No discussion of this period can avoid artist Leo Baxendale.
His energetic drawings helped create the frantic visual world associated with characters such as Minnie the Minx and the Bash Street Kids.
The punishment scenes worked because everything in those strips was exaggerated. Faces stretched, bodies flew through the air and classrooms descended into chaos.
After leaving The Beano, Baxendale worked elsewhere and created characters including Bad Penny for Smash!.
The same ingredients remained: misbehaviour, escalating catastrophe and a final reckoning.
It was not realism. It was theatrical cartoon violence in much the same tradition as characters being flattened by falling objects and emerging perfectly healthy in the next panel.
