Very silly season indeed!

Okay, two Daily Mail articles have caught my eye today - one is the sort of stuff I always get my knickers in a twist about, but first...

I thought silly season was meant to be over now, today's Mail has a classic piece of silly season crap in the article 'Desperately dull: The politically-correct Desperate Dan for the 21st century'.

Here's the main thrust of the article:

In fact he is nothing more than a politically-correct big softie, according to the daughter of the man who created the Dandy's best-loved character 70 years ago.

Oh, woe. Surely Desperate Dan can't be PC? What's happened to make him a softy? This:

Over the years the once-portly Dan has been slimmed down and his six-shooter replaced with a water pistol.

You wouldn't expect the paper that bangs on about glamourising guns [pun intended - shut up] in our culture to care too much about them being removed from kids' stories (unless that paper was the Mail and it had a cheap point to make by doing so), but what's this about him slimming down? Here's the picture from the Mail, for those of you who can't see the small type, the caption says 'The Dynamic Desperate Dan of old':


So what does he look like now? Here's the current picture of him from the Dandy site:


Ah. That would appear to be the exact same picture! The current appearance is indistinguishable to the Mail from the one it's moaning about Dan changing from. It's not even a different one by the same artist. It's the same picture!

Okay, maybe that's a mistake. What else makes Dan PC? This, apparently:

His favoured cow pie, with animal parts protruding through the crust, bit the dust during the BSE crisis.

Here's another picture from the Dandy site:

Yikes! That would appear to be the exact same picture as the one the Mail uses in the article to illustrate Dan chompin' on a cow pie! The exact same picture. Again. So when the Mail uses the caption 'Dan's favourite dish fell victim to the BSE scare', it's telling fibs. Again.

Now, you might think the Mail has a point when it mentions the guns and the softening of the character even if the paper does find the current version totally indistinguishable in appearance from the older one. So here's a quote from the Desperate Dan page on Wikipedia:

But, as of the "re-revamp" in August 2007, the strips are classic reprints on the back cover of Dandy Comix in The Dandy Xtreme. These are still in their original monochrome, not colour.

So, the original stories are there for the kids - or Mail journalists - if they don't like the new ones. Cripes! And, if I've read that correctly, the revamped version of Dan from 2004 doesn't even appear anymore! Crumbs!

Anyway, I've managed to find an early picture of Dan so we can compare the original fat Dan from 1937 with the slimmed down version:


Slimming down Desparate Dan from the original - it's Political Correctness Gone Mad!

That or 'made up rubbish'. You decide, readers!