Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Drawn in by children's comic annuals


Whether it was Rupert Bear's reassuring Nutwood or the preteen perils of Mandy and Bunty, a Christmas comic annual would keep me engrossed for hours

Famous four … an advert for Bunty, featuring The Four Marys
Famous four … an advert for Bunty, featuring The Four Marys
I wasn't much of a comics buyer as a child, although I did succumb to Sandman graphic novels in my teens. Comics represented poor value for pocket money to a greedy, speedy reader concerned primarily with the fatness of purchased reading matter, so I never experienced the excitement of agitating for the new Beano on a weekly visit to the newsagent. Annuals, though, were quite another story, combining weapons-grade heft with all the brightly coloured strips and pat punchlines a youthful reader could desire – not to mention pull-out posters, join-the-dots and impossible origami.
As a wean, my Christmas annual of choice was Rupert Bear, dandyishly resplendent in his yellow checked scarf and trousers, and tootling perpetually into surreal adventure with his equally natty chums. The anthropomorphic animals of Nutwood, including many small dogs – Algy Pug, Pong-Ping the Pekingese, and Bingo the Brainy Pup – were small-boyish, larky and inclined to bumble, while Tiger Lily, the Chinese Conjuror's dainty daughter, was draped in exotic lilac and turmeric, with a red flower always nestled in her glossily bobbed black hair. A delicate mixture of the mundane and the magical, the Rupert stories were simply told – four panels to the page, with a one-line summary at the top and a rhyming couplet below each panel in mallet-blow iambics, which made the stories' outcomes seem somehow hypnotic and inevitable. There was a fuller prose text, invariably in the present tense, at the bottom, but never any speech balloons or other integration of words with images – in fact, in many ways they weren't very comic-y at all. And no matter what peril Rupert and his pals strayed into, the gentle, authoritative faces of the elder animals (including PC Growler, yet another canine) and Mummy Bear's teatime unflappability created an unbreakable bubble of quiet reassurance around the reader. Charmed artefacts, scary twiggy people and malefactors might abound on every side, but Rupert, Bill Badger and Edward Trunk continue adventuring in Nutwood and beyond, serene, unscathed and ready for anything.
In my selfconscious, preteen, pupal stage, I moved away from Nutwood to Bunty and Mandy annuals, of which I retain a predominantly pink collective impression of breathless stories about ponies and Victorian orphans nursing wounded squirrels back to health. Bunty's "Luv, Lisa" photo-stories tended to regrettable 80s hair and anoraks, but at least their preoccupations were timeless: how to handle boys' attention or the lack thereof, how to be a good friend or sister, and – importantly – how not to make a fool of yourself along the way. But "Bunty – A Girl Like You" was irritating and bizarre, its hapless heroine always ending up aghast in disastrous and unlikely situations. (I always rather resented "A Girl Like You", as the Bunty of the early 90s was blonde, leggy and generally as unlike me as it was possible to be without being an animal or a boy.) My favourites were The Four Marys – Cotter, Radleigh, Simpson and Field, eponymous third formers united by a forename and their zeal for the common good. Their arch-enemies, Mabel and Veronica, had severe, short haircuts and were always trying to get Simpy booted out for being a scholarship girl, when they weren't sucking up to Raddy because she was an Earl's daughter (Mary Radleigh, another leggy blonde, was very gracious, the schoolgirl embodiment of noblesse oblige. I quite admired her.)
All my annuals, and the faint festive memories that hung about them, read for the first time on Christmas Day, have long since gone the way of the charity shop. But the enormous guilty enjoyment I recently found in reading a play-prop Mandy has reawakened the kraken. I may have to start tracking down old Ruperts for my daughter, or buying the latest facsimile annuals which feature reprints of older stories (carefully vetted for non-PC content). Bunty, Jackie and their ilk, alas, have long since bitten the dust, but the Beano and the Dandy, more resilient than their girly cousins, are still appearing in the newsagent's rack every week and as handsome Christmas thumpers every year. Which annuals would you be tempted by if you came across a cobwebby secondhand box? And can anyone remember the name of the Rupert story about the little blue-green magic sweet balls?

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