Beau Peep was a popular British comic strip written by Roger Kettle and illustrated by Andrew Christine. The strip features the misadventures of the eponymous lead character, Beau Peep, an inept and cowardly British man who joins the tough and hardy French Foreign Legion in the deserts of North Africa to escape his terrifying wife Doris back home. There are also numerous surreal supporting characters. Origins Beau Peep was first published in the launch issue of British newspaper The Daily Star on 2 November 1978, and ran until late 2016. Kettle and Christine also produced the popular cowboy strip A Man Called Horace which was featured daily in the Daily Mirror and Daily Record until August 1, 2015. This strip was commissioned in 1989 by Mirror Group Newspapers in an attempt to lure the Beau Peep fan base from the Daily Star. Roger Kettle also scripts Andy Capp for the Daily Mirror. The strip is drawn by Roger Mahoney. Beau Peep was originally intended as a parody of Beau Geste, a 1924 adventure novel by British author P. C. Wren, which has itself been adapted for the screen several times, and again parodied even more. However Beau Peep grew to have a distinctive character and identity in its own right and is perhaps the most famous of these parodies of Beau Geste, still retaining a large fan base. On the forum of the official Beau Peep website, writer Roger Kettle also claims to have been inspired by the American comic strip Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz, in that like Schulz's creation Charlie Brown, Beau Peep is a "loveable loser". Publication history As well as daily appearances in The Daily Star, paperback anthologies of Beau Peep were published every year between 1980 and 1998. A total of 20 books were published, including, in 1987, a special 'Colour Collection'. These have been issued through various publishing houses, most notably by Pedigree Books. Some comic strips are available for viewing online on the Beau Peep official website. A new collection of strips called "The Return of Beau Peep" was published by CreateSpace () in February 2012. The strip was dropped from the Daily Star in December 1997, as part of a cost-cutting exercise. This resulted in a huge sales loss for the paper and demands from fans for Beau Peep to be brought back. The strip eventually returned in March 1999, and continued