Walter the Softy

Walter the Softy, or Softy Walter as he is sometimes called, is the fictional enemy of Dennis the Menace in the British children's comic The Beano. 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.

Profile

Walter is a camp and effeminate boy, who is always very stereotypically girly in his behaviour. He is portrayed as a typical "geek", wearing a blue schoolboy's jumper, schoolboy's shorts, a bow tie, and has glasses and an 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.

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. It can be considered slightly uncanny that Walter's parents resemble each other. 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 (VERY) rare 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 in a recent story he tried to save Dennis's favourite tree by "chaining" himself to it (he failed because he used daisy chains, but Dennis appreciated the effort).

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. 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, 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