On Tuesday the 19th of October 1993 Leo Baxendale threw a 40th birthday party for his creations The Bash Street Kids and Minnie the Minx at the Preston SF Group. Everyone was encouraged to come in related fancy dress and there was a prize for the best costume. There was also live music from Ben and Sonja with a specially reformed group to be called The Banana Bunch for the occasion. At least one song is especially written by Leo.
In his late teens as he was nearing the end of his National Service days in the RAF, Leo Baxendale was sure he wanted to be an artist. He had spent a great deal of time accumulating a portfolio of drawings and these got him a job at Preston's The Lancashire Evening Post. He drew adverts and cartoons, but knew this was only the first step. He had always known that when he was 21 or 22 he would be ripe for moving into a national market. In 1952 at the age of 22 he felt the time right but which direction should he go?
He had sent some samples of comic drawings to Faber & Faber who recognised his talent but who did not publish comics. The told him that he would find no problem in finding work with children's comics. However, Leo's memories of comics were dreary affairs of public school characters. Of boring rehashed magic based tales. So when he picked up a copy of his brother's Beano in 1952, he was not expecting much inspiration. He was wrong. On the inside cover was a strip he had never seen before, although it had been running in The Beano for 18 months: Dennis the Menace was drawn by David Law, and was in a totally new vigorous flowing style; the pictures "pulsed with life".
Leo was inspired to create a similar vital strip, he wrote immediately to the Beano publishers, DC Thomson. However the management of DC Thomson were conservative and were still wanting artists who drew like the old Lord Snooty and Pansy Potter (the Strong Man's Daughter). Leo was given the job of drawing a couple of strips; Oscar Krank about a Heath Robinson type inventor, and Chopstick Charlie Choo (the Chinese Detective). Leo applied himself to these, but his heart was not in them. It was imperative that Leo came up with a character like Dennis which he could put his whole creativity behind.
He had seen a Giles cartoon with a horde of children pummelling and thumping as they escaped from school. Leo was taken by the excitement of the scene and quickly pencilled a large scene of rampaging children pouring out of school. He sent it off to the Beano with a covering synopsis. However the idea did not impress R.D. Low the managing Director of DC Thomson; they were not ready for it. In the coming months Leo sent in idea after idea but all came to nothing.
So seven months after starting with the Beano he was desperately trying to think up a character in the family home in Preston, when his brother appeared with his comics. This time it was a Mickey Mouse Weekly and as he read Leo saw a picture of Hiawatha on the back. `That's it!' he thought, `a red Indian Dennis the Menace.'
The Beano accepted the idea of Little Plum. After initial attempts at copying the frown and mouth of Dennis, Leo saw that it was not working. Little Plum was putty-like and he was to have ever-shifting facial expressions to show the different sides of the character. Plum could be cowardly, naive, credulous, a gormless conniver and a disaster-prone bumbler. This was to prove the fundamental difference between Dennis and Plum. Dennis with his frown created the events in his strip. Plum with his innocence was pummelled by the fates and had little control.
Little Plum was doing well when in August 1953 George Moonie, the Beano editor, wrote to Leo wanting a new character; The Minx! Leo sent off the first strip without delay; by return of post in fact! They liked it, but it was drawn `too posh', they wanted Minnie and her Dad to be more working class. Leo had drawn the house as a bungalow and Dad with a collar and tie. Leo wanted there to be appeal across all classes and felt he could do this by making the Bungalow a two-storey house, although with a small suburban front garden. The figure of Dad was more tricky. Leo resolved this by changing what Dad wore in different stories. A suit in one, rolled up shirt-sleeves in another, and an open neck shirt in another, and so on. It seemed to work because he got no more complaints. However, after Leo moved from Preston to live in Dundee, he always drew Minnie's Dad with collar and tie (and pullover).
The initial thoughts on Minnie by George Moonie was to have a Dennis-like girl. However Dennis's creator David Law had done this in The Topper with Beryl The Peril. Leo did not want to go down the same road. He empowered Minnie with limitless ambition desiring every high post on earth, with the strength and ferocity of a Amazon to help her.
Originally Minnie looked about 6 or 7 with a big open mouth like a blacked in O (she did a great deal of shouting). However, Leo soon found that her intended persona would not work, until he raised her apparent age to 12 or 13. In doing this he also got rid of the permanently shouting mouth.
It was out of the blue when George Moonie asked for a meeting in Preston to discuss an idea for a new strip. One of the sections in Leo Baxendale's book, ON COMEDY, which details his work on the Beano, is entitled THE BASH STREET KIDS - BORN IN PRESTON and chronicles the birth of the Bash Street Kids.
The rest, as they say is history. The series started as When the Bell Rings but through general consensus everyone referred to it as The Bash Street Kids, however it would take two and a half years before the title would change in the comic! The first `set' contained about fifty characters, half boys and half girls on a frozen mill pond. There were two lead characters, Toots and Death's Head Danny, or just plain Danny to his friends. After about the forth set, Leo reduced the vast number of kids down to a smaller core group. Fatty was made to be as unlike Billy Bunter as possible. In fact Fatty was not a butt of jokes or greedy as this type of character would have been alien to Leo's character. Plug was based on a child version of Eccles from The Goons which was on the radio but there was no pictorial representation. Leo saw Eccles, and thus Plug as a bit like Disney's Goofy. Plug's first appearance in February 1954, had been mis-inked by a staff lettering artist so his jumper declared him as `Pug'! This was put right from the next story.
Smiffy and Wilfred appeared first in April, and in June Toots's brother Sidney is named which completed the core group for quite a while. On impulse in November 1995 he created Herbert to join the group. A transitory character of some note was a Rock and Roll Teddy boy aptly called Teddy. He was created in September 1955 and lasted for less than two years when he was becoming an extra rather than a lead player. When Teddy's comic possibilities dried up Leo retired him, he thought too much of his to let him linger on as one of the crowd.
While at the Beano Leo had created The Banana Bunch for The Beezer, and after the Beano Leo created a multitude of characters for WHAM and SMASH. He moved on to other comics to create even more characters, but eventually he became frustrated with the children's comics industry. He approached a book company with the idea of creating a whole book. They seemed much more civilised than the hurly burly of the comics, and WILLY THE KID was born. This lasted for three volumes. There is also a slightly more adult book, called Thrrpp! He was due to be a major contributor to a new comic from the VIZ people, but an offer from the Guardian came along and We Love You, Baby Basil, a weekly strip was the result. These strips have been collected by REAPER BOOKS in a lovely hard backed book and available for a very reasonable price.
Leos Home Page can be found at : http://www.reaper.co.uk