By Dan Pearce
ISBN: 0-86245-103-5
Once upon a time it was acceptable and desirable rather than just cool for entertainers to be political. Music, film, comedy and especially comics and cartoons rather than today’s obsessions with sex, parenthood and celebrity were at the forefront of social and political criticism…
From the Plutonium Age of Comics comes this scarce, all but unknown, but still readily locatable little lost gem by Dan Pearce which perfectly captured all the daily indignities and nightly horrors of the Thatcher years: the rise of untrammelled greed, the death of personal responsibility and the celebration of conscienceless self-aggrandisement…
I’m ashamed to say that I know very little of this wickedly effective dark satire, although it does look as if the saga was released in strip or magazine instalments a la Steve Bell’s Worlds of If… or Donald Rooum’s stunningly funny Wildcat series.
As ever if anyone knows more, I’d love to hear from you…
Drain Pig is a social leper and despised outcast: a full-grown talking animal who ekes out a pathetic existence living in the sewers. One dreadful night he sees the woman who raised him but when he tries to talk to her she denies him and has him arrested.
The wealthy Mrs. Berkely-Hunt is a pillar of the community and well-in with the powers that be: how could someone of her standing possibly know a scumbag like Drain Pig?
Meanwhile her daughter Mag has started a job as the newest journo for the Daily Dross and her first day is spent covering the trial of the ghastly layabout and social dreg…
She is shocked to see her mother as witness and complainant and horrified when she realises the maternal Society snob is lying in her teeth. The railroaded pig gets five years hard labour when the Judge forces a guilty verdict…
Meanwhile Mag’s scientist boyfriend Mike is travelling to Sizemould Nuclear Power station on a fact-finding mission investigating reports of leaks and mutations.
Mag forces Mummy to tell the truth: Drain Pig was once the beloved companion of a scientist who named him Danny. Her mother, still an impressionable girl herself, was named executor and guardian of the piglet’s inheritance.
Mrs. Berkely-Hunt then reveals how she grew to despise the low beast, leading to the dowager’s flushing the poor piglet down to loo to get rid of him whilst keeping his endowment for herself and making a socially advantageous marriage.
Appalled, the plucky reporter resolves to make amends but discovers to her disgust that the pitiful porker has been deliberately lost within in the prison system…
Meanwhile the secret connections between Britain’s sales of weapons-grade Plutonium and the decrepit, radiation-leaking power station are beginning to circulate and Mag is sent to cover the protesters peace-camp set up around the plant.
Whilst there she interviews Bernard Klein, the physicist who originally built Sizemould; now the spiritual leader of the movement to close it down. Amidst determined, well-intentioned campaigners and a host of four-clawed crabs, Mag learns of the “rabble’s†only success – convincing all the local unemployed not to take jobs as “glow boys†or pipe repairmen.
So faulty is the building that steam generator and water-system repairs are necessary every day, but the ruptures and escapes are so radioactive that workers can only safely be exposed to the pipes for 30 minutes a year!
Unknown to all, however, the ruthless controllers of the plant and the Ministry have worked out a perfect solution: use hardcore convicts nobody will miss as the unwitting repairmen. As long as the public is kept in the dark nobody important will care…
However when Mag glimpses the long missing Drain Pig through the security fences and armed paramilitary guards policing Sizemould, she knows something dirty is up…
With her editor rewriting and slanting her copy, the plant’s technical director in a drug-and-booze filled meltdown, Special Branch infiltrating the protest camp and bugging phones, an ambitious junior circumventing what few safety-protocols still remain in the plant and a snap inspection by Men from the Ministry (of Defence as well as Energy…), the situation looks ripe for an explosive confrontation…
And then Bernie Klein is murdered and everything starts to spectacularly unravel…
Blending Machiavellian intrigue with baroque humour and perfectly riding the popular wave of corrupt back-door deals, old boy network cronyism and vile elitism which has become the hallmark of the period, Drain Pig and the Glow Boys tells a captivating tale in compelling, evocative visual style enticingly reminiscent of the best of Underground Commix’ stars such as R. Crumb and Spain Rodriguez.
Despite being as funny as The New Statesman, mordantly surreal as Whoops, Apocalypse! and as trenchantly biting as Spitting Image, Critical Mess never caught the battered, impoverished public’s attention – although the book still has its passionate supporters to this day.
Perhaps it was because Pearce was too good at his job. Not only is this a bitingly savage satire on the times, but a well-reasoned and minutely researched assault on the idiocies and inadequacies of the Nuclear industry, “legitimate†Arms deals and exports and a blistering attack on the Press and legal system.
It’s also a superbly well-written thriller with stark overtones of David Drury’s 1985 film Defense of the Realm and the gloriously absurdist swingeing satire of Gulliver’s Travels or Animal Farm…
If this kind of honest incisive, important cartoon work appeals there are still copies to be found at incredibly reasonable prices and the author is still active, still passionate, still angry (and rightly so after all these years) and can be found here…
© Dan Pearce 1983.