Fase de concreción

The figurehead of DC Thomson’s newspapers and magazines is the Sun-day paper, which was founded as the Post SunSun-day Special in 1914 in Glasgow

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and has been published as the Sunday Post since 1919. On 8 March 1936, The Broons and Oor Wullie came into being under the influence of the American newspaper “funnies.” Robert Duncan Low, the chief editor of several chil-dren’s publications, created the character “Oor Wullie” with artwork by the Nottingham-born artist Dudley Dexter Watkins (1907–1969).

During Watkins’ era as the series’ graphic artist, competing DC Thom-son employees submitted written outlines for the strips every week, from which the best was printed in the Sunday Post as the weekly cartoon. In this way, Watkins and the authors continuously improved the comics’ quality. In 1940, following the publication of highly popular double pages of The Broons and Oor Wullie in the Sunday Post, DC Thomson satisfied the still-rising demand for the series by publishing annual collections. Since then, an Oor Wullie annual and a Broons annual have been published alternately every autumn, in time for the Christmas season, and this release date has become an important event in the Scottish cultural calendar.

However, the path to success was by no means a smooth one. The steady rhythm of the publication of the annuals was interrupted by World War II until 1948 when the first postwar Oor Wullie annual was finally published to great acclaim. Watkins and the authors of the series improved the comic’s quality further in the following years until Oor Wullie became a Scottish icon in the late 1940s and early 1950s with sales reaching record levels. This phase of the series is often referred to as the “Golden Age of Dudley Watkins.”

The artist was so famous that he was exempt from military service in World War II. Apparently, the nation’s morale during the war profited so much from The Broons and Oor Wullie that the authorities did not wish to risk losing the series’ unifying and supportive force.

After Watkins’s death in 1969, for over seven years DC Thomson was unable to find a cartoonist who could satisfy the readers’ demand for an authentic continuation of the series. Thus, the publisher kept the regular string of Oor Wullie and The Broons comics alive by reprinting old stories every Sunday in the paper, and each year in the annuals. This helped to keep the fame of the double comic page of the Sunday Post alive, which it did from the late 1970s with Ken H. Harrison, until a new cartoonist was finally found, Peter Davidson, in 1997. Both artists introduced some changes but kept the essence and visual character of the series alive. Consequently, Oor Wullie is still seen by most Scots as a living national icon.

Considering its fame within Scotland, its production team is rather small.

There is no central editorial pool for comics within DC Thomson, but each title of the various series has its own small office. The present “Broons/Wullie–

team” consists of no more than three members of staff, who pursue the var-ious tasks connected with the series but also work on other projects. They

compile the Special Collections,* design the Broons calendar and discuss the scripts the chief editor composes. From January 2005 until March 2006 all scripts were written by BBC broadcaster Tom Morton. From March 2006 onward Dave Donaldson has written the manuscripts, which are then sent to the cartoonist who draws the story panels.

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A very illustrative example of an Oor Wullie strip appeared on 15 Octo-ber 1944, when hunger had become a constant companion of many Scottish families. In the story, the protagonist, ten-year-old Wullie, envies his friend, Fat Bob, who has received a pie as a present from Jeannie, a girl who admires him. Wullie tries to find a way to attract the girl’s attention so that she will give him a pie, too. He passes by a statue of Robert Burns, the Scottish national poet who, Wullie surmises, must obviously have known how to get about successfully in life. In imitation, Wullie decides to write a poem for the girl.

His first attempt is a failure. Jeannie chases Wullie away and throws an empty casserole after him which he, in turn, takes to a bramble bush and uses to pick blackberries with while he is thinking about an improved version of his poem. He then returns to Jeannie with a second piece of poetry. The poem and the additional gift of the pot of blackberries please Jeannie very much and, in return, she gives Wullie two pies, which he eats — enthroned in front of the statue of Robert Burns on his trademark bucket. In a way typical for Oor Wullie, a defeat has been turned into a marvelous success. Wullie very often manages to make something out of nothing by applying his natural cleverness. In this strip, if only for a short time, he has distanced himself from hunger and misery and he has gained recognition. Wullie has thus met the standards set by his Scottish role model, Robert Burns, who rose from an impoverished farmer to national fame through his poetry.

In much the same way that Burns captured the Scottish national imag-ination with his poems on rural life, love, and drink, Oor Wullie offered a figure of identification for the Scottish population with the short stories of a wee lad from a simple working-class family who does not know upper-class

*Since 1996, additional collectors’ books have appeared, i.e. the Special Collections. The 60th anniver-sary volume The Broons and Oor Wullie, 1936–1996 was the first of nine collectors’ books published so far. In these volumes the best stories of certain epochs are reprinted in chronological order. In addi-tion, striking historical and cultural events of the time are illustrated with pictures as well as headlines and excerpts from newspaper articles. The many decades of Oor Wullie and The Broons publications have thus become a repository for an illustrated history of Scotland in the 20th century.

manners but manages to get along due to his natural wit. He has become a figure of identification for Scottish society as a whole despite his lack of social graces, and probably exactly because of his “rough but hearty” approach.

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With the topics it addresses and with its language, Oor Wullie strength-ens Scottish identity. This has always been one of the secrets of the success of the series, which can be estimated when one considers the following facts:

“Reading the Broons and Oor Wullie” was among the “100 Things to Do in Scotland before You Die” by the Glasgow Herald. Old annuals are sold at top prices rising up to £4,000. Oor Wullie’s and Watkins’ iconic status was also underlined when a family moved into Watkins’ former home in Dundee in 2002 and discovered murals on the walls, which the artist probably drew for his children. The murals have been officially recognized as a national treas-ure, and consequently the wall is now owned by the Scottish National Trust.

Furthermore, as part of the Tartan Day festivities in April 2004, Oor Wullie was voted the most important Scottish icon.

At least four factors are responsible for the striking effect Oor Wullie has had on the Scottish readership. The first two hold true for many comics.

Firstly, the structure and symbols of the comics are consistent. From time to time Wullie addresses the reader directly in a short prologue or epilogue. Sev-eral of the stories thus begin and end with Wullie sitting on his typical bucket, which has become the symbol of Wullie’s cleverness and his ability to impro-vise. Similar symbols that support his main character traits are Wullie’s rough but also practical dungarees, his self-made wooden cart and the shed where Wullie, “the inventor,” creates new things to entertain and amuse people.

Secondly, the mechanism of what Konrad Lorenz has termed Kindchen-schema leads to an intense identification with the protagonist. The character’s round cheeks and big smile are an invitation to identify with him. The figures in comics have to be universal for readers to be able to identify with them.

Third, the character’s attributes — as well as the topics — are typically Scottish, which means that they are easily recognizable for the readers. This is demonstrated by the frequent portrayal of Scottish inventiveness depicted in the main characters but it also frames the plotlines, which are often firmly linked to Scottish life and culture. The editorial board considers the Scottish setting to be an obligation, unlike other comic series, like the Belgian Tintin, which are mainly based on “foreign adventures,” rather than being set in the home country of the protagonist.

Finally, the language of the strip is very convincingly Scottish for the

readership in Scotland, not least because of the subtle orthographical tran-scription of the Scottish accent. Along the lines of what Allan Bell has termed ingroup referee design (187f ), the authors of Oor Wullie use language as an expressive instrument for the declaration of identity and thus signal “you and I are an ingroup” to the audience.

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The topics in Oor Wullie constitute a corpus of recurring subjects. Con-sidered chronologically, topics like “school,” “money, work and jobs” are used less and less. In contrast, “growing up,” and “cultural Scottishness” as well as

“ingenuity,” “food” and “authority” are very stable topics. “Sports” and “pets,”

on the other hand, increase in frequency. These changes mirror developments in Scottish society and culture as well as the decisions of the editorial teams as to which topics might be most interesting for the readers.

The topics revolve around four main stereotypes. First, the vital High-lander, the image of the strong and rebellious Scot, who often appears in 19th-century romantic views of the past, as, for instance, in Sir Walter Scott’s novels Waverley (1814) and Rob Roy (1817). Second, the “Kailyard,” a deroga-tory term that refers to a specific nostalgic genre of Scottish literature that was extremely popular from about 1880 to 1914. The name “kailyard” refers to the little “cabbage gardens” behind the modest Scottish tenement houses that have come to represent the petit-bourgeois ideology of “home sweet home,” which is often seen as reaction against the evil forces of industrializa-tion. This is best embodied by The Broons, the harmonious Scottish family often depicted in front of the fireplace. The third stereotype of significance to Oor Wullie is the “Hardman,” the strong, sweaty Glaswegian worker with his cigarette and smoky voice. Finally, there is the “Improvising Scot” with his cleverness. Wullie demonstrates his skill at improvising for example when he fills his ubiquitous bucket with water and uses it variously as a shower, foot warmer, or cooler. Similarly, he employs his self-made wooden cart for various jobs, for example, for carrying tourist’s luggage.

The Improvising Scot is a stereotype the Scottish can most easily iden-tify with and can be regarded as the native equivalent of the “mean/stingy Scot” stereotype, which so dominates the foreign perception of Scotland. The latter occurs almost never in Oor Wullie. Both images originate at the same source, namely — and in decisive contrast to England’s wealth — the scarcity of Scottish resources. In the foreign view, the Scottish response to the lack of resources represents niggardliness. From the Scottish perspective, it represents the skill to improvise.