Wednesday, 1 January 2025

But He Didn't Get Far


The Beano Super Stars was yet another spin-off of D. C. Thomson's most enduring weekly humour comic, published monthly for a full decade between January 1992 and January 2002. It was very similar to the bite-size Comic Libraries and Fun-Size Beanos, with each issue telling a single long-form story over its 32 pages, but with the obvious added selling points of being in full A4 size, on glossy paper and in glorious technicolour.

They also evolved out of a very similar series that were simply branded as "Beano Specials", which were published quarterly between 1987 and 1991 and alternated between featuring Dennis the Menace and the Bash Street Kids; during this time a few Dandy Specials were also published, featuring Desperate Dan and Bananaman. For most of their existence the Super Stars alternated between Dennis, Roger the Dodger and Minnie the Minx, with the Bash Street Kids also in the mix but only for the first two years; beginning in late 1998, however, only Dennis was featured, and a few issues later the Super Stars rebranded to effectively be Dennis the Menace Monthly.

Not only that, but many of these later issues were direct adaptations of the 1996-98 Dennis the Menace CBBC series; in fact, every episode of that series was adapted into an issue of Super Stars. Having a page count ten times greater than Dennis' strip in the weekly Beano was desirable, obviously, but the wackier, offbeat take on the characters of the TV show fitted in pretty well with what the Super Stars were already doing. Clearly adapting the animated series was a popular idea, as not long after the Dandy ran Bananaman strips which adapted the series of shorts from the eighties, which were enjoying one of their final runs on CBBC at the time. When I eventually relocate the pertinent Dandys from 1999, you can bet that I will have something to say on those, but thanks to Comic Vine having a complete database of covers, it's much easier to work out which issues of Super Stars adapted episodes of the TV show and when.