Inspiring Young Readers
Why I could never really love Rupert Bear
I’d be willing to bet that any list of the twenty favourite children’s characters is likely to include Rupert Bear. He’s immediately recognisable in his yellow scarf and check trousers looking like a young boy who just happens to have a bear’s head and he has a clutch of friends who’ve also swapped heads with a menagerie of other animals all scaled to be the same size.
He made his first appearance as a comic strip in the Daily Express newspaper back in the 1920s but I don’t think that by the late 1950s and early 1960s, when I was just old enough to read his adventures, too many children saw him as a newspaper-based comic strip. It was, in fact, the iconic Rupert Annuals that introduced the Bear to me.
Looking now through my adult eyes at those annuals I can appreciate the extraordinary quality of Alfred Bestall’s artwork, the surreal concepts that drove the plot lines and, unfortunately, some of the more regressive social attitudes that disfigured the stories. It was also a solid portrait of a Middle England, middle class childhood with adventures. But with my child’s eyes it wasn’t any of this that I was really conscious of – it was the layout of the stories.
All the stories were presented in the same way. A classic comic strip took the story forward and immediately beneath the drawings were rhyming couplets that briefly explained what the drawings were telling us. The bottom quarter of the page was then given over to a more traditional text telling the story in more detail. The decision to use what is known in the business as a ‘text comic’ format meant that there were no text bubbles in the mouth of any of the characters and so nothing to break-up the rather set-piece, almost static feel of the drawings.
I still feel slightly embarrassed to admit that whenever I got my hands on a Rupert annual I tried to dash through it as quickly as I could, ‘reading’ the drawings and maybe the rhyming couplets but rarely having the commitment to try reading the extended text.
So, now we come to the nitty-gritty – why could I never warm to Rupert? Well I suspect that unconsciously I felt that Rupert’s middle-class world didn’t really have any resonance with mine. I didn’t have a Daddy who smoked a pipe and went off to work in an office job and I didn’t have a Mommy who stayed at home, wore an apron and did homely things. But that alone wouldn’t have been enough to turn me against him. No, there was something else – Rupert was cold to me, unapproachable.
I’ve always felt that there was actually something a little bit sinister about Rupert. Somehow his face is a little bit too immobile, too inexpressive. He smiles but without the smile making a wrinkle on his face, he doesn’t ever seem to get too excited or too concerned – his face doesn’t crease with emotion, you can’t read him. It’s as if he’s been botoxed.
So although he looks anthropomorphic he’s not really because there’s something essentially not human about him. As a child you wouldn’t look for him for warmth or solace nor is there – as there is with Paddington Bear - anything essentially cuddly about him.
In the past when we were going through a phase of collecting old children’s toys we came across an old Rupert doll that illustrated the dilemma of the bear as a character. Everything was in place – the scarf, the trousers, the red sweater and a pair of boots. The head was perfectly modelled and there was no mistaking who this was. But the problem was the hands. What do you do with the hands? Bear’s paws? A child’s hands? The manufacturer hand gone for limp, pink, distressingly tactile children’s hands and the effect was, frankly, spooky.
So there it is. Rupert just doesn’t work for me and never really has. Clearly there are plenty of people who have great affection for him but I’m not one of them and I’m probably too old now to change my mind.
Terry Potter
December 2017