ARTIST Leo Baxendale is preparing for a year long tour of Britain to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his famous Beano comic creations - Minnie the Minx and the Bash Street Kids.

It was in 1953 that the characters which have now taken their places in comic book history first wowed so many excited eyes in school playgrounds across Britain.

Also celebrating a milestone birthday is the Beano itself, which reaches pensionable age this week having published its first edition exactly 65 years ago.

Eastcombe artist Leo Baxendale was responsible for some of the Beano's most popular creations. Here he talks about his life as a comic cartoonist...

LEO was just seven years old when a school chum thrust an early copy of the Beano into his hand in 1938.

Although he didn't quite get the humour at such a tender age he went on to become the brainchild of two of the Beano's most timeless stars.

The year after embarking on a life as a freelance artist in 1952, Leo persuaded the then-editor of Beano George Mooney to include his two creations.

"The Beano was still very fresh in 1930," said the artist, who moved to Eastcombe in 1967 after quitting the comic in 1962.

"In the 1950s people wanted something new."

And that was what Leo, a father of five and grandfather to "umpteen grandchildren," provided.

Shortly after the introduction of Minnie the Minx and The Bash Street Kids fan mail flooded onto the editor's desk.

Recalling one occasion Baxendale said: "At one point, the Beano editor showed me a letter from an adult reader saying that the artist doing the Bash Street Kids was near-genius.

"I think he expected me to be pleased but I was annoyed, actually, by the word 'near'.

"I was full of myself then. Now I'm only three quarters full of myself."

In 1953 Beano's weekly circulation was 400,000 and with Baxendale's help this had topped the two million mark by 1958.

Having drawn up his creations as a 22 year old, the pressure of producing a full page of Minx, a full page of Bash Street, of Little Plum, Three Bears, as well as work for the Beezer, every week 52 weeks a year took it toll.

"In 1962 I just blew up like an old boiler and walked out," he said.

Baxendale later left the comic industry to pursue books - a business he is still involved with.

But before swollen knuckles in his drawing hand forced him finally to put his pencil on the shelf in 1992, a High Court case against Beano publishers DC Thompson that ran from 1980 to 1987 took Baxendale's focus in the same way drawing did.

"I realised I had created structure of comedy that would last for decades so I had expected other artists to take them over," he said.

"The bad bit was - the part where I was naive - was with the copyright. It turned out I had lost control and I was going to lose out financially.

"Oddly the court case became addictive in a very similar way to drawing for the comics - when I was drawing for the Beano I could hardly bear to wait until morning to carry on with the drawing."

Leo says that it was in the mid 1970s that he realised the comic industry was declining.

"Three things went wrong. First, the comics industry failed to take advantage of new technologies.

"Then there was the constant pressure on a tiny number of artists.

"And finally there was the copyright issue: the entire British comics industry sought by one means or another to acquire the copyright issue: the entire British comics industry sought by one means or another to acquire the copyright for the work which meant that the artists had no control over their own lives or characters.

"In the end, that destroyed their intensity. Nevertheless, the Beano will make it to its 70th anniversary, I'm sure."

Leo is looking forward to speaking at a major celebration of his work in London on November and then embarking on a nationwide tour of such events for a year.

An exhibition of his work, 'Minnie, Plum and Bash Street UR 50!', is running at the Centre for the Study of Cartoons and Caricature at the University of Kent until September 12 when it will then go on tour.