Scrunge and Un-Scrunge
Though it's hard to know whether the memories generated by Paul Gravett's Great British Comics are anything other than fantasies conjured up by The Numskulls inside my own head, I'm still enjoying them.
One story whose outrageous brilliance I have been vividly reminded of is "Faceache" – drawn (with flamboyant gusto) by the mighty Ken Reid. For those who need their flaccid comic-remembering muscles exercised, Faceache was a boy with a "bendable bonce" who could (as he put it himself) "re-shuttle me atoms and distort meself".
If you're still scratching your own bonce…what that all meant was that he could contort his features (and occasionally his entire body) into all manner of monstrous shapes. Like a tubby, pre-teen Lon Chaney he was the "Boy of a Hundred (or often 'Thousand') Faces", terrifying all and sundry with his ever more elaborate "scrunges". Yes, that’s right…scrunges:
‘Tis well I remember the satisfaction and pleasure that word provided me. "Scrunge": a more perfect marriage of the visual and the verbal it's hard to imagine. Faceache could both scrunge (verb) and un-scrunge (er…verb), but frequently used the word as a noun too – as in "I think I'll do a mini-scrunge".
When I was but a young fella (in striped jumper and short trousers) I harboured vague ambitions of being a cartoonist myself, and it was to the work of Ken Reid (though his name was unknown to me at the time) that I turned to for inspiration. By that I mean I copied it – repeatedly. For manic, demented energy, Ken's grotesqueries were hard to beat – conjuring up wildly OTT worlds of mortarboards, canes, and everyday acts of sadism (long before The League of Gentlemen staked out similarly perverse "English" ground).
No less a figure than the Dark Lord Alan Moore had this to say:
More than just a great comic creator, Ken Reid was a great English fantasist, with a drawing style as accomplished as that of a Carl Barks or a Wally Wood. Reid created a fantasy world in his comic strips that had its own unique asylum atmosphere, where hilarity was dragged out to the point of gibbering dementia and the humour flirted shamelessly with the disturbing and the repulsive. In all the rich history of British children's comics I can think of few artists who can equal Reid in their technical skill, and none who match him for sheer inventiveness or originality of vision. British comics have lost one of their greatest and most seriously overlooked craftsmen. I regret never having penned this tribute while he was alive to read it.
Speaking of Mr. Moore, I believe his daughter Leah has resuscitated Faceache (at least as a cameo) in the intriguing Albion (a copy of which I have yet to see). As to whether or not the immortal word "scrunge" lives on…we can but hope.
P.S: Peter Gray has reminded me that Ken Reid also illustrated a Numskulls-esque story called "The Nervs": "blue-collar microbes working in the factory-condition innards of obese kid Fatty"1. Delightfully disgusting it is/was too.
December 12, 2006
4 responses to Scrunge and Un-Scrunge
While you’re on the subject of comics, it might be worth looking at the unbelievably secretive and sinister DC Thompson company.
from today’s Duardian:
Why Captain America had to Die
‘scuse the typo,
that should read Guarniad
I actually received news of it (Cap America’s death) via Sinéad Gleeson’s blog. The Guardian piece is merely playing catch up with the increased politicisation of mainstream comics in recent years. Anyone who’s read The Ultimates will know how well the Cap can (could) be used as a “Man out of time who just doesn’t understand what America has become” character.