Wednesday, 24 April 2013

Pranks a lot!


British comics have often featured activity pages amongst the strips, from the humble reader's jokes page ("submit a joke and win a 10 shilling postal order"), 'How to' features on magic tricks, and puzzle pages such as Teaser Time. The latest thing appears to be the 'pranks' page, with readers actively encouraged to play harmless pranks on their parents and pals, with step-by-step instructions on each mischievous moment. 

Today's issues of The Beano and BeanoMax are no exception. In The Beano I've illustrated Pop Goes the Weasel, - and no, weasels are not involved. It's a prank involving keys and balloons.

Over in BeanoMax, my cartoons run across five pages for the It's Prank O'Clock feature, telling kids how they can get up to 15 pranks during the course of a day. 



This week's Beano is rather special because not only does it feature the return of the cover strip (as opposed to one big picture) it also contains the debut of four new strips. (My regular Rasher mini-strip is still in there too.) Out now for a mere £2.00.

BeanoMax comes bagged with a pile of goodies, the best of which in my opinion is a plastic fake fried egg. (A nice oldschool joke prop which I'm sure thousands of today's readers will enjoy playing with.) That's issue No.77, on sale now for £3.99. 

6 comments:

Alec Dever said...

Hilarious illustrations. Glad to see you're getting more work.

Also, I made a rebuttal on The Sun's "news" article on Dennis and Gnasher. The thought of putting up with news websites making false statements was unbearable so here it is:
http://theblogofalecd.blogspot.com.au/2013/04/dennis-and-gnasher-rebuttal-on-why.html

What do you think of it?

Lew Stringer said...

Unfortunately when I tried to access your blog my browsers froze (both Firefox and Safari) so I had to Force Quit. From what I did see, it looks like you took them to task on their lazy journalism. Good job!

Alec Dever said...

Thank you so much! It means a lot to me.
:-D

Alec Dever said...

I put a new and simpler template on my blog so you won't have the freezing up problem again. I was using a "dynamic view" last time which would probably explain why it was freezing up. I fixed that. Feel free to look at the blog post again and once again, thank you.
;-)

Anonymous said...

The Beano: a cover strip - good idea! i like it! kinetic and colourful.
ps: on my travels the last few days, I noticed "the last ever Dandy" on numerous WH Smith shelves.

Jonathan Ingram said...

I bought the Beano for the first time in 16 years, based on that front cover alone.

It would be interesting to see whether they had a sales spike that week (due to other adults like me who went all nostalgic over the layout).