This new PlanetSlade book - my fifth - opens with the epic Andy Capp essay which once appeared here. I've kept it available as a free online piece for over ten years, but now I'm asking people to buy the book instead.
The essay is built round my appreciation of Reg Smythe, who created Andy for the Daily Mirror in 1957 and produced the strip single-handed there for over 40 years. Few people realise how much of his own troubled childhood Smythe poured into this work, basing Andy on his own wastrel father, Flo on his formidable mum and placing them firmly in the working class Hartlepool neighbourhood where he himself had grown up.
Far from being merely the exploits of a wife-beating drunk - as many people unfamiliar with the strip often assume - Andy Capp is the work of an absolute master cartoonist whose only true peer was Peanuts' Charles Schulz. It's true that Andy was the vilest kind of bully in the strip's early days, but Smythe quickly came to regret that approach, and was quick to move the couple's balance of power towards Flo. It was only when he'd made this change that the strip began its climb to such phenomenal success: a global readership of 250m people, a roomful of cartooning awards and a West End show. One 1973 piece in the Saturday Evening Post, called Smythe "the most popular English humorist with Americans since Charles Dickens".
Later in the book, I've added a selection of my other essays on comics and cartooning. These include a history of the recent legal battles fought over Superman and Spider-Man's ownership, a look at the extraordinary depth of research behind Tintin's adventures and details of an entertaining row between blues guitarist Johnny Winter and the writers of a DC cowboy comic. All these delights can now be yours in either paperback or e-book form for the price of a couple of drinks.
Head over to Amazon US or Amazon UK to buy your copy now!
