Currently there's a campaign to ban all junk food advertising aimed at children. Ofcom want no tv ads for such foodstuffs advertised on tv until after the 9pm watershed, and the Advertising Standards Authority are pressing for a ban on unhealthy foods in the pages of children's magazines (which would include comics). Apparently 21st Century parents can't explain to their kids that sweets in moderation are okay because their 21st Century kids have such addictive personalities that they'll stuff their faces with chocolate and sweets until they turn into Jabba the Hut, and even then they'll still put their parents "under pressure" to buy them more. (Mind you; who's going to argue with a 70 stone kid?)
I have to wonder if any representative of Ofcom or the ASA has ever visited a newsagent. If they had they'd see kids spending ages staring at the chocolate selection whilst stuck in an indecisive zombie-state trying to choose between Milky Way, Curly Wurly, those penny chews that dirty-fingernailed scruffy kids fumble through or any other primary coloured confectionery. Surely if advertising was so potent as the pressure groups claim those kids would be in and out of the shop with SAS precision, chomping on their purchase while the tv jingle was still fresh in their ears.
Still, best not to admit that advertising isn't as effective as people think or we'll have advertising executives in rehab. Personally I like the idea of advertising in comics, as long as it's not at the expense of too much comic material. For one thing they provide the comic with revenue, but in a historical and social context they present us with a glimpse of the culture of the times. Take a look at the ads here for example. These are just a few from 1950 to the early 1970s when advertising confectionery towards kids wasn't looked upon as the scheme of a James Bond super villain. Let's go through them...
1: Ice cream keeps you fit. This was the moral of the Tommy Walls strips which ran in the early years of Eagle. Sponsored by Walls, these strips originally featured artwork by Frank Hampson and were later illustrated by the likes of Harold Johns and Richard Jennings (who went on to draw The Dalek Book in 1964). These two examples are from 1950. The second strip has some particularly nice imagery of life in Britain at that time. Favourite unintentionally funny line: "He was carrying a handbag. He's got away with it."
2: Mars feeds you goodness. Well, I don't know about that but it might make you feel good for a short while. Mars was always promoted as being good for "work, rest and play" in those days. I'm sure Mick Jagger would agree with the latter.
3: How times change. Today's society is on the verge of treating chocolate like hard drugs but in 1959 that bastion of the establishment Eagle had its own Fry's Fun Page to promote Fry's range of chocolate. Fry's Five Boys bar had its pieces embossed with the facial expressions of five schoolboys. No. I never understood why either.
4: "Suck it and see, it's magic!" said Crackerjack's Leslie Crowther. He was talking about Wiz, which was a very tasty banana flavoured lolly with soft toffee inside. Look at the image in the ad though: someone's bitten into the lolly when Leslie clearly said they should suck! Bloomin' sixties hippy anarchists.
5: Sugar Smacks (like Sugar Puffs but, in my opinion, tastier) had their finger on the hyperactive pulse of every sugar-addicted kid in the land, and were always running free gift promotions like this one which tied in with contemporary tv shows. Those free Captain Scarlet badges were great, and are no doubt highly collectible today.
6: Kinky! Yes, it's 1968. How did you guess? Walls launched their newest lolly covered in hundreds and thousands. Dozens of which fell off as you ate it.
7: Super Mousse was regularly promoted in comics during the early 1970s. Hey kids, you could send away for Apollo badges. Apparently you could wear them and be the "envy of your friends". A kid at our school had some. They were alright I suppose. I wasn't envious though. I wasn't. Honest.
8: Golly's Fun Book. Yes, it's Robertson's Jam trying to distract the reader's attention away from the racial stereotype with the chance of winning a chopper bike. These were a big craze in the early seventies you know. Okay, jam isn't exactly junk food unless you eat a whole jarful in one go but you still couldn't get away with this advert in comics today for obvious reasons. And rightfully so.
9: "It's frothy man!" So said the Cresta Bear on a tv promo that turned into a 1970s catch phrase. Fizzy pop, basically. The fizz went out of the catch phrase when adults started using it.
10: The Gumslinger used a rather flatly drawn but active comic strip to promote Rowntree's Liquorice Gums. Only 4d a tube in the days when comics and confectionery were around the same price.
11: Count Dracula's Deadly Secret. Yes, it's a 1973 lolly that turns you into a vampire, going by the advert. No chemical reaction caused buyers incisors to grow, but it was a refreshing taste. They should bring it back. I'm sure a black ice lolly would go down a storm with Goths.
Chances are advertisements like these will not be appearing in comics for the foreseeable future. For better or worse? You decide... or rather you don't, as bodies like the ASA, under pressure from the government, are deciding it for you.
Although the British representation of Marvel Comics in Odhams Fantastic and Terrific didn't meet with huge success in 1967/68 it didn't deter Top Sellers Ltd. from attempting a similar UK title in 1969.
Super DC was, like Fantastic, a 40 page anthology comic with full colour covers and black and white interiors. Its layout owed more to Odhams Smash! and Pow! in that it resized American pages to better suit a UK format. The logic being that British readers were used to seeing pages with 12 panels or more, not 5 or 6 like the American comics had, so layouts were re-jigged to accommodate two pages worth of US material on one Super DC page. This often led to noticeable results, with panels being cropped awkwardly or extra art added, sometimes poorly. Worse, the covers were usually sloppy composites of character poses that produced bizarre results, most infamously on the cover of No.3 which appeared to not only show Robin peering intently at Batman's crotch but also crouching down for a closer inspection!
If the reader could get past its flaws, Super DC was a good showcase for the DC heroes. The contents included Superman, Batman, Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen and Superboy; all taken from a classic and much respected period of late fifties / early sixties DC comics. The issues also included new two page text stories (Superman or Batman), an editorial page using the DC Direct Currents logo (but being nothing like its American page), a centrespread photo-feature which usually covered tv shows of the period (anything from Doctor Who to Randall and Hopkirk Deceased or Please Sir!), a Denis Gifford strip Jolly Jack (in No.6) and "The Skipper's Mailbag" where in one issue a reader asked what a ship's captain had to do with DC comics. The question went unanswered.
The "Skipper" in question, the editor of Super DC, was Mick Anglo, more famous for the creation of Marvelman in the 1950s. His editorial pages were an eclectic mixture of info ranging from background snippets on DC characters to the rotary index of Scotland Yard's fingerprint system or the workings of London's Victoria Line.
No doubt Top Sellers intended Super DC to attract readers to the regular American titles, for Top Sellers were also the distributors of DC comics in the UK! This was pretty blatant by the advertisement that appeared on the back cover of every issue of Super DC, urging readers to "Get in on the action" and order World's Finest, Lois Lane, etc from their newsagent. (Inspired by this I tried to do so, but my newsagent told me he never knew which titles Top Sellers would sent him, so it had to be an unspecific order for "every American comic" or none. I chose none.)
Incidentally, your eyes aren't deceiving you; that DC comics ad (shown above) was indeed coloured by someone who clearly had no idea what Batman looked like, colouring him naked apart from green trunks and gloves. This was never corrected throughout Super DC's run.
Priced at 1/- (5p) and published monthly, Super DC should have worked but didn't. Perhaps the format of complete stories failed to hook the readers. (I think that's one reason I gave up on it after 7 issues. That plus the poor covers.) I understand there were 14 issues in all, although I only have 1 to 12 and have never seen any others. (Unsold copies of the monthly were later redistributed to newsagents with a 5p sticker added.) There was also a hardback Super DC Bumper Book which was an improvement on the monthly in that it featured full colour and the pages were not resized, but bizarre recolouring (such as a brown Krypto) let it down somewhat.
Today, DC comics are represented in the UK with Titan's Batman Legends monthly and its companion comic Superman Legends (coming soon); both featuring up to date strips in full colour and running to 76 pages each. Far better designed than Super DC, but at least for a short while in 1969 to 1970 Mick Anglo's publication was an interesting if sometimes offbeat home for the DC heroes.
Following my blog about the Oink! Smokebuster Special yesterday, cartoonist Laura Howell e-mailed to remind me that there was another Oink! special around the same time. Sure enough, the July 1987 issue of Spectrum computer mag Crash gave away a 16 page Oink! Computer Special comic within its pages.
This was quite an odd publication as it was designed to tie-in with the Oink computer game produced in 1987 for the Spectrum. This game, (which I've never seen and was never sent by the way) featured two of my characters, Tom Thug and Pete and His Pimple (simplified to Pete's Pimple) plus David Haldane's superhero parody Rubbishman.
The idea was for the Oink! Computer Special to heavily promote the game, therefore the strips contained some differences to their versions in the usual Oink! comic. In Pete's Pimple, instead of Pete's giant zit bursting, it shot off his nose as a complete sphere, bouncing around the streets. The changes requested for Tom Thug were even more bizarre. Instead of the usual urban-based bullying, Tom became the driver of the "Thugmobile" hunting down zombies!
The games designers had completely missed the point of Tom Thug by depicting him as heroic. In the regular strips Tom was always a bully, a villain, not even an anti-hero like Dennis the Menace, and the strips always showed the consequences of his mischief with violence that always backfired on him. In the game, Tom's aggression was seen to be admirable even if it was only against zombies, but there was the other anomaly: the supernatural had no place in Tom Thug's streetwise environment. It just wasn't that sort of strip and venturing down that route would seem out of place.
To solve this problem I had the Tom Thug strip end up being "just a dream". It wasn't the ideal solution, and far too unoriginal, but it seemed to fit in this instance. In Tom's mind he would consider himself brave and heroic, and zombies were the sort of thing he'd dream about.
No doubt some will think I was being too precious about a character that some comic fans would consider "only a humour strip". However my concept of Tom was always that showing his bullying backfiring on him would be a catharsis for readers who themselves were bullied. In the real world bullies often get away with their actions, but in Tom Thug they never did. Tom was always depicted as stupid, intolerant, aggressive and pathetic, just like real bullies, and never as a role model. He wasn't a "rough diamond" or a cheeky-but-cute kid as seen in the other humour comics. He was the bad guy. I wrote and drew every one of the 400 plus Tom Thug strips so maybe I'm entitled to be a bit protective of the strip. ;-)
The good thing about the Oink! Computer Special was that, character discrepancies aside, it was a good promotional item for the regular Oink! comic. As well as the aforementioned strips it also contained some nice work by Jeremy Banx on Burp the Smelly Alien and an impressive colour centrespread by J.T.Dogg (Malcolm Douglas) which is shown above.
Following on from the anti-smoking theme of the previous blog post, here's a rarely seen item from 1987. The Oink! Smokebuster Special was a joint (pardon the pun) effort between Oink! Publishing Ltd (who normally packaged Oink! comic for Fleetway) and the North West Regional Health Authority. It was published by Project Smoke Free and, I think, given away in schools in the North of England.
It was in the same glossy format as the standard Oink! comic, albeit with half the number of pages (16). Edited by the usual team of Mark Rogers, Patrick Gallagher and Tony Husband, it combined the usual Oink! humour with some hard-hitting messages. (Particularly the Addict strip by Rogers, Gibson and Matthews shown here.) This was material that would be considered too strong for the standard fortnightly Oink! where Tom Thug would never have been depicted smoking, even though it was obviously an anti-smoking story. (Those sixties anti-smoking strips shown in the previous blog entry were my inspiration for this story.) As you can see, subtlety wasn't our intention.
As this special had limited distribution I imagine most Oink! fans out there would never have seen it. We only ever did the one issue, but I hope it had some effect, however small.
Forty years ago there was a run of strips in UK comics that presented an anti-smoking message, presumably sponsored by the government. The strips would run irregularly, and often be repeated, but their messages were clear and direct. What's interesting is a) that an anti-smoking campaign is nothing new, and b) that publishers didn't shy away from running this campaign in comics. They didn't pretend some of their young readers weren't smokers. In fact the strips portrayed children smoking. The consequences were usually a moral about health and fitness, although I recall one (which sadly I couldn't find) which took a more mercenary angle, breaking down how much cigarettes cost and how a kid would be able to afford other stuff if he gave up the fags. (If I find that one I'll add it to this posting.)
The pages entitled Bill Learns the Hard Way and A Shock for Bully Brown were drawn by Fleetway artist Tom Kerr. I'm not sure who drew the rest. I was amused by the Bully Brown one portraying the non-smoker vs smoker situation as a basic Mod vs Rocker fight. Those swingin' sixties eh?
You'll notice that all the strips are obviously designed to deter boys from smoking, and appeared in comics aimed primarily at boys. Did the girls comics feature a similar campaign I wonder? (Today, it's estimated that more women smoke than men.)
These examples were all taken from Odhams comics. Around the same time, seemingly oblivious to the campaign,(or in defiance of it) Pow! No.4 featured a girl in The Dolls of St. Dominics merrily puffing away on cigarettes and a pipe with no consequences whatsoever! (See scan above. I'm sure that the schoolgirl sitting on the builder's lap and asking him for a date wouldn't be allowed in comics today either.) Crazy days... but did the anti-smoking campaign work? Well, I for one have never been a smoker so maybe it did have some subconscious effect on myself and others, although conversely thousands of other sixties kids obviously did take up smoking. Perhaps such campaigns are ultimately pointless, showing that the direction children take is influenced by many social and environmental issues, with comic strips playing only a tiny part in it, if anything.
