Who's Who in the CBU 2009

Name: Regie Rigby

Regie is a strange, almost ethereal creature. Who can plumb the hidden mysteries of his dark and murky past - a past which contains a terrible secret. A secret that taught him that with great power comes great responsibility, that criminals are a cowardly superstitious lot and just who exactly knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men.

By day, he assumes the appearance of a mild mannered teacher, bringing the joy of literature and the English Language to classes of enthralled and enthusiastic students. But by night?

By night he goes home and writes lesson plans. Sorry. That's as interesting as he gets. Really.

The rumours about rooftop struggles with underworld uberfiends, the gossip about the hidden cave filled with hi-tec equipment and the suggestion that his car might be fitted with turbo lasers are all nonsense.

When he's not teaching he reads comics. Sometimes he combines the two activities. When he's not doing that he's either playing computer games or asleep.

A Classic Excuse...

By Regie Rigby

There is no excuse for racism. This is a truth I hold to be so self-evident it scarcely needs to be uttered. Prejudice, intolerance or discrimination based on ethnicity is unacceptable, and although free speech may not be impinged the expression of racist views should be condemned and those who espouse such views should be shunned. This is not a negotiable position for me. I’ve read far too much history to view anything which might incite racial intolerance or hatred with anything other than contempt and concern.

So, if this is so self evident, why am I telling you? And what does this have to do with comics?

You might well ask.

Well, it’s like this. As regular readers will know, I didn’t read comics when I was growing up in the seventies and early eighties. Even if I had, there is no way in hell my new age pacifist pseudo hippie mother would have countenanced my reading war comics such as Victor and Battle. This is why I missed both Darkie’s Mob and Charlie’s War, strips which I heard old timers speak of in awed tones once I did begin my career in panelology in the late eighties, early nineties.

Until recently, this continued to be the case. Although there was a collected edition of Charley’s War a long time ago it has been out of print and impossible to obtain for many many years. So, these stories lived in my imagination, growing in significance to me as legends are wont to do. There seemed little hope that I would ever get to read these classics. The old British War comics are long gone, and the tales of gutsy British derring do during the Second World War would weem oddly out of place in these more enlightened times. In a world where Germany is one of our closest allies as part of an ever closer Europe repeated references to “Krauts” and plucky British Tommies machine gunning hordes of Germans with cries of “Take that Fritz” would be inappropriate and unacceptable. Reading such stories now would make me uncomfortable at the very least – maybe even angry, and quite right too.

These are stories which belong in the past with the attitudes that spawned them. Although they purport to tell of a time when Britain was very much at her best, standing alone against a tide of fascism that had gripped a continent (which between 1940 and 1942 was pretty much the case) they are reflective of attitudes which display my country at her worst. Britain in the seventies could be a deeply insular and intolerant place, where guest houses were able to display “No Coloured Please” signs in their windows and the first non-white family to move into an area were regarded as the “thin end of the wedge”.

So, the legendary or not, it seemed unlikely that Darkie’s Mob and Charlie’s War would be reprinted because there was no natural home for them. At least there wasn’t until 2000AD’s sister publication Judge Dredd the Megazine began to reprint classic British strips under the banner 2000AD Gold. ‘Tooth is all that remains of the “Boy’s Comics” tradition to which comics like Battle and Victor both belonged and if the Meg was doing reprints, well, suddenly there was always the possibility that I’d finally get to read about Darkie’s Mob and Charley’s War.

Sure enough, Darkie’s Mob is currently running in the Megazine and I found out today that Charley’s War isn’t going to be too far behind. Whoopee, you might say.

Except no sooner had Darkie made his appearance Rebellion, the Computer Game company and publisher of 2000AD began to get complaints. Many readers felt that the material was racist, and as such should not be repeated, however fondly it features in the memories of the thirty something’s who grew up with it in the dark days of the seventies.

The charge against Darkie’s Mob centres on the way the strip portrays the Japanese. The story is set in the jungles of Burma in the Second World War (a backdrop familiar to any British bloke my age as the setting for the BBC comedy It ain’t arf hot Mum…) where a ragged band of mis matched British servicemen are rallied and honed into a fighting force by a mysterious, slightly crazy but charismatic Darkie. As the motley members of the Mob are picked off one by one the mis-matched crew operate behind enemy lines wreaking havoc.

It’s all good solid war story stuff. The story pulls no punches regarding the horrors of war. Central characters die in almost every installment, often in pain. As readers we see the suffering of the civilian population and even begin to appreciate the utter hopelessness and despair of the soldiers themselves.

But the Japanese soldiers features in the stories are the most Blatent stereotypes, both in terms the their actions, their dialogue and their physical appearance. There are no sympathetic Japanese characters – most existing only to die in a hail of bullets or as victims of an ingenious ambush. As a rule they tend to be shown as either sub human cannon fodder or sadistic megalomaniacs. Were I Japanese I’d be offended. On this level at the very least there can be little argument that Darkie’s Mob is a racist story.

And yet, and yet…

It is a bloody good story. Well written, well plotted, gripping and honest. You find that you care about the members of the mob, you cheer their victories and weep at their defeats. For all the exaggerated slanting of the eyes and “Vely wel, Dahkee” dialogue the Japanese characters seem to me to be designed to provide the amoral Darkie with an opponent less noble than he is. They don’t appear to have been created to incite hatred against the Japanese nation or its culture and people.

Which of course begs the question, “so, if all the Japanese characters are merely ciphers why make them Japanese?” To which the answer is of course – “Because that’s who the British were fighting in Burma!” In fact, the accusation of racism is surely inevitable when a victorious nation tells stories of wars it fought. Racism is the result of intolerance and hatred, both of which are to be found in abundance in war. If you want to tell a realistic story about war then you have to include those elements.

The only way around it is to take the 2000AD approach and set all your wars in the future with fictional enemies to avoid causing offence. In the early days the strip Invasion featured a Soviet invasion of Britain, except they called the Soviets Volgons. Later the Volgs reappeared as the bad guys in the even more futuristic war story The ABC Warriors. More recently still the spirit of Darkie’s Mob was revisited when 2000AD took us on a trip to the war torn planet of Ararat where the mysterious, slightly crazy but charismatic Kano led a ragged group of misfits against the sadistic alien empire of The Krool.

In all the cases the enemies were exactly like the Japanese portrayed in Darkie’s Mob – but with no a whiff of racism or ethnic stereotype. This would seem to me the way to go if war stories are to continue to be told.

But Darkie’s mob exists. It is an important plank in the development of British Comics, and the career of one John Wagner, whi went on to write Judge Dredd and a whole host of other strips in 2000AD and elsewhere just as Pat Mills, who penned Charlie's War – would later go on to write the ABC Warriors, Slaine, Third World War, Nemesis the Warlock and all manner of other good things. Should the use of what we would now regard as racist imagery preclude a new audience from reading it? After all, such sentiments and images were perfectly acceptable at the time of original printing – should we even be allowed to deny that once our nation thought in that way?

We don’t ban Wagner’s operas because they contain anti Semitic imagery and Hitler liked them. Even Israel, a country with fairly obvious reasons for taking a robust view on anti-Semitism has had performances of Wagner. Should art not transcend politics in the end? Although Wagner isn’t my cup of tea (I’m a Mozart man) the fact remains that his opera’s survive because of the power of their music and their stories. Can the power of the story behind Darkie’s mob over ride the objections to it on the grounds of racism?

The honest answer is I don’t know. My instinct as a citizen and a teacher is to stamp on racism in all its forms. But my instinct as a lover of story and advocate of freedom of expression is to accept Darkie, flaws and all.

The boards are open. Does being a classic get Darkie’s Mob off the hook? Is this a simple issue of zero tolerance for racism or a complex one about culture, and history and freedom of expression? Is my discomfort with this evidence of political correctness gone mad, or does my enjoyment of the story indicate latent racist attitude in my own psyke? I’m interested in what you think, because I’m not sure what I think.

But, in the spirit of the above: