For some reason I've always vaguely remembered 'Ali Ha-Ha & the Forty Thieves' as a follow-up to Ken Reid's five-year run on 'Jonah', so when I checked the dates it came as something of a surprise to me that the two strips actually ran concurrently in
Dandy and
Beano, and that Jonah even outlasted Ali by a couple of months. On the other hand the latter character retained his place on
Dandy's back cover right up to the end, whereas Jonah was relegated to an interior page of
Beano during 1962 as Dennis the Menace reclaimed his old territory.
In fact, Ali Ha-Ha made his debut in the issue of
Dandy dated October 15th 1960, the very same week that both
Dandy and
Beano took a dramatic leap forward by expanding from 12 to 16 pages, including full-colour centrespreads for the first time (albeit at the cost of a massive 50% price increase which saw the two comics jumping overnight from two 'old pence' to an eye-watering 'thruppence' each!).
Moreover, while the front covers of
Dandy and
Beano had always been printed in full colour (black, red, blue and yellow), their back pages had, for the most part, been limited to black and
two colours: red and yellow in Beano's case, blue and yellow in Dandy's. To my eye this resulted in strips with a curiously anaemic look, as can be seen on the back cover which graced the final 'old-style' edition of
Dandy.
By contrast, the next week saw no less than
two Ken Reid strips printed in full colour for the first time ever - ‘Jonah’ on the back of
Beano and this introductory episode of ‘Ali Ha-Ha and the Forty Thieves’ on the back of
Dandy:
Whereas Jonah had made a relatively slow start in 1958, taking several months to build up a head of steam, Ali Ha-Ha pretty much hit the ground running. And while the assigned scripter might not have been as sure-footed as Fearn it’s clear that Reid had a massive input in designing the cast and embellishing the action. This was an artist at the height of his comic powers: in particular he went out of his way to come up with a dazzling array of characters. At a time when the overworked Baxendale was being forced to concentrate on a core group of Bash Street Kids Ken seemed to delight in drawing
every single one of the forty thieves (in fact I suspect that there were far more than just forty over the course of the series).
Set in a land that was a mixture of the Arabian Nights and a caricatured version of present-day Bagdad, the ongoing battle of wits between Ali, his policeman father, and the ubiquitous thieves rarely ended well for the forces of law and order - with our junior hero inevitably getting the blame for each new debacle. It has to be said that Reid’s indiscriminate use of old-fashioned arab stereotypes would probably give rise to charges of racism and Islamophobia from a modern audience - at least until they realized that he generally drew
everybody in the same exaggerated way, with the ugliest mugs of all being reserved for his own countrymen! I must confess that, as a kid, one part I found inexhaustibly funny was the way in which every single one of the Forty Thieves answered to the name ‘Mustapha’ - beginning with their leader Mustapha Phag, then going on to include an equally excruciating collection of puns such as Mustapha Banana, Mustapha Negg, Mustapha Laff, Mustapha Napple, etc. (Incidentally, does anyone know the name of the little chap in green who always tagged on to the tail end of the bandit horde?)
Here are a couple more of those strips that went head to head with Jonah during 1961:
So it was that, from October 1960 until his breakdown in late 1961, Ken Reid enjoyed a kind of ‘Annus Mirabilis’ with an almost unbroken run of inspired lunacy appearing in glorious colour on the back pages of both
Dandy and
Beano. What’s more, he somehow found time to draw some Roger the Dodger sets (though sadly not the one that guest-starred Jonah!) as well as as a wealth of brilliant contributions to the 1962
Beano and
Dandy Books. The former is, of course, famous for its striking Jonah strips and cover, but in my opinion the ten pages of Ali Ha-Ha material that Ken provided for that year’s
Dandy Book were amongst the greatest he ever drew. Here are just a few examples (including a wonderful ‘Cops and Robbers’ game that gives some indication of what Ken might have been capable of if he ever produced a whole book of his own along the lines of Leo Baxendale’s ‘Willy the Kid’):
(Note the incredible border designs in that two-pager: not just forty thieves, but an equal number of policemen!)
In spite of the inevitable dip in quality that afflicted both Jonah and Ali Ha-Ha during Ken’s illness the two strips did regain something of their old vigour when he eventually returned in 1962 (albeit with other people inking his work for a time). Nevertheless, things were never entirely the same. So it was that in 1963 DC Thomson decided to replace them with two brand new features - little realizing these would be the last new strips Reid would ever draw for them...
- Phil Rushton