Review by Win Wiacek
On April 14th 1950, Britain’s grey, post-war gloom was partially lifted with the first issue of a glossy new comic that literally shone with light and colour. Eagle was a tabloid sized paper with full photogravure colour inserts alternating with text and a range of other comic features. Tabloid is a big page and you can get a lot of material onto each one. Deep within, on the bottom third of a monochrome folio was an 8-panel strip entitled Captain Pugwash, the story of a Bad Buccaneer and the many sticky ends which nearly befell him. John Ryan’s quirky, spiky style also lent itself to the numerous spot illustrations required every week and when Pugwash disappeared, later to be revived for television, Ryan had already begun writing and illustrating new feature Harris Tweed – Extra Special Agent.
Tweed ran for three years as a full page. Then in 1953 it dropped to a half-page strip deftly repositioned as a purely comedic venture. For our purposes and those of the book under review, it’s those first three years we’re thinking of.
Harris Tweed is a bluff and blundering caricature of the military “Big Brass” Ryan had encountered during World War II service. In gentler times, the bumbler with a young, never-to-be-named assistant known only as “Boy” solved mysteries and captured villains to general popular acclaim. Thrilling and often eerily macabre adventure blends seamlessly with sly yet cheerful schoolboy low comedy in these strips, since Tweed was in fact that most British of archetypes: a bit of a twit and a bit of a sham stumbling through a world of thud and blunder.
His totally undeserved reputation as detective and crime fighter par excellence, and his good-hearted yet smug arrogance somehow endeared the posturing buffoon to a young and impressionable public. He could be seen as a forerunner of Captain Mainwaring in Dad’s Army and, more pointedly perhaps, Peter Sellers’ numerous film outings as Inspector Clouseau. Maybe most of those enthralled kids had an uncle or dad who buffaloed on about the war in just the same way!
Ryan’s art is particularly noteworthy. Deep moody blacks and intense, sharp, edgy inking creates a constant mood of fever-dream intensity. There are anachronistic echoes and nuances of underground cartoons of more than a decade later, and much of the inevitable ‘brooding, lurking horror’ atmosphere found in the best works of Basil Wolverton. Ryan knew what kids liked and he delivered it by the cartload.
This too-slim, oversized (324 x 234mm x) paperback compilation is all that’s readily available these days, but surely in the era of electronic publishing, some enterprising fan with a complete Eagle collection can link up with a perspicacious publisher someway, somehow and produce a comprehensive compilation of the nation’s most self-lauded sleuth.
