The Beano does what I tell it to do

 Whenever I complain about something on the internet, I always like to check a couple of days later to see whether the powers that be have fixed everything that's wrong with the world. Somewhat to my surprise, a mere four weeks after my cutting critical dissection of the Bash Street Kids, I looked in this week's Beano (number 4141, and let's stand back in awe at a weekly comic that's long since notched up its four thousandth issue and is now thundering towards the big 5K!) to find there have been more changes to the Kids' cast of characters!

Not only are there three new Kids in class 2B, two of whom are definitely female, Teacher is sporting an artist's beret that evokes memories of his classic mortar board! Obviously the sheer force and eloquence of my rhetoric (I seem to have used the word 'style' five times in one simple sentence) has convinced the Beano bosses to implement exactly the scheme I was talking about, of gradually adding more characters to equalise the demographic mix. So, good job, Beano people. Carry on. You have my approval.

In all fairness, Andy Fanton is actually a really great writer of comics, so I shouldn't sound so scathing about the whole thing. He not only writes this Bash Street Kids story, but on the page before it there are mini-strips devoted to the three new classmates (plus Pup Parade, which doesn't seem to have acquired five new dogs yet. Or for that matter a Cuthbert analogue - I don't think the Pups ever had one of him, did they?)

Harsha is long-established by now as appearing every week, along with her family, in Har Har's Joke Shop. There's also a Summer Special on the shelves, in which the new bugs appear in the Bash Street Kids story, but not in the title banner, so obviously they're here to stay (for a while, at least. I mean, we don't talk about Wayne, do we?)

I hope they really do continue to add characters at this kind of rate! It would take things back to the earliest days, seventy years ago, when the cast of When The Bell Rings were a vast, mostly unnamed, horde of Kids, rather than having a well-defined roll-call. They DID have more than one girl in the earliest days, even for a little while when all the characters had got names, you know. So really, we're just moving back to the classic era! I approve!

But again, that joke at the bottom of the page! One that the average Beano reader's great-grandparents might possibly find funny! A quick internet search reveals that there was a disastrously unsuccessful Lone Ranger movie in 2013; it passed me by completely, and I doubt that a nine-year-old movie has made much of an impact on the typically nine-year-old Beano reader. If you're going to tell a joke that needs the Lone Ranger to be common knowledge, you really need to beam it back through time to the 1950s. They might have laughed at it then. You could get Leo Baxendale to illustrate it!