Sapphire & Steel: The Pied Piper

For the Adherent of Pop Culture

Episode Studies by Clayton Barr
enik1138-at-popapostle-dot-com

Sapphire & Steel
"The Pied Piper"
Look-In (1981) #14-17
Written by: Angus Allan
Art by: Arthur Ransom

The pied piper, now an evil time agent, uses the music of a famous pop group to lure children into oblivion.

Didja Know?

Comic strips in Look-In magazine were generally not credited to author and artist. According to the Animus Web site, the Sapphire & Steel strips were written by Angus Allan and drawn by Arthur Ransom.

Most of the strips feature Sapphire and Steel dressed in the clothes they wore in the first television storyline, "Escape Through a Crack in Time". The artist must have had only photo references from those early episodes.

This story appeared in three issues of Look-In, a UK magazine geared towards kids. The story is told in comic strip form and appeared in two-page chapters of each issue.

The story itself is untitled. I borrowed the title "The Pied Piper" and short description from the Sapphire & Steel Chronology on the Look-In wiki.

As they frequently do in the Look-In stories, Sapphire and Steel travel back in time in this story, this time back to the time of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, roughly the 13th Century. Though they fought the forces of time, the pair did not have the ability to travel back in time beyond Sapphire's ability to rewind time up to about half a day.

This was the final Sapphire & Steel strip to appear in Look-In magazine. However, two short text stories ("The Albatross" and "Rogue Robot") would appear in the 1981 Look-In Annual.

Characters appearing or mentioned in this story

Pied Piper of Hamelin

Sapphire

Steel

Jason Jackson

Les

Tarquin (band)

Evil Eric

Sekkaido

Caldonia

Didja Notice?

The Pied Piper in this story is based on the character who appears in legends dating back to the Middle Ages of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Hamelin is an actual town on the river Weser in Germany.

Page 1 of the story tells us that the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin using his pipe to lure the rats out of the town and then, when he wasn't paid, used it to lure all the children away from there is true. It also goes on to say that the piper was an embodiment of the evil force of Time and he was soon trapped and disposed of by Sapphire and Steel.

In the modern day (c. 1981), teenagers Jason and Les go to a night club to see the London band Tarquin play. Tarquin was a fictitious band of the time as far as I can tell.

Before his night out, Jason reads a book assigned as homework called Poetry for Schools on the bus. There have been several text books by this name made for schools. Jason finds he has to learn a poem called "The Pied Piper of Hamelin". The poem referred to is probably either the 1803 one by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe or the 1842 one by Robert Browning.

After the Pied Piper emerges in modern time and vanishes with a club full of young people, Sapphire says he will use them to ensnare more and more children. Steel then jumps to the conclusion that children will be taken from countries all over the world and bringing the human race to an end! And he's right, that turns out to be Piper's plan.

On page 6 of the story, Sapphire and Steel try to stop the Piper by going back in time to Hamelin to stop him then, but discover that Time has altered the pattern so that the Piper never went there in the first place. At Steel's spoken observation of this, Sapphire confirms, "You're right. They've flown the plague flag over Hamelin. Nobody's goin' to clear the rats..." It seems out of character that Sapphire, normally so perfectly spoken, would clip the final "g" off of "going" (especially if you've watched all of actress Joanna Lumley's performances as Sapphire in the TV series)!

Back to Sapphire & Steel Episode Studies