| Denis Gifford | |
|---|---|
| Born | Denis Gifford 26 December 1927 Forest Gate, London, England, UK |
| Died | 18 May 2000 (aged 72) Sydenham, London, England, UK |
| Occupation | Film and comic historian, comic artist and writer, non-fiction writer, radio and television |
| Nationality | British |
| Genres | Film history, comics history, radio history |
| Subjects | 19th Century comics, early 20th Century comics, UK/US comics of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s |
| Spouse(s) | Angela Kalagias (divorced) |
| Children | Pandora Jane (daughter) |
Denis Gifford (26 December 1927 - 18 May 2000)[1] was a British writer, broadcaster, journalist, comic artist, collector and historian of film, comics, television and radio. In his lengthy career, he wrote and drew for British comics; wrote more than fifty books on the creators, performers, characters and history of popular media; devised, compiled and contributed to popular programmes for radio and television; and directed several short films.
As a 14-year-old at Dulwich College, Gifford began drawing for The Dandy, after sending a comic strip to its publisher D. C. Thomson of Dundee. He collaborated on comics writing and drawing with schoolfriend Bob Monkhouse, who was later to become a highly successful comedian and television presenter. The two toured in the South East, giving charity performances with Monkhouse as the “straight man”.
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Gifford's prolific career as a cartoonist included both newspaper strips and comics. It began in 1942 with a contribution to The Dandy at the age of 14, and briefly worked as junior cartoonist for the newspaper Reynold's News. After National Service in the RAF, Gifford drew the Telestrip cartoon for the London Evening News, continuing in Rex magazine (1971-72), and on bubblegum and cigarette sweet packets.[2] Other newspaper strips were produced by Gifford for Empire State News and Sunday Dispatch, and his work as a cartoonist continued throughout his life.
His work included various genres and styles, from humour to western and superheroes, and included Pansy Potter, The Strongman's Daughter for The Beano. He created at least two of the earliest British Golden Age superheroes, Mr Muscle for Dynamic Comics (1945) and Streamline, co-created with Monkhouse (1947). Gifford himself credits "the first British superhero in the American comic book style”[3] to Derickson Dene by Nat Brand in British anthology comic The Triumph in 1939, but both Mr Muscle and Streamline were early attempts to introduce British characters in a characteristically American genre, prompted by severely limited imports or reprints of US superhero titles due to wartime paper rationing and import restrictions. In 1989 Streamline made a guest appearance in Grant Morrison's 2000 AD strip Zenith [4] along with other vintage British superheroes, Streamline himself becoming a traitor serving the alien villains. Since 1986, the original four-issue run of Streamline (only issue 1 had story and art by Gifford) has been reprinted along with several other out-of-print Golden Age superheroes by British independent comics publisher Black Tower Comics Group.
Various strips for the highly popular humour comic Knockout followed, including Our Ernie (1950) and Stoneage Kit the Ancient Brit, several years in the 1950s writing and illustrating the early Marvelman, the superhero reinvented in the 1980s with a darker vision by Alan Moore, and drew Roy Rogers for The Sheriff Comics in the 1950s. [5] In the late 1960s, Gifford's work included Swami Riva for TV Tornado (1967) and various strips for Whizzer and Chips.[6] Gifford and Monkhouse set up their own publishing company, Streamline, in the early 1950s which published reprints of other Golden Age superheroes such as Captain Might and Masterman.
In the period Gifford drew for them, D. C. Thomson and most comic publishers had a strict policy that artists could not sign their work[7] but exceptionally, he was allowed to clearly sign his art[8].
Gifford had a distinctive, simple drawing style with a lightheartedness evident even in more action-orientated strips. It was characterised by the "visual conventions" [9] of comic art, informed by an intense awareness of the cultural heritage of the medium.
Gifford wrote extensively for comedy and light entertainment in both television and radio, his work often relecting his fascinations of radio and film nostalgia and cartoon art.
Gifford wrote the first television series of comedy stars Morecambe and Wise, Running Wild (1954), having been brought in with fellow cartoonist, comic enthusiast and film buff Tony Hawes to save a series which was initially panned by critics.[10] He also provided material for the opening night of ITV (1955) and co-wrote the first comedy show to be screened by BBC2, the TV movie Alberts' Channel Too (1964) for the launch of the channel, although the whole evening's broadcasting was lost due to a power blackout. He wrote for Junior Showtime (1973), devised the ITV nostalgia panel show Looks Familiar (1970-87), presented by Denis Norden, its radio counterpart Sounds Familiar and the ITV quiz show Quick on the Draw (1974-79) featuring drawings by cartoonists and celebrities, with presenters including Bob Monkhouse, Rolf Harris and Bill Tidy. He also wrote scripts for the ITV childrens' puppet shows Witches' Brew (1973) and The Laughing Policeman (1974). Gifford also designed stunts for popular BBC1 game show The Generation Game.
The scriptwriting partnership with Hawes began in radio, for weekly BBC concert party The Light Optimists (1953) and continued with stunt devising for the US-bought game show People Are Funny.[11]
A broadcaster in his own right, Gifford featured in numerous television and radio programmes as an expert in the history of film, radio and comics, as well as appearances in a variety of documentary and news magazine programmes over several decades. Appearances included editions of ITV's Clapperboard (1974) and BBC1's Film 1973 (1973), Goon but not Forgotten, a radio history of the Goon Show as part of the Laughter in the Air: The Story of Radio Comedy (1979), guest panellist for Radio 4 panel show Quote Unquote (1985)[12].
Gifford and Monkhouse reprised their partnership with radio programmes on the history of the comics, Sixpence for a Superman (1999) on British comics and the two-part A Hundred Laughs for a Ha'penny (1999), a history of comic papers.
Although a highly respected film historian, Gifford's professional involvement in cinema was relatively limited. However, in the 1950s and 1960s he directed and photographed a number of short films, most of which were publicity and public information films commissioned by the British Government. He also produced and directed the Pathe newsreel Highlight: The Singing Cinema (1964), a compilation of extracts from British musical films from 1929-64.
Gifford scripted the Space Race spoof Carry on Spaceman in 1962, but although scheduled the film was not shot.
Although Gifford did not have an academic background, he was an acknowledged authority on film history who is respected by academics in film studies, media studies and social and cultural history. Much of his reference work is recommended reading in these disciplines.
Gifford compiled a comprehensive reference work of British-made films, The British Film Catalogue, 1895-1970: A Reference Guide, listing every traceable film made in the UK, including short films generally omitted by film catalogues, with detailed entries including running time, certificate, reissue date, distributor, production company, producer, director, main cast, genre and plot summary. It was a labour of many years, as Gifford tracked down retired industry professionals and researched back issues of trade publications, fanzines and directories. The Catalogue's third (1994) edition revised all entries and was published in two volumes, The Fiction Film, 1895-1994 and The Non-Fiction Film, 1888-1994, [13]. It became a seminal work for British film historians, acclaimed by the The British Film Institute (BFI)'s curator of Moving Image in a Sight & Sound magazine shortlist of the best ever film books: "The nearest we have to a British national filmography was created not by any institute or university but by one man."[14] Gifford's A Pictorial History of Horror also made the shortlist.
All editions of the Catalogue omitted animated films, but Gifford's British Animated Films, 1895-1985: A Filmography provided a similarly completist approach. Over 1200 films were detailed, attempting to include every British animated film of the period with a cinema release, whether full-length feature, short, public information film or advertisement. Gifford also provides an historical overview, giving particular attention to the pre-World War II era. As he was to attempt with the history of comics, Gifford sought to correct inaccuracies in cinema history that gave undue credit to the US industry, citing Dudley Buxton "who [in 1915] first animated the sinking of the Lusitania in all its terrifying drama, three years before Winsor McCay tackled the same subject in the United states. Yet according to film history, McCay's version was the world's first dramatic cartoon film!"
As well as vintage comedy, Gifford had a particular interest in genre films, favouring the origins of those genres and the lower-budget B-movie output. He had written for science fiction fanzines since the 1950s, and later reflected on its genesis: "it was the 1950s before sci-fi really got started, first with George Pal's astounding semi-documentary Destination Moon pipped at cinematic post by Robert L. Lipert's B-movie Rocketship XM. Where the cinema led, comics followed." [15] Horror held a special fascination for Gifford, and in the 1970s he had regular columns in Dez Skinn's House of Hammer magazine, first a serialised Golden History of Horror and later History of Hammer.[16] However, Gifford had been deeply critical of Hammer Studios, especially its later years output, preferring the more understated examples of early British and Hollywood horror. He found Hammer's relatively explicit use of blood-letting and sexuality to be cynically exploitative, noting in his 1973 Pictorial History of Horror that “The new age of horror was geared to a new taste. Where the old films had quickly cut away from the sight of blood, Hammer cut in for a closeup.” [17]
Gifford's writing also included biographies of cinematic figures, including Karloff: The Man, The Monster, The Movies and The Movie Makers: Chaplin, with his meticulous research and detailed knowledge well suited to the form. He also wrote numerous articles on film, comics and popular entertainment, both professionally and for fanzines, including Abbot and Costello, in Films and Filming (1985). He also regularly wrote obituaries for British national newspapers of notable figures in entertainment history, drawing on his specialist knowledge and often personal familiarity with the subject.
The BFI holds an extensive archive of interviews recorded by Gifford of various figures in the film, television and comics industries. The Denis Gifford Collection [18] is held as part of the BFI National Library.
Gifford was regarded by many as the UK's pre-eminent comics historian, particularly of early British comics. The British Library provides catalogues and reference works written by Gifford as assistance to researchers of its British Comics Collection, and indeed most of the reference works on the subject provided by the British Library were written by Gifford.[19]
Comics scholarship, still relatively undeveloped in comparison to other media, was almost non-existent in 1971, when Gifford published his first book on comics history, Discovering Comics. Gifford was determined that the comic should gain a credibility in mainstream culture and academia which it already possessed in continental Europe, and to a lesser extent the US: "Curiously, only Great Britain, where the comic paper was born, takes its comics for what they superficially seem – ephemera to be discarded as soon as read." [20] Although enthusiastic about comics of every era, Gifford had a particular passion for vintage comics, "earlier in the medium's evolution, when it was a chaos of one-offs, irregular schedules, and a comic historian's nightmare of inept publishers operating from the back rooms of run-down bookshops on a shoe string budget." [21]
Gifford provided the first reliable, detailed account of early comics in works such as Victorian Comics (1976) and The British Comics Catalogue, 1874-1974 (1974), with a detailed overview in his International Book of Comics (1984). He also advanced debate on the origins of comics, including what the first comic and comic characters were,[22] arguing that "there is no point [in the history of comics] where we can pick up a paper and declare it Comic Number One." [23] He identified the first comedic narrative periodical, as an antecedent to the comic as The Comick Magazine (1796) which although all text included a single Hogarth print per issue, which Gifford suggested when combined formed a “narrative sequence... [so that] they could be described as an early form of comic strip." [24] Gifford identified the signicant stage of "the first continuing cartoon hero"[25] as Rowlandson's Dr Syntax in the serial The Schoolmaster's Tour in The Poetical Magazine (1 May 1809). He argued that "in Europe, perhaps the world" [26] the first caricature magazine, an important prototypical form of the comic, was Hopkirk's The Glasgow Looking Glass (11 June 1825), and located the origin of the modern graphic narrative in the late nineteenth century, tracing development through various stages that included Judy - The London Serio-Comic Journal (1867-1907) featuring Ally Sloper, the first recurring character in a text and picture serial. He suggested a key contender as the first comic as being the paper Funny Folks (1874-94), which had an unprecedented half-picture, half-text per page layout. While deabate continues, Gifford's research and conclusions into the origins of comics as a medium have gained considerable academic acceptance. [27]
As the Golden Age and other historical eras of comics were defined for US comics history and relate to UK comics as a result of American influence on the UK market and creators, Gifford sought to draw a distinction, observing that the "Thirties were the Golden Age of British comics." [28] This he based on the profusion of successful, high quality and specifically British humour comics beginning in the 1930s, including D.C. Thomson's The Dandy (4 December 1937) and The Beano (30 July 1938) and Amalgamated Press's Jingles (1934), Jolly (1935), Golden (23 October 1937), Radio Fun (1938) and Happy Days (8 October 1938). The start of the Second World War in 1939, and the resulting paper shortages, marked the end of many of the titles and a definable end to the era.
Gifford had a particular interest in children's comics. Although his collection included 1960s underground comics, the alternative comics of the 1970s as well as the more experimental mainstream of comics' Modern Age, he was not initially convinced by changing conceptions of comics as a medium suited to addressing adult themes such as sexuality, violence and storytelling techniques influenced by literary fiction, cinema and art. He recognised that the growth in adult readership of comics since the 1970s was due to nostalgia, but did not foresee the potential for a development of the medium. "And nostalgia is escape. The comics - the best of them - represent wholesome innocence, a marvelous sense of fun and a pointer to current times perhaps, the triumphant overcoming of all sorts of difficulties." [29] When children's comics began to reflect changes in cinema and mass culture, he was unafraid to speak out, even where this might involve constraints on the comics industry and creators. After media outrage at the 1976 Look Out for Lefty strip about football hooliganism in the IPC comic Action, Gifford controversially drew parallels with the Wertham censorship of the US comics industry in the 1950s, remarking that "Perhaps its time we had another outcry against products like Action. Action is a new kind of comic geared to the lowest form of behaviour in children. Just as pornography caters for a mass market for adults, stuff like this provides violence for a mass market of children. As far as the people who produce Action are concerned, the children are simply a market and moral considerations do not apply." [30] Certainly Gifford's preferences in comics writing and art were informed by his nostalgia for UK comics of the 1930s: "I look back to the days of my youth... when comics were things of joy and pleasure, rather than blood and guts." [31] However, Gifford's concerns were limited to comics intended for children and adolescents, and he was well aware of a development of the medium for an adult audience. He collected and was able to appreciate the content of underground and Modern Age, offering sophisticated and sometimes sympathetic analysis.[32]
Ally Sloper was championed by Gifford as the world's first ever comic character,[33] and became a totemic figure for him, being revived and sometimes drawn by him in a number of comics[34] and other publications[35] that sought to ensure a modern readership had an awareness of early comic history. The Ally Sloper magazine was not a commercial success and lasted only four issues, but the innovation of Gifford's tone in the title was acknowledged by one cultural historian as “..With his accurate spoof of the style of traditional British humour comics…anticipat[ing] Viz by nearly three years.” [36] Gifford also initiated the Ally Sloper Awards in 1976, an annual prize for veteran comic artists.
At a summit on comics history convened by the 1989 Lucca Comics Festival in Italy, Gifford was invited to be one of the eleven 'international specialists' to sign a declaration that The Yellow Kid was the first comic character having been first published in 1895. Gifford signed, but pointedly did so in the name of Ally Sloper, first published in 1867. [37]
Gifford's work The Golden Age of Radio was the first reference guide to programmes, broadcasters and catchphrases of radio of the 1930s and 1940s, and remains an important source for researchers in radio history.
Gifford's most valuable research resource was his own collection, as in over sixty years he had accumulated what is generally recognised as the largest comic collection in the UK, including the only known complete runs of all comics published in the UK in the 1940s.[38] He was also a collector of other ephemera, including pulp books, popular magazines and sheet music, as well as pop culture memorabilia. It was an obsession which dominated both his life and his South London home, once described in a colour supplement interview as the den of “a boy who had run away from home” and never returned. A reliable figure was never established for the size of his collection, but its scale constrained movement throughout the house.
Unusually for a collector, Gifford's interests were defined by their eclecticism, including comics, radio recordings and film from throughout the world and spanning from the origins of the media up to new releases. He had certain specific interests, notably British horror films of the 1930s to the 1960s, early cinema and radio, Laurel and Hardy movies and memorabilia, British comic papers of the late nineteenth century and British and US comics of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, especially those which featured personalities from contemporary radio. However, the parameters of his interests and collection broadened substantially throughout his life.
Despite his hopes that his vast collection might form the basis of a national museum of comics, through an archive such as the Victoria and Albert Museum National Art Library Comics and Comic Art Collection, it was broken up and auctioned off after his death.[39]
Gifford's collection was the product of his lifelong passion for comics and popular culture, and his highly prolific research work was an attempt to provide a comprehensive history of the ephemeral. Particularly in the early decades of his writing on the subject, pop culture drew little attention from academic research and Gifford was particularly passionate about the most obscure examples of vintage comics, film, television and radio, and determined that they should recognised, chronicled and remembered before extant editions were lost.
Giford was a pivotal figure in the development of comics "fandom" in the UK, first through his writing and publishing of early fanzines in the 1950s. In the 1970s he helped introduce comics conventions to the UK, events where creators and industry figures could meet and respond to comics fans, as opposed to the already established comics marts where comics were simply sold.
In 1974 he was the only comics industry guest at an early meeting of Britain's major comics convention, Comicon 74[40]. Gifford organised Comics 101[41] in 1976, the first convention dedicated to British comic creators, with guests including celebrated figures in British comics including Frank Hampson, Leo Baxendale, Frank Bellamy and Ron Embleton, Marvelman creator Mick Anglo and Garth creator Steve Dowling, conducting an on-stage interview with Dowling [42].
In 1977 Gifford co-founded the Society of Strip Illustration, a network for all those involved in any stage of the creative process of comics production which later became the Comic Creators Guild. In 1978 he established the 'Association of Comics Enthusiasts', which ran for 14 years proper and, as a section of UK comics fanzine The Illustrated Comics Journal, until his death. Gifford also wrote extensively for comics magazines and fanzines, particularly Comic Cuts, the newsletter of the Association of Comic Enthusiasts, and it was here that he wrote some of his most specialist work on comics history and criticism.
Prizegiving of the first Ally Sloper Awards for comic creators also took place at Comics 101, with Bob Monkhouse presenting. Dowling received the 'Best British Newspaper Strip Cartoon Artist' award, former Mickey Mouse Weekly artist Stanley White was honoured as the 'First British Science Fiction Artist' for Ian on Mu (1936) and Dan Dare artist Frank Hampson won 'Best British Strip Cartoon Artist'. IPC sponsored an award for outstanding work in their own publications, which was given to Don Lawrence for The Trigan Empire. [43]
Gifford continued to organise, guest and attend comics conventions throughout the 1970s, 80s and 90s in the UK, USA and throughout Europe.