flook by trog

Pursuing this Colonel Pewter article (which I am planning to write with Lauren Pikó) has got me a little involved in contexts. Apparently Arthur Horner was asked to do the strip as a response to Flook (I read this in Wikipedia, but I also wrote it in Wikipedia). I figured it would be a good idea to have a look at, at very least, a few weeks' worth of Flook from the early 50s (it started in 1949 so was well entrenched by 1952 when CP began). 

However, the problem here was that Flook ran in the Daily Mail which wasn't available in archive form, so I was kind of despairing about how to find examples, particularly contiguous ones. As you know I pay handsomely for access to newspapers.com but it is a relentlessly American product in the main, used apparently mainly by genies to find out the name of their great-great-aunt's first cousin in Minneapolis in 1877, though it also for reasons unknown supplies access to the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, which is what's mainly interesting to me (Trove is excellent, but Trove generally speaking runs out in the 1950s, aside from the Canberra Times, and so as far as I know newspapers.com supplies the only digital run of any other Australian newspaper in the second half of the C20). Anyway, the only 20th century British newspapers newspapers.com supplies are the Guardian and the Observer and hey these are great but they are not the Daily Mail. So as I said I was kind of despairing but then I thought well whatever apparently Wally Fawkes, who drew Flook, was Canadian-born so maybe there's something in one of the Canadian newspapers about him. 

What do you know, Flook ran massively in North American (well, at least Canadian and US) newspapers in the early 50s. Once again, my assumptions had messed me round. I had figured that being such a British construction, it wouldn't have even made sense in the USA. Maybe that was eventually true, but in the 50s apparently it was more of a fun adventure strip, and the Americans seemingly took to it because it's all over the place - for instance, in the Lincoln Star for 19 August 1952 p. 11 (with a hilarious instalment of Pogo above it for context):

Clearly I have to pursue this Flook story in particular because it appears to deal with some aspect of a postcolonial nation, but wow I l-o-v-e the depiction of the city in the last frame there - Fawkes was quite an amazing artist (or 'is', I guess, he's still alive! 96. But he had to give up drawing because his eyesight failed).

So, yeah, not only am I going to be reading a lot of Colonel Pewter I am also going to be scrolling through quite a bit of Flook, at least until the American newspapers get rid of him, I'm not sure when that happened yet (additionally, and this just occurred to me, I can't really know whether the global Flook is the same as the British Flook, or whether it was created in a dual version - I'll worry about that later). In the meantime I have bought a couple of Flook books online. I balked at paying $120 for a 1950 publication and when I say I balked I'm just bignoting myself because I might still do it, but more likely I can access these strips through newspapers.com and feel like I am accessing less mediate/more authentic source, as well. 

Always on the lookout for hot antisemitism (casual, satirical or otherwise) I am intrigued by the name 'Moses Maggot' (you know, the Moses bit in particular) but I am not going to prejudge. Denis Gifford in The World Encyclopedia of Comics (p. 256) merely says 'The friends' earliest opponent was Moses Maggot, abductor of Sir Cloggy Bile's daughter Ermine.' George Perry in the Penguin Book of Comics (p 206) merely describes Maggot as 'a shrivelled embodiment of all that is evil.' Perry also compares Flook to the Humphries/Garland Adventures of Barry McKenzie strip ('Barry McKenzie has a spirit and attack that is completely lacking elsewhere in British strip cartoon humour, with the exception of Wally Fawkes's Flook') (p. 246). 

Tell you what though, what I didn't think was going to happen when I woke up at 5:40 this morning was that I'd be correcting the wikipedia entry on Sandy Fawkes, Wally Fawkes' first wife, who apparently did not know her parents and was found adrift (?) well, at very least, abandoned 'in' the Grand Union Canal in mid-1929. I was greatly umbraged that whoever wrote the Sandy Fawkes wikipedia entry decided not to bother with a maiden name figuring that since she was Sandy Fawkes after the age of 20 that should do it. Bollocks. I found a maiden name and put it in, though I suppose I was a little unsure, and maybe the original writer was a little unsure, about saying she was 'born' Sandra Boyce-Carmichelle, but I guess a lot of us weren't named until after we were born. That, apparently, was the first name she had anyway. Wikipedia should be called Wifipedia, every second woman on it is defined by her relationship to the man she married. The Sandy Fawkes wikipedia entry is actually pretty disgusting, spending far more time on her drinking and her brief relationship with serial killer Paul Knowles (tbf, she wrote a book about this) than other aspects of her life and work but I can't find access to other material on this and perhaps it's not my job. Perhaps. 

Update later same morning: 

I was partially correct about the Flook published in the US as being remade to be US friendly at least insofar as Gifford writes that the strip started on 25 April 1949 and was originally entitled Rufus. Rufus met Flook 'during a prehistoric dream. He and Flook feel out of the dream balloon and into reality in strip number 21.' Well the strip that began its run in the Philadelphia Inquirer on 10 September 1951 (i.e. roughly 18 months after the debut of Rufus) was called Flook from the outset and Flook himself appears in the 'prehistoric dream' in strip number 2. So something was remodelled to cut to the chase. Here are the strips 1-5 from the Inquirer; the image of Flook falling out of the dream (almost) onto Rufus was reproduced in Horn's World Encyclopedia, on p. 256. 

The drawing is just beautiful and I think owes a little to John Ryan stylistically but perhaps that was the style of the era as well. Great use of black. Actually, great use of everything.