Why traditional kids comics died out!

Hello and welcome to Fleetway town, the seemingly innocent fictional place of children's comic book tales, but with sleazy undertones and poorly hidden agendas tucked into the stories. Mind you, as kids, we were really that clueless and innocent back then. Today's children have the helpline number for Operation Yewtree given to them at preschool. And a blummin' good job too!

So today, we're taking a humorous look at some of the more morally dubious kids comics characters to ponder why were they 'acceptable in the seventies?'

Our first exclamation of 'WTF!' comes courtesy of this character.

Featured in 'Krazy Comic', it's Steve Ford, aka the 'Buytonic Boy', or the more longwinded official version, 'The twelve and a half pence Buytonic Boy.'

This story was inspired by the mega-hit telly program, 'The Six Million Dollar Man', who was rebuilt to that price tag following a catastrophic aircraft crash and went onto several super-powered adventures. Our Buytonic Boy, meanwhile, crashed his go-kart into a lamp-post and purchased a strange bottle of "vitamin tonic pick-me-up" from exactly the sort of 'stranger' that you were warned not to go off with by your parents and school. He actually had a name in the strip, Professor Nutz. Yeah, right. "It's yours for just half a dollar" says the Professor "That's twelve and a half pence in decimal money." - Glug glug glug! goeth a grateful and unquestioning Steve.

The above illustration just bursts out in a triumphant outcry of wrongness. The old boy on the left is actually leering, just look at his face, as naive trusting Steve gulps down the unknown liquid!

"Soon, you will be mine!" Croons the mad "professor". Waiting for the tranquillisers to take effect, then he can 'help' Steve back to his house. There's a nice cool cellar that unconscious Steve can lie down in. It's soundproofed.

In the unreal world of the strip, somehow none of this happened, and Steve went on to gain the superpowers alluded to in the strip title. More interestingly, 'Professor Nutz' wasn't seen again, so maybe the law did catch up with him in the end?

Our second member of the comics rogue gallery is more quickly done and dusted. We now meet X-Ray Specs.

It's another leery face. But there is an undercurrent of disappointment in there too. A pair of real working X-Ray spectacles that can properly see right into stuff is all well and good, but Ray ordered the ones from the fancy American superhero comics which only penetrated a few layers of clothing so he could get to see girls panties! Full-frontal views of girl skeletons doesn't gratify pubescent sexual curiosity in quite the same way!

We're off to the local park now, to encounter a dangerously unstable adult authority figure, Parker the Parky. This fellow could exercise extreme levels of violence in pursuit of keeping his park clean and tidy. He'd have his shotgun out and blasting away before anyone near a telephone could scream for a police armed response unit.

Interestingly, this character managed to gain a ghastly undead afterlife, even when children's comics had gone away, appearing with enhanced violence levels and more explicitly 'cunting' bad language in the pages of the over 18 publication Viz Magazine.

There's really nothing to tell them apart now, is there?

Lastly, we turn to perhaps the most tragic of them all.

Mustapha Million was perhaps the most rooted to a specific time period of all these comic creations. A formerly poor Arab boy turned into a rich kid via a lucky discovery of liquid hydrocarbons, he could only have been conceived as a comic character in the 1970's. He was sent to the UK to get an education, but inexplicably did not end up being despised and hounded at one of our top fee-paying schools. Instead he lived in a big house at the posh end of generic comic town, which allowed him to interact with ordinary comic strip kids.

Mustapha had a happy, open and trusting nature. A little naive perhaps. His comic superpower was extreme wealth, which unlike the other stuck-up and mean 'rich' characters in other strips, he was happy to share around. I'd tend to think that this relationship with his peers was all giving on his part, with not a lot coming back in return? Superficial admiration follows the money after all. A whole lot of years later, I'd also wonder how Mustapha would think back on a lot of the relationships that underpinned his life here?

It's not inconceivable that as a result of all that less than happy contemplation, Mustapha when he grew up, finally ended up something like this!

Mustapha - All grown up now!

And with that rather grim final thought, it's curtains down time on the Seventies comic characters!

CiH for Mag! - July 2013.

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