Wednesday, May 18, 2005

Mohawkish

Sarah has a post on the new series of Mr. T Comics. Not the crazy Photoshopped webcomics that were so popular a few years back, but real comics, by Chris Bunting.

Bunting is British and AP Comics is a British comic book publisher, which brings up something I've noticed: the Mr. T cult is as big in England as it is in the U.S., possibly bigger. A lot of the Mr. T webcomics were from England; a lot of the A-Team fanfics (and there were a lot of them, for various reasons including the rampant "slash" possibilities) were by British writers, etc. The A-Team apparently was and still is hugely popular in the U.K. -- it came out on DVD there before it came out on DVD in North America.

I'm not really quite sure what accounts for The A-Team's appeal to British viewers. The A-Team seems about as purely American as a show could get; it was inspired in part by ads in Soldier of Fortune Magazine, for Pete's sake. And as the New Statesman pointed out at the time, in an insightful (albeit humorless and scolding) review, the show's politics didn't really travel:

This is classic right-wing American populism -- patriotic, macho, anti-authority -- and is unlikely to be understood in Britain, where to be right-wing implies an obsequiousness towards officers and the status quo.


But whether or not it was "understood in Britain," it sure became popular in Britain. Heck, even that New Statesman review comes from a British site.

No comments: