The Beano
Scottish weekly children's comic magazine
The Beano (also known as Beano and formerly The Beano Comic) is a British anthology comic magazine created by Scottish publishing company DC Thomson. Its first issue was published on 30 July 1938, and it published its 4000th issue in August 2019. Popular and well-known comic strips and characters include Dennis the Menace, Minnie the Minx, The Bash Street Kids, Roger the Dodger, Billy Whizz, Lord Snooty and His Pals, Ivy the Terrible, General Jumbo, Jonah, and Biffo the Bear.
The Beano was planned as a pioneering children's magazine that contained mostly comic strips, in the style of American newspaper gag-a-days, as opposed to the more text-based story papers that were immensely popular before the Second World War. In the present, its legacy is its misbehaving characters, escapist tales and anarchic humour with an audience of all ages. Beano is a multimedia franchise with spin-off books and Christmas annuals, a website, theme park rides, games, cartoon adaptations, and a production company.
The Beano is the best-selling comic magazine outside Japan, having sold over 2 billion copies since its inception. It is also the world's longest-running comic magazine, being published weekly since 1938. For most of its history, DC Thomson published The Beano alongside its sister comic The Dandy until the latter ceased publication in 2012.
It has had three characters as the mascot throughout the years: Big Eggo (1938–1948), Biffo the Bear (1948–1974), and the current, Dennis the Menace and Gnasher (1974–present).
The public source identifies “The Beano” as scottish weekly children's comic magazine. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Beano, Scottish and weekly.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q965587. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1938, 2019, 2012 and 1948.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Beano” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.