Leo Baxendale, obituary: Beano cartoonist and creator of Minnie the Minx and The Bash Street Kids

From the 1950s, Baxendale helped to revolutionise the legendary comic and bring it up to date

(Rex Features)

Leo Baxendale, who has died aged 86, was the cartoon artist behind the creation of classic comic strips including The Bash Street Kids, Minnie the Minx and Little Plum that first appeared in The Beano in the 1950s.

Baxendale was born at Whittle-le-Woods, near Chorley, Lancashire in 1930 and went to school in Preston. Following national service in the RAF, he became an artist at the Lancashire Evening Post, drawing adverts and cartoons.

He began working for the publisher DC Thomson in 1952 and was a key figure in the modernisation of its leading comic title, as he later recalled: “The Beano was still very 1930. Lord Snooty was still clearly based on an amalgam of Little Lord Fauntleroy and low-budget comedy films. That was all right for 1930, but in the 1950s people wanted something new. The only exception to the rule in The Beano was David Law’s Dennis the Menace. I was captivated.”

When, in 1953, the comic’s editor, George Mooney, sought to create a female peer to the already popular Dennis the Menace, Baxendale responded with Minnie the Minx, a “wild as wild can be” character whom he described as “a kind of Amazonian warrior”.


 The Bash Street Kids, created by Baxendale, has been a favourite of Beano readers for more than 60 years

The strip for which he is best known, The Bash Street Kids, first appeared in The Beano on 13 February 1954 under the title When the Bell Rings. Initially inspired by the view of a Dundee school from the publisher’s office window, the anarchic strip featured 10 unruly classmates and their hapless master, named only as Teacher. The strip took on its current title two years later and has remained a firm favourite with Beano readers ever since.

By 1958, and thanks in no small part to Baxendale’s creations, The Beano was selling two million copies per week. But the pressure of endless deadlines became too much for him. He left The Beano in 1962 to establish a new comic, Wham!, featuring characters such as Eagle-Eye, Junior Spy and his arch foe Grimly Fiendish.

During the Sixties Baxendale collaborated with the writer Terence Heelas to produce The Strategic Commentary, a weekly newsletter which sought to prove, using “cold military logic”, that an American victory in Vietnam was impossible.

He published an autobiography, A Very Funny Business (1978), which exposed the lucrative world of comics and the companies behind them. For much of the Eighties Baxendale had battled with his publisher, DC Thomson, over the legal rights and recognition to his comic character creations. They eventually settled out of court and Baxendale subsequently set up his own imprint, Reaper Books, in 1988, publishing high-quality collectors’ editions of his work.

A celebratory exhibition commemorating 50 years of Bash Street was held at the University of Dundee in 2012, featuring work by Baxendale and David Sutherland, who drew the strip from 1962 onwards. Two years the City of Dundee honoured the strip and its creator by naming a road in the town’s West Marketgait area as Bash Street, with a sign that features the characters Plug and Wilfred leaving messages for Teacher.

Leo Baxendale, born 27 October 1930, died 23 April 2017