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Friday, February 10, 2012. New Comics were 2 days ago

 

H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks: Searle's St. Trinian's

By Kristy Valenti

Tuesday March 24, 2009 09:00:00 am

Pig-snouted or sharp-beaked, squat or spindly, curly-haired or plaited, all of them black-stockinged,[1] brutal and profane — the British boarders at St. Trinian's school for young ladies are as much an antidote to the cloying stereotypes of little girlhood in this millennium as they were sixty years ago. Appearing in a series of one-panel gag cartoons (some of which were drawn on stolen paper while the artist Ronald Searle was in a Japanese prison camp during WWII) in various publications from 1941 until 1952, their exploits were collected in 2007's St. Trinian's: The Entire Appalling Business (with the complete drawings).

Contemporary American readers will most likely draw on the Harry Potter books for understanding of the British boarding school system. Though St. Trinian's pupils make the occasional foray into the dark arts, the real magic in this collection is Searle's consummate cartooning: first come the loosely penned figures, "instructed" by Muppet-mouthed, pigeon-breasted schoolmistresses; next, the school's gothic architecture begins to take shape around them (its crest is a skull and crossbones); ink washes seep in; cigarette stubs, broken liquor bottles and dead bodies form a litter; then, suddenly, a realistically drawn horse (or hippo) solidifies, throwing all around it into sharp relief. Without panel borders, the cartoons fade into a white space: in these amorphous gutters, readers can project the violent events leading up to the punch line, or imagine the carnage still to come.

The spell is only broken during the "Sixth Form" chapter (in England, "sixth form" was what they called a non-compulsory, additional two years of schooling for 16-18 year-old students). The drawings aren't one-panel gag cartoons like the rest, but rather illustrations to a St. Trinian's novel by Timothy Shy. Without the context of Shy's narrative, much of the humor is lost. More fundamentally, so much of St. Trinian's humor is derived from the incongruous youth and youthful attitudes characters (crying because your sister is hogging all the rotgut liquor, etc.) that when you age a student into an oversexed, spidery-lashed teenager, it, like the characters, dissipates.

This is not just a matter of a punch line or two: St. Trinan's students are drawn in just the way that very young people and very old people resemble one another. Like fellow Brit and novelist Roald Dahl, Searle's child characters depict the nastier side of human nature unfiltered. (In the introduction to this volume, Searle's publisher Kaye Webb is quoted. She notes the impact of WWII on these cartoons and suggests that Searle created the cartoons as one mechanism to help cope with the war. In another sign of the times, in the '50s, Searle ended the series by blowing St. Trinian's up in a student-made nuclear blast.)

Fortunately, "The Sixth Form" is only one chapter: soon the book returns to 4 ½" foot-tall hockey-stick-wielding hellions having more fun (and are more fun to read about). There's the occasional pun and non sequitur, but Searle is at his best when he pulls off pure sight gags, such as a lass blowing smoke rings through a tuba, or two priests and a guard leaping up in unison to avoid being pole-axed by a St. Trinian's student.

One cartoon quite early on struck me: summoned by the teacher's bell, the pupils are patted down as they re-enter the building. As they file past a heap of confiscated items, including but not limited to knives, guns and grenades, I couldn't help but think that Searle was somewhat prescient regarding both the students and the schools of today.

Kristy Valenti currently works for The Comics Journal and Fantagraphics Books, Inc.

Uncharted Territory is © Kristy Valenti, 2010

 

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