A Special Summer With The Beano

(updated 2/8/10, with thanks to Lew Stringer) Summer and Holiday Specials of British comics were once a mainstay of the news stand year: special, (usually) higher-priced "one-offs' of popular comics that not only gave regular readers something extra featuring their favourite characters, but also offered a 'sampler' of a comic to those that might not be able to afford buying it regularly. They also might help attract new readers to the regular title.

The first such Special would appear to be a Mickey Mouse Holiday Special published in 1937, which Kaya Özkaracalar, over on his Disneyville blog notes as being one of four holiday special issues published before the Second World War on the eve of the Christmas season. (These are, of course, some of the rarest pre-war British Disney publications and much sought after).

Over on Blimey! It's Another Blog about Comics, Lew Stringer's research would seem to indicate that regular holiday specials - issues that were not part of a comic's regular run - really kicked off in the 1960s. "Fleetway did a Jack and Jill one in 1960, Odhams did an Eagle one in 1962, and TV Publications produced the first TV Comic Summer Special in 1962 (all new material)," he tells us.

DC Thomson, with their all-reprint 1963 combined Dandy/Beano special, cautiously entered the area set up by others. It proved successful for them so they started doing individual all-new specials in 1964.

While Summer Specials associated with weekly comics are now a thing of the past, the Beano and Dandy Xtreme don't seem to have fallen into the "Summer Annual" concept that other publishers now use.

To celebrate summer this year The Beano has instead decided to class their six summer holiday July/August issues, numbers 3544 to 3549, as collector's editions with wraparound summer activity cards on the outside and, along with the usual bagged toys and sweets, each issue will have an A3 poster of an old Beano cover.

Last week's issue 3544 had the first of the posters showing, not surprisingly, the cover of the first issue of the Beano with its 30 July 1938 cover date - except that it wasn't quite the complete cover. Black comic character 'Little Peanut' was missing.

When Waverley's History Of The Beano book was published in 2008 editor Christopher Riches pointed out that Peanut was retained on the cover of that book due to his historical context - but then it was a nostalgia book aimed at adults. It is therefore unsurprising that a 1930s comic's depiction of a black child would be removed from the image for a poster aimed squarely at modern children's bedroom walls.

Issue 3544 also listed the four "mega gifts" to be given away with this week's issue of the comic and they included a "Multi-Menace Blaster With Target!" This is actually a red plastic gun which fires yellow sucker tipped plastic darts.

One downthetubes reader who is also a Beano reader made the point of looking out for the Beano as he passed through a UK airport this week to see if the toy gun was included in the copy of The Beano that could be bought there. It wasn't and it had been replaced with a Dennis and Gnasher whoopee cushion instead. This is not surprising: airport retailers take a dim view of any free gifts that look like guns (one publisher fell foul of these concerns a couple of years ago, and, under protest, had to withdraw their title from sale because the free gift simply looked like a gun).

What is also available in the current issue, number 3545, is the second of the six posters of old Beano covers. This time it is the cover of the biggest selling Beano issue of all time, number 405. The History Of Beano book tells us that issue 405 sold 1.9 million copies and that "records show that an even higher sale could have been achieved but the presses just could not print any more!"

Was there a particular reason that issue 405 sold more than any other especially when there was no free gift with it to give it a sales boost? Perhaps the children of Britain were more tuned into comics that week than usual. After all the biggest selling issue of The Beano is dated 22 April 1950, eight days after the cover date of issue 1 of The Eagle.

The current idea of The Beano turning weekly issues into summer editions is a great idea, but it isn't new. Lew Stringer tells us it revives an early 20th Century concept, when Amalgamated Press would have "Holiday Numbers" as part of their regular weekly run, just as publishers still do with Christmas editions.

• The Beano is published each Wednesday and costs £2.50. The set of A3 cover posters of old issues will continue with the issues up to and including issue 3549 which is due to be published on 25 August 2010

• There's more summer fun on the Beanotown website

• Blimey! It's Another Blog About Comics - Heyday of the Summer Special

• The Guardian: What Became of comics' summer specials?

Tube Surfing: 24 November 2008

• Kieron Gillen talks about writing the new Warhammer Crown of Destruction comic series from Boom Studios over on comiccon.com, the series inspired by on Nottingham-based Games Workshop's hugely popular gaming system and figures. "It's a world that lives on the cusp of destruction," he notes. "The good guys... well, they aren't good guys. The Empire are religiously fanatic, and it's only that devotion which stands between them and transmutation into a literal hell on Earth. It's grim. In, fact, it's GRIM. It's a universe which needs a lot of capitals...."

• Talking of Warhammer, you might also like to check out the Online Black Library of Warhammer stories, which includes work by Nathan Long, author of the Gotrek & Felix series, who has recently penned some stories for Warhammer Online.

• Ben Templesmith will be drawing a Doctor Who one-shot (written by Leah Moore & John Reppion) in February for IDW. The company's head honcho Chris Ryall shares a bit of the creative process in putting together a book like this on his blog with some of Ben's initial sketches of the good Doctor and Martha.

• Talking of Doctor Who, former Time Lord Chriustopher Eccleston has been spoofing the character on The Sarah Silverman Show for US channel Comedy Central. One episode featured the obsession of one of the characters with a television show called Doctor Lazar Rage, and here's a behind the scenes video (left).

• Meanwhile, Lance Parkin posts about writing Doctor Who novels and talks about his own processes a little...

• Edinburgh's Evening News recently warned a new animated version of Dennis the Menace will not be "as generations of Beano readers might know him.
"The familiar red and black stripes are there, so is the mischievous look and the general air of having been up to no good. But this is one of our best known comic characters gently revamped and modernised for a new generation of fans. Read more about the new cartoon from Red Kite Animation here on the Evening News web site.

• Talking of The Beano, The Guardian notes how aristocracy still survives in the comic, "in the person of Lord Snooty III, inheritor of the Snooty fortune and embodiment of modern wealth," notes Jonathan Jones in the paper's Arts Pages. "That's right, The Beano is the home of acute social satire. Lord Snooty's world of toffs and hounds has of course long gone. So instead we have Lord Snooty the Third who terrorises his staff by riding his quad bike and driving a train through the house. He is modern, he is style-conscious, and he's still a bastard. In fact he treats underlings much worse than his feudal forebear ever did. Cartoonists looking for ammunition against David Cameron's Tory party might want to consult Lord Snooty the Third."

• Snooty of course is merely upholding a long tradition of British comics, that of anarchy and rebelllion, the kind of things that mean Mickey Mouse, for example, has never been really popular in Britain in the same way as Dennis the Menace -- that, and the fact that he isn't "home grown". Bill McLoughlin, an archivist at DC Thomson and who was a script writer for 40 years at titles such as the Beezer, Topper and Rover recently argued Mickey never really took off in Britain because he wasn't very British. "If you look at the history of our comics, they are all very British and what appeals to us is kids getting one over authority," he told the Sunday Herald for an article about Disney's mouse hero, "whereas Disney's characters had this middle American morality that said: if you do something that isn't nice, you get your comeuppance.
"You can see that reflected in the Beano, which was anti-establishment, but Dennis always got punished for what he did wrong. In the Dandy though, which was anarchic, the violence was total."

• Finally, check out this great Strontium Dog fan strip, A Girl Called Johnny, by Dan Whiston, Kames Kircough and Richard Clemonts, originally created for Dogbreath. A gem...

(Special thanks to Matthew Badham for some of the links in this round up)