Fulfil your childhood dreams and step inside the mischievous world of Beano

It’s July 1938, and somewhere in Dundee, Scotland, a child holds in his hands the very first Beano, newly equipped with all the tools to make (to the dismay of his parents) a bit of mischief. Beano began as a weekly comic, published by DC Thompson and created by R.D Low, and the comic is still created weekly in Dundee. In 1951, Davey Law’s iconic and notorious Dennis the Menace made his appearance – tagged as the “world’s naughtiest boy” – followed by his dog Gnasher in later years. In 1970, David Sutherland, the artist who was responsible for Biffo the Bear and The Bash Street Kids at the time, took over, and thereafter saw Dennis’ popularity grow to become the most famous character from the comic.

Curated by Andy Holden, a life-long fan of Beano, Somerset House’s newest exhibition takes us back to a simpler time overrun by the organic medium of comic books – remember those? Dennis the Menace and his trusty sidekick Gnasher were an emblem of our upbringings and Andy’s team have created an immersive Beano experience which has never been seen before. The mammoth exhibition opens with a selection of over 100 comic artworks, rare archive artefacts, and even new work from over 50 contemporary artists. To add to the fun, the exhibition is even complete with its own Beanotown. For the show, there’s a special edition Beano comic set in the exhibition itself, featuring many of the artists involved. And there are interactive elements like Plug’s mirror created by Simeon Barclay, a jukebox in the Beanotown Record store, and chances to make some art in Peter Liversidge’s sign making project.

It’s been 70 years since the launch of Beano, and although the comic and its characters stay near and dear to our hearts, the rapid rise of technological advancements have had a historic and irreversible impact on the nature of art, publishing, and comic books. More of us are choosing to take to our screens rather than flick through pages due to the accessibility, longevity, instantaneousness, and economical nature of digital publishing and content. But that doesn’t mean we don’t still want some relic of paper-pasts to exist in our lives, if only for its nostalgic capacities.

On one hand, it’s Dennis’ 70th birthday, “so that’s something to celebrate,” says Sam Jacob, who turned two-dimensional cartoon graphics into three-dimensional structures for the exhibition. And on the other, “it’s a show about the very Beano idea of rule-breaking: how can culture – from Beano to contemporary art – challenge authority.” In essence, Sam points to the timely, political themes running throughout the exhibition which make the here and now a more appropriate time than ever for this large-scale art show. “Beano has a history of breaking rules about gender, class, and identity. So there’s a lot that we can learn from that attitude.” Sam also thinks that “maybe it’s a good time, after years of degrees of isolation, to step into something bright and challenging and larger than life.” Wanting to bring the Beano world from the page to our three-dimensional world, Sam, who has always loved working between two and three dimensions, tried to carry across the imaginative world of the page into Somerset House. Reflecting the evolution of Beano’s artistic and editorial style, and reflecting the changing printing technologies which have seen Beano throughout the years, “the colours get brighter and more lively as you walk through, just like the print technology has allowed Beano to get more vibrant,” claims Sam. For this reason, “this is a show that you really need to experience in the flesh to get its full delight,” the artist claims.

Elsewhere, Nicola Lane, who imagines Dennis the Menace as a 70-year-old on his character’s 70th anniversary, looked back 44 years to when she was creating comics for The International Times, an underground newspaper dedicated to “disruptive and Avant-Garde ideas,” the artist tells It’s Nice That. “My comic strips were a British riposte to the American comic-strip hegemony of the Underground press – dominated by Robert Crumb and other Californian comic strips, like the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers,” Nicola continues. Inspired by Beano, she turned Dennis, the Bash Street Kids, and the other Beano characters into their adult 1970s selves: “unemployed, living in squats, and as the 70s drew to a close, discovering radical politics.” Fascinatingly, these strips were forgotten until the scholar Paul Gravett, somewhat of a comic aficionado who’s been working in the comics industry since ‘81, included an extract in his British Library exhibition Comics Unmasked; Art and Anarchy in the UK, which then led Nicola into being included in 2016’s Comix Creatrix: 100 Women Making Comix at the House of Illustration.

For the new comic strip exhibited in the Somerset House-based retrospective, Nicola had to start thinking about Dennis’ “survival as an iconic character,” asking herself, “has print technology changed him as much as social attitudes?” Dennis was born in 1953, Nicola was born in 1949. “We are both Baby Boomers!” she proclaims. So she wanted to explore her own process of ageing through Dennis’s ageing. This self-referential approach from Nicola might help some of the older visitors see Dennis as even more relatable. “The graphic style and printing technology of Beano in the 1970s was a big influence,” she tells us, “I love the spiky expressive line of pen and ink, the crude and expressive colour printing with ‘Ben Day’ dots and inexact registration,” says the artist, referring to the mechanical printing method developed by Benjamin Day in the 1880s and recognisably used in Roy Lichtenstein’s works. Nicola wanted to incorporate these same techniques into her own work. In order to immerse herself in a Beano sensibility, Nicola took on a “colouring outside the lines” approach, not wanting the work to be framed: “it seemed contrary to the ephemeral, mass-produced nature of comics like Beano,” she explains, so she asked Andy Holden if the final piece could be pasted directly on the wall.

Although Nicola is an admirer of the print technology of the 1970s, using this retro tech to print the final piece would have “cost a fortune!”, so a brainstorm began on how to combine “yesterday’s techniques with today’s digital process.” Comix Creatrix had introduced the artist to women creators in contemporary comics and she had become interested in the techniques of digital colourising. “I approached comic artist and architect Alison Sampson,” she says, “and asked her to recommend someone who might be interested in working on my project.” Alison then put Nicola in touch with Dee Cuniffe, a prolific colourist, working on books for DC, Marvel, Image and others. Dee was able to bring techniques to the project that he had developed for his creator-owned ‘Crossover’ comic, featured in Image, to help bring the “old school” look to Nicola’s piece. “It was so important to have that collaborative element in creating the work,” she argues. “Comics are mostly created by people with different skills, all working towards the final piece.”

Leeds-based artist Simeon Barclay has been a fan of Beano for a long time. “I have a different relationship with it today but the impression it has left on me is quite profound,” Simeon relays. He claims that a couple of years ago, Beano references began seeping into his work; “It gave me the realisation that in part, my early inclination to draw was the urge to mimic and copy the illustrations in the pages of those British comics like Beano, The Dandy, Whizzer and Chips.” Mischief, comedy, kinship, solitude, and escapism were what the pages of those comics opened up to a young Simeon. “And yes, there was that sense of the anti-establishment that chimed with a lot of the news stories that took centre stage whilst I was growing up,” the artist continues. As a boy, anti-Thatcher sentiments, strikes, and uprisings were commonplace. Simeon thinks there exists a “revelry within the space of the frames for anarchy and turning conventions upside down, so there is an element of the carnivalesque, a sort of release for the viewer”. But this release, continues Simeon, is nevertheless contained, edged by the straight lines of the frame and “encapsulated in the regular format of the comic”.

For the exhibition, Simeon created a neon two-way mirror inspired by the Bash Street Kids character Plug, who the artist claimed as a leitmotif in his work: “his innate ugliness places him on the fringe of society. A mirror to societies’ normative tropes, he stands proud at the fringe in the liminal space where his mere presence enacts a criticality.” Simeon’s scrutinisation of Plug’s role takes the character beyond merely a comic trope, but becomes almost a socio-political reflective exercise. “Looking back throughout my readership of the comic,” Simeon narrates, “I can see that the illustrators have had real fun with him, constantly morphing him, his unpredictability was really exciting to me.” Plug’s character was “all the more heroic” in his unconventionality, says Simeon. He claims it’s a shame, to say the least, but in the absence of any relatable or expansive Black characters at the time of Simeon’s reading in the 80s, “Plug’s bonkers individuality opened up an unorthodox and contingent space in which to insert and mirror myself within the frame of the comic,” continues the artist.