An Irishman’s Diary on comic books and the ‘funny papers’

If there’s a compensation for the gradual fading with age of short-term memory, it’s the way its long-term counterpart becomes increasingly detailed. For instance, I’m astonished at how much I remember about the comic books of my nonage.

Not just the Beano and the Dandy from DC Thomson of Dundee. Desperate Dan and cow pie and Pansy Potter the strongman's daughter were common currency all over these islands. I'm talking, also, about Film Fun and Radio Fun, British publications of the Fleetway Press and not, as far as I know, circulated south of the Border. (Free Staters were deprived not just of Spangles).

In Film Fun Laurel and Hardy frolicked, and Joe E Brown, Old Mother Riley, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd had strips. But Radio Fun boasted even more esoteric personnel. Issy Bonn, for example, was an East End Jewish comedian who appeared on BBC radio variety programmes. I suppose nowadays he'd be called a stand-up (by the way, does anybody else find the expression "a rising stand-up" amusing?).

Vertically challenged Arthur Askey, looking like a foreshortened civil servant and with his irritating catchphrase “Hello, playmates!”.

Scrapes and adventures

Spunky-as-bedamned teenager Avril Angers, getting into all sorts of scrapes and adventures, a kind of cis-Atlantic Nancy Drew.

Angers went on to a varied career in film and television. Arthur English as a “wide boy” character.

The wide boys or spivs were a phenomenon that operated in the postwar black market in Britain, and were distinguished by their zoot suits, broad-brimmed fedoras and loud ties. English was still going strong not so long ago as Mr Harman, the man in the brown shop coat, in Are You Being Served?

Comic books

But in this matter of comic books I also claim cultural bragging rights over my coevals. The American “funny papers” were, and I suppose still are, simpler predecessors of graphic novels and manga. There was an uncle in Canada who would occasionally send the

Montreal Star

, Sunday edition, which included the strips (syndicated American, of course, not Canadian).

Some of these (eg Blondie, Jiggs and Maggie) have since leaked across the ocean and appear in newspapers here, usually in black and white. But in the funnies it was glorious rotogravure colour all the way. Dennis the Menace (the blond winsome one, not the thug with the black spiky hair from Dundee). Steve Canyon, piloting his Super Saber over the Yalu River (Korean War).

There was Smokey Stover, a firefighter with a hole in the front flap of his helmet to hold his cigar and always a little sign hung in one of the frames that read “Notary sojac” (no, neither did I, for many decades, until I turned to the omniscient Wikipedia and discovered that the cartoonist Bill Holman defined it as Gaelic for “Merry Christmas” (Nodlaig Sodhach?).

Dick Tracy with his hatchet nose and his two-way wrist radio, a marvel of imaginative technology in those days but pretty tame when set against today’s Google watch and other such gizmos that fulfil an entirely unfelt want.

Little Lulu says: Kleenex! Soft! Strong! Pops Up! The ads were envy-making. Instead of our own home-made “bogies”, crudely crafted from old pram-wheels and bits of wood, American kids had the store-bought Flexible Flyer. Where we had only the modest Hornby train-sets, they had Lionel layouts, with Pullman cars and snorting locos with big lozenge-shaped smoke-stack and cow-catcher on the front. Big, everything BIG.

And yet it was mostly a small-town image the comics portrayed. Here is a diffident attempt at a word portrait of the world they pictured: “This morning Pop washed the whitewall tyres [excuse me, tires] on the Nile green Pontiac sedan. Now he is raking the leaves in the backyard and putting the screens away for the winter. Rags the dog has treed a ’coon and is barking fit to bust. Out on the sidewalk Junior, wearing his beanie with the propeller on the top, is playing with his Flexible Flyer.

“Sis and the neighbours’ [excuse me, neighbors’] kid are selling homemade lemonade from a roadside stand, 5c a glass from the big jug. Gramps has wandered down to the depot, as he does most evenings, to shoot the breeze with his pals and watch the Super Chief barrelling through on its way to Los Angeles. In the kitchen, Mom is preparing her entry for the Pillsbury Bake-Off and listening to the big Zenith radio in the corner. Sloan’s Liniment presents . . . Gangbusters!”.

A long, long way from Ferguson, Missouri, or Charleston, South Carolina.