Flook

Flook was a British comic strip which ran from 1949 to 1984 in the Daily Mail newspaper. It was drawn by Wally Fawkes (of the jazz group Wally Fawkes and the Troglodytes), who signed the strips as "Trog". It was the first newspaper comic strip to be published by the New Zealand newspaper Otago Daily Times, where it ran from 1952 to 1979. Characters and story The central characters were a young boy called Rufus and his magical animal friend, Flook. According to the strip 'The Coming of Flook', which forms part of the cartoon book Rufus and Flook v. Moses Maggot, we learn that Flook, who vaguely resembled a furry pig walking on his hind legs, was a creature from the age of the dinosaurs whom Rufus, in a dream, rescued from cavemen and who then came back to waking reality with him. Flook was able to talk (in seven languages) and had a fine sense of irony with which to temper Rufus' innocence and enthusiasm. He was also able to change shape into all manner of objects, though not much was made of this power after the first couple of years of the strip. They inhabited a satirical and socially-perceptive fantasy world not unrelated to contemporary Great Britain, populated by larger-than-life characters, mostly bearing a striking resemblance to leading politicians and celebrities. Many of their adventures starred their principal adversaries, the villainous Moses Maggot (who, for the purposes of North American syndication, was renamed Mossy Mildew) and his sidekick the gaolbird Douglas Bodger, whose sister – the overweight teenage witch Lucretia Bodger (a play on Lucretia Borgia), with her cat, Gobstopper – also appeared quite frequently, as did a mad retired colonel. Scripts The strip was initially written by Douglas Mount, a Daily Mail employee. Mount left the Mail with little warning and subsequently the strip's authorship was taken up by the Australian journalist Robert Raymond. In his memoir Giving Luck a Chance, Raymond describes the way in which Fawkes brought him on board as Flook'''s author in 1949. Fawkes invited Raymond into his office, where he was being harassed by telephone calls from the production team for the latest daily instalment of the strip. Raymond himself was unemployed at the time: