Beano Brain: Why Does the Beano Have its Own Special In-House Child Psychology Unit?

Remember the Numskulls? First appearing in the Beezer comic, then migrating across to sister DC Thomson publication the Beano in 1993, they were a clan of tiny little people who lived inside the otherwise empty head of a child named Ed, from whence they manipulated his every emotion – making Ed grow up to become excessively afraid of CO₂ and join the Labour Party, for example.

Having the Numskulls inside its pages has naturally made the Beano’s editors experts in the topic of the immature infant mind – which is why, disturbingly, the comic now has its own special in-house child psychology unit.

Laughter Is the Best Medicine

As we saw last time, the modern Beano has gone woke – its editors openly brag of the fact – and as such is very, very concerned about its readers’ mental health. In 2022, the comic ran a special edition where the Beano’s chief character, Dennis the Menace, was revealed as possessing some mind-controlling Numskulls of his own, in a strip produced in collaboration with kids’ mental health charity YoungMinds. In the words of Mike Stirling, the Beano’s so-called ‘Director of Mischief’:

There is more and more research highlighting the positive effects that reading has on the mental health of young people and we are proud that our continued partnership with YoungMinds promotes reading for children. I hope as many children as possible can read this week’s edition and show that mental health issues affect everyone, even Dennis!

That’s odd. I thought the sole traditional purpose of a children’s comic was to make children laugh? Ah, but even laughter must now possess an avowed therapeutic purpose for impressionable young Beano readers. Starting in 2023-24, the comic launched a partnership with another “awesome kids’ mental health charity”, Place2Be, to encourage schoolchildren not to kill themselves in the school toilets by lacing the comic and its associated website with brain-healing resources like these: 

If that’s really the case, why doesn’t the Beano itself just go back purely to being funny like it used to be, then? Even the above graphic ostensibly pushing funniness can’t resist simultaneously pushing diversity too, by virtue of dressing the child medic in a hijab, can it?

Menace to Society

One way the comic hopes to rebuild your child’s broken mind is to hand him or her special self-esteem stickers with Beano characters on them, telling your offspring how great they are, even if they’re not:

The comic also now offers “fun – not scientific” online mental health quizzes for children to address their manifold neuroses with. Note how Dennis the Menace himself now seemingly suffers anxiety, which he definitely would not have done in pre-woke times, just one more part of the relentless feminisation of the comic. Formerly, the Beano’s female characters were all tomboys, like Minnie the Minx and Ivy the Terrible. Now instead the male ones are all gayboys, like Dennis the Mincer. Once, the role of ‘scaredy boy’ would have been filled by Dennis’ habitual bullying-victim Walter the Softy – but the whole ‘Softy’ element of the bowtie-wearing schoolyard pansy has since been dropped completely, lest it be viewed as homophobic and Dennis be “accused of gay-bashing”.

Is there not a danger, however, that by encouraging small children to focus endlessly upon their mental health, you counterproductively end up making previously healthy minds become mentally ill for real? Look at the following Beano mental health quiz query, jointly posed by Dennis and Minnie:

Would the very idea of seeking to “rehearse awkward conversations” on a habitual basis really have come into the average reader’s mind, if the comic was not explicitly suggesting it to them beforehand? That’s the kind of sadistic plot to drive kids insane that the olden-days Dennis and Minnie would probably have come up with themselves, so maybe they’re the ones who conceived the whole impish idea of transforming the Beano into an outpost of the wellness industry in the first place?

Brain Children

Perhaps the Minx and the Menace are also behind the unexpected existence of the Beano’s own special in-house child psychology unit, Beano Brain, a major part of publisher DC Thomson’s modern business portfolio. Rather than being run by cartoonists of anarchic genius, like the comic in its pre-1990s glory days, Beano Brain is instead run by escaped full-size adult Numskulls like these:

Leo Baxendale must be so proud. In one sense, this appears a perfectly legitimate market research business, aimed at gauging the tastes of the lucrative pre-teen market. Manufacturers will want to know whether raspberry-flavoured gum or dung-flavoured gum will sell better, or whether a soft toy shaped like a cute puppy or a dead rabbit will shift more units, and the above head-probers will be able to tell them. The problem comes when Beano Brain shifts its resources around to manipulating children’s opinions and behaviours, rather than simply reporting back on them to Unilever and PepsiCo.

One common trope of Beano strips of old was the extreme distaste of the Bash Street Kids for disgusting-looking ‘healthy’ school meals dished out for them by Olive the Dinner-Lady, which they would tip out surreptitiously into nearby pot-plants, making them wither. Today, the Bash Street Kids & Co are instead enlisted by Beano Brain to help steer children into eating any old shit Olive ladles onto their plates, like a junior version of the old Downing Street Nudge Unit.  

In 2019, for some reason, ITV decided to launch a healthy eating campaign to get more children to eat vegetables, even though it is supposed to be a commercial television company, not the nation’s parents and this being none of its business. Nonetheless, Beano Brain helped ITV out by commissioning surveys to do Stalinist things like “measure kids’ vegetable consumption behaviour”. 

But the comic also repurposed its most popular characters, like Minnie the Minx and Dennis’s dog Gnasher, by wedging them into various online games, like ‘Eat Them to Defeat Them!’ and ‘Forknite’, a parody of popular online shooter Fortnite:

The main time in the past I can recall Beano characters being enlisted to alter the child-readership’s behaviour and opinions was during WWII, when they were depicted collecting scrap-iron for the war effort or kicking Hitler up the arse – rather more important, pressing and justifiable issues than saving their bowels and the planet by chewing on radishes.

Lord Snooty and His Pals

But it gets worse. Beano Brain describes its services as follows:

Beano Brain is an innovative fusion of ethnography and behavioural analytics (combining a nationwide kids’ panel, school visits, compliant first party data from on-site polls and user testing) that allows us to constantly monitor and respond to what kids want. From a content perspective, Beano Brain drives everything the editorial team [of the comic] does. If kids start talking about a new YouTuber, game or playground trend, Beano Brain lets the team know and they quickly create relevant content. From a commercial perspective, Beano Brain provides clients with a means of testing their own ideas, preconceptions and propositions with real kids – both at scale and in depth.

For Halloween 2019, for example, the latest content of the comic and website was decided thus: “We made the internal switch from our content creators [i.e., cartoonists] wondering ‘what should we do for Halloween this year?’ to asking our audience ‘what do you want us to do this Halloween?’”

And the answer, we are led to believe, is this: transform Halloween from an annual holiday largely centring upon ghosts, vampires, werewolves and zombies, into one primarily focusing upon the horror that is Boris Johnson instead.

According to the Beano’s own website, in the market research surveys, when asked to name the “ghastliest figure of the 21st century”, children surprisingly did not choose any popular modern youth-horror figures like Slenderman, but the then-UK Prime Minister. Supposedly, said Beano Brain:

This makes the Brexit bogeyman THE Halloween costume of choice, which means trick or treaters across the country will be teaming with ghouls and guys decked out like the British PM. So to give kids an idea of how they can bring a little Prime Ministerial pizzazz to their parties, we’ve chosen three of Boris’s most iconic looks to bring to life. Dare you dress as Bullingdon Boris? Scare your pals as Zipwire Boris? Or just look wheelie weird as Biking Boris? The choice is yours – and you don’t even have to cast a vote. How nice is that?

The precise phrasing of the child-survey is not provided, but I’m guessing it may have been some multiple choice affair along the lines of a) Count Dracula, b) Frankenstein’s Monster, c) Boris Johnson, as the average junior school kid would not be likely to answer with Boris’s name unprompted otherwise. Then, seeing it listed there, many children would think BoJo “the Brexit bogeyman” is the funniest answer to tick, meaning the Beano gets some free easy Brexit-bashing publicity. How many eight year-olds just automatically know what the Bullingdon Club is?

But then, how many eight year-old just automatically know who Dominic Cummings is? The following Beano strip, from lockdown of 2020, expects them to, an assessment we are told was purportedly based upon yet more Beano Brain market research data:

Officially, this was a special strip for parents to cheer adults up during lockdown. Unofficially, kids will obviously have read it too, then asked for more explanations from mummy and daddy about what the wicked, granny-killing Tories were up to. The Beano these days certainly does seem to enjoy bashing Tory politicians. In 2018, the comic sent a fake legal letter to Jacob Rees-Mogg accusing him of breaching the copyright of Walter the Heterosexual:

Unlike the original Walter, Jacob Rees-Mogg isn’t gay, though. He has more children than Bash Street Junior does (at least until all the new Muslim ones started enrolling there).

Empty of Beans

Alongside Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings and Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Beano also presumes its pre-teen audience absolutely love seeing Donald Trump being mocked too: here’s a video the comic’s website made of kids dressed as Trump for Halloween (notice a trend here?), and an animation of him as a new character called ‘The Trumpkin’. Both are quite amusing, but I do once again question whether the average six to 12 year-old (the Beano’s stated target audience) really wants to see any politicians in their comic at all, not even one whose surname also means ‘fart’ in playground-speak.

Admittedly, Trump is President of the USA, and thus Main Character of the World right now, and famous even to schoolboys – but so was Joe Biden, once. Was the Beano website equally full of jokes about him? The only mention of Zombie Joe I could find was the following deeply anodyne quiz:

Joe Biden potentially liking to eat ice-cream isn’t really as insulting as it would have been to have kids dress up as him emerging from a coffin at Halloween dressed as a living corpse, to go with the Beano’s similar Trump and Johnson wheezes, even though as a genuine member of the undead, Joe would have been ideally suited to it. So why the discrepancy?

The only Beano joke mocking a Left-wing politician I could find was this one of Keir Starmer:

More expectedly, in one recent issue, Sir Keir actually saves the day by rescuing Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos from the fate of dying on a rocket in outer-space by (admittedly rather haplessly) pressing an escape-hatch button.

But who’ll save the United Kingdom itself from Mr United Kingdom? Not Dennis or Gnasher anymore.

Some readers may think there are far more important things to worry about than the sad decline of a once-great children’s comic. Indeed so: but the fact that even something as inconsequential as the Beano has been captured and co-opted by the ideologues and mind-manipulators of the Left shows just how all-encompassing the totalitarianism we now suffer is. A dogma which can’t even leave Roger the Dodger or Little Plum alone really is one which aspires to control our entire mental universe – and that of our children, too.

Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books.