Sunday, September the 4th, 2005

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Billy Parallelogram

Hands up those of you who remember the cartoon character Billy Parallelogram. For decades in the last century he appeared weekly in The Pabulum, a comic which also featured Magnet Boy! The Boy Magnet. Whereas all Magnet Boy! The Boy Magnet's adventures followed a strict, unchanging formula, you could never guess what might happen in the Billy Parallelogram strip. Sometimes he was accompanied by his cousin, Tilly Dodecahedron, or by the Massed Hordes Of Gruesome And Frightening Things From The Pit Of Foulness. Sometimes the weekly adventure might be as simplistic as Billy Parallelogram buying an accordion and learning how to play it. There were serial stories, too, spread over two or three months, where Billy Parallelogram would be shown teaching children how to cultivate wheat, or to devise spring, prong and lever mechanisms to automate household tasks, or even to compose majestic symphonies for full orchestra so emotionally charged that listeners would blub into their handkerchiefs. His cousin Tilly Dodecahedron's appearances often signalled storylines involving bees, turpentine, silhouetteists, farm implements and Dakkadakkadakka. This last was a speciality of the Billy Parallelogram strips, an ill-defined yet curiously unnerving monster goblin with bulging eyes and forehead, seemingly bent on destroying the universe but always distracted by parlour games such as snakes-and-ladders or gluttons-and-rhubarb.

My favourite Billy Parallelogram story was the one in which he single-handedly thwarts the evil designs of a mad scientist called Weems. Weems is blond and has eerily sparkling blue eyes, and is always dressed in a trenchcoat. There is an inference, never made explicit, that he is some kind of Nazi. Also never made explicit is precisely what his evil scheme is, other than that it involves the enslavement of the world's entire population. How he is meant to accomplish this from the cockpit of an antiquated sea-plane is unclear, but before we have time to consider such questions, Billy Parallelogram heroically tampers with the fuel gauge, leading Weems to think he is out of petrol. The plane crashes into a mountainside, killing Weems and his fiendish crew, but not before Billy Parallelogram bails out and lands in the courtyard of a pie shop, where he is hailed as a saviour and given free pies for life.