This day in 1963 a holiday custom began with the Dandy-Beano Summer Special. At one shilling and sixpence, at a time when the weekly comics were threepence each, this first edition had to be something special, and it was! Larger than the regular comic, on glossy paper, and with several pages of full colour painted artwork, it was a treat for the senses! The cover was drawn by Dudley D Watkins, famous for Desperate Dan, Biffo The Bear and Lord Snooty, among many others. This inaugural edition was mostly reprint, but subsequent years, when The Beano and The Dandy had their own individual editions, would be all-new material, and that tradition carried on delighting kids at the seaside until 2006. It wasn't the first ever special issue of a weekly designed for the beach, but it was the first regular annual one, and the longest lasting. Eventually, publishers DC Thomson would go on to publish many other titles in this special once-a-year form, but this was the first, and the only time that The Beano and The Dandy shared a title until the nostalgia boom of the 1980s.
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