A SCREAM! for Halloween

[00:00:00] When the days of October are all but done, When the eve of all hellos is here upon us, When spooky creatures walk the earth, Ghoulies and ghosties were creatures, thus swampy ill.

[00:00:19] You can be sure of only one thing. It is time for the new episode of Comics Are My Spooky Place. Mwahahahaha!

[00:00:56] Hello lovely listeners, or happy campers, because the initials of the podcast are C-A-M-P-H, like campers. Look, yeah, if I have to explain it, it's not working, is it?

[00:01:22] It is I, Nick Kirk, aka Nick Kirk, aka Nickity Crickety, aka, well as I used to hear random strangers say on a train when Breaking Bad was still on air, bloody hell it's Walter White. Yes, it's me. Mr Colin Hoult and I are still having fun times trying to sync up on diaries, so in the meantime, I'm going commando again, actually I'm not sure going commando is the right term that I meant, or the image that you want,

[00:01:51] but it is the term I've used now, so we're going to go with it. It's just me this week to bring you our little comics podcast in which we chat about the world of comics, and in some episodes, not this week, in some episodes we run through the Marvel characters all the way from A-A-Bomb to Zzzax. This week, I'm bringing you a spooky little interlude in honour of it being Halloween.

[00:02:18] Now, we've already covered off a lot of the Marvel horror comics, like Tomb of Dracula, Werewolf by Night, Frankenstein's Monsters. We did that in a previous episode. Go back and have a listen to that one. It's good fun. So today, I am going to take a look at a comic of my childhood, one that I was absolutely obsessed by for the very brief space of time that it existed for.

[00:02:45] Today, we are going to talk about the very short-lived UK comic, Scream. Yeah, suitably spooky, I think you'll agree. Now, Scream was a UK newsstand comic that ran from March to June 1984. Yes, you heard that right. It ran for a span of only a few months back in the 80s. It was 15 issues in

[00:03:11] total, and a couple of specials, I think, as well. It was a dedicated weekly horror comic, and it was the only one of its kind at the time in the UK. Horror comics had taken a bit of a battering way back in the 50s with the publication in the States of a book called The Seduction of the Innocent by a psychiatrist called Frederick Wertham, and that book basically stated that comic books were

[00:03:38] harmful and led to juvenile delinquency, based on your usual amount of not a lot of evidence at all. However, this book was influential. It was read by people in higher places, and it led to a number of congressional hearings in the States, which were the direct cause ultimately of the establishment of the Comics Code Authority, something that we've mentioned on the podcast before, and that Comics Code

[00:04:04] Authority prescribed exactly what you could and couldn't do in comic books. It wasn't so much a legal thing, but it was a recommendation of the congressional hearings that the comics industry needed to regulate itself, or else was the implied threat there, obviously. So the comics industry came up with this Comics Code Authority to try and monitor and regulate what went into comic books. This code,

[00:04:30] you could really say, was the downfall of most horror comics at the time. I mean, the biggest publisher of horror comics back then was a company called EC Comics, and they were a pretty prolific horror publisher. They had titles such as Vault of Horror, Haunt of Fear. All those kind of disappeared after this and the introduction of the CCA. Fast forward a bit into the sort of 70s and 80s and move across the pond to

[00:04:54] the UK, and at this point IPC magazines are having a pretty successful run with weekly comics like 2000AD, Roy of the Rovers, and in the early 80s, a relaunched version of the classic British comic Eagle, which was the home of square-jawed pilot of the future Dan Dare back in the 1950s. IPC magazines

[00:05:18] had been no stranger to controversy themselves at this point in their publishing career, as one of their 70s titles, Action, had fallen foul of media outcry for its violent content. The outcry was strong enough that it led to the comic being sort of temporarily withdrawn, a lot of the quote marks offending strips removed, and then the comic itself heavily sanitised. A move which ultimately saw sales

[00:05:46] of the comic drop to such a point that it was then effectively cancelled by being merged with another comic. And actually this was a pretty standard tactic at the time. Often comics titles, if they started to fall in sales, they'd be merged with another one to try and bolster the one that was doing slightly better with some of the better received strips from the failing comic. So as they got into the 80s, the success of the weekly sci-fi action comic 2000AD, we've mentioned that many times before on the podcast,

[00:06:16] home of classic strips like Judge Dread, Rogue Trooper, and Strontium Dog at the time. The success of 2000AD made IPC consider getting back into a more mature title, and so Scream was born at this point. It wasn't that horrific a comic. I mean, bear in mind, I was eight years old when this comic came out, and I loved it. And you could still, you know, you could just buy it in the newsagent without needing

[00:06:40] to show any ID or anything like that. It was certainly grimmer than 2000AD was. You know, the comic itself consisted of a number of one-off horror tales combined with ongoing serials. So it was the same format they were using for 2000AD. In Scream, the regular serials included The Dracula File, in which Dracula returns to hunt in modern day 1980s England. And I guess you could say that's pretty

[00:07:09] similar, to be honest, to Marvel's Tomb of Dracula comic, which had launched about a decade earlier. Other serials included Monster, in which a young boy discovers his deformed uncle who's been hidden in the attic his entire life, and the two end up going on the run because the uncle turns out to be inadvertently quite murderous. Interesting little side fact here, for Monster, the first part of the story was written by comics legend Alan Moore, who we've definitely mentioned many times on the

[00:07:37] podcast before. But only that first episode. The Judge Dread writing legends John Wagner and Alan Grant took over from episode two onwards. I would say though, in terms of the ongoing serials, the one that was my favourite was one called The Thirteenth Floor, in which the new high-tech computer building supervisor of a fancy apartment block decides that the best way to protect the apartment block's residents is by murdering anyone that tries to harm them, usually in the fictional

[00:08:07] thirteenth floor of the building. So the building was built without a thirteenth floor. But anyone attempting to harm the residents is sort of lured into the lift, gets out on what appears to be the thirteenth floor, it's a computer generated hologram, they generally get sort of scared to death, and the computer has saved the residents. I would say nowadays though, that storyline in these days of impending AI apocalypse feels a

[00:08:33] little bit less like a horror tale, and a lot more like a sort of sales pitch by a Silicon Valley tech bro. Much like in 2000 AD, Scream had its own fictional editor, where 2000 AD had the alien Tharg, Scream had hooded ghoul Ghastly McNasty, I mean it is a good name, yeah you've got to give him that, and Ghastly McNasty graced the intro and letters page of the comic, and was obviously in reality

[00:08:59] the actual editor Ian Rimmer, and his assistant Simon Furman. Simon Furman would later go on to write most of the Transformers UK scripts, and I would say is a lovely bloke who was once stood next to me at a comic mart when I was selling a load of stuff, and he very kindly offered to sign something in order for me to get my money for it, which he did and I did, and I now wish that I'd just kept it of course. Scream did only last 15 issues before it got cancelled, but that wasn't actually due to

[00:09:25] controversy over its horrific content, surprisingly, even though a lot of people seem to think it was. I mean the then Liberal Democrat leader Paddy Ashdown did apparently send a letter of complaint about the title, but seeing as this was about a year after it had already been cancelled, I don't think we can give him much credit on that one to be honest. No, the reason for its cancellation was in fact a Labour dispute. In 1984, a Labour dispute disrupted publication,

[00:09:55] and upper management at IPC used that as an excuse to basically cancel some of the poorer selling titles like Scream. So Scream found itself, I'm gonna do it, on the chopping block. I had to do it, it's a horror title, you've got to do that, you've got to make that kind of metaphor. It wasn't entirely decapitated though, do you see what I've done there? Yeah, that was nice, yeah. As both Monster and the 13th Floor lived on in the pages of Eagle for some time afterwards,

[00:10:21] like I said earlier, merging a failing title into a currently successful one was common practice. So Eagle briefly became Eagle and Scream for a while after that, before the Scream was dropped and it was just back to Eagle again. Scream itself has made a comeback in the intervening years. Rebellion Publishing, who now published 2000 AD, picked up the rights to Scream as well.

[00:10:45] So about 10 years ago they started publishing one-off Halloween specials of that. So it's nice to see that it's made a comeback in the 21st century. You can read the whole thing yourself now. Rebellion have been going through and publishing a lot of classic British comic strips, so they've published a hardback collection of that whole set of 15 issues and the special I think on that one.

[00:11:09] They've also published the first volume of that original violent run of Action Comic as well. When I say Action Comic, I don't mean the Superman title Action Comics. I mean the UK 70s comic called Action. It's just called Action, not Action Comics. Rebellion have also published a collection of the specials they've been publishing so you can get a collection of all of Scream and read it in a lovely,

[00:11:35] nicely restored physical format. I'm not paid by Rebellion Publishing, by the way this isn't an advert, but if they would like to sponsor the podcast I'm more than happy to advertise for them. So there you go, just a little spooky comics interlude to send some shivers down your spine this Halloween eve and keep the podcast ticking along while we're not able to both be in the same

[00:12:00] place at the same time. One or both of us will be back next time with more comics-based tomfoolery, and I think all that remains is for me to leave you with a censor-enraging, blood-curdling shaflang and just remind you to be careful out there because Hank Pym sucks your blood. Mwahahahaha

[00:12:28] Thank you for listening to Comics Are My Happy Place. If you have enjoyed this podcast there are many ways you can support us. You can follow us on Instagram at comicsaremyhappyplace, you can drop us an email at comicsaremyhappyplace at gmail.com, and if you've got anything funny or interesting to say we'll read it out on the podcast. But the best way to support us is to go to our Patreon, patreon.com slash comicsaremyhappyplace,

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[00:13:37] This podcast is part of Podomity, the UK's podcast comedy network. Why not laugh at what else we've got? Visit Podomity.com