Happy Birthday Rupert Bear, a Comic Centennial

Comments ²

1. Jason Chatfield

   Yes indeed! November 13 2021 will be the Centennial year for Ginger. Stay tuned ?

2. Katherine Collins

   Being a Canadian, growing up in the still highly British country of Canada in the 1950s, meant that I got a new Rupert book every Christmas. And when I was deemed too old for those gifts, I started buying them myself every year, and also sent the annuals to the children of my family and friends. My life has been steeped in Rupert for as long as I can remember.

   Rupert is one of the pillars of my comics education, along with Barks and Caniff. Strange trio, but it covers all the important bases. I think that American comics fans have missed out on something wonderful. Superheroes are so banal. I feel I was very lucky to have Rupert instead.

   I still buy the annual every year! For a few years, starting in the 90s, the publishers kind of lost track for a while, and were publishing some very inferior “new” artists, and I stopped buying. But they went back to re-publishing Bestall’s work, plus new stories by more competent creators than before.

   I have several long shelves of Rupert books, of course. On trips to England, I have been able to purchase some of the replica editions of the earliest Rupert books, from the 1930s. And I have a large sampling of the Tourtel work, albeit in Dutch. I like her works, as they are, as often stated, a mite darker and scarier that Bestall’s. And Rupert’s time frame in Tourtel’s stories seems more slippery; he appears to live in an amalgam of the “modern” 1920s, the Victorian era, and mediaeval times. There are lots of people running around in a jerkin and tights, and there are castles and princesses and knights and so on. But Rupert goes back home at suppertime in a thatched cottage with a car parked in the driveway. Bestall dropped the Middle Ages (darn it), but kept quite a number of the characters from that world. Their existence, contemporaneous with the 1920s and the 1800s, makes for an indefinable era that Rupert lives in. I think that’s where I live, too.

   In the early 1980s, I did a very long telephone interview with Bestall, who was a very eager interviewee, and we went on for over an hour. I used the interview in connection with a long radio programme about Rupert which also included some dramatised excerpts from Bestall’s work, with actors and music and sound FX. I sent the finished work to Bestall, and he replied with a lot of grace and friendliness.

   Viva Rupert Bear!