Biggles in the Blue
Aug. 21st, 2023 09:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rosanicusHaving ploughed through (I believe) sixteen issues of The Eagle alongside the *cough* very legitimate *cough* ebook for missing bits, I have officially finished Biggles in the Blue!
It's a mixed bag of a book. On the one hand I do think the mystery is quite fun, and there's a lot of enjoyable rushing about to new exotic locales rather than the occasionally maddening to-ing and fro-ing of lesser plots (I am looking directly at Flies North with extreme ire) and there's a lot of wonderful moments between characters, both within & Co and also between them and EvS, who I think is quite well served here. On the other, there's the W.E. Johns of it all.
This past week I got Biggles! out of the library and had a look at the little defense of the standard criticism of Biggles (jingoistic, racist, misogynistic) and while I agree with the dismissal of accusations of jingoism and - to an extent - the misogyny, I have to say that the authors are VERY quick to dismiss the racism. The words 'product of his time' approach the text's horizon with worrying speed. I do think that on the whole it is good that the black characters in the book have names and - it would seem - independent motivations. However, the way the dialect is written and the level of paternalism in the narration drove me up the wall every time it came up. Personally I hope Susannah Shaw never has to deal with another white man for the rest of her life now that Biggles has got her a job watching flamingoes (a dream job).
Idk this post isn't going to go in depth on this because being honest W.E. Johns has been dead for fifty years and I sincerely doubt his estate are rubbing their hands in glee watching the secondhand market for ratty paperbacks of Biggles Takes A Holiday. Nor is anyone in the fandom (under the age of ooh about 75) touting this book as wall-to-wall perfection. It's not like trying to watch Talons of Weng-Chiang for your Doctor Who podcast (completely random example of course, I say while staring at my Audacity project file for the next episode in procrastinatory dread) in the sure knowledge that a million cunts out in the fandom think it's an unimpeachable masterpiece.
ANYWAY. I liked that there was a big snake :)
The slashiness was, as Philomytha readily assured me some time ago, off the charts. Biggles being so immediately furious that Zorotov would talk to EvS in that way and that EvS would let him... Ginger seeing shame in EvS's face "for the first time" - it's only the first time you've seen it Ginger, I sincerely doubt it's the first time he's felt it - as well as the entire conversation about wine and snakes and Biggles immediately going to bat for EvS just doing his job in difficult circumstances. It's all very good food for the slashy reader. I also think that W.E. Johns is struggling at this point with how much choice EvS has in any of this. We start out by claiming he's a free agent or perhaps spy-of-fortune and then later Biggles notes that not only is Zorotov clearly in charge, any orders coming from behind the Iron Curtain have to be obeyed Or Else. The defection is being set up! Sort of, anyway.
All the setting descriptions were suitably gorgeous, although I continue to note that W.E. Johns will go out of his way to put the characters in a place which we would imagine to be quite nice (for example a wildlife reserve in the Bahamas) and then describe it like a bomb's just gone off. It's a sort of narrative pessimism which works well to make the peril seem realer but I also think it does a bit of a disservice to some of the places. He also fucking hates rainforests so much which I noticed in Takes a Holiday, one wonders how much personal experience he had with them. I personally feel my lungs filling with water whenever I step into the wet biome at the Eden Project but I still think the Amazon is quite beautiful.
I also really like the flamingoes as part of the mystery. Commander Evans and his quest for a scarlet flamingo egg were a nice way to tie the nature thing into the main plot, and also initiated the best scene of action in the book (Biggles & Fishing Rod & Ginger & Other Fishing Rod vs Snake & Armchair) as well as a great tragedy (the egg smashing). I always like a good snake in a book, the bit in Terai with the snake in a bag is a particular highlight.
Overall, I think it's one I'll reread in the future but only by aggressively skim reading parts of it and stubbornly imagining Napoleon Morgan's adventures after the close of the book (they didn't find his body, he's obviously fine and going to go back to his activities of being the best dressed man in the Caribbean). He's a great character stuck in a narrative he doesn't deserve, I think, and incidentally I'd quite like to know more about his and EvS's working relationship. Reading between the lines I think they got along a lot more than Morgan and Zorotov, and one wonders if there was ever a very restrained bitching session over some of EvS's cover identity wine samples.
What I'm really here to do, however, is to share some of the illustrations from both in the Blue and in the Gobi, which was serialised directedly after Blue concluded. Both were illustrated by Edwin Phillips, who varied in his interpretation of the characters but never wavered in making them just slightly more twinky than Stead, which I appreciate as a twinky Biggles fan.
First of all we have a lovely group shot from Gobi, which begins the ongoing issue that in a black and white medium Phillips doesn't know how to distinguish Ginger. He's recognisable in contrast to the others here but in solo shots he could be Bertie or Algy quite easily. Still handsome though!
Also from Gobi we have some mechanical fiddling along with a nice profile of Bertie, who comes off pretty well here.
Onto in the Blue. I adore Ginger's expression here, it made me laugh quite hard when I opened the comic. It's a very perplexing egg, and also clear that the illustrator hadn't really paid attention to the text (or possibly hadn't even seen it) and just drew a hen's egg when the whole point is that it's way too big to be one. The whole egg conversation had me in stitches to be honest, it was a nice moment of Biggles and Ginger having a bit of a joke together in the midst of an investigation. I like it when characters are friends!
I really like this one. It's a good action shot and the composition is interesting with Biggles in the foreground. And of course the evidence that & Co. are once again dressed in an insane way for trekking through the forest and various lagoons. Ginger immediately regrets this and to be honest I think later illustrations missed a trick not having him in a shirt which is ripped to shreds considering how often WEJ mentioned the thorn bushes he's getting tangled in.
Here we have Algy, shot in the thigh about an hour before, having landed his plane on a narrow sand-bar, apologising for all the fuss. I like the composition again and also the generally dishevelled and worried vibes from the gang. Oh and this time it's Algy in the flying cap and goggles to show he's been flying a plane, because the visual evidence of the plane wasn't enough.
Another good Bertie in this one. Honestly I think Bertie might be best served by this artist, he's much more handsome than one might otherwise imagine (I tend to think of him a bit gawkier than this). This is also a better angle for Ginger, who in the unseen illos for this story is almost comically chiselled. Not how I imagine our beloved Northern protege at all!
The last image I'll put here isn't Biggles at all. It is instead an advertisement for Colman's Mustard, because as it turns out in the fifties the advertisers liked to put a bit of thought into what type of print their ad would appear in and so suit it to the medium. In the case of The Eagle, this resulted in the ongoing adventures of Jimmy Walls (one strip has him rescuing a fawn from a literal towering inferno) where every strip ends with him eating a Walls Ice Cream, and also The Three Mustardeers and their arch nemesis the Slipper (because he always slips away, you see). The advert which had me actually reading these alongside in the Blue was one in which the Slipper tricks them into following him into a series of catacombs full of skeletons and then abandoning them in the dark. Then it turns out one of the children (the Mustardeers are at most thirteen or fourteen years old) has thoughtfully brought some chalk and a pocket torch, so they manage to escape the catacombs quite easily. And then they have sandwiches with Colman's Mustard, although they don't say what else they contain so for all I know the sandwiches are just bread and an inch of mustard.
This strip is not that strip. But it's also bonkers!
I must know the entire saga of The Three Mustardeers. Is there a D'Artagnan of Mustard? D'Artadijon? It's almost too much to consider.
It's a mixed bag of a book. On the one hand I do think the mystery is quite fun, and there's a lot of enjoyable rushing about to new exotic locales rather than the occasionally maddening to-ing and fro-ing of lesser plots (I am looking directly at Flies North with extreme ire) and there's a lot of wonderful moments between characters, both within & Co and also between them and EvS, who I think is quite well served here. On the other, there's the W.E. Johns of it all.
This past week I got Biggles! out of the library and had a look at the little defense of the standard criticism of Biggles (jingoistic, racist, misogynistic) and while I agree with the dismissal of accusations of jingoism and - to an extent - the misogyny, I have to say that the authors are VERY quick to dismiss the racism. The words 'product of his time' approach the text's horizon with worrying speed. I do think that on the whole it is good that the black characters in the book have names and - it would seem - independent motivations. However, the way the dialect is written and the level of paternalism in the narration drove me up the wall every time it came up. Personally I hope Susannah Shaw never has to deal with another white man for the rest of her life now that Biggles has got her a job watching flamingoes (a dream job).
Idk this post isn't going to go in depth on this because being honest W.E. Johns has been dead for fifty years and I sincerely doubt his estate are rubbing their hands in glee watching the secondhand market for ratty paperbacks of Biggles Takes A Holiday. Nor is anyone in the fandom (under the age of ooh about 75) touting this book as wall-to-wall perfection. It's not like trying to watch Talons of Weng-Chiang for your Doctor Who podcast (completely random example of course, I say while staring at my Audacity project file for the next episode in procrastinatory dread) in the sure knowledge that a million cunts out in the fandom think it's an unimpeachable masterpiece.
ANYWAY. I liked that there was a big snake :)
The slashiness was, as Philomytha readily assured me some time ago, off the charts. Biggles being so immediately furious that Zorotov would talk to EvS in that way and that EvS would let him... Ginger seeing shame in EvS's face "for the first time" - it's only the first time you've seen it Ginger, I sincerely doubt it's the first time he's felt it - as well as the entire conversation about wine and snakes and Biggles immediately going to bat for EvS just doing his job in difficult circumstances. It's all very good food for the slashy reader. I also think that W.E. Johns is struggling at this point with how much choice EvS has in any of this. We start out by claiming he's a free agent or perhaps spy-of-fortune and then later Biggles notes that not only is Zorotov clearly in charge, any orders coming from behind the Iron Curtain have to be obeyed Or Else. The defection is being set up! Sort of, anyway.
All the setting descriptions were suitably gorgeous, although I continue to note that W.E. Johns will go out of his way to put the characters in a place which we would imagine to be quite nice (for example a wildlife reserve in the Bahamas) and then describe it like a bomb's just gone off. It's a sort of narrative pessimism which works well to make the peril seem realer but I also think it does a bit of a disservice to some of the places. He also fucking hates rainforests so much which I noticed in Takes a Holiday, one wonders how much personal experience he had with them. I personally feel my lungs filling with water whenever I step into the wet biome at the Eden Project but I still think the Amazon is quite beautiful.
I also really like the flamingoes as part of the mystery. Commander Evans and his quest for a scarlet flamingo egg were a nice way to tie the nature thing into the main plot, and also initiated the best scene of action in the book (Biggles & Fishing Rod & Ginger & Other Fishing Rod vs Snake & Armchair) as well as a great tragedy (the egg smashing). I always like a good snake in a book, the bit in Terai with the snake in a bag is a particular highlight.
Overall, I think it's one I'll reread in the future but only by aggressively skim reading parts of it and stubbornly imagining Napoleon Morgan's adventures after the close of the book (they didn't find his body, he's obviously fine and going to go back to his activities of being the best dressed man in the Caribbean). He's a great character stuck in a narrative he doesn't deserve, I think, and incidentally I'd quite like to know more about his and EvS's working relationship. Reading between the lines I think they got along a lot more than Morgan and Zorotov, and one wonders if there was ever a very restrained bitching session over some of EvS's cover identity wine samples.
What I'm really here to do, however, is to share some of the illustrations from both in the Blue and in the Gobi, which was serialised directedly after Blue concluded. Both were illustrated by Edwin Phillips, who varied in his interpretation of the characters but never wavered in making them just slightly more twinky than Stead, which I appreciate as a twinky Biggles fan.
First of all we have a lovely group shot from Gobi, which begins the ongoing issue that in a black and white medium Phillips doesn't know how to distinguish Ginger. He's recognisable in contrast to the others here but in solo shots he could be Bertie or Algy quite easily. Still handsome though!
Also from Gobi we have some mechanical fiddling along with a nice profile of Bertie, who comes off pretty well here.
Onto in the Blue. I adore Ginger's expression here, it made me laugh quite hard when I opened the comic. It's a very perplexing egg, and also clear that the illustrator hadn't really paid attention to the text (or possibly hadn't even seen it) and just drew a hen's egg when the whole point is that it's way too big to be one. The whole egg conversation had me in stitches to be honest, it was a nice moment of Biggles and Ginger having a bit of a joke together in the midst of an investigation. I like it when characters are friends!
I really like this one. It's a good action shot and the composition is interesting with Biggles in the foreground. And of course the evidence that & Co. are once again dressed in an insane way for trekking through the forest and various lagoons. Ginger immediately regrets this and to be honest I think later illustrations missed a trick not having him in a shirt which is ripped to shreds considering how often WEJ mentioned the thorn bushes he's getting tangled in.
Here we have Algy, shot in the thigh about an hour before, having landed his plane on a narrow sand-bar, apologising for all the fuss. I like the composition again and also the generally dishevelled and worried vibes from the gang. Oh and this time it's Algy in the flying cap and goggles to show he's been flying a plane, because the visual evidence of the plane wasn't enough.
Another good Bertie in this one. Honestly I think Bertie might be best served by this artist, he's much more handsome than one might otherwise imagine (I tend to think of him a bit gawkier than this). This is also a better angle for Ginger, who in the unseen illos for this story is almost comically chiselled. Not how I imagine our beloved Northern protege at all!
The last image I'll put here isn't Biggles at all. It is instead an advertisement for Colman's Mustard, because as it turns out in the fifties the advertisers liked to put a bit of thought into what type of print their ad would appear in and so suit it to the medium. In the case of The Eagle, this resulted in the ongoing adventures of Jimmy Walls (one strip has him rescuing a fawn from a literal towering inferno) where every strip ends with him eating a Walls Ice Cream, and also The Three Mustardeers and their arch nemesis the Slipper (because he always slips away, you see). The advert which had me actually reading these alongside in the Blue was one in which the Slipper tricks them into following him into a series of catacombs full of skeletons and then abandoning them in the dark. Then it turns out one of the children (the Mustardeers are at most thirteen or fourteen years old) has thoughtfully brought some chalk and a pocket torch, so they manage to escape the catacombs quite easily. And then they have sandwiches with Colman's Mustard, although they don't say what else they contain so for all I know the sandwiches are just bread and an inch of mustard.
This strip is not that strip. But it's also bonkers!
I must know the entire saga of The Three Mustardeers. Is there a D'Artagnan of Mustard? D'Artadijon? It's almost too much to consider.
no subject
Date: 2023-08-21 10:06 pm (UTC)Gritting my teeth and trying to squint past how she's written, I do actually like the solution to Susannah's problem - it is actually a very nice happy ending that she gets, and it's a general theme in the books (I feel) that Biggles & Co. tend to try to help the people who help them rather than just being like "hey, nice of you to give us assistance when we needed it, have fun living in poverty, byeeeee" (see also: giving most of their food to Miskoff in Buries a Hatchet; it's also implied that they would have taken him off the island if he'd wanted to go). That being said, I hope she never does have to deal with another white person ever again and just lives quietly and happily with her flamingoes. Totally also on board with Napoleon Morgan living his best life as far from Biggles & Co as possible.
Would also read fic about his and EvS's bitchfests about having to work with Zorotov.
And thank you for posting the illustrations - they're great! I like that illustrator's style. I'm also delighted by the Mustardeers. (THE THREE FROG-CHILDREN. Also, mustard and *bacon*?) It reminds me of how comics of that general era would have ads in the form of mini comic strips inside the main comic. This needs to come back. I do have questions about a detective allowing spear-wielding children to help him investigate his cases ...
no subject
Date: 2023-08-22 03:57 pm (UTC)Definitely agree about Susannah, she's in a long line of Biggles side characters who helps and is helped in turn. It's a nice moral code for Our Heroes to have and means there's often more payoff to side characters at the end (see also: Ginger making sure to get the egg for Evans, and then there's an update about how having the egg cheered him right up).
EvS's arc starting here makes sense, and you are very right about everyone else trying to kill & Co while he becomes miserable the moment he realises they're there. If it wasn't for these meddling Englishmen he could turn off his moral compass and get on with his job...
no subject
Date: 2023-08-21 10:21 pm (UTC)(The airplane's wrong, though, they're flying the Sea Otter AKA the orange monstrosity, and it's a monoplane, not - whatever that is. /geekiness)
I love Susannah Shaw, with her mule and her flamingo-watching job and having a go at digging up bits of buried treasure on the side, I'm sure she's got more right to any buried treasure lying around than Biggles does. And Napoleon Morgan is definitely Best Dressed Character, sorry EvS, you have been upstaged here - and absolutely, no body no character death :-D
And I am glad to hear you found the slashiness delivering as promised, Biggles flying off the handle because Zorotov swears at EvS is solid gold, as is all the flirting in the bungalow, WEJ is absolutely setting up his defection in this book.
As for WEJ and racism - yeah. I've definitely seen the same tendency to brush past it very fast as 'of his time'. He does include a lot of POC characters, more than many authors of his type, which means he has a lot of opportunities to fuck up - and to do better, and sometimes he does, he covers the whole range from 'utterly indefensible' to 'I can kind of see he's trying but omg the unexamined assumptions' to 'actually for a white guy in the 1940s this isn't a bad attempt'. And Li Chi, who I cannot be objective about because I love him and the way he plays Algy and Biggles's racist assumptions for all he can get and does it with style <3
no subject
Date: 2023-08-22 04:05 pm (UTC)Hard agree on Li Chi!! He's so much fun, I really need to get on to Delivers The Goods solely for more Li Chi in my life. You're very right on the rest of WEJ's attempts there, though, you just get the feeling he has a LOT of unexamined assumptions. Which makes sense considering his life, but makes for a tough reading experience at the best of times.
The slashiness filled me with SO much joy as noted. I will never read the entirety of No Rest owing to respecting my own time too much, but I did skim it for the bit where EvS shoots Zorotov. You can imagine a whole professional history between them, none of it nice for EvS.
no subject
Date: 2023-08-22 04:48 pm (UTC)Delivers the Goods has one of the best Algy/Biggles scenes, and also a great bit where Li Chi calls Biggles out for his definitions of 'civilised' and 'uncivilised' :-DDD