CONCERN over COMICS

Korero (AEWS), Volume 3, Issue 11, 2 July 1945, Page 7

CONCERN over COMICS

A KORERO Report

uttargo the vandal” leapt from a V black cloud in a green sky, narrowly missing a purple moon inscribed “ 6d.” in yellow. A lavishly hatted and cloaked desperado, hennahued, with a face resembling (if anything) a sad horse, held back a slavering Alsatian dog. From a distance not exceeding six yards, three sinister figures crouched. The right arm of one of these most evil men had disappeared in a white cloud, from which extended a thin, red line. Presumably, he was firing at the Cloaked Desperado. The outraged Alsatian snarled at a bilious yellow rectangle, one-quarter of an inch away from his nose. The rectangle read : ‘‘A 32-page Thrilling Adventure Picture Story.” Shuddering slightly, we turned the cover page of this quality production. Stone the crows ! We were spared the glorious technicolour, but the anonymous artist, denied this medium to enliven his tale, had gone the limit in black and white. He’d prepared such a line-up of characters that war criminals seemed saints beside ’em. Frog-eyed, hooked, battered- or bul-bous-nosed, sour, sly and shifty of countenance, they sneered, leered, and jeered at one another Gorilla George,” “ Splayface,” " Blackie the Dwarf,” ‘‘Bent nose,” "Jackdaw,” and “ Lockjaw ” (twin brothers in Crime), and eight other atrocities, including the great Vargo himself, a cadaverous hidalgo with sweeping sideboards and moustachio. The picture-story, in which violence is exceeded only by improbability, spreads over thirty-two pages. Vargo’s victims are overcome by " a deadly spray,” lured to a boat with a false bottom, delivered in a spiral lift to Vargo’s hideout beneath the river, suspended above a shark in a glass tank, handcuffed,

attacked by an Alsatian, clutched by an octopus (in yet another glass tank), shot at, attacked with knives, and drowned. Yet in spite of his infinite resources, Vargo, eventually trapped, is told by the law : “ Keep moving, master mind. There’s no stop until we get you behind the bars.” The drawings are deplorable. The paper is poor. Even the spelling is incorrect. Vargo ” and similar stuff is printed in Australia. Another sample of Australian work is “ The Camouflaged Code,” a Shado McGraw thriller, plus Red Steele’s adventures with “ The Assassins.” In the thirty-two pages of blue and red illustrations, revolvers are flourished twenty-five times, but are fired only in three scenes, twelve uppercuts are delivered, there is one clubbing (“ dong ! ”), one kick in the stomach, and three occasions where a prostrate man is jumped on. Dialogue : — “ Sock him plenty, he’s beating me ! “ Okaze.” “ Pocket your pop guns in public, pals. You’re Mary, and I’m the little lamb, and I’ll follow you wherever you go-” “ She says if we send him- over the cliff it will be murder.” “ Arrh ! It’s just her old-fashioned idea. Let’s get busy.” “ Get moving, Shado McGraw, we’re going to practise the dead march.” Comics of this type are being read to-day by hundreds, perhaps thousands, of New Zealand school-children. In an investigation around Wellington booksellers and stationers were found to be fairly well supplied with matter closely resembling “ Vargo ” and the Shado McGraw thriller. They don’t like selling it. But demand has to be met, and

English comics are scarce these days. Booksellers have little, if any, opportunity for selection, and mostly they just have to take what they can get. That’s how a good market sprang up for quickly produced, illustrated trash. But throughout New Zealand, as throughout the United States, a growing number of men and women, parents, and educationists is voicing resentment against poorly printed comics packed with violence. " This is awful tripe and trash. There is nothing altruistic about it. It is nothing but murders, highway robberies, and shooting, which must be unsettling to young minds,” declared G. A. Maddison, taking strong exception to one comic magazine sold throughout New Zealand . He was speaking at a meeting of the Hawke’s Bay Education Board. One shop in Waipawa sold 216 copies of this and similar magazines every week. They should be stopped from entering New Zealand, it was suggested. Every month thousands of copies of " yellow ” comics such as Danger Comics (" Adventure,” " Thrills,” " Mystery,”

"Humour, 6d. ”) are distributed throughout New Zealand. Adventure, presumably, is the lot of Barty Malone, taxi-driver (" cab-driver ” on the cover), and Karl Klaus, of the Secret Radio. Barty, by madly driving a blood-stained secret service man to a mined bridge, saves a troop train, while Karl, canoeing down a river, broadcasts : " People of Poland. This is the secret radio calling you once again. Rise at once and throw off the yoke of Nazi oppression. We will do all we can to help you in your fight for liberty. Down with the Nazis. So, once again, good-night listeners.” Enter however, a suspicious Nazi, whereupon “ Karl deals him a smashing blow ! — and he grashes to the ground unconscious! ” Dale Marsh sinks (" to rise no more ”) a Jap submarine, flying dogs harass Captain Spadger in New Guinea, and “ Nick Carver of the Circus ” watches a lion and tiger “ locked in mortal combat.” “ Erb and Zeb,” red-nosed, bearded, and " Little Ossie ” are the humorists :— Zeb : “ Dynamite, 00-ER ! Erb : “ Well, this’ll fix him up fair dinkum, because next time he slaps my back the dynamite’ll go off ' BOONG,’ and he’ll blow his arm off ! ” And, finally, with strangled exclamations such as : • "UNGF!” “ Sniff, snuff, snaff. Sniff, snoff, snitch.” “ MIGOSH ! " HRFF ! PHNK ! HOIK ! GURGLE ! Professor McPhoo, Butch Grogan, Oscar the Scout, and Fortescue the talented hound search for the " GNUGNAH,” the dragon with the 18-carat diamond teeth. We went to see the wholesale newsagents who distribute a great variety of comics, including those from Australia and the Danger Comics series. A representative told us how the war had " reduced considerably the supply of good [?] English comics such as Chips, Comic Cuts, Playbox, Rainbow, and so on. Gem, Magnet, and Triumph are dead, but Champion and Scout are still going.” " By how much has the supply been reduced ? ” He wouldn’t say. We couldn’t find out, either, how many comics from Australia (where " Vargo the Vandal ”

was born) came into New Zealand. We couldn’t find out the circulation of Danger Comics or any other comics, for that matter. But we learned that Danger Comics is one of a large brotherhood of “ spot ” publications, either imported, or printed in New Zealand from overseas drawings. They are put on the market at no set intervals. They have no continuity or fixed names, although some sets of drawings are obviously serials. “ But I certainly wouldn’t like my children to read some of the comics we handle,” the wholesale agent admitted, as we were about to leave. We spoke to a publisher whose firm turns out a 6d. edition every five weeks of “ Radio Patrol,” “ Secret Agent,” and “ Katzenjammer Kids,” all made from American sketches. He regretted he couldn’t reveal the circulation figures, and quite frankly said the first two were “ a bit gangsterish.” He himself acted as censor. First of all, he did his best to get the rights to print and publish

But the cost, overcome in America by world-syndication, probably would be prohibitive in New Zealand. So it would appear, judging by the history of the Supreme Feature Comic, containing New Zealand and (apparently) English contributions. Printed and published in Auckland, sold originally for 6d., this 20-page comic is now being given away with small purchases at chain stores. The Supreme also featured danger, Tiger Darrell in “ The Island of Horror,” A blood-chilling adventure, yet its captions, conversations, and general tone was not alien, and above the average. One page, “ Its a Fact, by Quiz,” was of some educational value, and a New Zealand artist, Harry Bennett, had made quite a pleasing job of Hiram S.Q. (Slightly Queer) Wintergreen, Our Crazy Inventor. But somehow, Supreme Feature Comic just didn’t “ click.” Meteor Comics, from the same firm, contains one New Zealand picture tale, “ The Secret Valley,” rearing prominent amongst futuristic adventure and foolish

English comics in New Zealand. English agents either refused or named a prohibitive price. So he tried Australia and the U.S.A. He rejected the Australian offers point-blank—they were too tough—and, after turning down a good deal of violent American stuff, at length selected the three he now publishes quite successfully. He would like to see a New Zealand comic. He believes our artists are sufficiently capable and imaginative.

fantasy. The valley, somewhere " in Fiordland, contains moas and Maoris, war canoes and warriors. It is an honest, yet not entirely convincing, attempt to bring a New Zealand story before our syndicate-stuffed children. We examined children’s comics until we were dizzy. The Aussie efforts were awful. The New Zealand attempts didn’t seem to get anywhere. English comics were as scarce as pork chops.

We concluded that the only reputable American ones came from the studios of Mr. W. Disney. The Customs Department told us that for 1944, £677,536 (N.Z.) had been spent in importations under the common classification of “ books, papers, magazines, and music, printed ” ; £450,520 was spent in the United Kingdom, £122,746 in Australia, and £102,079 in the U.S.A. But they had no idea (or record) of the quantity and cost of comics imported amongst that readingmatter last year. Anyhow, we knew, out of the forty booksellers and stationers in Wellington, most of them were selling a minimum of 100 alien (or alien in thought and atmosphere) comics each week. One chap was selling 500 a week : “I could get rid of 400 on Friday alone if the stocks weren’t limited. And for every 500 rough-stuff, cheap-jack comics, I get one, two, or three decent English comics. There’s a racket in it somewhere.” Nobody seemed to know how many “ yellow ” comics were entering New Zealand. A lot of people didn’t seem to care. Some were becoming perturbed, others thought something was wrong somewhere. Booksellers said they didn’t like selling them, but . Should children read, repeatedly, all about gangsters, gun - play, murder, and violence ?

Next we questioned a regular subscriber. He told us that people who called themselves grown-up made him tired. He and his schoolmates only read their comics for seven years. Grown-ups had forty-nine years of being grown-up—-seven times longer than children — read what they liked. The child glanced round the playground where we were standing, selected a stone, threw it at a passing cat, missed it, then said that he understood there was a time when children read Grimm and Andersen and Beatrix Potter and liked and believed in the stories they told. Grown-ups, he said, with their newspapers, picturepapers, radios, and wars every twenty years, had knocked the bottom out of romance. “ Then you turn round and growl at us and our comics. And you grown-ups, you read frightful murder books, too, about detectives and crooks, and magazines like True Romance and True Detective and Wild West, and most of the films you see are just plain awful.” He then asked if we had seen a recent advertisement for a horror film : ‘‘lf you like your mental beef-steak underdone, here it is ... Gory, Ripe, and Red ! In ‘ They Met in the Dark,’ weird horrors and unspeakable terrors ! A chilling thrill in every scene 1 ” “ Arr ! ” said the child, “ you make me tired.” He reached for another stone.