during those colonial days and up to the 70s, for amusement and light reading, most of us were sustained on a diet of beano and dandy, two british publications. i think, we in singapore, received the back copies but nobody complained at all. they were published either weekly or fortnightly and you could get them from the newstands as well as the mamak stalls.
i can still recall some of the characters but i cannot say with certainty whether they were from this comic book or the other. desperate dan, korky the cat, smasher, dennis the menace, the bash street kids and corporal clott are some that come to my mind. there were many others but i have lost them in the inner recesses of my brain.
both comics, which i believe are still in circulation, came in a smaller than tabloid form. they seemed to complement each other, rather like partners than rivals. they were printed on newsprint kind of materials and so were priced within the reach of most children. however, i never bought one and always relied on hand-me-downs or discarded copies.
apart from pictures stories and cartoon strips, there were also pages on quizzes, puzzles and jokes. if i remember correctly, not all the pages were in full colour, some were in two colours but most of them were actually in black and white.
i was still reading them when i was in secondary school, in the early 60s. i think the comics were meant for those in the 7 to 11 age range. because they were printed on cheap print material, they could not keep for very long. however, each year they would produce a hardback edition annual in a book form.
i wonder what comics today's children read. simpson's and garfield, but not beano and dandy.
5 comments:
There were 3 places I patronise in order to read those comics.
1. Mama Shop (I squat down to read)
2. Indian barber shop (as the barber cut my hair, I sat on the chair to read)
3. RI Hullet Library (They kept stock until 1968)
i was not aware that comics were available in the library. whenever i went to the library, i would read school magazines of other schools.
Yes, YG, I too love both the Beano and Dandy esp...Desperate Dan and Dennis the Menace. There were others I like including those smaller war and action comics like
" Combat " and the western comics.I also hardly bought them...no money then.
In my early years of teaching, one Pri 4 boy OPL[ his name ], the son of a trishaw rider, was the youngest illegal entrepreneur I came across. He borrowed comics from the shops at a small fee. He then charged his class and school mates a "reading" fee before school and during the recess. His school bag was filled only with comics! When we terminated his operation...he switched his merchandise to cigarettes!! This is no joke. That's why I still remember his name to this day. He should be in his late forties today.
dick,
the OPL must be one of those street smart chaps. sleazy places like geylang and jalan besar are breeding grounds for such characters.
This boy, OPL, used to live in the Joo Chiat Road area which was then quite similar in street culture to Geylang and Jalan Besar. I've never met his parents when dealing with him...only his aged grandma.She often came to our school carrying a rattan stick and would always implore us to help cane her wayward grandson!
Obviously, we had to decline. But despite being caned numerous times by the SA and P, OPL only 10 years old then was also the only schoolboy who managed to climb up the schools'church steeple as an act of defiance!
I often wonder what became of him as an adult.
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