The Numskulls the Numskulls Is a Comic Strip in the Beano, a UK
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Self-Negotiated Unit// MSN 1 // Research 010 // The Numskulls The Numskulls [From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia] The Numskulls is a comic strip in The Beano, a UK comic. The strip is about some tiny human like creatures that live inside the head of Edd Case, a boy, and control his actions. The Numskulls are: • Brainy Controls Edd’s brain. • Blinky Controls his sight/eyes. • Radar (previously Luggy) Controls his hearing/ears. • Snitch (previously Nosey) Controls his smell/nose. • Cruncher Controls his mouth/taste. Occasionally other numskulls are seen including germ fighting numskulls, numskulls in the stomach and blood numskulls and sad memory dept. History The strip first appeared in The Beezer and was drawn by Malcolm Judge. In this version they lived inside a man’s head rather than a boy’s head. The man was never named, but the Numskulls referred to him as “our Man”. There were six Numskulls during this time - instead of the aforementioned Cruncher, the ‘Mouth Department’ was home to two Numskulls, named Alf and Fred. They also looked different. Luggy (Radar) looked a lot like Cruncher, Snitch looked like Cruncher as well except Snitch wore orange, Brainy had no glasses and had no hair apart from around his ears and wore black, Blinky looked the same except he was bald and Alf and Fred had two hairs on their head and wore black and yellow. Upon Judge’s death at the start of 1989, John Dallas became the strip’s artist. In 1990 the comic became The Beezer and Topper following the acquisition of The Topper by The Beezer. It was at this point that Edd replaced the man. Three years later the comic folded, and the strip joined The Beano in issue 2674, dated 16 October 1993, drawn by Tom Paterson. The strip was later drawn by Barry Glennard, who became the permanent artist in 2003, although Dave Eastbury drew some strips on occasion in the past. Tom Paterson returned to contribute a number of strips in 2007. Henning M. Lederer | MA Digital Arts FT | +44 (0)7551 960 327 | www.led-r-r.net 1 Self-Negotiated Unit// MSN 1 // Research 010 // The Numskulls After “Our Man” became “Edd” and “Luggy” became “Radar” and “Nosey” became “Snitch”, Edd became aware of the Numskulls’ existence inside him, after a doctor discovered them on his X-ray system. Despite the doctor’s alarm and decision that they had to be removed, Edd was very calm and wondered whether getting rid of them was a bad idea. Homunculus [From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia] The concept of a homunculus (Latin for “little man”, plural “homunculi”; the diminutive of homo, “man”) is often used to illustrate the functioning of a system. In the scientific sense of an unknowable prime actor, it can be viewed as an entity or agent. (...) Very few people would propose that there actually is a little man in the brain looking at brain activity. However, this proposal has been used as a ‘straw man’ in theories of mind. Gilbert Ryle (1949) proposed that the human mind is known by its intelligent acts. (see Ryle’s Regress). He argued that if there is an inner being inside the brain that could steer its own thoughts then this would lead to an absurd repetitive cycle or “regress” before a thought could occur: Faz Choudhury [http://www.fazchoudhury.com] “According to the legend, whenever an agent does anything intelligently, his act is preceded and steered by another internal act of considering a regulative proposition appropriate to his practical problem. Must we then say that for the agent’s . reflections how to act to be intelligent he must first reflect how best to reflect how to act? The endlessness of this implied regress shows that the application of the appropriateness does not entail the occurrence of a process of considering this criterion.” [Ryle 1949] Ryle’s theory is that intelligent acts cannot be a property of an inner being or mind, if such a thing were to exist. (...) “(...) These homunculi are the ultimate actors, even though they may be said to simply follow instructions. The visualization strategy thus ended in two equally disastrous alternatives. Either the images revealed human beings to be little more than the slaves of their bodily machines, or they explained nothing and only shifted the problem to the level of the homunculi, who replaced human beings as centres of decision and control. On a more general level, one could as easily argue that the technological reductionism depicted here was itself already outdated, regardless of its borrowings from the cinema.” [From: Communicating the Modern Body: Fritz Kahn’s Popular Images of Human Physiology as an Industrialized World, Cornelius Borck, McGill University] Henning M. Lederer | MA Digital Arts FT | +44 (0)7551 960 327 | www.led-r-r.net 2 Self-Negotiated Unit// MSN 1 // Research 010 // The Numskulls Philosophy of the Numskulls (fustar.info) http://www.fustar.info/2006/12/02/193/ (...) For those who don’t remember them (or don’t remember that they remember them) “The Numskulls” were large-headed, thin-limbed homunculi who lived in the head of a central human character known (to them, and us) as “Our Man”. Each ‘section’ of the head - Ears, Nose, Mouth, Eyes, Brain - was controlled/maintained by an individual numskull, with the various ‘departments’ communicating through (I kid you not) an intercom system. The story first appeared in The Beezer, where “Our Man” was depicted as a balding, moustachioed, single worker living in a terraced house (or some such). It was here that my encounters with the strip began and ended though apparently - following the folding of The Beezer (1990) and its merger with The Beano - “Our Man” became “Our Boy”, and thus it remains to this day. Since The Beezer generally concerned itself - like most of its competitors - with stories detailing mischief-making, the eating of “slap up feeds”, and the beating of children with tartan slippers - “The Numskulls” stood out (even to this child’s eyes) as something of an oddity. The curious appeal of the story is hinted at by its Wikipedia entry, which details a typical “Numskulls” story. “Our Man” is pictured asleep in the first panel and in the second we see Luggy in the Ear Dept. awoken by the sound of the alarm clock next to “our Man’s” bed. Using an intercom system Luggy sends a message to Brainy that the alarm clock is ringing. Brainy, in turn uses his intercom system to wake up all the other numskulls and feeds the written message “SWITCH OFF ALARM!” into the suggestion box. We then see “our Man” thinking “Noisy alarm! I’ll switch it off. Where is it?” In the following panel we see Luggy informing Brainy that the alarm is still ringing whilst Brainy reads a print-out from the computer “WHERE IS IT?”. It transpires that Blinky, who is in charge of the man’s eyes, has neglected his duty by staying in bed. The other two numskulls burst into his department and force him out of bed. Grumbling, Blinky opens the man’s eyes with a hand-crank whilst Brainy and Luggy stow his bedding in cabinets under the eyes. In the last panel we see “Our Man” reflecting that he couldn’t open his eyes this morning and now he has bags under them (caused by the bedding). The philosophical mileage which could readily be...er...extracted from a strip in which tiny creatures control a character’s every thought and deed by inserting messages into a “Suggestion Box” (a sort of fax machine-cum-tissue box) remains curiously untapped. Nowhere in the course of my three undergraduate years studying philosophy in Galway (...) was any mention made of “The Numskulls” and their importance in regard to debates about free will, mind/body dualism etc. (...) Henning M. Lederer | MA Digital Arts FT | +44 (0)7551 960 327 | www.led-r-r.net 3 Self-Negotiated Unit// MSN 1 // Research 010 // The Numskulls The above description is typical of the Numskull’s formula. The Man (who represents ‘us’) is totally determined by the decisions and actions of the num- skulls. He has the freedom only to reflect on what has occurred, all his decisions are made by Brainy [The numskull in charge of the “brain department”]. As all the thoughts sent from Brainy’s ‘suggestion box’ appear to “our Man” as his own he little suspects the existence of the numskulls. Much of what he reflects on is actually a consequence of the Numskulls’ free will, rather than his own. All of this seemed to suggest that the numskulls were the true instigators of human action and desire, but an obvious question raises itself... as noted on daily chump.org: The thing that used to really bug me was whether the numskulls were operated by their own, smaller, numskulls, and so ad infinitum. The mind boggles. If, like Russian dolls, there is always a smaller numskull within a numskull then where does the trail end? If Aristotle had read “The Numskulls” (and ‘tis a pity for him that he didn’t) then I’m sure he’d have suggested his “Prime Mover” (the universal numskull) as an answer. (...) Henning M. Lederer | MA Digital Arts FT | +44 (0)7551 960 327 | www.led-r-r.net 4.