Doom Patrol

Gerard Way & Nick Derington Doom Patrol (2018)
It came back and it was mostly wonderful, and then it was cancelled because no-one bought it. This isn't one of those graphic novels you're always hearing about - which are actually just a bunch of comic books stuck together with selotape - but the twelve issues of the thing which came out one at a time before it went tits up. Having given up on comic books many, many years ago, then cautiously returned to the form more recently, it seemed like time to do the right thing, to support my local comic book store, to support the comic book industry, and to loyally buy the fucker right from the stands each month rather than wait a couple of years for the graphic novel.

It turns out that one aspect of getting old is that new things often tend to look shit, and this is how it has been for me and the comic book industry, generally speaking. I liked comics when they were a bit crap, when they were kind of cheap and wouldn't seem out of place mixed up with issues of Take-a-Break magazine in a dentist's waiting room. I liked comics before half the store came to resemble Chinese cartoons or European cinema, when they were printed on crappy paper, and when they were read by people who bought them because they liked to read comic books rather than through a desire to belong to some larger community of sad fucking wankers. These days - as I should probably get used to saying - the comic book seems to be the least important part of the store which is otherwise filled with memorabilia and box upon box of grotesque collectible bobble-headed caricatures which must surely have been designed with children under the age of two in mind. Assuming this is what the younger generation actually want, this is why I sometimes have difficulty not regarding the whole fucking lot of them as essentially ridiculous.

Anyway, I tried to buy Doom Patrol each month just like I would have done in the good old days when everything was much better than it is now, but half the time it was delayed, or it was sold out because they hadn't bothered to set a copy aside for me as they had said they would; or at the other extreme, I accidentally bought the same issue twice because a few of them had eight or nine variant covers - keeping the investors and collectors happy no doubt. I even tried buying a couple of other Young Animal titles just to be a sport but gave up because they just didn't seem like anything special. Thus did I accumulate a collection of about eight of the twelve issues of Way's Doom Patrol which came out before it got cancelled because no-one was reading, and which I didn't bother reading because I obviously only had two thirds of a story and was saving myself for when I'd found the missing issues; except the back issues weren't even turning up at my usual online comic book retailer, begging the question of what the full fucking print run had even been - fifty copies?

Anyway, I finally filled in the gaps so here we are at last.

This was mostly a great run. The influence of Grant Morrison is difficult to miss, but this Doom Patrol was more than just a well-played cover version, possibly equating to the stranger excesses of pop art in relation to Morrison's free form Dada, given Way's greater investment in disposable consumer culture and action figures. That said, it's a shame he seems to have ignored Rachel Pollack's run on the book given its spiritual compatibility with what we have here; and it's nothing like so shocking in 2018, or at least 2020, as was Morrison's Doom Patrol back in the nineties, possibly because for all the superior artwork, quality paper, and CGI effects, it's difficult to get past the variant covers, the collectibility, and the possibility of it having been bankrolled as something in which you invest rather than actually read, or enjoy, or which fuels your running around the back yard with your little pals with towels around your shoulders. Where this sort of comic book was once punctuated with adverts for chewing gum or model kits or Hostess Twinkies, now it's shaving products, graphic novels (mostly Batman) and bingeworthy television shows (also mostly Batman).

This was a great comic, and the fact of it falling on its arse probably tells you everything you need to know about mainstream comic book publishing as it stands in 2020.

I saw some knacker slagging this off as incomprehensible on Goodreads, illustrating his point - whatever it may have been - with references to something called Rick & Morty, which is apparently a cartoon like you see on the telly, one of those things beloved of all the really important YouTube people.

Prosecution rests, m'lud.

Wide Sargasso Sea

 

Jean Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
One day we will have all become so fucking stupid that somebody will describe this as Jane Eyre fanfic, but thankfully that day remains some way ahead, at least in this house. Older boys and girls will doubtless remember that Jane Eyre is about a woman called Jane Eyre who sort of fancies her boss, Mr. Rochester. He kind of fancies her back too, but is unfortunately already married and keeps his crazy wife locked away in the attic so as to keep her from setting things on fire. It might be observed that the aforementioned crazy wife gets something of a raw deal in Jane Eyre, although in literary terms she's not much more than a piece of scary scenery provided so as to throw her husband's twattery into sharp relief. All the same, I guess Jean Rhys felt that the first Mrs. Rochester got something of a raw deal, hence this prequel telling her side of the story.

Antoinette Cosway is the approximately white daughter of a nineteenth century Caribbean plantation owner and heiress to a fortune, which is why she attracts the attention of the aforementioned Rochester, although he isn't specifically identified here. While I'm not convinced Charlotte Brontë's novel is quite the expression of patriarchy it might seem - her mad woman in the attic playing a more or less gothic and hence symbolic role rather than being ancestral to Bernard Manning jokes - it's hard not to be left a little uncomfortable by the first Mrs. Rochester, which was almost certainly the point; and Brontë was writing from a very much colonial perspective, which seems worth addressing

Rhys' Antoinette is a victim of her environment more than anything. Her life begins to fall apart in the wake of the abolition of slavery, leaving her and her dwindling family marooned - interred within a Caribbean existence which is itself mostly hostile to them. By the time Rochester turns up in hope of marrying her bank account, the psychological damage is mostly done, and the novel maps her falling apart over time, not so much for the sake of turning a victim into a martyr to any particular cause, but to render Antoinette as a rounded human being rather than just a one-dimensional reason why some better known English guy is a bit of a dick. No-one comes out of this looking good.

'Then I will have the police up, I warn you. There must be some law and order even in this Godforsaken island.'

'No police here,' she said. 'No chain gang, no tread machine, no dark jail either. This is free country and I am free woman.'

Additionally, to Rhys' credit, Wide Sargasso Sea makes no attempt to impersonate Brontë's novel, but rather is formed from dreamlike impressions with viewpoints shifting from one individual to another and keeping the reader guessing for much of the time. Thus we are afforded wildly variable sides of the same story obliging us to draw our own conclusions regarding Antoinette's state of mind and the ominous nature of her environment.

I suppose someone must have adapted it for screen with Hugh Grant or one of that bunch goshing and crikeying his way through a completely unrelated script in period costume, but it doesn't read like anything which would lend itself to that sort of distillation into lace, milkmaids and pretty pictures, so I hope not and I'm not going to look, just in case. Some things only really work as books, or work significantly better as books than in any other medium, and I suspect this may be one of them.

Genocide

 

Paul Leonard Genocide (1997)
I know I'm only going to end up writing the same review I always write of underwhelming Doctor Who tie-in novels, but what the fuck, why not? Maybe something nice will happen.

As I've stated on several occasions, I used to be addicted to these things. There were two published each month for a while and I bought and read every single one of them without fail, not quite to the exclusion of anything else, but with hindsight I really wish my focus had been a little wider. My subsequent tendency to sneer is therefore derived from my eventually having realised that quite a few of these books were pretty poor, which is massively embarrassing given how amazing I once believed them to be. This possibly informs my tendency to overreact when writing reviews of Who novels. I additionally tend to throw babies out with whatever bathwater happens to be available because I dislike almost anything which calls itself fandom, and I'm disappointed with anyone who can claim such a fervent degree of allegiance to bland, button-pushing generic entertainment product; and I'm disappointed with them because that was me a couple of decades ago.

Nevertheless, given the tonnage of eighties X-Men comics I've purchased over the last couple of years, I'm not really in any position to disparage the Doctor Who novel on the grounds of it being either juvenile or mass produced, because - aside from anything else - I still fucking love some of this shit even if I don't necessarily want to hang around with anyone dressed as one of the characters; so I'm going to try to break it down a little further.

Mark Hodder has observed that the once considerable popularity of the fictional detective Sexton Blake seems to have waned roughly correspondent to the rise in popularity of Doctor Who, prompting Hodder to further speculate upon their similarities, and how it could be argued that the two characters have occupied more or less the same cultural niche at different ends of the century*. Blake was initially a response to Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, an arguably more egalitarian interpretation freed from the limitations of single authorship, and even if Blake was more product than Holmes, he benefits from being born to an era prior to the full mechanisation of the production line, figuratively speaking, meaning even serials such as those featuring Blake, Doc Savage, Perry Rhodan or whoever else, might showcase the singular vision of an individual author rather than a committee or a fucking focus group. In writing terms, we're talking craft more than art but this isn't to say that we're talking artless, and for my money, the best Sexton Blake has been equal to or superior to Conan Doyle's antecedent. In other words, pulp - as is generally applied willy-nilly by persons who rarely seem to understand quite where the term came from - doesn't have to mean low quality.

I see something of this as being applicable to Who, and to how Who has evolved over the years into something which is more or less all product. Of course, it's always been a mass produced and undeniably populist deal, and anyone who ever mistook Who for handwritten Kafka manuscripts unpublished during the author's lifetime is a fucking idiot; but mass production tends to be corporate, and the nature of the corporation has changed from something which may once have supported stables of semi-domesticated creative weirdos to what it is now, wherein marketing has become so invasive as to infest every stage of the allegedly creative process to a degree which seems almost comparable to ideology. In terms of Who, both televised and written, this means we've gone from slightly cranky but occasionally inspired outsiders who drew their influences from across the board, to persons who are usually fans with all the brand loyalty implied by the term, whose inspiration is mostly self-referential, and who have been hired to fill a quota and tick certain boxes. Doctor Who went off the air in 1989 when it was discovered that only seven people were still watching. It returned as a one-off special in 1996, which - for me - approximately represents the corporate singularity, the point beyond which the whole enterprise became more akin to product than anything derived from even a diluted artistic vision. It was specifically designed to capture an audience, to corner a market, and creative considerations were subservient to this goal.

Going back a couple of years, Virgin Books took it upon themselves to publish novels continuing the series in print alone once the TV show went tits up. The series was called the New Adventures and they were mostly pretty good, or at least that's how I remember them. Having been pitched at what was by definition a dwindling audience, none of whom were children - at least not physically - the authors were free to go wild, to come up with all manner of crazy shite which we never would have seen on the screen. So even those who might be deemed slavering continuity obsessed fans occasionally shone brightly, and as a result, many of the New Adventures worked as science-fiction novels in their own right.

Then someone presumably noticed the success of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and figured it might be worth giving the Who goose another squeeze just in case there were a few more golden eggs still to be popped out; and so it came back, as described above, and because we didn't want to take any chances, we got all of our best people on the job, the award winners, the proven sellers, the stars of the marketing department. We held meetings and asked the kids what they wanted, then pulled our findings apart so as to work out what they really wanted even if they didn't know it. We published our conclusions. We talked to the shareholders. We got a great deal.

So where the Virgin books had been mostly decent, occasionally exceptional, and at least aspiring to something other than text which asks us to imagine we're watching a TV show, the BBC novels which supplanted them were patchier, with occasional flashes of inspiration arising apparently in spite of the general thrust rather than as part of the strategy; and Genocide seems sadly illustrative of this.

I remember liking it a lot but seem to have outgrown the form, I suppose you might say; and it's not even a bad book. Paul Leonard wrote a lot of these things and was generally competent, able to string a sentence together and good for just the sort of weird, screwy ideas upon which Who first built its reputation. Here we have time trees - and you can probably guess what they do from the name - which facilitate the unfortunate extinction of the entire human race thanks to a species of four-eyed horses - all of which seems to hint at the influence of Larry Niven, at least from where I'm standing. His prose is mostly workmanlike and efficient without being truly dull, and he occasionally slips into clipped cinematic non-sentences for the sake of drama or pacing without ending up looking like a wanker, as so many others often do.

This was enough for me back in 1997 but this time around, I can't quite get past those elements which seem to betray the overbearing hand of editorial direction. We're clearly reading something aimed at a younger age group, and someone at head office doubtless thought we'd identify with Sam and all of her modular teenage concerns; and we're reading something which quite clearly aspires to viewing as an imaginary television show on our mind's inner screen, right down to entire alien races represented by just three actors in funny costumes.

Paul Leonard does as good a job as he can within the limitations of the revised form, and it starts well and doesn't read like fan fiction - as was often the case; but once the big ideas have been delivered, there's not actually a lot of story to be had. It certainly didn't need three-hundred pages and sags horribly after the first hundred or so, descending into inconsequential scrapes and running around until it's time for The Generation Game. It really feels as though these BBC novels were the last good thing, or at least the last with any potential beyond mere sales figures and pushing that consumer loyalty button. Genocide had potential, but time was running out.

*: Unfortunately I can't remember where he made these speculations, so it was probably some private correspondence or other.

The Other Mexico: Critique of the Pyramid

Octavio Paz The Other Mexico: Critique of the Pyramid (1972)
I've had this since 2003, as suggested by a couple of bus tickets preserved between the pages - a return to Tottenham Court Road on Saturday the 2nd of August of that year, so I'm assuming that's when and approximately where I bought the thing. I've been under the impression of this being a book I never got around to reading - which is why I took it from the shelf on this occasion; except I find handwritten footnotes within, and obviously mine, suggesting that I've read it but have no memory of doing so.

Complete crap is probably an overstatement given that it doubtless depends on the source to which Paz was referring. Back in 2003, I tended towards overcompensation when it came to Mesoamerica; plus I'd bought this book because there was a pyramid on the cover and was most likely bewildered by much of it - which probably explains my being unable to remember it.

Now that I'm older, marginally wiser, and living significantly much closer to Mexico, it makes more sense than it probably would have done on the number forty from Tottenham Court Road. Additionally, I'm living fairly close to the border so Mexico's relationship with the United States has become part of the wallpaper of my daily existence, and while this is arguably peripheral to what Paz writes about, it's nevertheless applicable and his insight is astonishing - at least now that I have some frame of reference.

The United States, smiling or angry, its hand open or clenched, neither sees nor hears us but keeps striding on, and as it does so, enters our lands and crushes us. It is impossible to hold back a giant; it is possible, though far from easy, to make him listen to others; if he listens, that opens the possibility of coexistence. Because of their origins (the Puritan speaks only with God and himself, not with others), and above all because of their power, the North Americans are outstanding in the art of monologue: they are eloquent and they also know the value of silence. But conversation is not their forte: they do not know how to listen or to reply.

However, The Other Mexico is principally about how Mexico relates to itself rather than to its neighbours, and attempts to reconcile the apparent contradictions of a national politic which abhors the horrors of the conquest while nevertheless celebrating that which was born from the same. We begin with the Tlatelolco massacre of October, 1968 where government troops slaughtered several hundred unarmed student protestors, compared by Paz to something like a mass sacrifice of the kind for which Ahuizotl was famed in the days before the Spaniards turned up. Given the improbability of ever fully explaining anything so horrific as the Tlatelolco massacre, Paz makes as much sense as anyone and he expands his argument with what feels like a certain sort of poetic truth.

Speaking of poetic truths, as I read about the Tlatelolco massacre it dawned on me that it had occurred fifty years ago to the day, and that I was reading about it on the anniversary of its occurrence, by uncanny coincidence; except, of course, I immediately realised my error because the anniversary would have been in 2018, so I was reading about events which had occurred exactly fifty-two years before, and the figure struck me as more significant, being the length of a Xiuhmolpilli by the Mexica calendar; and significant because The Other Pyramid is quite specifically about pre-Colombian systems mapped onto post-conquest reality.

Paz identifies Mexico's colonial and revolutionary systems of government as a continuation of that which the conquest attempted to eradicate and replace - namely what is essentially a one-party state with rulers picked by the governing body rather than the people. It's a convincing argument, and one that seems to go some way towards explaining the Mexican government's peculiar relationship with the drug cartels who, in this model, might be deemed more like a rival tribal group than necessarily criminal or enemies of the state. It's coincidental that I should choose to have read this directly following The Medium is the Massage, but seems fitting given McLuhan's observation that the medium - in this case, Mexico itself - seems to dictate the general thrust of that which is transmitted.

Additionally, it seems fitting that I should find myself reading this on the eve of yet another American Presidential election, given America's apparent descent into what has begun to feel a little like a one-party state policed by what amounts to just another gang; also regarding which:

When a society decays, it is language that is first to become gangrenous. As a result, social criticism begins with grammar and the re-establishing of meanings.

As my younger, more defensive self noted, Paz was misinformed regarding the prestige, or lack thereof, of Chichimec origins in Mexica society, but pretty much everything else he had bang to rights. This time I'll try to keep it all in mind.

The Medium is the Massage

Marshall McLuhan & Quentin Fiore The Medium is the Massage (1967)
I've found McLuhan a little impenetrable in the past, or perhaps not so much impenetrable as so information rich that it can be difficult to process what he's saying. The Medium is the Massage seems to represent a loosely populist concession, representing a few of his core ideas in a more accessible form - almost a pop art translation with heavy emphasis on the pictures, not least because the pictures carry part of the argument. McLuhan's argument seems to be that the electronic communications revolution of the twentieth century influenced the nature of the messages which passed between different parts of society, favouring non-linear narratives and thus allowing for greater spontaneity within society as a whole, hence the revolutionary or reforming tendencies of sixties culture. If it helps make sense of the suggestion, a linear narrative might be, for example, the nineteenth century notion of progress as something moving forward with clear and coherent purpose. McLuhan suggests that the switch to a non-linear narrative has created something like a global village, as distinct, I suppose, from a global corporation or corporations. McLuhan's conclusion additionally seems to account in part for the rise of postmodernism and is essentially optimistic in proposing that a better, more developed society should result.

Weirdly, it's fairly easy to see how human society in 2020 seems to represent a continuation of McLuhan's model, despite our being in an arguably quite different, even devolved place to that which he foresaw, possibly because the last half century of technological progress has comprised revision and development of existing forms rather than innovation on the scale of the printing press being an innovation. Also because postmodernism seems to have proven unusually conducive to the investiture of naked emperors.

That's what I've taken from it anyway. I could be wrong.

Busted Synapses

Erica L. Satifka Busted Synapses (2020)
I don't really keep any sort of finger on the pulse of contemporary science-fiction and don't have much of an idea of whether it genuinely exists or what it is - and obviously I'm talking about the written word here, having significantly less interest in the more corporate forms. This means that, from where I'm standing, Erica L. Satifka is either one of the best authors we have right now, or I simply haven't noticed the good stuff because the shelves at Barnes & Noble seem to be chock full of things which would really, really like to be on telly when they grow up. Stay Crazy was great, if you remember that one, and Busted Synapses may be better, or is at least as good.

Certain parts of the publicityplex have been mumbling about cyberpunk, which sort of works, but nevertheless feels to me like an appeal to persons who wear aviator goggles at fan events. True enough, here we have the notion of many tentacled corporations as inherently evil combined with something resembling virtual reality, neither of which were invented by William Gibson, and frankly this is a damn sight better than most of his body of work with the possible exception of Pattern Recognition. Busted Synapses isn't an adventure, isn't the cool new flavour, shifts no paradigm, and inhabits the regular unskilled existence of people I immediately recognise from the real world; which is nice because I'd argue that we don't need either Star Captains or plucky day-saving teenagers in 2020. Busted Synapses grabs that familiar, thoroughly depressing reality outside the window by the sack and gives it a goodly twist, just like proper science-fiction should. The call centers, screen addiction, and human populace reduced to economic resource will be known to most of us. The rest is extrapolated from where we are right now, but not by a whole lot, and not enough to leave us cosily reflecting on how at least things aren't yet this bad because they sort of are but for the small print.

There's a chance Erica L. Satifka may eventually tire of comparisons with Philip K. Dick, because she's certainly no copyist and comparisons made with himself usually refer to something blandly cinematic from an adaptation rather than his actual novels; but Busted Synapses is inhabited by those same doomed outsiders we met on Mars fiddling about with their Perky Pat layouts in Palmer Eldritch - or possibly their relatives - and the company is just as faceless, just as lacking in basic humanity as in both Dick's oeuvre and Trump's America. Additionally, Satifka's focus is sharp and without distracting diversions down mystical or otherwise psychological side roads. My only complaint is that this focus means for a short, snappy novel where I could have stood to spend more time reading, although I suppose that's barely even a complaint.

Publishers need to start throwing money at Erica Satifka because on the strength of what I've read, what the world needs right now is more of her work, or work of equivalent quality. Popular and intelligent don't have to be mutually exclusive, and this sort of thing - which aims resolutely higher than the usual bingeworthy consumer product - makes the world a better place.

Wolverine

 

Chris Claremont, John Byrne, Larry Hama etc. etc. Wolverine (1991)
Not a graphic novel, not a collected edition, just a big stack of comic books like you would read when in bed with the measles, or a hangover if you're a little bit older. The story, as I've definitely already mentioned on more than one occasion, is that I was once a massive sucker for caped comic books, then sold my entire collection during a sudden fit of what I imagined to be maturity. It's a decision I've always regretted and have finally set right, having spent the last couple of years buying them all back - mainly thanks to the fact that none of them ever ended up quite so collectible - and by association, expensive - as we were told would be the case.

When it finally happened, Wolverine as a regularly monthly title didn't make much of an impression on me, as is possibly indicated by my having re-bought entire runs of X-Men, X-Factor, and New Mutants* before I even remembered that there had ever been a regular Wolverine title, and one to which I subscribed and presumably read. Anyway, I picked up a few and realised that yes, I actually had enjoyed the thing well enough, thereby justifying another couple of hundred dollars spunked away at Lone Star Comics in the name of nostalgia, albeit an admittedly vague form of nostalgia.

Anyway, Wolverine was essentially everything Charles Schulz had warned us about in his Peanuts strip back in 1952.

Unfortunately, a homicidal nutcase whose superpower is stabbing people proved somewhat limited in terms of what kind of stories might be told, and so Wolverine was written as a man wrestling with inner demons, which at least allowed for bit more wiggle room. Frank Miller and Chris Claremont had already done a lot to flesh out the character both in the main X-Men comics and in related spin-offs, and Claremont got the regular book off to a fairly decent start, essentially turning Wolverine into a hard-boiled detective and letting him run loose in an old Terry and the Pirates strip. It worked well, and was at least more engaging than the endless cycle of growling and stabbing which it could have been, and which a few of the readers had seemingly expected.

That said, a few of Claremont's plot points were somewhat bewildering - possibly due to this being just one of fifty other books he was writing to a monthly schedule, and the whole thing came across as kind of dry at times what with the rigorous adherence to Wolverine as film noir. Peter David and then Archie Goodwin took over from Claremont after ten issues, roughly maintaining the same mood and general standard, even allowing for bursts of humour. Considering the vigour with which Marvel had been milking the X-cow at least since the second half of the eighties, the actual quality of Wolverine is surprising and impressive, although I suppose if they were throwing money at any title, it was going to be this one; and so the art is likewise mostly exceptional as one would expect of John Buscema, John Byrne, Klaus Janson, Marc Silvestri and others. However, I couldn't help but notice that this stuff reads a lot better when you sit down with a big stack of comics and binge the lot in just a couple of sittings. It played its cards just a little too close to its chest for a monthly schedule - as I vaguely seem to recall - which is probably why I'd forgotten so much of it, including even the point at which I gave up and stopped buying the thing.

Having no idea of where I'd originally jumped ship, and being reluctant to buy a run of back issues where the cut-off point might leave me hanging in the middle of an unfinished story, I re-bought the book up to and including issue fifty on the grounds of it being a round number and not too deep into the period beyond which these comics had mostly turned to shite in a grimacing cross-hatched effort to tap into some of that old Rob Liefeld magic. Now, having actually read the things, it seems I've made the right decision, both in drawing the line at issue fifty and in dumping the book when I did first time round. Larry Hama's run on the last twenty or so of these restores a lot of the humour and peculiar novelty which had either been missing or else was stood in the corner pretending to be Mickey Spillane during previous episodes. On one level, Hama turned Wolverine into sixties telly Batman, having Logan fight his own android double while trying to save the life of a bomb disguised as a cute little girl with pigtails and a lisp programmed to blow him into pieces; but for all Hama's wit and invention, it becomes obvious that all those letter-writing twerps complaining about the lack of stabbings have had their way. Various X-Men begin to turn up as crowd pleasing guests with increasing frequency, and by now it's the grimacing nineties X-Men in those bondage costumes covered in pockets, utility belts and holsters and all the women with massive tits and no waist; and inker Dan Green seemed to be doing his best to make Silvestri's pencils resemble something from the Image stable.

Wolvey's secret origin, you won't fucking believe it, deffo the real thing this time, not a dream, grimace grimace, black ops, even more fucking cross-hatching and random pockets, more black ops, clandestine government organisation, foil stamped edition also available blah blah blah…

Wolverine was never really in competition with The Taming of the Shrew, in case anyone missed that particular memo, but this was a decent, even classy book for a while, regardless of having sprung from Marvel's increasingly rabid attempts to take its readership for every last penny - although I gather much worse was to come, and a mere fifty new X-titles hitting the racks each week now seemingly represents a model of restraint by comparison. Inevitably there were lapses, notably the bewilderingly shit Lazarus Project issues featuring art by Barry Kitson whom I seem to recall as having contributed to my giving up on 2000AD back in the eighties; but these were exceptions rather than the rule. Otherwise, for my money, these issues belonged to the final flowering of the American superhero comic before it grew up and became an absolute fucking bore, having mistakenly assumed a massive body count and increasingly baroque forms of slaughter to be pretty much tantamount to adulthood. Those vicious little letter page gorehounds got their way, effectively killing off the thing they purportedly loved, then themselves most likely grew up to be cops, security guards and right-wing politicians, so I'd guess.

Still, it was nice while it lasted.

*: Well, entire runs of the readable stuff, my cut-off point being around 1991, beyond which most of them had turned to shite.
 

Don't Hide the Madness

 

Steven Taylor (editor) Don't Hide the Madness (2018)
...or William S. Burroughs in conversation with Allen Ginsberg as the subheading promises, which began life as an article for the Observer vaguely intended to promote Cronenberg's attempt to film Naked Lunch. The idea was that the editor would hang around with Burroughs and Ginsberg for a couple of days, recording their conversation on tape in the hope of a written piece being mined from this wealth of source material. Handily, Taylor already knew Ginsberg well, and Burroughs as a friend of Ginsberg, and there were a few others hanging around and chipping in - James Grauerholz, various friends and neighbours and so on. Don't Hide the Madness is three-hundred pages of transcript whittled down from eleven cassette tapes of the gang yacking away without any obvious attempts to steer the conversation.

Taylor claims to have edited out the really inane stuff, so we don't get to hear Ginsberg spotting an apparently discarded shoelace in the corner of the room, then pick it up to discover that it's actually string, then spend the next twenty pages talking about how it really, really, really looked like a shoelace. We do, on the other hand, get to sit in on them talking about guns, which is mystifying, being mostly a series of numbers presumably describing what type of gun someone is waving around.

Yet, as with real life, attention wanders and certain points keep swinging back around, restoring our focus; which keeps the emphasis fairly light, conveys a touching sense of moment which might have been otherwise lost, and even communicates the more intensive subjects by allowing for nuance, and which might not have been quite so engaging had it been pared down to just Cronenberg, Naked Lunch, and the stuff directly relating to Burroughs as author.

I don't remember particularly liking the Cronenberg movie on the one occasion of my seeing it - although I don't think his work is really my thing - but Burroughs' take on it, which is generally positive, is fascinating; not least because it all seems to tie into wider discussion of the ugly spirit, to which Burroughs attributes blame for his having shot his wife all those years ago. This comes up because at the time of recording, and of the release of Naked Lunch, Burroughs was looking into exorcism, and had been subject to some sort of spiritual cleansing by a local shaman. It's the kind of discussion which might inspire the rolling of eyes and general grumbling about new age bollocks under other, more formal circumstances, but here it's revealed as simply the easiest way to discuss and deal with something which otherwise resists analysis in more coldly analytical terms. The pay off, should we need it, is that Don't Hide the Madness actually explains pretty much everything you ever needed to know about Burroughs and his writing, but delivers the information as low-key conversational dialogue which communicates a hell of a lot more than the traditional lists of names, dates and places. As a particularly weird consequence, it very much separates the author from his work in revealing Burroughs as a genuinely nice guy, someone who would be fun to hang around with, or at least I thought so.

He loved his cats, so he's fine by me.

A Planet for Texans

 

H. Beam Piper & John J. McGuire A Planet for Texans (1958)
I picked this one up out of curiosity for the same reason I picked up Fritz Leiber's A Spectre is Haunting Texas - because that's where I live. Also, it was the only science-fiction novel in the bookshop of the Texas State History Museum in Austin and I vaguely remember enjoying Piper's Little Fuzzy. A Planet for Texans was originally published as half of an Ace Double and later won a Prometheus Hall of Fame Award, whatever that is.

The premise is something about Texans being so ornery that the entire state secedes from planet Earth, and I gather the novel strives to examine some political point along vaguely libertarian lines, something inspired by H.L. Mencken proposing a political system incorporating the occasional assassination of candidates as a legitimate part of the governmental process. At least this is what it says on Wikipedia.

Considering that I was half expecting something ghastly about a planet of rootin' tootin' racist fatties, it could have been worse; but it also could have been better. Texas here is invoked by desert, cows, barbecue, and the sort of Texans it's fairly easy to avoid, even in Texas - namely ranch dwelling shitheads with too much money; so there wasn't much I recognised from my daily existence and I've been here for a whole decade. The only problem with Little Fuzzy, so far as I recall, is that about half the book was spent in a court room. Unfortunately this time it feels like it's almost the whole thing, although maybe something different happened during the pages where I was asleep. Unless I've read it wrong, it seems to be a conversation about libertarian stuff for 126 pages, with a few mentions of cows and barbecue thrown in here and there for the sake of local colour.

A Spectre is Haunting Texas isn't without its problems, from what I remember, but it was at least a lot more fun than this.