Turner - Boys will be boys: the story of Sweeney Todd, Deadwood Dick, Sexton Blake, Billy Bunter, Dick Barton et al

BoysWillBeBoys was first published in 1948, when the juvenile idol of the day was the BBCs Dick Barton. It was revised and extended in 1957, after the Parliamentary battle over horror comics. By that time the picture-strip was well on the way to ousting the printed story. The theory was (and is) that youth reared on television are capable of assimilating print only if it is accompanied and sustained by pictures.

In the space of a generation the cry has changed from Yaroooh! to Aaaaargh! The boys of Greyfriars are not entirely lost to the bookstalls, but they appear in handsome facsimile volumes of the Magnet tailored for the nostalgia trade. Frank Richards, otherwise Charles Hamilton, creator of Billy Bunter and Harry Wharton and Co., died on Christmas Eve, 1961, in his eighty-sixth year. A biography of this Grand Old Man, whose early life remains something of an enigma, is being written by a relative. He may be the first man to have achieved an entry in WhosWho under an alias. His white-haired admirers still meet to discuss and analyse his writings.

The BoysOwnPaper died in 1967. It had long fought the good clean fight, but if its fans ever met for readings from the works of Talbot Baines Reed they kept their sessions secret.

Sexton Blake, when this book was last revised, had just shaken off sixty years asceticism and had introduced provocative young women into his entourage. Older readers dared not think what changes might follow the dissolution of the Baker Street monastery. Their worst apprehensions were unfounded. It was a shock when, in 1963, the old SextonBlakeLibrary came to an end, with Blake apparently retired to a foreign strand; but soon afterwards he escaped into hard covers (see Chapter VIII). He was a tougher and worldlier man than the middle-aged moralizer who fell from a balloon into the English Channel in the Marvel of 1893.

Even more hard-nosed and worldly is Nick Carter, the American investigator who will soon be a centenarian. Like Blake he has moved up market. Instead of having his own weekly he has his paperback series. A recent chronicler attributes to him a face that might have belonged to a Renaissance princeling, a sensual mouth and, like Blake, a quizzical eyebrow. We are invited to admire his sexual prowess.

The name Marvel is now worn by a group of comics, American in origin but English in imprint, whose ultra-fantastic characters are compounded of ice, fire, smoke, rubber, sand and builders rubble. They are touched on in the last chapter.

The Dundee boys papers battle on, as predictably unpredictable as ever. It is rare for a paper to be merged with another and then fight its way free again, as the Wizard did. In a recent issue it carried a picture-strip feature based on R. M. Ballantynes Coral Island, as if to show that nothing is too old-fashioned for the jet age. The beefed-up hearties of this group still fight the world wars over again, not to mention earlier imperial wars. Every now and then a Member of Parliament is shocked to find that these papers carry recruiting advertisements for the armed forces. The Dundee publishers declined wisely, one feels to lend any material or encouragement to a celebration of comics organized in 1970 by the Institute of Contemporary Arts. It was entitled, inevitably , Aaaaargh! The SundayTimesMagazine of 29 July 1973 published two alarming, full-page, grainy, dark blue photographs of the mystery men behind the Wizard and Beano; the cover showed a third mystery man pacing through a graveyard. It is hard to believe that such sombre, even sinister-looking, men have been guilty of providing so much innocent enjoyment.

This edition has been revised and brought up to date where necessary, but the list of births, marriages and deaths among boys papers in recent years is so long that no attempt has been made to log them all.