Over Christmas, my children received the obligatory Beano annuals but also - mystifyingly, from a Yorkshire relative - a couple of Scottish wild cards: an Oor Wullie album, and a The Broons album. Two weeks on, the verdict is in: according to my eight-year-old, "Beano stories are like a pile of bricks, but Oor Wullie and The Broons are like houses."

Oor Wullie and The Broons are comic strips that have appeared in the Sunday Post since 1936. "Oor Wullie" is Scottish for "Our Willie", a shock-haired scamp who begins and ends his adventures sitting on an upturned bucket; "The Broons" is Scottish for "The Browns", a quarrelsome, ultimately harmonious family of ten who live in a tenement (imagine The Waltons minus a ton of treacle).

The strips, written in Scottish dialect, are characterised by a sturdiness of narrative and characterisation that put the Beano and Dandy to shame. Yet they are from the same stable, the Sunday Post, Beano and Dandy all being published by

D C Thomson of Dundee, which has supplied the third ingredient

in that city's fabled make-up of "jam, jute and journalism".

From the Thirties to 1969, The Broons and Oor Wullie were drawn by Dudley Dexter Watkins, a dapper, evangelical Christian who was also the man behind Desperate Dan of the Dandy, and Lord Snooty of the Beano. Just as Desperate Dan inhabited (still inhabits, indeed) a perplexing limbo in which cacti sprout but the policemen are English bobbies, so the Broons and Oor Wullie live in a cosy, ostensibly pre-war Scotland into which modern phenomena occasionally float. A Sunday Post spokesman - who sternly corrected me by saying "It's Oor Wullie" every time I accidentally spoke of "Our Willie" - assured me that a DVD player had once turned up in a Broons strip. Perhaps tactlessly, I told this chap that, as a boy, I'd had a newspaper round and that all the people who took the Sunday Post seemed very old. "It's because once people start taking the Post they can't stop," he responded, rather cleverly.

Certainly, it is remarkably unirritating for a newspaper: tabloid in format but not at all trashy, and full of advice to readers. This week, for example, a man writes in to ask whether it's true that if you've tended a plot of earth for ten years, it becomes yours. The answer is no.

The Sunday Post is big in Scotland, and does quite well in northern England, especially among people of Scottish descent. It is not universally available in England, but the spokesman told me it had been spotted in a Turkish newsagent's in Stoke Newington, north London. What they make of Oor Wullie and The Broons in that shop I cannot begin to imagine.