John Geering
(196?-199?)

John Geering's early style was the closest D C Thomson had ever come to the style of Warner Bros cartoons - the eternally-scrapping Puss and Boots being a kind of Tom and Butch with Road Runner-style violence. The witty scripts, peppered with endless fighting-based euphemisms, were a help.

Even this was eclipsed by Geering's most famous creation - Bananaman. The unlikely superhero first appeared in Issue One of Nutty comic in 1979, initially on the back cover. The strip quickly rose to two pages and eventually took over the comic's cover. Within a few years Bananaman was appearing on television in a series of cartoons narrated by The Goodies. On the front of Nutty he was now billed as "Bananaman - your TV star". A few minor changes were made to the strip to make it more saleable, most of which consisted of downplaying its more eccentric features.

When Nutty was incorporated into The Dandy, Bananaman was one of the strips to be retained. Although it has not been a permanent fixture, the strip has made regular re-appearances, often to coincide with repeats of the tv show. For a period in the mid-late nineties Geering also drew a more action-based Desperate Dan, but after a while it returned to a more traditional style under Ken H. Harrison.

For The Beano, Geering drew mucky-pup Smudge in the eighties and occasionally the nineties, the Munsters-inspired Number 13, and a variety of less remembered strips. Sadly, John died in the late nineties.