A Life in Comics 5
IT’S WAR!
It’s 1974. DC Thomson have launched Warlord, a comic based almost entirely on the Second World War, interest in which is undergoing a popular resurgence, with companies like Purnell also putting out a wide range of WWII partworks.
Like most comics DC Thomson produce, Warlord is reliably good. Its name is taken from what I imagine they think will be their most popular character, Lord Peter Flint: Codename Warlord, a James Bond clone who adopts the persona of a conscientious objector while operating as a secret British agent.
The standout character, however, is Union Jack Jackson, a barnstorming British marine serving with the US Marine Corps in the Pacific theatre who paints a Union flag on his helmet to distinguish himself from his American fellow soldiers.
At IPC in London they observe the success of Warlord and crave a piece of the action. Publisher John Sanders, however, has doubts about the ability of his boys’ comics division to produce an adequate rival. Their approach to stories has been too formulaic and repetitive, lacking in realism. The top character in the IPC comic Valiant, for instance, is Captain Hurricane, a brawny officer who every issue has to be worked up into a ‘raging fury’, at which point he becomes capable of flipping artillery pieces around like toys and tying German tank barrels in knots. It’s stale and predictable. And of course, hardly credible.
No doubt egged on by John Purdy, Sanders turns to the girls’ comic division – in particular Pat Mills, who has impressed with his work for the company and his ideas on boys’ stories.
Pat asks for me to join him to help co-create the new comic. That is why I’ve been summoned back down from Scotland. We’ve collaborated well together before and share the same opinion of IPC’s boys’ comics output. Indeed, before I left for Scotland I had produced a report for Sanders outlining what I felt were the problems with them.
As this development is sure to arouse significant unhappiness in the boys’ division Pat and I are placed in an out-of-the-way office and instructed to keep very quiet about what we are up to. Careless talk costs…well, extreme displeasure at the very least.
Pat remembers a certain reluctance on our part to create a war comic – it seems a backward step. I have no recall of that, but I don’t doubt him. Memory is a very selective thing. In any case we bite the bullet. Our aim will be to create hard-hitting, realistic war stories with a strong measure of credibility. In our stories people will die. War is exciting, but it is also a grim business and we won’t shy away from that aspect of it. We believe readers will react well to a more honest approach.
We are put on a tight time scale. Warlord must not be allowed to monopolise the market for too long.
I’m staying with Pat at his home in Colchester for the meantime, and we work on the train up to London, in the office at Fleetway, and on the train back home again. We work weekends and if we go out for a meal or to the pub we’re still at it. It is intense. We feel management constantly breathing down our necks.
I remember walking along Farringdon Street discussing how much we still have to do, how much longer it’s going to take us. I’m slightly behind Pat and I put on my best John Sanders voice. “But, Patrick, you’ve already had SIX WEEKS!” I’m not that good a mimic but I get that one just right. Pat practically jumps out of his skin.
It takes us roughly eight weeks before we have what we consider enough strong stories to make the initial mix, with two or three back-ups. Our preferred title is ‘Battle’, but when the comic eventually hits the stands management for reasons that now escape me decide it is to be called ‘Battle Picture Weekly’.
In story creation we have a lot of help from Gerry Finley-Day, who by this time has left Tammy to go freelance. It is he who writes, with a little prompting from us, what turns out to be our top story – a worthy rival to Union Jack Jackson – ‘D-Day Dawson’.
Sergeant Steve Dawson takes a bullet near the heart on D-Day. But Dawson reckons that ‘his boys’ will be lost without him. Determined to get them to Berlin alive, he makes the ultimate sacrifice, checking out of med bay, concealing his condition, and soldiering bravely on – despite frequent debilitating reminders of the bullet that if not removed will – and eventually does – pierce his heart and kill him.
The first episode is drawn by a foreign artist called Casablanca, with the rest drawn mainly by British comic stalwart Geoff Campion. The story quickly climbs to the top of the readers’ poll.
A close rival to Dawson is ‘Day of the Eagle’, a story about a British agent tasked with assassinating Adolf Hitler – inspired largely by Frederick Forsyth’s ‘Day of the Jackal’. Like many of our stories, Pat and I write the first episode and then farm it out to another writer. This one goes to Eric Hebden (whose son Alan later also becomes a regular writer for the comic). Eric is a former army officer and will as time goes by be tasked with handling much of the comic’s factual material.
The story is allotted pride of place in the comic, the coveted full-colour centre spread. It is drawn by Patrick Wright, an elegant illustrator with a realistic style, perfect for the story, though his painstaking approach causes severe time problems for Battle’s harassed editorial team.
It is essential to cover war in the air, and we’re looking for something a bit out of the ordinary. We come up with a story about a British airman fighting undercover in the guise of a German air ace. We call it ‘Lofty’s One-Man Luftwaffe’.
British pilot ‘Lofty’ Banks escapes from a POW camp and steals a plane to fly home – but instead ends up joining the Luftwaffe, masquerading as a German air ace, to fight the Nazis from within.
The story is scripted by various writers and drawn by Paulo Ongaro. It’s a reliable middle-of-the-road story with some good action and a likeable hero, but never quite hits the level of popularity we expect of it – we reason because the readers instinctively feel there’s something rather underhand about Lofty’s duplicity.
* * *
We want to include one story featuring someone more the readers’ age and ‘The Bootneck Boy’ fills that spot. It is another Finley-Day effort featuring a plucky working class lad desperate to join the marines but too young and too small to qualify.
By determination and perseverance our hero eventually makes it. Drawn by Juan Giralt, the strip is inspired by the DCT comic Victor’s long-running working class hero Alf Tupper – alias ‘Tough of the Track’. It’s never going to be our number one story but is nevertheless likeable and important for the mix.
* * *
‘The Flight of the Golden Hinde’ features a replica of Francis Drake’s sailing ship trying to make it back to Britain after being caught thousands of miles away by the outbreak of war. A lyrical story beautifully illustrated by Vanyo, it should all the same never have made the final mix. In a comic full of hard-nosed action stories it stands out like a sore thumb, and is never going to be a hit with the readers. Strangely this story is allotted four pages rather than the normal three given to better stories. Perhaps at one time we had more confidence in it.
By the way, how do we know which stories are popular? In every issue is printed a voting form. Anyone writing in is asked to include it (or their votes at least if they don’t want to cut up their comic), nominating their three top stories.
I must also mention the lettering. On Battle, as on John Purdy’s IPC girls’ comics, we are rather blindly following the DC Thomson practice of machine lettering. Today I would always go with hand lettering, even if much of it is produced on computer. It is far more a part of the art and blends in more naturally, and I do wish we had had the sense to use it. You live and learn.
* * *
The prison camp story ‘The Terror Behind the Bamboo Curtain’, inspired largely by the film ‘The Bridge on the River Kwai’, is our one dip into the Japanese theatre. We struggle with this one. It’s not working. Despite all the potentially interesting elements it’s coming over as rather dull. We rewrite it and rewrite it. It’s not until we decide to soup up the character of the Camp Commandant, Colonel Sado, that the story comes to life.
All the same our expectations of its popularity are dashed. The Bamboo Curtain is our unloved love child. What went wrong? It’s clear now that we didn’t work the story out well enough beyond the opening episode, especially the role of our main protagonist, Big Jim Blake. Blake is never proactive enough – too often has things done to him rather than instigating the action. Readers don’t go big on a hero that is more of a victim.
To make matters worse, following the first episode the story is given out to a writer called Charles Herring. Charles was once a fine writer, but way back even when I was editing Sandie he had suffered a stroke that left him unable to function properly.
Charles had been a good contributor and so we continue to buy his scripts – the man has to live. His wife Sue does her best to make sense of them but they always require extensive rewriting in the office. With the time pressures on us on Battle Picture Weekly there is not the time to give them or the broader story the attention they deserve. I’m not even sure at this remove that Charles did actually write the stories. It could be that we wrote them ourselves in the office and simply paid Charles for them. If so, they are too rushed. So The Bamboo Curtain does okay, but falls far below the kind of popularity we had hoped for.
We include a regular factual story, in this case ‘Brew-Up at El Alamein’, plus a short true-life text piece, and to finish the comic off a back page colour feature about amazing weapons of war drawn by a fine young artist comic readers will come to know well, Ian Gibson.
There is, however, one more major cog in our battle machine. This we decide is to be a double length, big impact story, six pages per issue instead of the usual three or four. It’s our version of The Dirty Dozen – or more accurately The Felonious Four. Four hardened criminals chosen to carry out the most dangerous missions under a tough commander.
The story is to be called ‘Rat Pack’. I can’t remember if Pat and I rough out a first episode or just pass on the basic idea to a writer and let him run with it, the writer being the dependable Gerry Finley-Day. I suspect it’s the latter because the names of two of the characters at least – knifeman Matthew Dancer and sneaky safebreaker Ronald Weasel are straight out of the Finley-Day playbook. All we need now is the right artist.
We have spotted a first-rate candidate in some of the DC Thomson comics, drawing historical action stories like ‘Strongbow’ and ‘Chained to His Sword’. A powerful style, great characterisation. He’s not British – Spanish or South American we think.
DC Thomson do not credit their writers or artists (at this time neither do IPC), clearly for fear of people like us filching them. So every art agent that comes through the door is shown samples of his work and asked: “Do you know this artist?”
We draw a good few blanks until finally Barry Coker of Bardon Press admits, rather reluctantly it seems, that yes, it’s one of his. His name is Carlos Ezquerra, he’s Spanish. I tell Barry that we must have him, we have just the story for him, but Barry is reluctant to agree. We’re an unknown quantity. Sure, we pay much more, but we could be fly-by-nights, gone in a few months and Carlos will be out of work and out of favour as well with our rivals in Dundee.
We plead with him. We promise him that Carlos will never be out of work, even if our comic doesn’t succeed. He’s too good, he’ll always have work here. Eventually Barry melts, and Carlos is aboard.
Meanwhile, inevitably, word of the secret goings on in our out-of-the-way office has escaped. In the boys’ division there is outrage, bitterness, a deep sense of betrayal. It’s quite understandable, they have indeed been betrayed. Here’s Purdy’s department with his two sneaky, hired hitmen moving in on their territory.
Some choose to voice their objections openly. Paul Gittens, one of their editors, tells me to my face that he doesn’t agree with what we’re doing, doesn’t like the more violent tone of our stories (though really, compared to today’s comics, they’re by and large quite tame). I respect him for it.
Others don’t demonstrate the same decency. Christmas time I exit our office door to find taped to it a cut-out of a flame-thrower-wielding Nazi incinerating enemy fighters. Attached to it is a big caption taken from one of the comics: A MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL OUR READERS.
Do I feel guilty. Perhaps a little. But the boys’ division has had years to sort themselves out and done nothing, happy to go along week after week peddling the same outdated ideas. The eventual success of Battle Picture Weekly will prove us right. In the end no IPC comics are cancelled, no one loses their job. And eventually, Battle and other comics spawned by the Purdy stable will come under the control of the boys’ side.
* * *
The comic is now practically complete. There is still the matter of the free gifts that usually accompany launch issues. On issue one we have decided on stickers of various wartime badges and insignia.
Cover-mounted gifts can be a minefield. On Romeo, I remember, we gave away what we called the ‘Romeo Dating Ring’. Before long complaints started to pour in – poor innocent girls being taken to A&E to have their Romeo Dating Rings cut off. It turned out our ring was in fact a cheap plumber’s washer – don’t ask me what it was supposed to go on, but it certainly wasn’t on a young girl’s finger. Today gifts made of plastic are very much frowned on – some outlets refuse to carry publications with plastic gifts. And swallow hazards for young children are a definite no.
On the new comic our problem is of a different nature. We meet in John Sanders’ office with the IPC lawyer, Peter ‘Perry’ Mason. He is incensed. Among the stickers we intend to give away are Nazi SS flashes, and he’s not having it. We really don’t understand why – they look great.
It’s not that long after the war, the memory is still fresh in the minds of many. The SS was an abomination. The thought of a British comic giving away their insignia is almost as abominable. We’re a pair of callow youths who have no understanding of what service people went through. How dare we, how very dare we!
Sanders sits back and enjoys the argument, but he has already made up his mind which way it’s going to go, and it’s not in our favour.
Perry Mason is quite right, of course, and to ditch the flashes is no big deal. It’s one argument I’m glad we lose.
* * *
Launch day is not that far off, and Pat and I can’t stop tinkering with the stories. We want perfection, never realising that perfection is impossible. Sometimes good enough is good enough.
An editor is brought in to take charge, and in many ways to keep us in line. He’s likeable and very capable, the former editor of Scorcher, David Hunt. To assist him is a young sub-editor, Steve MacManus.
It must take some courage to have come from the boys’ division that hates us so much. I don’t know how many bridges have been burnt behind him, but Dave’s always amenable, keen to take in what we’ve been up to, to learn what’s good and different about the comic we’ve created. But he’s never a push-over.
We have a lot to learn too. Dave is well versed in the prime function of an editor – get the bloody comic out. Get it out ON TIME. Our perpetual tinkering can’t go on, and he doesn’t let it.
March 1975. Launch day eventually comes, and it’s not long before steady sales figures tell us that Battle Picture Weekly is proving a roaring success – even without the SS flashes.
As the days pass and I can see that Dave and Steve have a good grip on things, I feel less and less needed. I have enjoyed my time helping to create the comic, working at such intensity. I’ve learned a lot from the experience. I think I may have found my niche.
But for now it will be a relief to escape the hot house of Battle Picture Weekly. So I make the big decision and step back out on to civvy street.
For me the war is over.
Next: THE VALIANT DAYS