Back in 2011 the University of Dundee ran a comic art competition as part of the annual Dundee Comics Day to create a new Beano-style comic strip of one or two pages. The competition was won by Steve English’s Belle’s Magic Mobile, which was printed in The Beano in February 2012 as well as in the University’s Anthology One publication. 

In 2012, the competition was for a three page strip and a cover image based on The Dandy’s1940s superhero, The Amazing Mr X. Entrants were allowed to update the character in any form they wanted and the competition was won by Steve Marchant, with a tongue-in-cheek take on an elderly Mr X still attempting his heroics.

Rather than running the winner and runners up as part of Anthology Two, the University imprint UniVerse have put out a separate title entitled The Amazing Mr X and labelled it as a Special Edition. 

Yet despite that description, this is more than just a publication of the competition winners as it reprints original pages from The Dandy as well as including a feature on the background and history of the character.

Dundee Comics Day organiser, and director of the Scottish Centre For Comics Studies, Dr Chris Murray writes about the background to Mr X in The Dandy, where he first appeared in issue 272 in 1944, as what Chris describes as “Britain’s first home-grown superhero”.

While the superhero grew to dominate the American comics scene, Britain never really  succumbed to the idea with most superhero characters that appeared in British comics over the years being reprints of American stories or British stories using US characters. Indeed, The Amazing Mr X only lasted 14 issues (plus a single appearance in the 1962 Dandy annual courtesy of Dudley D Watkins) and Chris postulates why the character failed to gain a following with The Dandy’s readership.

The book reprints three of those 14 stories which were in the “picture and paragraph” format that we now tend to associate with Rupert Bear. These are certainly interesting as an historical document but seventy years after they were originally published they are now more of a curiosity piece than actually being entertaining.

The book then goes on to publish the strip by the Dundee Comics Prize winner, Steve Marchant, which Chris says “undercuts the tome of the usual superhero story with a playful satire on the mythology of the superhero”.

Personally, I prefer the Darren O’Toole written and A Kaviraj illustrated runner-up strip, which sets the scene for a potential ongoing series that the actual winner did not, while the other runner-up, Gavin Boyle, presents an amusing Scottish themed tongue-in-cheek version of the character.

A further eleven stories from the competition cover a multitude of styles and ideas, some rather more interesting than others, giving a total of 14 new strips with the character, echoing the original number of 1940s episodes.

The Amazing Mr X: Special Edition is not at all what I was expecting to see from UniVerse given their previous two Anthology titles. A very well produced, 76 page US comic sized book, it will be of interest to devoted Dandy fans as well as no doubt proving to be something of a curiosity to students of old British comics.

Jeremy Briggs

• The Amazing Mr X: Special Edition has a cover price of £8 and is available, as the other UniVerse titles are, by sending an e-mail requesting details to – universecomic@gmail.com

Jeremy Briggs

News, reviews, interviews and features for print and on-line: Spaceship Away (since October 2005), Bear Alley (since February 2007), downthetubes (since June 2007), and Eagle Times (since October 2008). Plus DC Thomson’s The Art Of Ian Kennedy, Titan’s Dan Dare and Johnny Red reprints, Ilex’s War Comics: A Graphic History and 500 Essential Graphic Novels, and Print Media’s The Iron Moon and Strip magazine.

Categories: British Comics, Comics

Tags: Dr Chris Murray, Dundee Comics Prize, Dundee University, Steve Marchant, The Amazing Mr X, UniVerse. Dundee