The greatest British newspaper strip cartoonist of the 20th Century

October 18, 2024 1:18 PM

“Andy Capp is often dismissed as nothing but the exploits of a wife-beating drunk,” Paul Slade says. “It deserves better." ... The Redemption of Andy Capp is an appreciation of Andy Capp’s creator, Reg Smythe and his skills as a world-class cartoonist. There was far more to the strip than people realise today.” [via mefi projects]
posted by chavenet (43 comments total)

I'd like to engage with this, but the only link is to an amazon page to purchase the book.

Is there a book review somewhere we could read or has the author written a condensed thesis containing some of the highlights for promotional purchases?

Thanks.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 1:23 PM on October 18, 2024 [5 favorites]

Try clicking the via mefi projects link which has all that
posted by chavenet at 1:32 PM on October 18, 2024

Really the only place with actual content is here.
posted by rikschell at 2:46 PM on October 18, 2024 [8 favorites]

Now do The Lockhorns!
posted by mittens at 2:56 PM on October 18, 2024 [3 favorites]

Reminds me of You’re a rat bastard, Charlie Brown.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 4:03 PM on October 18, 2024 [1 favorite]

I don't know. .. I started reading that but.. it may be accurate to say that gendered violence was a socially acceptable norm in the 50s and 60s, but that doesn't make me want to spend any time looking at contemporaneous art that celebrates it.
posted by latkes at 4:09 PM on October 18, 2024 [20 favorites]

'andicap, geddit?
posted by whuppy at 4:14 PM on October 18, 2024 [8 favorites]

I am enjoying this essay so much.
posted by mittens at 4:16 PM on October 18, 2024 [3 favorites]

Well, I'm definitely going to read this, although I haven't read an Andy Capp strip in my adult life. My father, a falling down drunk who often wore a derby cap, always reminded me of Andy Capp, and so -- because I was a child and had no idea there was anything wrong with being a falling down drunk -- I loved to read Andy Capp in the newspaper, because I basically thought he was my dad. I don't think I understood the jokes. I have no idea whether it was at all unusual for this immensely British strip to run in American newspapers, but it ran in the Cleveland Plain Dealer for many decades.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 4:21 PM on October 18, 2024 [13 favorites]

I should also say that I suspect by the time I saw this strip (the late '70s/early '80s) the wife-beating was not a thing; if it was, it definitely went over my head. I sure knew that Andy drank a lot, though.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 4:25 PM on October 18, 2024 [5 favorites]

He's known as Tuffa Viktor in Sweden, Charlie Kappl in Austria and and Willi Wacker in Germany
These are good names.
posted by Glinn at 4:51 PM on October 18, 2024 [4 favorites]

I really only know him through hot fries. I see now he is on the chips because they sort of resemble the cigarette he often has in his mouth.
posted by GoblinHoney at 4:51 PM on October 18, 2024 [9 favorites]

Andy Capp.
my grandfather would save the Sunday comics so I could 'read' Henry.
My grandfather did his best to try to explain the world of Andy Capp to a five year old.

but I think it was the praxis of the comics that came through from my grandfather, for example when he quit drinking, he used to keep stacks of empty NyQuil™cups then give them to me all the while I try to decipher that look on grandmother's face.
posted by clavdivs at 5:22 PM on October 18, 2024 [5 favorites]

As I recall it was usually Flo who was beating Andy. Usually with a rolling pin.
posted by spudsilo at 5:23 PM on October 18, 2024 [10 favorites]

He's known as Tuffa Viktor in Sweden, Charlie Kappl in Austria and and Willi Wacker in Germany

I will be committing these to memory against future Only Connect questions.
posted by biffa at 5:40 PM on October 18, 2024 [7 favorites]

it may be accurate to say that gendered violence was a socially acceptable norm in the 50s and 60s

Just like how some may say they don't like slavery today but vigorously defend Confederate statues, I don't believe people's values have changed really if they still uphold the relics of barbarism.

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia has absolutely loathsome main characters, but that show is great because the show doesn't frame them as cool and aspirational. When chuds say "you couldn't make Blazing Saddles today", they overlook Always Sunny because they want a show that revels in bigotry and bullying, not one that laughs at it and makes the bigots and bullies look like losers.

I read a few thousand words of that essay and flipped through some random Andy Capp comics for a while. Yeah, nothing is redeemed. This is just the Archie Bunker effect with extra steps.

You do not, under any circumstances, "gotta hand it to him."
posted by AlSweigart at 6:30 PM on October 18, 2024 [10 favorites]

If you'd told me this morning that I was going to spend my evening reading a pretty riveting history of a comic strip that wasn't even in my local paper growing up, that I only knew from a collection at a friend's house and the occasional newspapers from elsewhere, I would have said--well, honestly, yeah, that's a pretty likely outcome for my evening, I guess. I'm a sucker for this stuff. But wow. One of the most striking things was Smythe's work ethic--or, call it a compulsion even. The idea that someone might sit down for five or six hours, knock out a week's worth of comics that millions of people would enjoy, then do it again tomorrow...I mean, oh my god, if you are not absolutely driven, how could you do it? But it sounds like he honestly enjoyed it--and knew how good he was at it, self-deprecation aside.

This is one of the best things I've ever read on Metafilter.
posted by mittens at 7:06 PM on October 18, 2024 [14 favorites]

The comic strip was a disappointment to my childhood self, but I'm intrigued enough to read more about it. I just wanted to say Andy Capp pub fries were pretty awful. It was like someone took what was good about Pringles and watered it down into slightly stale tasting blandness. Discontinued so long ago they feel like a fever dream.
posted by BrotherCaine at 7:47 PM on October 18, 2024 [3 favorites]

Yeah, I read a fair number of pages looking for any hint of redemption, and the closest I could come up with was, later in the strip his wife beat him more than he beat her. Is it that? Or is it just that violent alcoholics finally got representation on the comics page? Or is it something you have to buy the book to discover?
posted by rikschell at 7:59 PM on October 18, 2024 [3 favorites]

How do you play snooker anyways?
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 8:28 PM on October 18, 2024 [2 favorites]

At very first glance, I thought, "Well, I hadn't heard that Al Capp was accused of wife beating, but given everything else we know about him, I'm not surprised."

My recollection of the strip is that Flo certainly got her licks in with a rolling pin, but that the violence was portrayed in the broadest, slapstickish way. I think that I generally found that less disturbing than the Lockhorns--Leroy was so often caught flirting with younger women that you got the impression that he'd stick it in mud if it wriggled--but maybe that's just me.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:42 PM on October 18, 2024 [2 favorites]

Something that happens here, at times, is that people take appreciation for a thing as an implicit endorsement of everything that happens in it, or even of every possible interpretation it could have. And I can understand that to some degree, like how Fight Club is not an endorsement of the culture presented in it, but that hasn't stopped a lot of aimless young men from latching onto that in an unhealthy way. But while that may have happened, but it doesn't change the fact that it wasn't intended to happen, that once a work emerges into the world sometimes it gets used in ways the creator may not have intended or approved of.

In any event. Please don't be too hard on this article. Paul Slade is, of course, a MeFite, and quite an awesome one IMO. I had long thought of Andy Capp as a relic strip, like Blondie, doomed to haunt the comics pages, for knowable reason, until the sun explodes. I had no idea it was so popular, or of its history, and I'm indebted to Paul for the information.
posted by JHarris at 9:44 PM on October 18, 2024 [27 favorites]

I read it as a kid around the same time a regular skit called 'the honeymooners' and starring Gleason and Art Carney was a regular feature of The Jackie Gleason Show/Hour(?) on TV, and I doubt there was a single episode without Gleason threatening to punch his wife Alice in the face; I may not have this right, but I remember him grinding his fist into his palm, giving Alice a wild-eyed sidelong glare and declaiming dramatically 'to the Moon Alice! I’m telling you!', while she rolled her eyes and looked exasperated.

And it always got one of the biggest laughs of the skit. Very different times.

But speaking personally, physical violence is not a relationship deal breaker for me. I’ve never so much as raised a hand to a girl or a woman since I was six years old, but I’ve been punched in the face hard by three of my long term girlfriends, one of whom was a silver medalist in the shot put at the state Junior Olympics when she was a junior in high school, and ironically enough that did damage our relationship because she was walking away from me as we were arguing, I was right behind her and said something she didn’t like, and in an absolute fury she spun on her heel and hit me as hard as she could with a roundhouse right, but by some freakish chance it kind of bounced off my cheekbone and didn’t hurt at all. It didn’t even interrupt the sentence I was speaking. But after that she was afraid of me and nothing I was able to do changed that. I thought it was the height of unfairness and I’m still kind of bitter about it.
posted by jamjam at 10:47 PM on October 18, 2024 [6 favorites]

I can completely understand why some won't want to read about such a character—or about a comic strip about such a character—the same way cancer jokes aren't for everyone. But it's an impressive essay, and made me curious about a strip I hadn't thought about in years.

Smythe essentially created a strip about his own parents, by the sounds of it, and with parents like that it's inevitably going to be a complicated tangle of love and fear, fond memories and dark ones. The overt depictions of violence seem to have been confined to the earliest strips, but would have hung over it all. Smythe wasn't blind to what he'd created—I had a look at Paul's earlier version of the essay when I saw this at Projects a while back, where he quoted Smythe from 1990:

"Some of my early Andy ideas were very naïve," Smythe admitted when discussing this cartoon with the journalist Les Lilley in 1990. "Good God! It seems horrible now!" In another interview, he adds [referencing one specific strip]: "That was a dreadful cartoon, and it was terribly naïve of me to have done it. He was too savage, a proper bully."

Paul argues that this was kitchen sink drama before there was kitchen sink drama, and I'd watch an hour or two of that at a time, even if the protagonist were a monster. I doubt I'd spend forty years reading, let alone writing and drawing, a strip about a bully (and in this case, I didn't ever follow it), but a daily strip is doled out a few panels at a time, and the effect of that is different from seeing it all at once. That can be good and that can be bad; I think my relationship to Peanuts was shaped for the better by knowing it from the book collections rather than just as a daily (my local newspaper growing up didn't carry it), which put the focus on the characters and on recurring themes rather than on individual gags.
posted by rory at 12:58 AM on October 19, 2024 [9 favorites]

Andy might have been a useless layabout but I don't remember him ever hitting Flo. He would have been removing a rolling pin from up his ass if he ever tried that.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 3:51 AM on October 19, 2024 [3 favorites]

The original longform essay which is part of the book seems to be still up here.

Flo's sitting on the living room floor in housedress and pinny, her frowning expression flushed with anger. The table next to her has been tipped over, throwing a cup and saucer to the ground and breaking the saucer into six pieces. A nearby picture has been knocked askance by whatever force landed Flo and the table where they now are.

Andy stands over her with one hand thrust casually into his trouser pocket and the other leaning against the wall. He's looking Flo straight in the eye, and the smile on his open mouth suggests he thinks this is all pretty funny. "Look at it this way, honey," he says. "I'm a man of few pleasures and one of them 'appens to be knockin' yer about."

That cartoon appeared in the Daily Mirror on August 20, 1957, just two weeks after the first Andy Capp of them all. Andy was then a single-panel cartoon, appearing only in the paper's North-of-England edition, and would not get national publication until the following April. Seeing the drawing today, you can't help but gasp at the casual cruelty it portrays, yet it was thought so uncontroversial at the time that the Mirror chose it to open Andy's very first collection.
Lawrence Goldsmith is one of the three-strong team chronicling Andy's adventures today. "It's an absolutely hideous cartoon," he told me when I raised this particular gag. "But it was perfectly acceptable at the time."

"Some of my early Andy ideas were very naïve," Smythe admitted when discussing this cartoon with the journalist Les Lilley in 1990. "Good God! It seems horrible now!" In another interview, he adds: "That was a dreadful cartoon, and it was terribly naïve of me to have done it. He was too savage, a proper bully."

posted by TheophileEscargot at 4:42 AM on October 19, 2024 [6 favorites]

The thing that makes this different from, say, Fight Club, is that I think there's very little danger of anyone who isn't already an abusive alcoholic layabout to encounter Andy Capp in the literary wilds and latch onto him as an aspirational figure.

Last night, I read most of a mass market paperback collection of strips published early on (scanned and still available on the internet even after the dedicated efforts of a bunch of douchebags to destroy Internet Archive), and I found myself thinking about social realism and how far from it western comics have gravitated. Smythe created this strip at a time when the average person would have read a newspaper. I'm sure there were plenty of science fiction and adventure comics sharing space with it, but I think Andy Capp would have resonated with a larger audience of working class adults, whose relationship to people like Andy Capp would have varied a great deal, but all of whom would have recognized the real life in it. Modern comics, when they do approach social realism, tend to depict things that are more comfortable for upper middle class readers to digest. I don't know. A lot of thoughts about this, this morning, I guess.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 5:10 AM on October 19, 2024 [8 favorites]

This is a good and nuanced discussion! Thanks to those participating in it! It DOES sound like an interesting history and deep dive. My comment was just that Andy Capp and this article are not for me. But I think it's also worth saying that the version of the strip I grew up with, where Flo beats up Andy, is also a misogynistic trope. The myth that women are mostly beating up hapless husbands serves an ideological purpose whether intended or not (not to discount the reality that women do hit men, as shared in this thread). I'm not so much mad at Andy Capp for the way it reflects sexism, but it does reflect and reproduce it. We live in a society and I don't think we solve discrimination by yelling at old comic strips, but worth interigating what they are doing. And for me not particularly interested in spending time with this one.
posted by latkes at 5:16 AM on October 19, 2024 [5 favorites]

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia's main characters are alcoholics, selfish, emotionally abusive, and Dennis is an outright rapist. But the show is hilarious and I recommend it because these are (usually) framed in a way where the abuse itself isn't the punchline: the abusers and their comeuppance are.

Show me an Andy Capp strip that does this? (Being hit by Flo's rolling pin doesn't count; the "equal rights, equal fights" crowd uses this same false equivalence to justify their domestic violence.) They all read like that friend in college telling "we were so drunk..." stories that elicit nervous laughter and concerned stares. Andy Capp jokes don't even have the fig leaf of 90s "ironic edginess": the joke is that he hates his wife.

If there was anything deeper to it than that, I'd think I would see a glimpse of it at some point.

I don't mean "aspirational" as in people want to be like Andy Capp: but the strip uncritically excuses the parts of yourself that is like him using humor as the cover. Rick and Morty has the same problem:

More than that, he is framed as “cool” – Rick is easily the most popular character in the series. In addition to being cool, he's also...cruel. Rick is cruel and intelligent, and several times over the course of the series, these two qualities are conflated, as if cruelty is a sign of intelligence.

It's normalization; something we've had far too much of in the last decade especially.

We are 17 days away from possibly REelecting a hateful, bigoted fascist because a few thousand people in Pennsylvania saw him act like a bossy jerk on reality tv... and laughed at it.
posted by AlSweigart at 6:32 AM on October 19, 2024 [2 favorites]

I don't think that's why Trump was elected at all, though. Trump behaving like an asshole on reality TV may have been why people thought the show was funny to watch (I never thought it was funny, and would change the channel when a commercial for it aired), but what got him elected was a false narrative of Trump as a hypercompetent business man. In reality, Trump is an idiot who squandered an inherited fortune several times over and never worked a day in his life. A thoroughly useless shithead, he was elected on a deliberate lie. But it was that lie that made him a person that low information voters could take seriously as a presidential candidate. The asshole behavior was just the icing on the cake.

This comic strip, though, is the story of a lout who is explicitly not qualified to do any kind of work whatsoever. You wouldn't put him in charge of anything, and if he has a good quality, it's that if you did accidentally put him in charge of something he'd quickly abandon his post. I absolutely think this is a realistic depiction of many people, but I don't think it's flattering or a thing that people would happily see themselves in. But I think that recognition is a worthy literary subject. Every narrative is not the story of a hero.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 7:33 AM on October 19, 2024 [9 favorites]

I have only skimmed the online essay/blog so far but I was re-reading Ducks last week and so it occurs to me to wonder if graphic autobiographies had been a thing, would this weekly strip version of Andy Capp exist? I'm still not sure I'm comfortable with it but I see the through line.
posted by warriorqueen at 7:49 AM on October 19, 2024 [5 favorites]

I disagree that Andy is filled with hatred for Flo, or vice versa. He may be abusive, thoughtless and self-centered, oblivious to her needs whenever one of his many vices beckons, and prone to flirting with any barmaid within visual range; he is deeply and irrevocably flawed, and the strip is a pun on "handicap" for a reason. But he is not without remorse or occasional tenderness, and lord help anyone who hits on her or causes her harm in his presence. He is a hell-raising alley cat who makes his entire town regret his existence but, nonetheless, knows he has a home and a long-suffering wife to return to.

To a modern eye, it is far less ambiguous; Flo would be best served by getting as far away from Andy as she could. The give-and-take of their many, many brawls, cartoonishly as it is depicted, is an unfortunate normalization of domestic violence. Andy has an unerring knack for draining Flo of energy, money and patience on a daily basis.

Their relationship has both ups and downs. Andy is Flo's cross to bear; Andy would be adrift and likely destitute or in jail without Flo's steadying influence. They've come this far together, and the good parts and the quiet moments and the comfort of their daily routine are just enough to make the many negatives bearable.

It is not a relationship to be envied, much less emulated. It is a product of an era in which many reprehensible behaviors were more societally tolerated. But it is a kind of dysfunction that many people recognized and for whom elements of it rang true.
posted by delfin at 8:06 AM on October 19, 2024 [5 favorites]

Andy Capp and Snuffy Smith are the same strip. A man with no discernible job lounges about, gets drunk a lot, and argues with his wife; these arguments are often punctuated with cartoon violence. Everyone involved has a huge, spherical nose, and they live in a strange, exotic place. Though Capp’s world is richer than Smith’s, what with being based on direct observation of an actual culture rather than a third-hand caricature of the Appalachians.
posted by egypturnash at 9:14 AM on October 19, 2024 [3 favorites]

I'm reminded there was an Andy Capp adventure game that lacks nuance though it is sort of a lonely tone poem with a Leaving Las Vegas vibe.
posted by credulous at 9:20 AM on October 19, 2024 [4 favorites]

I really enjoyed this. I suspect others who enjoyed it as I did grew up in similar circumstances, socially, economically, etc. I think it’s hard to appreciate how different the lives of the working poor are from those of the securely employed, even if they’re both nominally considered working class. If you read this piece and still disparaged the lifestyle of the family depicted in the strip, did you notice the unemployment stat repeated a few times in the essay? 30%. Thirty percent unemployment does wild things to the culture of your families and communities.
posted by toodleydoodley at 10:01 AM on October 19, 2024 [7 favorites]

(Pub Fries) discontinued so long ago they feel like a fever dream.

Remarkably, Pub Fries is gone but there's a whole range of Andy Capp's Fries still for sale. I think I've only seen them in gas stations (and here on Amazon, natch). They're also doing some odd promotional work to stoners.
posted by JoeZydeco at 11:15 AM on October 19, 2024 [2 favorites]

MetaFilter: fully baked
posted by chavenet at 11:35 AM on October 19, 2024 [2 favorites]

My recollection of the strip is that Flo certainly got her licks in with a rolling pin, but that the violence was portrayed in the broadest, slapstickish way.

To me, that's worse, not better. It's a joke, it's dismissive, it paints it as not important, not significant, just a laugh. Treating the violence now seriously would be far more uncomfortable, and that would be good. Domestic violence is not a joke, it isn't comfortable or safe.
posted by Dysk at 12:36 AM on October 20, 2024 [2 favorites]

I appreciated this article. I love the history of comics, but being stateside, Andy Capp was more of a joke, a weird intrusion from the side of British comedy that is not in fact funny—naughty postcards, Benny Hill, etc., without the sex appeal. As a kid, it baffled me, but a lot of things about the comics page did. It’s remarkable to see that Andy Capp had a whole personality besides being useless and/or violent.

There was a slightly sinister undercurrent in the article suggesting Smythe was not much better of a husband than he’d been raised to be, but at least it didn’t appear that he hit his wife.
posted by Countess Elena at 8:18 AM on October 20, 2024

(And to be fair to Andy Capp, those ketchup fries kept me going for many crucial nights in college when they were the last thing in the vending machine.)
posted by Countess Elena at 8:19 AM on October 20, 2024 [2 favorites]

"Modern comics, when they do approach social realism, tend to depict things that are more comfortable for upper middle class readers to digest. "

This is discussed in the essay as part of what made Andy Capp stand out at the time — the notion was that newspaper readers wouldn't want to see their own lives so much as aspirational comics about higher classes.
posted by klangklangston at 10:17 AM on October 20, 2024 [3 favorites]

I remember one line from the Andy Capp strip from when I was a kid. Andy is talking to a policeman after apparently being in a fight at the bar. "I thought he was going to hit me so I hit him back first."
posted by neuron at 11:35 AM on October 20, 2024 [1 favorite]

Now do The Lockhorns!

Josh Fruhlinger would argue that most aspects of the Lockhorns as currently presented are fully explained by the fact that the Lockhorns are Millennials.
posted by jackbishop at 11:36 AM on October 21, 2024 [1 favorite]