Phew, it's been a CONTENT RICH week this week, and we conclude with EVEN MORE content. For LO! I have had ANOTHER article published in an Esteemed Academic Journal and this time you can read it for FREE!
The article is called The three generations of Dennis The Menace and it has been published in The Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. It's all about the amazing RETCON that The Beano have carried out over the past few years which means that the CURRENT Dennis The Menace is NOT the same character as the one that most people my age will remember reading about in the 1970s and 1980s. THAT Dennis is the FATHER of the current one, and HIS Dad (the one with a toothbrush moustache and red pinstriped suit) was the ORIGINAL Dennis from the 1950s!
It is pretty MINDBLOWING stuff for anyone who read The Beano as a young person, and do believe me when I say that THAT is not even the MOST MINDBLOWING thing in the article. I will leave eager readers to find all that out for themselves, and rather wonderfully you can do so FOR NOTHING. The delightful people of the UAL Scholarly Communications Team agreed to use some of their FUNDS to pay for this to be Open Access, as part of a scheme to investigate how All That Sort Of Thing Actually Works, which means we all sat together on TEAMS a couple of weeks ago and filled in the many FORMS involved to make it happen. That bit was Quite Exciting for ME, and hopefully the results will be exciting for ONE AND ALL.
I was really pleased to get this paper out Open Access, as it's always a bit frustrating to spend MONTHS or YEARS working on something that most people can't actually READ (e.g. books that take YEARS to write but then cost NINETY QUID to buy). If you have ten minutes to spare do give it a read, I promise you that there is some AMAZING INFO in there for long-term and/or lapsed Beano fans!
