David wrote:The Metro newspaper article claims picking on Walter was banned in the late 1980's, but isn't that a 1990's Walter getting picked on in the picture?
Also, didn't Walter have a girlfriend in one issue?
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Newspapers today have more pages to fill. They know that alarmist stories about comics turning "pc" will get people talking. Remember the story about Plug being made less ugly? Or Desperate Dan going veggie? Yet there's Plug still as goofy as ever, and Dan's still chomping into Cow Pies.
All this hoo-ha is taken from the Beano book thats coming out later in the year, in the nineties section. They discussed this exact line when I was up at the offices last month. Didn't think it would kick up this much of a fuss! Incidentally one of my relatives is gay and wears glasses, owns a poodle called foo foo, is a teachers pet, picks flowers all morning and has tea partys all night so I can see why the politically correct neverevenseenabeano type adults may have thought that walter replicated the actions of homosexuals in every aspect.
I just seen you already revealed that about it been in the new book, sorry Lew.
Its interesting to note how much walter was changed in the TV series in relation to the comic so that the various codes and rules of the television universe, He was no longer walter the softy he was walter the sneaky (so the show was not just about a bully, better if the snob gets what he deserves) and his girlfriend matilda was featured heavily.
But comics and television and two different animals the rules of an animation are different to the rules of a comic, if you want to call them rules
Personally when i was of Beano reading age i didnt even know what "gay" was. Though we called each other it all the time. Also when Classics (and the reprint annuals) started coming out and i was getting that i barely even noticed the differences between the Dennis i was reading and the one of 30-40 years previously, aside from the art style.
Tough call on all this. I began reading the Beano in 1983, at a time when Walter was already quite soft. Earlier, it appears he'd been more superficially prim and proper, which didn't stop him actually fighting with Dennis—but by the 1980s, "softy culture" had taken a turn of its own, and the mere thought of a fight was out of the question.
It was quite clear that Dennis could and did embarrass or scare Walter, but Walter just as often (if not more often!) outsmarted Dennis. Frankly, the business about Walter being proud of his softy nature—quite obviously enjoying his life—would seem to have been part of the character since I first met him.
That said, I can also see why the character has been interpreted as a gay stereotype. As late as about 1990 one could witness the Softies going to a mardi gras or other festival wearing full-body flower costumes, with Dennis taking particular glee at Walter being costumed as a pansy; cue shot of costumed Walter skipping along with wrists limper than usual, presumably just so older readers would get the double meaning of the word. At 16, I did; this boy was often wearing perfume and modeling dresses, so the idea barely came as a surprise even though I didn't know much about gayness at the time.
Another story (or series of stories?) featured Walter and other Softies having an adult Softy mentor with blond curly hair and a tight, very short-sleeved shirt. No implication that he was interested in the younger boys—indeed, he may have been the older cousin of one, or something—but the visuals were rather stereotypically gay.
I should at at this point that I don't object to gay behavior in any way. Nor have I ever seen Beano "softyism" include any elements overtly related to sexual desire; if one looks at it though a gay prism, it seems to be more about the Menaces fighting/being scared by certain physical trappings of gayness and/or girliness than by any notion that the Softies could be attracted to them, an issue that I don't think the Beano has ever intentionally even touched.
Still: having concluded at 16 that Walter was probably gay, it was easy for me to perceive much of his overoptimistic behavior toward Dennis as a kind of crush.
Poor Walter... I was always pretty sure Dennis was straight.
dunno, DAVID.....DENNIS may well 'come out of the closet' yet, in an appalling, 'new, improved' direction for the 'BEANO' to take...........or perhaps they may have DAN come on and directly apologize to readers for his acts of 'vandalism' and/or animal cruelty over the years........I wish folks would just leave these comics as the escapist fantasies they innocently started out as.
Good post, David, and I think you're basically right (except maybe the bit about Walter having a crush!) I remember a friend of mine used to jokingly refer to Walter as Walter the Homosexual instead of Walter the Softy - the implications were obvious. (Not that gay people are actually like Walter. He was just a crude old school caricature of an effeminate boy.)
I think it's too easy to dismiss everything as merely innocent fantasies. On one level, yes, of course, but things do put across a point of view, whether it be the imperialist propaganda of comics past or the rather macho worldview of D C Thomson's adventure comics - rather keen on boys boxing, weren't they? There was often a feel of the old 'muscular Christianity' ethos in a lot of their older papers.
There's no real way of sanitising Dennis's behaviour. He was a bully and picked on Walter for not conforming - in this case to what boys are supposed to be like. Dennis hated Walter for his terrible sin of being 'sensitive.' I'm not surprised there was growing concern about the way the strip could go.
By the way, David, I picked up your Donald Duck Halloween freebie comic yesterday; very nicely scripted. And your 'Mickey and the Gang: Classic Stories in Verse' book is a thing of beauty!
WALTER always reminded me, visually of 'CARRY-ON' member CHARLES HAWTREY, [the weedy, bespectacled one] and long after I knew much about him, it turns out he was gay in real life: all this is sheer co-incidence, of course, but if the 'BEANO' ever intends introducing openly gay characters, I'd prefer they started with a brand-new character rather than mucking about with DENNIS' persona.........
ISPYSHHHGUY wrote:dunno, DAVID.....DENNIS may well 'come out of the closet' yet, in an appalling, 'new, improved' direction for the 'BEANO' to take...........or perhaps they may have DAN come on and directly apologize to readers for his acts of 'vandalism' and/or animal cruelty over the years........I wish folks would just leave these comics as the escapist fantasies they innocently started out as.
Considering you've just completely made up those two scenarios, I think it's safe to say you're not likely to see them happen in the actual comics!
Well said Gary. Amusingly, The History of The Beano has an item all about the way the comic has used publicity stunts to draw attention to the comic in recent years. Perhaps some people here could read it.
Seriously, come on chaps. As comic historians we're supposed to see through these stunts, not fall for them hook line and sinker. It's just a bit of fun to keep the comics in the public eye. In short: don't believe all you read in the papers.
ISPYSHHHGUY, does that Walter "toy" have a winder at the back?
I bought one a few years ago (don't know why, I prefer to just read the comics or history of them) that had a winder at the back. I left it behind when I moved though.
the above 'WALTER' prototype 'bra' might give future 'progressive' 'BEANO' scriptwriters ideas: if so, this is by far the biggest blunder I have yet undertaken on these pages:
------DAVID: sorry, I'm not too sure of the details of the 'WALTER' toy/figure; this is a pic I plucked from the web.
