Your favourite stupid quote about comics?

[suebutcher]

Mine is from Frank Wells, who describes comics thus: "A strange literary form... where phrases, sentences, lines and paragraphs have given way to indiscriminate balloons, containing spattered globs of language that can, if it is worth doing at all, be read in any order." Obviously Wells was one of those people who detest comics because they don't know how to read them!

[ISPYSHHHGUY]

mines is:


MILLIONS OF PEOPLE READ THE BEANO


---Well, it was true in the 50s of course, and the comic still will be familiar to millions, but the sad fact is that much more people see lowly Channel 5 on a bad-ratings day.

[Lew Stringer]

mines is:


MILLIONS OF PEOPLE READ THE BEANO


---Well, it was true in the 50s of course, and the comic still will be familiar to millions, but the sad fact is that much more people see lowly Channel 5 on a bad-ratings day.

Who's that a quote from, Rab?

[matrix]

I guess not so much stupid but surprising, was someone saying "they were not allowed comics in their boarding school", now I cannot for the life of me remember where I read or heard that quote?

The reason that I say surprised is that some comics had boarding school stories in them? Also some comics were aimed at the middle class, 'Girl' comic being one that we have recently been discussinig under girls comics.

Did anyone on here go to boarding school, or know anyone that did, was that a one off school or common practice?

[ISPYSHHHGUY]

mines is:


MILLIONS OF PEOPLE READ THE BEANO


---Well, it was true in the 50s of course, and the comic still will be familiar to millions, but the sad fact is that much more people see lowly Channel 5 on a bad-ratings day.

Who's that a quote from, Rab?

I've met a few people in real life who have said the above---or something very similar------to me in all seriousness, Lew. A 'quote' I suppose, but maybe not in the sense that suebutcher intended.......

[felneymike]

Among various sweeping statements on a forum I later left in disgust were such gems as:

"Maybe if British comics weren't stuck in the 80's..." (no doubt referring to the fact the earliest issue of The Beano he has seen is one from the 80's, when in fact it's not significantly changed since the 60's. On the other hand, The Dandy, which had dramatic changes every few years recently, plummeted to it's death).

"The Victorian attitude that 'comics are just for kids'..." (She ran a club night that I went to once, not going again. She then spluttered something about her great-uncle not letting his children read comics. I doubt the great-uncle of somebody now in their twenties grew up before 1901)

On the phoenix: "Let's face it, two pages of story a week is pathetic" (This from a manga fan who simply assumes that just because the big-panelled, well-funded, art-created-with-several-assistants Japanese comic scene can manage 25-page weekly chapters, everybody should do it. In a later thread, however, she said that "once the working time directive has been repealed, we'll all be working 70 hour weeks anyway", neatly writing off the entire history of trade unionism and assuming one piece of EU legislation is the only thing keeping us from serfdom. I bet various comic artists in Britain, even those producing the 'pathetic' 2 pages a week, WISH they only worked 9-5 days anyway. That lot are utterly clueless)

[suebutcher]

That last one's a jaw-dropper, Mike. Two pages a week seems amazingly fast to me. I've never managed a page in less than a week.

[philcom55]

Fredric Wertham can always be relied on to say something spectacularly stupid about comics. This is one of my favourite quotes from 'Seduction of the Innocent' in which he lays into DC's Wonder Woman:

"...As to the 'advanced femininity,' what are the activities in comic books which women 'indulge in on an equal footing with men'? They do not work. They are not homemakers. They do not bring up a family. Mother-love is entirely absent. Even when Wonder Woman adopts a girl there are Lesbian overtones...In no other literature for children has the image of womanhood been so degraded."

...Somehow I can't help feeling that poor old Fred wouldn't have liked the 21st century very much!


Rather more surprising, however, is the author of this lurid attack on comics which appeared in Britain's Sunday Dispatch during February 1949:

"Horror has crept into the British nursery. Morals of little girls in plaits and boys with marbles bulging their pockets are being corrupted by a torrent of indecent coloured magazines that are flooding bookstalls and newsagents.

Have parents really bothered to study them – these weekly and fortnightly 'comics' that sons and daughters from seven to seventeen years old are devouring?

Not mere 'thrillers' as we used to know them, nor the once-familiar 'school stories'. These are evil and dangerous – graphic, coloured illustrations of modern city vice and crime. Any school child with a couple of pennies can buy them.

Latest crime figures in the Metropolitan Police area show a 33.7 per cent increase since 1938 in child criminals of nine years old – and nearly 40 per cent increase among children aged ten.

I blame much of this on their 'comics'. As soon as a child becomes old enough to read, he enters a new world of horror and vice, where there are no apparent morals and certainly no holds barred.

It sickens and frightens me. Even in the lisping little nursery comics for the tiny tots the cute little animals seem mostly to be bashing each other’s heads or stealing each other’s sweets and cakes..."

- Forget about the Crypt Keeper and the Old Witch: clearly the true corruptors of our Nation's morals during the '40s and '50s were Tom & Jerry!

...Oh, and the author of the astonishing diatribe shown above?

None other than the Reverend Marcus Morris - soon to become editor of Britain's new, 'super-colour weeklies' Eagle and Girl!

- Phil Rushton

[suebutcher]

"Not mere 'thrillers' as we used to know them, nor the once-familiar 'school stories'. These are evil and dangerous – graphic, coloured illustrations of modern city vice and crime."

That's a common theme with decency campaigners. "The old stories we loved and our parents hated were great, but this modern stuff is dangerous rubbish!"

[ISPYSHHHGUY]

Is that examples of your own characters in your avatar, Sue? Looks good!

[suebutcher]

No, it's Baxendale, a detail of "Doomsday School" from "Wham!"; Deidre The Weirdie at centre, Fred Feendish below, Young Nick's ear left, and an unnamed squelchy thing right.

[ISPYSHHHGUY]

Funny, I'm just reading GILES AT WAR right now---highly reccomended-----and your avatar cartoon wouldn't look out of place amongst the Giles creations.......

[felneymike]

That's a common theme with decency campaigners. "The old stories we loved and our parents hated were great, but this modern stuff is dangerous rubbish!"

Though today the even older stuff is also dangerous rubbish. The recent TV show about the British Empire featured a random page of Chums being opened, to the exclamation "look at all this racist propaganda", and then a close-up of a picture of a leering savage with a spear. Owning many years worth of Chums myself (as well as the less 'genteel' Boys Friend and Union Jack) I know for a fact it would actually have taken them a long time to find a picture like that, though the show implied such things were on every page.

Then more recently, some educationalist in Cambridge said that Britain's schools were still "stuck in the 19th century, inspired by stories such as Billy Bunter...". The same Billy Bunter whose stories ran from 1908 to 1940, then continued through the 1950's as books before ending up as a slapstick comedy strip into the 1980's? Very 19th century.

[Lew Stringer]

...Oh, and the author of the astonishing diatribe shown above?

None other than the Reverend Marcus Morris - soon to become editor of Britain's new, 'super-colour weeklies' Eagle and Girl!

- Phil Rushton

Yes, very convenient for him to spread fear and suspicion about other comics just before he launched his own.

As for Wertham, some of his claims have recently been exposed as exaggerations to put it mildly:

http://www.bleedingcool.com/2013/02/11/ ... ut-comics/

[felneymike]

"recently"? His claim that Batman and Robin were gay could have been disputed by reading any Batman ever