THOUGHT BUBBLE MONTH 2025! There’s been a recent marketing move to describe long forgotten US serial comic collections as compiling “lost” comics. That has never sat well with me given the hundreds of thousands of copies that would have been printed at their original time of publication. Never before reprinted doesn’t really equate with “lost” to me. It’s an adjective, however, that seems far more fitting when it comes to self-published work which may have had print runs in anything as low as the 10s, rarely have much collectable value, and in some cases the artists concerned may be more keen to forget than ever haven it resurface again.
All of which brings us to Dan White’s Secret Oranges: Early Comics 2005-2008, material from the Cindy & Biscuit creator that even I had never seen before. The 120-ish page anthology compiles comics from the mid to late 2000s when White was finding his creative voice and, as such, is a fascinating revisitation in print for anyone with a grounding in what was to come. There’s the same malleable cartooning style for a start, the same dark sense of humour, and crucially that same sense of all-pervading melancholy soaking each page. The foundation for White’s later work was definitely built here and each story comes with a context-setting introduction.
Beau & Me
Secret Oranges opens with the slice-of-life story ‘Beau & Me’ which recaptures the events when an old close school friend comes to stay with White. Rather than the usual diary comic procession of events with no real subtext this is a more layered affair that deals with (late) coming-of-age themes, relationships evolving and changing, and more than a hint of existential angst. It’s a series of autobiographical vignettes that build into something far more profound in their own quiet way, with White’s use of anthropomorphised animal avatars tapping into the humanity of the piece in a way in which a more literal depiction never could.
The Wish List
Following this are a couple of festively themed tales. ‘Christmas with Frank’ sees the titular character faced with an unwanted feline house guest for the holidays and gives White an opportunity to indulge in a few pages of kinetic slapstick action. ‘The Wish List’ takes us back to the ‘Beau & Me’ characters as kids enjoying the season. Unlike its predecessor this is a lighthearted romp through Christmas traditions with a jaunty pace and lots of fun gags. Notably, White’s cartooning is becoming far more fluid at this point.
The Cigarette Smoked Itself: A Max Valentine Mystery
‘The Cigarette Smoked Itself: A Max Valentine Mystery’ is a perhaps formative predecessor to White’s later Terminus cartoons – a series of one-page cartoons that you can try and construct a narrative from if you want but are far more fun if you take each as individual snapshots and build a story around them as discrete images. ‘Escape from January’ is the penultimate strip, an offering for an anthology designed to beat off the post-Christmas blues. It’s an oddly self-indulgent piece in one way but this meta explanation for why the audience didn’t get the comic they were meant to be reading has a self-confessed ‘Duck Amuck’ influence which also feels reminiscent of something like Gerber’s ‘Dreaded Deadline Doom’ issue of Howard the Duck.
Escape from January
Finally we have ‘What I Did Last Summer’ – a feral child’s eye view of what appears to be life in a post-apocalyptic world of some kind – something that long-time White fans will find familiar given elements of it have been recycled elsewhere by him. It’s a neat coda though, bridging the gap between these forgotten stories and the more well-known work that was to follow.
With White’s Cindy & Biscuit finally getting the attention it deserves, courtesy of Oni Press, Secret Oranges provides us with a most welcome chance to see where it all began. It’s work that holds up extremely well around two decades on.
Dan White (W/A) • Self-published
Review by Andy Oliver
Visit Dan White’s online store here
Dan White (Cindy and Biscuit) are at Table B9 in the 2000 AD Hall at Thought Bubble.
Thought Bubble 2025 runs from November 1oth-16th with the convention weekend taking place on the 15th-16th. More details on the Thought Bubble site here.
Read all our Thought Bubble 2025 coverage so far in one place here.
Poster by Ng Yin Shian
