A heavenly body is hurling itself through space. Time, speed, day and night are no limits to a planet called Earth. Stretched across the comic-strip’s opening frame is Adam Eterno, an “uncanny figure”. There are no borders to his lonely freefall, only the deepening sea of dark into which he and the backdrop planet plunge. Eterno was a Nosferatu-type figure, “cursed to live forever unless struck a fatal blow by a weapon made of gold”. But there was one fatal blow he never saw coming. It was dealt to him by the readers of a letters page.
Looking more and more wretched by the week, Eterno turned up in Dublin and elsewhere between the covers of a comic called the Valiant. I became acutely aware of him sometime in the very early 1970s.
In the same publication, he had a colleague in the equally uncanny Janus Stark. They had a theatrical whimsy and perfect-lined plausibility; miles from Billy Bunter, they moved in a harsher, more malign world. With his angular looks and vaguely dandified outfit, Janus Stark was far cooler than Eterno – even if he had no gift for time travel. Stark’s freakish strength arose from the rubbery nature of his bones – as an escapologist and sleuth in a Victorian underworld populated by orphans, thugs and top-hatted toffs, this skeletal flexibility stood him in great stead. He could travel not across time but through letterboxes. He was able to inch slowly into and along gas and water pipes; he shrugged off easily the tightest of shackles. His only real flaw was that he lacked credibility in the corridors of Scotland Yard: his nemesis there concluded the only reason Stark could be capable of solving so many crimes was that he must also have been responsible for committing them. But beware! His arch-foes were the innocent contributors to his own comic’s letters page.
Like any publication, the Valiant competed in a marketplace. While the literary and illustrative artistry helped to inform and/or derange many a young mind, it was an artistry that ultimately had to answer to commerce. This was evident in several pages carrying ads and offers apparently aimed at children. Charles Atlas promised "I'll prove in 7 days that you can build handsome muscles" (my eight-year-old self made a mental note to take him up on it).
Other ads were for purveyors of stamp collection outfits, whose 14-piece cornucopias included a perforation gauge, a watermark detector and a magnifier. There were ads for fishing reels, for Airfix models and seemingly premature invitations to apply for training brochures from the RAF.
But the true commercial heart of the enterprise was, surprisingly, the letters page. It featured gags, fascinating facts and funny drawings, with names and city or region identifying the readers who sent them in.
While Adam Eterno and Janus Stark fended off master criminals and their henchmen in a series of dangerous scrapes week in and week out, the real threat lurked elsewhere. These heroes may as well have swapped their mythic strengths for puniness when faced by one banal force: the compulsory listing by readers of their favourites in order of 1, 2 and 3. Every entry to the letters page had to be accompanied by a cut-along-the-dotted-line “coupon” on which the sender listed their favourite “features”.
Behind the charm and chumish rhetoric of the page was a primitive prototype of today’s search engine algorithms – its purpose was to assemble sufficient market intelligence with which to calculate a yarn’s popularity. The result was punishment or reward. Your favourite story could one day be dropped. Worse, your comic could be merged with a rival – and you and your imaginative purchasing habits would be sold on seamlessly.
The rationale was not aesthetics but commerce – dark forces were at play. Senders of puerile letters, laboured puns or “fascinating facts” were unwittingly assassinating their beloved characters through process of lowest common denominator. Young readers were co-opted as mobs to attack vulnerable stories. These 1970s 1, 2 and 3 analogue engines erased great yarns from existence. In a market for stamp hinges and offers for live goldfish sent “in a special travelling container” by Chivers Jelly (“ask your mother to keep her empty packets”), an underage gang was beating up comic-book heroes. It was an early lesson in how tough entertainment can be. Letters page? Beware!