Friday, November 17, 2023

My hero / Dennis the Menace by Steven Butler

 


Comics and graphic novels

My hero: Dennis the Menace by Steven Butler

Dennis taught me that it didn't matter if I hated books. He became the helping hand between being a non-reader and the children's author I am today


Steven Butler
Saturday 15 March 2014

I was a miserably illiterate child. Riddled with it. Stuffed full of the inability to read or write.

It wasn't just that I was extremely poor at the basics of the English language, I despised it. Books were a threatening source of stress and classroom embarrassment. Steven Butler wanted NOTHING to do with books.

Cue the little boy in the red-and-black stripy jumper. When Dennis the Menace first came into my childhood I was about eight and my hatred of books had reached such a level that I refused to even have them in my bedroom. I had already squeezed every present under the Christmas tree and knew that my parents had snuck a book into my pile. There's no mistaking the feel of a gift-wrapped book.

When I unwrapped the Beano annual and came face to face with the boy in his iconic stripes for the first time, I had no idea what a life-long friend the character would become. Dennis taught me that it didn't matter if I hated books. Books were for losers, and reading was boring. In no time I fell in love with his anarchic stories, became a comic kid and felt cool for the first time in my life.

What my little brain hadn't caught on to was the fact that through Dennis's comics, I was fast becoming a greatly improved reader. Writing inserted among zany pictures lost its threat, and Dennis became the helping hand between being a non-reader and the children's author I am today.

Writing Dennis for a new generation of children has been a privilege and the funniest of games. I love watching a child frantically turning the page to read more about how boring books are. It's the perfect trick.

 The Diary of Dennis the Menace is published by Puffin. The second in the series, The Diary of Dennis the Menace: Beanotown Battle, comes out on 1 May.


THE GUARDIAN


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