See how this print emerges out of the panel in The Beano in the 1980s.
Handmade screen print on cotton paper.
Signed and numbered out of 200 in pencil by the printer, John Patrick Reynolds.
Standard size: 26cm x 19cm
Medium size: 48cm x 38cm
Large size: 76cm x 56cm
Dennis Menace has one of the most recognisable faces in Britain. That chaotic shock of hair, that round face, that grin. He’s also come to be associated with the colour red – the colour of the stripe on his football jersey ... and the colour of danger.
Dennis and Gnasher are a gift to the screenprinter, from a graphic point of view, with Dennis's red-and-white sriped jersey and explosion of black hair.
Gnasher seems to be made of the same kind of thing as Dennis's hair – the untamed explosion of black somehow symbolic of the chaos they embody.
This image first appeared in an issue of The Beano. He has become a kind of national mascot – what Asterix is to France, or Oor Wullie is to Scotland. Incidentally, The Beano is the longest running British comic. It first appeared on 30 July 1938, and is still published every week.
Dennis Menace, the star of The Beano comic, first appeared in 1951. Dennis has gone through various phases since he first appeared, from the pocket-sized Satan of the 1950s, to the pugnacious youth of the 1960s and 1970s to the incorrigible imp of the 1990s. In the early 1960s, he was joined by his Abyssinian wire-haired tripe house, Gnasher.
The Beano is of course also home to those other icons of British children's comic humour Minnie The Minx, The Bash Street Kids and Roger The Dodger. Incidentally, the word beano is apparently short for "bean-feast" and means a feast, a celebration and a good time.
This screenprint has been officially approved by DC Thomson. I am the first and only screenprinter with permission to use the images of Dennis Menace and Gnasher in my work.
These are all original screenprints. An original print is a work of art printed by hand, from a plate, block, stone, or stencil (which is the case here - screenprints are made using screen stencils) that has been created by the artist for the purpose of producing the image.
© D.C. Thomson & Co., Ltd.