This week’s edition of that venerable British comics institution The Beano (#3404) boasts a brand-new strip, Tales of Johnny Bean from the Happy Bunny Green, courtesy of Laura Howell, who has been slaving away on preparing it for months. On Laura’s main site she describes it as a bit like “ASBOs come to Trumpton” (for non British readers, an ASBO is an anti-social behaviour, supposedly designed to curb the activities of out-of-control youngsters but which in practise seem to have become a badge of honour for delinquents), but here’s what Laura had to say about the new strip on her blog Panel Beat:
(new Beano character Johnny Bean, borrowed from Laura Howell’s website)
“The strip’s a bit of a departure in format for The Beano, as the story’s almost entirely told using caption boxes, in a “Jackanory” style (it even has its own avuncular narrator). A bold move – will the kids like it? Only time will tell. But anyway, there’s more Johnny info and a nice swizzy graphic I created over on my website. Or, of course, you could just buy the comic, eh?”
Sticking with Laura, a quick scroll down her new blog shows that she did make good on her promise last month to post a bit about her recent visit to the Jornadas De Cómic De Avilés, a comics convention in Spain. Although, as Laura notes, a convention quite unlike any other comics con she’s been to before:
“But for me the really great thing, and what set it apart from any other con I’ve been to, was the total sense of community – not just the daily lunches and dinners, where all the attending artists and the festival organisers broke bread and forged friendships together – but in the town as a whole. During the sketching sessions, you were as likely to be asked for a drawing from a typical comics geek as a five-year-old girl or an immaculately-coiffed Dona with a tiny dog stashed in her LV bag. The atmosphere was incredibly relaxed and very welcoming, to the extent that the mayor even invited us into the town hall to hear a speech expressing his gratitude for bringing the spirit of comics to the place.”
Ah, me… We can only dream of that kind of reception here…
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October 29th, 2007 at 12:49 pm
[...] How about that? Actually openly crediting the writers and artists after all these decades? Comets fall from the sky, the blind see again!! Its something that really should have happened years ago, I think, but at least they have actually done it at last. The new-look Beano boasts Laura Howell’s brand-new strip Tales of Johnny Bean From Happy Bunny Green (see last week’s post) and also London B4 12 by Barrie Appleby, as well as the regular beloved characters of Minnie the Minx and Dennis the Menace of course. Lew also flexes his olfactory senses, noting that the printing process imparts a scent to the new Beano that smells remarkably like the old TV Century 21used to… Print this Story Send to a Friend [...]