Serial Killer Part II: Chapter 18
Dave liked the episode because he had inserted precise details on how readers could find the ingredients and make a pipe bomb in it. His short sharp shock working on Laarf! had fuelled his hatred of the readers and he knew no one was taking notice of The Spanker anymore.
And if they did, there was the Major as fall guy. When they looked into his disreputable past and those school fees going walkabout, it would be easy to put him in the frame. He disregarded his recent encounter with the Demon Barber and was back to his old risk-taking self.
Chewing on his pipe, he recalled, from readers’ letters and complaints, there had only been walking wounded thus far.
There had been that kid who tried to breathe air through the plughole and smashed his teeth. There were the two boys who tried to imitate the Caning Commando when Dave had him pushing his cane through the spokes of the Oberspankerfuhrer’s motorbike. One had gone over the handlebars of his chopper bike and broken his arm. The other, holding the cane, had dislocated his thumb.
Dave had written in a scene where the Commando jumps out of a plane onto a barrage balloon. Copying him, a kid had jumped out of his bedroom window onto his space hopper, only he had missed and broken his leg. But it didn’t put him off. He wrote in to say, as soon as his leg was better, he was going to jump again.
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Then the Oberspankerfuhrer had forced the Commando to drink a deadly poison. Dave had Grabham saving himself thanks to inserting a balloon down his throat. It didn’t work, of course, so Dave had had high hopes for that one. It never got to the poison stage, because a kid trying it out had nearly choked on a balloon and had to be rushed to hospital.
However, Dave had a good feeling about the pipe bomb. If they followed his instructions correctly, and were even a little bit smarter than Alf Mast, this could be the big one.
Now it was time for him to visit the vaults where a century of British comic art was stored. What Dave was after was on the infamous Aisle 13, a.k.a. the Black Museum of Comics: Ken Royce’s legendary, banned masterpiece, Micky’s Mutants.
In Britain, after a nuclear war, Micky is happily living in the ruins of his semi-detached house with his mutant mum, dad, brother and sister, all grotesquely but humorously mutated, but still wearing the remnants of their clothes. They jeer at Micky because he was normal and had five fingers on each hand, two eyes, and two ears.
If Dave could find it, it would be perfect for JNP 66.
Dave had had a conversation with Ron about it while he was on Laarf!. ‘Why is it locked away on Aisle 13, Ron?’
‘So people like you can’t get at it.’
‘What’s it about?’
‘If you really want to know, it’s these fucking mutants who make fun of Micky ’cos he’s the only one who’s normal after a fucking nuclear war. Now, do you think that’s funny?’
‘Well, yes, I do.’
‘Well, you would, wouldn’t you? I don’t see what’s funny about mutants with three legs and one eye, who talk out their arsehole.’
‘Could I see it? Purely for my personal interest?’
‘No,’ said Ron, regarding him suspiciously. ‘That strip will never see the light of day again. It would give kids nightmares. We’d have the Guardian, Mary Whitehouse, and fuck knows who else onto us. I think it’s deeply offensive to take the piss out of someone with two heads and a tail.’
‘But Royce is a brilliant cartoonist. He’s up there with the greats: Ronald Searle, David Low, Osbert Lancaster.’
‘We wouldn’t put up with any of their indulgent stuff here neither,’ responded a scowling Ron. ‘Ronald Searle – we’d have seen him off. He’d be tunnelling his way back into that prisoner of war camp if he’d been working for us.’
Dave owed it to Ken Royce that his lost masterpiece should finally be revealed to his thousands of fans who didn’t even know his name. Only hours earlier he had been saying how much he hated the readers and yet here he was, fighting for their right to laugh. The paradox was lost on him.
‘You’re doing a good thing,’ said his mother from inside his head.
‘Yeah, well don’t expect me to make a habit of it,’ he replied grudgingly.
But first he had to find it.
He entered the dimly lit vaults, which had a strange, eerie atmosphere like something out of Gormenghast. Endless aisles of classic pages of artwork, labelled and wrapped in brown paper, and famous magazines going back to World War Two, World War One, and beyond, that seemed to go on forever, were looked after by bored browncoats. This vast basement was actually much older and bigger – half an acre of arched, subterranean cellars – than Fleetpit House above it.
No one was quite sure why the former Edwardian hotel had its somewhat unfortunate name. It was claimed the site had once been a mass burial pit that massacred Romans were thrown into when Boudicca destroyed Londinium. Another theory was there had been a plague pit or a cock fighting pit on the site. Or a cesspit from which sewage poured into the underground River Fleet, now enclosed inside a giant sewer pipe, which ran the length of the vaults.
How apt, Dave had commented, that this building, built over a sewer, was now producing the worst shit in the world. As he liked to say, ‘Our comics have brought shame on a plague pit.’
Approaching the entrance, Dave pretended he was looking for a harmless old page to reprint in The Spanker. He had forged the necessary chit. The browncoat on duty consulted a ledger. ‘Aisle 9. Rack 3.’ He waved Dave forward without looking up. ‘Help yourself, mate. We’re on our tea break.’
Dave noticed the storemen were using a beautiful, original piece of artwork, depicting a heroic British gladiator in a Roman arena, as a tea tray. ‘Is that a Frank Delano original?’ he asked in horror.
‘Dunno,’ replied the browncoat.
Dave explained to the bored storemen, ‘Frank Delano was one of the finest illustrators of the 1960s. He’s world famous. He’s won dozens of awards.’
‘That’s nice for him,’ said one of them, spilling tea onto it.
Close-by, another storeman was stoking the boiler. He looked across curiously at Dave, hovering by the tea drinkers, as he loaded priceless bound volumes of the history of the South African War into the furnace. They were so old, they burnt particularly well. As he ripped out the pages, depicting Britain’s courageous slaughter of the Boers, his features were illuminated by the glow of the flames. He was a silver-haired, once handsome man, somewhat disfigured by an old facial injury, giving him a twisted and malevolent look.
On another aisle, a browncoat used a Stanley knife to cut some original artwork down to size, a fully-painted Crusader castle that had had appeared in But Why? magazine, slicing off the battlements.
The others called across to him. ‘Oi! What you doing, Bill?’
‘Artwork’s sticking out. Got to cut it down so it fits the shelf.’
‘Hurry up. Tea’s getting cold.’
Dave couldn’t let it go without comment. ‘I suppose you have more old artwork blocking leaky drains?’
‘You been spying on us?’
Shuddering, Dave headed off for Aisle 9, unaware that the browncoat stoking the boiler had left his assignment and was following him. Picking up the art from Aisle 9, Dave then sneaked across to Aisle 13.
Water, at least he hoped it was water, was slopping out of the drains. This always happened when the sewer pipe couldn’t cope and the subterranean Fleet overflowed. It looked like the bottom shelves had been temporarily submerged and the artwork allowed to dry out. He prayed that wasn’t the case for Ken Royce’s work.
He leafed through the ‘Black Museum’ of forbidden comics. There were a number of Caning Commando banned stories that were never to be reprinted under any circumstances. The ‘Relief of Mafeking’ story appeared in 1963 at the height of the Profumo affair. In it, the Caning Commando visits his canemakers, Mafeking and Jones, and discovers traitorous aristocrats purchasing canes for dubious purposes, bringing his beloved profession into disrepute. Meanwhile, Alf finds a ‘bumpy man’ named Mandy in one of the cane-fitting rooms using a ‘special reserve’ cane on a member of the House of Lords.
It was embarrassing, because Mafeking and Jones actually existed and, rumour had it, the story was a little close to the truth. They supplied canes, tawses, paddles, whips, birches and other ‘disciplinary devices’ to teachers and security services around the world.
The Major had bought his canes from M&J when he was a housemaster, and the canemakers had no objection to him using their name. They seemed to rather enjoy the Caning Commando being their ‘poster boy’. Whenever the Major mentioned Mafeking and Jones in a story, they sent him a bottle of single malt whisky.
Next to the ‘Relief of Mafeking’ story were the ‘Belt Up Britain’ posters. In 1964, in the wake of the mods and rockers riots, there were calls to bring back the birch to deal with the ‘yob problem’. As the birch had only recently been banned, the publishers thought they would capitalise on the public anger. The Caning Commando fronted a poster campaign encouraging parents to discipline their children. He was depicted waving a huge belt with the captions, ‘Belt Up Britain’ and ‘Dads Do Your Duty’.
Alongside it was the infamous ‘Bumzai!’ episode where the Caning Commando visits the Asian theatre of war and is awarded a ‘purple arse’ medal by the Americans for ‘giving the Japanese a taste of their own divine wind’. It fell foul of the 1965 Race Relations Act because of the Commando’s unrepeatable racist language as he battled with a cane-wielding Samurai. Clearly the Major had had a bad time as a Japanese prisoner of war.
But yes, there it was – Micky’s Mutants! Dave tore back the corners of the wrapping paper and beheld the masterpiece as the lurking browncoat watched him from around the corner of the aisle. It was everything Dave hoped for. Micky’s dad! He was in awe. And that blob with tentacles, with the skirt on: Micky’s mum!
Using the reprint page of art as a cover, Dave slipped the banned pages past the other browncoats, who couldn’t be bothered to sign him out or even look in his direction. They were too busy throwing darts at a priceless piece of art from Homework – an impressive, full colour cutaway of a Vickers Vanguard airliner.
Dave was delighted with his find. Publishing it in JNP66 would be his tribute to Ken. He might even put some words in the comic:
‘In memory of Kenneth Royce, a Master of Comedy. Martyr to the “Humour” department. Sacrificed on the Altar of Shame. In the Temple of the Humourless.’
Ken would have the last Laarf!
Back down in the vaults, the browncoats had finished their tea break and returned to work, leaving a lone attendant on the front desk. Dave’s mysterious stalker – the ‘Phantom of the Fleetpit’ – strode up to the desk and enquired, ‘Hey, Sid, who was that git from upstairs who was looking for art?’
‘They’re all gits upstairs,’ said Sid. ‘Which git?’
‘The big git who looked a bit of a shit.’
‘Which shit? They all look like shits to me.’
‘You know. The … fan,’ The Phantom said with an air of disgust.
Sid looked equally repelled. ‘Oh, yeah. The … fan. I know who you mean now. Old effendi. Didn’t like our choice of tea trays.’
‘So who is old effendi?’
Sid consulted his ledger. ‘Let’s see. Dave Maudling.’
‘Thought as much,’ said the Phantom. ‘What magazine does he work on?’
‘Says here he’s the editor of The Spanker.’
‘Well, what do you know?’ said the mysterious storeman. He repeated himself: ‘What do you know?’
‘So what do you know?’ asked a puzzled Sid.
‘I know I’m going to be paying him a visit,’ said the Phantom smiling cruelly.
Serial Killer by Pat Mills & Kevin O’Neill is the first book in the Read Em And Weep series and is on sale digitally or as paperback.