan strips, and names him on the cover, something very, very unusual for a DC Thomson comic, which has traditionally done its best to hide the creators. Even now, they are shoved away to the side. But Jamie Smart is the biggest thing in British comics and his Desperate Dan strip has just been sitting there, unused for fifteen years…

The Dandy Presents: Desperate Dan by Jamie Smart – Dandy Summer Special 2025 Paperback – 25 May 2025
by Jamie Smart
Desperate Dan appeared in the very first Dandy in 1937 and remained a fixture of the comic throughout its life, becoming its cover star and signature character in 1984. A resident of Cactusville, a strange mash-up of wild western town and a modern British city where herded buffalo could be seen side by side with red pillar boxes, Desperate Dan was the strongest, and often silliest, man in the west! In 2010, Jamie Smart was offered the chance to bring Dan and his appetite for cow pies into the 21st century, and this summer special collects some of his funniest, wackiest and silliest comics in a single volume for the first time. It's a true celebration of one of the most famous British comics

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