Last Train Outta Beanotown

I woke up one morning to the sound of my alarm clock calling me to rise and face another day but I couldn’t help feel my world was swamped in grey.  I expected to witness a splash of jet black and fire red horizontal lines streaking across the sky into forever but instead merely treated to overcast clouds and foul weather.  Did you ever get the feeling someone had pulled a dirty trick, that this isn’t the only world to ever exist, once upon a time there used to be another world they not only made fade away like a dream at dawn, but also tried to carve from our minds one panel at a time.

I remember a world of spiky hair, red and black hooped jerseys and Abyssinian Wire Haired Tripe Hounds.  Armouries stacked with catapults, peashooters and water pistols, carties and an endless supply of rotten tomatoes.  Unruly, unrulebale kids raised and educated on Bash Street, Minxs, Dodgers and Menaces who accept authority like Lord Snooty needs charity.

Did all the Dads and Mums and Mayors and sergeants and Teachers and headmasters finally charter a master-crafted stratagem to keep these hoodlum youths at bay?  Did they realise it would turn the world so grey?  Did they dismantle the world with such subtle revenge you woke up one morning and wondered when all the mischief ended?  Did the Dodge Books get thrown on some sinister bonfire or left under a mountain of dust in some old abandoned attic, each word and dodge left unreadable and static.

Maybe I got the last train out of Beanotown when I asked my Gran to cancel my subscription and cut off my 60p addiction to be replaced by a hunt for CDs and surreal TV.  But I still try and wake up each morning with a plan for the Hi-Jinx of the day, what scheme accompanies this 12 panel scandal.  Fights a blur of dust and fists, puns coming thicker and faster than a combination of Fatty and Billy Whizz, the reader’s voice accompanying every story in this weekly, ever-living glory.  Our thoughts are made real in clouds hovering above our heads.

 Never let the slipper have it’s bitter victory, never become a softy and quiver and simper.  Think what glorious rebellion we could achieve under the menace-manifesto of a British Comics Masterpiece.

I pressed snooze on my alarm clock and drifted back to sleep