On December 4th 1937 cartoon character Desperate Dan first appeared in the "Dandy" comic.
The face of Desperate Dan was sketched out as Dudley Watkins sat at his desk in Dundee, combining inspiration from the Wild West and English polismen.
The artist originally saw his cartoon character as an outlaw and gave him a stubbly lantern-jaw, the strength to lift a cow with one hand, and an appetite for cow pie, complete with horns. But as the anti-hero of the Dandy caught the imagination of thousands of young readers, Watkins evolved his persona into a champion of the underdog.
Dan made his appearance in the first issue of the Dandy on December 4th 1937. He survived until the comic closed in 2012, reappearing in a short-lived app.
He was just one of many comic book characters which Watkins created for Thomson’s Dundee publishing house. The success was huge, and Oor Wullie and The Broons, written in broad Scots, soon followed and became an essential part of school bairn’s lives.
A devout Christian, Watkins lived in a substantial house in a village near Dundee. It was his ambition to adapt the whole Bible into illustrated format, but that dream was never realised.
On the morning of August 20th, 1969, his wife found him at his desk, a half-finished Desperate Dan strip on his desk. He had died of a heart attack. His strips Oor Wullie, The Broons, Desperate Dan and Lord Snooty continue to be popular to this day.
In a 2006 BBC documentary marking 70 years of Oor Wullie, it was claimed that, due to his frequent mocking of Axis leaders in his comics before and during World War II, Watkins’ name was on a list of enemies of the Third Reich.
The final printed edition of The Dandy was issued on 4 December 2012, the comic's 75th anniversary, after sales slumped to 8,000 a week. On the same day, The Dandy relaunched as an online comic, The Digital Dandy, appearing on the Dandy website and in the Dandy App. The digital relaunch was not successful and the comic ended just six months later.
