30 days of comics I love #6: How would you like to help save the world?

DC: The New Frontier #6 

By Darwyn Cooke 

Darwyn Cooke's New Frontier series is a modern masterpiece, using the dusty Silver Age heroes to say a heck of a lot about America, produced with some of the most gorgeous art ever made for a 21st century comic book. Some of what it has to say might be a little unintentional - the big 'heroes walk' shot of this series in this final issue is slightly undermined by the sheer whiteness of it all - but a lot of it is very much on the nose.

It all gets very heavy in the epilogue, with one of the great JFK speeches interspersed with collages of a great heroic age for DC's heroes, but I still find hope in what New Frontier says about the best aspect of the United States - that it's a place where people from incredibly different cultures and backgrounds can join together for the common good.

It's most obviously there as they all team up to fight the bit floating alien island that wants to wipe out humanity, with the Flash standing beside King Faraday and the Blackhawks against this existential threat, and doing it with bravery and honour.

But it's also there in the cherry on the sundae moment when Aquaman shows up, and wasn't needed to spear someone with his trident or bash them with mind-controlled killer whales, he's just there to help, and comes in peace to save everybody's best friend.

America has its issues now as much as it did in the period that New Frontier depicts, and in the era in which it was published, 20 years ago. The John Henry sequences in New Frontier are still painfully relevant, all these years later. But the spirit of helping out because it's the right thing to do is also part the American dream, and it's easily still the most important.

30 days of comics I love #5: It's nature's perfect food!

Tales To Offend #1

By Frank Miller 

If you're looking at this strange little one-shot from 1997 with 2024 eyes, the first thing you are going to to notice is how fucking tame it is. With a title like that, and Frank Miller at his peak show-off stage, you'd expect a bit more spice, instead of ongoing gags about smoking cigarettes and eating meat.

It would, of course, be a fucking awful idea for a comic book these days, because everybody has been perpetually offended by everything since social media let us talk to each other, and because truly offensive shit like blatant racism and transphobia is frequently leading the news. There's enough of that nonsense in real life, we don't need more in our comic books.

But in the post-ironic 90s, when Miller still had a decent sense of humour about the grim and gritty world he had help popularize, Tales To Offend can still be a lot of fun. It was an age where sexism was okay because you didn't really mean it - and that really doesn't matter any more because who can tell who means what? - but Lance Blastoff is just a fucking jerk, and easy to digest in all his simplicity.

It's also a lot of fun because, with the exception of a black and white and pink Sin City story in the middle, there are some lovely eye-popping coloring work by the great Marie Severin, capturing a silver-age gloss that still shines in the issue, more than a quarter of a century after it was published by Dark Horse. Miller's usual coloring collaborator Lynn Varley does work on a pin-up that has wonderfully muted colors in this issue, but Severin's work on the main strips is garish and alive.

Unsurprisingly, there haven't been a lot of Lance Blastoff stories since then, and that's no great loss, the world is offensive enough. But his technocolor nonsense is enough for one issue, and one issue only.

30 days of comics I love #4: Hey! You're sittin' on my navel!

1st Issue Special #6: The Dingbats of Danger Street 

By Jack freaking Kirby and Mike Royer

Jack Kirby spent a chunk of his long and brilliant career on comics featuring gangs of kids running wild, and the Dingbats was one last roll of the dice in 1975. And as Kirby got older, he looked farther into his own youth, and the Dingbats weren't out on the western plains, or fighting Nazis behind enemy lines, they were on the kind of streets that the King grew up on.

There is still a weirdo in a mask gassing the joint up, and the Dingbats themselves all have their own quirks. And it's still got the powerful energy of 70s Kirby, with characters flying across the panel and bashing into immovable objects, or leaping out windows while cackling at the cops.

It was just one of thousands of ideas that Kirby threw at the DC wall during this period, and despite a plea to write in and ask for more about the Dingbats' 'tragic stories', they were always going to be a footnote in the DC universe. Despite the small amount of depth that Kirby is able to give Good Looks, Non-Fat, Krunch and Bananas (truly unfortunate racial stereotyping and all), no serious comic book reader is ever going to ask for something called 'Dingbats', and all comic readers were starting to get very serious indeed in the mid seventies.

They are lucky to be in-jokes in crowd scenes these days. I am aware that Tom King has done something with the Dingbats and the rest of the 1st Issue Special crew in recent months, and I do not have any interest in looking at that.

Besides, one issue of the Dingbats could be enough. It's still a lot of fun in a tight little package, barely containing the enthusiasm of the Dingbats, who don't stand up for anybody except each other, especially all those crummy adults.

30 days of comics I love #3: What could be more just?

Excalibur #23
By Chris Claremont, Alan Davis and Paul Neary

Almost all of the second year of Excalibur was spent stuck on the Cross-Time Caper, and it was definitely getting old by the end. They were skipping across time, but not really progressing anywhere.

So everybody - both characters and readers - was fairly grateful when it finally came to an end, with Alan Davis returning to wrap things up.

(Davis wasn't the official artist on Excalibur by that stage, and after these two issues, wouldn't do any more until he came back for full writer/artist duties a couple of years down the line. The only real Excalibur is Davis Excalibur, but I still fee a little bad for Chris Wozniak, a genuinely interesting artist who was announced as the regular penciller, but didn't really fit, and only lasted a handful of issues before moving onto a career of claiming that Batman movies were ripping him off.)

The Excalibur crew had been rocketing through a checklist of different comic genres during their wild travels, and in this penultimate part, crash into a world very similar to Judge Dredd (right own to the logo.) It's a grim place full with high technology, massive overpopulation and gross pollution. 

A new version of Kitty Pryde is a crime boss in this world, but as typical for a Dredd story, the villain doesn't survive for many pages once the story gets going. Meanwhile, Meggan, the team's empathic spirit, literally chokes on the foul air before metamorphing into a huge armoured creature, brutal enough to withstand this brutal world.

The Cross-Time Caper didn't really work because the team would smash into the local narratives, and then bugger off again just as things were getting interesting, and this final jaunt was no exception, after a bunch of arrests and fights and demonic forces, everyone just gets back into their train and disappears, and the Dredd analogue lets them go, as she prepares for a long career of silent cameos when they get all the Captain Britains together.

 

It's still prime Davis and Neary, just before the penciller moved on to the even smoother lines of Mark Farmer as his inker. Alan and Paul were always a good mix, and have a fitting finale on their regular collaborations with this slice of brilliance..  

30 days of comics I love #2: I'm the fuckin' pearl!!

Peep Show #15
by Joe Matt

The thing I'm already missing most about Joe Matt's comics is how far he'd go to show what a complete asshole and total loser he was. By all accounts, he wasn't really exaggerating too much about his real world life for his comics, but you had to admire the guy for his honesty, if nothing else.

It's only fitting that the last comic he ever did comes with a cover featuring him sitting on a toilet, pants down around his skinny legs. But that smile, as he enjoys some old piece of pop ephemera, shows that this is his happy place, and that's a good a place as any to leave a final statement. Before it is flushed away.

This last Peep Show comic, coming out months after Matt fled this mortal coil, comes with the inevitable sadness that the artist isn't with us anymore, and even though the comics were created years ago - the final update on the life and adventures of Joe Matt peters out with events from 20 years ago - it's still fresh Joe Matt comics, and after his history, you know what you're going to get.

But there is some kind of statement, some kind of small culmination of his life's work, in three key areas. Most obviously in the adaption of the speech from Seth on leaving Toronto in 2003 (right down to the sharp punchline at Joe's indignation at being an irritating piece of sand) - but also with the listing of all the women he slept with, in all the unpleasant details (all on Joe's part, the women all seem pretty cool), and the final panel of his final page of published comics has him trying to sell off some Sopranos DVDs he grabbed from the HBO offices, which was only good and proper. He was always trying to make a buck.

I'll miss these glimpses inside Matt's sordid life, and I'll always miss his art, which was as pleasing as ever, becoming much more freer than his earlier work, more open and more room to breathe, even as Joe Matt loses his shit again, or just exposes how much of a goddamn perv he was.

30 days of comics I love #1: And we're all we've got.

All Star Superman #12

by Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely and Jamie Grant

Everybody rightly remembers the gorgeous emotional efficiency of that scene on the ledge from earlier in the series, where Superman stops a young woman from killing herself, but I always found the emotional heart of All-Star Superman in the final issue, when Luthor finally sees the world like his most hated enemy does.

Quitely is a master of the hyper-tableaus, capturing static moments of brilliance, but the emotional heft of the moment on Lex Luthor's face when he sees how the universe really works - and Superman was right all along! - has more power than a million exploding suns.

Luthor is the biggest dipshit in the DC universe, whatever continuity it is, his base jealousness so terribly petty, when he could change the world any time he can. Instead, he tries to beat up the one guy in the world who just wants to help everybody, and it's only when he siphons off enough of Kal-El's abilities that he sees the world on some metaphysical spectrum.

For all the good it does him - Superman flies off to be some kind of gnostic god in the sun at the end, but Luthor is just a punk with a broken jaw, lying the street, full of regrets and missed opportunities, as the guy he hates more than anything tells him that he could have saved the world years ago, if it really mattered to him.

But if even a shithead like Luthor can see beyond the pettiness of his immediate concerns, there is hope for all of us. This version of Superman - the ultimate ideal of the character, created by a writer who isn't afraid to let the snark slide away and embrace the ideological purity of the big man - has many lessons to teach us, and they're all so super. 

And maybe there is just a giant thought behind everything, that connects us all, and has the universe sitting up and admiring itself, and it's properly nice to know that this thought is probably 'be excellent to each other'.

'But I can't make it any louder!'

The third funniest thing you can do with music is drive somewhere with your kids, and put on some banging tunes that are slightly too loud, and then ignore your pre-school children and their moaning that it's too loud, and tell them that you can't hear what they're saying because the volume is too high, and you ask them if they want it turned up, so you make it louder, and you keep that going for the whole song.

The second funniest thing is after you turn the music down and it's all quiet in the car, and you just hear the three-year-old whisper in the back: "Louder."

You all know what the first funniest thing you can do with music is.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: All my lovely boys

The 2011 adaption of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a genuinely perfect film, (although the things Alec Guinness did with his earlier portrayal of Smiley are eternal). It's sad and grim and has the best possible cast, from Oldman on down. I think about the way Tom Hardy tells the station chief in Istanbul to fuck off on a daily basis alone.

And while it's a total sausage fest of a movie, I never cease to be amazed by the way Kathy Burke comes in and blows them all away with her tiny scene, putting some emotional heft into those stiff-necked spy games.

I wasn't surprised - Burke is one of the great actors of her generations, and was able to get actual pathos out of Waynetta Slob, it's no wonder she could weave gold out of the regrets of old spies. sheer perfection. 

Squid Game: Old Ben's an android!

We're a bit slow around these parts, and only just got around to watching that Squid Game show that all the cool kids were raving about years ago. But the timing was fortuitous, with a second season about to drop on the world, and it's now so old I feel slightly less guilty about spoiling the shit out of it.

Because while it was just as fun and heartbreaking and tense as everybody said, I can't believe I got sideswiped by the oldest twist in my book again.

So we figured out that the actual mastermind behind all the squid gaming was the crazy old guy - who you hadn't actually seen die - a good 30 seconds before he showed up again on screen, and all I thought was that they got me again.

Forty years ago, Harry Twenty on the High Rock was one of my absolute favourite strips in 2000ad. The comic was in its absolute golden age, and Harry 20 stood with the best of them, with plenty of space-prison thrills from writer Gerry Finley-Day and artist Alan Davis. 

And the late second-act revelation that Old Ben - the crazy old coot who had been at the prison since the start - was an android blew my eight-year-old mind. Ben had been a vital part of Harry's attempts to get off the Rock, with the usual dose of comic relief that always comes with that kind of character, and the sudden turn that he had been a pawn of the evil warden all along was genuinely shocking.

And then Squid Game pulled that dusty old trope out for its last episode twist, and I never saw it coming. O Yeong-su is so good in the role, charming and befuddled, an inane grin in the face of slaughter. Of course he was the bad guy all along.

I fully expect to fall for this again in the future, because time is a flat circle, and I never suspect the harmless old guy.