Superman and the Beano are both 83 years old. The American superhero first pulled on his tights for Action Comics No. 1 in June 1938. The following month, roughly 443,000 copies were sold of the Beano’s first issue, featuring Pansy Potter (the Strongman’s Daughter), Big Fat Joe, Wee Peem (He’s a Proper Scream) and, my personal role model, Lord Snooty. Not until Grand Theft Auto launched in 1997 has anything so culturally significant come out of Dundee.
But there is a key difference between Superman and the Beano. While American heroes in general and Superman in particular uphold rules, the Beano’s success — its 4,000th edition in 2019 made it the world’s longest-running weekly comic — is predicated on characters who break them. True, Beano characters do sometimes battle evil (during the second world war, Pansy Potter did her bit for Blighty by single-handedly capturing a Nazi U-boat), but regulars like Ivy the Terrible, Minnie the Minx, Dennis the Menace, Roger the Doger and the Bash Street Kids were and are antinomian scamps bent on wreaking havoc in a rule-bound world run by grown-ups.
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