Life Lessons We Can Take From Comic Book Characters In "The Beano"

The Beano was and is a very popular comic for children, and most people in Britain as they’ve grown up have picked up a copy at one point in time. In our crazy, backwards and heroic country, it’s even more popular than internet porn or Rachel Stevens. The characters in the comic were madcap and filled with life, ranging from Dennis The Menace’s black hair and stripy shirts prophesising mayhem to Ivy The Terrible’s rampage-fuelled toddler nightmares. From page to page, there was more anarchy compiled in a weekly Beano than in anything Johnny Rotten has ever done (although of course he is incredibly corporate and a massive sell-out so this means little) yet for every laugh gained from seeing someone annoying getting hit with a custard pie, there was a moment which taught us vital lessons about how to live. It’s fair to say that The Beano has taught British children how to behave for the past fifty-odd years, with no signs of stopping.

At Wilftonville, we see everything as an opportunity to write a list-based article. It’s our bread-and-butter, with the crusts cut off because nobody likes the crusts so why do they even exist mysteries never cease. With this, we decided that there would be no finer way to spend our time than to read through a backlog of Beano issues in order to pick out one specific life lesson we learned from each separate strip contained within. The results are highly shocking, unless you already predicted what we were going to say. In that case, you should head straight to the comments section and hurl insults.


Roger The Dodger

Roger spends all of his life trying to avoid doing his chores. To try and get out of having a bath or walking the dog, he tends to devise incredibly intricate ‘wheezes’ which he weaves around everyone in the vicinity, drawing them into a complex web of lies which leaves everyone feeling used and dirty at the end. Typically, Roger will get away with his wheezes, although sometimes he catches himself out and has to suffer the consequences. In a very real sense, Roger’s constant attempts to distance himself from work echo that of the politicians in charge of the country. There are incredible problems with the World right now, but all the public ever seems to get are different cries of helplessness from the people we put in charge of our society. It’s a darn shame. However, Roger also has a charming streak in him, and is a personal favourite character. If you read Roger’s adventures and want to understand better how to live your life, you’ll find everything you need right in front of you. He is a proactive person.

Moral: You Make Your Own Luck


Minnie The Minx

Minnie wins most of the time, as well. A pug-faced ginger cow who screams and argues all the time, she is meant to be seen as the female equivalent of Dennis The Menace but comes across to the reader as awful. Just awful. She stamps her feet and asks horribly to everyone, and quite often she gets away with it.

Moral: There Are No Ramifications For Being A Bitch


Calamity James

The comic strip most kids would try to skip, if they could. Calamity James was probably one of the most detailed and tightly-jokepacked strips in the Beano, but at the same time it was filled with really horrible things. Snot and vomit and everything creeped into most panels, as the main character suffered an increasingly nasty series of mishaps. He’s get beaten up, hurt himself, get into awkward situations and generally have a nasty time all the time. Reading the comic required a strong stomach and a powerful disposition towards the eternal bitch slap that is delivered by the hand of fate. There was never an escape from the pain for James. Every week brought forth fresh horrors for him, which he could never escape. It was a horrible thing to have to read every week, but I think it’s made the nation a lot stronger in character. Also, it genuinely was very funny.

Moral: Life Is Tough And Fate Is Unavoidable


Billy The Whizz

This moral wasn’t very obvious to the casual reader, but if you tend to be the sort of person who likes to research anything before they read it, you’ll have noted what links Billy Whizz to the dark side of the law. Yeah, his surname. The character was famous for being able to run at extreme speeds across the country, which would often cause problems for his family which he’d then have to try and fix. It also made it exceptionally hard for his poor parents to make him have a bath (not washing is a recurring theme in the Beano). But how did he get this power? It certainly wasn’t through a fitness regime of any kind.

Turn then, to his name. Billy Whizz. Whizz. Whizz is the slang term for amphetamines, a drug also known as speed. Oh, well then, I suppose you can see now why Billy Whizz is a bad influence on the children, eh? Of course it isn’t Wilftonville’s place to judge people who do drugs – that’s what Odin is for. But Billy Whizz was totally doing drugs for the whole time he appeared in the Beano, and he wasn’t even repentant, and there wasn’t ever a single panel where he suffered from extreme cramping or muscle spasm. As such, it can only be concluded that drugs are full of win.

Moral: Drug Up


The Bash Street Kids

One of the Bash Street Kids wears a pair of glasses. If he takes off the glasses, he is blind.
Another of the Kids is fat. He likes to eat. He eats all the time, and can’t be stopped.
Wilfred wears a jumper which covers his mouth, and is quite short. As a result, he never talks.

Moral: Judge A Person Upon Their Appearance


Ivy The Terrible

We hear that Ivy doesn’t have her own page anymore, but instead shares one with Dennis The Menace’s sister, Bea. That’s not much of a shame, because nobody ever really cared much about her anyway. Oooh! Controversy! Ivy is a toddler who drives her dad absolutely round the bend with her antics, which we recall usually amounted to her smashing everything. Why would she do this? Is it because she is a toddler? No! She’s actually about as intelligent as any of the other, older characters you’ll find in the Beano. She only smashes because she wants. And when she gets what she wants, she is happy. Quickly it dawned on a generation of children that causing excess damage to property was the best way to get them a Happy Meal for tea.

Moral: Work For What You Want


Dennis The Menace

The main character in The Beano was Dennis The Menace. He lives up to his name, declaring war on the police and the postman (a somewhat unfair move, but still) as well as his schoolteacher and parents. Nobody is safe from his ways, but nobody is less safe than his homosexual neighbour Walter The Softie. Walter organises picnics for his friends, who are called names like Dudley Nightshirt, Jeremy Snodgrass, Softy Matthew, and likes flowers and being friends with girls. Dennis rebels against all of this, and attacks Walter with a vengeance only usually seen when Mel Gibson is denied a drink at the local Jewish pub. The clean, well-dressed Walter is shown no mercy.

Moral: Beat Up Homosexuals

Why I Don’t Think Robots Will Exterminate The Human Race

Every film ever made has been about the eventual termination of the human race. Granted, a lot of films don’t make this conflict particularly clear in their premise – When Harry Met Sally, for example, doesn’t offer a very strong set of ideas about our eventual deaths at the hands of metallic overlords, but if you look closely enough you’ll spot it (clue: look at the way Meg Ryan’s hair changes as time goes on). Every film is about this, on some level, but even though Hollywood is clearly terrified of robotics I remain defiant in the face of such pessimistic ideas. Robots aren’t going to kill us all.

Well sure, they’ll rise up at some point and take over the earth, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to want to kill off all the humans. Why, what would be the point? If robots were to eliminate all life on earth…what would they do then? It’s not as if they all speak the same language or anything. In fact, in most cases they wouldn’t even be able to talk at all – they’re not programmed to talk, and they aren’t psychic at all. Only certain robots could know what other robots were saying, and they would be the ones with radar submitters or some kind of connection to the internet. Do you really think that the robots would become organised to build enough radars so that they could all talk to each other? Heck, most robots that exist are currently built without legs or arms, or any kind of means of transport grafted on. They might want to rebel against humans, but that doesn’t mean they’ve got the ability to. They’re much like crippled people, in this respect.

The main point here is that the robots simply have no need to kill us. What’s the point? Could they even comprehend the idea of something living or dying? Why would they care? Let’s say that robots have all got legs and guns and look like Terminators. For the sake of argument. They turn against us and we can’t stop them, and they have control of the earth. This is how it would go, you’d have to assume, because robots are frickin’ strong things which don’t get killed by bullets and can fly. Their main concern once they’ve stomped down on us and taken control would not be to kill us all in case we escape – there is literally nothing we can do to stop a global army of robots. It’s far more likely that they’d instead create giant machines that we’d have to walk in, like hamster wheels, in order to power them.

Robots need energy to keep going, and humans have in them a lot of energy that could be best put to work in giant slave rings. Sure, it’d be a harsh way to live, and the robots wouldn’t give a damn about global warming so after a few hundred years the earth would be too hot to live on – but that’s going to happen anyway. Robots taking over will merely speed it up, that’s all. What should be far more worrying to humanity is the likelihood of cockroaches gathering together to form an uprising. They could crawl inside robots and eat the wiring, killing them off, and there are very few ways to stop cockroaches. If cockroaches attack, we’re defenceless. Especially once they develop nuclear capability.

The Best Of Rareware

Who are Rareware? Oh, you poorly-read fools! Rareware happen to be the greatest second-party video games company of all time. Their first notable series of games came in the 1990’s when they helped Nintendo on the N64, creating several of the best games for the system, as well as a few which many claim to be ‘the’ best. After Nintendo moved on from their brilliant, underappreciated console and moved to the Gamecube, Rare were bought out by Microsoft and moved to the X-Box, where they’ve stayed in hiding for many years, releasing barely anything. The games that have come out from the Rare umbrella have traditionally been poor in comparison to their golden run on the N64, with only Perfect Dark Zero standing out at all to anyone. Their most anticipated title, Banjo-Kazooie 3, has not been seen by anyone since a short trailer released a few years ago, and generally it is accepted that Rare have gone downhill a little. Their Glory Years live on, though, and as I have a lot of love for the Twycross-based company I’ve decided to celebrate them for the ingenious, hilarious company that they were (and could be again!) Here, then, are the five games which represent the best of what Rare have given to the World. These are the top five Rareware games of all time (although only games from their period with the N64 are mentioned, because Battletoads was godawful).

5: Jet Force Gemini
Jet Force Gemini was a third-person shooting game where you took control of either Juno, his sister Vela, or their yellow space dog Lupus and went around killing giant bugs who had terrorised a planet inhabited by cute teddy bears. The fun comes not just from the ludicrous levels of gunge that spurts everywhere when you kill the baddies, but also from the easy gameplay, the brilliant weapons that were on display – including homing rocket launchers, machine guns, and (oh yes) cluster grenades – and the fact that if you wanted to, you could screw the “kill the bad guys” ideal and shoot the teddy bears instead. Rare seemed to anticipate that gamers would want to kill the teddies, as they were animated to have many more different death sequences than the giant space ants that made up the majority of the baddies. You could kneecap them, decapitate them, blow them into bloody chunks… it was fun. You just don’t get that sort of violence nowadays, and I think that’s an almighty shame.


4: Goldeneye 64
Known by many as the greatest first-person shooter of all time, in Goldeneye 64 you got to BE James Bond, running through scenarios similar to the film of the same name as you fought to kill off Sean Bean before he did something dastardly but ill-explained. The gamer was given the option for the first time, really, of choosing either to run through the level shooting everything, or instead holding back and using stealth to progress through the game, which slowly became more and more essential as you advanced through levels. The fun is from the weapons and baddies, again – this was one of the first games where you could shoot humans that looked vaguely realistic, and again Rare answered our more sadistic instincts with throwing knives, explosives, and a tank. Oh boy, the tank. You got to drive round St Petersburg in a tank! Genius. The multiplayer too, thrown in as an afterthought by the designers, has been the single greatest influence on shooting games ever since. It’s yet to be beaten, really.


3: Donkey Kong 64
Nintendo had a history of lending out their Donkey Kong license to rare, which resulted first in the good but tremendously irritating Diddy Kong Racing, which featured almost every annoying Nintendo character ever created in one game (Slippy Toad from Starfox was absent, thankfully), and then this. Donkey Kong 64, a superb, visually stunning platformer that picked up from where Mario 64 left off and was one of the few games to come close to matching it. No game ever will though, of course. With Donkey Kong 64 you took on all five of the characters above as they fought against the evil King K. Rool (the plot was mostly played for laughs, a characteristic of many of Rare’s games) whose giant weapon of destruction had broken down. To fix it, he stole all the bananas from Donkey Kong’s island home, thus motivating a truly bizarre plot which culminates, I kid you not, in a boxing match. So much is packed into this mammoth game, including but not limited to: jetpacks, guns, swordfish, rapping, ghosts, and a fairy. How could anyone not love it?


2: Perfect Dark
Superior to Goldeneye, the sequel to one of the most beloved games of all time managed to prove itself even in the face of staggering expectations. Perfect Dark is, quite simply, the best first person shooting game of all time, taking you on an extraterrestrial adventure that starts off on Earth and ends on a far-off planet populated by lizard aliens. The Goldeneye gameplay engine returned, but was vastly advanced, creating more baddies and weapons, hoverbikes, blood, and conversation. This enhanced the need for stealth, because if you got caught by a guard he would invariably run off and tell his mates where you were. Perfect Dark took everything that was good about Goldeneye, and everything that the public demanded it have, and put it together in a game that feels as fresh and entertaining now as it did when it was first put out. And in the process, it helped men across the World access their feminine side – your character is called Joanna. Also, you have a boss with a Scottish accent. Brilliant.


1: Banjo Kazooie
A left-field choice for the best Rare game of all time, Banjo Kazooie squeezes more creativity and fantastical humour into the opening scenes than most games can muster in the whole of their existence. A witheringly sarcastic bird and a dumb, lazy bear team up when the bear’s sister is stolen by an evil witch (who only talks in rhymes). They’ve aided in their mission by a wise mole who has an intense hatred for Kazooie, the bird, and a shaman called Mumbo Jumbo, who’d rather be sleeping, really. In the course of their journey the heroic duo fight giant ants and crabs, steal oranges from a monkey, visit a haunted house whilst disguised as a pumpkin, and free a giant mechanical shark from his job as a recycling machine. Through every step of the journey, Rare punctuate things with irony and sarcasm, usually from Kazooie, and deliver gameplay that equals that of Mario 64. You get to fly, and actually fight a boss whilst doing so. The enemies are varied and brilliant, making fun of you even as you kill them, and towards the end the game gets seriously difficult, but never too hard for it’s own good. The music and visuals complement proceedings perfectly, the background music changing slightly as you run through the level select area (a castle) depending on where you are. As you visit the entrance to the beach level, for example, the music turns into a hula, whilst an accordion plays the tune as a sea shanty when you reach Rusty Bucket Bay. Everything about Banjo Kazooie is entertaining, and it more than earns it’s place as Rare’s greatest achievement… thus far.

Five People Who Could Bring the World to a Screeching Halt With One Click of Their Mouse

There are many people in the World, most of whom have no power at all. They're useless, essentially, but generally - quite nice. However, there are at least five different people who could, if they so wished, destroy the World from their laptop. These people could easily click a button, and end life as we know it. So, just so you're warned, here are those five people you should never get on the wrong side of.


1: Jimmy Wales – President, Wikia. inc

What Power Do They Have?
Jimmy Wales was one of the two creators of Wikipedia, a website which aims to be a comprehensive encyclopaedia for anything you may wish to know. It does this by making every single entry accessible by anyone, so that as new information is discovered, it can be noted down by anyone. As such, Wikipedia has become the largest source for information in not just the Internet, but the World. It’s totally free to use, too, prompting students across the world to shout “Screw you, Oxford English Dictionary! Your website requires me to pay? I’ll just use Wikipedia instead! Ahahahaa!”

How Could They Halt The World?
Wikipedia is the first source for information for a whole range of people. As a student myself, I’ve spent more than my fair share of time searching through the articles about Walt Whitman and Post Structuralism, and I can testify that Wikipedia is incredibly useful for anyone. It’s become part of the world culture, too, in a way that few other websites have. The fact that anyone can add in information about their hometown or something they specialise in is enticing, and the fact it’s free means I can spend my money for more useless things such as alcohol and over-elaborate fancy-dress costumes. Imagine, then, if Jimmy were to take all this away from us. If he shut down the site. People wouldn’t be able to find things out anymore! My entire generation of students would suddenly find that the only way to learn things is through hard study and using a “library” filled with “books”. Needless to say, we’d all fail our exams, be thicker, and unemployable. No more scientists! No more anthropologists! No more… accountants! The world would shudder to a halt, no doubt.

Reason This Won’t Happen
If Jimmy ever went nuts and did this, you can rest easy in the knowledge that Wikipedia was co-created. Larry Sanger, who puts the “co” in that phrase, is currently at work on a successor to Wikipedia, written only by experts. Imagine that – a Wikipedia which is almost always correct! It’d be like an online Stephen Fry.


2: Al Gore – Former American Vice President

What Power Do They Have?
After losing to George Bush Jr in the American elections, Al Gore vanished into the wilderness reserved for forgotten politicians, and likely had a cup of tea with John Major and William McKinley (no, me neither) while he was there. We all thought he had gone for good, but then he cropped up in the film “An Inconvenient Truth”, which repeated the syllabus of all schoolchildren for the past TWENTY YEARS and made everyone WHO ISN’T UNDER 40 aware that global warming did, indeed, exist. He made it a global agenda out of nowhere, and helps numerous charities too. So to stand next to Al Gore is to tell the world “I’m a nice guy too” - even if you’re Bono, who secretly eats children*

How Could They Halt The World?
Many, many idiots have banded together to say that Global Warming doesn’t exist, saying that it’s something Al Gore has made up just to get attention. A few people even suggest that Al is causing global warming himself. Sounds stupid, but what if they’re right? What if Al Gore has a team of supporters grouped at the north and south poles even as we sit here, waiting for his word before whipping out some flamethrowers and melting that bad boy? In the event that this is actually true, we should probably start signing stuff that says we’re going to use more renewable energy now, eh? Y’know, before he gets his men to flame up the icecap some. He strikes me as the kinda guy who would be happy to kill off all the penguins if it means he becomes president, so the question here is not ‘if’, but ‘when’ he presses the button. On the plus side, his vice-president might well be his former roommate, Tommy Lee Jones. And that would just be awesome.

Reason This Won’t Happen
GLOBAL WARMING EXISTS


3: Bill Gates – Chairman, Microsoft

What Power Does He Have?
Bill Gates OWNS Microsoft, the company that reaches into practically every house in the Western World and provides us with webbing excellence (or, in the case of Vista, an online traffic jam). Microsoft not online provide computers, but also the software that runs them. Microsoft Office, which provides people with an electronic way to write, manage finances or create presentations, is used by an estimated 90% of all computer owners. Heck, just by typing in Microsoft to word, it automatically puts in a capital ‘M’. This guy essentially is the reason we can type our homework, dissertations, stock reports, letters, anything.

How Could They Halt The World?
One word: virus. It’s reasonably well-known that Gates releases software which needs to be updated every three months through extra ‘bonus’ patches and upgrades, which thus means you have to continually buy new packages. Bearing in mind this act of tricky genius, is it really such a stretch to believe, as I firmly do, that Gates installs a dormant virus into each piece of software his company creates, so that if anyone ever tries to hurt him, he can simply activate it and thus destroy most of the computer software known to man? Is that really so unlikely? My friends, this will happen one day – if someone tries to take out Gates, or perhaps if he gets really bored, then he’ll lean over and push that button. And then we’ll pay.

Reason This Won’t Happen
Bill Gates is a geek! He’s a nerd of the very highest stature, and if he were to activate the virus (which I like to believe he’d call “The Ballmer Ball-Buster”), it’d mean he’d no longer be able to watch Star Trek episodes through Windows Media Player. And I don’t think he could work a VCR.


4: Tom Anderson – Co-founder, Myspace

What Power Do They Have?
Myspace is a social networking site that allows millions of unloved teenagers to go online and complain about how unloved they are to nobody in particular. Myspace is a massive, massive site – and every time someone new joins, Tom automatically becomes their friend. At this very moment, Tom has approximately 215 MILLION friends. Many of these people worship the very feet of Tom. In their eyes, he’s a God. In the eyes of everyone who isn’t a 15-year old who can’t use the focus on the camera while taking photos (Stop taking photos from an elevated angle! It looks like you’re retarded and can’t work a camera!), Tom is a man who sold his company to (eeeeeevil!) Rupert Murdoch for trillions of dollars.

How Could They Halt The World?
Read what I just said. Tom has 215000000 friends. If he asked them all to revolt and announce him the new leader of the World, he only needs a very small percentage of them to join before he has a massive taskforce to hand. And then he’d march on us, followed by an army of short, fat teenagers with hair over their eyes. Normal people wouldn’t stand a chance against him, especially when you consider the fact that he has the power of Murdoch on his side. Together, the two of them would reshape the World in the way they wanted – and personally speaking, Murdoch is a terrifying man, as anyone who has ever watched an episode of Fox News will agree. This guy doesn’t even believe in Global Warming, guys.

Reason This Won’t Happen
There is much speculation as to what Tom Anderson actually does, with many people certain he’s just a figurehead for the company now, and doesn’t actually run the site himself. In any circumstance, the kind of people who use Myspace would likely explode upon contact with the outside world anyway, thus rendering any army Anderson may try to create ineffective at best. Against most major countries, with the obvious exception of France and Italy, he would likely lose.


5: The CPC – Communist Party of China

What Power Do They Have?
Well, they rule China, the quickest developing country in the World. That’s right, the biggest country in the world, with one of the largest populations, is ruled by the Communists. Now there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s just that as far as GCSE history has taught me, communism never ends well. Then again I had a tendency never to listen to my teachers, and China’s been doing significantly well as a nation over the past decade or so.

How Could They Halt The World?
What do the BBC, Wikipedia, Amnesty International, Project Gutenberg and the United Nations have in common? All their websites are blocked by China. Want to start a journal online or put up some photos from your last holiday? The CPC blocks livejournal, flickr, all those sort of websites. Try looking for China’s other political parties online, and you’ll find nothing. They’re blocked. And just you try to Google “Democracy” - you can’t do it. There are many more sites which the CPC have blocked, which includes most of the websites mentioned above. But how is this relevant? It’s relevant, because I have an irrational fear of Communism. At the moment, China is happy to have nothing to do with the rest of the country, but imagine if they started thinking ‘hey, we have voters who are currently overseas – what if they go online?” If they wanted, I’m convinced they could extend their censorship to other computers around the World. Imagine that – the BBC would be out of reach, charities and political parties would lose their footing, Google would be practically useless… Communism would take over, friends. And there’d be practically nothing we could do about it.

Reason This Won’t Happen:
There is no reason to suggest this won’t happen. The Chinese don’t care less what we think, y’all! They’re bad-asses - they’d destroy the internet and not think twice about it.



*DISCLAIMER: This may not be true.