I was seven when the Beano began in 1938 but I didn’t buy it or its sibling, the Dandy. I read the D.C. Thomson story papers Wizard and Hotspur, which were aimed at 14-year-olds, and the AP boys’ paper Champion. The writing was rigorous and the titles magnificent — The Giant Gun that Shook the World, a tale of Afghan tribesmen building a siege gun that could lob a shell from Kabul to the House of Commons.

During the Second World War, when I was at grammar school, paper rationing made comics as scarce as striped ladybirds, so I read the Dandy and Beano on alternate weeks, mainly for the artist Dudley Watkins, who drew Desperate Dan and Lord Snooty.

I had meant since infancy to earn my living as an artist but didn’t know what markets would open up, so I studied everything, not comics in particular. Comedy and language mattered to me as much as drawing, and in 1944 I absorbed the sly drollery of Max Wall, whose absurdist comedy on the radio subverted everything.

After I finished my National Service in the RAF in July 1950 I started as a staff artist on the Lancashire Evening Post: I did editorial cartoons, strips and adverts (I drew a series of half-page ads for a charabanc tours firm — a coachload of tourists plunging down a 10,000ft drop and other enticements). On Saturdays I went to football and rugby games, golf tournaments and cricket matches, where I would scribble notes and ideas from the press box and sketch players in the dressing room (once I dashed off a caricature of Bobby Locke while he was pulling his trousers on). On Sundays I would spend my time drawing features for the Monday sports pages.

In the last week of August 1952 I sat in my parents’ home thinking. I was 21 and entering the prime decade of my life (of any artist’s life), the time when energies of mind and body are at full charge. I had long planned to make a break for a career in the national market at this age.

My younger brother Richard came in with a Beano. I hadn’t looked at the Beano in years. When Richard had finished, I idly picked it up. There was a jolt of excitement, at the unexpected. The inside cover pulsed with life. Somebody was putting an intensity of creation into the set. It was no more than a two-thirds feature but I was struck by the portent of Dennis the Menace. This was the future. I wrote at once to the Beano, seeking freelance work, and the managing editor of D.C. Thomson comics, R.D. Low, replied by return. What followed was an interregnum of strangeness that lasted for seven months.

During my National Service I drew three pages of a book in comic-strip format: pen and ink and monochrome wash; the adventures of a crowd of children. I thought that it was time for me to have a dispassionate professional assessment of my work.

I posted the three pages to Faber & Faber, not for a moment expecting the work to be accepted for publication; I wanted a detached appraisal. A week later the drawings came back with a letter from Faber & Faber’s managing director: his firm did not publish strip cartoons but he had thought that he ought to tell me that in his opinion I would have no difficulty earning my livelihood doing this kind of work. That was enough for me.

Let us fast-forward to January 13, 1953. I pencilled a bison herd of kids stampeding out of school, their marmalizing hooves trampling the world underfoot. I called it The Kids of Bash Street School and posted it to R.D. Low. I waited with high expectation but his reply was offhand, a dampener. Three months went by. Early in April I sat in my parents’ living room, thinking. Then, exactly as on the day in August of the previous year that had provoked my first approach to the Beano, my younger brother Richard came in with a newly bought Beano and another comic (a swap). When he had finished with the Beano I picked it up. Dennis the Menace had gone up to a full page the month before and had taken wing.

I seemed to have been travelling for seven months in a circle, repeatedly passing the sign NO MEETING OF MINDS; and here I was again, looking at Dennis. By now I had found out about Dennis the Menace and his creator. Dennis had burst into the Beano in March 1951, begat by the Scottish artist David Law, a stylish perfectionist and 24 years older than me.

I happened to look up at my brother. He had his other comic folded back as he read it, and facing me was a large illustration of Hiawatha. I quickly sketched a little pencil portrait: chubby, bare to the midriff, with a bellybutton, and with Dennis’s frown and stylised mouth.

I posted the portrait to the Beano editor, George Moonie, and waited in continuous excitement for his reply.

Times Recommends

• 6 reasons not to give gifts this Christmas
• Remembrance Day: All the lonely heroes