Yikes, it’s a pensioner

Though the sales have fallen from their 2m-strong heyday in the 1950s to about 200,000 now, it’s still worth pondering what the enduring appeal of The Beano is — particularly to the current generation of six- to 12-year-olds.

Nicholas, 13, and Keziah, 10, are avid Beano readers in the west end of Glasgow, and they both like its characters for their “cleverness and cunning”. Nicholas’s favourite is Roger the Dodger. “I learnt quite a few dodges off him when it came to chores and stuff. I love the way characters like The Three Bears are always scheming to get food,” he says.

Euan Kerr, the current editor, is pretty sure that “it’s the sheer cheekiness of the characters that keeps the comic alive. We keep surveying our readers and the top three favourites are always the most unruly — first Dennis the Menace, then The Bash Street Kids, then Minnie the Minx. We always write from the perspective of the child — and that always has to mean authority is oppressive”.

Historically this makes sense. The “golden era” of The Beano came just as the 1950s were beginning to lift out of post-war austerity — a time when “youth delinquency” became a big social issue. Indeed, when Dennis the Menace first appeared in 1951, social workers complained his unruliness would have a bad influence on children.

And let’s face it, The Beano is an “anarchic” world, where kids, bears and dogs are in a state of permanent insurrection against authority and (in Gnasher’s case) owners of poodles. But there’s strong evidence that we shouldn’t use the “A” term lightly. Leo Baxendale, the creator of The Bash Street Kids, Minnie the Minx, Little Plum and many other characters for British comics, has explicit associations with political anarchism.

Look on Baxendale’s website and you will find essays written for underground publications such as The Raven and A K Press, with titles such as The Beano and National Consciousness. The artist struggled for seven years to assert his rights over his creations, eventually reaching an out-of-court settlement with D C Thomson in 1987.

Baxendale publishes bespoke editions of his cult characters Willy the Kid and I Love You Baby Basil!, which take his classic style into more adult and political areas.

In an interview last week, Baxendale said the appeal of The Beano to children was “the complete lack of inhibition . . . (the characters) were driven to the brink of insanity and delirium. There was no pulling back, they were pushed over the brink”.

It’s funny to note that almost all the rebellious tykes in last week’s Beano are dressed up in the classic anarchist colours of red and black. Each copy of the comic features legions of similarly costumed malcontents roaming the streets of suburbia and wreaking havoc on the institutions of mainstream society.

There’s a lot of vandalism going on. And as for physical abuse? There’s always plenty of that.

Last week The Bash Street Kids strapped a game show host to his wheel of fortune; Bea (Dennis’s little sister) pinned a hated family visitor to the ground and shovelled coal into her mouth. And both Ball Boy and Calamity James suffered violent assault (one getting strung up by his heels, the other getting beaten up).

Stated as baldly as this it’s not difficult to imagine some opportunistic moralist raising a media scare about this “corrupter of our children’s values”. Kerr is keen to stress that “there is a comfort zone about these characters — they know they’ll always get a mild punishment, no matter how wild they get. Anyone who bullies, or shows off, always gets taken down”.

Yet the energy of these comics is irrepressible. Dandy, The Beano’s sister title, was even involved in an international terrorist scare this year when Birmingham airport banned copies of the comic because it had a yellow plastic gun on the cover, which fired a little blue gloved fist.

When you see The Beano in a newsagent’s you realise just how politically incorrect it is. So many children’s comics seem to have been programmed by an educational psychologist in Whitehall (some even announce proudly that their features are in synch with the “outlines of the national curriculum”).

The offshoots from television and films are the worst. Publications such as the BBC’s Toybox, or any of the Disney magazines, are stuffed with insidiously improving stories and assiduously mind-expanding games. No tale can be told without the children having to go through exacting memory tests at the end (Question 4: Why did the hyenas think Simba was a ghost?).

Kerr says that The Beano is “very picky about whether we get involved in educational material — we have to be careful that someone like Dennis isn’t seen to be preaching at kids, otherwise we dilute his appeal. We reject a lot of approaches”.

On another shelf in the average newsagent’s — somewhat higher up the racks — there is probably the most affectionate, yet the most unruly tribute to The Beano ever published. Viz comic may well have passed its moment of cultural hipness, but every frame-packed page remains a homage to the classic 1950s strips, sometimes explicitly. Black Bob, The Beano serial involving a heroic collie, was turned by Viz into Black Bag, which was about a heroic bin-liner.

You’d think The Beano would wish to keep its distance from this kind of subversion, but Kerr is enthusiastic about Viz.

“Whenever we’re at the comic conventions, they’re the ones we’re always closest to. I think that our bosses at D C Thomson have fired a few legal warning shots across their bows, but we take it all in the best of spirits.”

Baxendale has claimed that The Beano’s best characters were inspired by the classic Warner Brothers cartoons: and it’s true that The Beano has much more in common with that tradition than with the sententiousness of Disney.

In fact, watch the US-derived Cartoon Network on digital or cable, and any Beano fan would immediately recognise kindred spirits. For Billy the Whizz read the Powerpuff Girls, for Roger the Dodger read Dexter’s Lab, for Little Plum read Mucha Lucha. And for the eternal battle between Dennis the Menace and Softy Walter, read The Cramp Twins.

All of which begs the question: why hasn’t D C Thomson made more of these characters in an age where any vaguely iconic children’s character can be turned into an avalanche of media and commercial opportunities? Yes, there has been a Dennis the Menace cartoon series, and yes, there is a “Beanotown” brand (currently occupying a website and a theme-park enclosure at Chessington in Surrey). D C Thomson is embarking on its first foreign language translation (Mandarin) of a syndicated strip. There is even a Beano computer game in the offing. And it’s not too difficult — though it’s not exactly easy — to get Beano merchandise.

But the company doesn’t seem to be concerned that it is not wringing every drop of cash value out of its creations. For example, says the equable Kerr: “We’re not going to continue with commercial sponsorship of our cartoon competition. It would be best if we brought it in-house next year.”

With Kerr’s continual references to “the family” (D C Thomson is still a private limited company), there is a strong sense that the consistency of The Beano is somehow tied to its historic base. All the writers are still based in Dundee, many of them coming through the company ranks. And somewhat shamefacedly, Kerr also admits that “we’re all men, the writers and the artists. Perhaps that explains why the gender split of our readership is 70/30 boys to girls — and the girls are the tomboys”.

But the children know what they like. Back in Glasgow’s west end, Keziah says she “likes the way it’s written and what happens”. Ball Boy and Gnasher are her favourites because she likes “football and dogs”.

Nicholas, though he’s moving on to strips such as Calvin and Hobbes and Charlie Brown, still keeps a copy of a special London edition of The Beano, where all the characters competed for a hidden treasure, found under the Millennium Dome.

“Our grandad really likes The Beano,” says Nicholas. “My sister’s in The Beano Club and we gave our grandad a souvenir edition of the first-ever issue. He was really pleased.”

Ultimately, what’s precious about The Beano is that it seems to have established a genuine contract with its young readers (and perhaps old fools), which editors such as Kerr seem to be able to defend.

There’s no “re-moralising” of characters here, in the way that Disney comics often do with their spikier movie icons. Dennis and Minnie, Roger and Ivy (the Terrible) are always guaranteed to be incorrigible, week after week: reliable anarchists in an overbearing world.

I can hardly claim to be a liberal on this. I have regularly marched my six-year-old youngest through the latest dull-and-worthy edition of Disney’s Princess, plodding through the various word games, memory tests and morality tales.

But when I brought in some Beanos for research, I saw her pick one up for the first time. She gazed at it in wonder. There, on the pages of The Beano Summer Special, an orange-haired, almost toothless little girl — suitably adorned in a red-and-black jumper and tammy — was affixing a “spy-gadget necktie” to her father.

As far as I could see, it seemed to be throttling him to death. My daughter looked up at me briefly, checked I was a sufficient distance away and continued reading. And thus, the tradition continues ...