Comics UK

According to the Guardian...

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/j ... e-magazine

Dennis the Menace is to get a TV makeover and possibly a movie as part of a digital re-imagining of the Beano’s characters for the YouTube generation.

Beano.com, which will also offer content through YouTube and PopJam, will become the digital home of the magazine’s vast array of hit characters including Minnie the Minx and Bananaman.

ano Studios is currently working with broadcast partners to develop a new TV series, Dennis and Gnasher – Unleashed!
The series, which will consist of 52 11-minute parts, promises see the 10-year-old Dennis “aged up a bit” visually in his first CGI animation makeover.

The printed comic will stay... but...

Meanwhile, Beano magazine, which sells 38,000 copies a week in the UK, is also set for a makeover.
The magazine brand will come under the auspices of Beano Studios with a promise that it will stay “true to its classic comic-strip roots with a refreshed approach and more wide-ranging characters.”

I am trying to imagine a fully-GGI-generated Dennis.

Hope it will not be too sterile-looking, and I will give it a chance and I wish the venture success.

I hope they don't go down the path they did with `Dandy Extreme` Personally, I felt that move did for the Dandy!

I wonder if "more wide-ranging characters" means more ethnically diverse and more females, as per Marvel's recent revamping.

Raven wrote:I wonder if "more wide-ranging characters" means more ethnically diverse and more females, as per Marvel's recent revamping.

And if so, why not indeed - The Phoenix has a great cast of diverse characters and it is part of its strength. People complained about it in Thomas the Tank Engine recently (there was an Indian engine for instance which caused some outrage) but international engines have been in the tv series for a long time, that ship has sailed!

I can only imagine folk complaining if classic characters are changed. Though I suppose you couldn't really make the Bash Street class more ethnically inclusive without changing the classic line-up.

The Beano is still fairly boy-character heavy, isn't it? Although it is aimed primarily at boys.

Current lineup (using last week's issue, not counting parents, villains, or the Make Me a Menace story):
Males:
Dennis the Menace
Gnasher
Gnipper
Shouty McShoutface
Yeti
Calamity James
The Numskulls
Ball Boy
Nine of the Bash Street Kids (all except Toots - includes Cuthbert)
Eight of the Pup Parade
Dangerous Dan
Bananaman
Tricky Dicky
Billy Whizz
Les Pretend
Pa and Ted Bear
Skanky Pigeon
Roger the Dodger and Dave

Females:
Bea (albeit only as a guest in Dennis's strip)
Toots
Betty
Minnie the Minx
Peeps
Angel Face
Ma Bear
Jungle Judy

Even condensing the teams to one entry, the boys clearly outnumber the girls. The comic also has very few racial minorities - Betty, Angel Face, Dave, Benji and Chandra - and the last two are in the same strip (they appear but didn't speak in last week's issue).

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CGI animation? I'm not sure how I feel about that. Since it's a comic strip, any animation should still be 2D - and I'm pretty sure the 2009/2013 series of Dennis and Gnasher would've been CG animated, so by "for the first time" they presumably mean the 3D style used in most Pixar and Dreamworks films nowadays.

Another relaunch for beano.com, that means the current version won't have lasted nearly as long as the previous one.

I wonder if this means any changes to the comics (the licensing biz article mentions no such thing, and neither does DCT's own Courier, the Guardian made assumptions there), The Beano itself and it's monthly spin-off Epic? The annual likely won't see any changes until the 2019 edition, as the 2018 one is already being worked on and the 2017 one will be in the shops before this launches.

And would the Bananaman movie, originally supposed to already be out but still in pre-production, now fall under this new banner?

One market The Beano has never managed to crack is the US (the Bananaman cartoon is their only real success there, but of course this was decades before he became a Beano character). I wonder if this will change that?

im not fussed about cartoons as long as the comic doesnt go down the dandy xtreme route.

I think the main issue with Marvel's diversity policy is it either largely significantly downplayed or got rid of the original characters, rather than introduced a more diverse cast. If the Beano followed that route, Dennis would, at best, be a supporting character in a Dennis the Menace cartoon.

starscape wrote:I think the main issue with Marvel's diversity policy is it either largely significantly downplayed or got rid of the original characters, rather than introduced a more diverse cast. If the Beano followed that route, Dennis would, at best, be a supporting character in a Dennis the Menace cartoon.

I must admit I haven't been reading Marvel in recent years so I'm not best placed to comment, though I do keep an eye out on internet discussion and I have read & greatly enjoyed the Ms Marvel series with Kamala Khan. Did what Marvel did really get rid of the original characters though? In the case of Kamala Khan for instance, Carol Danvers is still around, so you now get Captain Marvel as well as Ms Marvel, so that does increase diversity there. And with Mile Morales as Spider-Man, again he is as well as Peter Parker, isn't he? I can't remember if he is in a parallel universe or if they just both swing around on webs in the same universe mind you.

One of the discussions I think I saw was with readers who argued that creating a new character who was black or trans or disabled just didn't have as much impact as re-visioning a big character who had lots of recognition factor. So making Miles Morales into Spider-Man instead of inventing a brand new set of powers and names has more of an effect on readers who don't otherwise see themselves reflected in the comics they are offered. I think there's something in that, though of course really you need to do both, and give the new characters time to grow - if no one had invented Luke Cage or the (significantly more international) second version of the X Men then the world of Marvel comics would have been much poorer!

Miles Morales used to be from an alternate universe (Earth 1610, editorially referred to as Ultimate), but after the Secret Wars event, that universe was destroyed and he got deposited in the prime one (Earth 616). So nowadays there are two heroes going around calling themselves Spider-Man. There's also two Hawkeyes (the second one is female and has been around for over a decade now), two Wasps (the new one only debuted last month, and is the original Ant-Man's daughter - the other Ant-Man's daughter also recently got Wasp powers, but calls herself Stinger), and two Captain Americas (Sam Wilson, the black hero previously known as Falcon, took over when Steve Rogers got aged. When Steve got his youth back, Sam suggested sharing the mantle, like the "Spider-Mans". A new Falcon had recently appeared). Thor is now Jane Foster, Thor Odinson goes by his surname and has been using an axe. There are rumours he'll discover the Mjolnir hammer from Miles Morales' world, which landed in the prime universe's Asgard after Secret Wars. Logan, the original Wolverine, was killed off last year. His daughter/clone X-23 took over the mantle, while an alternate universe version of Wolverine known as Old Man Logan got deposited in the prime universe after Secret Wars.

big bad bri wrote:im not fussed about cartoons as long as the comic doesnt go down the dandy xtreme route.

Yeah, Xtreme killed the Dandy. The 2010 revamp was great, but too little too late. I'd hate to see the Beano meet the same fate.

comixminx wrote:

starscape wrote:I think the main issue with Marvel's diversity policy is it either largely significantly downplayed or got rid of the original characters, rather than introduced a more diverse cast

One of the discussions I think I saw was with readers who argued that creating a new character who was black or trans or disabled just didn't have as much impact as re-visioning a big character who had lots of recognition factor.

For some, there's more than one character. But if, like me, you're a Thor or Captain Britain fan, there's little point buying a comic with the same name but without the character you've been reading for the past 30-40 years.

I'd have thought a better way would be duo comics, with the Falcon partnering Cap America, the Valkyrie with Thor, Daredevil with Black Panther etc. There you've got the new readers without throwing out the current readers. Bring in a few characters on the backs of the current heroes without destroying the originals, no-one can complain.

Digifiend wrote:Current lineup ... has very few racial minorities - Betty, Angel Face, Dave, Benji and Chandra...

Pretty sure Dangerous Dan is in that group.

Digifiend wrote:Yeah, Xtreme killed the Dandy. The 2010 revamp was great, but too little too late. I'd hate to see the Beano meet the same fate.

It won't.

So major changes to the UK's oldest weekly. I look forward to seeing the results.