Gordon Bell (comics)

Gordon Bell is an artist who lives in the UK. From the 1960s onward he has worked extensively for D. C. Thomson & Co. Ltd, publishers of The Beano and The Dandy comics (among others). His sketchy, breezy cartoon style places the emphasis firmly on the foreground characters, with the backgrounds often consisting solely of a blank wall, a townscape silhouette or bleak scrubland. His regular strips over the years have included:

• Sammy's Scribbles (Buzz)
• The Buzzies and the Fuzzies (Buzz)
• Harum Scarem (a rabbit against a farmer's dog trying to protect the carrots etc...) (Buzz)
• Jimmy Jinx (Topper)
• Pup Parade (AKA The Bash Street Dogs) (The Beano)
• Scoopy (Nutty)
• Snoozer (Nutty)
• Micro Dot (Nutty)
• Doodlebug (Nutty)
• Fiends Beans (Cracker)
• Billy the Kid (Cracker)
• Dreamy Daniel (Sparky)
• Spoofer McGraw (Sparky)
• Hugh's Zoo (Plug)
• First Ada (Plug, Dandy) *The Wabits (Beezer) *Joe Mince (Dandy *Colonel Blink (Beezer)

Various other Strips he drew were Tik & Tak, The Dandy Editor's little Helpers, and Fibba, a three-frame strip from the Dandy in 1992 about a boy who was very bad at lying.

Pup Parade made appearances in The Beano into the 2000s, still drawn by Bell, who had drawn the strip since it started in 1967. Most of his work involves animals as main characters, although two exceptions are Jimmy Jinx and Spoofer McGraw. In all his strips he regularly uses quirky comic details and side comments in his strips, such as smaller captions denoting to the reader (who might otherwise miss such details) that Smiffy was not only too lazy to move, but also sitting on a tack.

External links

• See Gordon Bell's work at http://petergraycartoonsandcomics.blogspot.com/search/label/Gordon%20Bell by Peter Gray