drawn slippy
 

A new book called Comics, Comix And Graphic Novels, which attempts the highly serious task of outlining the history of comics, is published by Phaidon this month. The book is all very scholarly and respectful. America, it reassures us, is the untouchable home of everything inherently great. The "comical comics" or "funnies" which apparently began around 1900 are, it explains, the foundation stones of a great art form, and are therefore to be treated respectfully. Nostalgia allows comics like the Dandy and Beano the benefit of the doubt. Several artists are mentioned in hushed tones, and the wit and story development employed is lauded. However, when it comes to the punklike explosion of cheek, contemporary allusion and bad taste contained in Seventies comics like Monster Fun, Cor!!, Whoopee! and Cheeky - the ones you and I grew up reading - then Comics, Comix And Graphic Novels decides that they are "derivative" and "dull". "Readers should be advised against investigating them too closely," it declares, "as we were all much less critical as children." Yes, and we were right too. Because being "critical" killed comics. Intellectualising about them, and pretending they could be high-brow literature instead of delinquent mayhem, tore the heart out of the British weekly comics, and led history to overlook a genre which reached a brilliant, peculiar zenith at the end of the Seventies. It left us at the mercy of rubbish from America which, seeming more suited to doctorate-level theorising, was celebrated at the expense of everything else. The people we've got to blame are the ones who think that a man who dresses up as a bat to hang around with his "young companion" is up there with Hamlet, while a lad who can "scrunge" his face into any shape except an attractive one is somehow ridiculous. Since the old weekly comics died in the early Eighties, we've got all the Wolverines and Batmen we need (more, in fact) and not a single Faceache to call our own. And it's criminal. Because if you ask me, the true spirit of the comic idea faded with those titles, and now lies lost in a thousand lofts full of yellowing copies of Whizzer And Chips, or buried beneath a basketful of Mills & Boon in a tatty old Shiver And Shake annual at your local Age Concern shop. It was in the late 1930s, with the Dandy and Beano, that the Dundee- based publisher DC Thomson invented the comic idea which, 40 years later, Monster Fun and its ilk would mug, tax and leave for dead. The social conditions prevalent in Scotland in that era were the obvious root of classic comic ideas like the toffs and their less well-off neighbours who would stare through their kitchen window at a steaming turkey dinner. The great thing about the new wave of comics was the way they took on old ideas like this, and turned them on their heads. Cheeky comic's Mustapha Million, for example, is the son of a Shah. His friends complain that the school bus is a bumpy ride. He buys them a hovercraft. They complain that the chairs in the classroom are too hard. He buys them a set of reclining Parker Knolls. They complain about school dinners. He fixes it for them to be served silver salvers full of bangers and mash. Benevolent socialism in action! Had that school of dreary right-on comedians like Ben Elton read these instead of the anachronistic Topper he obviously had his nose stuck in, he might have realised when to drop his trousers for laughs instead of boring us all with Mrs Thatch gags. Although these comics really made their mark in the Seventies, many of them have their roots in the Sixties. In fact the new breed can really be traced back to Buster, which began in 1960. Buster was the first publication of the new IPC/Fleetway group, formerly part of the Daily Mirror empire. Buster, the eponymous character, was created as the son of the Mirror's snoozing cartoon layabout Andy Capp; he soon had a life of his own, and survived into the Seventies, eventually being integrated into the cutting edge anarchy of Cor!!. Time had sadly caught up with him. By 1975, still in his trademark shorts and chequered cap, Buster was making pennies taking photos of his mate with an old camera he'd found in the loft, while Junior Rotter - no longer trapped in a class-ridden society and out for his two-dimensional self - was ripping people off and avoiding conventional final-frame mortality by getting away with it. Whizzer And Chips, home of the era defining 12.5p Buytonic Boy (a slight return on the Six Million Dollar Man) began in 1969 but had accelerated to a warp speed of quirky irreverence by the time Cor!A Shiver And Shake and Whoopee! (which all originated in the Seventies) held sway in a competitive frenzy of free gifts - water pistols and vomit-inducing sachets of lemonade powder sellotaped to front pages. This new breed of comics, nearly all produced by IPC/Fleetway, were distinguished by two traits which at first sound contradictory. The first was an enthusiasm for facing the modern era head on; characters would refer to a strike down at the local factory, contemporary TV stars would crop up in twisted ghost stories, and pop music, previously just an annoying blare from some bully's transistor radio, was acknowledged to the extent that Northern pools-winner Lolly Pop could open a recording studio for crap local bands. The second was a surrealism which allowed, say, a tiny baby (Sweeney Toddler), to be motivated by satanic malevolence, or pieces of wood to be haunted (Haunted Wood, Knockout). By the second half of the Seventies, the madness was multiplied in order to maintain the attention of a readership which was beginning to get restless. Mindful of the hypnotic power of television, writers bent the rules to breaking point. Horrornation Street, Angels Charlies, Strange Hill and the like got distinctly unhinged. Stories like The Slimms (a set of fat parents on a constant diet dictated by their megalomaniac son) mixed off-the-wall humour and contemporary references in a way that would have had Desperate Dan's mentors reaching for their shotguns. Evil Eye, simply an eye which hovered ten feet above the ground causing trouble, was as far away from Korky The Cat as it was possible to imagine. And it's not just the television derived classics like The Incredible Sulk or Six Million Dollar Gran that makes them so evocative of that time. It's also the adventurous tackling of strikes and sackings - Whoopee!'s Willy Worry fretting that "Dad's on strike - we won't be able to pay the rent" for instance - without any right-wing propaganda. It's Whizzer And Chips' Worldwide School - kids of all nations taking the piss out of a thick teacher - while the television of the time made space for unbelievable racist poison like Love Thy Neighbour. More than anything it's Disco Kid in his "Three Degrees Forever" T-shirt and Lily Pop "the cracking crossing lady" that make the point.

Comics bores - these friendless collectors, these anal-retentive frames potters - like to call the inter-war years the "Golden Age", as if there was something special about badly drawn Americans titting about in swimming trunks. But the Seventies were the true golden age of genius, spark and serious attitude. And like any earthly nirvana, it couldn't last. Towards the end of the decade two comics arrived which provided the bridge between the world of the kids' weeklies - anarchy, chaos, childlike surrealism and a free penny chewy - and the po-faced future regime of publishing's favourite oxymoron, adult comics. The "boys' adventure" title Action and the sci-fi cash-in vehicle 2OOOAD were conceived as a sensationalist next step to catch the attention of kids who were already being distracted by Star Wars and the first rumblings of computer games. Action was an ultra-contemporary distillation of hipness and violence which read like it was written and drawn by suede-heads on day release. Its touchstones were Magnum Force and Sven Hassel, Jaws and Norman Hunter, and it was an enormous success. In less than a year, it had been pulled from the shelves after an unprecedented campaign by the TV show Nationwide, but its successor 2OOOAD just carried on the carnage in outer space, where parents didn't mind so much. Action and 2OOOAD were short on the likes of Danny And His Tranny (that's a boy with a magic transistor radio, so don't be getting ideas), but they shared with Whizzer And Chips a strong sense of the ridiculous and I a need to freak out the reader on every page. Played for laughs, these strips could have fitted into Cor!!; done seriously, they made 2OOOAD into the biggest British comic in 20 years. But they also helped it drive the first nails into the coffin of the funnies. Within a couple of years, Whizzer And Chips, Krazy and the rest of them had fought (and sadly lost) a hard battle with the combined forces of television, fledgling techno-toys and computer games. Some, though, struggled on into the Eighties, reaching new heights of mad genius. A Shiver And Shake annual from 1984 shows that the artists had lost none of their edge. The Desert Fox, a cartoon animal causing havoc behind enemy lines in the Second World War, is as surreal as it's possible to get without appealing exclusively to adults. The mentally-retarded elephant Shake still appeals for no sensible reason. But most of the original readership had by this stage disappeared - saving its money for Millennium Falcons or playing Pacman with the curtains drawn. It's not the kind of thing a grown man should be losing any sleep over, but it's about time these comics were given their long-overdue respect. It's not just nostalgia that prompts such an idea. A reappraisal becomes necessary when some of the revered comic names of the current era like Jamie Hewlett, who created Tank Girl for Deadline and now draws THE FACE's Get The Freebies, and the artists at Viz start owning up to a childhood twisted beyond repair reading The Big Kidds (trendy parents who wouldn't grow up) and Loser beats Beck to the lo-fi ennui aesthetic by about 20 years). Once you get him started, Jamie Hewlett can't be stopped going on about Shiner and Sweet Tooth and Greedy Greg. "I got bored with all that stuff that was happening in the Eighties - all that drawing with airbrushes bollocks," he says, "and I went back to this stuff. I went through a phase of buying loads of annuals but I ran out of space." He still reads some of these comics and seems to get a post-modern kick out of "the unpredictability of it all". You can't knock the man for being a retro-ironist when he recalls the excellent strip in which the Bumpkin Billionaires couldn't hear their new colour TV from the sofa because they'd bought a house with rooms so big they were at least 100 feet away from the screen. The startling success story that is Viz obviously owes a debt to these comics. Viz often does what they couldn't, taking the horror idea to its logical extreme with innocent characters ending up beaten senseless or covered in blood. And it often swipes directly from its forebears: while the Topper had Sid's Snake (a cheerful reptile keen to assist his owner in catching burglars, and so on), Viz's Victor And His Boa Constrictor usually ended with the hissing co-star crushing and eating his owner, or at least a passing child. Editor Chris Donald points out that the IPC titles were more 'with it' as your dad might say - not necessarily as well drawn, in that attention to details is sometimes lacking, but with better, stranger and more contemporary ideas. I'd have to add that the simplicity of some of the drawing (which was never incidentally just bad) became a recognisable style and developed into an "artform", if you'll pardon the expression, in its own right. Graham Dory, who draws Ravey Davey and Spoilt Bastard at Viz, admits that he sometimes refers back to these artists "so I can see how they draw shoes or something". At times in the last few years, Viz has recorded excerpts from the modern British way of life with a unique, cruelly sharp accuracy - an accuracy that back in 1990 inspired no less a highbrow than the Daily Telegraph's Auberon Waugh to write that "if future generations look back on the literature of the age, they will more usefully look back to Viz than to the novels of Peter Ackroyd or Julian Barnes". It will no doubt be a disconcerting thought for Peter and Julian, but if Viz does have that sort of value, it owes a little part of it to the strange, roughlydrawn little boys, girls, elephants and snakes that careered through our Saturday mornings more than a decade ago. This is not a wake, it's a celebration; a way of setting the record straight and I'm not recommending you take to pedalling to the Heavenly Social on a Grifter or start shouting out "Erk!" when you see the Big Issue seller and take a sharp left down some back alley. We simply need to acknowledge that these comics have a place because they reflect their time better than, say, your old T-Rex records or a video full of Wacky Races. And if all of this still doesn't mean much to you there's really nothing much that can save you. You'd best get back to worrying when George Lucas is going to get cracking with the next Star Wars. Best get back to your X-Men and your neatly-bagged copies of Watchmen. Because you're the kind who would want to point out that a shark with no teeth called Gums is not that funny anyway. Nobody said we were going to need to stitch our sides back together after reading Willy Worry. We were just smirking like Smiler at people who take comics too seriously.   Comics, Comix And Graphic Novels by Roger Sabin is published by Phaidon.           NB. as far as we are aware, there are no other webpages around devoted to this particular strand of comic history - let us know if you know different.     links to other pages........ 10 years of house Patrick Adams Bluffers Guide to Dub David Bowie review Bristol Rising British Films Dawn of Detroit Techno Depeche Mode Drawn Slippy - 70's British comics Bruce Forrest Guide to 808,909,303 Hacienda club Jane's Addiction Marshall Jefferson Chaka Kahn Kingbee Records KLF Kraftwerk Krautrock The La's Manic Street Preachers  Massive Attack Joe Meek Miami Bass Moog Synthesizer Northern Heroes Paradise Garage The Pet Shop Boys Punk-Funk Scallies rally to Pink Floyd Yes Kenneth Williams