Unless you’ve been living under a rock you’ll be aware Oor Wullie is 80 years old.
Sculptures of the cheeky eternal child raised almost £900,000 for charity at the Bucket Trail auction.
Now, Oor Wullie and his sister comic The Broons – also 80 – are the inspiration behind a new exhibition at Dundee Contemporary Arts.
DCA Thomson runs from Saturday December 3 until Sunday February 19 and showcases the work of six artists.
Rob Churm, Malcy Duff, Rabiya Choudhry, Craig Coulthard, Hideyuki Katsumata and Sofia Sita have each visited the DC Thomson archives and will exhibit their own takes on the rich cultural history of the city’s publisher.
Featuring murals, prints, drawings, sculpture and videos, the exhibition will also include archive material from 80 years of DC Thomson’s most beloved characters.
Glasgow artist Rob Churm is influenced by comics and underground zines.
He’s worked with the Jonah strips that appeared in The Beano in the late 1950s and early 60s, and which were notable for their ingenious storytelling, compressing elaborate action sequences into a one-page cartoon.
Artist, musician and cartoonist Malcy Duff has taken inspiration from Oor Wullie and produced a comic that can be read within a new sculpture inspired by Wullie’s famous bucket.
Rabiya Choudhry’s work is loosely based on her family and inspired by riotous comic strip The Numskulls, about a team of tiny human-like technicians who live inside people’s heads and run their bodies and minds.
Craig Coulthard was an avid reader of the Commando comics and has created a series of drawings inspired by these for the exhibition.
He has also commissioned one of the great DC Thomson artists, Ian Kennedy (Commando, Dan Dare), for a painting depicting what the Leuchars Air Show of 2116 might have looked like.
Hideyuki Katsumata, whose solo exhibition at DCA last year was one of the organisation’s most popular to date, developed a fascination for DC Thomson’s cartoon characters while working in Dundee.
The Tokyo artist is using characters from his imagination to converse with the DC Thomson universe.
Sofia Sita is an artist and illustrator based in Dundee who has exhibited locally and in her home country, Italy.
Inspired by The Broons, Sita will make a mural celebrating The Dundonians – a happy family of DCA visitors.
DCA director Beth Bate said: “We’re going to see six very different responses to the riches of the DC Thomson archive from the artists taking part, and I can’t wait to share them with audiences from December.”
