From: ntaib@silver.ucs.indiana.edu (Iskandar Taib)
Subject: Re: Austers, Biggles & Brit War Comics
Organization: Indiana University
Date: Fri, 20 Nov 1992 23:05:10 GMT


OK folks.. I'm serious about this lending library thing. Anyone in 
Britain live close to a used books store and willing to act as a con-
duit for Biggles books and War Comics? One can't get these in the 
States.

This was posted on sci.military.


In article <Bxx2KL.Ix@law7.DaytonOH.NCR.COM| ntaib@silver.ucs.indiana.edu (Iskandar Taib) writes:
|
|From ntaib@silver.ucs.indiana.edu (Iskandar Taib)
|
|In article <BxM68G.5LF@law7.DaytonOH.NCR.COM| MR KR COMAN <bakc@giraffe.ru.ac.za| writes:
||In article <BxGrH2.6K9@law7.DaytonOH.NCR.COM| ntaib@silver.ucs.indiana.edu (Iskandar Taib) writes:
|
|||I remember the Auster as being Biggles' favorite airplane (anyone read 
|||Biggles anymore?
|
||Also Percival Proctors, plus the odd Mosquito, Sunderland, Lancaster, etc.  
||If you go back to the really early stuff that came out in the inter-war 
||years, Bigglesworth and his stalwart comrades 'danced the skies' and did 
||right in Sopwith Camels.   
|
|Oh.. and I forgot to mention the Otter (not the twin, I think..)
|
|I've found some of his WWI books. I particularly remember the one 
|where Algy turned up and his goldfish got flattened by a pair of 
|German boots dropped out of an airplane. Interesting indeed.. don't
|know how much of it is true-to-life but you did find out that Flak
|was called Archie and Sopwith Camels turned tighter one way than the
|other and spewed castor oil everywhere.
|
|For those not in the know..Bigglesworth (what the HECK was his first 
|name? Everyone just called him "Biggles") was born in  Imperial India 
|in the waning years of the 19th Century. I suppose he was sent to 
|England to attend Public School, and in the First World War he flew 
|a Sopwith Camel in the RFC. Between the wars he and his companions 
|had adventures in various exotic locations such as a Radium-bearing 
|mountain in China (thwarting a death-ray plot) and Brazil (finding 
|an ancient Inca city in the Andes), Central Europe (organizing a 
|small country's air force) and the Sahara (some ancient Tuareg chief-
|tain's tomb). During the Second World War he flew Spitfires (or course). 
|I haven't found any Battle of Britain accounts but I remember various 
|adventures in the Western Desert, the South China Sea and in Burma. 
|After the war he joined the "Special Air Police" and flew Austers and
|Otters around the world thwarting the bad guys, including drug smug-
|glers, gun runners and Soviet spies, including his nemesis, Erich 
|von Stalhein, who he eventually rescues from a Soviet prison camp on 
|Sakhalin. 
|
|His comrades were his cousin Algernon Lacey (Algy), who joined his 
|squadron during WWI, "Ginger" Hepplewaite, who he met between the wars,
|and "Bertie" (whose real name I can't remember). These three were with
|him in the Special Air Police.
|
|I think the American equivalent were the pulp book heroes of the '30s,
|Phineas Pinkham and G8. I haven't been able to find any of these.
|
||Oh what memories!  I grew up with this valiant gentleman of the air.  A 
||couple of months back I found a 2nd hand bookshop with a whole shelf of 1950'
||s-era Biggles adventures -- bought a whole armful for my little guy.
||Happy news is that I heard that many of the Biggles stories have recently 
||been re-released -- presumably suitably "sanitised" to suit the 
||sensibilities of 1990's moral guardians. 
|
|Hmmm hopefully they weren't too zealous at 80's-fying the books. The 
|Hardy Boys series was 80's-fied and I cringe at the thought. Apparently
|they have them driving Corvettes and taking greater liberties with the
|opposite sex (just kidding... 9-) ).
|
|Makes me wonder what planes they'd have him flying if he was still 
|having adventures in the 80s (despite being close to 90 years old!).. 
|
|||I'd heard he'd been banned in Australian school libraries 
|
||I wonder why??  (Rhetorical question!)
|
|Heh.. I came across this in a newspaper article ca. 1978 or so.. appa-
|rently he was accused of being bigoted and unrealistic (i.e. not interes-
|ted in women). 
|
|A letter to the editor that came out a week or so later protested that
|he was "so busy battling Huns, Japs and Chinks that he didn't have any
|time to be bigoted". At least to me he didn't come across as being ra-
|cist.. he was fair with his adversaries and treated them as people.
|
|
||| Similarly, are 
|||those British war comics still being printed much these days?)
|
||Are they ever!  "Battle Comics" are still very much around. Plus I notice
||that many of the famous UK comic "annuals" continue to feature WW1 and WW2
||comic strip-features.   When I was a kid this was great stuff and motivated
||a life-long interest by prompting me to ask questions of relatives who were
||there.  Back in circa 1960 you could still meet up with chaps who fought in 
||WW1, and WW2 vets and storytellers were just about everyone over age 30.  
|
||This sets me to wondering just what sense this folklore now makes to the 
||average 10 year old living in Bradford whose parents weren't even alive 
||within a decade of 1945....it's probably right up there with extra-
||terrestrial science fiction: fun but unreal.  (Even the comic strip artists
||themselves are probably post-war baby boomers!!)
|
|What I'd noticed (in the early to late 70s, when I was the right age) was
|that they had a number of comics that got re-released every few years. I 
|suppose many of these might have been written back in the 50s.
|
|These days I read them and notice quote a few things - the stereotyping 
|of Americans, for instance, or even better, Scots, who are mostly named
|"Jock" 9-). The artwork is pretty good, but I like to read them mostly
|for the stories. They aren't simple, shoot-em-up kill-em-off episodes,
|but can be rather moving. The one that sticks in my mind was called "Check-
|point" - an American newsreel cameraman caught in Belgium in 1939 causes
|a massacre when he meddles too much in the war and gives false orders 
|for a battalion of Highlanders (still wearing kilts from a parade they 
|were having earlier) to attack just so that he could get some footage.
|He feels really disgusted with himself and gives up the camera trade to 
|go to war flying B-17s.
|
||BTW, on the basis of a *limited* periodic content analysis of said comics 
||they do seem to have moved with the times -- the "traditional" phraseology 
||of the heros when referring to (esp) Japanese oppos has been toned down; and 
||now and again they feature a "good" German/Italian (i.e. a dude with 
||moral principles).  There was even one I saw that featured some good Germans
||who resented the presence of a thoroughgoing Nazi in their unit: the latter 
||got his comeuppance ultimately and in the interim hosts of Russians were 
||dispatched!
|
|Actually, I do remember seeing several  comics with such material in them - 
|the noble German usually. One I remember was about a certain Major Kruger 
|who was ordered to blow up a bridge in Russia during the German retreat. 
|Problem was, by doing so he was trapping his division with all his friends 
|and comrades with whom he had spent the war on the other side. He chose to 
|remain on the far side with his division rather than on the side which would 
|have meant a continued existence and return to his wife and children.
|
|
||Gotta run, the latest war comics have just arrived!!!!!
||Cheers,
||Keith Coman
|
|Ah! Hmmm - thats what I ought to do..
|
|Get someone in England to buy $20-30 worth of used comics and ship them 
|to me! Any volunteers? Send me mail, I'll send you money. Perhaps I can 
|start a lending library of the things  9-)
|
|
|
|-- 
|-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|Iskandar Taib                          | The only thing worse than Peach ala
|Internet: NTAIB@SILVER.UCS.INDIANA.EDU |    Frog is Frog ala Peach
|Bitnet:   NTAIB@IUBACS                 !
|


-- 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Iskandar Taib                          | The only thing worse than Peach ala
Internet: NTAIB@SILVER.UCS.INDIANA.EDU |    Frog is Frog ala Peach
Bitnet:   NTAIB@IUBACS                 !
Newsgroups: soc.culture.british