The classroom was another favourite setting.
Comic schools tended to bear only a passing resemblance to the real thing. Headmasters wore gowns and mortarboards, teachers carried canes and pupils spent an improbable amount of time plotting revolutions against the staff.
The Bash Street School was perhaps the classic example.
Other strips took the idea even further.
The Dandy featured Whacko, with a medieval schoolmaster whose disciplinary enthusiasm became part of the joke. The original recollection describes pupils applying mock “ye olde cold cream” afterwards—exactly the sort of deliberately ridiculous detail these comics enjoyed.
Then there was Whacky in Whizzer and Chips, a strip built around a boy whose astonishing ability to encounter punishment was practically the entire premise.
The title itself told readers what sort of nonsense awaited them.
