I've got mountains of new American comics to read, so what am I doing? Kicking back with some bad British comics from the 1970s of course! What else are Sunday afternoons for, eh?
My comic of choice today is The 1976 Smash Annual, which is pretty grim, even by late '70s standards. It's littered with racist nastiness, nowhere more so than in a football story called The World-Wide Wanderers, one of those text pieces that filled the pages of British hardback annuals back in the day.
The World-Wide Wanderers is a tale about the greatest football team the world has ever seen, a crack unit who also happen to be a a bunch of racial stereotypes.
Oh dear.
Anyway, so good at the beautiful game have The World-Wide Wanderers become, that their own fans have grown bored of watching them routinely annihilate the opposition. Faced with falling crowds, millionaire owner Harry Kraft, turns to computer Whizz, Aristotle Smith who feeds a copy of the rules of Association Football and a bunch of info about the Wanderers players into a super computer that comes up with a new exciting way of playing football based wholly on racial stereotypes...
HUZZAH!
Thus in the Wanderers next match against the (I kid you not) European All-Stars they set out to bamboozle their white opponents with a uniquely offensive brand of football...
Fats walks the ball into the net. The All-Stars complain. Unfortunately for them, the referee is from Tibet and waves their complaints away with the following explanation...
Ah yes, no gentlemen in Tibet, just a bunch of skull-kicking nutcases. The fellah who wrote this should be working for the Chinese government. But I digress, on with the game, and time to shine the spotlight on Moto, Wanderers' Japanese star...
Two-nil. Yay for the unstoppable foreign footie machine! Roared on by their demented crowd they swing into racial overdrive...
Two penalties follow, the first dispatched, kung-fu style, the second...
Half-time and the score is 6-0. Second-half starts with Bulgy the Turk cutting a square of turf out with his dagger, plonking the ball on it, waddling up the field and placing it carefully in the All-Stars goal...
And so it goes on, we get goal number eight when Fijan keeper, Sharky sneaks up the field and scares the All-Star keeper off with "a ferocious cannibal yell" before hiding under his cap, taking a backpass from the All-Star keeper whipping off his cap to reveal his "grinning black face" and backheeling into the net.Number nine arrives courtesy of Bandy the Indian. Intoning a sacred Hindu incantation, he whips out a piece of rope from under his shirt, throws it in the air, where it magically stiffens allowing him to Climb above the All-Stars defence and head Chang the Afghan's cross into the net.
The game moves into the last minute, and it's time for Wanderers captain and only white player (obv) Carruthers, to put the icing on the racist cake. Surrounded by his racial inferiors he runs unchallenged, monocle string flapping in the breeze, to plant number ten in the old onion bag...
Stitch that. A thorough hiding for the European All-Stars. What a rip-roaring yarn. Who the fuck came up with that one eh?
Scans from Smash Annual, 1976. Writer and artist uncredited.
1 comment:
I always recount this when reminiscing about the 1970s comics, though I thought the Mexican played in a sombrero and Bandi the Indian headed the ball in his turban. Oh well time marches on.
I thought it was great but I never became a National Front member or Skinhead racist from reading it.
Maybe we could start a new team with a Nigerian claiming a goal when it wasn't, a Rumanian stealing the ball if the team were loosing and an Englishman scoring with the ball re bounding off his bacon sanwich belly.
Maybe an Iranian womens team could all play in Burkahs against a British Geordie shore team of girls in high heels and mini's.
Post a Comment