While her female schoolmates trade smelly rubbers and fancy notepaper, independent Suzi mopes about the playing fields watching the lads stand around a football.

Her presence does not go unnoticed or uncommented on. All those long, solitary hours spent leaning against a wall with her hands thrust firmly in pockets may have paid off.

Or not…¹

While this brutal rebuff isn't quite shocking enough to make Suzi withdraw her empocketed hands (before pressing them to tear-stained eyes), it does cause her to despair of her gender entrapment.

Refusing to surrender to this sense of hopelessness Suzi proceeds to (optimistically and desperately) follow the boys hither and yon – earning the following savage put-down.

Ouch. "If only they'd understand how much I want to play football", she thinks, gazing straight into the camera (and straight into the soul of the moved reader).

A short while later and the (relatively) kindly and sensitive Dave spies our heroine displaying some silky ball skills – hands (once again) glued to pocket interiors.²

As astute observers will have noticed, Dave is male and (by the look of him) in his early teens. Given these facts, we should treat the literalness of the words "Suzi's pretty good with that football" with several pinches of salt. A more accurate translation of that thought bubble might be – "I'd very much like to vigorously kiss and cuddle Suzi".

Says he to her, "Where did you learn to play like that?". Says she in reply, "Oh just by watching you boys play, and I sometimes practise here alone". And why, in case we need reminding, is she forced into this lonely activity?

Yowsers. Just when you're beginning to think that the story's punchline will involve gender reassignment surgery, in steps Dave to offer something pitched halfway between reassurance and condescension.

Skip forward to the day of the big match. Disaster strikes! At the playing field Derek breaks the bad news to distraught teammates – "Jimmy can't come. He's ill in bed". Who will take his place? Dave provides the (obvious) answer – self-loathing Suzi!

In spite of the lads' hostile incredulity (and the absence of pockets in her shorts), Suzi leads the team to glory.

Not a thing of beauty. A goal-mouth scramble; a static (Zombie-like) defence; an unorthodox, straight-legged toe-poke – but (as the fella says) they all count.

Final score? 3-2. "Suzi's the champ!", cries a fickle youngster. The socially constructed barriers that separate and segragate the sexes have been triumphantly demolished. The world is forever changed.

Except, of course, it isn't. Reactionary editorial forces at Debbie HQ have baulked at the possible implications and pressed the reset button.

Phew! With her silly, tom-boyish flirtation out of the way Suzi is free to let her hair down and allow her true self to shine forth. Gone is the "rebellious" leather jacket and out of the pockets (at last) come the hands. The mystical fathers of patriarchy smirk down from their kingdom in the clouds. All is right with the world. Let's boogie.

1. Her brother Derek, it would appear, is an enthusiastic advocate of the "Girls are twittery simpering idiots" school of thought. [back]
2. Recurring motif this. [back]

Fumetti or photo novels are a form of comics illustrated with photographs rather than drawings. This kind of graphic storytelling has experienced the most popularity in Italy. Italian weeklies such as Grand Hotel and Bolero Film sold millions of copies in the 1940s and continue to sell well today…Fumetti are also popular in Spain and Latin America, where they are called fotonovelas, and in France. Fumetti have never been widely appreciated in the United States.

Though US readers may not have embraced the joys of the fumetti, photostrips did enjoy a brief period of popularity in the late 70s/early 80s in the UK. Though most popular as a device for telling tales of teenage romance (in titles like Jackie etc), photostrips also featured heavily in the early years of the relaunched (1980s) Eagle.

Easily the most memorable of the Eagle photostrip stories was "Doomlord" (written by British comics legends Alan Grant and John Wagner):

Sent from the planet Nox to destroy humanity, Doomlord rejected his mission, believing humanity had enough potential to make them worth saving, and instead battled for the survival of humanity against both his own people and mankind itself. Like most British comics characters, he was a definite anti-hero – he not only killed his enemies, but regularly slaughtered innocent human beings too, either for information he gleaned from absorbing their identity or simply as a personality with which to disguise himself.¹

Though the photostrip format served the telling of 'soapy' romance stories quite efficiently, its limitations were fairly evident when it came to satisfying the more fantastic demands of science fiction.

Over at Comics International, Lew Stringer offers his tuppence worth on the issue:

1) Photostrips were fine for character-based soapy drama (and most girls I knew at school only read 'em for a laugh anyway), but not for action-orientated stories. 2) It cost more to hire actors and photographers than to use artists and writers. 3) They were completely naff. (That last one's just my opinion. Well, mine and enough people who stopped buying Eagle so that IPC had no choice but to turn it into a comic again.)

As point number 3 makes clear, Eagle eventually dropped photostrips entirely and (wisely) returned to standard comic book illustration. The death of the Eagle photostrip was not, however, the end of "Doomlord", and the series continued until 1991 (when it was abruptly discontinued).

For all the failings of the sci-fi photostrip, the technique did succeed in generating a rather bizarre (and unforgettable) atmosphere: part kitchen sink drama, part Doctor Who, part Coronation Street etc. My memories of Doomlord sitting round his digs drinking tea and watching telly with his landlady ("More tea, Mr. Doomlord?") may be somewhat flawed and inaccurate, but they definitely capture the curious ambience of the strip.

Co-creator Alan Grant describes the appeal of the character quite succinctly:

Because Doomlord was like Dredd. His philosophy is Platonic, socialistic and fascistic at the same time–the fate of the individual is unimportant, only the fate of the species matters. This makes it right and inevitable that an elite will arise to supposedly safeguard the rights of the majority (and keep them in line). And you can see the logic in his conclusions–mankind is polluting Earth to death, we're slaughtering each other with ever bigger bombs, we're on the threshold of space travel with ships bearing nukes. Shit, if I was a Doomlord I'd be putting the kibosh on the species too.

But there's another side to the tale: ordinary people are, by and large, honest and decent. It is the elites themselves which, corrupted by the power we gave them or they stole from us, are leading man to catastrophe after disaster after apocalypse.

Doomlord also had a softer side: his Coronation Street-type soap opera existence in Mrs Souster's boarding house was quite surreal, given that he'd hypnotised the landlady and her children and was murdering his fellow guests.²

For those that remember (and enjoyed) the strip, there's good news and bad news. The bad news is that there seem to be no reprints available from the old photostrip days (and hardly a single image to be found online). The good news, however, is that a small Irish publisher (Hibernia) has seen fit to produce a reprint of "The Deathlords of Nox", the fourth Doomlord story to be printed, and the first to abandon the fumetti style. Details on how to obtain a copy can be found here.

It also appears that Mark Millar is set to attempt a fumetti revival with a new strip for Marvel entitled 1985. We'll wait and see, but unless it features the Hulk eating Jammie Dodgers and sipping tea in a grotty bedsit, then I'll be giving it a miss…

1. 2000 AD Review [back]
2. 2000 AD Review – Interview with Alan Grant [back]