STILL A MENACE AT SEVENTY!
He’s Britain’s favourite naughty schoolboy – and even on his landmark birthday, Dennis won’t be hanging up his catapult just yet...
HE turns 70 today, but is ten eternally, his age as abiding as his thick spiky hair, red-and-black striped jumper, chunky shoes, schoolboy shorts and that devilish behind-the-nose grin.
And Dennis the Menace is the great survivor in a comic born in 1938 and which itself is another great survivor.
The Beano is the last all-out-for-laughs children’s comic in Britain, with the whitened bones of The Beezer, The Topper and even the late, lamented The Dandy in its dust.
Dennis endures because, subversive and mischievous, there is something of him in all of us – a rebel streak that chafes at rules, hates being told what not to do – and is yet, essentially, benign, free of hate and malice.
And the year of his creation was probably no accident. While 1951 might have been marked by the Festival of Britain, we were at just about the nadir of postwar austerity.
Rationing was still in place, there were shortages of all sorts of things, there was shoddiness throughout industry and it was still a time of rules and restrictions, finger-wagging and snitches and snoopers – indeed, the current Queen was on her throne before the requirement to carry an identity card was abolished.
Into this Britain, Dennis the Menace didn’t so much arrive as explode.
And, in these anxious months of Covid, when Warden Hodges is once more everywhere and in his bossy element, the scamp has all the more appeal – doubtless to the abiding despair of Sergeant Slipper and the effete, affected Walter the Softy.
Our friend was inspired by a popular song – Dennis the Menace from Venice – and, incredibly, the same song inspired a cartoon-strip in America, also called Dennis the Menace, nowadays syndicated all over the States – and which was also launched in March 1951.
BUT that Dennis the Menace – resident in Wichita, Kansas – is an endearing, be-freckled five-and-a-halfyear-old, slightly dim, and who causes incessant mayhem with his well-meant efforts to ‘help’.
Our Dennis the Menace causes incessant mayhem for the sheer fun of it.
He has nevertheless evolved over the decades, and much of what we think we know of him has been quietly changed.
In his first outing, on March 17, 1951, he was not in his famous jumper but in a shirt and tie. He acquired the jumper the following month – striped black and red because, by the printing technology of the time, these were the boldest shades. And it has changed pattern: from black-redblack-red, collar down, to the other way around.
Gnasher, the indefinably endearing hound, he acquired only in 1968. (And Gnasher isn’t just any dog, you know, he is a wire-haired Abyssinian tripe-hound.)
The artist who first drew him – David Law, who was in charge of Dennis from 1951 to 1970 – was ordered to ‘take Dennis’s hair and add a face and four legs’.
In 1986, Gnasher, for seven long weeks, disappeared, as Dennis appealed to the nation to join him in a ‘Gnational Gnasher Search’.
Dennis’s adventures have had to adapt to the times. The sort of trespass and vandalism he got away with in his early decades would be unacceptable to parents today. Nor, since the 1980s, has he been subjected to corporal punishment – though Sergeant Slipper’s name is a sly nod to the past.
Like other Beano strips, there was an unfortunate 1990s spell when stories for the first time resorted to flatulence and toilet humour, though that has been largely reined in.
And, in 1993, editor Euan Kerr grew concerned at the way Dennis was trending – bigger, teenagey, erring on the thuggish.
The artist then in charge of the lad, David Sutherland, was asked firmly to soften the character. Dennis became smaller, more childlike, and his clumping black shoes were replaced with trainers.
No longer allowed to derail trains or terrorise opera-goers, Dennis’s exploits have become much more fantastic.
Recently he managed to infest Beanotown with alligators. ‘The sign said “Danger! Alligators! Do not open”’, remonstrates his Dad.
‘Exactly,’ snaps the Menace, ‘who has time to read all that?’
Eager to mend the situation, Dennis asks clever Rubi to build him a time machine and, typically, presses a button he is not meant to touch – which, to make a long story boring, results in his 51 Gasworks Road home being encircled by a moat and Beanotown being stormed by Vikings.
This sort of delirious insanity has long marked DC Thomson comics – vividly one recalls Desperate Dan’s Cactusville, Texas, mysteriously replete with British bobbies and red telephone boxes.
INCIDENTALLy, Rubi is a wheelchair user – it is never talked about, but it is there. It’s an instance of The Beano’s worthwhile endeavours in recent years to reflect all sorts of children in its tales. A still more striking change is in the Menace family. In my 1970s boyhood, Dennis’s mum was matronly, be-aproned and ineffectual; his father a pompous and besuited businessman who had, if memory serves, fought in the war. Today his parents are younger, casually dressed – and in a slightly annoying conceit we are told that his dad and grandfather are the Dennises of decades past, the Menace being less a character than a meme.
The Beano’s paper circulation today is a whisper of what it was – some 45,000 copies, dismally south of the near-two million sold weekly in 1950.
But the comic has a huge online and virtual following, with strong interactive input from children even in the print version.
The Dennis the Menace fan club has more than a million members and, on the TV station CBBC, the animated Dennis and Gnasher Unleashed! is now in its second series.
The kid is incorrigible. ‘We’re celebrating 70 years of Britain’s favourite ten-year old,’ enthuses Mike Stirling, editorial director of Beano Studios.
‘For 70 years the Menace family has been spreading laughs and unique Beano cheer across multiple generations of children and adults alike.
‘It’s fantastic to see the impact today’s Dennis has on kids, just like his dad and granddad did before him for readers in the 1950s and 1980s...’
But let the last word go to children’s author Michael Rosen, who in 2016 sagely observed: ‘In most children’s books, a bad child is made good.
‘But the great thing about Dennis is he never gets better.’