SHOW ME THE COMIC and I'll give you the man.

To my knowledge there has never been an official study into the effects of cartoons - static or animated - on the emerging male psyche, but clearly such a survey is long overdue. I emphasis male here because, by and large, women, or rather young girls, have an altogether different relationship to the explosive drawn form than their male counterparts.

Broadly speaking, Bunty girls will always prefer life experience over cartoon logic. They will take the real and tangible, via rosette-wearing ponies and dormitory detectives, over the silly and fatuous. Beano boys, however, will go through the rest of their lives doggedly standing this seemingly obvious choice on its head.

Let us take a typical comic example. A person rushes headlong at a wall and, rather than crash intoit with disastrous physical effect, smashes straight through it, leaving the exact shape of their body in the brickwork. Girls will either find this wearily silly or simply smile at the absurdity of the idea and move on. Boys, on the other hand, will treat the image as a Great Truth and something that one day absolutely must be put to the test. The same applies to running off cliff edges without falling; outsmarting a pursuing column of previously aggravated bees who will then immediately form themselves into the shape of a giant question mark; and the belief that when swiftly exiting a scene, one always leaves behind a perfect silhouette in smoke and dust. Speaking of which - just how fast was the Beano's Billy Whizz?

Well consider a strip from 1966 - sadly not included in the magnificent work under review here - that saw Billy chance across a TV news crew in his local high street. The presenter canvasses Billy for a quote - opinion given, Whizz then asks when he will be able to see himself on television.

“You're out of luck there, son,” says the director, “that was live.” “Live?!” Billy gasps, just before getting his legendary legs into a tremendous whirl and haring off home. Incredibly, he gets there in time to enjoy his performance. That's how fast he was. I can clearly recall, as a nine-year-old, being totally knocked sideways by that concept. Putting The Beano down on my lap I spent several minutes mulling over the speed and science involved in someone's legs being swift enough to outpace the pictures on live television. I mean, was that possible? I decided it surely was and then moved on to my weekly rendezvous with Little Plum.

The Beano came on Thursdays. The Beano WAS Thursdays. It would be delivered at about 8.15am along with my elder brother's copy of The Hotspur - a dour and rugged publication too based in workaday factual settings for my young taste - and Mum and Dad's Daily Mirror (ditto).

I didn't receive mail generally, with the possible exception of an occa-sional low-wattage communiqué from dear old Aunt Pat sending me photographs of her dog wearing a hat or a necktie. Sometimes the dog himself would be said to have authored the note, hence the wayward, spidery writing. Although I was very much a happy, secure and polite child, I was acutely aware that the “rush” from receiving such family-generated gags would be fleeting at best.

I craved something else. I needed my Beano. The Beano was mine. These were my people - the Bash Street Kids, Roger the Dodger, the ravenous Three Bears, Minnie the Minx and Dennis the Menace would speak to me from a world every bit as cool and exclusive as that of the NME waiting just a few years down the line. But The Beano came first. Nobody else in our house read The Beano but me. I “got” it. I loved it.

I read the comic in absolute seclusion, ideally while sitting on my bed with the door shut. No detail was too small to devour with pages being read and re-read to winkle out every nuance. Oddly, I don't remember laughing much at The Beano. It wasn't that sort of experience. True, the characters in the comic would laugh a lot - but it was their world that was the deep attraction, their license, laws and lives.

A perfect illustration of this solitary fascination is captured in the film Kes when Billy Casper escapes to a lonely hillside with his copy of Dandy - a comic I always considered a decent, but failed version of my Beano. In the scene, Billy reads through Desperate Dan - every talk bubble, every stage direction, every onomatopoeic blurb - as though it was a rallying speech to the masses. In the final frame Dan knocks his opponent clear over the horizon to an unseen place that an artist's arrow informs us is “The Middle Of Next Week”. Billy reads this with an obvious sense of awe in the concept. And that's the attraction. That brilliant world of mad possibilities. The weekly triumph of the effortlessly fantastic. The escape from accepted life.

Even at the age of 8 or 9 you knew that The Beano people - whoever they were - understood you. Week after week they never relaxed in the seemingly impossible task of making the familiar completely fresh.

Often the characters spoke directly to you: “Isn't that right, readers?” Of course it was always absolutely right.

Jokes were rarely used as punch lines but usually simply to reinforce the wonderful worldview we all shared. When we were given a look at the wife of Teacher from The Bash Street Kids, she, of course, looked exactly like him but with ringlets and in a dowdy frock. She even had his moustache. This was as it should be. His children were also identical but tiny.

Then there were the Summer Specials and Christmas Annuals. Every year my family holidayed on the Norfolk Broads. The sight, at Liverpool Street Station, of The Beano Summer Special, a full-colour larger-than- usual bumper issue, wherein characters would often guest in each other's stories made me almost breathless with anticipation and as happy as I have ever been in this life. Really. I would read it and re-read it until it fell apart.

As for The Beano at Christmas, well, here's something I don't know if it's wise to share but, once the general tumult had died down in our house, I would find a quiet place and then bury my head in the annual. Literally. Opening the crisp, seemingly damp, pages, the spine of the book would squeak and creak as I would put my nose to the pages and inhale deeply. That, not the turkey cooking, was the smell of Christmas Day. It still is. Then it was down to a solid hour of intense reading, sometimes dot-to-dotting or helping Dennis to find which lead is Gnasher's among the tangle, the Great Work's festive black and white pages usually given an exotic extra wash of turquoise or dull pink ink.

I don't remember when it ended. I don't recall tossing aside The Beano one week with a world-weary sigh. I think I probably experienced considerable guilt as I ultimately found myself cheating on the bed with Alfred E. Numan and his MAD magazine. Then came rock'n'roll.

It is easy to romance iconic glories like The Beano. It is even easier to overlook the critical stamp they make on millions of lives. Undoubtedly, frivolous gag-based comics and cartoons can lay waste an otherwise potentially serious male mind. They will corrupt emerging common sense with an almost suffocating emphasis on The Joke. Show me the comic and I'll give you the man.

Here's the rule of thumb. Hotspur boys grow up to read stupid, useless Batman magazines and then on towards equally dour rot such as The Independent or something.

Beano boys never grow up at all. And it is wonderful. Isn't that right, readers?

The History of the Beano: The Story so Far edited by Christopher Riches

To buy this book at the offer rprice of £22.50 rrp £25 call 0870 160 8080 or click here

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