30 days of comics I love #22: It's big, too.

Avengers #167 

by Jim Shooter, George Pérez and Pablo Marcos

Long before Star-Lord beat Ronan the Accuser with an on-screen dance-off, I thought the Guardians of the Galaxy were a much bigger deal that they really were.

It was partly because, for some reason, I had a beach towel with the original Guardians flying through space for much of my childhood (I've tried to find an example of the art used on that towel, which I would always recognise, many times over the years, without any luck). But it was also because the archetypical Avengers for me will always be the brief time the Avengers were teaming up with the Guardians to take down the evil Korvac.

The Korvac Saga actually only runs for several issues, but still looms large over the hiostory of the Avengers. Written by Jim Shooter, and largely drawn by Pérez at his seventies heights, it has the Beast at his most eloquently humourous, Wonder Man in that bitchin' leisure suit, the colourful Vision and the Scarlet Witch blatantly getting it on, and Captain America, Iron Man and Thor to round out the iconic roster, and even that crew wasn't enough to stop the reality warping Korvac was bringing to the party.

Adding more characters to the long-term plotting would usually leave the story feeling crowded and thin, but with Shooter and Perez, it all flows remarkably well. Issue #167, a comic I've had since I was five-years-old, has all the heroes team-up and recognise the stakes they are facing, before shifting gears entirely and having Yellowjacket, the Wasp and freakin' Nighthawk beat up on the Porcupine for several pages. 

Decompressed comics had their day years ago, but the style still lingers in most mainstream superhero comics, so this kind of tight storytelling still feels impressive. As impressive as I always thought Starhawk and Charlie-27 were, drifting through the void on my towel.   

30 days of comics I love #21: I love adventure!

Detective Comics #38 (Millennium edition) 

By some golden age legends and a few literal unknowns

I've only read a tiny fraction of comics from the golden age, they are just something I've never seen around, and I have no idea how many even made it to this part of the world, all the way back in the day. The only things I've seen from that era have been reprints, and they are usually tiny slices of some extremely well-known comics and characters.

And then I get something like this, a facsimile reprint from the year 2000 (with some very 2000 advertisements) featuring the first appearance of Robin, and it reprints the whole lot, filler and all.

And there is a lot of filler in these comics, with strips and storylines that literally nobody cares about anymore. It's not hard to see why, the Batman story is clearly the most energetic and fun. even the colourful costumes alone makes it stand out from the pack. 

The Steve Malone, Cliff Crosby and Red Logan comics are all thuddingly dull to modern eyes, and even characters who still have some name recognition today, like the Crimson Avenger and Slam Bradley, have the same leaden art and tedious plots.

These are comics from a different time, and it's more than a little ridiculous to judge them with a modern eye. I don't begrudge anybody who gets real enjoyment from these crude comics from almost a century ago, and I even envy their ability to look past the simplicity of them.

But seeing them in a chunky package like this comic does leave me with the assurance that I don't really need to hunt out much more of this type of thing. I've read almost all of the early Batman and Superman comics in various reprints through the years, but his back-up crew from the golden age can happily fade away with history. 

They were only meant to last as long as the attention span of a 10-year-old boy in the 1930s anyway, and the fact that they have been reprinted at all gives them some kind of longevity, but it's only their proximity to the first Robin that put them in front of my eyes. 

30 days of comics I love #20: So much for subtlety!

Epic #4 

By Martin Edmond (and others, I suppose) 

It's in weird little series like this one - a four-part prestige format comic from Marvel's Epic line, largely published to bring more attention to the more regular Stalkers, Wild Cars and Nightbreed series that they were putting out - that you find real comics treasure.

I'm a massive, massive fan of the late, great Martin Emond, a kiwi cartoonist who did remarkable things with pencil, paint and tattoo ink in his short life, and I thought I knew of all the comics he had drawn, but I can still find a few precious pages lurking in this reject from the dollar bins.

Even better, it's Emond's take on Clive Barker's Nightbreed, and this short example shows that Emond was born to draw these wonderful freaks. Look at what he does with this spider hybrid lurking in the back of a pickup truck - 

- or the incredible way he draws Craig Sheffer's Boone in all his Cabal glory - 

or even just the wiry rednecks who have the misfortune to run into the Nightbreed crew - 

Even a tragically short artistic career can produce gorgeous comics hiding in the most mundane of places, and I know I'm never going to stop looking for them, especially when I see those bug eyes of doom staring back at me.

30 days of comics I love #19: I have taken his name, I must take his destiny

Legion of Super-Heroes #59 

by Levitz, Giffen, Bright, Gordon and Garzon 

With such a large and sprawling cast, a long-running series like the Legion of Super-Heroes always needed issues like this, where a solo member gets something of a spotlight, and usually learns an important lesson about life and heroism, often by studying something from the Legion's past adventures. 

This particular one was the last of the classic period Legion - the next issue saw the Magic Wars kick off, and then the whole concept was crashing into the five years later era, and literally nothing would ever be the same again. 

That v4 Legion is my favourite incarnation of the team ever, so I will never regret the decisions that led to those comics, but it is still a little wistful to see Levitz sign off from his long run on the regular Legion with a focus on the Invisible Kids (and poor old Chemical King).

It's a pretty standard effort, giving a little more depth to characters that were killed off years and years ago (although it is weird how much Lyle Norg keeps calling Chemical King a kid, when they're all basically children), and has some lovely Mark Bright artwork which looks a lot like something Curt Swan would have done in 1968, along with some gorgeously grimy Giffen pencils on the framing story.

And while it might not have felt like it at the time it was published in early 1989, it really is the end of an era. There was one more small epic too come, and then innumerable reboots and rethinks, but the simple pleasure of a basic solo Legionnaire comic book would never quite be the same again. The future moved on, a long time ago, and is already ancient history.

30 days of comics I love #18: You think the stain'll lift?

Warrior #26 

By Dez Skinn and pals 

You could always tell when a British comic paper that went after a slightly more sophisticated audience is about to fade away, because that's when the European reprints start overwhelming things. The comics from the continet are fun and stylish, but they're always a sign that the comic is running out of money.

Warrior only lasted a couple of years in the early eighties, but left behind a great legacy, if only because it was the first palce that Alan Moore's Miracleman and V For Vendetta appeared. The 26 black and white issues that were produced had a lot more than just Moore's post-modern superheroics going for it, before blazing out with this final issue.

Even at the end, and even with the overseas reprint crowding things out, the last issue of Warrior was a lot of fun. Moore and Lloyd were still doing V For Vendetta right till the end, and while Miracleman was absent, publisher Dez Skinn was still doing the very strange Big Ben spin-off with Will Simpson, and it is one of the very few comics that has both Moore and Grant Morrison in the credits box. 

The Morrison story - Liberators with the great John Ridgeway - is the first chapter of something that went exactly nowhere, but still hints at future greatness for the writer, while you also get a silly four-pager from a very young Carl Critchlow.

But, despite promises of big doings in the next issue, that was it for Warrior, although that more mature audience would still be a target for the rest of the decade, with comics like the brilliant A1 limited series giving writers and artists greater creative freedom, or efforts like Crisis and Deadline taking things in a more political and nihilistic directions.

So while this Warrior dies here, at least it goes down fighting and resides in the halls of comics Valhalla, where plenty of others would soon join it, once they resort to cheap reprints. 

30 days of comics I love #17: We all need hope.

Superman/Batman: World's Finest #3 

by Dave Gibbons, Steve Rude and Karl Kesel

My faith in the inherent justice of the universe took a major hit when I saw Steve Rude begging for comic work on social media. He should be fending away offers from every comic book publisher on the planet, not begging for scraps.

Maybe it's because he spent so much of the prime of his career on Nexus, an extremely 1980s sci-fi epic that is largely forgotten today, but Rude's art has always been incredible, with warmth, vitality and humour and should be appreciated more.

Consider this series from 1990, a period when Superman and Batman were hardly friends, and any sort of team-up between them was relatively rare. The scrip from Dave Gibbons is overloaded and overcomplicated in the way of so many superhero comics of the era, but Rude's art is genuinely timeless.

His Batman is sleek, flowing and mysterious, while Superman is open and powerful, always ready with an encouraging smile alongside some feat of super-strength. With able assistance from Karl Kesel and Steve Oliff, World's Finest looks like nothing else produced in the early 90s, which makes it even more appealing today. 

Rude's retro style helps with that timeless factor, but the storytelling is also always so clear, with plenty of visual gags and character moments to keep things moving. It is, quite frankly, so hard to understand why Rude isn't held up with the greats of the medium, and able to pick his projects on a whim. Maybe it's just too smooth, too pretty, and just too good for the world. 

We just don't deserve Steve Rude and his incredible style. 

30 days of comics I love #16: One cannot fall from so lofty a height without breaking.

Thanos Annual #1

by Jim Starlin and Ron Lim

With such an overwhelming personality and ethos, less really is more when it comes to Thanos. He was never more of an imposing presence than when he was taken off the table for more than a decade in the 1980s, and frequent attempts to do more with the character in the past few years have only diluted his appeal.

Even creator Jim Starlin can take it too far, with a number of graphic novels in the past decade that were painfully inessential, and all I've ever needed in 21st century Thanos is in the one-shot annual from 2014.

With typically slick art from Ron Lim and Andy Smith, this Thanos comic is set in the mad Titan's past, with one aspect of Thanos coming from the split second where he is about to pound on Captain America in the Infinity Gauntlet series from more than 20 years earlier, and clashing with an even earlier version who is still suffering a cosmic cube hangover.

Thanos likes the sound of his own voice as much as he literally loves Death, and this comic ensures that everybody is clear that Thanos' only great foe is himself, and that he has let omnipotence slip through his big chunky fingers time and time again, because deep down he believes he isn't worthy of it, and whether he is fighting Mephisto or the Silver Surfer or everybody in between, he's really only battling himself.

Everybody and their grandma knows who Thanos is these day, he was the ultimate villain of the Marvel movies, and had to be slain twice before it would take and the universe could be saved. And while Josh Brolin's performance found some surprising depths beneath that grey skin, it's Jim Starlin's version who is the one, true Thanos, defeating himself over and over again, because nobody else is worthy.

30 days of comics I love #15: Gentlemen, I hate you all.

War Story: Condors

By Garth Ennis and Carlos Ezquerra

When Garth Ennis is interviewed about a new comics project, he often gets asked why he keeps going back to the war stories, and you can almost hear the writer roll his eyes. He'll usually just ignore the fact that nobody asks why there has to be so many superhero titles, and patiently explain that while the comics are set in times of conflict, you can never run out of storytelling possibilities in the stresses and emotions of the characters living through such times.

Because these stories are never about the great leaders, the generals and political leaders who decide the fate of the world, they're about the people that are trapped in these places at the sharp end of the bombs, and just trying to stay alive, and maybe hold onto some scrap of their humanity while they do it.

Condors is entirely set in a foxhole during the Spanish Civil War, where four men from different backgrounds are trapped together, and have nothing else to do but tell their stories until the shelling lifts. They're all fighting for different reasons, some for ideology, some for the love of their country, some because they have no choice, but they're all circling the carnage of industrial 20th century conflict.

Most of Carlos Ezquerra's long and distinguished career was spent telling comics in the far future, or on another worlds. Even the real-life setting of his war comics were usually in some unnamed battlefield, but this is his home, the land of his forefathers, and the disgust at the nations using his own as their testing grounds for mass slaughter given their horrible clarity

And it is horrible, with a graphic depiction of the bombing of Guernica, one of of the most terrible events of that time in history, unflinchingly portrayed in all its gore and pointlessness. This is the price of war, as babies are burned alive in their mother's arms, and makes a cruel mockery of any justification for any kind of war.

There is no justification for this, of course, and the same old arguments in the foxhole may be given more weight with the experiences of each of the men that ended up in it, but they're still horrible and stupid. And there is always room for more of these kinds of stories on the comic book shelves, alongside all the spandex and crises.

30 days of comics I love #14: I see my whole life flashing before my eyes

Star Wars #79 

By Jo Duffy, Ron Frenz and Tom Palmer

Even with all the constant product beaming its way from a galaxy far, far away, I keep trying out new Star Wars comics. They're usually fairly bland and disappointing, and full of 12-part sagas that explain why some lightsabers are green, but I keep looking at them all the same, because I'm trying to capture the thrills of reading this issue back in early 1984.

It's a simple done in one, when Lando and Chewbacca were searching for Han Solo (which I never really understood, even as an eight-year-old, because it was obvious that Han was being taken to Jabba's joint). But it's got a spark that is often missing in modern Star Wars, full of action and event, and plenty of silly little jokes.

Duffy's script doesn't treat the characters are untouchable icons, but leans hard on the charming rogue factor, and isn't afraid to show Lando making stupid mistakes. He drives the wrong way down a hyper-highway and gives the game away after a few drinks, and some of it is pure slapstick - the part where he puts the wig and eyepatch on the wrong way and blinds himself still makes me laugh.

And when everything goes wrong with the intergalactic gangsters and the shit hits the fan, there is some high-speed action through the crowded space city. Frenz's art isn't quite as defined as it will be, leaning less into the retro look that he will become associated with, with Palmer's typically detailed inks giving it real heft.

It's a tiny part of the overall Star Wars saga, but not everything has to be the most important thing ever, It can just be a fun romp, at ultimate velocity, with lasers flying all around.

30 days of comics I love #13: Should have done this years ago

Judge Dredd Megazine #465 

By lots of different people

Let's talk about value for money. Comics are a notoriously bad return on investment for small businesses with a magazine rack, they gave you fuck all profit for the amount of retail real estate they consume. It's even worse in paces where the comics cost three times what they do in the US, and has only got worse everywhere as comics got flimsier and flimsier.

But you can still get a lot of bang for your buck with some comic books - manga gives you a solid hit of everything with every publication, and I've never seen one of the new digest titles that DC has been publishing out in the wild, but I dig the idea.

And I still feel like I'm getting my money's worth with every new issue of the Judge Dredd Megazine. It's more than $20 an issue, but it's also more than a hundred pages of comics and features, at a pretty high quality.

Issue number 465 is the most recent I've been able to get - I'm at least six months behind the rest of the world and only get a new issue every few months - but it's got a lot going on.  There's brand new Judge Dredd by Carroll and Williams (a middle chapter, but full of incident); Demarco PI by Bailey and Richardson (I'm still weirdly annoyed by the way they took her fortune away, and justifiably outraged by the way they killed her ape); some retro Mega-City 2099 fun from Niemand and Boyle (where they ruthlessly dispose of Maria the Italian stereotype landlady); some Hugo Pratt war comics from 1960; reprints of Hookajw and American Dredd comics that I never read; new Devlin Wayugh by Kot and Austin (nice try with the dildo, but still lacking in the acerbic wit of the original Smith version); and the prerequisite international judges story by Ballie and the still magnificent Steve Yeowell.

It's also got moving tributes to late art droids Ian Gibson and John Burns (the world is lesser without them), as well as several other features, previews and interviews. There has also been some Johnny Red comics by Garth Ennis recently, and Dan Abnett and Phil Winslade's regular Lawless series is fucking excellent, and feels most like classic 2000ad than anything else in the meg or the prog.

I'll be in a town that sells the Megazine next week, and I'm looking forward to catching up on it (and I hope there is some Lawless), and I don't know what issue it will be, or what it's going to have in it, but I know I'm getting my money's worth.

30 days of comics I love #12: We have to see what happens.

Marvels Epilogue #1

By Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross 

There have been many, many attempts to capture the lightning of the original Marvels series that Busiek and Ross gave us in the 90s, but this effort from 2019 is the only one to come close to the quality of the original.

A lot of the follow-ups to Marvels featured the original creators in some way, but rarely working together. Ross even went fully in the other direction with the Earth X stuff, which became voluminous. (I recently found the original Earth X ashcan thing that they gave away with Wizard, and they remain interesting redesigns for the Marvel universe, but I'm also happy with just that one little ashcan and none of the following comics.)

But it's only when Ross and Busiek are working together that the concept begins to sing again. Busiek's earnest style works perfectly with Ross' devotion to making the heroes look like they're flying around the real world, and it remains the principal appeal of the original mini-series.

This 2019 one-shot slots easily into the story of Phil Sheldon and his life photographing the Marvels, finding a brief moment in a 70s X-Men comic to show that it's still as terrifying and exhilarating to run into these marvelous creatures while out with your family.

Ross' painting has obviously evolved over the 25-year gap between the original Marvels and the epilogue, the 90s series has a hazy quality that might be a by-product of the artist's inexperience at the time, but definitely helped wit the dreamlike atmosphere that the story sometimes sought (the bit with Gwen Stacey and the Atlantean invasion in particular, all that wonderful water vapour.). In comparison the art on the epilogue is noticeably sharper, with a clearer line. More exact, which gives a 70s grittiness to this nostalgic trip.

But it's just as open and tender and wistful as anything in the original. Turns out all you have to do to match the success of the original comic was to get those creators together again. Nuff said.

30 days of comics I love #11: It is as simple as that.

History of the DC Universe #2 

By Wolfman and Pérez 

There has been another four decades of DC lore since this was published, but it's still a fine thing to read, largely because it's just page after page of great Pérez art, and that is as timeless as it ever was.

But it's also still very readable, because it captures that absolute sliver of time when the unified DC universe still made some kind of sense. It had somehow been deemed that the multiverse was too confusing for DC's readers, and things needed to be simplified into one universe. And it worked, for a whole month or so. 

And then the immediate contradictions kicked in, and you couldn't say who was an original member of the Justice League anymore, and the Legion of Super-Heroes were bringing their pocket universe nonsense into Superman, and nobody knew what the fuck was going on with Hawkman, a superhero who can fly and hit bad guys with a mace, and somehow suddenly had the most complicated history of any comic character anywhere.

It was all much, much more confusing than the idea of Earth-S and all that, and DC never really recovered that simplicity it craved, as it immediately undercut its own worlds with unnecessary complexity.

But still, for one moment, around the month that this comic came out, that it all made a kind of sense. Without the need for things like plot and character development, Wolfman delivers a lively history of the universe, and Pérez's pencils, massively shored up by the solidity of Karl Kesel's inks, makes it all look so very exciting and pretty.

And it's just a quiet reminder of the very last time you could sum up the DC universe in two 48-page comics. Two prestige format books was enough to contain all the universe that you needed, you didn't have to be shackled to the Book of Destiny to get the full story.

30 days of comics I love #10: He's a freakin' kid!

Marvel Preview #8: The Legion of Monsters

By Moench, Trinidad, Wolfman, Colan, McGregor, Ploog, Severin, Jones, Warner and Mayerik

You certainly got your money's worth in the sleazy and sexy horror magazines that Marvel used to publish, back when they still had some guts. This one-shot certainly gave it to you, with Morbius going full vamp in some gorgeous Sonny Trinidad pages, some extraordinarily gooey noir by Mike Ploog and Marie Severin (the criminally underrated Severin again providing extra value), and Val Mayerik bringing a dreamy haze to a story of a mummified dog god.

But it's a six-page Blade story from regular Tomb of Dracula collaborators Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan that hits the hardest, with the vampire hunter entering a dark old house to take down a nest of child bloodsuckers.

I first read this story as a kid myself, and there was some special horror in seeing people my size turned into undead terrors, bloody drool falling from their fangs, their eyes just pinpoints of evil light. It was the first time I had seen children used as monsters, and this one story was responsible for some specific nightmares that still linger in my mind.

And now, reading this comic as a parent, it's a whole new horror, because I have been unable to escape the cliché of being more upset by the sight of children suffering now that I have children of my own. These kid vamps might be 'older than any human', but they once had parents who lost their loved ones to this vampiric curse, and there is true tragedy behind the misty moodiness of Colan's artwork.

Blade wipes them all out in the end, because that's what Blade does, but the sight of a grown man thrusting his wooden knives into the chest of such a small creature is a whole new level of horror, from a time when black and white nastiness was everywhere.

30 Days of comics I love #9: Gonna be doin' some eatin'... and some readin'!

True Stories #1

by Derf Backderf

All of Backderf's books are excellent - My Friend Dahmer is a remarkable work that doesn't sensationalize the artist's connection to the serial killer, and his Kent State book is absolutely essential reading - but I wish we had a thousand issues of his True Stories.

Produced for free weekly rags that had a half-life of three days, the few issues of True Stories we got collected the best of Backderf's strips. They're all four panels long, all feature some kind of weirdo that Backderf has seen roaming around the American Midwest, and they are as funny as fuck.

The most surprising thing is that even though the people that appear in True Stories are usually very, very strange, the strip rarely felt like it was condescending towards its subjects. It's only a few panels, so it's only the most basic representations of real people in all their complexities, but there is a sense of just telling it like it is, without all that much judgement attached.

And they are also very, very funny people. The glory of living in a society is that we are surrounded by people with strange quirks or mannerisms, and there is humour in their interactions with a straight society. 

There is plenty of exaggeration in Backderf's figures, often to extreme effect, but these are real people that we all see out and about every day, and whose idiosyncrasies are usually forgotten as soon as they walk around the street corner.

Instead, a tiny handful of them are memorialized in Backderf's strips. We all know people like this, and we all see people like this, every day in every place, just doing their thing, and making the whole world just a little less drab.

30 Days of Comics I love 8: Words! Words! Hulk is sick of words!

Incredible Hulk #133 

by Thomas, Trimpe and Severin

It's absolutely diabolical how Marvel treated Herb Trimpe in the artist's twilight years. He produced decades of great comics for the company, including a long run on the Incredible Hulk that is still the seminal take on ol' jade jaws, and he was left out in the cold by a company that has frequently shown nothing but disinterest for its own history and the people that created it.

Take any Hulk comic from the 70s, and chances are Trimpe drew it, and chances are he drew the hell of it. Issue #133 is a typical effort from this era, with the Hulk crashing into the world of another petty tyrant, and fucking it all up with his rage and power. It's not saying anything that a thousand other omics aren't saying, but there also aren't a thousand comics with Trimpe's powerful pencils on it, or with the stunning inkwork of John Severin thrown in on top.

Severin is such a precise, exact artist, that even as inker, his faces are clearly his, with that incredible detail and the tightest of lines. Trimpe's art is still powerful and thrusting, but has new delicacies under his collaborator's fine inks, bringing out the best of both artists. There are big open panels, and storytelling that is so clear that even Roy Thomas knows to shut up for a page of Hulk sneaking aboard a ship and keeps it silent. 

This combination of Trimpe's power and Severin's exactness means The Hulk has rarely looked better and while the big guy is still smashing the occasional fascist these days, he isn't doing it with as much style as he did, way back then. 

30 days of comics I love # 7: The food was all ate and the fire went out.

The Last American #4

By Wagner, Grant and McMahon

Even though the creators of The Last American series - published by Epic Comics in the dark days of the early 90s - are most associated with the world of Judge Dredd, the post-Apocalyptic landscape of this comic bears little resemblance to the Cursed Earth that surrounds Mega-City One.

There are no mutant hordes roaming the wasteland on jazzed-up motorcycles, no clones of dinosaurs attacking small villages of normal folk, and no blatant metaphors for the dangers of mass capitalism running riot in Vegas.

Instead, Ulysses S Pilgrim, the final American of the title, is the only human left in a world that has been completely wiped out. There is no post-apocalyptic pulling together of civilization, just endless death and a world choking on ashes.

There has been a trend towards seeing the end of the world as one big violent party, where all inhibitions have been vaporized in the nuclear fire. Instead, Mike McMahon's usual gorgeous art gives us a never-ending wasteland of nothing, where nobody can be alpha anymore, because there is nobody else to rail against. The horror of nuclear war is that it blasts away the old world, but doesn't replace it with a blank slate, it just replaces it with the cold silence of nothing. 

At the end of this short series, there is still a sliver of hope that there might be other people out there, despite any real evidence that anybody else is actually left. Even Pilgrim gives up the search, the last person to try and find America, and the last to realize there is nothing left to find.

All that is left for Pilgrim is hallucinations of mass musical numbers, and souless robots to keep him company, there at the last gleaming of the twilight, before the lights go out for good.

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.

The only horror I could get

The closest I come to the hoary old thrill of browsing at the video store these days is when I go to the local library to load up on the triple features I need while I'm working, and I'm still amazed that it doesn't cost a cent. It's all free with the library card, and I load up on half a dozen films a week.

I'm amazed because having your own copy of anything used to be ridiculously expensive, especially if you had the audacity to want it for longer than one night. I once got hit with a huge $70 bill for a copy of Turkey Shoot that got stolen from my car while I was renting it.

If I actually wanted my own copy of something, especially one that wasn't second-hand, I had to save up for it. The first film I ever owned on video tape was Pink Floyd The Wall, and that cost me $35 in 1988 money. I could have bought 10 X-Men comics for that.

So the only way to build up any kind of movie library was to haunt the video stores, and pick up the stuff they've put out for sale. It didn't matter that they had been played hundreds of times already, or that they were covered in the store's stickers, or were just usually the shitty movies that nobody cared about anymore, every one was precious.

Or, at least, between 10 and 15 bucks, which was still a lot of money for young Bob. I still managed to scratch together enough spare change to get enough, and of course I tried to get as much horror as I could.

The first was the best - I picked up Dawn of the Dead at the Record Parlour in Timaru for $10 of birthday money, and I still have it now. I was also stoked to get my own Robocop, especially because the one I had taped off the TV was censored to hell, and I also still have the gorgeous Jean Rollin suckfest that I got in 1995 up on the bookshelf.

But those were rare gems, and I still ended up with a  load of very dodgy movies, like CHUD, or Waxwork, or a compilation of the Freddy's Nightmares show.

They weren't, by any measure, the greatest things in the world, but they were the start of a film collection, and I held onto them for years without watching them, (I'm still not sure I ever watched that Freddy thing.)

Now I own and have access to hundreds of films, the sort of movies I would have killed to see in the 90s. But those first films, picked up from video stores and second hand stores around the country, were somewhere to start, and we all have to start somewhere.

This is a house of McMahon: Proto Dredd

Mike McMahon was literally right there from the start of Dredd - while not a co-creator, he drew the first stories to be published - and helped create the look and feel of Mega City-One, but it still took him a while to define his own individual style. His early work is more crowded, and more rounded, than the sharp, angular brilliance that was to come, but the greatness was starting to shine through by the time Judge Dredd walked out of the Cursed Earth.