Whatever happened to Freddy the Fearless Fly? Or Dipper the Dodger? Or how about Podge, Jimmy and his Grockle, Marmaduke Mean the Miser or Flippy the Sea-Serpent?
All now lost in the mists of time, they enjoyed a brief ray of sunlight alongside the rather better known Korky the Cat a week ago when the first ever Dandy annual, from 1938, sold for a tidy £1250 at auction.
The Dandy Monster Comic, as it was then titled, was the first of more than 80 issues published over the years, with characters like the irrepressible Desperate Dan emerging along the way.
Always slightly in the shadow of its rival The Beano, a first (1940) edition of which made £2700 at auction last year, The Dandy was one of the all-time greats and, although still printed as an annual, no longer enjoys a weekly run, replaced some years ago now by an online version instead. Time moves on, I suppose, but it leaves me with a twinge of sadness.
If you really want to make money at auction from comics though, you need to look across the Pond. Superman’s first appearance in 1938 is the holy grail. On the cover and the last ten pages of Action Comics No 1, and now one of the rarest in the world, an example has already made $3.2 million at auction.
