Beano and Dandy Birthday Bash

The Beano and Dandy Birthday Bash celebrates the 70th birthday of these classic DC Thompson cartoon characters. The Beano launched back in July 1938, with the Dandy having hit the press only 8 months earlier in December 1937. Responsible for entertaining thousands of children each week, the Beano and Dandy Birthday Bash invites you to relive your childhood with a big exhibition of these kids comics.

Iconic characters such as Desperate Dan, Dennis the Menace, the Bash Street Kids and Minnies the Minx are all on show in the Beano and Dandy Birthday Bash, with original comic artwork from all eight decades of the comic strip's publication. A chance to see how the characters and the comic itself developed over time, this celebratory exhibition takes a trip down memory lane.

When the Beano and Dandy appeared in the 1930s, they brought a new generation of children a handy size comic book all of their very own. Mixing picture stories and comic strips, early favourites like Lord Snooty and the cow pie eating Desperate Dan were to become standards of the comic and become the classic characters which we know and love today.

Once the comics were established as a necessity for kids up and down the counrtry, the readership grew and grew, and during the 50s, more characters were added to the list as artists like David Law, Leo Baxendale and Ken Reid created their ingenious drawings of naughty, mischevious, comical and inventive kids. Dennis the Menance, the Bash Street Kids and Roger the Dodger are a few of the characters that featured in the record selling issues sold during that period.

Developing from the simple graphic style of the 30s up to the more modern style of the present day, the Beano and Dandy Birthday Bash shows the entire history of the comic book in one celebratory exhibition. With new characters mixing in with the old, you can see Ball Boy, Bully Beef and Chips, Brassneck, the Three Bears, Les Pretend, Pansy Potter and Ivy the Terrible, as they demonstrate why children still love the mischief and mayhem created every week in the Beano and Dandy.

The Beano and Dandy Birthday Bash exhibition is on show at the Cartoon Museum until Sunday 2nd November 2008. Tickets are £3.00 for concessions, £4.00 for adults, and free for children under 18.

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