Peter Pan and the Lost Comics

On the voiceover, Armando Iannucci is talking about comics for adults. But on the screen, there’s a big picture of Judge Death.

Hello, cognitive dissonance!

The overt argument of the third and last of the BBC’s Comics Britannia documentaries, “Anarchy in the UK”, was that comics had grown up. But everything conspired to remind the viewer of how far comics still cling to childhood. 2000AD was originally designed for 12-year olds. Unusually, its readers did not give up the comic in puberty, but went on reading it through their – OK, then, our - teens, twenties, thirties and forties. That allowed 2000AD’s creators to build up the satire and the violence, and eventually to add in a little sex. But the tastes of those 12-year olds formed its foundations and still determine its basic structure.

There’s a similar consideration about most of the other comics featured last night. Viz not only uses the style of DC Thomson and IPC children’s humour comics, but much of its own humour is thoroughly juvenile. Small children would enjoy the fart jokes of Johnny Fartpants, while Roger Mellie is just that boy on the bus shouting “bogies!”, but with a more extensive vocabulary. Much was made of Deadline’s connection to the rave scene, a pop culture movement that rejected adult responsibility and idealised ravers as loved-up children. The featured works of Alan Moore are elaborate and complex stories – but about superheroes and the heroines of classic children’s books.

Mind you, that impression was partly due to the selection of material. In my mind’s eye, I pictured an alternative arrangement that put 2000AD, Warrior and Watchmen into an extended version of last week’s documentary about (in part) boys’ adventure comics. My imaginary new third instalment would, instead, consider how Raymond Briggs had used the techniques he developed in his comic albums for children to address genuinely adult concerns in Ethel and Ernest (by way of When the Wind Blows). It would trace Posy Simmonds’s development of newspaper comic strips – always intended for adults – into works such as Gemma Bovery and Tamara Drewe. It would cover the undergrounds and Hunt Emerson, the small press scene and Eddie Campbell, the growth of British-produced manga and webcomics. And it could conclude with the two big British commercial successes this year – not just Alice in Sunderland, but also Simone Lia’s Fluffy.

Because, sometimes, there’s nothing more grown-up than a talking rabbit.


Panels
Roger the Dodger and his friend Tommy attempt to impersonate an adult. Non-consecutive panels from a story reprinted in Dandy and Beano: Famous Faces from the Comics (DC Thomson, 1992). Art by Ken Reid, I think.

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

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).

Before Comics Britannia

Anyone with a specialist interest must have mixed feelings when the mass media turn their attention to it: however welcome the exposure might be, the risk of misrepresentation and mockery is high.

The BBC has now filled out most of the web-pages on the site supporting the upcoming BBC4 series Comics Britannia (thanks to the FPI blog for pointing this out).

Taking those pages with the fuller descriptions of what is in each of the three parts posted by Lew Stringer on his Blimey! It’s Another Blog About Comics, and with the review Rich Johnston wrote for his Lying in the Gutters column, based on preview discs, it would seem that the BBC has actually produced an accurate and balanced series of programmes about British comics, which is not something I’d ever have expected. I’m very much looking forward to the broadcasts.

But I still think it’s a pity that, like Keith Robson’s exhibition at the Museum of Hartlepool, the BBC has chosen to start with the publication of The Dandy in 1937 (though the captions to some of the gallery images, such as the note about Dudley Watkins’s artistic debt to Tom Browne, do lend some reassurance that earlier material will not be entirely written out of history).

I can understand why this is a tempting starting-point for a TV programme aimed at a general audience: mention The Dandy and The Beano to anyone under the age of 80, and you’ll provoke instant nostalgia. Mention Comic Cuts and Illustrated Chips and you’ll get blank looks. But it seems to me that a series about British comics should attempt to consider the ways in which the British variety is distinct from those in other countries, and some significant distinctions had already taken form by the 1930s. Of course, each of these is shared with some other countries: it’s the combination which creates the unique flavour.

Short, weekly anthology formats were already the norm. This would mean that British comics would continue to concentrate on stories that could be told in one or two pages, or in one or two page instalments, unlike the longer formats favoured in the USA or Japan. Collected reprints would allow European comics, which also favoured short anthologies, to break out of this restraint, but that did not happen in Britain.

Comics were wholly for children. The older line of comics for adults, such as Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday was dead. Unlike Japan or Belgium and France, an adult readership for mass market British comics would not emerge in the post-World War Two years. The contrast with other countries would be even stronger if the growing adult readership of comics in the USA had not been nipped in the bud by the creation of the Comics Code Authority.

Comics based on other media were common. They dated back at least as far as Dan Leno’s Comic Journal of 1898, and their place in the market had been cemented by the success of Film Fun and its imitators in the 1920s. Now they make up the majority of periodicals published for children. Apart from the success of Disney, I don’t think this has been true in other major comic-producing countries, where it has, if anything, been more common for other media to borrow from comics (US television and film; Japanese anime) than vice-versa.

Common themes, stereotypes and tropes were already in place. For example, it was common for humour strips to feature people of low status (such as children or tramps) opposed to authority: contrast The Bash Street Kids, where the children of Class 2B are in conflict with Teacher, with Archie, where the pupils of Riverdale High are mostly in conflict with each other.

It may be that Comics Britannia will fill in some of this backstory once it has got viewers’ attention with more familiar comics. Whatever, when it comes to what is actually in the documentaries rather than what is not, I feel a lot less apprehensive than I did when the series was announced.


Picture
Front page of Film Fun issue 254, artist and writer uncredited, Amalgamated Press, 22 November 1924, reprinted in Alan and Laurel Clark Comics: An Illustrated History, Green Wood Publishing, 1991