Walter the Softy, or Softy Walter as he is sometimes called, is the fictional antagonist of Dennis the Menace in the British children's comic The Beano. He made his first appearance in the Beano in 1953. He is a prime target of Dennis and his friends. His last name, in a Beano Christmas Carol was said to be Brown, but this may have been an easy rhyme excuse.
Walter is a camp and effeminate boy, who is always very stereotypically girly in his behaviour, this varies from a strong aversion to typically "masculine" interests and situations, to full-blown transvestitism. He is portrayed as a typical "geek", wearing a blue schoolboy's jumper, schoolboy's shorts, a bow tie, and has glasses and slicked-back hair. He also has a strange resemblance to Cuthbert Cringeworthy of the Bash Street Kids strip. He lives next door to Dennis and his family. He often spends his time in his Wendy house with his gang "The Softies", playing with dolls or pressing flowers etc. He is regularly featured in the Dennis the Menace strip, and when he appears it is nearly always the case that he is attacked by Dennis. If not, he is generally involved in a plot to attack Dennis, usually involving either chess or perfume. He has a white cat called Fluffy and a pink poodle named Foo Foo.[1]
Walter is terrified of Dennis, as well as other (mostly harmless) aspects of life, such as butterflies, birds, rain, and a variety of others. He is often seen as a devoted and seemingly "perfect" child. He does well in school and is adored by his teachers and parents. Indeed, Walter is an only child and a stereotypical mummy's boy and a spoiled brat, luxuriously pampered by his wealthy parents. It can be considered slightly uncanny that Walter's parents resemble each other. Walter often dresses as a girl in some strips, mainly wearing a pink ballerina tutu, but occasionally simply wearing a dress, along with his mother's makeup. His parents do not seem to be disturbed by Walter's transvestitism. In some strips, he is seen to wear pink boxer-shorts, mostly with either love-hearts or bunny rabbits on them. He has a teddy bear named 'Teddikins', which he often carries with him. However, it is not really the case that Dennis is "bad" and Walter is "good". Walter has been shown to have a deep streak of spite and malice in him that he is too weak to express. He and his family are typical snobs who constantly mock Dennis and his family, as Walter's father seems to earn higher than Dennis' father, although their occupations are never revealed. Walter's vindictiveness and determination to get Dennis into trouble have been highlighted in recent years, making Dennis' behaviour appear less like bullying. However, there are occasions in which he has been willing to help Dennis: when Gnasher went missing in the 80's, he tried to help Dennis find him, and more recently, he has helped Dennis several times: finding Gnipper's long-lost sisters when the puppy had been poisoned, helping Rasher win a pig race, and trying to save Dennis's favourite tree by chaining himself to it, thus changing his relationship with Dennis from enemies to, if not outright friends, civil rivals.
In the 1996 television series, Walter is not scared of Dennis but acts like a snob, and lives in a huge house and acts more like a spoiled brat than before.
In one story, he and Dennis are revealed to be distant cousins, but nothing more has been said of this, so it was possibly a one-off joke.
Walter has two apparent friends named Algernon 'Spotty' Perkins and Bertie Blenkinsop. They are equally as camp as he is, and the three of them often wear their mother's clothes and makeup. He also got himself a girlfriend named Matilda, who bore an eerie resemblance to him, except that she was a redhead, and obviously wore a schoolgirl's uniform. She also spoke with a lisp. She first appeared in the 1996 TV series (although a character with the same name appeared in at least one comic library from 1993), and has rarely appeared in The Beano. Other softies include Sweet William, Dudley Nightshirt, Jeremy Snodgrass, Softy Matthew and Nervous Rex, a character who is scared of everything and everyone. If truth be told, the Softies seem to be bound together much more by fear of Dennis than by any real mutual liking; though they are scrupulously polite and strangely devoted to each other, they have occasionally decided to pick on someone perceived as a much bigger wimp than they are. Naturally, there are not many of these people.
Walter is parodied in some editions of the adult comic Viz as "Cedric Soft" in the strip about popular character Biffa Bacon. Their relationship is in a similar vein to Walter's with Dennis, with extreme comic violence added.
Because of Walter's profoundly feminine behaviour, it is argued that Walter is actually gay[2]. Because of this speculation, not only did he have a girlfriend created for him, but Dennis the Menace also had to soften his antics against Walter in fear it would be seen as homophobia[3][4].
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