The Tearoom of Despair

Blog From Another Universe #6: Superman Forever, from Siegel and Shuster Publications

2012-01-25T13:30:00.001+13:00

The 75^th anniversary of thefirst Superman comic is not until 2013, but owners Siegel and ShusterPublications have already announced plans for their own celebrations.

As well as Zach Snyder’s Superman Beyond -the long-anticipated follow-up to Wes Anderson’s 2005 billion-dollar blockbusterSuperman Returns - 2013 will also see the release of Superman Forever, a500-page hardback tribute to the Man of Steel, with the greatest names incomics writing and drawing their own Superman stories.

Names already announced for the tributecomic range from Art Spiegleman and Stan Lee to Frank Miller and Howard Chaykinto Kevin Hezunga and Los Bros Hernandez to Alan Moore and Grant Morrison, anddozens of other top creators.

In a statement released earlier this week,S&S Publications said the project was not just a celebration of thecharacter’s long history, it was also a commemoration of the thirty yearhistory of S&S, which was established in 1983.

The company came into existence after thelandmark ruling in the early 1980s that all rights to the Superman characterbelonged to their creators – Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. The result of the case,which the Siegel and Shuster families took to the Supreme Court after themassive success of the 1978 Superman movie, took everybody by surprise, with DClosing all the rights to its major (and minor) characters in one case afteranother.

Nobody seemed more surprised than thefamilies of Siegel and Shuster, who signed a short-term one-year deal with DCfor the continued publication of Superman comics. Decades later, those last DCSuperman comics still feel full of sadness and whimsy, with the year-longCrisis On Krypton story by Marv Wolfman and George Perez giving Superman aproperly farewell from the DC universe.

When the year-long deal was up, the Siegeland Shuster families revealed their plans – a new publisher that would dealonly in Superman. Retaining all movie, television and comic book rights,S&S Publications was born.

Concerned with flooding the market withSuperman comics, S&S maintained a strict publishing schedule – two monthlybooks starring the Man of Steel, with a number of one offs, short mini-seriesand special projects. The monthly comics launched in late 1983 with JohnByrne’s Action Comics #1, followed the next month by Howard Chaykin’s Superman#1.

The new company enlisted the editorialtalents of Karen Berger, whose eye for sharp stories and sharper creators led to a series of well-picked self-contained books, with longer stories in the main titles that weremore epic in scale.

Over the years, this has resulted in anumber of high quality stories that have remained in print, and continue togenerate sales for S&S. These range from Wolfman and Ordway’s three-year-longExile storyline in the late eighties to Frank Miller’s epic The Man Of SteelStrikes Back in 1986 (and its 2001 sequel The Man Of Tomorrow Returns).

In 1987, soon after writing ‘Whatever Happened tothe Dark Knight?’, the last Batman story for DC - and still riding the successof his work on Watchmen for Ditko Inc - Alan Moore was invited by S&S toproduce any kind of Superman comic he fancied, and ultimately responded withSuperman: Supreme in 1991, an affectionate pastiche of the character’s long andtumultuous history.

Moore’s work on Superman reached a climax with the Death of Superman in1995, with Kal-El reborn as a transcendent figure of glory and compassion. Healso introduced a new supporting cast that replaced those the company no longerhad access to. While they could publish a Superboy comic, there could be noappearance by the Legion of Super-Heroes, but Moore created anall-new backstory for Superman in the Supreme stories, one that has been usedfairly consistently since.

One slightly sad side-effect of thecreations going back to the creators is that there has been no Justice Leaguecomics since 1981. Several attempts at bringing all the trademark ownerstogether for a special Justice League comic have all failed, largely due to theincredible complexity of the deal. (The thought of somebody like Grant Morrison– who made the Avengers the biggest Marvel book of the nineties – doing aJustice League story remains an impossible dream.)

Fortunately for Superman, he still got tosee his best friend. The World’s Finest annuals, set up in a co-publicationdeal with KFR Comics has allowed Superman and Batman to have team-up adventurestogether, with the rarity of these team-ups continually attracting some ofcomic’s biggest names, right from the first issue’s For The Man Who HasEverything by Moore and Gibbons, and up to last year’s Crisis on Bongo World byBagge and Lee.

After losing its heroes, DC stayed inbusiness by publishing creator owned work, but became a minor publisher withoutits main characters. In comparison, S&S had guarded its Superman trademarkcarefully, and built on the iconic recognition to create one of the biggestcomic companies in the business, while staying true to its founding principlesof creator rights, with all new characters created for new Superman comicsbelonging to the creators who came up with them.

And this has produced some incrediblecomics – It’s amusing to read old issues of Amazing Heroes at the time thatSuperman was off the shelves for a couple of months, between owners, and seethe fear in the letter columns, concerns from fanboys about their monthly fix,terrified that there might be no more Superman comics. The fear seems so sillyin the light of what has happened since, with a revitalisation of Superman thathas brought the world’s greatest superhero into the 21^st century.

***

Blogs From a Regular Universe will resume next week....

Blog From Another Universe #5: Fearsome Four by Lee and Kirby

2012-01-22T08:15:00.001+13:00

Everybody knows that it was the 106-issuerun of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s X-Men that really kicked the Marvel Age ofcomics into life, with the World’s Greatest Mutant Magazine providing such aburst of life and energy that the entire superhero genre was revitalised.

But less well known is the fact that theMarvel Age almost didn’t happen at all, with the company almost destroyed bythe continued survival of EC Comics, when that company almost pushed Marvelout of the market altogether, while also influencing it into a less successfuldirection.

As a comic company, EC was almost wiped outduring the Fedric Wertham-inspired moral backlash against horror and crimecomics in the 1950s, and for one brief moment, it looked like ECwould only be able to publish its flagship humour title Crazy.

But when William Gaines got a good night’ssleep in 1954 and made an impassioned and eloquent speech on the importance ofartistic freedom before a senate committee, the moral outcry soon faded away,and EC continued with more sexy and violent stories.

EC’s continued success ate up preciousmarket share that other companies could not afford to lose, and Stan Lee wasordered by Marvel publisher Martin Goodman to do something with a superhero team. Goodman had heard about thesurprise success of Justice League of America, which managed to crave out asmall – but profitable and growing – slice of a comic market dominated by crimeand horror, and he wanted a piece of that pie.

But with EC comics now the biggest company inthe industry, Lee decided to play it a bit safer by going back to the monster genreand – with co-creator Jack Kirby – created the Fearsome Four, a team ofdestructive creatures who rampaged through the earliest days of the MarvelUniverse.

The Fearsome Four – Mr fearsome, the Human Fireball,Invisible Witch and the Thing – were a group of thrill-seekers whosought to unlock the mysteries of the occult through the use of science, andinstead unleashed their own primal desires in the form of fantastical powers.

For 18 wonderful issues by Lee and Kirby,the Fearsome Four plotted and schemed to destroy a world that didn’t understandthem, with only mysterious masked hero Doctor Victor Von Druid standing in theway of their terrible plans.

And with new EC titles like Tales From theTomb and the Crypt of Horror still a heavy influence on everybody’s stories,the creators pushed things to the extreme – the Invisible Witch created bubblesof nothingness in men’s minds; the Thing would rip off limbs without a secondthought, the Human Fireball would set helpless waitresses ablaze from theinside and Mr Fearsome could tear a man’s soul apart with a glance.

While Kirby’s art showed plenty of thebombastic energy that would later make the X-Men the biggest comic in theworld, it was also stuffed with gloom, dread and awful terror, mixed with gorethat still seems overtly gruesome, decades later.

But while the Fearsome Four was a boldexperiment in fusing horror and superhero comics, it was not a huge success andcancelled after a year and a half in late 1963. Lee and Kirby were both hugely disappointed - they had both puttheir creative hearts and souls into the Fearsome Four and were ready to turntheir backs on comics altogether.

But after the modest success of Spider-Man- a creepy and largely forgotten superhero who lived in an old dilapidatedmansion with a werewolf for a groundskeeper - the comic company survived longenough for Kirby and Lee to give one more go, and struck gold with the X-Men.

With stories like the Galactus Saga, inwhich the world’s most feared and misunderstood heroes saved Earth from theWorld Eater and were finally embraced by a thankful public, Lee and Kirby started the real Marvel Age. Bythe time they were finished on the mutant title, other creators were taking thenext step in the company’s evolution - Claremont and Byrne were making The Defendersthe most exciting book in the market, while Frank Miller was bringing a new noirsensibility to the Hulk title and Steve Gerbe was doing odd things with dwarfsin the pages of the Champions.

The Fearsome Four only appeared once morein the Marvel Universe, showing up as villainous henchmen in a 1994 issue ofNightstalkers, only to be swiftly dispatched by Hannibal King, but the original18 issues had relatively low print runs and are now highly prized bycollectors.

EC Comics has been the biggest company incomics ever since it purchased DC Comics in 1975, and incorporated its widerange of genre-bending titles into a larger and weirder superhero universe, but Marvel has gioven that comics giant a run for its money over the years.

WhileMarvel eventually found its own voice, the Fearsome Four is a fascinating relicof a time when it tried to talk like somebody else. The Fearsome Four neverreally caught on, but they don’t have to be forgotten.

Blog From Another Universe #4: Dave Sim’s Cerebus The Barbarian

2012-01-19T12:25:00.001+13:00

When Dave Sim’s epic Cerebus seriesfinished with #350 in October 2003 – three years ahead of schedule after anastonishing late burst of productivity – the Canadian artist revealed one ofthe great secrets about his series: The utterly human character Cerebusinitially started life as a furry animal.

Cerebus has become one of the great iconiccharacters of modern comics, with his furious visage one of the mostrecognisable faces in the medium. In the initial issues of Sim’s mega-epic, thecharacter looked exactly like Barry Smith-Windsor’s Conan, before later takingon more of an idiosyncratic look. (Sim went on record in 1982, stating that hebased Cerebus on Peter Tork from The Monkees, but he was very, very high at thetime.)

But in a career-spanning interview withGary Groth’s Newsarama in 2005, Sim revealed this his initial intention was to have avery different lead character.

“At first I thought I had to make somethinga bit wacky to make it stand out,” Sim told Groth, “and I was going to makeCerebus an anteater or antelope or something stupid like that. But then Irealised I’d spend the rest of my career being asked ‘Why an anteater?’, andthat would probably have driven me crazy.”

It’s interesting to speculate what mighthave happened if Sim had stuck to his initial idea of Cerebus being a talkinganimal. It is unlikely the title would have lasted 350 issues, or that most of the lastdecade of the comic would be totally concerned with the 100-issue Battle For Iest.Sim might never have got to his final, transcendent 50-issue Peace For Ieststoryline, which climaxed with the highly emotional #350, with Cerebus on hisdeath bed, surrounded by an entire kingdom who would all gladly give theirlives for him.

(On the positive side, it also might nothave resulted in the appalling 1987 adaptation of Cerebus, starring DolphLungren as the barbarian hero, Brigette Neilsen as Jaka and Bob Hoskins ascomedy sidekick Oscar Wilde, but some cinematic atrocities can’t be erased thateasily.)

Sim broke new ground with his Church &State storyline in Cerebus the Barbarian, but abandoned a brief dabbling insexual politics after Jaka’s Story, and pulled back to focus on Cerebus’existential dilemmas on the battlefield, with the title character unexpectedlyfinding the meaning of the universe in the lamentations of his opponent’s lovedones. This story, which ran in the ‘Love’ storyline from issues #150-200, was a nakedly emotional plea for understanding from Sim, that only the hardest of hearts could resist.

This new direction towards a kindler,gentler barbarian was not in the initial blueprint for the series, as Simrevealed in an interview with Hero Illustrated in 1997: “The initial plan wasto really get into the relationship between men and women, before moving intosome deep religious allegory, mixed with Three Stooges slapstick and musings onthe 20^th century’s literary giants.

“But then I thought nah, fuck that, andwent back to telling stories about adventures and girls with big tits.”

He also revealed that a noted Britishwriter had a major influence on his new direction.

“Michael Moorcock wrote me a lovely letterin the late eighties, talking to me about the dubious sexual politics he saw inthe title at the time. He said it in the nicest possible way, and I just feltlike a bit of a dick, so I stepped away from all that kind of thing.”

Sim has remained busy since Cerebus endedwith the universally-acclaimed #350 – his SimWorld message board system is thefourth biggest comic board on the internet, with ‘Dave’s Love Corner’responsible for more successful relationship than all the others put together,while WW2 revenge epic Judenhass was the second biggest selling comic book of 2007.

And Sim has jumped back into the monthlygrind with Glamourpuss – a Modesty Blaise meets Millie the Model pastiche thathas already racked up more than 40 issues, with Sim promising a shorter runthis time and an anticipated ending somewhere around #100.

After that, Sim has signalled that he willretire from comics and let his work speak for itself. In the unusuallyintrospective follow-up interview with Groth, he talked about settling downwith his second wife Colleen – who he has now been married to for more than 20years – and enjoying life with his four kids.

But he also spoke of one great regret inhis work, and – surprisingly – it was that he didn’t stick with his initialplan to make Cerebus a furry animal.

“I know it was a stupid stoner idea, but Ikinda wish I had stuck with my guns on that one. If I hadn’t made that firstinitial compromise, who knows what could have happened?”

Batman, Ltd

2012-01-15T14:48:00.003+13:00

Grant Morrison’s fascinating run on Batmancame to a natural conclusion with the Return of Bruce Wayne, with Batman’sreturn from a fate worse than death suitably apokalyptic and fun.

But Morrison was apparently getting so muchenjoyment out of writing Batman that he carried on with Batman Inc, a seriesthat has managed to be exciting, essential, inconsequential, dark and silly,all at the same time.

Stories don’t always stop where theyshould, but that’s not always a bad thing…

Consider Vertigo’s ultra-resilient Fablestitle. Everybody knows it was supposed to end with the defeat of the GreatAdversary, even Bill Willingham. But Willingham ignored that general wisdom and wrapped that particulartale a couple of years ago in three issues flat, and then went on to do otherthings with the title.

The post-war Fables stories have provoked anagging sense that the story is finished and everything after is epilogue,which is a little odd to think of when you’re talking about characters whosestories have become literally endless over the centuries, and that idea thatthings have moved past the predictable ending that was always going to happengives the comic a terrific sense of freedom and unpredictability. Anythingcould happen now.

There is a fair bit of that Fables factorin Batman Incorporated. The first volume of Batman Inc recently wrapped up withthe double-sized Leviathan Strikes, leaving ten issues of comics that tried todo something new with Batman beyond the natural conclusion of Morrison’s story.

And yet, while it was a typically witty andtrippy and fast-paced Morrison Batman series, it sometimes tried too hard to benow and fresh and interesting, and the story sometimes out-paced itself,leaving the reader gasping in its wake. Morrison’s superhero shorthand allowshim to skip past all the dull bits and nail one scene in a couple of observantpanels, but it can also cut out a lot of emotional resonance, and the story isin dire danger of becoming a Series Of Events, rather than an Actual Story.

This sense of all surface, no feeling wasnot helped by the series’ initial artist - Yanick Paquette – whose work was abit too flat for the intended effect Thecolours were also oddly muted, when they desperately needed to be bright andgarish, and the entire comic looked dangerously un-sexy.

Still, while it had its faults, Batman Incstill managed to be the most entertaining and interesting Batman comic beingpublished every month. By taking Batman outside his Gotham comfort zone, the seriesgained a zesty international flavour. After thousands of issues set in Gotham City, seeingBatman engage in the big wide world is still refreshingly satisfying.

The series also saw the startlingdevelopment of artist Chris Burnham, who is quickly shedding the Quitelyinfluence to build his own unique style – his line is getting a lot looser thanQuitely’s, and he doesn’t have - or need - that same obsessive attention todetail.

And it was a Batman comic written by GrantMorrison, who manages to be deadly serious while retaining an ironic sense ofhow beautifully absurd it all is. It was an idiosyncratic and deeply individualstory produced within the rigid confines of corporate comics, and that issomething that is always worth celebrating.

The most surprising thing about sneakingthese high-faluting ideas into a Batman comic was that is actually paid off,because there is a real audience for that kind of thing. The first volume ofBatman Inc remained one of DC’s consistently top sellers over its short life, outpacingmany other comics with 'Batman' in the title, without resorting to tie-ins todubious events, or superstar artists.

It was a comic that proved that trulyindividual stories told in a slightly challenging format could be salessuccesses.

It couldn’t last. And it didn’t.

Because then the new 52 came along andbrought back the same old Bat doing the same old Bat-shit in the same oldBat-town, and while creators insist that there are vital differences betweenBatman and Detective and Batman & Robin and David Finch Batman, therereally isn’t much of a difference from a slight distance - just that same oldstatus quo, spread across titles that share that same intensely scratchy artstyle. All-new, all-extreme, all the time.

Batman Inc was shunted off to the side inthis latest soft reboot, the final relic of a obsolete continuity which doesn’tfit with all the other regular titles, and no longer counts in the greaterBat-story. Batman Inc is left feeling like a time capsule from six months ago,passing itself off as the brand new thing, when it’s been relegated to the old– and not even old enough to be interesting again.

It’s hard to deny the financial success of DC’s52 initiative, but it’s succeeded by retreating to tried and tested formula.Just when it looked like things could be different, they’re back to the sameold games. There might be imaginative mutilations and locked room mysteries inthe new Batman comics, but that’s nothing really new.

One unfortunate side-effect of the DCrelaunch is that it’s shown that while something like Batman Inc can gainenough readers to be a consistent sales success, the only really big sellersare those driven by large editorial visions, rather than eccentric and singularideas. And while it certainly pays off in the short term, this kind ofpandering to a committed base is only going to have diminishing returns.

Then again, Batman Inc is not dead yet….

The series returns later this year, eventhough, for a while there, it looked like the second volume of Batman Inc wasgoing to be one of those projects that Morrison never quite got around tofinishing off. But DC has enough goodwill towards the Scots writer – and hasmade enough money off his ideas over the years – to let him finish the story,even if it is an odd fit for the new DC universe.

That could be for the best, because Morrison’scomics always work a bit better when they’re just a little out of sync with theregular universe. His audacious Seven Soldiers work was not quite in the sameworld as Batman, and the pleasantly jarring appearance of Booster Gold in thepages of Doom Patrol gave that comic some necessary context.

So if Batman Inc goes off and does itthing, it doesn’t really matter if it doesn’t fit with the current DetectiveComics. Those weird little pathsoff the main continuity road are where some of the best work gets done andshould be encouraged as much as possible. It can lead to dodgy results, likeNeal Adams’ recent unfortunate Bat-comics, but this is the area where thingslike The Dark Knight Returns and Killing Joke come from.

Batman Inc felt so unnecessary after theReturn of Bruce Wayne, but has become more essential as other Bat-comics returnto their comfortable chairs. It’s hard to follow its pace sometime, but it willwait for you to catch up.

Criminal: Crime totally pays

2012-01-11T10:38:00.003+13:00

(Warning, this post contains big-assspoilers for Criminal: The Last Of The Innocent)

After decades of comics showing thatcommitting any sort of crime has some sort of consequences, it’s actuallyslightly jarring to read one where the main character commits a heinous andviolent murder, and totally gets away with it.

On the other hand, since this is happeningin the pages of a Criminal storyline, and since Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips havedelighted in playing off genre convention with unexpected results since thefirst book, it shouldn’t be all that surprising.

For reasons far too boring to go into here,I only get Criminal when it is collected in a trade paperback, even though Ihappily buy a new issue of Incognito – and now Fatale – every month.

There is just something so satisfying abouta Criminal story when it is full and complete, and can be read in one sitting. Eachone is an absolute delight – the most efficient comic on the market also comes withdeadly doses of darkness and weird emotional epiphanies.

Despite being extraordinarily late in jumping on the Criminal bandwagon, I now get each new book as soon as it comes out.This means I have to wait a few months, but that’s okay – I can wait.

What I can’t do is avoid general reviews.While I have no desire to spoil anything, I can’t help skimming through reviewsand previews, just to get an idea of the general critical vibe.

That vibe was – as usual – almost uniformlypositive for the first few issues of Last of the Innocents. The inspired use ofArchie analogues gave this particular slice of noir an extra emotional punch,and, as many noted, it was a story that could only ever really work as a comic.You couldn’t evoke that Archie atmosphere and get a similar effect in a movieor TV show.

But while the series still featured on anumber of ‘Best Of’ lists at the end of the year, the vibe was hit by a naggingsense of disappointment when the final issue rolled around. While many criticsand readers appreciated the ending - in which the Archie character kills theVeronica and Jughead analogues and totally gets away with it - there were manyothers who felt that this particular Criminal ballad ended on a flat note.

It’s easy to see where they are comingfrom. After Riley Richards stabs his beloved Felix in the eye with an ice pick,there is a creeping sense of dread and despair. There is no way Riley can getaway with it, especially when his enemies (and best friend) know exactly whathe has done. Some kind of terrible retribution is inevitable.

But it’s also totally avoidable. Storiesdon’t always go the way they should, and Riley ends up with his dream girl, thebeach house and the millions of dollars. He’s killed his best friend and hiswife, and there are hints of regret in those final pages, but they are onlyhints. Riley has simplified his world again and he figured it was worth thecost.

I admit - my first reaction to Last of the Innocentswas vague dissatisfaction, because I was expecting some kind of gory andintense end, and it just didn’t happen like that. But I’ve been more thansatisfied with it on subsequent re-readings, because I didn’t know what thestory was the first time round.

This isn’t the story about a man beingpunished for his terrible crime, it’s about a man willing to go to horriblelengths in a bid to get his life back into a teenage ideal.

And this kind of ending, where crimeactually pays, is genuinely unexpected. Everything else in the genre, from theEC crime comics of the fifties to David Lapham’s mad Stray Bullets, has shownthat committing a crime has some sort of consequence. Even people who aren’tpunished by the law face some sort of karmic justice, or are mentally destroyedby the experience. Because crime is bad, and nobody gets away with it.

Which isn’t always how it works in the realworld. Despite nightly doses of CSI bollocks on the TV every night, a lot ofpeople do get away with all sorts of crimes. These types of things don’t alwayswrap up nicely.

And Brubaker has been using thatexpectation against us since the end of the first volume where a mortallywounded Leo was supposed to slip away into death as police come closer – eyesflutter, police lights blur, roll credits – but finds it’s a lot easier to killthan it is to die.

While this kind of ending is difficult topull off, Brubaker and Phillips just keep on doing it, to the benefit of thelarger story they are telling.

Creating a good crime comic is a lot harderthan it looks – Vertigo’s recent line of original crime novels have produced alot of mediocrity, and nothing truly great – but Criminal is Brubaker’s bestwork, and his obvious love for the genre shines through on every page.

It’s not just the unexpected twists andturns the plot takes, it’s the overall story of generations of crime, makingthe same old violent mistakes and (not always) suffering terrible fates. Andit’s the gorgeous and moody art by Sean Phillips. And it's the little connections to the greater criminal story, with Sebastian Hyde and Teeg Lawless showing up. And it’s the fact that it’salso still very funny – the line about Riley only really existing when peoplewere watching him was a cracker – with the crispest dialogue around, makingeach new volume absolutely entertaining

Like several other stories in the series,Criminal: The Last of the Innocents doesn’t end like you think it would orshould, and the story it’s telling might not be obvious from a first reading,but that’s what I dig the most.

Comics

2012-01-07T00:04:00.000+13:00

I love movies and music and books andtelevision, but it’s the comics I love the most.

I travel to the other side of the worldjust to see what the comic shops look like. I lie awake at night wondering howmuch worse Dashiell Bad Horse’s life is going to get in the next Scalped book. Ihave genuinely emotional reactions to old issues of GI Joe and 2000ad andRichie Rich.

Then again, I also have genuinely emotionalreactions to old issues of Wizard magazine, so I’m obviously not right in thehead. I found a whole bunch of them from 1991-1996 in the cupboard the otherday, and the stench of nostalgia was so overpowering, I shelved plans to getrid of the magazines, even though they’re taking up a fair bit of room.

If I can’t get rid of old Wizards, whathope it there?

They say you’re meant to grow out of it,but they don’t know what they are talking about.

Comics are just another medium fordelivering stories, and it’s easy to see why they’re the best. You can doanything with words and pictures. Harvey Pekar famously said that and then usedhis words and pictures to tell stunningly mundane stories, which somehow provedhis point.

And there are so many different comics,doing such wonderful things with words and pictures.

There are sexy spies and transcendentsuperheroes and Kitchen Sink Plus and gritty crime and heartbreakingautobiography and pure laffs and genuinely creep horror and metaphysicalmindfucks and historical epics and fairy tales and war stories and love storiesand action stories, and that’s all just on a couple of shelves in the bookcasenext to the computer.

There really is something for everyone, anincredible variety of tales and fables, and anybody who cloisters themselveswithin any one genre or mindset is really missing out.

I always, always buy comics made by AlanMoore, Grant Morrison, Matt Wagner, Brendan McCarthy, Paul Chadwick, FrankMiller, Evan Dorkin, Dan Clowes, Jim Aparo, Bryan Talbot, Neil Gaiman, AlanDavis, Los Bros Hernandezx, Garth Ennis, Frank Quietly, Brian Bolland and PeterBagge.

It might take me a few years to get them,but I get there in the end.

There are also a hundred other creatorsthat I actively seek out work by, even if I never feel any kind of completisturge, from Sergio Aragones to Pat Mills. But those 18 creators produce workthat I find Always Entertaining and Occasionally Quite Moving, so I geteverything they do.

Because of all the major creative outlets,comics are the most likely to get across a specific and singular artisticvision.

There are always dozens of hands in the mix when it comes to movies or television stories, and while creating a comic is almost always acollaborative process - even work by writer/artists often have editors orcolourists or somebody backing up their ideas - it's also the best place to get that singular perspective. The insatiable demand fornew comics, and the speed with which they come out, and the ability for anybodyto pick up a pen and paper and just fuckin’ do it, results in some remarkablypersonal and idiosyncratic work.

Even in the cold, hard world of corporatecomics, creators like Peter Milligan or Frazer Irving or dozens of others get totell stories that are their own. There will always be some editorialinterference, but Grant Morrison has shown that you can deal with all that, andstill put out some Batman comics that are sometimes uncomfortably personal.

And when it comes to comics that are morenakedly personal, there are some wonderfully extreme world views. Never mindthe greats, like Crumb or Spiegelman or Eisner, who have all left behindsubstantial bodies of work representing a specific artistic vision that willlive for centuries after they have gone. Even that one guy back in college whodid that one autobiographical comic about the day his girlfriend dumped him andhis grandfather died, even he has created something out of nothing, and left itout there in the world.

One of the other great little pleasures inmy life is sitting down in front of the telly and sorting out some comics. Ilove hefting boxes of comics around, and filing away scattered comics intotheir proper places, slotting that one issue of Hellblazer right where itbelongs, putting all the Paul Grist comics in the right place.

I also spend far too much time thinkingabout bookshelves, wondering if the Vertigo books really belong on the sameshelf as Superman/Batman: Saga of The Super Sons.

There is something beautiful about a goodcomic – the way art and design and story all combine to produce this littlepackage.

I don’t care what form the stories come in,but I can still appreciate a good-looking comic. Whether it’s an extravaganthardcover or a stapled mini-comic, each comic is a beautiful singular thing,and some of them are prettier than others.

A really good looking comic is prettierthan anything.

I actually did a little dance in the storethe other day, when I realised the new Milk and Cheese hardcover was out. Iknew it was coming, but didn’t know when, so when I saw it on the shelf I didan honest-to-God jig, right there in the aisles of Real Groovy.

My lovely wife bought it for me for my birthday,because I said I’ll love her forever if she got it for me. She did and I will.

She also says that if I ever cheated onher, she would burn every comic I own, and that I would come home one day andthere would just be a big pile of ashes in the spare room, because she knowsthat this is the worst thing she could do to me.

Besides arguing that I will never, ever bea cheater, I have also tried to convince her that there are tens of thousandsof dollars locked up in all those boxes of comics, and it would be much betterto take them and sell them for money, rather than a quick fix of fiery vengeance.

After all, it’s not the comics’ fault. Theyshouldn’t suffer.

I haven’t convinced her of anything, andall those wonderful comics, from the Uncanny X-Men comic I’ve had since I wassix to the Secret Avengers I bought last week, would justifiably all go up in acloud of thick, black smoke.

I turn 37 today, and I love comic booksjust as much as I did when I was w Whiz-Kid (not a Chip-ite) at seven, or whenI was 17 and cracking open my head with the first Love and Rockets comic Ibought, or when I was 27 and enjoying the hell out of the Ennis/DillonPunisher.

This blog turns three today, and I’m nevergoing to get sick of talking about how much I love comics, so it will still begoing for some time to come.

Best of 2011

2011-12-31T13:43:00.002+13:00

TheTearoom of Despair is closed for the summer holidays, because it’s hard to getworked up about things when you could be sitting on a sunny beach, sipping coolcider and watching the waves roll in.

(Normalservice will resume, as ever, on January 7.)

Butthere is always room for a best of list at this time of year. It’s alwaysimpossible to compare the quality of vastly different comics, just because theyshare a medium. But I can truly say which ones I enjoyed the most, and whichones had the biggest emotional punch, and it was surprisingly easy to rank thatenjoyment.

Thereare the usual caveats: Despite a brilliant local library and a $40 a weekhabit, I haven’t read everything I would like, and reserve the right toretroactively declare that the best comics of the year included something like Habibi or Ganges #4 or the latestCriminal series or Prison Pit or one of the other half dozen pieces ofbrilliance I just haven’t got around to yet

Andthere are entire series I haven’t got into yet, even though I know they’ll bebloody good for me. So I will probably fall in love with something like themuch-adored King City long after everybody else has movedon, or wonder why it took me so long to get into Godland in 2015 or so.

Somecomics that missed out on the list, even though I found them all immenselyenjoyable, are Sweet Tooth, the Chronicles of Wormwood, Incognito, Holy Terror,Absalom and Justice League Dark, while Johnny Red and Roger Langridge’s TheShow Must Go On were both some of my favourite comics of 2011, even though theywere written and drawn decades ago.

I wassurprised to note that there were no Grant Morrison comics in my top ten, whichmust be the first time that has happened in 20 years. But most of his creativeenergy seemed to pour into Supergods, and Action Comics is severely hampered byoccasionally substandard art while Batman Inc still seems weirdly limiting.

But I'mstill painfully predictable and a bit ashamed of that. There are six of themthat are by British writers, and there are no female creative voices in myfavourite comics of 2011, which is deeply embarrassing, although I do thinkthat’s something we all have to get better at.

So theseare the comics I enjoyed the most in the past year – and I tend to like comicsthat are fast and funny and and colourful and smart - so that’s just the way itworked out.

***

10. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen:Century – 1969

BecauseI'm always up for a beautiful technocolour apocalypse in Hyde Park, withO’Neill’s terrific grotesques dragged into the sunshine of the 1960s and confrontinga couple of dark truths behind the Age of Aquarius. You can playspot-the-reference all you like, but it was still a thoughtful meditation on the idea of immortality and an inability to change with the ages, no matter howhard you try, and I’ll take that over wondering who The Karkus was.

Thebleakness of those final pages, when everything has been broken down and needsto be built back up again, was a stark contrast to the primary colouredadventures of the previous decade, and a wonderful way to set things up for thefinal Century story.

Roll on, 2009.

***

9. Kick Ass 2

Kick Ass2 is an appalling tasteless comic, offensive and stupid and a symbol of allthat is wrong in the world.

But Ican't help enjoying it, probably because it's so dedicated to tastelessnessthat it takes it all the way. It's like an early John Waters film - they'reactually terrible things to watch, but you have to admire the fact they don't pussy out,and go All The Way, even if it means that literally eat their own shit.

So inthe second Kick Ass story, there are cute kids callously cut down, innocentpeople suffer horrible and humiliating fates, there are characters who arehomophobic, sexist and racist, and absolutely nothing is sacred.

But thisalso means there is never any sense of anybody taking their foot of theirpedal, and some rampant acceleration is always good for the soul. It’s actuallynice to read a comic where the creators don’t stop every couple of pages andthink it’s gone too far, or is a bit much. And if they are doing that, they’renot letting it stop them barreling ahead.

Millar’sgleeful need to offend as many people as possible turn most right-thinkingpeople off his work, but in an age of stories that have been focus-grouped intoinanity and constant concern about ‘sending the wrong message’, I’m always upfor a fast-paced and ridiculous story about bad people doing terrible things.

Besides,I also love stories about people that have been turned into weapons trying tobe people again, and I still get a kick out of seeing them give in to theirmost horrible desires. When I read the most recent issue of Kick Ass and itended the only way it could – with Hit Girl bloodily and finally stepping in tosort out all this shit – I swear I heard the sound of a gun cocking, or of asword being unsheathed.

Theexpected carnage is breathlessly anticipated.

***

8. Jack of Fables #50

Speakingof nothing being sacred and expected carnage, it was a fond farewell to themost successful Fables spin-off earlier this year, and it all ended with allthe comic's characters wiping each other out in amusing and ironic fashion,before Jack cheats the devil and goes on his way to new adventures.

It wasthe sheer enthusiasm with which characters were disposed of that was soappealing, and a hard-bitten desire on the creators’ part to break all of theirtoys before they put them away for good, so nobody else can ever play withthem.

Jack ofFables finished the only way it could. With blood, fire and absolute free-wheelingfarce.

***

7. Shaolin Burning

A terrificKung Fu comic by New Zealander Ant Sang, Shaolin Burning got a fair bit oflocal media attention at the time it came out, but hasn't really been seen inthe bigger world.

It's worth keeping an eye out for - the speech anachronisms are a little jarring atfirst, and it's a lot bloody harder to convey martial arts in comics than itlooks, but Sang gets there with some dynamic action sequences. The overall plotis harder to get into than it looks, but there are some great individualmoments.

There isa lovely little tribute to Martin Edmond, and some of the late artist’s linescan be seen in a powerfully outstretched arm, but Sang also brings an animationbackground in to his comics, and it can be seen in his beautiful characterdesigns and marvellously-paced individual sequences.

There have been the usual bunch of thoughtful andslightly dark comics coming out of New Zealandin the past year, but Shaolin Burning was the only one that had the balls to grab myattention by slapping me around until I gave in. That’s a good thing.

***

6. Secret Avengers

I'll always have a place in my heart for sharp,well-drawn single issues of superhero comics that come in, have a bit offighting, a bit of crazy science and a couple of cool lines, and then piss offagain before they outstay their welcome. Result.

***

5. Nikolai Dante

Thiswould be higher on the list if there was more of it, but I only read 42 pagesof new Nikolai Dante comic in 2011 (I haven’t seen the story in the 2012 issueyet).

Fortunately,those 42 pages are typically spectacular, with the usual witty and consideredscripts by Mr Robbie Morrison, superbly rendered by Mr Simon Fraser.

NikolaiDante is one of the best comics I’ve ever read, and still cannonballing towardsan epic conclusion in the nest year or so. This year, it set up the final actof this long and crazy story with The Memoirs of Nikolai Dante in 2000ad prog1731, summing up the tale so far, setting the stakes for the forthcomingclimax, and ending with a good joke with whatever-his-name-is-there.

Therewas also a five-part serial, full of action and incident, which ended withDante back in the dungeons, racked with despair. But the story isn’t over yet,and there is no doubt that Dante will come out on top. (There is stillconsiderable doubt as to whether he will actually survive his victory.) Me, I’mstill convinced that Lulu hasn’t betrayed Nikolai at all, and this was just hisutterly mental way of getting into the palace…

And inthose 42 pages, there was one of those moments that perfectly sum up everythingI love about Nikolai Dante, and shows his passion, compassion and zeal for life.He’s talking to his pirate queen mother, and she asks him if he can forgive herfor abandoning him as a child. Dante has every right to be angry. But thenagain….

“Ha ha ha! Mama, I was a pirate when I was tenyears old. I’ve been a thief, gentlemanly or not. An aristocrat, an adventurer.I’ve commanded armies, won and lost fortunes.

“I’ve fought some of the most evil men thatever lived and put them in their graves. I’ve fooled around with the mostbeautiful women in the world and a real-live princess agreed to marry me.

“Forgive you? I should thank you! People’llstill be talking about me centuries after I’m gone.”

Diavolo,that’s good comics.

***

4. The Boys

Garth Ennis’latest longform comic is, like Dante, rapidly reaching some horribleconclusion. All the necessary background has been explained, and all theplayers are where they need to be in the end and there will be blood.

Thesuperhero decadence is still a big part of The Boys - and it is still either trulydisturbing or really funny - but the real story of this comic is about thecorrupting influence of irresistible power, and this is all coming to a head.

TheBilly Butcher spin-off comic has helped set this stage where all debts will bepaid, and the revelation of why The Boys’ leader hates superheroes so much isjust as horrible as promised.

In fact,the terrible fate of Billy’s wife was probably the single most intense thing Isaw in a comic book all year – a mind-numbingly traumatic event caused by asuperhero’s callous indifference that justifies everything Billy does, in hisown mind at least.

Thatlevel of intensity is harder to find in modern comics than it really should, soI cherish those moments when they do come.

***

3. OMAC/ Daredevil/ All Star Western

All ofthese new comics scratch a certain itch that I thought had gone dormant, aninsatiable need for fast, funny and furious action comics that didn’t treat melike a child.

I still wantnew and shiny and smart science fiction/superhero/western comics more than Iever realised.

***

2. Judge Dredd

Theongoing adventures of Judge Joe Dredd were my favourite comics of 2010, andalmost made it to the top of this list again, with only a stunning piece ofHernandez brilliance heading it off.

Dredd’syear did get off to a pretty average start, with the first half of his 2011adventures consisting almost entirely of the usual short, snappy, one-offstories that have filled out his history over the years. There was some reallynice art, including the long-overdue re-appearance of the Brendan McCarthyDredd, and some phenomenally efficient short stories by new writers such as AlEwing and Michael Carroll, who have both nailed the unique voice of the Dreddstrip remarkably quickly.

But thebrilliance of Judge Dredd always comes from the sharp pen of John Wagner, andhe returned to the story in the second half of 2011 with Day of Chaos, one ofthe big Dredd mega-epics that is composed of a whole lot of smaller stories.The actual overall point of Day of Chaos is still relatively unclear – it hassomething to do with the long-suffering Sovs and the daftly twisted PJ Maybe –but it is a story about retribution and justice finally being done.

Itwouldn’t even be surprising if Day of Chaos does feature the long-promiseddeath of Judge Dredd. For a couple of minutes I thought they had actually doneit in the storyline, with Dredd apparently shot through the head in the sixth chapter of the story. He survivedthat brush with death, only to instantly get his throat sliced open. Dredd ismade of stone, and he wouldn’t let something like a slit throat put him down,but Judge Dredd could still die at any time.

Andthat’s okay. He’s come to terms with his own humanity, and – in a MichaelCarroll story that I could have sworn was written by Wagner – even admittedthat he is comforted by the thought of new generations of judges, knowing thatthere will be a new batch of lawmakers to take his place when he is gone.

That dayis coming, and possibly soon, but for now, there are still new adventures ofJudge Dredd every week, and it’s just as funny and clever as it always was. Itruly enjoy reading a new Dredd every Thursday, and after another year that wasmostly brilliant, I’m always looking forward to the next chapter.

***

1. Love and Rockets: The Love Bunglers

The instant when Irealized what was going on in the montage scene near the end of JaimeHernadez’s Love Bunglers was the single most genuinely moving moment I’ve hadreading a comic book in many, many years.

Jaime’s work in Love andRockets New Stories #4 is funny, sad, heartbreaking, life-affirming, clever andwicked, and sings with an emotional depth that few other stories – in anymedium – could ever hope to match.

The best comic of the year. No question.

Last night the Invisibles saved my life (One Year To Go Remix)

2011-12-22T00:14:00.002+13:00

They said the word is ending next year, butthey didn’t tell us how fucking fast it was going to creep up on us.

Sometime in 2000, when 2012 still felt along way away, I make my friend Brian drive me 200 kilometres one wet Fridaynight after work, so I can get the last issue of The Invisibles. Working on adelivery dock lets me get away early if I need to, and we’re in Christchurch byseven.

I get drunk in the car on wine with aMillennium label and we all get stoned in the Port Hills as usual and eat someHell Pizza and catch a shitty movie before heading back home. I’m saving thecomic for the right moment.

When we get back, I lose it in the backseat of the car and panic, before finding it under a blanket. I take it insideand think about reading it.

I don't want to.

I don't want it to be over.

A year or so earlier than that night, Idon't have a job, or a girlfriend, or a home. But I do have the first threeissues of volume three and read them over and over and over again as I live ona mate’s sofa for a while.

Philip Bond is the sexiest artist alive andeverything is coming to a head, just like we were promised. Life is just ashectic, and giving it all away and starting over again is the only obvioussolution to all of this.

It's 1999, and the 20^th centuryis coming to an end in suitable tecnocolour and cool Matrix leather. When theMillenium comes, I’m up in the hills tripping balls with my best mates, and spendthe rest of the night watching fireworks across the world on a tiny television,and There’s Something About Mary is the first movie I see in the 21^stcentury, and somewhere in there, it all melds together, and I’m sure it wouldbe a good idea to make The Invisibles as a movie starring Cameron Diaz as JaxFrost, because she’s the Day-Glo Messiah of the new…

Hang on, more fireworks, and the Thames is on fire.

The first issue of The Invisibles wasreleased in mid-1994. I was 19 at the time. This explains a lot.

After all, it’s the most impressionable agea human ever goes through. Most of the tastes are cemented at this age, as youfinally become an adult and take your place in the universe.

The Invisibles WAS my early twenties, backwhen I was trying to figure out how to be a grown-up. I made a tonne ofmistakes, and was a right little wanker sometimes, but I got through it. Thecomics helped.

I give all of volume one to one of my bestfriends after he has devoured Watchmen and Sandman and all the usual suspects.When he gives it back to me, he tells me his entire flat thought the comic wasevil and he didn’t want to read any more.

What?

He’s slightly Christian, but I’m still a bitsurprised by this. I don't give him any more to read. I don't give TheInvisibles to anybody else after this, but I’m always up for a conversationabout it with anybody, any time.

This is a lesson: everything is not foreverybody.

At this point in the story, I keep gettingtoo drunk and wake up under bushes at four in the morning, more often than Iwould like. There is always the sour acidic taste in the back of my mouth anddirt on my lips and the horrible sensation that I’ve done something stupid inthe usual alcoholic fugue.

When I wake up under a bush with grass inmy ear and a bug in my pants, often the last thing I remember is blathering onabout the Supercontext or the Hand of Glory with somebody who just looks at melike I’m mental. They were right to do so. This isn’t normal.

It’s all right. I’m young and alive. Thisis when I was always supposed to do this stuff.

At least I’m not missing it. At least Isurvive.

For a while there, I buy into the entirephilosophy. Wanking for magic and playing around with the esoteric, and if youput some effort into looking good, people will believe any old bollocks yousay. It works, just like everybody said it would. The everyday starts drippingwith significance. Every morning, noon and night there is aturbocharge of unlikeliness and I drink it all up.

But, as usual, I take it all a bit far. Ibecome convinced that the awful things that are happening to good people I knoware a direct result of this dicking about. So I stop and become boring. It’sfor the best.

“No,” whined Bob, as she skimmed throughthe pages. “You don’t understand. I really, really like it. More thananything.”

She just sighed and dropped the comic onthe coffee table and Bob knew he had blown a definite shag.

In the years since, I’ve read all sorts ofarticles and essays and books that look to deconstruct The Invisibles. They’veripped it up and put it back together, and answering the all-important questionof what it all means.

I don’t really care about What It Means,I’m all about the How Does It Make You Feel?

It’s Audrey’s story that is the most moving,when all is said and done, and her kind decency changes everything in the finalpages.

Poor Bobby never stood a chance. Ordinarypeople, their lives all messed about and chopped up by forces happening farbeyond their comprehension. There are still snatches of happiness, and if wecan get as many of them as possible, then we’ve lived the good life.

Every henchmen has a story, every dead bodyhad its dreams. It takes King Mob a long, long time to realise this and thinkof something better. The rest of us still need to catch up.

Sitting behind that bus shelter in aparticularly comfy piece of grass, staring out over a wide golf course and thesea beyond, high on scrumpy & sunshine and I know that Britpop is dead, andI don’t know whether to blame Pulp for This is Hardcore, or Grant Morrison forv2 #16.

I staple a photocopy of the cover of thatissue to my work cubicle, along with a couple of panels from Flex Mentallo.Crunching numbers under the eye of the infinite, especially after a fewafter-work beers.

I’m convinced that King Mob is going to diesome time in the last half of volume two and am genuinely concerned forMorrison’s health if that happens. I really am taking this all too seriously.

What if…?

And in the park, down by the duck pondwhere I memorised bits of Coleridge, I read about King Mob blowing up a mansionand giving ontological terrorism a go. For some reason, I've never felt morealone, but I’m glad to see Mob is still here. The wretched paranoia that soakedthe series gives way to pre-millennial freedom.

Give it all up.

Live on the move for a while.

No pressure.

All I want to do is dance.

Sometimes I think I'm still there in thatpark, and on that beach. Any second now I'm going to realise the last 11 yearswere just an Invisibles illusion, and there is no such thing as time.

No. That’s not it. I am still there.

I’m sitting in an extraordinarilycomfortable armchair, with an orange juice and vodka in one hand, some volumetwo in the other and Buffy on the television. There’s a hole in the ceiling,and if I reach for it, it’ll pull me through into the infinite. I know it.

Or I’m on that park bench in the Dunedin botanicalgardens, with half a $1 pie and 17 pages of a movie script about somebody goingmental and wondering how Morrison does it.

I’m in front of a computer, gushing aboutthe Pander Brothers art when everybody else is spitting on it.

I’m sitting in a beachfront hut in Fiji inmid-2011, reading those last four issues a few more times and drinkingridiculously expensive gin.

I’m on that beach, or this beach, or thosebeaches.

I’m in a hallway at Aoraki Polytechnic,listening to people talk about the shiny and new concept of internet chatrooms, with the fourth issue of the Invisibles in my bag, fresh in the mail.

There is some King Mob graffiti on the wallof a building that used to house a second hand bookstore. I’m sure of it. I seeit as I’m walking home from the Empire, with another dose of feedback rockbouncing around my head and some poisonous gutrot in my stomach.

But it’s not there in the cold light of thenext day, so it probably wasn’t real in the first place.

A month or so before that very last issue,I'm sitting on a bench in the centre of town, reading the penultimate comic.The street is busy, with hundreds of people walking around in all theirbeautiful, stinking glory. I finish the comic in 10 minutes and have to sitthere and have a think about it.

Two hours later I'm driving home and Irealise who saved King Mob in the phone booth, and a new pattern is formed.

Whatever happened to Barbelith?

Time is never as flexible as I think itmight be, but I still feel like I’m here, there and everywhere sometimes.

Once upon a time, 2012 sounded so sexy andweird and exotic, and now it’s just another shitty Roland Emmerich film. It’salmost here – just over a week away.

I’m still getting over the fact that 2001was more than a decade ago. Time is slipping by faster than I can adjust, andall I can think of is Fanny: “Do you feel as though time’s speeding up,darling? I mean actually getting faster?”

Phil Jiminez’s art takes a while to getused to, his art like flexible bodies made out of water, flowing through thestory. When things break down and the Hand of Glory is activated, his work goeswith it.

Sometimes, it feels like the story is allhappening around the edges of something big and wonderful, something that isnever quite seen. It moves through the narrative like the ghost of a whale,occasionally bumping up against the narrative and sending everything apeshit.Jiminez almost captures this horror out of the corner of the eye, and makes everythingsuitably sick and slick.

Weston is a dirty little boy in comparison,and that’s just the way we like it, right readers?

When I try to explain the Invisibles andwhy I love it so much, it all comes out wrong. It sounds like the stupidest thingin the world when I start blubbering about the End of the Aeon and the secretuniverses between the cracks in the sidewalk.

I’m still struggling, but the wholeglorious mess still thrills. The dialogue is as sharp as ever, and while we’veall moved on from those oh-so-‘90s conspiracies, there is still terror in thesedark, unknowable plans for humanity.

It’s funnier than it looks, and anybody whogets too deep into it starts wanting to write their own languages. It’s hot andhumid and there is a smear in the membrane of space time, there at the edge ofall things.

This is the kind of rubbish I start sayingwhen I read too much Invisibles.

I’m not sorry.

This is an apology:

There’s something wrong with Fanny’s tripto the other side in Sheman. It feels sick and wrong, even though it’s justanother rite. I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all.

I still feel guilty about that initialreaction to the story, when I got confused and sickened by stupid stuff, backbefore I stopped being a dick.

Not being a dick has worked outsurprisingly well in the past decade. Thanks, Invisibles!

One great weekend in 2002 climaxes with ascreening of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive when I’m all sorts of fucked up onall sorts of highs, and it all seems a bit obvious really.

They’re all just malfunctioning fictionsuits, aren’t they?

Even though I’ve read literally dozens ofessays and books that have attempted to explain what happens in Mullholland Drive, and even though there is a general consensus over what is real andwhat is dream in the movie, I still think my initial reaction is a bit right.

It’s cold on the roof, but I’m wrapped upwarm. There is beer here and the bass beat from a live band coming through thebuilding and good conversation and I can just about read about Boy’s origin inthe orange glow of the street light.

It’s How I Became Invisible and the chillsand conspiracies in the story seep into my bones. In three hours I’ve passedout in the hallway again and I’m so ashamed. I just can’t do anything about it.

Then I’m going home again, counting off thesteps and pavement slabs to keep the legs moving. I’ve lost my glasses and mybooze and I think I gave my wallet to Greg earlier, but I’m not sure. I have aniron grip on The Invisibles #20. Dignity comes and goes, unlike comic books.

Some things are worth holding on to.

Suddenly …

I read most of The Last Temptation of Jackwhile standing in line for a quarter pounder at McDonald’s and it all feels abit weird. Something is going on in my head, and I can barely order the food.I’ll have some enlightenment with my cheeseburger, thanks.

I still manage, because that’s one of thefew things I learn about magic – you can travel into vast and intricaterealities within your own mind, but you still need to eat. You still got to paythe bills. You still got to live.

It’s hot and humid and Lord Fanny neverlooked sexier than on the cover to #14 of the second volume. This one is allabout the sex and I’m still a bit messed up about that stuff in 1997. Theadolescent drive fading and I’m still just as stupid.

I’ve got a boring job and I don’t know whatto do about it. I’m so uncool.

It’ll take me another six years to figureout that there is more to life than this.

Not long after The Invisibles ends, I getthe worst case of food poisoning I’ve ever had in my entire life (probably dueto a dodgy Burger King), and I’m sitting on the couch, feeling delirious andwatching the 2000 US Presidential election on the TV.

George Bush comes into power, bad thingshappen and the promise of a decade of dancing evaporates as greed and fearprove just as powerful in the twenty-first century as they did in the last one.

I should have listened to my gut.

Just last week, US troops pulled out ofIraq, leaving behind the horrible feeling that nobody learned anything at allfrom the experience, and all that pain and misery was unjustified.

This isn’t the future of The Invisibles, anearly 21^st century day-glo mess where we all get stoned on mediafeeds. But who knew that so much effort and time and wealth would be wasted onpointless conflict in the past ten years? The future is always unwritten, andpeople in general don’t really change, and if there is one thought thatconvinces me that nothing will happen this time next year is that people don’tchange that much, that quickly.

The Invisibles never promised anything, butit did show possibilities. We’re just still a bit too caveman to grasp them.

I must be fucked up, because thatBackstreet Boys song is actually all right and I want to dance to it. I looklike a dick, but that’s because I keep seeing the Harlequin out of the cornerof my eye and I’m trying to catch its attention.

It’s okay to let it all go on thedancefloor. Even if the music is terrible. It’s okay.

I’ve just pissed off another friend whowon’t speak to me for another eight years and Grant Morrison might be deadtomorrow. Mark Millar has taken over the comic's letter page, providing regularupdates and it’s a good shot of mortality for this 22-year-old reader. For awhile there, it really looks like he might not make it as his face is eaten bya virus.

It’s a trial for the writer as he faces hisown mortality, and winks at the abyss. After that kind of thing, it’s hard notto laugh at the seriousness of it all.

Life is just a ride.

Last night, The Invisibles saved my life.It’s made me a better person and while there are a lot of comics that have donethat, nobody does it better.

Peaking on life, off to the pub everyweekend, out and about, shaking it all around. If you don't have the best timeof your life getting out there at 19, you missed a lot.

Need new comics fix, X-Men just not doingit for me any more. Discovered Love and Rockets last year, got a littleobsessive over that, and looking for something good and new.

The Invisibles? Shit yeah, I'll give that ago.

I cave in and read the last issue in halfan hour, savouring every crinkle in Quietly's art, drinking in the talk of anarrative you can catch like a cold. I feel the love of the AllNOW and reachout for that last full stop that goes right off the page.

It's four o’clock in the morning whenI finish, and the house, the town, the whole fucking world is quiet. I sitthere for another three hours, patting my cat, and by the end of it, he’s sofloppy his bones must have turned to mush.

I don't want to go to bed.

I don't want to do anything.

I don't know what I want.

I still don’t know what I want.

I might never know what I want.

And then I start up all over again. You cando that if you want. For another year, at least.

A week of moaning #4: Screw destiny!

2011-12-19T09:22:00.000+13:00

Just because there are storytelling rules,doesn’t mean you have top follow them implicitly. You can always bend them allout of shape.

A devotion to the three-act principle canbe a good thing – there are very good reasons why you should tear your protagonist’sworld apart at the end of the second act – but it has become part of a formula thathas been boring and unintentionally harmful to fiction.

You can now watch a trailer for almost anydamn movie, and you’ll be able to tell how the story turns out without botheringto see the film itself. Look, there’s the bit where the heroine is left alonein the rain, before they have that big confrontation at the beach at the end.There might be some tension in not knowing who is left alive at the endcredits, or who has become romantically entangled, but that’s it. No wonderpeople get so upset about spoilers – there is nothing else but the finaloutcome that remains unknown.

Along with this rigid code of storytelling– which can be found in films, comics, novels or anything with a narrative –there are other demands. There must be relatable characters, they must grow aspeople during the story, and you can’t kill the dog.

Most of all, the lead character(s) musthave motivation, and must have a reason for getting involved in the story. Motivationis everything, but it’s also painfully necessary, so it’s often got out of theway as quickly as possible.

The most common reason for any kind ofHero’s Journey in any kind of medium is vengeance, and some desire for somekind of revenge drives the vast majority of fiction. It’s all over our oldeststories, and still dredged up every week, all over the place. At its worst,this can lead to Women In Refrigerators, where an unimaginative writer uses thedeath of a loved one, especially a wife or girlfriend, to drive a tale ofgritted teeth and tearful dedications, without really given any real emotionalthrust.

I like a good bloody romp of rampantrevenge as much as the next guy, and there are always interesting things thatcan be done with a tale of vengeance. But one motivation that could use agoddamn rest is Destiny with a capital D.

It usually starts with a vague prophecy,and while it is often unclear who actually came up with this vision of thefuture, it’s ancient, so it must be true. It tells of a time when somebody whohas movie star hair will rise up and defeat unimaginable evil. And it musthappen, because it is written. It is destiny.

The hero might scoff at the prophecy, butwill ultimately come to believe it, and become convinced that he is, indeed,The One. It might take a montage of crying children, but he will embrace hisdestiny and save them all.

This is easily the most tedious ways ofcreating the motivation, but it also teaches a toxic lesson – that people onlydo the right thing because that’s their fate. People in those stories don’tstand up to all that is wrong and evil and bad in the world because it’s theright thing to do, they do it because some lunatic had a vague premonitioncenturies ago.

There are always exceptions, but it’severywhere. It’s in the obvious places like Clash of the Titans, or Immortals,or Prince of Persia, where heroes can’t just be simple fishermen or farmersstanding up against unimaginable odds, they have to be Kings or Gods who mustaccept their destiny.

It’s also in so many comics, but there isalso a weird contradiction. While it feels only right and proper that DCcharacters are a little bit mythic and a whole lot iconic, Marvel’s attempts tocreate that kind of Pantheon have actually devalued many of their characters.

Men like Tony Stark or Reed Richards can’tjust be brilliant men who stood up and did the right thing when it counted,they have to be part of a long tradition of family destiny and tradition, withtheir parents doing extraordinary things in Jonathan Hickman’s daftlyhumourless SHIELD comic.

Even Spider-Man, the ultimatewrong-place-at-the-wrong-time superhero, can’t be somebody who learned his ownlesson in power and responsibility, he’s just another in a long line ofpre-destined individuals who have been chosen by some ridiculous Spider-Totem.

Hardcore religious types will argue thatthere can be no morality without conforming to some kind of ideology, but lotsof people manage to do the right thing without fearing divine retribution,mainly because it’s the right thing to do. It’s not hard to figure it out.

While Hollywood is oftenrightly seen as a seething cauldron of sin, this puritanical viewthat people only do brave and noble acts because of fear of eternal damnationhas filtered through to so many movies in so many different forms. It’s inromantic comedies and hardcore horror, it’s in every damn blockbuster andinfects independent weepfests.It's in comics and novels and songs. Characters are destined to be great, just because.

It doesn’t need to be this way.

Do it because it’s right, not because it’syour destiny. You write your own fate.

A week of moaning #3: Oi! No!

2011-12-16T08:30:00.002+13:00

I’m running out of week, so here is ageneral list of things that tick me off, before I end this childish week ofgroaning on Sunday with a moan about the single biggest failure in modernfiction. (Then the annual Invisibles love, then a holiday.)

So yeah, it’s a hard life sometimes, andthese things make it harder:

* Readers who consistently assume that thewriter shares the exact same point of view as one of their characters.

* Film festival wankers! I have missed outon so many screenings because I’m stuck in line behind some smug couple whodon’t know if they want a Sav or a Pinot with their film, and I just want toget a fucking ticket, and then the movie start time creeps past while I’m stillin line, listening to that woman at the counter loudly demanding to know whyher expired vouchers are no good any more.

* Members of the public who try to tell mehow to do my job when they have no fucking idea what it actually entails.(Mentioned earlier in the week, but it’s been a rough couple of days on thatscore.)

* Anybody who thinks superheroes who don’tkill are lame.

* So there is this one ad that plays ontelevision all the time, and it features all these people getting on a trainand then putting these SUPERAWESOMEHIDEF televisions up over the windows, andthen marvel at pictures of the sun and other places around the world, and Idon’t know why – probably because I really enjoy sitting in trains and watchingthe countryside roll by - but this ad irritates the piss out of me.

* Top ten lists of music that nobody butthe reviewer has ever heard.

* Fast food places where the food isn’tfast.

* Paranoid lunatics who see the whole worldin terms of their own political ideology.

* Soft porn! People who love porn don’tlike it, and people who hate porn don’t like it, so what’s the point? (copyright BotY)

* People who moan about the fact that DavidLynch films are hard to understand, and people who go on about the fact thatDavid Lynch films are easy to understand.

* Comic book collections that don’t tell afull story.

* The Academy Awards

* People who sneer at me because I didn’tvote in the last general election.

* Especially when they say “Well, you can’tcomplain if you don’t vote”, as if that’s the only real reason for exercisingmy democratic rights.

* Drivers who go 20 kays under the speedlimit and don’t pull over, or drivers who have no idea how indicators seem towork, or drivers who take too long to move when a traffic light goes green, ordrivers who stop for no bloody reason.

* All other drivers on the road, basically.

* And cyclists who ride in the middle of atraffic lane, bringing everyone on the road down to their own pitiful speed.

* And for that matter, the prick who setthe timings on Auckland traffic lights. I’ve driven in some big cities, and Auckland easily hasthe worst I’ve ever driven through.

* Every judge on every talent show ever.

* Anybody who has ever checked their phone,halfway through a movie in a darkened cinema.

* Anybody in criticism who plays the man,not the ball.

* People who whine about lazy storytelling.

NEXT: I whine about lazy storytelling.

A week of moaning #2: A lack of impact and a failure of craft

2011-12-14T09:27:00.000+13:00

The full-page spread has been stripped ofall its power, and it’s time to think of something new, or at least give it arest for a while.

When the good lads at the local comic shophad a decent sale recently – offering brand new American comics at cover price,which is about equivalent to 67 per cent off – I took the chance to pick upthings like the Superboy’s Legion 100-page special by Alan Davis and some random Hellblazer, and finallycomplete a run of Mark Millar’s Ultimates comics. It was also a lot easier totry something new, like the comic adaptation of A Game Of Thrones.

I’ve been more than a little obsessed withGeorge R R Martin’s epic Song Of Ice and Fire this year. I knew nothing aboutit twelve months ago, and now sit awake at night, wondering if the BlackfyreRebellion has anything to do with the Summerhall tragedy. I was hooked afterthe TV series, and have devoured the books. I was soaking up as much of it as Icould.

But when the comic adaption was announcedby Dynamic, I was dubious. Comic adaptations of thick novels were rarely asgood as they should be, and even those that mange to capture the tone aredragged out beyond absurdity. There are well-intentioned efforts, like the DoAndroids Dream Of Electric Sheep? comic that uses every single word of textfrom the original novel, but they turn out to be terrible comics.

The HBO Game Of Thrones is an excellentadaption of Martin’s work, finding its own confident voice remarkably quickly,thanks to some extraordinary acting, some terrific stuntwork and a phenomenalsoundtrack

All the comic has is some weird cross-eyed grimacing.

There is no style of its own, it needs moody, stylistic art that captures thefilth and depth of Westeros in equal measure, not art that looks like fill-inwork for Young Justice. There is no real attempt to do anything with the comicmedium, even though the source material offers plenty of opportunities. Theycould have done some lovely text/art pieces on the history and geography ofthis fantastic world and its Houses, or use colour and tone to do interestingflashbacks. There are so many chances to do world building beyond ploddingthrough the basic plot. It doesn’t even have any bloody maps, and as the TVshow proved, giving these things a sense of geography is essential for storycomprehension.

(Weirdly, it reminds me of the Watchmenmovie, which was so eager to get on with the plot, it dumped everything thatdidn’t help that goal, losing all the real humanity and emotion in the story. TheGame of Thrones comic is so keen to depict things exactly as they appear in thebook, it forgets to get in the weird inner voices and vague feelings that makethe novels such a compelling read.)

Instead, it just plods along and gets stuckinto the long plot without offering any of the original text’s charm. It allplays out exactly as expected. And you know when the issue gets to the MostImportant Moment, because they give it a full page spread.

It’s time to face facts, true believers:The full-page panel is designed to show something Big and Important, but itsoveruse has reduced it to tedium. It’s probably all Mark Millar’s fault, sincehe loves the full-page spread so much he wants to have its babies and has usedit well past its best-before date.

Because it doesn’t mean anything if it isused all the time. Outside of splash pages, comic creators from before the1980s would only whip out a full-pager if the story absolutely demanded it. Whenhe did go for it, Kirby would always fill a huge spread with loads and loads ofKirby Stuff (including that bizarrely beautiful collage work), and one of themost visceral reactions I’ve ever had to a comic book was Batman on a horse inthe Dark Knight Returns, exploding onto a full page

But when it’s used in everything, as apunchline or an introduction or a cliffhanger or a bit where all the heroeswalk towards something, it doesn’t have any kind of impact.

The storytelling techniques that permeatemodern DC comics are a bit farcical when they manage to make a 20-page comiceven less value for money. Look at how many of the new DC #1s ended with a fullpage splash of somebody posing in a dramatic position, saying something COOLand BADASS.

It’s a stylistic tic that has filteredthrough into almost every modern mainstream in the past couple of decades –pioneered in the bronze age, refined when comics got all grown up and serious,run into the ground by lazy superstar artists of the early nineties and alreadyold and tired by the time Superman died in a comic composed of nothing butsplash pages.

And yet, it’s still being used. Nearlyevery mainstream comic on the shelves has some kind of full page splash, andit’s frustrating that the incredible possibilities of the comic page areignored as everybody marches to the same beat.

And if that’s frustrating, it’s damnedembrassing that the comic version of A Game Of Thrones is easily the worst of any telling. Comics are my favourite medium, and the industry surely have a chanceto pick up a few new readers with the comic, only to produce something mediocreand pointless. You shame me with your lack of ambition, comics. You shame me.

NEXT: And another thing….

A week of moaning: Complaining about complaining

2011-12-12T18:00:00.001+13:00

Bah!

While Idon’t like to complain too much - the Despair in this Tearoom is strictlyironic - I do sometimes enjoy a good moan as much as the next person. So thisweek, in the spirit of Christmas cheer, I’m going to pick at petty concerns andtalk about all the stupid crap that really grinds my gears.

Fittingly –and because I’m all about the hypocritical contradictions - one of the things Ireally like to bitch about is people who complain too much. Excessive and pettycomplaining devalues genuine grievances, and people who demand things shouldalways be their way irritate the piss out of me.

ConsiderThe Word – a terrific British music/culture magazine that has some wicked freeCDs on its covers, some fascinating articles, some sharp writing on sharpsubjects, terrific reviews of esoteric music and film and television, and loadsand loads of stuff I like to read about.

It’s alsoguaranteed to feature several letters to the editors from readers outraged thatthe magazine dared run a story on somebody whose music/film/books they don’t like,or appalled that the magazine had printed interviews with people they foundideologically dubious. (A recent interview with Tony Blair got a particularkicking.)

People whocomplain about a certain mix of stories in a magazine are missing the point ofmagazines entirely. In any magazine, there is always going to be something I’mnot interested in, or even slightly turned off by, but I’ve never felt the urgeto make a fuss about it. Not when I have the magical power of page-turning, andcan quickly get on to reading about how Frank Zappa treated his secretary.

Or considerthe Sepinwall – One of the very first things I do after watching a particularlysatisfying television show is go to Alan Sepinwall’s website and see what hethought about it. I always enjoy Sepinwell’s evaluations, because he hasexcellent taste (which, amazingly, is very much in line with my own,) and evenwhen he doesn’t enjoy something, he always explains why with eloquence andfairness.

Reading histakes on Boardwalk Empire or The Walking Dead are often more enjoyable than theshows themselves, and sometimes I even find his writing genuinely moving.

But I cannever read the comments anymore, because it just gets too depressing too fast.Even if 90 per cent of the comments left by people are thoughtful analysis andappreciative discussion, there is always one wanker who rains on everybody’sparade.

Even ifyou’ve just watched a transcendent piece of television, and all of creationshould agree, there will still be that wanker who sniffs at it, declares it tobe dull or tedious without backing it up with anything, and then disappearslike a fart in the wind.

Itshouldn’t get to me, but it does. And after laughing my arse off at somethinglike Curb Your Enthusiasm for half an hour, I really don’t need somebodytelling me I’m a moron because it wasn’t as good as that season three episode.

Or considerthe Catwoman – I may have some sympathy with this complaint, but the fuss itgenerated was far more than necessary. It was over the recent relaunch of thistitle, which ended with a remarkably tasteless sex scene, which was just a bitgross.

It’s stillperfectly good and proper not to like stuff, but you don’t need to go on and onabout it. The first issue of Catwoman is the unsexiest thing I’ve ever seen, soI did the only sensible thing and ignored it entirely. There are dozens anddozens of pointless, ugly and silly comics I don’t want to read, it’s not hardto add Catwoman to the list.

Besides,drawing attention to it just encourages this sort of thing.

Look, Istill like reading a good moan, especially when it’s a smart critic making validpoints, but I like reading a good rave even more. I want people to tell meabout the good stuff, because I’m way more interested in that.

It’s easierto moan, but only adolescents get mixed up on the difference between snark andclever, and we all have to grow up and realise that we can’t always get what wewant.

It might bea symptom of the Playlist Generation, so used to getting exactly what theywant, in the order that they want, that they’re baffled when the World doesn’talways conform to their strict view of it. It must be hard for them, but it’sup to them to deal with it. The rest of us have lives to get on with..

I have toconfess – I work for a newspaper website, an industry where complete strangersare telling me every single day that I’m doing a terrible job, because theythink they know how the media works. They don’t, and while I have a thick skin,daily insults do get under that skin after a while.

So that’smy excuse for the next week of moaning. While I handle things like a typicalpassive-aggressive Kiwi, and take all my distaste and anger and stress andsqueeze it all up inside until it bursts out at the most inappropriate moment,I got to let off steam sometime. I take it every day, and I have to give someback.

Next: ADance With Disappointment

Who's the best?

2011-12-08T11:31:00.001+13:00

When I get obsessed with comics and books and TV shows and movies, I want to know everything about them. When that obsession lasts more than three decades, I soak up a whole lot of information.

I have spent a significant amount of his life with my nose buried in a Doctor Who reference book, and I can honestly say that Lance Parkin’s aHistory – a comprehensive history of the Doctor Who Universe – is easily my favourite.

Reference books used to be an absolutely invaluable source for any kid who was crazy about Doctor Who. Before the internet, before episodes were easily available for viewing on DVD or YouTube or download, reference books were sometimes the only thing you could use to find about more about Doctor Who.

After all, by the time I was born, the Doctor Who production team had created 12 years worth of stories, and there was a lot more to come over the next decade, and I could barely keep up with it all.

Target novelizations were excellent for reading about past Doctor stories, but even though those books were everywhere, there were still vast sections of Who continuity that I was painfully unaware about. (The fact that Target books sometimes had completely different names to the televised stories didn’t help.)

But reference books offered a better glimpse inside Who continuity. A classic magazine produced by the Radio Times for the show’s 20th anniversary was my bible for years, and I literally read that thing to pieces. Whenever I think of a particular point in the series history, I automatically think about its position on the pages of the episode guide in that magazine. (I’m not joking – I always think of the Key To Time stories as the ones going down the right hand column of one page, and the Dalek Invasion of Earth is sitting at the top of the second page in the guide.)

Over the years, there have been plenty of Doctor Who reference books to help fit in the gaps. Some of them were a bit too fixated on the behind-the-scenes stuff (which was always fascinating, but there are only so many times you can hear the same old stories of creating such wonder on an incredibly small budget), or offered up dodgy background material that didn’t always conform to anything else in the series (like The Gallifrey Chronicles and Cybermen).

My favourites were the ones that focused on the stories, rather than the production or anything else. I wanted to know about the Doctor’s adventures, not about the special silver paint used to colour the Cybermen’s shoelaces.

So when Lance Parkin’s chronological stab first got a decent printing from Virgin in 1998, I was always keen, and I must have read that book all the way through a dozen times.

It put all the televised and novelised adventures – at that time – into order, starting with an older universe containing its own Time Lords and its destruction with Event One back in 13,500,017,903 BC, and ending with our own universe consumed by its successor, the realm of Saraquazel.

Considering how obsessed I was with the Virgin New Adventures at this time, without actually being able to get my hands on the majority of titles, it was an invaluable resource, and it was a real kick seeing ho wit all stacked together, all the Doctor’s adventures in Time and Space with his ever-resourceful companions.

But in the decade that followed the publication of A History of the Universe, the amount of Who material increased by an incredible amount, with new television, novels, audio adventures and comics.

It’s almost impossible to keep track of it all. The audio plays from companies like Big Finish have had spin-offs of spin-offs, with whole series of non-Doctor adventures taking place in the same universe.

It’s easy enough to just follow the TV show, (although with the Moffat’s tendancy for intricate time-twisted solutions, even that can be asking a bit much sometimes). But with all this other new material, I just can’t keep track. I’ve never heard Evelyn Smythe's voice, or read a third of all the comics produced in the past five years.

But I have got aHistory, and that helps a lot.

If I want to check out how many times the Doctor was on the Titanic, or what exactly he was really up to during World War 2, it’s all there. Any voyage the Doctor has taken on screen, or page, or through speaker, has all been catalogued and put in some kind of order. (Well, every adventure up to the 2007 second edition of the book that I have. There has been even more since and an update is inevitable.)

It’s a massive, thick and detailed work, and I’m surprised Parkin produced it without going totally mental, found in a corner somewhere gibbering about the 1980 reference in Pyramids of Mars and how it relates to Sarah Jane’s birth date.

Because he’s dealing with a chronology that involves the entire history of the universe, created by hundreds of writers over all sorts of mediums. There are inherent inconsistencies that just don’t match up. The New Adventures had the world decimated by plague and war before 2010, when the Eleventh Doctor was wandering around a completely recognisable world.

Chronology only becomes a problem when you take it too seriously, and Parkin treats these inconsistencies with some half-hearted explanations and a bit of a shrug, which is the right way to go about it. There has been an extraordinary debate over the past four decades regarding the UNIT years, and Parkin has to deal with it. His solution doesn’t make a lot of sense if examined too closely, but it’s a game effort.

Parkin – who has also written some very fine Doctor Who novels over the years – shuffles everything in some kind of order, while gleefully pointing out the inconsistencies, and wrapping them up with closed-off alternate timelines and the fact that the Doctor is a terrible name-dropper who is prone to extreme exaggeration. It almost all makes sense.

All this passion and research is poured onto the pages of aHistory. It just goes on and on, dense with information and hidden meaning. I might not be able to afford all those Big Finish productions, or follow all those expensive Doctor who comics with the poor art, but I can still use this one book to see how all those adventures play out.

It’s not the sort of book that you can burn through in one sitting – my lovely wife gave the book to me as a Christmas present last year, and after reading it steadily for most of the year, I’m still only up to the 23^rd century.

But it is a book built for dipping in and out of – and an ideal travel book (It is big and bulky, but I have never, ever complained about the weight of my books.) Parts of a long road trip around the American desert earlier this year are seared into my brain alongside earnest consideration of whether a Cyberman Empire actually existed, or whether there are more than one Dalek timelines.

(A couple of months later, I watch a new episode and see the Doctor sitting in almost the exact spot in Monument Valley where I stood in February during that same trip, sparking a chain of unlikely coincidence that climaxed when the Doctor literally made a house call in October. Not a dream, not a hoax, not an imaginary story.)

Back in the day, when you couldn’t see old episodes anywhere, you could only read about them, and dream about them. It was years before a repeat of a William Hartnell story showed up on television, and all I could do was soak up plot synopses and faded photos in old magazines. They were enough to spark the imagination, and while the actual productions often turned out to be slightly awful when I finally saw them, I still love the stories.

aHistory taps into that feeling – and I spend more time than I’d like to admit wondering what that Zagreus business was all about, without hearing a single Eighth Doctor audio that didn’t have Lucie Miller in it. It’s that feeling that there is always more to read about, always new adventures in time and space to follow.

‘I’ll have that’: Five reprint wishes

2011-12-04T09:57:00.001+13:00

Even though we are living in a real GoldenAge of comic book reprints – where it’s possible to get almost anything in somekind of collected form – there are still books that I would get withouthesitation, if they only existed in the first place.

Not many people might buy these fivecollections if they were actually published, but I would.

***

AnnNocenti and Sean Phillips’ Kid Eternity

I’ve been on an Ann Nocenti kick in recentweeks – enjoying both her writing and editing work. I was delighted to see shewas returning to monthly comics with Green Arrow and I’ll probably buy that fora while, based purely on goodwill stretching back to those remarkable issues ofDaredevil she did.

One of the last things she wrote for comicsbefore shifting her focus to journalism, Kid Eternity has Nocenti’s typicalstream of consciousness joy, with Sean Phillips actually let off the leash foronce. His art is still a little too stilted for the askew stories, but he showsan imaginative flair in design that he barely gets to use in more earthlyconcerns like Criminal.

Kid Eternity was also one of the firstVertigo comics, helping to set a vague template for insane, road tripping sagasthat the imprint has returned to, again and again. It was also a sequel toGrant Morrison’s aggressively obtuse mini-series, and while it shared thatshorter series’ warped sense of humour, it also carved its own path into theAmerican headspace, taking the road of beat poets and crazed psychoanalysts.

Entire runs of Vertigo comics like Sandman,Preacher, Fables, Lucifer, and The Inivisbles have all been collected and areeasily available, but of the uncollected Vertigo comics (and there really are alot of them), Kid Eternity is one I’d like to see the most. It didn’t last longinto its second year, and one, good chunky reprint could take care of the lot.With Nocenti coming back to Green Arrow, and Phillips still doing wonderfulthings with Ed Brubaker, there may not be a better time to find an audience forthis.

Somebody borrowed all my Kid Eternitycomics more than ten years ago and never gave them back, and they’re not as plentifulin the $1 bins as they once were, so any kind of book featuring these oddlittle comics would find a home on my shelf.

***

TheAmazing World of DC Comics

I keep seeing the covers for these thingsin copies of Back Issue magazine, but I’ve never seen one in the real world. Anin-house fanzine that offered unprecedented looks at the production andconstruction of DC comics in the 1970s, issues of The Amazing World of DC nowlook like brilliantly interesting slices of history.

At least, I hope they offer fascinatinginsights, but like I said, I’ve never even seen one. But friendly interviewswith people like Joe Kubert and Carmine Infantino at the very height of theirpowers, and glimpses behind the office doors of DC Comics, and passionate (ifbiased) appreciations of DC’s past, are all guaranteed.

I mean, just look at these covers.

How could anybody with the slightest interestin DC comics not want to see what lurks beneath these covers?

While we’re at it, it would also be bloodywonderful if the FOOM magazines were collected too. Same thing, differentcompany….

***

Charley’sWar omnibus

Charley’s War - the absolutely brilliantWorld War One comic by the great Pat Mills and the greater Joe Colquon – isalready available in nice big hardcovers, but I would give anything to own itin chunky, pulpy volumes.

It’s a proper saga that never loses sightof its humanitarian roots, sprawling all over the War’s grim conflicts, takingin many of the key battles that carved out history, at the tragic cost of tensof thousands of lives. And while it is immensely satisfying in short, sharpdoses, it also works incredibly well as one big, long and terrible tale.

The Great War was a gigantic and horrificmeat grinder, as soldiers marched into machine gun fire. A larger collectionwould pile the horror up higher and higher and add to the intensity. CharleyBourne’s story is a long and terrible one, but it also says multitudes aboutthings like honour, class treachery, survival and compassion.

It would also balance out the story a bitmore. Each of the hardcover books covers a huge amount of ground, but onevolume –which might only deal with one battle in that vast conflict - can beunrelentingly grim, and it can be a long, long wait until the next volume,which offers a little blue sky of peace in the thunderstorm of war.

I’ve already got a lot of it when it alarge amount was reprinted in the Judge Dredd Megazine, but it stretches wellpast that (and even past the official end of WW1, into the forgotten Britishincursion into Russia), and even though it really finishes when Mills stoppedwriting the title, there is merit in Charley’s curtailed World War Twoadventure. (Scott Goodall is no Pat Mills, but who is?). That could all becollected in a few mammoth Omnibus-style books.

Besides, each of those hardcovers costsupwards of 70 bucks these days, and, as ever, that’s just too much to ask forthat much comic.

***

Theessays from the back of Criminal

Oh c’mon, man. Criminal just reads a wholelot better in book form, and we all know it, but don’t deny us all thosefascinating essays by guys like Brubaker, Aaron, Grant, Stradford and Nevins that bulk out each new monthlyissue. I know they’re supposed to encourage people to go monthly, but I’m in anice little habit of getting the books, I just want to read those essays.

***

Legionv4

I had a dream about the Legion of Super-Heroeslast night. In it, I was reading a comic about their adventures in the 41^stcentury, and then I was in the comic, using my flight ring to help Ultra Legendand his ghost kids take down Brainiac 27 high above the ruined surface of Takron-Galtos.

It was over before it started, but it wasfucking awesome while it lasted.

It wasn’t the first time this happened - Ihad an insane, shroom-related waking dream involving LuornuDurgo in the late nineties, and I once dreamt that Timber Wolf wason the roof of my house. (Sometimes I think he really was. Sometimes I think hestill is.)

All of my long and sad obsession with theLegion of Super Heroes goes back to issue number twenty of volume four. Ihaven’t followed the Legion on a monthly basis since 1998, but I still rate theissues by Keith Giffen and the Bierbums as highly as any other period in theLegion’s convoluted history.

I was recently sorting out how much Legionof Super-Heroes I really needed (a lot of the Jeff Moy chunky Barbie books werethe first to go,) so I’ve had the Legion on the brain recently, which explainsthat vivid dream. There is a distinct possibility that it’s also all Colin’sfault again. But once I get Legion on my mind, I always find myself gravitatingback to those Giffen/Bierbaum issues, because they arealways my favourites.

They’re clumsy and clunky stories, beatenup and left for dead in a dark alley by DC’s editorial direction, withgood-natured character nurturing that occasionally went over the line intobizarre perversion (poor old Proty). Giffen’s cragtastic scowls and extremeclose-ups melded with the Bierbaum’s naturalistic dialogue and stories thatwere both narrtively baffling and utterly confusing on a panel-to-panel level.

I’ve always thought this was a good thing, andhave always been richly rewarded every time I’ve gone back to these comics,finding new references and in-jokes, making new emotional connections. For along, long time, I just assumed everybody who ever read this version of theLegion enjoyed that same blunt complexity, but I have since realised that it’sreally not for everyone.

While I used to be genuinely baffled by thelack of any collection of the Giffen/Bierbum, I now realise that the things Ienjoyed most about Legion – its confusion and refusal to make it easy for thereader – were the things that put most people off it. Most people just don’twant to put that much time and effort into a superhero comic, especially a20-year-old comic that has zero impact on the current DC universe.

I’m sure that one day, somebody willreprint all these comics. If we’re really lucky, they might do a black andwhite Showcase, and make it all even more confusing. DC will probably sellabout thirty books.

I’d buy one.

Know what I want, don’t know what I need

2011-11-30T12:02:00.001+13:00

There is no better experience in a comic shop than finding something that you didn’t even know existed, and having to get it straight away because you don’t know how you ever lived without it.

I can spend hours looking for that perfect book, going over and over shelves again and again.

I am a browser. I like to browse.

Digital utopians have been writing obituaries for brick and mortar bookstores since the 1980s, promising us all that we will be able to buy any goods, or seek out any services, without suffering the discomfort of actually leaving the house. And they’ve certainly been proven partly correct.

The recent demise of the massive Borders chain and the almost total annihilation of its brand was the end result of years of consolidation and losses. It’s so easy to order books through Amazon, or win an online auction, and get it shipped right to your doorstep. You literally do not need to leave the house.

The internet has radically increased ease of access to both new and old books and comics and movies. If you go to enough effort, and are willing to spend enough money, there is almost literally nothing you can’t find somewhere on the internet.

I’ve used both Amazon UK and US to ship books and DVDs all the way to the arse end of the world, and it’s usually cheaper than the local option. And while it’s no fun, it’s worth it to get things I thought I’d never get to see.

This incredible array of choice, combined with a once-undreamt-of accessibility to almost any comic, book, or DVD you could ever want, have had a hard effect of stores, and tens of thousands of once proud bookstores have vanished like a whisper in the wind.

That’s life, that’s progress, and that’s a shame, but it’s not all bad. There are still plenty of quality bookstores all over the place, offering all sorts of lovely new work. Every decent sized city has one decent bookstore, full of hidden gems and gleaming new fiction.

I can spend hours in a decent bookstore, taking the time to look through sections I wouldn’t usually bother with, looking for something very particular, even though I don’t know what it is.

I always know it when I see it. It could be something I’ve been after for a while, or something I’ve heard nothing but rave reviews about, or something new by a trusted creator.

And if I’m very lucky, it will be a complete surprise

This week it was The Show Must Go On, a collection of Roger Langridge’s daftest cartoons. It’s a collection of all his stuff that didn’t have a home, all sorts of odd strips that showed up in self-published zines, obscure anthologies and web experiments. The thoroughly decent souls at Boom Studios have now given all this stuff a home.

I’m been a fiend for Roger Langridge’s work since the early Knuckles. I first started really following his work after the – pretty shitty – Straightjacket Fits. I love Fred the Clown, think the Tarquin stuff in Zoot is still hilarious, and think he draws the best Fin Fang Foom. And I had no idea The Show Must Go On even existed.

To be fair, I’m a fiend for a lot of comic writers and artists. It’s easy to lose track of what’s new, and what’s old, from all these different creators.

And when I first saw The Show Must Go On sitting on the shelf at a local comic shop, I thought it was more Fred The Clown, but I quickly realised it was 200 pages of Langridge art I’d never seen before.

Most of it is written and drawn by Langridge, with a couple of stories scripted by future Judge Dredd writer Gordon Rennie, and it’s page after page of pitch-black humour, lame puns and gorgeous artwork

Langridge’s comics are so dense, and his sense of humour so idiosyncratic, that it really works best in short, sharp doses, rather than one quick read. So I knew it would take me weeks of pleasurable reading to get through this latest book, while I can get through one of Marvel or DC’s latest collections in a 15 minute bus ride.

These were all fine justifications, but this brazen hussy of a book had me at first sight. As soon as I saw it, I knew I needed it, and 10 minutes after first becoming aware of its existence, I owned a copy of The Show Must Go On.

This doesn’t happen to me when I buy stuff over the internet. Everything I have ever imported from overseas has been targeted products – I wanted specific things, and I bought those specific things. It was efficient and easy, and I had absolutely no urge to spend more time looking for other things I might be interested in.

There is a tactile enjoyment in browsing the shelves in a shop that is lost on web surfing. Using computers is too much like work, I literally spend my entire working life in front of some kind of screen, I want to use a computer as little as possible in my spare time.

There is also the idea that something might seem a lot more attractive if I can pick it up in my hands and walk away with it straight away, rather than rely on the random insanity of the global postal service. I do get some heinous buyer’s remorse sometime, and it only gets worse in that interminable wait between purchase and delivery.

But mostly it’s because I can never think what to look for. When I get online at somewhere like Amazon, I draw a blank when I think of what I want to look for, and always end up searching on the same old names like Morrison, Moore and Ennis, and always come away with nothing new.

It’s possible to take in a huge amount of information while scanning a shelf that dozens of heated clicks can never match, and it’s far easier for a classy cover to catch the eye when it’s sitting on a shelf, rather than beaming out of a screen.

I never find weird little things like obscure charity comics created by my favourite people online, and I never would have got into Scalped if I hadn’t been able to pick up the first trade, flip through it, and fall in love with the way R M Guera draws people kicking in doors.

The thrill of finding something I never knew I wanted, like a collection of Roger Langridge comics is the best part of browsing, but I just love taking my time in a good book or comic or record shop, and digging around.

(As for the latest unearthed gem, it’s taken me a week to get 72 pages into the Show Must Go On, and that’s some real value for money in my entertainment.)

You can fight City Hall, says the Antichrist

2011-11-26T13:23:00.001+13:00

How come Chronicles of Wormwood – a comicthat is full of sexual deviancy, outrageous violence and sheer perverseness –manages to teach a valuable moral lesson that a Green Lantern comic can’t?

Esteemed blogger Colin Smith recentlypointed out the appalling moral failings of a new Green Lantern comic. In it,John Stewart - a brave hero who has a history of fighting against socialinjustice and intergalactic threats with the same fervour – faces off againstsome rich and corrupt men and realises ‘he can’t fight City Hall’.

Instead of calling bullshit on this claim,and taking the sleazy developers down, John Stewart just kinda wanders off andmoans about the fact that being a superhero isn’t fun anymore.

I have no idea if the storyline hasresolved this ridiculous introspection. For all I know, Stewart has found hisballs, and found a way to fight the man, no matter how powerful he is. But itsays a lot if his first reaction is to give up, go off and have a moan abut it.

There was a similar negative reaction toanother moment in a recent Marvel mega event, where Spider-Man just shrugs andtakes off. A hero who has faced down Thanos and the Silver Surfer, who will diebefore he lets his friends down, decides to give up, and it’s not justcompletely out of character, (and utterly contradicted in dozens of differentplaces), it’s also the oldest and dullest storytelling trick – this must be abad menace because even Spider-Man thinks he can’t take it down, so it must bebad.

I like my superheroes to be better than me,and it is profoundly unsatisfying when they turn out to be moral cowards, orsimplistic fools. I get enough of that in the real world, I don’t need it in mysuperhero comic.

There are plenty of superheroes who aremuch, much funnier, smarter and braver than I am, and I never get sick ofreading stories about them. While the case of the whining John Stewart wasdisappointing, there is always a new issue of Daredevil or Action Comics orSecret Avengers to wash that bitter taste out of the mouth.

I knew it wouldn’t be long before a comicwould come along and tell me that yes, you can fight City Hall, and that it’s absolutely agood thing to do if City Hall is corrupt. I just didn’t expect it to be in theChronicles of Wormwood.

Chronicles of Wormwood: The Last Battle byGarth Ennis and Oscar Jimenez wrapped up a couple of months ago, but was barelynoticed, largely because the last issue came out almost a year after thepenultimate one. It also had typical Avatar covers that managed to be bothtotally bland and utterly grotesque, which saw them sink into the mass of gorein the Avatar section of the comic shop.

But there was still a decent comic beneaththose intentionally horrible covers. The art by Oscar Jimenez is stronger than Jacen Burrows’usual scratchy efforts in the first Wormwood comic, and it’s a typical Ennisscript, which manages to mix some genuine sweetness in amongst all thedepravity.

The Chronicles of Wormwood series (which shouldnot be confused with Ben Templesmith’s excellent Wormwood: Gentleman Corpse) isall about an antichrist who doesn’t want to do what he is told, so he becomes atelevision producer instead and enjoys life, rather than trying to destroy itfor all time. His best pals are Jesus – who nobody can lie to – and a talkingrabbit, and he can do one impossible thing every day.

The Last Battle sees Danny Wormwood grow upa bit and stop lying to his girlfriend, while also dealing with a fresh attackfrom the very dead and utterly odious Pope Jacko.

There are lots and lots of knob jokes, somealarmingly imaginative swearing, disgusting demons, gruesome and disturbinggore and all sorts of perversion. It is a pretty cynical comic about a lot of things– the willingness for people to do something awful if you pay them enough, orsome bluntly satirical jabs at the state of modern television.

But it’s also about growing up, and takinga path of kindness and co-operation over one of fear and paranoia. And it’sabout standing up to City Hall.

When pope Jacko lays out his master planfor Wormwood, he tells him that they will ultimate ascend into political gloryand bring about the long-awaited and long-postponed apocalypse, because, afterall:

And he’s almost right. You can’t fight CityHall, because it’s too big and mean and tough. But you can still fuck it in theface.

The power of the Establishment has been blatantall over the world in recent weeks, with the casual use of mace one of the mostobvious signs of institutional fear. Physically fighting back against that kindof power is morally inadvisable and personally dangerous.

But the little guy can always fuck CityHall, if he gets in the right position at the right time. Entire governmentscan be screwed over by the actions of an individual, and terrible corruptioncan be exposed by one person who is willing to tell the truth, or at leaststand up for the idea that they’re right. You can’t beat up City Hall, but youcan still make sure it’s doing what it is supposed to.

In that Green Lantern comic, John Stewart hasno plan beyond A) beat things up. He has a magic wishing ring that canliterally create anything he thinks of, and he can’t do anything to fight theMan. Danny Wormwood has a guy nobody can lie to, and one Star Wars-obsessedlittle rabbit, and he digs out the corruption at the core, before it gets achance to spread and gain power.

This can’t be right. Why is the Antichristteaching me a lesson that Green Lantern can’t? Why do so few superheroes havethe smarts and balls to tackle a complex issue without coming off as totaldickheads?

If somebody can use a rabbit literallyfucking a man in the face to say something about the right way to deal withcorruption, why can’t you say the same thing with a decent superhero like JohnStewart?

Even if a Green Lantern can’t fight CityHall, you can. Listen to the Antichrist. He knows what he’s talking about.

Comics that time (mostly) forgot

2011-11-22T20:39:00.001+13:00

There are thousands of comics producedevery year - hundreds of different titles from dozens of publishers. Some ofthem fall through the cracks of comic’s collective consciousness, some of themwere once hailed and are now barely remembered.

Somebody cares about all these comics.There are comic readers who can swear that the weekly version of Action Comicsfrom the late eighties is a genuinely enjoyable comic, and I know somebody whothinks the Nightbreed comic published by Epic is the greatest comic evercreated.

I care about some of them. My interest insuperhero comics peaked sometime between 1988 and 1999, and there are somecomics from those periods that nobody talks about any more, and I think theycan use all the love they can get.

***

Vext

Vext was an astoundingly silly comic from KeithGiffen and Mike McKone that lasted for six whole months in 1999. Giffen’ssilliest comics are always taken out behind the chemical sheds after less thana year, and Vext is no different. Part of a mini-wave of genuinely interestingsuper-heroish titles DC debuted in the very late nineties, Vext didn’t evenlast as long as Chase or Chronos or Hourman or Major Bummer, and is the leastwell-remembered of that crop.

It’s a comic that doesn’t go anywhere, butthat’s the whole point. Vext is an unemployed god of misfortune, dumped intothe DC Universe at the turn of the century. Pitched somewhere in the vast comicwilderness between Giffen’s Justice League work and his Ambush Bug misadventures,Vext features super-heroes standing around looking vaguely awkward, a patrondeity of ill-timed flatulence and the issue-long adventures of theStrepto-Commandos of Company Q.

There are whole issues where nothing reallyhappens, which give the impression that Giffen has just sat through aneight-hour Seinfeld marathon, and huge amounts of exposition dumped out in acomedy dialogue. But it also has McKone’s art at his very slickest – and he cando slick. He also does some good exasperation (and there is a lot of that inVext), and the briefest bursts of action don’t gt in the way of his comictiming.

Vext was also a very traditional title insome senses - it has supervillians who are almost always the cause of their owndownfall, loads of plot exposition that doesn’t mean anything and the oddunexpected explosion.

But it also has several charming aspects –the lead character is affably clueless about the entire world, there is somegeneral mockery of racial stereotypes and there is a bunch of story crammedinto the whole thing.

A comic book about the god of misfortunewas never going to last long, because the world isn’t quite that ironic yet.Frankly, it’s remarkable it lasted six issues, so I suppose we should begrateful for that much.

***

Longshot

It’s slightly odd to think of the originalLongshot limited series as forgotten – it was damn popular for a couple ofyears in the mid-eighties, with places like Mile High Comics charging upwardsof $20 for a copy of the first issue as demand soared.

Most of this demand was fuelled by the factthat Longshot was Art Adam’s first major project, and his ability to usethousands of tiny scratchy lines to create ridiculous amounts of detail waseagerly devoured by comic readers, right from the start.

But within a few years, and after thecharacter’s story was effectively all tied up with Jim Lee’s last issue of theX-Men, nobody really cared about Longshot anymore. Maybe it was hissimple-minded (but never dumb) attitude, or his somewhat obtuse power, or thefact that any story since then has been another retread of Longshot v Mojo thatdoesn’t need to be told, or maybe it was just that bloody mullet. Nobody reallycares about Longshot any more.

(Well, except for Peter David’s current X-Factorseries, where the character has been making some interesting appearances, but we’reconcerned with the past here.)

There was plenty more sublime Art Adams toget into after Longshot, from Gumby and Monkeybrain & O’Brien, all the wayup to the recent Ultimate X, and that whole style that Adams pioneered (andsubsequently evolved away from) in the Longshot comics doesn’t look so coolafter two decades of pale imitations.

Once one of the hottest back issues on themarket, Longshot is now more of an interesting curio – the debut of some trulyoriginal creators, a laudable attempt to bridge the gap between Marvel streetlevel superheroes and the demand for a more mature level of storytelling(Longshot’s contemporaries were things like Watchmen and the Dark KnightReturns and… er… Secret Wars II.)

It’s also a profoundly weird comic - densedialogue and parts that are pure nightmare, spineless creatures building perfectbeings with four fingers, and innocent stuntwomen strapped to the front ofinsane flying ships.

It does take place in the Marvel Universe,with She-Hulk, Doc strange and Spider-Man all showing up, but it’s far from thehalls of the Baxter Building, and a long way from a perineal Westchester estate. This is a dirty and nasty corner of the Marvel Universe,with every speck of filth lovingly rendered by Adams. There are still kidsplaying space games, but also outright slavery, a malevolent little sidekickthat turns into bloated, dangerous menace and a dead parrot.

Ann Nocenti’s script does overcook thestory occasionally, but for a novice writer, it’s an assured, witty, moody andwell-thought-out tale that didn’t feel like anything else on the stands at thetime, and has only become more unique over the years, despite the pale imitations.

Nobody cares about Longshot anymore, buthis debut series is a weird and wonderful book that shouldn’t be overlooked.Good luck with it.

***

Guice/BakerNew Mutants

Bill Sienkiewicz leftthe New Mutants comic broken in the wake of his brilliance. It couldn’t go backto regular superhero art, not after all those remarkable things he had done, sothe one 1980s Marvel comic that seemed pre-programmed for mediocrity continuedto be an incredibly interesting book.

Around about the same time Ann Nocenti wasdoing terrific things with that Longshot book, she was also editing the NewMutants, and managed to keep the post-Sienkiewicz shockto a minimum. Chris Claremont’s scripts were some of his freewheeling eightiescraziness, and while it all looks a bit dated now, it’s also packed withincident – the entire cast die, come back to life, go to Valhalla and areovercome by nerves at a local school dance. Anything could happen.

Fortunately, there was also terrific workby idiosyncratic artists like Steve Leialoha, Rick Leonardi and Mary Wilshireto ease the blow, before Jackson Guice became the regular penciller.

Guice’s art is classical superhero, and heoften goes for big movements buried beneath a soft line. It can also beincredibly stiff, sometimes to a distracting degree (the JLA: Gates of Hellthing he did with Warren Ellis is the worst example of this stiffness). But hecan also be the perfect artist for certain material, and his mid-eighties stylewas made for the New Mutants’ mix of mutant angst, teenage longing,metaphysical musing and goofy action scenes.

A lot of Guice’s work lives and dies on thestrength of the inker, and it’s here that Guice’s art becomes something else.It helps that he had proven talents like Terry Austin and P Craig Russellpitching in to ink his pencils, but there are also half a dozen quietlyextraordinary issues inked by Kyle Baker.

After work as diverse as the Cowboy WallyShow, Nat Turner, Plastic Man, King David, The Bakers, Baker’s brilliance iswell known, but his inks on New Mutants are proto-Baker, and not even mentionedon his wiki page.

This was when he was learning his craft atMarvel under Walt Simonson, Al Milgrom, Larry Hama and Jim Shooter, hooveringup any advice he could get and churning out enough work to evolve his ownstyle. The New Mutants comics are before his terrific work on the shadow, andjust before Cowboy Wally, but his artistic signature is all over these six NewMutants comics between #40 and #47 in late 1986. It’s all over their faces.

Baker’s strength is in the expressions andemotions on his character’s faces, and this gives a vitality to Guice’s pencilsthat is often lacking. There are brooding eyebrows, delicate noses and astartling variety of lips. Baker’s early work is a direct descendant of the looser,more cartoony, style, but there is something affecting in the way he and Guicecombine to convey super-teen angst.

The joy of these slightly clumsy NewMutants issues is that Guice and Baker are very different artists, but theirstyles unexpectedly meshed so well together here. Their careers both went offin separate direction, but these early comics of theirs are only gaining infascination as the years pass by.

Not enough comic in my comic

2011-11-18T09:30:00.001+13:00

One of the things that is most enjoyableabout buying back issue comics from a couple of decades ago are theadvertisements. We all hate them when they are new, but give them enough timeand they shine a sociological light on the darkest recesses of pop culture.

It’s not just the obvious stuff, like thesea monkeys or the $1.79 locker of army soldiers or the Hostess cake stuff orthe X-Ray specs, it’s the stuff we’d all rather forget that often resonatesmost strongly.

While it’s not surprising to see how manyads there are for Star Wars products late seventies comic books, it’s a littleastonishing to see how many David Cassidy tee-shirts there are in endlessseventies adverts, and how big somebody like that teen heart-throb can get,before crashing back into obscurity.

The first attempts to make serious moneyout of this bizarre little hobby we call comic books can also be seen in thesethirty-years-old advertisements. Some of the most well-known Golden Age comicswere actually worth hundreds of dollars by the 1970s, and mail-order companiesrealised that advertising in then-modern books was the best way to reach theircustomers.

(As somebody who hit prime superherofascination sometime in the mid-eighties, I still have an inordinate fondnessfor those yellow Mile High advertisements that listed huge amounts of comicsfor sale for 50 cents each. I used to go through them with a magnifying glass,composing imaginary lists of what I would buy if I had the undreamed-of sum of$100. This is about as sad and pathetic as I ever got in my comic obsession.)

But the very best thing about oldadvertisements are the house ads, showing covers from other series from thatpublisher. It’s an absolute joy to run across a full page ad featuringcontemporary comics when I’m halfway through a random issue of Teen Titans from1975, when DC had people like Carmine Infantino and Joe Kubert producing bloodybeautiful cover designs.

There can also be a cheap thrill of an adin the back of an Avengers comic promising the debut of a new series calledTomb Of Dracula, or seeing other historic issues jumbled up with a bunch ofcomics that were forgotten the month after they were published.

So that’s something to look forward to in2042, because current Marvel and DC comics are choked with house ads.

Consider Action Comics #3 – anotherimaginative and witty script from Grant Morrison (even if the xenophobicreaction to what appears to be first contact with an alien race in the new DCUniverse is massively disappointing), with some rushed artwork from Gene Ha andRags Morales that occasionally hits the mark.

But it’s also a comic book that isliterally half full of advertisements, with just twenty pages of comic in aforty page-issue. There is just not enough comic in my comic.

The rest of it is full page spreads forcomics and characters I’m not interested in, padded out by blatant advertorialand silly back-matter. The editors are trying to give something the substanceof a decent DVD extra, but it’s just lots of art we all saw on the internetthree months ago, and creators revealing that they are really excited aboutworking with Creator X on Character X. It’s bad enough when Marvel’scollections are padded out with pointless interviews from Marvel Spotlight,doing that in a flimsy single issue is just wrong.

This would be a lot easier to swallow, ifthe comic didn’t cost 33 per cent more than most of its contemporaries - $3.99for a twenty page comic is bad enough, but when you’re paying that much forthat much advert, you’ve got to start wondering why you’re paying it at all.

With exchange rates and shipping costs,these $3.99 comics cost nearly ten bucks in local money, which means every pageis costing me fifty cents. Which also means that a two page spread costs me $1,and that is a harsh and difficult investment to make.

(I’m also still bitter about the way TheBoys was jacked up in price with absolutely no explanation two-thirds of theway through it’s long – but limited – run.)

The ad situation isn’t as bad as a fewyears back, when NuMarvel choked the life out their stories with a ridiculousamount of advertising, destroying any storytelling or dramatic drive by cuttingup every page. But that kind of thoughtlessness is still there, (whoever decidedto put a full page picture of an intentionally smug blonde news anchor for theOnion News Network right next to the most dramatic part of All Star Western #2almost destroyed that moment entirely).

These ads will be fascinating for futurecomic scholars, but in the here and now, they’re nothing that hasn’t alreadybeen all over the internet for months, all the art previews and creatorinterviews are almost totally worthless when there is so much of that for freefor anybody with a net connection of any kind – expecting readers of a Morrisoncomic to pay extra for a couple of interviews with Dan Jurgens is asking a bitmuch.

I don’t mind the twenty-page comic,especially when writers like Morrison can tell super-compressed stories,cutting whole scenes down to one pertinent panel.

But there is little real value for money,and if this kind of ratio of story to ad just does not stack up. If continued,it would surely see me drop one of my deadest favourite superhero comics,because of dollar double-page spreads and extras I didn’t ask for or want inany way.

There is always more value in actual comic,and it’s good to hear that the writer of the excellent Brave and Bold is comingin with some back-up stories in future issues. While DC is still making theclassic mistake of thinking that people read Grant Morrison’s comics for hischaracters and concepts, rather than for his Celtic wit and deft storytellingtouch, Sholly Fisch is a terrific writer of short, sharpentertainments, and it will be interesting to see if the humour and humanity ofthe cartoon comic’s stories can be transferred to current continuity.

But it’s the thoughtlessness of padding outthese comics with things that might actively put people off the title thatreally bites, along with the blithe and arrogant presumption that they cancharge whatever the hell they want, people will still buy it. While this hasshort term gains, there is nothing to be gained in annoying the small amount ofreaders modern comics have left with inappropriate use of ads.

There might be a solid business plan behindmasses of house advertisements, but that doesn’t mean it makes editorial senseto mess with the flow of a story like this.

It’s good to support comics in theirmonthly format, if only so the artists involved get the chance to do thingslike eat and clothe themselves while they’re working on a project. Andcollections are often little better, with the interminable Handbook entries andpencilled versions of pages you read five minutes ago.

It might sound picky and pedantic, but theuse of advertorial and the lack of value for money is one of the main reasonswhy I don’t buy more than half a dozen comic books every month, even though Iam actually interested in reading so much more. Ten bucks for twenty pages ofsuperhero comic just isn’t worth it, no matter who is writing it, and it’s justeasier to not bother with new comics, and wait a few years – or decades -before coming back to these stories.

I can wait.

Golden Boys

2011-11-14T23:03:00.001+13:00

It’s still remarkable that most of theiconic comic characters that we all know and love were created in such a shortperiod of time, just seven decades ago. While it is now almost impossible toimagine a world without Superman or Batman or Wonder Woman, they all blossomedinto life in the same short span of years, along with hundreds of othercharacters who are still popping up in new comics, from Captain Americato Ma Hunkel’s Red Tornado.

There is undoubtedly a romantic streak inthose early days of American comics, moments that can be seen in MichaelChabon’s Kavalier and Clay, and in Gerard Jones’ Men of Tomorrow, with youngmen locking themselves up in overheated apartments and making comics for threedays straight, taking breaks only to go get some more beer and fried chicken.

All those comics are so crude, but settemplates that are still followed slavishly every week for the next seventyyears in a single weekend of frenzied activity. Young men facing a world wardug into myth, pulps and their own imaginations to come up with new heroes foran age that needed ‘em.

They can look old and dusty now, (and wehave to overlook the appalling racism and sexism that often crops up if we ever want to really appreciate them). Thesecomics were produced all those years ago on cheap paper, and the physicalobjects are becoming yellower and more brittle every year. But the stories canstill be startlingly modern. For most of us on the planet, there has alwaysbeen superheroes like Batman and Namor, the Sub-Mariner, but there are also stillloads of people who lived in a time when these concepts didn’t even exist.Super-heroes have dominated the comics medium for decades, but it really isstill a young medium.

This relative newness has been used for anexcuse for some shockingly poorly crafted comics over the past few years - ascreators intentionally break storytelling rules that have been built up foryears, only to discover there were actually really good reasons why these rulesexisted in the first place - but thatdoesn’t make it any less true. Stories evolve over years and decades andcenturies – they don’t stay still, and the superhero still has a long way togo.

Not that they were thinking of this, backin Manhattan, in those art studios, in the spark of creative innovation andcommercial ruthlessness in the late 1930s and early 1940s. They could neverhave imagined that their characters would still be going strong in the 21^stcentury, in a bewildering variety of mediums.

It was still a troubling time in the goodol’ days – terrible things were happening in Europe and Asia, and the world had onlyjust dug itself out of a horrible economic hole. There were still examples ofridiculous prejudice and hatred, and millions were still suffering all over theworld.

But like Harry said in The Third Man,centuries of Swiss peace gave the world the cuckoo clock, and the horrors ofWW2 gave us incredible innovations in medicine, engineering and all the basicsciences, while also giving birth to the modern idea of the superhero.

This monolithic character had ancestors,most recently in the pulps, but going all the way back to good ol’ Gilgamesh.But it was also something big and bright and new, with a fictional vigour thatis still going strong.

All these young writers and artists ofcomic’s golden age were running on pure enthusiasm and creative freedom, andproduced it in startling amounts – there are dozens and dozens of remarkableand idiosyncratic creators like Fletcher Hanks out there, waiting forre-appraisal with a twenty-first century eye.

The creators were screwed over in rottenbusiness deals that left them with nothing after they were responsible for someof the most iconic figures of the twentieth century. You never learn anythingif you idealise the past, and the success of today’s biggest creators oweeverything to the men and women who spent their lives in anonymity.

But their deeds are etched in the bedrockof history now, and the crooks who took advantage them are long gone andforgotten. Everybody knows about Bill Finger and Jerry Robinson’s contributionto proto-Batman, and while it’s a tragedy that Finger died without seeing hiscredit come calling, we can still celebrate his achievements.

Golden Age superhero comics can now lookcrude and clumsy, but they are also full of simple beauties and absolutelunacy. All these stories and art, churned out over those immortal weekends ofthe medium’s earliest days can still teach us something about storytelling andbuild for the future.

Biz

2011-11-10T09:46:00.001+13:00

Well look, I’m never going to be the bestjudge of Simon Bisley’s artwork, because I was 14 years old when I opened up anissue of 2000ad and was confronted by THIS:

So after THAT, he had me hooked for life,and I love everything he does. He caught my eye with the sleekest Joe Pineapplesand meanest Blackblood in ABC Warrior history, I got every issue of Lobo heever did, and bought a couple of issues of Doom Patrol even though I had themin a collected edition, just because I wanted those beautiful Bisley covers.I’ve got the insane Melting Pot comics, and Bad Boy and the one issue of GlobalFrequency he did and I love ‘em all.

From several interviews he has given,Bisley has laughed at the idea of formal art training, and this uneducatedenthusiasm is there in everything he does. The Biz is part of that breed of artistwho believe power is an entirely reasonable substitute for craft. Fortunately,he is also one of those artists who has talent to burn, and he often sets italight for fun, right there on the page.

With the type of projects he chooses, this style of artisn’t just a benefit, it’s absolutely essential. There is no way Lobo wouldhave become so popular in the early nineties without that extreme and sloppyBisley art, and the wild freedom to do anything - unconstrained by things likeartistic logic or reality - made those Doom Patrol covers the best lookingcomics on the stands.

This is nothing new, but as time has gone on, hisinfluence has settled in more deeply, even if it’s not as obvious as it oncewas. It’s almost impossible to underestimate Bisley’s impact on British actioncomic art in the early nineties. Dozensof artists started chasing after that rush of Biz that came from those veryfirst paintings of the Horned God, even if like all the best drugs, nothingbeat that original high.

In the aftermath of that first Bisley explosion, he wasseen glowering in interviews behind dark glasses, long hair and a fucking bigmotorbike. Bisley was one of the few real superstar artists 2000ad everproduced, but while somebody like Brian Bolland forced everybody who followedhim to be as clean and detailed as possible, Bisley inspired others to go crazywith the paintbrush. Look at any random issue of 2000ad a couple of years afterthe Horned God’s debut, and you can guarantee that at least 60 per cent of itwill be muddily painted art (which looked like crap on 2000ad’s cheap paper.)

There were diminishing returns in this style: artists asdiverse as Clint Langley, Carl Critchlow and video director Chris Cunninghamall started out by being told to ‘do a Bisley’, before they all found artisticsuccess by branching out into their own style.

One of the great things about Bisley, and something manyof his initial imitators struggled with, was that he didn’t do everything injust one style – his work on Slaine is very, very different from his work onLobo, which is very, very different from his work on Melting Pot, even thoughthey all share the same vigorous vulgarity.

Even on Slaine, he would switch between lush, paintedvistas and crude, ugly penciled faces to devastating effect. Some projects havebeen rushed and incoherent, others have been fully painted, and his overallstyle has seen several major evolutionary leaps.

Twenty-two years on from Prog 626, and Bisley is stilldoing the business. After years of relative quiet, during which he did the oddalbum cover for Danzig and comics for companies withnames like Berserker and Full Cirkle, he has been chipping in on PeterMilligan’s Hellblazer comics over the past couple of years, resulting in drawings of the main character that looklike this:

And this:

Hellblazer is currently blessed with the talent of Giuseppe Camuncoli, an artist who is making amighty contribution to the comic with his moody and blocky art. As the series’regular artist, he has taken on Milligan’s own brand of effete and spooky madnesswith glee.

But Bisley has also done some typically stunning covers,and the odd story inside, and this is a new Biz entirely.

It’s still the same square jaws and goofy kicking, stillthe same wired and aggressive body language, still the same odd splashes ofcolour. There is still plenty of devious energy and loads of evil sly looks andwicked grins and angry old punks spitting their anger at the old fascist enemy.There is also still some crazy exaggerated poses being thrown about, but it hasall been suitably toned down, and the stories take place in a recognisablydirty Englandthat is haunted by too many old ghosts, and defended by one cranky old git.

Because it’s also more restrained, with a newly murkypalette from his colouring collaborators highlighting this restraint. All thiscraziness never comes at the expense of the story, and never overwhelms thetale it is telling. While this has been obvious in Young Bisley’s work, the ongoingdedication to just telling a well-crafted story is absolutely admirable. Hisstorytelling skills have aged like a fine wine, and while that browner tone isthe most obvious indication of Bisley’s evolution, it’s the panel-to-paneltransitions that really show the maturity.

In some time travel-related parts of the currentHellblazer run, the reinvigorating shock of seventies punk is capturedperfectly by Bisley (who would only have been a teenager at the time) inscratchy gloom. Kevin O’Neill did something similar to terrific effect in thedying pages of the most recent league of Extraordinary gentlemen, (althoughthat example was particularly shocking after the psychedelic apocalypse in a Londonpart).

While Bisley is proudly part of a long line of Britishartist who specialise in the grotesque (which includes artists like O’Neill andCritchlow), he is still very much his own man, doing his own thing. It growsand matures, but it is always, always unmistakably the Bizness.

Omac and Ultimate X: When bad writers turn good

2011-11-06T13:21:00.000+13:00

It’s incredibly easy to write off certaincomic creators who have produced years of terrible work, with no signs ofimprovement in the near future.

After all, there are hundreds of comicspublished every single month – why on Earth would anybody ever continue to buysomething they won’t enjoy, unless it’s for brand loyalty or sheer completism?

I never really gave up on Jeph Loeb,because I never had a lot of faith in him anyway. While his Halloween Batmanstories have a lot of fans, they left me cold, and I could never get into theequally-lauded ‘coloured’ Marvel series or Superman: He’s Just A Big Ol’Farmboy.

(Although any lack of enthusiasm I had wassurely fuelled by the fact that I never really dug Tim Sale’s superhero art. Sale is one ofthose artists whose art is always a pleasure to read, but he just isn’t reallysuited to tights and fights.)

Many smart people say Loeb’sSuperman/Batman run is just big dumb fun, but the dumb often overloaded thefun, and it had some of the most godawfully literal captions in comics. Butthen he started writing the Ultimates, and everything went horribly, horriblywrong.

While I still maintain a perverse interestin really bad superhero comics, Ultimates 3 and Ultimatum were a bridge toofar, and were simply appalling awful. Muddled storytelling, ham-fisted shocksand characters that stopped acting like actual human beings left a badaftertaste. An eagerness to offend was not balanced out by Marvel’s refusal toadmit its Ultimate toys were totally broken.

And it looked like they didn’t learneverything, because they kicked off the whole line again with Jeph Loeb takinga leading hand. While it was comforting (and slightly disappointing) to seeBendis and Millar still doing their thing, nobody could have had much hopes forthe Loeb comics.

I don’t know how the New Ultimates titlewith Frank Cho turned out, because I haven’t read any of that, but I did readUltimate X in the past week, and was pleasantly surprised.

It was the Art that got my attention – youcan’t go wrong with Art Adams on pencils duty. Adams has been producing histight figures and fully-fleshed faces for 25 years now, and it’s as enjoyableas it ever was. It could be argued that his arrival on the comics scene in themid-1980s was a direct influence on the artists who went off and formed Image,but we shouldn’t hold that against him, not when he’s drawing consistentlybeautiful work.

In fact, while Adams’ art in Ultimate X isinstantly recognisable, it’s still come a long way over the years. His line isless craggy, with a softer flow that still barrels into his insane amount ofdetail. His ability to convey complex emotion in a furrowed brow isunparalleled.

So on that score alone, the Ultimate X-Menrelaunch was worth a look. After all the other Ultimate Bollix, the fact thatJeph Loeb was writing it was a severe disincentive.

But even with years of bad form, you can’twrite off anything without making some small effort to see if those badexpectations were justified. So I read Ultimate X, and think it’s one of thebest things I’ve ever read from Loeb.

Because underneath all those stupidbombastics and blunter than blunt narrations, Loeb is actually a really good characterwriter, who can get to the heart of a fictional person with a couple of scenesand a poignant expression. Or a really satisfying burp.

Having an artist like Adams certainly helps, becausehe can actually draw proper human emotions, (something a lot of Loeb’scollaborators – especially on his Ultimate books - have been completely unableto do). But Loeb is also due a fair bit of credit for the pleasant readingexperience.

There is still a bit of grabbing randomcharacters and throwing them at each other like they’re action figures, but itkeeps the cast reasonably tight, and after the carnage of Ultimatum, it’sfitting that anything goes in the aftermath. (There is also an odd nostalgicrush for all those late eighties What If…? stories where the X-Men were allslaughtered and a random collection of mutants were bought together to form anew team, especially when Loeb reaches out and tries to justify Bruce Banner asa mutant…)

And while it is still clumsy, and there arestill moments where people act more like plot movements than actual people, itends without the usual brutal fisticuffs and takes its time to set up the cast.It might have a blonde pretty-boy teenager standing in as a Wolverinesurrogate, but when he comes to Wolvie spawn, he’s still more charming than thetry-hard Daken of the regular Marvel universe.

Ultimate X is not a great comic, or even avery good comic, but it isn’t that bad, either, and that’s more than you cansay for almost anything else Jeph loeb has done in recent years.

Over at the Distinguished Competition,another writer (who also happens to have some incredibly strong editorial power)has also produced something surprisingly readable. Dan DiDio’s writing for theOutsiders title was nothing short of terrible, but his work with Keith Giffenon Omac is great fun.

DiDio’s Outsides scripts tried to be deepand meaningful, but DiDio’s strengths are as a micromanaging overseer with aridiculously media-friendly personality. His attempts to be deep and meaningfulcame out all wrong, clumsy beyond belief and almost offensive in their lack ofcraft.

Like Loeb on Ultimate X, DiDio’s name onthe credits of Omac was a severe disincentive, even though Giffen’s art isalways interesting (and may help explain why it was the lowest selling of allthe New 52 DC comics). It did seem unnecessary, as Giffen has proven hisability to be a solo scriptwriter over and over again, and it’s apparent connectionto half a decade’s worth of completely shit stories about Omac (overseen byDiDio), was the final straw.

And then, astonishingly, Omac turned out tobe a pretty good comic, and a large part of its appeal came from DiDio’sscripting. He’s ditched the heavy super-angst of Outsiders and cranked up thehappy go lucky absurdity of an accidental superhero.

His clumsiness with narration and dialoguehad a severely negative effect on any comic that made pretenses at real world relevance,but in the balls-to-the-wall rush of Omac, that clumsiness is absolutelyfitting. Jack Kirby’s dialogue in the original Omac comics was not anythingproper humans actually said, but it worked on things like Omac and Kamandi sowell because these weren’t ever meant to be recognisable people of the 20^thcentury – these were future people who spoke in wild gesticulations and massiveamounts of exclamation points. If it don’t sound natural, it’s doing the job,and DiDio’s dialogue is many things, but it isn’t natural.

(Giffen is great and he ain’t no Kirby, butwho is?)

These bursts of readability from these twowriters are not likely to last long – Ultimate X has already been superseded byyet another relaunch and according to the numbers, Omac is unlikely to last ayear. (Hopefully it will end with somebody like Doug Mahnke coming in and drawingan abrupt final panel where everything blows up, because that would beCosmically Awesome.)

There isn’t much faith in the future,either. It’s hard to imagine DiDio’s style suiting anything beyond loud andshouty punch-ups, and Loeb’s next major work is an Avengers/X-Men series thatalready shows a dedication to stupid by focusing on the – as demanded bynobody – return of Cable.

But to get anything worthwhile from eitherwriter is more than could ever be expected, and should be savoured while itlasts.

"Armageddon some more of that!": Nine things I learned after buying a painfully heavy load of cheap comics from the $1 and $2 bins at this year’s Armageddon comic convention in Auckland, New Zealand.

2011-11-02T22:32:00.000+13:00

1. It’s brilliant when Baker breaks itdown.

Kyle Baker’s art in his Plastic Man comicstarted to look awfully rushed in the last year of the title, but it works.There are a couple of issues where it’s just cartoony madness, but since thestory is about a things like a big, bad superhero who can change into anything chasing aftera totally anthropomorphic mouse, it’s a fitting breakdown in Baker’s line.

When he returns to that beautiful heavilytextured work in the last couple of epic issues, it’s actually slightlydisappointing.

***

2. The cheaper it is, the funnier it is

Bristle #10 – the latest collection ofcomics from a pretty damn good Kiwi comics collective – is the funniest issueof the anthology series so far. It’s always nice to see mini-comics that don’tgo too far up their own arses, and Bristle has a healthy sense of absurd humourthat suits the low-fi format perfectly.

Whether it’s the glee of a happy chickentucking into a plate of roast turkey, or an overload of fantasy joy leading tosomebody spewing rainbows, it’s fucking funny stuff.

My favourite cartoon is a strip by Grant Buist featuringnothing but 16 ‘Awful Flatmates’, from ‘Believes housework is beneath himbecause he goes to university’ to ‘Extremely boring when drunk. Often drunk’.

I thought it was really funny because I hadlived with a good dozen of these people, and then it wasn’t so funny, because Irealized I’d been some of those awful flatmates in the past.

Now I just feel really guilty about themassive fry-ups of my youth….

***

3. I still love you, super-heroes.

I… I actually quite liked Busiek andBagley’s Trinity comic….

I went to this year’s Armageddon conventionon the first day, which was on a Friday for the first time. They didn’t haveany guests, but it was much cheaper to get in, and I was only interested in thecomics.

I only went to my first comic conventionfive years ago, after dreaming of doing so for literally decades. I’ve been toa few more since then, and while I have never been to one outside of New Zealand, I have never been disappointed by one. I don’t care who the guestsare, or what video games they are showing off, or anything else.

I just want the comics.

And I got loads on that Friday: Obligatoryissues of Shade The Changing Man and Cerebus, some Giant-sized chills andkung-fu, the last issue of that Hedge Knight mini I was after, Richard Corbenhorror comics, more Lobo than is healthy, the issue of Kamandi where he turnsinto OMAC, and Marvel Tales #4 in a beautifully atrocious condition.

So I was happy with all that, but Icouldn’t think about all those modern and glossy superhero comics that I’d leftbehind. I’ve still got a lot of affection for bright and shiny new superherocomics, so I went back to the convention on the Sunday and bought heaps of it.

I got three-quarters of the Trinity series,and a bunch of Whedon/Cassady X-Men, and loads of recent Ultimate comics, andman, did that scratch that superhero itch.

Especially when they all turned out to bemuch better than expected. The Ultimate comics now each cost almost ten bucksin local money, so I’d fallen out of touch with the entire line, but walkingaway with twenty recent issues for the price of two new ones was hard to avoid.I loaded up on the Ultimate, and found some unexpected gems, including one by awriter who had got so bad I’d written him off entirely. (More on this soon.)

I also really enjoyed the Trinity stuffmore than I expected, largely because I genuinely adore Bagley’s slick line and partly because it was far better than the bland uniformity of 52 or the sheer awfulness of Countdown),and I will buy any comic John Cassady does, X or not.

The point is that despite all mypretensions towards the pursuit of great art in comic books, sometimes I justwant to smother myself in glossy new superheroes, and I don’t feel guilty aboutthat at all.

***

4. Now I just keep thinking about how he’spissing his pants.

Actually, there was one other benefit ofgoing on the Friday other than the comics – I got to watch the Batman: Year Oneanimated film on a big screen with an audience of people who all laughed andcheered at the right spots. That was fun too.

***

5. “I’ve known the innocence of youth, thewarmth of a loving family, the grief of the… last goodbye…”

I always thought that early eighties issuesof Marvel Team-Up, with Herb Trimpe’s most half-assed Romita licks, were theultimate example of average comics – not offensive or exciting in any way. Butthen I saw some of them were written by JM DeMatteis, who has a habit ofslipping interesting ideas into the most prosaic of comics, so I gave them ago.

I also needed to grab another dozen comicsto make up some numbers for a good deal, and half a dozen thirty-year-old MTUswere ample ballast.

And they were all right, with a surprisingamount of inter-issue continuity, a whole series of events barely acknowledgedin the other Spider-titles, as the lowly status of the team-up book allowingthe creators to take it to some slightly interesting places.

But there is also the DeMatteis touch, withlight (but strong) touches of real emotion in amongst the wall-crawling. Oneteam-up with the Gargoyle is a stand-out, turning into a genuinely touching pieceabout the dignity of growing old.

Ample ballast.

***

6. The Beast was badass

I finally got to read all four parts ofBatman: Ten Nights of the Beast, from Jim Starlin and the great Jim Aparo, andit’s still an effective story. Even if it’s impossible to take KGBeast seriouslyany more.

After two decades of overuse, to see theKGBeast as a genuine threat to Batman in the eighties story is a littlestartling. It doesn’t take long in this story for Batman to realise that theKGBeast is actually better than him at this running, jumping and fightingthing, but now he would barely bat-blink before taking the Beast downpainfully.

But I like the fact that Batman is drivenby a deep-seated sense of protecting the innocent and preventing the sort oftragedy that ripped his life apart, while Ten Nights of the Beast implies that theKGBeast will always lose, because he doesn’t care about things like that andhis own nihilism will ultimately be his downfall.

The Beast has become crowd cannon fodderover the years, but he did once push Batman as far as he could go, and that’sstill a story worth reading.

***

7. One issue is enough

I also loaded up on a small pile of PeterMilligan’s current run on Hellblazer, which might be the best run of JohnConstantine since Garth Ennis moved on, with a terrifically modern sense ofstreet-level magic depicted in some energetic and slightly perverted artwork,(including some gloriously muddy work from the great Bisley).

These comics have got Shade: The ChangingMan, John’s wedding and a couple of trips back to the grim and grimy seventies.They’re fucking fantastic.

I got about a dozen issues, and there aremaybe two or three that are in some kind of consecutive order. Milligan hasracked up an impressive amount of issues in the past couple of years, and I’venow got a scattering of them.

It makes for a frustrating readingexperience that can also be rewarding. Anybody who has grown up reading comicsknows they couldn’t always rely on reading every issue in a particularstoryline in the proper order. It’s easier since the proliferation of trades,but most of the comics I’ve been devouring have been read out of order since Iwas 15 (and I haven’t finished yet).

Both John Constantine and Peter Milliganlent themselves well to the old cut-up technique, and offer new revelationswhen read in an utterly non-linear fashion. If each individual issue isinteresting enough in its own right – and every issue of Milligan’s HellblazerI’ve read so far has had something unique – it doesn’t if the overall storydoesn’t make sense. It will one day.

***

8. In-between is good

Ed Brubaker and Colin Wilson’sPoint Blank is a brilliant comic, kicking off that whole wonderful Sleeperthing with a dose of intense super-paranoia and lively action art.

It's especially satisfying to read something that isn't afraid to use the way grim and gritty comics are told for narrative effect. With the use of unreliable narration and things happening in the gutter between the panels, the story creates entire mysteries in scenes of people walking out of toilets, and odd moments of confusion are later shown to contain devastating revelations.

If all comics had this much thought and energy bit into them, we'd have nothing to complain about.

***

9. Don't encourage him.

I always thought the mysgonistic tippingpoint for Cerebus The Aardvark came when Dave Sim launched into Reads, and theinfamous #186. (The first issue I ever read – it took a long, long time to getpast that.)

But now I’ve got a few more Jaka’s storyand Melmoth issues and the general concern over Sim’s attitude towards women isobvious at a much earlier period.

In fact, there is an oddly mean letter fromMichael Moorcock printed in #147 that shows this. While Moorcock – who hasalways been one of my favourite writers in any medium – does undercut his pointslightly that insisting that in 1991, Lord Horror was the only comic worthreading, he cuts right to the point, calling Sim a ‘self impressed misogynistwith an exageraated idea of his own intellect’.

Sim gleefully printed the whole thing on the opening Notes From The President page of #147, and takes even more joy in cutting Morrcock's points into slices of raw inconsequence.

It's all classic Dave, and he makes a few good points, but twenty years later, it's this line that really stands out:

"Say, I better cut this out - I may get to like it."

Sim spent the next two decades willfully offending large sections of his readership, unconcerned by those who started labelling him various nasty things.

Thanks a lot, Mr Moorcock.

Jason v Iron Man

2011-10-29T16:20:00.000+13:00

You’re not supposed to compare apples andoranges, but I do like apples more.

I also think some of Norwegian artistJason’s work is masterful comics, with a brevity and wit that gives hisstorytelling universal appeal, while the latest collection of Iron Man comics thatI got to read was fuckin’ rubbish

On a recent Sunday afternoon, I read abunch of comic books in a (not entirely successful) bid to calm Rugby WorldCup-shredded nerves. Rugby is my sport, I’m allowed to be nervous.

Most of them were from the local library,and some were pretty good. It can take me a while to catch up on things, but it’seasy enough to follow work like Peter Milligan’s currently excellent Hellblazercomics, or a bunch of different superhero titles for free from the local.

The latest round of Captain America andSpider-Man trade paperbacks were both entirely enjoyable (if incomplete), Ireally liked Bone Sharps, Cowboys, & Thunder Lizards and while Flash: Rebirth and Superman:Grounded were both better than I actually expected, I had the lowest of allexpectations in the first place, so that wasn’t saying much.

But the biggest contrast came between WhatI Did by Jason, and Iron Man: Stark Resilient volume one by Matt Fraction andSalvador Larroca. One of them was a charming and entertaining read that managedto touch on some universally human themes, while the other was a turgid andsneering comic that looked shiny and didn’t go anywhere.

Guess which one was which?

I feel like I’m being unduly harsh on theIron Man book because I read it in such close proximity to the Jason comic andJason’s stuff is Always Good. But it killed any interest I had in the currentIron Man comic stone dead, and I won’t be bothering with it any more.

It didn’t even cost me anything, I’ve beeneagerly getting it for the library, waiting for it to get good. There wasplenty of potential, but it was largely unfulfilled, and it’s taking too long.I just can’t be bothered keeping track of it any more, and I left volume two ofStark Resilient on the shelf just yesterday.

I think my last interest vanished somewhereabout the ninth time a bunch of characters all stood around talking about thesame things, over and over again. It’s not just that they’re saying the sameold shit, or have substituted snarky sarcasm for actual human conversation,it’s just got dullness built into the foundation of the page

And it’s not just that Larroca has nowcarefully erased all vigour out of his artistic line, and draws everybody likethey just escaped from the set of Westworld. It’s the way the whole thing ispaced out. It is the long and drawn out sequences that go nowhere, acted out bythings that don’t look like proper humans.

But most of all, it’s these bloodyinexplicable widescreen panels that serve no purpose:

What is going on here with all this empty nothingness?

Who thought this was a good idea to leave vast amounts of the page useless?

Who thought it should go on for page afterpage like this, stacking up panels like they are cumbersome pieces of timber:

There are pages and pages of this, withstacks of widescreen panels with a whole lot of nothing on either side. Individualpanels that are just huge wastes of space, especially when they seem to rely onportraying an intricate piece of human emotion, and totally fail to do so.

Look at this!

Leave aside those freaky mannequin armswhich seem to be springing from some different person entirely, there is thatspace on either side of the panel, that endless dull wall of nothin’ much. It’sgoing for mood, but it just comes off as boring and stale

They should start putting advertisingthere. At least it’s something. Look! There is heaps of room, as I have provenwith my tremendous MS Paint skillz:

It took me ages to get through this comic,and this dedication to boring did not help. And when things ended with anothernon-ending, and even more doses of fuck-all, that was enough to say no more.

Then I read a Jason book and I felt muchbetter about comics again.

I’m so glad that Jason is ridiculouslyprolific, but there seems to be a new book by the Norwegian cartoonist everysecond time I go to the library, and I devour each one (and go on to buy a fewmore).

What I Did is a collection of some of hisearlier works, and I’ve already got Hey Wait sitting on the bookshelf like allright-thinking people do. But it also has ‘Shhh’ - one of his silent stories,that hovers on the edge of a dream without any possibility of waking up; andThe Iron Wagon - a straight adaption of a strange and spooky little novel fromthe turn of last century.

As always, Jason’s anthropomorphiccharacters are fill of silent pain and dignity, maintaining straight backs astheir heads spin off into delirium. His sense of comic timing is unparalleledin modern comics, and while his pacing often appears languid, there is a lotgoing on beneath that stiff surface.

So I know I shouldn’t compare the two, butafter the thoroughly depressing widescreen of Iron Man, Jason’s work was a goodand timely reminder of everything that is great about comics – telling tinylittle epics in four panels:

Or sliding around on angles to give the perfectperspective and some terrific tension on a small and important event.(particularly tasty after the endless medium close-ups that plagued Iron Man,even in the action scenes):

It’s really great comics, and insanelyreadable. While the Iron Man book took me ages to get through, I blew throughWhat I Did in no time at all, in the best possible way.

I’m still old enough and dorky enough toremember the endless Iron Man vs X-Men debate that raged in Wizard for years,but this is much easier. Jason v Iron Man?

Bad luck, Tony Stark. No contest.

Jason wins!

Rugby: It’s been no bed of roses

2011-10-25T13:46:00.002+13:00

I startedsuffering a terrible case of acidic stomach a couple of weeks ago and startedchewing on the antacids like they were candy in a bid to calm things down.

My lovelywife suggested that it was stress induced, but that didn’t make any sense atfirst. I’m happily married, I love my job (and she loves hers), we’re minimumwage kids making all right money for the first time in our lives, planning todo a bit more travel before inevitable settling down, I’m living in a city withan extraordinary access to my favourite comics and movies and books, and withmy work shifts I get to sleep in every single morning. Life is good.

But I wasstill stressed, and it didn’t take me long to figure out what was wrong.

It was therugby.

It’s alwaysbeen the rugby.

Rugby is mysport and the All Blacks are my team, which means the Rugby World Cup is a BigFucking Deal for me. Held every four years and routinely ignored by most of the globewho have other passions (mainly football), the World Cup is weeks and weeks ofsolid rugby.

It’s aterrific sport – lots of hard running, tactical thought, massive kicks,crunching tackles and a rich history of triumph, tragedy and big games. TheWorld Cup is all that in a space of less than two months.

Like allthe other tournaments, stretching back to the first in 1987, there were allsorts of upsets and pleasant surprises at the 2011 show, with Ireland overcoming Australia andthe mighty French going down to the mightier Tongans. There was high drama onand off the field, and some great tackles that could be heard from space.

As theweeks went on in the 2011 tournament, it got more and more stressful, becauseNew Zealand does not have a strong World Cup winning rate. While the overallnumber of winning matches reaches Harlem Globetrotter rates, the All Blacks hadnot won a World Cup since the inaugural 1987 one.

They werealmost always the absolute favourites going into the tournaments between 1991and 2007, but were bundled out by Australia, South Africa, France, Australiaagain and the France again.

There werea tonne of reasons why they lost, but ultimately, they just weren’t goodenough.

I can’tremember the first time that New Zealand won the World Cup, even though I was12 at the time. But I can remember every place I was every time the AllBlacks lost at the tournament since then.

I was at mycousin Leilani’s place in 1991, and sitting alone on the mattress at my firstever flat in Dunedin for the 1995 final. I was with my best mates in Timaru forthe 1999 and 2003 semi-final losses, and was alone again in an all new city forthe 2007 heartbreaker.

I wasgenuinely bummed out after each of these losses, and it lasted for weeks andweeks. I never cared about any sport that much.

I’ve gottonnes of friends who are a bit intellectual, and more than a little nerd-ish,and they all laughed at me when I tell them how depressed I got after the otherWorld Cups.

It’s just agame. It’s just a bunch of men running around a paddock. It doesn’t meananything. I have friends – trueborn Kiwis – who told me they wanted the AllBlacks to lose because it might have an effect on an upcoming general election.

I told themall - with all due respect - to get fucked. Even though I can totally see where they are coming from, Idon’t think like that, because I’m still convinced that sport is a Great BigMetaphor For Everything.

It ispossible to take a step back and sneer at the tight shorts, or take a stepforward and immersive yourself in the narrative. Sport is full of real tragedyand farce and action and betrayal and displays of remarkable physical strengthand incredible surprise and triumph and doses of the utter unexpected, and ifthat sort of thing doesn’t interest you, you’re missing out on some of thefiner things in life.

All of thisis there at the local clubs, and when blasted upwards into a global event, it’san incredible thing to witness. All the foibles and marvels of humanity playout on the rugby pitch, and you never know what might happen next.

This year,the biggest games of the Rugby World Cup were being played about six blocksfrom my home, which was pretty damn convenient. I got trapped by the massesthat gathered for the opening night on Auckland’s waterfront, and watchedabout 80 per cent of the games (though I never missed any highlights.)

We onlywent to one – a scrambling affair between Samoa and Fiji at Eden Park, but wewere there to soak up the atmosphere, not to be bothered by the quality of thegame.

I startedfeeling genuinely stressed just before the Argentina game in the quarterfinals. On paper, it was no contest between the teams, but this is knock-outtime, when anything could happen. And frequently does.

The AllBlacks whipped out their meanest Haka and put the Argentina team away, and wereeven better against the Australians in the semis – rattling poor old QuadeCooper and keeping the pressure right on from start to finish.

That putNew Zealand into the first final in 16 years, which meant the job was nearlydone. I think I burned through an annual allocation of stress in the weeksleading up to the Australia game, and it was the French in the final. TheFrench, who had lost to Tonga and already been soundly beaten by New Zealand.France could barely beat Wales when it was cut to a 14-man team, and there wasconstant talk of team unhappiness.

But it wasthe French, and they never play better than when they’re up against the wall,playing a quality team.

And it wasthe all Blacks playing the French, just like in 1987, and the signs all pointedto an easy win. New Zealand had suffered the loss of key playmakers, and thentheir replacements also started falling over, but they had picked themselves upand carried on. Under unimaginable pressure to win, they kept calm.

Next year’sallocation of stress was all used up in the dying 20 minutes of the World Cupfinal, when the French were playing the game of their lives, breaking throughthe All Black defence and bringing the lead down to a single solitary point.One mistake, one silly move and it could all be over for everybody.

And then itwas down to two minutes, and they had the ball, and they just kept recyclingthe hell out of it until there was no more time on the clock, and then it wasover, and they had won.

One pointwill do.

Like allthe best sports tales, you couldn’t write this as a fictional story becausenobody would ever believe it – key playmaker Dan Carter goes down with acompletely unprecedented groin injury, captain Richie McCaw’s foot is shot tohell, but he plays on. Poor Piri Weepu plays his best game ever, and then istold his grandfather has just died. (He goes on to have a shocker in thefinal.)

And all infront of a home crowd who need some goddamn good news after a year of economicdoldrums, tragic mine disasters and catastrophic earthquakes, they pulled itoff. We’ve officially got the best rugby team in the world, and while thatdoesn’t do anything to lessen the pain of these other hardships, we’ll take allthe good vibes we can get.

It’s twodays after that, and I’m still bloody hungover, but fortunately the day afterthe final was a public holiday, so everybody got to celebrate.

I was up and about less than eight hours after the final hadbeen won, horribly tired and with a motherfucker of a hangover just coming on.But I didn’t want to lie down and sleep at all and kept going for hours.

Later inthe day after the final, I went down to the Auckland CBD with about 200,000other people and we all cheered out lungs out at a team parade and it was great.

When BradThorne thrust the World Cup in my direction, I might have got a bit emotional.

I thinkI’ll remember where I was when we won this one.

Holy Terror: I’m the goddamn absurdity

2011-10-21T11:02:00.001+13:00

Holy Terror - the latest comic book byFrank Miller - has been greeted with the usual derision from the usualquarters, and a foolhardy few who are willing to admit they actually kindaliked it.

I’m one of those latter fools. It was themost expensive comic I’ve bought all year, but I got what I wanted for that cost. There are points where Holy Terror can be genuinely (andintentionally) offensive, bits where the art degenerates into crazy splashes ofpaint and mad staring eyes, and parts where the dialogue is absolutelyguaranteed to cause cringing in any reader, but I still enjoyed it.

It’s particularly hard to mount a defencefor something like Holy Terror, when many of the arguments decrying it arecompletely right. It can be read as a misogynistic, racist and ideologicallydubious piece of work, if that’s the way you want to read it.

I just liked the bits where Natalie Stack kickeda bunch of arseholes in the face, and the parts where the main characters tumbled through acres of negative space.

I’ve still got a lot of affection forMiller’s art style. Those stark silhouettes and madmen bouncing around on theirown rage. I enjoy the maddeningly random spot colouring which gives certainpanels an easy shorthand. I love his sound effects and the way he hascharacters kiss like they’re teetering on the edge of the universe.

Frank Miller’s line is still energetic andhas a kinetic punch that is terribly lacking in the current house styles of thebig comic companies. There are all sorts of things going on in one massivepaint stroke, and insanely detailed bits of the background, like the dinosaurhead that randomly shows up.

There is a weird beauty in the way TheFixer shoots people in the head, sudden circles of negative space appearingwhere a brain should be, and storms of rain and nails slash across the page.

Defending the art is easy – all of that isjust a matter of taste. Defending the ideology is a bit more difficult.

But it’s still possible when you takecertain ideas into consideration – that you don’t have to agree with acharacters point of view to enjoy a story about them, and that important andtroubling issues don’t have to be treated with nothing but griml seriousness, and that I’dprobably be pissed off if somebody attacked my city too.

1. “I don’t agree with that.”

I think the idea of an eye for an eye is a barbaricideology that has no place in the 21st century, but that doesn’t mean I can’tenjoy a rollicking romp of bloody revenge. I’m more genuinely moved bynarratives that show a little goddamn compassion, but I can still enjoy JackBauer killing and torturing his way through the vaguely ethnic cast lists of Hollywood.In fact, questioning the motives of somebody like 24’s lead character was amajor part of that television show’s appeal.

If I had to discard all the movies and books andtelevision and comics that I didn’t politically agree with, I’d be severelylimiting my choices. It’s easy to only absorb the media you agree with, butthat’s not necessarily a good idea.

I don't agree with The Fixer's methods, but that doesn't mean they can't give a brief and intense visceral thrill.

There is also aworrying tendency in criticism to attribute the actions and motives ofsignificant characters to the true feelings of their authors, which is always abad idea. Miller might have characters saying the most politically appallingthings, but that doesn’t mean Miller feels the same way.

Especially when thebook ends with a one-page stinger that might be the whole point of the thing –other than prevent a few more of those blank panels, The Fixer doesn’t do shitin Holy Terror, because Dan Donegal (A hard man, a tough cop) is fuckingterrified.

What is Miller saying here? Whatever thehell you think he’s saying.

2. “Well, that’s just silly.”

The easiest defense is that Miller is going for asatirical vein, but it’s more than just that. There is satire in here,including some fairly obvious, but hearty, slams on the main character’s pointof view, but there is also pure and nasty caricature, complete farce, balls-out action andutter silliness.

The one thing Miller’s superhero work has going for it –the one that is most often sneered at and ridiculed – is their sheer absurdity,but despite what the 1980s keep telling you, that isn’t always a bad thing.

It’s the sense of the truly absurd that keeps me comingback to superhero comics, that silliness that gets taken so seriously is a hugepart of their appeal. I want to read about superheroes who step in when thingsgo crazy, and I really, really want to read about superheroes who step in whenthings go absolutely bugfuck mental.

There is no escaping it in Holy Terror - it’s patently absurd to thinkthere is a big supervillain lair beneath New York City,ready to fire out terrorist ninjas and unlimited megadeath, but this isfiction, where anything goes. Absurdity is a valid part of fiction, and the moreblatantly ridiculous it all gets, the more I love it.

No, you can’t just go up to your fears and punch them inthe mouth (or knife them in the guts), but you can dream about it. We all dothat.

Miller’s work has beenin the realm of grim absurdity since his first Daredevil comics, which are muchfunnier than everybody remembers. By the mid-nineties, he was all about theabsurd, taking a path through the excesses of Elektra: Assassin into thestraightforward and glorious stupidity of Sin City, Hard Boiled and Martha Washington.

Anybody who issurprised by how silly Holy Terror is hasn’t been paying much attention toMiller’s work. There are dozens of super-folk comics that wear their uniformsjust a little too tightly, and humourless super-heroes are no fun, but they sure are everywhere. What's wrong with a bit of silliness to counter-balance things like Aquaman's sneering and self-important dismissals?

3. “Hey! You can’t do that!”

It can’t be denied that the September 11attacks did something to a lot of Americans, many were shocked enough to go towar in far-off lands, many were angered by the liberties taken in theover-reaction and some just shrugged their way into catatonia.

Some, like Frank Miller, made comics aboutsuperheroes slapping around terrorists. It’s rumoured that a lot of The DarkKnight Returns’ energy came from the frustrated and impotent rage Miller hadafter a New York mugging in the late seventies. Frankly, we got off lightly with HolyTerror, if that’s true, considering his angry instant reaction..

Golden Age comics are cool again, and whilethat doesn’t make them any less crude or unwittingly offensive, they were bornin a crucial period in American history. The very first thing Captain Americaever did was punch out Hitler and Superman was soon tossing tanks around, incomics created by young men who were appalled by the inhumanity in Europe.

It’s only fair that a direct artisticdescendent of Siegel, Shuster, Kirby, Simon and Eisner –who all wrote and drew crude stories about kicking injustice in the balls –gets his own go at it.

Frank Miller’s home town got attacked by moronicmartyrs who think their own idiotic cause is worth any bloodshed, and he wroteand drew a comic about total retribution on these idiots. I can’t say Iwouldn’t have done the same thing.

Holy Terror is not for everyone. It is asilly and violent comic, loaded up on its own righteousness. It’s a FrankMiller comic, and I think it’s terrific.

I fell in love with a Video Nasty

2011-10-17T12:53:00.003+13:00

They saidthese films will make you a horrible person. They said they had no artisticmerit, and only appealed to illiterate morons. They said Don’t Go In The House,Don’t Go In The Woods, Don’t Go Near The Park and Don’t Look In The Basementwere Bad Movies.

They saidVideo Nasties were bad for you.

Well, whatdid they know? I was sitting at home recently feeling sick and miserable, so Iwatched almost eight hours of trailers for films that had been banned in the UKfor their sex, violence and general depravity, and I felt bloody great afterall that.

Okay, thebit in the Beast In Heat trailer where the gimp eats the pubic hair made mefeel a bit sick.

But apartfrom that, it wasn’t that bad. Laughably bad gore effects are alwaysentertaining and it’s hard for a 21^st century mind to get around theidea that people took this shit seriously, and actually thought it had adetrimental effect on society. Politicians and police who led the fight againstvideo nasties showed a worryingly absurd tendency to mix up fact and fiction,parading the fakest of fake gore as proof of real life atrocities.

The UK VideoNasties affair is nothing new in genre fiction, with horror and fantasybecoming a convenient fall guy for society’s ills too many times. It happenedin the fifties with all those lovely and wicked EC comics, and because nobodyever learns anything from history, it happened again in the UK in the earlyeighties.

This wasthe birth of home video, before the industry became corporatised and drivenstraight into extinction. There was an insatiable demand for video product, andthe producers quickly realised that the more gory and offensive and extreme thecover got, the more it would sell.

Inevitably,these things started leaping over the line of good taste with reckless abandon,and a crackdown by the authorities saw dozens of titles placed on a bannedlist. These were the Video Nasties.

Allof these films have long ago been passed into legitimacy, (or faded intoirrelevance), but they remain as fascinating as ever. Most of them are dark anddirty films with little to recommend to the average viewer, but for anybody wholikes their cinema with the intensity cranked up to 11, and just generallyfucked-up, these are a terrific bunch of films.

VideoNasties :The Definitive Guide is a DVD collection of trailers of every singlefilm put on the Video Nasties list, with fine intros from the likes of KimNewman, Alan Jones, Allan Bryce and the wonderful Dr. Patricia MacCormack &her tattoos. They can usually find something nice to say about every film onthe list, even if they really have to stretch the boundaries of ‘interesting’quite a lot.

Italso features a fine documentary by director Jake West, which looks at thestory of the video Nasties, speaks to people affected by it and tells thebackground. Crucially, it also features interviews with the people who broughtthe ban in, giving their side of the story. (I still think they were horribly,horribly wrong, but it’s worthwhile to see them try and justify it.)

It’sa fascinating story – people actually went to jail for hiring out certainhorror films, as a conservative government that had implemented terriblyanti-social legislation looked around for convenient scapegoats. The moralbacklash against the films was inevitable, but it was never going to last oncepeople realized how silly a lot of these ‘disturbing’ films were. It’s hard totake anything seriously when you see people desperately try to suppress thegiggles while hacking up some poor unfortunate victim.

Besides,one of the Video Nasties was the Evil Dead, and if you thought that film was aninsidious threat, you’re a bloody moron.

Butit’s the trailers that make this collection so brilliant, with those hours andhours of gore, lust and depravity, spread across two DVDs from films madeprimarily in the l;ate seventies and early eighties.

Thereis a surprising amount of variety amongst the nasties – they’re not all Italianzombie/cannibal/nazi atrocities. The vast majority are some sort of horrorfilm, but there are also films packed with dubious social realism, films thatare flat-out science fiction, films that are that same old Mondo bullshit anduncategorable films like The Witch Who Came From The Sea.

Andthe horror movies themselves represent all sorts of sub-genres, there are ghoststories and slasher mayhem, monster romps and grim revenge tales.

Some,like the notorious Snuff, are so incompetent and stupid that they are barelywatching, and there are some films you can read a lot about, and never, everfeel the urge to see. (I’ve never watched The Last House On The Left, or I SpitOn Your Grave, but I could tell you everything that happens in them, and whythey are nothing I’m really interested in watching. I also can’t watch Faces ofDeath, because I find that kind of thing genuinely disturbing.)

Others,particularly in the three-minutes-and-out trailer format, are a lot moreinteresting. There are splashes of gratuitous art in there among the blood& guts. Moments of intensity that take things just a bit too far, and thentake them much, much further. Many people might write off Abel Ferrara’sstill-disturbing Driller Killer as utter trash, but it’s trash with a point,buried beneath all that fake blood on the terrifically in-your-face videocover.

Andthe wonderful thing about watching the trailers to these video nightmares isthat they show all the money shots, without the endless clumsy exposition.Terrible acting is reduced to tiny soundbites, and if there is a movie that istoo stupid, or perverse, or – worst of all – boring, it doesn’t matter, becauseanother one is coming along in a second.

Thesefilms are not for everybody. I’m not surprised that I had to literally orderthis DVD collection in from the other side of the world. This is uncomfortablematerial for many people, and anybody who finds these kinds of films queasy shouldstay the hell away from them. Nobody is arguing that these films are good foreveryone.

Butthey are good for me. A bit of fatigue set in around the sixth hour oftrailers, but that was largely because many of the introductions couldn’t findmuch to say beyond “I don’t know why this was banned, and if it wasn’t on thelist, nobody in the world would care about it.” But there were still plenty ofsurprises, and it all ended nicely with the atrocious Zombie Creeping Flesh,which is almost a greatest hits of the video nasties, with cannibalism, stockfootage, idiotic zombies, terrible dubbing, blunt social commentary andappalling gore all rolled into one film.

Years ago, I used to watch Zombie Creeping Flesh with abunch of kids I babysat, and they thought it was the greatest film ever. (Andthey turned out to be fine adults.) But I’ve still only seen less than a dozenof the nasties on the list, and for most of them, it was footage of stuff I’dread about in magazines like The Dark Side and Fangoria since I was 13. It wasoccasionally invigorating, and sometimes utterly disappointing, to see thesethings I’d read about over and over again.

While watching yet another trailer for a film about yetanother dubious atrocity, I fell in love with these daft efforts all overagain. They are films at theextreme edge of any kind of taste or restraint, where a greasy film-makingstyle smashes into the desire to be more hardcore, more brutal than anythingelse, standing out from the rest.

There isreal beauty in the final shot of The Beyond, or in the ripped-out tongues ofBlood Feast, or the floating corpses in Inferno. Cannibal Holocaust’s foundfootage style was still fresh at that time, Flesh For Frankenstein wasartlessly artful and Evil Dead’s claymation disintegrations are stillgracefully gory.

I fell inlove with a lot of Video Nasties, and they did me no harm.

This is why I do it

2011-10-13T10:17:00.003+13:00

Borag Thungg, Earthlets!

Sometimes I can’t think of anything to say on this blog,and that’s when it really starts to feel a bit pointless. I’ve been postingfairly regularly at this blog for almost three years, and more often than Iwould like, I end up sitting here at two in the morning, wondering what thefuck I’m talking about.

But I still do it, because I love talkingabout comic books and movies and novels and other narratives that I’ve enjoyed.Like everybody else, I also like to have a good moan, especially when somethingI genuinely love, like the modern American superhero comic, is so lacking inbasic craft that it’s downright offensive.

And it’s even more fun to talk aboutsomething I really loved. It’s harder sometimes, to put that feeling ofaffection and contentment that comes with a good story into words, instead ofjust slagging something off, but it’s always worth it when somebody says theylove the same shit I do.

But there is another reason, and it’s loadsmore selfish. One of the great benefits of writing a blog is that every now andthen, you get a package in the mail that contains something like this:

It might look like a random issue of a fairlyrecent 2000ad, but it’s not entirely random – it’s one of sixteen issues I needto complete a colossal run in my collection. I’ve now got a complete run from prog107 to 1366 – a run of 1259 consecutive issues. I am inordinately excited aboutall of this.

This is how a decade-long obsession starts:In 2001 I finish up another prog slog – reading every single issue of 2000ad Iown in one go. It ends fairly apruptly with #950, because I quit reading thecomic in the mid nineties, largely due to a dire drop in story quality.

But half a decade after they had beenpublished, the few post-950 issues I had didn’t look quite so ugly anymore, andthere was this Judge Dredd storyline called The Pit that looked fascinating,and I didn’t know it at the time, but I was hooked again.

I picked up a few more issues over the nextcouple of years, but didn’t start buying 2000ad every week again until 2004,and by then I had eight years to catch up on. And I had to catch up – I wastotally obsessed with the latest twists and turns in the Judge Dredd saga,adored Nikolai Dante and loved the slick art and stories on dozens and dozensof other strips.

But man, eight years of a weekly comic. That’sfour hundred issues. This was going to take some work.

Well, it’s not really work, because it’s somuch fucking fun: buying more than a hundred circa-1999 issues from a Sydneysecond hand bookshop over one week in 2005, finding that one issue with theShaun of the Dead comic in it in Jim Hanley’s store beside the Empire State Building, innumerable TradeMesurprises and a terrific weekend in Dunedin watching Mulholland Drive afterbuying the last of the pre-1000 issues I needed.

I love this shit so hard.

This is how a decade-long obsession ends(or reaches a significant milestone, at least): a couple of weeks back, I get alovely e-mail from the UK from somebody called Ben, who runs a terrific Grant Morrison site and wants to ask me a favour. He read my review of an obscure British charity comic from the mid-eighties, and he is dying to get a copy forits early Morrison goodness, but keeps getting beaten to the punch by AlanMoore completists who want it for the Bryan Talbolt-illustrated dinosaur story.

He’s so keen, it would be a crime not toget it to him. But I’m selfish enough to admit that when he offers me somethingwonderful for it, I can’t refuse.

He’s willing to pay a silly amount of moneyfor it, but I’m not bothered by that. But then he offers to get me some of themissing 2000ads I need – they are plentiful in his parts, and he is more thanwilling to swap a small pile of them for the much-needed Food for Thought.

The deal is done – Ben gets his comic, Iget my 2000ads, and we’ve both done well out of our obsessions.

In the past couple of weeks, post-travelblues means I’ve been buying more crap over the internet than I usually do,and ended up with issues of Jack Kirby’s 2001, and Justice League cartoon DVDsand the new edition of Kim Newman’s extraordinary Nightmare Movies, and thatone bloody issue of Batman:Year One I’ve been after forever, and a beautifullychunky DVD collection of Video Nasties, all coming through my letterbox.

But the most exciting package was the2000ads. Opening that one when it finally arrived generated a sense of enormous well-being. Dork life!

So I’ve got this monstrous beast of acollection now, but I’m far from done. There is still loads more to get – bigchunks of the Judge Dredd Megazine, a small fortune in pre-100 issues andseveral annuals from the 1980s that I’ve never seen anywhere.

But I’ve almost completely filled thatgaping hole when I lost faith in Tharg, and it’s a terrific feeling, and allthe incentive in the world to keep on blogging. It’s great to talk about stuffI like, but getting something substantial and real out of it is even better.

Splundig vur thrigg!

Love and Rockets: “There ain’t no deposit money”

2011-10-09T09:40:00.001+13:00

There is so much love (and rockets) on thefinal page of Jaime Hernandez’s The Love Bunglers, so much genuine lovingemotion between Maggie and Ray, built up on years of pain and tragedy andguilt, that it’s the perfect enduing for these characters, and I would have noproblems if their story ended right here.

I love these people in the stories morethan any other characters in all of fiction, and I wouldn’t mind if I never seethem again, if it can climax with a final declaration of love and end on atearful and heartfelt kiss.

That’s how good The Love Bunglers is.

Once again, there is the terrible guiltthat I‘m not saying enough about Beto whenever I get a new Love and Rockets,but that’s the way it goes. King Vampire and And Then Reality Kicks In areterrific little comics with the usual hidden depths, but they don’t have theemotional catharsis of Jaime’s work, they don’t have decades of storytellingbuilding and building to tiny little moments of transcendent wonder.

And once again, this is no review. This islove.

The art is as beautiful as always,evocative of time and place, and Jaime still draws the best body language and facialexpressions in the medium, telling entire stories in a frown or wink.

It can be as mundane as the long and lonelypath that leads to a crappy meal in a crappy diner –

- orthe easy confidence of somebody who is finally comfortable in her own uneasyskin.

All over, the art is as beautiful as ever,and it’s so easy to get lost in Jaime’s gorgeous profiles, or his effortless commandof geography, or simple panels of people looking at each other.

Jaime’s panel structure is also stillincredibly rigid, but that just keeps all that energy and vigour bottled upthere on the page, released with every new visit. There is more artisticenjoyment in his flowing line than can be found in dozens of other comics. It’sjust gorgeous.

While it’s no surprise that Jaime Hernandezis still producing magnificent and beautiful comics, it is also still incredible to seehow big his storytelling balls are, man.

Much of The Love Bunglers takes place atthe same leisurely pace Jaime’s stories have had for the past few years, butafter a startling piece of violence that throws the future up in the air, thestory bounces forward two years, and after three pages, takes another similarleap forward in time, showing how things worked out for Maggie and Ray.

(And Hopey – there was another big emotionalkick to see little Hopey all settled down and reasonably successful. The factthat this little hellion has grown up enough and can lend Maggie the money tostart up her business is astonishing, but not as astonishing as the fact that Ifelt genuinely proud for her that shehad got this far. She’s still got that same awesome haircut she had as a16-year-old, but Hopey is All Grown Up.)

Those last seven pages are dense withinformation and revelation, but it doesn’t overwhelm the story. The abruptleaps in time allow for drastic changes that seem so natural, like things werealways going to end this way.

And the comfort in that is so warm andtoasty. The past is still spiky and tragic, but it all worked out in the end.

Oh man, that bit when I realised what washappening in that montage was the most emotionally moving moment I’ve read in acomic book since, well, the last Love and Rockets.

Letty’s story is also an unexpected treat –telling a tale that answers questioned first asked decades ago, while providingdetails that are absolutely essential to the ongoing narrative.

With a continuation of all that painfullyunnecessary guilt and shame from Browntown in #3, Return For Me also shows thateveryone leaves Maggie, no matter how much they intend to stay. Poor Letty’slast thoughts are that she will always be there for Maggie, and you can bet herfamily, and Speedy, and Hopey and Ray and Calvin and all those others made thesame promise, only to leave Maggie behind.

Dig it: Jaime Hernandez is now tellingstories that cast a whole new light on 30 years worth of comics. That’s anastonishing feat.

I really, really hate Coronation Street, (mainly because I wasn’t allowed to watch the Incredible Hulk onthe other channel when I was a kid), but it makes so many other people so happythat I never want it to go away.

It is also hard to hate something that hasevolved from a bog-standard soap opera into something else. It’s still rubbishon an everyday basis, but when you consider it as the continuous biography ofan ordinary man named Ken Barlow, it’s something extraordinary.

Ken – as played by William Roache – has hadhis daily life dissected by an audience of millions since 1960. That’s 51 yearsago. Ken has grown from a pimply little dork to an affable old man. He has theworld record for being the longest-running character in a televised soap opera,and Ken’s wikipedia page is more than 10,000 words long.

He has been a teacher, journalist, waiter,newspaper editor, writer, male escort and trolley pusher, and has been marriedfour times, fathering numerous offspring. He’s the most boring man on the mostboring show of all time, but over fifty years, it adds up. What a life!

Jamie’s Locas stories are just like that,but instead of being the most boring thing ever, the story of Maggie, Hopey,Izzy, Ray, Doyle and Angel has been fascinating, moving, exhilarating, sad,silly, beautiful and utterly human. To see characters grow and develop overdecades of terrific stories is one of the great pleasures of these comics. Allthe young punks have grown up, but that doesn’t make them any less interesting.

(And yes, it’s particularly ironic thatthis latest Love and Rockets - which pays off on situations set up 20 years agoand shows the growth and maturing of ripe characterisation - came out right atthe point that DC is putting out All New All Different versions of the same oldcharacters, giving them another tedious reboot because people can’t handle theidea that Superman isn’t 29-years-old any more - but let’s not go there rightnow….)

So if it did end? If Jaime went off and didWolverine comics for the rest of his career, or spent the remainder of his lifesitting on a mountain painting landscapes? It would certainly be painful, butto leave the characters where they stand isn’t a bad way to finish it.

The artist himself has even expressed ininterviews some trepidation about where the story could go from here, but heundoubtedly has more stories he could tell. Angel’s story is just beginning,Izzy is undoubtedly off doing something peculiar, and it’s always nice to seewhat Doyle is up to.

But for Maggie and Ray and Hopey – thisisn’t a bad place to leave them. You never really stop growing up, but if youcan mature enough to get to a point where you’re actually happy with yourselfand the way things turned out, then…

What else is there?

Just love, baby.

Love.