The Redemption of Andy Capp by Paul Slade

I doubt if there is a reader of this blog who hasn't heard of Andy Capp and I imagine nine out of ten has an opinion of the strip, good or bad. The strip began appearing in 1957 and is still a part of the Daily Mirror. I grew up in a house where the Mirror was our daily newspaper, but my favourite strips were 'The Perishers' and 'Garth'. As a kid I didn't need to read about a hard-drinking northerner, always arguing with his wife. I had enough of that at home.

Andy Capp has often been denounced as a drunken wife-beater and that's an accusation Paul Slade dives straight into in his essay collection The Redemption of Andy Capp. There must be more going on for the strip to have lasted almost seventy years, 15,000 strips drawn by his creator Reg Smythe, who died in 1998, at which time the strip was being syndicated to over 1,700 newspapers around the globe, translated into 14 languages and read daily by an estimated 250 million in 52 countries. There has to be more.

"It was a different time," some will argue, and indeed it was, with slapping and smacking far more acceptable than nowadays. Let's not forget that one in eleven women over the age of 16 suffers domestic abuse even now; things were a lot worse in the 1950s and 1960s. But Smythe was already cutting back on strips that involved violence by the early 1960s... or at least disguising the violence as a cloud of dust with a couple of fists and feet sticking out—impossible to know whether Andy or Flo was getting the better of the other.

Slade quotes Smythe, his niece (Helene de Klerk, author of My Dancing Bear) and others on the subject that Flo is no doormat in their relationship but the fact is that the strip has moved away from domestic violence  to the occasional thrown pan. Co-author Lawrence Goldsmith says of Andy's violent past "People still refer to Andy like that, but he hasn't actually been that way for over 40 years."

Slade's account of Smythe's upbringing paints the artist's parents as the models for Andy and Flo, Richard Smyth a heavy-drinking boat-builder in a flat cap  and Florrie Smyth (née Pearce) an argumentative barmaid, her hair in curlers and held in place with a scarf. Young Reg saw nothing more of his father after joining the army at 18., but his mother would later confirm that it was her relationship with Richard that was the basis for Andy and Flo.

After the war, Smythe found work as a clerk with the G.P.O., but his interest in drawing led him to approach editors and an agent, Charles Gilbert, who managed to sell two of his cartoons to Everybody's, earning the artist more than he earned from the Post Office. Thereafter, he churned out 60 cartoons a week in his evenings which meant he could marry and set up home.

He added the 'e' to his signature in the 1950s because he thought it looked classier and was soon working regularly for the Daily Mirror. In July 1957, while visiting his mother at 37 Durham Street, Hartlepool (later to become Andy & Flo's address), he received a telegram: "Mr Cudlipp needs a cartoon to appeal to Northern readers. You are wanted straight away." This was to appear on the 'Laughter' cartoon page of the Manchester edition of the paper.

Andy first appeared on 5 August 1957... but the rest of Andy's (and Reg Smythe's) story is for Paul Slade to tell, as he does in detail in his essay that takes up over 70 pages of his latest 190-page book. While Andy gives his name to the book's title, the eight essays and reviews in the book cover a broad range of comic-related subjects, including Tintin, Frank Miller's Born Again and Elektra: Assassin, and Peter Jackson's London is Stranger Than Fiction (full disclosure: there's a quote from me in the latter essay which caught me by surprise because I'd forgotten all about Paul mailing me some questions about Jackson).

The final piece was inspired by a nature talk given by David Attenborough about a caterpillar that fools ants into thinking it is an ant larvae; they treat it like a Queen until a butterfly emerges... but sometimes wasps lay their eggs in the caterpillar larvae and wasps emerge. It all sound horrifying and Slade has turned it into a very creepy comic strip (drawn by Hans Rickhelt).

Along the way there's a look at superhero court cases between Marvel and various creators (Jack Kirby, Siegel & Schuster, Steve Gerber, etc.) and a brief interview with 'Alex' co-creator Russell Taylor.

There should be something here for everyone and the centrepiece essay on Andy Capp is a fully-referenced and compelling argument that the character should be reassessed and not condemned for how he was—a wastrel born out of Smythe's own experiences—but appreciated for the world famous character he is.

The Redemption of Andy Capp by Paul Slade.
Self published, 26 August 2024, 191pp, £9.80. Available via Amazon.