colonel pewter

It was seventy years ago today that Colonel Pewter debuted in the Melbourne Age. This really is a brilliant story and was deservedly reprinted in book form soon after it completed in the British News Chronicle. Horner was Australian of course (but lived in Britain for fifty or more of his eighty or so years) and I love the 'outsider' view of British society this has (not that these three strips necessarily demonstrate that). 

For two seconds I considered serialising Colonel Pewter like my massively successful repeats of Flook but the first adventure was published as Colonel Pewter in Ironicus, which is excellent and I suggest you get a copy of that for yourself. I also noticed that the following week's run of strips in the Age was very badly reproduced (or at least the version available via newspapers.com is a very bad reproduction) and it seemed a bit of a painful thing to inflct on anyone including myself. I will consider resurrecting some adventures from later though. 

horner

 

It was really good to be able to give Arthur Horner's lost weekly cartoon strip Tall Poppies another viewing, even if one of the episodes was virtually unreadable and many of them have lost their tart edge, I'm going to suggest, by dint of (1) world's moved on (2) relatedly, some jokes now unfunny/whimsy faded (3) also relatedly, visual refs now completely incomprehensible/ good caricatures but of whom? And why? That's what newspapers used to be, I guess. It was like memes. It made sense in the big broader context and then one day it didn't. 

Tall Poppies was based clearly on Ronald Searle's Rake's Progress or the original Hogarth series that Searle's book was based on, or both or more. I like that Horner, who was Australian-born but spent most of his career in the UK, could be both Australian and an outsider, just as in the UK he had been an outsider too. 

I love Horner's art (he could also be very funny too). If I live to be, um, 80 I think I will try and bring some of his work back to the public eye for instance there might be a biography in there perhaps? Very interesting man. 

This picture from the Age 'Saturday extra' section 25 October 1986 p. 11

flook and moses maggot

So you will remember my interest a few weeks back on the origins of Flook and the difference between Flook in the UK (est. 1949) and Flook for the few years it ran in the U.S. (1951-53 or thereabouts). The US Flook story is not told anywhere else and I think probably Flook just became more and more of a UK political/social satire and less and less of an entertaining adventure for children, which was why it ended up unusable in North America, but we'll see about that when I finish my research.

Anyway, as I think I mentioned probably last week, I forked out big time for a copy of Rufus and Flook v. Moses Maggot, and when it came it had a whole lot of pages missing (not sure how many). The good news is, I got a refund. The other good news is that as far as I can tell (and I'd never sit down and compare anyway) the pages that do exist in this damaged copy of the book absolutely go right up to where the US version picks it up. You see the 'flying buttress' frame, which I made a point of talking about a month ago in the post linked in the previous sentence, at the end of these pages. None of the rest of this version of the story appeared in North America as far as I can tell. Whether it then goes straight into the US version I don't know, obviously. 

The only other thing that I find interesting in this original/alternative reality pertains to the whole reason I got into this Flook business in the first place: Colonel Pewter. Just as Flook was ostensibly a response to the Crockett Johnson strip Barnaby, about a boy with a fairy godfather, Colonel Pewter was apparently a reply to Flook a few years later (by which time, incidentally, Barnaby had been discontinued - it ended in February 1952). These strips were all in different papers, so I'm not suggesting there was any real connection other than inspiration/competition (I'm not even sure Barnaby ran in the UK). Rufus (which was the original title of what soon became Rufus and Flook and was, pretty quickly I'm sure, Flook) was about a boy of that name who lived with his uncle who, like Martin in Colonel Pewter, he calls 'uncle'. Rufus' uncle is not himself of great value except as a launching point and doesn't seem to have any interest in Rufus (or Flook) but only in his own home zoo (e.g. the 'dear animals') despite the fact that, yes, Flook himself is an animal and often referred to as such. Odd contrast too with the North American beginning of the strip where Rufus is thrown out of the house for the day and told to go to the natural history museum rather than collect a 'menagerie' of animals in the bathroom. I wonder if page 4 above ('bye uncle') is the last time Rufus ever saw his uncle? Also, speaking of lasts, re: the next page - is that the last time in western culture a boy was ever depicted running towards someone with a massive box of eggs, neither of them looking where they were going, but which merely led to a conversation about something else entirely not even pertaining even slightly to eggs, the value of looking where you were going, or really anything else that even slightly 'spoke to' the initial scenario? Answer: yes.*

*It was also the first and therefore the only 

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. 

more rainbow (sort of)

After wondering about Rainbow recently I went on a scout to see if much had been written about people of colour in early 20th century British comics (we know what the Americans did, and it was no prettier). I didn't find much, but it was an interesting journey I guess. There is something called The Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics which included (in 2010, the first article in the first issue) an article by one Paul Gravett called 'From Iky Mo to Lord Horror: representations of Jews in British comics' which is obviously not the same thing but you'd think there would be some pointers or commonalities or something in there. It didn't really suit my purposes though it was quite interesting, a scenic tour of all kinds of examples of representations of quite another minority (I guess when it comes down to it black people were much much more of a minority in early C20 Britain than Jews who, according to Gravett, made up 1% of the population). A quick look through my Penguin Book of Comics and another book I haven't looked at for a yonk, The World Encyclopedia of Comics (ed. Maurice Horn) didn't want to go there (although to be honest I'm not quite sure what I'm looking for, but the Penguin BOC for instance was not up for some kind of expose of racism as far as I can tell. (Neither of them listed Marzipan as a character, the PBOC does have quite a bit to say about Tiger Tim, though.)

It doesn't matter in a way because I'm less interested in what was published and more interested in what it meant at the time, and I guess those kinds of books aren't going to tell us that (and also, eye of the beholder, etc). 

I did discover that Marzipan (originally 'Marzi-Pan') was drawn by one Ernest Webb but just like the comics historians of the 1960s-70s, (btw: not real historians) the current enthusiasts/collectors just don't have any real interest in the social history of these publications, and I'm not equipped to do much of that study myself. 

I just looked through all the issues of The Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics which is actually a pretty fine looking publication though not much of it really clicks with me (I could not care less about superhero comics, for instance). They have evolved from running articles about Alison Bechdel in successive issues to actually finding a niche I think and even expanding to 6 issues a year (though it seems there were only 4 this year - so far, anyway). I downloaded a couple of articles for later perusal. I think this might be the place to put a Colonel Pewter article at any rate. 

And that clearly will present a whole lot of extra problems when it comes to representation of colonialism because if you can't even figure out what 'Eggs for Char, George?' means (was it a catchphrase from radio? Something from a film??) what business do you have trying to write with authority about... anything? (British newspapers, it would appear, listed 'eggs' and 'char' in the same sentence four or five times in the late 19th century; I know that 'char' is a kind of British slang term for 'tea' but I don't know if it only means/meant tea the drink or if it can/could also mean tea the meal. However, I think that whatever it means the joke here in this frame from Colonel Pewter as published in the Melbourne Age 31 July 1953 is that an 'uncivilised' and certainly 'non-western' black man in 'traditional' garb is saying something ridiculously British-vernacular. Back to square one, although I still think the point of Marzipan's language was not that it was funny that a black man could wander round anytown, UK with a big magic candy cane in his pocket being treated with complete civility by everyone around him, but that black people were simply visually recognisable 'types' about whom nothing more be said or understood. 

rainbow coalition

Poor old Rainbow, no doubt the delight and even passion of millions of Empire children particularly at its 1920s peak, and today conspicuously unable even to get someone to write a wikipedia page for it (though it is in this list where we see it existed 1914-1956 and it is discussed here). Presumably it was called the Rainbow because, whereas many comics were still utterly black and white, it had a colour cover (I think that's all it had but maybe there was some spot colour inside). How the little ones must have chuckled with joy when they saw a publication with a range of colours on it, like, you know, real life. Except how grey and sombre was their real life really. 

Anyway I am interested in the way that the Empire and race (-ism) were reflected in popular publications of this nature in the first half of the 20th century (and even beyond) in part because of my long ambition to write about Colonel Pewter in Ironicus, so when I was looking for something else entirely in my bookshelf this morning my '1925' (would have come out in 1924, dated for the year ahead) Rainbow annual caught my eye - it's in really poor condition, and also, it's fascinatingly on the nose in other ways. Let's get the worst one out of the way first, at least I think it's the worst:

I'm sorry but what I really want to do is get that machine that not only takes you back 96 years in time but also turns you into a fly on the wall with a brain big enough to understand human language and to resist being swatted, so I can hear the discussion about this two-frame comic strip and how it was conceived and the end product received by the editors. I can't even begin to imagine. Like most English comics from, you know, 1900 to whenever Leo Baxendale showed up,* I am pretty sure no-one ever laughed in any way at any of this shit. The casual racism was clearly not even remarkable to anyone, but was there some discussion perhaps about the appropriateness or wisdom of calling a character like this 'Nanny' considering all decent English children were assumed to have a nanny, and wouldn't this lead to a certain amount of disrespect to nannies? 

To be honest my main take home reading this now is: what became of the big bird? Was it stuck there forever to die? The other question is, why doesn't Nanny speak in that patois so often attributed to people of colour in these kinds of portrayals? That is really, really interesting to me and I'd love to know what the background to that decision was. Because it suggests on some weird level, to me anyway, that Nanny while obviously being a figure of fun and, I guess, derision, is also a little girl (?) like any other and not to be othered by her speech (I mean she is othered in other ways but her fine English subverts that somewhat, in my opinion). Indeed, the 22 words/four sentences attributed to Nanny here, though simple, at least don't feature that parlous grammar error of the shitty 'it's' for which I guess the buck stops at a bad typesetter/bad proofreader, if these publications were proofed.  

Next example: I'm intrigued by this household

I'm guessing these people (eg 'Gretchen') are somehow derived from The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls, which I had a facsimile copy of at some time in my life and which I have to say is a charming book in many ways. I don't know enough about these characters/their world to be certain who lives in the house, but it does appear it's a kind of share house where girl dolls and boy toys (and a parrot) cohabit.  I'm assuming it's a pretty sexy arrangement worthy of a late sixties movie/ late 70s sitcom/ Helen Garner short story but that's my upbringing. 

Marzipan, a magician with prodigious powers residing (I gather) in a candy-cane/walking stick wand which can make things bigger or smaller, is to me the most interesting character. It's the fine line trod here between a caricature of blackness with all its underlying fear and ridicule, with the fear, I guess, of introducing any style of talking, other than the English spoken by George V, into the family living room. 

There is another story facing this one across the pp. 34-35 spread in which Marzipan, wandering the streets, encounters a naughty boy playing with a hoop rather than come in to be put to bed by 'Mary' (surely the maid or even the Nanny, obviously not his mother); 'and off he ran, the naughty boy'. 'You must learn to do as you are told, Johnny' says Marzipan, touching the hoop with his wand to make it so big that Mary can pull Johnny, inside the hoop, into the house. 

'Marzi' is a second-string character to Tiger Tim and the Bruin Boys, who were the main stars of Rainbow. They are a whole extra problem for anyone interested in colonial representations, being as they are students of Mrs Bruin's jungle school (are there bears in the jungle? Well... obviously yes!). There is a story in this annual where Marzipan and Tim et al interact, and magic, fun, larks and corporal punishment ensue, ending rather boringly with Marzipan promising to come and watch Tim and the Bruins play cricket, then doing so. Once again, Marzipan is himself entirely benign, but also an adult with power (not just magic power, but a kind of banal authority) who speaks in the most white, middle class way imaginable: 'I hope they will beat Mr. Lion's school at cricket, because they are nice boys. I will come and see them play,' he tells Mrs. Bruin on p. 7 (she calls him 'Mr. Marzipan', incidentally).  I will put aside the fact that the 'boys' have been anything but 'nice' up to this point in the story, it's not important, take my word for it they have been little jerks for three pages (they audaciously demanded Marzipan hand over his magic wand, which I admit they may not have tried on a white man, but by the same token - they are animals from the jungle, and yes, this is where it gets too hard to make a real pronouncement on what's going on). 

Look there is probably even more extraordinary nonsense in this book, the problem is it is a slog, dull but also dense in the weirdness of the assumptions and ideas and the suggestion that nursery rhyme characters are funny or engaging, and all the tropes that no-one surely gave a loose root about even in 1924 let alone any time since. However, one last thing, when we're looking at certain representations, I mean I can well understand that golliwogs were a benign, 'safe' interpretation of blackness in a white colonial system, so I'm not confused, exactly, (although: Marzipan is not a golliwog, clearly, but a powerful free agent - was that in itself meant to be amusingly bizarre???) but it is in any case interesting to me that on the cover we find 29 figures, 13 human(oid) to 26 animal (did someone insist on that 1:3 ratio? It's hard to imagine they didn't, particularly considering the Dolliwogs' parrot friend is absent! Was Foxwell paid per character and 40 went into a higher pay grade?) and of those 13 human(oid) creatures, there are 3 females to 10 males (this is a guess, some I'm not sure about, but when in doubt I'm assuming male). It is clear that the teddy is completely naked, I am going to suggest so too is the pig on the left of the turret and maybe the little dog** on the far left. Everyone else is very clothed, including the parrot right at the front with a pair of trousers Donald Duck would have killed for (and spared us all a lot of embarrassment seeing his big hairy duck dick swinging about but I guess that was the character). But perhaps more interestingly, there is a lot of racial/ethnic characterisation there. I don't know who the figures are looking out of the window at the lower right hand side of the castle, but I do know they are meant to be Asian in some way. At least one of the Dolliwogs along the top row of the castle (I guess it's Gretchen) is supposed to be Dutch. And, of course, we see four stereotypical black caricatures, including Marzipan very prominent on the right in the central turret.   

I'm going to leave it to you to figure out (I think it's partly a matter of personal opinion and not really clear) which characters are looking us directly in the eye, and whether that is significant. But as you can see, one of the key Dolliwogs is flying the flag for the future.  

I mean, everything's significant about all of this, and also, nothing is. 

*1953

** Fluff, seen here with his owners Peter and Pauline 'The Two Pickles'. I'll spend another two hours another day picking them to pieces.