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

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

When the good lads at the local comic shop had 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 up things like the Superboy’s Legion 100-page special by Alan Davis and some random Hellblazer, and finally complete a run of Mark Millar’s Ultimates comics. It was also a lot easier to try something new, like the comic adaptation of A Game Of Thrones.

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

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

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

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

There is no style of its own, it needs moody, stylistic art that captures the filth and depth of Westeros in equal measure, not art that looks like fill-in work for Young Justice. There is no real attempt to do anything with the comic medium, even though the source material offers plenty of opportunities. They could have done some lovely text/art pieces on the history and geography of this fantastic world and its Houses, or use colour and tone to do interesting flashbacks. There are so many chances to do world building beyond plodding through the basic plot. It doesn’t even have any bloody maps, and as the TV show proved, giving these things a sense of geography is essential for story comprehension.

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

Instead, it just plods along and gets stuck into the long plot without offering any of the original text’s charm. It all plays out exactly as expected. And you know when the issue gets to the Most Important 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 its overuse has reduced it to tedium. It’s probably all Mark Millar’s fault, since he loves the full-page spread so much he wants to have its babies and has used it well past its best-before date.

Because it doesn’t mean anything if it is used all the time. Outside of splash pages, comic creators from before the 1980s would only whip out a full-pager if the story absolutely demanded it. When he did go for it, Kirby would always fill a huge spread with loads and loads of Kirby Stuff (including that bizarrely beautiful collage work), and one of the most visceral reactions I’ve ever had to a comic book was Batman on a horse in the Dark Knight Returns, exploding onto a full page

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

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

It’s a stylistic tic that has filtered through 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 already old and tired by the time Superman died in a comic composed of nothing but splash pages.

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

And if that’s frustrating, it’s damned embrassing 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 chance to pick up a few new readers with the comic, only to produce something mediocre and pointless. You shame me with your lack of ambition, comics. You shame me.

NEXT: And another thing….

A week of moaning: Complaining about complaining

Bah!

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

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

Consider The Word – a terrific British music/culture magazine that has some wicked free CDs on its covers, some fascinating articles, some sharp writing on sharp subjects, terrific reviews of esoteric music and film and television, and loads and loads of stuff I like to read about.

It’s also guaranteed to feature several letters to the editors from readers outraged that the 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 found ideologically dubious. (A recent interview with Tony Blair got a particular kicking.)

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

Or consider the Sepinwall – One of the very first things I do after watching a particularly satisfying television show is go to Alan Sepinwall’s website and see what he thought about it. I always enjoy Sepinwell’s evaluations, because he has excellent taste (which, amazingly, is very much in line with my own,) and even when he doesn’t enjoy something, he always explains why with eloquence and fairness.

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

But I can never 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 and appreciative discussion, there is always one wanker who rains on everybody’s parade.

Even if you’ve just watched a transcendent piece of television, and all of creation should agree, there will still be that wanker who sniffs at it, declares it to be dull or tedious without backing it up with anything, and then disappears like a fart in the wind.

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

Or consider the Catwoman – I may have some sympathy with this complaint, but the fuss it generated was far more than necessary. It was over the recent relaunch of this title, which ended with a remarkably tasteless sex scene, which was just a bit gross.

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

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

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

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

It might be a symptom of the Playlist Generation, so used to getting exactly what they want, in the order that they want, that they’re baffled when the World doesn’t always conform to their strict view of it. It must be hard for them, but it’s up to them to deal with it. The rest of us have lives to get on with..

I have to confess – I work for a newspaper website, an industry where complete strangers are telling me every single day that I’m doing a terrible job, because they think 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’s my excuse for the next week of moaning. While I handle things like a typical passive-aggressive Kiwi, and take all my distaste and anger and stress and squeeze 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 some back.

Next: A Dance With Disappointment

Who's the best?

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

Even though we are living in a real Golden Age of comic book reprints – where it’s possible to get almost anything in some kind of collected form – there are still books that I would get without hesitation, if they only existed in the first place.

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

***

 Ann Nocenti and Sean Phillips’ Kid Eternity

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

One of the last things she wrote for comics before shifting her focus to journalism, Kid Eternity has Nocenti’s typical stream of consciousness joy, with Sean Phillips actually let off the leash for once. His art is still a little too stilted for the askew stories, but he shows an imaginative flair in design that he barely gets to use in more earthly concerns like Criminal.

Kid Eternity was also one of the first Vertigo comics, helping to set a vague template for insane, road tripping sagas that the imprint has returned to, again and again. It was also a sequel to Grant Morrison’s aggressively obtuse mini-series, and while it shared that shorter series’ warped sense of humour, it also carved its own path into the American 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 are easily available, but of the uncollected Vertigo comics (and there really are a lot of them), Kid Eternity is one I’d like to see the most. It didn’t last long into 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 wonderful things with Ed Brubaker, there may not be a better time to find an audience for this.

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

***

The Amazing World of DC Comics

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

At least, I hope they offer fascinating insights, but like I said, I’ve never even seen one. But friendly interviews with people like Joe Kubert and Carmine Infantino at the very height of their powers, and glimpses behind the office doors of DC Comics, and passionate (if biased) appreciations of DC’s past, are all guaranteed.

I mean, just look at these covers.

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

While we’re at it, it would also be bloody wonderful if the FOOM magazines were collected too. Same thing, different company….

***

Charley’s War omnibus

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

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

The Great War was a gigantic and horrific meat grinder, as soldiers marched into machine gun fire. A larger collection would pile the horror up higher and higher and add to the intensity. Charley Bourne’s story is a long and terrible one, but it also says multitudes about things like honour, class treachery, survival and compassion.

It would also balance out the story a bit more. Each of the hardcover books covers a huge amount of ground, but one volume –which might only deal with one battle in that vast conflict - can be unrelentingly 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 a large amount was reprinted in the Judge Dredd Megazine, but it stretches well past that (and even past the official end of WW1, into the forgotten British incursion into Russia), and even though it really finishes when Mills stopped writing the title, there is merit in Charley’s curtailed World War Two adventure. (Scott Goodall is no Pat Mills, but who is?). That could all be collected in a few mammoth Omnibus-style books.

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

***

The essays from the back of Criminal

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

***

Legion v4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

While I used to be genuinely baffled by the lack of any collection of the Giffen/Bierbum, I now realise that the things I enjoyed most about Legion – its confusion and refusal to make it easy for the reader – were the things that put most people off it. Most people just don’t want to put that much time and effort into a superhero comic, especially a 20-year-old comic that has zero impact on the current DC universe.

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

I’d buy one.

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

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

How come Chronicles of Wormwood – a comic that 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 recently pointed 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 social injustice and intergalactic threats with the same fervour – faces off against some 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 and moans about the fact that being a superhero isn’t fun anymore.

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

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

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

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

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

Chronicles of Wormwood: The Last Battle by Garth Ennis and Oscar Jimenez wrapped up a couple of months ago, but was barely noticed, largely because the last issue came out almost a year after the penultimate one. It also had typical Avatar covers that managed to be both totally bland and utterly grotesque, which saw them sink into the mass of gore in the Avatar section of the comic shop.

But there was still a decent comic beneath those 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 Ennis script, which manages to mix some genuine sweetness in amongst all the depravity.

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

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

There are lots and lots of knob jokes, some alarmingly imaginative swearing, disgusting demons, gruesome and disturbing gore 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, or some bluntly satirical jabs at the state of modern television.

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

When pope Jacko lays out his master plan for Wormwood, he tells him that they will ultimate ascend into political glory and bring about the long-awaited and long-postponed apocalypse, because, after all:

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

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

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

In that Green Lantern comic, John Stewart has no plan beyond A) beat things up. He has a magic wishing ring that can literally create anything he thinks of, and he can’t do anything to fight the Man. Danny Wormwood has a guy nobody can lie to, and one Star Wars-obsessed little rabbit, and he digs out the corruption at the core, before it gets a chance to spread and gain power.

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

If somebody can use a rabbit literally fucking a man in the face to say something about the right way to deal with corruption, why can’t you say the same thing with a decent superhero like John Stewart?

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