The Iron Eaters always left me hungry to read more

The Topper or the Beezer?

I think it must have been the Beezer.

The Iron Eaters – all readers of a certain age, you’d at least have to be in your mid-50s – do you remember those pink sponges that suddenly appeared from outer space and nearly brought civilisation to an end? I loved them.

These sponges ate iron, and other metals too, and as they chomped away they got bigger and bigger so that in the end they could scoff an entire car, even a lorry, or even a whole steam engine resplendent in BR "blackberry black".

They were extraordinary; so light that a puff of wind could blow them forward, or even up into the air, and yet the appetite for metal, including the very heaviest, was voracious.

The paradox of where did all that weight go, as the sponges lightly floated to the next meal (maybe a whole cargo ship?) never occurred to avid readers like me. As enthralling reading goes, The Iron Eaters remains hugely memorable.

Par for the course for 1960s’ comics, it was quite natural that foremost in the battle against Iron Eaters was a bold young lad (his name long forgotten) and as his derring-do unfolded week after Beezer week, certain truths became evident about these space weeds.

The first was that the conventional defence forces of the United Kingdom were quite useless at tackling the threat.

A stick of bombs dropped from a V Bomber or a round from a Centurian tank, or even a full salvo from Britain’s last battleship HMS Vanguard, did no more than blow a giant pink sponge apart – the bits of which became wee round sponges themselves, which then floated away to continue the destructive work. It was the stuff of nightmares and truly nations tottered.

But after a year’s worth of this horror, our plucky lad eventually stumbled across the sponges’s nemesis. It’s strange that Her Majesty’s General Staff hadn’t thought of it before; it was a simple can of petrol and a match.

Whoof!

In a magnificent fireball, one that must have had the Beezer artists reaching for their yellow and orange paint pots, the pink sponges were no more. Merely a dusting of ash on the ground that again completely defied the "where had all that metal gone?" paradox, not that that deterred our hero who week on week continued incinerating the enemy.

Of course when the war was won and the world saved, and the Beezer moved on to another less enthralling serial, things turned out to be not quite as the reader had assumed. For there, in the following year’s Beezer annual, there they were again. The Iron Eaters!

This time a really huge one had been missed.

It had got into a massive warehouse and eaten all the metal stuff in it until it was too fat to get back out of the double doors again.

Indeed so bloated was it that it was hard up against all four walls of the warehouse – and it stayed there, trapped and gathering cobwebs, until some hapless warehouse demolition chaps made a most unwelcome discovery and, happy days, the story was on again.

(Can you build a warehouse, roof, doors and all, without any metal in it? Because that is how it would have been to have properly trapped the sponge? Such niceties didn’t trouble writers and readers.)

Another year of calm ensued after this episode and comics slightly receded amongst my interests and passions. By this time things that I have written about before such as the Ardgay wolf cubs, or fishing, or my first air gun, were taking over.

Then we had another Beezer annual. Agh! What kind of idiot goes and keeps a tiny Iron Eater in a Swan Vestas match box in an old desk! We were off again.

These days comics are almost gone. The iPad, the electronic device and total connectivity, is the reason.

But if today’s generation of young mums and dads are to understand the early influences on their own parents, then the role of the comic shouldn’t be overlooked. I have only to see a protuberant chin, and I think of Desperate Dan.

A top hat, and it’s Marmaduke, Earl of Bunkerton, aka Lord Snooty.

And, in a service station on the A1 last week, on our way to visit our first grandchild, when I saw a pink bath sponge, well this column just wrote itself.

Best wishes from sunny England-shire.

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