John Kent (2) (1937–2003)

A real pleasure to catch up with Varoomshka in a 1972 collection of this vintage British newspaper strip that I remember gawking at on the shelves of one of the big bookshops in the seventies. (I really wanted this instead of the Blue Peter annual!) Varoomshka, perhaps a great-niece of Jane from the classic Daily Mirror strip of the wartime era, tumbles through a series of black and white political satires, encountering fearsome dinosaurs of her time like Edward Heath and Tricky Dicky himself. Our pin-up heroine embodies Bowie's moonage daydream of glam allure in a succession of outrageous platform-booted period outfits, no doubt fresh from a shopping spree at Biba and Mister Freedom.

John Kent's cartooning is energetic and stylish, if perhaps blown up a little larger than it needs to be here. (It's POP ART, though, innit?) The satire is mostly incomprehensible at this historical remove, but it is a point of interest that it is written from a broadly left-wing perspective, and that Varoomshka appeared in the left-liberal Guardian newspaper from 1969-79.

Time capsule stuff from a vanished era when sexual desire was seen as a purely liberating force. VAROOMSHKA ROOLS OK!… (more)