Beano: The Art of Breaking the Rules, Somerset House review: a glorious tribute to the rebellious
What’s the point of comics these days? What chance do Dennis the Menace and Gnasher stand in the battle for children’s attention against screens and the stars of Fortnite?
Fear not, says this ambitious new exhibition set over two floors of Somerset House: rebellion is eternal. Every generation strains at the leash of authority – of parents, teachers, and society at large. Every child seeks a foothold in a world built for, and run by, others. Each must learn the rules for breaking the rules. It’s a thread that binds across time.
And the show’s grand point, as it celebrates the Beano’s mercurial magic and plots the themes which have shaped it in the 83 years since it launched, is that the comic has been a uniquely glorious exemplar of such colourful, universal anti-authoritarianism. At times it seems not a British child was without it. At its outset it sold more than 400,000 copies a week, rising to a staggering two million in the 1950s. Now circulation is a more modest, but still relevant, 54,000.
Launched just in time for half term, the layout here is designed to appeal to fans both old and young, though just how young it’s hard to say. I can imagine my nine year-old drifting through, taking in the vintage hand-drawn panels, seeing how some characters have adapted or disappeared over the decades, and how others – notably Dennis, Minnie the Minx, and the Bash Street Kids – have remained so gloriously the same. My seven year-old, perhaps, would be less patient.
Their old Dad, by contrast, found plenty to discover about the comic he thought he knew inside out – expertise acquired 40 years ago through membership to the Dennis the Menace fan club. How I waited for that membership envelope, with its furry Gnasher badge (rebellion may endure in our digital age, but learning to deal with delayed gratification truly has died a death).
It was interesting to see how dramatically the comic, like Britain at large, changed after the war, ditching anachronistic characters for the heroes who still grace it today. Also gratifying to see the influence those pages which I treasured in boyhood came to have on others; how its unruly escapism seeped into the ideas of contemporary artists from Gilbert and George to Sarah Lucas, whose works are dotted among the exhibits.
Indeed, there’s a lot here: not just those contemporary works but also smart, bite-size themes such as Food (which remains the central reward in Beano strips, reflecting its wartime rationing origins) and the Slipper (the great threat which, by contrast, has not survived). The show communicates too, the lasting joy some Beano comic artists take in the job: David Sutherland, for instance, who has been drawing the Bash Street Kids since 1965. Only someone enjoying their work could draw a strip announcing a sale at Beanotown’s camping shop with the poster: “Now is the winter of our discount tents”.
Some of the fabric of that town – its highstreet and school – is reproduced among the galleries in what, to grown-up me, seems the least successful element of the show, though it may have appealed to my younger self. The challenge is that the very spirit the show is aiming to reveal is not so concrete, but lives chiefly in the mind, unique to each reader. The more the exhibition seeks to recreate the world of the Beano, the more it slips from one’s own imagining of it.
Not to worry. The expert economy of those cartoon panels on every wall soon help that interior world flicker back to life. In doing so this exhibition succeeds in putting its finger on that ineffable spirit of defiance - in conjuring and defining an attitude that has long united wannabe Dennis’ and Minnies up and down the land.
Oct 21- Mar 6 somersethouse.org.uk
