YMMV / The Dandy

• Audience-Alienating Era:
  • The Dandy Xtreme era (2007-2010) is almost universally considered this, due to the lack of comic content, poorly put together "features" that come off as patronising, and the whole feel of the comic being Two Decades Behind. Some consider the glossy era (2004-2007) as being this as well, with the way it tried too hard to be cool, and requiring a minimum of about three pages to get across a story that could have been told in a single page.
  • A lesser one hit from 1999 to 2000, due to Desperate Dan being bumped from the front page and replaced by Cuddles and Dimples, who were considered likeable enough characters, but nowhere near as iconic as Dan, leading to him making a comeback after barely a year. The comic also struggled to replace two of its most prolific artists, John Geering (who suddenly died in early 1999) and Robert Nixon (who went into semi-retirement that same year, and passed away himself a couple of years later), causing a lot of characters to rapidly rotate between artists before permanent replacements were settled on, with a few of them, most notably Korky the Cat, never really recovering.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: The beautiful young mother of the naughty toddlers Cuddles and Dimples has her fans.
• My Real Daddy:
  • Desperate Dan was originally drawn by Dudley D. Watkins until his death in 1969, and then (after a decade-plus in reprints) by Peter Davidson for a brief period in the early 1980s, but Ken H. Harrison's taking over as artist is seen as where the strip really came into its own, and saw him finally replace Korky the Cat as cover star.
  • On a related, while Korky himself was originally drawn by James Crichton, and then by Charlie Grigg for several decades, Robert Nixon's run from 1986 to 1999 — which also saw the introduction of his nephews, the Kits — is generally the one most fondly remembered by fans.
  • While Eric Roberts (no, not that one) was Winker Watson's original artist, Terry Bave's run in the 1990s is credited for casting off the stuffy and somewhat outdated nature of the strip in favour of something more offbeat.
• Older Than They Think: Many people don't realise that the first Owen Goal strips were reworked versions of Cannonball Kid, a strip that featured in Nutty over a decade previously, recoloured with the speech balloons redone; after about a year, when they'd exhausted the strips that could be reprinted without looking too dated, new strips started appearing, which may explain why Owen's sporting ability seems to fluctuate Depending on the Writer.
• Seasonal Rot: The 1970s, while considered a golden age for the comic by some, is often seen as a weak point in The Dandy's history due to how badly the comic fell behind the times, with outdated strips like Black Bob and Winker Watson running in an era where other comics had more relateable, down to earth strips like Dennis the Menace (UK). Similarly, the comic kept with Korky the Cat as its cover star, despite the "anthropomorphic animal in a world of humans" archetype being seen as outdated by this point, evidenced by The Beano and The Topper dropping Biffo the Bear and Mickey the Monkey as their respective cover stars at the start of the decade. To add to this, most people drawing the strips were veteran artists who had started with comics in the 1940s or before. If an artist died, then more often than not their strips were reprinted, rather than replaced or given a new artist. Little effort was made to remedy this until Albert Barnes, who had been the Dandy editor since its inception in the 1930s, was finally replaced... in 1982.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: Percy of Growing Paynes can easily be mistaken for a girl as he inherited his hair from his mother and he has facial features similar to that of Ivy the Terrible.

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