I'm grateful to Lew for posting that amazing 'putrid date' episode on his blog as it's not one that I have in my own collection of
Smash! It really is remarkable how many people have managed to convince themselves that Ken Reid was the principal artist on the Nervs all along, in spite of the fact that it had been running for well over a hundred issues when he took over, and that it only lasted for six months after
that before IPC pulled the plug.
This set me wondering why the Reid version has burned itself so indelibly onto people's memories, so I looked back over the strip's history and realized that, by contrast, the previous appearances had made almost no impression on me at all. When it was introduced in
Smash! no.1 it's clear that The Nervs was intended as a near carbon copy of Leo Baxendale's Georgie's Germs from
Wham! (a strip that already owed more than a little to DC Thomson's Numskulls, which had been appearing in
Beezer since 1962). Whereas Georgie's Germs introduced a number of significant twists to Mal Judge's endearingly simple model - notably a varied collection of Leo's fanged and tentacled monsters as the Germs, and the likeable character of Georgie himself as the scruffy schoolboy whose body they inhabit - The Nervs added almost nothing new to the formula at all. The only apparent difference was that these microscopic creatures lived inside a grown man called 'Fatty', and that he had an appetite for junk food that matched his girth.
As the series progressed, drawn throughout in a sub-Baxendale style (though never by Leo himself), even these distinguishing features were eroded away as we discovered that Fatty, just like Georgie, still lived with his long-suffering mother; what's more he seemed to get significantly younger over time, though never to the extent that he was shown going to school. Fatty was a lazy slob - but beyond that he was something of blank cypher: the real stars were supposed to be the Nervs.
Then along came Ken and everything changed! Suddenly, miraculously, Fatty became all too real - I realized that he reflected the lives of a million adolescent school leavers who still lived at home, unable and unwilling to get a job, constantly appalled at their own awkwardness and lack of social graces. In effect he was myself! - but like all great comic creations he was myself writ large and caricatured, so that I could identify with the toe-curlingly embarrassing situations that were caused by his unruly emotions, nervous tics and bodily incontinence (all byproducts of the Nervs' secret actions), while yet being relieved that it was happening to someone else.
And, of course, the most excruciating encounters for any spotty-faced, self-hating, nerdy, adolescent male tend to be those with the opposite sex - even when the female in question happens to be their own mother:
For me, encounters like the one above are comparable to Basil Fawlty whacking his unresponsive car with a tree branch or Ricky Gervais 'dancing' for his incredulous staff in 'The Office': one cringes with intense embarrassment even as the tears of laughter roll down one's face!
- Phil Rushton
(
n.b. - the above is obviously an example of Ken Reid's work
after he'd become 'Ken', and is therefore something of a departure from this thread's main theme!)