Clyde and Seek - The Annotated Captain Clyde Part One
Post date: Jan 16, 2019 5:44:23 PM
Incredible scenes over the past couple of days, as the heretofore unknown (to me at least) website globalvariables.net started posting huge chunks of Grant Morrison's long-lost Captain Clyde comic strip, originally printed in Glasgow local newspaper The Govan Press from 1979 to 1982. As of this writing, we're at strip 66, so just over a third of the way through the 150 page run, with plans - it seems - to put the lot up.
Morrison was 19 and, like his hero Chris Melville, terminally unemployed when the strip began. The Govan Press paid Morrison £4 a strip initially (about £20 or $26 in today's money), rising to £6 (basically the exact same amount of money, accounting for inflation) by the time the run ended. When that end came - 3 years almost to the day since the strip began - it was in the middle of an epic saga of Captain Clyde versus Satan, truncated to just 11 installments from the original 30, and cruelly replaced by a syndicated Tom & Jerry strip, with extreme prejudice.
It struck me reading through the first few chapters that there's a lot of Scotland-centric and/or extremely dated contemporary references in there, so as someone who was barely born when the strip started, isn't Scottish and has literally never been to Glasgow I thought I'd be the best person to walk you through it... Yeah, actually, feel free to help me out with that as much as possible please.
