Reid Fleming
World's toughest Milkman
I love comic books. From the moment I learned to read I decided I would rather look at pictures. I devoured them all, lost in the vivid colours like a young LSD enthusiast. My favourite comics in the late 70’s were from the UK. Beano, Dennis the menace (of course) and because I was already a little football maniac, Roy of the Rovers. Who was actually a bit of a pretentious dick, but Roy had not entirely accurate depictions of football action, so I loved it.
Remember those A5 black and white war comics which were pretty boring but good for learning useful German phrases like “Achtung Englander Schwein!” And “Gott inn Himmel!” I couldn’t really relate to mainstream American comics, Donald Duck and Goofy were entertaining slapstick but Mickey Mouse was a manipulative control freak.
My fascination and love of comics went to a whole new level when my older sister got a job at Forbidden Planet in London, and I discovered 2000AD. Back then I think there was only one Forbidden Planet in Soho. In 2023 there are about twenty stores across the UK. They are an institution providing comics, graphic novels, books, art, manga, action figures, anime, costumes and so much more.
You can buy a brand-new identity at Forbidden Planet. Purchase your own ready to go personality. Emo gamer, indie collector, LARPing nerd, gothic vampire, cosplay furry, samurai cyberpunk. You can walk in as a nobody no mates and walk out as a heavy metal warrior. My sister would send parcels from London in the early eighties and when one of those showed up in the letterbox back home in Wairarapa, I was ecstatic.
Comics are pure lazy escapism. With a book you actually have to concentrate on the words and then trust your brain to conjure some images. Comics do it all for you. Narrative, plot and pictures laid out for you to absorb like a painting, then move on to the next panel.
The parcels from London were mostly 2000AD comics. Judge Dread the visionary dystopian mega-city future. Nemesis the Warlock featuring the amazing art of Kevin Oneill. Barbarian fantasy Slaine, Strontium dog and Rogue trooper, so many stories, so much fantastic art. But 2000AD was mainstream. Thanks to my sister I discovered many underground, alternative, subversive stories that broke the boundaries of what I thought comics were supposed to be.
One of my favourites was Reid Fleming, the world’s toughest milkman. Written and illustrated by David Boswell. Boswell based the character on a childhood bully with the same name. Reid delivers his dairy products extremely aggressively, he has superhuman strength, is able to lift his milk truck with his bare hands, and has complete disregard for, well, everything. It’s laugh out loud material.
A normal day for Reid sees him careering around the city drinking whiskey, savagely beating a bald-headed bystander for making fun of his milk truck, a rude visit to Mrs. Jenkins’s house, where he pours milk into the goldfish bowl and demands, “78 cents or I piss on your flowers.” Taunted by a pair of boy racers, Reid chases them in his milk truck with relentless perseverance, lands on top of their hot-rod and tosses a lit cigarette into their gas tank.
Reid terrorizes the neighbourhood. He is not someone you would want anywhere near your house. In one episode he pretends to have been stabbed in the back on the doorstep of one of his customers, to freak them out. Not only are they overjoyed that he’s apparently dead, but when the mailman arrives and sees the body, he congratulates the couple, and runs off to spread the good news.
Reid is an inarticulate, violent, rampaging brute, but has a soft spot for his favourite TV soap opera, The Dangers of Ivan. It is appointment viewing and our hero Reid regularly skips work to watch it. At one point, Ivan has a terrible accident while driving, spends 6 years in a coma, (Reid watches every riveting second) and, upon awakening, falls to his death from an open window. The show continues with Ivan as a walking corpse, called The Horrors of Ivan. Reid fears the inevitability of his own death and he feels trapped by the mundane. “How many Mondays can there be in a man’s life?”
He seems to get genuine satisfaction when venting his existential panic in repetitive acts of gratuitous violence and expressing his outrage by deriding everyone he comes across. Reid has a whole bin full of alarm clocks he’s destroyed in his fury at being woken. He forms sentimental attachments with his milk trucks which he regularly wrecks and has a similar relationship with the love of his life, the beautiful, unattainable Lena Toast.
He’s an unlikable anti-hero with just enough vulnerability to make you sympathise. There are hints of abstract emotion in Reid but no moral motivation. The question we all ask is why? Why is Reid so angry? What has made him like this? And we are never given a satisfactory answer, so we are only left to speculate. There are dream sequences, showing Reid’s inner anxieties and fears.
There are visions and revelations, hinting that Reid is but a puppet of a higher power, hurtling him uncontrollably towards inevitable disaster. He has long given up on any semblance of control in his own life, maybe that is why he is such a hilarious nihilistic monster. Might as well drink whiskey and drive milk trucks.
Reid’s infamy grew in the comic underground in the 80’s and 90’s. The art is minimal but expressive. Everyone seems to have square heads and square noses. There is so much quotable dialogue and so much nuance amongst the anger and explosive action. There was talk of a movie, Hollywood was interested. Boswell even wrote a screenplay. Rumours of Robin Willaims, Bill Murray and Jack Nicholson for the lead role (Jack would have been brilliant).
The stars lined up, the end was in sight, but when the proposal hit the desk of the studio boss at Warner Brothers, it stopped there. The guy didn’t get it. Boswell’s milkman was just too challenging for mainstream consumption. Boswell sold the rights to Warners, but Warners did nothing with it. The project went from full speed ahead to dead. The script remains locked in their vault, and they refuse to sell it. Someone at Warners knows the power of Reid Fleming and doesn’t want anyone else to get their hands on it.
Meanwhile Boswell is still a broke cartoonist. In a time of Hollywood wish-fulfilment superheroes, I think the movie going public would love the reality check of Reid Fleming. David Boswell continues to deliver sporadic stories of the world’s toughest milkman. Hollywood, so far, has not.
Please go and check out Boswell’s cool stuff and maybe buy a t-shirt here.
