D.C. Thomson & Co.

A friend lent me a few of these compilation of British comics, so I am now able to fill in a gap in my knowledge of international culture, or something like that. The first one I read was a sampling of comics going back many decades, and, while it was amusing in places, was honestly more interesting to me as a quaint sort of curiosity than anything. This one, however, I found more enjoyable in its own right, although the individual comics vary a lot. Some were genuinely quite funny, others were just... kind of dumb. Most were somewhere in-between: mildly amusing or cute, but not anything that made me laugh out loud. I think I could easily imagine myself being into them as a kid the way I was into the Sunday funnies here, though, if I'd grown up on the other side of the Pond.… (més)

A friend of mine lent me a few collections of British Beano comics, I think possibly because he felt my not having read any was a gap in my education. This was the first of them, sort of. It's actually a sampler of comics from several publications, ranging mostly from the 1950s through the 1980s, with a few older ones thrown in as well, showcasing a variety of hapless, high-spirited, or bratty characters. I suspect it's intended more as a nostalgia hit for those already familiar with this stuff than as a first introduction, though.

I can't say I found any of it to be a giant laugh-fest -- at most, it got a few quiet snorts out of me -- but there is a little bit of quaint charm to it all. Or to a lot of it, anyway. And I was interested to discover that the British version of Dennis the Menace is very different from the one I was familiar with. Theirs is a lot more menacing-looking than ours!… (més)