The Turkey Has Landed
Talk About The Passion have launched this week’s theme of comics with a poll of the greatest British comics. The piece is jolly good fun but manages to omit the first relaunch of The Eagle in 1982. From page 48 of City Limits, 26th March to 1st of April 1982:
THE TURKEY HAS LANDED
In the 1950s the Eagle was the boys’ comic. NIGEL FOUNTAIN ruminates on its re-launch.
Born in 1950, under the editorship of the Reverend Marcus Morris, the Eagle boomed in that decade, slumped in the 1960s, and folded in 1969.
A quarter of a century ago the Eagle had class (lower middle, with middle middle tendencies). It had patriotism, with backpage bios on Alfred The Great, Winston Churchill, St Paul (he was more or less Englishanyway). In Dan Dare it had the perfect World War II Biggles figure, transmuted into space hero, with The Mekon as Napoleon, Hitler, Mao (?) rolled into one. Erudition was provided by ‘Special Investigator’ McDonald Hastings (unusually located in the Kalahari surrounded by pygmies), interesting facts, and cut-away plans of ships, flying boats and new (steam) locomotives…
It was a comic with everything that was decent, white and British in it. It was great. And, looking back, it stinks. Full of the myopia and hypocrisy of an era when the war was won, the economy was expanding, and would always expand. An era when one would grow up to buy an Austin Cambridge or a Morris Oxford - the transnational Ruritania of Cortinas and Marinas was a far country then - and marry Muriel Pavlow or Sylvia Sims.
The new Eagle was unveiled at a press launch last week at the Waldorf Hotel. It features ‘Doomlord’ (bringer of death) taking over the physical form of PC Bob Murton of the Cambridge force. Doomlord looks surprisingly like Manchester police chief James Anderton, only thinner. The sneaky thuggishness of ‘Sgt Streetwise’ steps into the void left by PC49 and there are more damn footballers. In the 1950s people went to football, now they read about it, or watch it on TV.
The Mekon is there to provide continuity. I wish he wasn’t. It’s like having Laurence Olivier on ‘Sale of the Century’.
While the Eagle launch featured a pleasing statue of the aging superstar, all it did was underline the difference 30 years make. Around the walls of the Waldorf Hotel suite ‘Missile Command’ video games whistled and crashed. A display of plastic models was topped by Yamaha and Kawasaki replicas; Spitfire and Hurricane kits made it on to the stand (made in France).
Then they doled out the product. Crashing through a screen came Big Daddy, a popular wrestler, dispensing Eagles from atop a Kenning Car Hire mini-van. His arrival was accompanied by a gramaphone rendition of ‘Big Daddy Is Our Leader We Shall Not Be Moved’.
The Reverend Morris wasn’t there. He has something to do with Cosmo these days, I understand.
‘So you were brave enough to come to the Waldorf!’ proclaims The Mekon in the press hand-out. ‘Since I last appeared, you have undoubtedly become less timid.’
I don’t know about that.
(Nigel Fountain is 97. Ed.)