The head boys
When I was younger, there was a comic book magazine "Agent X-9" which consisted of reprints of such newspaper comic strips as "Modesty Blaise", "Secret Agent Corrigan"
and "Garth". The last strip doesn't even have its own Wikipedia page,
which in my books is being close to nonexistence. Maybe I just imagined
the whole strip. There was often also a British comic about a man and
woman agent who were looking for people who had vanished (and female
characters often lost their clothes in these comics, even though the
comics wasn't meant to be comical), but I really can't tell what the
original name of this strip would have been. Something like "Seekers"
or "Searchers", perhaps?
"Garth" is a British superhero / action comic whose origins were in the forties. Initially the character and the overall style of the strip bore a strong resemblance to Brick Bradford, based on the little that I remember of that strip from when I was a kid. (For some reason, that name was nowhere as funny back then as it is now: wouldn't that guy be a character in Hairspray or something?) The muscular title character Garth is the world's strongest man, and he is supported by Professor Lumiere, who is the smartest man in the world and can thus always guide Garth to right direction that the plot requires. But Garth isn't a dumb jock either but shows good character and solves problems in a clever fashion. The early stories featured time travel, interplanetary travel and parallel dimensions, such as Garth travelling back to pre-revolutionary Russia or to a parallel dimension where Hitler had won the war. But there was at least one non-supernatural mystery story where Garth and Lumiere solved who was blackmailing and murdering rich American industrialists one by one. Along the way, the befriend a gangster who helps them with his crew simply because he is angry for not getting his cut of the blackmail money.
In later decades, Garth were written and drawn in a more modern style and had more action and sex. Now that I think about these strips, they were full of humour which was perhaps largely unintentional, such as Garth wearing a shirt that had the text "Garth" in it. I remember one particular story quite vividly, since it is about a thousand times funnier now than it was when I was a teenager and could not appreciate the subtle humour and social commentary to the same extent as I can now.
At the beginning of this story, Garth was kidnapped by a bunch of hot space amazons and taken to their home planet. They explained him that the men in their planet had become so wussy and weak that the women no longer found them desirable, so they had to find and bring in a real man such as Garth to serve as their breeding bull. When Garth tried to escape, he was immediately stopped by a crowd of horny beautiful women (for some reason, I don't think that there was one ugly woman in the whole planet, now that I think of it) who were ecstatic to finally see "a real man" and ran towards him in an attempt to have sex with him. Garth did eventually manage to escape this civilization of women, taking with him the wussy husband of the leader of women. They escaped to the jungle where they encountered a group of strong and masculine primitive warriors who first tried to kill and eat them, but Garth used his massive strength to win them over.
After Garth, the wussy husband and one of the primitive warrior men had travelled for a day, Garth noticed that the primitive man was chewing on a plant and asked him what it was. The primitive explained that this particular plant gives them strength and energy when they are tired. Garth got a great idea and gathered as much of that plant as he could. He then returned to civilization and asked the ruling women there not to execute him, but to mix the extract of this plant to the drinking water of the city, and then just sit and wait for a few days. After a few panels, it is morning and the leader of women is bossing around her husband and giving him instructions of what to do that day. The husband, who is now looking a lot more virile and muscular, suddenly grabs his wife and carries her to the bedroom over his shoulder. The confused woman asks what is going on, but the husband tells her to shut up and says that she'll see. In the next postcoital panel, the husband tells the satisfied woman that he is now hungry, so she should go to the kitchen and cook up some food, and she cooingly obeys this order.
In the conclusion, a crowd of men and women cheer with their fists in the air when it is announced that women of the planet will give up their leadership and men will return to their natural role and leadership position. Since Garth is no longer needed to satisfy the women who again have real men in their lives, he gets to return to Earth, and the story has a happy end.
The site "An Overview of the History of British Comics" has another comic that I had already forgotten but remembered liking a lot. "Billy Binns" was a weakling schoolboy who was the biggest nerd and top student at the boarding school, but whenever he put on his pair of magic glasses, he became superior in every possible sport. For added drama and humour, Billy himself didn't know that the glasses had this effect, but whenever he lost them, he tried to find them and put them back on since he was practically blind without them, so it always worked out just right. The storylines (which I guess were somewhat predictable in retrospect, but this was a kids' comic) mainly consisted of Billy ending up in a position of responsibility as a sports team captain or for some other reason needing to win some athletic competition, accidentally losing his glasses and then getting them back and using them in the last moment to win the day. I wonder if this is what they mean when they say that the battles that Britons fought in were won in the playing fields of Eton.
Inside the school Billy also had a friend, a boy from the colonies, and since he was from India, he naturally had strange fakir powers of hypnotism that enabled him to make other people obey his orders. This skill depended on maintaining the direct eyesight, if I recall correctly, and it was often put to good use in making the goofy principal forget what he had seen and to hoist the upperclassman bullies on their own petard.
"Garth" is a British superhero / action comic whose origins were in the forties. Initially the character and the overall style of the strip bore a strong resemblance to Brick Bradford, based on the little that I remember of that strip from when I was a kid. (For some reason, that name was nowhere as funny back then as it is now: wouldn't that guy be a character in Hairspray or something?) The muscular title character Garth is the world's strongest man, and he is supported by Professor Lumiere, who is the smartest man in the world and can thus always guide Garth to right direction that the plot requires. But Garth isn't a dumb jock either but shows good character and solves problems in a clever fashion. The early stories featured time travel, interplanetary travel and parallel dimensions, such as Garth travelling back to pre-revolutionary Russia or to a parallel dimension where Hitler had won the war. But there was at least one non-supernatural mystery story where Garth and Lumiere solved who was blackmailing and murdering rich American industrialists one by one. Along the way, the befriend a gangster who helps them with his crew simply because he is angry for not getting his cut of the blackmail money.
In later decades, Garth were written and drawn in a more modern style and had more action and sex. Now that I think about these strips, they were full of humour which was perhaps largely unintentional, such as Garth wearing a shirt that had the text "Garth" in it. I remember one particular story quite vividly, since it is about a thousand times funnier now than it was when I was a teenager and could not appreciate the subtle humour and social commentary to the same extent as I can now.
At the beginning of this story, Garth was kidnapped by a bunch of hot space amazons and taken to their home planet. They explained him that the men in their planet had become so wussy and weak that the women no longer found them desirable, so they had to find and bring in a real man such as Garth to serve as their breeding bull. When Garth tried to escape, he was immediately stopped by a crowd of horny beautiful women (for some reason, I don't think that there was one ugly woman in the whole planet, now that I think of it) who were ecstatic to finally see "a real man" and ran towards him in an attempt to have sex with him. Garth did eventually manage to escape this civilization of women, taking with him the wussy husband of the leader of women. They escaped to the jungle where they encountered a group of strong and masculine primitive warriors who first tried to kill and eat them, but Garth used his massive strength to win them over.
After Garth, the wussy husband and one of the primitive warrior men had travelled for a day, Garth noticed that the primitive man was chewing on a plant and asked him what it was. The primitive explained that this particular plant gives them strength and energy when they are tired. Garth got a great idea and gathered as much of that plant as he could. He then returned to civilization and asked the ruling women there not to execute him, but to mix the extract of this plant to the drinking water of the city, and then just sit and wait for a few days. After a few panels, it is morning and the leader of women is bossing around her husband and giving him instructions of what to do that day. The husband, who is now looking a lot more virile and muscular, suddenly grabs his wife and carries her to the bedroom over his shoulder. The confused woman asks what is going on, but the husband tells her to shut up and says that she'll see. In the next postcoital panel, the husband tells the satisfied woman that he is now hungry, so she should go to the kitchen and cook up some food, and she cooingly obeys this order.
In the conclusion, a crowd of men and women cheer with their fists in the air when it is announced that women of the planet will give up their leadership and men will return to their natural role and leadership position. Since Garth is no longer needed to satisfy the women who again have real men in their lives, he gets to return to Earth, and the story has a happy end.
The site "An Overview of the History of British Comics" has another comic that I had already forgotten but remembered liking a lot. "Billy Binns" was a weakling schoolboy who was the biggest nerd and top student at the boarding school, but whenever he put on his pair of magic glasses, he became superior in every possible sport. For added drama and humour, Billy himself didn't know that the glasses had this effect, but whenever he lost them, he tried to find them and put them back on since he was practically blind without them, so it always worked out just right. The storylines (which I guess were somewhat predictable in retrospect, but this was a kids' comic) mainly consisted of Billy ending up in a position of responsibility as a sports team captain or for some other reason needing to win some athletic competition, accidentally losing his glasses and then getting them back and using them in the last moment to win the day. I wonder if this is what they mean when they say that the battles that Britons fought in were won in the playing fields of Eton.
Inside the school Billy also had a friend, a boy from the colonies, and since he was from India, he naturally had strange fakir powers of hypnotism that enabled him to make other people obey his orders. This skill depended on maintaining the direct eyesight, if I recall correctly, and it was often put to good use in making the goofy principal forget what he had seen and to hoist the upperclassman bullies on their own petard.
Comments