The Beano bashes its way into the iPad age
A lifelong fan of Dennis the Menace and pals, James Brown finds out what the future holds.
BLAM! BOOF! POW! CRASH! BOILK! SPLUTCH! Dennis The Menace, Minnie The Minx, The Bash Street Kids, Rodger The Dodger, Lord Snooty and co are fighting their way into the 21st century.
If you walk past the DC Thompson HQ on Fleet Street this week you’ll see a lot of those BIFF! CRACK! SMACK! sound effect bubbles, because the overlords of Beano Town are launching a new, 15 months in the making, operation called The Beano Studios.
It’s a serious move from the legendary comic – which still sells 40,000 copies a week – straight into the media heartland of distraction-loving seven-to-10 year olds: the iPad.
The new service is an alwayson, internet-editing offering that launches today, sitting across multiple platforms from YouTube to Apple and Android apps, including something called Pop-Jam (an ‘‘Instagram for kids’’).
As a man who has experienced four childhoods, the Beano attitude has accompanied me through all of them: the first being my own, the second launching Loaded magazine, (a Beano for grown men who happily struggled to take life seriously), the third and fourth being those of my 15- and three-year-old sons.
I can confidently claim to be an expert in receiving slipperings, avoiding pea shootings and lifting hot steaming pies from other people’s window ledges. The Beano came through our letter box at home, ordered by my dad who had been reading it since he was a boy in the 1940s.
As a kid I devoured it alongside the Dandy, Cor!, Whizzer & Chips, Roy of the Rovers, Tiger and Jag, Cheeky, Victor and Action ona weekly basis. Combined, they made a very early framework for the men’s magazines I would go on to create in the 1990s. The Beano was also a direct influence on its punk rock descendant, Viz Comic, which I acquired first as a reader and later as a publisher.
But even icons have to adapt to new formats, especially when their audience has changed so massively.
The website, app and films I’m shown, as the Beano bigwigs explain how they’ve created a multi-platform digital environment to house all sorts of Beano-style content, look about right.
There’s skateboarding and Star Wars and interactive videos and new Dennis cartoons and ways to make yourself a Minx. ‘‘Eighty per cent of kids in our target audience of seven-to-10-year-olds have access to iPads,’’ explains Emma Scott, chief executive of Beano Studios.
‘‘This is about extending the character and spirit of Beano. Importantly it’s free.’’
Her colleague Mike Stirling says: ‘‘If you give The Beano to kids, they’re as passionate about it as we were, but their social habits have changed. Kids today live quite solitary indoor lives, they don’t play in the streets so much.’’
After 90 minutes with Scott and Stirling, their enthusiasm makes me feel like I’ve just been written into one of their strips. If only. Stirling explains there’s a 40-year waiting list for the weekly ‘‘Make You A Minx’’ spot. That’s over . . . erm, 2,000 kids wanting to have their own Minnie Minx makeover, he helps me deduce.
Stirling is the editor in chief or content director, I didn’t get to read the actual title on his business card because I was so busy smiling at the massive drawing of Gnasher on it. But he’s basically in charge of the comic end, and the tone, the Gnashing you could call it.
‘‘Dennis was originally drawn on the back of a fag packet in a pub one lunchtime in 1951; the guy who draws Plug from the Bash Street Kids sucks a lemon and looks at his own face in a mirror when he needs to give Plug a really ugly face.’’
Scott has leapt in from TV and digital platforms, intent on moving the Beano into a more approachable medium for kids. They make a good pair, he’s been in Dundee and the comic world for decades and still loves it, she’s just arrived and is intent on getting this right.
As I stand up to leave and gather my enormous History of The Beano, this year’s annual and latest two comics, Stirling looks at me and says: ‘‘You know, at school the teacher would see me with my head in a comic and say, ’Michael Stirling, comics will get you nowhere’. But look at me now!’’