Murray Ball is best known for Footrot Flats, set in the New Zealandian countryside and starring a sheep farmer called Wal, his pointedly nameless Dog, Horse the cat, sof touch neighbour Cooch, Major the pigdog and a host of other animal and human eccentrics. A strip revolving around the great obsessions of New Zealand country life (cricket, lambing, rugby, hunting, the weather etc) it was hugely popular in its home country but barely known outside it, the type of cartoon you find and treasure in some dusty secondhand bookstore and nobody else knows about. I’ve only talked to one other person here in Holland who knew it and she was a Kiwi herself. It turns out Murray Ball also used to do a satirical comic for the Labour party of all people, as discovered by Owen Hatherly:
The premise is a little peculiar, but once you’ve accepted it, the cartoon is not exactly complicated. Bruce, a Barbarian from the East – specifically, New Zealand – comes to invade the (falling) British Empire to ‘RAPE and LOOT and PLUNDER’, but, says the blurb, ‘he found the Tories had got there first!’ So he sets out to ‘save the British from Ted the Tory and grab a fair share of the looting, plundering and raping’. This should give you some sense of the somewhat complex allegiances of the strip, particularly with respect to sexual politics. Various forms of disbelief have to be suspended – most of all the portrayal of Edward Heath, or rather, ‘Emperor Tedius Heath’, as a proto-Thatcherite Roman Emperor bent on class war – but the lack of pissing about occasionally makes for extremely sharp political satire, which the hint of wrongness only helps. It’s Up Pompeii-goes Class War, with Frankie Howerd replaced with an Antipodean barbarian armed with a ‘pig-sticker’, which gets regularly plunged into sundry toga-ed plutocrats.
This is the sort of comic strip that’s most likely to disappear down the cracks of history: done for a specialised audience on a specialised subject, for a publication that has long since disappeared itself, by a relatively unknown cartoonist. Footrot Flats will quite likely be rediscovered and reprinted as long as there are New Zealandian sheep farmers, but Bruce the Barbarian is too rooted in its time and context to be of much interest to anybody but Labour and comics historians…