The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

Leo Baxendale, one of the true treasures of Brit comics, kindly drops us a line today to let us know that he’s in The Times recalling the early 1950s and how as he created a variety of illustrations for different businesses he was approaching the mighty DC Thomson organisation in Dundee about making his own comics strips. Little Plum was born out of such approaches and then his ‘Amazonian warrior’ schoolgirl Minnie the Minx, both long-cherished characters to generations of British schoolkids. But his idea for a large-cast strip featuring anarchic school pupils seemed to be going nowhere until then editor George Moonie arranged to meet Leo as he was travelling by train, stopping off to talk to him en route and brining up the subject of the school strip, which Leo had floated to DCT much earlier but had heard little about and presumed it wasn’t to their tastes. But George had seen what Leo had sent in and he was interested – and out of a chat over a cup of tea Leo got his chance to create one of the best loved strips in British comics history, the Bash Street Kids.

(a page from the Times article on Leo; click the pic for the larger version, art (c) Leo Baxendale and DC Thomson)

“Arriving home, I started on the drawing at once, working on the dining room table. When my mother came to lay the table for the family tea I had to clear Bash Street away, impatient for the meal to be finished, so that I could carry on.

The Bash Street Kids was initially a whole school. When I had finished one of the first half-dozen sets — one was the Army Display, which had the Bash Street Kids defeating the British Army and carrying off the heavy weaponry as booty, with sundry kids machine-gunning fleeing teachers (this was 15 years before Lindsay Anderson’s If) — I thought, I could draw sets like this for years, and the readers would love them; but in the very moment of thinking that, I decided abruptly to change the structure of Bash Street fundamentally. I would get rid of the whole-school concept and replace it with a smaller group of characters, to bring them closer — closer to the readers. ”

Right to this day those characters remain firm favourites with British schoolkids – my friend’s wee boys still read and love them and I wonder how many generations of us grew up on those strips? The article can be read on the Times online here, with Leo recalling how those famous strips came into being and made their way into the Beano over half a century ago and of moving to Dundee to be closer to the publishers and the importance of a game of Keepie-Up in the formation of new comics ideas. Leo also tells me that his latest volume of memoirs, Hobgoblin Wars, is off to the binders and should be available in the near future; as with his previous (and fascinating) books you will be able to buy it via his site.

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