Seven months later I’m finally back reading a classic issue of The Beano, this time from 1960. First up though, let me address something. This issue has a cover date of 29th October with a scheduled release day of every Thursday, despite the 29th having been a Friday. But if I told you the actual release date was Wednesday 26th October 1960 you might think I was wrong. Given the amount of people who tried to “correct” me about the previous three issues on socials I have to take a moment to explain.
British weekly humour comics were often dated for the Saturday after publication day and would be available the working day before the day written on the cover. Don’t believe me? Well, this comes straight from Lew Stringer, a bigger authority on British humour comics you’d be hard pressed to find. Of course, it doesn’t help that publishers (including DC Thomson) often celebrate anniversaries on the cover dates. But yep, all of my dates are correct, and with that let’s get stuck in.
I was never a fan of Biffo the Bear, drawn above by Dudley D. Watkins. I never really understood the appeal. He never did anything bear-like, he was just an ordinary, rather bland character to my young eyes and I ended up avoiding his strips in my friends’ Beano Books. The cover to #954 doesn’t change my opinion. Thankfully, David Law’s Dennis the Menace is on the very next page. However, what about that ending! For the most part the strip is fun old-fashioned Dennis fare, but he gets the slipper because his dad misheard him?! Beating your son when he did nothing wrong and you just weren’t listening? Wow, okay then!
Sadly, there’s no Halloween content in this issue despite us being so close to the holiday but it still marked an important part in Beano’s life. Harry Crammond had recently come on board as editor and the look and style of the comic was freshened up, becoming much more like that which my friends grew up with in the 80s. For example, the logo now has the famous Beano colours. There’s more familiarity with The Three Bears on the next page.
Drawn by the incredible Leo Baxendale I remember these characters well, even though I never personally bought the comic as a kid. They started out in Little Plum, their popularity leading to their own strip. Little Plum is in here too but its stereotypes are quite painful to read today so I’ve included the bears instead. Besides, their page is also much funnier! Always looking for their next Slap-Up Feed™, this is the perfect example of the lengths they’d go to every week. Still, the art is the star.
The comic had only recently increased to 16 pages after the war so a price hike was necessary and to ease the pain free gifts returned for the first time in several years. Normally used as a way of increasing slowing winter sales (thanks to the expense of Christmas), it’s the reason this issue was chosen for the box set. Strangely, there’s no indication of what the gift actually was, either in the comic or the bookazine. One thorough search online later and I found out it was one of a series of Clickitty Clickers.
Basically, they were bits of metal with drawings of characters on them that made an annoying clicking sound when pressed together. I could see plenty of these being purposely misplaced by many parents. You can check out the others available with other copies of this issue at the British Comics & Story Paper Index (where the images of the gifts above are from).
Another character we meet for the first time in this blog series is a favourite of mine in the modern Beano, Minnie the Minx. The undisputed (in my eyes anyway) star of the Christmas Specials given her history with Santa, here she’s also drawn by Leo. The story could be seen as somewhat Halloween’y I guess, even if the wonderfully drawn monstrous faces are awkwardly squeezed into the story in ways that don’t really make a lot of sense.
Speaking of Minnie and Santa, this year’s Christmas Special has already plopped through my letterbox and I’m using all of my will power to leave it be! I’m sure neither Minnie nor the comic will let us down this year. Back to our classic issue for now and Beano still had some adventure stories within its pages, albeit in picture-panel format rather than prose. Although, they seem to be showing their age more than ever.
The Ting-A-Ling Taylors is essentially a White Saviour tale of a British family (and their fire engine, weirdly) rescuing African wildlife when the locals prove unable to do so for some reason, despite having lived there for generations. It’s also telling that everyone in the family is given a name in this episode except for Mrs Taylor, who is only known as “his wife”. Next up, The Danger Man is such a clichéd 60s square-jawed hero I initially thought it was a spoof, but the Martian and his kids risk life and limb to rescue a cat from a burning skyscraper so you can call me a fan.
The Danger Man by Michael Darling
The Great Flood of London by David Sutherland
Lord Snooty by Dudley D. Watkins
The Great Flood of London tells the tale of a family living inside the famous clock tower beside the Big Ben bell, scavenging for food in half-sunken ships and shops beneath the surface. It’s difficult to judge it by one chapter of an ongoing adventure, but while it’s interesting it doesn’t do much apart from detail their everyday lives. Not the most adventurous of adventures, this one.
Lord Snooty and his pals are still here and this issue’s strip is notable for including Professor Screwtop, who modern kids might recognise as the father of Rubi, another highlight of my yearly Christmas reads. The issue also contains The Bash Street Kids, Wonder Boy and Colonel Crackpot’s Circus, but my final highlight couldn’t be anything other than the strip on the back page.
The instantly recognisable art of Ken Reid (who OiNK Blog readers will know from Faceache in The Big Comic Book) is behind the chaotic Jonah. His lifelong dream is to be a bonafide sailor but, in a career where symbols of bad luck were treated very seriously, having every ship sink after he stepped on board is nothing short of a curse. Here, he sees a way around this by playing a role in a film that just happens to be filmed on a boat.
At the very end you can just about make out Jonah being thrown back on board and the next issue saw his attempts to integrate himself with the same crew as the strip often ran scenarios over several weeks rather than resetting each time. I remember Jonah from the 80s so I’m assuming he’ll be in the following issues in this set, but whether he’ll still be drawn by Ken… well, I can only hope. (Please, no spoilers, I want to find out for myself, that’s the whole point of the blog after all.)
Deciding to cover these eight issues on their original release dates means we’ve eight months to wait until the next one, #1768. It marked the creation of the Dennis and Gnasher Fan Club. So make sure you come back on Wednesday 2nd June 2027 as we relive 1976, the year of the first supercomputer, the release of Breakout in arcades and Carrie in cinemas, Jimmy Carter, the first craft to land on Mars, the discovery of the megamouth shark, Mrs. Warsaw-pact’s (from OiNK #10) namesake and that heat wave the news kept banging on about this summer.
