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

It is perhaps going too far to say that this week’s Beano knowingly pushed the UK towards revolution. And it is perhaps over-menacing the Dennis to suggest that Beano 3580 was a Numskull or two away f

Having said that, in this age of austerity any price increase in a product as universally important as comics aimed at the under-tens is a risky business. Done without due care, attention and cause this type of goalpost repositioning will create dangerous levels of anger among the general population. Jürgen Habermas warns about this somewhere in Reason and Revolution. Again, look it up.

To speak plainly, The Beano rose in price by 15p to £1.50 this week, and the increase was timed, perhaps not accidentally, to coincide with the new tax year and a further tightening of the belt for the UK’s comic-buying families.

When we at the Beano Review first heard about this change, we were extremely concerned. The Beano is facing stronger competition than ever, and disaster may indeed strike if it were to price itself out of the market. Plus, we really, really don’t want The Beano to have any more money than necessary, lest they recommission Robbie Rebel.

What a pleasant and honest surprise it was, then, to pick up this week’s issue and find that (profit/loss analysis aside) DC Thomson’s price increase was entirely justified.

To start with the most obvious, and most positive, change, The Beano changed its paper stock this week as well as its price, and the result was nothing short of astonishing. The new paper is heavy, tear-resistant, firm, sharp and solid. If let fall onto a clear desk, this week’s Beano lands with a satisfying slap: not quite a thud — this is no monthly anthology or annual — but a strong and declarative punch. Held betwixt a thumb and two fingers the new stock has backbone, and strength. It convinces you not only to keep it flat, but that it will remain so without your attention. It will increase the lifespan of the average Beano by 4-12 weeks. It is an astonishing improvement on previous weeks’ flimsy, rumpled paper. It is a revelation.

Admittedly, like eyes to a high-resolution television, or consciousness to a swift punch to the head, the impact of The Beano’s new paper dulls with time. We quickly adjusted to its charms, and briefly even lost patience with a slight tear between pages 14 and 15 of our edition. Then there is the so-called ‘pull-out poster’ centrefold, which was cheap-looking, unimaginative and basically appalling. But these were minor faults, if even faults they were. For the Beano Review the new paper stock was worth the 15p price rise alone.

This week's basically worthless Beano centrefold poster.

Perhaps anticipating a positive reaction from the Review, the Beano decided to piss us off in a variety of other ways this week.

Take the cover, which is another irritatingly topical one, this time around featuring a headline-grabbing (probably) appearance by President Obama. The caricature of Obama itself is quite good. Obama’s hands (five digits to Dennis’s four) are particularly well done, weirdly, and the choice to exaggerate Barry O’s teeth and not his more mockable ears was sensible. Unfortunately the pun (of the White House/Treehouse genre) is another dud, and the more The Beano repeats the same bland blue-sky and recycled Beanotown skyline background the more we expect kids are learning to ignore it, Obama or no Obama.

Seriously, DC — take a poll of 100 kids. If more than 40 know Obama is in town this week, we’ll eat our subscription.

Inside the cover, Dennis’s encounter with the Prez is on temporarily risky ground when the Menace appears to attack Obama’s guards with a pair of pistols. Sure, it’s always clear that these handguns shoot only water, but there must have been an editorial meeting or two about this one. We think they got it right, and the story — Dennis is testing O’s guards for competence — has a positive ending. But still, it makes for an uncomfortable read for 16 of the comic’s 17 panels.

There is yet more politics on page 27 this week, as Gnashional Treasure features Cameron, Miliband and a pretty pathetic drawing of Nick Clegg (The Beano’s second in two weeks) as they try to decide what to make Obama for dinner. The strip is okay, but we stand firm on the fact that The Beano is going a bit overboard with the Westminster politics. At this point we would not raise an eyelid if issue 3581 featured a nine-panel strip set entirely within the House of Lords during a technical debate on voting reform legislation.

Further questions were raised later in the issue. Among the more pressing were: did the artist behind this week’s Billy Whizz really just set the strip in the Alps to avoid having to colour in his backgrounds? Shouldn’t Retro Dennis have treated his apparently dying father with more respect than dousing him with water and mocking his pathetic attempts to hobble after him? And when did Minnie The Minx’s blonde, Converse-wearing, bespectacled science teacher get so absurdly attractive? She’s like a younger, nicer, gigglier and more intelligent version of Robbie Rebel’s mum. More please.

Other negatives included a a ropey Ball Boy effort from the variable hand of Dave Eastbury, a sad step back in quality from last week, another ugly outing by Fred’s Bed and a Numskulls strip about fish pedicures, which just made us uncomfortable. As usual, we loved Bash Street Kids and Roger the Dodger for their consistent approach to the nuance of character, and some funny gags.

Of course we are acutely aware that the quality of this week’s paper stock was such that whatever The Beano published, we wouldn’t have paid any attention. They could have filled the comic with already-complete Sudoku puzzles and over-60s erotica and we wouldn’t have minded, so impressed were we by a simple change in paper supplier. In that sense this week was a free-pass: as we have already mentioned, technical improvements only dazzle for so long.

And if Kate Middleton ends up on the cover in the next two weeks, as we fear she will, all hell is going to break loose.

Yours distractedly,

The Beano Review

Like a stooped, aging king standing at the edge of a rising tide, The Beano is nothing if not defiant, resisting as it does the whims of contemporary culture and the waves of protests that pummel its shores with the stoicism and defiance of a block of granite, albeit one shaped like Dennis’s endlessly fascinating hair.

Through refusing to remove the various gay stereotypes, child beatings and Hitler moustaches from inside its covers, for instance, and by only ever making changes to its content for reasons that appear unconnected to either creative or financial logic, it is as if The Beano believes that its very soul is defined by the dark idiosyncrasies at its heart and the fact that it refuses to acknowledge them.

Given this endemic character flaw, it is comforting to note that The Beano has so far refused to change anything that we at the Beano Review have pointed out via our brutal, unrelenting criticism.

In this way The Beano Review is now as much a part of Beano history as Dennis’s unibrow, for by the ineffectual impact of our criticism itself do we enhance the character of our subject.

Indeed, virtually every page of this week’s issue, for once correctly numbered #3579, is a celebration of DC Thomson’s rejection of everything we stand for, and everything we stand against.

Let’s take the cover. Last week we bemoaned the fact that The Beano placed an obvious Formula One reference on the front page, since it was clearly timed to match the start of the racing season in Melbourne. We resented its topicality: we said it then, and we’ll repeat it, that The Beano should forge, not follow, the editorial and artistic agenda of the week for the 6-13 demographic in the wider Dundee area.

So what happens this week? Dennis The Menace appears on a well-drawn, if not exactly eye-catching, front page dressed as a wrestler, just a few days before… you guessed it: WrestleMania XXVI hits television screens. And so our souls die a little more. You bastards.

Now, we have no idea if these topical covers are part of an advertising deal. That Wrestlemania itself is mentioned nowhere inside the comic suggests it isn’t. But from a purely artistic point of view we hate this trend, and moreover, we just cannot conceive of a kid in Tesco badgering Mum to buy The Beano because Dennis is dressed like a wrestler. Do kids buy magazines for their topical jokes? Does anyone who can read even watch wrestling? And why when the cover is supposed to be Dennis as a wrestler is he actually wearing the swimming costume of a man at the beach in 1897? Whatever the answer to these questions, our view remains the same: The Beano must define itself, not allow itself to be defined.

Inside the comic this week we are treated to an almost insane number of celebrity appearances, references and in-jokes, something which is also apparently designed for the sole purpose of annoying The Beano Review.

Fred’s Bed adds insult to the wrestling injury by meeting real-life wrestler Wedge, and then running with virtually the exact same storyline as the main Dennis and Gnasher comic. More ambitiously The Ratz launch an insurgent campaign on the Downing Street Cat,  and end up causing havoc in a cabinet meeting where David Cameron, William Hague, Theresa May, Eric Pickles and a tiny man we assume is Nick Clegg are discussing something boring. True, the comic itself is quite good — we liked DC’s secret Beano collection (panel 10) and the fact that the cabinet meeting in the comic has more women in it than the actual cabinet — but it all felt a bit unnecessary.

Later, The Queen and Prince Phillip turn up in the Mighty Dork promo, and Kate Middleton and that guy she’s marrying make an annoying appearance in an otherwise very new-school, and weirdly Photoshopped — but on the whole likeable — Ivy The Terrible.

But then there is Robbie Rebel. Now, we don’t want to repeat ourselves here but Robbie Rebel is quickly becoming this column’s least favourite thing, either inside the Beano or anywhere else, and the constantly-winking little dweeb makes yet another good fist of almost ruining the Beano this week. We don’t have space to take this comic apart as viciously as we usually do, but let’s just say if you’re going to include An Attractive Celebrity Woman in your comic then you date yourself by about a million years in the eyes of Beano readers if you make it Ginger Spice wearing the Union Flag dress she wore to the Brit Awards. In 1997. It’s like those caricaturists in holiday hotspots that still advertise their services with drawings of Princess Di. Modernise!

On the plus side this week, one comic that we have previously slated did show a marked improvement. Dave Eastbury’s Ball Boy — whose strip in our review of issue 3576 we tore to pieces for being an obvious 10-minute rush job — is the best thing in the comic this week. Drawn with grace and a sense of detail, and including a 3-panel time-lapse cartwheel in panels 6, 7 and 8 which really sets the comic alight, it’s an all-around great job. In particular we liked the fact that Ball Boy’s shopping bags were labelled Tesda, which is a small detail but a very Beano-esque joke all the same. Mr. Eastbury, we apologise for dismissing your talents in our first review. Let’s hope the good streak continues.

Elsewhere The Beano makes up for the ropier strips (Meebo & Zuky is a painfully old-school Tom and Jerry caper, and Minnie The Minx is a just bizarre retelling of Frankenstein involving a teddy bear hospital) with some solid work from Bash St. Kids, Numskulls and Roger the Dodger. And while this week’s Retro Dennis strips tone down the murderous violence of last week, they’re still pretty brutal. Which we liked.

On the whole, however, we were left with the Very Clear sense that not only are our attempts to improve the comic not being heeded by The Beano, but that we are being actively taunted for even trying.

Which, as we have already mentioned, is just the way we like it.

And if you’re paying attention you’ll notice that creates a paradox, which results in our inevitable victory.

Yours circuitously,

The Beano Review

Which is why, after fully 19 visits to newsagents, supermarkets and at one desperate point even a branch of HMV this week, we at the Beano Review began to worry. For not only had we failed to find a single copy of issue 3577(b) to review, we were starting to suspect that DC Thomson, in an effort to shut this enterprise down, had deleted its stock from any outlet within a half-mile radius of our offices.

Paranoid? Yes, of course. But consider the evidence. First, a good proportion of our traffic for this blog comes from Dundee — which just so happens to be home of The Beano production team. Clearly our work has not gone unnoticed in DC’s airless 4,000+ employee cubicle farm. Second, when we were followed on Twitter this week by the official DC Thomson account (@DC_Thomson) and were subsequently challenged by them to explain “who holds to account those who are holding The Beano to account?” we knew that we were being watched.

So could our work have really hit home to such an extent that The Beano’s distribution team felt compelled to actively remove all traces of the comic from our region? Could The Beano Review’s merciless, though fair, criticism, be striking so hard at the foundations of The Beano that the comic was buckling at the knees, hitting out in the only way it knows how, namely by polite social media engagement and tactical withdrawal of its product from the Tottenham Court Road area?

Well, no. We eventually found a copy in WH Smiths. Nevertheless, this week’s Beano — which has the feel of an overall solid product beginning to fray at the seams — does suggest that the relentless steady gaze of The Review is causing rumblings of doubt at the very heart of Britain’s Brightest Comic.

The Review:

First, let us deal with the glaring error on the cover, to which we have subtly referred already. In a rare misprint, which we are informed by our loyal commenters is only the second such instance since the 1970s, The Beano printed the same issue number on the cover as it did last week. To be even more clear, March 19th’s Beano was no. 3577, and so was March 26th’s. Now, this is a small error, true, but it’s a pretty poor one all the same. At best it points to a lack of attention to detail, at worst it hints at total panic in the ranks. If it happens again we may have to hold an intervention.

Indeed, a sense of panic pervades the entirety of this week’s cover. The concept of placing Dennis in a racing car certainly puts Dennis front and center where he should be, but we resent its topicality. We understand that this week’s issue coincides with the start of the F1 season in Melbourne this weekend, but to our mind The Beano’s editorial agenda should not be this reactionary. What are we to expect next — a Beano cover tackling the bombing of Libya? A Beano cover themed around the launch of Apple’s latest iPad? No, no and no: forge your own path, Beano cover editors. Do not let yourselves be buffeted about by the winds of the age. We also noticed that The Beano masthead overlaps the edge of the race car, which is sloppy.

This week’s Dennis And Gnasher strip is likewise spoiled by a lack of care and attention. Overall it is a nicely drawn and paced two-pager with a funny punchline, but the weird decision to Photoshop — not draw — “The Beano” and “Formula Fun” logos onto every drawing of Dennis’s car wrecks the cohesiveness and warmth of the art. Indeed, the placement of these logos is inconsistent and the use of perspective is often flat-out wrong (see panel 4). Either take the time to draw in the logos properly or don’t bother at all.

Unusually, 60 Second Dennis improves on its longer counterpart this week by gambling all its chips on one spin of the roulette pun wheel. True, if we hadn’t found the pun funny (Dennis helps his nan prepare for the GRAN National… boom-boom) it wouldn’t have worked, but we did and it did. We also liked Nigel Parkinson’s artwork, including as it does many small touches and details that reward a careful re-reading, from the greenhouse in panel seven to the floating hat in panel nine. Nice job.

This week’s retro strips feature two more Dennis comics from the mid-1960s, a time when Dennis was apparently drawn by a five-year-old with detached retinas. These retro strips are dark and intensely harrowing. In one, Dennis annoys his neighbour by jumping in his pond. In response Dennis’s dad digs a deep hole and throws his helpless son inside, before allowing the neighbour to pelt him with stale buns. In the other strip Dennis ruins a family photo by apparently killing his father, but sends the photo of the event to his aunt anyway. Chilling.

Elsewhere in the comic Billy Whizz had a rough week. The plot (Billy’s class is given pedometers to check their fitness, Billy agrees to wear them all to help out his classmates but is so weighed down that he can’t move and gets everyone in trouble) is a stretch for a one-pager in itself, but the fact the punchline is only explained by a callback thought balloon right at the end is very weak. Minne The Minx is well-drawn in issue 3577b, and we liked that Minne’s dad met up with the other Beano dads out of context, but there are only so many times you should use ‘crash’, ‘crush’ and ‘slam’ in one strip. Nine is too many.

Worse still, Robbie Rebel reared his unfunny, middle-aged face again this week and the story was irritating as ever — Robbie’s mum buys him a present, but he hates it and then destroys it, sigh. On the other hand, we did appreciate the panel in which Dennis splats Robbie with a rotten tomato.

We’re all thinking it, Dennis.

On a positive note The Bash St Kids were as solid as Gnasher’s jawbone this issue, and Roger The Dodger had mildly unsurprisingly but generally sprightly outing. Fred’s Bed wasn’t our cup of tea stylistically, but the art was creative, the jokes (“Give Peas A Chance” on a hippie’s T-shirt) were good and we appreciate any children’s comic that can make so many subtle references to the trippier side of 60s club culture (or was that just us?)

Overall then, this was not The Beano’s worst week, but the more small errors accumulate the more we sense that Dundee is starting to buckle under the pressure.

We suggest The Beano worries a little less about stopping us finding their publication, and a little more about working out exactly which issue it is they’re producing.

In any case, we now have a subscription — so there is nowhere to hide.

Yours suspiciously,

The Beano Review

* Note for legal fans: the stuff about The Beano deliberately hiding the comic from us is obviously a joke… Right?

Fittingly, we also celebrated an anniversary here at the Beano Review, marking as we did exactly a week since we published our first ever edition. The significance of this date only served to increase the palpable sense of pressure on our shoulders to follow-up last weeks’ well-received debut column, and if our words reek of nervous sweat then now you know why.

Anyway, it was March 17, 1951 when Dennis The Menace made his first appearance in the comic, billed as “the world’s wildest boy”. It was a big anniversary, and it deserved to be covered extensively and joyously by the DC machine.

Now, it would have been wonderful for this column if The Beano had gone on to roundly ignore this fact. It would have been marvellous for our self-esteem, and yes our page views, if we had been the only ones to notice The Beano’s maltreatment of their best character, and his sixth decade of being almost, but not quite, totally evil.

We could have cried foul. We could have raised hell. We could have ended up on BBC breakfast television complaining about the Beano’s downfall to Sian Williams, which is surely the ultimate destiny of this column anyway, and perhaps even finally secured The Simpson’s Comic sponsorship we’ve been lusting after like a fat Aberdeen boy in 1985 staring at a box of Highland Toffee bars behind a closed newsagent’s window.

Thing is, we didn’t have to. Why? Because The Beano was brilliant this week. Excellent, in fact. And it covered Dennis’s birthday with style, humour and panache.

This edition’s front cover was clear, basic, eye-catching and professional in its route-one aesthetic. Its design, based around a torn birthday paper motif and a ‘keep it simple’ “Happy Birthday Dennis” tagline, was very solid. There were a few nice details too — the Gnasher silent-G pun (‘Gnifty’) was funny, and the gift tag looped around the O in Beano was a nice, 3-dimensional touch.

(On a side note while the cover also promised ’60 giggles, guaranteed’ we only counted 58. We can be persuaded to accept that others might have found the second pun in the last panel of page 23 funnier than we did but hell, we have to call ‘em like we see ‘em.)

Most of this week’s comic was dedicated to celebrating Dennis’s history and legacy, and highlighting some of his greatest and funniest moments. It was a fitting tribute, and we’re sure it was also an education for historically-minded younger fans who we believe are more aware of (and interested in) The Beano’s legacy than the Modernist wing of adult comics fans might suggest. The tribute included full reprints of Dennis’s first comic strip, his first encounter with Gnasher, the first appearance of his first red-and-black jumper and his first full-colour comic. We were also treated to his first cover appearance — a one-panel cameo in an otherwise pedestrian Biffo The Bear — and his first cover proper. Perhaps nicest of all was a half-page poster of Dennis and Gnasher drawn and painted by David Sutherland, the artist who took charge of the weekly menace between 1970 and 1995. It was a sweet idea to bring Sutherland back, and a fond tribute to a time when one artist rather than four was responsible for Dennis’s antics.

If we were being overly critical we would hesitantly float the opinion that the retro strips themselves were a mixed bag. Maybe the post-war rationing and nuclear fallout had an effect on the British sense of humour during Dennis’s early years, but we’re not sure how anyone in 1953 made sense of the reprinted strip in which Walter tricks Dennis into smashing a load of glass in a factory. In the story Walter launches his ruse by letting Dennis watch him smash a sheet of faulty glass. Dennis assumes he can join in and does so, only to realise when it’s too late that Walter’s father owns the factory and that since Dennis’s glass was not already faulty he shouldn’t have broken it. For this Dennis receives a beating, leaving a modern reader with a haunting sense of disaster, regret and anger. Now, we can’t rightfully hold DC to account for a strip it first printed over half a century ago, but it’s an interesting piece of evidence to show that while much has changed in the comic, not all of it has been bad.

Another way of putting it is to say that the deficiencies of 57 years ago served to make the Dennis strip from this week’s comic shine even brighter. It was a smasher. Beginning with a fun idea — Dennis has to share his birthday cake and does so by splashing people with icing and eventually firing small chunks of cake into their mouths with his catapult, a feat both imaginative and, frankly, ballistically impressive — the comic was drawn with a kinetic energy and clever pacing. We also liked the moral at its heart — which suggests that Dennis is not in fact a bad child per se, but rather an icon of anarchistic freedom and artistic joy. Dennis shows through his actions that he intends primarily to undermine an existing system and point out its ridiculous flaws, not to destroy it outright or wage war on the notion of ‘good’ itself — with the wise head of a subtle and intelligent scholar. A bad child would have selfishly refused to share the cake, but Dennis goes further. He teaches us this lesson by technically sharing the cake, but doing so in a style utterly imbued with his personal Menacing ethos. This is what The Beano is all about.

Elsewhere in the comic the regulars who were allowed to share Dennis’s big day (Minnie, Roger, The Bash Street Kids, Numskulls, a Lego one-off ad strip and a Manga-ish Korky the Cat Dandy promo) were of a generally high standard. Of them all we liked the Minnie The Minx ‘dad-tries-to-use-a-computer’ strip the best, even if we felt that the Facebook reference at the start was a bit forced. Do Beano readers really use Facebook? We suppose they do, despite that site’s supposed age restrictions. We just thought it was awkward.

A special mention should also go to the well-executed idea of ‘hiding’ Dennis somewhere on almost every page of the comic. We would like to pretend that we resisted the urge to find them all, but we just don’t have that kind of willpower. Well done, Beano Ed, you devious and beautiful bastard.

If we wanted to be harsh — we usually do, though it seems churlish giving this issue’s such abundant class — we’d say that Roger The Dodger didn’t really make sense this week (including as it does among other inaccuracies a drawing of his uncle on the moon with his space helmet open that was not followed up with that same uncle’s immediate asphyxiation). We might also say that the Numskulls played well to its base but didn’t take many risks, and that the ‘PC Factoids’ placed around the edge of some strips are almost as annoying as the fact of Robbie Rebel’s continued existence.

However, those are small points. This week’s special birthday Beano might not be admissible in the imaginary court assessing the title’s overall quality in the modern era, but it did two things extremely well — it paid great tribute to its best character, and it made us laugh almost, but not quite, 60 times.

For that we raise our glass and say thank you, Dennis — here’s to 60 more menacing years.

Update: those with an excellent eye for detail have pointed out some surprisingly endemic flaws in the Beano this week, see comments. Thanks, James!

Click image for larger version.

Writing fair and yet critical reviews of The Beano after having not read the comic seriously for around fifteen years presents certain difficulties; principally, those of bias.

For while we at TBR would like to believe we are fair and balanced in our assessment of The Beano’s various strips and features, it is hard to deny that we will instinctively lean towards those we remember from our youth (which, for those of you who demand such things, is the mid-1980s-ish, appended by a healthy stack of car-boot bought comics from the 70s).

No matter how hard we fight against the impulse, Dennis The Menace will always evoke a richer, warmer reaction when it does things well — and a harsher put-down when it does things badly — than, say, Meebo & Zuky, whoever, or whatever, they are, and whatsoever the quality of the japes into which they get themselves.

We will thus always strive to avoid critiquing the comic on the basis of nostalgia alone. Indeed, insensitivity to the past is not something of which we can fairly accuse The Beano. It is to DC Thomson’s credit how well it serves the appetite for retro strips, both online and in the two pages — formerly four pages — of the comic itself that are dedicated to reprints. But we digress.

In this cause we at TBR will  be making an extra effort to review comics with which we are not so familiar.

“Freddie Fear: Son of a Witch” is one such comic.

Freddie’s adventures, most of which revolve around his mother, who happens to be a witch, and her various mishaps, are drawn by Dave Eastbury and are quite possibly beloved by The Beano readership. Wikipedia informs us that Freddie Fear is something of a Beano veteran these days, having first appeared in the comic almost ten years ago.

As far as we can tell, though, Freddie’s adventures are also somewhat troubled.

Now. Let’s be clear: we at The Beano Review have read precisely one Freddie Fear comic, and it’s the most recent one. We are coming at this with fresh eyes. It is quite possible that every Freddie Fear comic before issue 3576 was a work of delicate genius. We have no idea. However, we have read Freddie’s latest adventure several times, and have produced the following panel-by-panel dissection of why we think that ultimately it doesn’t quite work.

Panel 1. Starting at the beginning, we considered the title panel — which in many ways is one of the most confusing in the whole strip.

Firstly, we observe that “Freddie Fear” is picked out in blood. But since Freddie appears to be a normal boy whose mother is a smiling witch, he is neither fearful or himself scary. So why is his name written in this fashion? In the back catalogue of the comic there may be a reason. We do not know it.

Second, there is the comic’s tagline: “son of a witch”.

Now. We can’t decide for sure whether the tagline is a deliberate play on the phrase “son of a bitch” or not. But we suspect it is. And that raises two, perhaps three issues. First, if the line is deliberate and it’s aimed at “da kids”, then we’re sorry, that’s just not The Beano. Dennis might burn down the house, but he doesn’t tell Dad to “fuck off”. It’s an unwritten rule. Conversely, if the pun is deliberate but intended to go over the kids’ heads and instead be a subtle wink at the adult audience, then it also fails, because it falls into the trap of a movie like A Shark’s Tale and its Godfather-referencing De Niro-voiced Great White, which instead of using creative humour that appeals to both adults and kids at once (see Toy Story) opts rather to divide its humour between that aimed at children, and a subtext hidden from children and delivered directly at adults. That’s not the same thing. One is clever, the other is just lazy and a little mean. Any experts out there who can confirm the intent of this tagline, we’d appreciate it.

Otherwise this panel is fine, even if the witch is a bit small. We liked the way Freddie’s fingers gripped the bottom of the panel, overlapping the edge. And blood writing is never easy.

Panel 2-4. The quality of the art is generally high in these panels, and the use of eerie orange as a motif adds to the mock-horror atmosphere in an admirably subtle way. The weirdly overlapping cakes in panel 1 are strange, but a minor problem. The main issue we noted, though, is that not enough happens. Everything in panels 2 and 3 should be contained in panel 1 (and anyway, no one ever says “better answer that” out loud to themselves). Having Mrs. Fear appear in panel 4 is correct for the symmetry of the page, but we did find it hard to believe that Freddie didn’t ask his mother why she wanted to meet him at the town hall. Clearly in the Fear household, things are just better left unsaid.

Panel 5-7. Panel 5 is fine. We’re glad Freddie resisted the temptation to say “here I am at the town hall” out loud, when clearly he was aching to do just that. Panel 6 though is a little strange. The bead salesman asks if Freddie wants beads, but he replies “duh”, which usually means “obviously”. And yet he doesn’t buy the beads. “Huh?” might have been better. Panel 7 is also okay — it gets the job done — but we would have preferred the table edges in panel 6 to match up evenly, even if the panel divide remained in place. This recalled us to the problem of the cakes in panel 2. Attention to detail should not be taken so lightly.

Panel 8-10. We liked panel 9 a lot. Freddie’s sudden realisation is picked out well by the yellow-glow around his head and the face-on positioning. Panel 10 is also very good — an odd use of perspective to be sure (detail, detail) but there is nice use of lettering and everything is falling into place. Freddie’s mum is here — she’s causing havoc, clearly something’s up, etc, etc — and so, to the denouement:

Panel 11-12. What a disappointment. After all that effort, the entire comic falls apart on the basis of the weakest pun since the celeb writers at The Sun captioned a piece about Katie Price’s recent jaw surgery by simply printing an alternate spelling of the name of her bosomed alter-ego (Geddit?).

Moreover, the weakness of the pun is as naught to the overall sense of wasted opportunity in terms of plot and structure.

Fans of suspense when it comes to punchline-comics might disagree, but we feel that all the time that Freddie (who due to another odd use of perspective appears to age 5 years between panels 11 and 12) spent at the boring craft fair should have been focused on his mother causing mischief. Mrs. Fear could have been turning the bean woman into a frog or causing thunder and lightning to ruin the wind chimes, whereas instead we had to just watch Freddie not buying things. Why was so much opportunity for imaginative and visually interesting magic lost here due to the overbearing demands of an awkward, C-minus pun? What a waste.

Overall Impression: Freddie Fear isn’t a disaster, and is by no means the worst thing in The Beano. But to our eyes it also seems lazy, and a bit limp. We can’t imagine too many kids bringing this comic into school to show their mates, or for that matter anyone at all finding the “witchcraft/craft” pun honestly funny, as opposed to amusing. Which it isn’t.

It’s certainly better than Eastbury’s work on Ballboy in the same issue, however, and while we can’t give it more than a 5/10 we’ll await further installments with interest.