`CAPRICIOUS SPHINCTERS'

D. J. Taylor assesses the state of the comic, 50 years after George Orwell's attack on `Boys' Weeklies' COMICS are an incorrigible part of the child's view of the world, whoever the child, whatever its social background. It is said that in the 1920s, when the Boy's Own Paper celebrated its half-century, Stanley Baldwin arrived from Chequers to superin- tend the proceedings: 60.years later, when the Dandy announced a similar celebra- tion, any number of politicians, novelists and what-not could be found in the pages of the Sunday supplements confessing to a childhood addiction. This type of pro- longed adult nostalgia for the reading matter of infancy is quite ingrained. Even today I can still remember the names of most of the Bash Street Kids and the occasion on which Wilson, the famous athlete, ran the 100 yards in nine seconds flat on a deserted beach with the finishing line simply a mark in the sand. Depending on your point of view, a children's comic can be either a vehicle for Propaganda or a hindrance to conventional methods of education. Fifty years ago this month Orwell's essay 'Boys' Weeklies', which appeared in an early number of Horizon, suggested that comics were a sinister plot designed to lure juveniles into accepting the status quo and, while ack- nowledging the dangers, called for a left- wing equivalent. 'In England,' he con- cluded, 'popular imaginative literature is a field which left-wing thought has never begun to enter.'

This might have been true then, and may even be true now but unquestionably part of the allure of comics arises out of the air of adult disapproval which attaches itself to them. In most middle-class homes of the 1960s there was nearly always a hard- fought battle between what the child bought at the newsagent's and the sort of magazines recommended by teachers and parents.

I can recall concerted attempts at about the age of nine to wean me off the Beano and on to mildly uplifting publications with titles like Look and Learn and Treasure (today's equivalent would be the Indy). Yet there cannot be many adults who did not spend some part of their childhood reconstructing scenes or mimicking events from a comic, and even at the age of eight one was aware that the selection of the school football team, with its bitter intri- gues and dark hints of favouritism, bore an uncanny resemblance to the processes de- scribed in the Victor or Scorcher.

This is not to say that children's comics bear even a distant resemblance to child- hood reality: after all, an average issue of the Beano is approximately as 'real' as an episode of Tom and Jerry or a tabloid newspaper. In fact, comics bring off their effects by providing a burlesque on reality, a sort of distorting mirror of impossibly stylised grown-ups and weirdly idiosyncra- tic children, a universe of sharp, vivid colours and emotional short-cuts, and, generally, not the faintest suggestion that the adult world exists. From an adult perspective this type of distancing can be futile or even harmful, but for the child it is the nearest approximation to the child's eye view — that world of fat, inexplicable adults always out to prevent children from doing the things they enjoy — which it is possible to imagine. Probably it is this characteristic which explains the persistent long-term popular- ity of these cheap, badly-printed weekly papers. Anyone going into a newsagent's shop to buy a comic for the first time in 20 years will immediately be struck not only by the variety of items on offer, but by the familiarity of the titles. First there are the straight comic papers, bought by both sexes: the Beano, the Dandy and their more recent competitors such as Whizzer and Chips. There are the sporting adven- ture stories, aimed one imagines at boys between the ages of eight and 12: Roy of the Rovers, Victor (still going), Eagle (re- launched in something like its original form). Then there are the girls' equiva- lents: Bunty and — for slightly older girls —Jackie. There are the futuristic comics of the 2000 AD school, American imports from the Marvel stable, and the pamphlet war-stories. Finally there are any amount of photo-romance and young-love booklets bought by teenage girls: sickly things which combine a certain degree of sexual know- ingness with the most viscid sentiment- ality.

Looking through these vividly drawn landscapes, with their casts of fat, doughnut-eating children and flaxen- haired footballers, one's first reaction especially with the purely comic papers is astonishment at how little anything has changed. The comic, with its fixed premis- es, has proved quite incapable of dealing with changing social circumstances. The Beano, for instance, seems exactly as one remembered it. 'Sir' in the Bash Street Kids still wears his mortar-board (I don't suppose there is a state school in England where this still happens); Roger the Dod- ger is still being pursued by his slipper- wielding father. There is no such thing as divorce or a one-parent family. It is not true, of course, to say that these comics are still entirely subservient to their original form, yet concessions to the present seem almost out of place. The Beano will occa- sionally run a story with contemporary paraphernalia — Billy Whizz testing a portable telephone, references to 'yuppies' — but it is capable of existing side by side with the long-running Lord Snooty series, in which a top-hatted jeune premier spends his time fighting off the insults of ruffian youths brandishing catapults. If Lord Snooty has a fictional prototype it is someone like The Honourable Augustus D'Arcy out of the Frank Richards books: his origins at any rate can be placed firmly before the second world war.

Move on to the sporting and adventure comics and the late 20th century, or one aspect of it, does loom fleetingly into view. Papers like Victor and Eagle and Mask are a curious amalgam of the old-fashioned and the up-to-date, bringing together stor- ies from the first world war and futuristic stuff about robots, much of it adapted from the Star Wars films. Victor even takes its readers back to the naval campaigns of the Napoleonic wars (`Ods Blud! That caught the old tub in her vitals!') balancing them with updates on the latest US navy gadget- ry. Only the sporting comics seem to be entirely contemporary, often containing thinly-disguised burlesques of real events, such as `Menzino', the brilliant Brazilian striker who comes to England to play for First Division Grimthorpe. `Menzino' is clearly based on Mirandhina, the former Newcastle United player, although, curiously, Grimthorpe's brutal manager bears an odd resemblance to Glasgow Rangers's Graham Souness.

Locating the attitudes and the moral preconceptions which underly this mass of mildly escapist, highly stylised material is not as straightforward as it seemed 50 years ago to Orwell. Periodically there emerges an article in the stiffer kind of newspaper alleging that children's comics are overly violent, 'amoral' and dangerously unsuit- able. Four or five years ago, for instance, controversy surrounded an IPC publication named Battle Action Force which was supposed to have initiated a whole new school of no-holds-barred, jump-on-his- testicles sadism, and whose villain, 'Baron Ironblood', seemed only a shade less vi- cious than his opponents (I know. I used to sit in a dingy basement in Newman Street writing the plot-lines). Such a blurring of the distinction between right and wrong, if it could be proved, would demonstrate a sharp transformation in the moral atmos- phere. For, though frequently anarchic, children's comics always supplied clear-cut moral solutions. In some ways this was a paradox: though written from the child's point of view, the traditional English comic always ended up on the side of the adult. If there was one precept which the child of the 1960s could learn from the Beano, it was that 'naughtiness' would be rebuked; and if there was one moral lesson incul- cated by an adventure weekly like Victor, it was that right conquered might, usually in a gentlemanly way.

Broadly speaking, this distinction still holds. The adults in the Beano still win and Dennis the Menace is still discomfited. Though graphically violent (`Hit those flak guns. . . . Straight in and no messing') the stories in Victor and Eagle still constitute a dramatisation of moral opposites, the only change — a significant one — being that the heroes no longer despatch the villains with diffidence but with lip-smacking re- lish. Set against this, however, are a number of explicitly didactic comics such as Roy of the Rovers, largely about football and full of references to 'fair play' and good sportsmanship'. A recent issue pro- vided a perfect example of the moral

stereotypes with which the comic is custo- marily invested, with Roy Race, blond, square-jawed, pitted against a leery- looking rival captain. 'This game is bigger than both of us,' Roy tells him decisively.

This sort of stereotyping is not confined to the field of morality. The attitudes and prejudices which inform papers such as Victor and Eagle are at bottom the same as those which Orwell detected. Foreigners are funny, or sinister, or treacherous. The status quo is still broadly upheld and many of the adventure stories still exude anti- Soviet and — a new angle, this — anti- Arab propaganda. Regional accents are funny. Fat people are still unimaginably funny. Girls still play with dolls, boys with footballs, although the two variations on this rule — the cissy and the tomboy — are still going strong in the shape of weedy Walter, the eternal butt for Dennis the Menace's asperity, and Minnie the Minx. Sex simply fails to exist. Significantly, whenever the Eagle turns up some vampish lure it is nearly always the robotic sidekick who falls for her rather than Dan Dare. This turning of the male-female rela- tionship into a mild form of joke is a characteristic of the comic: a similar air, one might recall, invested the Billy Bunter stories.

To establish the popularity of comics among children is a more or less impossible task. Publishers are chary of releasing sales figures, and in any case it is probably true that the Beano is bought by large numbers of nostalgic adults. Much more definite is the appeal of 'adult comics' such as Viz and its feebler cousins, Brain Damage and Gas. Viz is supposed to have sold nearly a million copies of its Christmas number, although circulation is now thought to be falling even as the notoriety of the product increases. The adult comic, left-field and anarchic, is not a new phenomenon: the tradition goes at least as far back as the 1960s with Oz and, from America, the dope-smoking, cop-evading Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, but the large sales of Viz put it into an altogether different category, that of a magazine with genuine popular appeal. Viz's forte is scabrous, unrelenting black humour. A representa- tive example of its cartoon heroes might be `Paul Whicker the tall vicar', a malevolent, hard-drinking cleric who abuses his Bible class, holds 'Fuck the Pope' jumble sales and tries to bribe an investigating bishop (Never mind the bullshit Whicker, I've been hearing some complaints about you').

'I think it's this new underclass we keep hearing about.' Whicker and the rest of the Viz cast, the `Parkie' who machine-guns those people unwise enough to stray onto his grass, the slovenly and vicious 'Postman Plod', fit fairly neatly into the mould of 'alternative' and occasionally mean-spirited Eighties comedy, the comedy of the Comic Strip or the American National Lampoon (which once featured a drawing of a puppy be- neath the caption, 'If you don't buy this magazine we'll kill this dog'). But to use such humour as a means of adducing `moral chaos', an absence of any sort of value system, as have one or two commen- tators, is to miss the point. Read three of the strips in Viz with any care and all that emerges is a series of artfully constructed parodies. In fact, by sending up the con- ventions of the traditional children's com- ic, Viz goes some way towards establishing what they are. The child with some special idiosyncrasy, a staple of the Beano or Dandy, finds his counterpart in Viz's `Johnny Fartpants (there's always a com- motion going on in his trousers)' or 'Felix and his Amazing Underpants'. Johnny Fartpants, in particular, is a fine recrea- tion, on a Rabelaisian level, of something out of the Beano, always fortuitously ac- quiring sums of money and then having to surrender them as a result of the damage caused to fences, buildings and property by his capricious sphincter.

Viz, of course, scarcely fits Orwell's prescription for a left-wing comic. In fact its relation to the world which Orwell defined — a world of deeply rooted, if unconscious, censorship and a rapt immer- sion in the values of the ruling class — is a peculiar one. This is not to say that Orwell's call for a left-wing comic has gone unanswered: one might point to Crisis, a recent effort from the 2000 AD stable, which contains cartoon strips of policemen planting drugs on black suspects and laboured explanations of the Irish problem from the Republican point of view. By contrast, Viz is far too random, far too purposefully anarchic, to have a definite, card-carrying political standpoint: it will happily poke fun at militant feminism Tant and her feminist conscience', a recent creation who declines to be rescued from a burning house by a male firefighter) and even in its obvious send- ups of right-wing opinion provides only a watered-down version of the leftist satire of Steve Bell's If cartoons. Seriousness, as Orwell pointed out, can only be taken so far in a comic. For Viz to take itself seriously, which is what any left-wing publication has to do in the end, would be entirely to demolish its appeal. But though it is easy enough to talk about `moral confusion', lurking among the lava- tory jokes and the sent-up photo-love romances are a fair number of subcon- sciously held 'values'. They are not perhaps 'steeped in the worst illusions of 1910' — Orwell's complaint about the Frank Richards stories — but their attach-

ment to the post-war liberal orthodoxy, what might be called the new establish-

ment, is quite distinct. Viz, for instance, is

keen to satirise imagined class distinctions — Timmy the 'Spoilt Bastard', anxious lest his birthday party be ruined by working- class children who live in council houses and its last issue contained a mild attack on the police (`Junior Cop' who allows himself to be bribed and beats up his mother in an attempt to discover the whereabouts of his lost whistle). Sun-reading Morris Day, Sexual Pervert (`Like any normal person I like to see a great big pair of tits first thing in the morning') and 'Sid the Sexist' with his rallying cry of `Tits oot for the lads' and his persistent defeat at the hands of Amazonian women are further examples of liberal 'issues' poking their head briefly above the parapet.

These attitudes are seldom pronounced, for to emphasise them would be to under- mine the magazine's principal function. Broadly speaking, Viz succeeds on two fronts: first, by mocking an extraordinarily imitable (and largely dead) form; secondly, by combining this mockery with deep, unquestioning reverence of the social arrangements which underlay the original. In this sense it resembles the Lord Peter Wimsey stories of Dorothy L. Sayers, in which the fun poked at aristocrats and the digs at 'his noble lordship' fail to disguise considerable admiration. Viz finds conven- tional family life and its prohibitions wildly amusing, but one gets the feeling that it would not want conventional family life, with its triumphant parents and cast-down children, to disappear.

These are odd attributes for something which has a popular reputation for being both subversive and disgusting. But the only genuinely disgusting thing about Viz, perhaps, is its tee-shirt advertisements. Its most obvious characteristic, whatever the chatter about 'moral chaos', is the element of sheer nostalgia. It may be written by adults for adults, its values would certainly have distressed Lord Camrose and the newspaper proprietors of Orwell's day, but no student of the Beano could fail to spot the resemblance between the amazing Felix or Buster Gonad (he of the Unfeas- ibly Large Testicles) and Roger the Dod- ger, not only in their idiosyncrasies but in their acceptance of the moral attitudes which underlie their adventures. And though they might exist on different levels, they are still part of that teeming cast of resourceful infants, gaunt schoolmasters and fat-bottomed women which goes to make up the child's eye view of the world; a world which, despite the slight shift of values, is essentially unchanged, a world in which authority conquers and dissension is rebuked; a world which has as many

established values' as ever it did 50 years ago. That world might now be the province of nostalgic adults, but its function as a vehicle for propaganda remains unim- paired.