Preserving British Comics: A Call to Arms!

Preserving British Comics – A Call to Arms!

Julia Round and Chris Murray

For half a century, British comics dominated children’s entertainment in the United Kingdom. They were diverse, exciting, irreverent, innovative, and worked on by some of the top talent in Europe. Their taut storytelling, dynamic layouts, and dramatic content are just memories to many old readers today – and in fact even these are fading. Memories from within the industry are equally precarious, as we have sadly lost a number of important creators over the past few years.  

In our introduction to this blog series, Billy and I reflected on the sad state of the British comics industry today, where just three print titles have survived. But due to a lack of archives, in fact this whole area of our cultural heritage is in very real danger of being completely lost. The comics themselves were low budget productions; printed on cheap paper and seldom properly stored, many copies are literally falling apart. Some public libraries have special collections, and the British Library has the collected runs of many titles, but even these are often incomplete. Ephemera such as free gifts and promotional materials, as well as supporting documents (publicity materials, sales ledgers, scripts, press releases) and any surviving pieces of original art are predominantly in the hands of private collectors. But as these owners age, their collections look set to be broken up and sold off in pieces, as was the fate of Denis Gifford’s legendary collection. Other collections have since been offered for sale, but so far a number of funding bids from UK scholars to obtain and preserve these have not seen any success. 

British comics represent a unique contribution to the culture of the UK. They are a way of understanding and interrogating our history, but they also represent a thriving creative economy, one with national and international reach. An international research strategy is urgently required to catalogue and map existing collections and archives, and to develop the resources required to ensure that comics, original comic art, and the ephemera that surrounds the comics (free gifts, advertising, information on fan clubs, and so on) is not lost. So much of that long history is at risk of disappearing, and not enough is being done to preserve the work being done right now. Although institutions such as the Cartoon Museum in London are doing important work with permanent gallery displays and public events, there are vast numbers of comics and research materials that are unseen, inaccessible, and in danger of being lost and forgotten.  

We hope that the ‘Remembering UK Comics’ series has not only been informative, but also a celebration of the rich history of British comics. As we move forward, we urge fans and scholars to consider the importance of creating and sustaining new and existing comics archives and resources that can be accessed by researchers and the public alike. We not only need to look to the past, but also to our present – how are we collecting and preserving the work of current creators? 

There can be no effective single strategy to protect and preserve this cultural history. Instead, this is a call for all fans and academics working in this field to do whatever we can to promote it and attract funding. We need to find new ways of understanding and experiencing the rich diversity of British comics, and to work together to preserve materials that can inform and inspire future generations of readers and comics creators. 

'Crisis on Inbetween Earths' (2 of 2) by Will Brooker

Grant Morrison and Richard Case later introduced a character named after another REM song, ‘Driver 8’, as one of Crazy Jane’s multiple personalities in Doom Patrol. The number on  his or her cap was turned to one side, and the eight became infinity.

Lines from Ulysses escaped my diary and spread across my bedroom wall, above the mirror.

At the same time, James Joyce’s style was also shaping Grant Morrison’s prose, in Zenith.

I think it was a coincidence – that I was into Ulysses anyway, rather than that I read Joyce because of Zenith – but at this distance, it’s hard to be sure.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes I said yes I will Yes.

At around the same time, Peter Milligan (author of Shade the Changing Man) and Duncan Fegredo released a Vertigo miniseries simply called Enigma. Again, I was more taken with one of the minor characters: in this case, Victoria Yes. The Envelope Girl.

Victoria’s pages were the colour of manila. She could transport her victims across time and space, from one time to another place. That was her one power. I was entranced by her.

It was a time when the boundaries between producer and reader, author and fan blurred a little more than they do now. Grant Morrison published reviews alongside mine in Fantasy Advertiser magazine. I spoke to Alan Moore for hours at the theatrical adaptation of Halo Jones, and published our conversation as an interview in one of my earlier fanzines, Frisko (itself named after the Halo Jones disc jockey). I wrote comics, and without even meeting the artists who drew them – we communicated by letter, of course – I seemed also to appear in comics.

I became part of a small-press network, pre-Facebook, pre-MySpace, pre-Friendster. We wrote and drew comics, and circulated them by post.

My first script was called ‘Vertigo’. It wasn’t very good. I found my style writing stories about a man who, like Victoria Yes, had a girl somewhere inside him, an envelope waiting to be opened. And when she came out, he saw stars.

When I re-read those scripts now, I cringe a little – but perhaps not for the reasons you imagine. They are texts of their time: the year was 94, and I was raw. I didn’t have a better word than ‘transvestites’, and — because I was so young — I thought it was all about passing on the outside, not how you identified inside. These are stories from before LGBT was an acronym; before I had anything more than a sparse, inadequate vocabulary and a briefly-glimpsed community.

I didn’t have the words, at the time. The right word would come later.

But meanwhile, pre-Facebook, pre-MySpace, pre-Friendster, how did we all find each other? Through pamphlets, through fanzines, through comics: through postal addresses in the back pages of magazines.

I wrote a letter to Shade The Changing Man every month, and it was printed every month: almost a regular column. And once, Shade wrote back to me. Artist Gavin Wilson sent me an original print of Shade, from his photoshoot for issue #23 (May 1992), ‘An Illusion of Real’.

So Shade was a real man, and we fans were a little like comic book characters. We were all so pretty, so seemingly-immortal. So young, so gone, as Brett Anderson put it in 1993. We’ll scare the skies with tiger’s eyes, oh yeah. (The opening lyrics to ‘So Young’ aren’t listed anywhere: Brett simply cries ‘Seeker! Star!’ a euphoric yell of yes.)

The Vertigo titles reflected us like a looking-glass. They showed us we could be a certain kind of superhero: shades, suede, leather, boots and buckles, broken parts and mosaic minds. Teams like Morrison’s Doom Patrol offered a gang of misfits we could all join.

I even performed in a Suede covers band. Funny, at the time I didn’t realise everyone in the house, everyone at the party, was gay.

But then, the boundaries were slippery. Brett Anderson claimed to be bisexual. Everyone I dated turned out to be bi. The binaries blurred. Shade the Changing Man woke up one morning as a woman, and went into a word-panic worthy of Molly Bloom: why man, woe man.

Milligan’s self-conscious wordplay – Joyce himself even featured in one episode of Shade – climaxed in a particularly slippery trick towards the end of Enigma.

‘Michael remembers the first time he stood naked in front of a strange girl…

Because that’s what he feels like now.

A strange girl.’

Like Shade, I was sharing a house with two or three other girls. I couldn’t always count them. That’s the kind of curious house it was: like Morrison’s sentient transvestite real estate from Doom Patrol, Danny-the-Street, things seemed to shift and move when you turned your back. I didn’t have the words, at the time, to describe the scene, the house, the carnival of sorts we were all part of – but later, I realised it had been starring me in the face all along, on the cover of a comic book.

Enigma, part 8, the final issue. A face stared straight out at the reader, with the caption ‘queer’.

Enigma is a remarkable comic: it seems obscure now, rarely-remembered, out of print. It’s astonishingly similar in its themes and approach to Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s later four-part series, Flex Mentallo (1996), but it’s not been examined or obsessed over to anything like the same extent.

It tells the story of an ordinary man called Michael who meets a superhero – a gorgeous, larger-than-life superhero called The Enigma, who comes to life from the pages of a childhood comic book. But where Flex only implies the homoeroticism of the relationship between fan and icon, reader and character, civilian identity and costumed alter ego, Enigma faces it full-on.

Enigma makes Michael gay. And then, in the last episode, offers to turn him back. And Michael says ‘NO.’ But it’s a no as positive as Molly’s final yes.

And as for me? I put the envelopes in the attic. I moved out, I moved house, I started a new life, I sold out.

I left everything behind and got a room in Cardiff, and began a PhD about Batman.

But that’s another story, for another time.

Will Brooker

November 2012

Will Brooker is Professor of Film and Cultural Studies and Head of the Film and Television Department at Kingston University, London. Professor Brooker’s work primarily studies popular cinema within its cultural context, situating it historically and in relation to surrounding forms such as literature, comic books, video games, television and journalism. In addition to the numerous essays and articles on film and fan culture that he has published, his books include Why Bowie Matters (2019), Forever Stardust: David Bowie across the Universe (2017), Star Wars (2009), Alice’s adventures: Lewis Carroll in popular culture (2004), Using the Force: Creativity, Community and Star Wars Fans (2002), and the edited anthologies The Blade Runner Experience (2004) and The Audience Studies Reader (2003).  He is also a leading academic expert on Batman and the author/editor of several books on the topic, including Batman Unmasked (2000) Hunting the Dark Knight (2012), Many More Lives of the Batman (2015).

'Crisis on Inbetween Earths' (1 of 2) by Will Brooker

In our final installment of our ‘Remembering UK Comics’ series, we have an essay by Will Brooker. Previously published on the now defunct website, Infinite Earths, Will has kindly permitted us to republish the essay in full, which we are very gratful for. I’m sure many scholars are intimately aware of Will’s work on Batman comics and other transmedia expressions in his Batman Unmasked: Analyzing a Cultural Icon (Continuum 2001), and Hunting the Dark Knight: Twenty-First Century Batman (IB Taurus 2012), but he was also a dedicated reader of the Vertigo comics line of the 1990s, an imprint of DC Comics that would not have had such an impact on the medium without the armada of writers and artists that came with the so-called British Invasion. Indeed, what was Vertigo’s gain turned out to be e a great loss for the British comics landscape..

—William Proctor & Julia Round

Crisis on Inbetween Earths

Will Brooker

The year was 94. Or thereabouts. It was a slippery time; I dig out my old diaries from the attic and discover that some of this happened in 89, and some of it in 96. But I think of it as circa-94, around the time that Vertigo comics entered me and I entered them. I was living in a tall house with two or three other girls.

This is what it looks like now, on a digital map. But that isn’t how I remember it. I remember it more like this: like the scene of Rose Walker arriving at her new home in Gaiman’s second Sandman story arc, The Doll’s House. (Looking it up now, I realize it was first published in 1989. You see what I mean?)

This was my bedroom, or part of it. It was on the top floor, and at night a beacon on the top of the newly-built Canary Wharf tower winked through my window There was a water boiler in the corner that heaved, breathed and gurgled. The room was maybe ten feet by ten, as big as the walk-in wardrobes in the hotel rooms I now occupy. But I loved it.  I painted Molly Bloom’s last lines from Ulysses on the wall, in affirmation. It was, in the words of Shade The Changing Man #9, my pink heaven.

It was on that top floor that I and my co-editor Alice Constance Ballantyne put together Deviant Glam, a fanzine about comics and cosmetics that was informed by, steeped in, swayed by, and segued into the approach and aesthetic of the Vertigo comics of the period.

Yes, a fanzine. It was printed out, photocopied and sent out by post. This was a time of inbetweenness: between the days of analogue and the early internet, when mix tapes were starting to feel quaint and clumsy, but long before Napster. It was a time when cut and paste meant scissors and clue, not control-C and control-V. It was a time when a folder meant a cardboard wallet, a desktop was where you typed your letters on a clunky machine or wrote them by hand, when file was the first syllable in filofax, and wallpaper referred to the collage – tickets, snapshots, pin-ups and posters – you stuck above your bed to make your space your own, as I did with that line from Ulysses above my mirror.

And looking back, that’s another line from Ulysses: stolen from chapter 11, Sirens, with Miss Douce and Miss Kennedy in a Dublin bar.

‘She laughed:
—O wept! Aren’t men frightful idiots?
With sadness.’

You wonder why every comic book and graphic novel cover by Dave McKean, Bill Sienkiewicz and their imitators between 89 and 95 was a mixture of postcards, pebbles, photographs and shells, with bits of lace laid over the top? Because our bedrooms looked like that. Because our diaries looked like that. It was a time of scraps, of bits and bobs. The Psychedelic Furs had a phrase for it, in their song Alice’s House (Mirror Moves album, 1984): ‘it’s a mess of souvenirs… there to remind you, telling the time.’

But Deviant Glam wasn’t just about comics (and not just about cosmetics). It was also – as the Fall put it, in their song Glam Racket, ‘entrenched in suede’. Brett Anderson’s indie band, dubbed ‘the last big thing’ by the music press, had released ‘The Drowners’ and ‘Metal Mickey’ in 1992. I bought all their singles, on vinyl, the day they appeared. It was a time of objects and physical artefacts. I was about Brett’s age. I became entrenched in Suede. The lyrics echoed and entered my diaries, which, I now admit, I often wrote when I was drunk.

‘I see you’re moving, see you’re moving

Moving in with her.

Pierce your right ear, pierce your heart, this skinny boy’s one of the girls.’

By coincidence, I’d bought my first Fall album (I Am Kurious Oranj, 1988) because of this frame from Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell’s superhero epic Zenith, where minor character Penny Moon wears their badge on her leather biker jacket for a moment in Prog 606, December 1988. The panel is barely the size of a postage stamp, but it stuck with me.

I probably bought a leather biker jacket because of Penny Moon, too.

Or maybe it was because of Zenith himself. Fiction had a way of blurring into fact, after a few drinks. And drinking had a way of blurring into sobriety. And the week had a way of blurring into weekend. There was a constant, low-level sense of party that segued into hangover and back to party, up and down, midnight to midnight. In May 1991, I borrowed the title of an REM song to describe the mood.

‘Carnival of Sorts’ was included on Dead Letter Office, REM’s compilation of B-sides and rarities, their rummage through the attic, their archiving of old files. I bought it to celebrate finishing my finals. (I’d gone out to buy the Cure’s album Mixed Up, but I got mixed up, and came home with REM instead).

All letters are dead now – antique museum pieces – but that was our means of communication not so long ago: not mails, but letters, with pen and paper. Straight boys sent handwritten letters to other straight boys, and added love and kisses at the end. I’ve kept them.

For a while, I looked a little like Zenith. That’s me reading Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell’s Sebastian O, near Comics Showcase in London, in 1993.

For another while, I looked a bit like Penny Moon. At another point, in another place, I looked a little like Kid Eternity, from the Grant Morrison and Duncan Fegredo reboot of 1991.

Will Brooker is Professor of Film and Cultural Studies and Head of the Film and Television Department at Kingston University, London. Professor Brooker’s work primarily studies popular cinema within its cultural context, situating it historically and in relation to surrounding forms such as literature, comic books, video games, television and journalism. In addition to the numerous essays and articles on film and fan culture that he has published, his books include Why Bowie Matters (2019), Forever Stardust: David Bowie across the Universe (2017), Star Wars (2009), Alice’s adventures: Lewis Carroll in popular culture (2004), Using the Force: Creativity, Community and Star Wars Fans (2002), and the edited anthologies The Blade Runner Experience (2004) and The Audience Studies Reader (2003).  He is also a leading academic expert on Batman and the author/editor of several books on the topic, including Batman Unmasked (2000) Hunting the Dark Knight (2012), Many More Lives of the Batman (2015).

British Comics Go to the Movies (Part 3 of 3) by James Chapman

Judge Dredd (1995) is another example of the throw-the-kitchen-sink-at-it-and-hope-for-the-best school of film-making. This was another ‘Hollywood British’ film, produced in Britain by Carolco, the American independent which specialized in action movies such as Rambo and Total Recall. Rambo himself, Sylvester Stallone, was signed to play Dredd, the futuristic Dirty Harry created by John Wagner and drawn originally by Carlos Ezquerra for the cult British science fiction comic 2000AD. Again, this should have been a hit. Films such as RoboCop, The Running Man and Total Recall had suggested there was a market for futuristic violent action movies. The monosyllabic, uncompromisng lawman Dredd was perfectly within Stallone’s emotional range as an actor. And $80 million was a hefty budget, even in the spiralling cost-context of contemporary Hollywood blockbusters. But critics were dismissive in the extreme: reviews were headlined ‘Dredd boring’, ‘Dredd-nought’ and ‘A slice of stale dread’. And while it grossed around $112 million (with two-thirds of that coming from markets outside the United States), that was a disappointing return for a would-be franchise vehicle and probably meant that the producer did not recover the cost.

To be fair Judge Dredd isn’t nearly as bad as some of the other films featured here. It’s reasonably close to the source material, combining elements of two classic early Dredd stories, ‘The Day the Law Died’ and ‘The Return of Rico’. The production values are all one would expect and the Blade Runner-influenced cityscape of the future is a visual feast. It’s clear that Danny Cannon, the British director of The Young Americans, had an ambitious vision for the film. He saw it as an epic in the manner of Ben-Hur, Spartacus or El Cid: ‘Those movies took themselves very seriously, just as the artists acting in them did, and I tried to incorporate that element of emotional honesty in Judge Dredd. It’s every bit as much an epic passion play as it is a sci-fi film.’ This claim is not as ridiculous as it might sound. If we take Dredd as Judah Ben-Hur, Rico (Armand Assante) as the bad brother Messala and Chief Judge Fargo (Max Von Sydow) as the surrogate father-figure Quintus Arrius, then Judge Dredd does indeed resemble the structure of Ben-Hur, with Dredd’s journey on the prison ship the equivalent of Judah’s imprisonment on the slave-galley, the crash landing in the Cursed Earth the equivalent of the sea battle, and the chase on Lawmaster bikes as the chariot race. That Judge Dredd did not, in the end, match up to Cannon’s vision for the film was probably due to drastic editing in post-production – invariably a sign that someone (usually the studio) has doubts about the box-office potential of the finished product.

Yet ultimately Judge Dredd became a text-book example of the compromises that occur when Hollywood attempts to turn a cult comic strip into a would-be blockbuster. In the end it was probably not authentic enough to the comic source material to satisfy 2000AD cultists but too close for the general cinema-goers unversed in Dredd lore but who make up the larger proportion of the audience. Judge Dredd outraged fans when Dredd removed his helmet and even shared a kiss with Judge Hershey (Diane Lane). It would be unthinkable for him to do this in the comic but it was necessary for the film which had to appeal to a wider audience than merely readers of the comics.

Of course there are some pretty dire American comic book movies too. I recently sat through (in the name of research) the infamous Howard the Duck (1985), aka ‘Howard the Turkey’, an experience that the CIA could surely adopt as an enhanced interrogation method.

But there’ve also been plenty of good American comic book movies to erase the memory of the duds. Dick Tracy (1990) is one of the boldest visual design jobs in American popular cinema, The Rocketeer (1991) is a cinephile’s delight, and Wonder Woman (2018) finally disproved the theory that there’s no box-office potential for a female superhero. There are also many ‘guilty pleasures’: I’m a big fan of Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze (1975) (PM me if you want to know the storyline for the announced-but-unmade sequel The Arch Enemy of Evil, which I found in George Pal’s papers) and I rather like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003) even though it was disowned by Alan Moore. And of course the continuing popularity of the Marvel superhero cycle – extending back to the first X-Men (2000) – has placed comic book movies at the epicenter of the political and cultural economy of contemporary Hollywood.

British cinema has long ceased to be a mass-production industry, and I very much doubt there is scope for production on the scale of Marvel Studios. But plenty of British comics would provide strong material for low or medium-budget independent films. The recent success of Sam Mendes’s 1917 might persuade an enterprising film-maker to take a look at Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun’s ‘Charley’s War’ (Battle). Paul Grist’s Jack Staff would make for a quirky, offbeat, alternative superhero flick in the manner of Deadpool. How about Sky Atlantic or Netflix investing in a serialization of Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta for television? And I still live in hope that one day we might see that film of Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future.

James Chapman is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Leicester and author of British Comics: A Cultural History (Reaktion, 2011) as well as several books on British cinema, including Licence To Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films (I. B. Tauris, 2nd edn 2007) and Hitchcock and the Spy Film: Authorship, Genre, National Cinema (I. B. Tauris, 2018). He is currently writing Comics at the Movies, a history of comic book film adaptations from the Flash Gordon serials of the 1930s to the contemporary Marvel and DC superhero cycles.

British Comics Go to the Movies (Part 2 of 3) by James Chapman

Tiffany Jones (1972) - produced and directed by British exploitation film-maker Pete Walker – was a sort of Jane for the seventies. Tiffany, who first appeared in a newspaper strip in the Daily Sketch, is a fashion model who, like Jane, tended to lose her clothes at the faintest narrative contrivance. The relaxation of censorship in the 1970s meant that, unlike The Adventures of Jane, Tiffany Jones was able to present its heroine in her natural state, though erotic it isn’t, even in the form of the New Zealand-born model-turned-actress Anouska Hempel, who reportedly later wanted to remove this abomination from her CV. Like other British films of the period, Tiffany Jones has the slightly jaded air of a hangover from the 1960s: its fashion model heroine is very much a throwback to the time of ‘Swinging London’ but that cultural moment had passed by the time of the film’s production. Walker was a low-budget director who specialized in exploitation fare including the sex comedies that were ubiquitous in 1970s British cinema (Cool It Carol!, Four Dimensions of Greta) and ‘punishment’ films in which young women fall prey to sinister oppressors (House of Whipcord, Frightmare). Tiffany Jones includes elements from both those genres: Walker’s penchant for punishment narratives surfaces briefly in a bizarre scene where Tiffany is threatened with torture in a restaurant kitchen – leering heavies menace her with hot soup and whip her with strips of spaghetti – while the climax conforms to one of the conventions of the sex comedy as Tiffany’s model girlfriends (describing themselves as the ‘South London Branch of the Model Girls’ Union’) strip naked at a garden party. Observer film critic Philip French thought it was ‘quite one of the most inept, witless, joyless and unerotic movies I’ve ever seen’.

Of course it’s easy to be dismissive about films that have little cultural ambition: these films are bad but there’s been many an American comic-strip movie of equal disrepute. Who today remembers Brooke Shields as Brenda Starr (1987) or Pamela Anderson as Barb Wire (1996)? But it’s a shame that comic-strip characters who represent something interesting about wider social and cultural discourses of femininity should have received such poor treatment in the movies. I’ve long believed that newspaper comic strips offer revealing insights into social mores and values, whereas the films based on them tend towards parody or camp.

It’s easy enough to make a bad movie on a low budget. To make a bad movie on a big budget, however, surely requires a special kind of skill. Witness for the prosecution: Modesty Blaise (1966). This is yet another film based on a female-centred British newspaper comic strip, which is evidently a subject for further research. Modesty Blaise was one of the so-called American ‘runaways’ produced in Britain during the ‘Hollywood, UK’ investment boom of the 1960s: British-made films backed by American studios, in this case Twentieth Century-Fox, which lavished £1.2 million on this dog’s breakfast of a movie. To put that in context, Modesty Blaise had over three times the budget of Dr No, the first James Bond picture, and was nearly twice the cost of Zulu. Modesty Blaise could – and should – have been a hit. Peter O’Donnell’s sassy adventure heroine, drawn initially by Jim O’Donnell for the Evening Standard from 1963, had all the hallmarks of a first-rate thriller in the style of James Bond. The strip itself was fast-moving, globe-trotting, took itself seriously enough not to be parody but was sufficiently aware of its genre conventions to remain on just the right side of camp. So how did it go so wrong?

What they should have done was commission a script from Brian Clemens, writer of some of the best episodes of the stylish British secret agent series The Avengers, bring in one of the Avengers directors such as James Hill or Robert Fuest to direct, and cast either of the Avengers heroines Honor Blackman or Diana Rigg as Modesty. Instead what they did was turn to auteur director Joseph Losey – director of such brilliant dissections of the British class system as The Servant, Accident and The Go-Between but hardly renowned as a film-maker possessed of a ‘light’ touch – and a miscast Italian art house darling Monica Vitti. Losey had no feel for the source material: indeed it’s not even clear whether he ever looked at the strip. The studio also rejected Peter O’Donnell’s script (which he subsequently used as the basis for the first Modesty Blaise novel, which is far superior to the film) in favour of one by Evan Jones that treated the material as camp in the manner of the contemporaneous Batman television series. There is a germ of an idea in Modesty Blaise, a sort of meta-fictional apparatus in which the ‘real’ Modesty performs as the Modesty of the comic strips. But the idea is poorly developed, Vitti fails to convince as an action heroine, and Dirk Bogarde’s camp super villain Gabriel is frankly an embarrassment. Only Terence Stamp as Modesty’s loyal sidekick Willie Garvin emerges with any credibility. As a result Modesty Blaise is the great lost opportunity of British comic strip movies.

Even so it had a surprisingly positive critical reception. The Monthly Film Bulletin felt that it perfectly captured the zeitgeist of the mid-1960s: ‘If a social historian were faced with the task of citing the film most representative of the spirit of the age, Modesty Blaise would be a strong contender. The film is a paean to the mid-sixties, the age of the ephemeral, the use-it-and-throw-it-away phenomenon, the era of the colour supplement, of paper plates and plastic toys and colourful gimmickry in the visual arts.’ The more serious and middle-brow critics seem to have welcomed it as a parody or deconstruction of the gimmicky secret agent movies exemplified by the Bond pictures. The broad approval at the time (it’s pretty much rubbished today) is revealing about a too-dogmatic adherence to the auteur theory: Losey was a critics’ director, and there was a sense in which he could not (at the time) be deemed to have made a bad film. But Peter O’Donnell was keen to distance himself from the film of which he later said: ‘It makes my nose bleed just to think of it.’

Modesty Blaise

James Chapman is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Leicester and author of British Comics: A Cultural History (Reaktion, 2011) as well as several books on British cinema, including Licence To Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films (I. B. Tauris, 2nd edn 2007) and Hitchcock and the Spy Film: Authorship, Genre, National Cinema (I. B. Tauris, 2018). He is currently writing Comics at the Movies, a history of comic book film adaptations from the Flash Gordon serials of the 1930s to the contemporary Marvel and DC superhero cycles.

British Comics Go to the Movies (Part 1 of 3), James Chapman

Before he became a film-maker, Lindsay Anderson wrote: ‘As, geographically, Britain is poised between continents, not quite Europe, and very far from America, so from certain points of view, the British cinema seems to hover between the opposite poles of Frances and Hollywood. Our directors and producers never or rarely have the courage to tackle, in an adult manner, the completely adult subject; yet they lack also the flair for popular showmanship that is characteristic of the American cinema.’

The same has often been held to be true of British comics, which are deemed to possess neither the cultural kudos of the French bande dessinée nor the wide appeal and popular mythology of American comics, especially the superhero tradition.

In my book British Comics: A Cultural History, I argued that British comics were worth taking seriously in their own right and should certainly not be written off as pale imitations of their American or Continental counterparts. Britain can claim talent to match the world’s best. I would maintain that Frank Hampson deserves a place in any pantheon of great comic-strip artists, and there is probably no more acclaimed comic writer in the world than Northampton’s foremost citizen Alan Moore. For British comic enthusiasts, it is a matter of pride that Dandy and Beano came before Detective Comics and Action Comics. And Britain made its own distinctive contribution to genre comics through such titles as Commando, Warlord, Battle, Roy of the Rovers and, of course, 2000AD

However, one area where we Brits have lagged behind our French and American friends is that so few British comics have made the transition to film – and even fewer have done so successfully. Indeed I am hard pressed to name a single film adapted from a British comic strip or comic book that is any good, though there are some that are very bad.

Why is this?

One reason might be that the adventure strip – the source of many of the comic book movie blockbusters since Superman (1978) – emerged later in Britain than it did in the United States. Until the Second World War most British comic strips were ‘funnies’: there were no real equivalents of Flash Gordon or Dick Tracy – both of whom made their celluloid debuts in Hollywood movie serials in the 1930s – let alone British counterparts of Superman or Batman. Britain’s own space hero, ‘Dan Dare – Pilot of the Future’, who made his debut in the Eagle in 1950, has never made it to the big screen, though there were abortive attempts to do so by the aforementioned Lindsay Anderson in the late 1950s and by entrepreneur Paul De Savery in the mid-1970s, who wanted to cast James Bond star Roger Moore. A deservedly forgotten CGI’d television series is the only screen Dan Dare.

Another reason might be that British cinema has historically had a smaller domestic market than Hollywood: insufficient to return the expense of a high-concept special effects picture. Alexander Salkind’s production of Superman and Dino de Laurentiis’ Flash Gordon (1980) were both technically British films on account of being shot in British studios and employing British technicians to qualify for the production subsidy offered by the Eady levy, but there was little or nothing culturally British about them. Superman’s Britishness derived not from its source material, its writers (Mario Puzo, David and Leslie Newman), its director (Richard Donner) or its mostly American cast, but from the fact that it was shot at Pinewood and Shepperton studios with a largely British technical crew by the British-registered subsidiary of a Swiss-registered subsidiary of Salkind’s Panama-based finance corporation. When it drew over £1 million of Eady money - a fund raised through a levy on ticket sales that was repaid to producers of ‘British’ films in proportion to their box-office revenues – it prompted the government to rethink the operation of the levy, which had been set up to assist struggling British producers and not to line the pockets of Hollywood mercenaries.

Most British comic-strip movies have tended to be low-budget affairs. The Adventures of Jane (1949), based on the famous strip cartoon heroine of the Daily Mirror and which by my reckoning was the first British comic-into-film adaptation, is case in point. Filmed around the seaside resort of Brighton during the off-season for low-budget specialist Keystone New World Productions, it is a dreary film in every respect: cheap production values, lacklustre scripting, flat direction and wooden performances. It exists now as little more than a historical curiosity, the only starring vehicle for original ‘Jane’ model Chrystabel Leighton-Porter whose acting ability sadly did not match the shapeliness of her legs.

‘Jane’ was very much a product of her time: the height of her popularity coincided with the Second World War when she represented an idealized girlfriend whose goodness and virtue provided reassurance for servicemen separated for the duration (despite her propensity to accidentally shed her clothes, Jane remains chaste and is unswervingly loyal to her boyfriend Georgie Porgy). Producer Harry Robertson maintained the wartime setting, sending Jane (Kristen Hughes) to Africa on a mission for the British government in Jane and the Lost City (1987). This film is surely a contender for the mantle of worst British picture ever made. It’s a sort of sub-Carry On version of Raiders of the Lost Ark, with Jasper Carrott camping it up as a German villain obviously modelled on Ronald Lacey’s sinister Toht who is so inept that he makes Herr Flick of the Gestapo (‘Allo ‘Allo) seem positively menacing in comparison. The production values are non-existent, the acting pitched at the level of a Comic Relief skit (though the film is not very comic and brings precious little relief) and the   crude ’foreign’ stereotypes make the Carry On films seem enlightened in comparison. It was picked up was picked by New World Pictures, a specialist in low-budget genre films that usually handled the films the major distributors did not want to touch, and disappeared without trace at the box office.

James Chapman is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Leicester and author of British Comics: A Cultural History (Reaktion, 2011) as well as several books on British cinema, including Licence To Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films (I. B. Tauris, 2nd edn 2007) and Hitchcock and the Spy Film: Authorship, Genre, National Cinema (I. B. Tauris, 2018). He is currently writing Comics at the Movies, a history of comic book film adaptations from the Flash Gordon serials of the 1930s to the contemporary Marvel and DC superhero cycles.

UK Underground Comix: Ar:Zak, the Birmingham Arts Lab, and Streetcomix #4 (3 of 3) by Maggie Gray

The Arts Lab Press

The Lab’s press itself operated as a kind of print workshop, with a similar experimental, interdisciplinary outlook and close ties to local community activity and activism. At first, Lab event publicity and programmes were produced using table-top silk screen and an A4 offset litho printer loaned from a local cash-and-carry. In 1972 the Lab expanded into the downstairs area at Tower Street, which allowed for a dedicated silk screen space, used by Hudson, Bob Linney and Ken Meharg to produce vivid, innovative posters. A better equipped darkroom was also set up, permitting image scaling, halftone screening, colour separation and production of printing plates, which enabled the press (having acquired its own second-hand A4 offset machine) to print a range of publications in significant runs, good quality and colour, including poetry magazines, music scores and, of course, comics.

But as well as printing their own material, the Arts Lab Press also partly functioned as a print shop for the wider community, used by local activist and cultural groups, students unions and bands to produce newsletters, flyers and posters. It additionally printed alternative local papers like Street Press – part of a movement of, often radical, localised independent media that flourished in the 1970s. As Emerson put it, the Arts Lab Press took a “more sympathetic approach than a normal commercial printer” (personal communication 2018). It was therefore part of a larger nationwide network of co-operative printshops supporting the community arts and alternative press movements which shared the Lab’s commitment to enabling democratic participation in arts, and was listed in directories of community presses. The Lab also ran its own magazine stall selling local and/or alternative publications.

Figure 5. Adverts from Streetcomix #4, Ar:Zak, The Arts Lab Press, p. 33; p. 22; p. 4. © the artists

Ar:Zak publications shared the same distribution channels as the wider alternative press movement, carried by the PDC distribution co-op, as well as Hassle Free Press (later Knockabout) – set up by Tony and Carol Bennett to publish underground comix, but also operating as a distributor of various alternative papers and magazines. Ar:Zak comics therefore sold through the same network of headshops, radical bookshops, record stores and comic shops that supported alternative papers, and equally avoided the de facto censorship powers of commercial wholesalers like WH Smith. This interconnection of comics and the alternative press was evident in the fact that many alternative papers carried comic strips – with Emerson’s work, for example, appearing in Street Press, Grapevine, The Moseley Paper and Muther Grumble, amongst others. It’s also apparent in the adverts in Streetcomix #4 (Fig. 5), which include ads for various alternative publications like The Leveller, Co-Evolution Quarterly, Undercurrents and Fanatic, as well as Alchemy’s Brainstorm Comix and Pyramidesx, and comic book shops like London’s ‘Dark They Were and Golden Eyed’ and Bristol’s ‘Forever People’ along with Birmingham headshops.

Figure 6. Mail order advert for Ar:Zak comics, Streetcomix #4, Ar:Zak, The Arts Lab Press, p. 4. Mr. Hepf’s Comix Briefs, Streetcomix #4, p. 49. © Ar:Zak, The Arts Lab Press

Ar:Zak

Similar ideas of making resources for independent media production democratically accessible, and supporting a wider movement in alternative publishing, framed Ar:Zak’s approach to comics. Emerson, who got a job at the Arts Lab Press in 1974 as a print operator, before taking over design and darkroom duties, had been self-publishing his Large Cow Comix series since 1972, using the print facilities at various ‘day jobs’ to run off small editions. The Arts Lab Press offered the perfect opportunity to print comics on a larger scale and in better quality, and so he teamed up with writer Paul Fisher (Streetcomix’ fictional editor Mr. Hepf), and Martin Reading (who had a background in theatre and came in to run the A4 offset litho), to form Ar:Zak. They were joined by cartoonists Suzy Varty (who co-founded Street Press), Chris Welch (previously involved with COzmic Comics and Nasty Tales) and Steve Berridge (‘a very young and angry punk’ by Emerson’s description), as well as Dave Hatton, who came in as a printer in 1976 to run a newly acquired A3 machine. Crucially, Ar:Zak didn’t just publish its own titles, like Streetcomix (first issued as a free insert in Street Poems magazine), or its members’ comics, like Emerson’s Zomix Comix and The Adventures of Mr Spoonbiscuit, but it also offered its services to others, printing David Noon’s Moon Comix and Mike Matthews’ Napalm Kiss, and thus supporting a wider UK alternative comics scene. Ar:Zak sold many such comics by mail order alongside its own titles, as advertised in Streetcomix #4, which also includes Mr. Hepf’s ‘Comix Briefs’ reviews  of these and other alternative comics in its backend editorial pages (see Fig. 6).

Notably, many of these titles were - like Streetcomix - anthologies, featuring work by a range of creators, with varying levels of experience, in a diversity of styles and genres. As stated, Ar:Zak offered wider participants in the Lab opportunity to get involved with comics. Playwright and journalist David Edgar, for example, (a board member whose shows were performed at the Lab and who acted there himself), collaborated with illustrator Clifford Harper on an anti-fascist strip for Ar:Zak’s most politically acute anthology, Committed Comix, published in 1977 at a time when a broad grassroots anti-fascist movement was confronting the neo-Nazi National Front. Perhaps the most important Ar:Zak comic in terms of British comics history, which similarly engaged with key contemporary political movements, was Heroïne, the first UK (near enough)-all-female anthology, put together by Suzy Varty. Varty was involved in feminist activism and had links to the U.S. women’s comix movement - thus Heroïne brought British cartoonists together with American peers like Trina Robbins, and included work by members of the Lab’s Women’s Art Group with which Varty was involved. Published in 1978, Varty sold the comic at the national Women’s Liberation conference taking place in Birmingham that year.

Figure 7. KAK ’77 insert, Streetcomix #4. © Ar:Zak, The Arts Lab Press

As well as sustaining the alternative comics movement by enabling creators to print their work more affordably than via commercial printers, and in higher print runs and better quality than was possible through self-publishing, Ar:Zak also helped it cohere by organising two national meet-ups. The first of these ‘Konventions of Alternative Komiks’, which included panels, exhibitions, workshops and jams, was held at the Birmingham Arts Lab’s Tower Street site in 1976, with the second at London’s Air Gallery in 1977. As well as printing posters and special souvenir comics KAK Komix and KAK ’77, Ar:Zak reviewed these conventions in Streetcomix. Streetcomix #4 includes a report on the London event in the form of a pull-out printed on blue paper, which the reader is invited to cut up and fold into a smaller, digest-size publication of its own (Fig. 7). It features photographs, the results of several of the comics jams, and summarises the key issues discussed. These included the financial and distribution challenges faced by those working in the scene, but in particular centred on heated debates over sexism and how it could be challenged without leading to censorship. Varty had taken artists whose work Ar:Zak printed, like Mike Matthews, to task for the way they depicted women (Huxley 2001, p. 84), and the Streetcomix write-up insisted that consciousness of misogyny had to be developed in the movement: ‘it is both sexist and defeatist for a man to give up and say “I’m just a boring old sexist fart and I’ll always draw tits and bums”’. In response to later accusations that Ar:Zak itself was sexist, Streetcomix #6 was dedicated to the issue, featuring interviews with Ar:Zak, Robbins and Clay Geerdes on the subject, alongside strips from a range of Ar:Zak stalwarts.

Figure 8. Table of contents, Streetcomix #4, p. 3, © Ar:Zak, The Arts Lab Press

M. Steven Fox of Comixjoint (2013) has argued that Heroïne can be seen as a bridge between the earlier U.S. underground women’s comix movement that kicked off in the early 1970s, and the later wave of alternative comics by women creators. Streetcomix itself arguably acted in a similar way, open to diverse contributions from a broad range of creators, it featured work which drew on an established underground vernacular, but equally pushed in a number of new directions. As its table of contents attests (Fig. 8), Streetcomix #4 includes work from Geoff Rowley and Chris Welch (whose strips had appeared in underground titles like COzmic Comics’ Dope Fiend Funnies), as well a comic by J. C. Moody supposed to have been published by COzmic before they went bust. Alongside this more ‘first wave’ work, are contributions from cartoonists with closer connections to the alternative press, such as Emerson and Steve Bell, as well as artists like Jerzy Szostek and Andy Johnson who cut their teeth in the punkzine scene. Experimental strips from Birmingham creators like Robin Sendak rub shoulders with work from Ray Weiland and George Erling of the U.S. newave minicomics scene – a connection augmented by the fact Ar:Zak titles were included in a list of ‘British new wave minis’ compiled by David Noon for the 1981 Collectors' Guide to Newave Comix.

Streetcomix’ content was thus diverse, but it generally featured, as Ar:Zak themselves put it,  creators ‘working in a less commercial vein that that usually associated with the comics medium’ (Streetcomix #2 1976, p. 3). This included work at the borders of the comics form, echoing the intermedial ethos of the wider Lab – in the case of Streetcomix #4, contributions from Szostek, Bell and Gary Hosty more akin to Hosty’s contribution (more illustrated prose, Johnson’s enigmatic fine-line illustrations, and even a Mr. Hepf editorial narrating a story of the characters Warbler and Yates who would appear in strips by Fisher and Welch in Streetcomix #5 and #6.

Figure 9. Hunt Emerson, ‘Large Cow Comix’, Streetcomix #4, Ar:Zak, The Arts Lab Press, p. 24; p. 31. © Hunt Emerson

The graphic design of Ar:Zak comics adopted the same innovative, experimental approach seen in the strips themselves, speaking to the fact it enabled cartoonists to also be involved as designers and printers. Typography is varied and bold, including playful typefaces made of human figures and prominent striped page numbers. Streetcomix #4 equally showcases an ambitious approach to printing, with Emerson’s ‘Large Cow Comix’ mobilising the rich colour possibilities offered by higher quality print reproduction (and better grade paper) to stunning effect, using colour to create evocative texture that adds to the silent strip’s enigmatic use of panel layout (Fig. 9). Having access to their own printing press and darkroom facilities enabled the Ar:Zak team to experiment with what the technology could do, including the machinery as a core part of the creative process. As Emerson recalls, ‘We were printing from photographic negative on to metal plates, and we used to work on the negatives, scratching out and painting ... We’d be getting effects in the drawings, collaging things with feathers and bits of rubbish’ (Emerson 2013). This is evident in Streetcomix #4, not only in comics like Blake and Sendak ‘s ‘Ice Age’, but in its broader design, with several of the strips overlaid on backgrounds that appear to be made up of some of this experimental photographed material (see Fig. 10). Fisher’s self-referential Mr. Hepf editorial similarly affirms the centrality of ownership of the means of production, and affective engagement with it, to what Ar:Zak was able to do with comics: ‘[Mr. Hepf] pulls a switch and the world is pushed aside by the rampant beat of the multilith. His eyes glaze over, as the pounding fills his veins’.

Figure 10. Pokkettz, Streetcomix #4, Ar:Zak, The Arts Lab Press, pp. 34-35. © Graham Higgins

For more on Ar:Zak and the Arts Lab Press, see Maggie Gray, ‘The Freedom of the Press: Comics, Labor and Value in the Birmingham Arts Lab’, in Thomas Giddens (ed.) Critical Directions in Comics Studies. University Press of Mississippi (forthcoming 2020).

Bibliography

Baetens, J. and Lefèvre, P. (2014) ‘The Work and its Surround’, in Miller, A. and Beaty, B. (eds) The French Comics Theory Reader. Leuven: Leuven University Press, pp. 191–202.

Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (1998) The Birmingham Arts Lab: The Phantom of Liberty. Birmingham: Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.

Emerson, H. (2013) ‘Back to the Lab: Hunt Emerson. Flatpack Festival: Projects.’ FlatPack Festival, March 24. Available at: https://flatpackfestival.org.uk/news/back-to-the-lab-hunt-emerson/

Estren, M. J. (1987) A History of Underground Comics. Berkeley, CA: Ronin Publishing.

Huxley, D. (2001) Nasty Tales, Sex, Drugs, Rock n’ Roll and Violence in the British Underground. Manchester: Critical Vision.

Long, P., Baig-Clifford, Y., and Shannon, R. (2013). ‘What We’re Trying to Do is Make Popular Politics: The Birmingham Film and Video Workshop.’ Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 33 (3), pp. 377-95.

Rosenkranz, P. (2002) The Underground Comix Revolution 1963–1975. Seattle: Fantagraphics.

Sabin, R. (1993) Adult Comics: An Introduction. London and New York: Routledge.

- (1996) Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels. London: Phaidon.

Streetcomix #2 (1976) Birmingham: Ar:Zak, The Arts Lab Press,.

Streetcomix #4 (1977) Birmingham: Ar:Zak, The Arts Lab Press.

Streetcomix #5 (1978) Birmingham: Ar:Zak, The Arts Lab Press.

Steven Fox, M. (2013) ‘Heroïne’, Comixjoint. Available at: https://comixjoint.com/heroine.html

Wakefield, T. (2015) ‘Beau Brum: Remembering the Birmingham Arts Lab’. Sight and Sound, August 7. Available at: http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/features/beau-brum-remembering-birmingham-s-arts-lab  

Maggie Gray lectures in Critical & Historical Studies at Kingston School of Art, Kingston University. Her latest book is Alan Moore, Out from the Underground: Cartooning, Performance and Dissent, Palgrave (2017). She is a member of the Comics & Performance Network and CoRH!, the Comics Research Hub. With Nick White and John Miers she co-runs Kingston School of Art Comic Club.

UK Underground Comix: Ar:Zak, the Birmingham Arts Lab, and Streetcomix #4 (2 of 3) by Maggie Gray

Figure 3. Hunt Emerson. ‘Birmingham Arts Lab 1970s’. Back cover, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, The Birmingham Arts Lab: The Phantom of Liberty (1998). © Hunt Emerson

The Birmingham Arts Lab

It’s useful to take a step back and identify what an arts lab was – an accessible, collectively organised, multidisciplinary, experimental arts space. Originating in London in 1967, they sprang up across the country in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, bringing together film and video, theatre and performance, music, dance and visual arts, as well as compound multimedia forms. The idea was to give artists a freer, more open space to develop and present their work; to facilitate experimentation in and across different forms and media through skills-sharing; to transform the way art was consumed via collaborative and interactive relationships with audiences; and to make the means of creative production more widely accessible and affordable.

The Birmingham Arts Lab was established in 1968 by a group of artists who decamped from the local council-funded Midlands Arts Centre to fundraise for a new, less creatively restrictive environment. In 1969 they acquired use of a building that had previously been a youth centre on Tower Street in Newtown, a working-class area of the city. They transformed the space with materials donated by local groups and appropriated from nearby building sites, creating a cinema with a home-made projection box (which screened a wide range of international arthouse films), a performance area for theatre, music, poetry and alternative comedy (adapted for immersive lightshows using hinged panels), workshop and rehearsal spaces and a coffee bar. Happenings and performances were also staged on the roof (where a show by visiting theatre company Sweetness and Light involving nudity caught the attention of the local papers), as well as in the city’s streets and open spaces. There was an emphasis on play and experimentation across disciplines, for example with a screening of René Clair’s Dadaist film Entr’acte accompanied by live piano, ballet dancers and experimental electronic sounds. Like many labs it also operated as a kind of commune, with members and touring theatre companies sleeping in the storerooms, water tank and even the spaces between the floors. Altogether it was an appealingly chaotic place, as captured by foundational Ar:Zak member Hunt Emerson in an illustration for the 1998 book The Birmingham Arts Lab: The Phantom of Liberty, which collated participants’ recollections (Fig. 3).

The Birmingham Lab was run on a co-operative basis and aimed to create an inclusive artistic space where ordinary people could get involved in creative practice, by making what was usually prohibitively expensive equipment publically accessible. It had strong ties to the local community, organising collaborative events and festivals with local arts organisations, colleges and community groups, running creative play sessions for neighbourhood children and involving local youth in an Arts Lab football team (Wakefield 2015). This was a key part of how the Lab connected to wider social movements, grounded in the conviction that creative autonomy was linked to political empowerment – that the ability to independently participate in cultural production was crucial to the self-determination of different social groups. Like many labs, Birmingham’s had a strong feminist presence, with a Women’s Art Group that organised exhibitions and participated in mail art projects like Portrait of the Artist as A Young Woman (and whose magazine, MAMA: Women Artists Together, Ar:Zak published and core member Suzy Varty illustrated). They also had close connections to local communities of colour, for example affiliated to The West Indian Narrative, a group exploring a distinctively Afro-Caribbean aesthetic.

Figure 4. Photograph by Derek Bishton, title page, Streetcomix #4, Ar:Zak, The Arts Lab Press, p.3. © Derek Bishton

Probably the most important way creative practice was made accessible to local people was via the Lab’s workshops, which included dance, music, sound, poetry, theatre, environmental performance, music and painting. Many of these workshops acted as a stimulus for broader community arts activity. For example, the film co-op based at the Lab initiated the Birmingham Film Workshop, which, by providing equipment, training and resources of production, distribution, exhibition and critical discussion, served to catalyse local filmmaking, notably film that engaged with the experiences of black and South Asian communities, such as the work of Yugesh Walia (see Long, Baig-Clifford and Shannon 2013). It was through involvement with such workshops that several key players in Ar:Zak  first got involved with the Lab – with Emerson joining Jolyon Laycock’s avant-garde sound workshop and Varty attending the dance workshop.

Thus involvement with the workshops opened doors to participation across the various artistic activities undertaken at the Lab and involvement in a range of creative outputs. This collaborative, interdisciplinary approach, and its connection to a broader community arts ethos, is also evident on the title page of Streetcomix #4. Above the colophon and beneath the table of contents is a photo by Derek Bishton (Fig. 4), a photographer and journalist who was the Lab’s publicist and involved in its photography activity. Bishton was highly engaged with community photography in Birmingham, establishing the design group Sidelines in 1977 with Brian Homer and John Reardon. Based in Handsworth, a multicultural area with significant British Asian and Afro-Caribbean populations, they worked with community groups producing reports, booklets and newsletters on issues like housing, unemployment, policing and racism, as well as projects like Handsworth Self Portrait, which enabled local residents to produce their own photographic portraits. They also began producing the magazine Ten.8 at the Lab, which showcased local photography while also discussing critical issues of politics, race and representation, strongly influenced by the work of figures like Stuart Hall at Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.

Streetcomix often featured such other, ‘non-comics’ work coming out of the Lab, including Siobhan Coppinger’s etchings and sculptures, illustrations by poster artist Ernie Hudson, and articles by poet and performer Nick Toczek and comedian John Dowie - evidencing the role played by Arts Lab Press publications in communicating and cohering the Lab’s identity as a multi-/interdisciplinary space. By the same token, Ar:Zak members also participated in collaborative work across different media, with Varty making costumes and props for the performance Dogman written by Paul Fisher (which then appeared in comic form illustrated by Emerson).  As Emerson later put it, ‘the Lab was always like that. People would suggest something and you would get involved and find yourself knocking together a film set out of rubbish’ (2013).

Maggie Gray lectures in Critical & Historical Studies at Kingston School of Art, Kingston University. Her latest book is Alan Moore, Out from the Underground: Cartooning, Performance and Dissent, Palgrave (2017). She is a member of the Comics & Performance Network and CoRH!, the Comics Research Hub. With Nick White and John Miers she co-runs Kingston School of Art Comic Club.

UK Underground Comix: Ar:Zak, the Birmingham Arts Lab, and Streetcomix #4 (1 of 3) by Maggie Gray

Figure 1. Streetcomix #4 November 1977, Ar:Zak, The Arts Lab Press. Cover art © Pete Wingham. Streetcomix #5 March 1978, Ar:Zak, The Arts Lab Press. Cover art © Hunt Emerson

A chance encounter with the UK underground

I first came across Streetcomix in 2006 at the London Comic Mart, which used to take place in the Royal National Hotel, just around the corner from University College London where I was doing my PhD. Although London Comic Mart mostly focuses on U.S. comics and collectables, you can also pick up the odd British title, and I was hunting for copies of Warrior, a later UK anthology of the early-to-mid-1980s in which several well-known strips written by Alan Moore (‘V for Vendetta’, ‘Marvelman’ and ‘The Bojeffries Saga’) were first serialised. Rifling through the boxes I was taken aback by the intense saturated colour cover of Streetcomix #4, promptly followed by Hunt Emerson’s striking issue #5 artwork, with its luminescent bugs threatening to scramble off the page onto my hands (Fig. 1). These comics had recognisable underground markers (‘-ix’ not ‘-ics’, poking fun at cops), and a dose of late 1970s punk attitude (brash, graffiti-like typography and lurid colour), but they were also quite lush material objects, with full back cover illustrations, high production values and decent quality paper stock.

My focus at the time had been on Warrior as a ‘ground-level’ indie comic, attempting to realise the artistic freedom and creator’s rights of the underground while competing via newsagent distribution with mainstream titles like 2000AD. But Streetcomix, the Ar:Zak imprint that produced it, and the Birmingham Arts Lab where Ar:Zak was based, grew increasingly relevant to my research as I became more and more interested in Moore’s earliest work for underground anthologies, alternative papers and the music press. This space of comics production carved out in Birmingham seemed to be a fulcrum of underground and alternative comics in Britain in the 1970s, bridging those scenes in ways that blurred the borders between them, and sitting at the centre at some of their core debates and developments (notably confrontations over sexism and the coalescence of a UK women’s comics movement). And Ar:Zak equally appeared to be deeply entwined in the same broader oppositional cultural formations, particularly the arts lab and alternative press movements, that had such a crucial impact on Moore and his creative practice.

Underground and Alternative in UK comics scholarship

Not much has been written about Ar:Zak, partly due to the fact that not much has been written about UK underground and alternative comics in general. In the historical narrative that does exist, most notably David Huxley’s Nasty Tales: Sex, Drugs, Rock’n’Roll and Violence in the British Underground - still the only academic book dedicated specifically to the subject - British titles are divided into two waves: the first underground, the second alternative. The first wave, catalysed by Robert Crumb’s Zap, spanned the late ‘60s to the mid ‘70s and was led by publications like Cyclops, Nasty Tales and COzmic Comics, spun out of hippie underground papers IT and Oz. This wave coincides most clearly with the chronology of U.S. comix as charted by Patrick Rosenkranz (2002) and Mark Estren (1987), and was impacted by similar issues of censorship (with police raids on publishers and high profile obscenity cases like the Nasty Tales trial), escalating costs in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis, and a wider waning of the counterculture. The second wave saw the sex, drugs and anti-authoritarian politics give way in late ‘70s and early ‘80s titles like Near Myths, Graphixus and Pssst! to greater concern with production quality, stylistic experimentation, narrative complexity and/or fantasy, horror and science-fiction themes, more in the vein of artistically ambitious European comics like Métal Hurlant or À Suivre. Distribution through hippie headshop networks was superseded by the emergence of specialist comic book shops, and publishers were more professionalised and market-minded.

However, as Huxley acknowledges, the contours of these waves are somewhat hazy, and it is difficult to situate Ar:Zak squarely in one or the other.  Huxley positions Brainstorm Comix, produced 1975-77 by headshop owner Lee Harris’ Alchemy Publications and prominently featuring Bryan Talbot’s work, as marking ‘the death throes of the underground movement’ in the UK (2001, p. 47). Yet others, like Roger Sabin (1993; 1996), situate it, alongside Streetcomix, as part of a partial, more regionally-dispersed revival of the UK underground in the mid-to-late-1970s, which maintained the counterculture’s ethos and organisational forms while registering the impact of punk.

Part of the challenge comes from Ar:Zak’s relative longevity, running from 1974/5 (when COzmic Comics was still going) into the early ‘80s (when Warrior was being hatched). But an inescapable factor is its foundation in the Birmingham Arts Lab, established as part of the counterculture’s autonomous infrastructure, which fought to maintain an experimental, collective and participatory approach to cultural production throughout its own comparatively extended lifespan from 1968 to 1982. As the UK’s longest running lab it engaged with the social and cultural movements emerging out of the hippie underground, above all the alternative press and community arts movements, which extended and developed many of its core principles in more decentred, networked, regional and local contexts.

The way Ar:Zak bridged the first wave of underground comix and later, more localised DIY comics publishing; its significance in sustaining an emerging alternative comics movement; and how that was contingent on its roots in the Arts Lab as a countercultural space; can all be read in those issues of Streetcomix I stumbled across at the London mart. And because Ar:Zak’s importance to British comics lies less in any one strip or artist featured than its overall role as publisher, printer, and coordinator, its significance can be most clearly discerned by looking at what Jan Baetens and Pascal Lefèvre (2014) call their ‘perigraphy’ - front and back matter, colophons, editorials, advertising, etc. Therefore this article will explore the perigraphic features of Streetcomix #4.

Figure 2. Colophon Streetcomix #4, p.3. © Ar:Zak, The Arts Lab Press

The colophon on the title page of Streetcomix #4 (Fig 2.) notes it was ‘Published, Designed and Printed by AR:ZAK, The Arts Lab Press’. This immediately tells us something crucial about Ar:Zak – they printed their comics themselves. And this was possible because the Birmingham Arts Lab ran its own press.  It additionally tells us that they addressed readers as potential contributors and ascribed copyright to creators, suggesting a less exploitative, more participatory and inclusive approach than the mainstream comics industry.

Maggie Gray lectures in Critical & Historical Studies at Kingston School of Art, Kingston University. Her latest book is Alan Moore, Out from the Underground: Cartooning, Performance and Dissent, Palgrave (2017). She is a member of the Comics & Performance Network and CoRH!, the Comics Research Hub. With Nick White and John Miers she co-runs Kingston School of Art Comic Club.

Adventures Under Ground: UK Underground Comix (1969 – 1982). A Memoir (2 of 2) by Dave Huxley

Regional Centres

The rise of several Free Press centres – community presses dedicated to cheap printing for local organisations - allowed for the creation of several regional centres of underground or alternative comic publication.

Birmingham: The most significant of these regional centres was Ar:zak in Birmingham. It’s most significant artist was Hunt Emerson, who became a major British underground figure, and also worked for mainstream publications like the BBC’s Radio Times magazine and drew Firkin the Cat for Fiesta magazine. His style was dynamic and easily accessible, and showed the clear influence of American cartoonists. Ar:Zak also featured the work of David Noon, who gave a bold design feel to the comics, which were already probably most graphically sophisticated of UK underground comics at the time.

Figure 11 . David Noon, Street Comix 2, 1976

Newcastle upon Tyne: The Junior Print Outfit was the brainchild of comic artist Angus McKie. As well as science fiction cover illustrations and commercial work for publications as diverse as House of Hammer, Metal Hurlant/Heavy Metal, McKie had been published in Cozmic Comics’ Half Assed Funnies. After an accidental meeting at the Tyneside Free Press in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1977 McKie joined forces with Mike Feeney, myself and Alan Craddock to form the Junior Print Outfit, and produced two issues of Either Or Comics. Difficulties with printing and full time jobs restricted output, leading to an A5 four page Neither Nor Comics.

Figure 12 . Neither Nor Comic, 1977

The final publication of the group was Comic Tales, a full colour hardback comic produced in conjunction with Titan books.

Figure 13 . Advertising poster for Comic Tales, 1982

Edinburgh: In 1978 Rob King’s Near Myths featured a range of artists, and most notably Bryan Talbot’s Luther Arkwright. The comic had full colour covers and was well produced, but it only lasted five issues. It also included early work by Grant Morrison.

By 1976 there were enough of these groups, and of course London based creators, to organise KAK – the Konvention of Alternative Komics (although notice already the dropping of underground for the more user-friendly alternative). This was followed by KAK 77, with both events organised by Chris Welch and Hunt Emerson. Interest in the field also led Mal Burns to produce Comix Index in 1977, which attempted to list all artists and writers who had appeared in British underground comics up to that point.

Figure 14 . Title page of Comix Index. Caricature of Mal Burns by John Higgins

This publication was invaluable to me when I later undertook a PhD on the subject, completed in 1990, which, with additions and changes, turned into the book Nasty Tales.

Decline

The general increase in interest in comics led the comics historian Denis Gifford to produce Ally Sloper, named after the important nineteenth century English comics character. However the mix of the nostalgic (reprints of work by earlier artists like Terry Wakefield) new work by major contemporary professionals (Frank Hampson and Frank Bellamy) and ‘underground’ artists (Hunt Emerson, Kevin O’Neill) seemed to be to just too diffuse to find an audience, and it only lasted four issues.

Figure 15 . Ally Sloper letterhead, latter to the author, 1976

As Cozmic Comics and Nasty Tales folded by 1975, the final phase of what might be called underground comics in the UK centred again on London, and the more professionally produced Graphixus and Pssst, despite their achievements, became the death throes of the form (although not in mainland Europe, but that is a whole different story). Graphixus was an ambitious title featuring, amongst many others, Brian Bolland, with his work sometimes being controversial, particularly his ‘Little Nympho in Slumberland’ strip. Yet again the comic failed to find a big enough audience, and editor Mal Burns explained its demise;

‘Graphixus, surprisingly enough, was doing better and better. It was actually let down by what was, in retrospect, was an extremely self-indulgent and obscure title. It was actually going to change to High Vision with number seven. The problem was my American distributor going bankrupt on me. I never got paid.’ (interview with the author)

Pssst was the most ambitious of all the later British ‘alternative’ comics. Bankrolled by Frenchman Serge Boissevain, it was also edited by Mal Burns, (and Paul Gravett amongst others). It featured some full colour strips and was vaguely based on similar French adult comic models. Despite a lavish outlay the comic struggled for good distribution and a solid market. It lasted ten issues and finished in 1982, but not before it had published work by veterans like Bryan Talbot, Mike Mathews, all of the Junior Print Outfit and newcomers like Glenn Dakin.3

Figure 16. David Huxley, ‘Mike Brutal’, Pssst, 10, 1982

Talbot comments, ‘Pssst was ahead of its time, but it was designed by committee and reputedly lost one hundred thousand pounds. There were five good issues out of ten.’ (interview with the author) The one exception to this decline was Hassle Free Press (an ironic title if ever there was one) which morphed into Knockabout Comics, although they were partially dependant on American material, in particular Gilbert Shelton and Crumb. Tony Bennett at Knockabout survived legal problems to import Crumb’s material, and Knockabout Comics became the home of Hunt Emerson, and published many other underground artists, including Bryan Talbot, Kevin O’Neill and Mike Mathews. History repeated itself in that Knockabout’s censorship problems and customs seizures caused great problems but lead to an outstanding comic in response – The Knockabout Trial Special, in 1984.

Figure 17 . Hunt Emerson, The Knockabout Trial Special, 1984

Legacy

One obvious legacy of British undergrounds was the nurturing of homegrown talent that went on to make significant contributions to comics as a whole (and particularly the US mainstream). Writers Alan Moore and Grant Morrison and artists Brian Bolland, Dave Gibbons and Kevin O’Neill all honed their skills on British undergrounds.

British undergrounds also helped to spread the idea, begun in America, that comics could address a whole range of issues in a whole range of styles. The listing of British underground comics done for my PhD and appearing in Nasty Tales ended in 1982 partially because new ways of producing comics (such as easily accessible and cheap photocopying) made any comprehensive listing impossible. The list, looking back, is woefully inadequate even for the earlier periods. On the other hand these methods, and all the technological advances that followed, mean that small run comics of all kinds are very easy to produce. The underground comics mentioned here provided the inspiration for many later artists. Thus a significant legacy of the underground is that it is possible in many cities across the world to find comics shops that stock a small number of eccentric, unpredictable small publications in amongst the mighty output of DC and Marvel.

Oh yes, I forgot to try and define underground comics, comix, alternative and ground level comics…

Notes

1. Leo Baxendale was the creator of many longstanding British comic characters (mainly for Dundee based D C Thomson) including the Bash Street Kids, Minnie the Minx and Little Plum.

2.  As well as the article in Art and Artists, Patricia Dreyfus discussed the impact of the underground on graphic designers in 'The Critique of Pure Funk' in Print, November/December, 1971, p.13.

3. As I drew and wrote comics, does this make me an Aca-Praca-Fan?

Bibliography

Bizot, J. F. 2006. Two Hundred trips from the counterculture Graphics and Stories from the Underground Press Syndicate, Thames and Hudson.

Huxley, D. 2001. Nasty Tales: Sex, Drugs, Rock’n’Roll and Violence in the British Underground. Critical Vision.

Huxley, D. (forthcoming) Robert Crumb and the Art of Comics in Worden, D. (ed) The Comics of R. Crumb. University Press of Mississippi.

Huxley, D. 1995: ‘Ceasefire: Women against the War’ in J Walsh (ed) ’The Gulf War Did Not Happen’ Politics, Culture and Contemporary Warfare, Arena.

Sabin, R. 1993. Adult Comics: An introduction, Routledge.

Sabin, R. 2001. Comics, Comix & Graphic Novels: A History of Comic Art, Phaidon. 7

Skinn, D. 2004. Comix: The Underground Revolution. Collins and Brown.

Regional Centres

The rise of several Free Press centres – community presses dedicated to cheap printing for local organisations - allowed for the creation of several regional centres of underground or alternative comic publication.

Birmingham: The most significant of these regional centres was Ar:zak in Birmingham. It’s most significant artist was Hunt Emerson, who became a major British underground figure, and also worked for mainstream publications like the BBC’s Radio Times magazine and drew Firkin the Cat for Fiesta magazine. His style was dynamic and easily accessible, and showed the clear influence of American cartoonists. Ar:Zak also featured the work of David Noon, who gave a bold design feel to the comics, which were already probably most graphically sophisticated of UK underground comics at the time.

Figure 11 . David Noon, Street Comix 2, 1976

Newcastle upon Tyne: The Junior Print Outfit was the brainchild of comic artist Angus McKie. As well as science fiction cover illustrations and commercial work for publications as diverse as House of Hammer, Metal Hurlant/Heavy Metal, McKie had been published in Cozmic Comics’ Half Assed Funnies. After an accidental meeting at the Tyneside Free Press in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1977 McKie joined forces with Mike Feeney, myself and Alan Craddock to form the Junior Print Outfit, and produced two issues of Either Or Comics. Difficulties with printing and full time jobs restricted output, leading to an A5 four page Neither Nor Comics.

Figure 12 . Neither Nor Comic, 1977

 The final publication of the group was Comic Tales, a full colour hardback comic produced in conjunction with Titan books.

Figure 13 . Advertising poster for Comic Tales, 1982

Edinburgh: In 1978 Rob King’s Near Myths featured a range of artists, and most notably Bryan Talbot’s Luther Arkwright. The comic had full colour covers and was well produced, but it only lasted five issues. It also included early work by Grant Morrison.

By 1976 there were enough of these groups, and of course London based creators, to organise KAK – the Konvention of Alternative Komics (although notice already the dropping of underground for the more user-friendly alternative). This was followed by KAK 77, with both events organised by Chris Welch and Hunt Emerson. Interest in the field also led Mal Burns to produce Comix Index in 1977, which attempted to list all artists and writers who had appeared in British underground comics up to that point.

Figure 14 . Title page of Comix Index. Caricature of Mal Burns by John Higgins

This publication was invaluable to me when I later undertook a PhD on the subject, completed in 1990, which, with additions and changes, turned into the book Nasty Tales.

Decline

The general increase in interest in comics led the comics historian Denis Gifford to produce Ally Sloper, named after the important nineteenth century English comics character. However the mix of the nostalgic (reprints of work by earlier artists like Terry Wakefield) new work by major contemporary professionals (Frank Hampson and Frank Bellamy) and ‘underground’ artists (Hunt Emerson, Kevin O’Neill) seemed to be to just too diffuse to find an audience, and it only lasted four issues.

Figure 15 . Ally Sloper letterhead, latter to the author, 1976

As Cozmic Comics and Nasty Tales folded by 1975, the final phase of what might be called underground comics in the UK centred again on London, and the more professionally produced Graphixus and Pssst, despite their achievements, became the death throes of the form (although not in mainland Europe, but that is a whole different story). Graphixus was an ambitious title featuring, amongst many others, Brian Bolland, with his work sometimes being controversial, particularly his ‘Little Nympho in Slumberland’ strip. Yet again the comic failed to find a big enough audience, and editor Mal Burns explained its demise;

‘Graphixus, surprisingly enough, was doing better and better. It was actually let down by what was, in retrospect, was an extremely self-indulgent and obscure title. It was actually going to change to High Vision with number seven. The problem was my American distributor going bankrupt on me. I never got paid.’ (interview with the author)

Pssst was the most ambitious of all the later British ‘alternative’ comics. Bankrolled by Frenchman Serge Boissevain, it was also edited by Mal Burns, (and Paul Gravett amongst others). It featured some full colour strips and was vaguely based on similar French adult comic models. Despite a lavish outlay the comic struggled for good distribution and a solid market. It lasted ten issues and finished in 1982, but not before it had published work by veterans like Bryan Talbot, Mike Mathews, all of the Junior Print Outfit and newcomers like Glenn Dakin.3

Figure 16. David Huxley, ‘Mike Brutal’, Pssst, 10, 1982

Talbot comments, ‘Pssst was ahead of its time, but it was designed by committee and reputedly lost one hundred thousand pounds. There were five good issues out of ten.’ (interview with the author) The one exception to this decline was Hassle Free Press (an ironic title if ever there was one) which morphed into Knockabout Comics, although they were partially dependant on American material, in particular Gilbert Shelton and Crumb. Tony Bennett at Knockabout survived legal problems to import Crumb’s material, and Knockabout Comics became the home of Hunt Emerson, and published many other underground artists, including Bryan Talbot, Kevin O’Neill and Mike Mathews. History repeated itself in that Knockabout’s censorship problems and customs seizures caused great problems but lead to an outstanding comic in response – The Knockabout Trial Special, in 1984.

Figure 17 . Hunt Emerson, The Knockabout Trial Special, 1984

Legacy

One obvious legacy of British undergrounds was the nurturing of homegrown talent that went on to make significant contributions to comics as a whole (and particularly the US mainstream). Writers Alan Moore and Grant Morrison and artists Brian Bolland, Dave Gibbons and Kevin O’Neill all honed their skills on British undergrounds.

British undergrounds also helped to spread the idea, begun in America, that comics could address a whole range of issues in a whole range of styles. The listing of British underground comics done for my PhD and appearing in Nasty Tales ended in 1982 partially because new ways of producing comics (such as easily accessible and cheap photocopying) made any comprehensive listing impossible. The list, looking back, is woefully inadequate even for the earlier periods. On the other hand these methods, and all the technological advances that followed, mean that small run comics of all kinds are very easy to produce. The underground comics mentioned here provided the inspiration for many later artists. Thus a significant legacy of the underground is that it is possible in many cities across the world to find comics shops that stock a small number of eccentric, unpredictable small publications in amongst the mighty output of DC and Marvel.

Oh yes, I forgot to try and define underground comics, comix, alternative and ground level comics…

Notes

1.       Leo Baxendale was the creator of many longstanding British comic characters (mainly for Dundee based D C Thomson) including the Bash Street Kids, Minnie the Minx and Little Plum.

2.        As well as the article in Art and Artists, Patricia Dreyfus discussed the impact of the underground on graphic designers in 'The Critique of Pure Funk' in Print, November/December, 1971, p.13.

3.        As I drew and wrote comics, does this make me an Aca-Praca-Fan?

Bibliography

Bizot, J. F. 2006. Two Hundred trips from the counterculture Graphics and Stories from the Underground Press Syndicate, Thames and Hudson.

Huxley, D. 2001. Nasty Tales: Sex, Drugs, Rock’n’Roll and Violence in the British Underground. Critical Vision.

Huxley, D. (forthcoming) Robert Crumb and the Art of Comics in Worden, D. (ed) The Comics of R. Crumb. University Press of Mississippi.

Huxley, D. 1995: ‘Ceasefire: Women against the War’ in J Walsh (ed) ’The Gulf War Did Not Happen’ Politics, Culture and Contemporary Warfare, Arena.

Sabin, R. 1993. Adult Comics: An introduction, Routledge.

Sabin, R. 2001. Comics, Comix & Graphic Novels: A History of Comic Art, Phaidon.

Skinn, D. 2004. Comix: The Underground Revolution. Collins and Brown.

David Huxley is the editor of The Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics (Routledge). He was a senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University until 2017. He has written widely on comics, including works on various artists, underground and horror comics, superheroes and also popular film. He has also drawn and written for a range of British comics, including Ally Sloper, Either or Comics, Pssst, Oink and Killer Comics. His most recent publication is Lone Heroes and the Myth of the American West in Comic Books 1945-1962 (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018).

Adventures Under Ground-UK Underground Comix (1969 – 1982): A Memoir (1 of 2) by Dave Huxley

Definitions?

If there is some doubt about the definition of ‘underground comics’ then perhaps the material dealt with here will be constitute a working definition. For the moment I will lean on the ‘I know one when I see one’ defence. As for ‘alternative comics’, ‘comix’, ‘ground level comics’ …

USA, UPS, Oz and International Times

Whatever uncertainties there are around the field, there can be little doubt that British underground comics owed a massive debt to their American counterparts. And unlike the debate around UK/US punk, there is no doubt about who was first – the movement clearly originated in the United States. This is not to say that there was also some stylistic influence from UK artists. British underground artist Hunt Emerson, although hugely influenced by Robert Crumb and Mad magazine, comments, ‘Leo Baxendale is of prime importance to all English cartoonists. Whether they admit it or not. He’s formed part of our general world view.’1 (interview with the author)

I can remember first seeing the work of Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton in Oz magazine and International Times in the early 1970s. Both benefitted from the Underground Press Syndicate agreement that allowed free reprinting from the various underground publishers around the world. Thus articles and illustrations could be freely reprinted by any members of the international UPS movement.

International Times also published homegrown artists such as Edward Barker. The co-founder of the magazine, Barry Miles, explains that, ‘At IT we originated our own cartoon strips, not wanting to the paper to become too American, but after about three years the work of Crumb, Shelton, Spain, Clay Wilson and the other American underground cartoonists had become so good that we started to reprint it.’ (quoted in Bizot)

As I don’t believe in throwing interesting print material away I still have these publications. The Crumb comic ‘My first LSD trip’ was reprinted on the cover of IT (14 June, 1973) with the addition of two colour overlays.

Figure 1 . Robert Crumb, ‘My first LSD trip’ IT 14 June, 1973

Gilbert Shelton was the other artist who was most widely reproduced in the British underground magazines. His Furry Freak Brothers were a natural fit with the pro-marijuana stance of most of the underground. In Oz number 25 (December, 1969) reprints a full page strip where Freewheelin’ Franklin, hassled by two rednecks, destroys them with aid of amyl nitrate.

Crumb’s work was also used in spot illustrations, sometimes with only a peripheral connection to the article they adorned. Reading these magazines at the time, it was Crumb who was particularly striking. However salacious or shocking the content, his method of rendering his drawings in a cute rounded style reminiscent of the Fleisher brothers crossed with Disney (and turned up to eleven) helped to create a visual style for the underground. This phenomenon was noticed in British art and design magazines, such as the respectable publication Art and Artists.2

Figure 2 . S Clay Wilson, cover of Art and Artists (as Art ‘N’ Artists), December 1969

Given the current reputation of some of the work in underground comics – and particularly Crumb – it has to be said that, nevertheless, as art students at the time, many of us saw the use of comics to address issues of drugs and sex etc as a liberating force. Crumb directly influenced many British artists, including Hunt Emerson, Angus McKie and Steve Bell. Bell, who later became a major political cartoonist working for the Guardian, comments,

‘The only one I copied was Crumb…it was a complete eye opener just to think that you could deal with that very real topic in a strip cartoon. Sort of warped, but I love his pen work, so that was the one who influenced me directly. I certainly copied his style.’ (interview with the author)

In 1970 I was a fine art student at Birmingham College of Art, becoming re-interested in comics of all kinds. Post-Roy Lichtenstein it was the case that comics were also semi-respectable in some art schools, although at Birmingham, as I used comic book imagery in my paintings, I was told in no uncertain terms that ‘representational painting is dead’. The 1960s had seen a gradual change from the drab conservatism of the 1950s and the early 1970s seemed, at the time, to be taking new freedoms even further, and this was seen by many students as ‘a good thing’. Greg Irons, Jaxon, Corben and others produced strange horror titles that were something from Fredric Wertham’s worst nightmares. All good dirty fun, it seemed. Looking back some of the material that was produced on both sides of the Atlantic looks like naïve juvenilia, albeit not without interest. The best has stood the test of time, and is still in print.

Availability

For those so used to the internet it can be difficult to comprehend how difficult it was to obtain somewhat obscure publications (or even some mainstream American comics in the UK) at this time. Underground publications were sold in the street in some major cities in the UK, and at various rock concerts. There was the Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed shop in London, which opened in 1969, but that covered a range of comic and science fiction material and did not specialise in undergrounds.

Figure 3. Steve Bell, Advert for Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed in KAK booklet, 1977

In Birmingham there was a similar shop, Nostalgia and Comics, but this had the same kind of stock, and underground material was not their speciality. Thus although it was possible to obtain whatever undergrounds they stocked (and these tended to be major titles like Zap) it was necessary to use mail order to try and obtain other comics. It should be pointed out that for many there was a general interest in comics that extended to anything that seemed adult or challenging. Even underground papers such as IT covered interesting mainstream publications, particularly from Marvel. Fanzine publications such as Fantasy (Comics) Unlimited, from Alan Austin, contained detailed history of Marvel and DC characters, and a large mail order section. As a collector it’s best not to look at how cheap second-hand comics could be then. But these titles also featured artwork by artists who would be central to both underground and mainstream comics. Covers were drawn by artists as varied as Kevin O’Neill and Antonio Ghura.

Figure 4 . Fantasy Unlimited covers. Kevin O’Neill , October 1973, Antonio Ghura, June 1975

Some listings also began to carry more undergrounds, such as Eddie Walsh’s Fandom, which also had short columns about comics, television and film (e.g.. in issue 13 we have ‘The next Star Wars saga may be titled Revenge of a Jedi’). Mail order was also the only way to obtain rarer American undergrounds, and it was possible to get these direct from the US, from dealers such as Bud Plant.

Figure 5 . Bud Plant leaflet, 1977

Through this period comic conventions and comic marts began to appear with increasing regularity. Comicon in London was the largest annual event, with many smaller marts around the country.

Figure 6 . Comicon leaflet, 1972

Figure 7 . Comic Mart advert from Fandom 13, 1980

These all remained an important source of all kinds of comics, even as an academic. By the 1980s it was possible to find two academics (rather more mature bearded gentlemen, Martin Barker and myself) mixing with fanboys and fangirls as the burgeoning academic interest grew in the UK.

Some readers will undoubtedly be asking where are the female or ethnic minority creators in this story? Unlike the US, where there were key contributions by creators like Trina Robbins, Melinda Gebbie and many others, in the UK, at this period, there was one major female artist, Suzy Varty, working out of Ar-Zak in Birmingham. In 1977 Heroine Comics was produced by Varty and other female artists, including Trina Robbins. The comic featured a refreshing range of different styles, including Julia Wakefield’s ‘Bull Ring’, a comedic meditation on consumerism and sexuality.

Figure 8 . Julia Wakefield’s ‘Bull Ring’ in Heroine, 1977

Heroine was followed by Sourcream in 1979 and Sourcream 2 in 1981, the latter featuring thirteen female cartoonists, including Fanny Tribble. Some of the strips had appeared in the feminist magazine Spare Rib, and it was published by Sheba Feminist Publishers in London.

Figure 9 . Sourcream 2, 1981

It was not until the later 1980s, outside the period under consideration here, that some female creators, such as Myra Hancock came to the fore, and Carol Bennett formed Fanny, a group of female comic artists in 1991. This would eventually lead to greater engagement with comics, with organisations like Nicola Streeten’s Laydeez do Comics, formed in 2009.

Cozmic Comics and Nasty Tales

Cozmic Comics and Nasty Tales grew out of Oz and International Times respectively, and were the two major and most easily accessible British underground comics, running from 1971 to 1975. Much of their history has been covered elsewhere, so I will just mention some of the highlights, and lowlights, of these publications. Cozmic Comics branched out into various one-off titles such as Half-Assed Funnies and Tales from the Void. As well as reprinting American artists like Crumb these comics gave the opportunity for home-grown artists such as Edward Barker, Dave Gibbons and William Rankin to see their work in print. Nasty Tales was, in many ways, very similar in content. However it became most famous for an obscenity trial based around Crumb reprints in issue 1 (1971). Although overshadowed by the earlier and more famous Oz obscenity trial, the comic was defended by, amongst others, Germaine Greer and George Perry, and eventually acquitted. This also led to The Trials of Nasty Tales, a comic giving a detailed account of the proceedings at the Old Bailey with artwork by Dave Gibbons, Edward Barker and others. All this, however, spelt the end for both these titles, and it was left to other publishers to continue

It should also be mentioned that there were some eccentric individuals who produced their own comics virtually singlehandedly. Foremost amongst them were Antonio Ghura and Mike Mathews. Ghura, drawing in a distinctly mainstream American style, produced several comics, such as Amazing Love Stories and Raw Purple (1977) whose parodies centred on extremes of sex and violence. Mathews, although using a style closer to Richard Corben, mined a similar vein of sex and violence in titles like Napalm Kiss. Both artists, writing, drawing and publishing on their own seemed intent on offending even the liberal sensibilities of other underground creators. For the more minor publisher/artists like Mathews, both printing and distribution were still a headache as he explained in a 1985 letter.

Figure 10 . Mike Mathews, letter to the author, 1985

David Huxley is the editor of The Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics (Routledge). He was a senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University until 2017. He has written widely on comics, including works on various artists, underground and horror comics, superheroes and also popular film. He has also drawn and written for a range of British comics, including Ally Sloper, Either or Comics, Pssst, Oink and Killer Comics. His most recent publication is Lone Heroes and the Myth of the American West in Comic Books 1945-1962 (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018).

Tracing Scottish Comics History (3 of 3) by Chris Murray

While much of Cartoon Art Production’s output was due to the industriousness of Reader, they had other talents, such as Crewe Davies, who drew Dane Jerrus, Agent One of the Interplanetary Solar Force, and Captain Magnet. Another key creator who worked between Glasgow and Dundee was Irish artist Paddy Brennan, who became a DC Thomson stalwart. His first published work was for The Magno Comics (1946), a one-shot published by Cartoon Art Productions, for which he drew ‘Jeff Collins - Crime Reporter’. Brennan then produced the wonderfully offbeat Marsman Comics (1948), a single issue also for Cartoon Art Productions (Fig. 15). He then went on to work for their flagship title, Super-Duper Comics, which ran until 1950, at which point the company seems to have shut down, possibly due to the fact that an exhausted Reader had quit by this point.  

The address given on many of Cartoon Arts comics was 141 Bath Street (Fig. 16). In the midst of writing about Cartoon Arts for my book The British Superhero (2017) I made a short pilgrimage to Glasgow to stand at 141 Bath Street and wonder at the marvels that had been created behind those walls. This was frustrated by the fact that this exact building has been demolished and replaced with a more modern building. This is just a short walk from Hope Street Studios, which I was also visiting as part of this comics pilgrimage. At this point I must acknowledge my long-suffering wife, who having driven me to Glasgow and being dragged around a comics inspired tour of the city, made every attempt to muster patience and understanding as I stood on the corner of Bath Street staring at a new building while lamenting another lost piece of Scottish comics history, lost in reverie at a place that had come to occupy an almost mythical space in my imagination.   

Fig. 15: Marsman Comics by Paddy Brennan (Cartoon Art Productions, Glasgow, 1948)

Fig. 16: Cartoon Art Productions annual, showing address as 141 Bath Street, Glasgow

Foldes Press

Another British superhero, Ace Hart, the Atom Man, starred in Superthriller Comic, which was initially published and printed by Foldes Press in 1947 (Fig. 17). Foldes was based in Joppa, Edinburgh, but after a few issues the title was bought by World Distributors Ltd (Manchester), who published the series from 1948 to 1952. After World Distributors Ltd took over Foldes continued to print the comic, and they are quite wonderful comics. The building where Foldes was based still stands in Joppa, but is now a MOT testing centre on one side, with the other side of the building having been converted into a row of houses. After the Bath Street debacle I knew the chances of getting my wife to take me to Joppa (she’s the driver in the family) were negligible. Upon explaining that I wanted to stand outside a MOT testing centre in a kind of comics history reverie, those chances shrunk to zero. Still, the wonder that is google maps street view allowed me to spend a long time examining the building in detail, trying to find of trace of its former life, but it’s just not the same. Some people have a longing to get away on a sunny holiday to some Mediterranean paradise. In wistful moments, my thoughts turn to Joppa. When I eventually manage to find a day when I’m not buried under the endless piles of paperwork, admin and teaching that come with academic life, I’m going to get myself to Joppa. I am not sure what practical or scholarly purpose this will serve. Maybe tucked in the back room of that MOT testing centre is a huge pile of SuperThriller comics, abandoned for decades, just waiting on me… a comics scholar can dream.

Fig. 17: Ace Hart in Superthriller Comic (Foldes Press/World Distributors Ltd, Edinburgh, late 1940s).

The comics produced by small publishers in Scotland tell an intriguing story, as do the spaces they once occupied. Tracing this almost lost and forgotten history of Scottish comics has become something of a weird obsession, but one that is currently finding a healthy outlet as I write my next book, Comicsopolis – A History of Comics in Dundee, which will hopefully make an appearance in 2020. There is so much more history to uncover, and, at the risk of stretching my wife’s patience beyond breaking point, so many places to visit. So, if you ever see me standing on street corner, staring in reverie at some old building, skulking about an MOT testing centre, or glowering at a Primark store, you’ll know why.  

Professor Christopher Murray is Chair of Comics Studies at the University of Dundee. He runs the MLitt in Comics and Graphic Novels (https://www.dundee.ac.uk/postgraduate/comics-graphic-novels-mlitt) and co-edits Studies in Comics (https://www.intellectbooks.com/studies-in-comics). He researches British Comics, and is author of The British Superhero (University Press of Mississippi, 2017) and Comicsopolis – A History of Comics in Dundee (Abertay Historical Society, 2020). Murray is director of The Scottish Centre for Comics Studies and Dundee Comics Creative Space, and is editor if UniVerse Comics. He has written several comics, including a number of public information comics on healthcare and science communication themes.

The ‘Remembering UK Comics’ series is curated and edited by William Proctor and Julia Round.

Tracing Scottish Comics History (2 of 3) by Chris Murray

The end of a comic book era!

Valentine & Sons

During the course of my research on Dundee’s forgotten comics I heard whispers of some comics produced by Valentine & Son, a publisher much more well-known for postcards. James Valentine started his printing business in Dundee in 1851, building on the previous business owned by his father, John Valentine, who was involved in textile printing in the city. The business later moved into photography, and became world-renowned as a printer of photographic postcards and greetings cards. Valentine & Sons produced two one-off comics in 1948. These were Ace Comics and Super Bumper Comic and are extremely rare and little is known about them, other than the fact that they were largely produced by artists who worked in the studios, such as Len Fullerton (who ran the studio with Bill McCail), Sam Fair and George Blow. The lead strip in Super Bumper Comic was ‘Clint Cairns’, an American style Western strip drawn by Fullerton about a daring cowboy adventurer who takes on thieves who rob a stagecoach (Fig. 11). However there were also humour strips in the British tradition, including ‘Bertie Bulger: The Fat Boy of St Merlins’, which was based very closely on Billy Bunter by Frank Richards, who originally appeared in the weekly story paper The Magnet, published by Amalgamated Press between 1908 and the 1940s. Bulger displays many of the characteristics of Bunter, from his vanity to his playful deceitful pranks which inevitably lead to trouble. Following this was a crime story about mysteriously vanishing train, and a science-fiction story, ‘The Menace of Asteroid X’. Fullerton also drew ‘Alpha’ and ‘Hugh the Rover’ for Ace Comic.

Fig. 11: Clint Cairns by Len Fullerton, in Super Bumper Comics (Valentine & Sons, Dundee, 1948)

It is not known why Valentines decided to embark on this experiment with comics, but for whatever reason second issues of Ace Comics and Super Bumper Comic never appeared, but it seems likely that their mix of British and American style comics was not as appealing to readers as the more blatant copies of the American comics style that were being produced by Cartoon Art Productions and the other small publishers (see below). Fullerton continued to work for Valentines, producing postcards and calendars, finding that his true inspiration was drawing from nature rather than drawing adventure strips. Fullerton left comics behind and embarked upon a very successful career as a nature artist. Valentines continued to operate in Dundee until 1994, but never ventured into comics again after that experiment in 1948. The long history of Valentines in Dundee has left its mark on the city. There are many buildings associated with the company, and the Publishing Department was housed in the main administrative building at 154 Perth Road, just a short walk from the University of Dundee where comics are studies and produced today (Fig. 12). This is likely the location where the two comics were developed in the late 1940s, at the same time that the McCail studios were supporting the comics industry in Dundee. It has been fascinating to visit these places and to consider what might have been. The appetite I was developing for visiting places where Scottish comics has once been produced quickly led me to Bath Street in Glasgow.

Fig. 12: Valentines & Sons, 154 Perth Road, Dundee, 2019.

Cartoon Arts Productions

The company that started life as International Comics and then became Transatlantic Comics, and then finally Cartoon Art Productions, seems to have operated out of several locations in Glasgow from the mid-1940s until at least 1950. Glasgow was a natural home for such an outfit as there was a significant American naval base nearby and American comics often found their way into the hands of children on the West coast of Scotland via that route. The company reprinted American material, but also produced some original material that attempted to mimic the American style. One of their first attempts was Dynamic Comics (1945) which featured a superhero called Mr Muscle by a young Denis Gifford (Fig. 13). The influence of American wartime propaganda comics like Captain America is clear. By 1946 the company had changed its name to Cartoon Art Productions, and was sometimes referred to as CAP-toons.  They were now ready to scale up their operation and to produce more American style comics. The result was Super-Duper Comics (1946-1950) which was an anthology featuring a mix of genres, comics and text stories (Fig. 14).

Fig. 13: ‘Mr Muscle, Britain’s Superman’ by Denis Gifford, in Dynamic Comics (International Comics/Cartoon Art Productions, 1945)

Fig. 14: Super Duper Comics #4 by Dennis M. Reader (Cartoon Art Productions, Glasgow, 1947).

These comics were smaller that standard British comics, looking more like American comic books, but they were often quite slim, sometimes running to just eight pages. Cartoon Art Productions also had a very clever but slightly dishonest marketing strategy, putting an American price on the cover (usually five cents) in order to give readers the impression that this was an authentic American comic, or that the company traded on both sides of the Atlantic, an ambition signalled by their earlier names (International Comics and Transatlantic Press), but this was far from the truth. It was a clever ploy and hinged on having artwork that could pass as American. Fortunately they had employed a talented young English artist called Dennis M. Reader, who had first found work with Swan in 1944, where his ability to create comics in the American style was instantly recognised. Reader’s work soon brought him to the attention of Cartoon Art Productions, where he produced a number of crime comics, and many superheroes, including Powerman, G-Boy and Wonder Boy, Electro Girl, Phantom Maid, and Acromaid.

https://www.dundee.ac.uk/stories/comicsopolis-public-appeal-unearth-more-dundees-comics-history

Bio

Professor Christopher Murray is Chair of Comics Studies at the University of Dundee. He runs the MLitt in Comics and Graphic Novels (https://www.dundee.ac.uk/postgraduate/comics-graphic-novels-mlitt) and co-edits Studies in Comics (https://www.intellectbooks.com/studies-in-comics). He researches British Comics, and is author of The British Superhero (University Press of Mississippi, 2017) and Comicsopolis – A History of Comics in Dundee (Abertay Historical Society, 2020). Murray is director of The Scottish Centre for Comics Studies and Dundee Comics Creative Space, and is editor if UniVerse Comics. He has written several comics, including a number of public information comics on healthcare and science communication themes.

Tracing Scottish Comics History (1 of 3) by Chris Murray

I’m fascinated by Scottish comics. This should come as no surprise. I was born and raised in Dundee, the home of DC Thomson, publisher of The Dandy and The Beano, and countless others. The indie Scottish comics scene is vibrant, and Scotland can boast of industry legends like Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely, Mark Millar, Alan Grant, Cam Kennedy, Eddie Campbell, Ian Kennedy… the list goes on and on.  Also, I teach and research comics at the University of Dundee, which provides many wonderful opportunities to meet and collaborate with the wealth of Scottish comics talent, and through our classes, and initiatives like Dundee Comics Creative Space and Ink Pot studio, to help support the next generation of comics creators and scholars. But the thing that really fascinates me is the all but forgotten history of Scottish comics.

Comics publisher and historian John McShane has made a case for the Glasgow Looking Glass (1825) as the world’s first comic, and whether or not that holds true, he has certainly put this long overlooked periodical back on the map (Fig. 1).[1] Likewise, over the last several years I have been keen to shine a light on some neglected corners of Scottish comics history, researching the smaller comics publishers, and particularly, trying to trace some of the actual locations of defunct publishers, printers and studios. There is an element of detective work here, which is hugely enjoyable, but there’s also frustration that comes from the fact that some of this information is extremely hard to come by, however, a story is slowly starting to emerge about Scottish comics publishing beyond the well-known story of DC Thomson. Apart from the Glasgow Looking Glass there were many illustrated magazines employing cartoonists, especially in Dundee and Glasgow, in the nineteenth century and well into the early part of the twentieth century. Also, several small Scottish publishers emerged in the 1930s and 40s, such as Glasgow’s Cartoon Arts Productions, Foldes Press, which was initially based in Edinburgh before being bought by Manchester-based World Distributors Ltd, and Dundee’s Valentine & Sons. A considerable volume of comics emerged from these publishers, in addition to the huge output of DC Thomson, who had an in-house comic art department, but also utilised an extensive network of freelancers. Moreover, this industry was supported by a number of private art studios. The Scottish comics industry is more varied and complex than has been appreciated, and this creative economy has not yet been properly mapped or understood. Here I would like to outline some of these aspects of this industry, and the physical traces that it has left behind.  

Fig. 1 Glasgow Looking Glass, Vol. 1, No.1 (John Watson, June 11th 1825).

Livingstone and Strathmore Studios (Dundee) and Mallard Features (Glasgow)

The brothers Jock and William (Bill) McCail came to Dundee from Hartlepool to work for DCT in the 1920s, but fell out of favour for political reasons and went to work for Amalgamated Press and Swan in London the 1930s and 1940s. The McCail’s also set up art studios in Dundee and Glasgow in the 1940s, which were mainly run by Bill, and the Dundee studios were co-run with Len Fullerton. The Dundee workshop was established in 1942 and was initially called Livingstone Studios, but then became Strathmore Studios, and was located in the High Street. It then moved to nearby Commercial Street. The Glasgow workshop was called Mallard Features Studios and Bill used it to combine his interests in comics and nature illustration, and particularly horses, for which he was well-known. This was seen in The Round-Up (1948), a superhero/cowboy mash-up starring Quicksilver, The Wonderman of the West, which was produced for the Children’s Press in Glasgow (Fig. 2).[1] These studios were instrumental in supporting freelance work in Scottish comics, and gave several artists crucial training.

Fig. 2: The Round Up by William McCail (Mallard Features/The Children’s Press, Glasgow, 1948)

The McCail studio in Dundee High Street was based in a building, now demolished, that was famously the headquarters of General Monck when he laid siege to the city in 1651. This building was demolished in the 1960s when the Overate area of the city centre was being remodelled (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3: Centre-Left, The building known as Monck’s Headquarters in the Overgate area of the city centre.

The studio was home to comics artists who were based at the McCail studios included Len Fullteron, a comics artists who, like Bill McCail, was also a celebrated nature artist; Sydney Jordan, a Dundonian who went on to create the popular science fiction newspaper strip Jeff Hawke; Sam Fair, a Dundonian artist who had contributed to The Dandy in the early years and throughout the war; and Colin Andrew, another Dundonian who worked as a junior artist in the Dundee studio at a young age and then went on to work for King-Ganteaume studios, producing art for Len Miller and Son, and then later working on The Eagle and TV Century 21 in the 1960s. Though the building is long gone, a ghostly trace of it remains. The statue of Desperate Dan now strides purposefully through the city centre, and towards the shopping centre where the building once stood, now the site of a Primark store (Fig. 4). The beloved Desperate Dan statue, designed by artists Tony and Susie Morrow, has become an iconic part of the city. It is commonplace to see tourist posing for photographs, and comics students also always pose with Dan at Graduation. The University Chancellor may officially confer all the degrees with a pat on the head from the University cap, but Comics Studies students only really graduate once Dan has done his part, doffing them on the head with a rolled up copy of The Dandy (Fig. 5 and 6). Also, upon hearing that The Dandy would cease publication I had to console Dan, or more properly, he consoled me (Fig. 7).

Fig. 4: Desperate Dan and Primark, High Street, Dundee, 2019.

Fig. 5: Comics students graduate at Desperate Dan statue, 2016.

Fig. 6: Comics student Megan Sinclair being graduated by Dan, 2015.

Fig. 7: Dan consoles Chris as The Dandy ceases publication in 2012.

The Desperate Dan statue is also sited very close to New Inn Entry, where the illustrated periodical, The City Echo, was published in 1907, in the tradition of the Piper O’ Dundee and The Wasp, late nineteenth century periodicals which featured many cartoons and comics artists. This is also short walk away from Meadowside, which is dominated by the DC Thomson building, often referred to as ‘Thomson Tower’, or ‘The Fun Factory’ (Fig. 8). Also nearby is the old Leng building, which housed the John Leng and Co, Ltd, the great rival of DC Thomson before the companies merged (Fig. 9). Leng employed the first cartoonist contracted to a newspaper, Martin Anderson.[1] I walk past these places on an almost daily basis, and can feel the history of Dundee’s comics. This extends from the celebrated and still thriving comics publishing industry based in the city to the all but forgotten and lost places associated with comics production. It is notable that DC Thomson has long maintained offices in London, and re the only publisher still located on Fleet Steet, which was once the heard of the publishing industry (Fig. 10). I confess that the thrill of finding and researching these places has given me something of a bug for finding more places associated with comics history. And there was yet more Dundee comics history to uncover.

Fig. 8: DC Thomson’s ‘Fun Factory’ at Meadowside, Dundee, and McMenace exhibition at McManus Art Gallery and Museum, artwork by Nigel Parkinson, 2018. Copyright DC Thomson.

Fig. 9: John Leng and Co Ltd, Bank Street, Dundee.

Fig. 10 DC Thomson offices on Fleet Street, London.

Notes

[1] Matthew Jarron, Independent and Individualist: Art in Dundee 1867-1924 (Dundee: Abertay Historical Society, 2015), p.125. 

[2] Chris Murray, The British Superhero (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017).

[3] John McShane, ‘Through a Glass, Darkly: A Revisionist History of Comics’, in The Drouth #23 (Glasgow: The Scottish Arts Council, 2007).

Bio

Professor Christopher Murray is Chair of Comics Studies at the University of Dundee. He runs the MLitt in Comics and Graphic Novels (https://www.dundee.ac.uk/postgraduate/comics-graphic-novels-mlitt) and co-edits Studies in Comics (https://www.intellectbooks.com/studies-in-comics). He researches British Comics, and is author of The British Superhero (University Press of Mississippi, 2017) and Comicsopolis – A History of Comics in Dundee (Abertay Historical Society, 2020). Murray is director of The Scottish Centre for Comics Studies and Dundee Comics Creative Space, and is editor if UniVerse Comics. He has written several comics, including a number of public information comics on healthcare and science communication themes.

The ‘Remembering UK Comics’ series is curated and edited by William Proctor and Julia Round.

Celebrating 'Action': The Comic of the Streets (Part 3 of 3) by John Caro

The cover to Action from 18th September 1976 – art by Carlos Ezquerra

Naturally, in a time of Mary Whitehouse’s Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, the provocative material of Action did not go unnoticed. Push against authority and it pushes back. The Evening Standard article was followed by headlines in The Sun – “Sevenpenny Nightmare!” (30th April 1976) and the Daily Mail’s “Comic Strip Hooligans” (17th September 1976). With the media already widely reporting the scourge of football hooliganism, when Lefty Lampton’s girlfriend Angie defended him by throwing a bottle at an opposition player, the Football League along with World Cup referee and magistrate Jack Taylor were quick to criticise. And then, infamously, because of an alleged colouring error, the cover of the 18th September issue appeared to feature a chain brandishing youth threatening a cowering policeman (above).

The backlash culminated with John Saunders being interviewed on the BBC1 magazine programme, Nationwide, climaxing, depending on which recollection you believe, with the presenter tearing up a copy of Action live on air.

Action had sailed too close to the wind and its days were numbered. Pat Mills and Steve MacManus feel that without their close involvement the new editorial team had become reckless and overconfident, to the point “where well-plotted, fast-moving action scenes began to be replaced with random violence on the apparent premise that this was what readers wanted” (MacManus, 2016, p. 70). However, fearing the backlash, Action did attempt to self-correct:

The original stories had already begun to be toned down. Alterations were made to both text and art before going to press. “Kids Rule O.K.” had half a page removed entirely because of the graphic violence taking place as a battle raged between the Malvern Road Gang and a group of enthusiastic Police Cadets. In “Death Game 1999”, new artist Massimo Belardinelli drew a particularly spectacular panel featuring the death, by explosion, of Karson City Warden Kruger. The panel was obscured by a giant white BA-ROOM!, entirely covering the disembodied portions of Kruger’s corpse. (Harris, 2016A, para.14)

Sadly, the die was cast and the 23rd October 1976 issue was withdrawn before sale and pulped. A combination of the enemy within (the old guard at IPC was never happy with changes that Action represented), mainstream media criticisms and threats of a boycott of all IPC publications from major newsagents saw the end of Action. Martin Barker recalls the impact on the readers:

Through the streets of Brixton (truly – several people have recalled this) and no doubt through many other places, rang the cry: “THEY’VE TAKEN AWAY OUR COMIC!” Action, the most important comic for a generation, the one comic in thirty years to win a genuine loyalty from its readers, had gone in for a terminal operation (Barker, 1990, p. 4).

I recall my own local newsagent gleefully informing me when I turned up to collect my reserved copy that the comic was over, because it wasn’t deemed acceptable for the likes of me. Of the 200,000 pulped copies a limited number of that 37th issue have apparently survived – one edition changing hands on eBay in 2016 for £4,000 (Freeman, 2016, para. 2).

Action did return a couple of months later but it had been defanged. It limped on until November 1977 before merging with another comic – as Moose Harris colorfully describes it, when “Action’s carcass was consumed by Battle” (2016B, para. 1), before quietly fading away.

On the plus side, Mills had learned from the experience, so when the opportunity arose to develop a new comic, the science fiction title 2000AD (1977-present), he took advantage of the genre’s ability to smuggle in a little rebellious social commentary. As The Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling once remarked, “Things which couldn’t be said by a Republican or a Democrat could be said by a Martian.” (King, 2013, para. 15). Interviewed in the documentary Future Shock! (Goodwin, 2014), Mills recalls he once again found himself developing a counter-culture comic, his seditious ways fanned by his unpopularity within the IPC establishment.

The more they tried to push things down the more I kind of worked against it, and that actually is responsible for a lot of the energy that 2000AD has, which the readers responded to.

Ultimately, this is the legacy of Action. Speaking about the so-called British Comic Book Invasion of the 1980s, which saw many 2000AD creators working for DC and Marvel, US editor Karen Berger felt that the Vertigo imprint’s spirit of subversiveness, anarchy and rebellion came from 2000AD (Goodwin, 2014) – a spirit that had been forged within the pages of Action. One contributor to the British Invasion was writer Grant Morrison:

The Americans expected us to be brilliant punks and, eager to please our masters, we sensitive, artistic boys did our best to live up to our hype. Like the Sex Pistols sneering and burning their way through “Johnny B. Goode,” we took their favourite songs, rewrote all the lyrics, and played them on buzz saws through squalling distortion pedals… Most important for me, we were encouraged to be shocking and different (Morrison, 2011 cited by Ecke, 2019, p. 157).

Bibliography

Barker, M. (1990). Action: the story of a violent comic. London: Titan.

Brooks, A. (2016, April). To what extent did class politics distinguish the punk rock movements of Britain and the United States in the 1970s? History Initiates. Retrieved from: https://www.mq.edu.au/about_us/faculties_and_departments/faculty_of_arts/mhpir/current_students/history_initiates/history_initiates_journals/history_initiates-vol_iv_no_1_april_2016/  

Chapman, J. (2011). British Comics: A Cultural History. London: Reaktion Books.

Ecke, J. The British comic book invasion: Alan Moore, Warren Ellis, Grant Morrison and the evolution of the American style. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers.

Freeman, J. (2016). Rare, ‘banned’ 1970s British Action comic sells for over £4000. Retrieved from https://downthetubes.net/?p=34682

Goodwin, P. (Director). (2014). Future Shock! The story of 2000AD. [Motion picture] [DVD]. [London]: Arrow Films. (2015).

Harris, M. (2016A). Action: the lost issue. Retrieved from https://downthetubes.net/?page_id=33298

Harris, M. (2016B). Action: battle stations. Retrieved from https://downthetubes.net/?page_id=33303

King, S. (2013, May 29). Anne Serling reflects on life with writer-father Rod. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved from https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/la-xpm-2013-may-29-la-et-st-anne-serling-20130529-story.html

MacManus, S. (2016). The mighty one: My life inside the nerve centre. Oxford: Rebellion Publishing.

Mills, P., Armstrong, K. and Ramona Sola, R. (2017). Hook Jaw: Classic collection. London: Titan. 

Mills, P. (2017). Be pure! Be vigilant! Behave! 2000AD and Judge Dredd: The Secret History… Malaga: Millsverse Books.

Mills, P. and O’Neill, K. (2017). Serial Killer (Read Em and Weep Book 1). Malaga: Millsverse Books.

Mills. P. (2018A). Goodnight, John-boy: Volume 2 (Read Em and Weep). Malaga. Millsverse Books. 

Mills, P. (2018B). Storyteller 9. In search of the muse. Retrieved from: https://www.millsverse.com/insearchofthemuse/

Mills. P. (2019). Storyteller 10. Collaborations. Retrieved from https://www.millsverse.com/collaborations/

Naughton, J. (2016). Action: How Britain’s most brutal comic laid the real ’70s bare. Retrieved from https://bigmouthmag.wordpress.com/2016/08/23/action-comic-britains-brutal-weekly-real-70s/

Rusbridger, A. (2005, July 23). The Great British holiday hunt. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/jul/23/featuresreviews.guardianreview12

Skinn, D. (2018). Horror? At IPC/Fleetway? Surely Not! Retrieved from http://dezskinn.com/ipc-fleetway/

John Caro is currently Assistant Head for the School of Film, Media and Communication at the University of Portsmouth. A graduate of Northumbria University’s Media Production programme, in 2001 he completed a Film and Video Master’s Degree at Toronto’s York University, supported by a Commonwealth Scholarship. He has directed and produced numerous short films, screening his work at Raindance and the International Tel-Aviv Film Festival. From 1983 to 1987 he was a set decorator at Pinewood Studios, working on such films as Aliens and Full Metal Jacket. More recently, he contributed reviews to the Directory of World Cinema: American Hollywood Volumes 1 & 2 (Intellect, 2011 & 2015), and his essay on the re-imagined Battlestar Galatica series, co-authored with Dylan Pank, appeared in Channeling the Future (Scarecrow, 2009). Of late he has rediscovered his love of British comics and re-joined the ranks of Squaxx dek Thargo.

The ‘Remembering UK Comics’ series is curated and edited by William Proctor & Julia Round.

Celebrating 'Action': The Comic of the Streets (Part 2 of 3) by John Caro

Hook Jaw took the point-of-view of the shark to tell its story. Subverting the traditional “boys own” Roy of the Rovers style sports strip of fair play, Death Game 1999 makes a ragtag collection of prison inmates the heroes, fighting against a corrupt system. Lefty Lampton and his notorious glass wielding “hooligan” girlfriend became the sympathetic leads – if the system in the form of an ineffectual referee won’t protect Lefty, they’ll look after themselves. Hellman, a World War II German tank commander is presented as an appealing anti-hero, operating on the Eastern Front to neatly side step any engagements with British troops. And Dredger made the conventional working-class oppo the protagonist, with the middle-class character assigned the sidekick role. Mills recalled:                                                                                                         

We so often have something like Colonel Dan Dare and his working-class sidekick from Wigan, Digby. Isn’t it wonderful to reverse things? I think that was so good for the morale of ordinary kids reading this comic. I grew up reading so much stuff where it was Lord this or Duke that who was the hero. It’s so good to have a hero from the streets (Naughton, 2016, para. 21).

Perhaps on a surface level, Hook Jaw is not an obvious working-class hero but the character is certainly anti-authoritarian. The story represents nature’s fight back against greedy corporate humanity. It is a narrative device that Mills returned to several times within the pages of 2000AD. In Shako, trying to retrieve a secret government-created germ warfare chemical, the CIA foolishly takes on a man-eating polar bear (Shako, thinking the toxic capsule was food, accidentally ate it…). And in Flesh, matriarch of the tyrannosauruses and charmingly monikered Old One Eye leads a dinosaur revolution against the evil Trans-Time Corporation, a company that has travelled back in time to intensively farm dinosaurs for the ready-meals of the future. Cowboys, dinosaurs and giant spiders feeding on blood – how could the story fail? For readers the fake advertisements for dino burgers and steaks did for fast food what Willy Wonka did for chocolate sales.

From Action’s successor 2000AD. A mocked-up advertisement for Flesh – art by Kevin O'Neill

Hook Jaw, that merciless force of nature, would munch through cast members week after week. Making maximum use of the comic’s precious colour centre pages, the writers and artists would top each other for the inventiveness and gore of the kills. A personal favourite was a blinded diver swimming directly into the titular character's gaping jaws – “Hope this is the way…” Mills later celebrated the enthusiastic use of color:

John [Sanders] actually encouraged us in our excesses. I remember one episode of Hookjaw, which was beautifully painted in watercolours. I recall John getting a paintbrush with red paint on it and saying, More blood, More blood! (Naughton, 2016, para. 33).

Yes, Hook Jaw killed indiscriminately but he appeared to save his more spectacular kills for particular types of character – for example, Red McNally, the cruel despot that runs an oil rig in the Caribbean. In the climax to the story, Hook Jaw makes a meal of his nemesis, not so much eating him as, well, bursting him. See for yourself…

McNally meets his end in Hook Jaw – story by Pat Mills and Ken Armstrong, art by Roman Sola.

In the sequel, Dr Gelder, the cruel capitalist owner of Paradise Island, meets his end not at the teeth of Hook Jaw, but speared by a member of the indigenous tribe he has exploited. In a story that features some toe-curling racial politics, it is at least of some solace that the colonialist is killed by the colonised. What is also of note is the fate of returning hero, Rick Mason. In a grisly fate reminiscent of EC Horror Comics, he is unceremoniously “de-bodified”, his decapitated head replete with lolling tongue washing up on shore. A particularly gruesome end which, long before Game of Thrones (Benioff and Weiss, 2011-2019), established that no character was safe. Mason had to die. Action wasn’t about traditional square jawed heroes. Hook Jaw was the only star of the story.

Another important part of Action’s rebellious working-class identity and appeal to its readership was its regular features. In the best tradition of the “Hello kiddies” Crypt Keeper, Action had a host – “Action Man” Steve. Except this was a host who wrote about his trips to the pub and his experiences performing dangerous stunts (although one would hope not necessarily in that order). Even the name Action Man would have been understood by readers as a reference to the then popular Palitoy doll (better known as GI Joe in North American markets).

Mills also wanted feature material, which he would lay out in a style that aped The Sun. Its concerns were both working-class (speedway, wrestling) and anti-establishment (there was a regular Twit of the Week slot which featured, among others, University Challenge presenter Bamber Gascoigne). Mills enlisted Steve MacManus, who would go on to be one of 2000AD’s most successful editors, but was then working as a sub-editor on Battle, to help out. He became Action Man, the game-for-a-laugh face of the comic who would be set challenges by the readers on a weekly basis. (Naughton, 2016, para. 27)

An example of Action Man's weekly column

Twit of the Week from 24th April 1976 - Doctor Who

In an era when perhaps the “establishment” was easier to define, Twit of Week exemplifies the subversive and irreverent nature of the comic – celebrities were not admired, they were mocked. Readers delighted in sending-in their nominations and justifications. The list included big hitters such as Nicholas Parsons, The Bay City Rollers, Donny Osmond, Lee Majors and Bruce Forsyth. Again, given Action’s fondness for adapting inspirational source material, it is of note that starting in 1974, Larry Flynt’s Hustler featured a regular “Asshole of the Month” nomination.

Another direct lift used by Action to reach out to its followers was the Mad, Mad Money Man. This was based on an old newspaper promotional campaign where figures such as Lobby Lud and Chalkie White would advertise a publication by giving away money to readers in the know.

Chalkie White comes from a distinguished tradition of mystery men, a British summer institution that began between the wars with the News Chronicle's Lobby Lud and was celebrated after a fashion in Graham Greene's Brighton Rock. Each day a picture of Chalkie's eyes appears in the Daily Mirror and each day the Great British holidaymaker memorises them, together with the line he must say to claim the £50 prize. It is usually some such sentence as "To my delight, it's Chalkie White". (Rusbridger, 2005, para. 4).

Steve MacManus later recounted his experience on the Action “outreach” activity, accompanying Money Man and former Valiant editor, Stewart Wales on a visit to Brighton.

On arrival at the train station we disembarked and made our way to The Lanes, where we expected to be challenged (or razored) at any moment. But, despite a swarm of kids carrying that week’s copy of Action evidently looking for the Mad Money Man, not one of them appeared to recognise Stewart. Eventually the penny dropped for one youth and he challenged Stewart successfully. The boy looked shellshocked when he was instantly handed a crisp £5 note and as we departed he remained rooted to the spot, staring blankly at the small fortune in his hands (2016, p. 57).

John Caro is currently Assistant Head for the School of Film, Media and Communication at the University of Portsmouth. A graduate of Northumbria University’s Media Production programme, in 2001 he completed a Film and Video Master’s Degree at Toronto’s York University, supported by a Commonwealth Scholarship. He has directed and produced numerous short films, screening his work at Raindance and the International Tel-Aviv Film Festival. From 1983 to 1987 he was a set decorator at Pinewood Studios, working on such films as Aliens and Full Metal Jacket. More recently, he contributed reviews to the Directory of World Cinema: American Hollywood Volumes 1 & 2 (Intellect, 2011 & 2015), and his essay on the re-imagined Battlestar Galatica series, co-authored with Dylan Pank, appeared in Channeling the Future (Scarecrow, 2009). Of late he has rediscovered his love of British comics and re-joined the ranks of Squaxx dek Thargo.

The ‘Remembering UK Comics’ series is curated and edited by William Proctor & Julia Round.

Celebrating 'Action': The Comic of the Streets (Part 1 of 3) by John Caro

In his 2017 memoir Be Pure! Be Vigilant! Behave!, 2000AD creator and founding editor Pat Mills decries the lack of working-class protagonists in fiction. The publication of the controversial British comic Action in 1976 can be seen as an obvious attempt to redress this imbalance, with the inclusion of characters such as tough no-nonsense agent Dredger (predating Brian Clemens’ The Professionals [1977-1983] by a year) and Kenny Lampton, the scrappy rough-diamond lead of football strip, Look out for Lefty. Apologies to any North American readers but my own working-class roots will not permit me to use the despised term “soccer”. I’d never be able to return home again. Mills states:

I featured working-class heroes in all my stories. It’s why you’ll find few officers as heroes in the early issues of Battle, the war comic John (Wagner) and I later created. That was something I was adamant about. Then came my Action – ‘the comic of the streets’ (that line speaks for itself), and it was loved by its readers for this reason (2017, p. 7).

The working-class representation seen in Action and to some extent its successor 2000AD is of a particular type: anti-establishment and rebellious – kicking against the pricks. Appearing as it did in 1976, it is of little surprise that Action is often associated with the punk movement: "Pat Mills is a punk…” the Jonathan Ross quotation at the head of Mills’ own website proudly proclaims. Indeed, with the scratchy, brutal black and white art of contributors such as Hook Jaw artist Ramon Sola (although his colour pages also proved to be significant) and Death Game 1999’s Costa – along with the comic being printed on low quality newsprint stock that its creators sardonically termed “toilet paper”, it is not too far of a stretch to see a connection to punk fanzines such as Sniffin’ Glue, which also first appeared in 1976.

Given the restrictive “Lowry-like factory system” (Mills, 2017, page 11), and demoralising working practices that existed at publishers IPC and DC Thomson, where Mills and his colleagues were expected to pump out content for the lines of boys’ and girls’ comics at an alarming rate, perhaps it is no surprise that a rebellious attitude crept into the work, which in turn was picked up by an appreciative youthful audience looking for anti-heroes who challenged authority. This was a workplace where creators were denied royalties and even credit, for fear that it would encourage a fanbase and demands for pay rises. This was an environment where six weeks of development time for a character was thought by senior management to be excessive.

Research was a dirty word, regarded as unnecessary or even pretentious – we were writing comics for kids, after all – who cares about them? Are they really going to notice the difference? (Mills, 2017, p. 13.)

The business model followed at IPC where the likes of Mills and fellow editor Steve MacManus worked was known as “hatch, match and dispatch”. A new title would be launched on the back of children’s television advertising and mass-produced plastic free gifts, then as sales figures dropped it would be curtly shut down and merged with a new release. This was a strategy that readers would come to recognize when the chilling words appeared on the cover of their favorite comic: “Great news inside for all readers! Two great papers join forces!” As covered by John Chapman in British Comics: A Cultural History:

The merger was a means of minimising the risk of launching new titles – the cost of a launch could be up to £100,000 – and of maintaining the balance between continuity and change that would keep loyal readers on board while at the same time testing new markets (2011, p.126).

Outlined in the black humour of Mills’ semi-autobiographical Read Em and Weep novels, it is of little surprise that the corridors of publishers DC Thomson and IPC were full of underpaid and disgruntled creators who took little pride or care in their work

In British comics (certainly pre-2000AD), speed-writing was the norm and you were seen as a freak if you took time and care over your storytelling. Payment rates were deliberately kept low by publishers, to encourage writers to knock out stories as fast as possible. In fact, ‘pissing stories off’ was a cause for congratulation, not criticism. There were no by-lines, the author’s name was blacked out on the script and artists’ signatures were whitened out on the artwork. That way, publishers could dispose of stories in any way they wished and ‘divide and rule’ over creators. The result was that writers stopped caring what happened to their work and were indifferent when others took over their stories or characters without acknowledgement or remuneration (Mills, 2018B, para. 1).

While in the old guard this mistreatment engendered a defeated and pragmatic cynicism, in rising new stars Pat Mills and co-conspirator and fellow writer John Wagner, a defiant and rebellious streak was evolving. Mills recalled how he and Wagner would “wander the corridors of DC Thomson wearing green visors, on which was emblazoned in white Letraset the word ‘Hack’” (Mills, 2019, para. 1). If the comics were unimportant and throwaway – archived artwork was only good for mopping up leaks before being “piled into black bin liner bags and thrown into skips” (Skinn, 2018, para. 12) – then why not have some fun with the content? Why not push a few buttons?

After the success of the gritty war comic Battle, developed in 1975 by freelancers Mills and Wagner, IPC managing director John Saunders took advantage of their subversive attitude and in secret commissioned Mills to develop a new comic of the streets. Initial names considered were Boots and Dr Martens. In his fictionalized version of this period Mills simply plumbs for Aaagh! – a thinly veiled reference to a critical Evening Standard article from February 1976, printed only

Although eventual editor Geoff Kemp described it as the longest development period for a comic that he had encountered (Barker, 1990, p. 4), with a turnaround of only three months Mills had to move quickly. For inspiration he looked at popular movies and personalities of the day. Consequently, Action featured leads such as Dredger, the taciturn .44 Magnum-toting agent based on Dirty Harry (Siegel, 1971). Or for Blackjack, the tale of a black boxer (in this particular case going blind), read Muhammad Ali. And notoriously, for Hook Jaw, see Spielberg’s 1975 mother of the contemporary blockbuster, Jaws. An important point to consider is that, pre-home video, in many cases kids would not have been able to see the original films. Even if they could afford to go to the cinema, films such as Dirty Harry and Marathon Man (Schlesinger, 1976) were issued with adult certification.

Arguably, a comic that both looks to and rips off mainstream movie success could be accused of not being especially anti-establishment.

I don’t think any of us, today, would closely imitate films like Rollerball or Damnation Alley in a way we did back then. We were on the right side of plagiarism but it’s still not aesthetically or morally pleasing. It’s why I don’t take kindly to anyone copying my own stories as ‘homage’. But sometimes it was the only way back then to produce comics at the required, sweatshop high speed (Mills, 2017, p. 17).

However, this is where it is helpful to dig a little deeper and reflect upon how the sources provided a springboard for a more rebellious approach – to consider how the inspirations were adapted and subverted. Perhaps in itself a rather punk-like attitude, given the common assertion that although punk originated in the US it was honed, improved and politicised in the UK (Brooks, 2016, p. 5).

John Caro is currently Assistant Head for the School of Film, Media and Communication at the University of Portsmouth. A graduate of Northumbria University’s Media Production programme, in 2001 he completed a Film and Video Master’s Degree at Toronto’s York University, supported by a Commonwealth Scholarship. He has directed and produced numerous short films, screening his work at Raindance and the International Tel-Aviv Film Festival. From 1983 to 1987 he was a set decorator at Pinewood Studios, working on such films as Aliens and Full Metal Jacket. More recently, he contributed reviews to the Directory of World Cinema: American Hollywood Volumes 1 & 2 (Intellect, 2011 & 2015), and his essay on the re-imagined Battlestar Galatica series, co-authored with Dylan Pank, appeared in Channeling the Future (Scarecrow, 2009). Of late he has rediscovered his love of British comics and re-joined the ranks of Squaxx dek Thargo.

'Supercats & Fantasta-Cats,' by Olivia Hicks & Zu Dominiak

Olivia Hicks

In the distant future, the galaxy is protected by… the Supercats! The stars of Moonbase 4, the Supercats are troubleshooting super-teens, and comprise of: Hercula, who has super strength; Electra, who has electric powers; Fauna, who can change her body colour like a chameleon; and Helen, has no powers, and is the captain.

This delightfully mad comic appeared across a number of Scottish publisher D.C. Thomson’s girls’ comics titles in the 1970s, beginning in Diana as the Fabulous Four in 1974. The initial title calls to mind both the Beatles and the Fantastic Four and sets up a range of playful transatlantic influences.  The team were then renamed the Supercats and became the cover stars of mystery comic Spellbound in 1976. Spellbound lasted till 1978, when it merged with Debbie (this was a common practice with failing titles). The Supercats survived the merger with Debbie, but not for very long – their last appearance was in April 1978.  

The comic was part science fiction adventure, part romance, and represents the more whimsical end of British girls’ comics. Magic and science fiction were melded together in a carefree fashion and the stories are accompanied by glorious (if unnecessarily sexy) art by Jorge B. Galvez and Enrique Bardía Romero.

The comic presented the four friends as glamorous career teens with a bevvy of boyfriends, tapping into the portrayal of single working women in contemporary magazines such as Cosmopolitan Magazine. The comic also flirted with second wave feminism: in the two parter ‘No Place for Trespassers!’ (Spellbound #28 and 29; 1977), the Supercats do battle with the galactic chauvinist Skorn who wishes to enslave all women. The story isn’t subtle; at one point the Supercats inform the men that ‘Sorry chums, you’re not OUR masters!’, but then, find a discussion of second wave feminism in 1970s superhero comics that is subtle.  For the most part though, the comics had its sights set squarely in the stars and avoided contemporary political debates.

Because of the way the comic draws together superheroism, teen antics, and a playful mix of British and American cultural influences, the Supercats are one of the key properties that I am examining in my PhD. My thesis also features elements of creative practice and creative response, and so I of course channelled my feelings and thoughts into a comic with art by Zu Dominiak.

This comic is a loving parody and homage and attempts to provide a sense of what the Supercats comics (and indeed, quite a few of the more bonkers girls’ comics strips) are like for those who haven’t had a chance to read the stories.

The comic, ‘The Fantasta-cats’, is inspired by the Supercats story ‘Roxana’s Revenge’, which was printed in Spellbound #37 and #38 (1977). Roxana is an evil witch who has been thwarted by the Supercats in the past, and so, we are told, enacts the ultimate revenge by attending the Moonbase 4 ball in the guise of a man so scorchingly handsome that the Supercats’ bonds of female friendship are shattered as they fall out attempting to woo the attractive stranger. The Supercats are able to recover and capture Roxana before she proceeds with the second portion of her plan… which it turns out, she hadn’t formulated yet.

As a queer academic, I could not resist the chance to tease out this idea of a witch who is so fixated on her schemes of seduction that she doesn’t get around to coming up with the rest of her plan. This comic plays with the queer potential of the comic, while also foregrounding the feminist concerns which Supercats also attempted to address in 1977. It is an attempt to give the reader a sense of what these Supercats stories are, and why I feel compelled to study them. It’s also a lot of fun, thanks to Zu’s incredible art.

Olivia Hicks is a PhD student and independent comics creator based at the University of Dundee. Her PhD is about superheroines in British and American girls’ comics. Her research focuses on questions of identity, using gender, whiteness, queerness, and teen studies. Her chapter ‘Fearfully and Wonderfully Made: The Racial Politics of Cloak and Dagger’ was published in Unstable Masks: Whiteness and American Superhero Comics (2020) from Ohio State University Press. She has written comics for Rebellion’s 2000 AD Summer Special (2018) and Cor!! Buster Easter Special (2020). Her webcomic Sarararara (which can be found at sararararawebcomic.tumblr.com) was nominated for Best Webcomic in the 2019 ComicScene Awards.

Zu  Dominiak is a PhD student at University of Dundee, researching comics exhibitions. Zu is also a comics creator who has been published in a number of anthologies and has self-published numerous titles.

'Less is Moore: Alan Moore's 2000AD Short Stories,' Andrew Edwards (Part 2 of 2)

This interest in time, allied to experimentation with the comics’ form, is also explored in ‘The Reversible Man’ (Prog 308, 19th March 1983). The depiction of backwards motion in a static medium like comics is achieved through manipulating what the reader reads and sees. Dialogue, from the very first panel, is reversed: ‘… had a stroke’ becomes ‘ekorts a dah’.

Furthermore, the order of the panels are arranged in reversed chronological order, which becomes apparent when you look at the just the visual content of the panels in reverse order, moving from the final panel on page four and ending with the first panel on page one. The caption boxes are set against both the backward motion of dialogue and visual panel arrangements. They allow Moore to narrate from the perspective of the protagonist who experiences his life in reverse, which anchors the meaning of the story so that it does not become too confusing an experience.

In addition to prefiguring the theme of time and formal experimentation in Moore’s later work, early consideration of the nature of superhero comics is also evident. With artist Bryan Talbot, he provides a comedic meditation on the nature of supervillains in ‘The Wages of Sin!’ (Prog 257, 27th March 1982) by asking what an unemployment training scheme for supervillians would be like. Here Moore draws upon a social issue that was prevalent at the time, combining it with supervillain conventions for comedic effect. One such convention is the notion of ‘taking candy from a baby’, which is literally manifested here. Humour is engendered when one student proves incapable of performing this act.

In addition, a student is rebuked by the teacher, Mr Dreadspawn, for suggesting that a hero can be dealt with by shooting him:

Give me strength! How’s he going to escape and defeat you if you shoot him?

This subversion of this narrative code both is both humorous in drawing out the absurdity of the statement and acts as a critique of an overused narrative convention. Furthermore, the creation of a supervillain identity through changes in name (Anthrax Ghoulshadow) and appearance are also portrayed, along with other conventions relating to dramatic poses and story conventions:

Such conventions also include a specific stereotypical appearance, that of the villain being bald, either with or without a metallic prosthetic limb. Ghoulshadow’s appearance recalls examples that include Ming the Merciless (Flash Gordon), Lex Luthor (Superman), Dr Sivana (Captain Marvel), and Ernst Stavros Blofeld (James Bond); for prosthetics, we can count Herman Scobie (Charade), and the fisherman (I Know What You Did Last Summer); for both baldness and prosthetics, Captain Hook (who wears a wig in Peter Pan) and Freddy Krueger (The Nightmare on Elm Street series) are key examples.

Another particularly noteworthy story is The Regrettable Ruse of Rocket Redglare (Prog 234, 17th October 1981). It opens with an exhortation to readers to remember previous stories, albeit ones that have never actual existed: this recalls the ‘unavailable story’ idea evident in Marvelman and Captain Britain. The use of alliteration also alludes to Stan Lee's characteristic usage, when Rocket Redglare is described as being the ‘sentinel of the spaceways and enemy of evil extra-terrestrials.’

In ‘Rocket’ the standard hero versus villain fight is subverted by making it a staged exercise in public relations. Rocket Redglare is an older superhero who is having image and financial problems, portrayed here for comedic effect: he is an overweight superhero who has to wear a corset to fit into his costume:

He arranges to stage an invasion with his own nemesis, Lumis Logar, in order to boost his popularity and earn more money. However, the villain takes the opportunity to take his final revenge in a twist ending, and Redglare is killed, which confounds reader expectations that the hero should win. Furthermore, Moore’s interest in the aging superhero is at odds with a genre where characters never age in order to remain commercially viable, and prefigures his more profound dealing with this theme on Marvelman and Watchmen.

The expectation of where a story will go, an expectation built upon previous stories' developments that have become predictable (or stereotypical), is a concern of narratology. Scholars such as Vladimir Propp and Joseph Campbell showed how plot progression can conform to established patterns. Moore uses these patterns and subverts expectations for comedic effect here. By having the hero work with the villain, and having the villain triumph at the end of the story, Moore is drawing on wider archetypal story structures, and this is a kind of intertextuality in itself. As such, there appears to be levels of intertextuality at work: Rocket Redglare is, on one level, a Flash Gordon pastiche: moving the frame of reference outward to the next 'broader' level he is a spaceman hero who is written within recognisable generic conventions, albeit subverted ones; finally, at a broader level upwards again he is a 'hero' in the Proppian and Campbellian sense. Subverting an expectation on one level (e.g. the 'Flash Gordon' level) also leads to subverting the wider levels ('spaceman hero' and 'hero'), in turn subverting specifically the narrative expectations implicit in the Proppian and Campbellian models.

Another manifestation of such subversion is found in ‘Bad Timing’ (Prog 291, 20th November, 1982), which subverts the origin story of Superman. Its intertextual relationship with the precursor text is mandatory for understanding the full scope of what Moore is trying to achieve.  The story begins in 1938, which is the first subtle indication of the relationship with the Superman character that is being forged here: his first appearance occurred in Action Comics #1 (June 1938). The story works on the concept of a doomed planet and a scientist who sends his infant son to Earth.

A short summary of Moore’s changes will illustrate how indebted this piece is to Superman’s origin story: Krypton becomes Klackton; Superman’s parents Jor-El and Lara are transformed into R-Thur and L-Sie; Superman’s Kryptonian name Kal-L becomes N-Ree. The names Moore gives to his character are based on more familiar names (Arthur, Elsie and Henry respectively), and the name of the planet is probably based on the British resort town of Clacton-on-Sea. Also, a reader will not even need to have read the original version in Action Comics #1 (or a reprint): they may have read a recounting of the events from any number of subsequent Superman comics, seen the 1978 film, or know of the origin from a third party: the story has passed into the wider culture through the propagation of memes like ‘Krypton’ and ‘Clark Kent’, which are recognisable to people all over the world. 

Moore’s twist on this is having the planet not explode, and for the infant’s craft to inadvertently signal a nuclear war in 1983. ‘Bad Timing’ was published on 20th November, 1982, predating the year that the alien craft nears Earth, 1983, only by a small margin. In the 1980s the threat of nuclear armageddon was an important topic, and Moore taps into the resulting anxiety it caused by showing its effects as occurring in the then very near future. The presence of nuclear anxiety also foreshadows its use in V for Vendetta and Watchmen.

Such foreshadowing underscores the assertion made above that these stories prefigure the later, major works in Moore’s oeuvre. In this, the value of these early stories in assessing the development of Moore’s skills, the thematic and formal development of his work, and the trajectory of his whole career should not remain underestimated.

Andrew Edwards is a comics scholar and writer. His research interests include comics and graphic novels, science fiction, horror, intertextuality, and representations of gender.  He gained his PhD in intertextuality and gender in the work of Alan Moore in 2018 at Wrexham Glyndwr University, where he also works as an Academic Skills Tutor. He is currently writing a book about Moore, Bissette, Totleben and Veitch’s Swamp Thing for Sequart. He can be followed on Twitter: @AndrewEdwards88

'Less is Moore: Alan Moore's 2000AD Short Stories,' Andrew Edwards (Part 1 of 2)

British comics have been dominated by the anthology format throughout their history. Theirs is an origin that runs parallel with American comics, up to a certain point, in that titles like Action Comics and Detective Comics were originally anthology titles. However, each issue would later become dominated by stories featuring one character, such as Superman in Action Comics and Batman in Detective Comics, in a number of short adventures, before their final evolution into one story per issue and, ultimately, multi-part serialised adventures. British comics never made that leap into character dominated titles. Variety served as the fuel that powered titles like the Dandy and Beano, Eagle and Hotspur, Action and 2000AD to greatness. Only the Beano and 2000AD have survived the cull of titles in the local newsagent, although this is mitigated by the strong showing independent comics have made in this country in recent years.

In terms of 2000AD, characters that match their American peers in terms of inventiveness and appeal abound. This is the title that brought us Judge Dredd, Strontium Dog, Halo Jones and dozens more. No doubt its nature as an anthology has led to its longevity; even through fallow periods, there is always another serial ready in the wings to potentially engage, amaze or astound us. Yet beyond the main attractions, or star turns, of 2000AD exist the ‘Future Shocks’ and ‘Time Twisters’, which are short, twist ending stories. They were conceived as being very much in the style of Twilight Zone or Outer Limits episodes.  This format was first used by Steve Moore with his story ‘King of the World’ (in issue, or ‘Prog’ 25, 25th August 1977). They came to be the training ground of numerous British writers who went on to more visible work both in the UK and USA, none more so than Alan Moore, who wrote over 50 of stories. These stories saw him gain experience of writing short narratives at a greater length than his early cartoons for Sounds, and enabled him to undertake early experiments with the form of comics and genre expectations. The remainder of this article discusses a representative selection of these works to give you an indication of Moore’s early achievements in this context.

One early experimental piece, ‘The English/Phlondrutian Phrasebook’ (Prog 214, 30th May 1981) plays with the format of the comic page by suggesting a futuristic handheld electronic language guide, with four screens that effectively constitute four panels of the comic page, ably designed by artist Brendan McCarthy.

The story, published in 1981, pre-empts hand held computing devices: indeed, the function keys resemble those to be found on tape recorders of the period (see bottom right of the above page); perhaps another potential influence could be the hand held guide that features in Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy. Here, experimenting with the visual form of the comic page serves to reflect the futuristic content on the story.

The relationship between words and images reveals two types of interactions, where meaning is either co-dependent or independent. The full meaning of this panel is dependent on both the words and images.

The image consists of a family running and being pursued by an alien. The word used – ‘Taxi’ – indicates that the man is hailing a taxi, rather than another interpretation of why he is holding out is right arm. Words and images are combined completes the whole meaning of the panel. In Understanding Comics (1994), Scott McCloud’s theory of the relationship between words and images in comics is helpful here, specifically the ‘Interdependent’ combination that he identifies, ‘where words and images go hand in hand to convey an idea that neither could convey alone’. Moore’s text serves as a counterpoint or ‘anchor’ to the action depicted in the panel. This is a precursor to the kind of effects he continued to develop in work like Watchmen, where he would juxtapose text with visual images to create more nuanced interdependent meanings, where dialogue from one scene anchors the visual detail in another, or extracts from ‘Tales of the Black Freighter’ offer an ironic commentary on the main narrative.

Historically, the use of words and images has sometimes been repetitive in comics, in the sense that the former merely repeated the content of the latter in what McCloud calls ‘Duo-specific panels’ in which both words and pictures send essentially the same message:

Moore is not averse to using duo-specific panels. In ‘A Cautionary Fable’ (Prog 240, 28th November 1981). Moore and artist Paul Neary draw on this method in the creation of a story that draws stylistic inspiration from early 20th century comics, in addition to illustrated stories and film.

The story features Timothy Tate, a child whose appetite reaches monstrous and unreal proportions during the course of the story. Duo-specific panels dominate the story in order to replicate the features of older children’s comics and children’s illustrated stories, where images and words contained the same meaning and the use of Interdependent panels would have worked against this and led to a less effective homage.

Moore and Neary produced accomplished pastiches in terms of the respective poetry and illustration used in this story. Moore maintains the strict metre and rhyming scheme required of this type of tale. Neary’s illustrations locate the story within the early twentieth century in terms of fashion styles. This is underscored by the reference to King Kong.

Such media knowledge and literacy is also evident in ‘Chronocops’ (Prog 310, 2nd April 1983), where Moore and artist Dave Gibbons combine a Dragnet inspired police procedural story with time travel, leading to some innovative experiments with time and the construction of comic panels within the story. Its comedic tone and science fiction subject matter also betrays the influence of EC comics, the publishers responsible for MAD and a number of seminal horror and science fiction comics. This influence is boldly signalled with a distinct variation on EC logo in the story.

In order to analyse Moore and Gibbons’ use of panels to reflect time travel it is beneficial to isolate specific panels from their pages. This panel establishes the first of two scenes in the same location that are returned to throughout the story.

Prior to this, cops Joe Saturday and Ed Thursday are have arrested Quarmsley Q. Quaalude for the attempted murder of his own great-grandfather. This panel depicts their arrival at Chronocop H.Q. two hours before they left, and meet the two hours’ past versions of themselves on their way to make the same arrest.

In this panel, both characters meet future versions of themselves, from later in the story, and discover that Ed has a black eye:.

Prior to the next significant panel, we see Ed receive the black eye, and so we now experience the moment from this perspective – having now reached that point in the story which was previously set in the future.

These panels, while chronologically in sequence, are located and interspersed with other scenes and panels.

However, further complications ensue later in the story, when the characters have to revisit the scene and, to avoid further confusion, hide behind a plotted palm.

Observant readers, upon reading the story and checking the previous panels, will now be able to notice the significance of the figures in the plant pot that existed almost subliminally in the background beforehand. Finally, in the events leading up to this next panel, Joe and Ed are disguised as nuns, who we then see walking in the background of the panel and who take on the narrative at this point:

When comparing this to the same scene depicted earlier in the story, the background presence of the nuns is now much more significant and relevant to the story in the hindsight we gain from finishing reading it. This innovative approach is even more interesting when the visual content of each panel is consciously observed: Moore and Gibbons have merely repeated two panels in order to accurately convey the sense that the same moment in time is being revisited by different temporal manifestations of the same characters. This is neatly underscored by minute attention to detail: no feature is altered, and even the time on the clocks on the wall in the background are consistent. Beyond this, the meaning of the panels, in the way they occupy a particular stage in the narrative that is unfolding as the reader reads, is altered through the text that accompanies them.

‘Chronocops’ effectively demands that you read it backwards and forwards to truly appreciate such effects. It also illustrates an usual and beneficial characteristic of the comic book medium is that you can control the direction and speed of your reading quite easily, either when prompted to do like in ‘Chronocops’, or whenever you want to do something like double-check a previous story point, remind yourself of a character’s name and so on. In this, comic books are akin to prose. For a medium like film, until comparatively recently it was not possible to manipulate the flow of experience in such a way, in that a viewer was locked into experiencing a film at the rate of 24 frames per second, in a forward moving, linear chronological sequence of time, one second to the next and so on. This barrier has somewhat eroded in recent years: first, by the advent of home videotape, which enabled some movement back and forth through a film text, albeit it at a pace limited to the rewind and fast forward speeds of the Video Cassette Recorder (VCR); secondly, by the more advanced digital technologies that began with Digital Versatile Discs (DVDs) and continues with Blu-ray discs, which increases a viewer’s ability to navigate their way back and forth through a text. Such formal experimentation in this story foreshadows similar experiments with time and narrative that we later see in relation to Dr Manhattan’s relationship with time in Watchmen #4.

Andrew Edwards is a comics scholar and writer. His research interests include comics and graphic novels, science fiction, horror, intertextuality, and representations of gender.  He gained his PhD in intertextuality and gender in the work of Alan Moore in 2018 at Wrexham Glyndwr University, where he also works as an Academic Skills Tutor. He is currently writing a book about Moore, Bissette, Totleben and Veitch’s Swamp Thing for Sequart. He can be followed on Twitter: @AndrewEdwards88