Andy Capp gets political

For the first time in 62 years, Andy Capp has put down his pint to make a political stand.... and he's not in favour of Brexit! 

Controversial for some, although most of the comments I've seen are in his favour, as one might hope from readers of the Daily Mirror. After all, it's the average working person who'll be hardest hit by Brexit. 

The Mirror asked Andy to explain himself, and he has, with the help of his writers, summing up the whole Brexit situation concisely and in a very funny way. You can read all about it here...
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/andy-capp-breaks-62-year-20051795

Good on you, Andy! Voice of the people!

See Andy Capp in the Daily Mirror every day!

Andy's back in the bookshops

Photo from Lawrence Goldsmith.

Just another quick plug for the new Andy Capp book that I mentioned months ago. It's now been published and is in bookshops. This is the 60th anniversary year for the Daily Mirror's work-shy character so it's good to see him back in a book of his own. 

Andy Capp: 60 Years of Thinking About the Big Issues is a collection of contemporary strips by Roger Mahoney, Lawrence Goldsmith, and Sean Garnett, and you can order a copy online now.

Andy Capp is 60 today

The distinctively memorable 2nd book, 1959.

On this day in 1957, Andy Capp first appeared in the Northern edition of the Daily Mirror. Initially a gag cartoon before later becoming a strip, Andy was the creation of cartoonist Reg Smythe. 

The first Andy Capp cartoon, 5th August 1957.

Andy Capp struck a chord with its working class readers and became a national institution. My parents and my grandad read the strip, and it seemed like everyone knew who Andy Capp was. He was so popular, and so respected by the paper, that his strip even appeared on the cover of the Christmas edition in 1966. 

Young comics creators today yearn for comics to be accepted by the general public. It already happened decades ago! Once upon a time the public loved newspaper strips and characters such as Andy Capp became household names. The Andy Capp collections, published twice a year, were read by blokes in the pub and by dads on holiday. Other newspaper strip collections such as Bill Tidy's Fosdyke Saga were also popular with adults. Sadly, over the years, comics have fallen out of favour with young and old, and the UK industry, down but not out, is not what it once was. 

Perhaps this explains why today's Daily Mirror makes no mention of Andy Capp's 60th anniversary. Not even a jokey line in their celebrity birthday listings. In fairness, they could be waiting until 17th August, which a recent article claimed was the actual anniversary. (Presumably this was when it appeared in the London edition.) 

Reg Smythe passed away years ago but his strip is still going strong, seven days a week, ably produced by writers Lawrence Goldsmith and Sean Garnett and drawn by Roger Mahoney. As previously reported here, a new collection of their Andy Capp strips is to be published soon.

There's been some criticism this week that Andy Capp is too "politically correct" these days. Certainly his profile lost part of its distinctive look when the character lost his ever-present cigarette, but aspects such as beating up his wife Flo (or her reciprocating) stopped being funny a long time ago. Changes were necessary when the strip became syndicated around the world, but the essence and look of the character remains intact and the strip still raises a laugh. 

In these dark days of newspaper cutbacks, the fact that Andy Capp has been running consecutively for 60 years is something to celebrate. Cheers, Andy!

Today's Andy Capp strip.

******************

Here's an article I wrote for the strip's 50th anniversary ten years ago:
https://lewstringer.blogspot.co.uk/2007/08/andy-capp-is-fifty.html

Andy Capp returns to bookshops

Andy Capp, the Daily Mirror's popular cartoon strip created by Reg Smythe, first appeared in the paper 60 years ago on 5th August 1957. From 1958, softback book collections began to appear, at a rate of two a year for several years. The collections proved to be a success with young and old alike. (My grandad was reading them in his 70s.) 

As with most newspaper collections in the UK, the Andy Capp books have appeared less and less in recent times, even though the strip continues in the Daily Mirror 7 days a week. The last book was published in 2011 (by Titan) but this year will see it return with a collection of strips from the current team of Roger Mahoney, Lawrence Goldsmith, and Sean Garnett. 

I'll post more about it at a later date but, for now, here's the cover to whet your appetite. 

Here's an article I wrote about Andy when the character was 50:
https://lewstringer.blogspot.co.uk/2007/08/andy-capp-is-fifty.html

50 Year Flashback: Daily Mirror strips October 13th 1965

Several years ago I bought a bunch of old newspapers from the first Birmingham Memorabilia Show, back before the show became dominated by more recent nostalgia items. Here are the strips and cartoons that appeared in the Daily Mirror exactly half a century ago today.

The Andy Capp strip that day (above) is of course typical of the character; boozy and in debt, but creator Reg Smythe always managed to make the gags feel fresh and, more importantly, funny. 

The main strip page, regularly shared with Live Letters, featured Garth by John Allard and Steve Dowling, The Larks by Jack Dunkley, and The Flutters by Len Gamblin. We had the Daily Mirror every day when I was a kid so I have a particular fondness for these strips. 

Like Andy Capp, The Perishers (by Maurice Dodd and Dennis Collins) was on a different page back then, and a larger size strip than the others.

As well as five daily strips, the Mirror had a good selection of cartoons 50 years ago too. The Laughter column always carried work by some of Britain's top gag cartoonists.

There were also two regular 'pocket' cartoons. Useless Eustace by Jack Greenall...

...and Playboy! by David Rowe...

Plus the political cartoon by Stanley Franklin...

Strips and cartoons were considered an important part of the paper back then, and served as light relief to the serious news of the day. Sadly, the news of 50 years ago was very grim indeed, with the cover story revealing the re-opening of the tragic case that would be referred to as the Moors Murders. At this point it seems the press had not been informed of the arrests a few days earlier of the vile serial child-killers Myra Hindley and Ian Brady.

To end this blog post on a lighter note, here are the TV listings for this day 50 years ago. Only three channels, but at least there was a repeat of Hancock's Half Hour to watch, and a new Dennis Potter play... 

I hope you'll find these pages of historical interest. Click images to see them much larger and more readable. As for the weather forecast on 13th October 1965: "Mainly dry with some sunshine after early fog". Pretty much like today then!

Daily Mirror strips of the 1960s

We had the Daily Mirror every day when I was growing up in the 1960s. My family must have been reading it since the 1930s as my mum told me that when she was a child she enjoyed the Pip, Squeak and Wilfrid comic strip. The Mirror was the paper of the working class, and it had a direct and intelligent writing style that cut to the chase for the man in the street. 

It also had some great comic strips. I showed a page from a wartime edition here the other day, but today I'm focusing on the strips I enjoyed as a child in the sixties. There was Andy Capp by Reg Smythe, and The Perishers by Maurice Dodd and Dennis Collins of course, and I'm showing a couple of those here, but the strips I enjoyed most were the three tiers that always appeared around page 20: Garth, The Larks, and The Flutters. 

18th September 1962

Perishers: 18th September 1962.

Frank Bellamy's dynamic take on Garth in the 1970s receives a lot of praise, and justifiably so, but it was the earlier strips by John Allard and Steve Dowling which captured my imagination as a kid. Their stories often had a creepy atmospheric quality about them, even tense and claustrophobic at times due to the hatching and cross-hatching of the inks, but that added to the likable strangeness of the strip. Garth was aimed at adults of course, and women our time-travelling hero encountered would sometimes be topless, so that, plus the dark mood of the strip made it seem very mature to my young eyes. 

28th June 1963.

The Larks by Jack Dunkley was a standard family sit-com, and it felt a bit too middle-class for the Mirror to me, perhaps better suited to the Daily Mail. Nevertheless, I often enjoyed the gags and I liked the artwork. The interesting thing about The Larks is that the characters aged with the strip, so as the years progressed the kids grew into teenagers, Sam (the father) gained a bit of grey in his hair, etc.

14th February 1964.

14th February 1964.

The Flutters was a strip I really liked. I'm sure that some of Ian Gammidge's scripts with all their sporting/gambling references went right over my head as a child, but I think it was the fact that it was a continuing humour strip that grabbed me. The artwork by the appropriately named Len Gamblin was the clincher though; busy but clear, and just right for the strip. I was disappointed when The Flutters was eventually replaced by Bill Tidy's Fosdyke Saga which I never really took to.

22nd April 1964.

Anyway, here are several examples of those strips, mostly from the mid-1960s. I hope you enjoy looking at them! All are scanned from old copies of the Daily Mirror I bought at a Memorabilia Show a few years ago. I've cleaned a couple up in Photoshop as necessary but I've left that authentic newspaper look to most of the scans. 

30th January 1965.

Perishers: 30th January 1965.

13th May 1965.

16th July 1965.

Andy Capp: 16th July 1965.

20th September 1966.

14th November 1966.

10th June 1968.

Also related:

http://lewstringer.blogspot.co.uk/2008/01/day-of-double-strips-in-daily-mirror.html