Billy Whizz
| Billy Whizz | |
|---|---|
| First appearance | 16 May 1964 |
| Created by | Malcolm Judge |
| Information | |
| Aliases | The World's Fastest Boy |
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 occasionally 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.
The strip was originated by Malcolm Judge, 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-1980s, 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.
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 Parkins, 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.
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