chapter ten

This is the fifth of eleven parts of The Last War in Albion Chapter Ten, focusing on Alan Moore’s Bojeffries Saga. An omnibus of all eleven parts is available on Smashwords. If you are a Kickstarter backer or a Patreon backer at $2 or higher per week, instructions on how to get your complimentary copy have been sent to you.

The Bojeffries Saga is available in a collected edition that can be purchased in the US or in the UK.

Figure 709: The symphony grows more complex. (Written by Alan Moore, art by Steve Parkhouse, from “Song of the Terraces,” in A1 #4, 1990)

Described as “a light opera with libretto by Mr. A. Moore and full orchestration by Mr. S. Parkhouse,” the strip is formatted as a musical, beginning with the chant of a paperboy as he walks down the terraced street, identifying the paper of choice of each house he walks past: “Sun, Sun, Sun, Sun, Sun, Guardian, Sun.” He is quickly joined by further paperboys, taking up his chorus and adding in descriptions of the papers’ contents: “Page three, transfer fee, ‘Is your man a sex bomb?’/ Which M.P.’s been compromised outside a Gent’s in Wrexham? / Outrage, sports page, ‘Di: her secret vices!’, / Someone out of Neighbours whose domestic life’s in crisis…” In time the original paperboy takes up a new verse, imploring the reader to, “when letter boxes snap / pity the little chap / who does not write the crap / but is its victim. / For while the world’s asleep / he works to earn his keep / lest, with poll-tax so steep / his folks evict him.” 

Figure 710: The symphony concludes. (Written by Alan Moore, art by Steve Parkhouse, from “Song of the Terraces,” in A1 #4, 1990)

At this point, things really get going as the first actual member of the Bojeffries family appears, with Raoul stepping out and singing his own tune about going to work, with other men quickly joining in and singing about how “we’ve little dicks and big dogs / and we’re not too fond of nig-nogs / but we whistle as we make our way to work” as Raoul proclaims, “At veekends I vill shop for shelving down at M.F.I. / or vatch a fourth diwision team at play / I’d like to vin der futball pools und then retire und die / so I vhistle as I go to vherk each day!”

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This is the fourth of eleven parts of The Last War in Albion Chapter Ten, focusing on Alan Moore’s Bojeffries Saga. An omnibus of all eleven parts is available on Smashwords. If you are a Kickstarter backer or a Patreon backer at $2 or higher per week, instructions on how to get your complimentary copy have been sent to you.

The Bojeffries Saga is available in a collected edition that can be purchased in the US or in the UK.

Figure 702: Sheena, a clear parody of Vyvyan Basterd. (Written by Alan Moore, art by Steve Parkhouse, from “Raoul’s Night Out,” in Warrior #20, 1984)

The story also marks a subtle evolution to the underlying format of The Bojeffries Saga. The plot is still basically that of a farce, but instead of focusing on one character in a traditional “idiot” role, he layers together a set of absurd misunderstandings incorporating several characters, all of whom are, in their own ways, complete dunces. But what’s in many ways more important than the change in comedic structure is the nature of the characters involved.  The first story was, at the end of the day, essentially a Hogben story transplanted to working class Britain, with the focus firmly on the eccentric family and Trevor Inchmale as an intrusion from the mundane world. But “Raoul’s Night Out” is a story about working class Britain into which a single werewolf has been inserted. This allows Moore to engage in a fairly direct satire of the working class. For instance, among Raoul’s coworkers is Colin Council Estate, who introduces his girlfriend Sheena,to Raoul by saying “society’s rejected ‘er because she’s got ‘**** off’ tattooed on her forehead” (a fairly straightforward homage to Vyv of The Young Ones). 

Figure 703: Cops beating a black man. (Written by Alan Moore, art by Steve Parkhouse, from “Raoul’s Night Out,” in Warrior #20, 1984)

The move to looking at the larger culture in which the Bojeffries exist allows Moore a considerably sharper sort of satire. The main thrust of “Raoul’s Night Out” is a night out with Raoul and his coworkers that goes wrong for a number of reasons, not least of which is that Colin consulted his diary to tell Raoul that it was a new moon without bothering to mention that, as Sheena puts it, his “***** diary is four ***** years old” and that he hasn’t “bought one since the *** Pistols disbanded.” This, rather awkwardly, results in Raoul turning into a wolf in the middle of dinner, which causes further deterioration in a situation already made fraught by Raoul’s passing on a pamphlet given to him by his coworker Stanley to another one of his coworkers, George, completely unaware of the fact that Stanley’s neo-Nazi propaganda (“Did Himmler Discover Radium,” one article asks) might go down poorly with George, who is black.

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This is the third of eleven parts of The Last War in Albion Chapter Ten, focusing on Alan Moore’s Bojeffries Saga. An omnibus of all eleven parts is available on Smashwords. If you are a Kickstarter backer or a Patreon backer at $2 or higher per week, instructions on how to get your complimentary copy have been sent to you.

The Bojeffries Saga is available in a collected edition that can be purchased in the US or in the UK.

Parkhouse, like his fellow Steve Moore, is one of the great strange men of British comics. Both serve to give the subtle and unsettling sense of the British comics industry prior to 1979 as a sort of graveyard of strange magicians, a vast collection of visionary weirdos content to be near-completely overlooked. Although Parkhouse does not share the Moores’ or Morrison’s active and public identification as a magician, he is as self-evidently one as exists. This is perhaps most clear in his often overlooked fantasy strip for Warrior, The Spiral Path. Like his Black Knight and Doctor Who work, there is an oddly shamanistic quality to The Spiral Path – it is a comic that is based heavily on intense visuals, at times at the expense of entirely clear plotting.

Figure 692: The ancient hill where Ruad hides Galbrain, one of many lush and mythic landscapes in The Spiral Path. (By Steve Parkhouse, in Warrior #1, 1982)

The Spiral Path is, on one level, a fairly straightforward bit of sword-and-sorcery fantasy in the tradition of Conan the Barbarian, or, to pick something perhaps somewhat closer to its conceptual terrain, Elric of Melniboné. It opens with a bombastic narration about how “the land of Tairngir had been invaded by hostile forces… after many years of battle, King Galbrain was deposed, his armies destroyed by magic and madness. Sick and dispirited, the King and a handful of warriors took flight and now approached the furthermost borders…” and the first installment largely focuses on Galbrain’s travels as he meets a druid, Ruad, who shelters Galbrain in “an old hill dwelling” full “of mine-workings and tunnels.” Galbrain obligingly retreats, at which point it is revealed that the armies that have been pursuing Galbrain have followed, and there are thousands marching upon the hill. 

Figure 693: Caed must kill the druid who saved him. (By Steve Parkhouse, from The Spiral Path, in Warrior #4, 1982)

But the story this seems to set up – of a King fighting to reclaim Tairngir against seemingly insurmountable odds – never quite materializes. Galbrain is essentially absent from the remainder of the tale. The next two chapters focus primarily on the twin sacrifices of the druid, Ruad, who first sends his crow, Caed, to fly forth, tying a message to his leg and telling him to “bear this spell with you, in the hope it may reach the ears of the one who dreams us all… the one who may some day awaken,” and the warrior Nuada, who dies facing a fearsome giant.

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This is the first of a currently unknown number (ten-ish?) of parts of The Last War in Albion Chapter Ten, focusing on Alan Moore’s Bojeffries Saga. An omnibus will be available as soon as possible – probably by next Friday, but the world is full of surprises. 

The Bojeffries Saga is available in a collected edition that can be purchased in the US or in the UK.

Figure 686: Ade Edmonson as Vyvyan Basterd in The Young Ones.

Sayle’s shock is not entirely fair (and it should be stressed that Sayle is clearly poking fun at his own political intransigence as much as he’s offering a serious history of the alternative comedy scene, describing how, upon turning up at the studio to discover the guest stars, he “railed at the writers,” saying, “The whole point of what we were doing was surely to challenge the smug hegemony of the Oxford, Cambridge, public-schoolboy comedy network, as well as destroying the old-school working men’s club racists,” to which, in his telling, the writers replied “that was just you, we never subscribed to your demented class-war ravings”). It is, after all, not as though the alternative comics were by and large from less privileged backgrounds than their similarly transgressive predecessors in Monty Python. Rik Mayall (who wrote for the series and played the entitled anarchist asshole Rick) was born to a pair of drama teachers, while Ade Edmonson (who played the sociopathic punk Vyvyan Basterd) had an international upbringing living, among other places, in Bahrain, Cyprus, and Uganda before attending a private school, and both attended the University of Manchester, as rigorous an academic institution as exists in the UK. 

All the same, the cultural differences between the University of Manchester and Cambridge are genuine, and speak to a larger difference in approach between The Young Ones and Monty Python. The Young Ones is not, by and large, a show that concerns itself at all with the notion that there might be such a thing as the sane world. Its conflicts are generally between equally absurd figures, such as the eternal hatred between Rick and Vyv. Indeed, this gets at the heart of the comedy in The Young Ones, which is often about the ruthless mockery of the excesses and pretensions of the very left-wing politics that animate it. Instead of being a show that pokes fun at the absurdity of the larger world, it is a show that pokes fun at the absurdity of its own audience, skewering the punks and hippies that the show appeals to.

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This is the first of a currently unknown number of parts of The Last War in Albion Chapter Ten, focusing on Alan Moore’s Bojeffries Saga. An omnibus will be available as soon as possible.

The Bojeffries Saga is available in a collected edition that can be purchased in the US or in the UK.

Figure 677: Hunt Emerson’s “Stir Crazy” was one of several humor strips published over the course of Warrior. (From Warrior #8, 1982)

There is, however, one more detail of Moore’s engagement with Warrior to cover – a pair of two-part stories published under the title The Bojeffries Saga. These are in many ways something of a curious footnote to Moore’s Warrior-era career. They constitute a total of twenty-four pages of comics, and are arguably most notable for being the answer to the mildly challenging trivia question “alongside V for Vendetta and Marvelman, what’s the third series Alan Moore created for Warrior.” Much of this is down to the fact that The Bojeffries Saga is markedly out of keeping with the general tone of Warrior. This is often ascribed to the fact that it is overtly a comedy, as opposed to an action-heavy adventure strip, but this does not really capture the full story. From the start, comedy was a part of Warrior – the first issue, in fact, featured a two-page comedic bit by Steve Moore and Dave Gibbons called “A True Story?” and firmly in the mould of Tharg’s Future Shocks from 2000 AD, and other overtly comedic stories like Hunt Emerson’s “Stir Crazy” and Laser Eraser and Pressbutton always had a consciously humorous streak to it, especially on the occasions when it was replaced with a Zirk strip. Nor can The Bojeffries Saga’s status as a comedy explain its marginal status within Moore’s overall career. Yes, Moore’s serious work is generally the material that attracts the most critical attention, but it’s hardly as if D.R. & Quinch, to take the most obvious example, is a relatively ignored and minor part of Moore’s career – indeed, if anything Moore’s ultra-violent alien miscreants get somewhat more attention than they deserve, despite clearly being a comedy.

Figure 678: A slave revolt in the Ninth Dimension. (From “A True Story?,”

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