It is tempting to dismiss all this as simple nostalgia.
But these comic strips deserve a little more attention than that.
Nobody would suggest that Dennis the Menace, Minnie the Minx or the Bash Street Kids provide a documentary record of British childhood. Their adventures were deliberately absurd.
Nevertheless, the humour depended upon a shared understanding between artist and reader.
Corporal punishment could function as a comic punchline precisely because generations of readers immediately understood what was being represented.
Whether they experienced such discipline themselves or merely knew that other children did, it belonged to the cultural vocabulary of childhood.
That vocabulary has largely disappeared.
