David Law character was actually created first. Law's "Dennis" was a juvenile anti-hero, uncontrollable and destructive, drawn in spontaneous, edgy lines, and was an immediate hit; the strip eventually displaced "Biffo the Bear" on the comic's full colour front cover in 1974. Law went on to create "Beryl the Peril", a similarly anarchic female character, for the "Topper" in 1953, and the accident-prone soldier "Corporal Clott" for "The Dandy" in 1960. He was taken ill in 1970, and his strips were taken over by other artists, including David Sutherland on "Dennis the Menace" and John Dallas on "Beryl the Peril". Law returned
Black Peril countries'. Along the road to that settled character white males in Rhodesia often soothed their feelings of isolation by sexual relations with black women. These sexual encounters were not usually based on mutual attraction but on coercion. As two observers have noted they were 'similar to those between masters and slaves, feudal lords and serfs,conquerors and conquered in other countries'. This side of the interracial sexual coin was the 'white peril', a term which rarely appeared in Rhodesian annals. The 'black peril' became a public issue in the settler community within South Rhodesia just after the turn of the century.