From the Daily Express:
Oh dear. 2000AD last survivor from the golden era? Beano and Dandy both still survive too, something they later acknowledge by mentioning Harry Hill and the TV version of Dennis the Menace. They also call TV Century 21 "V-21". And the original Snooty's death wasn't in 1990. He appeared in Fun-Size Beano in 2000, and we only found out he had died when a recent Snooty the Third strip confirmed it (although it was obvious since that strip's debut, since the Lord title is hereditary). And Desperate Dan hasn't been stripped of his guns. His gun was always holstered. Yet again, Jamie Smart gets criticism for the way he modernised him.WHEN I was young my ambitions were simple: I wanted to eat a pie with a whole cow in it, win a VC and Bar by flying bombers against the Germans and the Japs, and score the winning goals in the FA Cup Final using the skills granted to me by my magic football boots.
Perhaps if you were a boy growing up in the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies you’ll remember something similar.
We all wanted to be Desperate Dan or Braddock VC or Billy Dane (with his magic boots). Or Alf Tupper, Tough Of The Track, or Roy Of The Rovers, or Dan Dare, or even Lord Snooty. We didn’t know it but we were living through the Golden Age of British Comics, an age which sadly now exists only in fond memory.
Of the comic heroes above only The Dandy’s Desperate Dan is still with us and only then in a revamped version.
Though they haven’t made him eat vegan pie (yet) they have stripped him of his guns and turned him from tough guy to bumbling fool.
Something equally grisly happened to Lord Snooty who before his death in 1990 had the longest-running strip in The Beano.
In 2008 he was revived as Snooty III; a horrible, spoilt, jet-skiing brat who says things like: “I was watching Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? To laugh at the poor.â€
This missed the point of the original Lord Snooty who, though a toff, hung out with the working-class Ash-Can Alley gang and was not snobbish.
So why don’t they make comic book heroes like they used to any more?
The answer lies in a mixture of market forces and changing social attitudes.
“Mainly it’s that kids have found other things to do than read comics,†says Simon Brew, editor of comics website Den Of Geek. “They’ve got computers, TV, video games.
Things change. When I was growing up in the eighties we played Subbuteo and read The Beano and The Dandy and Whizzer And Chips. now they’re all on Facebook.â€
Also, argues comics expert John Freeman, heroes like Dan Dare were the products of a particular era. “The war had ended and though times were difficult people wanted to believe in a better future. That’s why the Reverend Marcus Morris founded the eagle comic. It was an antidote to horror comics coming over from America. Its star Dan Dare was created as a positive role model for British youth.â€
Dare was the lean-faced chief pilot of the Interplanet Space Fleet. Always accompanied by his fat, bumbling, touchingly loyal batman Digby, Colonel Dare travelled the universe spreading honour and decency, using violence only as a last resort, usually against his arch-enemy the Mekon.
eagle became hugely popular because, in a time of austerity and rationing, its colourful spreads and zappy story lines proved such a tonic.
But there were plenty of rival comics (The Wizard, The hornet, hotspur) with equally strong characters, many of them created by ex-journalist Gilbert Lawford Dalton. They included Wilson The Wonder Athlete, Alf Tupper and Braddock VC.
In his Unreliable Memoirs, Clive James wrote how as a boy he had loved the tales of Matt Braddock and Alf Tupper, quite unaware that they had been designed as fantasy figures for working-class readers. The same, I’m sure was true for all of us.
The fact that I was at private school didn’t stop me identifying with Alf Tupper, the welder from the wrong side of the tracks, forever battling the snooty prejudice of the posh Amateur Athletics Association kids as they tried to sabotage his running races.
The only survivor of the golden era is 2000AD, which like its ruthless hero Judge Dredd, is still going strong.
Most other titles (Victor, Action, Battle, Beezer, Tiger...) have been wiped out by changing markets.
In the Seventies, says Freeman, a comic would be considered a failure if it wasn’t selling 100,000 copies a week. In the Sixties, the comic V-21 (featuring Captain Scarlet, Thunderbirds and Lady Penelope) sold 495,000 copies a week); now a comic is lucky to sell 20,000.
Most titles sold today are aimed at a very young market and are little more than TV tie-ins.
“There’s still a huge ‘nursery’ market but almost nothing for the eight to 12-year-olds,†says Freeman.
“This means there’s no carry-through audience of readers ready to move on to comics with more sophisticated story lines.â€
Publishers such as DC Thomson have tried for new audiences by up dating their image. The Dandy now has a strip called Harry Hill’s Real-Life Adventures In TV-land and is much more about TV satire and celebrity.
Freeman argues that comics have always had to move with the times.
“People talk about political correctness gone mad but you couldn’t have a Dennis The Menace where Dennis’s Dad uses the slipper as he did up until the Eighties. Modern kids couldn’t relate to it. Dad would be arrested for child abuse.â€
But you can push these things too far. My children, aged eight and 10, were avid fans of The Beano but are unimpressed with its TV friendly Dennis The Menace and its subtle eco-propaganda references to wind farms. They still read it but prefer the Seventies and Eighties annuals they buy second-hand.
I think a lot of modern comics are an insult to children’s intelligence.
Freeman, however, is having a valiant stab at reviving traditional values with his ROK Comics venture – downloadable to iPhones – offering well-plotted adventure story lines with strong characters.
We can only wish him well, those of us who remember the good old days when Britain still felt like a land of decency, honour and hope with traditions worth fighting for.
Those comics were more than entertainment.
They were a reflection of the pluck and optimism that made us great.
Thanks for the scans, which include another error - Billy's Boots actually last appeared in Pete Nash's Striker comic as a back-up reprint strip (alongside, of course, the earliest Striker strips from The Sun - both were coloured where they were originally black and white). It also neglects to mention that Roy of the Rovers had his own comic.