Boston United win on penalties! Again! After another 0-0 draw! I probably didn't miss much by not being there. But that's worth a second blog today, and I do have something else to say anyway...
You know, I feel like I was unreasonably rude to Americans in that last blog post, and elsewhere on this blog. It's not their fault they don't know we use miles. Someone British probably told them all that once, as a cruel joke. And anyway, I think America is a great country, full of lots of really cool people. Polite ones, too - they'd never be so rude about my country as I am about theirs!
So I really should redress the balance and talk about ways we misrepresent America in British comics, but actually there wasn't much of that left in our comics by 1989. I think Baby-Face Finlayson, Little Plum and the Three Bears were all either gone or about to be dropped from the Beano. Desperate Dan was still starring in the Dandy, of course, but he's not such an interesting subject for blogging about.
I do remember being surprised to find two almost identical Oor Wullie comic strips in the every-two-years collections, in which there was an American visitor to Wullie's home who boasted that everything is bigger in the U S of A, only to find that Wullie's appetite was bigger by far! At that time, I hadn't twigged just how few different stories there had been in the fifty years Oor Wullie had already been running by that point. But the everything-is-bigger American is such a British archetype that I think we should apologise for it. I've seen Americans who've watched Fawlty Towers being confused by the American guest who's so rude to Basil in "Waldorf Salad" - confused not just by his extremely strange accent but by lines like "Couldn't find the freeway, had to come in on some back road called the M5." He's not exactly 'being sarcastic', as I've seen it described, he's being a stereotypical American. American viewers don't get that, because real Americans don't actually do that.
So sorry, American readers. I'll leave you with that time in the Transformers annual when Ronald Reagan described Optimus Prime as a 'lorry'.
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