Billy Whizz
Encyclopedia
Billy Whizz is a fictional character
featured in the British
comic
The Beano
, first appearing in issue 1139, dated 16 May 1964, when it replaced The Country Cuzzins
. Billy, the title character, is a boy who can run extraordinarily fast. His speed often causes chaos yet at the same time his ability can prove useful. He also has a younger brother called Alfie Whizz of similar appearance. Alfie is usually shown as a normal boy but occassionally he is shown to be just as fast as his brother.
In strips up until the 1980s, Billy lives in Whizztown rather than Beanotown like most of the other regular characters, however this later changed and more recent strips place him in Beanotown.
, who had previously drawn Colonel Crackpot's Circus, and would go on to create several more popular strips, including Ball Boy
, The Numskulls
and The Badd Lads
. Judge's style tended to be typified by a wide variety of styles in which Billy's speed was depicted, including trails of dust, motion blur, multiple copies of Billy in a panel, and more besides. Later artists tended to use a single, specific visual device to represent Billy's whizzing. Judge drew every single Billy Whizz strip until the mid-80s, when other artists, including Barrie Appleby and John Dallas began providing occasional fill-in strips, though Judge still drew the vast majority of the strips.
, who began a major overhaul of the strip, making the effects of Billy's speed more destructive to his surroundings, giving him a more laid-back attitude, and later introducing a rather alien-looking tracksuit.
Parkins acted as the main artist in this time, but Trevor Metcalfe
and Vic Neill
also drew occasional strips for the next few years; all three artists used a broadly similar design for Billy, but Metcalfe and Neill's strips featured a much more happy-go-lucky version of Billy. A reshuffle of the Beano's artists (coinciding with the comic's move to all-colour printing) saw Parkins leave the strip in 1993, and Neill became the main artist, upon which he began further tweaking Billy's appearance, the most notable change being that the two long hairs he had always been drawn with were turned into a thunderbolt
. He continued to draw the strip until his death in January 2000, and Graeme Hall took it up afterwards.
for the Dandy, the strip was understudied again by Trevor Metcalfe, who, aided with a Wacom tablet, drew the strip in a mixture of his own and Thompson's style. Metcalfe later drew the strip full time, gradually bringing the strip's artwork more in line with his early '90s work, until his sudden departure from the comic in 2007, after which the Beano started running re-prints of the strips drawn by David Parkins.
This run of reprints continued for the next year (including a few early Trevor Metcalfe and Vic Neill strips along the way) until the comic's 70th anniversary issue, when Barrie Appleby returned to provide a new strip (this time drawn in his own style, as opposed to his 80's work which followed Malcolm Judge's style). The strip then reverted to being reprints for the following year, mostly of Vic Neill's, with one Graeme Hall reprint in October 2009. At the end of that month a new permanent artist was appointed, namely Nick Brennan who had previously drawn Crazy for Daisy
in The Beano, and Blinky
in The Dandy.
In the Beano Annual 2008, Billy's story was drawn by Tom Paterson
, and in the 2009 annual Wayne Thompson drew it. Tom Paterson again drew Billy in the 2010 annual, while Nigel Parkinson
drew his strip in the 2011 annual, in the style of Vic Neill.
In some issues of the comic in the autumn of 2011, Billy appeared as the first strip in the comic - this slot is usually reserved for Dennis the Menace and Gnasher.
are usually worn out very quickly by whizzspeed running, and as a result often have holes in the soles.
From the first strip, Billy sported a shaved hair cut with two long, antennae-like hairs sticking out at the top. In the 1970 Beano Annual, it is revealed that the reason why Billy, plus Dad and Alfie, always have this style is because they always get thrown out of the barber's before the last two hairs can be shaved off. After Vic Neill became artist, the two hairs morphed into a lightning flash, with no explanation given for this in the comic. This hairstyle was retained by Graeme Hall, but was later reverted to the original two hairs once Wayne Thompson took over. It has been revealed in some strips that Billy's hair is blond should it grow to full length.
he does not appear to have a set group of friends. His kind nature and good heart is occasionally taken advantage of by other Beano characters, especially that of Roger the Dodger
and Dennis the Menace, as for example in one strip he agreed to carry Roger's dodge books so he could slow down.
late 1970s/early 1980s Billy starts wearing trousers instead of shorts. This is explained in a story where Billy's dad tells him to buy some trousers, in the hope that they will slow him down, but Billy chooses some tracksuit bottoms which don't slow him down.
27 January 1989 The final appearance of Malcolm Judge's Billy in the comic. Barrie Appleby draws the strip for the next few weeks, before Steve Horrocks takes over.
1990 David Parkins takes over as the full time artist.
1991 Trevor Metcalfe starts drawing Billy as understudy to Parkins.
1992 Vic Neill also starts drawing Billy.
9 May 1992 Billy Whizz wears his new thunderbolt tracksuit for the first time in a story where he runs so fast in his new tracksuit that he is mistaken for a lightning storm. Issue No. 2599
1993 David Parkins quits drawing Billy, and Vic Neill takes over permanently, although Trevor Metcalfe still contributes occasional strips for the next year.
1993 Trevor Metcalfe provides the Billy Whizz strip for the Beano Annual 1995, which proves to be the last time he draws Billy for over a decade.
9 July 1994 Billy's hairstyle changes, with no explanation in the comic. Issue No. 2712.
2000 Vic Neill dies, and is replaced by Graeme Hall.
5 April 2003 Wayne Thompson takes over as Billy's artist. Issue No. 3168
2005 Trevor Metcalfe again starts drawing Billy, this time as Thompson's understudy, before later becoming permanent artist.
16 June 2007 The final regular new strip in the Beano drawn by Metcalfe. From the following week's issue, Billy's strip became reprint. Issue No. 3385
2 August 2008 Barrie Appleby draws a new Billy Whizz strip in the 70th birthday edition of the Beano, the first new strip in the comic for over a year. Issue No. 3443
31 October 2009 Nick Brennan takes over as artist and new strips start being printed.
Fictional character
A character is the representation of a person in a narrative work of art . Derived from the ancient Greek word kharaktêr , the earliest use in English, in this sense, dates from the Restoration, although it became widely used after its appearance in Tom Jones in 1749. From this, the sense of...
featured in the British
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
comic
Comic book
A comic book or comicbook is a magazine made up of comics, narrative artwork in the form of separate panels that represent individual scenes, often accompanied by dialog as well as including...
The Beano
The Beano
The Beano is a British children's comic, published by D.C. Thomson & Co and is arguably their most successful.The comic first appeared on 30 July 1938, and was published weekly. During the Second World War,The Beano and The Dandy were published on alternating weeks because of paper and ink...
, first appearing in issue 1139, dated 16 May 1964, when it replaced The Country Cuzzins
The Country Cuzzins
The Country Cuzzins was a comic strip in the UK comic The Beano until issue 1139, dated 11 May 1964, when it was replaced by Billy Whizz. It was drawn by Hugh Morren. A reprint of one of their strips recently appeared in the Retro Beano section of The Beano, dated 24 May 2011...
. Billy, the title character, is a boy who can run extraordinarily fast. His speed often causes chaos yet at the same time his ability can prove useful. He also has a younger brother called Alfie Whizz of similar appearance. Alfie is usually shown as a normal boy but occassionally he is shown to be just as fast as his brother.
In strips up until the 1980s, Billy lives in Whizztown rather than Beanotown like most of the other regular characters, however this later changed and more recent strips place him in Beanotown.
Concept & Creation
The strip was originated by Malcolm JudgeMalcolm Judge
Malcolm Judge was a British cartoonist, best known for his contributions to DC Thomson's range of comics. He was married, had one daughter, and lived in Bishopbriggs near Glasgow....
, who had previously drawn Colonel Crackpot's Circus, and would go on to create several more popular strips, including Ball Boy
Ball Boy
Ball Boy is a comic strip in the UK comic The Beano and also the name of the main character. It first appeared in issue 1735, dated 18 October 1975. It features a five-a-side football team that includes:* Ball Boy - the captain of the team, Ball Boy bears resemblances to The Dandy's Owen Goal...
, The Numskulls
The Numskulls
The Numskulls is a comic strip in The Beano, a UK comic. The strip is about some tiny human like creatures that live inside the head of Edd Case , a boy, and control his actions.The Numskulls are:...
and The Badd Lads
The Badd Lads
The Badd Lads was a comic strip that ran in The Beezer for twenty years starring Fingers, Knuck and Boss who were inept crooks. They were always getting caught, escaping jail and then finding themselves incarcerated again...
. Judge's style tended to be typified by a wide variety of styles in which Billy's speed was depicted, including trails of dust, motion blur, multiple copies of Billy in a panel, and more besides. Later artists tended to use a single, specific visual device to represent Billy's whizzing. Judge drew every single Billy Whizz strip until the mid-80s, when other artists, including Barrie Appleby and John Dallas began providing occasional fill-in strips, though Judge still drew the vast majority of the strips.
Changes in the 1990s
Upon Judge's death in 1989, Appleby acted as artist for a few weeks before Steve Horrocks took over as regular artist. Both Appleby and Horrocks drew in a style that was broadly similar to Judge, but slowly began modernising the strip. Horrocks continued as artist until late 1990, when he was succeeded by Beano newcomer David ParkinsDavid Parkins
David Parkins is a British cartoonist and illustrator who has worked for D.C. Thomson, publisher of The Beano and The Dandy. Now based in Canada, he illustrates children's picture books....
, who began a major overhaul of the strip, making the effects of Billy's speed more destructive to his surroundings, giving him a more laid-back attitude, and later introducing a rather alien-looking tracksuit.
Parkins acted as the main artist in this time, but Trevor Metcalfe
Trevor Metcalfe
Trevor Metcalfe born May 1939 in Brotton, Yorkshire is a British illustrator and comic book artist. Known for his comic strips in IPC Magazines comics such as Sweet Tooth and Junior Rotter in Whizzer and Chips....
and Vic Neill
Vic Neill
Vic Neill was a British cartoonist who drew for D.C. Thomson and I.P.C.'s comics. His first notable comic work was on Sparky strip Peter Piper. In 1969, he replaced Dudley Dexter Watkins on Topper cover star Mickey the Monkey after Watkins' sudden death. Neill was a big admirer of Watkins' artwork....
also drew occasional strips for the next few years; all three artists used a broadly similar design for Billy, but Metcalfe and Neill's strips featured a much more happy-go-lucky version of Billy. A reshuffle of the Beano's artists (coinciding with the comic's move to all-colour printing) saw Parkins leave the strip in 1993, and Neill became the main artist, upon which he began further tweaking Billy's appearance, the most notable change being that the two long hairs he had always been drawn with were turned into a thunderbolt
Thunderbolt
A thunderbolt is a discharge of lightning accompanied by a loud thunderclap or its symbolic representation. In its original usage the word may also have been a description of meteors, or, as Plato suggested in Timaeus, of the consequences of a close approach between two planetary cosmic bodies,...
. He continued to draw the strip until his death in January 2000, and Graeme Hall took it up afterwards.
Post-2000
By March 2003, the strip's popularity had faded badly, and the comic's editors were giving serious consideration to dropping it. Instead, it was decided that the strip would be given a stay of execution, albeit under a new artist. Wayne Thompson took over from the following month. Thompson did another revamp of the strip, creating a version of Billy that was based on Malcolm Judge's work (and to a lesser extent, David Parkins' design of Billy), and gave a new life to the character and feel of the strip. However, due to his commitments with JakJak (comics)
Jak Hurley and Todd Nolan are two fictional comic strip characters from the UK comic The Dandy who rose to popularity as the comic's main strip after its re-launch in 2004...
for the Dandy, the strip was understudied again by Trevor Metcalfe, who, aided with a Wacom tablet, drew the strip in a mixture of his own and Thompson's style. Metcalfe later drew the strip full time, gradually bringing the strip's artwork more in line with his early '90s work, until his sudden departure from the comic in 2007, after which the Beano started running re-prints of the strips drawn by David Parkins.
This run of reprints continued for the next year (including a few early Trevor Metcalfe and Vic Neill strips along the way) until the comic's 70th anniversary issue, when Barrie Appleby returned to provide a new strip (this time drawn in his own style, as opposed to his 80's work which followed Malcolm Judge's style). The strip then reverted to being reprints for the following year, mostly of Vic Neill's, with one Graeme Hall reprint in October 2009. At the end of that month a new permanent artist was appointed, namely Nick Brennan who had previously drawn Crazy for Daisy
Crazy for Daisy
Crazy for Daisy was a comic strip in the UK comic The Beano. First appearing in issue 2865, dated 14 June 1997, it was part of an ongoing selection of six comic strips that were to be voted into the comic by readers. This strip was the winner, beating Camp Cosmos, Have a Go Jo, Sydd and Trash Can...
in The Beano, and Blinky
Blinky (comic strip character)
Blinky was a fictional character in a comic strip in the UK comic The Dandy, about a boy with large, thick glasses and the chaos he always causes, as what he sees through his glasses is a galaxy different from the rest of the world...
in The Dandy.
In the Beano Annual 2008, Billy's story was drawn by Tom Paterson
Tom Paterson
Tom Paterson is a Scottish comic artist who drew characters for Fleetway in 1973–1990, and D.C Thomson from 1986-onwards. He lives in Leith, with three kids, and is a Hearts supporter.He is famous for drawing comics such as:-Fleetway:...
, and in the 2009 annual Wayne Thompson drew it. Tom Paterson again drew Billy in the 2010 annual, while Nigel Parkinson
Nigel Parkinson
Nigel Parkinson is a British cartoonist who currently works for D. C. Thomson & Co. Ltd and mainly draws for The Beano and The Dandy.-Biography:...
drew his strip in the 2011 annual, in the style of Vic Neill.
In some issues of the comic in the autumn of 2011, Billy appeared as the first strip in the comic - this slot is usually reserved for Dennis the Menace and Gnasher.
Physical Appearance
When the strip began, Billy simply wore a T-shirt and black shorts. In a late 1970s strip, Billy's dad sends him out to buy a new pair of trousers, supposedly to slow Billy down, but as he buys a pair of tracksuit bottoms this doesn't happen, though from that point Billy wore those trousers. A more dynamic change came in the early 1990s when he began to wear a black tracksuit marked with a lightning bolt. When depicted in colour, originally all the non-black areas of the tracksuit were in yellow, though soon all but the lightning flash was in red, and later the lightning flash turned red itself. Billy initially wore ordinary shoes but around the same time as the tracksuit was introduced he started to wear trainers, whichare usually worn out very quickly by whizzspeed running, and as a result often have holes in the soles.
From the first strip, Billy sported a shaved hair cut with two long, antennae-like hairs sticking out at the top. In the 1970 Beano Annual, it is revealed that the reason why Billy, plus Dad and Alfie, always have this style is because they always get thrown out of the barber's before the last two hairs can be shaved off. After Vic Neill became artist, the two hairs morphed into a lightning flash, with no explanation given for this in the comic. This hairstyle was retained by Graeme Hall, but was later reverted to the original two hairs once Wayne Thompson took over. It has been revealed in some strips that Billy's hair is blond should it grow to full length.
Personality Traits
Billy is known not to be quite as mischievous as the other Beano characters and often does not go out of his way to harm or annoy others. Any trouble he causes is usually by accident, though this happens quite often due to Billy's whizzspeed. However, he does seem to have a fairly short temper, as in the 1999 Beano Book he exploded into a rage after he found out Alfie had a glass of ice during a race. He has been known to be rather impatient, not able to sit still even for a film. Much like other Beano characters save for Dennis and The Bash Street KidsThe Bash Street Kids
The Bash Street Kids is an ongoing comic strip featuring in the British comic The Beano. The strip was created by Leo Baxendale under the title When the Bell Rings, and first appeared in The Beano in issue 604, dated 13 February 1954. It became The Bash Street Kids in 1956 and since then, it has...
he does not appear to have a set group of friends. His kind nature and good heart is occasionally taken advantage of by other Beano characters, especially that of Roger the Dodger
Roger the Dodger
This is the article for The Beano comic strip, for other uses please see Roger the Dodger Roger the Dodger is a fictional character featured regularly in the UK comic The Beano...
and Dennis the Menace, as for example in one strip he agreed to carry Roger's dodge books so he could slow down.
Timeline
16 May 1964 Billy Whizz debuts in the comic. Issue No. 1139late 1970s/early 1980s Billy starts wearing trousers instead of shorts. This is explained in a story where Billy's dad tells him to buy some trousers, in the hope that they will slow him down, but Billy chooses some tracksuit bottoms which don't slow him down.
27 January 1989 The final appearance of Malcolm Judge's Billy in the comic. Barrie Appleby draws the strip for the next few weeks, before Steve Horrocks takes over.
1990 David Parkins takes over as the full time artist.
1991 Trevor Metcalfe starts drawing Billy as understudy to Parkins.
1992 Vic Neill also starts drawing Billy.
9 May 1992 Billy Whizz wears his new thunderbolt tracksuit for the first time in a story where he runs so fast in his new tracksuit that he is mistaken for a lightning storm. Issue No. 2599
1993 David Parkins quits drawing Billy, and Vic Neill takes over permanently, although Trevor Metcalfe still contributes occasional strips for the next year.
1993 Trevor Metcalfe provides the Billy Whizz strip for the Beano Annual 1995, which proves to be the last time he draws Billy for over a decade.
9 July 1994 Billy's hairstyle changes, with no explanation in the comic. Issue No. 2712.
2000 Vic Neill dies, and is replaced by Graeme Hall.
5 April 2003 Wayne Thompson takes over as Billy's artist. Issue No. 3168
2005 Trevor Metcalfe again starts drawing Billy, this time as Thompson's understudy, before later becoming permanent artist.
16 June 2007 The final regular new strip in the Beano drawn by Metcalfe. From the following week's issue, Billy's strip became reprint. Issue No. 3385
2 August 2008 Barrie Appleby draws a new Billy Whizz strip in the 70th birthday edition of the Beano, the first new strip in the comic for over a year. Issue No. 3443
31 October 2009 Nick Brennan takes over as artist and new strips start being printed.