The Beano: Classic or Dud, Search and Destroy

Search: Bash Street Kids, obviously.

Destroy: all Dennis spin offs except RASHER.

Also search Leo Baxendale's autobiography.

Also, Blur are honorary members of the Dennis the Menace fanclub.

search:
babyface finlayson (= a cowboyt outlaw who ACTUALLY WAS A BABY IN A PRAM)
the three bears (story = they do not pay for their meal and as punishment will do the washing up)

destroy:
lord snooty and his pals (= retain hegemony over all discussion of class in the UK ever)
billy whizz (= nicely drawn but YES HE DOES THINGS FAST YES WE GET IT)
biffo the fucking bear

(Answer: not at all)

i bonded w.my mum over the beano mainly i think (and the dandy also) (i have a copy of each from the month before i wz born)

i wz always ambivalent abt desperate dan, even though the concept of the "cow pie" is visionary

Incidentally, has anyone actually SEEN a copy of the Beano recently? Is it still essentially the same lot?

(I think Lord Snooty, Biffo etc were being phased out when I was reading the Beano). I remember Pansy Potter.

(Dan P is both the above which is why we love him)

No Alan I don't - they're very rare ("search" actually means "search" for once), I got the Bodleian Library copy out and read it while I was at Oxford. He wrote another book, I think of Marxist theory mixed with memoirs, which used to be always on sale in the Comics International classified ads back in the day.

Ans was Watford Gap (He's The King of the Rap) in the Beano or Buster?

I still have a place in my heart for Roger the Dodger.

The Bash Street Kids was generally the favourite. Although I loved Calamity James in the later issues for the many sight gags and unrelenting misery of its protagonist.

A question remains about the Bash Street Kids. All the kids had clearly defined roles based on character traits or physical peculiarities: Danny (charismatic leader & initiator of mischief), Plug (ugly), Smiffy (thick), Fatty (fat), Spotty (spotty), Wilfrid (jumper too big), Herbert (myopic), Toots (only girl in class), Cuthbert (teacher's pet). But what did Sid do other than be Toots' brother? Did any strip EVER centre on Sid?

The Beano's World Cup Special (either 1998 or 2002, probably 1998) was ace, but I haven't seen a copy in ages. Saw the Dandy a year or two ago, though, and that was horrific. "Look! The Japanese! They eat RAW FISH!"

Plumping for either I'd go for "The Beano" everytime. How 7 year old kids got anything from a fucking ginga trying to shoot his load in two twatty birds is well above my head. And it was never even funny - some cunt called Jughead who eats burgers. Oh stop it, my ribs are splitting.

Anyway, I think The Beano is one of British comics' great pinnacles of artistic achievement, but I'm thinking particularly about the '50s and '60s - it's been mostly pretty limp for ages now.

A scene straight out of a comic methinks
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/tayside_and_central/7105605.stm

Happy 70th birthday, big man

http://www.localgov.co.uk/index.cfm?method=news.detail&id=107579

Hooray!

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/68106000/jpg/_68106584_camilla.jpg

oooh the irony given the state of the countries libraries ..

is this in the current edition - its in my kids room so will have a looksie ..

Probably next weeks.

Obi Joe - DANDY SEND (beano4lyfe)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vy2-cRXF8jU

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2021/december/in-beanotown

Excellent, thanks for that. I especially agree with this sentence:

If there’s one form of rule-breaking that covers the entire exhibition, it’s the way the lowly kitsch of commercial publishing can so easily be horseshoe-theoried round to meet the tics of the high avant-garde.

I think you're kinder, or more discrete, than I would be about those modern artistic 'responses' - most of them felt like Stuart Maconie 'remembering' old pop cultural things for money, rather than something long-lasting and long considered. I did like the YouTube Kittens playing Schoenberg, tho.

I missed the detail of Biffo knocking the policeman's helmet over, but yes, there are a few of those punctum-like moments throughout, where a genuinely anarchic thought or deed breaks through - especially startling when you know something about the hairshirt conservatism of DC Thomson as a publisher, ruthlessly crushing David Law's attempt to form a union for example, as revealed in Leo Baxendale's pretty bitter memoir A Very Funny Business (copy included in an exhibition vitrine but not otherwise mentioned). Again, I thought the exhibition would have profited a lot for having much more basic history in the accompanying text boards - about publishing in the UK, the history of comics, the particular history of DC Thomson and the Beano, etc etc, rather than some rather mundane stuff about identification and representation etc.

Dennis was created by David Law in 1951 (with Gnasher arriving in 1968). Ken Reid’s Roger the Dodger and Leo Baxendale’s Minnie the Minx both appeared in 1953, while the Bash Street Kids (also Baxendale) began their forever war on Teacher in 1954.

Thomson of course never credited writers, artists, editors, but my suspicion is that most of the characters or situations started from Thomson editorial, and were then fleshed out by a freelance artist who was often given quite a lot of freedom to improvise around the script provided, written by the editor or a freelance writer. Again, DC Thomson have rather uniquely kept ALL the original artwork to their comics, so it's quite possible they have similarly retentive records of who did what. We may never know.

My gf’s favourite meal. She calls it ‘The Beano Meal’. pic.twitter.com/xZ3s67x1qN

— Tokyo Sexwhale (@tokyosexwhale) December 30, 2021

I like to make my gravy more like French onion soup, the type of school canteen viscous gloop in that pic is giving me nightmare flashbacks!

after reading the final image in this exact baxendale strip i asked my mum (an avid beano reader herself since she was a tiny) what tf was going on

https://i.imgur.com/wJhz0xQ.png

(bad penny was not a beano or a dc thomson character tho, except as a blatant refit of minnie or beryl: she was in smash!)

pic.twitter.com/JnbVFoc72I

— Good Faces (@good_faces_bot) October 9, 2022

critical support for the shooter of peas here

But what did Sid do other than be Toots' brother? Did any strip EVER centre on Sid?

This never got sorted.

sid's snake!

b-b-but

sid's snake! (warning: not real answer)

― mark s (mark s), Wednesday, July 30, 2003

https://m0.joe.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/12171541/Beano11.png