SPARKY PEOPLE

After rummaging through the old box of comics which I found mouldering on a shelf the other week, I think that I can safely announce the the oldest comic I possess is issue 354 of the “Sparky” comic dated October 30^th 1971.

I read the “Sparky” for years and later on it would start doing rather impressive television parodies on its cover, which, as I was a bit of a budding ‘tellyphile’ at that age, probably has an awful lot to answer for. Years later, it would be ‘incorporated’ (or perhaps ‘absorbed’ is a better word…?) into another comic called “Topper” which is a thing that, rather disappointingly, happened rather a lot to the comics I used to read as a boy.

It’s rather difficult to tell from the rather lame gag on that particular cover (featuring the soon-to-be decommissioned “Barney Bulldog”) what a truly brilliant read that the “Sparky” was. Its letters page was brimming jokes and whimsy, and with the most creative notions about “Nirdles”, odd creatures that sprang from the imaginations of it’s readers. I remember a schoolfriend had his drawing of an “Illuminirdle” (based on a lightbulb) actually published on the letters page, which seemed like the height of achievement in those days…

But what set the “Sparky” apart from the other, more average, run-of-the-mill publications was the sheer genius of the subversive masterpiece and “work of art” that was its comic strip called “We Are The Sparky People”.

This was set in a (presumably) fictionalised version of the offices of the people who actually were publishing the very comic you were reading, which was so extremely “metatextual” and “post-modern” before the world had even had chance to become “modern” in the first place, that it truly beggars belief.

The weekly misadventures of Throgmorton. his mysterious typist of a non-girlfriend, Minnie the tea lady, Dick the office boy, the artist , the printer, the strange pie-eating writer and not forgetting the office cat predated the sitcom “The Office” by decades and was truly a high point of the comic, and simultaneously prepared we dear readers for our own future “office life” far before we could have even imagined such a thing…

One of the most brilliant conceits was the “heard but never seen” thundering-voiced entity known as “Sir” who existed in an inner office somewhere beyond where the real “work” was done. Only ever represented by capital letters drawn in RED CAPS, and the occasional glimpse of a hand or boot, “Sir” represented the great unseen off-screen “controlling voice” who had the power to strike fear into all of his underlings who heard his booming voice resonating around the workplace.

This led inevitably to another phenomenon of the letters page, the ongoing series of “Sir-Pics” in which various readers would send in their images of what they imagined the enigmatic and mysterious “Sir” looked like and which inspired children from all parts of the country for many, many years. Modesty forbids that I should draw your attention to the “Sir-Pics” as printed in issues 582 and 599 in 1976, by the way.

Ahem!