Adam Riches - Football's Comic Book Heroes

[dem]

Apr 24, 2015 14:41:57 GMT Craig Herbertson said:

What a fascinating tale. The Old Etonians sound like they totally screwed up. A huge moral victory for the working class.

Playing for the Old Etonians over the three games was Lord Arthur Kincaid, a man with a fearsome reputation for on field violence. Kincaid's mother is said to have confided that she was worried he would one day return home with a broken leg, whereupon one of his team-mates consoled her, "You must not worry, madam. If he does, it will not be his own."

The Footballer Who Wouldn't Stay Dead (Roy Of The Rovers, 1980-82), is another strip whose opening panels, unfortunately, had a real life precedent. In February 1967, tiny Highgate United of the Worcester Combination league hosted favourites Enfield in the Amateur Cup quarter final before a club record 3,000 crowd. Half an hour into the game, a lightening bolt struck the pitch, felling the referee and a number of players, two of whom required mouth to mouth resuscitation. Tragically, United centre half Tony Allden, 23, recently married, never regained consciousness and died in Solihull Hospital the following day. In 2012, to coincide with the 45th anniversary and raise funds toward a memorial plaque, the club issued a booklet, .... When Suddenly Tragedy Struck: Remembering Tony Allden 1944-67.

Back to the fiction. Dug out a pair of annuals, Scorcher for 1978 and Roy Of The Rovers for 1979, both of which include text stories, competent for sure but anodyne, certainly when compared to the exploits of the Traitor Of The Team, Meg Foster - Footballer, and Nazi-hunting Fireworks Flynn's Freebooters, even if they were still reworking essentially the same themes. It seems somewhere along the way the football prose story lost its all-important strangeness. On a brighter note, in later years Roy Race's life took an astonishing turn for the morbid, losing both his wife, Penny, and his leg in a helicopter crash, this after The Great Melchester Massacre (Roy Of The Rovers, 19th July 1986), in which the squad were kidnapped by terrorists while on tour in the Middle East and eight players lost their lives during the ensuing, bungled SAS rescue attempt. Incorporating a list of casualties in the strip was particularly tasteless.

[pulphack]

Well, I have now read this - including the comic - and have little to add to what Dem has already said. I would agree with his comments that the way in which the author contextualises the comics and stories is excellent: the state of the nation and also of the football league throws a whole new light on many of these tales. Particularly of note are the chapters on WWI and II, and the chapter on women's football and the surprising number of girl's football stories.

The thing that made me chuckle about the stories, though, was that even into the seventies there was an astounding preponderance of evil chairmen with a propensity for enhancing their players by chemical, surgical, and non-specific ray machines (well, I suppose Major Frank Buckley did have Wolves on monkey gland injections in the '30's), as well as a desire to blow up their grounds (at which point I should mention the interesting new book I'm looking for by a survivor of the Bradford fire of 1985 which draws a number of parallels between that incident and arson occurring at failing businesses of the then chairman; and of course an ex-Doncaster chairman did time for setting fire to their ground in the dark days when they nearly went out of business, before their plastic surgeon saviour and life-long fan bought them*). My theory is that Sydney Horler started this in one of his Vivanti books, and a light bulb went on over the heads of a number of Amalgamated and DC Thompson writers. Fans of Leeds, Portsmouth, Leyton Orient, etc are familiar with this scenario...

(* his ambition had always been to play for them, so then-manager Dave Penney arranged his registration with the FA and he got to come on as sub for a couple of minutes at the end of the last game of the season when they were safely in a play-off place in the Conference the year they regained their League status. He was about 55 at the time, so I guess he could pretend he was Stanley Matthews.)

[dem]

Very pleased you enjoyed it, Mr. Hack! It was the chapters on the war years and attendant developments back home worked best for me. I'm sure there's a fascinating book to be had from the War & Peace chapter alone.

Meanwhile ....

..... scandalous doings at Repington School on the eve of the big game versus Milverton! Thanks yet again to the magnificent Comic Book Plus, we have opportunity to read a self-contained episode - cliffhanger and all - of Sydney Horler's ripping football yarn, That Council School Boy (Chums, Dec 8, 1923), which, in terms of plot, appears to mirror Charles Hamilton's previously mentioned The Bounder in everything save shape of ball. The new tick, Tom Speedie, son of a famous Midchester City superstar, is ostracised by all but one of his fellow pupils on account of he is beastly common and an an oik. Despite Tom's outstanding soccer skills, a toff alliance fronted by Thompson, the football captain, and Merritt, (official school bully) conspire to have him banished from the school team. But the arrival of a new sports master, Mr. Grayson, looks to have upset the balance. Grayson knows a decent player when he sees one, and promotes young Speedie to the side. Merritt & Co. are furious. Master or not, something will have to be done about the interfering Mr. G. and no mistake!

To celebrate the launch of a new series - Sax Rohmer's The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu, no less - the same issue boasts a striking cover illustration depicting the Yellow Devil hovering bat-like over an unsuspecting London.

Here's the direct link: Chums (scroll down to foot of page)