Ball Boy
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Ball Boy is a comic strip in the UK comic The Beano and also the name of the main character. It first appeared in issue 1735, dated 18 October 1975. It features a five-a-side football team (who usually lose all their matches) that includes:
- Ball Boy - the captain who thinks that he is the best player in the team. He is usually a striker.
- Titch - A small boy who usually plays in defence.
- Dimmy - a dim boy who acts a bit like Smiffy out of The Bash Street Kids sometimes.
- Benjy - a good player who usually plays on the wing and crosses the ball to Ball Boy.
- Goalie - the goalkeeper. This character is an anomaly in the sense that in some strips he is a superb goalkeeper and in others he is comically awful, letting in everything. There are a few strips where he just sits in the corner of the goal, reading, because the rest of the team can't get a shot on target.
Ball Boy's team kit is usually (in later strips) shown as having red and black vertical stripes along the t-shirt and black shorts. Sometimes they get guest players joining the team for 1 strip, like Bea, or Gnasher. The team sometimes also have other players featured, including a recurring black player called Elvis.
The strip was drawn by Malcolm Judge until his death in 1989. John Dallas took over from him afterwards, and drew it until his retirement in April 2003. Since then, the artist has been Dave Eastbury.
For issue 3260, dated 8 January 2005, the Ball Boy strip was meant to feature a french footballer called Henry Thierry who wore a red shirt. In the strip he is shown a red card and then runs from the team bath when a snorkel appears close to him saying "Time to va-va-voom" - a reference to the Renault adverts Thierry Henry does. The Beano editor Euan Kerr decided to destroy the entire print run of that comic so as not to risk the striker's wrath, the issue eventually going on sale with a different Ball Boy strip in its place.