One contributor who read British comics throughout the 1970s and 80s remembered the punishments as reflecting the world around him.
They did not seem strange because similar ideas about discipline existed in real homes and schools. Looking through something such as a 1975 Beano annual today therefore produces not merely nostalgia for the comic but memories of the atmosphere of childhood itself.
That may explain why these old strips remain so fascinating.
They are tiny pieces of social history.
The clothes, furniture, language, family relationships, classrooms and ideas about authority all reveal something about the period in which they were created.
Even the jokes tell us what audiences once regarded as familiar
