I recently found myself hitting my head against the desk. Someone had sent me a screenshot of a comics conversation where an American had knowledgeably stated that the main features of "the UK" were London smog, cobbled streets and Stone Henge being outside London. This was fact, apparently even though its hard to find a lot of cobbled streets these days and smog is a relative thing of the past -say 50 years in the past. And Stonehenge is roughly 90 miles west of London.
It also appears that the learned American gentleman also understood that "the UK" only had "a few little woods scattered around villages." I once had a conversation with comics legend Jerry Ordway at an old UK Comic Art Convention in which he told me that most Americans probably think "Europe and the UK look like Latveria or the old 1930s horror movies" complete with cobble streets and the British Army of the 1980s dressed as per WW2 and Northern Ireland (or "Ireland" as Marvel comics called it) looking like Dresden after the RAF air raids. THAT Spider-Man issue will live on in infamy. As Ordway asked me: "What the heck are 'meadow muffins'?" I asked some Irish people I knew. They had no clue but my guess is that it meant cowpats!
Here's a quote:
"In the United Kingdom, an ancient woodland is a woodland that has existed continuously since 1600 or before in England, Wales and Northern Ireland (or 1750 in Scotland). ... The analogous term used in the United States and Canada (for woodlands that do contain very old trees) is "old-growth forest"."
In fact 13% of Britain's land masss has woodland/forestry. The Domesday Book records wood-pasture and woodland covering about 15% of England but 2.5 centuries later wood had to be imported as we were left with just 7% woodland coverage. After WW 2 new forests were planted and existing ones had new trees planted. Take the Forest of Dean which even Wikipedia can tell you about:
The area was inhabited in Mesolithic times, and there are also remains of later megalithic monuments, including the Longstone near Staunton and the Broadstone at Wibdon, Stroat. Barrows have been identified at Tidenham and Blakeney. Bronze Age field systems have been identified at Welshbury Hill near Littledean, and there are Iron Age hill forts at Symonds Yat and Welshbury. There is archaeological evidence of early trading by sea, probably through Lydney. Before Roman times, the area may have been occupied by the British Dobunni tribe, although few of their coins have been found in the area and control may have been contested with the neighbouring Silures.
If out of all that you cannot make a story (I did back in the early 1990s) then you do not have the imagination to be a writer.
We only have Stonehenge? Aubrey Burl's gazetteer lists 1,303 stone circles in Britain, Ireland and Brittany. The largest number of these are found in Scotland, with 508 sites recorded. There are 316 in England; 187 in Ireland; 156 in Northern Ireland; 81 in Wales; 49 in Brittany; and 6 in the Channel Isles.
As for semi hidden ancient caves that go deep under the Earth...we got 'em.
We even have a lot going on in the waters around the UK that are mysterious or even showing the early activity of humans before the sea took over.
It goes on and on and yet little has ever been exploited for stories...unless you've read Black Tower comics because we try to use as much as we can to take the supernatural and action stories to a fresher level.
Please do not take your view of the UK from a Scooby Doo cartoon.
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Time to dust off this old post (again) as it seems that (if we are to believe the two idiots from a comic forum who contacted me) there is the ridiculous iodea that the UK had no masked crime fighters or super powered heroes "before Martvel Comics got to the UK". Firstly, dumb-asses, DC (as National Periodicals) was here before Marvel comics -in 1939 to be precise with UK reprints of Superman.
You can always learn more by buying Comic Bits ...or just go on talking kack.
Since I originally wrote this piece things have changed. For one thing Paul Grist's Jack Staff ended and despite my asking a couple of times I have received no response from him about future plans and being years later I doubt there are any plans for a return. The same can be said for Grist's Mud Man that left the reader with many questions. Again I have asked a couple of times but no response. I had very high hopes for his Marvel series The Union -which he wrote. However, with issue number 3 I gave up as it was quite literally bad reading.
Jack Staff and Mud-Man were such fun books, too.
But the thing that has not changed is the 'comic fan' apathy. We could have great fun action comics out there but people don't buy why put them together. So this post is more of a "What we had and could have" but comic buyers don't support so we are stuck with the memories.
This 2014 article "At Long Last! The Return Of The Improbability Of The British Super Hero" got some of the highest views on CBO so this seemed a good time to repost but under a new heading and with a lot more cover and interiors art added.
I think it well worth re-posting this item (with some new artwork) because, as I pointed out in my post on Delcourt jumping on to the cash-cow of super heroes (admitting it!) by having its series Sentinels made into a film, super heroes are highly profitable and if the rather conservative big Franco-Belgian BD publishers realise this....
But where are the business entrepreneurs -hmm?
Myself, Stransky, LaBatt and Ben Dilworth sit ready. Yes, after years of just saying "someone" needs to be a figure-head to launch such a project I am now so fed up that I am putting myself forward ("Blimey! A Saviour complex -I told you!" I can just hear that little moron screaming it now).
Forget skyscrapers. We have high streets, coastal towns, villages and cities -we have unique scenery in the UK and all are ripe for British super heroes! Grant Morrison's Zenith hopped around to ther parallels but the story art did not have to depend on skyscrapers but locations people in the UK might be familiar with.
“Hmm. Don’t you understand? Think about it –we have no skyscrapers! How can you have American style super heroes in England?”
My response to the senior editor is probably why things went a little “odd” work-wise. My first response was “So, what exactly is Marvel UK publishing? And Power Comics (Odhams) before it? And…” I went on to rattle off a very, very long list of British super characters going back to the 1940s. I think I ticked him off. Really, he should have known better though, in one respect, he was right.
British comics never had super heroes.
Before you start thinking that I’m on new medications and answering “Yes” and “No” at the same time allow me to explain.
Tim (Kelly’s Eye) Kelly travelled the world and even in time and space at one point and was totally indestructible. He was not a super hero.
Clem Macy, television news reporter had a costumed archer alter ego…The Black Archer. He was not a super hero.
Cathy had amazing cat-like abilities and wore a costume. She was not a super heroine.
William and Kathleen Grange were incredible acrobats and wore costumes as Billy the Cat and Katie The Cat. They were not super heroes.
In fact, for my graphic novel featuring many old IPC and Fleetway costumed characters, The Looking Glass, I noted several times that the characters were not super heroes. In the UK we tended to call them “costumed adventurers” or even “masked crime fighters” but not super heroes.
Some, of course, were…uh..”revived” for the Wildstorm Studios Albion mini series which had great art but, sadly, showed a lack of any real knowledge of the characters by the writers –which they admitted to. In comics you get paying work you take it!
Characters such as Adam Eterno, the focal point in the Looking Glass story had no choice and were at times almost anti-heroes. Whereas The Spider had a choice of being a master crook and then changing sides (basically all ego driven), Eterno did not. He was cursed to be taken by the mists of time from one period to another where he encountered Spanish Conquistadores, pirates, sorcerers and even modern day (well, 1970s) crooks.
Olaf (“Loopy”) Larsen a rather meek school teacher found the Viking helmet of one of his ancestors and, donning it (that’s putting it on his head) became a super strong, flying Viking hero…The Phantom Viking. There are stories of The Phantom Viking rescuing ships and much more and not a skyscraper in sight.
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The great exponents of British roof-top crime-busting were, first, Billy The Cat and later Katie The Cat. Running across the rooftops and leaping the often not so great gaps between one row of terraced houses and another, the duo were the fictional ancestors of today’s urban free-style runners/jumpers –examples found here:
To most people who never get to see the rooves of terraced houses they assume they are all steep and sloping. However, having on two occasions chased someone across terraced root-tops I can tell you there is plenty of room to move about (though at my age I now look back and get nauseous over that memory!).
Later, in the 1970s, William Farmer became the costumed crime-fighter known as The Leopard From Lime Street. As one Fleetway boss told me (later confirmed by artist Mike Western) “Thomson had a schoolboy who fights crooks in a costume and if Billy the Cat was popular I was sure we could do better!”
Interestingly, in the Billy The Cat series he was later to be hunted as a vigilante by authorities who did not like what he was doing. Likewise, The Leopard was also hunted down at one point. In fact, a number of British comic crime-fighters found themselves not just ducking the crooks out for revenge but also the very side they were fighting for!
Towns, cities, villages, countryside, coastal locations –all featured in some very fun stories that endure in the memory to this day. And not a bloody skyscraper in sight!
When UK creators were recruited to save the ailing US comic companies such as DC in the 1980s (I was at those UK comic art conventions watching how desperate they were to recruit British talent –and in some cases introduced both parties to each other) the idea of outlawing super heroes and tracking them down so they could be arrested was a new concept. In the UK we’d been doing that since the 1940s ( thanks to the creators who churned out material for publishers such as Gerald Swan)!
The mistake in the minds of publishers is that they equate costumed crime-fighters with skyscrapers and the United States. Despite the long history of such characters in the UK going back to the Boys Papers of the 1900-1930s.
What it says, really, is “This is just a job. I don’t care about comics history.”
D. C. Thomson have enough characters to produce good costumed-crime-fighter comics. The same applied to IPC who appear to have now taken the stance (a letter to me from senior management dated 19th July, 2011) “We were once publishing comics but that was over 30 years ago and have no further interest in comics.” Of course, had a rich stable of characters.
I have no doubt at all that a good “super hero” comics could work in the UK but so few Independent Comics writers/publishers seem to be able to produce an obscenities free script that does not also include over the top violence and rape –the “Millar-Ennis-Morrison Legacy (MEML).” I may not like it but it sells...obviously!
But let’s mention, I really must, two shining examples of British “Super Heroes” by British creators that have excellent plotting, story and action without having to resort to the MEML.
The first is, naturally, Paul Grist’s Jack Staff. Okay, he’s never accepted my offer to interview him in the last decade but I’ll not hold that against him! When I first saw Jack Staff I thought “**** that anatomy is really off!” I bought a copy. I’m a comics bitch, I just can’t help it.
I read through issue 1 and do you know what? I..I..deep breath…I enjoyed it! There it’s out now! The anatomy did not put me off and, as the manager of Forbidden Planet (Bristol) said “It doesn’t make a blind bit of difference –it’s so enjoyable!” With references to old British TV comedy series and so much more each issue of Jack Staff was a must read. There was, I must point out here, a major flaw in each issue. There were not enough pages!
And while Grist takes a break from Jack Staff he came up with a new series –Mud-Man (which should not be confused with my German character Schlamm Mann –mud-man!). Lovely stuff but, again, the major fault of not enough pages but maybe that is why this works: it is almost episodic like old British weekly strips…but with more pages…okay. Grist wins.
Then we have, and I have to say this on bended knees and in very humble tone…Nigel Dobbyn. When someone told me that he was drawing Billy The Cat I remember thinking to myself “I wonder whether his art style is any different than when he was drawing for Super Adventure Stories?” (a 1980s comic zine). I opened up the comic and a big thought balloon appeared above my head in which was written in bold Comic Sans “WOW!”
To this day Fish Boy is still hunting the serial killer who committed multiple murder and then placed his victims in tin cans.
Forty years on the Sardine Can Killer has never been caught!
The style and colouring I had not seen outside of European comics (say Cyrus Tota’s work on Photonik). After that I never missed an issue and I made a point of grabbing The Beano Annual as soon as it appeared in shops. But with this incredible talent working for them did Thomson take advantage? No, they did something ensuring he would not work on new strips for them. The story can be found here:
Sadly, Dobbyn is no longer around and British comics are the poorer for that,
Dobbyn even re-introduced (with help from scripter Kev F. Sutherland, of course) General Jumbo but as The General. In fact, you go over those issues and I can see why so many people were telling me that they only bought copies for Billy The Cat. I could drool on and wax lyrical for hours about Dobbyn’s style and colouring.
A giant spider lives in my electricity meter box. I'm being cautious -he says that he has "connections"!Now here is the real kicker. Two talents such as Grist and Dobbyn whom any UK publisher (I know –“Who??”) should be fighting, spitting and kicking to get their hands on but are they? Nope. And while Grist publishes his books via Image Comics you have to wonder why Marvel or DC have not tried to get him on a title?
Could it be his style is just not understandable by people in US Comics?
Robot versus dino...where are the PETA and Humane Society when needed?? Well, SJWs -WHERE??
I know that if as a publisher I had the money I’d be employing both full time!!
I need to stop mentioning Dobbyn now as my knees hurt (a lot) and it’s hard typing from this position.
Walking over terraced rooves in a colourful skin tight costume can get you into trouble with the authorities. I was lucky to get off with a fine after, uh, accidentally landing on that woman's window ledge.
What both creators have shown is that there really do not have to be skyscrapers for a “super hero.” There is enough car crime, drug crime…violent crime of most types going on in the UK and believe it or not none involve a single skyscraper. Incredible, isn’t it?
Also, the UK (as already noted but I will keep noting it) is rich in legends, myths, fairy tales and much more that are just crying out to be included in storylines. The reason the Americans and other comic readers world-wide like UK strips is because they are uniquely British. In India, particularly in Southern India, The Steel Claw, Robot Archie, The Spider and many others are still very popular in reprint form over 35 years since they last appeared in print here.
One of the better British comic super heroes was Zenith and I still look through the Titan Books collection every so often!
Black Tower Comics has published a wide range of comics and the costumed crime-fighters (or even non-costumed in the case of Krakos) are the most popular.
So the market is there but where are the moneymen, the backers needed to help revive the corpse that is British comics so that it can proudly boast an industry once more that takes advantage of talents such as Grist, Dobbyn et al?
However improbable British super heroes might seem to some I can tell you they are not. There is a history going back 80 years and even longer if you include the Penny Dreadfuls of the Victorian era.
And there is a point I need to make: just because I do not like something does not mean it is no good. And vice versa because comics, ultimately, are there to be read and enjoyed from the professionals to Independent right down to Small Press creators. Read and make comics but always HAVE FUN!
And remember British characters were popular enough in France to have long runs in various titles:
And when the UK Vulcan weekly became Kobra in Germany its run outlasted that of its British counter-part:
What I forgot and highly recommend is Accent Comics and Whatever Happened To The World's Fastest Man? involved no costume. No mask. In fine British tradition....some times.
It really was great to read but it was a while ago so my review was on the old CBO and I never saved it!
According to the Forbidden Planet blog:
“With a sigh he put his half-empty pint glass on it’s beer mat …. and stopped time”
Yep, that’s it. Bobby Doyle can stop time. He’s the mysterious “World’s Fastest Man” that all of the papers have been talking about ever since he carried all of those people from that train crash. But he’s not fast, not in the way they think. He just has this strange power where he can stop time for the world and carry on with his life inside his own time-zone. Bobby’s no hero, not in the way people think of them. He’s just an average 25 year old bloke who wants a normal life. But that’s not his fate. He may have saved people before, may have been the hero before, but never on this scale. And he knows what’s coming, he knows the end result. That’s why he looks so resigned to his fate in the artwork above.
So Bobby sets off to the future ground zero – Prometheus Tower in London, where the bomb proves to be just as big, just as deadly and just as impossible to turn off as he feared. Which means he knows for certain now – he has 59 minutes to rescue everyone he can, 59 minutes to get as many people to safety as he can.
But he knows how his powers work – everything’s frozen when he stops time – so no transport works, doors remain shut unless he temporarily unfreezes time and opens them and the only way he can get people to safety outside the 2 mile blast radius is by the slow, physical, back-breaking way – he has to carry them. And he knows that even though time may be stopped for them, for him it carries on as normal, saving all of these people, carrying them all to safety will be no more than a blink of an eye for them, but for him it will take 50+ years of his life – possibly even all of his life – it’s the ultimate sacrifice and what makes him a true hero – no gaudy spandex, no incredible powers of flight and adulation, his is a special power that no one will ever know about.
I think the book is still available: http://www.accentukcomics.com/index.html
I have to, out of fairness, note that Rebellion who are publishing a lot of the old UK comics in trades -quality of production varying, did raise a few hopes when it was announced that they were (as per Looking Glass) uniting a lot of the "classic British characters" in a comic titled The Vigilant. What we got was more Americanised and rebooted characters that seemed to borrow a lot of ideas from Wild Storm Studio's Albion. It was not good. I've covered this subject elsewhere so will not go into it further.
WHY do these people not realise that there was a reason these characters were so popular and that was because they were uniquely British. Making The Steel Commando some insane killer is so far from the original character that I almost tore the comic in half.
I had to conclude that the writers had either never seen the comiocs featuring these characters before or just did not give a shit. I need to be blunt. It was almost as if they were panting over Skype: "Let's try to make everything edgey like Moore did ....edgey like Moore and Americanised! Violent!" I ought to point out that by volume 3 of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Moore had done that to death.
To my mind The Union and The Vigilant fail because in one case they completely Americanised and made the characters something they never were and forgot the uniqueness of British comics and characters -and this is why Stransky, Labbat, Dilworth and myself keep the old characters as they were while we develop them to "fill in the gaps" of the quickly produced strips from the war years.
STAY TRUE to the character AND the environment they are in.
Here endeth the sermon.....
Your Ally Against Crime.......
(c)2019 T. Hooper-Scharf/Black Tower Comics
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