Credit where it's due - in this week's Beano

Well here's a welcome turnup for the books, credits in the Beano. Have I started something?

A marvellous thing to see, it was briefly tried under Alan Digby's editorship back when I was last a regular in The Beano, and now Craig Graham's doing the same, crediting writers and artists in a table up the front of the comic. Is it a coincidence that I start asking to get my name featured on my strips, or back in the day hiding it in the background of all my drawings, and widespread credits start appearing all over the shop? Well, whatever the inspiration for it, I'm delighted to see it. And fascinated to see that Mike Pearse, my role model when I started in The Beano, is writing the Bash Street Kids for David Sutherland to draw.

And talking of credits and collaboration, this week's Bananaman should by rights have borne another name, on top of my own and Wayne Thompson's, because this week's story came from an idea by Hev Tweed. It was she who googled Bananaman, found the characters Appleman and Kiwi Fruit Girl in his back catalogue of co-stars, and came up with the Banoffee Pie story idea. I then wrote the story which was nothing to shout about, but inspired me to write more. A three-parter featuring these characters in a bizarre love triangle should be appearing soon. (Hopefully the gentle tweaks to the dialogue that seem to be a feature of the sub-editing, as you can see below, won't leave any of its subtle nuances behind. We'll see.)