Beano annual 2015

This book is the annual compendium of special comics from that archaic weekly sort-of-funny children's comic and relic of when your parents were kids, the Beano. I've been at the family home over the week surrounding Christmas, and I found myself stuck in inactivity.* My brothers are elsewhere so games, conversations, or just annoying them with my presence aren't doable; the books I brought with me have tired me somewhat in their length and seriousness; the three inches of snow outside froze over in the night and I'm too cowardly of an Englishman to go for a slippery walk in it; the internet is a bottomless hole of boredom-inducing-boredom-prevention material; TV is obsolete and I don't know entirely how the new remote control works. I found this annual on the coffee table and decided to shoot my nostalgia in the face by reading it.

   The Beano is a weekly children's comic published in the UK since 1938, familiar to any English people who were children during the second half of the 20th century (or in the early noughties, if your parents swamp you as they did me and my siblings with hundreds of back-issues to keep you so occupied in reading them that you neglect to notice and thus ask for such expensive new-fangled contraptions as Playstations or SNES consoles). It features a host of characters that I will not be able to fully list at their present population (some of them have died because of cutbacks or retiring cartoonists, others have been absorbed from complementary "rival" comic the Dandy, others have been newly created to try desperately to find something that will turn the comic into a product that doesn't routinely hemorrhage its printers through children these days simply having far too many better things to do). To give some disappointedly-cynical overviews of examples of characters (most of whom have been around for decades) from the heyday of Beanodom back when I was aged 3-9 and a devoted a reader as there ever was, characters included:

• Dennis the Menace, a boy with spiky black hair who wears a red-and-black striped jumper and deliberately irritates people. Vocations range from systematic bullying of wimpy kids, subversion of all generic authorities,** and causing mess and upset. He has a dog called Gnasher who helps with these endeavours, which also for some reason looks almost identical to his hair given eyes, legs and teeth.
• Minnie the Minx, literally just the girl version of the above but ginger and wearing a beret with an inexplicable pompom.
• Roger the Dodger, a classic anti-authority wise-guy who uses far-fetched pranks and tricks to avoid doing work, get out of trouble, avoid normal healthy social interactions, and so on.
• Ivy the Terrible, a toddler who pretty much just shouts and causes mess and upsets her dad lots.
• The Bash Street Kids; the incorrigible class 2B at an ineptly-run school. One of the favourite classics, probably because it's the only one that was funny more than 40% of the time. It was always my favourite as well, so I'll do it the justice of listing the characters - of whom there are about as many as there are in all the other Beano comics combined. Comprising them are:
• Teacher (the teacher, duh). Like Dennis' dad he also has a Hitler moustache; stoically resigned to a life of misery, he very rarely manages to teach anything.
• Danny, the gang's supposed leader; he proclaims naughtiness more than any of the others and managed to be the favourite of none of the readers. The comic-runners should have picked up on this and had more cartoons about people being funny instead of people just throwing tomatoes at policemen.
• Sidney, generic boisterous child.
• Toots, token female, who is Sidney's twin.
• Smiffy, a boy whose borderline-severe learning difficulties are accommodated for laughingly by his inclusive classmates. Or maybe he is all there and, for want of better-defined personality and friendship, has taken to saying and doing silly things all the time so as to retain a niche as the beloved social joke-butt.
• Wilfrid, a very short kid whose entire gimmick is that he is shaped like R2D2. Turtleneck extends halfway up his face. Says very little but seems well-meaning.
• 'Erbert, shortsighted boy who walks into things when people are looking at him but the rest of the time is perfectly able to join in the mayhem-causing.
• Plug, who always gave me the impression that he was one of the smartest in the group, but will never fully find acceptance because his whole being is centred around his Shrek-like ugliness.
• Spotty. Has a gimmick that his name makes rather predictable. Bald. Also has a very long tie for some reason.
• Fatty. Guess.
• Head (the headteacher); looks identical to Teacher but fat and in a suit. Eats biscuits. Avoids responsibility. My personal favourite, possibly tied with Spotty.
• Janitor (guess what his job is); looks identical to Head but in scruffy clothes. Gets annoyed when the kids make mess, which is like, every week.
• Winston, janitor's long-suffering cat. Can handle a broom. Possibly enslaved.
• Olive, the cook, all of whose concoctions are burblingly hideous.
• Cuthbert, the one good kid in class 2B, who looks like a miniature version of teacher and gets lots of stuff thrown at him for being sensible.
• Billy Whizz, a kid who can run very fast. All his comic strips are basically just not-even-funny explorations of what it would be like to be a really fast kid in a variety of mildly inconvenient situations.
• Calamity James, an unfortunate soul to whom everything bad that would likely be socially ruinous and/or actually fatal happens. Used to have a really visually-witty cartoonist, but in this book there's a new one, very closely imitating the style of the character's inventor with none of the panache.
• Bananaman, a boy called Eric who is really dumb and turns into a superhero whenever he eats a banana. This superhero is great at saving the day but is still really dumb. Imported from the Dandy after it collapsed from shifting demand.
• The Three Bears, literally just a family of three bears who, instead of hunting normally, devote endless outrageous plots to stealing food from the supermarket of a blunderbuss-toting rightly-annoyed man called Hank.
• Lord Snooty, basically Billy Whizz but he's rich instead of fast.
• The Numskulls, five tiny things that live inside a guy called Edd and respectively control his brain, eyes, nose, ears and mouth. Things happen to Edd because of them which are apparently amusing.
• Little Plum, a probably-racist portrayal of a Native American kid whose main task in life is to follow the orders of Big Chief regarding something to be done to buffalo.
• Crazy for Daisy, a girl called Daisy who has to frequently resort to pugilism in repelling the advances of a devoted stalker called Ernest. He is ignorant of being repeatedly spurned in his efforts to woo her.
• Ball Boy, the captain of Beanotown's (yes all the characters live in the same fictional town, calm right down) incompetent football team.

   There are many others who have come and gone over the years, but these are the core bunch that I recall. It definitely used to be funnier; this isn't just a nostalgic projection of my endless childhood afternoons reading these cartoons onto the disappointment that this annual was, nor is it that my age has tripled since my peak enjoyment of them and a more mature sensibility cannot as much find pleasure in them. No. They've actually got worse, and it's no fault of the publishers, whose commitment to still making a product that almost nobody wants I find kind of inspiring. Kids these days just aren't bothered about a cartoon boy throwing flour at his neighbour - why would they be if the alternative source of entertainment for them is throwing grenades at digital soldiers controlled by their friends? I feel like such an old person. Dammit.

* Yes, it's fair to say that December has thrown an odd spanner into the spokes of my reading habits: rather than plodding through a half-dozen pretentious novels and a half-dozen even-more-pretentious non-fiction books at a time and finishing them almost by accident, this month I have read a fair few random easy-go lazy-books. Cat poetry, regional trivia, weird cartoons, this; it's that time of year. Allow it.

** His dad used to have a Hitler-style moustache back in the 1990's. New artist now though. Thought you should know.