Alan Bissett: What separated Angus Og from his comic peers

However, with the obvious exceptions of The Broons and Oor Wullie, for 30 years, Angus Og was arguably Scotland’s most famous cartoon strip (not including those found in The Beano or The Dandy, which were published in Dundee but featured no Scottish content).

Why is it that loveable rogue Angus, denizen of the “Utter Hebrides”, has fallen by the wayside, while his counterparts from The Sunday Post are memorialised in annuals, stage plays, recipe books and on confectionary tins to this day?

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On the eve of a one-day conference in Glasgow on Angus Og and its creator Ewen Bain, it’s worth reappraising the long-running strip to discover what it has to say about life in the Hebrides – and in Scotland more generally – both then and now.

First of all, who is Angus Og? A native of the fictional island of Drambeg, dressed in his regulation black wellies and with his pointed nose sniffing out an opportunity, he’s a wheeler-dealer type, a proto Del Boy, perpetually on the make.

Ewen Bain, a Glaswegian, drew upon the Hebridean roots of his parents, and the many summers he spent in Skye, to create a world that probably felt real to Highlanders of the late 20th century, populated by tipsy and cynical Gaels, uppity Lairds, crafty spey-wives, moralistic ministers and fantastical creatures drawn from Scottish folklore.

It’s all played for laughs, but there’s a political edge that makes Angus Og distinct from the soft-focus likes of The Broons. Bain makes reference to the current events of his day, especially those which affected Scots, and even anticipates some of the debates – many decades early – which resurfaced in the 2014 independence referendum.

For example, Angus’s capers frequently place him at the centre of an uprising, whether against the British state or the island’s wealthy owners. In The Pretender (1968), Angus tries to install a relative of Bonnie Prince Charlie to the throne. This coincides with the real-world rise of Scottish nationalism and features a cameo from Winnie Ewing.

In The Election (1964), the owner of the local distillery, looking to evade Britain’s tax laws, proposes independence for Drambeg and puts Angus up as a local candidate. Angus bribes voters with whisky, but none of them turn out on election day as they are too hungover.

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In Angus Takes A Trip (1971), his success in managing folk singer Marileen means that her smash-hit single “Hee-drum Ho” establishes Gaelic as the trendy new language throughout the world, used by everyone from Mick Jagger to Emperor Hirohito.

In The Fete (1969), the British army invades Drambeg to quash a lawless spell, cluelessly reported in the UK press as “Foreign News”. In The Listeners (1983), the islanders rebel against the new owner of Drambeg, a sheikh who wants to transport the place, stone by stone, to the Gulf, and in The Oil Well (1975), Angus himself becomes a baron after he strikes oil in his garden (cue references to the SNP’s “It’s Scotland’s Oil” slogan of the seventies and the UK Government’s broken promises on devolution).

If this all sounds heavy and radical, it’s sweetened nicely with lashings of satirical humour and Hebridean charm.

But it’s not only the political realities of 20th-century Scotland upon which Angus Og comments. The strip isn’t afraid to both celebrate and poke fun at Highland folklore and customs, as well as Glasgow’s place as a mainland Mecca for islanders. In The Kelpie (1983), Angus has to escort a water horse down to the Clyde to avert a curse, only to end up squandering his Govan-based auntie’s hospitality.

At one point in Lachie Mor’s Inheritance (1976), Angus contacts all exiled Highlanders in Glasgow by placing a notice underneath the railway bridge at Central Station (the “Heilan’man’s Umbrella”). In The Peat Reek (1965), he flogs Shredded Peat to the same exiles so that they will be reminded of home when they burn it, and in The Gaelic (1973), he concocts a magical brew that allows even landlords and foreigners to speak Gaelic instantly. This being Angus, everything is done for a nice fee, of course.

These latter two adventures are complicated by the meddlings of the spooky Granny McBrochan, the island “spey-wife”, whose access to spells, potions and Gaelic traditions scunners Angus, since he’s usually tried to take advantage of her. This is a moral outcome itself in keeping with Gaelic custom.

Neither is Bain afraid to peer at the history of the Highlands, at a time shortly after its trauma has been re-invoked by 7:84’s play, The Cheviot, The Stag And The Black, Black Oil (1973). In The Seer (1985), a magical clock allows Angus to live the different eras of the Western Isles backwards, travelling, in turn, to the ages of press gangs; the Clearances; the sinking of a Spanish galleon in the harbour of Tobermory; Viking raids on the west coast; the spreading of St Columba’s gospel; and finally the building of Scotland’s mysterious stone rings.

As well as placing Angus into comedic scrapes – he nearly winds up sacrificed by druids – this all provides history, depth and richness to Bain’s fictional world, a testament to his project of exploring the West of Scotland in all its complexity.

This rootedness in Hebridean lore is in keeping with the language Bain invokes for Angus’s voice. While Gaelic is deployed sparingly, Angus and his cronies mainly speak English. This was presumably so the strip may be comprehensible to the Daily Record’s hundreds of thousands of readers across Scotland, but it’s nonetheless an English hugely informed by Gaelic. The characters say “chust” instead of “just”, “effer” instead of “ever”, and frequently begin their exclamations with “Ochone ochone!” and end them with the lament “at all at all”.

It’s easy to imagine that, within their own world, the islanders are speaking to each other in Gaelic but that it’s somehow been translated for our ears.

Bain has linguistic fun when Angus visits Glasgow or when Glaswegians visit Angus, and the familiar dialect of the city blasts across the page, with all its “huv”s, “waant”s and “howzit gaun”s. Angus’s cousin Malky, who lives in Govan, calls him “ma big china”, while another Weegie declaims Angus and his pal Lachie as “a per o’ bams”. Bain makes further mischief with the posh dialect of the gentry and the British state.

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On the run from the authorities, in The Pretender, Angus hears a voice outside his croft demand: “Now I say – look heah you cheps! This is a jolly bad show, what!” “That’ll be the man from the Scottish Office!” Angus quips, correctly.

Given the cumulative effect of all of this, it’s perhaps easy to see why The Broons and Oor Wullie have broader and more lasting appeal across Scotland. While Scottish in locus and idiom, they are, in short, for children – apolitical and gentle.

Angus Og, on the other hand, might provide laughs but it has a razor-sharp satirical edge and an anthropological agenda. If we lose Angus, we lose a three-decade, insider documentation of Highland life, as well as one of the greatest Scottish comedy characters ever created.

Indeed, according to Frank Quitely – one of Scotland’s leading comic book artists and illustrator of Superman, The X-Men, Judge Dredd and Batman – Ewen Bain was “creating real art that went beyond the two-dimensional depictions so often found in cartoons. Seeing someone from Scotland succeed in this field made me feel that I too could pursue this art as a career.”

In order to boost Angus Og’s status, Rhona Flin, daughter of Ewen Bain, has gifted her late father’s entire treasure trove of drawings and sketches to the Skye and Lochalsh Archive Centre, who have in turn organised a symposium to discuss its significance at Glasgow University on May 29.

It will feature talks about Angus Og’s importance and legacy from myself; archivist Catherine MacPhee; archives project officer (Angus Og) Katharine Macfarlane; Paul Bristow, creative director of Magic Torch Comics; Jon Place, lecturer at Buckinghamshire New University, and cartoon expert Professor Laurence Grove, who said, “this collection is of national, indeed international importance, and its value as part of the history of storytelling and cartoons in Scotland and Europe cannot be over-estimated”.

The themes of Angus Og have only become more relevant over time. “Towrists”, as Angus calls them, have now swamped the Hebrides. Wealthy landowners still expect deference. And Scotland – whose independence the SNP-supporting Bain desired – has in recent years come within a whisker of throwing off British rule.

It’s time for Angus to stick that big nose back into our lives.