Beano’s big birthday bash is a chance to relive innocent days

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

Even after all these years, you only have to see the cover and its famous masthead to guarantee a smile – because the Beano comic was part of all our younger days. And 80 years on, it’s still an integral part of growing up.

This July the comic celebrates its 80th birthday, a remarkable feat in an era when Playstation brings animated characters to life in a virtual reality, when CGI means that super heroes fly through the sky at ease, when a small child can literally hold the world of entertainment in the palm of their hand.

And yet you just have to see it on the newsstand to remember Dennis the Menace and Gnasher, Minnie the Minx, Lord Snooty, Roger the Dodger, the Bash Street Kids – all as real to a small child as the kids they sat beside in the classroom.

So, 80 years is worth celebrating – not just for the Beano team themselves but for all of us who shared part of that journey with them from July of 1938.

Hitler featured early on – but only because he was on the receiving end of exploding eggs – and a host of actual celebrities, from Charles and Camilla to the Spice Girls with Andy Murray and Mr Bean thrown in for good measure.

Last week’s was bang up to date – Harry and Meghan were being pushed in a wheelbarrow by Dennis the Menace himself.

Indeed, in a storyline to rival the real one and the Markle family who make the Bash Street Kids look like the Poor Clares during a Novena, the gang crash the Royal wedding and land the bride in her own cake.

But readers of the Beano didn’t need real world influences in Beanotown; we all wanted to be Dennis (although one or two of our legal or medical friends might have seen Lord Snooty as their role model) and we revelled in the things that the Bash Street Kids got away with.

It wasn’t just the Beano of course – the Dandy has long been its great rival and we have the Beezer and Topper; Tiger and Roy of the Rovers worked for the more sporting kids and much later the world of outer space was looked after by 2000AD and its ilk.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.