87 Years of The Beano

It's Friday, we enter a new Month and by coincidence we do mark an anniversary many of us are glad of even if you may no longer be a reader of.

On July 30th 1938, the Beano was born by Dc Thomson of Dundee, Scotland and if you look in those early decades of the Beano you will detect a bit of that scottishness even though it's very much british centric as many of its illustrators back then were scottish, drawn from the Scottish media empire they had and the cartoons in those newpapers.

While that picture is fantastic for showing a man inroducing a modern child to the very first edition of The Beano ina world very much different than today where values and childhoods might seem a world away the comic isn't quite as it was published.

Looking at the top left of masthead of the front page that illustration of a black child eating a watermelon has been taken out of the copy we see in the top picture.

Now I will say that has racial overtones I cannot endorse but such attitudes were not uncommon 87 years ago in adults and inevitably the spilled over to children having read children's encylopaedias of that era with text many of us today would strongly disapprove of .

The only sensible way to deal with such things is to talk about them and explain why those attitudes, words and phrases are wrong thatwe should not use them rather than airbrushing them out of our history.

Facing challenges in its early years thanks to Mr Hitler and those evil Nazis waging war on us with paper shortages, children found comfort in stories they could relate to and laugh loud at while in the decades the way the stories would be told changed from illustrations and text to the more modern speech bubble and changed times as society altered.

By 1967 it had reach it's 1,000 editionwith many staples we all know such as Dennis The Menace, The Bash Street Kids Biffo Bear and Minnie the Mix having come in and if you were reading the Beano in the 1970's and 80's you'd feel quite at home with that apart from the change of currency we went through.

In time some comic strips that we enjoyed but did have some racial stereotypes like Little Plum went and some of borderline "queerbashing" in Dennis The Menace  directed at Walter got toned down as as a society and as children we did begin to understand to be more respectful of differences and cultures as our society itself evolved.

In the nineties full colour came in and we moved from small newsprint to A4 glossy paper as slowly traditional humour comics dropped off to to today where the Beano is the only survivor of the old school comics.

It's moved a bit more toward a magazine format, is more inclusive even if I feel it can be too heavy going around some topics at times - kids like a laugh and a joke and stories that are entertaining not slavishly earnest but it is here.

A link to the past, a window on modern childhood as unimagable to us today as forty or so years today might be.

Happy 87 years!