The Beano #1768: Half way there

Welcome back to my reviews of significant issues of The Beano from across its eighty-year history, as chosen by DC Thomson themselves.

It all began with this post, giving a personal overview, then went on to look at issues from 1938, 1945, 1951 and 1960. So go and have a look at any or all or none of them.

This issue is dated June 5th 1976 and will be the last issue I look at (for a while at least) that was printed before I was born. Albeit only by a few weeks. I'm old guys. So old. Like body-giving-up-on-me old...

Ahem.

So the first thing to notice is that cover star. Yes, our boy Dennis the Menace has finally taken up his rightful place on the cover. Knocking off boring old Biffo the Bear after 26 years (!) as cover star. Dennis took to the front page in 1974.

Also, one may notice the banner across the top declares the existence of the Dennis fan club! More on that story later...

Another new development is that Dennis' adventure continues on the back page! The whole back page!

Let's take a leap over there right now and see what's on the other side of that wall...

Feels weird going to the back page so soon in the review, but needs must.

One more thing to note before we move on is the change of creative personnel. Many of the artists I mentioned in the 1960 issue review are no longer here. They lost Ken Reid and Leo Baxendale to Odhams/Fleetway back in 1964  and Dudley Watkins and Davy Law to the Reaper's scythe more recently.

Hence, this Dennis is by the great David Sutherland, who took over in 1970 and continued until 1998. It's a striking visual that retains the spirit of Law while being its own thing. And still the Dennis most people think of.

Inside we go on our journey into the now 20-paged Beano.

Page 2 gives us Wee Ben Nevis, a michty Scottish boy who disnae ken his ane strength.

Here he is slamming his teacher's car door.

An unremarkable strip by Vic Neill, who would go on to create the much better The McTickles.

Next up, another long-lived, fondly remembered strip: Pup Parade (starring the Bash Street Pups).

Doggy analoggies to the Bash Street Kids, Bones, Sniffy, 'Enry, Tubby, Wiggy, Manfred, Peeps, Dotty and Pug (and sometimes Spinner the Spider) were created by Gordon Bell in 1967 and stayed in The Beano until 1988 before going on to The Topper/Beezer and Topper until 1992.

This week, Bones and Sniffy are playing golf.

Minnie the Minx now gets two pages, due to her popularity.

Now drawn by Jim Petrie, who took over from Baxendale in 1962 and continued till 2001. Again this is a wonderful continuation, adding Petrie's style to Baxendale's designs making a beautiful new thing.

We get to see a bunch of pranks as Min does warm-up exercises, practicing for doing things like stealing from nemesis Fatty Fudge.

And it all ends with a slipper.

Lord Snooty (and his pals) are still here, but by now we're down to just Scrapper, Fat Joe, Doubting Thomas, Snitch and Snatch. The girls and the animals are gone.

Although, frankly, the personalities of all the characters are interchangeable at this point.

Dudley Watkins ceased drawing the strip in 1968, with Robert Nixon taking over until 1973. Here we have Jimmy Glen, who drew the strip until 1988.

Although fondly-remembered (not least by me), this has little of the charm of Watkins' work and is so far from the original concept it may as well be any group of kids, like The Banana Bunch, say.

In this strip the gang hire a "lightning artist" to paint their portrait and to test his skills they get him to sketch Billy Whizz.

Another well-loved character next with Ball Boy. The football mad tyke only arrived the previous October and was drawn by Malcolm Judge until he passed in 1989 and has been appearing on and off by various artists ever since.

Sorry, not much football action this week. And none of his regular team mates show up either.

On the next page is one of my childhood favourites: "Baby-Face" Finlayson, the cutest bandit in the West.

A thief (usually of food, not unlike The Three Bears) who looked like an ugly baby and got around in a motorised pram.

Surely he was based on Baby Face Finster from the 1954 Bugs Bunny cartoon Baby Buggy Bunny (not one of Chuck Jones' best but still pretty good, you can watch it here if you want).

Finster is a bank robber who uses his small stature to disguise himself as a baby. The name, presumably a play on real-life 1930s bank robber Baby Face Nelson. 

Anyway, a typical "Baby-Face" Finlayson story would involve a relative who is also named "Something-Face" helping with a robbery. This week sees astronaut cousin "Moon-Face" attempt to steal the Moon's cheese. Obviously it goes wrong and they are arrested in a cheese factory by resident antagonist Marshal "Marsh" Mallow.

"Baby-Face" had first appeared in Little Plum and was created by Ron Spencer (not to be confused with the Magic the Gathering artist which Wikipedia links to) from 1972 to 1991. The art style is delightfully bizarre.

Then we get a rather more down-to-earth strip with Tom, Dick and Sally. A simple strip about a little girl constantly besting her bullying older brothers.

It was created by Dave Jenner but mostly drawn by Keith Reynolds and ran from 1975 to 1986.

A small tangent here but when I watched the sitcom Third Rock From the Sun I noticed the male characters took the names Tom, Dick and Harry and the female took the name Sally. I always wondered if it was because of this strip. Seems unlikely, right?

We have now reached the centre pages which now has The Bash Street Kids spread over them, given room to go wild.

As with Dennis, this is now drawn by the wonderful David Sutherland. Sutherland took over in 1961 and I never tire of reminding people he is still drawing it every week to this day. That's one strip a week for 57 years!

I love the style of this. And now we have Sidney's twin sister Toots as a regular as well as class swot Cuthbert Cringeworthy. Cuthbert was really another Walter.

A pun on the word "spelling" leads to Toots pretending to be a witch and putting the frighteners on Teacher, right across the centre staples...

Of course Teacher figures it out eventually...

Next up, The Three Bears, which, since Baxendale left in 1961, was drawn by Bob Mcgrath until 1985.

Like last time we see them decoding smoke signals. But lets get to comedy violence!

Nice!

Another stone-cold classic next: Billy Whizz!

Like Ball Boy (and last time's Colonel Crackpot's Circus) this is another creation of Malcolm Judge. The fastest boy alive debuted in 1964 and was kept on after his creator's death in 1989, passed around various artists and been more-or-less consistently appearing ever since. 

I was fascinated with that design as a kid, the way the antennae-like hair stuck up and the lines around his head didn't join. "Are they allowed to do that?" 

Another icon we have not seen before on this journey is Roger the Dodger.

At this point Roger is drawn by the great Frank McDiarmid (well-known for his work for Fleetway such as The Krazy Gang, Cheeky and Pongo Snodgrass).

This version of Roger has less of a cheeky look and more of a malevolent evil. I guess that fits. He is more of a schemer than his contemporary mischief-makers. He also has a pet crow called "Crow".

I really like McDiarmid's style but it feels like he's holding back on the weirdness he will bring to his later creations. He drew the strip from 1976-1986 after various artists had been given a chance following creator Ken Reid.

Ah yes, Ken Reid. Can't help feeling we've been slightly robbed by not getting any Roger by Reid. The strip was on its only hiatus at the point of the last issue we looked at. But if you want, you can have a look at some Reid strips here.

Next up is the first appearance ("Starting now!") of Jacky Daw with Maw and Paw.

A simple strip about a clumsy young bird which, I'm told, is by David Gudgeon and has this nifty gag where Jacky is twanged out of the panel:

I love it when comics do that kind of thing.

Boring old Biffo the Bear is still around, now drawn by Jimmy Glen. It really feels like a relic by now. A thing from the 1930s. Which it definitely is but feels like it hasn't noticed how the rest of the comic has changed.

The art style looks like it's stuck in the old Beano (is Glen just too devoted to replicating Watkins' style?) and this week's strip has Biffo and pal Buster playing with a hoop and stick as well as men having their shoes shined. 

Surely this stopped with The Little Rascals?

A glimpse of the past is followed by a glimpse of the future!

It's the Dennis the Menace Fan Club! The launch of the society I and many others joined and was re-launched this year.

By joining the fan club you were also made a member of Gnasher's Fang Club.

You got a wallet, a membership card, two badges (one of them furry, with googly eyes) and access to the secret code words.

This was also the first Beano letters page. 

Being the first meant that they didn't have any letters yet from readers, so instead they came from within Beanotown.

Grandpa was another Reid creation, now drawn by Jimmy Glen.

The adventures of another mischief-maker but this time with the twist that he's an elderly gentleman getting into scrapes.

Anyone wondering about the problematic nature of cultural appropriation of Native American culture can relax. He's just got stang off of some nettles.

Anyway save that indignation for Little Plum.

Yep, Baxendale's "Redskin Chum" is still with us, now drawn by Ron Spencer (as mentioned earlier) and I love the style of it.

And that's it. We've reached the back cover once more and The Beano has found its Platonic ideal. First went the prose stories, then the picture stories and now we've seen the back of adventure stories altogether. The comic is now entirely made up of humour strips, plus the letters page. Not that future editors won't experiment with non-humour content in the future.

Before I go, I have one word to say to you, dear reader.

Ding.

The Beano #954: NOW we're talking

And so we continue our journey through the 80-year history of The Beano, the UK's longest-running comic.

If you want to, you can read my personal history of The Beano here, or visit my reviews of single issues from the 1930s, the 1940s or the 1950s. Go on. I'll wait for you here.

You're back! Great!

Okay, today we are looking at issue #954 from 1960 and this is the point where it really starts to look like the comic we all grew up with. Largely thanks to some newer talent. But we'll get to that.

As you can see, Biffo the Bear has stuck around as cover star, still drawn by the great Dudley D Watkins. I love the expression on Biffo's face here (and his pal Buster's face too).

The inside of the comic has, however, made great leaps forward in style. In fact, this issue was chosen for the boxed set because the comic had had a redesigned "new look". 

The editor of The Beano from issue #1 was George Moonie but in 1959 Harold Cramond took over, bringing a fresh approach to the children's comic market. 

For example, there's that new logo you can see on the cover above. That combination of black, yellow and red that (with variations) remained that standard for the almost sixty-tear period since. The page count is now up to a healthy 16 pages.

And there's the characters...

Dennis The Menace is, of course, still with us. His popularity meant he now gets a full page, instead of the half he had when last we saw him. He is also the first thing the readers see once they're past the cover. 

And Davy Law's art really pops off the page here. I love it. His style has developed incredibly well.

The story here concerns Dennis' Dad offering to take on his judo teacher. I love how casually cruel Dennis is to the other boys in town...

Of course the whole thing is a misunderstanding as Dad thought he was challenged to a game of Ludo and after a humiliating defeat he takes it out on the boy.

Our first spanking! Not a slipper though...

On to page three and we get another of those all-time great comics creators. It's our first glimpse (on this tour) of the work of Leo Baxendale.

This is The Three Bears, itself a spin off from Baxendale's Little Plum (more on him later).

Ma, Pa and their son Teddy are three bears who live in a cave near to a town in an Old West setting. They are perpetually hungry and looking for food to steal.

In this story, a coyote is reading smoke signals and discovers a shipment of steaks will soon be passing through. When word reaches the bears they are determined to beat all the other animals to it.

I love Baxendale's cartoony style which looks like it was heavily influenced by US animators like Tex Avery and Bob Clampett.

Oh, and it all turns out to be another hilarious misunderstanding.

Adventure time now with The Ting-A-Ling Taylors. This one has a high concept that sounds like a Viz parody.

So it's a family who live on an African wildlife reserve. 

And they own a big red fire engine.

All right, so we've got an ethnic stereotype and the "great white saviour" trope but this was well written and nicely presented so I'll allow it.

This was a two-page story and featured the fire engine being used to subdue the elephant for long enough that they treat the injured foot that was driving it mad.

This strip did not last long, I imagine because the writer ran out of ways a fire engine could be used to solve animal problems.

Time to check in with the only character to have appeared in every review so far: Lord Snooty. And his pals.

The "pals" seem to be the same ones as the last time we saw them, apart from Polly who is no longer in the gang (or possibly has been edited out).

Excitingly, however, we do get our first glimpse of Professor Screwtop! All right maybe not exciting for you but I perked up when I saw him.

Anyway, Screwtop was Bunkerton's abent-minded wacky inventor character and hit all the same cliches of the type from Gyro Gearloose to Professor Branestawm.  In later years he would turn up in other strips. I have an 80s Beano Comic Library where he invents a time machine a sends various characters back through history. I'll do that one here someday.

But more interestingly, a version of the character was brought back into the comic recently and appears in the current Dennis animated series along with his daughter Rubi Von Screwtop.

Back to the story in hand and the gang find the Professor's invention of a mobile paddling pool useless so head back to the castle...

Note that Watkins was allowed to sign this strip.

Also: this page featured an ad for the latest Black Bob book ("The Dandy Wonder Dog")

It's time for some more of that sweet sweet Baxendale action next as we get our first look at another iconic (and I do not use that word lightly) British comic strip:

Yes! It's The Bash Street Kids! Another bunch of characters we all know.

Drink in that panel. It's fascinating to see how much Baxendale crammed into every drawing at this point in his career. And I love this comedy violence!

Originally titled "When the Bell Rings" in 1954 it was a strip that showcased the chaos of kids leaving school, usually featuring one large panel packed with detail.

In 1956 the formula was simplified and Baxendale picked out his favourite characters and put them all in a single school class and renamed it The Bash Street Kids.

In this strip the kids are recognisably the same as the ones you'd see in today's Beano. Namely Danny, Smiffy, Wilfrid, Sidney, Fatty, Plug, Spotty and 'Erbert. Only Toots is missing.

More please!

The centre pages are given over to The Great Flood of London, another adventure strip set in the far-off future of 1970. Not much has changed but we live underwater.

This was why the Thames flood barrier was built. 

Yes a "mysterious burning planet" caused sea levels to rise and London was evacuated.

Harry Foster, however decided that he was keeping his family there in spite of what an obviously terrible idea it was because Brexit means Brexit and it would be an insult to democracy to give in now.

So yes, they live in the Elizabeth Tower in the Palace of Westminster (it's not called Big Ben) and scavenge from submerged shops.

Remarkably, it is drawn by David Sutherland, the man who would take over Dennis from Davy Law and is still drawing The Bash Street kids today after taking over from Baxendale in 1962! That's 56 years!

Simple gag strip Wonder Boy is next. About a boy who wonders. 

Here he is wondering what it would be like to be a long jumper.

This page also has an ad for the new Beano Book, promoted by more Baxendale art with a picture of Little Plum. I said we'll get to him later.

Next up: Little Plum. 

It's that Baxendale man again.

Again, I love all the little details, like the fish biting things.

Little Plum was a juvenile Native American in an Old West setting. He'd get up to the same sort of mischief as his UK-based contemporaries and usually get punished by the leader of his tribe, "Chiefy".

It was long-running and still occasionally appears in today's Beano, now drawn by another British comics legend, Hunt Emerson.

Some elements could be considered problematic today. For example the way characters talk is um heap big stereotype. But Little Plum is fondly remembered for a reason.

There's a final two-page adventure strip with extra-terrestrial hero The Danger Man.

Nope, no relation to John Drake.

This Danger Man is from Mars and lives on an island in the south Atlantic.

There he waits for calls for help regarding disasters, whereupon he can launch his specially-built rocket crafts, loaded with equipment to deal with any emergency.

This is Thunderbirds, five years early!

He has two child sidekicks, Jet and Jane (I don't know if they are also Martian or not) and while DM pilots the larger craft the Zoomar, they fly the smaller Zoomets.

This week's story sees them saving the cat from a burning skyscraper in San Francisco.

It would be churlish of me to point out that San Francisco does not have any skyscrapers, due to it being built on a fault line, so I won't.

As we head towards the end we get one more Leo Baxendale treat, and another comics icon: Minnie the Minx.

Again, Minnie is a character that survives to this day in the Beano and is as popular as ever. Here we get to see her creator invent some "monsters" that make Min's scary mask prank backfire.

I love these panels, in spite/because of how contrived they have to be.

The inside back cover is Colonel Crackpot's Circus, by Malcolm Judge (who would go on to create Billy Whizz and Ball Boy). A fairly simple concept about the odball characters one would expect to find in a circus.

One of us, one of us...

And so to the back page where we find the other bona fide comics genius working on The Beano at that time.

The genius is Ken Reid and the strip is Jonah.

The concept of Jonah is an odd one. He's a man who sincerely believes that his calling in life is be a sailor. However, a combination of clumsiness and coincidence means that every ship he sets foot on sinks.

Soon his reputation precedes him and no ship will have him so he has to use stealthier methods to get on board. He is, of course, inevitably discovered, usually with a loud "Aaargh! It's 'im!" and then all heck breaks loose.

Unusually, this was a serialised humour strip, with events carrying over week on week. This week starts a new story as Jonah attempts to get cast as "Huckleberry Hack, the runaway who wants to become a chimney sweep on a river boat" in this big-budget movie from Colossal Films.

Seriously Jonah, who's your agent? I'd never get an audition like that...

Anyway, when he's asked to take his hat off he is immediately recognised and break out the heck.

I love Ken Reid's art so much and we'll have a look at his work again some time. Especially his monster designs.

A cargo of springs sends Jonah back onto the ship as it moves off and we have to wait to see what happens next. Please, DC Thomson, reprint Ken Reid's Jonah.

It's worth noting here that Reid also created Roger the Dodger the previous year for The Beano, but at this point that strip was on hiatus. So no Roger today.

But come back next time and we'll see how The Beano looked in the 1970s.