This week's issue

[Digifiend]

Dave was mentioned in the Roger's Diary feature this week as well. But yeah, unless Roger gets a new artist, Dave's actually a goner.

With Bash Street, the main modernisations I had in mind was long trousers for the boys, a whole new outfit for Erbert and maybe Fatty, new footwear, and maybe a tweak to Toots' hair (girls don't wear bows like hers these days - perhaps replace with an alice band?). We already know what Danny would look like (on the infamous Danny cover, his most iconic item of clothing, the skull and crossbones jumper, remained unchanged). Teacher wears a suit - that never goes out of fashion. The only thing dated about him is his mortar board. Roger would stay recognisable as long as he keeps his checkerboard pattern top I reckon. Personally I think that being on the trousers instead of the jumper or t-shirt is the only thing wrong with Diego's design.

[swirlythingy]

Whoops - you're right, of course, I forgot about Billy.

I'm not sure what it was that I liked about the tie - the only plausible explanation I can think of is that it helped set him apart from characters like Dennis and Minnie, in that he much preferred to use his brains instead of his brawn. (I mean, he was even bullied by someone bigger and stupider than him - you could probably take a Roger script and pass it off as Dennis by switching "Cruncher" for "Dennis" and "Roger" for "Walter" without too much effort.)

I wish they'd stop trying to pass off these reprints as new - with every passing week, it gets more desperate. "Reading his retro collection", indeed! I hate it when the Beano tries to explain away period details (and even period characters - see, for example, the 2000 reprint in the 2007 Christmas special) instead of just coming clean and saying, "This strip is 25 years old, but we thought you might like to see it." (Or, possibly, "But we're skinflints.")

Particularly stupid example: a pre-revamp Dennis reprinted in the Summer Annual, which received a badge saying "Classic Dennis". This was the only reprint they owned up to in the entire book - and then only because even they couldn't think of a shoehorned explanation for why Dennis's mouth had suddenly migrated behind his eyes.

[Digifiend]

They've passed off scripts as being for different characters than intended before. One Bea strip involved Cruncher Kerr. It was clearly intended that Bea's role would be the Beezer's Little Mo, and Cruncher's role would be her enemy Mugsy. But when the Beezer Annuals stopped, they used the script in The Beano instead.

[Jonny Whizz]

I wish they'd stop trying to pass off these reprints as new - with every passing week, it gets more desperate. "Reading his retro collection", indeed! I hate it when the Beano tries to explain away period details (and even period characters - see, for example, the 2000 reprint in the 2007 Christmas special) instead of just coming clean and saying, "This strip is 25 years old, but we thought you might like to see it." (Or, possibly, "But we're skinflints.")

Looking at that strip, the following major characters appear in it that had been dropped by that time:

. Calamity James and Alexander Lemming. The strip points out who they are, as they play quite a prominent part in the story but may not have been familiar to new readers.
. Daisy and Ernest from Crazy for Daisy, although that strip had not been dropped that long prior to the issue. Like James they appear fairly prominently, but it is assumed the readers already knew who they were.
. Les Pretend appears as well, although Laura's one strip in the comic (not counting the Leses she has done for the annuals) had appeared less than ten weeks previously.
. Web Boy - the reprinted strip doesn't mention who he is, but he does appear in a few frames and gets a speaking role.
. Splodge the Goblin, who made a small appearance but is explained as Splodge, the last of the goblins.
. Joe King, who doesn't make many appearances, though he does get a speaking role.
. Tim Traveller, who only made cameo appearances in two or three frames and doesn't speak at all. If the speech bubbles had been placed differently his appearance could have been completely disguised.
. The Three Bears, who appear in America during the strip but by the end are in Beanotown with the other characters. As classic characters that have periodically appeared and then disappeared from the comic, they have a speaking role and are mentioned by name but not given a caption like Calamity James and Alexander Lemming.

Also, Billy Whizz is drawn in a very different style in the strip to the reprinted strips that were appearing the comic at the time. The strip was from when Graeme Hall was drawing Billy, and his appearance in the strip reflects this, but in 2007 the Beano was reprinting pre-tracksuit David Parkins strips, although shortly after they switched to Vic Neill strips where Billy looks more like he does in that Christmas strip. Ball Boy's football kit also changed colour, from red and black to blue and black, and at the time the strip was reprinted she was in red and yellow stripes rather than her more famous red and black.

None of the other surviving characters from 2000 had significantly changed, although Ivy's robot dog Chip appears in the strip (he was dropped before I started reading the Beano in 2002). On the other side of the coin, Fred's Bed (drawn by Lew, before Super School started), Ratz, Johnny Bean, Pirates of the Caribeano, Robbie Rebel and the Riot Squad all appeared in that issue but not in the reprinted strip.

[swirlythingy]

I'm guessing you don't have a copy of the original? Although Web Boy appeared in a speaking capacity later on, a certain amount of cover up had taken place beforehand...

became:

(Fran Tick, the "Editor's secretary", was the fictional personality who introduced the Beano Club pages at the time. Another venerable old regrettable comic trope. This was only three years ago, but it really shows how daring the Dandy was for its time (2010) in using the names of real staff members.)

While looking for that, I also stumbled across the following:

(All in one image, because apparently there's a limit of 3 attachments.)

There really was quite a lot of stuff which had to be explained away in that story, which makes it all the more embarrassing that they even bothered.

[Jonny Whizz]

Yeah, I don't have a copy of the original unfortunately. I knew that the original wouldn't have mentioned Fran, but I didn't know that the mouse was for Web Boy when the strip first appeared. The reference to the Menace car was removed because it was on the cover of the 2001 annual (and also the 2002 annual), but by 2007 it wasn't appearing very prominently.

In fairness, the strip hadn't aged that badly as a whole, thanks mainly to the Beano's generally fairly consistent character line-up. Imagine if the Dandy had tried to reprint a 2000 strip in Xtreme in 2007 - a lot of characters from 2000 had been dropped by then, whereas most of the main characters in the Beano from 2000 were still in the comic in 2007.

[Digifiend]

That's the difference between the two comics - Beano builds itself around Dennis, Minnie, Roger and Bash Street, and has done since at least the 60s. Dandy has for a long time rotated its characters, with of the current roster, only Desperate Dan and Korky the Cat being as long running as the Beano's core four strips - and Korky's appearances were sporadic in the last decade. Even the long running Smasher, Brassneck, Bully Beef and Chips and Winker Watson all ended in the late 90s to early 2000s. In fact during the Xtreme era, after Dan, the next longest running surviving character was Bananaman. The Beano's center spread has usually been Bash Street ever since Dave Sutherland took over as its artist in 1962 - 49 years ago! In that time, Dandy has had various different center spread stories - Corporal Clott, Jack Silver, Desperate Dan, Cuddles and Dimples, among others. It's even had two since it's last revamp - Pre-Skool Prime Minister and Arena of Awesome. Dandy has always been more experimental than the Beano, it's nothing new. Constant rotation, and a steady core, both have their pros and cons.

[big bad bri]

Arrgh! big middle pages just as bad as dandy with their big covers

[Digifiend]

I know...

in other news, Ivy's in this week. I guess there was still one or two of Diego's strips left in stock. Bash Street is drawn by Nigel Parkinson instead of Dave Sutherland, but the generic title panel is still used. And Minnie is a board game drawn by Laura Howell. Retro Beano features five stories - Rip Van Wink, Sammy Shrinko, Freddy Flipper Feet, Maxy's Taxi, and Winnie the Witch.

[stevezodiac]

I was quite impressed with the latest Beano when I saw it in Tescos this evening. All those cut-outs are a good idea. I might buy it tomorrow night and pass it on to my toddler neice.

[swirlythingy]

Well, that explains why Nigel Parkinson drew Bash Street last week, then!

I wouldn't exactly call it 16 pages, though - a 10 page story and 6 pages of filler. (Fatty seems to have two entries on the third page!)

Who is the mysterious "A Beano Reader"?

And as for "Funniest Bash Street Ever!"... Mike Pearse would like a word with you.

[Digifiend]

The cartoon is creeping in again is it? Advert at the back mentions Den Do, which was the mock martial art from the TV episode The Way of Den Do.

That advert is a big waste of a page. Most of it was blank.

[swirlythingy]

The cartoon is creeping in again is it? Advert at the back mentions Den Do, which was the mock martial art from the TV episode The Way of Den Do.

That advert is a big waste of a page. Most of it was blank.

Far from it be for me to defend the Beano, which as we all know is an unholy perversion of the natural order, just because something's blank doesn't mean it's a waste of space. I thought that was a far more effective advert than their usual lazy, confused five-minute job, although it had evidently had less than generous amounts of effort expended upon it (the mask doesn't even line up with the eyes!). Not having all parts of the page screaming at once was a refreshing break; it's something the Dandy's traditionally been better at (its covers are still more clear and organised than the Beano's present ones, never mind the Beano's cringingly awful 2007-10 ones), and it makes the page as a whole have far more impact. (Also, it wasn't all blank - did you notice the small print?)

But I do hope it isn't a cartoon feature after all, especially after the stills posted in one of this week's fillers. Dennis still isn't officially the Menace, and his title (although it's changed) still carries "As Seen on CBBC!" Please, I don't want to go backwards. Look at almost all of the scripts from the last few months, then compare them to one or two years earlier and see how far we've come. It would be a shame to just stop here.

[Jonny Whizz]

I think that one of Fatty's entries on the third page was an error. It looked like it was meant to be Toots' entry to me.

I agree that the Beano covers between 2008 and 2010 were often not good - they were too cluttered in my opinion, and often the cover had nothing to do with the story inside. The recent covers are an improvement because at least Dennis is the main focus on the cover again. However, I wouldn't say the covers in 2007 were poor. After the changes made in April, the cover designs didn't change that much apart from the logo, and I actually quite liked the changes made in October - having an actual comic strip was a positive move in my view. I think it was the following spring when the covers started to get worse.

[Digifiend]

Yeah, I spotted that too. Fatty will be getting the grade in his name... F, not A - for taking the credit for someone else's work!