The class system in comics

[steelclaw]

Winker Watson - Private/Public School(Posh)
Billy Bunter - (Private/Public School(Posh)
The Bash Street Kids - Comprehensive(Working Class)

[philcom55]

Originally the more expensive photogravure comics tended to be bought by well-off kids (or their parents) so I think it's pretty logical that titles such as Eagle and Look & Learn were aimed at posh kids, whereas Beano and Dandy were more working-class. As Topper and Beezer were, to some extent, DC Thomson's answer to Eagle it makes sense that they were a bit more middle-class than their older stablemates.

In a way it reminds me of that famous sketch with John Cleese and the Two Ronnies on The Frost Report - ie: Topper (Ronnie Barker) 'looks up' to The Eagle (Cleese) but 'looks down' at The Beano (Corbett). Of course, by the time those sketches appeared the earning-power of the working classes had already increased significantly, giving rise to an entirely new type of expensive comic that didn't have to be aspirational at all (eg Wham! and TV 21).

- Phil Rushton

[ISPYSHHHGUY]

Phil; I reckon you probably get dyed-in-the-wool SUN readers who snootily look down upon committed DAILY SPORT readers, who they regard as 'intellectually inferior!'

[Terry]

Iron Barr from Spike was working class, the Darbury Rangers director Sir Gregory Slade was always trying to get him into trouble, as he thought he was better than Barr.

[Phoenix]

Iron Barr from Spike was working class, the Darbury Rangers director Sir Gregory Slade was always trying to get him into trouble, as he thought he was better than Barr.

That's not too surprising, Terry, because Iron Barr was a retread of Bouncing Bernard Briggs, who found text fame in The Wizard from 1955 onwards. He was introduced in the cricket series The All-Round Roughneck and then starred in other sports serials, football, rugby etc. He went on to further success in picture form, initially in The Hornet and then in The Hotspur. When he completed his spell as Iron Barr in Spike he was transferred from Darbury Rangers to United in Champ. Both Briggs and Barr were goalkeepers, played football as amateurs and made their living from scrap metal. My late mother-in-law would have referred to them as 'common as muck', but by being scrupulously honest and fair, they were morally superior to the upper-class snobs they came across.

[tony ingram]

Phil; I reckon you probably get dyed-in-the-wool SUN readers who snootily look down upon committed DAILY SPORT readers, who they regard as 'intellectually inferior!'

Well, surely they're right?

[ISPYSHHHGUY]

yes....for once!

Love the new avatar by the way, Tony.

[HUGH]

A very good point about escapism, there, Hugh: comics at that time were the only real form of entertainment that you could study visually as long you wanted to: especially if you kept all your back-issues. The technology of videotape or DVD never existed at the time, and comics---and radio [which I couldn't record until 1976 ] and, later on, records----were the main source of entertainment.

3 channels on TV meant having to watch what my parents preferred, none of this 'four tellies in every home' scenario we have today.

There were 5 kids in my family and though we certainly weren't rich, my childhood wasn't miserable.......

Wouldn’t want you to think I was miserable because of my background - when everybody lives the same you don’t notice your circumstances. Rather my misery was caused by watching my mates out playing in the street while I had to stay in bed due to bad health - hence all the comics as compensation, every cloud etc.

Interesting your point about collecting and rereading comics, although I did collect the war, sci-fi and superhero comics I only kept the humour comics for a week (constantly rereading them until the new one came out) unless I was following an adventure story - then I’d keep the comics and reread the whole adventure at one go. My favourites were Billy the Cat, a strip about a kid who befriended two space kids and had adventures in their space car - for some reason the space kids race reminded me of the original Klingons from Star Trek. But my favourite was General Jumbo - as I loved the small Airfix soldiers this strip fired my imagination.

I know this isn’t related to class, but I noticed a mention of Look & Learn and it reminded me that a reason my father got me so many comics was as I missed a lot of time from school a teacher advised he should get me comics as part of an exercise to keep me reading - was there any sort of policy that comics should inform and educate along with entertain within D C Thomson?

I could be totally misremembering, but it seems to me that D C Thomson humour comics did seem to have more literate adventure stories and stories with written text rather than speech bubbles (sorry not sure of the technical name for this type of story) than other humour comic publishers.

Sorry for rambling in my posts - but I’m not sure when I will get an opportunity to ask raise these points I have thought about again.

[Lew Stringer]

Wouldn’t want you to think I was miserable because of my background - when everybody lives the same you don’t notice your circumstances. Rather my misery was caused by watching my mates out playing in the street while I had to stay in bed due to bad health - hence all the comics as compensation, every cloud etc.

Yes, comics are fantastic escapism. The dullest people I know are the ones who never read comics! Shame there aren't more around now for the kids of today.

My favourites were Billy the Cat, a strip about a kid who befriended two space kids and had adventures in their space car - for some reason the space kids race reminded me of the original Klingons from Star Trek.

That was The Whizzers of Oz, in Topper. A very popular strip for years.

I know this isn’t related to class, but I noticed a mention of Look & Learn and it reminded me that a reason my father got me so many comics was as I missed a lot of time from school a teacher advised he should get me comics as part of an exercise to keep me reading - was there any sort of policy that comics should inform and educate along with entertain within D C Thomson?

Possibly, but it sounds like you had a good, open-minded teacher who understood the benefits of comics. (They stimulate both halves of the brain you know.) My teachers at infant school and junior school were equally favorable towards comics. (High school less so.) Bizarre as it sounds now my infant school teachers gave us copies of Aquaman, Hawkman, and Metal Men to read if it was raining in the break. Comics that were easily "too old" for five year-olds but reading above one's age is very beneficial. (Perhaps we were part of an experiment. )

I could be totally misremembering, but it seems to me that D C Thomson humour comics did seem to have more literate adventure stories and stories with written text rather than speech bubbles (sorry not sure of the technical name for this type of story) than other humour comic publishers.

We tend to call those "light adventure stories" to differentiate, say, General Jumbo from adventure stories like The Steel Claw, because the tone is lighter. Regarding literacy, D.C. Thomson were sticklers for good grammar and solidly-told stories. They even published an internal guide for their writers. (I have a copy somewhere, published in the 1960s I think, that I found at a comic mart.) They took great care to train their writers, so that's good you picked up on that.

Lew

[Raven]

I could be totally misremembering, but it seems to me that D C Thomson humour comics did seem to have more literate adventure stories and stories with written text rather than speech bubbles (sorry not sure of the technical name for this type of story) than other humour comic publishers.

I always assumed that this was because they were just decades behind the times and locked in a kind of 'it's still the 1930s' bubble, just impossibly slow to modernise, rather than them having any specific agenda to be more literate or educational!

They certainly did keep the written text-driven picture stories much longer than the others, though. I was never keen on these myself as a kid, feeling that they weren't proper comic stories - and I was a big book reader.

Talking about an era when people went to the public baths and often didn't have bathrooms or indoor toilets, Hugh, I assume you're talking pre-70s; possibly considerably so? No need to say if you don't wish to reveal your age! I'm thinking that bathrooms and indoor loos were quite common by the '70s or earlier - though I think people were still doing the public baths thing at the start of the decade at least; it's a feature of the 1971 film Deep End.

[Raven]

Regarding literacy, D.C. Thomson were sticklers for good grammar and solidly-told stories. Lew

I think IPC were equally sticklers for good grammar and language, too - I don't recall ever seeing a single grammatical, spelling or punctuation mistake in any comic of theirs in a lifetime of reading them. But I think people were generally much more literate back then, especially people going into the writing and publishing professions - and grammar was quite rigorously taught in schools, of course.

By comparison, it's interesting to read Phoenix's recent list of spelling mistakes and language and punctuation issues in the When the Comics Went to War book, which leads you to presume that there wasn't even a proofreader.

[Lew Stringer]

Regarding literacy, D.C. Thomson were sticklers for good grammar and solidly-told stories. Lew

I think IPC were equally sticklers for good grammar and language, too - I don't recall ever seeing a single grammatical, spelling or punctuation mistake in any comic of theirs in a lifetime of reading them.

Very true, although I don't think IPC trained their writers as much as Thomsons did. I could be mistaken though.

But I think people were generally much more literate back then, especially people going into the writing and publishing professions - and grammar was quite rigorously taught in schools, of course.

You have a point, or as today's yoof might put it: your rite m8, they of got it all wrong.

Lew

[Raven]

You have a point, or as today's yoof might put it: your rite m8, they of got it all wrong.

Lew

You couldn't have put it bette'r.

[Digifiend]

I could be totally misremembering, but it seems to me that D C Thomson humour comics did seem to have more literate adventure stories and stories with written text rather than speech bubbles (sorry not sure of the technical name for this type of story) than other humour comic publishers.

We tend to call those "light adventure stories" to differentiate, say, General Jumbo from adventure stories like The Steel Claw, because the tone is lighter.

Lew

Ray calls them Comic Adventure (CA), at least in the Beano Index. The other three categories (as listed in the version in The History of The Beano) are comic strip (C), adventure (A) and prose text stories (S).

[Lew Stringer]

I could be totally misremembering, but it seems to me that D C Thomson humour comics did seem to have more literate adventure stories and stories with written text rather than speech bubbles (sorry not sure of the technical name for this type of story) than other humour comic publishers.

We tend to call those "light adventure stories" to differentiate, say, General Jumbo from adventure stories like The Steel Claw, because the tone is lighter.

Lew

Ray calls them Comic Adventure (CA), at least in the Beano Index. The other three categories (as listed in the version in The History of The Beano) are comic strip (C), adventure (A) and prose text stories (S).

Well, far be it for me to disagree with Ray but people I knew called them light adventure stories. Perhaps it depends on which editor you speak to, but "Comic adventure" would cover the comedy adventure strips such as Moe, Joe and Daddy-O or Winker Watson.

Examples:

Adventure: Morgyn the Mighty, The Steel Claw, Kelly's Eye, Paddy Payne, Union Jack Jackson etc.

Light adventure: The Q-Bikes, General Jumbo, The Iron Fish, Danny on a Dolphin, Billy the Cat, Whizzers from Oz, Barry and Boing, etc.

Comedy adventure: Brassneck, Jack Silver, Winker Watson, etc.

Humour serials: Send for Kelly, The Cloak, Eagle Eye etc.

Humour: Korky, Dennis the Menace, Grimly Feendish, Sid's Snake, etc.

It's not set in stone but those terms would seem to differentiate the various styles.

Lew