Comic moments
I have always been a fan of comics, particularly anarchic ones. As a boy, it was the Beano, Dandy, Topper and then Whizzer & Chips. I didn’t buy them all of course, we used to swap them round. I can remember buying several Mad Magazines from Walkers news at the reduced price of sixpence (2.5p) and then getting a bollocking off my Dad when I spent half a crown (12.5p) of my three bob (15p) pocket money on the latest issue the following week. I also enjoyed the occasional imported Marvel comic, with their strange adverts for Charles Atlas and BB Guns, whatever they were.
When I was in high school, one of the lads called Snakey (Paul Snaith) loaned me two underground comics, namely Oz Magazine and Nasty Tales. This was at the time of the Oz obscenity trial so it must have been 1971 when I was in the 2nd or third year. These were rather subversive and certainly would have been confiscated if the teachers had found us with them.
During by 6th form years, a lot of the roadies would have comics with them to while away the time once they had everything set up and I saw quite a broad selection, including American ones. (Some of the roadies had some quite bizarre porn mags from their European tours as well, but we won’t go there…)
When I went to work for the GEC (as a thin sandwich style Technician/Engineer Student) and lived in the GEC halls of residence, there was a slush fund for buying weekly & monthly magazines by the house committee and there was a vote on what should be bought. This boiled down to car & bike mags, electronics mags and mucky books. (The former and latter were the most popular unsurprisingly, with fifty or so testosterone crazed eighteen year olds). The Magazines were signed out for no more than two days, although the average retention time of the porn was probably just twenty minutes).
One of the Magazines was Fiesta, a fairly soft porn title at the time (unlike say Whitehouse which was more akin to a Turkish Butcher’s window, as Billy Connolly says). Whilst many of the lads would claim that they read it for the articles, there was one feature that I particularly enjoyed enough to check it out each month. It was a very funny cartoon of a rather manky cat called Firkin who had various adventures exploring human sexuality.
Fast forward several years to 1983 and I settled down in the Town of Maidenhead. Here there was a particularly good privately owned record shop that also sold underground comics. This is where I first discovered Viz Comic which was just starting to go nationwide (but not yet mainstream). I also started to explore the back catalogue of other publications like The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers and Fat Freddies Cat.
I eventually discovered Hunt Emerson (the Firkin artist) and his other creations. I was delighted when he made compilations of Firkin the Cat available as well.
Viz spawned many competitors, most of which were rubbish, one trick ponies.
Now, having moved house several times since that time, they were all lost, thrown out or given away along the way. So why did I suddenly find myself remembering them at a Deer Park in Norfolk?
We were on a tractor tour off to see the deer and the driver was telling us about the sheep. He told us that the Ewes had been through their “Tupping” with the Rams and the orphan Lambs were in the barn being hand fed. He explained that they weren’t actually orphans, it was just that any Ewe that had more than two Lambs couldn’t successfully rear them sue to a teat shortage. When he explained how there were two “tupping” seasons once the Rans had got their stamina back a distant memory stirred, of Firkin the Cat explaining animal breeding. 
The claim (by Firkin) was that when the Ewes were in heat the farmer gave each ewe a quick diddle with a tupping stick in order to get them keen on what was to follow.
Now I have no idea if this is actually the case or not, but I thought i’d have a look on ebay to find if there was any Firkin stuff about and there it was, A quick buy me now later and after a delivery lag, I’m now happy to be reunited with this hugely amusing (and rather saucy) book of past Firkin strips.
I’ve been through it to check on the tupping stick reference and it isn’t there- he did do some softback collections as well so it must be in there.
As Firkin would say… See Yaaaawwlll!
