The Topper Book 1989: An Overview

I spend a lot of my time reading old children's annuals I've picked up in charity shops. I'm used to seeing material of a somewhat... questionable nature in them. You know, there will be jokes or stories based around certain attitudes of the time that would no longer be acceptable. Usually racist, often sexist occasionally homophobic. Sometimes a word will have shifted in meaning over time giving us a good ol' 21st century snigger.

With that in mind, here is a selection of nuggets culled from a single annual. The Topper Book 1989.

The Topper was published by DC Thomson between 1953 and 1990 and was certainly the weirdest of its "big four" humour titles. Strips you may remember include Beryl the Peril, Tricky Dicky and Mickey the Monkey (who I've only just realised is actually an ape, not a monkey).

There is also a character who tries to make other children's wishes come true.

Hey look! He's dressed like.... Oh. 

Okay, they could not have foreseen that.

Let's move on to casual racism.

Figaro was a Mexican bandit character. The two jokes were: He was a rubbish bandit. He spoke with an hilarious accent.

It's the late 80s. Allo Allo is on telly.

Ugh.

Then there's Video Kid ("HE STARS IN HIS OWN VIDEOS!")

It starts out innocent enough. He wants to make a musical but hilariously stumbles off onto another film set, then another (like the end of Blazing Saddles). At one point he crashes a war movie and takes a grenade to the face:

Yes, the bright side... He can get back to that musical he was doing. With a twist:

Oh dear. A reminder: This was published in 1988.

Another popular character you might remember if you're over thirty was a boy who had a magical transistor radio. It could make things shrink, grow or fly because reasons. Leaving aside just how dated the concept of a transistor radio was in 1988 (I didn't know what it was) the strip is saddled with this unfortunate title: 

Now, I've recently been told that the word "tranny" is seen as a term of abuse by the transgendered community but until then I'd only known it as a fairly cute word for a cross-dresser. And that's the use I chose to think of when I read this strip in which Danny is watching a football match with a friend in a pink frock.

Danny and his friend prevent the opposing team from cheating and are hailed as heroes:

They were so accepting. It's rather beautiful...

And then there's these panels from Beryl the Peril....

Erm...

That's your Dad you're talking to, Beryl.

DADDY-BOOTS!?

GOOD NIGHT EVERYBODY!

Minnie the Minx meets Walter White

My last post featured Minnie the Minx and an ice cream van. Oddly the current issue of The Beano also features Minnie and an ice cream van. But the real interest is the artist has chosen to include a cameo of everyone's favourite chemistry teacher-cum-meth dealer.

You could argue it is not really him, even with that blue crystal-like lolly and the trading name "Icenberg's". But the strip is called "Breaking Dad". They should call him Walter the Mr Softee. Expect an outraged Daily Mail story.

Minnie the PC Minx

I've just found out that this month saw the 60th anniversary of Minnie the Minx. So, have these images from 1978 that show how Minnie brought the feminist agenda to Beanotown.

Happy New Year!

Review: Man of Steel

Here are my opinions on the movie Man of Steel. There may be spoilers ahead, but I really think Zack Snyder already spoiled it for everyone. I did not like it.

My initial reaction to finding out Snyder was making a Superman film were not positive. Watchmen remains the movie that has made me the most angry I have ever been at fiction. Sucker Punch (even if you accept the misogyny as ironic) is a messed up collection of music videos with the plot of an early nineties video game. My hopes weren't high. But I felt it would be my duty as a Superman fan to go see it even if no-one else did. I remembered going to see Batman and Robin on my own in a mostly-empty theatre in 1997 and thought that might happen again.

Then the second trailer came out. And it was ace. It perked me up and actually made me excited to see it. This is going to be good! Like the first trailer (all arty shots of butterflies and washing lines) it still seemed almost embarrassed about showing Superman but that's just to preserve some mystery right? Right?

No. The truth is this is not a Superman movie at all. In the same way that Superman III is not a Superman film but a Richard Pryor comedy that happens to have Superman in it, Man of Steel is an alien invasion film that happens to have Superman in it.

Seriously, all I want from a Superman film is to see Superman doing Superman stuff. If I want to watch the American military fighting spaceships I'd watch Independence day or Battleships. And be massively disappointed with them.

It's not until nearly the end of the movie before someone calls him Superman. And he's made to feel ridiculous for it. Lois (Amy Adams - I'll admit to something of a crush on her) nearly calls him Superman but is interrupted. He doesn't get his costume for over an hour and even then it doesn't really look like his costume. If you didn't want to make a Superman film you could have done something else.

The interesting stuff about Clark Kent's journey is probably the best part of the film. We see what life is like for him as he travels from town to town under new identities, hiding his secret power until being forced to show it by, for example, getting angry and heading on the road to the next town, all the while being pursued by an intrepid reporter who believes he killed Bruce Banner.

No. Wait. Got confused there.

Eventually Clark comes forward and offers his help to the military who don't know whether they can trust him. At this point he has become Klaatu from The Day the Earth Stood Still. I don't mind this. (incidentally Klaatu was a Christ allegory which is something Superman often is - indeed the script explicitly states that Clark is 33 years old)  I think ditching the whole secret identity thing was a bold and interesting choice which makes a lot more sense in a movie than in serial fiction. Which is why I was surprised that he gets his secret identity at the end of the film.

A real problem I have with most superhero movies is the need to tell the origin story. For most of the running time. The Amazing Spider-man from last year spent far too long telling an origin the audience has barely had time to forget. The Fantastic Four was almost all origin and I'm sure put people off seeing the sequel, which is a shame because that's one of the most fun superhero movies ever.

Is there anyone who doesn't know Superman's origin? It's one of those cultural touchstones of twentieth century western storytelling. And it's been told on screen at least six times. Smallville took nine years telling it for Klaatu's sake.

This is how Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely told the origin story in the excellent All Star Superman:

Eight. Words.

I don't want to get bogged down with complaining about plot holes because they were no worse than those in, say, The Dark Knight Rises or Skyfall. Although both those films entertained me so much I didn't notice them until long after. Man of Steel has so many boring extended action sequences that I was able to think about the internal logic problems in the script. I will however highlight a piece of dialogue which might as well have been this:

"We also demand you hand over the one called Lois Lane!"
"Why?"
"No reason. We wanted to give her a chance to save Superman and spoil our plans. We're evil but we're sporting."

As for the representation of other Superman family stuff. That was a mixed bag too.

Krypton was a planet of over-designed machinery. Smallville was too big (a bit more like that bafflingly popular TV show's Smallville). But Metropolis... Superman's most famous home was barely seen. In fact I didn't even notice that's where we were meant to be during the big Avengers-y fight at the film's climax (hey, did you like them big metal flying snake things from The Avengers? Then you'll like seeing then again!). It could have been anywhere except for it having The Daily Planet offices there. Which looked like every other building.

I liked Laurence Fishburne as Perry White and I'm not aware of any racist whingeing about casting him like there was with Idris Elba in Thor. I'm sure if did a search I'd find a thousand tweets saying "They should call him Perry BLACK! lol!" so to preserve my faith in humanity I won't.

I was more concerned with the fact that Lois and Lana both had wrong coloured hair! Which is equally ridiculous, really. But Pete Ross is a fat bully? That's right out of order.

Also nice to see Professor Hamilton and Kelex make appearances (for those you who weren't reading Superman comics in the 90s, don't worry about it). Also what may be the first onscreen appearance of sports reporter Steve Lombard. Even though he neither looked nor acted like the character I'm still putting that under "positives".

But then there's the big negative. A huge hole in Superman's world. No, not Lex Luthor (there was at least a tiny reference to LexCorp). I mean the faithful friend. Cub reporter. Mr Adventure. Y'know, Superman's Pal.

Jimmy Olsen.

I love Jimmy Olsen because I love silver age comics. If you don't understand how I can love him look at this:

Who could resist? Apart from Lucy Lane.

There is an intern by the name of Jenny, who I'm sure was intended to be Jimmy in an earlier draft. Maybe the producers were concerned that there weren't enough female characters (not something producers usually care about kudos if that is so). So why they didn't use Cat Grant or any other woman in Superman's life is odd.

Still. If this gets a sequel I DEMAND SOME JIMMY OLSEN ACTION!

Batman pays tribute to The Dandy

Ah, The Dandy. Good Ol' Dandy. Doomed, soon to be defunct Dandy.

One of the better-known strips out of the many to have been published is called "Bully Beef and Chips".

It debuted in 1967, drawn by Jimmy Hughes and featured an amiable boy called Chips, perpetually threatened and/or thumped by a big bruiser called Bully Beef (or "Beefy" for short). Here's a picture from their first outing, helpfully reprinted in The Dandy 75th Years Special which is out now (sadly exclusive to WH Smith):

 It was a simple format that made it enduring. Bully picks on underdog, underdog uses cunning to defeat bully. Born and bred in the briar patch. The style changed a little over the years. Here's the version I grew up with, this image taken from The Dandy Book, 1975:

 It lost its appeal (at least for the publishers) during the 90s when children being bullied became a touchy subject for comedy but after a couple of revival attempts this is how they look in the current issue of The Dandy:

 But another reason they have been remembered over so many other characters is that the spirit of the strips was transferred to the decidedly non-child-friendly pages of Viz in the form of Biffa Bacon (taken from the annual The Last Turkey in the Shop):

 "Yes, yes" you say "But what about Batman?"

I was reading the latest issue of Batman Incorporated this week (Volume 2, Issue 3 if you must know, written by Grant Morrison, drawn by Chris Burnham) and watched Matches Malone (one of Batman's undercover identities) quizzing a boy about Leviathan. Or a man with a growth deficiency who looks like a boy. "Huh" I thought "That henchman looks familiar."

 I reached over a grabbed a Dandy (always keep a Dandy handy) and flipped to Bully Beef and Chips. Yep. Looks just like him. If that's a coincidence it's a terrific one. But Morrison (a Scotsman) has previous form here. He attempted to introduce a British comics sensibility to Batman Incorporated before during a storyline in which Batman came to Britain to aid The Knight and The Squire, who then had an excellent spin-off miniseries written by Paul Cornell. That miniseries paid direct homage to the Oddhams/Fleetway comics style, including having a villain called "Jarvis Poker, the British Joker".

 Then the little fella calls his goon "Bully". Okay. Definitely deliberate now. Oh, hang on doesn't he look like... Yes, it's not as obvious but he's dressed like Chips and has his silly curls. And when Batman calls him "Small Fry", he gets corrected:

So there you have it. The British Joker is called Jarvis Poker and the American Bully Beef and Chips are called Bully and Fry.

And people tell me I've wasted my life.

The timing of this means Morrison couldn't have known he was paying homage to a comic that was about to end (unless something very unusual happened) but I doff my cap to him once again.

Britain's Oldest Comic To Cease Publication on its 75th Birthday

The Dandy. Reliable Dandy. Good Ol' Dandy.

The Dandy is Britain's oldest comic and will celebrate 75 years of publication in December this year. Then it'll stop.

That's right, they've finally thrown in the towel and the comic will cease to exist as a published, printed, stapled-together paper thing this year. Although owners D C Thomson claim to have digital Dandy projects in the works. We'll see what that means.

As it is lots of newspaper column inches and nerdy blogs have been given over to discussing what this means. Is it a terrible destruction of a British icon or a long-overdue mercy-killing of a pre-war relic? And there are those (like Charlie Brooker in The Guardian) complaining that these writers have no business pontificating on something they don't read and isn't aimed at them. They're just pining for their lost childhood.

Well guess what. I read it. I am an adult man and I read The Dandy. And I enjoy it.

Admitting you like good art specifically aimed at children gets you looked at with either pity or suspicion in this country. We've yet to have our own movement like the Bronies. But our time is coming.

I grew in a time when there was a huge choice in children's comics. After the true golden age had past but I still had plenty to choose from. I generally preferred the Odhams/Fleetway/IPC stable (the company changed hands a lot) as they generally seemed more anarchic and weird but D C Thomson's output was always consistently great too.

The king of those comics (and soon to be the last man standing, more-or-less) was The Beano. The Dandy (which was less than a year older) always seemed the less fun one. The Topper and The Beezer also seemed slightly "cooler" than The Dandy for reasons I couldn't explain as a kid. However when a comic failed to meet its target circulation and was cancelled, the popular characters who still had legs found themselves in The Dandy. This had the effect of gradually strengthening the parent comic.

Thus Nutty's TV star superhero Bananaman moved to Dandytown and Hoot's anarchic toddler Cuddles merged into a strip with Dandy's anarchic toddler Dimples (oddly ret-conned into being twins eventually). And as more titles dried up Topper and Beezer characters joined them too.

Since my teenage years I hadn't paid The Dandy much attention. Until the horrific relaunch as "Dandy Xtreme" a magazine (!) with a pull-out comic (!) in 2007. I was working in a shop that sold comics at the time and I was furious. The publishers were making it hip and cool and "not your father's Dandy" and Poochie. And the comic part was secondary. "That's it." I said. "It'll be dead within a year." I was wrong, as it turned out, but it did damage the Dandy brand.

Then, brilliantly, nearly two years ago, the comic relaunched. As an actual comic. With no regard for free gifts or two-page features on the latest CGI movie with tie-in McDonalds toys, it was back and better than ever.

It reminded me of my favourite read as a kid; Oink!

Oink!, which incidentally was the aforementioned Charlie Brooker's first writing gig, was great. It was anarchic, rude and hilarious. Outside of Viz (which was TOO far for my sensitive Catholic eyes) it was the most punk rock of the comics.It even had Frank Sidebottom, a funny bloke off the telly, doing strips starring himself. And it was peppered with fake adverts for all the stuff marketing people were telling me to buy in other comics. Ace.

And most of that last paragraph can be used to describe the "new" Dandy. Just replace Frank Sidebottom with Harry Hill (cover star for most of the relaunched comic's first year) and pretty much still stands. And it was funny. Properly funny. To my grown-up brain. It was a joy.

And in the (nearly) two years since it has been consistently entertaining, innovative and giving exposure to new talents. Everything I would have wanted in a comic as a child or an adult.

And this is what we get. Shame.

I'm willing to bet that the more popular characters like Desperate Dan (genuine British icon - he's got a statue in Dundee y'know), Bananaman and hopefully a couple of Jamie Smart's brilliant creations will live on in the pages of The Beano (which appears safe for now) but it's a sad time for British comics. I'll be watching the fortunes of Toxic and The Phoenix too. Because that's it once they've gone.

Excuse me.... I have something in my eye....

Hello and come on in. This is my comics-related blog. I've planned this for a while and didn't intend to start blogging until I was fully prepared.

The idea of this was to review the comics I was reading as and when desire, whether old or new, with a particular emphasis on British comics so as to distinguish myself from the main comics blog I read: http://livingbetweenwednesdays.com/

Today I went for a day out with my lady-friend to Buxton and was delighted to find it was the day on which the book fare was. Lady-friend is hoping to open her own children's book store and was happily chatting to the stall-holders while I flitted about looking for things. I was surprised how many DC Thompson annuals were available from the various sellers and giddily anticipated several purchases. However we had agreed (as we are quite poor right now) to limit our purchases to two things. Oddly, the surprising availability of these annuals made them seem less interesting. I ended up paying £5 for three of them: two Topper Books (1967 and 1971) and The Beano Book 1976.

Then, just when we were told the fare was closing, I went back to one of the first stalls I visited, which had some splendid 1970s reprints of Eisner's The Spirit, and noticed a pile of comics I overlooked before. The front cover on the top of the pile said: "HE'S BACK! AXEL PRESSBUTTON THE PSYCHOTIC CYBORG!" I tried to remember where this character came from and noted his similarity to Mean Machine Angel and then it clicked. The sidebar noted "PRAY THE FUTURE WILL NEVER NEED V FOR VENDETTA" and then i realised: this was Warrior No1. First appearance of V. In very good condition. I really should get this.

I then looked at the next on the pile. Front page: FROM HUMAN (explosive effect) KIMOTA (end effect) TO SUPERHUMAN. Oh shit (I thought) this was where Alan Moore debuted his Marvelman. A strip so mired in legal wrangling it has never been reprinted. A strip I have wanted to read for years.

The stallholder popped up and told that there was all 26 issues of the warrior run and if I wanted them it was £25 for the lot. I was struck dumb. I knew I could not afford it. I also knew I had already bought more than I promised I would. I could not justify giving away £25 however I sliced it. I decide I would go and talk to lady-friend first.

"I want to" I said "but I can't afford to." "All right then," said stall-holder, "How about £20?". Instinct kicked in and I just handed him the money. If nothing else, I'm sure I could make a profit on this.

I tried to hide it from l-f but knew I would have to come clean. I spent £20 I can't afford on old comics. I explained importance of Marvelman to her and told her I could sell them at a profit. Truthfully though, I don't think I could sell them. Especially now that I know I also have the first Bojeffries Saga strips in my possession. Joy.

Warrior N0.1-26 in my lap as I write. Do you have them? Well I do.