The Beano/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Memetic Mutation:
    • The comic magazine itself was the first of its kind for DC Thomson, so most of the comics it created after it and The Dandy were shallow imitators.
    • Jimmy and His Magic Patch became a nickname for mismatched cloth patches on repaired outfits.
    • Lord Snooty became a slanderous nickname for a middle-to-upper-class person trying to relate to poorer people, and failing. Ironically, Snooty himself didn't befriend the children as Ash Can alley for a PR stunt, but because he could be himself outside of his royal duties and envied their lack of responsibility. It makes one wonder if the inventor(s) of the nickname understood the source material...
    • Although he may not have been the Trope Maker of The Kid with the Remote Control, General Jumbo may have become an expy of this trope for British comics.
  • Menace Decay: Some fans consider the Dennis the Menace reboot in 2009 when the new TV series began to air on CBBC turned the character from a menace into just a generic kid.
    • Dennis' change in character might be justified in-universe by him being a different kid: a 2015 strip revealed that Dennis's Dad was the Dennis the Menace of the 1980s, but it didn't say when the stories "switched" from the older to younger Dennis.
  • Misblamed: Whenever a major narrative revamp happens to the comic, older/former readers complain Political Correctness Gone Mad, but revamps sometimes occur because of the readers' diverse opinions or waning interests.
    • A common complaint from adults who used to read the stories in the mid-20th century is the misbehaving characters abandoning pea-shooters and slingshots, even though toys of those kinds might've been banned for health and safety reasons sometime later.[1]
    • News outlets were quick to complain when all the overweight characters called Fatty were renamed Frederick. Beano reps later revealed it was because children sent letters and emails to the studio wondering why the characters got mean nicknames, despite the nicknames intending to be empowering.
    • Lord Snooty's series became boring to new readers was discontinued because it was a relic of an unrelatable, long-dead era where upper-class schoolboys wore top hats to class. Newspapers wrote Shut UP, Hannibal-like articles about how it was a big mistake and that the long-celebrated editor-in-chief Euan Kerr had gone too far. One blamed John Major's "classless society" election campaigns.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks: A common complaint among older readers of newer comics. For some, the change of dimensions of the annual for the 2011 edition was pretty pointless and generally horrible.
    • Serious enough that Nigel Dobbyn, the artist for Billy the Cat, quit, resulting in the superhero's absence from the 2012 annual.
  • Toy Ship: Dennis the Menace — Minnie the Minx.
    • Daniel "Danny" Deathshead and Toots from The Bash Street Kids.
  • Unfortunate Implications: Biffo the Bear's human aunt. Bananagirl is Bananaman's neice according to the Beano webiste but Bananaman is a child and his strips never show his siblings so that implies one of his siblings may have had a child and been disowned because of it. Which would also make sense as to why Bananaman never features in Super School strips.
  • Values Dissonance: An old comic strip featured in the 1940 was entitled Hard-Nut the Nigger. Also the character Little Peanut from the late 30s to early 40s who was a stereotypical poor black boy who appeared on the logo of the first issue but did not reappear on the cover when the first issue's cover was made a poster in 2010. Also the character Polly in the Lord Snooty strip looks unfortunately like a chimpanzee and the late 1950's strip entitled Pom-Pom the boy who brightens darkest africa.
  • We're Still Relevant, Dammit!:
    • Robbie Rebel, the short-lived hip and contemporary version of Dennis the Menace.
    • Dennis the Menace inexplicably gaining trainers around 1995 can be seen as a stab at this, quickly dropped in favour of his traditional boots.
  1. Interestingly, 2019's issue 4000 showed the characters using said pea-shooters and slingshots against evil robots.