Just for a change of pace – and because I can put whatever nonsense I like on my own blog – we’ll be enjoying a brief interlude in 11th Century Spain, via the 1970s. Specifically, I’d like to offer a capsule review of sorts of the book I’m currently reading. Increasingly, like a lot of old farts, I find myself revisiting the entertainments of my youth. I used to read a lot of horror comics as a teenager, and have been rereading them courtesy of various collections (or graphic novels if you want to get literary about it) that have been proliferating over the past decade or so. I’m guessing that the primary market for these is nostalgia, because, truth be told most of them don’t really stand up to the modern competition.

In general, the art meets muster (I actually dislike a lot of modern comic art with its over-use of computer technology and the ghastly influence of manga), but the scripts are woefully leaden and the plotting comically ham-fisted. A case in point is El Cid, which I never read at the time, but thought looked fun the other day. For reasons best known to themselves, the editors at Eerie (a horror comic published by Warren) decided what they needed was a rip-off of the Charlton Heston historical epic El Cid, already 14 years old when they commenced the strip in 1975. What they got was a sort of Happy Shopper Conan the Barbarian, half-heartedly relocated to medieval Spain.

In common with most of the comics I’ve been revisiting from the era, El Cid is compelling, fun, and frankly, a bit shit. There is something inimitable about 70s comic scripts that makes you grin as it makes you flinch. An attempt to seem sophisticated and worldly that is wholly unconvincing, as if somebody’s ODed on pubescent hormones and then gone crazy with a bad thesaurus, spraying a feverish diarrhea of hot adjectives all over the page. While El Cid spares us the usual attempts to appear hip and with-it via embarrassing references to drugs or hippies courtesy of its historical setting, it more than makes up for it with the fervid flood of sex and violence, all written with the unmistakable tone of someone with no practical experience of either.

It’s probably easiest to demonstrate with examples. Here our hero gets into a tussle with a village full of evil dwarves. I can’t remember why he does – it seldom matters much – but the results are plain to see. El Cid 5 – Dwarves 0. You see our protagonist is rock hard and there’s seldom much actual tension in the story as there’s rarely much prospect of El Cid getting killed. Just, as it says here, panel after panel of brutal butchery.
Of course it’s not all blood in El Cid’s world. There’s also babes. Here, our hero is being tempted to murder a young man he happens to be passing and do something equally terrible to the chap’s girlfriend. The hooded fellows doing the tempting are actually ancient demons, who El Cid thwarts by the less than dramatic method of declining their polite suggestion.

Sometimes, however, El Cid does taste the musk of people’s moisting charms, though this seldom pans out. In this case it’s a Moorish slave girl who – like all the women in El Cid – falls madly in love with out hero almost instantaneously. This may have something to do with the fact that (with the exception of crones, who don’t count) all of the women in the strip look almost identical. They also all, almost inevitably, die violently before the end of the episode. This allows El Cid to morn the loss of the love of his life (even though he only met her three panels earlier) and ‘taste love anew’ in the following episode.

Part of the dubious charm of these old strips is their naïve misogyny and inept sadism – too silly to find offensive – stories full of the kind of crazy surrealism that people who’ve never taken drugs imagine might come to you on LSD. I dread to think of how many youngsters had the shit kicked out of them trying out moves cribbed from comicbooks, or indeed romances sabotaged by teenagers emulating seduction techniques suggested in the pages of El Cid. Still, never did me any harm… Incidentally, for the benefit of the uninitiated, the title is a reference to a character in a rather more recent comic. I daresay Sid would’ve fitted right in in 11th Century Castile.