D C Thomson Cartoonists: Dudley D. Watkins Special

    DUDLEY D. WATKINS:  [1904-1969] 

Clearly, it is unthinkable to leave out such a giant in British Comics Publishing as the true phenomenon that was Dudley Dexter Watkins: his material over more than four decades was, and is, literally familiar to tens of Millions in his own time and ours, through the massive comics sales achieved within his own working career: he and the top artists back  then enjoyed  levels of readership we will never likely see again; the world has moved on from those times, in many ways too multiple to outline here, but comics sales today are indeed pitiful in comparison, if better documented via the web........... in the eyes and minds of many, Watkins  was the best---[in my view, certainly one of the very best] and most famous comics creator[s] Britain ever produced.

One established BEANO writer I conversed with---and who well  remembered him-----stated that Watkins was the only  comics artist of his time who was truly famous, through the simple expedient explanation that he was the only one at DCT then who was allowed to sign their work in full; but surely there is much more to his elevated status than just that: my own view is that the powerful spirit evident in his work connected with the readers in a way that very few indeed have since  managed, or even approached from a distance----David Law is the only other artist who possessed such spirited work, although his style was much less accomplished than the 'figuritive' work put out by Watkins.

Also, Watkins and Law were the two UK comics artists who were sorely missed, almost yearning-like, leaving a gaping hole in the BEANO especially, that was never fully filled by any of the undoubted talents who followed them; for example, BIFFO the BEAR was ably undertaken just two weeks after the final Watkins' bear-strip [there was a bizarre composite-version of this strip by an unknown artist , the week inbetween] by the highly accomplished David Sutherland, easily one of the very best comics artist in Britain,  highly- skilled at ghosting  in particular,  especially in those days. Sutherlands' tenure on the bruin is slick, highly professional, and more noticably polished than the Watkins original...but something is surely missing in the mix: for all the meticulous compositing and polished inking, the sheer spirit of Watkins himself is glaringly  absent in all of the strips of his characters  not produced by him, and looking at vintage early Watkins versions of this character today brings a real sense of recognition and pleasure in discovering the 'Real Mc Coy'.

His successors' versions of his characters pulled off some really neat work, but I am damned if I can recall much of it.


I only shared the same world as Dudley Watkins for a few short years as he did : in the 60s,  and all I could see  then of his legacy was his fairly recent material-----unlike today, there was no looking up vintage comics artwork on a screen with a couple of mouse-clicks. In fact, for well over a decade, other than a few old Oor Wullie/Broons annuals, I had absolutely no DDW imagery on hand at all, most of his characters like Mickey the Monkey and even Desperate Dan existed only in my memory-banks. This lack of revisiting the Masters' Works was rectified much later in  1984,  when I  first  visited the hallowed halls of D C Thomson in Dundee. One of the many opportunities I grasped was the ability to scour through yellowing, War-era BEANO literature, in leather-bound volumes, high up on the shelves------this was the very first time I had encountered very early Dudley Watkins artwork; and although recognizable, it was certainly a lot cruder-executed than the mid-late 60s output so burned into my memory.

It was still good stuff, though: soaring Wartime Propaganda stuff like Lord Snooty and his pals, comandeering a plane, and going over to Germany to bomb 'Hitlers' Palace'. However it is clear that it took a few years for Watkins to really get into his stride, and is a measure of DCT'S willingness to invest in their artists' long-term potential that they allowed him plenty of time to develop and hone his skills. It is true that even towards the end, the occassional Watkins page sometimes looks a bit rushed and sometimes even odd, with bizarre proportions even on some of the characters he had drawn for decades---and even the odd 'wrong perspective' can turn up in a few of his frames: but I am not complaining, due to the sheer weight of quality input he managed to attain throughout his long career. However you can tell when Watkins really took his time on a page, and these ones especially easily rank amongst the finest put out by any British comics artist-----ever.


If Watkins had just managed to give us OOR WULLIE and THE BROONS [a delicious irony, that one: the Nottingham-born artist turning out this most Scottish of phenomena, drawing these in his Broughty Ferry home!] ---this alone would have been more than enough to cement his reputation as comics genius-legend: but he also produced regular weekly covers for BEANO/ TOPPER /BEEZER , as well as producing Desperate Dan for DANDY and LORD SNOOTY for BEANO:  and at one point earlier on, he had a very busy time of it indeed putting out endless adventuire-and-fantasy-fare, stuff that was chockablock with highly-accomplished detail, like JIMMY AND HIS MAGIC PATCH,  and DANNY LONGLEGS: even mostly-forgotten output, like  Dandys' Brave Young Black Hoof, was an artistic tour-de-force in it's Bambi-like depiction of nature and rampant stallions.


Watkins' own personal favorite of his many characters was of course DESPERATE DAN, and looking through some of the very last editions he done just recently, I can see why: the scripts are a glorious ramshackle of absurdist, random events that somewhow manage to gel into a wonderfully chaotic---but still very readable------chain of imaginitive, anarchic events, grounded in a sense of child-like wonder: witness the good-natured, but still opportunist Dan lick the fudge from the bottom of Aunt Aggies' cooking pot---just the sort of thing kids of that age could relate to.





Later on, Watkins used an assistant: although really, all this meant was that others were filling in his black inks [hardly the most artistic of comic-strip jobs] so he could increase his output a bit. In July 1969, he suddenly died at his drawing desk, working on BIFFO THE BEAR, which resulted in the half-finished page being completed by another artist [reportedly David Sutherland]: whatever one makes of this controversial decision [I can see both sides of this argument: it's both a worthy testimony and an  ill-judged insult ] it has ensured that this page has attained a morbid fascination for many comics fans [it's a very good page, with frames of a manically laughing BIFFO: maybe Watkins was having the quite literal 'last laugh' on both us the readers, and the comics Industry] this certainly put a final and  fatal 'full stop' on his forceful career, and if no-one ever really replaced DUDLEY D WATKINS, others took up his unfinished assignments and continued with his characters.

The best of these in my view were:


     DESPERATE DAN   by CHARLES GRIGG  [DANDY, around 1970]; very accomplished indeed


     LORD SNOOTY by ROBERT NIXON  [BEANO, 1968-73]   Watkins lived to see some of the early ones. and the two artists often alternated on this output: the style of Nixon  is quite different but it's very good stuff, impressive in a different way


     DESPERATE DAN/ OOR WULLIE and the BROONS   by KENNETH H HARRISON  [DANDY, from around 1983, SUNDAY POST pull-out Fun Section, 1990s]:   To me, this was easily  the best 're-imagining' of Watkins' style and characters ever put out: although it's clearly 'not Watkins'  on view here, the polished inkwork and appeal of the characters [ a 'sexy' Maggie Broon was a much welcome update] were second-to-none, a stunning achievement by Ken.


Putting this post together just reinforces my belief that I have merely scratched the surface regarding the deeply impressive output gifted to us by Dudley Watkins: there are many, many well-worthy enterprizes he inked that I have not even mentioned here: it would be very easy indeed to assemble an entire blogsite dedicated to his unforgettable drawing style.


I will leave you with this final thought though:


if I could bring him to our time via some time-displacement portal from Professor Screwtop and present him with a modern-day BEANO, what would his true thoughts on todays' version of the comic be? [I think his creation LORD SNOOTY still turns up in BEANO now and again].








The illustration by me seen below was a really nice change of assignment for me: in the latter 60s and early 70s, DCT put out some very well-done Summer Special and annual covers with very dimensional, fully-painted close-ups of characters----some find these creepily-realistic, but I love them and have never forgotten them.

Here's my tribute to that style of covers: