Tuesday 12 March 2024

Marvel Firsts: the 1960s


Stan Lee, Jack Kirby & others
Marvel Firsts: the 1960s (2011)

This collects all those first issues or first appearances and is therefore where it all began, assuming we can agree on what it is. I've been engaged in an attempt to understand the evolution of caped adventures and this seemed a better gamble than collected editions of any single title, running as it does in chronological sequence from the  1961 debut of the Fantastic Four through to the first issue of the Silver Surfer in 1968, and with a lot of the stuff we've forgotten about in between.

The Marvel revolution is generally characterised as Stan Lee and Jack Kirby combining existing comic book genres into a single continuity, then having everybody turn up in everyone else's books. The existing (and failing) genres which went into the mix included romance, horror, humour, superhero, and monster comics. The first issue of the Fantastic Four pushes most of those buttons, not least the cover featuring a giant and vaguely reptilian thing smashing its way up through the asphalt, gargantuan claws reaching out to ensnare the puny surface dwellers - duplicating the cover of pretty much every issue of Tales to Astonish prior to Hank Pym discovering he could talk to ants. Inside we get super-science, rocketry, the hot-rod loving teenager, wisecracks, and the Invisible Girl ticking all of the usual chick boxes in requiring the protection of the lads.

Most surprising for me has been the realisation of just how shaky were the first stirrings of the Marvel universe, because Stan Lee telling me how the first issue of the Fantastic Four was at least on par with War and Peace to a monthly schedule apparently wormed its way into my subconscious. Unless War and Peace - which I've never read - is actually fairly ropey, in which case fair play.

Fantastic Four #1 has all sorts of wonderfully screwy things going on, but it has the rhythm of hesitant first steps with Stan and Jack - but mainly Jack - making it up as they go along, jamming disparate elements together and hoping it will work. It doesn't feel confident and lurches along much like the strips of the thirties and forties, as does the first allegedly pulse-pounding issue of the Avengers, in case anyone was wondering. This isn't really a criticism given the likelihood of anything living up to Stan's hyperbole, but it's engaging for reasons besides those promised by the cover, or at least was to me. Further clues as to the balance of the Lee and Kirby partnership may be found by comparing Lee's typewritten synopsis for Fantastic Four #1 - also included here - with what was published, and it looks a lot like Jack was doing his best to give the thing a bit of a dynamic, a quality which isn't conspicuous in Lee's vague, even apologetic stage directions.

Stranger still, the wild west comics running contemporaneous to the early superhero stuff are by far the best material in at least the first half of the collection, their obvious confidence presumably deriving from established traditional styles. However, as the years pass, we can see our caped pals catching up and cohering into something which seems to know what it's doing, and Silver Surfer #1 is legitimately a masterpiece of the form.

This has been less exciting but more educational than I expected, which is nice.



Tuesday 5 March 2024

New Mutants Forever


Chris Claremont, Al Rio & Bob McLeod
New Mutants Forever (2011)

Chris Claremont had already returned to the X-Men in 2009 with X-Men Forever, a title continuing the story from which he'd been unceremoniously unplugged back in 1991 when it was discovered that some readers disliked issues in which the X-Men girls go shopping and felt there weren't sufficient stabbings. Here he does the same with the New Mutants, although there are different circumstances to the end of his original run, notably that - so far as I understand it - he simply didn't have time to keep it going given everything else he was writing at the time, and handed the keys over to Louise Simonson who was at least on his side. I'm not sure this one really needed to happen by quite the same terms as X-Men Forever, but it's mostly fun with Claremont playing to his not inconsiderable strengths.

I can see the logic of utilising the trusty crayon of Bob McLeod given his status as co-creator, but I have to admit he's never been one of my favourites; and Al Rio's art looks very much as though he attended the Bob McLeod school. There's nothing wrong with McLeod's art and, to paraphrase what somebody or other once said of Tony Hadley, that's what is wrong with his art. It's very clean and clear, and it gets the job done, but it gets the job done with a limited range of variant facial expressions and not much you could describe as dynamic. Still, the magic of Claremont is that he can worm even the most preposterous shite into your subconscious and have you swear you've been watching Citizen Kane, sidestepping the problem of clichés - of which one should probably expect a number given that New Mutants is one of those caped titles - by splashing them about regardless with just enough spin and distraction to get away with it.

Here we have the New Mutants battling Red Skull and his Nazi pals in a version of Rome which has somehow survived the last twenty thousand years in isolation in the Amazon basin. Red Skull turns Cypher into a boggle-eyed version of himself who stands around in just his y-fronts agonising about this most ludicrous of transformations; and even the swastikas resemble something from the Beano; but not once does it inspire the question of why anyone bothered. It's no Demon Bear Saga, but New Mutants was a great book and this collection effortlessly reminds us why.

Tuesday 27 February 2024

American Victim


Meg McCarville American Victim (2023)
There was a bit of a commotion on social media when Amphetamine Sulphate published Four Circles, McCarville's previous volcanic eruption of righteous bile. I couldn't tell what had happened and felt disinclined to ask nosey questions, but the fallout seemed to be that Amphetamine Sulphate weren't going to be publishing this one which, as it so happens, provides substantial insight into the shit show which ultimately led to its publication by someone else, namely Ric Royer's Model City Books.

By her own testimony, Meg McCarville is a woman with issues who tends to find herself in unfortunate situations. The unfortunate situation was, in this instance, finding herself stalked by a nutcase who, amongst other things, dibbed her in to the FBI for alleged acts of terrorism which were obviously nothing of the sort, and all because he cared. He's identified in American Victim as Max Cady on Wheels, which seems fair, and whilst many of us will have met people like him, this goes a lot further than some disgruntled twat making a few prank phone calls. In fact it's terrifying, and even more terrifying than the aggressive-aggressive acts of sabotage dispensed by our boy is the fact that he gets to keep on keeping on, because while American law enforcement agencies excel in certain areas, not least of these being the dispensation of traffic citations, they're mostly fucking useless unless you're being menaced by an African-American with one of those candy bars that looks a bit like a firearm. If law enforcement did the job it purports to do, American Victim would have been a five-page pamphlet.

As ever, it's both a fucking tough read, and yet one which gets its hooks into you almost immediately because even at her absolute lowest ebb, Meg McCarville is very, very funny, wielding the kind of sarcasm which could have an eye out. It's Bukowksi with tits jammed on eleven, Lydia Lunch admitting she digs Kiss and rocking out, all directed by John Waters at his furthest remove from polite society and the closest I've come to writing with the face-punching intensity of an MOP album; and these aren't even necessarily its greatest strength, that being the words of truth spoken in dark, dark jest - truths that leave bruises.


I've gone through phases of surrounding myself with junkies and nobodies and ex-cons, but never in my life had I felt like I really fell in with the worst crowd until I found myself surrounded by phony progressive anarcho-feminist cunts and dopey woke boys (who really just pounded their politics so they can pound some psycho feminist pussy) who got into more of an uproar about someone getting misgendered even though they changed their pronoun every other week.



Honestly, this is one of the most powerful extended rants I've read in a long time, and anyone whose gag response has started kicking off would do well to remember that Voltaire, Swift, Rabelais and all those other sarcastic fuckers of yesteryear likewise delivered their testimonials with lashings of piss, vinegar, and castor oil. If you really want to understand the modern world, it's all here.

Tuesday 20 February 2024

The Vanishing Tower


Michael Moorcock The Vanishing Tower (1970)
This is my fourth Elric book and I realise that I've been going at it all wrong. It isn't that I haven't enjoyed them, but I expected to enjoy them more than I have done. I'm not automatically well-disposed towards anything involving either spells, wizards or castles, so I need my occasional fantasy novel to do a bit more than the usual. Elric does a bit more than the usual, but nothing like so much as Moorcock's other novels tend to do. This would be fine in itself but for the scrappily episodic feel of short stories welded together, one quest after another, mystic day-saving gemstone after mystic day-saving gemstone…

Well, it seems these novels actually are short stories welded together, but short stories of such length as to be further subdivided into portions by my customary reading habits - an hour when I wake up and another before I go to sleep, which usually works out at about fifty pages a day with most books. Anyway, being as these things are pretty breezy, I made the effort to read each of the three short stories into which this one divides in single hour-long sittings, and suddenly they were a whole lot more enjoyable. I guess the existence of all those droning fifteen volume sword and sorcery epics has fooled me into the belief that I need to treat this kind of thing as a saga, accordingly remembering all the unpronounceables with walk-on parts for when they turn up later to reveal they still have such and such a mystic dingus in their possession.

It seems that reading each Elric episode in one go without worrying too much over minor points of continuity is the key, additionally meaning one is less likely to be distracted from the profoundly atmospheric weirdness; which is the main reason for reading these things.

So, it seems it wasn't Michael Moorcock after all. It was me. I still say he's written better, but then even the fruits of his occasionally phoning it in tend to be way above the average.

Tuesday 13 February 2024

Strange Adventures


Tom King & Mitch Gerads Strange Adventures (2021)
Adam Strange is a regular guy who finds himself randomly and instantaneously beamed to the distant planet of Rann, there to fly around wearing a jetpack solving science-fiction crimes with just his wits and his trusty laser pistol. He was an old school character from before pow! the comic book grew up, one I first encountered in Alan Moore's version of Swamp Thing wherein it was revealed that the sexy naked ladies of Rann were literally queuing up for a go on Strange's mighty Earth penis. Whether or not pow! the comic book had grown up by this point is probably debatable, but issues were sold only to older boys and girls who had - you know - done it.

I'm now at the stage where I'd probably pick up The Adventures of Jeff Lynne and ELO were it produced by Tom King and Mitch Gerads, so I found Strange Adventures irresistible. I know some Toms have been better than others. Rorschach wasn't quite what I'd hoped it would be and Batman could have been better, but this one is up there with his best.

I remain mostly unconvinced that the comic book ever truly needed to pow! grow up, mainly because it usually translates into Red Tornado taking crack and then having a wank behind some bins; but Strange Adventures shows us how it's supposed to work. The art is gorgeous, suggesting bande dessinées rather than the usual manga-influenced tripe, and the telling is nothing if not cinematic, invariably leaving it up to the reader to work out what the hell is happening.

What the hell is happening is that this version of Adam Strange is involved in a war. It wouldn't be anything new but for King writing with all the nuance necessary to describe actual conflict, doubtless drawing from his own experience in Iraq. The revelation of Strange having engaged in less than chivalrous acts during the heat of battle comes as no great surprise, but the supplementary revelation of the deed being very much what it looks like rather than a dream or fake news is genuinely shocking. Ordinarily we'd ask how he's going to get out of this one, and he doesn't; yet this isn't one of those jobs where we know that pow! the comic book has grown up because we can quite clearly see Superman killing a homeless person for chuckles. Rather, the startling message is that terrible things happen during war, and usually so terrible that no amount of squinting can ever draw forth some tidily moral lesson about good and evil, getting one's hands dirty, omelettes requiring broken eggs or whatever other bullshit we keep telling ourselves. So King's Adam Strange isn't a hero, or if he is, he's a hero who goes to war and fails to come out of it smelling of roses - the whole point being that no-one does.

Strange Adventures resembles a comic book but reads like a novel, and a fairly substantial novel too.

Tuesday 6 February 2024

Meanwhile in Dopamine City


DBC Pierre Meanwhile in Dopamine City (2020)
Up until this year I had assumed that DBC Pierre had jacked it in following the thorough slagging which I seem to recall Ludmilla's Broken English had garnered. I looked online but could find nothing more recent. Then taking another look just a few months ago I discovered at least three novels I'd somehow missed, so not only is he back, but it turns out that he hasn't actually been away.

Meanwhile in Dopamine City is nothing less than a dissection of why everything is shit. Some will tell you that the idea of everything being shit is an erroneous assessment, even suggesting that we've perhaps forgotten about rickets, cot death, and Adolf Hitler. The reason it's an erroneous assessment is usually because you're old and not everyone who likes manga is necessarily a kiddy fiddler, which is racist to say, and all sorts of other poorly defined reasons which twenty-something victims of product placement wearing cat ears will generally hide behind slogans, flags, hashtags, retweets, and strength in numbers because it's all about how you feel, and you just a hater. Get over it. You're like really old LOL.

This is a story about a father who strives to separate his nine-year old daughter from her smartphone, and it could have gone the Richard Littlejohn route, except DBC Pierre is a master of nuance, with not a molecule out of place in his scathing testimony, no ambiguity, not even a gap by which to accommodate anything he didn't actually say - before anyone starts rolling their eyes over cancel culture or its alleged non-existence. This being the third of his novels that I've read, I can see the pattern and feel I understand the first two a little better. Pierre writes satire in the Swiftian sense, but his escalation of reality is so extreme as to border on the Bugs Bunny cartoons of the forties, with Will Self growing a vagina at the back of some rugby player's kneecap seeming almost sober by comparison. Yet, Pierre's prose is of such precision as to nail his narrative firmly to something we can only recognise as reality. If this one is almost science-fiction in its dabbling with cyberspace, social media, and quantum bollocks, it feels like the novel which William Gibson has been trying to write but never managed because he gets too hung up on designer labels and usually forgets to fucking say anything.


Lon sucked a blast of crisp air through his nose, rinsed it around as if to renew his brain as the world renewed around him. He didn't know if it was bad shit out and good stuff in - nobody knew if it was bad shit out and good stuff in any more. For Lon's money the Medinas hadn't been bad shit, Capital hadn't been a bad bank, waiting for the hair to arrive on your parts hadn't been a bad time to start talking teabagging, but now it was shit out, shit in, and nobody knew which was which any more, nobody seemed to care - it didn't matter if it was bad shit, there was no bad any more, there was no good, no scientific basis for either, it was all shit out, shit in.



The bad shit is, in case you haven't looked out of the window lately, pretty much the voracious ascendance of what Guy Debord described as the Spectacle and the devaluation of reality and human experience by ideology, even amorphous corporate driven almost ideology. Pierre communicates the divide with a shocking switch of narrative technique, the first hundred or so pages of poetic second person prose flipping to disorientating first person accounts sharing each page with a sidebar, essentially splitting the narrative into a plurality of cause and effect. This takes some getting used to. I read each first person account then flipped back to catch up on the sidebars, which sort of works. The sidebars comprise the kind of sub-newsy shite the internet chucks at you at almost every click which, in this case, informs what's going on in the novel and is in turn informed by it.


78177407943098723-0203437: Donkeyhooty de la Munchies announced he's going 'quad' and moving on to all fours for life. The move has been hailed by the wider Low-Responsibility Individuals community - better known as Loris - as a major step towards its recognition as a thriving lifestyle sector. Though not originally a Lori himself, Donkeyhooty aligned with the movement after being forced to defend his right as a quadruped to relieve himself in public, if only in parks and on verges. A recent survey reported that Loris have overtaken Emos as the lifestyle of choice for disaffected under-thirties, though they still rank well below haulers.



I've attempted to reproduce the author's de-emphasis by use of greyed-out text, which I assume attempts to invoke the attention span which is typically applied to such information. In contrast to the familiar human drama of the main text, the narrative unfolding through the sidebars jumps a shark every third or fourth page yet without diminishing the integrity of the whole, and anyone claiming otherwise - particularly anyone invoking hyperbole, overreaction or hysteria - might start by looking up either Richard Hernandez or Anthony Loffredo. Never in human history has there been a better time for the expression of self-loathing.

Meanwhile in Dopamine City is not an easy book, and even though it works, and works well, the split narrative is too disorientating to facilitate anything you could describe as a comfortable ride, but it's undeniably and cathartically exhilarating as blast of random noise, like William Burroughs but with a much sharper focus; and I'm not sure I've read a more thorough, convincing, or funnier damnation of our times.

Tuesday 30 January 2024

The Sheriff of Babylon


Tom King & Mitch Gerads The Sheriff of Babylon (2016)

Given that it has somehow taken me five years to get around to bagging and reading the second collection of this twelve-issue comic book, I've just re-read the whole thing from issue one onwards. In fact, I've re-read it twice in consecutive sittings because, much like real life, it's occasionally confusing and difficult to work out who is on which side; and because it seemed to warrant it.

Tom King worked for the CIA and spent five months in Baghdad after the fall of Saddham Hussein. The Sheriff of Babylon isn't really autobiographical, but has the cadence of human existence doing what it can in terrible situations. This terrible situation was, of course, the war; and King's experience of the war, as informs this story, suggests that the principal casualty - which I suppose you might say we've been referring to as truth for the sake of argument - is the notion of there ever having been an us and them. War, the book seems to suggest, atomises combatants into a million disconnected individuals, each just trying to survive, with allegiances sworn in peacetime rendered meaningless by shitbags on both sides of the divide. The allegiances cautiously struck in this tale - Chris the US military contractor, Nassir who was Saddham's favourite cop, and Saffiya, whose entire family were executed by Saddham's favourite cop - could only have come about during wartime. The story attempts to solve the murder of a single individual in a country busily fighting itself, where the lives of single individuals mean nothing, and therefore mean everything. It's occasionally difficult to keep track of who probably shouldn't have done what because this isn't one of those Punisher stories about guns, grunting, and clearly defined moral codes; all of which is the great strength of this work fuck it - this masterpiece.

The art is astonishing, distinctly filmic, and never overplays its hand. One might imagine that The Sheriff of Babylon would be better suited to film given that it seems to impersonate one in certain respects; but I'm not convinced. Some of what occurs is too awful, and the horror would overpower the narrative, turning it into something it never set out to be. Gerads beautiful yet harrowing art, on the other hand, removes the story from its own reality just enough to allow for its telling without the body count getting in the way.

You remember all that stuff about pow! the comic book grows up? Well, this is what it looks like.