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.

The very first episode broadcast was also the first to be adapted, but after that the comic order has little relationship to the order the episodes were shown in, although they do adapt all the Series 1 episodes first before moving on to Series 2:

TV episode	Original CBBC airdate	The Beano Super Stars adaptation
Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow	2 April 1996	Issue #61, January 1997
The Day They Took Gnasher Away	9 April 1996	Issue #65, May 1997
Bathnight Club	16 April 1996	Issue #81, September 1998
Dennis Ahoy!	23 April 1996	Issue #71, November 1997
Revenge of the Robot	30 April 1996	Issue #83, November 1998 (under the title Undercover Cop)
Wanted!	7 May 1996	Issue #63, March 1997
Dennis and the Beanstalk	14 May 1996	Issue #67, July 1997
Unidentified Funny Object	21 May 1996	Issue #77, May 1998
Special Agent Dennis	28 May 1996	Issue #82, October 1998 (under title What My Dad Does)
Dennis and the Grown-Ups	4 June 1996	Issue #73, January 1998
The Secret Diary	25 June 1996	Issue #79, July 1998 (under title When Dad Was a Lad)
Gorilla Warfare	2 July 1996	Issue #69, September 1997 (under title Wayward Bound)
The Day TV Was Banned	9 July 1996	Issue #75, March 1998 (under title The Day They Banned the TV)
The Competition!	13 February 1998	Issue #94, October 1999
Summer Holiday	20 February 1998	Issue #85, January 1999
Menace Power	27 February 1998	Issue #87, March 1999 (under title Fuel of the Future)
Dennisaurus Rex	6 March 1998	Issue #93, September 1999
Adventures in Dennis Sitting	13 March 1998	Issue #90, June 1999
Haunted House	20 March 1998	Issue #86, February 1999
Oil Strike!	27 March 1998	Issue #84, December 1998
Mauled	3 April 1998	Issue #95, November 1999 (under title Shop Till you Drop)
The Trial	9 April 1998	Issue #91, July 1999
Journey to the Centre of the Bed	16 April 1998	Issue #96, December 1999
Skull & Crossbones	23 April 1998	Issue #92, August 1999 (under title Pirate Pandemonium)
Snowbound	30 April 1998	Issue #89, May 1999
Monster Menace	7 May 1998	Issue #88, April 1999

From issues 61-80, The Beano Super Stars was still featuring other characters, and the issues followed a strict sequence of a Dennis TV adaptation, then an original story with Roger or Minnie, then another adaptation, and so on; issue 80 was the final non-Dennis issue (Roger the Dodger: In Search of the Lost Dodge!, to wit), and from thereon the comic exclusively featured adaptations until they had done the lot, after which they began running original stories again with issue 97. The rebranding to minimise the Super Stars name began with issue 84; it may not be a coincidence that this was the first issue to adapt a Series 2 episode after the previous issue finished off the Series 1 episodes.

I was planning on including repeats in the above table, to see if there was any correlation between when the Super Stars adaptations were released and if the episodes were being repeated on TV at the time, but BBC Genome is not particularly helpful in identifying which episodes were shown, and given the Super Stars variously released the panto-themed Dennis and the Beanstalk in July, Summer Holiday in January and Haunted House in February, it doesn't seem like there was much logical correlation.

One thing that does seem worth noting is that after the Super Stars returned to original stories once they'd exhausted the TV series, there were two spiritual successors to Dennis and the Beanstalk; issue #108's Pantomonium! and issue #120's Panto Time Again, both published in December and tying into D. C. Thomson's long history of adapting pantomimes using all a comic's characters. The 2012 book Classic Beano & Dandy: Panto Time reprints many of these, including the Dandy's 1999 take on Robin Hood and Minderella from one of the 1990s Beano Books; it also includes a very rare reprint outing for one of the Super Stars in the form of Panto Time Again, included as a separate mini-comic tucked into the inside back cover.

As mentioned earlier, the Super Stars were already a shade wackier than the usual weekly Beano even before they started adapting the quite wacky TV show, but the remaining new stories after the TV adaptations ended seemed to keep an extra infusion of strangeness. This may, however, just be down to my particularly strong childhood memories of reading The Day the Town Went Mad!

* * *

There are a couple of unanswered questions here, and many of them we can only guess at the answers to. For example, I don't know why The Bash Street Kids were only part of Super Stars for its first two years, but I suspect artist availability played a part; some of the stories are quite obviously not done by David Sutherland, who drew the weekly strip from 1962 until his death in 2023, or even by his usual ghost-artist of the time. One question we can have a crack at, though, is "why wasn't there a Dandy Super Stars series, and why did the range only ever feature four characters?" (Yes, technically it's two questions, never mind.) This is probably down to the characters needing to be both "iconic" enough and capable of carrying a longer-form story. The Comic Libraries were more experimental with who they chose to feature (they could presumably afford to be thanks to lower production costs and cover prices), but some of them are arguably more like sketch shows than a single story, and if you look at the lead character for every single Beano Comic Library it does back up the idea these were D. C. Thomson's most reliable hitters:

Character	Beano Comic Libraries as lead
Dennis the Menace	74
The Bash Street Kids	55
Minnie the Minx	41
Roger the Dodger	22
Little Plum	21
Gnasher and/or Gnipper	17
Ball Boy	17
The Beano All-Stars/other crossover with no distinct lead	16
Jonah	16
Lord Snooty	16
The Three Bears	14
Calamity James	10
Baby-Face Finlayson	7
Pup Parade	6
Pansy Potter	6
One-offs	5
Smudge	4
Rasher	4
Ivy the Terrible	4
Bananaman	3
Billy Whizz	3
The Numskulls	3
The McTickles	2
Snitch and Snatch	2

The Dandy Comic Libraries tended to be more fragmented, in part because if there was a Comic Library featuring a character who didn't hail from the Beano or the Dandy they would usually appear under the Dandy banner (but not always, hence why there are three Bananaman stories in the Beano table). A full table would probably be less useful, but it may not surprise you to learn that there were 60 Desperate Dan Comic Libraries, far more than any other Dandy character; in second place of the Dandy Libraries is "crossover with no distinct lead" with 35. If we add his three Beano Comic Libraries to his total, Bananaman just pips Bully Beef and Chips for the bronze medal; then Puss 'n' Boots number 18, Cuddles and Dimples 16 -- impressive given they didn't exist for a good few years of the Comic Libraries' lifetime -- Beryl the Peril 14, and Winker Watson and Korky the Cat have twelve apiece.

(Big crossovers featuring all of the comic's incumbent characters continue to be referred to as "The Beano All-Stars" to this day. The Dandy also used this name for a while, but in later Comic Libraries it changed to "The Dandy Fun Pals"; to keep the two different comics' brands distinct, perhaps?)

I am not getting into a full breakdown of the Fun-Size Beanos (not yet, anyway) -- those were marketed as, well, mini versions of the weekly comic with multiple stories and features, so it's not comparing like-for-like with the Comic Libraries even before you get into the fact that many of the later issues were reprints of old material -- but a quick flick through the covers indicates that nearly every issue featured at least one of Dennis, Minnie, Roger and the Bash Street Kids alongside a more recent or less 'iconic' character, although a few later editions break this rule. The Fun-Size Dandys are significantly odder at times, sometimes devoting entire issues to entirely new characters or resurrecting ones who had been retired for decades and originally appeared in entirely different comics, perhaps with a view to bringing them back in the weekly edition. It does add to the general picture that perhaps the Dandy had fewer instantly recognisable characters compared to the Beano, and there weren't enough bankable characters for a Super Stars series.

In conclusion: Dennis the Menace is one of the most famous British comic characters. Who knew?