This compact exhibition relays the 70-year story of two sister publications in much the same way as the comics entertained generations of kids – with a manageable ratio of artwork to words and not an inch of flab around its succinct perimeters.
Benefiting from the 1930s’ booming cartooning catalysed by Walt Disney, The Beano and Dandy were dreamed up in Dundee by publisher DC Thomson. Before long they became uniquely British icons. The titles sparked the imaginations of cartoonists from Steve Bell to Nick Park and, more personally, my brother Andreas – an animator indelibly inspired by the capers of havoc-wreakers The Bash Street Kids, mini-feminist Minnie the Minx and cow pie-scoffing Desperate Dan.
Casting an animator’s eye over the original strips in the exhibition, Andreas picks out distinctive detailing worked in to every panel by artists such as Leo Baxendale and Tom Paterson – expressions, the lines of a hand and ‘nasty things like volcanic pimples and whiffy socks’ that filled many a child with revolted glee.
Far from being the only grown-ups at the show, we find the museum is milling with a roughly equal number of nostalgic comic fans and pencil-happy kids answering the questions in a comic competition. Adult themes surface most notably in the wartime issues (remarkably, production never ceased during World War II, but paper shortages and a skeleton staff forced the publications to alternate fortnightly). Children were distracted from the grimness of rationing and evacuation by characters including the thoroughly ridiculed Musso the Wop and Hitler himself, who received a right royal thumping from Lord Snooty and His Pals in The Beano’s pages.
The physical violence and un-PC characters have long been banished. Lamentably the titles have drifted towards the general Americanisation of popular culture, sporting both sanitised subject matter and blander drawing styles. The exhibition, however, is smashing.
