Heroines had names like Hetty, Bubbles, Cherry and Babs and male relatives called Jago, Rodney and Pongo (the latter usually reserved for an obnoxious brother). Girls’ comics featured young ladies who invariably went to posh boarding schools with dorms, matrons, removes and tuck shops. Young readers wallowed happily through jungles, cities, prairies and lost planets, in the company of people (or robots) who grappled with pterodactyls, stopped villains in their tracks with a freezing ray, leapt over double-decker buses, averted tanks by smearing ice cream over the road, burrowed through the earth in a vehicle like a giant oversized wood screw, hacked at the tentacles of giant squids coiled around ocean liners, or beat off several thousand baffled tribesmen with nothing more than a cricket bat. And so stories involved anti-gravitation bracelets or cream to make you invisible, or mysterious masked players leading a flagging team to victory (sometimes it wouldn’t be a masked player, but a kangaroo or a robot). The creators of these comics knew instinctively an adolescent’s subconscious desire to become invisible at will, or to fly like a bird, or to wipe the floor with the opposition by an amazing display of skill at football, cricket, running, boxing or pole vaulting. Reading them required, of course, a complete acceptance of people rolling downhill engulfed in a monster snowball of dogs, snakes, horses, bears and ostriches being able to talk and of lightbulbs hovering over people’s heads containing the word “Idea”.
The comics shared a common vocabulary of emotive words like “Tee-hee”, “Haw-haw”, “Aaargh”, “Gulp”, “Zzzzzzzz”, “Yikes”, “Splat”, “Eeek”, “Yeeow” and “Glub” (as when sinking into a pool of mud) and a shared approach to food – someone was always being rewarded with a “slap-up” meal or a “good tuck-in”, usually involving a chicken leg, a slice of fruit cake dripping with icing, or a pile of bangers and mash where the sausages stuck out of a mountain of mashed potato like fat fingers. And at Christmas – apart from slap-up feasts of spherical puds and cigars – there would always be snow on the lettering and a cascade of presents and overflowing stockings, often distributed from the open cockpit of a plane by a genial Santa Claus. In November, the pages and the title whirled with sparks and whooshing rockets. In August, the sun always shone on the sands, the cliffs, the lighthouses, the sparkling sea and the crabs. Easter always brought loads of adventures involving eggs. The comics presented a world of constant, dependable friends and reliable traditions. World War II, cowboys and soccer were the tripod on which boys’ comics were built in the 1950s and 1960s.ĭC Thomson and Fleetway were in tough competition with their comics, although Thomsons were clear winners with their ageless twins, The Dandyand The Beano which had no real counterparts.įleetway, meanwhile, led easily with their nursery comics, Jack and Jill, Playhour and Harold Hare against Thomson’s Bimbo and Longacre’s Robin, which were all prettily produced in colour.
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