37: Fighting for the 1970s!
The kids have settled on a common cause: they’re going to fight for, and defend the 1970s! Sadly, for all all of their heroic and brave posturing, even back in the wonderful nineteen seventies, there were psychopathic bullies.
Terrorism in the 1970s
What our Parents Feared…
Carlos the Jackal. The stuff of nightmares? Not compared to school bullies.
The grown-ups were scared of recession, powercuts but also the rise in international terrorism and hi-jackings, in the Middle East – but also in Northern Ireland and England. And they were scared of Nuclear War.
In the Dawson’s Field hijackings (September 6, 1970) four jet aircraft bound for New York City were hijacked by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
What the kids feared…
But we kids didn’t tend to watch the news, or worry too much about those minor things in the 1970s: we had bullies to worry about. We Faced a different form of Terrorism.
Meet ‘Dom’ O’Brien. Warts an’ all
Were you too, sometimes scared to leave the gate when school ended? The walk home was like running a gauntlet. A gauntlet, or assault course of terrors that might be lurking around every corner. There was a real fear for one’s physical survival. What are your recollections?
I hope you enjoy the comic episode – and please leave a comment below!
** Stay Groovy – all you Seventies kids! **
– John
John- brilliant as usual! Love your work.
Thanks very much John. Your kind words mean a lot to me 😉
Yeah, that’s a memory I can do without! And it’s like that Rush shirt with the naked guy standing on a star was their uniform, and Queen and Rush were the soundtrack to being beaten with baseball bats and stabbed with sharpened glass. Freddy Mercury’s and Geddy Lee’s voices still trigger a fight reflex in me that makes me swing at unexpected noises and sudden movements!
That’s uncanny Grace. I was actually thinking of putting a UFO or Judas Priest T-Shirt on one of them! Imagine those types being into Rush? What with Neil Peart’s imaginative/intellectual lyrics and that naked man! Or being into Queen, when they would discover some years later that Freddie was gay! These kind of morons usually went around calling the likes of us ‘benders’. Oh, the sweet irony!
I’ll tell you what else is odd and ironic. Some of these guys, who called other guys ‘benders’ where exactly the types who went around hitting thise guys in the testicles. Maybe substitute the phrase ‘fast touching’ for ‘hitting’?
I love it, John. Especially our heroes against that vivid background which could be a sunset or an explosion — seems to be a familiar composition from the era (the Charlie’s Angels logo springs to mind, although I’m pretty sure it could be found in lots of places).
I also liked the way you drew the bullies (or, probably, one bullying ring-leader plus his lackeys). Yeah, I have a few memories of bullies, although in the schools I went to, there was probably more of the verbal kind than the physical. I still worried about nuclear war as well, though.
Thanks Damien. Yes, that 70s palette visual device is like an explosion meets wallpaper or kitchenware meets Charlie’s Angels. Check out Jenny’s Karate/Kung Fu pose in panel 2.
I don’t think I worried about Nuclear War at all. It was something which I predicted would happen – in an excited (!) doomsaying manner, and drew pictures of, and imagined a new amazing futuristic world developing afterwards. But really, I was cavalier about it because I probably thought that it wouldn’t happen within my life-time. I probably first worried about it in the early 80s, when the anti-nuke campaigns stepped up and Ronald Reagan was trying to outdo the Russians by having enough nukes to destroy the world 10 times over, rather than the Russians’ mere 5. And we saw those chilling TV films, ‘The Day After’ from the States, which then inspired ‘Threads’, the British one.