A FOOTBALLING FACT

This is my rather battered old copy of Marvel UK’s “STAR WARS WEEKLY” comic issue number 50 published in the days when “The Empire” hadn’t even got around to “Striking Back” yet. Inside there’s a short article about the fact that they were in the process of filming that, of course, alongside all of the usual comic strips that nowadays probably get ignored by the dyed-in-the-wool fans as simply not being “canon” or somesuch…

“Be nice to him Luke, he might be somebody’s father…!”

Anyway, I’m not here today to burble on about “Star Wars” - after all, there are plenty of places you can go on the jolly old internet if you want to look for that kind of thing.

No, my eye was drawn to the advertisement on the back cover of that particular edition which was one of a series being run by the late, lamented “Smiths Crisps” back in those days.

My sister worked for “Smiths Crisps” for a while, back in the day, which meant that, for one blissful year, we had boxes upon boxes of the things stacked all over the kitchen of the house I grew up in. Employees got given a box of 48 packets every week to take home with them, you see…?

Well, at least that’s what my sister said happened anyway, although I do notice that “Smiths Crisps” no longer seems to exist all that much as a brand name any more, so maybe there were shenanigans afoot…?

Who knows…?

Anyway, even we couldn’t pile our way through that amount of crisps every week and so there started to be a bit of a backlog and I got to take lots of crisps to school in my packed lunch, something that would no doubt be “frowned upon” by the modern day “lunch inspection” culture in modern schools.

Meanwhile, back to the back of my comic. This advert was “Number 6” of the run of the “Football Crazy Fascinating Facts File” sequence that they were running and I always remembered it because it mentioned my local team, Stockport County…

Well, I say “my” local team, but only in the sense that they happened to play in the town I grew up in, but nevertheless, the “Fascinating Fact” that they were involved in the game which had the lowest ever crowd for a league game must have sunk in because for many years afterwards it was the only “Football Fact” that I actually knew…

Thirteen people.

May the 7th, 1921.

They were playing Leicester City.

I always liked Paul Sample’s drawings, too.

For what it’s worth, he also used to draw the covers of the Tom Sharpe novels that I started reading at about that time, so there’s a distinct possibility that he was something of an “influence” upon my own inept daubings.

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!