Girl Flight! Kitty Hawke and Worrals of the WAAF versus Angela Air Hostess

Speaking on this week’s instalment of BBC4’s Comics Britannia, “Boys and Girls”, Jodi Cudlipp, a former member of the editorial staff of Hulton Press’s comic Girl, had this to say: “I thought from the very beginning that Kitty Hawke was wrong … I said, no, this is not the thing that girls of today want … You want stories about animals, or something like a ballerina.”

Kitty Hawke and Her All-Girl Air Crew was the original lead comic strip of Girl , appearing on the front page in full colour from the first issue in November 1951. Modelled to some degree after Dan Dare, the big hit of Eagle, Kitty Hawke was the story of the adventures of a group of women running a charter aeroplane company in the (then) present day.

Reportedly, it went down badly. Marcus Morris, founder of Eagle and Girl, later recalled, “We had received reports that quite a number of girls were reading Eagle and drew the wrong conclusion: we had made Girl too masculine. We therefore made it more romantic in its approach, more feminine. I worked on the theory that you should be a good deal more personal in your motivation in a girls’ paper. The adventure and the danger can be there but the reason for it must be the search for a long-lost uncle or father. If you can add a fair amount of personal rivalry, jealousy and a very close friendship, so much the better. We applied this theory to Girl and sales picked up. Before long they reached 650,000 and stayed there“ (quoted in Sally Morris & Jan Hallwood Living with Eagles: Marcus Morris, Priest and Publisher, Lutterworth Press, 1998).

Part of the revamp was that Kitty Hawke was dropped. The message seems clear: Cudlipp was right. Girls did not want stories about adventurous aviatrices.

Except that, over the previous decade, Captain W E Johns had written and published no fewer than eleven (prose) books about Flight Officer Joan Worralson of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, starting with Worrals of the WAAF in 1941, previously serialised in Girl’s Own magazine. Like her more famous male predecessor, Biggles, Worrals was a pilot known by an abbreviation of her surname, had a sidekick nicknamed after her physical appearance (“Frecks”, rather than “Ginger”), and showed an alarming propensity to stumble on spy rings while on routine missions. There was no romance, Worrals’s family never showed up, and she acted for King and country rather than personal interest.


So why the difference? Perhaps Hulton Press was wrong to conclude that girls did not want stories of this type – perhaps they just did not like Kitty Hawke in particular. Or perhaps boys were buying the Worrals books.

Changes in society provide a more likely explanation. The last Worrals book was published in 1950, just before Kitty Hawke’s abortive flight. Worrals had made her debut in wartime. The girls who read the books were likely to have mothers or other female relatives serving in the armed forces, while others worked in the factories. These were people to be respected and emulated.

By the early 1950s, demobbed men had replaced many of the women in civilian occupations, and the Treasury was struggling to pay for all the men still in the armed forces – women auxiliaries were well down the list of priorities. Class consciousness reasserted itself. For a woman to go out to work was now a sign of economic necessity for her family, rather than for the country. In the middle classes, and those who aspired to be middle class, it was a stigma for a married woman to work. Significantly, the Hulton Press’s expensive titles were aimed at these middle class families, and were reputedly often bought by parents for their children rather than by the children themselves. The parents knew what values they wanted to nurture.

It was no disgrace for single women to work, but only in supposedly feminine occupations. Girl did eventually produce another flying, green-uniformed heroine. But Angela, Air Hostess was not in charge: she wasn’t flying the plane, or dictating the terms of her own adventures. She was right at the bottom of the pecking order, and preoccupied with romance and jealous rivals.


On the whole, the animals and the ballerinas were probably a better bet.


Panels and pictures

Kitty Hawke and Her All-Girl Air Crew, art by Ray Bailey, Girl issue 1, November 2 1951, Hulton Press, scan taken from the Lambiek Comiclopedia

Uncredited illustration from Worrals Carries On by W E Johns, Lutterworth Press, 1942

Angela, Air Hostess written by Betty Rowland, drawn by Dudley Pout, reprinted in The Best of Girl, Prion Books, 2006

Kirby Comes Clean

”The dialogue is terrible! But they mean every word of it!”

Panel
Mister Miracle issue 4, “The Closing Jaws of Death!", written, drawn and edited by Jack Kirby, inked by Vince Colletta, DC Comics, September-October 1971, reprinted in Jack Kirby’s Fourth World Omnibus volume 2, DC Comics, 2007

Jonathan Ross Explains the Television License Fee

No, that’s not fair.

Without Jonathan Ross, it is inconceivable that the BBC would have made an hour-long documentary about Steve Ditko, and unlikely that it would have had the same access to interviewees as did In Search of Steve Ditko, broadcast last night.

Inevitably, with Ditko unavailable for interview – which could have been more economically established by a phone call from this side of the Atlantic – the documentary was stronger on how his work was received and read than how it was created. Alan Moore was particularly lucid, though that does not entirely excuse indulging him when he recited a song lyric about Mr A. That sort of fluff, and the constant repetition and trails for what was coming up, gave the whole thing the feel of a half-hour documentary unnaturally inflated to an hour.

It was a shame, too, that Ross used his interview with Stan Lee to concentrate on whether Lee considered Ditko to be the co-creator of Spider-Man. The dispute turned out to be based on different definitions of the term “creator” – Lee favouring the initial idea, Ditko arguing that ideas were commonplace, and that it was the execution that mattered. This was not terribly interesting to me. I wanted to know more about what Ditko was trying to achieve with his comics work and how he went about it, rather than dwelling on office politics.

Still, that aspect was not neglected entirely, with Moore, Mark Millar and Cat Yronwode offering some interpretation of Ditko’s ideas, and Ralph Macchio touching on his working methods. The sheer range of interviewees was impressive: I very much hope that the crew taped some material with Jerry Robinson about his own work, as well as his reminiscences of Ditko as a pupil.

And, for fans of Jonathan Ross/Neil Gaiman slash fiction, surely a growing genre since San Diego, there was plenty of fuel for their fantasies. “I’m Robin to your Batman … Etta Candy to your Wonder Woman," indeed.


Picture
Drawing of Jonathan Ross by Steve Bright for “Dennis Meets Jonathan Ross”, BeanoMax issue 1, DC Thomson, March 2007. Views expressed in the captions are none of Steve Bright’s doing, so don’t blame him for them.

Stutter

This has been bugging me, so please forgive me if I make a meal over what should be a couple of bites.

In Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 issue 6, Brian K Vaughan and Georges Jeanty drop in a couple of references to external fictions, not in the usual pop geek dialogue way, but as if they were real in Buffy’s world.*


Yes, for the moment, I’m going to treat the idea of Alan Moore as a wizard as fictional, even if he believes it himself. (See Scans Daily for an example.)

Now, the first panel posted above doesn’t bother me at all. I scan the image, take in the Doctor and Rose, smile internally, and move on. But the second panel stalls the comic’s engine.

Why the difference?

At first, I thought it might be because one reference is done in pictures and the other in words. And there might be something in that. It’s easy to make an element of a picture unobtrusive. It is much harder with words – unless there is some kind of set-up, common in American Flagg, for example, in which word balloons are used to indicate the fact of background chatter, rather than to carry meaning in the words themselves.

The type of picture and the type of words matter too. The first panel is an establishing shot: the narrative has already slowed down to show the new location, and, in such low gear, it is easy to take in the side reference without juddering to a halt. The second panel is in the middle of a run of dialogue in which Giles explains the plot to Faith: when the need occurs to stop to take in the reference, it’s like slamming on the brakes while still in third.

And you do need to stop. The phrase “the great bearded wizard of Northampton” is not natural speech, and jolts the reader out of the word balloon to wonder why. That it is shaped as a puzzle – albeit a simple one for comics fans – means that you can’t simply drive on into the story until you’ve solved it. Worse, while it doesn't greatly matter if you don't recognise the Doctor and Rose, as you would just think of them as passers-by added to populate the London street and not know that you'd missed anything, if you didn't know who “the great bearded wizard of Northampton” was, you'd still be aware that there was a puzzle that you'd failed to solve.

So that’s that explained. OK, down to neutral, turn the ignition, up into first, and away.

Oh, heck, he said "fall" instead of "autumn". This thing just isn't destined to run smoothly.


*That was rare on the TV show, wasn’t it? The only example I can think of was Dracula’s appearance in one episode.


Panels
Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight issue 6, “No Future For You” part 1, by Brian K Vaughan (script), Georges Jeanty (puzzle), Andy Owens (inks), Dave Stewart (colours), Richard Starkings & Comicraft’s Jimmy (letters), Scott Allie (editor) and Joss Whedon (executive producer – whatever that means)

Newsflash

Following the generally positive reception given to the news that Jim Shooter would be returning to The Legion of Super-Heroes, a title which he last wrote in the 1970s, DC Comics has announced that the new regular writer on Superman will be Otto Binder.

“Otto is one of the most iconic Superman writers ever,” said a spokesman, “and although he died in 1974, we are confident that he will be more productive than Allan Heinberg, Richard Donner or Frank Miller.”

But Binder’s return has already sparked controversy. In an ectoplasmic interview with the frankly non-existent web-site Spiritualists Read The Comics, he said, “I find comics today completely unreadable; and that is not just because my eyes have been eaten away by worms – I have spoken to many top corpses, and they all agree with me about everything. And have you heard that terrible noise youngsters listen to all the time? You can’t call that music. They can’t even dress themselves properly, with their trousers hanging off and their hats on backwards. I blame the editors.”

Civil War, Take One

I’m not sure why there is so much fuss over Marvel’s Civil War issue 1 winning the Harvey Award for Best Single Issue or Story.

After all, it may have been a pretty rotten comic, but it was the one that owed most to Harvey Kurtzman’s own work.


Wait, what do you mean, Civil War wasn’t supposed to be a joke?

Panels
“Superduperman!” by Harvey Kurtzman (story) and Wallace Wood (art), Mad issue 4, EC Comics, 1953, reprinted in The Complete First Six Issues of Mad, Russ Cochrane, c 1985

Mainstream Driftwood

The broadcasting of Comics Britannia (first episode tonight, BBC4, 9pm British Summer Time) has prompted articles in two of the broadsheets (well, one tabloid and a berliner now, but you know what I mean).

The Times ran an article on British comics by Kim Newman, with some slightly muddled quotes from the documentary (at least, I hope that it is The Times, and not Leo Baxendale, who thinks that Dudley Watkins created Dennis the Menace).

The Guardian trumped that with a three-page history in comic form of British comics, by Bryan Talbot. So, naturally, I missed it, and it doesn’t seen to have been posted on either the Guardian Unlimited website or the official Bryan Talbot fanpage. I am currently on the scrounge among Guardian-reading friends. For the time being, there is a photo of the first page at the bottom of Lew Stringer’s review of Comics Britannia. (Update, 11 September: Rich Johnston has now posted scans on Lying in the Gutters.)

What Guardian Unlimited does have is Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn column about Comics Britannia. I never knew that he worked on Oink!, as both a writer and artist. Unfortunately, he has swallowed and repeated DC Thomson's inaccurate claim that The Dandy is the world's longest-running comic (Detective Comics is several months older).

Review: The Best of Look-In – The Seventies

The Best of Look-In – Junior TV Times – The Seventies, compiled and edited by Graham Kibble White, Prion Books/Carlton Publishing, 55 pages of strip (out of 144), £12.99
Features:
Crowther in Trouble by Geoff Cowan (story) and Tom Kerr (art)
Please Sir! by Angus P Allan (story) and Graham Allen (art)
On the Buses by Scott Goodall (story) and Harry North (art)
Catweazle by Angus P Allan (story) and unidentified artist
Michael Bentine’s Potty Time by Robin Tucek (story) and Arthur Ranson (art)
Les Dawson is Superflop by Geoff Cowan (story) and Arthur Ranson (art)
The Adventures of Black Beauty by Angus P Allan (story) and Mike Noble (art)
The Tomorrow People by Angus P Allan (story) and John M Burns (art)
Man About the House by Angus P Allan (story) and Bill Titcombe (art)
Flintlock by Angus P Allan (story) and Bill Titcombe (art)
ABBA by Angus P Allan (story) and Arthur Ranson (art)
The Bionic Woman by Angus P Allan (story) and John Bolton (art)
The Benny Hill Page by Geoff Cowan (story) and Bill Titcombe (art)
Sapphire & Steel by Angus P Allan (story) and Arthur Ranson (art)
Cover art by Arnaldo Putzu, montaged by Alistair McGown

Untidily spilling out of the racks in the children’s comics section of newsagents throughout Britain are publications that combine comic strips based on licensed properties from other media (including television, film and toys) with articles, puzzles, posters and competitions. They are all the spiritual children of Look-In, born in 1971 when its publisher decided to take two pitches – for a children’s magazine about TV and for a comic in the style of TV21 - and combine the two. Whether this formula proved to be the salvation of children’s publishing or cost comics their soul is a matter of opinion.

Whereas the likes of The Simpsons, Doctor Who Adventures and Transformers have a single brand to play with, Look-In had access to almost everything shown on ITV, which was then one-third of all programmes broadcast in Britain. The range of strips reproduced here, wide though it is, is only a selection. Some series were omitted because they were too adult, and one or two were licensed elsewhere. I remember being most put out when I learned that Marvel UK had obtained the rights to Planet of the Apes, because I so much preferred the artwork in Look-In.

Editor Alan Fennell, late of TV21, had hired many of the best boys’ comics artists in Britain, including some of my favourites from Countdown, such as Mike Noble, John M Burns and Martin Asbury, as well as humorous artists like Bill Titcombe, whose work I admired on Dad’s Army in TV Comic. He had also brought with him TV21 writer Angus Allan, whose stories now seem thin and perfunctory, but which appeared to my pre-teen self as being much more faithful to the television originals than the overwrought melodrama of Marvel.

If the writing for these strips doesn’t carry too much appeal for an adult thirty years on, the artwork remains a major draw. Noble, for example, makes Black Beauty a far more dynamic and visually expressive story than it ever was on television.


It’s fun to see the veterans apply their mature skill to these strips. But there is even more interest in watching future stars in development. Here is John Bolton, working chiefly in line rather than his more familiar modelled tones.


Particularly startling is the range of styles deployed by Arthur Ranson, before beginning, with Sapphire & Steel, to develop what would become the highly detailed hatched realism familiar from Button Man and Anderson, Psi Division.





Reproduction is occasionally grainy, and at least some pages have been scanned from published copies (a number of pages, particularly those in black and white, show a tell-tale darkening towards the spine). But on the whole everything looks acceptable.

And what of the magazine content? Well, the articles were always pretty thin at the time. There may be some nostalgic buzz from reading a day’s TV schedule that is no longer being broadcast, working through competitions for prizes that can no longer be won, and gazing at adverts for products that can no longer be bought, but once you’ve skimmed through that stuff once, it becomes clear that it’s the comics that have the greater and more lasting value.

But, then again, I thought that at the time.


Relevant links
Alistair McGown’s Look-In: A Tribute to the Junior TV Times
Bear Alley article about by Alistair McGown about compiling The Best of Look-In
Look-In Picture Strip Archive

Friday Night Fights: Vindicate Away, Mary Wollstonecraft

As Friday Night Fights* enters the last round of the current bout, no-one can escape Bahlactus’s command to fight; not even eighteenth-century political philosophers.


Ouch! Jean-Jacques was born free, but is everywhere in pain.

Panel
Action Philosophers: The Lightning Round by Fred Van Lente (writer) and Ryan Dunlavey (artist), Evil Twin Comics, July 2007

* Actually Saturday morning now, but as long as that burglar alarm across the street is ringing, I’ll not be getting to sleep.

Big and Brassy

They may have lost a comic, but it seems that Wallace and Gromit will gain a statue, in animator Nick Park’s home town of Preston, Lancashire.

Putting up statues of cartoon characters is something of a trend. There’s an Andy Capp in Hartlepool (Reg Smythe’s birthplace) and Desperate Dan and Minnie the Minx share a metaphorical plinth in Dundee (headquarters of publisher D C Thomson).


Round here on Tyneside, the local heroes are the characters created by Chris and Simon Donald and their cohorts for Viz. So, who do you reckon should be immortalised in the Bigg Market? The Fat Slags? Sid the Sexist? Buster Gonad and his Unfeasibly Large Testicles? Or perhaps Finbarr Saunders and His Double Entendres would provide a suitably impressive erection.

Fnarr, fnarr.

Oh, and if you doubt that the Viz folk are of suitable character to be immortalised in bronze, remember that, as Lew Stringer reminds us, Andy Capp was not just a drunken layabout, but also a wife-beater.

Pictures
Photo of Andy Capp statue by Stan Laundon
Photo of Desperate Dan and Minnie the Minx statues by Stonefaction

Review: The Last Fantastic Four Story

The Last Fantastic Four Story issue 1 (!), “World’s End” by Stan Lee (writer), John Romita Jr (penciller), Scott Hanna (inker), Morry Hollowell (colourist), VC’s Joe Caramanga (letterer) and Tom Brevoort (editor), Marvel Comics, October 2007, 48 pages of strip, US$4.99

There is something distinctly morbid about this comic. It’s not the story, which (SPOILER ALERT!) ends with the Fantastic Four alive and well and flying off into the moonrise. It’s not even the cover, with its funereal black edging and sombre serifed type. It’s the feeling that, taken with the recent Stan Lee Meets … series, we are seeing Lee, at the age of 85, taking his leave of the characters who made his name.

Of course, being an old showman, Lee would probably be as happy to make as many farewell appearances and comebacks as Old Blue Eyes himself. Let’s hope that he gets the chance to do so, because The Last Fantastic Four Story would not be a good note on which to end.

The plot concerns a technologically superior power, the Cosmic Tribunal, who decide, on the basis of faulty intelligence, that the human race is worthless: so they decide to invade and kill us all. This may be a stab at relevance – something Lee used to pride himself on – as the parallel with the US invasion of Iraq is fairly obvious. That may be why Lee refers to the members of the Tribunal as “good guys”; because he sees them as analogous to his own country. But in the context of this story, it makes no sense. Good guys do not commit genocide, let alone unprovoked genocide. Worse, in another stab at relevance, the Tribunal is bringing about mankind’s destruction by accelerating global warming, killing lots of entirely innocent animals in the process.


This is not a good showcase for the Fantastic Four. Ben and Johnny's attempts to fight back are wholly ineffectual, while Sue does, quite simply, absolutely nothing throughout. “Invisible Girl,” indeed.

In an attempt to update his style, Lee has dropped a lot of the polysyllabic bombast. He has also attempted to embrace decompression, by cutting up his captions into smaller blocks, spread across more panels. But this lays bare the lack of sophistication in story and sentiment, and leaves the narrative and dialogue to read like an extended issue of Spidey Super Stories.

In one respect, John Romita Jr was a good choice to provide the art for Lee’s valedictory story. Like some of Lee’s favourite collaborators, his father John Romita Sr and John Buscema, Romita Jr is a consummate craftsman, a solid and accurate draughtsman with the talent and skill of telling stories with crystal clarity. But like theirs, I find his work unengaging: these are the Volkswagens of comic art: well-engineered, reliable, but nothing to get excited about. In a comic which will always stand in the shadow of Jack Kirby, that is a problem.

As the story ends, the Fantastic Four are in unconvincing retirement, and so is Stan Lee. Let us hope that he gets the chance to write The Last Spider-Man Story, and that it provides him with a more fitting swansong.

Not Great News, Pals

I think that this is the last issue of The Wallace & Gromit Comic. It doesn’t say so explicitly, but the cancellation had been announced in advance, and there’s a short note at the end “to thank all of our readers for supporting our little comic over the years”.

They did things differently in the old days. If past customs still held, there would be a strapline on the cover reading, “Great News Inside, Chums,” trailing an announcement that, as of next month, you’ d be able to enjoy all your favourite features in the brand new Shaun the Sheep and Wallace & Gromit Comic.

But no. The age of comic mergers is passed, and the days of rigidly separate brands are upon us. Ah well, sic transit gloria wensleydale.