Absolutely Smashing!

I am not one of those who think childhood was better in the old days. When my children were growing up I was fully aware that they had better toys, better telly, better food, better playgrounds, nicer clothes and more enjoyable school experiences than I ever did. Not to mention warmer bedrooms. But there is one area in which a twentieth-century childhood beats a twenty-first-century childhood hollow. I’m talking about comics.

My first regular comic was the Beano (still going, just about) but at the age of 9 I graduated to something far more grown-up and interesting. I started to read Smash! I vividly recall sitting on the bottom step of the stairs every Wednesday morning waiting for it to arrive, and the thrill when it came thrusting through the letterbox. Smash! was one among a whole group of comics of a genre that no longer exists: others included Lion, Valiant, the Victor and the Eagle. They were adventure comics and shared very much the same mental atmosphere: stories featured plucky boys and men battling against overwhelming odds, yet always pulling through. The mix of stories was similar in all of them: there would be a sporting story, usually football; a science-fiction or fantasy story; a school story; a story set in some turbulent historical time; and always at least one story set in the Second World War. Each of these stories would be three or four pages long (the usual length for a Beano story was a single page) and the drawings were far more detailed and realistic. They also contained far more text: the little scene-setting comment boxes at the top of the frames might contain a paragraph of description, and characters often indulged in wordy commentary or repartee. I was and remain a huge fan of this kind of comic. They were brilliant, and Smash! was the best – a vital part of my imaginative world between the ages of 9 and 13. It was a world I shared with my mum, incidentally; she’d always read Smash! after me and we’d talk about the stories together. I accumulated an impressive collection of them and they remained in a pile at the bottom of my wardrobe until I was well into adulthood – until, idiotically, I gave them away. I do, however, still possess a number of Smash! annuals, from 1971 through to 1974. Let’s get them down from the shelf and have a look at them. Ah, yes, ‘The World-Wide Wanderers’. This was a strip about a football team composed of eleven players from all over the globe, each in true ’70s style representing a national stereotype: Sharkey, the goalkeeper, was a South Sea Islander with a necklace of sharks’ teeth; Pancho was a sombrero-wearing Mexican; Hoppy, a gangling Watusi; Bandy, an Indian in a turban; Chang, a wild-looking Afghan mountain man; Bulgy, an overweight Turk in a fez; Fats, also overweight, but an Eskimo (we didn’t say Inuit back then) who wore a fur-trimmed anorak; Ivan, a gigantic bearded Russian; Moto, a wily, diminutive Japanese inside-right; a rangy Texan in a ten-gallon hat, called – guess what? – Tex; and their English captain, Carruthers, who sported a pith helmet and a monocle. Most of them spoke pidgin English, liberally sprinkled with appropriate foreignisms – Caramba! Howdy! Viva! Bwana! In the 1971 annual, the World-Wide Wanderers have reached the final of the European championship but then fall out and start nicking the ball off each other as each wants to earn prestige for their own country by scoring. At half-time their manager, the canny Scot Rory Granite, works out a strategy by which they can all score, and so they duly hammer the hapless opposition 11-0 and honour is satisfied all round. Seen with the cynical eye of a post-colonial theorist there’s plenty here to offend. But that would be to miss the essential good-naturedness of the stories. Clearly the writer knew virtually nothing about the nationalities depicted, but equally clearly he wanted the reader to like them. It might be a naïve and rose-tinted picture of international harmony – but it is a picture of international harmony. And back then, when black players were facing ugly and vociferous racism in their struggle to break into professional football, it was a welcome endorsement of diversity. What else do we have here? ‘The Incredible Adventures of Janus Stark.’ This was my mum’s favourite. Stark was a Victorian escapologist: a dark, saturnine figure who wore a cape and carried a silvertopped cane. He was tall, exceptionally slender and narrow-shouldered, with a high forehead, black brows, dark deep-set eyes and a pointed chin. His body was unnaturally lithe and flexible – like ‘indiarubber’ as the text often reminded the reader – and he could escape from anything – chains, lead caskets, blocks of ice, you name it. And that was just his stage act. The stories always obliged him in addition to escape from some ghastly real-life predicament that some dastardly villain had engineered. In the 1974 annual, for instance, he escapes from a room where the walls are closing in and threatening to crush him by squeezing through an air-duct that looks too narrow to accommodate a grass-snake. And then we come to . . . ‘The Master of the Marsh’. Possibly the weirdest of all the stories, this starred a powerfully built hermit called Patchman, who lives with his dog Leofric in the fens of East Anglia, dresses in bits of animal skin and goes barefoot even in winter. Like Doctor Dolittle, he can talk to animals. By a strange concatenation of circumstances he becomes a PE teacher at Marshside School, where he wages a daily war against the delinquents who are always trying to skive off and break the rules. Normally, in a battle between a PE teacher and a bunch of skivers, I would automatically side with the skivers, but Patchman was such a charismatic character you couldn’t help rooting for him. Oh, and he was a descendant of the eleventh-century Saxon warrior Hereward the Wake, who resisted the Norman invasion; in moments of heightened emotion Patchman’s eyes would glaze over, he would start chanting ‘Awake! Awake! Hereward the Wake!’ and he would seize a sword or whatever alternative lay to hand and whirl it around his head. In common with every other boys’ comic of the period, Smash! had a strip about the Second World War: ‘Send for Q-Squad’. Q-Squad were a Special Ops group of six soldiers and airmen, each with his own combat specialism, who were called in when things got tough in theatres of war all over the world, resulting in lots of explosions, cries of ‘Blimey, Sarge!’ and of course British victories. The Germans in their consternation would exclaim Ach!, Gott im Himmel! and Donnerwetter! In fact you could pick up a fair bit of German from boys’ comics at that time. Schnell! meant ‘Quick!’, Ja meant ‘Yes’ (the more emphatic form being Jawohl!), and Achtung! meant ‘Look out!’ The vocabulary of the Japanese was more limited: they just said Banzai! when they were winning and Aiee! when they were losing. Every boys’ comic contained at least one war story along similar lines, and some – Warlord, Battle, Commando – consisted of nothing but. Odd to think that when I was reading this, the Second World War had been over for twenty-five years. I could go on. I could write about ‘His Sporting Lordship’, a brilliantly funny strip about a labourer (Henry Nobbs) who is unexpectedly elevated to the peerage when a distant relative dies, but who under the terms of the will can only keep his title, wealth and estate by constantly winning sporting competitions. Nobbs is the athletic type, so that’s all right – except that a comedy villain, Mr Parkinson, and his slow-witted henchman Bloggs are constantly trying to nobble him, because Parkinson is next in line to the title. The whole thing has the air of an Ealing comedy. Smash! influenced me in a number of ways. In the first place it taught me lots of new words, at a time when I was starting to become a little vain about my vocabulary. Here are a few plucked at random from the pages of my Smash! annuals: acclimatization, decipher, disembodied, incessant, minarets, mollified, relentless, scimitar, self-indulgence, swashbuckling, unobtrusive, velocity . . . I also gained a wider frame of reference – to put it plainly, I learned the names of more famous people (or famous men, to be exact). Smash! had a weekly feature, ‘Warriors of the World’, and it was here that I first encountered Hannibal, Julius Caesar, Richard the Lionheart, Napoleon, Wellington, Stonewall Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, Shaka Zulu, Chief Sitting Bull and General Custer. And it gave me a window on to a much wider world, in both time and space. The stories in the Beano were set in the here and now, and their settings were limited to home, local streets and school. But with Smash! I roamed through deserts, jungles, mountains, skies and oceans, castles and crime-infested Victorian alleys. The kids of today simply don’t know what they’re missing.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 81 © Brandon Robshaw 2024