Happy Birthday, Leo Baxendale

I’d have missed this, if it wasn’t for the Comics Reporter: today is the 77th birthday of Leo Baxendale, the brilliant and influential comics artist who created (among others) Little Plum, The Three Bears, Minnie the Minx, the Bash Street Kids, Grimly Feendish, the Badtime Bedtime Books and Baby Basil, which was another of The Guardian’s forays into comic strips. Together with writers whose names I still don’t know, Baxendale was responsible in one way or another for getting on for a quarter of all the reasons I started reading comics in the first place.

So, happy birthday, Mr Baxendale! This blog is largely your fault!

Panel
Minnie the Minx, art by Leo Baxendale, The Beano, 1950s, reprinted in Dandy and Beano: Famous Faces from the Comics, DC Thomson, 1992

Big and Brassy

They may have lost a comic, but it seems that Wallace and Gromit will gain a statue, in animator Nick Park’s home town of Preston, Lancashire.

Putting up statues of cartoon characters is something of a trend. There’s an Andy Capp in Hartlepool (Reg Smythe’s birthplace) and Desperate Dan and Minnie the Minx share a metaphorical plinth in Dundee (headquarters of publisher D C Thomson).


Round here on Tyneside, the local heroes are the characters created by Chris and Simon Donald and their cohorts for Viz. So, who do you reckon should be immortalised in the Bigg Market? The Fat Slags? Sid the Sexist? Buster Gonad and his Unfeasibly Large Testicles? Or perhaps Finbarr Saunders and His Double Entendres would provide a suitably impressive erection.

Fnarr, fnarr.

Oh, and if you doubt that the Viz folk are of suitable character to be immortalised in bronze, remember that, as Lew Stringer reminds us, Andy Capp was not just a drunken layabout, but also a wife-beater.

Pictures
Photo of Andy Capp statue by Stan Laundon
Photo of Desperate Dan and Minnie the Minx statues by Stonefaction