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New Andy Capp Collection Number 1: No. 1 (The Andy Capp Collection)

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Said Smythe: “I concocted a letter of reply in which I say that Andy probably raffles his dole money to make the extra cash! It was just the sort of thing the little rascal would do.”

I didn’t drink until I’d started doing Andy,” Smythe said. “The family was rather ashamed of me. Everyone else would be having a few pints, and I’d sit there with my tomato juice. You might say I was the white sheep of the family. Andy and Flo are always on the cusp of poverty. Flo works as a charwoman (cleaning woman), but Andy is unemployed, and their amusements— drinking, playing cards and snooker, and, for Andy, gambling — take more money than they can be presumed to have. Andy borrows from Flo, but they’re still always in arrears on their rent. Readers sometimes write in to ask how Andy and Flo manage it. Maley, Don. "Super Roads to Riches are Paved with Comics", Editor & Publisher (30 November 1968). Archived at The Internet Archive. Accessed 12 November 2018.Strips into 2021 and beyond only show credits for writers Goldsmith and Garnett and continue the subtly different style. This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sourcesin this section. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. ( August 2016) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) In the comic strip, the magic goes on. Smythe had so thoroughly and profoundly evolved the character of Andy Capp that he lives on without his creator. Like a miracle.

Good God,” exclaimed Smythe, “ Andy went off like a bomb! He forever disproved the theory I had long held that humor in the South is different to humor in the North. Andy was appreciated everywhere. The gags I wove around the character seemingly knew no boundaries.” More than many comic strips in the 1960s, Andy Capp was, and remains, essentially a character-driven comic strip. Like Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury and Lynn Johnston’s For Better or For Worse and, later, Stephan Pastis’ Pearls Before Swine. The comedy arises from the personality of the characters. But in Andy Capp, Smythe turned a stereotype into character. And the character was Smythe. Early on,” says Don Markstein at his Toonopedia, “the strip was accused of perpetuating stereotypes about Britain’s Northerners, who are seen in other parts of England as chronically unemployed, dividing their time between the living room couch and the neighborhood pub. ... But Smythe, himself a native of that region, had nothing but affection for his good-for-nothing protagonist, a fact which showed in his work. Since the very beginning, Andy has been immensely popular among the people he supposedly skewers.” In 1982, a musical version of Andy Capp opened in Manchester and then went on to play in London’s West End for six or seven months. And a television show began in early 1988 but was soon abandoned. Neither production achieved anything like the success of the comic strip. Why?

But Bill liked the ideas and showed them to Hugh Cudlip. Mr. Cudlip also liked the idea and almost immediately started it off in the northern editions of the Mirror.” The hilariously workshy northerner from Hartlepool, often seen stumbling home late from the pub, also inspired a West End musical, a TV series starring Likely Lads actor James Bolam and a stage play with Tim Healy. Percy is also always confronting Andy on the way he treats Flo. It's obvious Percy has a crush on Flo and believes he would treat her far better than Andy does. This has led the two men to fight. The mindset’s exactly the same,” he said. “I can still go down to the Boilermarker’s Club and get two or three ideas just listening to the conversation.” ASKED ONCE about what he thinks the appeal of his strip is, Smythe quoted a college professor, who said the strip was “beautifully observed.”

Revel Barker, who worked for the Mirror Group, reported a different origin for Andy: Smythe, he said, “told me the inspiration for the strip was a guy he saw at a Harlepool football match, which he’d attended with his father. It started to rain and the man standing next to him took off his cap and put it inside his coat. Young Reg said, ‘Mister, it’s started to rain.’ The man said he knew that. ‘But—it’s started to rain, and you’ve taken your cap off,’ said the puzzled Reg. The man looked at the youngster as if he was stupid. ‘You don’t think, do you, that I’m going to sit in the house all night wearing a wet cap.’”Cigarettes and Alcohol: Andy Capp, extensive article about Reg Smythe and the comic strip, at PlanetSlade He took a job as errand boy for a butcher. At the age of 16, he was forced to quit the job: his employer wanted to avoid paying a special tax he would be liable for in employing anyone 16 or older. For the next three years, Smythe was “on the dole” (welfare): he couldn’t find work. Demobilized in 1946, Smythe returned to Hartlepool, but, unable to find work, he soon left for London. There, after an extended period of unemployment, he found a job at the General Post Office in 1950. He also married Vera Whittaker. And his popularity eventually spread to American shores. In 1963, Andy Capp was running in the now defunct Majorca Daily News, where a vacationing American newspaperman saw it and liked it. The newspaperman was Bob Hall, head of Publishers Syndicate. He went to London on his way home and got syndication rights for the American market. Starting September 16, 1963, Andy Capp was distributed in the U.S. by Hall’s syndicate.

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