For a man who fathered some of Britain's best-known juvenile delinquents and than abandoned them before they were 10 years old, Leo Baxendale has not been harshly judged by society. On the contrary. Although it's almost four decades now since he turned his back on the Bash Street Kids, he is universally credited for their formative years - 1953 to 1962 - during which time his careful nurturing ensured they would be a threat to society for decades to come.
Those nine years took a toll on him. The Bash Street Kids would have been plenty for any man to deal with, but Baxendale was also raising Minnie the Minx and Little Plum (Your Redskin Chum), both conceived in the same procreative frenzy that produced Fatty, Smiffy, Plug and co. Little wonder that, after nine years of covering their antics for the Beano, their creator was suffering from nervous exhaustion.
Now a young 70, Baxendale is probably benefiting from his decision to quit when he did. The life of a children's comic artist was not famed for longevity. Former colleagues Dudley Watkins (Lord Snooty, Desperate Dan) and David Law (Dennis the Menace) both died in their early 60s, and opportunities for working yourself into the grave were always available to the talented. In Baxendale's first five years at the Beano, sales soared from 400,000 to two million, a coincidence not lost on anyone, least of all him. But the success was soon matched by his workload.
"One of the things you learn quickly in comics is that there are the selling pages and the fillers. There are certain pages that sell the comic, and when you're the one producing them, the natural thing for your editors is to give you more and more work.
"It's the wrong thing to do, of course, because the intensity you need to produce quality material gets diluted. But it's a natural reaction. Anyway, I was working too hard. I always remained a freelance, so I could control my time. But it got to the point where I was working seven days a week and staying up all night to finish things. And that's not a long-term solution to anything." Although credited as a revolutionary who shook up the then sedate world of children's comics, Baxendale was inspired into the industry by others. In particular, seeing Dennis the Menace (Law's version, not the cuter US one) for the first time was, he says, "an electric shock; it was a beautiful, luminous thing".
And even feminist icon, Minnie the Minx, was not a pioneer. Beryl the Peril was already blazing a trail at the Topper when the Beano editor created a vacancy for a female Dennis and asked Baxendale to oblige. Struggling for an identity, Minnie spent the first weeks of her life aged six, before becoming suddenly and permanently 12 when the artist decided she needed to be more of an Amazon.
Having moved to Dundee, home of Beano publishers DC Thomson, Baxendale's work-related rituals included regular visits to the office for a game of "keepie-up" with staffers. The object was to keep a ball of paper tied with Scottish tweed in the air, without the use of hands, while the players shouted suggestions for what the Bash Street Kids might do in the next issue.
When a good idea was formed, Baxendale would go home and start drawing. This vital part of the creative process also fell victim to overwork, however. And towards the end of the Beano years, Baxendale was compensating for the adrenaline loss with a new game: trying to sneak rude jokes through the editing process. An example was the Bash Street doctor announcing he was testing one of the children's reflexes, to which the kid replied that if the doctor touched his reflexes, he'd tell his mother. The joke didn't make it to the shelves.
A tell-tale sign of cartoonist stress, apparently, is that characters become elongated. When Dennis the Menace started getting longer, Baxendale temporarily deputised for Law. But his own days at the Beano were numbered. After he left, he created the mid-1960s comic Wham, and the money was so good he was able to indulge another of his interests: radical politics. He funded a weekly newsletter, Strategic Commentary, to oppose US involvement in Vietnam. The paper had short deadlines - a special on Israel's Six-Day War was published before that war ended - and a short subscription list, too. It netted Noam Chomsky among early subscribers, but it didn't quite change the world before the money ran out.
Baxendale's wealth was misleading. "I was earning more than a Cabinet minister at the time, but the damage had been done and I couldn't sustain it. The comics industry was in decline, so there was even more pressure on me to produce pages, when I should have been doing less." He would create yet another favourite in the Willy the Kid book series. But sometime around 1974, he says, he had a sudden realisation "that the whole industry was going to fail".
The insight cleared the way for an epic fight with his old employers, DC Thomson, for the ownership of copyright on his creations: "In my own naive way, I'd always thought they were mine." The legal battle went on for seven full years, starting in May 1980. Baxendale built his case as he had built his comic stories: "I had this big structure in my head - it was very similar to Bash Street. There was more analysis and less synthesis, where- as with the comics it was the other way round. But otherwise it was just the same." He talks this way a lot. Without apol- ogy, he will say that, even in the early years of Minnie and Bash Street, he knew he was creating "structures of comedy that would last for decades". The mind can only boggle at how his structures might have emerged in court; but we'll never know. Scheduled for three weeks in 1987, the case was settled on the steps. DC Thomson retained copyright, Baxendale got some original drawings back and, it can be assumed (it has to be assumed because there's a gagging order), a tidy sum of money. One of the drawings returned was the "reflex" sketch, which shows that the joke survived to be reproduced by the lettering artist before being caught later and blanked out.
Baxendale's last regular job was the Baby Basil strip for the Guardian in the early 1990s. He didn't expect it to continue more than a few weeks. But after two years, the aching knuckles he'd noticed as long ago as 1970 were joined by eyesight problems, and he'd had enough.
Since then, he's busied himself with exhibitions in Britain, France and Italy - writing books about his art and developing a website, home to a virtual gallery of his works. Boasting as it does a range of highlights from Little Plum to the Strategic Commentary, the site spans the intellectual spectrum. But the Jesuit-educated Baxendale, father of five real and apparently well-adjusted children, is happy to be best-known for the Bash Street Kids, who were sorely in need of Jesuit attention themselves.
Sorely being the operative word. In one of his books, the artist tracks the use of corporal punishment by the Bash Street schoolteacher, which increased from six incidents in 1954 to a high of 12 in 1960. Indeed, there was little let-up by 1962, when the plot-lines included: "Kids thrashed by Teacher with a riding crop" and, in a gesture to progress, "Kids thrashed on TV". In defence of Teacher, it was a violent world he inhabited. The children often got their own back, as when they defeated and disarmed the British Army, before shelling the school and machine-gunning staff.
Remarkably, nobody seems to have suggested then that Baxendale was a bad influence. "All the focus was on the US horror magazines," he says. And if his drawings were cruel on schoolkids and teachers alike, they were cruel on him as well. "It was a hard style, very intense. The pages were very dense - there were a lot of characters and a lot of things happening. And, yes, I suppose could have developed a style that was easier to sustain. But that would have been at a price too."
Leo Baxendale's website is at www.reaper.co.uk
Leo Baxendale was in Dublin this week to launch Comic Cuts, an exhibition of cartoons by Tom Mathews and caricature sculptures by Stephen Dee, at the Whichcraft Gallery, Cow's Lane, Temple Bar, until November 9th.