EIGHT year-old Max Lees is the envy of every youngster who has ever been enthralled by the antics of Dennis the Menace, Minnie the Minx, Billy Whizz, Roger the Dodger and The Bash Street Kids.

Max, who lives near Malmesbury, has starred in his own cartoon caper in the hallowed pages of The Beano, Britain’s best loved and one of its longest standing comics.

Dedicated Beano reader Max, a pupil at Sherston School, entered a competition for the chance to appear in his favourite comic – and to his delight and his parents’ amazement he won.

With mum Jo and dad Michael, he was flown to Dundee, where the comic is produced, and watched as a Beano artist created a character that Max had made up and which was, of course, loosely based on himself – Mythical Max.

Mythical Max’s cartoon strip adventure, which involved slaying dragons, appeared in a recent edition of The Beano.

Max, who picks up his Beano from Sherston Stores every Wednesday, said: “The whole thing was amazing.”

The youngster, a Beano reader since he was five, saw how the black and white cartoon was created and was thrilled when he was invited to finish it off by applying the colour by computer.

“It was a brilliant day and my favourite part was getting to colour in the cartoon which was all about me,” he said.

Max won the chance to live out every Beano fan’s dream when he took part in a competition which involved correctly counting the number of cans in an image – 160.

Mrs Lees, 44, said: “He entered it and posted it off himself and a few weeks later we got phone call saying that Max had won.

”The people at Beano were fantastic. They treated him like a king.”

She said that as well as creating a story around Mythical Max, they included Max’s dog Bolt in the story, while Max helped them fill in the voice bubbles.

He was also shown copies of the original editions of The Beano going back to the 1930s and was loaded up with souvenirs from a model of Dennis the Menace, complete with catapult, to the false teeth of Plug of The Bash Street Kids.

“It was all very cool,” added Mrs Lees.