Baxendale on the Beano

[HighAndMighty]

(It's a month old so this may have been posted elsewhere on these pages but I couldn't find it...)


From the Daily Telegraph- Baxendale on the Beano's 70th
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/ ... enace.html
"On a brilliant sunny day in 1938, exactly 70 years ago this week, I stood in the school playground, doing nothing in particular, while all around was clamour. I was seven.
By Leo Baxendale


This was an historic day, although I didn’t know it. An older boy rushed up and thrust a comic into my hands: “Look at this!”

I studied the comic politely, then handed it back, and he rushed off. The boy had just shown me the first issue of the Beano, published that day. For him, it was a wonderful moment. Given that I would work in comics for much of my life, you might have expected me to feel the same – but I was actually rather disconcerted by the cover, which featured an ostrich, Big Eggo.

......

At grammar school during the 1940s, I did read the Beano and the Dandy (published on alternate, paper-rationed weeks), but mostly out of professional interest – to study Lord Snooty and Desperate Dan, the creations of cartoonist Dudley Watkins. I knew by then that as an artist, I meant to deal in comedy.

.......

And then, in 1953, when I was working as a freelance cartoonist, the dam burst: I created a Red Indian called Little Plum for the Beano in April of the year, Minnie the Minx in September, and the Bash Street Kids in October.

At the end of the year, in this headlong rush, I drew a strip that proved pivotal: Bash Street School visiting an Army display in the park, carrying off the heavy weaponry as booty. In the background, sundry Kids shelled Bash Street School and machine-gunned the fleeing teachers (this was 15 years before the similar scenes in Lindsay Anderson’s film If, and long, long before the horrors of Columbine and Dunblane).

I realised that I could draw a strip like this for years and the readers would love it. But at that very moment, I abruptly decided to change the structure of Bash Street: to get rid of the focus on the school as a whole, and concentrate on a smaller group of named protagonists, so that I could bring them closer to the readers.

One of these was Plug – I gave him his name from the phrase “plug ugly” (he took after his mum – his dad was a raving beauty). It took a little while for me to work out his true nature. Then the answer came: at the heart of Plug’s comedy must be an inner vision of himself as a radiant being.

The worlds of Little Plum, Minnie the Minx and the Bash Street Kids all differed from each other, but they were all built on a bedrock that offered rich pickings for producing comedy. Disasters could happen for no apparent reason, but more often, the crises and “marmalizings” had been set in train unwittingly by the ambitions, desires and actions of the characters themselves.

Yet these were not worlds of conformity, of certainty, but of complexity, change and sudden gusts of wind. Perhaps that was the secret of their success. I knew that the drawings would be printed by the million, but was also aware that for each child their Beano was particular to them: to read, to pore over, to absorb, to return to again and again. Holding our work in their hands, they knew that we were intent on making something that mattered, something that came to life.

[...] Then, in 1955, commercial television came into being, and the bombardment of the senses began. With it came more complexity, more change, but also a greater coarseness, a loss of the innocence that characterised our work.

This week, for example, we have been told that the number of violent attacks by women has doubled in just five years. Characters such as Minnie the Minx used violence, but were not defined by it. I realised as I drew her adventures that what drove her was an intensity of will. This was an Amazonian warrior, a street-fighting woman, but I never showed her hit another child. Where would be the comedy in that? Minnie’s fighting techniques – employed against armies of boys – and her inventive demolishing of misguided careers officers and headmasters, would have needed intricate choreography to replicate in real life.

Similarly, when I came to create Bash Street, the name was a misnomer. The Bash Street Kids did not hit each other, or anybody else. What would have been witty about that? The world might be trampled underfoot by the daily stampede out of Bash Street School; the nervous system of Teacher might be under relentless siege; classrooms might explode; battleships might be sunk (“Oh dear, did it cost a lot?”) – but there was no bullying.

The cruelty that came to characterise entertainment, I regarded as intended to diminish a person. Of course, I wasn’t perfect. Early in 1953, the founding editor of the Beano, George Moonie, was disturbed that in one of my first Little Plum sets, I had drawn something unfortunate happening to a bear. George thought the bear should have done something to deserve it.

Today, the Beano is still here, celebrating its anniversary with, among other things, an exhibition at the Cartoon Museum in London. Yet in recent times, the comics industry has come under intense stress. The Dandy has rebranded itself as “Dandy Xtreme” in an effort to appeal to today’s unsettled youths. But what mattered about our work was not its title, but the values it presented.

When I read about today’s knife culture, and youth violence, and politicians talking of a “broken society”, it makes me think of Little Plum, the Red Indian I created in April 1953. He was a puny being, trapped in a world of thirsty deserts, and hungry vultures circling with knives and forks at the ready. For today’s puny beings, born into the desperate now, it will take more than a comic to stop the ground shifting.

Yet I can take comfort from the generations that read the Beano, and learnt from its pages that while we live in a world of uncertainty and ugliness, we can still, like Plug, be radiant beings – and find, as he did, the wit and the spirit to survive."