the three Dinahs

[Digifiend]

So that's why Mo was dropped? I always assumed it was due to the Dandy taking over Beryl the Peril (who is quite similar to Mo, both characters being mischievous rebellious tomboys) from the Beezer and Topper after that comic folded.

[Classic Comics]

We ran Mo and Beryl in the same comic for a few years. Beryl tended to be larger scale in her mischief than Mo, who I usually kept very domestic. It was nearly always Mo and her Dad. That helped to put some distance between Mo and Beryl in terms of their schtick. We tried a few artists with Mo after Pete died but it didn't really work for me with any of them. That's not meant as disrespect to any of the artists we tried. Pete was a friend, so I would have struggled with any artist taking the character on.

[-MikeD-]

We tried a few artists with Mo after Pete died but it didn't really work for me with any of them..

I'd never heard of Pete, and a Google search for his work turned up nothing. Unfortunately, I don't have the comics with his Dinah Mo, but I'd love to see one...could someone put up a scan?

[swirlythingy]

Beryl tended to be larger scale in her mischief than Mo, who I usually kept very domestic. It was nearly always Mo and her Dad.

Funny - that's exactly the way I'd describe Beryl in the years leading up to the 2004 revamp, long after Mo's cancellation. I often found myself thinking that her character had changed to not really being much of a 'Peril' any more, but maybe it was a case of each character being kept in check by the need to distinguish from the other?

[-MikeD-]

Beryl tended to be larger scale in her mischief than Mo, who I usually kept very domestic. It was nearly always Mo and her Dad.

Funny - that's exactly the way I'd describe Beryl in the years leading up to the 2004 revamp, long after Mo's cancellation. I often found myself thinking that her character had changed to not really being much of a 'Peril' any more, but maybe it was a case of each character being kept in check by the need to distinguish from the other?

I love domestic mischief! I think it's become harder to write straight ahead 'naughty kid' characters since the 70s. Characters such as The MInx, Beryl and Dennis can't be seen to be 'getting away with it', but neither can they be whipped into line with a swift thwack of a slipper. The upshot appears to be a rise in hyper realistic hijinks, smartass remarks and badness with basically good intent. In fact, Dennis has become a superhuman recently - he can scratch build rocket engines and slap down a brick built maze outside a police station in minutes! That's not menacing…it's genius!

Over in The Dandy we have a new emphasis on the age old trope of clowns, or congenital idiot characters - which allows Bash Street Kids style anti-establishment behaviour. Sometimes I think The Dandy has a surfeit of such characters…even Dan is desperately dumb now. This isn't always a bad thing, the comic is consistently funny, but it's maybe a little limiting in the long run...

[Jonny Whizz]

Going slightly off-topic, I can remember far more examples of domestic mischief in Minnie the Minx stories than in Dennis the Menace - probably because Minnie's dad has a much clearer personality than either of Dennis's parents. I think this has been the case for a long time, as more of the 1960s Minnie strips I've seen are domestic based than Dennis strips of the same time.

Staying on topic, I think Beryl was quite similar to Dinah Mo when she was drawn by Karl Dixon and John Dallas (in that the strip focussed on her relationship with her dad), but less so in the Bob Nixon era.

[Classic Comics]

Staying on topic, I think Beryl was quite similar to Dinah Mo when she was drawn by Karl Dixon and John Dallas (in that the strip focussed on her relationship with her dad), but less so in the Bob Nixon era.

I wrote most of the Beryl scripts for Karl Dixon and focussing on the dad-daughter relationship was deliberate on my part. It had worked with Mo and we thought Beryl needed to be more domestic to work up her personality and make her more identifiable to the readers. A lot of work was done to give Dad a bit of extra personality too - being touchy about his big nose, denying that he wore a wig, being obsessively mean with money, trying to balance being an adult but having fun, as well... I think it worked for the most part.
It might sound like we just used the same idea on both stories but that's not the case. The characters are different and that leads the stories to be different. I really believe that investing story-time in the parent-child relationship in a comic strip is really worthwhile. In 2007-ish, Minnie the Minx was struggling badly in popularity polls. The relationship between Minnie and her Dad was a big part of what had made Minnie work and it had been a bit lost. So we made significant changes, switched artist and Minnie was back in the top 4. It works.

[philcom55]

It's interesting that, even in the earliest David Law strips I got the feeling that Beryl was actually quite fond of her Dad - unlike her male equivalent Dennis who seemed as near to a classic psychopath as any comic-strip character could be in those pre-Gnasher years.

- Phil Rushton

[Classic Comics]

Minnie's the same. She adores her Dad. He's a bit of a useless lump, but she adores him anyway - because he sometimes joins in her schemes. He knows he shouldn't; he knows he's the nominal authority figure... but Minnie's antics are much more fun, so he joins in. When it comes to female comic characters, it tends to be the mums who have the real authority. At least when I write them.

[Peter Gray]

Thanks Classic its been really interesting the writing side of the strip...
as you say the Dad seems more accepting of Minnie these days and joins in..also nice to see her teacher Ken is great at drawing the female form also Laura H..

[swirlythingy]

I'd say the "girl and her Dad" premise is much more appropriate for Minnie than Beryl, at least from a historical perspective. Beryl was created first, by David Law, and it was she who was supposed to have been the "female Dennis", not Minnie, in spite of the stripy jumper. I remember reading Leo Baxendale's words at the Cartoon Museum during the Beano's 70th anniversary exhibition, in which he described Minnie's genesis and the lengths to which he went to ensure she was a different character from Dennis, and how a key component of this was the focus on the long-running battles with her Dad - not all of which, again unlike Dennis, Dad would ultimately win. He even revealed he'd kept a score of the strips he drew up to the early 60s, with each strip awarded one of "Dad Wins" (last place), "Min Wins" (second) or "General Shambles" (the clear winner).

Personally, I've never seen why anyone should have an issue with allowing comic characters to be seen 'getting away with it'. I mean, they're only comic characters, after all. The Beano - rightly IMO - does seem to have finally come to the same conclusion, after all those decades of pages reliably ending with not so much 'punchlines' as 'spanklines'. Dennis, for example, has had his much-needed post-TV personality reboot, and while he's got his naughty streak back, what he hasn't got back is the almost formulaic nature of his strips - Dennis does something which makes for a catchy cover image, Dennis does naughty deeds, Dennis gets punished. It's a great improvement.

While Classic Comics is here, one suggestion: I'm a great believer in recurring characters, and the likes of Teacher and the Haarm twins really helped liven the strip up, but in one of Tom Paterson's later strips (I think - sometime around that period, anyway), two near-copies of the Haarm twins featured, under the name "The Bruise Brothers". I always thought that was a much better name, myself!

[colcool007]

...Personally, I've never seen why anyone should have an issue with allowing comic characters to be seen 'getting away with it'...

And in one sentence, you doom us all. Many comics ensured that the 'bad' were punished. Be it with a slipper in the old days or with 5 gazillion lines today. And in doing that, they help to reinforce a subtle UK stereotype where we assumed that Good will always prevail over Bad.

But as been demonstrated in reality, it doesn't always happen that way. And by not reinforcing the link between crime and punishment, we look towards a very bleak future.

[Digifiend]

Swirly, Beryl only debuted a few months before Minnie - they're both from 1953. Characters aren't created overnight, I bet they were in development at the same time.

[Raven]

...Personally, I've never seen why anyone should have an issue with allowing comic characters to be seen 'getting away with it'...

And in one sentence, you doom us all. Many comics ensured that the 'bad' were punished. Be it with a slipper in the old days or with 5 gazillion lines today. And in doing that, they help to reinforce a subtle UK stereotype where we assumed that Good will always prevail over Bad.

But as been demonstrated in reality, it doesn't always happen that way. And by not reinforcing the link between crime and punishment, we look towards a very bleak future.

Would you feel the need for anarchic, zany, cartoon characters like the early Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny to be punished at the end, for their complete lack of inhibition, and assaults on people's sanity, too, though?

It seems to me a peculiar approach for this kind of comedy, which is not of the real world, and it still surprises me to look at some old D.C. Thomson strips, like early '70s Beano pages, to see the likes of Roger the Dodger beaten so severely at the end - for some minor prank - that he needs a column of cushions to sit down on.

Interestingly enough, Leo Baxendale was very much against the idea that his characters had to be shown to be punished for their exuberance. In his book 'On Comedy', he wrote about his disagreement with Beano editor George Moonie's belief in it as a moral necessity: "I could not accept it. it was necessary for the strip's development that the Bash Street Kids should burst out into the world, and marmalize it under their trampling hooves."

He cites that "punishment" is almost always absent in his Bash Street strips, and even in the relatively few that end with whacks, they're not really about punishment but "the result of frenzied 'revenge', or of the flailings of a soul in torment - Teacher."

Because these characters inhabit a purely comedy world - and where's the humour in it?

[-MikeD-]

Would you feel the need for anarchic, zany, cartoon characters like the early Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny to be punished at the end, for their complete lack of inhibition, and assaults on people's sanity, too, though?

Maybe it's the difference between an anarchic anti-establishment stance and easily identified antisocial behaviour. Bugs Bunny tweaks the nose of the pompous, as Dennis does too in his best stories. And, as Leo Baxendale says, often the slippering is pure impotence on the part of authority. A shorthand to placate the parents and guardians, perhaps? Like I said - obviously characters cannot be seen to be getting away with it all the time and we'd expect PC Slipper to do more than shout 'ooyah!' if Dennis donned a hoodie and wilfully looted a Debenhams store, but I wouldn't like to see the characters always on the sharp end of a metaphorical spanking. Afterall, the net effect would be to show that punishment has no effect whatsoever - business as usual next issue!

What I loved as a kid about DCT comics, and it's still true, is the pricking of authority. Dennis exists to expose the hypocrisy of officialdom in a creative way. I'm sure one of the defining features of the Beano is the 'kids rule' code, which could be defined in terms of what they are against. There's even a strong undercurrent of class war…

Now, to suggest this somehow contributed to this week's social unrest…I don't see it. I'm much more concerned about the celebrity worship, the consumerism inherent in advertorials and the reinforcing of stereotypes (next weeks 'Are You A Chav?' quiz in The Dandy…I hope I'm wrong). The problems are, I think, more insidious than some black and white concept of crime and punishment. Even in childrens' stories.