A Visit to The Strip Club

I've spent the last week or so on a trip down memory lane, to my misspent youth. Inspired by BBC4's excellent Comics Britannia series, I've been scouring the web in search of the comic strips which enthralled me back in the 1970s. When I was a kid I was never really into the American DC and Marvel titles, I preferred the less glamorous, but no less weird and wonderful, British weeklies, printed on cheap paper in glorious black and white. What I loved most about them was the variety of stories you got in a single issue - the average title would typically include an historical yarn, a crime story, a war story a weird/science fiction strip and at least one humour strip. In addition to the on-going characters, there would often be one-off strips and various 'factual' features. Whilst the art work could sometimes seem crude, more often than not it was of a remarkably high standard. TV21 was my first 'proper' comic - I 'inherited' it from my older brothers who had originally subscribed to it. This was a surprisingly high-quality comic running strips based on TV shows like Thunderbirds and Star Trek, I could be mistaken, but I seem to recall that it was in colour (although I could be confusing the weekly comic with the annual). However, my relationship with TV21 didn't last long - in 1971 it was amalgamated with another long-running title: Valiant.

It was in the pages of Valiant that I was introduced to such great strips as Kelly's Eye (ancient crystal makes the eponymous hero virtually indestructible - he then spends his days involved in time-travelling adventures when not starting revolutions in South American banana republics), House of Dollman (puppeteer uses puppets to fight crime), a strip whose title I don't recall about a gypsy footballer who didn't wear boots ,(and unlike those wimps Beckham and Rooney, he never suffered any broken bones in his feet), and Captain Hurricane. This latter character helped warp my view of WWII - I believed that it was won by powerfully muscled Royal Marines so strong that they didn't need guns and were apparently impervious to bullets. When the Captain went into one of his 'ragin' furies', he'd take out entire SS panzer divisions with his bare hands. I grew up thinking that all Germans had shaven heads and shouted things like 'Gott in Himmel' and 'Donner und Blitzen' when surprised, whilst the Japanese all had buck teeth, wore glasses and said 'By Shinto!'. Actually, it was an interesting feature of British comics that, for them, it seemed like WWII had never ended. The Cold War was completely ignored - the Axis, not the Communists, were still the enemies of choice.

In the mid-1970s Valiant began to change (I now know that this was due to the editorship of John Wagner, later to create Judge Dredd, who had been brought in to try and modernise the title). Stories like One-Eyed Jack (tough Dirty Harry-style New York cop who doesn't play by the rules) Death Wish (British soldier loses entire squad in WWII, blames himself and consequently wanders the battlefield trying to get himself killed whilst taking lots of Germans with him), and Stryker (a bit like High Plains Drifter, but set against the backdrop of a lower-league football club) began to appear alongside old favourites like Captain Hurricane. On the whole, these stories were pretty good, but it was too little, too late. With circulation falling, in 1976 Valiant was merged with Battle Picture Weekly. I couldn't take to the relentless emphasis on war stories to the exclusion of all other types of strip in the new comic and parted company with it after a few issues. I switched my allegiance to Action (the revived, less violent version), where I found that secret agent Dredger was quite a bit like One Eyed Jack and there was a reassuring variety of strips. Sadly, it only lasted a year before being swallowed up by Battle. I jumped ship to 2000AD, where I felt much more at home.

Looking back at various strips and comics-related sites I've found on the web has reminded me of just how much I loved those old comics. God, how I wish I'd kept some of them! The story-telling on the likes of Kid Pharaoh (revived Ancient Egyptian becomes a boxer (or was it a wrestler?), but falls into catatonic state when the lights go out), might not have been as sophisticated as Spiderman, but his adventures moved much more briskly (he only had 2-3 pages a week to get through his latest escapade). I really do miss those much simpler days!