Derrick Fish has been writing and drawing Dandy and Company since 2001, and he likes to mix it up a bit. I haven’t read all the strips, but from what I have seen of the archives, Dandy is a smart take on the gag-a-day concept. The strips revolve around Bernard, a sweet little boy, and Dandy, his smart, strong-willed, mischievous dog. Yes, it’s a familiar setup, but Fish’s witty dialogue and stable of over-the-top side characters keeps it interesting.
Derrick wrote to us a few weeks ago to let us know that he’s turning Dandy into a long-form adventure strip for the summer. He has done this before, and he actually foreshadowed this plot with a short series in May, in which hyper-cute puppy Mistake and robot dog Mr. Fuzzy go missing after a series of ATM break-ins. Dandy goes after them in the new summer story, The Search for Mr. Fuzzy.
The story mixes up a lot of old secret-agent and sci-fi cliches with a strong dose of the characters’ individual personalities and a lot of humor. It works pretty well as a caper strip, but the plot is complicated by the fact that Fish is re-introducing characters from older story arcs. He makes it work by putting just enough exposition in the strip to make it comprehensible, then adding additional explanations and links to the earlier storylines in the blog posts beneath the strips. That means longtime readers aren’t bogged down with information they already know, while new readers can pick up bits of backstory as they go.
