Fred's Book Club: Such Tripe!

It is Wednesday, which is Hump Day, and that means it's time for the Humpback Writers, our serious book feature with the silly name. To date no actual humps on the writers have been detected, despite our best efforts. In fact, today's author/artist, while being a bit advanced in years, still has no sign of back problems, as one can see on his Web page. 

Yes, today we're profiling British cartoonist Bill Tidy, and specifically one book-length installment of his long-running cartoon saga, The Fosdyke Saga (a takeoff on the novel and TV series The Forsyte Saga). And if you stay to the end of today's post, you'll see an interesting connection between this comic strip and a notorious case currently in the papers.

When I was a kid, I loved comic strips, especially the funny ones. What would prove to be my favorite form was not the straight gag or the adventure stories, but the rarest and most difficult -- the continuing story that still had a daily punchline. Strips like Thimble Theatre and Little Nemo were known for it, but they were long gone. It was a vanished breed in my youth, at least in America, but across the pond Bill Tidy had been writing and drawing one since 1971 for the Daily Mirror. The Fosdyke Saga featured the various adventures of the Fosdyke clan, Britain's greatest tripe-selling family, and their ongoing struggles in the Edwardian era and beyond, especially against the nefarious rival Roger Ditchley. The adventures centered around selling tripe, promoting the public's awareness of tripe, inventing new uses for tripe (tripe parachute!), fending off various wicked persons, and acquiring rare tripe-related objects for their tripe museum (on the book cover above you can see the South American tripe pyramid, composed completely of dried tripe). 

From the front matter

I bought the above book (the last in the series) at the Forbidden Planet store in the Village. While a lot of the humor (or humour) was lost on this young American at the time, I still thought it was brilliant, funny, endlessly inventive, and a veritable a circus of great characters.

Tidy maintained interest with cliffhangers and rotating storylines. In one adventure in the book above, adventurous son Tom Fosdyke has been dispatched to the Arctic Circle to seek the Arctic Tripe Snake!

Meanwhile, in Manchester, youngest and strongest son Tim has had a breakdown following a plot of Ditchley's to convince the Fosdykes they are haunted! Unfortunately the doctor leaves much to be desired....

Meanwhile Jos, head of the family, is stuck in a pub, where he is spying on a devious plan to rob a bank and pin the blame on his own horse, the mighty and faithful Tripeworks!!!! (!!!)

I loved the format and desperately wanted to create a comic strip like that for the American market. Unfortunately by the time I was coming of age, newspapers were starting to die and the comics pages were shrinking, a shadow of what they once were -- and that was before the Internet just about delivered the coup de grace. 

But that came much earlier for Tidy at the Mirror. In 1984 the Mirror was acquired by Robert Maxwell, MP, who didn't think Bill Tidy was funny, and cast him out. Tidy had been at the paper since the fifties, so this was a pretty big blow. The thing that saddened Bill most was that he'd planned to extend the Fosdyke adventures much longer:

“It was a very sad day when, with forty years of the Fosdyke story told, the Mirror’s new management decided to axe the strip [in 1985]. Fosdykes at Dunkirk, The Salford Blitz, the place of tripe production in the Marshall Plan, the possibility of free school tripe under the terms of the 1944 Education Act. All these stirring events are ready chronicled and simply need the light of day — a nation waits.”

But alas, that was the end. The Fosdyke saga, which had been adapted into radio plays, a TV show, and a stage play, came to a close. And people wonder why hardly anyone eats tripe anymore.

Here's the kicker I mentioned at the top: Robert Maxwell, who later annoyed New Yorkers by buying the Daily News, perished in 1991 in a bizarre incident where he apparently fell off his yacht naked while peeing in the ocean (as one does). Murder and suicide were ruled out (hmm); death by heart attack that caused drowning was the coroner's deduction. Maxwell had defaulted on a fifty million pound loan, which set off a feeding frenzy among his creditors, and his publishing empire came to the same fate as did he, minus the peeing.

More recently, Maxwell's daughter Ghislaine has been much in the news. As I write, she still faces serious charges for her dealings with the late Jeffrey Epstein, who probably did not kill himself. That story is, shall we say, tripe. The question is whether she can bargain her silence for freedom, based on the high rollers that went to Pedo Island under her watch. 

But on goes Bill Tidy, drawing and doing many other things, and God bless him. His is the kind of saga one should emulate, not that of the strange and awful Maxwells.