Brought to Book

A Kettering public library has been closed indefinitely, after shocked parents claimed that it had been peddling lewd and offensive material to their children. The local council has promised a full investigation after it was found that several of the books in the children’s section were, in fact, black-market ‘adult’ versions of popular classics including Tin Tin, Biggles and Asterix the Gaul. One mother, Mrs Sally Nautch, was horrified to discover what she thought was merely a harmless comic book being read by her ten-year old son Tommy, was actually the notorious Tin Tin and the Golden Swallow, a sexually explicit and completely unauthorised adult edition.  “I became suspicious when I caught Tommy urinating over his best friend’s head – he claimed that he was only trying out something he’d read in a library book,” she told The Sleaze. “When I looked at the book he’d borrowed I was appalled! I never suspected that grown men did such things!” Indeed, page seventeen of the comic book features a scene at Marlinspike Hall in which Nestor the butler lathers Captain Haddock’s dick whilst the latter takes a bath, before proceeding to urinate all over the old sea dog.

The anonymously authored comic strip – thought to originate in Eastern Europe – follows the fearless Belgian boy reporter’s adventures as he investigates the sinister white slave trade in young boys. The trail leads him from Belgian paedophile rings to the fleshpots of South East Asia, via the seedy sex clubs of Amsterdam. Along the way he is shocked to discover the various secret sexual proclivities of his friends and companions – Professor Calculus indulges in oral sex with underage prostitutes using the alias ‘Professor Cunnilingus’, whilst Captain Haddock reveals his love of pipe smoking (as well as golden showers), with a variety of rent boys. Even Snowy the dog is revealed to be an S&M enthusiast, enjoying lengthy sessions with a choke chain. Eventually, Tin Tin finds himself kidnapped by white slavers and sold to an Oriental potentate (the mysterious ‘Golden Swallow’ of the title) as his bondage slave. In a tense climax, the boy reporter is forced to drink his master’s urine in a bizarre domination ritual, before being rescued by Captain Haddock and his crew of rough seamen. This book should not be confused with Tin Tin in Thailand, another unofficial and banned addition to the canon, which features his friend Tchang being buggered by a Yeti, or Tin Tin in the Third Reich, in which he gleefully joins the Hitler youth, which was written by Herge in 1939 and suppressed by the Belgian authorities.

Another parent was appalled to discover that the wartime adventure story his child had brought home from the library was actually Biggles Buggers the Bolsheviks – definitely not written by Captain W E Johns. “Its not so much that in chapter eight Biggles takes it up the bum from a bearded Bolshevik that I mind, but rather the historical inaccuracies the book contains,” fumes an irate Gavin Hall. “To the best of my knowledge Lenin and Stalin never had a homosexual relationship in which Stalin was the ‘bitch’ and Lenin the ‘daddy’. This sort of thing could easily confuse impressionable young children.” The book, an anti-communist tract written in the 1930s, has the heroic flyer and his companions fighting against the Russian revolutionaries as part of Britain’s ill-advised expeditionary force sent to the Soviet Union in support of the Tsarist White Russians in 1918. The revolutionaries are, rather offensively, portrayed as being part of a Zionist-homosexual-Chinsese-black conspiracy hell-bent on destroying capitalism and under-mining the moral fibre of white civilisation. Biggles finds himself captured by Mad Monk Rasputin (bizarrely revealed to be a militant gay leftist Rabbi who had plotted to destroy the Russian royal family from within by seducing the Tsar), who tries to convert him to the cause by chaining him up in a dungeon and relentlessly buggering him for three days. Needless to say, he fails.

The book spawned a 1941 ‘sequel’, Biggles Buggers the Bosch, clearly written from a leftist perspective and probably intended as a satirical riposte to the previous volume. Here, Biggles and his friends become involved in a bizarre British Secret Service plot to undermine Hitler’s credibility with his own men by smuggling faked film footage of him apparently having sex with male prostitutes in a Paris brothel – once the SS learns that Adolf is a raving homosexual they will turn against him, or so the Secret Service believes. Needless to say, the film is lost and Biggles has to resort to giving the Fuhrer one up the jacksie in front of thousands of spectators during a rally in Nuremburg. The book portrays Biggles’ companions as British ruling class stereotypes – Algy is a homosexual former public school head boy, whilst Ginger is his fawning working class Tory ‘bit of rough’ boyfriend/fag, and Bertie is an absinthe-swigging and drug-taking titled degenerate – whose self-absorption and indifference to their social responsibilities allowed the rise of fascism to continue unchecked during the 1930s.

Also discovered in the children’s section at the library were several unauthorised versions of the popular Jennings series of novels set in a public school – all featuring a disturbing emphasis on corporal punishment and dormitory initiation rituals which usually involved Atkinson Major sticking lighted newspapers up the bottoms of new pupils. Asterix and the Amazons, another banned comic strip – featuring Asterix being captured by a tribe of Greek nymphomaniacs, Obelix carving phallic menhirs to distract them and Getafix the druid brewing a special potion to keep the Gauls’ erections up for hours at a time as they launch a rescue mission – is also believed to part of the Library’s stock, but is currently out on and loan and three weeks overdue.

Political reaction to the scandal has been swift, with Tory Education Spokesman Harry Johnson roundly condemning Britain’s library services. “This just confirms my belief that all public libraries should be shut down immediately. Far from being educational, as the left claims – they are simply purveyors of filth and perversion,” he told a press conference. “Allowing unsupervised children and working class people unlimited access to books could easily expose them to dangerous ideas and concepts they are not mentally equipped to handle. The average man in the street can gain all the knowledge he might reasonably need from fine newspapers such as The Daily Mail and The Sun.” Johnson has long maintained that libraries pose a grave threat to social stability and should be closed and their stocks of books publicly burned.