No child in a kids' comic could ever be shown reading a comic without a huge grin, tears flying in all directions and such convulsive laughter that they levitate. As all we comic readers knew, the reading of comics is a serious matter, and any real child reads a comic with a look of intense concentration.

But in a rich and varied life I have yet to see a fat schoolboy racing round the corner, his velocity illustrated by a cloud of vapour.

Brilliant fun. And we used to call men "Mister". But I've never seen anyone with steam coming out of their ears.

here. (Note the bolt-on health and safety feature.)

Yep had one. Had to buy a box of Bachelors dried peas as ammo (pretty certain that dried peas were only sold to children as ammo down our way).

We had go karts as well (or the kids whose Dad had wood in the shed and, more importantly, a set of wheels from a pram did).

...but I've yet to meet a native American who sprinkles his speech with the word "um".

I was just talking, on Twitter, about how much I would like to see a red-faced butcher shaking his fist at a small dog running away with a string of sausages!

that was contained in a cloud, with arms and legs coming out of it.

what about anvils they are central to all cartooning and yet hardly common place what heavy dense every day Item can we replace it with?

On the subject of old comics I can heartily reccomend
Great British Comics (Paperback) by Paul Gravett (Author) http://www.amazon.co.uk/Great-British-Comics-Paul-Gravett/dp/1845131703/...
it's fully illustrated , i tried playign I bet they haven't got X and they seem to have most British characters and comics since the year dot

...but I've never left a pie to cool down on my windowsill. At least, not in Deptford. And definitely not when the only fat person in town goes to school next door.

did you ever have chance to put a book down the back of your "trews" to absorb the blows?

... so many of the teacher things do ring true.

Plently of toilet paper to pad the backside for a canning had been tried (not for me, I was a good boy) by a few lads. Methinks a book might be a bit obvious...

still waiting for my army of tiny remote control soldiers, my cat suit to turn me into super hero, very strong magnets, never caught a boot in the canal or tin can. I have been bitten on the toe by a crab though!

...I saw a banana skin on the pavement.

(at the other end of the high st to the Pie shop!) aren't as picturesque as the gentlemen of the road in comics.

In real life you can’t enjoy a “slap-up” meal in a restaurant and, being a bit strapped for cash, pay for it by doing all the washing-up. Happened all the time in Beanoland.

really load up blunderbuses (?) with half a hardware shop and then blast away at each other across a narrow valley, the only injury being seemingly an exposed (througha torn pair of all in one underware) and a slightly smokey rear end?

I've never seen anyone in a hospital bed who's completely mummified in bandages, with a tuft of hair sticking out at the top. Usually with their right leg elevated in a Carry On style.

My dog once ran into our local cafe and came out with a sting of sausages. I offered to pay for them but the owner thought it was so funny he let me off. Tom's Cafe,Duke Street, Brighton in case you were wondering. Not there any more. Shame

I've yet to see an exercise book with a cover that looks anything like the fake-exercise-book-cover that was once supplied with my Whizzer and Chips.
Designed as a cunning wheeze to hoodwink "Teach", I would now find it useful - if it weren't utterly useless - to hoodwink pupils whilst I read Word Magazine.

I felt equally dubious about the remote control clock that used to be advertised in Whizzer and Chips, with a picture of a young scamp moving the clock hands forward to home time from the safety of his desk, while a bemused teacher shakes his wristwatch.

The clicking of fingers and whistling while listening to pop music on headphones,
"OOYAH!" as a reaction to sharp pain,
Frightened dogs covering their eyes with their paws,
A relaxed, reclined figure drinking a bottle of pop saying "this is the life!"

I have just realised that in my house it is common to say "Boilk!" after a hearty meal. Another homage to the Three Bears.

Anyone seen a Book of Dodges on Amazon?

I can recommend this lovely audio interview with some of the writers and artists for DC Thompson:
http://speechification.com/2008/04/21/the-reunion-the-dandy/

It will make you smile just as warmly as this thread has done.

is the only thing likely to be of any help if your arse is on fire. But where are you going to find one nowadays? I bet local councils don't think about that when they're setting budgets.

angry bees?

...two groups of people from Glasgow and Newcastle beating the crap out of each other?

Sounds extremely unlikely...

Near my office there is a market stall which sells cheap books and back-issues of magazines and comics. I stopped by on my lunch hour and spotted a Wimbledon themed copy of something called Beano Max. It came with a four-part gift including a badge reading 'Kiss My Ace' and a key-ring bearing the legend 'New Balls Please!' When did the Beano get saucy?

..especially variations of balsa or plastic planes launched with elastic bands.

comics most villians (except in cactus gulch) went armed only with pick axe handles!

In comics people would get knocked through a wall and leave a spreadeagled shape behind. Now there is that game show where the wall moves towards people and they have to make the shape to get through.

for some time now, in an attempt to bring it back.
Harder than you'd imagine.
I can heartily recommend it though, it sums up perfectly that feeling of disappointment & annoyance and leaves the recipient in no doubt as to their stupidity. Combined with a small shake of the head, I know of no better put down.

Has nobody mentioned them yet? Marvellous devices and invaluable in the garden chase scenario, since as any fule kno, they can handily appear out of nowhere, often already lit and fizzing, ready for thrusting into drains, crevices etc for discovery by one's pursuer, eg Spike The Dog. Hilarity ensues.

After a particularly heavy punch the character would be drawn being dispatched over the horizon into the "middle of next week" which I've never seen.

onto the edge of the cliff would inevitably be followed by a glance down while utterly stationary in mid air, a gulp then a rapid descent. Finally a puff of dust as body hits ground.

and then managing to stand up totally flat.

A great-Uncle of whom I thought I knew quite a bit passed away last year at the age of 90. ARP warden during the war, expert calligrapher, pillar of the community (Round Table, Twinning society etc) and a friend to all. A rich enough life, one might say.
It was only during his funeral eulogy that I discovered that he was one of the original illustrators for the Dandy and worked for DC Thompson comics from 1937 until the outbreak of the war. He'd never mentioned it and had never kept any of his work, but I have rarely been prouder of a relative's achievements.

and was expecting unlikely stories from Boston !

'Oooraagh!', as they might say in the comics.

...always wanted one of those

...when one hit 8 or 9, any Warlord or Victor readers in the house? Lord Peter Flint (coward by day, daring James Bond at night) usually had some alarming scrapes, but could get away with calling everyone "old sausage". Deaths limited to the Germans ("Arrrgh") and Japanese ("Aieeeee"), the Brits would always head off towards the sun, fate unspecified.

Now, where's my Luger keyring...?

Is there actually a Bash Street anywhere in Britain?

I'll leave it there because I'm still drunk from last night and all of the above has flooded my brain with childhood memories... an overdose in fact, this one sticks

We need someone to check for any recorded instance of a burglar wearing a mask and a hooped jumper and carrying a sack marked "SWAG".

Somewhere in my misty academic past is some theorising about why these cartoon devices look more like what they're trying to convey than a realistic drawing would. It also explained why people in cartoons look more natural with only four fingers.

I don't think the theory was extended to account for burglars wearing hooped jumpers.

A bonniest baby competition in the town hall, with cross-eyed, snaggle-toothed babies being pushed in 1930s prams by hat-wearing mums, and I haven't even managed to attend a dog show that ends in a massive tangle of leads and stolen pork chops.

Also, from a plumbing perspective, is it possible for a bath to overflow and flood the whole town, so that irate neighbours are forced to punt down the street on broken doors and rubber rings? I hope so.

I always thought that the type of small round pies with the vertical sides that all characters in the Beano (but particularly Pie Face, of course) ate was made up until I went to Liverpool Uni and had my first meat & potatoe pie from the chippy on campus.

was as close to a comic book kid as there has ever been. Eternally scruffy, grubby faced and a shock of blond hair in a fingers-in- socket style.

He, literally, left a shape of himself as he fell through the rotted floor to the cellars of the derelict paint factory where we always used to play having forsworn to our parents that we would never do so.

We gathered round the Stevie shaped hole - fearful that he may have departed this life and more fearful still of what we would tell our parents - whereupon he sprang up with the brusque enquiry "what you bunch of ninnies lookin' at?"

Of course, he'd winded himself, cut his knee open and sprained his wrist badly but that was no reason to stop playing.

We were made of indestructible material in those days.

looking to be headed for an unjust but inevitable slippering, only for an object he's inadvertently launched into the air coming down squarely on top of a scarpering thief.

It's all very significant, apparently. British comics have a visual language all of their own but I don't know if any academics have deciphered it. It strikes me that two comics which emerged from Dundee during the time of the Great Depression, most of whose stories still conclude with a "slap-up feed", are trying to tell us something.

I had a mate that was way more Beano than Sheevmaster's. He pulled a six foot wall over onto himself and suffered concussion. Had a phase of making enourmous bombs out of metal pipes, icing sugar and weed killer.. one such bomb made the local paper with a report of a "mystery explosion". He once electrocuted himself while wiring up a metal door handle to give his brother a shock (using the mains). He also managed to ruin a game we had of cranking up an old elevator and watching the iron crank whirl round and round in a blur speeding metal as said elevator crashed to the ground; my mate walked into it- head first, we then we hung around while the ambulance arrived and rushed him to hospital. Not surprisingly he was also regularly banned from our house.. for such crimes as: destroying my scalextrix on Boxing Day; burying my action men and then forgetting where; breaking windows on our farm with an air rifle; trying to saw down an giant tree outside our house after my mum had said she hated it as it cut out the light (my mate and his brother got about a foot into the tree with a two man saw before he was stopped... the tree survived.

I won't tell you his name as he is still a little crazy after all these years... and knows where I live. Unfortunately he never got a saucepan stuck on his head, or chased by a swarm of bees or had the seat of his trousers torn out by an angry dog, but he did have a lot of scars and smelt a bit...

Not the Beano, but DC Thompson all the same. Never heard a Scot saying above line, or Jings! Crivvens! etc. Didn't the God-like Genius that was Dudley D, Thompson also do Desperate Dan? And talking explosives my mate Dave and I used to build a small bonfire and throw aerosol cans on it, watching closely to see how long they would take to explode. Himmel!

They came from the same stable - D C Thompson. Interesting that they cornered the kids comic market for decades which was helped by having this engineered rivalry between Beano and Dandy, when the same people produced both. I didn't realise this for several years.

the people on the 'Illustration' course considered DC's the elephant's graveyard

what was it Joe wrote about they who fuck nuns?

Ever seen anyone with a large piece of cloth tied under their jaw and around the top of their head, with an extremely large protruding knot/bow, making you look like you're entering a really rubbish Easter Bunny competition? No me neither. And anyway, how exactly does the said cloth ease the pain of a toothache? Any Dentists out there?

... but I've never seen anyone 'Chortle' 'Larf' 'HeHe' or 'Haw Haw' while reading it.

Yet those faceless readers, hidden by the comic, that appeared next to the Denis The Menace Fan Club details seemed to find it really funny.

God, I can't believe I put Dudley D Thompson instead of Watkins. He's not to be knocked by silly students, on a par with the fascist Hergé for draughtsmanship. I've never seen a fat man fall down a manhole and get stuck, or a decrepit pensioner playing on a child's slide (see Gran'paw Broon, Oor Wullie).

They all did it. Billy Whizz, Minnie the Minx, Dennis the Menace.

Seen pictured running 'along' a pavement or whatever yet fully suspended in thin air a good foot or so above the ground.

I can admit now that I used to try this myself.

Can't imagine any athletes these days being allowed a slap up fish & chip meal by their dietician/nutritionist!

I look forward to seeing a fat boy fall into a puddle and go 'glub!'. By the law of averages, probability or whatever it must happen at some point.

to jump in the air and click their heels neatly the way characters always did to celebrate a minor triumph?

Great thread.

Was anyone else out there a paid-up member of the Dennis the Menace Fan Club? I enrolled in, I think, 1981. From what I remember, the benefits of membership comprised two badges (one, excitingly, made out of some sort of plastic 'fur' to represent Gnasher's head) and a set of codewords that members were expected to use to identify their co-fans. Something along the lines of: Member A - "Gnish?" Member B - "Gnash!" I feel fairly sure I never had any luck using these outside of my immediate circle of friends, but then I wasn't really the type to wander down the high street saying "Gnish?" at other schoolchildren.

Other quirks that existed only in Beanoland:
-The word 'bah!', popular with irate fathers/ teachers/ shopkeepers.
-School ties that literally came down past the knees.
-Rollneck jumpers that literally came up as far as the nose.
-Traffic wardens/ policemen being so surprised by some piece of Minnie/ Dennis/ Roger derring-do that their hats jumped a short distance into the air.
-Unfeasibly fast children with antennae.

is a great word. I often say it Frankie Howerd style - 'Bah bah and thrice bah!'

Cartoon stuff in real life for US TV show:

http://www.trutv.com/shows/man_vs_cartoon/index.html

Watch as a team of the country’s brightest minds takes on the devices and techniques used by Wile E. Coyote in his vain attempts to snare his arch-enemy the Road Runner. See if expertise, years of training and the best equipment that money can buy will be enough to actually make Coyote’s flawed Acme Company machines work.