Mike White,
Kids Rule OK?,
Action #31, 11 Sept. 1976
"I've no truck with elitism or the intellectualisation of pop culture, and want to make this zine as open and welcoming as possible. but if you are looking for an article on what a classic
Charley's War is or the history of
Dennis the Menace, you are unlikely to find it in these pages. It's already been done very well elsewhere. I would much rather read about
Troubled Souls or
Class War Comix or DC Thomson strips about frozen cavemen unthawed by foolhardy explorers." — Justin Marriott
Launch issue of the latest
Paperback Fanatic spin off (I have genuinely lost track of how many there have been), title inspired by the notoriously violent
Kids Rule OK. Delighted to see the 70's girls comics well represented — Justin on witchcraft, mad scientists, circus fiends, hostile extraterrestrials, and death by purple trumpet in
Judy; Jim O'Brien - who is all over the issue - revisits
Mandy's
Slaves of War Orphan Farm, a misery porn serial which saw child evacuees starved, brutalized and worked to death in a quarry by sadistic pillar of the community Ma Thatcher. "Coincidentally but intriguingly, it has long been assumed that Mrs Thatcher was also part inspiration for the character of deranged hanger and flogger Margaret Wakefield (played by Barbara Markham) in Pete Walker's seminal women-in-chains exploitation film,
House of Whipcord made in 1974, just three years after
Slaves saw print. The target audience for a comic aimed at 12-year-old-girls and for an X certificate movie designed for (largely male) adults-only viewing could hardly have been more different but, even setting aside the Thatcher link, the thematic territory that
Slaves and
House of Whipcord share (incarcerated girls, aggressive female jailers, thwarted escape attempts, the failure of the authorities to notice that anything is wrong) is greater than one might at first imagine." Among Jim's other outstanding contributions to the launch issue,
Oil-rigs in British Comics, a companion piece to
North Sea Scramble in
Paperback Fanatic #46, and a feature on the epidemic of hooliganism and bottle throwing in 'seventies football-themed strips, most notably the infamous attack on
Action's
Look out for Lefty which had the
Daily Mail throw its customary fit (to be fair, they weren't alone. Dennis Gifford was of a mind that "Just as pornography caters for a mass market for adults, stuff like this provides violence for a mass market of children.").
Snappier pieces include two pages sampling David Lloyd's pre-
V for Vendetta illustrations for such small press publications as
Fantasy Tales,
Dark Horizons, David Sutton's
Shadow, Ro Pardoe's
Ghosts & Scholars, and David Rowland's super Father O'Brien booklet,
Eye Hath Not Seen; a brief 'When Dinosaurs ruled the Wild West' retrospective featuring Cowboys and Native Americans versus Triceratops, Pterodactyls, King Kong, T. Rex, etc;
Varoomshka, leggy, mini-skirted heroine of John Kent's political strips and skits for
The Guardian and others, "simultaneously gorgeous to look at and bafflingly inappropriate for the titles and times it appeared in." Seeing out the issue, James Bacon on a
Crisis series set against a backdrop of the war in Northern Ireland.
Desmond Walduck,
Slaves of War Orphan Farm,
Mandy #1, 6 Feb. 1971
