No discussion of this period can avoid artist Leo Baxendale. His energetic drawings helped create the frantic visual world...
The classroom was another favourite setting. Comic schools tended to bear only a passing resemblance to the real thing....
Buster provided another memorable example through Faceache. Faceache was the boy capable of pulling grotesque expressions—the famous “scrunges”—but later...
The 1970s comic Cor!! produced another remembered school strip, Teacher’s Pet. Its central character, Patsy, was forever attempting to...
Looking back, several readers noticed something curious about The Beano and The Dandy. Why was it so often Dad...
This raises the most interesting question of all. Did seeing corporal punishment repeatedly depicted in comics help make it...
One contributor who read British comics throughout the 1970s and 80s remembered the punishments as reflecting the world around...
It would be misleading, however, to imagine every British children’s publication overflowing with slippers and canes. Readers remembered noticeable...
The discussion also wandered across the Atlantic. American newspaper strips and comic books contained their own history of spanking...
Comic books were never produced in a cultural vacuum. Publishers had to consider parents, teachers, distributors and, at various...
By the 1980s, Britain was changing. Attitudes towards children, education and physical punishment were shifting, and the comics changed...
Pick up an old annual today and the experience can be surprisingly revealing. There are jokes that remain funny,...