ABSTRACT
Whether it is with a custard pie, a dog or a slipper, violence has remained an ever-present feature of The Beano’s iconic comic strip ‘Dennis the Menace and Gnasher’ (1951 to present). The outcry against the strip’s 2009 revamp, which removed the title character’s trademark peashooter and slingshot, demonstrated not only the centrality of violence to Dennis’s identity but the value attributed to such depictions of violence by its readership and the British public at large.
Violence is a phenomenon common to human experience. Yet definitions of violence remain intensely malleable across axes of individuality and community, normativity and deviance, and physicality and psychology. This chapter explores the terms of this malleability in how the relationship between children and violence is rationalised and developed in the strip, by analysing the conflict between the two main characters, Dennis the Menace and his nemesis, Walter the Softy. Both characters are opposed, and the conflict between them motivates much of the violence found in the strip. Moreover, as the comic has developed over time, the depiction of each character, and Walter, has changed to, if not justify, at least explain the violent relationship that exists between them. This chapter asks how the representation of violence between the characters has changed over time, and how this change is underpinned by changes in the depiction of each character. Methodologically, this chapter draws upon the work of comics theorist Neil Cohn to understand the depiction of violence as part of a continually developing visual lexicon. By highlighting specific periods of transition in this lexicon, this chapter explores the continued appeal of violence depicted in the strip with the intention of understanding the privileging of certain violent acts over others.
