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

Remembering UK Comics: An Interview with Martin Barker (Part 2 of 2)

Q: You said that you had once intended to produce a social history of The Beano. What is it about The Beano that is worth exploring further in an academic context?

Ah, the Beano.  Possibly the most successful British comic of all time, sadly now just a husk of what it once way.  Formulaic – but what a formula!  So damned inventive in its simple, short, repetitive story-lines with wickedly funny characters. Who doesn’t love Minnie the Minx, or the Bash Street Kids?  For a number of years I gathered all kinds of materials, including sample issues from all its decades, references to it, interviews with writers and artists (I remember with deep affection my meetings with Leo Baxendale).  But it was beyond me.  I should have known that I never really didn’t have the skills or the time to do this.  I think there is something really interesting about the way the Beano found its métier and format the height of the changes in schools in the UK in relation to class, in the 1950/1960s.  I can’t now recall in sufficient detail how I thought this might go, but there was something about a confluence of influences – the puritanism+market instinct of D C Thomson, its publishers, the changes in schooling and relations of kids to parents and authority – which found expression in the comic, its characters and their storylines.  Sad to say, it is another of quite a long list of things that I have wondered about doing, across my researching years, but it ain’t going to be done by me, now.

Q: Although you do not identify as a fan, or aca-fan, of comic books, you energetically argue that you “live in this damned country at this damned time and comics are part of my and my children’s lives. And I now say this passionately: let us have as many of the things as we possibly can. In the face of the capital-calculating machine called Thatcherism which uses morality like murderers use shotguns, all the little things like comics matter.”  Although written in the context of 1980s Britain, can you expand further on this rhetorical framing?

‘Imagination’ is to me a really important term, but it doesn’t have a great history, as something to be thought about.  I remember someone – I can’t remember who, to be honest – pointing out the different ways people tend to gesture when they use the words ‘imagination’, and ‘fantasy’.  With ‘imagination’, hands tend to go up and wave animatedly in the air, as though something light and breezy was being welcomed. With ‘fantasy’, chins go down slightly as though something heavy and slightly disreputable was being named.  Nowadays this shows in the ways in which the arts (what Lynn Conner calls ‘high value arts’ …) are sought, praised, encouraged, studied, compared to the ways – even now – that popular media materials are considered.  I have wanted to reclaim the ways many kinds of cultural materials can help us conceive and wish beyond ourselves and our present circumstances.  I remember the expression used by one young woman whom I ‘interviewed’ (it was done at a distance, by a posted tape recording, way back in the 1980s), who said that her comics were important to her because they ‘let you see how far you could see’.  I absolutely love the openness of that phrasing.  You are right, I did write that in the 1980s – as part of the Afterword to my big Comics and Ideology book.  I must confess I wrote that in a hurry, at the explicit behest of my publisher, who felt the book lacked an ending.  I am not disavowing it at all, by saying that.  But it needs expanding, and in a sense I think a lot of the work I have done since, on audiences for various kinds of ‘fantasy’ is that expansion.  Perhaps the thing I have done that is most directly in line with it, is the essay I did out of the pornresearch project, on the ‘problems’ of sexual fantasies (it appeared in Porn Studies in 2013).  ‘Imagination’ and ‘fantasy come trailing debates, in ways that impede real research.

Q: What first drew you to the medium as an analyst?

Irena C*****a.  It’s all her fault.  She was a final year student at Bristol Polytechnic (around 1981/2), who asked if she could do her dissertation on Superman, using Carl Jung as her implement.  Of course she could – though it struck me as a pretty arbitrary choice of ‘theorist’.  But I had no idea how to supervise her. So I went to the library and searched the (then card-index) catalogue, to see what I could find to help frame her work.  There was almost nothing.  But one thing, one small pamphlet, caught my eye.  It was by someone called George Pumphrey, entitled Comics and Your Children (published by the Comics Campaign Council in 1954).  And it talked about a ‘horror comics campaign’.  I was of course a child of that period, but had never heard of anything like this. So, a streak of sheer bloody-mindedness took hold of me, and I decided I would try to find out what this thing was that my parents – who were brilliant and lovely people, but very traditional – had shielded me from even knowing about.  I was also inclined against and distrustful of censorship, but without having thought deeply about it – I had lived through the campaigns to abolish censorship of theatre, and the struggles over D H Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley.  So, I went into the task of (a) trying to uncover what had happened in the campaign, and (b) gathering and looking at some of the comics concerned, to try to make sense of this ‘missed’ period of my childhood.  I have to say that comics are not a medium that I respond that strongly to, until, that is, I have a reason to examine them closely.  Then, I begin to appreciate their shape and complexity.  But it doesn’t come to me naturally.  So, I had a lot of fun analysing in detail ‘The Orphan’, that infamous story from 1953 that Jack Kamen drew. But had I not had a motive for studying it closely, I doubt it would have lingered long in front of me.

Q: Many scholars have casually—and perhaps lazily—accused Disney of being an ideological factory dealing in suspect material that potentially colonizes the minds of children with racist and gendered stereotypes, thus skewing their image of the world in reactionary terms. As you have stated in an analysis of Donald Duck comics: “Children’s literature has become the prime centre for the ideology of American capitalism […] there can be no more effective form of propaganda than wholesomeness. If anyone attacking it can be branded as ‘anti-children’, you have the perfect device. This is Disney, to the T” (1989, 279, 280). Can you expand on your thinking here? What do you think of the so-called ‘cultural imperialism’ argument? What is it about the figure of the child that dominated moral discourses of this type?

Let’s be clear, first – in that quotation I was trying to summarise a view that I don’t hold to, but which I feel is strongly and widely (and influentially) held.  And around that time, the concept of ‘cultural imperialism’ was a site of a lot of debates.  Though I haven’t followed the debates closely since, I think it is clear that the high tide of those debates has passed.  There are now several books entitled ‘Beyond Cultural Imperialism’ or ‘After Cultural Imperialism’.  The concept was intended to provide a lens through which to see ways in which internationally dominant countries – of course, notably the USA – might importantly sustain their domination through the importation and normalization of their own cultural patterns.  Stories (films, books, comics, etc) were identified as means by which this might be done.  I wasn’t convinced, even though I could feel the strong pull and argumentative conviction of Dorfman and Mattelart’s key book How To Read Donald Duck (produced in Chile not many years before the real American domination – a CIA-backed coup, led by General Pinochet).  The irony is that the work which I most drew on was the wonderful work of David Kunzle, who researched and told the history of the ‘good artist’ who produced the great bulk of the Disney Comics stories, Carl Barks – and David was content to use the term ‘imperialism’.  Looking at the comics themselves (and without the benefit of anything approaching reception evidence or audience research), I became convinced that, textually, they showed the influence of two competing fascinations: a love of money for its own sake, and a fear of power and chaos.  There was also of course the issue of humour – does it work to make Disney ‘innocent’, does it modify the message, does it satirise and undermine?  At that time, it was a tiny research area.  Now, it is a big area within media and cultural studies, and I don’t have a clue how my ideas from that time would stand up to consideration from the much enriched field as it is now.

Q: In much of your work, the concept of ideology is centre-stage. What are your thoughts on ideological analysis conducted without speaking to audiences? How does your ‘dialogical approach to ideology’ attempt to re-situate the argument, and why did you think it was necessary?

You must understand first of all that the period I tackled this was a kind of high water mark of attempts to theorise and research the concept of ‘ideology’. Dozens of books were written about the concept – and even one or two important empirical studies (I am thinking nostalgically about the Dominant Ideology Thesis, and the work of several brilliant social historians).  There were endless disquisitions about the place of ‘ideology’ within Marx’s theory.  The concept reverberated with important anti-colonialist movements.  By the end of the 1980s, however, the term was largely being dropped, replaced by the softer/looser, less demanding ‘discourse’ – which then easily pluralised into ‘discourses’. 

But at the time, it felt important to think how one might formulate a conception of ideology that didn’t ignore questions of evidence about ‘influence’ (in some versions, ‘ideology’ was the left-wing version of the ‘effects’ tradition).  And I tried to do this, through a long struggle with the ideas of Valentin Volosinov, the Russian linguist – for whose work I still have a huge admiration.  I suspect that my chapter on ‘A dialogical approach to ideology’ shows all the signs of having been a struggle to make sense of a really difficult book – but I think it still stands up.  The key concept at the end of the struggle, is Volosinov’s concept of ‘little speech genres’: that is, located and historically specific modes of speaking and hearing that carry within them the results of all kinds of struggles to manage (bits of) the social world.  I am sure that it would not be difficult to build links and connections to some of Antonio Gramsci’s works on the politics of culture.  But Volosinov was the key, to me.  ‘Power’ in ideology thus became not like ‘effects’ or ‘affordances’ or anything like that – it became a function of the operations of institutions which provide homes to ‘little speech genres’.  Is that the same as Foucault’s notion of distributed discourses?  I don’t think so – but I can see that the topic deserves debate.

Q: In From Antz to Titanic, you write that scholars who write about audiences without speaking to audiences end up ‘constructing figures of the audience’ through ‘imputation’. What do you mean by this?

I’m not alone in this.  There is now a strong body of really good scholarship on what I have called ‘figures’, and what others have called ‘images’, or ‘myths’, or ‘presumptions’ of the audience.  Perhaps my favourite book on this is one that is a bit weird, but hugely interesting:  Edward Schiappa’s Beyond Representational Correctness (2008).  Schiappa is a very ‘American’ (in the sense of the methods he uses) communications researcher, who examines the ways scholars of television in particular arrive at conclusions about the impact of shows on their audiences from forms of textual enquiry.  He simply and insistently asks: can we check and see if these claims can be operationalized and tested?  OK let’s mount a small experiment …  And of course they don’t stand up.  Still, who cares?  Our fields are generally not that taken with the idea of ‘testing claims’.

But where Schiappa is particularly concerned with strands of academic thinking and practice, I am as much concerned with the role of claims about the audience in the general public arena.  Some of these are so small and local as to matter not a whit: when a reviewer asks ‘what will the audience make of this?’, then s/he is not making strong claims about the unity and vulnerability of viewers.  But the claims are often carried forward by more disturbing rhetorics, and by images (I have in my collection an illustration from the Daily Mail from the time of the video nasties campaign, showing a horned creature watching the TV screen, implying without saying that the ‘nasties’ are the work of the devil, with a headline screeching that children are being ‘taken over by something evil from the screen’ …).  So I prefer the term ‘figure’ because it reaches more widely.  It includes everything from those relatively benign use of the expression ‘the audience’ by reviewers, to highly condensed and charged claims about what must be happening as ‘they’ read/watch/listen to whatever ignites the fury of moral campaigners.  Sometimes they construct semi-coherent ‘theories’ of how the ‘effects’ they fear are generated.  Sometimes they work simply by denunciation.  But it has long struck me as part of the responsibility of people in our (relatively privileged academic) situations, to try to draw out their claims, examine them in broad daylight, and bring expertise to bear on testing them.  Sadly, too many who work in our fields are content just to contribute to their construction rather than their testing – nowhere more so, in my experience, than in people who work with ‘spectatorship theory’. 

I happened to re-read the other day a short piece I wrote in Screen in 2002, about academic responses to David Cronenberg’s film Crash, which was the locus of one of my first big audience research projects (with two colleagues, Jane Arthurs and Ramaswami Harindranath).  I talked about my (genuine, not put-on) astonishment that hardly one film academic spoke up in defence of the film, when it was attacked for over a year in the UK, the Daily Mail making all kinds of stupid claims about its ‘dangers’.  Instead, Screen published a series of ‘analyses’ of the film which, when I looked at them, were built on a kind of up-side-down version of the Mail was claiming about the film.  The Mail and its allies were scared that the film might ‘arouse’, or ‘heat up’ people’s interests in sex and cars.  The academic analyses were all about the question of whether the film was ‘cool’, ‘distancing’ (because if it wasn’t, that was a ‘bad sign’).  All in the name of ‘film theory’…  I found – and still find – that kind of thing simply irresponsible.

Q: You have studied audiences for a considerable portion of your lengthy academic career. What have you learned about audiences? Why is it important in your mind to consider reception and audiences? Are there common themes and conventions that continue to emerge, patterns as well as divergences?

I dread this question.  It is one I sometimes ask myself, and am never very happy with any answer I give myself.  I fall back, in my mind, on a series of particulars (this audience here, that context there) – and to some extent that has to be right.  Asking the question is risks being the equivalent of asking a chemist what he has learned in his career about ‘chemicals’ – to which the only answer could be ‘which ones, in what contexts, interactions’, etc?.  One of the things that I have learnt as an audience researcher is the sheer power and complexity of context.  People fashion their responses to cultural materials out of personal factors (their individual histories, ages, company, novelty, previous encounters, etc, etc – there are going to be a lot of those), physical situation (where and how they encounter the materials – from locality, architecture and scale, right up to warmth, hunger, need for the loo, etc, etc – here we go again), circulating attitudes and discourses that they butt up against (gossip, debates, reviews, etc, etc), larger configurations (assumed ways of doing things in their period, generation, friendship groups, etc, etc), and … add your own long list of etceteras.  A big challenge for audience researchers, it seems to me, is never to lose sight of the operation of all these complex contexts, yet still to try, as honestly as we can, to identify patterns and tendencies, connections and structures. 

There are however some recurrent outcomes of all the audience researches I have done.  Perhaps most importantly is captured by the highly tricky word ‘engagement’.  Liz Evans (from Nottingham University) is publishing a book on this in December 2019 (Understanding Engagement in Transmedia Culture).  She argues, rightly, that we need to be cautious how we use this, since it has become a powerful marketing term/ambition (how to ‘engage’ consumers deeply).  But she acknowledges that it is a term she is regularly tempted to use herself.  I am, too.  I am much taken with the rising interest, in various areas, in dense engagement with media.  Fan studies is one branch of this, without question.  But it appears elsewhere in various forms. I simply love Alf Gabrielsson’s Strong Responses to Music, which is based on the talk of devotees of many different kinds of music, and explores the ways people characterise how the music impacts on them.  Some of these would no doubt be classable as ‘fans’, in the sense of engaging in multiple arenas with talk and materials about their beloved traditions, but some are essentially private.  I recall too with affection an early book by an unusual neuroscientist who was fascinated by the way people become Lost In A Book (Victor Neil’s title for his 1988 study).  What these and a range of other studies seem to me to show, is that the denser a person’s engagement with whatever cultural form is their choice, the more complicated, ‘slowed’, combinatory (sensory, cognitive, emotional, evaluative) their response is. 

For the rest, the most important things I have learned about audiences is (a) their localised unpredictability – moving from one context to another, you rarely find the same things, and people also evolve their responses and views, (b) in the main, if they trust you, they are extraordinarily generous with their time and thoughts.  A few years back I stumbled over one response in our database of completions of our Hobbit questionnaire.  It was from a Syrian refugee, writing from Russia where she had fled the war, but writing about how the English language was so important to her as something beyond her war-torn country (and an abusive father as well).  She talked at great length about the importance of Tolkien’s work in keeping her sense of possibilities for a better world alive.  I wrote about her in an essay I published in a Finnish journal Fafnir, because she touched me greatly.

What I have just said, I have long realised leaves me in a tricky position. If audiences are so localised, and so mobile, can there be much in the way of a general theory of audiences and audiencing?  I am genuinely unsure.  While I work on that, or until I conk out, I will hopefully carry on with the work on Participations – which seems to me to exemplify that wonderful panorama of differences, localization and complexity that I am talking about !!!!

Martin Barker is Emeritus Professor at Aberystwyth University, and Visiting Professor at UWE Bristol.  Following a career which began in 1969, he finally – with a small sigh of relief – retired from teaching in 2015, but is still doing research as he is able.  Across his research life, he has studied (among other things) contemporary British racism, children’s comics, censorship campaigns, and a variety of particular films.  But he has over the last twenty years particularly focused on the development of audience research in a cultural studies mode – including trialling and developing a mode of quali-quantitative research.  He is founder and now Joint Editor of Participations, the online journal of audience and reception studies.  His major audience projects include the international Lord of the Rings, Hobbit, and Game of Thrones projects, and he has led contracted research for the British Board of Film Classification on audience responses to screened sexual violence.

Remembering UK Comics: An Interview with Martin Barker (Part 1 of 2)

Introduction: How do you know what you know?

William Proctor

I hope everyone had an opportunity to take a breather over the Christmas holidays, and have now woken up in 2020 all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed!

We return to the ‘Remembering UK Comics’ series this week with a special interview with Professor Martin Barker, who I’m sure many comic studies scholars know from A Haunt of Fear: The Strange History of the British Horror Comics Campaign (Pluto Press, 1984) ,Comics: Ideology Power and the Critics (Manchester University Press, 1989), and Action: The Story of a Violent Comic, (1990), all of which provide exceptional, insightful studies of the medium, its receptions, and its audiences.

I first became aware of Martin’s work as an undergraduate at Sunderland University in the North-East of England, courtesy of Professor Clarissa Smith (who was incidentally supervised by Barker for her PhD, which became the excellent monograph One for the Girls! The Pleasures and Practices of Reading Woman’s Porn, 2007). Martin’s work upended everything I thought I knew about audiences, about media effects, about academic studies that were built on less than solid grounds for the vaunted claims that were being made. More often than not, Martin’s work—and indeed, Martin himself—challenged me to maintain a vigilant watch on my assumptions and prejudices, which of course we all have whether we care to admit it or not. One of the questions Martin once asked me over dinner one evening actively threw me into a philosophical tailspin for days, a seemingly innocuous question that I believe has served me well ever since. I don’t recall what we were discussing, but the question is there, burned on my brain for all-time, a scholarly scar that I’m especially proud of.

How do you know what you know?

I didn’t know how to answer that at all! I know what I know because I know it? That’s a tautology if ever there was one!

I believe that Martin was asking a simple question about the epistemological foundations of whatever argument or position I was espousing. This kind of query underscores a lot of Martin’s work over the past four decades or so (at least in my reading). I want to expound further as I think it’s an important point that Martin was making.

How do you know what you know?

“Erm, I’ve read books and stuff”?

That just won’t cut it with Martin.

If we reframe Martin’s question, it becomes even simpler:

What evidence do you have that supports your claims?

Let me offer an example from Martin’s work that should challenge and provoke our common-sense beliefs.

In one article, Martin diligently pursues the thorny concept of ‘identification’, a concept that has oftentimes been mobilized by American Behavioral ‘Scientists’ to establish, and thus prove, that casual links exist between fictional media and the behavior of its audiences. Many readers probably understand this model interchangeably as the ‘magic bullet,’ or ‘hypodermic needle’ theory, terms which can be understood as part of the so-called media effects tradition. In very basic terms, the media effects tradition treats audiences as little more than empty containers to be filled up by insidious and sinister ‘messages’ transmitted by ‘the media’ (whether TV, film, comics, and what have you).

In many ways, ‘media effects’ has long been empirically debunked for decades in academic circles, or I should say, in some academic circles. It is perhaps surprising that the concept lives on, and remains a powerful way of (mis)understanding the way in which media forms ‘do stuff’ to us, be that psychologically, behaviorally, and/ or emotionally. Many embracers of ‘media effects’ have found it difficult to provide solid foundations for their claims, primarily because the tradition is akin to a house of cards trying to maintain its structure in a hurricane. Yet it persists.

In relation to ‘identification’, Barker writes:

“The concept of ‘identification’ remains a commonly-called upon resource for considering how media audiences might be influenced into taking up moral and cultural positions. Yet very little empirical evidence exists to support its claims; and recent critical conceptual work has undermined many constituent parts of it […]  If audiences ‘identify’ with particular media characters, they come to ‘take part’ in the story to a depth where they become open to its ‘values’, or ‘messages’. The concept belongs to a domain of thought concerned with audiences’ vulnerability […] the concept was at work, albeit without the particular word to express it, as early as the 1850s. Its component parts were at work within, for example, 19th-century scares about the influence of Penny Dreadfuls. This is important, for it suggest that we have here a concept that benefits by remaining unclear “(Barker’s italics, 353-54).

At the heart of Barker’s critique here is that ‘very little empirical evidence exists to support its claims’.

How many times have we been confronted with claims about media ‘messages’ anchored to the concept of ‘identification’? Unfortunately, it is so much a part of accepted wisdom and common-sense that we don’t tend to query these claims, and some academics continue to mobilize their ‘evidence’ in similar ways. The question, then, ‘how do you know what you know?’, becomes less neutral than it seems at first. It is essentially a question about epistemology, about the empirical foundations that support and do not support scholarly claims in this arena. How many times have you read academic studies that use terms like ‘messages’ without solid foundations provided by empirical data? How have these ideas and concepts been tested?

How do you know what you know?

I have been very fortunate to have had many opportunities to speak with Martin about these kinds of issues, some of which I admit had never crossed my mind during my PhD years. When I was thinking about conducting a large-scale audience project based around the first Star Wars film under Disney’s control, Martin kindly invited me to his home in Aberystwyth, Wales, to talk through the challenges that he faced, and the methodology he created, on various audience studies: from the Crash controversy of the 1990s and the Sylvester Stallone/ Judge Dredd film  to the Lord of the Rings and World Hobbit projects. Martin is very experienced at working with ‘big’ data sets, a ‘richly structured combination of data and discourses’ of a size not that common in academia. Respectively, the Lord of the Rings study captured almost 25,000 responses, while the World Hobbit project garnered 36,109.

One of the things we discussed at Martin’s home was psychoanalysis. I don’t think Martin would mind if I said that he has been openly critical of psychoanalytic approaches to culture. Indeed, in the introduction to From Antz to Titanic: Reinventing Film Analysis (2000), Martin admits that ‘one of the main motives for writing this book is my dislike of psychoanalytic modes of film analysis’, partly because he has ‘sympathy for students’ frequent sense that to read the stuff is to take forced marches through jungles of jargon, behind whose every frond lurks a phallic snake, biting, accusing’ […] But mainly, I reject psychoanalytic accounts because their findings resolutely refuse any kind of empirical verification (13).

How do you know what you know?

I explained to Martin that psychoanalysis might well be little more than an intellectual parlor game, replete with assumptions and imputations, but its users have the critical upper hand in a sense. Which is to say, psychoanalysts rely on the ‘subconscious’ as a ‘get out of jail free’ card. One doesn’t need empirical evidence if we’re talking about the subconscious—no-one has access to the subconscious activities of their own, never mind audiences.

Martin’s response was brief yet profoundly impactful on my thinking, and has remained so ever since

“I don’t believe in the subconscious.”

Imagine that! What if everything we think we know about the human mind, and the subconscious is not supported by empirical evidence (it isn’t)? Yet like ‘identification,’ perhaps even more so, we use the idea of the subconscious in everyday conversations. It is common-sense, naturally, but it could be nonsense too! Indeed, even the psychoanalytic community have admitted that it’s wholly theoretical and unfalsifiable (and as a consequence, unjustifiable); that is, it can neither be proved or disproved.

To this, Martin recommended a book by Valentin Voloshinov called Freudianism: A Marxist Critique, a heady text that I wouldn’t recommend for bedside reading. I openly admit that I may not have yet grasped the finer granularities of Voloshinov’s argument—he is one of those theorists that are intensely tough to grasp, in my view— but it is worth checking out all the same.

(I should say that Martin wasn’t saying he’s right and everyone else is wrong. I often view Martin as someone who relishes chucking spanners into the works as a way to complicate and challenge what we believe to be ‘true.’)

That afternoon, we chatted more about this, and other topics, and I strongly believe that the many discussions we have had over the years has made me a stronger scholar. In many ways, my engagement with the concept of what Bridget Kies and I describe as ‘toxic fan practices’ came about precisely because of the imputations and assumptions made by journalists (and scholars). ‘Why are (some) Star Wars fans so toxic?’ ‘Fandom is so toxic right now.’  ‘The alt-right claims credit for the Last Jedi backlash’.

How do these commentators know what they know?

Who knows!

I’d like to thank Martin for his work, his generosity, his friendship, and for posing that question while we ate dinner one gloomy night in Newcastle. I am both fortunate and very grateful to have had the opportunity to discuss and debate many topics over the years, discussions that have had such a massive influence and impact on my life in academia thus far.

Oh, and Martin kindly passed on his collection of Action to me, with only one rule: ‘enjoy them.’ And I have,. and will continue to do so.

In the interview that follows, Martin and I discuss his career, with a particular focus on UK comics and those early, seminal studies that anyone interested in not just comics, but audiences, ideology, media effects, politics, etcetera. should most certainly check out. Be careful though: you may need to check your assumptions and prejudices at the door. But that’s not a bad thing. Not at all.

William Proctor

———————-

Q: You’ve done a lot of work on censorship and debunking media effects arguments. Can you say a bit about how the British horror comics campaign fits into bigger debates and trends in censorship practice? What can it teach us? 

Just a quick word at the beginning about how and when I did this research.  It was in fact my first foray not just into comics research, but also historical and empirical research – and I learnt as I went (it was the early 1980s).  That was both lucky and unlucky.  Lucky, in that my naivety let me trip over things that might otherwise have remained hidden (particularly when I interviewed surviving campaigners); unlucky, in that it took me quite a few years to learn how to fill in gaps in the historical knowledge (in particular when I finally got round to looking at British Government Cabinet Papers).  Unlucky, in that one organisation destroyed key materials just as I was approaching them about the period.  Lucky, in that they felt really guilty about this, and so made me a present of a surviving piece of materials which gave me some key insights!

What I would now say is this. The anti-crime/horror comics campaigns were simply exceptional, in the sheer number of countries involved (more than 20).  But, as emerges very clearly from John Lent’s (1999) Pulp Demons, there were a whole series of local drivers which meant that the local campaigns were in some ways distinctive.  And there is no question but that the local colouration of the British campaign owed a great deal to the role played by the British Communist Party, which staffed and financed and motivated the campaign as part of its attempt to attack ‘Americanisation’ of culture.  I would say that revealing the part played by the CP, via their various publications on the topic, was a key contribution.  I was able to show in particular that there was a decisive shift in their rhetorics in 1953, from talking of ‘American culture vs British heritage’, to ‘horror vs children’ – because it depoliticised the public image of their campaign, and helped to ‘hide’ their involvement.  But the price – that they ended up attacking some of the few elements of anti-McCarthyism coming out of America in this period, in the EC Comics – is a horrible irony.  These were the EC Comics, which used melodramatic Grand Guignol story-lines to take various strands of extreme American conservatism, nationalism and racism to task.  

So, to me the lessons of this are that (a) we cannot trust the rhetorics used by campaigners – they regularly conceal their motives behind a front of words which make them as publicly acceptable as possible.  ‘Protecting children’ – who could possibly object to that?  I found precisely the same with the later ‘video nasties’ campaign, whose leaders hid fundamentalist Christian motives behind a rhetoric of ‘protecting children’ – and literally invented evidence to this end. 

(b) I mentioned earlier my ‘luck’ in being given a very useful item.  It was one of the last surviving copies of the filmstrip used by speakers from the British National Union of Teachers when they (belatedly) joined in the campaign, as part of their attempt to prove how ‘professionally concerned’ they were for their kids.  It contained a farrago of now-almost-unobtainable strips.  But there was one panel from one panel, which I still use in talks I do about censorship.  Called ‘When You Die’, just the opening panel was reproduced in the filmstrip, giving a wildly dishonest impression of its nature.  Actually, when seen in full, it is a really weird bit of (ironic?) discourse on ‘America as heaven’ … wow.  And that is my next point.  What the horror comics campaign taught me was that there are important – if very complicated – politics at work behind both the campaigns, and the comics (or whatever other cultural forms) that come under attack.  This became really important for me when I did my work on the censoring of the British comic Action (1976).  But there again, I just got dead lucky in gaining access to archives of materials which told such a different story than the official version.

(c) But the residue that these campaigns leave behind become part of a sequence, a point brilliantly made by Geoff Pearson’s Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears (a superb book, sad that he died just a few years ago – I was really pleased when he agreed to write an essay for my ‘video nasties’ edited collection).  Thirty years on, the horror comics campaign was being cited as just the kind of campaign that was needed to ‘protect children’ from the evil of ‘video nasties’.  A sort of ‘we did things better then’. 

Q: In your book, Comics: Ideology, Power and the Critics, you cover a lot of ground regarding UK Comics. In the case of Action, you argue: “I am confident that the ‘problem’ of Action was not a simple as ‘violence’. It was in fact a political objection’ (1989, 45). What was it about the comic that ‘stood at the edge of radicalism’, ‘of a very radical politics’ that ‘couldn’t be allowed’? (1989, 49).  

Action was attacked as an example of ‘violence’ – and it certainly used conflict, including physical confrontations, as one of the vehicles of its stories.  But the key thing about the comic’s various stories was their focus on confrontations with authority.  Sometimes these were generically safe enough, as in the strip ‘Dredger & Breed’, which is set in the world of John le Carré and other spy narratives – but notice the evident hints at class as a dimension within the characters.  Others were more overtly about contemporary, lived class experiences and conflicts – think ‘Probationer’, or ‘Kids Rule OK’ – both of which focus directly on young people’s conflicts with agents of the State.  Here too, for me, the key moment came when a gap emerged between the public rhetorics and the detailed actions.  Action was withdrawn ‘for reconsideration’ after a series of attacks from public figures, including politicians, moral campaigners and journalists.  I was told that at the key editorial meeting a member of senior management gave an instruction to the editorial staff: ‘He told us to take out all the adult political stuff and turn it back into a boys’ adventure comic’.  And when I had the luck, then, to get into their archive, and be able to reconstruct what had been intended as the story-arcs, and then compare then panel by panel with what was seen as ‘acceptable’, the shift away from any kind of class politics became brutally clear. 

The point was that at a time when comics generally were losing readership, at the time of its withdrawal and castration Action was bucking the trend and seeing rising sales – and an unprecedented kind of committed readership.  Pat Mills, its founding editor, doesn’t fully agree with me about this – I have a really high regard for Pat and his work over the years – but I am convinced that, far from ‘going too far’ (Pat’s view), Action was on the edge of doing something really without precedent: it was offering young boys – especially working class boys – a pretty direct mirror of their own situations, and fantasies, in a period of rising conflict of many kinds. 

So the emergent politics were a very imprecise but interesting example of anti-authority rebellion – a distrusting of those with power, and an acting on (young) people’s own behalf.  They were of course very unspecific, but that doesn’t entirely undo their significance.  This comic was ‘on the side’ of young rebellious working class boys.

I believe that I showed this very concretely when I had the extraordinary luck to be allowed unfettered access to the IPC archive, and was able to reconstruct the pages of the comics that had been bowdlerised under that ‘take the politics out …’ regime, and identify concretely the changes/losses to the individual stories (sometimes blatant, as in ‘Hellman of Hammerforce’, where the picture of Stalin vanished; sometimes more complicated).  The guts of that work appeared in the now-so-hard-to-get-hold-of Action: the Story of a Violent Comic. 

Q: In your work, you have often rejected, or at least questioned, the popular use of the term ‘violence’ as a catch-all. Can you share your thoughts on the concept as it tends to be related to comics, to film, and other media representations?

You are right to call it a ‘concept’ – it is not a descriptive term.  I have to refer to another essay I wrote, which will almost certainly not be known to any of your readers.  It was titled ‘Violence Redux’, and appeared in a very interesting book New Hollywood Violence (edited by Steven Schneider, 2004).  In it, I try to show that the concept ‘violence’ was once a very new term, replacing ones like ‘delinquency’ (which is more specific and class-located) – and that this began effectively and non-accidentally in the mid-1960s, as waves of discontent and new social and political movements emerged in many countries (student movements, anti-Vietnam War, anti-racist, feminist movements, for example).  A key revealing document, because all the fears get exposed in it, was the extraordinary Presidential Inquiry into the Causes and Prevention of Violence, produced and published in the USA in the late 1960s.  Mostly, it is a remarkably radical document – rooting the high levels of violence in America in slavery, extremes of wealth, and the like.  But then in its final Section, it turns its attention to the anti-War movement – and suddenly the language changes.  The war is not ‘violence’, but opposition to it is, and the probable causes of that are … television coverage, which ‘rouses emotions’.  This gave renewed life to the linear ‘effects’ tradition of studying the media, which dominated discourse for the next twenty years.  So, my insistence is that ‘violence’ is a concept, not a descriptive term.  It tends to carry with it a skein of assumptions, about randomness, location in weak, prone individuals.  It couples easily with claims about ‘cumulative effects’ (the more you see, the more you are influenced.)  And so on.  I have come back to this on a number of occasions, directly and indirectly.  It leads to simple absurdities, since on its own admissions the most dangerous media materials are cartoons such as Tom and Jerry because simple ‘counting’ processes identify these as the ‘most violent’.  Bonkers.

Martin Barker is Emeritus Professor at Aberystwyth University, and Visiting Professor at UWE Bristol.  Following a career which began in 1969, he finally – with a small sigh of relief – retired from teaching in 2015, but is still doing research as he is able.  Across his research life, he has studied (among other things) contemporary British racism, children’s comics, censorship campaigns, and a variety of particular films.  But he has over the last twenty years particularly focused on the development of audience research in a cultural studies mode – including trialling and developing a mode of quali-quantitative research.  He is founder and now Joint Editor of Participations, the online journal of audience and reception studies.  His major audience projects include the international Lord of the Rings, Hobbit, and Game of Thrones projects, and he has led contracted research for the British Board of Film Classification on audience responses to screened sexual violence.

Endings, Beginnings, Transitions: Star Wars in the Disney Era (Part 3 of 3) by Will Brooker and William Proctor

Proctor

The finale of The Mandalorian dropped about one week after the release of The Rise of Skywalker: what are your views on the show now it’s finished its first season?

Brooker

The Mandalorian is straightforward, sometimes corny, with a couple of minor plot holes in each episode, but I also find it thrilling, witty and surprisingly moving, with a very strong sense of character development considering that the protagonist almost never removes his helmet. I was struck, in the finale, by how much I was drawn into and won over by the brief dialogue between two Biker Scouts, who are never named, never previously introduced, and who simply sit around on their vehicles killing time, bickering and delaying the moment when they return to base to face the series villain, Moff Gideon.

The dialogue is banal, everyday stuff, but as they shoot the breeze we gain a strong sense of these two guys, who aren’t committed to the Empire but were just doing a dull job in a quiet outpost until the episode’s action started, and their relationship. It’s Waiting For Godot or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern meets the 1997 fan film Troops, and it gives us a rare insight into the life of an average trooper, who usually just provides cannon fodder for the heroes. There’s a lovely, if obvious, visual gag where they both try to shoot a nearby can with their blasters, and assume their guns aren’t working when they repeatedly miss -- it’s a long term fan joke that Stormtroopers are terrible shots -- and because they don’t take their helmets off, the actors convey character and mood through slightly-exaggerated shrugs, head tilts and nods. I was more fascinated by those two bikers than by many of the named minor characters in The Rise of Skywalker, and it really brought home the difference between the two for me. I was bored through much of the most recent Star Wars movie’s two hours and twenty-two minutes, because I just didn’t feel invested or engaged. The Mandalorian shows it’s possible to draw viewers fully into characters and their situation within a short TV episode; within a five minute scene, even.

It’s undeniable that The Mandalorian provides fan service itself, and here I think it’s easier to pin down who it’s appealing to: Yoda, Mos Eisley, IG droids, Biker Scouts, even Mandalorians are all from the Original Trilogy. But the Troop Transporter I mentioned above had previously featured in the animated series Rebels, and the new weapon revealed in the finale’s final moments, the Darksaber, was also previously seen in both Clone Wars and Rebels, with this appearance marking its entry into live-action canon. So The Mandalorian also pays respectful tribute to the previous Star Wars TV shows, as well as to the first trilogy of films. I think it judges its approach almost perfectly, balancing nostalgic name-checks and throwbacks with twists and innovations: exactly what I would have wanted the sequels to do.

Proctor

I’m not certain how I feel about the finale right now. In the main, I remain happily ambivalent. It was fine, better than I expected, and it was quite funny to see and hear the Biker Scouts shooting the breeze in the scene you discussed (and failing to shoot the can is certainly a slice of fan service, as if we’re all in on a private joke about Stormtroopers being terrible shots). I didn’t like Giancarlo Esposito’s character, Moff Gideon—I couldn’t help but think about his role as Gus in Breaking Bad! I like the fact that we finally learned the Mandalorian’s name—Din Djarin—and that the next part of his mission to protect the foundling will be to scour the galaxy to find his home-world. There are some world-building opportunities there. Although I was pleased with the weekly release schedule for the series, I want to go back and rewatch it all in two or three gulps. I have heard that someone online has edited the series into a six-hour movie. That’s an interesting idea.

Interestingly, the budget for The Mandalorian was $100 million, which I thought seemed high for a live-action TV series. Comparatively, Star Trek: Discovery cost $120 million for fifteen episodes, and includes huge space battles, lavish set designs, and higher production values than any Star Trek series before it, although I think the series suffers from the same blight that the Star Wars sequels did—a fantastic spectacle marred by severe canonical breaches, and poor storytelling.

If we take the sequel trilogy combined, the production budget works out at approximately $900 million for seven-and-a-half hours of Star Wars cinema. Now I recognize that blockbuster films in the Star Wars vein need to make much more profit than streaming platforms like Disney+, but I wonder if budgets have to be so extravagant considering that The Mandalorian is relatively low-key, but still manages to be stronger in story-telling than any of the sequels. With Blumhouse Studios currently attracting a higher return-on-investment with their ‘micro-budget’ model than any blockbuster of recent years, it may be high-time for the bigger players to consider what should be more important: story or spectacle (if they can’t seem to do both together). Remember that Blade Runner 2049 was deemed a catastrophic commercial failure because it only made $150 million, even though it was mostly a critical triumph. If TROS doesn’t at least match up with the box office haul of The Last Jedi, which was almost half what Avengers: Endgame managed, I bet it will be considered a failure too. Perhaps the entertainment-industrial complex should consider if the largest budgets are actually converted into bigger profits. Consider Todd Phillips’ Joker, a film made for $60 million yet still managed to exceed the billion dollar watermark. (For my money, Joker is a far superior film than Avengers: Endgame, but if box office receipts are anything to go by, I’m probably in the minority on that one.)  

I’m sure my thoughts on both The Mandalorian and the Star Wars films in the Disney-era will continue to shift, but for the moment, I’m quite glad that there will be no more movies for a while. And that saddens me.

To finish, I’d like to conduct an experiment, if I may. While searching my hard-drive, I came across the interview I conducted with you almost immediately following the Lucasfilm acquisition in 2012. So let me take you back in time to meet your former self. It’s quite brief, so I’ll include both questions and answers (for posterity, if nothing else). Professor Brooker meet Dr Brooker!

——————————

Q. As a 'Star Wars' fan, how do you feel about the news? i.e excited? indifferent? cautious but optimistic?

A. I would say a combination of the three. I am only really a fan of classic Star Wars, and I am not even sure if I include ROTJ in that. What Star Wars has become, as a franchise, now leaves me cold and disconnected, so in that respect, I am indifferent -- I don't think there is anything left to ruin or spoil that Lucas hasn't already done, and I don't feel much sense of investment, loyalty or protectiveness about the franchise anymore.

However, as a fan of the OT, what I always really wanted to see, when I was 12, was a continuation of the first trilogy -- not prequels at all. So in that respect, something about this announcement touches my inner 12 year old (in a good way).

At first, my reaction was that this would run the franchise even further into the ground, but now I'm feeling that it couldn't get worse, and could actually be rescued.

Q. What would you like to see happen here? i.e storylines, actors, etc?

A. Nathan Fillion as Han Solo. I think he was essentially playing ESB-period Han in Firefly and Serenity, and this would be a perfect choice -- far more perfect than Ewan McGregor as Obi- Wan, for instance.

It would have the resonance of Brandon Routh's tribute to Christopher Reeve in Superman Returns, and Zachary Quinto playing Nimoy's 'Spock' in Star Trek.

In terms of storylines, I think there is a great deal of promising territory to be explored. The overthrow of an empire does not happen in the blink of an eye. Many civilisations that were colonised by the Empire would resist the new Republic regime and see them as an unwelcome, invading, colonising force. In a galaxy-wide empire, there would be multiple pockets of Imperial resistance (which would in turn be a form of new rebellion) -- all the stormtroopers and officers wouldn't surrender at once, across the entire galaxy.

Moreover, we know there is a substantial third strand of gangster culture in the SW galaxy -- the Hutts would not simply accept the new republic on Tatooine. Han Solo didn't even believe in the Jedi -- there is a huge network of smugglers, administrators, spice miners and businessmen who don't care about the Jedi/Sith conflict, and aren't going to take kindly to a new regime, however benevolent it feels it is. And with only one Jedi around, it's not as if the new republic has a ready-made police force as it did in the old days.

Q. Who would you like to see involved on a creative level? [i.e, director, writer etc].

A. Joss Whedon. He would actually be my new hope.

Brooker

I imagine I was singling out Joss Whedon in 2012 because of Firefly, which I was clearly very taken with. I think his most recent movie project was the disastrous Justice League, so I don’t think I have quite that much investment in him any more. However, everything else I said seven years ago sounds pretty solid to me. Obviously, the sequels chose a very different direction, using the original cast and setting the action thirty years in the future, whereas I proposed recasting and exploring the galaxy soon after the end of Return of the Jedi. What’s most striking to me is that I describe a scenario where the Empire has broken down into stubborn outposts and resistance groups, fierce in their loyalty to the old order; where most characters have no reason to believe in the Force; where the New Republic has failed to establish itself convincingly, and where we focus on smugglers, miners, criminals and petty officials doing business in the aftermath of galactic conflict. If you replaced my suggestion of the Hutts with the Bounty Hunters’ Guild, I was almost pitching The Mandalorian there.

On a purely personal level, when I think back further to what I dreamed of in 1983 and what I would have told you I wanted from a Star Wars sequel once Return of the Jedi was over, I’m saddened to consider how far removed the actual films are from what I imagined. To an extent that is because of the simple length of time between 1983 and the present day; if Ford, Fisher and Hamill had agreed to shoot a new trilogy in 1987, for instance, we might have had something closer to my ideal. And of course, I’m very different now from the person I was in 1983.

This is not to begrudge anyone else’s enjoyment, but when I consider that gulf between what I wanted, as a teenage Star Wars fan, and what we got, a significant part of me would have rather seen no sequels than the messy trilogy that’s just finished, with its uneven continuity and very mixed critical reception. If we were able to send Episodes VII, VIII and IX back for me to watch in 1983, I think I’d be dismayed by them.

That is, again, an entirely personal, very narrow and subjective response to the films, and I’m not suggesting that anyone else should agree with me; but I think it’s a valid response from the perspective of someone who was an absolutely devoted fan from 1977-1983, kept the faith during the lean years of EU novels during the 1990s, and in the 2000s, wrote two books about the franchise. Looking back, I think it will be difficult not to judge both the prequel and sequel trilogies as deeply flawed projects, both of which should arguably, with hindsight, never have been undertaken.

Kylo Ren argues in The Last Jedi that Rey should ‘let the past die.’ Increasingly I find myself feeling that we should let the past be, and that despite the merits of the six movies that added to the Skywalker saga, I might have just preferred to imagine what happened before and afterwards.

Proctor

I realise that readers may believe we are the academic equivalent of Statler and Waldorf from The Muppet Show, but I’m reminded of something I read as an undergraduate that I’ve kept close to my heart. In a chapter titled ‘The Culture That Sticks to Your Skin: A Manifesto for a New Cultural Studies’ by Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson, and Jane Shattuc, the authors write that ‘we confront that popular culture with a profound ambivalence, our pleasures tempered by a volatile mixture of fears, disappointments, and disgust.’ And in Jenkins’ seminal Textual Poachers, he argues that ‘fandom is born out of a mixture of fascination and frustration.’ As Original Trilogy Star Wars fans, I think we’re quite frustrated with the direction the sequel trilogy went in, but remain fascinated by the potential of what the franchise could be, if managed by the right creative people. We are absolutely being subjective, and of course we would use more objective language for academic outputs; but I don’t think we’re saying anything that hasn’t been said by other fans (although quite what the term ‘fan’ means nowadays is more amorphous than it has ever been, I believe—a conversation for another day!).

When the Disney acquisition was first announced, I was quite excited. I’m all for more Star Wars movies, truth be told. I think we both love popular culture, but that love doesn’t come without conditions, and without criticism. Personally, I’m not overjoyed that audiences have enjoyed the Disney Star Wars films as that would surely mean we will get more badly constructed stories—and story must remain the boss, as Stephen King once put it. There’s no stronger feedback than box office receipts, and if TROS manages to, say, overtake The Force Awakens’ commercial dividends, which isn’t looking at all likely at the time of writing, then I fear that Disney will plough on regardless. That being said, the reviews of TROS are mostly negative from what I’ve seen, and many of the issues we’ve raised with the film here have been articulated by others. Perhaps we’d never be pleased in any case. Perhaps we’re expecting too much. 

Brooker

Ironically, my hopes and expectations for Star Wars are guided by what I wanted to see, or what I think I wanted to see, back in 1983 when I was a boy -- and they make me sound, some 36 years since Return of the Jedi,  like a grumpy old man. But I am happy that there are currently two mainstream, official Star Wars narratives, running at the same time across distinct media platforms, that seem to appeal to different generations and fan groups. If some viewers are thrilled and inspired by The Rise of Skywalker, I think that’s genuinely great. I wouldn’t argue with their interpretation. I’m also very glad that The Mandalorian is providing the kind of Star Wars I enjoy. Perhaps the films can’t please everyone any more, but the fictional galaxy is easily large enough and diverse enough for us to have our own distinct stories. Though I was clearly disappointed by the conclusion to the Skywalker saga, thanks to The Mandalorian I now feel more ‘seen’, more recognised by and engaged with the Star Wars franchise than I have in years.

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). 

William Proctor is Principal Lecturer in Film and Transmedia at Bournemouth University. He is co-editor on the books, Global Convergence Cultures: Transmedia Earth (with Matthew Freeman, for Routledge 2018), and Disney’s Star Wars: Forces of Production, Promotion and Reception (with Richard McCulloch, for University of Iowa Press, 2019). William is a leading expert on reboots, and is currently writing a monograph on the topic for Palgrave titled Reboot Culture: Comics, Film, Transmedia. He has published on a wide-range of topics, including Star Wars, Batman, James Bond, Stephen King, and more.

Endings, Beginnings, Transitions: Star Wars in the Disney Era (Part 2 of 3) by Will Brooker and William Proctor

Proctor

What are your thoughts on TROS, and the Disney-era of Star Wars more generally?

Brooker

First, I should note that I hadn’t seen Anita Sarkeesian’s tweet about The Mandalorian, but I made what seems a very similar observation myself after watching the first episode in November.

I don’t think quantitative approaches to popular culture give us the full picture -- a movie that stars almost entirely women, in which female voices are heard far more often than men, could still be misogynistic -- but I feel they can provide a useful starting point for further discussion. The Bechdel Test was surely never intended as a serious analytical tool, but it nevertheless prompts valuable debate. Since the first episode, The Mandalorian has introduced more female characters, most notably former shocktrooper Cara Dune, played by former MMA fighter Gina Carano. I would personally find it more interesting to consider the fact that Gina Carano is clearly a very strong woman, with visible muscle and broad shoulders, and the way her physicality disrupts the conventional representations of women’s bodies that we see in, for instance, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where even the ‘strong’ superheroines like Captain Marvel and Black Widow tend to be more toned and slim than Carano. So to my mind, it is worth asking what role women play in the narrative, what they say, how they look and what relationship they have to other characters, rather than just how many there are of them. But I’m certain Anita Sarkeesian would agree that adding up numbers and presenting the total is a way to make a clear and striking initial point, rather than a final argument. Far too much has been made of her tweet, I suggest, which she says she wrote when she was tired, and in which she asked a question rather than making a statement. Note that I didn’t get thousands of abusive replies to my tweet saying almost exactly the same thing, and that isn’t just because she has many more followers than me.

As for The Rise of Skywalker, I hardly know where to start. I saw it twice during the opening week and it’s the most disappointing Star Wars movie I have experienced since The Phantom Menace twenty years ago. Despite its poor critical reception, there seems an overall consensus that it was trying to provide ‘fan service’, which to me prompts the question: which fans is this movie serving?

To an extent, there are rewards for fans who like the Original Trilogy best; a glimpse of Bespin, the return of Palpatine and Lando (and Solo), and Chewbacca’s long-awaited medal. And I can understand the argument that J.J. Abrams was trying to -- misguidedly, in my opinion -- appease the vocal minority who complained about Rose Tico, by marginalising her character so dramatically in this movie. I’ve seen the movie satirised as ‘Written and Directed By Reddit’, implying, I think, that it met the demands of white, straight, conservative fanboys.

On the other hand, while it does seem that Abrams deliberately rejected key characters, ideas and narrative prompts -- such as Rey’s parents being ‘nobodies’ -- set up by Rian Johnson in The Last Jedi, he also continued the love-hate dynamic between Rey and Kylo Ren that was only really established in the previous episode, and made use of the flexible Force powers such as the telepathic FaceTime that had played such a role in their troubled romance under Johnson’s direction. Another popular online satire implies, in contrast to the ‘directed by Reddit’ image, that The Rise of Skywalker is fanfic in the mould of the notoriously bad Harry Potter story ‘My Immortal’, and presumably aimed mostly at teenage girls.

So I think critics have a tendency to use the term ‘fans’ without considering that there are many, many conflicting factions of Star Wars fandom -- there have been at least since The Phantom Menace, which I documented back in the day, and no doubt the divisions and debates go back to the late 1970s, though they would be a lot harder to track prior to the internet. It’s equally lazy -- I agree with you here -- for journalists and other commentators to claim that negative response to The Last Jedi was primarily due to racist, sexist fans who disliked the focus on characters like Rose; while I don’t agree with your suggestion that people with bigoted views can be dismissed simply as ‘trolls’’, which implies mischievous provocation for the sake of it, I think there were, again, multiple groups of viewers who were disappointed with Rian Johnson’s film for various and diverse reasons.

Anyway, my objections to The Last Skywalker were primarily due to what I saw as its inconsistency, lack of logic and the gaping, glaring plot holes, which shattered my engagement and enjoyment. It’s telling that there are so many lists of questions about this movie online, some of them presenting a hundred issues: they overlap, but each list finds different problems to raise. It would be tedious for me to present all of my own, but they start right with the opening crawl and continue to the last shot. Why would Palpatine send out a taunting message about his return if his new fleet is a secret which it takes elite agents and spies to uncover, in the film’s second scene? (And why are we being told in text about such a massive upheaval to the galaxy, the titular ‘star wars’ and the ongoing storyline, which has apparently shifted onto an entirely different track since the end of the previous episode?) How are we supposed to know that the opening sequence of Ren defeating a small army of extras was set on Mustafar, and that his opponents were Vader cultists? The information was only given in surrounding paratexts, rather than as part of the film itself. Why, for that matter, would Vader have kept a ‘Wayfinder’ to the Sith planet Exogol in the wilderness of Mustafar, and what was the agenda of the cultists: to protect it for eternity? In that second scene, why does Poe argue with Rey that she should have been on the mission with them to recover information from the Imperial spy? He’s supposedly the Resistance’s best pilot, and he had Finn as a gunner; there was no hand to hand combat or Force ability involved, so why would a Jedi have been of more use on the ship than training back at the base? Jumping ahead, why would the address of the second Wayfinder have been inscribed on a Sith dagger decades ago, and how could its hilt be reliably used as a guide to the precise location of the Wayfinder on the wreck of the Death Star? Why do Poe’s companions react with such scandalised shock to his past as a spice runner, when it’s a carbon copy of Han Solo’s history, and they treated him with awed respect in The Force Awakens? How do Rey and Kylo’s telepathic communications allow them to see each other and touch objects around the other person, but not to detect their location? When they fight, with Kylo on Kijimi and Rey on the Imperial craft, would they each look, to an observer, as if they’re ducking, dodging and swinging sabers alone? I’m happy for films to portray uncanny powers, but I think there must be some rules and logic even to magic, or it becomes a hand-waving, anything-goes free for all.

And skipping all my objections about Palpatine family history, why would it would be appropriate in the final scene for Rey to pay tribute to the Skywalkers on Tatooine? Luke was deeply unhappy there and couldn’t wait to leave. Anakin was a slave who witnessed the murder of his mother there; his violent revenge was part of his turn to the Dark Side. Leia’s only time on Tatooine was spent as the prisoner of Jabba the Hutt. Why, lastly, is the Lars homestead so pristine, like a heritage site? When we last saw it, it was scorched by a Stormtrooper raid, apparently half destroyed. I like nostalgic callbacks, but they must make some sense.

It is possible that a third or fourth viewing would clear up some of these puzzles for me. It is very likely that Abrams could explain his intention in interviews, the way he did with the mystery about what Finn wanted to tell Rey during the entire movie. I don’t doubt that the Star Wars Visual Dictionary would fill in the details for me, the way it does with the minor character Beaumont Kin, apparently a professor in the Star Wars universe and an expert in Sith History. And I expect some spin-off novel, or comic, or Disney+ series, will come along to justify or retcon the more glaring errors. 

But I don’t think I should really have to see a space fantasy blockbuster movie more than twice to make sense of it and be satisfied by its plot and characterisation, and I certainly don’t think I should have to read a Visual Dictionary or a spin-off novel, or watch another TV show, or seek out interviews with the director, to get the full picture. I think that’s a sign of a bad movie, frankly. Because I was so regularly jolted out of the film, I found it very hard to become invested in the heroes and their missions, which involved a complicated and mostly-pointless series of secondary missions and fetch quests; so while they kept insisting earnestly to each other that this was their last chance, this was what they’d been fighting for, this was the one shot they couldn’t fail and so on, none of the emotion felt properly earned to me, and the flat, expository dialogue didn’t help. My only real enjoyment came from the performance of Adam Driver, who I think transcended the material -- his incorporation of Han Solo mannerisms in his final, almost silent scenes was remarkable -- and is leagues above almost everyone else in the cast. 

So overall, while I’m glad a new generation has clearly gained a great deal of pleasure from the sequels, and I’ve enjoyed the world-building, spectacle and adventure to an extent, I am starting to secretly wonder if it would have been better to leave the Star Wars movies as they were, before both prequels and sequels. That makes me sound very much like a nostalgic, veteran purist, or worse, conservative and reactionary, but it’s surely clear that neither of the trilogies produced since 1999 has been anything like as successful -- not commercially, but critically and I’d suggest, aesthetically.  

The new film started me wondering, in fact, whether Star Wars has always been this bad; whether all the movies, right back to 1977, have nonsensical, convoluted plots that don’t make sense when you look twice at them, plus cheesy dialogue and poor acting. I’d have to revisit and reconsider them properly to make sure. I think the Original Trilogy is actually admirably simple and direct though from start to finish, though, and that it tends to avoid the faults of The Rise of Skywalker. As a final anecdote, I clicked on a clip recently, linked from someone’s tweet, and watched Leia explaining to Han that Luke is her brother, as Han reacts with surprise and relief: I was caught up immediately in the moment, and the performances seemed subtle and intelligent. And that’s a brief scene from my least favourite part of my least favourite movie in the Original Trilogy. I don’t think it’s just nostalgia and memories of my childhood that makes those movies work for me. 

Proctor

Personally, I think the Bechdel Test is perfectly fine to spark conversations, especially in class-room situations, but as an academic methodology, it is not only useless, but emphatically absurd. It was never intended as a rigorous scholarly instrument, its origins coming from two-pages within a comic book (by Alice Bechdel, hence the name). I feel very strongly about this, as you can probably tell! There are many films that pass the ‘test’ that have been criticised for misogyny, from Fifty Shades of Grey to Charlie’s Angels (2001), while The Hurt Locker fails to meet the grade, even though it’s directed by Kathyrn Bigelow. Quantitative bean-counting of this nature tells us little to nothing, and I strongly believe it has no place in academic study.  

I think you’re right about the original trilogy. It’s quite a simple story, which is not to say it’s simplistic, and in no way is it as convoluted nor as baffling as the recent sequels. I wonder if the state of blockbuster cinema these days is much more focused on spectacle than narrative, generally speaking. Although that accusation has been levelled at blockbusters since at least the 1970s, I can’t help thinking that films like Jaws, E.T, The Goonies,The Lost Boys, Ghostbusters, the Indiana Jones films, and others, were more successful as stories as well as SFX vehicles. Like you, I don’t think this is simply nostalgia for my childhood. The Rise of Skywalker is an example of bad storytelling, one albeit decorated superfluously with costly SFX, I’d argue. Character arcs are left dangling and incomplete. For all the positives that came with John Boyega’s Finn in The Force Awakens, he has almost zero character development in The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker; and as you rightly point out, Kelly Sue Tran’s Rose Tico is unceremoniously sidelined for much of TROS, which has sparked a hashtag protest since the film’s theatrical release (#RoseTicoDeservedBetter). Moreover, calls for a Disney+ series focused on Rose are currently making the rounds on social media and in entertainment journalism.     

I also saw TROS twice in as many days, and it will be my last, for all of the reasons you illustrate. It’s not worth repeating the same criticisms here, but I’d like to add that I was less cynical when the news surfaced that a new trilogy would be entering pre-production in 2012, that I am now. Overall, the sequel trilogy is at best a missed opportunity, and at worst, a flagrant disregard for the so-called Skywalker Saga. It undermines the victory in Return of the Jedi in many ways, and dilutes the tragedy of Anakin Skywalker. Not that I’m arguing that the prequels are ‘better,’ not by a long chalk. In fact, one of the reasons why I was ‘cautiously optimistic’, as with many Star Wars fans at the time—captured in an article I wrote for Participations—where I partly drew on your methodology in your Using the Force: Creativity, Community and Star Wars Fans—was precisely because George Lucas would no longer be involved, and that Disney would surely hire seasoned writers and directors to continue the story in a new, inventive way. It’s all very well having The Empire Strikes Back scribe Lawrence Kasdan return to co-write The Force Awakens, but as I said above, Abrams has proved that he’s not a good writer, even in collaboration. Hiring Chris Terrio to co-write TROS seems an odd choice to me, too. He hardly has an exceptional track record, having written Batman Vs Superman: Dawn of Justice, and the more risible Justice League movie (although to give Terrio his due, he also wrote Ben Affleck’s Argo, which was based on Tony Mendez’s The Master of Disguise).

So, I would argue that the sequel trilogy does not, as Disney disingenuously announced in promotional discourses for TROS, finally end the Skywalker Saga satisfactorily. It’s not as if Return of the Jedi left dangling plot threads: the Empire is defeated, Luke confronts Vader and the Emperor, and Vader sacrifices himself to save his son and bring balance to the force (as prophesied in the prequels). Palpatine being somehow ‘alive’ in TROS feels to me like a retcon too far (although it’s worth pointing out that the Star Wars Expanded Universe [EU] of novels and comics featured the Emperor returning as a clone in Dark Empire, so there is at least some precedent).   

(For readers unfamiliar with transmedia Star Wars, the EU included stories told in the aftermath of Return of the Jedi, since Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire was published in 1991, that is, before it was removed from all levels of canon by Lucasfilm in 2014 to clear the slate for the sequel trilogy.)

Indeed, Lucas himself claimed many times that the saga was now over. I realize that Lucas feels mistreated by Disney: he was meant to be the ‘keeper of the flame,’ and gave them detailed treatments of what would have been his sequel trilogy (which I admit doesn’t align with his comments about the saga being finite and complete, but Lucas has been a notorious editor of established history).

For that article, I interviewed fans and scholar fans, including Henry Jenkins, who said that:

The best news contained within the announcement may be that George Lucas himself is stepping back from direct control over the future of the franchise. After the first trilogy was created...he [Lucas] lost the capacity for self- censorship and thus put every idea that caught his fancy, good and bad, on the screen or elsewhere into the franchise. And as this happened, he became increasingly embattled with his fans, refusing to bow to popular pressure in any form, and reading it more or less as the same thing as pressure from the studios, that is, as a compromise to his own artistic vision...There could be no way forward for Star Wars as long as Lucas remained at the helm.

I also interviewed one Professor Will Brooker! Lucas is ‘a bad artist’ you stated, and ‘he shows bad artistic taste…it is a shame he has been allowed to exercise it so freely.’

I now wonder what the sequel trilogy would have been like if Lucas’ treatments weren’t discarded so quickly. Disney claimed that they wanted to produce something that tapped directly into the original trilogy’s aesthetic to address the prequel ‘bashers,’ while Lucas was all for expanding the imaginary world with something radically different. (Say what you will about the prequels, they certainly involved massive amounts of world-building, even if the story was not articulated as well as one would expect.) The Empire Strikes Back remains the firm favourite for many fans, but it was based on Lucas’ treatment, then written by Lawrence Kasdan and Leigh Brackett (and directed by Irwin Kershner). I can’t help but imagine that the sequel trilogy as outlined by Lucas, but written and directed by veteran creators, might have been more interesting and innovative than what Disney gave us. Viewing TFA, TLJ, and TROS as a unity— especially when joined with the original trilogy and the prequels—lacks narrative logic and causality, and jars with what has been established in Star Wars canon. Again, the lack of editorial governance and coordination has created an enormous narrative mess.

I did enjoy some elements of the sequel trilogy, nevertheless. As expected, the SFX are dazzling. I thought that The Force Awakens managed to successfully tap into the original trilogy's aesthetic, and it was exuberant and energetic, for the most part. I was completely on-board in fact until the moment when one of the rebels commented on Starkiller Base with, ‘it’s another Death Star,’ only for an image to demonstrate that the former is simply MUCH BIGGER than the latter (which works perhaps as a metaphor for the size-and-scope of blockbuster cinema in the 21st Century).  

I enjoyed the more diverse cast, while also remembering that Lucasfilm would not be so progressively-minded if diversity didn’t sell, and that hiring ethnic minorities does not necessarily mean that representation is automatically serviced and box-ticked. I am indebted to Kristin Warner for her theory of ‘plastic representation,’ meaning ‘a combination of synthetic elements put together and shaped to look like meaningful imagery, but which can only approximate depth and substance because ultimately it is hollow and cannot survive close scrutiny.’ I would certainly argue that John Boyega’s Finn is an example of this ‘plastic representation,’ especially in TROS.

I also like Daisy Ridley’s Rey, but Adam Driver is by far the stand-out actor here. I was bothered when Rey kissed Kylo/ Ben once he resurrected her from the dead—I’m even irritated typing that—as it seemed ad hoc and without the necessary foreshadowing. Was that to appease Reylo fan shippers? And to address your point about fan service, which fans are being ‘serviced’ per se, as you ask? I can’t see that Disney would seek to appeal to the minor corpus of anti-PC, reactionary audiences—that’s an abysmal business model for blockbuster Hollywood to invoke, I’d argue. You can’t please all the people all of the time, as the adage goes, and there’s no way to satisfy every Star Wars fan. You’re right, of course, that there is no such thing as a singular Star Wars fandom, nor has there ever been (we could be speaking about fan cultures in general here). As I have written elsewhere,

“Star Wars fandom isn’t ‘broken’ nor is it’ fractured’—as an abstract concept that cannot be quantified substantively or entirely, fandom has never been in a state of unity from which it might be broken and in need of repair…what seems to be surprising to many critics and fans is that The Last Jedi might be loved and hated simultaneously, but by different kinds of fans.”

The idea of fan ‘community’ is one that has been criticised by Matt Hills, among others. As Hills writes, ‘media fandom cannot be viewed as a coherent culture or community,’ and as such, we may need to approach contemporary fandom not as a singular or coherent “culture” (if we ever really could) but rather as a network of networks, or a loose affiliation of sub-subcultures, all specializing in different modes of fan activity.’

These nuances and  insights simply do not exist in fan and/ or journalistic discourses, both of which generally view fan cultures as homogeneous and Utopian, until they’re splintered and shattered by disagreement.

It is worth noting too that Star Wars has been spark and kinder for political debate since 1977, where critics and audiences had their knives out for the first film, especially regarding the representation of race (or lack thereof). Raymond St Jacques critiqued the film in the Los Angeles Times for ‘the terrible realization that black people (or any ethnic minority for that matter) shall not exist in the galactic space empires of the future.’ Jacques goes on to accuse Lucas as ‘worse than any racist’ for not acknowledging ethnic minorities, especially black people.

I would like to add that I didn’t mean to imply that bigoted voices should be dismissed as the work of trolls, but that these voices are a minor contingent of Star Wars fandom that have been over-amplified by journalists, while other more progressive actors that have been overwhelmingly pushing back against reactionary scripts are almost sidelined completely. One thing is impossible to determine, in my view, is whether these voices are legitimate Star Wars fans, trolls, or an anti-PC brigade out to aggressively attack what they view as social justice pop culture. In a chapter I’ve written recently for Henry Jenkins, Sangita Shresthova and Gabriel Peters-Lazaro’s Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination: Case Studies of Creative Social Change, titled ‘Rebel Yell: The Metapolitics of Equality and Diversity in Disney’s Star Wars,’ which will be published in February 2020 for New York University Press, I discuss the way in which the so-called alt-right have mobilized discourses of boycotting and anti-progressive rhetorics through a strategy that Matthew Lyons describes as ‘metapolitics.’ In essence, this strategy is less about attacking political institutions directly, and more concerned with upending contemporary artefacts of popular culture that is deemed, in their eyes, too progressive, and too politically-correct (if I’m being diplomatic). Many websites, like Return of Kings, are largely ideological containers for hate speech, for sexist, misogynist, homophobic, transphobic, and general reactionary screeds that might be described as Neo-Nazi. Yet the only way these minor contingents are given valuable oxygen, and as clear evidence that Star Wars fandom has been overtaken by right-wing agents, is through mainstream reproduction and recirculation, while progressive ideological currents are given little concentrated attention in comparison.

I have been misrepresented on this matter in academic discourse, even though I have been very cautious and careful not to suggest that there are no racist, sexist, or reactionary fans. I always say unequivocally that they’re easy to find if one goes looking. My concern is that journalists tend to jump on—and at times, manufacture—controversy, in the pursuit of more readers and more clicks. More concerning is the way that some academics have effectively re-produced press discourse without doing the required empirical work necessary to check the veracity and validity of journalistic accounts, be that professional, pro-am, or fan-oriented. And in this era of fake news, or what Claire Wardle has called ‘information pollution’ to avoid associations with Donald Trump, it is more crucial than ever to ensure that journalism is fact-checked, even when coming out of entertainment spheres.

To return to Disney’s Star Wars, it is noteworthy that there will apparently be a cessation of cinematic material for a while, although precisely how long isn’t yet known. Rumors abound, of course, the most interesting one being that Keanu Reeves is in talks to lead a new Jedi-focused trilogy based on The Knights of the Old Republic video-game and comic book (although not necessarily a straightforward adaptation). Until we learn more, Disney is putting all eggs in the streaming basket, with a second season of The Mandalorian coming in 2020, and two new series, one based on Cassian Andor from Rogue One, and one that has Ewan McGregor reprise his role as Obi-Wan Kenobi. Despite Bob Iger’s insistence that audiences have grown tired of Star Wars for the moment, Disney+ seems to be top of Lucasfilm’s priorities for now. We’ll no doubt see the return of Star Wars on the big screen in a couple of years or so, I reckon. There too much profit to be mined from blockbuster cinema to send it into cultural hibernation for much longer, but for the moment, the future of live-action Star Wars is on TV. Perhaps that’s for the best considering how well The Mandalorian has been received.

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). 

William Proctor is Principal Lecturer in Film and Transmedia at Bournemouth University. He is co-editor on the books, Global Convergence Cultures: Transmedia Earth (with Matthew Freeman, for Routledge 2018), and Disney’s Star Wars: Forces of Production, Promotion and Reception (with Richard McCulloch, for University of Iowa Press, 2019). William is a leading expert on reboots, and is currently writing a monograph on the topic for Palgrave titled Reboot Culture: Comics, Film, Transmedia. He has published on a wide-range of topics, including Star Wars, Batman, James Bond, Stephen King, and more.

Endings, Beginnings, Transitions: Star Wars in the Disney Era: (Part 1 of 3) by Will Brooker and William Proctor

Proctor

Since Disney acquired Lucasfilm in 2012, it’s safe to say that there has been a pronounced surge in Star Wars-related franchise activity. Naturally, this shouldn’t come as much of a surprise—Star Wars’ new corporate landlords certainly didn’t purchase Lucasfilm and its various intellectual property holdings only to idly sit on one of the most successful profit machines in history. Of course, this activity is hardly ‘new’ either; there have been Star Wars spin-offs since the franchise’s inception. In fact, the very first Star Wars text was not George Lucas’ (1977) Star Wars (which was given the subtitle Episode IV: A New Hope in 1980), but Alan Dean Foster’s (1976) novelization and the first issue of Marvel’s comic book adaptation, both of which were published before the film’s theatrical release on May 25th 1977.  

Yet I can’t help but feel that the marked increase in activity since the Disney acquisition—or more accurately, since the first of Disney’s Star Wars’ transmedia expressions, the novel A New Dawn by John Jackson Miller was released in 2014—has been relentless, especially when compared to the Lucas era. There have been five Star Wars films in four years—The Force Awakens (2015), Rogue One (2016), The Last Jedi (2017), Solo (2018), and The Rise of Skywalker (2019). Compared with another of Disney’s prized assets, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), this doesn’t seem like a great deal at all. There are usually between two and four MCU films on the annual roster, not to mention the various Netflix series and network TV’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (now approaching its seventh and final season). That being said, there was a twenty-five-year gap between A New Hope (ANH) and the release of the fifth film in the series, Episode II: Attack of the Clones in 2002. Perhaps Star Wars was unique to fans precisely because of this trajectory, and perhaps that uniqueness has now been lost in some way.  

Disney CEO Robert Iger has suggested recently that the more frantic pace of Star Wars film releases in the latter half of the 2010s has rapidly led to ‘franchise fatigue,’ a rationale that I don’t totally accept given that the MCU juggernaut shows no sign of slowing down yet. Indeed, Avengers: Endgame (2019) became the most financially successful film of all-time despite being the 22nd film in the franchise. With The Rise of Skywalker, the Star Wars film series comprises eleven films, two of which are not part of the episodic Skywalker Saga, which is over 50% less cinematic content than Marvel Studios has produced since the theatrical release of Iron Man in 2008.

What is interesting is that the Star Wars franchise seems to have had a difficult relationship with television. The first live-action Star Wars television series premiered on the new Disney-plus streaming service in November 2019, barely five weeks ago at the time of this writing. Granted, there has been the infamous (and for some fans, quite embarrassing) Star Wars Holiday Special first broadcast in 1978—apparently set between ANH and Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)—and three animated TV series, one from the Lucas-era, The Clone Wars (2008-). which is due to return early in 2019; and under the Disney brand, Rebels (2014-2018), and the ongoing Resistance (2018-). Although Lucas planned to produce a live-action TV series in the late-2000s, with the working title Underworld, plans were dropped due to budgetary constraints. It would seem that Disney and writer/ director/ actor Jon Favreau have managed to come up with a way to solve the economic peril that worried Lucas with The Mandalorian. Whether or not we consider The Mandalorian to be live-action Star Wars TV is worth considering, I think. To be sure, it’s released weekly in installments (unlike the Netflix model); it’s a combination of episodic and serial storytelling; but its location on Disney-plus means that the series is neither on broadcast or cable, but a subscription-streaming service, a service that is not yet available outside of the US. It’s not quite TV, but it’s not HBO either!

I assume you’ve been watching The Mandalorian, Will?

Brooker

In your comprehensive survey of Lucas TV texts, I think you’ve omitted a couple -- Droids, the further adventures of Threepio and Artoo, which first aired in 1985, and its sister show Ewoks from the same period. Now officially outside continuity, they also introduced elements that were incorporated into the prequels. There were, confusingly, also two TV animated series about the Clone Wars: Star Wars: Clone Wars (2003-2005), directed and with the distinctive aesthetic of Genndy Tartakovsky, and the longer-running, computer animated Star Wars: The Clone Wars, which debuted in 2008.

I must confess the only Star Wars TV I’ve seen until this year, except a passing glimpse, has been the Holiday Special, which I watched once, thinking it couldn’t be as bad as people said. I cringed and grimaced through a lot of it, and fast-forwarded the rest. It does have the distinction of introducing Boba Fett though, which is interesting: the first and the most recent Star Wars TV shows both feature characters in the same Mandalorian armour -- though I’m not sure if Boba Fett and his father are currently Mandalorians within official continuity.

Fortunately for our discussion I have been watching The Mandalorian regularly. Until the release of The Rise of Skywalker, it seemed to me that the official movies were focusing more on the new generation of heroes, and that they were, in turn, aimed at a new generation of fans; The Last Jedi had made it clear, at least for the moment, that we should ‘let the past die’, and was allowing the main characters from the Original Trilogy to fade out of the narrative, replaced by young people who reminded me a little of my own students. Rey, Poe and Finn are smart, enthusiastic, idealistic and full of energy, but my relationship with them as a viewer was inevitably quite different from my hero-worship of Han Solo when I was seven and he was in his early 30s. So I was happy enough to gradually let go of the ongoing saga, leaving it to others, and I found my own nostalgia trip -- comforting and thrilling at once -- in The Mandalorian, which seemed aimed at veteran fans who want more of the old-school Star Wars.  The series takes us back to the period immediately following Return of the Jedi, and affectionately recreates the aesthetic of the Original Trilogy, even revisiting some of its key locations such as Tatooine. As such, it has similarities to Rogue One, which of course takes place immediately prior to A New Hope, but I feel it’s pitched at a slightly more mature audience, and its episodic TV structure means there are also significant differences in its storytelling and in the way it develops character.

Ironically, J.J. Abrams’ The Rise of Skywalker turned its back, to a great extent, on the forward-looking philosophies of Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi, and pays extensive homage to the Original Trilogy through its revival of characters who were thought dead, its return to Endor and the second Death Star -- with a bonus glimpse of Bespin -- and its flashback to Leia’s Jedi training, complete with CGI de-aged actors. So we’re in a unique, unprecedented situation where the Skywalker saga has ended in cinemas after 42 years, and the first Star Wars TV show has just begun -- and despite the differences between them, there are also remarkable overlaps between the two. Leia’s training sequence must take place relatively soon after the end of Return of the Jedi, which is exactly when The Mandalorian is set; The Mandalorian revisits the Mos Eisley cantina, and The Rise of Skywalker concludes at the Lars homestead, which is a landspeeder drive away.

Surprisingly, then, the two official, dominant, top-level canon Star Wars primary texts at the end of the 2010s are retrospective and nostalgic in their approach, rather than launching into new timezones and territories, or even moving the saga gently away from the trilogy that ended decades ago, in 1983. We might ask whether this is a symptom of a broader 1980s nostalgia, evident in Stranger Things, IT, Black Mirror’s ‘Bandersnatch’ episode, Ready Player One, the Transformers movie Bumblebee, the forthcoming Wonder Woman 84, and even Joker.

We can return to The Rise of Skywalker later, but what’s your view of The Mandalorian? Has Lucasfilm/Disney  succeeded with this bold experiment into live-action TV?

Proctor

First of all, I did miss Droids and Ewoks off my list of Star Wars TV! I also forgot the live-action films Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure (1984) and Ewoks: Battle for Endor (1985), both of which were made-for-TV (although the former also received a limited theatrical run). In fan circles, I’d no doubt take a well-deserved drubbing for that (my symbolic, subcultural bank now emptied of funds, my fannish identity in ruins).

Badinage aside, I understand what you mean about Disney’s Star Wars films, especially the Sequel Trilogy. As a first-generation Star Wars fan—first generation not being ‘better’ or superior to later fan generations—my force-platonic ideal is so attached to the Original Trilogy, aesthetically, generically and narratively, that unless new Star Wars content taps into that ideal in some way, unless it ‘feels’ like Star Wars to me, then I’m always going to have a tough time enjoying or embracing it. I recall Henry Jenkins saying that the prequels symbolizing ‘an open wound’ in the Star Wars community, but that’s not strictly accurate, I’d argue. Fans who grew up with the prequels as their Star Wars trilogy are more likely to embrace them as ‘the best.’ In research that Richard McCulloch and I conducted for the World Star Wars project, there are many respondents who cite one of the prequels as the ‘best’ Star Wars film, and mapping their ages seems to bear out this notion of generations. I guess the Disney sequel trilogy will work the same for this (third?) generation, too. But we’ll come onto that later.

As with HBO’s Watchmen, I wasn’t concerned about engaging with The Mandalorian; not with indignation or hostility, but mainly indifference. I initially thought that drawing from the Star Wars image-bank with a character that closely resembled fan-favourite Boba Fett was disingenuous, but once I came across positive discourses on social media, not least of all the fleet of memes snapshotting ‘the Child,’ or as christened online, ‘Baby Yoda,’ who can’t literally be a fledgling Yoda as the character died in Return of the Jedi—unless he has been resurrected in the Zen Buddhist tradition—I decided to try it out, if only to participate in the cultural conversation.

Like your assessment, I enjoyed the series much for the same reasons as I think Rogue One is the best of the Disney Star Wars films. That The Mandalorian is temporally-situated in the aftermath of Return of the Jedi means that the series looks and ‘feels’ like the Original Trilogy aesthetic, perhaps directly and consciously servicing first generation fans, like you and me.

Although the first episode, ‘The Child,’ had its moments, some of which are quite funny, especially Takika Waititi’s IG-11, I wasn’t overly enamored. But by the third episode, I found myself looking forward to new episodes every week. Unlike the streaming model of releasing complete series in one go, as with the majority of Netflix and Amazon Prime’s original programming, The Mandalorian’s weekly release pattern felt strange at first, then very welcome. I haven’t thought my response through that much, but as I was watching HBO’s Watchmen during the same period on a weekly basis, it was quite an alien viewing experience, more akin to the way we simply had to watch television prior to the inception and proliferation of streaming platforms; and for me, that led me to reflect on my engagement with contemporary television culture. The weekly release pattern dictated that I slowdown, which made me think about the way in which my own engagement with TV in the streaming-era is often a mad-dash to be up-to-date! Sometimes, I yearn for the days when there wasn’t so much media available, and one didn’t feel that they were drowning in an ocean of so much content. My stack of films and TV series ‘to watch,’ as well as the armada of books and comics I want to read, has become more like a chore than ever before. I’m only speaking about my own experiences, of course.

How did you find the weekly viewing experience?  What is it in particular that you believe is experimental about The Mandalorian?

Brooker

By ‘experiment’ I simply meant commercially, as the franchise’s first live-action TV show since 1978. The Mandalorian is very far from experimental, except perhaps in its inclusion of both Werner Herzog and Taika Waititi in the opening episode. In fact, its structure reminds me of The Littlest Hobo (1963-1965), the later seasons of Lassie (1964-1973) and contemporary shows like The Fugitive (1963-1967), in that every episode up until the finale is a self-contained adventure that progresses the overall narrative very slowly, but tends to return roughly to the status quo by the end: a nomadic character on the run meets new people, faces new challenges and then keeps moving, never able to settle. This structure is not confined to the 1960s by any means; The Littlest Hobo was revived from 1979-1985 and as I remember, 1980s classics like Knight Rider, Airwolf, Street Hawk and even The A-Team follow the same pattern. In the 90s, The X-Files also had its self-contained ‘monster of the week’ episodes that make no attempt to progress the overall story-arc. But I’d suggest that this classic approach to TV storytelling fell out of fashion with the ambitious box set dramas of the 2000s, and that in this sense, The Mandalorian feels comfortingly old-fashioned. The last show I remember like this was Firefly, which was also the last show I binge-watched: I almost invariably watch TV on a traditional week-by-week basis, even when all the episodes are available.

Of course, The Mandalorian is also nostalgic in its approach to Star Wars, and I’ve been delighted to see the return of locations, props, vehicles, droids and alien races we haven’t encountered in live-action canon since The Empire Strikes Back or earlier: Ugnaughts for instance, the workers from Lando’s Bespin facility; IG-11, the same model as bounty hunter IG-88; a gatekeeper droid of the type we last saw outside Jabba’s palace; the Imperial Biker Scouts first introduced on Endor, and even a Troop Transporter, a 1979 Kenner toy that has only previously featured in Marvel comics and animated series. These affectionate reprises of the Original Trilogy’s aesthetic offer me, as a fan since 1977, what I can best describe as the pleasure both of recognition and of being recognised, as if the saga is acknowledging me again; there’s a mixture of thrilling novelty and reassuring familiarity to the dynamic. The best single example is when the Mandalorian visited the Mos Eisley cantina, allowing us to see how much it had changed since A New Hope -- droids now running the bar, with Stormtrooper helmets on spikes outside. The scene felt, to me, like my memory of entering Secret Cinema, which replicated Tatooine in stunning detail and allowed visitors to wander around, interacting with key characters: visitors to the Galaxy’s Edge theme park, no doubt, have similar experiences.

The most obvious point of reference for The Mandalorian is the Star Wars Original Trilogy. But it also feels, for me, like watching a live-action TV show of the 2000AD character Strontium Dog, about a wandering bounty hunter in the Clint Eastwood mode, and reminds me further of Firefly, which was for some time the closest we had to a new Han Solo story, with Nathan Fillion clearly, to my mind, modelling his performance on the Empire Strikes Back period Harrison Ford.

Like Firefly and Strontium Dog, The Mandalorian is a space Western; but in drawing on Westerns, it also intersects with the samurai movie -- fittingly, as both Akira Kurosawa and John Ford inspired George Lucas back in 1977. If we were to chart The Mandalorian’s position on a matrix of influences, it would be at the centre of a cultural network including Lone Wolf and Cub, The Searchers, The Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven: it refers back to stories that have already borrowed from and shaped each other. Episode 4, ‘Sanctuary’, for instance, reminded me vividly of the Strontium Dog tale ‘Incident on Mayger Minor’, where protagonist Johnny Alpha protects a homestead but rides away at the end, turning down the temptation of settling with a single mother and her child; but that plot is itself ripped directly from the 1953 movie Shane.

Finally, The Mandalorian has an interesting relationship with The Rise of Skywalker. Although they take place decades apart -- with the exception of the movie’s brief flashback -- they overlap in terms of geographical galactic space, as I’ve noted above, with the consequence that Rey’s cinematic return to Tatooine may have had less nostalgic impact for viewers who’d seen Mando visit the cantina a couple of weeks earlier.

But there’s one further small but significant connection. ‘Baby Yoda’, the Child, performed what fans call ‘Force Heal’ in the season’s penultimate episode, just one day before the release of Episode IX, in which Rey’s apparent ability to heal and revive through the Force was a controversial element. So to those who watched the TV episode before the movie, that power would have been demonstrated and established in canon, albeit very recently; to the majority who didn’t, it ran the risk of seeming abruptly introduced, unexplained and a frustrating change to the rules about the extent and limitations of Force abilities.

Proctor

That’s an insightful intertextual tour of the Mandalorian matrix, Will. Interestingly, I read episode four as a remake of The Magnificent Seven, which was of course a Wild West remake of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. I also thought of 1970s TV series like Kung Fu, starring David Carradine, and The Incredible Hulk, which had professional body-builder Lou Ferrigno as the green giant. Just as Star Wars did in 1977, The Mandalorian pinballs across an array of intertexts, often wearing its many influences and utterances on its sleeve.

Perhaps we should also consider the backlash from feminist quarters. Of course, nowadays it wouldn’t be Star Wars without at least some negative criticism. Anika Sarkeesian, who became a prominent feminist during the #Gamergate flame wars, angered a minor contingent of Star Wars fans for her pointed criticisms of The Mandalorian, and its showrunner Jon Favreau, for the series’ lack of female characters. ‘Most mass media overwhelmingly centers men,’ wrote Sarkeesian, ‘and perpetuates patriarchy. The Mandalorian is no exception…I guess Jon Favreau was like “well if we just make all the vehicles female like the ship and the Blurrg then we’re good right? That’s just the right amount of ‘female'”.

While I don’t necessarily agree with Sarkessian’s points—I admit that I’m often perplexed that counting characters’ screen-time has become an absurdly unnuanced method of deciding if a series if acceptable to feminists or not—I certainly dislike the way that her tweets became yet another source of online dogpiling and harassment. It is true that Sarkessian’s first tweet about the series wasn’t factual—she stated that the first episode had no female speaking characters, which isn’t accurate. This was first countered not by male trolls, but by another female fan, @thatstarwarsgrl77, who tweeted: ‘I’m extremely tired of your blatant sexism. No one cares about your obsession with women. There’s a concept called Quality vs Quantity. Learn it.’ The Mandalorian has clearly not escaped progressive criticisms of the galaxy far, far away (not that it should).

I think you’re right that the series/serial narrative hybrid that television audiences were more accustomed to, especially between the 1970s and ‘90s, has shifted. Robin Nelson has argued that this model, this combination of self-contained episodes and an overarching serial mythos, was innovated by the likes of the Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-77), and in particular, Hill St. Blues (1981-87). Naturally, this ‘flexi-narrative’ approach to TV series is not extinct—many crime series retain that multi-form structure between episodicity and serialization: from Law and Order: Special Victims Unit to NCIS, both of which have associated spin-offs that are part of a shared universe.

(As an aside, it has been claimed that Star Trek is the apotheosis of televisual world-building, with six TV series produced since 1966. Yet compared with Dick Wolf’s ‘Law and Order,’ and ‘Chicago’ franchises, which occupy a shared universe canvas that involves crossovers between multiple series and properties, Star Trek lags behind in quantitative terms by a significant margin.)

In this era of so-called ‘‘complex TV,’ as Jason Mittell has described it, The Mandalorian seems to not only be a kind of nostalgic throw-back in generic terms, hybridized though it is, but is also less complicated in its narrative trajectory (unless taken as a ‘micro-narrative’ that is meant to be experienced as part of the Star Wars ‘macro-structure’). Not that that is necessarily a bad thing, but I also think that’s its greatest weakness (for me, at least). The plot is quite thin and aimless, although I like the world itself for many of the same reasons you do. At times, I found myself drifting off while watching it, less riveted and engrossed than I like to be.

That said, the cinematography is luscious, the scripting is tight, and it definitely manages to ‘feel’ more like Star Wars than anything Disney has produced thus far (except maybe Rogue One). It could be that the series is meant to be a love-letter sent to people like you and I who grew up around the Original Trilogy; and while it’s not ‘perfect,’ if such a thing is possible at any rate, I have enjoyed following the titular character and his sidekick, ‘The Child,’ more and more as the series progresses. I guess I would say I’m happily ambivalent, if I was pressed.

It’s interesting that you raise the episode where ‘The Child’ heals The Mandalorian with the Force as an entry-way to The Rise of Skywalker (TROS), a kind of paratext that prepares audiences for Rey and Kylo Ren’s new Jedi super-power(s). I’m not sure if that was Favreau’s intention, but since viewing TROS, the first Star Wars film to be released in theatres while being paralleled by another live-action iteration, I have been comparing the approaches. TROS is obviously a blockbuster, a special-effects extravaganza, epic-in-scope, and enormously convoluted—the most convoluted narrative in the Skywalker Saga, I’d argue. Comparatively, The Mandalorian is small-scale, less convoluted and complicated, focused mainly on a single character-arc, rather than an expansive dramatis personae that often robs certain characters of their due. We know that the Disney sequel trilogy—The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi, and The Rise of Skywalker — was not planned with any creative governance and coordination in mind. I’m not saying that Lucas had everything planned out beforehand—clearly, he didn’t. I very much doubt that Leia and Luke were twins even by the time The Empire Strikes Back was released, otherwise that kiss between siblings, with a jealous Han Solo looking on, would be in bad taste. There are other examples which I won’t go into here. Given that the Disney-era of Star Wars includes having the Lucasfilm Story Group, an executive committee that manages the rebooted Expanded Universe of comics and novels etc., it’s very odd that J.J Abrams was pitching ideas for TROS on the day that TLJ was released in theatres. That seems like a lack of managerial coordination that has led to the sequel trilogy being quite a mess, in narrative terms. In my mind, I wonder what could have been had Jon Favreau been in charge of the sequels? Don’t get me wrong; Abrams is a fine director, but he’s not a great scripter (or ‘scriptor,’ in the Barthesian sense).

The idea that Disney has produced too many Star Wars feature films in too short a time that I mentioned earlier fails to deal with the fact that the sequel trilogy not only adds nothing new to the Skywalker Saga, or at least nothing that makes sense, but it also actively undermines both the prequel and original trilogy, which Lucas said was about the rise, fall, and redemption of Anakin Skywalker/ Darth Vader. Consequently, I doubt that many fans are unhappy with the promise of more Star Wars content, but rather, that they’re unsatisfied with the quality of storytelling on offer. Indeed, many of the criticisms of Rian Johnson’s TLJ were not racist, sexist, and so forth, but were about plot, story, and character (especially the treatment of Luke Skywalker). Moreover, if Abrams needs to use interview paratexts to confirm that Finn was going to tell Rey that he’s force-sensitive, then the film has certainly failed in storytelling terms. In fact, the entire sequel trilogy does not fulfill basic narrative logic, in many ways.

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). 

William Proctor is Principal Lecturer in Film and Transmedia at Bournemouth University. He is co-editor on the books, Global Convergence Cultures: Transmedia Earth (with Matthew Freeman, for Routledge 2018), and Disney’s Star Wars: Forces of Production, Promotion and Reception (with Richard McCulloch, for University of Iowa Press, 2019). William is a leading expert on reboots, and is currently writing a monograph on the topic for Palgrave titled Reboot Culture: Comics, Film, Transmedia. He has published on a wide-range of topics, including Star Wars, Batman, James Bond, Stephen King, and more.

More than Mere Ornament: Reclaiming 'Jane' (4 of 4) by Adam Twycross

Nudity was not the only development for Jane during the period of the Bartholomew revolution; as Rothermere’s influence receded and the Mirror increasingly aimed itself at working girls, the previous emphasis on Jane’s elevated social position was gradually replaced by a more down-to-earth characterisation that saw her take on a raft of paid employment. Between February and May 1936  alone, Jane tried her hand as a chorus girl, nurse, publican, rent collector, artists’ model, laundress, driving instructor and teacher.

A clear break with the past occurred on April 1st 1938, when a number of contemporaneous developments occurred for Jane. Behind the scenes, Don Freeman had been drafted in to help Norman Pett devise Jane’s scripts, and a young model named Chrystabel Leighton-Porter had become one of the series’ regular models (Fletcher 2011, p.84). Together the new creative team ushered in a raft of changes.

Pett 1938

Visually, Jane was remodelled, her bobbed hair becoming longer and fuller, and her silhouette becoming less angular and austere than had previously been the case. The series’ title was shortened to simply Jane…, the ellipsis introduced to indicate the intentional omission of the Bright Young Things reference that no longer reflected the character or social positioning of the strip’s star now that Rothermere’s influence was in the past. The format of the series also dramatically changed; gone was the diary format and the self-contained daily ‘gag’, replaced instead with an ongoing continuity format that saw the storyline unfold day after day. Each episode was also now clearly broken into panels, and the first person narration that had been one of the hallmarks of the series was replaced with direct speech, although it took a further two weeks for Pett to settle into a full use of speech balloons. Finally, within the fictional world of the strip, Jane herself underwent a transformation; ignoring previous continuity, expository dialogue in the opening episodes established that Jane lived in a northern town, where a private fortune had inured her to a life without the need for paid employment. A serious stock market crash, however, necessitated a fresh start, and Jane travelled south the start a new life in London. Over the following weeks, a new supporting cast was established, and Jane was remodelled as a continuity romance series, enlivened with plenty of comedy and regular nude and semi-nude appearances by its female cast.

Elsewhere, the storm clouds of war were brewing; in the world of Jane, all the elements that would make the series one of the great icons of the war were already in place.

References

Andrews, M and McNamara, S, eds. 2014, Women and the Media: Feminism and Femininity in Britain, 1900 to the Present, London, Routledge

Bingham, A., 2011, Representing the People? The Daily Mirror, Class and Political Culture in Inter-war Britain, In: Beers, L., and Thomas, G., eds., 2012,  Brave New World: Imperial and Democratic Nation-Building in Britain Between the Wars, London, Institute of Historical Studies, p. 115.

British Cartoon Archive, 2016, Harry Guy Bartholomew (Bart) [online], Kent, University of Kent. Available from: https://www.cartoons.ac.uk/cartoonist-biographies/a-b/HarryGuyBartholomew_Bart_.html [Accessed 07/11/2019].

Chapman, J., 2011, British Comics: A Cultural History, London, Reaction Books.

Conby, M., 2017, British Popular Newspaper traditions, In: Palander-Collin, M., Ratia, M., and Taavitsainen, I., eds. Diachronic Developments in English News Discourse, Amsterdam, John Banjamins Publishing Company, p.127.

Cudlipp, H., 1953, Publish and Be Damned: The Astonishing Story of the Daily Mirror, London, Dakers.

Daily Mirror, 1955, The New Paper By Jane, Daily Mirror, 18 January 1955, p.6(a).

Daily Mirror, 1934, Give the Blackshirts a Helping Hand!, Daily Mirror, 20 January 1934, p.6.

Daily Mirror, 1937, The Glory That Is Perfect Womanhood, Daily Mirror, 14 September 1937, p.14.

Daily Mail, 1994, D-Day: The Human Stories: Why I Stripped for the Boys: The Pin-Up Girl’s Story, The Daily Mail, 21 February 1994, p.33.

Fletcher, N., 2011. Jane, In: Gravett, P., ed., 1001 Comics You Must Read Before You Die, London, Quintessence, p.84.

Gore, I.P., 1931, Cabaret: More Revelry, The Stage, 8 January 1931, p.17.

Horrie, C., 2003, Tabloid Nation: From the Birth of the Daily Mirror to the Death of the Tabloid, London, Andre Deutsch Ltd.

Irish Independent, 1994, The Pin-Up Girl’s Story, Irish Independent D-Day Supplement, 1 June 1994, p.4.

Jones, M., 1982, Echo Woman: Jane in the Flesh, Liverpool Echo, 30 July, p.8

Levine, J., The Secret History of the Blitz, Available at www.amazon.co.uk/kindlestore.

Nicholson, V., 2011, Millions Like Us: Women’s Lives During the Second World War, New York, Viking Press.

Pett, N., and Freeman, D., Jane…, Daily Mirror, 7 June 1944, p.7.                                                      

Pett, N., 1933a, Jane’s Journal- Or the Diary of a Bright Young Thing, Daily Mirror, 21 June 1933, p.7.

Pett, N., 1933b, Jane’s Journal- Or the Diary of a Bright Young Thing, Daily Mirror, 1 May 1933, p.7.

Pett, N., 1933c, Jane’s Journal- Or the Diary of a Bright Young Thing, Daily Mirror, 8 July 1933, p.7.

Pett, N., 1933d, Jane’s Journal- Or the Diary of a Bright Young Thing, Daily Mirror, 8 December 1933, p.7.

Pett, N., 1934a, Jane’s Journal- Or the Diary of a Bright Young Thing, Daily Mirror, 23 February 1934, p.7.

Pett, N., 1934b, Jane’s Journal- Or the Diary of a Bright Young Thing, Daily Mirror, 21 December 1934, p.7.

Pett, N., 1934c, Jane’s Journal- Or the Diary of a Bright Young Thing, Daily Mirror, 5 April 1934, p.7.

Pett, N., 1934d, Jane’s Journal- Or the Diary of a Bright Young Thing, Daily Mirror, 10 April 1934, p.7.

Pett, N., 1934e, Jane’s Journal- Or the Diary of a Bright Young Thing, Daily Mirror, 27 October 1934, p.7.

Pett, N., 1934f, Jane’s Journal- Or the Diary of a Bright Young Thing, Daily Mirror, 16 January 1934, p.7.

Pett, N., 1935a, Jane’s Journal- Or the Diary of a Bright Young Thing, Daily Mirror, 30 October 1935, p.7.

Pett, N., 1935b, Jane’s Journal- Or the Diary of a Bright Young Thing, Daily Mirror, 25 October 1935, p.7.

Pett, N., 1936a, Jane’s Journal- Or the Diary of a Bright Young Thing, Daily Mirror, 9 July 1936, p.7.

Pett, N., 1936b, Jane’s Journal- Or the Diary of a Bright Young Thing, Daily Mirror, 11 November 1936, p.7.

Pett, N., 1937a, Jane’s Journal- Or the Diary of a Bright Young Thing, Daily Mirror, 11 March 1937, p.7.

Pett, N., 1937b, Jane’s Journal- Or the Diary of a Bright Young Thing, Daily Mirror, 28 August 1937, p.7.

Pett, N., 1938, Jane…, Daily Mirror, 1 April 1938, p.9.

Pilger, J., 1998, Hidden Agendas, New York, Vintage.

Radio Times, 1982. Jane’s Daily Strip, Radio Times, 31 July 1982, p.1

Ramsay-Kerr, J., Adventures Out Of My Own Set: No.III- The Dietists, The Sketch, 4 April 1928, p.4.

Saunders, A., 2004, Jane: A Pin-Up at War, Barnsley, Leo Cooper.

Shields Daily News, 1924, Bright Young People: Chasing Motor Clues at 50 Miles an Hour, Shields Daily News, 15 July 1924, p.3.

Smith, A.C.H., 1975, Paper Voices: The Popular Press and Social Change, 1935-1965, London, Chatto and Windus.

Stanton, B., 1937, Blame it on the Moon: Extracts from the Diary of Jean Hunter, Daily Mirror, August 2 1937, p.17.

Taylor, D.J., Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation 1918-1940, Available at www.amazon.co.uk/kindlestore.

More than Mere Ornament: Reclaiming 'Jane' (3 of 4) by Adam Twycross

Daily Mirror 1934

In late 1934, with plunging sales at last spurring the board of directors into decisive action, Bartholomew was given full control of the Daily Mirror. His revolution was slow to take hold, the gradual pace necessitated by the board’s continuing nervousness concerning the scope and scale of Bartholomew’s emerging plans (Horrie 2003, p.52). In incremental steps, however, the entirety of the Daily Mirror was transformed, and by 1937 the revolution was complete (Smith 1975, p.64). The transformation had brought bigger, blacker headlines, a more concise and colloquial style of English, and a brasher and more irreverent tone overall. The importance and frequency of human interest stories had grown, and perhaps most obviously the use of images, and in particular comic strips, had rocketed. When Jane had first appeared in 1932 it had been one of four such strips, sharing the Mirror with Haselden’s regular cartoon, a juvenile humour strip called Tich, and Pip, Squeak and Wilfred. By 1937 Jane had been joined by Beelzebub Jones (1937), Belinda Blue-Eyes (1935), Buck Ryan (1937), Ruggles (1935), Terror Keep (1936), Gordon Fife- Solider of Fortune (1936), Popeye (1937), Connie (1937), Love Me Forever (1937), and Camille and Her Boss (1937).

Within the wider paper, a spirit of youthful irreverence had replaced the tired dogmatism of the Rothermere years, and it was in this context that erotic imagery, and particular images of female nudity, began to become a key feature of the Mirror’s address. Whilst this might suggest a straightforward repositioning away from the declining female audience that had barely sustained the Mirror during the 1920s, closer analysis suggests a more complex picture. Instead of representing a straightforward co-option of the female body for the gratification of a newly-male audience, the Mirror’s strategy instead was to frame the female body as an iconic signifier for the themes of energy, confidence and youthful irreverence that, as a paper, it increasingly sought to embody. These themes, and their visual projection, seem to have resonated with audiences of both sexes, and the paper continued to appeal to strongly to women (Smith, 1975, p.83), although admittedly it was a different type of woman than had been the case in the recent past. Hugh Cudlipp would later write that one of Bartholomew’s key new demographics was

“a section of citizens much neglected by newspapers of the time. Girls- working girls; hundreds of thousands of them, toiling over typewriters and ledgers and reading in many cases nothing more enlightening than Peg’s Paper” (Cudlipp 1953, p.87).

The synergy between audience and text that emerged during this period is typified by Blame it On the Moon, a piece of Mirror prose fiction written by Barbara Stanton, and which was published on August 2nd 1937.

Stanton 1937

Neatly epitomising many of the elements of the new Daily Mirror address, this short story detailed a summer romance enjoyed by Jean, a young woman holidaying alone at an English seaside resort. In one passage Jean is enthusiastic about displaying as much of her body as possible, noting with satisfaction that her shorts are shorter than those of another girl of a similar age, and she later goes for a naked moonlit bathe with a man she has only just met. “What would mummy have said if she’d seen us bathing without a stitch!” thinks Jean, “Still, there was no harm in it- and I don’t care what anybody says or thinks.”. Blame it on the Moon ran alongside an illustration of Jean and her paramour enjoying their moonlit encounter, with art supplied by Arthur Ferrier, who would later create Spotlight on Sally, a Jane competitor, for the News of the World..

The Mirror’s use of female nudity as an iconic signifier of youth, vitality and the future potential of the nation was also in evidence in the paper’s photographic content. On 14th September 1937, for example, the Mirror ran a large photograph of an apparently naked young woman under the title “Perfect Womanhood”. The lighting conditions suggested that the photograph had been taken in brilliant sunshine, with a clear summer sky framing the subject as she readied herself to throw a beach ball to an unseen companion. The overall impression was one of youth, vitality, optimism and self-confidence, reinforced by the Mirror’s own accompanying commentary:

“vibrant with health in every tense and graceful line, this figure typifies the very essence of the girlhood of to-day”.

Daily Mirror 1937

It was in this context, two years before the outbreak of war, and more than six years before the D-Day landings, that nudity arrived in Jane. Like the wider Bartholomew revolution of which it was part, the pace of change was gradual, and at first nudity in Jane was suggested more than it was seen. The Jane strip of 9th July 1936, for example, depicted a furtive crowd gathering in a park in the hope of catching a glimpse of a naked Jane. later the same month another strip saw an excited crowd of men rush to Jane’s house under the erroneous impression that she would be welcoming them inside, in the nude.

Pett 1936a

On 3rd December another strip used the potential for Jane’s nakedness as the central narrative conceit, when it appeared that she would be forced to hand the eiderdown with which she was covering herself to a courier. The closest that the strip came to an actual depiction of nudity during 1936 occurred on 11th November, when Jane was shown taking a bath. Only her upper back was visible, however, as she slipped out of a dressing gown, and once safely in the bath a profusion of bubbles hid her body from the neck down.

Pett 1936b

Four months later the strip was going just a little further; Jane was once again in the bath, but the bubbles had been dispensed with, and now only the positioning of her arm stopped Jane from appearing topless.

Pett 1937a

The spring and summer continued in a similar vein, when occasional trips to the beach were used as a pretext for Jane and her swimwear to either wholly or partially part company, although outright nudity was still avoided. By the late summer, however, the Mirror took the final step and Jane appeared entirely naked for the first time in August 1937.  

Pett 1937b

Nor was this a one-off; having made the leap to outright nudity, numerous further examples appeared in the remaining pre-war period.

Pett 1937c

Adam Twycross is currently engaged in PhD research on the development and evolution of adult comics in Britain. Between 2012 and 2019 he was Programme Leader for the MA in 3D Computer Animation at Bournemouth University’s National Centre for Computer Animation, and has previously worked as a 3D modeller, with credits including the Xbox 360 title Disneyland Adventures and the Games Workshop graphic novel Macragge’s Honour. He is co-founder of BFX, the UK’s largest festival of animation, visual effects and games.

More than Mere Ornament: Reclaiming 'Jane' (2 of 4) by Adam Twycross

For the time being, however, Rothermere’s long shadow still fell across the Mirror and its contents, and as such, at the time of its first appearance Jane was obliged to straddle two competing ideologies. On the one hand, like every other aspect of the paper, the series was shaped by Rothermere’s right-wing conservatism; on the other it was cut through with a bawdy irreverence that was more in keeping with the ideological leanings of both Bartholomew and Pett. To a significant degree, the split allegiance that this necessitated was enabled by the social positioning of Jane herself within the fictional world of the strip. Although today remembered chiefly in its truncated form of Jane, Pett’s original title was both more loquacious and more descriptive; for the first six years of its existence, the series appeared as Jane’s Journal- Or The Diary of a Bright Young Thing. This title, the nuance of which would be lost on many modern audiences, would at the time have immediately established Jane within an existing ideological system that perfectly suited to Jane’s needs.

Although in truth something of a spent force by 1932, for much of the previous decade the Bright Young Things had provided the popular press with a steady stream of stories revolving around increasingly extravagant examples of aristocratic intemperance. The group had entered the public consciousness around the summer of 1924, when the Honourable Lois Sturt, the daughter of Baron Alington, had been arrested for speeding through Regent’s Park in the early hours of the morning. Sturt claimed to have been taking part in a game called ‘Chasing Clues’ that had been arranged by the previously unknown “Society of Bright Young People” (Shields Daily News 1924, p.3). Within months the groups’ name had became synonymous with a carefree and somewhat debauched style of youthful aristocratic play, with activities centering around extravagant games, opulent themed parties and, it was widely assumed, a liberal attitude to sexual congress, alcohol and the use of stimulants in general. Although largely composed of individuals from privileged, moneyed and aristocratic backgrounds, the Bright Young Things self-consciously rejected much of the ritualised and rule-bound etiquette that their elevated social position would usually have imposed on them, and instead absorbed influences from parallel and overlapping social subcultures that were less obviously aristocratic in nature. The inherent iconoclasm of the Bright Young Things’ rejection of societal norms gave them a compatibility with alterity of all types, creating a space in which young aristocrats mixed freely with homosexuals, artists, poets, and “tribes of girls answering to the loose description of ‘model’” (Taylor, 2007, loc.2073). The group’s particular affinity with the bohemian lifestyle, which had also proved so alluring to Norman Pett, was reflected in the contemporary press, who on occasion referred to the Bright Young Things’ activities as those of “high bohemia” (Ramsay-Kerr 1928, p. 4). Press interest in the group’s activities reflected an enduring public fascination that was heightened by inaccessibility. As well as foregrounding Jane’s social position, therefore, the series’ title and its formal construction dovetailed to create an alluring, if entirely apocryphal, sense of intimacy. The strip’s diary format, backed by first-person, hand-written narration, suggested a level of privileged access to the Bright Young Things, and to a world that remained otherwise closed to all but a small band of well-connected individuals.

Over the first few years of Jane’s existence, numerous strips reinforced the link between Jane and the iconoclasm of the Bright Young Things. Several strips featured a positively Sturtian disregard for road safety as a central narrative conceit, and Jane’s social life was shown to be a heady mixture of high and low pursuits that was perfectly in keeping with the Bright Young Things’ public image.

Pett 1934a

Jane, and indeed her contemporaries, seemed equally at home in an after-hours nightclub as at more formal gathering.

Pett 1933a

Jane also attended numerous parties, including the Chelsea Arts Club Ball.

Pett 1934b

This new year’s eve celebration had, by the early 1930s, become notorious for its riotous behaviour, and was described in contemporary accounts as “the last notable event of the old year in Bohemian circles” (Gore 1931, p.17). Like Lois Sturt, Jane’s portrait hung in the Royal Academy,

Pett 1933b

Several strips made clear that she and her social circle regularly indulged in precisely the type of urban treasure hunts that had first propelled the Bright Young Things into the public consciousness in 1924.

Pett 1934c

Although nudity and erotica was not yet a feature of the strip, it was clear that Jane’s youth and glamour facilitated a satisfying and varied love life that put her at odds with the decorum and propriety expected by her social circles’ elder generation.

Pett 1934d

The youthful and rebellious nature of the Bright Young Things therefore allowed Jane’s early years to feature an irreverent streak that reflected the liberal and somewhat unorthodox worldviews of both Bartholomew and Pett. Yet the social elevation and undoubted prosperity of most of the group’s members gave it a natural alignment with the systems and structures that supported and perpetuated the dominance of the ruling classes, and for all the raucousness of its subtext, Jane’s early strips also exhibited a clear affinity with the right-wing conservatism and social elitism of Rothermere. Being moneyed and cultured, much of Jane’s leisure time was filled with the typical pastimes of the young aristocrat; she regularly holidayed abroad, enjoyed trips to Ascot and relaxed in punts during the Henley regatta .

Pett 1933c

Although she was shown to be an attentive and generous friend, there was a sense that both she and her wider social circle looked down on the lower classes and their lack of sophistication. Some strips revolved around the ease with which their social inferiors could be seduced and manipulated into acting as Jane and her coterie desired.

Pett 1934e

Other strips reinforced a hierarchically encoded worldview in which England was emphasized as pre-eminent amongst the home nations, and London repeatedly affirmed as its social and cultural centre. As a result the humour of many strips were built around an oppositional structure in which Jane’s cultured, sophisticated and urban worldview collided with the unrefined coarseness of her social inferiors. Consequently farmers, labourers, Scotsmen, the working classes and ‘nasty looking tramps’ were all ripe for mockery and derision .

Pett 1934f

Strikingly, given the series later fame as a morale booster for allied servicemen, this same hierarchically aligned narrative structure was deployed to tacitly support Rothermere’s fascist leanings. In the early years of its existence, numerous Jane strips aligned fascism with Jane’s own cultured, sophisticated and ordered worldview whilst depicting the opponents of fascism as uncultivated, unsophisticated and brutal. In a series of strips focusing on the Abyssinian conflict, for example, Italian troops were depicted as well-equipped and glamorous; their Abyssinian counterparts were openly racist caricatures, depicted as primitive, dog-eating tribesmen who decorated themselves with discarded tin cans and deployed laughably inadequate military equipment (figs 13) .

Pett 1935a

Pett 1935b

Another strip saw Jane, resplendent in a new all-black outfit, mistaken for one of Mosely’s fascists by a braying mob of left-wing agitators. In the strip the mob appears likely to attack Jane, but their danger is nullified by the arrival of a Police Constable, narratively serving as an icon of law and order, who leads Jane to safety. The strips’ use of clothing as a storytelling device is telling. Pett’s choice of where to spot blacks provides an opportunity to link Jane and the Police Officer at a pictorial level, and serves to narratively associate the visual iconography of the Blackshirts with the unruffled composure of the British police force and with the sophisticated elegance of Jane herself. By contrast the undignified mass of left-wing protesters are depicted as a mass of lighter tones, their overweight and ageing members sporting either balding or unkempt hair and ill-fitting, baggy clothing which serves to accentuate their gracelessness. Other aspects of the Mirror’s address during this period echoed the gentle reinforcement of pro-fascist sentiment that this strip provided. The following month, for example, the Mirror’s sister paper the Sunday Pictorial ran an article by Rothermere eulogising the Blackshirts as a practical example of “patriotism and discipline”, and the Mirror ran prominent advertisements for the feature in the lead-up to its publication.

Pett 1933d

Adam Twycross is currently engaged in PhD research on the development and evolution of adult comics in Britain. Between 2012 and 2019 he was Programme Leader for the MA in 3D Computer Animation at Bournemouth University’s National Centre for Computer Animation, and has previously worked as a 3D modeller, with credits including the Xbox 360 title Disneyland Adventures and the Games Workshop graphic novel Macragge’s Honour. He is co-founder of BFX, the UK’s largest festival of animation, visual effects and games.

More than Mere Ornament: Reclaiming 'Jane' (1 of 4) by Adam Twycross

Jane was a newspaper strip that first appeared in the Daily Mirror in December 1932. Created by Norman Pett, it was originally a daily gag strip, but was redeveloped as a continuity series in 1938. It developed an increasingly erotic edge, and became the most popular British comic strip of the Second World War (Chapman 2011, p.38), with its popularity boosted by republication in a series of forces newspapers and the arrival of spin-off publications and stage shows. In 1948 Mike Hubbard replaced Pett as principal artist, and the series continued for a further eleven years before Jane’s story finally concluded in October 1959.

In both popular and academic discourse, Jane is typically remembered in uncomplicated terms. The series is most commonly assumed to offer little more than a titillating glimpse at the erotic preoccupations of a bygone era, the original appeal of which can be credited to the lusty desires of its wartime audience. Decades after Jane’s heyday the Radio Times gave a sense of the character’s cultural positioning when it described Jane as the “scantily-clad cartoon heroine who cheered wartime Britain” (Radio Times 1982, p.1). In the same era, the Liverpool Echo recalled “Jane, of the lacy bra and snapping suspenders, the legendary strip cartoon heroine of Word War 2” (Jones 1982, p.8). More recently, from the realm of the popular historiography, authors such as Virginia Nicholson and Joshua Levine have continued to perpetuate a mythology that sees Jane’s primary function as being the facilitator of male sexual desire during the Second World War. Nicholson’s Millions Like Us describes Jane as a wartime “fantasy driven by lust and loneliness” (Nicholson 2012, p.226), whilst in The Secret History of the Blitz Levine dismisses Jane simply, and with striking inaccuracy, as “a character whose clothes fell off, in front of groups of men, for no apparent reason” (Levine 2015, loc.3063).  The associative link that ties Jane so firmly to notions of erotic appeal and the gendered experience of the war are often framed within a wider wartime context, and in particular the perception that Jane’s body was used as a vehicle to both incentivise and reward male participation in the war effort. In 1994, for example, the Irish Independent published recollections of the wartime Jane, including the suggestion that

“they dropped a consignment of the papers to the troops near Caen at the Pegasus Bridge, and they made huge advances into France after that. The joke during the war was that the British Army always attacked when Jane stripped to her scanties” (Irish Independent 1994, p.4).

So ubiquitous is this vision of Jane that it persists even in academic appraisals of British comics history and in books devoted entirely to Jane itself. James Chapman, in British Comics: A Cultural History, for example, discusses Jane firmly through a wartime lens (Chapman 2011, p.38-42). He describes the series as “the most popular comic strip of the war” with an audience composed largely of “schoolboys and servicemen”, drawn in by a basic motif of a heroine routinely shedding her clothes. Andy Saunders, in Jane: A Pin-Up at War, similarly frames Jane as an icon of wartime sexual fantasy, concluding that modern sensibilities would inevitably find the series “sexist, and certainly exploitative of women” (Saunders 2004, p.16) .

Despite the near universality of this mythology, however, there are compelling reasons to question its thoroughness, and ultimately its validity. Despite being widely assumed to have been aimed at male audiences, a more comprehensive engagement with the historical record reveals that Jane appealed as much to- indeed sometimes more to- women as it did to men. Smith (1975, p.83) notes that in the decade of Jane’s arrival, the Daily Mirror was considered to be a paper aimed primarily at women, with a readership that was around 70% female. An internal Mirror survey from 1937, meanwhile, found that of these 85% were regular readers of Jane. Despite the character’s subsequent fame as a ‘forces sweetheart’ in the war years that followed, a similar poll conducted in 1947 found that Jane’s appeal to women had remained consistent with the level recorded a decade earlier. This time the poll targeted female readers specifically, and again 85% reported that they were regular Jane readers (Cudlipp, 1953, p.75-76). The continued centrality of a female audience to Jane can be identified in other ways, too. Towards the end of the series’ life, for example, in January 1955, the Mirror Group launched a weekend companion to the Daily Mirror entitled the Women’s Sunday Mirror, and Jane was chosen to front much of the in-house publicity. The new Sunday edition was described as “the new paper by Jane”, and advertising reused images from the daily strip, with new speech balloons seeing Jane address female readers directly as she exhorted them to make contact so that the new paper could accurately reflect “what makes us girls tick!”

‘Jane,’ Daily Mirror (1955)

Similarly, although Jane is usually considered synonymously with the Second World War, in truth the series was a long-lasting one. It appeared day after day, week after week for nearly thirty years, persisting through decades of huge social and cultural change for Britain and the wider world. Around 80% of Jane’s original output occurred during peacetime, and had no appreciable connection either to the Second World War or to wartime conditions. The persistence of Jane’s cultural association with the war, however, means that huge swathes of the strips’ history have been ignored and forgotten. Yet if, as Chapman (2012, p.42) suggests, Jane offers a “good reflection of wartime changes in British society”, it seems curious that so little attempt has been made to identify similar process at work in the strips’ wider history.  

Even the oft-repeated suggestion that a clear causal link can be established between Jane’s nudity and the need to satisfy a male audience of armed forces personnel (see, for example, Andrews and McNamara 2014, p.187)  does not stand up to much scrutiny. Reinforcing the conceit that Jane’s nudity was initiated as a spur to armed forces morale, it is often claimed that, after years of teasing, Jane’s first fully nude appearance occurred on or around D-Day,  the 6th June 1944 (see, for example, Daily Mail 1994). Although on the day after D-Day the Daily Mirror did indeed run a strip in which Jane appeared in the nude (fig.2), this was far from a novelty. In fact, as this article will discuss in detail, such nude appearances pre-dated the war by some years, and resulted not from a desire to satisfy wartime troops, but from an unconnected revolution in the Mirror’s editorial style that occurred during the latter half of the 1930’s.

Pett and Freeman, 1944

Much of the cultural memory surrounding Jane is, therefore, erroneous, and the story of Jane’s full history is both more complex and more interesting than popular legend allows for. This essay will begin the process of fleshing out in more detail the true story of Jane’s development, focussing in particular on the way in which the series developed during its early pre-war period.

Jane’s debut, in December 1932, occurred at a time of wider turmoil for its parent publication. Established in 1903, the Daily Mirror had survived a rocky start to become, by the end of the First World War, Britain’s best-selling daily paper with sales often in excess of two million. Throughout the 1920s, however, the Mirror had struggled under a gradual but seemingly inexorable decline that had seen its readership collapse to less than 800,000  by the early 1930s (Horrie 2003, p.45). Principally, this had been the result of chronic mismanagement and interference by the paper’s principal shareholder, Lord Rothermere, who had spent years neglecting the Mirror and siphoning off its financial resources in order to bolster other parts of his sprawling publishing empire (Horrie 2003,  p.35). Like many newspaper proprietors, Rothermere was also adept at meddling in his paper’s editorial direction, which in his own case was particularly unfortunate, for he was a spectacularly poor reader of the moral and political tides of the early 1930s. Under his guidance the Daily Mirror became a vocal supporter of the ‘strong leaders’ of fascist Europe in general, and of Nazism in particular, as well as of Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts and their virulently anti-Semitic campaign to establish fascism in Britain. Compounding this highly questionable editorial direction, the Mirror was widely derided as a dull and anachronistic, regarded in some quarters as

“a silly, insignificant little Tory newspaper that ran quaint front-page pictures of ‘girls in pearls’, county cricket matches and brass bands playing music to caterpillars” (Horrie 2003, p.45).

Although the Daily Mirror’s future therefore looked bleak at the time of Jane’s arrival, the paper’s salvation lay close at hand. Although not yet obvious, in less than two years the Mirror’s pictures editor, Harry Guy Bartholomew, would be promoted to editorial director and would embark on a dramatic reconceptualization that would transform the Mirror into a brash, irreverent, working class newspaper (Bingham 2011, p. 115). The huge resurgence in popularity that would follow would irrevocably break Rothermere’s control over the paper and cast the newly invigorated Daily Mirror as “the model for popular journalism throughout much of the rest of the world for the rest of the century” (Horrie 2003, p.45). Bartholomew was a bombastic figure who was, in many ways, entirely the opposite of Rothermere. Irascible, foul-mouthed, and only semi-literate, he also harboured a particular, though for the time being carefully concealed, contempt for the pomposity and entitlement of the upper classes (Conby 2017, p.127). He was also almost preternaturally gifted at understanding the needs and nuances of modern news-craft, and he had a particular awareness of the power of the image as a driver of sales. Later he would be remembered as “simply and solely a picture man, who used pictures in a way they had never been used before” (Pilger 2010, p.381), but of all the visual arts it was perhaps cartoons and comics that were closest to Bartholomew’s heart. He was a sometime cartoonist himself, and occasionally had even ghosted for W.K. Haselden, the Mirror’s principal cartoonist who had been providing a daily dose of light social satire since the paper’s earliest days (British Cartoon Archive 2016). Although in 1932 Bartholomew had yet to gain control of the Mirror, as pictures editor he was able to commission new material. His power and influence within the paper’s hierarchy was also growing, and it was Bartholomew who employed Norman Pett to create Jane. Up until this point Pett’s cartooning career had been somewhat unremarkable; although he had been a regular contributor to Punch since the end of the First World War, he still supplemented his income with part-time work at the Birmingham School of Art. He enjoyed a somewhat unconventional life, and in his native Birmingham had cultivated a free-spirited lifestyle in which, despite having been married for more than ten years, he was almost permanently surrounded by young women, ostensibly to model. Given Bartholomew’s later strategy, which would make cartoons and comics a central feature of the new-look Daily Mirror,  Jane can be understood as representing a ‘trial run’ for the wider revolution that would follow in its wake. Bartholomew also appears to have been using Jane as a means of verifying whether the existing audience for comics in the Mirror could be broadened and increased. Since 1919 the paper had published a juvenile strip called Pip, Squeak and Wilfred, which through the years of Rothermere-inspired decline had proved to be a rare Mirror success. As well as being a popular feature in its own right, it had provided crucial revenue from a dizzying array of spin-off merchandise that saw the central characters appear on everything from china plates to matchboxes. When commissioning Jane, several sources suggest that Bartholomew specifically tasked Pett with the creation of a series that would repeat this success with an older audiences (see, for example, Cudlipp, 1953, p.73).

Adam Twycross is currently engaged in PhD research on the development and evolution of adult comics in Britain. Between 2012 and 2019 he was Programme Leader for the MA in 3D Computer Animation at Bournemouth University’s National Centre for Computer Animation, and has previously worked as a 3D modeller, with credits including the Xbox 360 title Disneyland Adventures and the Games Workshop graphic novel Macragge’s Honour. He is co-founder of BFX, the UK’s largest festival of animation, visual effects and games.

'The Beano's' Lord Snooty (Part 4 of 4) by Dave Miller

Cartoonish toffs, memes & use of Beano characters to criticise political power 

For a couple of decades discourses of class became unpopular. In Britain the divisive labour struggles of the Thatcher era had ended and in 1990 John Major announced his plans to make the whole country a genuinely classless society. When New Labour came to power in 1997, Tony Blair declared the class war was over, and talked instead about combating social exclusion and increasing social mobility.

But in actual fact, the class war merely changed form. Richard Hoggart, the author and academic famously said that "Class distinctions do not die; they merely learn new ways of expressing themselves." This is as true now as it was 25 years ago, and 25 years before that. "Each decade," he continued, "we shiftily declare we have buried class; each decade the coffin stays empty".

Jacob Rees Mogg, aged 13

The Huffington Post’s Alex MacDonald argues that the Occupy Movement in 2008, with the 99% campaign, highlighted that the UK class divide is not shrinking, but is in fact bigger than any time since World War II. Yet the Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 2012 highlighted a total lack of class awareness, with its huge popularity and the register of approval for the Monarchy and Wartime nostalgia that came with it. The Jubilee was an immense spectacle of privilege, wealth and hereditary superiority, and the public loved it. Boris Johnson was elected Mayor of London (and now Prime Minister) based on his cartoonish toffery, a self-parody of his own immense wealth and privilege - and again the public lapped it up. Since 2008 Britain has had a cabinet of millionaires - Cameron, Osborne, Johnson, Mogg - all belonging to an Etonian mafia, Oxbridge, Bullingdon Club heritage which almost guarantees them power. How much of this popularity comes from a British attitude of deference to class superiority and poshness?

Cartoonish buffoony - Boris Johnson dangling from zip wire (Daily Mail, 2012)

Paul Mason in the New Statesman argues that “Politics, for Johnson and the entire clan surrounding him, has become a form of showing off - and that Conservative politics has become not just a game for privileged people, but a kind of catwalk on which they can display their egos”. 

Bizarrely, this showing off seems to involve these aristocratic politicians modelling themselves on comic book English toffs. For example, in 2012, referring to Andrew Mitchell, the former chief whip, and George Osborne, the Chancellor, Alex Salmond asked the SNP conference: “Why on earth do we allow this bunch of incompetent Lord Snooty’s to be in positions of authority over our country?”. In 2017, the TUC boss Frances O’Grady likened the top Tories to Beano characters Lord Snooty, and Snitch and Snatch. She labelled Boris Johnson as posh Earl Lord Snooty, and Liam Fox and Michael Gove as like Snitch and Snatch . 

How intentional is this adopting of comic personas, or is it mere coincidence? Just how much have politicians been influenced by Beano and Dandy comic characters? Is this a case of life imitating art? Is it even a form of Cosplay?  Quite possibly the politicians play up to the comparisons with comic book characters?

Politicians adopting Beano and Dandy personas

As well as politicians adopting the personas, Beano and Dandy characters are also being used as ways to criticize political power. They are easy to use - distinctively British, familiar to a certain generation (though probably not with young generations as less familiar with the comics), deeply rooted in British culture, very strong associations, instantly recognizable. 

This demonstrates that the Beano and Dandy are no longer just kid’s comics - their characters (and background stories, sometimes distorted) have become ideological and political instruments – as Lord Snooty has been for generations, as a commonly used insult. In this way Lord Snooty is no longer just a comic character or an insult, he’s a vehicle for political argument, even a weapon.

Rah Rah Rah We’re going to smash the Oiks! (Lord Snooty Meme, 2019)

Mogg is a fake Lord Snooty – Twitter (@communicipalist, 2019)

Politicians have used (Beano and Dandy) cartoon insults and comparisons as a (cheap) way to attack the opposition and tap into the civic imagination. In essence, a popular children’s comic is being adopted and adapted for political ends. In recent years, memes have been employed and deployed by audiences on the left and the right, becoming effective weapons in the new culture wars (such as Trump followers did with Pepe the Frog).   

Boris Johnson has been accused of cynically constructing his identity in order to gain power. His identity seems to be a mixture of Beano comic characters, Bertie Wooster and Billy Bunter, but most likely the cheeky and mischievous Lord Snooty. As Hitchings et al puts it: “Johnson favours a passé form of exclamation that makes him seem unthreatening. Every time he says ‘Cripes,’ it calls to mind a short-trousered scamp who has just set aside his slingshot in order to inspect a mysteriously broken window. It’s a powerful archetype in English children’s literature, from Dennis the Menace to Just William.” 

In The Telegraph newspaper —often described as the ‘Torygraph’ by the left — Moore wrote an article in 2009 on the then-Leader of the Opposition, David Cameron comparing him to the idea of Lord Snooty, a ‘toff’ befriending the poor, and argued that Lord Snooty was the ideal role model for him. However, they questioned whether Cameron was the first version of Lord Snooty, or the nasty Lord Snooty III (Moore, 2019). 

Rees Mogg is regularly compared to Lord Snooty.

Mogg is also frequently compared to ‘Walter the Softy’ - a popular character from ‘Dennis the Menace’ cartoon in the Beano. Walter the Softy is frequently pranked by Dennis the Menace and his trusted dog and sidekick Gnasher.

In April 2018 (to mark their 80th anniversary) the Beano comic even issued a (tongue in cheek) cease-and-desist letter to Mogg, claiming he has modeled himself on its character Walter the Softy. DC Thomson accused the Tory MP of “masquerading” as Walter Brown, a foe of Dennis the Menace. It listed traits including his side parting, round glasses and “snootiness” as “distinctly copying” the character.  

In the letter, addressed to the North East Somerset MP at the House of Commons, Mike Stirling, head of Beano Studios Scotland, said Mr Rees-Mogg had been "infringing the intellectual property rights of one of our cartoon characters". He said it was "evident there are numerous instances whereby you have adopted trademarked imagery and brand essences of the character to the benefit of enhancing your career and popularity".

Cease and desist letter to Rees Mogg (Daily Mail, 2018)

Mike Stirling, head of Beano Studios Scotland, said: “We were flattered when we discovered that Jacob Rees-Mogg has dedicated his life to impersonating one of my favourite Beano characters, young Walter”. 

Rees-Mogg reacted light-heartedly to the humorous legal letter, denying he was doing this and claims he has more admiration for PG Wodehouse characters … “I did read the Beano as a child but I never thought I'd model myself on Walter the Softy.” Addressing the specific allegations in the letter, Mr Rees-Mogg insisted that he was “in favour of other people having fun” and said “snootiness is really rather unpleasant.”

Conclusion 

Lord Snooty started out in 1938 as a strip in the kid’s comic The Beano. The strip taps into the humour of class difference and the idea of a lovable anarchic aristocrat who poked fun at the bourgeoise establishment, as the character joined forces in solidarity with his working class friends, to rebel against the establishment that he himself was part of. 

The Beano and Dandy comics were created during the 1930’s Great Depression, and reflected and commented on the social hardship of daily life at that time. Lord Snooty is a strip that taps into class differences with a comedic, satirical bent. 

Over the years the Lord Snooty comic and character has become part of common language usage. For generations it has been used as an insult and slur against someone posh, snobby, aloof, who looks down on people - which is actually a gross distortion of the original story and character. More recently still, some Conservative Party politicians have adopted the Lord Snooty persona (as well as other Beano and Dandy comic personas) and have started looking and behaving in daily life like those comic characters. 

At the same time, Beano characters are being used to criticise political power. This is happening in Parliament, in the newspaper media, and especially in Internet memes. Beano characters are being adopted by audiences to use as memetic warfare, and the Lord Snooty meme is a good example of this.  

These popular Beano characters are much more than last century’s comics: they have become ideological and political weapons in the digital age.

Dave Miller is a designer and artist who makes mostly satirical works through combinations of comics, graphic novels, interactive and non-linear storytelling, especially in the context of computation, the Internet and emerging media. He has taught courses in both Design and Interactive Media at London South Bank University and Bournemouth University. He currently works at the Cartoon Museum in London, and is writing a political graphic novel. This is his first writing about comics.

The ‘Remembering UK Comics’ series is curated and edited by Dr William Proctor and Dr Julia Round, both of whom are Principal Academics at Bournemouth University, Dorset, UK.

'The Beano's' Lord Snooty (Part 3 of 4) by Dave Miller

A modern parody - ‘Dave Snooty and his Pals’ (2008)

Lord Snooty inspired a parody strip entitled ‘Dave Snooty and his Pals’, featuring the Conservative Party under the leadership of Prime Minister David Cameron, and published in the Private Eye magazine. This was the brainchild of satirist Ian Hislop and artist Nick Newman.

Dave Snooty III - 2008

The strip depicts David Cameron as ‘Dave Snooty’ and Conservative politician Boris Johnson (now Prime Minister) as his nemesis, ‘Boris the Menace’, complete with red and black stripy jumper. Dave Snooty would almost always end up defeated or humiliated.  

Unfortunately ‘Dave Snooty and his Pals’ was not true to the original Lord Snooty story. At no point did the title character inspire his comrades to emulate his gentlemanly virtues, or show that he had become their leader because they deferred to his innate moral worth (as in the original version of the Lord Snooty story). This would no doubt have improved the strip enormously.

‘Lord Snooty’ usage in common language 

Nowadays ‘Lord Snooty’ is a common insult for an overbearing or patronising snob, and often directed at Eton educated politicians. Popa-Wyatt and Wyatt suggest there are many words that slur the rich and powerful, and convey considerable contempt, such as ‘toff’, ‘Lord Snooty’, ‘nob’, ‘suit’, ‘the one percent’ and ‘Hooray Henry’. 

Though the name ‘Lord Snooty’ has remained firmly rooted in the public mind, the essence of the original comic story has been corrupted. In terms of the story, it doesn’t make sense to use his name as an insult. Lord Snooty was on the side of the ordinary (poor) folk, he was benevolent and generous, and never looked down on them. Bizarrely the common usage of his name (as a slur) is the total opposite of this. 

Probably the most likely reasons are: the original comics have been mis-remembered, people haven’t read the comics for so long that they have forgotten the original story, or perhaps they never read the comics but have heard the name and (lazily) assume that Lord Snooty is true to his name - ‘snooty’ - i.e. considering himself to be better than others, especially people of a lower social class.  

Parody versions of the comic have probably also contributed to the corruption of the story, and newspapers/ media certainly use Lord Snooty as an insult. Sometimes, confusingly, they seem to be referring to Lord Snooty III. 

So why was he even called ‘Lord Snooty’ in the first place, when he wasn’t intended to be snooty? He didn’t behave in a snooty manner, though, looking through the comics, you can see he was always presented as being superior to people of a lower social class, through his inherited wealth power and privilege - but it was seen as admirable that he chose to hang out with the ordinary people, and he was kind and generous to them. He wasn’t arrogant or pompous or full of airs and graces, and didn’t behave in a ‘snooty’ manner - in fact he rebelled against his privilege. In effect, the original Snooty strip poked fun at the bourgeoise establishment, as the character joined forces in solidarity with his working class friends, to rebel against the establishment that he himself was part of. 

According to the ‘History of the Beano’, in the early days of the Lord Snooty strip, the storylines were along the lines of the Mark Twain novel ‘The Prince and the Pauper’. This story explores themes of social inequality, where two boys - one very rich and the other very poor - are fascinated by the other's life, and to get a ‘feeling’ of the other's life, they exchange clothing and swap roles.

The Beano editor of the 1990s, Euan Kerr, admitted that Snooty was an outdated character in a dated mid-20th century world that 1990’s children could never relate to. He also admitted Lord Snooty was his least favourite character to write for and commented that “I never liked Lord Snooty at all and I suppose I was the cause of his demise in the end. He was completely outdated by the time I sat in the Editors chair, though, and I could see absolutely no way of updating him. Although there were some great “Lord Snooty” strips in the 1940s, he was becoming increasingly difficult to write for in the modem era and the readers just couldn’t relate to him anymore.” 

The world had moved on a lot since Snooty was first created.

Changing attitudes to class in Britain 

Historian Arthur Marwick described a radical transformation of British society resulting from the Great War, that he saw as a ‘deluge’ that swept away many old attitudes and brought in a more egalitarian society. He pointed to an energised self-consciousness among workers that quickly built up the Labour Party, the coming of partial women's suffrage, and an acceleration of social reform and state control of the economy. He noted a decline of deference toward the aristocracy and established authority in general, and the weakening among youth of traditional restraints on individual moral behaviour. Marwick felt that class distinctions softened, national cohesion increased, and British society became more equal. 

Snooty was part of the old world, where everyone knew their place and social class - deference to class superiority was the norm, as in the famous class-conscious skit from John Cleese and the Corbetts. Snooty was born into aristocratic power, yet he remained likeable, as he chose to use his power to help the ordinary folk, something which was eccentric and comical, admirable, radical even rebellious or anarchic. He chose to be one of the ordinary people, even though he was born into a superior class and therefore he knew, and everyone accepted, that he was superior. 

The basis of the Lord Snooty story - comedy around class difference - worked well when the comic was first launched, but UK society changed radically during the Twentieth Century, and attitudes to class changed. Snooty’s behavior would be interpreted differently nowadays (perhaps seen more as slumming it or patronizing). 

The post-war Labour government worked hard to eliminate class barriers with its introduction of high tax rates for the well off, the creation of the welfare state, expansion of the public sector, free education, free healthcare, and there was a belief among much of the population in the following decades that class was no longer the barrier to success it had been before the war.

Dave Miller is a designer and artist who makes mostly satirical works through combinations of comics, graphic novels, interactive and non-linear storytelling, especially in the context of computation, the Internet and emerging media. He has taught courses in both Design and Interactive Media at London South Bank University and Bournemouth University. He currently works at the Cartoon Museum in London, and is writing a political graphic novel. This is his first writing about comics.

The ‘Remembering UK Comics’ series is curated and edited by Dr William Proctor and Dr Julia Round, both of whom are Principal Academics at Bournemouth University, Dorset, UK.

'The Beano's' Lord Snooty (Part 2 of 4) by Dave Miller

The Lord Snooty comic 

‘Lord Snooty and His Pals’ made their first appearance in issue No. 1 of the Beano, in a story titled “Son of a Duke But Always Pally - With the Beezer Kids of Ash-Can Alley” (published on July 30th, 1938).

‘Lord Snooty and His Pals’ (The Legend of Lord Snooty and His Pals, 1998, p.6)

Marmaduke, the young Lord of Bunkerton, is known to his friends and to generations of comic readers as Lord Snooty, the newest member of the House of Lords. He goes to Eton (a private school), lives in a castle, and has servants. He's a very ordinary boy who just happens to be a Lord and one of the richest people in the whole world, lives with Aunt Matilda, and is assisted by his butler, Albert.

Early version of Lord Snooty

The responsibilities of being a peer of the realm weigh heavily on Snooty’s young shoulders and he often slips into disguise to mix with his street urchin pals from Ash Can Alley. He finds his posh friends too soft and boring (and snobby), and prefers to play with his urchin pals - who he considers to be his “real pals in Ash-Can alley”, and where he has real fun. Snooty is rebellious and full of mischief, acting against his privileged life which he finds strict and oppressive. 

The Ash Can Alley kids regularly face their most bitter rivals, the Gasworks gang, and adventures often revolve around this. Other adventures involve the eccentric Professor Screwtop and his wacky inventions. Although everything in Bunkerton Castle was fun and games, world events soon provided the scriptwriters with a new theme, as Snooty and pals entered the propaganda battle in the early stages of the Second World War. Over the following years, the pals would repel many a Nazi assault on Bunkerton Castle and Lord Snooty often personally took on Hitler (Watkins, 1998).

Lord Snooty & WW2 - 1941 (The Legend of Lord Snooty and his Pals, 1998, p.31)

The Lord Snooty strip was drawn by Dudley D. Watkins until his death in 1969, but Leo Baxendale and Albert Holroyd occasionally filled in for Watkins. Watkins drew Desperate Dan in the Dandy and Lord Snooty in the Beano, and the enduring celebrity of these stand as testimony to his observant eye and witty draughtsmanship. “In Watkins, DC Thomson had found their inhouse genius. He was a devout Christian who kept a Bible near his drawing board, and in his spare time drew cartoon strips for evangelical newspapers. His great ambition, barely begun when in 1969, he keeled over his drawing board with a fatal heart attack, was to convert the Bible into what would now be known as a graphic novel. He drew the Lord Snooty strip until April 1968.”

The Lord Snooty strip was discontinued from the Beano in 1991, but it was the only remaining strip left from the first issue when it was withdrawn. 

Analysis of the stories 

Lord Snooty is a strip that taps into class differences with a comedic, satirical bent. Lord Snooty is a ‘toff ‘, a derogatory stereotype for someone with an aristocratic background or belonging to the landed gentry. His Lordship preferred to hang out with the poor urchin Ash-Can Alley gang, and he himself was not snobbish at all. He identifies with his poor friends, more than with kids of his own privileged class. Below is the theme of the first episode, where he rejects his posh friends who he is supposed to play with:

Lord Snooty - first comic - July 1938 (The Legend of Lord Snooty and his Pals, 1998)

The original Ash Can Alley gang were Scrapper Smith, Hairpin Huggins, Skinny Lizzie, Rosie, Happy Hutton, Gertie the goat and later Snitch and Snatch. The sworn enemies of the Ash Can Alley were the Gasworks Gang, a group of ill-favoured yobs. 

Snooty was an aristocratic ragamuffin, a good guy, benevolent, who identifies with the ordinary people, and they are very fond of him. He was kind to the ordinary kids, looked after them, was generous, and mischievous with them. Snooty was a popular hero, because he shared the sufferings of his comrades while adding the gentlemanly virtues which they lacked (Moore, 2019). On the other hand the story appears to follow a Dandy and Beano stereotype, i.e.  the ‘lovable benevolent aristocrat’ versus the uneducated poor/ lower orders. 

The majority of Beano readers would identify with these playful working-class kids and fully understand why Snooty liked them. Life at the castle looks like a life of discipline that lacked freedom and fun. Dudley Watkins (who drew the comic) caught this contrast beautifully; everyone connected with life at the castle had an expression of severe aloofness, whereas the gang playing in the Ash-Can Alley had happy animated faces full of energetic fun. 

It seems the story was revised early on - Lord Snooty wasn’t initially a nice person, and the story didn’t quite work, as some of these forum comments point out: 

“Marmaduke, Earl of Bunkerton (Lord Snooty) is a right nasty piece of work in the first few episodes. A forerunner of Dennis the Menace in some ways, but with added money and power. He also likes to have it both ways- slumming it in Ashcan alley but making full use of his castle and seemingly unlimited wealth. Fortunately, the writers must have realised this flaw as he becomes the good-hearted soul we're more familiar with very quickly. In comics, it's OK to be rich and OK to be a bully, but not both...One particularly nasty moment is in the fifth ever strip (fourth in the collection) dated 27/8/1938, where in revenge for the cook telling tales on him, he frames the cook so the cook is not only fired, but literally fired at with guns by the castle's hunting party.”

There are theories that the Ash Can Alley gang idea was “borrowed” from a 1930s film gang featuring Mickey Rooney, as some of the character names seem to be the same.

Over the years 1938-1991 there were different versions of Lord Snooty. He changed with the times, the themes changed, his gang members changed, to try to cater for changing tastes and a changing world, and to try to keep him relevant to his audience.

10/9/1938 was the last strip with Snooty in his ‘street urchin’ disguise. It's not clear at what point his pals in Ash Can alley stopped being a secret to his Aunt Matilda and when they started being welcome visitors, and eventually residents, at Bunkerton Castle. From there onwards, this seems to have changed the story into less of an ‘us and them’ scenario. 

In no. 10 the crazy eccentric Professor Screwtop and his inventions was introduced. From no. 13 onwards, Snooty was masterminding freelance operations against the Nazis - for example, dropping germs on them, and a desperate Hitler had to write to Snooty and beg for mercy. 

The first series of Lord Snooty came to an end in July 1949, but then Snooty returned at the end of 1950. There were character changes in the 1950s - some characters were dropped and others introduced, such as ‘Doubting Thomas’, ‘Swanky Lanky Liz’, Lord Snooty’s twin classmates ‘Snitch’ and ‘Snatch’. 

In the later years Lord Snooty’s personality took a turn for the worse. The character was eventually axed because it became outdated and difficult to write strips, readers could no longer relate to him, and in 1991 Snooty was dropped by the Beano .

But years later Lord Snooty re-appeared in a different format (in 2008), though this time the comic was about Lord Snooty III (Marmaduke's grandson), who has inherited his fortune and his Bunkerton Castle. The plot is similar: he is a mischievous boy who is extremely rich and lives in a castle; he has a butler (called Parkinson); and forms his own gang. However, there are major differences - his character is almost the total opposite of Marmaduke as he wallows in his wealth. He’s a ‘repulsive’ boy who laughs at those less fortunate. His butler is long-suffering and sarcastic. His gang consists of an adolescent named Naz, a young black girl named Frankie, Emo, and One and Three the triplets. The strip wasn’t popular and the comic series officially ended in 2011.

Lord Snooty III - 2008

Dave Miller is a designer and artist who makes mostly satirical works through combinations of comics, graphic novels, interactive and non-linear storytelling, especially in the context of computation, the Internet and emerging media. He has taught courses in both Design and Interactive Media at London South Bank University and Bournemouth University. He currently works at the Cartoon Museum in London, and is writing a political graphic novel. This is his first writing about comics.

The ‘Remembering UK Comics’ series is curated and edited by Dr William Proctor and Dr Julia Round, both of whom are Principal Academics at Bournemouth University, Dorset, UK.

'The Beano's' Lord Snooty (Part 1 of 4) by Dave Miller

The children’s classic comic character has evolved into a modern day insult.

Lord Snooty by Dudley Watkins

The Dandy & The Beano

DC Thomson Ltd of Dundee, Scotland, was established by David Coupar Thomson in 1905, and has been a major publisher of magazines, newspapers and comics in Britain ever since. The company is best known as the publisher of the Dandy comic (launched on 4th December 1937, and for decades one of the longest running comic titles in the world), and its younger sister, The Beano, launched on 30th July 1938 and still published today. .

The Beano #1 (1938)

According to Roger Sabin, the Dandy and the Beano, more than any others, have defined modern perceptions of a comic in Britain. And thanks to DC Thomson, Dundee is often referred to as the comics capital of Britain. 

The Beano is the longest running British children’s comic magazine, and one of the best-selling comics, along with The Dandy. Its most famous characters and stories include Dennis the Menace, Minnie the Minx, The Bash Street Kids, The Numskulls, Roger the Dodger, Billy Whizz, and The Legend of Lord Snooty and His Pals. To this day the Beano is still popular; in 2018 it was selling more than 37,500 copies a week, or 1.86 million copies a year. 

Happy 80th birthday to The Beano

What was so special about these comics? According to Anita O’Brien, director curator at London’s Cartoon Museum, when comics like the Beano and Dandy first emerged in the 1930s, they were almost the only entertainment available to children.  

In Sabin’s account, the early children’s comics produced by the Amalgamated Press (AP) were popular, but staid and old fashioned. Text captions ran underneath each cartoon panel, and often the images merely illustrated the descriptions given in the text. But the text captions were AP’s way of countering critics who complained at that time that comics were a threat to literacy.

Happy Days - October 1938 (Amalgamated Press)

When DC Thomson moved into the production of comics it was already a well-established publisher, with a monopoly of Dundee's newspapers. The Dandy and The Beano appeared in the late 1930s, and were immediately popular, as Chris Murray argues.

Why were these comics so popular? The Beano and Dandy looked similar to comics that already existed (especially the AP comics) in that they were printed on cheap paper, with color covers and black/ white inside pages (as in the ‘Happy Days’ comic above). But Sabin maintains that the Beano and Dandy were years ahead of their time, and that they redefined the genre. Placing dialogue within word-balloons seemed to make a big difference; the drawings seemed more dynamic, and were no longer not tied to the rigid AP panel format, which allowed more fluent joke-telling. Murray points out the word balloon idea came from the format of American comics at that time. This new style in British comics revolutionized the comics industry, and made the Dandy and Beano household names. 

But the DC Thomson titles were also unusual and interesting in how they approached the storytelling. Murray argues that from the beginning DC Thomson drew on the tradition of political comics and social commentary, particularly Hogarth and Gillray, and their satirical prints of working class life. 

DC Thomson's comics were calculated to appeal to children rather than parents, so seemed much more unruly and anarchic than their competition at AP. AP comics were quite well mannered, while DC Thomson's were brash and featured working class characters. They appealed to children growing up in hard times, which was Dundee in middle of the 1930’s Great Depression, and were a distraction from the grim realities of the Depression and rationing.

Dundee poverty in 1930’s (Tweedie, 2019)

Dundee during the 1930’s Great Depression was a world where everyone was hungry all the time, where social inequalities were pronounced. Sabin believes this explains why there were so many comic strips about relationships between ‘toffs’ and the working class (e.g. the Lord Snooty comic), typically ending with a reward of ‘grub’, such as a plate of bangers (sausages) and mash, or massive pies - seen as a desirable reward. Curiously, this comic formula hasn’t changed much over the years.

Lord Snooty & grub - March 25th 1939 (‘The Legend of Lord Snooty & his Pals,’ 1998, p.14)

Interestingly, there are certain story/ stereotype combinations or themes which seem to be repeated in different comic strips within the Beano and Dandy. Readers in the “I love Comics forum” have identified three of the most common, namely: (1) the cheerful poor vs up-themselves nouveau riche (class difference/ social inequality); (2) hooligan idiots vs teachers pets; (3) ‘oikish’ lower orders vs lovable aristos (nostalgic idealised dream of feudalism, "all England loves a lord" etc.)

Murray believes the comics represent a kind of social history of Scotland, reflecting the character of the times, with humor and crafty japes keeping spirits high during hard times. The comic strips appealed to Scottish readers because it represented a world they recognized; though the comics also appealed, and made sense, to readers nationwide. The Dandy and Beano introduced a sharper, more knockabout type of fun and jokes, and a range of eccentric, strange but lovable characters. These included Desperate Dan and Lord Snooty by Dudley D. Watkins, Korky the Cat by James Critchton, Dennis the Menace by David Law, Minnie the Minx and the Bash Street Kids by Leo Baxendale. The subject matter and the anarchic approach made these comics special, along with the simple, appealing drawing style.

Characters from the Dandy are joined by Paul McCartney in the last ever print edition of the Dandy (published in 2012)

The Beano and Dandy were radically different in that they allowed transgression against adults, challenge adult authority and celebrate a world of anarchy and mischief-making. This probably explains the enormous popularity and extraordinary longevity, as James Chapman emphasizes. There is often a strong sense of morality at play in the comic strips, but the Beano's strength is its sense of mischief and rough-and-tumble approach to life, which is surprising as DC Thomson had a reputation for staunch conservatism. Thompson himself openly discriminated against Catholic employees, and categorized job applications by religious affiliation. He also strongly opposed trade unions. Yet DC Thomson’s family business gave us characters such as the proto-punk Dennis the Menace and riot grrl forerunner Minnie the Minx, two children whose entire lives are geared towards taking on the adult world (and therefore the establishment). As The Guardian’s Ben Myers writes: “Teachers, parents and policemen - no one is safe from their catapults, pranks and stink bombs.”

Dave Miller is a designer and artist who makes mostly satirical works through combinations of comics, graphic novels, interactive and non-linear storytelling, especially in the context of computation, the Internet and emerging media. He has taught courses in both Design and Interactive Media at London South Bank University and Bournemouth University. He currently works at the Cartoon Museum in London, and is writing a political graphic novel. This is his first writing about comics.

The ‘Remembering UK Comics’ series is curated and edited by Dr William Proctor and Dr Julia Round, both of whom are Principal Academics at Bournemouth University, Dorset, UK.