My friends and I have been rediscovering Minnie The Minx recently. She's a character from long-running British weekly comic book 'The' Beano', and i think she was invented in about 1955. I'd kind of forgotten how cool she is.





She's from a long tradition of British 'naughty children' comic book characters. There are hundreds of these... let's call them 'menaces'- Dennis The Menace, Rodger the Dodger, Oor Wullie, Robbie Rebel, Des Troy, Cuddles and Dimples, Vic Volcano... America got a thousand different superheroes, we got a thousand different naughty children. Minnie is my favorite, hands down.

She is refreshingly, fascinatingly ugly for a cartoon little girl. It's a cliche to point it out, but there's no way her character design would make it past the marketing department of a modern animation production. I doubt even most web cartoonists (who do whatever they like, commerciality be damned) would want to make a character who looks like Minnie, which is kind of a shame.

My friend scanned in a couple of her stories, so I've posted them up here. I'd like to use this blog to explore British children's comics a bit more in the future, because I'm sure they'll be fascinating to people who didn't grow up with them. They have their own visual language and vocabulary that doesn't occur anywhere else. Anyway, here you go!








( TAKE MY PLASTER OFF SO I CAN FIGHT )

As you'd expect for a comic that's been running for 50+ years, there's a lot more of this stuff floating around. Probably a lot that's much better than what I just posted here! I'll post the good stuff as I discover it, because Minnie the Minx is frigging rad.