edited by Morris Heggie; foreword by Andy McNab
176 pages, Prion
Review
by Pat Black
We’ve
done 2000AD; we’ve done Roy of the Rovers. Now, Booksquawk turns
to another great 20th century boys’ comic. One that’s just a little
bit older and more forgetful, and prone to spilling dinner down his V-neck pullover
- the Victor.
Launched
in 1961, the Victor was part of Dundee-based
DC Thomson’s stable – separate from the worlds of Judge Dredd, Dan Dare and Roy
Race, which were part of IPC (the ITV, if you will, to Thomson’s BBC). Looking
back, DC Thomson were a lame prospect compared to IPC’s swashbuckling,
risk-taking, punk spirit of the late 70s and early 80s. But as a younger boy I
devoured DC Thomson’s output, with my favourite comics being Spike, Champ and the Football Picture Story Monthly. Although
only 2000AD remains as a weekly
action staple, surviving on its considerable cult appeal, DC Thomson hangs in
there, publishing the world’s longest running weekly comic for children, The Beano, clinging to life by the skin
of Gnasher’s teeth. The war mini-comic, The
Commando, which has lasted longer than any modern conflict, still continues
to rattle its sabre in shorter form for DC Thomson, a cult all on its own.
When
I was mainlining British comics as a young boy in the 1980s, most of them still
displayed a fascination with the Second World War. Warlord, Battle, Victor and toy spin-offs like Action Force continued to fight these haggard old battles, even as
the Berlin Wall teetered and fell. In one way I can understand the fascination
with the machinery of war; the beautiful planes, the engineering that went into
the ordnance, the ultra lo-fi craft of code-breakers and spies. But in another
way, it seems a ghastly throwback. When I was six I was bored with the Second
World War stories. It wasn’t so much an appreciation of history; rather, it
wallowed in military glories of the past. It was the kind of thing my dad might
have liked.
The
fact that SAS war-bastard-turned-author Andy McNab turns in a commendably
knowing foreword to this volume should be a tip-off about its contents. Victor was primarily concerned with war
picture stories involving brave British squaddies and fighter pilots and navy
men. Its colour wraparound cover was still dispensing true-war stories almost
up until the paper’s demise in 1991; the kind of stuff which today’s Help For
Heroes crowd might read with some pleasure.
This
collection makes the smart move of compiling stories as an entire run, spread
out through the whole book, rather than snipping out strips here and there
(aside from the odd one-off). Many of the staple front-cover true war stories
are included, as well as complete story arcs from classic heroes such as Alf
Tupper, The Tough of the Track. There’s aerial derring-do in I Flew With
Braddock; many a goal net is burst by the outrageous shots of Gorgeous Gus, the
footballing toff; and you can even take your shirt off and don your leopardskin
loincloth in the straight-up Tarzan rip-off, Morgyn the Mighty.
One
word of warning: just about every story included here is from the early-to-mid
1960s, Victor’s heyday, when it could
rack up half a million sales per week without breaking sweat. When I read Victor in the 1980s it had a better
spread of stories, with some decent football, sci-fi and fantasy tales as well as
the war grind. Even to my eyes, the stuff included in this book seemed creaky.
Alf
Tupper, the Tough of the Track, is perhaps the Victor’s best known character, and a type we’d see a lot of in DC
Thomson’s world; the chirpy working class Joe who has the natural talent and
grit to beat anyone on his day. Alf was an athlete, turning his hand to middle
distances in the main. By day he worked at a scrapyard and slept in a bunker
beneath railway sidings, scraping enough money for a pair of second-hand,
mismatched running shoes with which to take on and beat his more well-heeled
opponents. There must have been some kind of template in place, because I can
remember a story in Spike comic about
a goalkeeper called Charlie “Iron” Barr, who was similarly lunk-headed, working
in a scrapyard and living in an old railway carriage while turning out for
English First Division side Darbury Rangers. Was it the same writer?
Alf
was a curious-looking character, lantern-jawed and spiky haired, a goofy
expression on his big, open face. He was a far cry from the knitting pattern
model heroes you usually got in these pages. He was uncouth, but honest; and
his homespun tastes included tucking into his favourite meal, fish and chips,
the perfect fuel for beating all comers on the track. In one story, an exhausted
Alf is offered an injection by a doctor after running several races in one
meeting – but refuses it, springs out of bed, and sprints down to the chippie.
“This is the only cure I need!” he says, stuffing his face with chips.
I
wonder how Alf would fare in today’s world, with sports scientists and
dieticians and training all set up to calibrate athletes to the maximum? I
watched a documentary on Andy Murray just before Wimbledon this year. He said
that after winning his debut senior match at SW19, he treated himself and some
friends to a pizza. He looks back on this now with absolute horror. “I wouldn’t
even dream about eating that after a match,” he says.
Different
times, of course. Footballers probably had a smoke at half time in those days,
the better to exercise their lungs. And this brings us to Gorgeous Gus, the
toff footballer. Gus – or Lord Boote, to give him his proper title - buys an
entire football team (“But… all these players combined would be worth a quarter
of a million pounds!” says the manager, aghast at such unimaginable expense) and
installs himself as centre-forward.
The
story is played for laughs; Gus has his own “royal box” set up by the side of
the pitch, and his Jeevesish servant attends to him at the sidelines, applying throat
spray and offering his own special silken kit to play in. On one occasion, Gus
returns to the field in only a dressing gown, after the manager tracks his star
striker down to a Turkish bath house, where he is – no joke – congregated with
a load of moustached men. The only reason any of this is tolerated is because
Gus has a secret weapon; an almost unstoppable cannonball shot that smashes
goalkeepers over the line when they’re daft enough to try to stop it.
Gus
is a curiously effete addition to the canon of macho male sports stars in
comics. This was something DC Thomson would repeat years later before my
disbelieving eyes in a strip called The
Potterton Pansies, when another British side is bought by a fussy Barbara
Woodhouse-style battleaxe who insists that they play in spotty pansy coloured
kit and hats that resemble petals.
What
was the thinking here? I can see how you would wish to juxtapose the effete
with the macho for the odd joke, but over an entire comic series? I would
applaud the challenge to stereotyping, but it’s an odd quirk for the
straight-laced DC stable.
I
didn’t take to Gus, I have to say. Mostly I was bored with the representation
of his crazy rocket shot, knocking goalkeepers into the net when they get
behind the ball. It’s frustrating because it looks like the keeper’s saved it,
unless both goalie and ball tear through the goal netting. It found it
repetitive and boring. I know this would have irritated my seven-year-old self;
briefly, we high-fived.
Jingoism
was standard in these comics, of course. Germans were “the Jerries”, and
Japanese soldiers were “the Japs”. They were simply cannon fodder for our good
old bully beef British blokes on the front lines. On the odd occasion the enemy
got a line, it was to say “Teufeul!” or “Banzai!” or “Hande hoch, Tommy
Englander!”, or to offer sporting appraisal of their bravery: “Mein Gott, these
Britishers know how to fly!”
Andy
McNab draws attention to this “dodginess”, but I don’t think it’s all that bad,
here. It was the early 1960s, after all, and DC Thomson certainly did its best
to include black characters in many of its stories when I was a lad.
Sadly,
one of the worst examples of stereotyping is contained in the jungle adventure
story, Morgyn the Mighty. The story here features the loincloth-clad jungle
beefcake with a short back n’ sides, and not the hair metal poodle haircut he
sported when I read him 20-odd years later. It’s a load of nonsense; Morgyn can
“talk” to the animals through some kind of telepathy, although this only
extends to cuddly mammalian jungle buddies like lions and monkeys, and not
things like spiders, crocodiles and giant pythons. The story must be applauded
for its environmental stance, which holds up well today; Morgyn is pursued by
seven hunters, all competing for the £6,000 prize on Morgyn’s head. They slash
and burn their way through the forest in order to capture him, slaughtering
elephants and big cats along the way. Morgyn hates killing for sport and nature being
tampered with, so he faces off with the hunters one-by-one over several
episodes.
But,
it’s another Great White Man in Africa – perish the thought that this great
African character should be black. Even worse is the awful depiction of the
Zulus who help the hunters find Morgyn – bwana this, bwana that, bwana will be
pleased. Surely the Zulus would be on Morgyn’s side, seeing the damage the
white intruders have wreaked on their homeland? If we’re making excuses, this
depiction of native cultures was absolutely endemic, from the Tarzan movies
this strip was inspired by right through to any number of books and comics. “Political
correctness”, as the ignorant sneeringly refer to common decency regarding
minorities, was a long way away.
But
at time of publication, Britain hadn’t long turned in the ration books, and
memories of bombs and air raid sirens and PTSD-wracked men simply kicked back
into society were relatively fresh. The wreckage still stood in parts of
Britain in 1961, particularly in London, which the Luftwaffe did their best to
flatten. We can perhaps forgive people, 50 years ago, for being a little bit
obsessed with the war.
Two
curious things; first, the complete and utter absence of women and girls. I
mean, there are none whatsoever in
these pages, barring one depiction of football star Denis Law’s mother waving
him off as he embarks on his career, far less spoken lines. This was the par
for the course for boys’ comics; usually, girls were depicted as an irritation,
either prim, soppy, flower-collecting creatures at school or annoying,
battleship-breasted mothers, unfailingly in spotty dresses. It’s a man’s world.
And true enough, we didn’t care about girls back then. None of that kissing
stuff for you, m’boy!
Except,
of course, we did care about girls, alright - mucky buggers that we were. I
have a vivid memory of creeping into the big cupboard at my folks’ house at the
age of maybe six and finding a stack of my sisters’ old annuals – the Bunty and the Mandy, the female flipside of Victor, Roy of the Rovers and the like.
I
was quite turned on by one action-packed story – better than just about
anything printed in this Best Of, I
have to tell you – where a secret agent girl in a bikini tackles sharks, tigers
and baddies on this tropical island. At the time I felt a fugitive glee in
cracking open those annuals; it was forbidden. I could remember my dad shouting
at me when I opened one of these up before they were put away in the big cupboard.
They weren’t for boys! Had I been caught, I might have felt as ashamed as if I
had been caught trying on a dress.
But,
oh, you’ve got it all wrong, ye editors – boys were quite happy to look at
girls in their comics, thank you very much. It’s a habit we tend not to grow
out of. The American comics, with their busty super-vixens contending with the
muscle-bound supermen, had this need pretty much spot-on.
As
a side note, many of the British comics aristocracy including Alan Moore and
Pat Mills have stated that they enjoyed writing for the girls’ papers – they
had more freedom with these stories, with less of the kind of moral code the
square-jawed, roughty-toughty heroes had to follow. Perhaps I sat there in the
big cupboard with my nubbin trembling to one of Alan Moore’s earliest scripts?
The
other fascinating point is the comics’ treatment of bravery and cowardice. Both
of these things are in great supply in Victor.
It’s quite class-conscious, in its way, with many socially superior characters
being the most treacherous. In one episode, Braddock the air ace spends more
time trying to refute the false accusations of a cowardly officer than he does fighting
off German planes. Alf Tupper is repeatedly sabotaged by an upper class rival,
who throws his running shoes off a train and blackballs him from taking part in
race meetings. Even Morgyn the Mighty, hilariously, offers his rivals a chance
to use his knife when he takes them on in one-on-one combat. He does this
twice. Both times he is double-crossed, and only just survives. Learn a lesson,
mate!
At
that age it’s good to have heroes. When you’re six, the anti-heroes, the
double-crossers, the chancers - the ones you come to appreciate later, if not
exactly admire - aren’t the ones to aspire to. DC’s heroes gave you good
lessons in life. Do it honestly; keep your wits about you; and if someone hits
you, you hit them back. And that’s all fine, but I am bothered that there’s so
little fear in these strips.
In
the opening true life panels, we are told the story of Bomber Command’s Flight
Engineer Norman Jackson, who won a VC for climbing out onto the wing of a Lancaster
to extinguish an engine fire mid-flight. There is no depiction of even the
slightest discomfort as this boy dodders out, thousands of feet in the air,
with tracer fire erupting all around him. We know Jackson actually did that in
reality. But here, his face is expressionless, resolute. His inner thoughts,
even when his parachute canopy goes on fire after he bails out, are a kind of
wry, fatalistic shrug of the shoulders. “Oh, drat.” But the poor man must have
been shiting himself! No-one with a full bag of marbles is that brave, or that
cool.
Is
it wrong to want a bit more realism in a comic aimed at very young, impressionable
boys? It’s a moral conundrum we face at every point of our lives. Cowards
behave in cowardly ways for one reason only: self-preservation. Graveyards are
stuffed with people who did things like storming machine gun nests, climbing
out onto the wings of burning bombers, tackling muggers and confronting vandals
– but medals, civic awards and exciting picture stories aren’t much use to them
once they’re gone. Their sweethearts may well have grieved, then moved on. Their
bravery is reduced to an after-dinner speech, a glib quote from a CO who would
struggle to recall their face, something shiny kept in the back of a drawer.
Somewhere
in your genealogy, perhaps going over millennia, one of your ancestors probably
moved out of harm’s way when others didn’t, or used a ruse of some kind to take
unfair advantage, whether in love or war. It’s not a lesson you would teach
your children; but it is innate. The animal kingdom understands cunning,
conniving, duplicity and avoiding dangerous situations all too well. What we
might term “risk aversion” has probably happened many times in your bloodline. You’ve
almost certainly done it yourself, and I bet you can easily recall whenever you
had it done to you. Think of anyone who uses gossip and lies to block love
rivals, or undermines workmates with innuendo and slander, or employs any
number of life’s everyday treacheries to get by or gain a simple advantage. I
can think of examples. If you’re a goody two-shoes who read the Victor, you will lose out many times in
your youth by applying the rules of boys’ comics to your dealings with actual people.
If
you occlude the moral principle at play, there is the uncomfortable fact that
because of these and other instances of cowardice or mendacity, you exist.
When
it plays with these themes, Victor is
far more interesting. It features one famous shitebag – Cadman, the Flying
Coward. He’s a World War One airman who is completely yellow, doing everything
he can to get out of scrapes and leaving the dirty work to his batman. In
Cadman, I recognised a similar character with a very similar name – George
Macdonald Fraser’s Flashman – although I think Cadman predates that
similarly-windy though far-more-randy literary rogue.
In
a neat twist, Cadman, in trying to get out of meeting almost certain death on
the ground or in the air, often ends up an unwitting hero. In the strip
included here, he does all he can to dodge an aerial duel with the Black Baron,
a German biplane ace who challenges him directly. But in his haste to get away
from the Baron’s guns, Cadman inadvertently rams his plane, bringing his
opponent down. It’s a subversive strip in a lot of ways, because you find
yourself rooting for Cadman even though there’s nothing to like about him.
Even
more interesting is the one-off strip included here about a young boxer – Crib
Carson, Fighter. Crib is basically a cheat, working in sledges and ploys in a
bid to get an advantage over his opponents. In one ruse, he puts on make-up to
make himself look ill, then asks the opponent to go easy on him – and of course,
he suckerpunches him. In his next bout, he keeps talking about a smell of gas
in the ring, unsettling his opponent before flooring him too.
The
story isn’t built on at all. The strip – the first of several episodes – ends
with an old trainer warning Crib not to rely on ruses to win, as he’s a good
enough boxer in his own right. Crib just laughs it off. Whether young Crib had
the tables turned on him, or if he learned the virtues of fighting fair, this
volume does not tell us.
What
Crib has is the competitive edge – the psychopathic instinct – of many winners
in life, especially in the sporting arena. Many great champions have employed
obfuscation and distraction as a weapon. Think of Sir Alex Ferguson, haranguing
referees; or John McEnroe, spitting fury at umpires – and always when they look
like losing. Again, it’s not pretty, but it’s part of life. The virtuous and
the craven alike would do well to bear it in mind.
The
reprinted Matchbox car adverts and the letters pages are a delight – the stuff
of young boys’ minds, indeed. A postal order went to John Broomhead of Bristol,
for example, for this gem of wisdom: “The smallest monkey in the world is the
six-inch pygmy marmoset, which is found in Brazil. It weighs about half a
pound, and can sit comfortably in a spoon!” I always wondered, even as a lad,
if any of the kids in the letters pages actually existed. In any case, the
prizes on offer – Meccano sets and roller skates – are another quaint signpost
of the times.
If
it’s nostalgia you’re after, then you’ll have to be within a certain age range
– 50-plus, at the very least, I think. Otherwise this stuff is a little too
anachronistic, closer to Billy Bunter in tone and execution than Judge Dredd.
It’s a shame, because, as I say, the later Victor
did have some exciting adventure serials that stayed away from the Second World
War.
I
lament the fact that boys’ comics have all but died. I was there for their
late-80s death throes, the desperate tie-ins with toy lines and celebrity
endorsements (did Spandau Ballet’s Kemp brothers really sign for Melchester
Rovers, or have I taken too many drugs in the intervening years?).
It
wasn’t enough then to sell a comic with a cover featuring a monster, or a great
goal, or knights in armour clashing swords. Trademarks forced their way in. It
was about products, and not story. You knew deep down that it was phoney.
It’s
a real shame the comic heroes are gone. Regardless of the ever-more immersive
experience of video games and sports news presenters getting excited over
transfer fees that you can turn upside down on a calculator to read a rude word,
I think that people will always retain a fascination for thrilling stories and
heroism. The dusty old boys’ papers, for all their flaws – mostly forgivable –
were a window into bigger worlds and braver deeds, and they had a reach and
scope back then which even the biggest movies of the time couldn’t muster. There
were no barriers to the imagination other than the panels on the page.
And
there are heroes, of course. Bravery exists. Perfidiousness may be the preserve
of the everyday, and it might help you win. But the bigger events, the
important ones, are almost always the preserve of heroism. It’s something to
aspire to, and perhaps more importantly, it can represent progress. Defeating
unpleasant concepts is as important as besting unpleasant people. Small wonder
we celebrate the brave ones in our stories, whatever form they may take.
I
do entertain a fond hope that one day a new boys’ comic, with original heroes,
will appear and be a success among a new generation of youngsters. But it’s a
forlorn one. The age of the mass market comic in Britain is long gone.
Brilliant, Pat. This is more than a review.
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