A Life in Comics 2
A Life In Comics 2
“Out of the way, big fella!”
“I’m sorry, Ed, I can’t.”
“So help me, big fella – ”
“It’s my job, Ed, I can’t let you in.”
Ed is stripped to the waist, muscles rippling, fists balled, a face like murder. He is the extremely violent, former bouncer of the pub where I’ve taken a part-time job to augment my miserly wages.
If my superiors find out I’m two-timing them it will result in my dismissal, but I calculate, quite rightly, that DC Thomson management is highly unlikely ever to stray within a mile of the Happyhillocks Tavern. The name is a misnomer. There’s nothing happy about it. It’s a rough pub in a rough part of a rough town. In any case, at the moment that is the least of my worries.
Ed is determined to get behind the bar and smash every bottle on the shelves and I – foolishly – am standing on the other side of the flimsy bar door attempting to stop him. Fishy Tam and the other bar staff have wisely disappeared. The manager (also called Ed) is standing inside the door to the backroom with his wife – watching, it seems to me, surprisingly calmly. The packed pub is enjoying the entertainment. Saturday night at the dancing is never this good.
Ed emits a snarl. “I’m warning you, big fella – ”
“Please, Ed, see sense, this isn’t doing you any good…”
It certainly isn’t doing me any good. I have since many times wondered why I chose this particular hill to die on. It matters not a jot to me if Ed smashes the bar. Yet here I am, ready to make the ultimate sacrifice. At one point I look round for a handy bottle, foolishly thinking it might perhaps be an idea to club Ed into submission, but his warning growl disabuses me of the notion.
“Don’t do it, big fella.”
“Right, Ed. You’re right. Sorry. Silly me.”
So I keep reasoning with Ed, caught up in the situation and strangely unable to see a way out – like for instance standing aside and saying “Aye, right, on you go” – as the minutes tick agonisingly by.
At last the cavalry arrives in the shape of the biggest policeman I have ever seen – over seven feet tall and probably the same around. Next to him his normal sized partner seems dwarfed. Together they gradually manoeuvre Ed into a corner, the big cop skilfully belly-bumping him little by little. At last the cuffs are applied and Ed is ushered out, glaring ominously in my direction. “I’ll get you, big fella.”
I do one final shift just to collect my week’s wages and I’m out of there.
Thinking about it many years later it strikes me that there was something highly suspicious about the whole incident.
The staff, I knew, were diverting much of the bar’s proceeds into their own pockets, and the place was doubtless running at a huge loss. Could it be that the manager had elected to hide the deficit by engaging the former bouncer to destroy all the stock? If so, my selfless (and suicidal) action would have put paid to the scheme.
If that is indeed the case I feel little sympathy for him. He would routinely fill more expensive bottles of rum, whisky and other spirits with cheaper brands, still charging the higher price. At closing time he would go round the tables sniffing remnants in the glasses – if unadulterated by mixers, back in the bottles they would go. A wise man didn’t order spirits at the Happyhillocks.
Fishy Tam (I know you’re wondering) drove the fish lorry. He would frequently arrive for his shift bearing large bags of cooked prawns for sale, no doubt filched from his consignments. I won’t lie, I had many of them myself.
* * *
Did I say I would get to comics? The truth is, casting my mind back all those years, I keep remembering other interesting events, which I’m happy to relate. Just to add colour. A comic writer’s life is not all comics, you know. But back to Fiction Department…
The new recruit, Patrick Mills, turns out to be bright and able, and indeed it is not long before Pat is snapped up by one of the magazines, the teen romance title Romeo (notice I’m still languishing in Fiction Department). We have become friendly, and I have a suspicion – though I never discussed it with him – that when a vacancy comes up for chief sub-editor on Romeo he recommends me for the position. And so it comes to pass.
Romeo prints three or four romantic picture strips per issue. Teen romance is a genre for which I feel I am not particularly suited. Pat, on the other hand, has fitted in very well, and has even written fill-in stories for the magazine, which to my critical eye are every bit as good as the regular writer’s.
We discuss going freelance. Pat is keen. For me it seems like a viable option, as I don’t see myself remaining long term at DC Thomson – I am not really their kind of person – though I am as yet far from resolved to spend the rest of my life as a writer.
In time Pat takes his leave of the company. The plan is for me to keep working to help support us until we start making enough money to live on, assuming we do. I can’t remember if I actually make good on that arrangement. Somehow I doubt it; it is hard enough for one person to survive on a DC Thomson salary. But clearly we get by.
Our target market is IPC magazines comics division. Their comics, apart from some on the girls’ side, we consider decidedly inferior to the Dundee publications, but DC Thomson as a market is closed to us, as they are not welcoming to ex-employees, especially ones who are also working for ‘that London lot’. Besides, they don’t pay as much.
Those who have struggled to break into the writing business will know that one of the hardest parts of the process is simply getting noticed. Editors are bombarded with unsolicited submissions and have little time to read most of them. Pat, though, comes up with a brilliant idea. We will choose a comic – in this case the juvenile weekly Cor! – and write every strip in it. It comes to 23 strips in all, most of them one-page funnies.
Imagine the editor’s surprise when he opens that fat envelope and 23 strips plop out. It is something he can’t ignore, and indeed, we sell 12 of them. We are off and running.
I hand in my notice to Romeo and am out of the door within 20 minutes – barely long enough to pack up my few possessions. Collecting my wages the next day I am allowed no further than the building’s lobby. To desert DC Thomson for IPC is clearly regarded as a betrayal on the scale of Lord Haw-Haw.
Pat and I are working from his house across the River Tay in the village of Wormit, where he has moved with his wife Angie and their two young twin daughters (I really don’t know how they manage!). We are stationed mainly in the tiny shed in the garden – an electricity line from the house for lighting, a length of plywood for a desk, and a paraffin heater that by some stroke of luck doesn’t manage to poison us.
Many years later, on a visit to Dundee, a friend who works at the Dundee Courier, Mike Donachie, kindly drives me round my old haunts, including a trip across the Tay bridge to Wormit. The village has changed a lot but I finally manage to identify the former Mills house. The woman who opens the door to us looks rather bemused when I ask for permission to photograph her garden shed. When I publish the photos on Facebook some wag on the 2000AD forum wittily christens it ‘the Thrill Shed’, and so it shall ever remain.
Thanks to the success of our 23 script introduction we are awarded several strips to write on a regular basis for Cor! and another juvenile publication, Whizzer & Chips. The IPC strips are generally inferior to the cleverer offerings of The Beano and Dandy and others in the DCT stable, relying too often on stale formula, and on puns for their humour. Strips like Jack Pott, a boy obsessed with gambling (try to get that one past the censors today), and Tomboy. Tomboy relies entirely on misunderstanding. Tomboy tells her mother she’s keen on pot plants. Mum goes into paroxysms of joy imagining her daughter heading for a brilliant career in horticulture – only to discover her running an illicit marijuana operation. Okay, we never get that one accepted, but you see the idea.
We type our scripts on a little manual Olivetti typewriter. There is always a decision to be made – are there so many crossings out, lines of unsightly xxxx, that a page needs to be typed again? And of course we must make carbon paper duplicates. This is in the days before computers – you young scripters don’t know how good you have it!
Flushed with success with the juvenile comics we send the first episode of a new strip to IPC girls’ division. They don’t buy it but it serves to attract the attention of the managing editor, John Purdie, himself a former DC Thomson man.
John comes to Wormit to meet us, and detecting some degree of talent there, becomes our mentor. He offers us the first episode of a script for a story designed for one of the girls’ comics, a mystery piece about a strange and sinister new headmistress who takes over a boarding school. It’s called ‘School of No Escape’. We get the impression they’re not quite sure what to do with it, what the actual mystery is. Would we like to continue it? Damn right!
In our hands the story turns out to be very popular, and through John Purdie’s good offices we’re also introduced to the boys’ division. The first story we create for them is called ‘The Can-Do Kids’, about a bunch of youngsters doing odd jobs and getting in crazy situations. It has the benefit of an excellent artist called Cruz (I know no more about him – I assume he’s Spanish). It appears in Lion. It’s fun and works well.
Never waste a good idea.
A second story is called ‘Yellowknife of the Yard’, about – you can guess – a native American detective moved to London. This is the only story that we ever try to sell to DC Thomson publications, in this case to Hotspur. We even go so far as to get a friend to send it in from England under his own name, so they can’t connect it to us. For our troubles we get back the most vitriolic, excoriating rejection letter I have ever received, or indeed seen. We wonder if somehow they have realised the script is ours, but re-reading a page or two of Yellowknife recently I can only agree with the criticism. It is atrocious. It is a mark of the standard of IPC boys’ comics at the time that we send the same story to Valiant and it is accepted, and indeed runs for two or three years.
Halfway through the first year I slip and break my leg while playing badminton on Pat’s back green, and have to struggle on crutches with a heavy plaster cast back and forth on the bus to my flat in Dundee. No sooner is the plaster off than I contract a very unpleasant case of dysentery from contaminated food consumed at Dundee’s Seagate bus station while waiting for the bus to Wormit. Just little blips along the way.
One regret is I do not stay long enough to continue with the best story we come up with during our time together, a classic girls’ piece called ‘School For Snobs’. Headmistress Hermione Snoot dresses like Mrs Mopp, speaks broad Cockney, chain smokes cigarettes and no doubt keeps a gin bottle in her desk. She runs an establishment dedicated to knocking the arrogance out of her toffee-nosed charges. I don’t suppose we’d get away with some of her character foibles today, but it is good fun and I imagine very popular.
We have completed only two or three episodes when we decide the strains of our working relationship are getting too much. I call John Purdie to enquire if there are any jobs going down south, and very soon I’m off to London.
Part 3 coming soon…