CHILDREN’S comics celebrate unruly characters, often with unhealthy diets (think cow pie). Their anti-social antics might attract ASBOs in real life, but in the cartoon world they are just a bit of harmless fun. Or are they?

Not according to anti-race campaigners, who yesterday criticised DC Thomson, the publishers of the Dandy, for reprinting the comic’s first annual of 1939, which has racist content.

The company has now been asked to withdraw from shop shelves the 20,000 facsimiles of the 67-year-old book.

What has caused outrage is the numerous references to the word “nigger” in the annual’s Smarty Grandpa strip — a wartime Dandy character that was axed about 30 years ago.

The 1939 cartoon opens at the seaside with Smarty Grandpa considering whether to go to “listen to the nigger minstrels”.

A short time later his face is accidentally blackened when a bag of soot he is carrying bursts open and, as he heads for the sea to wash, an elderly lady mistakes him for a “poor old nigger minstrel” and gives him sixpence.

This gives him the idea of staging his own minstrel show and he is next seen dressed in a beach tent with a blackened face, saying: “Hi folks, help the nigger minstrels”.

Yesterday Anita Shelton, of the Glasgow Anti-Racist Alliance, said that the strip was “degrading and humiliating” to black people. “This kind of thing cannot be permitted,” she said. “The word is not a term that has been looked on with favour for many years.”

But DC Thomson was unrepentant and argued that, although the word nigger would not be published in today’s comics, the facsimile annual was “of its time and was not something they felt had to be edited”.

Martin Lindsay, licensing director, said: “It is meant to be a collector’s edition, more aimed at adults than children. You can tell that from the £16.99 price. It has been reprinted as it was, in black and white, without censoring any of the language used in the original. It is of its time.”

Yesterday Winston Walker, 42, who bought a copy of the 1939 annual from a Dundee newsstand as a gift for a Dandy fan he knows, said he was horrified when he browsed through the content.

Jamaican-born Mr Walker said: “I couldn’t believe it when I opened the book and saw the Smarty Grandpa page. I do not know what DC Thomson were thinking. It’s extremely derogatory to black people. Any decent person would be disgusted by the terms used.”

A spokeswoman for the Commission for Racial Equality said it had not received any complaints about the annual.

“It is not for us to decide on what people may or may not take offence to,” she said. “We should celebrate the fact that we live in a time where such ideas are no longer seen as appropriate and society does not condone this kind of language.”

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