A Fantastical August 7th 1968

The Week In Fantastical Cinema, Central London Edition

There wasn’t much to cheer up The Almanac in London’s West End cinemas on this day in 1968. Just three fantastical movies, if we’re to push the already-woefully vague term’s envelope, were there to be had. The newest of them was the animated Yellow Submarine, which had been premiered just a few weeks before on July 17th and was, despite The Beatles already mythic reputation, already in trouble. So disappointing had the responses been to a number of test screenings that, despite good reviews and strong houses in Oxford Circus’ Studio One, the decision had been taken to give it only a limited national release national.

Released in the UK on May 1st, Kubrick’s 2001: a space odyssey was still on in the Casino Cinerama Theatre on Old Compton Street. Late night shows – 11.30 on Fridays and midnight on Saturdays – would surely have been the sittings to go for. Stepping out of the Casino into the darkness of London during the wee hours, having sat through 141 minutes of heavy-duty sci-fi with a full-on psychedelic ending, must have been an experience and a half. That in itself would surely have been worth the necessity of taking a night bus home, or even hanging on for the milk trains.

Finally, the rereleased Bambi, from 1942, was playing at Jaceyland near Piccadilly Station. No need for late night sittings there, since the times for the “special family show” suggests its very latest audiences wanted out by 10pm at the very latest.

(My five year old self saw Bambi in suburbia’s Staines ABC during this period. So upset was I by the death of Bambi’s mother that I’ve never dared watch it since.)

Other first-run movies of interest playing in Central London during this week included The Odd Couple, and The Graduate. Earth worth a ticket’s price, undoubtedly, but there’s not a spaceship to be seen in any of them.

The Week In Garth

When most of us see decades-old newspaper strips today, we see them in typically beautiful collected editions. But that’s not how many of those stories were experienced back in their day. British papers in particular were, for most of my youth and far beyond, printed on appalling paper. I could, in a trying hour, weep for the artists who persevered in creating beautifully detailed storytelling under these wretched limitations.

Yet whatever the quality of reproduction, and no matter how small the strips were printed, they were still positively radiant in comparison to the papers’ black and white and text-crammed sides, with their tiny print and their rare, grainy, indistinct photos. In 1969, Britain was a poor country compared to much of America, and that showed in our thin, cheap papers.

Two other qualities made the more imaginative action/adventure strips sing in their grimy contexts for we youngsters. Firstly, they were often fantastical. As I know I keep emphasising, that was rare enough. And secondly, they were an exceedingly rare example of comics read, unashamedly, by adults. In that, they felt like a signpost towards a future in which comics could be for anyone and everyone.

Compare, if you will, this gorgeously printed Garth cover by the great Frank Bellamy with the quality of the strips below.

Almost forgotten now, The Daily Mirror’s Garth was frequently the most outré of the daily strips in the national press. The week’s worth of story reproduced (authentically poorly) below was written by Jim Edgar with art by John Allard. (The August 7th 1969 instalment, in keeping with The Almanac’s raison d’être, is the third in the sequence.) I don’t think I’ve ever truly grasped who Grant was. Clearly, he was a super-humanely strong guy whose adventures took him through space and time. Beyond that, it seemed that anything went. The strip was at its height for the five years in the Seventies when the great Frank Bellamy was the artist. It was still a bizarre reading experience, packed with naked bodies and fiendish villains, but such was Bellamy’s vision and skill that little of that mattered in each two or three panel burst.

Why adults could read, say, Garth and not a Spider-Man tale in public is one of pop culture’s mysteries. Truth is, context legitimised content. But where most of the paper’s fantastical strips of the period were concerned, their quality was at the least matched by the best of ‘kid’s’ comics.