http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/aug/13/oldest-comic-the-dandy-faces-closureI don't know how comics like the Dandy and Beano (are they the only ones?) have survived this long. They surely belong to a lost era of school caps and short trousers, Biggles, airfix kits, carts made out of pram wheels, jamboree bags, Sunday afternoon classic serials, 2 way family favourites, brylcreem, Colin Cowdrey, football rattles and Charlton winning the FA Cup when the FA Cup was a competition which mattered. Still, sad to see.
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One of the reasons I became a graphic designer was because of these comics and the tintin books.
There was an awful lot of tosh by educationalists who took a very dim view of comics in the 50s -60s.
But they were great tools in developing a child to have an interest in reading, albeit a rather dated and almost reactionary account of the world as it was.
Of course as kids we just looked at it as if it was a good read, exciting, and something you could relate to. I used to love the Valiant, but the Christmas annuals were great companions, and I used to read them when I had flu.
I tried to do a feature once on the scottish comics, and they were very guarded about there use of illustrations, for a magazine called school leaver about illustration and commercial art as it was then , to soon be called graphic design. Hopefully it will be recreated as an app, or transferred to the electronic age.
To me they will always be more than mere comics, perhaps if teachers had appreciated them years ago, they could have used them to engage with children and use them as a platform for a world of literacy, instead of the reading ages we have these days which people like my wife have to deal with as a senior SEN teacher.
When my son came to live with me at the age of 8, he couldn't read or write.
His mother was convinced he was dyslexic, the school said he wasn't.
Armed with copies of the Beano and Dandy, each night I made it his bedtime stories.
With the cartoon stories, using very simple word recognition and lots of laughter, he started to make progress.
He's at University now.
Viz parodied this with "Biffa Bacon and Cedric Soft" which later morphed into just Biffa and then the Bacon family.
I remember:
Dennis the Menace
Ivy the Terrible
Minnie the Minx
Bash Street Kids
Ball Boy
Billy Whizz
Roger the Dodger
Lord Snooty
Does anyone remember the Black Sapper (who I think might have been in The Beezer) and the Purple Cloud which disintegrated metal and Jet Ace Logan in Tiger?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/tayside_and_central/7514362.stm
The illustrator was Kate Charlesworth
I have a beano in my parents attic which still has the free refresher attached to it. It's sell by date was in 93 or something. If anyone's hungry let me know!
as well as the eagle, (Dan Dare and all that)
My kids also read them.
One of the reasons I think they have declined is the stories are so tame, all so PC . Bought one a couple of years ago for my grandson and could not believe how poor it was
If you read my old annuals all the the kids got up to proper capers and were regually thrashed as a result and the adventure stories were really exciting. Well I thought so anyway
1.40 to 1.50