The Bear Facts: Rupert & OZ

Schoolkid's OZ

[...]A central piece of evidence at the trial was a montage/collage of two cartoon strips that appeared in this issue. This montage was put together by Vivian Berger, then a 15 year-old schoolboy. The strips used were parts of a Rupert Bear cartoon which had been superimposed on a strip by the American underground artist Robert Crumb. Rupert Bear had appeared in the pages of the Daily Express for years (he emerged in late November 1920 as a result of circulation battles between the major dailies) and offered an innocent, nostalgic and quintessentially ‘middle-English’ version of childhood. Crumb was one of the most prolific and notoriously ‘explicit’ of the underground artists (incidentally, established cartoon characters like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, often up to no good, had frequently appeared in the work of underground cartoonists) and the Crumb strip that Berger used was part of a long cartoon called ‘Eggs Ackley Among the Vulture Demonesses’, which had appeared in Big Ass Comics, June, 1969. Basically, Berger’s montage presents a sexually excited Rupert Bear violating the virginity of an (unconscious) female. Although the basic drawings and speech-bubbles are Crumb’s, Rupert’s head and scarf had been carefully superimposed on the original character, and the frame titles (there are six frames) and the characteristic narrative in rhyming couplets beneath had been retained from the Rupert strip...
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