Portal:Scotland/Selected article/Week 40, 2013

Desperate Dan is a wild west character in the British comic The Dandy, published by D. C. Thomson & Co., Dundee. He made his appearance in the first issue which was dated 4 December 1937. He is apparently the world's strongest man, able to lift a cow with one hand. The pillow of his (reinforced) bed is filled with building rubble and his beard is so tough he shaves with a blowtorch. Desperate Dan's favourite food is cow pie – a type of enormous meat pie with the horns sticking out. Much like Popeye with his spinach, Desperate Dan draws his immense power from eating these pies. Desperate Dan was voted the UK's second favourite superhero after Batman in 2011.

The strip was drawn by Dudley D. Watkins until his death in 1969. Although The Dandy Annuals featured new strips from other artists from then on, the comic continued reprinting Watkins strips until 1983 (though the then Korky the Cat artist Charles Grigg drew new strips for annuals and summer specials), when it was decided to start running new strips. These were initially drawn by Peter Davidson, but Ken H. Harrison soon took over as regular artist. The following year Dan was promoted to the front cover of The Dandy, replacing Korky who had been there since issue 1. Although Ken Harrison was the main artist from 1983 to 2007, other artists have also occasionally filled in for Harrison, including David Parkins and Trevor Metcalfe in the early 1990s. John Geering took over the strip between 1994 and 1997, after which Harrison returned as full-time artist. When the Dandy was redesigned and renamed Dandy Xtreme, the writers used reprints of the old comic strips, until Jamie Smart took over drawing and writing the Desperate Dan comic strips in April 2008.