A pirate ship is pretty much a perfect metaphor for The Beano. The riotous, chaotic, independent spirit of the buccaneer neatly resonates with the comic’s legacy and its perception of itself — while at the same time the relentless love of treasure and free gifts, for which the comic is now notorious, is a problem that also blights the character of the outlaw seamen of old.

So clear were the parallels, indeed, that this week’s Review almost wrote itself, since this issue was all about – can you guess yet? – pirates. Specifically those originating from the Caribbean region. (We’ll get to that.)

First, we must state right away that this week’s cover is the finest that we have seen in weeks. In fact it was marrrr-velous. (We promise that’s the only pirate-speak pun in this review except for, well, all the oth-arrr ones.)

In fact, it’s probably the best cover since we picked up The Beano for our first review on that rainy night all the way back in March. It is an action-packed, well-designed, kinetic and funny cover, drawn with love and attention. In the scene Dennis — who is captain of course but whose hat of insignia lies so lightly on his head that it actually levitates above it, a nice touch — fires a pea shooter at unknown assailants while The Bash St. Kids shoot cannons at The Beano logo, destroying part of it in a hail of shrapnel. Bea, Dennis’s sister, flies with a cannon ball in a suicide dive into the sea, while Minnie fires what appear to be sponges into the ocean depths, which is a futile but sweet gesture of defiance.

So impressed were we with the cover that we were almost certain the comic inside would disappoint. We said as much last week.

Not so. In fact Dennis & Gnasher’s flagship strip this time around is, in some ways, more impressive than even the cover. In the strip Dennis builds a pirate ship go-cart to get to the cinema to see (sigh) the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie. In doing so he commits an act of terrorism on the cinema screen and destroys it, but comes up with a way of projecting the film onto the sail of his cart, thus saving the day. Awkward product placement aside — as ever — the comic is really nicely drawn and put together. The first page, in particular (reproduced right) is very pleasing. And for nostalgia fans like us it was nice to see a properly old-school go-cart make it into the strip.

Of course the fact that this week’s issue was tied so closely to the release of the new Johnny Depp action romp — both Minnie The Minx and Fred’s Bed succumbed to the PR push along with Dennis — did bother The Review.

But as the weeks go on, and as the product placement tie-ins rack up, we find it more and more difficult to care. Neither Minnie — who had a good week involving buried treasure and a librarian designed, apparently, to look just like Premiership referee Howard Webb — or Fred’s outings seemed to suffer too badly. Pathetic ‘free gift’ aside (a catapult door-hanger made of paper that failed to either tie-in to the film (as it was apparently intended to) or be any practical use to anyone) the comic basically avoided selling its soul to the Depp-vil (ho ho) this time around.

Elsewhere in the comic Dave Eastbury moved remorselessly forward in his attempt to run DC Thomson dry of orange ink by delivering yet another all-orange autumnal Ball Boy. The Review wonders what happens to the energy levels of children as they turn to this page at the height of spring and see the Earth instead dry, dead and decaying. Do they see it and then slump in despair to the television and refuse to leave the house? Do they regard Ball Boy as an anachronism? An advert for exercise, a pastime so plainly pointless in the face of all this death? Is this Eastbury’s intention?

Billy Whizz, on the other hand, fought the good fight for energy and life in the face of Eastbury’s campaign of inactivity with a strip about baseball, which was a nice try but not enough to stem the tide of despair emanating from page 19.

On slightly poor form this week were The Bash St. Kids, whose (pull out and keep!) adventure took place entirely within the greyest of grey playgrounds, and as such looked overwhelmingly dull and lifeless. This is a surprise — David Sutherland is normally a bastion of quality — so perhaps it just suffered by comparison to the richest on show elsewhere.

Otherwise the comic was not without its problems. The Roger The Dodger’s ‘Dodge Diary’ feature still seems a bit superfluous, and Fred’s Bed’s Foul Facts page clearly just didn’t have enough facts about pirates to print, since it left on entire quarter of the page entirely blank so that kids could ‘draw their own Jolly Roger’. Just three weeks in and already relying on user-generated content for your facts section, Fred? We suggest you invest in an encyclopaedia sharpish — those Roger The Dodger-style tactics are not going to cut it for long.

All told, however, this was a fine week for The Beano. Not spectacular, perhaps, but funny and well-made. As Dennis says in his introduction, it’s ‘Yo Ho Ho and a comic of fun’.

We’d find it harrr-d to disagree.

Yours, blackbeardingly,

The Beano Review

In the 1980 sci-fi action film The Final Countdown, a modern-day American aircraft carrier is mysteriously thrown back in time to Pearl Harbour in 1941. Kirk Douglas, playing the captain of the stricken vessel, explains the predicament to his crew with the following words:

“We are going to fight a battle that was lost before most of you were born. This time, with God’s help, its going to be different,” he says, and then pauses for a moment before adding, simply: “Good Luck.”

The Final Countdown is thus an interesting lens through which to view The Beano. For it too is a modern vessel fighting a long-abandoned war. And it is difficult not to imagine that a variation of this speech is delivered roughly every seven days or so around The Beano’s editorial table.

Indeed, The Final Countdown is an even more apt analogy for The Beano this week, at least in name, because Dennis & Gnasher’s three-pager this week features a cameo by the hosts of Countdown, the long-running (and conspicuously not aimed at children) Channel 4 quiz show.

And so bizarre is this cameo that we’ll be surprised if it doesn’t lead to the establishment of at least one major conspiracy theory.

The problem is not the strip’s quality. The story is fine (Dennis needs his gran to help with his homework but she’s watching Countdown, so Dennis travels to the studio to wreck the recording) and the execution is fair. The problem — and the inexplicable flaw at the heart of issue 3584 — is that this strip exists at all. Why? Because it’s about Countdown.

Countdown!

And as the world has found this week regarding the death of Osama Bin Laden and President Obama’s birth certificate, apparently incomplete information surrounding a bizarre occurrence often breeds unfounded speculation. IE if something seems a bit weird, someone will usually invent a conspiracy theory to explain it.

You can almost see the YouTube videos now. Moody, brooding music plays over black-and-white images of this week’s Beano, and a poorly-produced voice-over asks us to reconsider the evidence. “How did the pitch meeting work?” the voice-over asks, dripping with anger and misdirected angst. “Did the guy with the Countdown pitch get to go first, and then someone pulled a fire alarm and no one else got a chance? Was there literally only one idea for a Dennis comic among the entire staff? Does The Beano really expect us to believe that this issue wasn’t written by an Illuminati gang of lizardmen?”

We want to make clear at this point that we at The Review don’t believe The Beano was actually edited this week by lizards, Illuminati, or a computer called The DC Editorial-Matrix 6000. We’ve just heard that it might have been. The problem is simply that there seems to be no other way to explain why this comic strip was anchored to Countdown and its awkwardly-caricatured stars, other than the more mundane reason that it was just another attempt to grab a few headlines.

Either way, the truth is out there.

Anyway, elsewhere in the comic the major talking point this month has been a spate of new ‘features’, including Roger’s Dodge Diary, Fred’s Foul Facts and a Bash St Kids pull-out section, which have arrived unannounced and now exist, whether you like it or not.

We liked the first of these, and its step-by-step instructions to repeat Roger The Dodger’s mischief. This character has always been a contradiction, in that he lives his life with an anarchic anti-authoritarianism while simultaneously maintaining an encyclopaedic, ruthlessly organised and bureaucratic note of every prank he plays, and this feature simply plays up that contradiction to humourous effect. Also, what kid doesn’t need advice on how to get out of tidying your bedroom? It’s funny because it’s practical, yeah?

The other features are a bit more suspect. Fred’s Foul Facts left us a bit flat, but on reflection the actual intended readers of The Beano will probably like it and we suppose that’s fine. The Bash St Kids pull-out, by comparison, is a piece of trash, simply because it’s so obviously a scam: the strip is already in the middle of the comic, in an easily pull-outable form. Just adding a ‘front page’ and a few jokes on a de facto reverse cover does not a four-page pull-out make.

Aside from the inexplicable Countdown fiasco and the slightly-iffy features, this week’s Beano was otherwise a very solid affair. Ball Boy was autumnal, as ever, but funny, and the Three Bears reprint was a joy. Fred’s Bed was good too. And the inside back page preview of next week’s issue featuring a classic, chaotic pirate shop was amazeballs. We can’t wait to see what happens with that set-up next week’s issue.

Finally, we refuse to take the bait when it comes to what happened to Minnie The Minx’s teacher this week — we’ve made no secret of our love for this recurring character, but this week was a bit too much… we’ll let the image speak for itself. (See below).

Overall, then, it was a weird but solid week for The Beano.

Despite all that we urge the editorial team to look up The Final Countdown and watch it. For as Kirk Douglas says, in monologue after relentless monologue: “It is not the battle out there that matters. It’s the battle within. You can only save the world when you learn to save yourself. Also, think really, really hard before you do a Countdown cameo.”

You get the idea.

Yours, counting down,

The Beano Review

It has thus far been the manner of The Review to produce up to 1,000 words, or more, for each edition of our unique brand of Beano criticism.

The reason behind this bizarre volume of words was simply that we wanted to allow our reviewers the proper time and space to make an honest assessment of the publication. We also, frankly, needed most of that word count just to make lurid comments about the physical qualities of Minnie The Minx’s teacher.

Unfortunately, due to circumstances beyond anybody’s control, The Review was unable to vent forth an equivalent word count this week. We have thus relaxed the rules, and have instead produced a review in the form of an abstract, free-verse poem.

We sincerely believe the poem is beautiful, in its way. In its finer moments the verse comes as close to the heart of the matter as only Milton, Shakespeare, Whitman, and to a lesser extent the art of long-time Bash St. Kids artist David Sutherland, have done before. Read on, below.

Ode To Beano 3583, by The Beano Review

Royal Riot front page, adorned.
Cheering crowds, hides youth, terror.
“Why the Prince is dressed in blue,
Not red!”
But we got the general idea anyway,
And despair filled our pockets,
With Middleton sand.

Inside the pages our Menace attacked the sovereign. The traitor.
Pelted her with sticky gum and words of hurtful pride.
Oddly no bride or groom appeared in the comic, as they did on the front.
Are even hand-drawn image rights now a budgetary issue?

(Sound effects by Numskulls over-used, as ever.
Also how do the little men make their spectacles?)

Billy Whizz spends the week doing make up for zombies.
We do not learn why,

But of his speed,

There is,
No doubt.

Minnie Minx’s teacher. We waited.
You did not appear.
Why have you abandoned us?
Did we gaze too long?
Was it getting a bit uncomfortable?

Dave Eastbury’s ambition vaulted the walls of the prison.
But he forgot to write a Ball Boy script again.

Retro Dennis featured a cousin, Denise.
It seems that 1967 was a troubling place.
Oh — the past!
Denise shares Dennis’s clothes, and mood.
She also shares his face.

Roger The Dodger’s diary is now a “feature”.
But not much.
Of one.

On reverse a dog dreams of riding a bike.
Is no one safe?

–

See you next week, when normal service will resume.

Yours, poetically,

The Beano Review

Given enough time and opportunity every oppressed people eventually draws a line in the sand. “We can tolerate much,” they declare, hungry and tired. “But not this.”

This is how The Beano Review feels about the pun on the cover of this week’s Beano.

We have tolerated much: the excessive ‘free’ gifts that actually cost an extra pound on top of the regular cover price, the topical appearances of David Cameron, the chaotic life of artist Dave Eastbury (more of which later). But we will not tolerate this:

“Eggs-Terminate”.

That’s right. An eggs- pun. Eggsellent. Eggcentric. Egg-bloody-sactly. The worst of the japes. The oldest of the Easter jokes. The lowest of the low. Eggs- puns are the most overused, groan-inducing, lazy and frustrating pun in human society. They require no effort, no skill, no sense of humour. They are the comedy equivalent of the nuclear weapon. They get the job done, sure. But they leave no spoils for the victor to enjoy. They’re so bad, it’s not even a yolk. (Joke.) See! You hate them too! We really expected better from The Beano.

There were lots of (non-free) gifts on this week’s Beano, and they comprised the following: a rubbish poster of a toy we didn’t understand, a packet of stickers that looked like a weird blend of Pokemon and a Japanese pop album, and a crossbow that fired little plastic balls. The first two were dross, but we actually had fun with the crossbow. A subtle call to insurrection ahead of the Royal wedding?

Still largely depressed, but energised by the crossbow, we opened up the cover of this week’s issue rapt with trepidation and fear. And then we saw it: more eggs- puns. In fact, Dennis’s introductory sermon on page two contained no fewer than three more Easter puns (“egg-cellent”, “it’s no yolk” and “cracking” gifts). Et tu, Dennis?

After this we had to take a break. Returning after a nice warm bath and a three-day holiday in the South of France, we eventually felt capable emotionally to tackle the rest of the issue.  To whit:

This week’s Dennis and Gnasher was very funny and well-drawn. The three-page Easter-themed tale included two half-page spreads of an almost-vintage quality, one featuring the feared Daleks and the other taking place up in a classic treehouse of the sort that used to entrance us when we read The Beano as children. It didn’t make up for the eggs- puns. But it went some way to proving that the comic hasn’t completely sold its soul to the Big Book of Almost Jokes.

And then there was Eastbury. Ball Boy artist Dave Eastbury, for readers not familar with The Review, is probably the most troubled artist working for The Beano today. Capabable of both great work and hideous laziness, often within the same strip, he typifies the modern incarnation of the comic in all its unreliable genius.

Eastbury also, as we realised this week while reading his below-average and typically orange, white and brown-tinted Ball Boy strip, lives in a perpetual autumn, where the trees are always dying and the grass is always parched and dry. The sun in Dave Eastbury’s comics is always setting on a scorched, doomed Earth. Birds flit about abusrdly and listlessly above the ground, but there is no wind. There is no movement. Ball Boy and friends amuse themselves training for a future that will never arrive. In the world of Dave Eastbury there is only doom.

By contrast, the legendary David Sutherland, who has been drawing in The Beano for more than forty years, turned in another great Bash St. Kids which featured bright blue skies and an exciting pirate-ship themed conclusion.

In comparing Sutherland’s work to Eastbury, it is impossible to avoid the thought that the world has moved past Sutherland’s optimism. This is a shame, but possibly an inevitable one in a world where eggs- puns are acceptable.

One small detail has kept us looking forward to The Beano in recent weeks despite its run of relatively poor form: Minnie The Minx. Specifically, Minnie The Minx’s teacher, who is a young, blond, glasses, Converse and American Apparel-wearing hottie. Often the only realistically-drawn character in the strip, she stands apart: graceful, whole. Luckily she returned in full-form this week, appearing in no fewer than nine panels, including on in which she agrees to collude in an act of theft in order to get her hands on a bag of jelly babies. We love Minnie The Minx’s teacher, and we have a suspicion that Kenith Harrison, the artist who created her, does too, whether in real life or only in his dreams.

Elsewhere in the comic this week there was again a broad range of quality and effort. But happily it was mostly a six-out-of-ten or higher. Fred’s Bed took place at Hadrian’s Wall in the Roman Empire, and was a fun and engaging little tale. Billy Whizz seemed rushed, which was admittedly apt, and The Numskulls was good enough. Roger the Dodger featured a memorably digusting compost-themed denouement, and while the double-page spread of prizes and quizzes was riddled with advertorial and product placement the retro Bash Street Kids (also by David Sutherland) was very welcome.

Indeed, to give the comic its due, there were more hits than misses this week. We had almost, although not-quite, forgotten about the eggs- pun controversy by the time we turned the page to read the inside back-page.

And then we saw it: nestled there, shamefully, but enthusiastically, was a one-page preview of next week’s issue.

A royal wedding special.

Se acerca una tormenta.

Yours, cowering from the approaching storm,

The Beano Review

Beano 3581: in there somewhere.

What do Father Christmas, the Easter Bunny and Dennis The Menace have in common? Two things. First, a crippling reliance on nostalgia. Second, the fact that they are all masters of the same rotten carnival trick: the free gift that is anything but.

For when is a free gift not a free gift? When it costs money to get it, that’s when.

Let us explain. Take Christmas. Most children regard Yuletide as a time when they merrily order their chosen toys and receive them free of charge. Little do they know that behind the scenes mummy and daddy have taken out a third mortgage to help pay for it all. Likewise at Easter the eponymous Bunny screws over both the parents and a couple of fairly major religious figureheads by taking the credit for what is, in reality, a parent-funded supermarket choco-fest.

Sad then, was it, to see the same ruse played out on the cover of The Beano this week, where a supposedly (although admittedly not technically described as ‘free’) triumvirate of LEGO-related pressies was offered for the low-low price of 166% of what you’d usually pay for the accompanying comic — a staggering rise to £2.50 from the itself recently-risen price of £1.50.

Regular Beano readers can perhaps take some solace in the fact that the cover of this week’s comic suggests that Dennis, and perhaps the editorial team, felt pretty bad about the whole affair. That is if you could find the comic beneath the Lego, plastic and shame.

Ah, there we go.

Look first at Dennis’s expression: embarrassed, red-cheeked, hunched over and apologetic. And what is he doing? Constructing a charmless, LEGO, square replacement of his best friend Gnasher, who turns away in disgust at the sight of this betrayal. Above these sad, craven figures The Beano logo stands, shattered and wavering, constructed of the very same LEGO bricks that have conspired to tear their mascots apart. It is not the fact of advertising that has ripped these heroes in twain, but the manner of it. The Dennis and Gnasher on this week’s cover look like sell-outs. And sell-outs that know it.

To The Beano’s young readership the haul of booty on the cover appeared to be simply a piece of good luck; a generous bounty of free goodies. Little did they know that it was no such thing. These gifts were bought, not given. So were the gifts at least of a high quality?

Well, no. Not really.

The centrepiece was a collectible custon LEGO minifig from the Danish company’s latest range. We liked it. We played with it. It was fun.

The other two, however, were ropier than the free rope on the cover of Rope Magazine. One comprised a sheet of minifig stickers, and the other a ’16 page’ LEGO magazine that was in fact only eight Beano-sized pages long. The mag in particular was riddled with flaws, including an unforgivable labelling of the football player minifig as the ‘Soccer Player’. The backgrounds provided for the stickers to be stuck to were laughable, and the quiz about ‘which minifig are you’ was cringe-inducing. The wordsearch was strong, we accept, but overall it was a sorry show.

As usual there were good things in this week’s Beano too. Most obviously, Gnasher was given sole control of the back-page comic, and made good use of it with an uncredited 8-panel yarn involving an attack on an arrogant postman. Launching this kind of terror on the Royal Mail is exactly what Gnasher should be doing, and while the narrative arc itself was not so much a one-act as a barely-complete-sentence, it achieved what it set out to achieve.

Dennis’s own three-page comic was also well-executed. However the story — in which Dennis orders a ton of real-life bricks to build with instead of LEGO — just felt like a hollow grab for editorial integrity in light of events elsewhere.

Likewise, Billy Whizz was a route-one winner this week, and Minnie The Minx was saved by the very welcome return of her very attractive teacher, for whom we professed our admiration last week and will be glad to see return for even more future installments.

Elsewhere Freddie Fear made his first return to The Beano since our far-too in-depth dissection of his appearance in issue 3576 this week. The story was nothing special — Freddie uses his supernatural connections to record the sound of vampires and skeletons for the school play, the end — and the art was imbued with all the oranges and warm yellow gradients we have come to expect from Dave Eastbury. And we still don’t get the tagline (“Freddie Fear: Son of a Witch”) which is either really risque for a kid’s mag, or really not funny, or both. But the tale skipped along, and we got a good sense of the dark solitude at the heart of Freddie’s existence, which was the point probably.

For all that, we still felt hollow after reading issue 3581. To understand why it is perhaps worth recounting the plot of one of the vintage Dennis comics reprinted in this week’s issue.

In the 1968 strip, Dennis agrees to take on a group of hoodlums in a tug-o-war contest, telling the men that his team mate will be ‘Walter’ — which they presume refers to the bow-tie wearing softy. Seeing the Menace’s soft-hearted counterpart dancing with a girl (of all horrors) the hoodlums are confident of victory. Only when they take the strain do they realise they’ve been had — Dennis’s team mate was not Walter The Softy, but Walter The Elephant. Dennis had laid a trap for their expectations, and forced them to see that he could not be tricked. He could not be bought. He wins, not in spite of his morals and anarchic convictions but because of them.

The Beano would do well to remember this lesson. Its enemies — and we repeat again that for all our criticism we do not count ourselves among their number —  saw its anarchic strength sapped this week by a choking advertorial tie-in. By an ally that was too soft at heart to fight the good fight.

When the contest began, between The Beano and another step towards the grave, between hope and the relentless erosion of time, the two sides took the strain. But unlike Dennis, The Beano had no elephant to reveal. No wild-card to unleash. No secret weapon.

So where was your elephant, Beano?

Where was your elephant?

Yours, LEGO-ingly,

The Beano Review