UK Comics - Some samples from The Beano and The Dandy

[icon_uk]

Ah childhood! I recently chanced upon a set of treasury style books released to celebrate the history of The Beano and The Dandy, two of the longest running weekly comics in the world, when I say that one book was released to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Dandy and the Beano, and IT came out in 1987 so we're talking ooooooollllllld school here.

So I though I'd share a few of the delights that we Brits had in our youth, and in most cases here, long before MY youth too... and yes, we DID have printing presses back then! ;P

First up, one of the many historical set stories





The Dandy and The Beano (and the likes of The Topper) were aimed largely at the boys market, there were plenty of "girls" titles which have been featured here before such as Misty and Bunty (Which has many examples posted by our own dear former Moderator, the much missed greenmask )

But both titles did carry the odd series with a female lead, and usually the lead was something of a tomboy, and sometimes a very non-stereotypical looking girl (though wjether that was a grounbreaking example of early non-sexist comics, or an indication that "girls are weird" I don't feel qualified to comment on.

First, and I love the name, Ivy the Terrible... (And Minnie the Minx cameos, but more on her another time I hope)



And then we have Dinah Mo! (Who IMHO bears an uncanny similarity to Popeye)



In the past I've posted pages from another UK series about animated toys, but this is perhaps the best remembered, General Jumbo (Who often featured in one form or another in titles where UK characters are referenced, such as Grant Morrison (Who had an analogue meet an unpleasantly horrible end in Zenith) or Alan Moore (Who had an alternate world's "Colonel Tusker" be one of the heroes killed by the Fury in Captain Britain, and less violently, he is the inspiration behind Top 10's "Colonel Lilliput", the father of regular character "Toybox")

He first appeared in 1953 and has been regularly revived and refreshed for each new generation, though he hasn't been seen in a few years AFAIK.

Here is a fairly early example where Alfie Johnson (Who is nicknamed Jumbo because he's rather heavily built, though it's hard to see it in any examples I've seen) temporarily sets aside his many soldier toys and picks up a few sailors (He's 12 get your mind out of the gutter!), making him Admiral Jumbo in this instance I suppose.





Not a bad little story to manage in two pages!

And this last one I had never heard of before reading the book, it's a series from 1975 about an ordinary lad and his robotic cat (which makes a change from the more usual robotic dogs... though there's one of those as well), and it has all the demented logic that one might assume from a series called "Tomtin and Buster Brass".... which sounds like they should be mixing and laying down tracks somewhere.

Have to say, though the world depicted is NOT that of the 1970's (Even we were a little more up to date than this) I LOVE the art in this story.

Comments

[captainbellman]

Yeah...as much as they were full of gems, I'm still quite surprised that my childhood self didn't notice a lot of the shockingly racist content (even by 90s standards) that the two comics regularly churned out. Every East Asian character being coloured bright yellow and doing the Ls-for-Rs pidgin speak ("Velly preased to meet you!"), or the Dandy running a feature called "Postman Patel", who goes around wearing a giant turban and saying "goodness gracious me!".

Still. Ignore that bit and it was mostly good for a laugh.

[icon_uk]

Yes, I avoided the "Little Plum" strip for that reason....

[kamino_neko]

I grabbed a bunch of old Beano scans a while back, out of curiosity, and was...not shocked, since it was from the mid-30s, but mildly appalled by the 'darky' image used in their original logo (IIRC, it lasted about 10 years)...

[icon_uk]

It was a particularly unenlightened time... though they did get to lampoon Hitler and Goebbels during wartime before things were viewed as being a little bit too serious for them to be taken lightly and the "Addie and Hermy" strip was dropped.

[chrisdv]

Yeesh, I still remember when they introduced Dennis' sister, it was actually considered newspaper worthy.

[icon_uk]

Indeed, and also Gnasher's offspring, Gnipper!

[kamino_neko]

Who IMHO bears an uncanny similarity to Popeye

It's SO not just you. I was half expecting a spinach reference through the strip.