Dennis The Menace is the naughtiest scallywag in the whole of Beano-land. This week in the first of twelve comic strip scenes, the chortling eight-year-old imp is pictured shooting his catapult at next door’s cat when a stone accidentally goes through a greenhouse window.
Dad shakes his fist and goes ‘GRRRRRR!!! Dennis! You little menace!’ Then, like every week for the previous thirty years, he chases Dennis around the house a bit. Dad catches him and takes off his own slipper. He grabs Dennis by the arm and drags him across the room to a chair. Then he sits down and turns Dennis over his knee and raises the slipper in the air.
‘No, dad, no!’ Dennis cries. ‘Not the slipper!’
But it is too late. Lessons must be learned. Naughty boys deserve to be spanked. This is the natural order of things and in Beano-land it always has been and always will be.
Dad brings down the slipper on the seat Dennis’s shorts with a loud smack.
‘Ouch!’ Dennis yells. Dad spanks him again and again.
The spanking over, we now see naughty Dennis balancing on top of a pile of cushions because his bottom is too sore for him to sit down comfortably. How we all chortle.
But what’s this in the final frame? This is new. This hasn’t happened before. The world is changing, even in Beano-land. We see Dad, shoulders hunched and grim faced, being lead away in handcuffs by a policeman and a social worker.
Words: Richard Rooney
Illustration: A.I.
Flash Fiction 250
Flash Fiction 250 