The Beano has changed 1) Modern art styles.

 The Beano is a thing I love. It's a British comic book, an anthology of gag strips. I have Beanos from nearly every single decade of its existence except the 1930s and 1940s. Yup, that's right, the Beano started in 1938 making it one of the longest-running comic books in the world!

Especially since DC cancelled Action Comics and Detective comics and restarted them, relatively recently.

Obviously with such a long lifespan the Beano has changed a lot over the years. Still it's maintained a strong continuity with the old comics slotting in very well with even the most modern comics. At some other time I might pull out some of my collection and do a thorough through-time with one of the characters. But today I wanna target something specific from one of my recent issues of the book.

Let's talk about the Beano

To make it easy on me, all these scans
are from Beano #3348, from 2006. I chose
it completely at random.

Ahh the Beano.

The Beano is an ongoing British comic book that started way back in 1938. It’s not a fart remedy, or an obscure Portuguese band. It’s not an ESPN commentator. It’s not even an Eric Clapton album. Okay, it’s on the album, and some people call it the Beano album, but that’s not what I’m talking about!

Look, the point is – the Beano is a British comic book. In fact it’s THE quintessential British comic book. It’s not the oldest British comic book, it’s not even the oldest book that’s still in print. It is however the longest running weekly comic book of all time. So that’s pretty impressive.

The Beano, like most British comics is an anthology series made up of a bunch of comic strips. Each strip stars a main character, or cast of characters, and generally the title of the strips describe that character and who they are pretty thoroughly.

There’s Dennis the Menace, Biffo the Bear, Minnie the Minx, Rodger the Dodger, Billy Whizz, and… god there’s so many others.

That Hilarious Racism and Xenophobia in Old Comics!

I'm glad you can tell they're not Korean or Chinese, Bucky.

There's a kind of strange attitude that I've noticed when people are reading old comics that says, "Well, they're old comics, of COURSE they're like that!" Sometimes this attitude is levelled against the structure of the plots, the art, and sometimes it's levelled against the social values represented in those old comics.

Of course they're racist! It's old comics!

This attitude tends to render these comics camp -- we laugh at the racism and xenophobia represented because, well, they're old! When talking about comics from the Super Hero 'Golden Age' (we'll talk about why I think the term 'Golden Age of Comics' is bullshit at another time) this dismissive attitude becomes heightened

It's hilarious when Superman tells us to slap a Jap, because it was World War II and that sort of attitude was acceptable back then. Of course it was okay to say all Germans were bad, or all Italians, or all Japs. After all, we were at war, weren't we?