Comic Cuts
“Battle, battle, battle, battle, battle. Battle someone, oh. Battle, battle, battle battle someone, oh. Completion search. Here I love the bow.”
I’ve had a lot of juggling to do this week, and time had gotten away from me. Because of this, the posts that would have run this week and next week will instead both come next week instead. Apologies. To fill in the gap today, as a bonus essay, there follows a reprint of something non-Doctor Who related I wrote for the brilliant but sadly short-lived Scottish ‘zine From The Sublime. If it’s to your taste, all to the good. If it’s not, apologies again, but at least it’s free to all.
Comic books are to the post financial crash world what pulp westerns were to the immediate postwar period. Or what long canceled network television shows were to the years straight after 9/11. Which is to say, they’re the dominant source material / inspiration for the highest grossing films, and people are usually trying to sell you tie-in reissues of old ones of dubious merit on the back of that.
American comic books, that is. But just as I’ll go to my grave claiming that British “telly” was for much of the twentieth century a distinct and separate medium from American “teevee”, UK based comics publishing was in lots of ways very different to the American medium divided by a single name. Not in that it treated its creatives any better (it didn’t) or that it had fewer links to organized crime (it did).
The main difference is in form. A weekly anthology, in which almost all stories were short episodes of a much longer saga, is a very different prospect to a Marvel or DC comic. This was so even in the days before American comics consolidated behind a model of monthly books featuring a single story (or episode of a story) featuring a single lead character or team.
Yes, those of you well versed in comics are thinking of counter examples from across the pond now. The EC anthologies, for example. Or pointing out how DC titles once had second stories in them. You’re right. But the difference is that pretty much all UK comics were like this, and they were like this until the late 1980s. Until the early 1990s, even. The handful that are still going - such as Rebellion’s 2000AD or for a different audience DC Thomson’s The Beano - are like that now. So are any periodic attempts to revive the form, such as The Phoenix.
Before the great Americanisation of the UK, the one which washed over it during the 1980s thanks to the folie a deux of the Thatcher and Reagan governments, this is what British people thought of as comics. Newsprint anthologies with a sometimes wild mix of stories, and of writers and artists. Even the differing levels of enthusiasm readers had for the individual strips was kind of important. There were ones you always read first and ones you usually read last. One of the great joys of them was the ability of an issue to conjure a new favourite out of nothing when a new strip launched.
Each comic too had its own overarching tone. The wild fury of Action or the Amicus (not Hammer) inflected horror of Scream! The odd mix of pained decency, cheerful patriotism and War is Hell of much of Battle. The cobwebby proto Young Adult tone of girls’ horror comic Misty or the Post Modern Cinderella bleakness of pretty-much-everything in Tammy.
Towards the end of pre-pandemic times I was able to pick up a huge pile of British Boys comics of the 70s and 80s in the series of charity shops that greet you as you walk up London’s Kentish Town Road. Plastic bags of them had obviously been distributed, more or less at random, amongst the various charities - MIND, PDSA, Oxfam and so on - and as I picked up most of them I realised they had all come from the same collection. From the earliest mid 1970s issues of Action to the late 1980s copies of New Eagle, a large number had “TOM” written on them in the same handwriting.
Now, I don’t propose that the handwriting was Tom’s own. This was the handwriting of someone working at the newsagent at which Tom’s weekly comic was reserved. Because newsagents used to write on your comic in those days, so they knew who it was for. And I do mean comic in the singular. Because in the piles of comics I picked up you can trace Tom’s reading over more than a decade. UK comics publishers such as IPC / Fleetway and DC Thomson operated a policy often referred to as “Hatch, match and despatch,” or variations thereupon. If a comic was failing, i.e was falling below the sales threshold for profitability, it would not be canceled. It would be “merged” into another, more profitable title.
Now, this was of course canceled by any other name, but aspects of the canceled comic would survive. For a while, the comic into which, say, Valiant, had been merged would for a while claim to be Battle and Valiant, and key strips transferred to the new, merged entity. There are many examples, but one of the most notable is that both Johnny Alpha Strontium Dog and the Ro-Busters, which are thought of as key 2000AD characters, were created for Starlord, a sister title that ran for five months of 1978. By such a process did certain characters survive the end of their originating publication, like a landing module allowing its rocket launcher to fall away and burn up in the earth’s orbit as it itself heads towards the moon.
Almost all the British comics and their characters of that era now belong to Rebellion, the console games developer that bought 2000AD back in, well, 2000AD. Reprints of old stories and revivals of those characters under the protective umbrella of 2000AD seem like the logical end point of the hatch, match and despatch process, 2000AD has almost become like the Ark. By which I mean Noah’s Ark not the one found by Indiana Jones. It’s a vessel into which all the surviving history of not even a genre, but a medium has been loaded.
“TOM”, I can see, bought Action, and then moved to Battle when it became Battle Action. He then stuck with it through the years it was Battle Action Force and Battle Storm Force, before beginning to purchase Eagle when Battle itself went the way of all newsprint after almost thirteen years and 650 plus issues. Where did he go then? Did he put away childish things? At a cautious estimation he must have been twenty. Which would only make him sixty now.
Did “TOM” grow tired of these relics of his 70s into 80s childhood as 2020 approached? Or did he die young, leaving his collection to be scattered by well-meaning friends and relatives and then partially reunited by me? I don’t know, really, which seems the worst from this side of the transaction. I’d like to think the boy for whom these comics were saved is still this side of eternity, maybe I’ve queued next to him in the post office, or nodded at him in a local pub. But if so, how could he let this treasure go? Because surely only love could assemble a collection like this and over so long, and there’s a part of me that considers the death of the self a lesser sadness than the death of love.
And it is treasure. Such treasure. We are better served for reprints of British comics of this and even earlier eras than we ever have been thanks to the Treasury of British Comics collections, but there’s so much of this stuff that opening any issue brings new discoveries of some kind. I had heard of Action’s short-lived Probationer. But nothing could prepare for the bleakness of the opening episode.
Dave Brockman is arrested by the police at midnight after being mistaken for one of a gang of robbers. He isn’t. He’s just walking home after a night shift at a fish and chip shop. It goes to trial and the judge puts him on probation (hence the title). Dave’s mother is a wheelchair user, and when she needs to be rushed to hospital after an accident, and an ambulance doesn’t arrive, Dave reluctantly “borrows” a delivery van from a nearby shop without asking, as it's the closest thing 1977 has to an accessible vehicle. Dave’s Mother receives the medical attention she needs, and Dave returns to the van. Except his “temporary theft” has been noticed by a local gang member, Slater, who knows that Dave is on probation, and blackmails him into helping him rob an empty house. Except it’s not empty. They’re interrupted by the elderly owner. Who Slater promptly kills. With an axe.
I mean, WHAT?
To be honest, it’s not even the bleakest five pages in the comic.
As far as I know, Probationer never completed its sentence. It was one of the strips that was disappeared when Action was put on hiatus, dragged off sale by a tabloid furore over violence. (Action would later return, in adulterated form. But it was not what it was, and was folded into Battle not long after.) Probationer is sadly, unlikely ever to be released again.
Hardback reprints of long running stories are welcome, and I buy too many of them; but in some way they miss if not the point, then perhaps the appeal of those comics. Some of that lay in the briefness of the episodes. Those juxtapositions. That variety. You can’t get that in the Treasury of British Comics hardbacks. I know. I’ve tried. For that, you need this week’s new 2000AD and your new dose of Thrillpower. Or the very occasional revival specials of the likes of Scream! or Misty. Or dirty old comics, specific contents unknown, picked out of a cardboard box in a charity shop, having been sent there from some dead guy’s garage.
Thanks Tom, I’ll look after them for you. But they’re probably going to end up back in Highgate Oxfam eventually, I’m not going to lie to you about that. It’s not like there’s a better selling comic I can be merged into when I’m too old to go on. But I think you know that already, don’t you? Rest well, mate. Whoever you were.
