Comics That Never Were #12

Suppose there was an “average” British comic… Let’s say that you could create a multidimensional graph with dozens of axes, one for every possible demographic — genre, format, atmosphere, target audience, price range, etc. — what sort of comic would be closest to the centre of that graph, the one that was most representative of them all?

Well, we’re not doing that today because it would be too hard, but we could maybe get a taste of what it might be like by finding the most ordinary or generic title for a British comic. With that in brain, I decided to gather all of the titles from my ever-expanding database and submit them to a word-frequency count. Just, y’know, to see what came out.

So — in descending order, and ignoring basic words such as “the” and “and”, and bearing in mind that the database isn’t complete (2151 different publications as of today) and might well have an error or two — the ten most frequently-used words in the titles of British comics are:

194 — comic
148 — library
112 — comics
90 — western
84 — picture
46 — big
45 — tales
42 — stories
41 — weekly
38 — marvel

And here’s that data on a graph, because I can do graphs if they’re two-dimensional:

Thing is, though, Comic and Comics have the same meaning in this context, so we should amalgamate them into Comic.

Nine words is rather long for a comic-book title, but it’s not entirely unprecedented: regular readers might recall a recent mention of The Mighty World of Marvel Featuring The Incredible Hulk and Planet of the Apes: that’s fourteen words!

And speaking of Marvel, you might be thinking, “Hey, how come the word ‘Marvel’ appears so many times in the titles of British comics? I know about Marvel UK, of course — because I clicked on that link up there in the previous paragraph — but there can’t really be thirty-eight comics with ‘Marvel’ in the title. Did you count them all twice or something?”

Well, by my reckoning there’s been at least seven different incarnations of The Mighty World of Marvel alone, and four different Marvel Legends comics, and don’t forget the old Captain Marvel / Captain Marvel Jr. / Marvel Family titles from L. Miller and Son, plus of course The Halfpenny Marvel from 1893. So while thirty-eight is a lot, it is accurate (or at least not wildly off the mark).

Regardless, we probably shouldn’t include Marvel because, well, history tells us that it’s potentially actionable — unless we were to change it to Miracle — so we’ll strip that one from the list. We’re down to a more manageable eight words:

comic/comics
library
western
picture
big
tales
stories
weekly

Now we scramble those words into a reasonably coherent title, throw in an ampersand to ward off evil spirits, and we end up with Big Picture Western Tales & Stories Comic Library Weekly, which sounds like an early 1960s digest-sized comic to me…

After pondering for a while on the title of the story that might be featured on the cover of this imaginary comic, I figured that I should apply the same word-frequency process: I analysed a list of almost two thousand Western movies released between 1940 and 1969, and the seven most commonly used words in their titles are, in descending order, Trail, West, Texas, Gun, Kid, Man and Frontier.

However… A simple word-frequency count is misleading because it only takes into consideration the number of titles in which each word appears. The first word, Big, has a count of forty-six but thirty-seven of those are from Scion’s line of “Big Whatever” comics, none of which lasted for longer than a single issue. So in terms of the amount of exposure each word has, Big doesn’t rate very highly.

Shirley the number of issues published would be a more appropriate measurement? There are, for example, six different publications with the word Chips in the title, but in total it appears in 4,188 issues.

So… if for each word we also add up the number of different issues in which that word appears in the title, we get a rather different top-ten list:

28,665 — library
24,407 — comic/comics
17,578 — picture
16,564 — weekly
15,337 — boy/boys/boy’s/boys’
11,972 — girl/girls/girl’s/girls’
9,245 — friend
8,693 — own
8,096 — paper
7,622 — stories

Because I know you were wondering: on the original list the word Chips is in the 162nd position, but on this new list, it’s at position #24. Makes you think, huh?

But, wait, now we’re back up to ten words again, and — according to charred notes found in a bonfire on waste land close to the house of noted mathematician Isaac Einstein — ten words is even more words than eight words. However, since in this instance Paper and Comic pretty much mean the same thing, mostly, let’s amalgamate those, too, and get back to nine…

comic/comics/paper
library
picture
weekly
boy/boys/boy’s/boys’
girl/girls/girl’s/girls’
friend
own
stories

You know, I don’t really like the word Friend in there. It’s a bit unsettling… One can all-too-easily imagine a young person yelling at their peers, “Well, I don’t care that I wasn’t invited to your dumb party! I don’t need you — I have plenty of friends!” before retreating to their gloomy bedroom and looking at their pile of comics as they softly whisper, “You’re the only friends I need.”

A comic isn’t a friend: it’s a medium for delivering entertainment. You wouldn’t call a TV set a “friend,” would you? Imagine someone you know telling you about their child, “What? Oh, no, Peninsula doesn’t need to mix with other children — she has the TV to keep her company! It’s actually her best friend!” Yeah, you’d be on the phone to social services quicker than jumping Jackie Flash. Although, to be blunt, you really should have contacted them a few years back when you first discovered that your friends had named their daughter “Peninsula.”

So we’ll drop Friend from the list. If nothing else, it’s archaic. And speaking of things that are archaic: in this modern, enlightened world we want to encourage gender equality so we certainly don’t want Boys or Girls in the title! Let’s replace them with the less divisive and more inclusive word Persons.

And there we have it! Mix them up a bit and throw in an “of”, and we end up with…

Persons’ Own Weekly Picture Library of Comic Stories

Why, that fairly doesn’t trip off the tongue, does it? It sounds very vintage indeed… here’s what such a publication might have looked like back in the early days of British comics:

With any comic that has such a clunky title, if it sticks around long enough the readers will eventually reduce it down to a nickname or an acronym.

In this case, the obvious short version is “Pow” but that one’s been used. The acronym is more handy, although “P.O.W.P.L.O.C.S.” is still a tad awkward.

Powplocs… It’s not terrible. Maybe we’ll get used to it. After all, 2000AD was an odd-sounding title when it first appeared but it quickly became very acceptable, plus no one on Earth knows what the heck a “Beezer” is any more, or even a “Beano.” So let’s say the word “Powplocs” a few more times until it starts to lose its roughness and sound a bit more normal…

“Have you seen the new issue of Powplocs? It’s the most!”

Some kid, somewhere

“Billy is nine years old and his favourite comics are Caution, Battle-Beetles and Powplocs.”

Character witness, local magistrate hearing

“This spud gun? It came free with last week’s Powplocs!”

A different kid to the first one

Yep, it’s definitely growing on me… I like it! I think we have a winner, folks!

I now present to you the Ultimate Generic British Comic…

As it needs to appeal to every possible comic reader, Powplocs‘s contents would be considerably varied: romance westerns, science fiction nursery tales, hard-boiled mischievous children, kidnapped orphaned barbarians searching for their one true love, and of course full-colour black-and-white text-only photo-stories about plucky young dewy-eyed nurses looking for revenge against the time-travelling footballers who threatened to ruin their impoverished wealthy uncle’s scrap-yard ballet pony business by masquerading as millionaire art collectors who steal pies left to cool on windowsills by much-put-upon but well-meaning mothers of lovable scamp twins armed with catapults that they use to fight Nazis because they lied about their ages in order to enlist and fulfil their destinies to become champion radioactive prehistoric robot wolf-cowboys of Atlantis. That kind of thing.

Now, who wouldn’t buy a comic like that?

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P.S.: “Powplocs” is an anagram of “Cowplops” which is, of course, perfectly appropriate for a nonsense article like this!