New-look Dandy comic set to launch

A new-look Dandy comic will launch tomorrow, featuring 18 new characters and a new comic strip written by TV star Harry Hill, which will be illustrated by Dennis the Menace artist Nigel Parkinson.

Scottish publishers DC Thomson carried out the editorial design in-house with visual guidelines from artist Jamie Smart, with individual comic strips outsourced to new and existing Dandy artists.

Dandy editor-in-chief Craig Graham says, ‘The comic will have a lot of different art styles, but we wanted to make it very homogenous and coherent, so we commissioned a style guide from Smart. His style is so graphic and bold, it gives it a great feeling of life.’

The design concept for the style guide was approved in March and finalised in July.

Smart, who illustrated the Desperate Dan strip, was briefed to create a functional ‘tool box’ for the designers to use. This included a set of humourous ‘widgets’ and a logo to be used across the comic, creating a ‘hand-drawn feel’, says Graham.

This was worked into specifications such as page borders and page numbers, and a new font was also created.

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