BEANO & DANDY CHRISTMAS CRACKERS...

Images copyright D. C. THOMSON & Co., Ltd

Why does DENNIS The MENACE on the above cover look like a 20 year old, powerfully-built man in short trousers?  Not quite sure, but he does, wouldn't you say?  In the shops now - The BEANO and The DANDY CHRISTMAS CRACKERS, priced £4.99 each.

While it's great to see so many classic strips, it has to be said that they look extremely washed out.  Perhaps this is to give them an authentic 'old' look, but it makes them less attractive than they could be.  If I were a cynic, I might think they were made to look like this in order to make the current strips in The Beano weekly look even more colourful and exciting than they actually are by comparison.  Surely not though?  

Either way, D.C. THOMSON have taken the lazy route to producing these bookazines, merely scanning and printing by the look of it.  I'm certainly no expert and hardly have the technology available to DCT, but even with my limited resources, I've managed to make the examples on this post much brighter and slightly less ancient looking.  Cop a gander at that Dandy logo - wouldn't have hurt them to tart it up a bit, surely?

Anyway, probably designed to appeal more to grown-up former readers than today's current crop of kids, so if you've got a spare tenner, you could probably spend it in worse ways.