Moral Minority: Philip K. Dick

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Ken Reid's City Hobgoblins

Before Neoliberalism and its products, the world could appear as a huge, nerve-wracking, fleshy mystery to many kids; and British cartoonists were willing to keep up that appearance. Here's some comics by the brilliant Ken Reid, creator of Faceache, Roger the Dodger and Jonah (the inept lowly sailor forever sinking ships - an allegory for the decline of Empire?). From the pages of 70s British comics like Smash, Buster and Whoopee! In comics, everyone's dad had a moustache and adult characters actually went to work (albeit to piss about or have fights for most of the day). Where there was only one overweight kid in school (simply named 'Fatty') and it was considered cool to burp creatively, or do something disgusting with your face. From the days before British comics settled into cynical TV/toy tie-ins, the punky brutalities of 2000 AD et al, and the knowing deconstructions of Viz - all responses to the shock of Thatcherism in their own way. Now British kids are trained to demand more expensive entertainment (with the resultant difficulty in singling anyone out as 'Fatty'), comics are as dead as our mining industry. 

Above is The Nervs, a variation on a recurring 70s theme of body-as-industry; seen also in the strip The Numskulls, a few Sesame St. sketches, and the final segment of Woody Allen's Everything You Wanted To Know About Sex. This being the 70s, the functions of the body politic were subject to industrial unrest, class-based rivalries and frequent malfunction. The threatening ointments and medicines introduced (by management/brain) may have been an allegory for necessary trouble-shooting, but readers were generally invited to root for the entire body, even its germs. IPC Publications, a notoriously exploitative employer, wasn't so benevolent to Reid himself. In 1987 he dropped dead while drawing his long-running Faceache ("The Boy With The Bendable Bonce!"), an already-ugly kid who could change into monsters to ward off snobs, bullies and pompous, cane-happy teachers. Like a class-war version of The Incredible Hulk (no nuclear physicists for 'brain drain' Britain). I can't help but wonder if Reid popped his clogs to Faceache's own wonderful sound effect: "SCRUNGE!" 

(click on Faceache to enlarge)

Not as well-known as Leo Baxendale (some of who's strips he took over), I'd say Reid was better; not least for the queasy aura of violence and bodily trauma that permeated his nevertheless chirpy work (an unease present in much British comedy). His style still makes me laugh, with its oddball language and general tone of working-class insolence. He's been cited as an influence on po-mo comics polymaths (and IPC alumni) Alan Moore and Grant Morrison, especially for his surreal body-horror and defiantly malformed  characters. Maybe he was even an (unconscious?) influence on fellow Mancunian Mark E. Smith. Back-page fillers 'World Wide Weirdies' (below) were almost Lovecraftian; with an added layer of subtle satire. As suggested by the name, there was a general theme of human hubris adrift in a sinister, unknowable world. Had he been American, I expect his grotesque, agitated style would have thrived in underground comics like Robert Crumb's Zap or Art Spiegelman's Arcade. Even with the decline of British comics, he would have found an outlet for his considerable talent.

I Wanna Cleave a Capitalist!

Bruce the Barbarian was a cartoon by New Zealand-born cartoonist Murray Ball, apparently well known for a series called Footrot Flats, about a farm. It ran in Labour Weekly, an official Labour Party publication that was closed down in 1988 - and given the year, and the tone of this cartoon, it's not hard to imagine that the weekly was being run by a cabal of those who, as official Labour Party history has it, ran the Party into the ground - macho, workerist, class warring, hairy. A book was published in 1973 collecting the strips, all of them dating from the Heath era, and it's as vivid and expression of polarised, oppositional politics in the British '70s you could possibly want. It's also quite funny.

The premise is a little peculiar, but once you've accepted it, the cartoon is not exactly complicated. Bruce, a Barbarian from the East - specifically, New Zealand - comes to invade the (falling) British Empire to 'RAPE and LOOT and PLUNDER', but, says the blurb, 'he found the Tories had got there first!' So he sets out to 'save the British from Ted the Tory and grab a fair share of the looting, plundering and raping'. This should give you some sense of the somewhat complex allegiances of the strip, particularly with respect to sexual politics. Various forms of disbelief have to be suspended - most of all the portrayal of Edward Heath, or rather, 'Emperor Tedius Heath', as a proto-Thatcherite Roman Emperor bent on class war - but the lack of pissing about occasionally makes for extremely sharp political satire, which the hint of wrongness only helps. It's Up Pompeii-goes Class War, with Frankie Howerd replaced with an Antipodean barbarian armed with a 'pig-sticker', which gets regularly plunged into sundry toga-ed plutocrats.

It's just a little a bit startling to find an official Labour Party publication advocating, via Roman/British Empire alternative reality or otherwise, that shoving daggers into the bellies of the ruling class is the means of changing society.

Reading it, it becomes obvious that this is the very thing itself that the Blairites wanted to change about their Party, not just in terms of politics but also of machismo. Bruce, barbarian and defender of the British proletariat, is as you see above a bit workerist. The workers themselves are usually a bit shorter than him, but usually in flatcaps and somewhat more downmarket togas.

The more things change, etc.

What is especially fun about it is how much it advocates things which would surely not have been official Party policy even at the time. Private Healthcare, which Bruce encounters after being impaled in a Gladatorial bout, is fit not just for nationalisation but also for avenging via pig-sticker.

Private education, similarly. Here you get the impression that for a lot of people in the Labour Movement, Thatcherism - in the sense of a concerted attack on unions, the Welfare State, etc - was seen coming a long time before it actually arrived, which leaves some of the attacks seeming a little odd. Thatcher as Education Secretary basically continued Labour policies (save for that heavily symbolic milk-snatching), much as Heath failed to make any real break with the social democratic consensus. That's what it seems like at this distance, anyway - but reading Bruce the Barbarian, the war is already here.

Yet lots of the things he opposes are Labour Party policies anyway. Only four actual politicians are encountered by Bruce in his travels through Britannia - Heath, Enoch Powell, Thatcher and Harold Wilson, who Bruce casually encounters in the street. In the strip above, Bruce stands against the construction of motorways, something the Wilson government did a lot of. They didn't exactly curb Private Health or Private Schools, either.

Being a barbarian, Bruce takes a dim view of Empire, and of its leading apologist in the ruling party.

That said, the strip is relentlessly unreconstructed. In terms of anti-racism, it's all fairly impeccable, if very un-PC in its use of inflammatory language. What is less so, is the sexism that runs through the book. He is a barbarian after all, and the scheduled raping, looting and pillaging doesn't leave much room for reading Spare Rib.

Hence the Up Pompeii! comparison. Bruce the Barbarian, despite being quite magnificently left-wing by today's standards, is still identifiably in the same world as the sex comedy, as George & Lynne, even, with a fair bit of bouncing bosoms and titillation. Bruce, maybe like the Labour movement itself on its Hard Left, Class War side, is not quite sure what he thinks of the women's movement.

So large breasted ladies are a sign of plutocracy as much as anything else.

The strips above and below encapsulate quite well the fact that Ball evidently wants to support feminism and take the piss out of it at the same time, to be a male chauvinist and supporter of equality at once. Ken Livingstone claims here, 'Old Labour culture was quite sexist and racist'. It probably was. But it was also perhaps vaguely, dimly aware that it shouldn't be, before the 80s New Left rammed the point home.

In its premise it's weird, as politics it's almost equally strange (Wilson as friend of the Marxist barbarian), and sometimes (well, rarely) it isn't funny - but isn't it great to see all the anger and violence and unadulterated class rage in this strip all there, all out in the open, and not just that, but celebrated? And more to the point, can you imagine the editors of any Labour publication looking at it now with anything other than aghast horror?

(click on pics to make larger)

Pulp Sorcery

In cinema, fashion, and not least political rhetoric, the 30s chic of Bonnie and Clyde was highly influential. However, if the cinematic past couldn't help but be concerned with the present by the late 60s, the 70s looked backwards with less urgency. The 30s were everywhere in 70s pop culture, but what the 30s 'meant' became elusive with the shift towards nostalgia. The darker aspects of the 30s were reserved for neo-noir howls of pain like Chinatown or The Conformist, just as bleak revisionist westerns like McCabe & Mrs. Miller alluded to contemporary political anxieties. In contrast, hit films such as Murder on the Orient Express offered shop-worn motifs and predictable resolutions. 30s nostalgia was used for the comforts of genre and style, not something as troubling as history, or how it resonates in the present. The viewer would have to dig very deep for historical relevance in the originals; never mind the pastiche, or affectionate parodies such as Young Frankenstein. It was the past as theme park, suitable for all ages.
 

In the early 70s, the revival of the 30s pulp was also underway. American comics, having reinvented superheroes via the technology and anxieties of the New Frontier, aimed to keep an ageing audience* by reviving the harsher heroes of the Great Depression. Doc Savage, the Shadow and Conan the Barbarian were being dusted down and resold to college kids hip to nostalgia, and especially for the 30s (with HP Lovecraft finally hitting the big time). With the decline of TV's pop art Batman - and the emerging gay monopoly on camp - these 70s versions were strangely po-faced in their reverence. Pulp revivals were also mirrored in paperback fiction, with Heinlenesque space opera and 'sword and sorcery' becoming huge money-spinners. Cultish revisionism like Philip Jose Farmer's Tarzan Alive! also paved the way for today's darker, but no less reactionary, 're-booted' heroes. Creaky 30s serials also found a new lease of life via TV and a booming nostalgia market.
 

It's been already been noted here how movie vigilantes emerged in the Nixon years. With a paranoid loner in the White House, and neoliberalism looking for enforcers, the fantasy of barbarian kings or crime-fighting oligarchs complemented vigilantes with aggressively pre-New Deal values. The original pulp heroes offered simple solutions to escape the Great Depression. The wealthy Shadow just knew "what evil lurked in the hearts of men" - he had no need to explain it to his hypnotised employees. Doc Savage could finance imperial adventures with profits from his South American mines. Conan could slay his way to monarchy without doubts, as might was the only right in his era of declining empire and lawlessness. The ruling class superman was back with a vengeance.
 

In the latter part of the decade, and true to postmodernism, nostalgia piled up on itself. With the emergence of mass collecting and 'fandom', every popular medium harked back to a 'golden age', comic books included. Bereft of a gold standard, various 'golden ages' were nevertheless agreed to end with Eisenhower's presidency. The 'innocent' 50s celebrated in Happy Days and Grease vied with the 40s 'good war' being endlessly fought on screen and print throughout the 70s. 'Golden oldie' songs were reanimated on radio and TV. Primetime hosts like Joe Franklin or Michael Parkinson toasted ancient stars (and by implication, the values) of a monochrome past. However, there was only one 'golden age' actor still on his way up. 

Despite uncomfortable connotations for certain sectors of the audience, pre-60s nostalgia was mainstream lingua franca by the end of the 70s. George Lucas, unsuccessful in his attempts to revive 30s icon Flash Gordon, followed American Graffitti (reimagining his own youth as theme park) with Star Wars**. Its inventory of pulp cliches, and shot-for-shot pastiche of older Hollywood glories, led to a boom in retro fantasy targetting all ages, on screen and beyond. Serials, cartoon characters, pulp icons and b-movies got big money makeovers, with varying degrees of success. Revived reactionary assumptions could lurk beneath the gloss of 'pure entertainment', as much as the Hollywood president could sell his agenda with a cute one-liner or movie reference. Raiders of the Lost Ark consolidated Hollywood's rush to the past, synthesising its childish influences and repackaging them for 'knowing' adults. This overdressed Republic serial was nominated for Best Picture, in a year when almost all Oscar nominations looked towards the distant past, its genres or stars. In Reagan's year of re-election, Indiana Jones advertised his second whip-cracking campaign with the tagline: "The Hero is Back!" Before long, the retro hero was even re-winning long lost wars. By the mid-80s the hero could do anything - except look forward.

*In the early 70s, average audience age for superhero comics was 11. In the 21st century, it's about 35.

**70s/80s film versions of 'new wave' science fiction (ie. downbeat, political, environmental, 'adult' and very 60s) were notable flops upon first release - these include Slaughterhouse Five, Damnation Alley, A Boy and His Dog, The Final Programme, Dune and even Blade Runner.

Crisis and the Big Society Solution

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Action! was a British comic published from February 1976 to November 1977. It was very popular for its ultra-violent knock-offs of Jaws (Hookjaw - except here the shark always won), Rollerball (Death Game 2000), and the novels of Sven Hassell (Hellman of the Hammer Force, caught between Soviet troops and the meddling Gestapo). But the shit really hit the fan with the serial Kids Rule OK (above).

The London Evening Standard and The Sun ran major articles on the comic. Over the next few months Action was the centre of a campaign led by Mary Whitehouse and her National Viewers and Listeners Association to censor or ban the comic. In September 1976 (editorial director) John Sanders appeared on the television programme Nationwide, where he tried to defend the comic from a vigorous attack by interviewer Frank Bough. Pressure within IPC's higher management, and alleged worries that the two major newsagent chains, W.H. Smith and John Menzies, would refuse to stock not just Action, but all of IPC's line, led to the 23 October issue being pulped. (Wikipedia)

By the time Action! was off the shelves, IPC moved the ultra-violence to past wars (Battle Action, continuing some Action! serials), or the far future (2000 AD - still going, and as brutal as ever). Below is the accelerated conclusion to Kids Rule OK, after weeks of carnivalesque "aggro", gang war, knife fights, petrol bombings, arson, riots, police brutality and absolute social decay (and where in hell were the girls?). It was never published.