Inferno

 

Grant Morrison, Mark Millar & Carlos Ezquerra Inferno (1993)
I was still buying 2000AD regularly when this saga was first published; I re-read some of it a couple of years ago after snapping up those Summer Offensive issues on eBay - mainly for the sake of Big Dave, and yet none of it rings any significant bells; and now I've bought it again as a collected edition—sorry, graphic novel—so as to give it a fair crack of the whip. I say saga but I actually mean a story lasting twenty issues of the galaxy's greatest which therefore probably wouldn't stand up in comparison to, off the top of my head, Beowulf.

Anyway, the main thing I've taken from this, and which I'd forgotten, is that Judge Dredd in its heyday was mostly a comedy, or at least satire, sharing more in common with those ludicrous hard man strips in the early issues of Viz than it did with any caped American fare. In a totalitarian future society where one might be executed by a monosyllabic uniformed nutcase for littering, chuckles were never far away. Dredd himself is therefore horrible, which is the point, his principal virtue being that he's absolutely consistent and ruthlessly honest by his own draconian terms. The weekly strip therefore usually seemed to work better in short, sharp bursts of ultraviolent slapstick, and earlier attempts at lengthy stories spanning multiple issues worked best when they kept this in mind - I still have fairly good memories of the Cursed Earth and Judge Caligula tales, although admittedly it's been a while.

However, fifteen or so years down the line, it was beginning to look a bit thin, at least to me, which was presumably why I stopped buying. Dredd works better as a Ramones album than as some sprawling conceptual Tolkien with firearms cycle exploring the limits of his grim, frowning universe, because that universe isn't really very interesting unless it's funny. Mark Millar's Purgatory develops the background of a prison break in a penal colony on one of Saturn's moons, and Grant Morrison's Inferno brings the escaped violent psychopaths to Mega City One - which they take over because what else would they do? So they act like escaped violent psychopaths - a handful of whom have somehow managed to oust the government of a city of eight-hundred million - Judge Dredd busts heads and saves the day, as usual.

I like Mark Miller but Purgatory is high on primary colours and low on redeeming features even by his standards, and Inferno reads like Grant Morrison was mostly just trying to pay off a phone bill. It would be saved by Carlos Ezquerra's mostly gorgeous artwork, but even that has begun to stray into caricature by this point, with Chief Judge McGruder having sprouted what looks like a loaf of bread where her nose used to be.

It's not bad but it feels somewhat like a strip going through the motions, and the inclusion of Millar's pleasantly ludicrous six-page I Hate Christmas serves mainly to remind us what Judge Dredd should look like.

Dead Babies

 

Martin Amis Dead Babies (1975)
I'm still trying to work out who or what the title refers to. So far I have the possibility that these babies are all, like, dead inside, man; or it's Keith Whitehead who, being a chubby dwarf, may be seen to have the appearance of a baby; or it's the emotional neoteny of everybody concerned; or it's something to do with the spunk flying in all directions, not many of which are conducive to procreation - shorthand, I suppose, for wank, inadvertently suggesting that the book reviews itself; or it's all of these. Nobody fucking knows. I seem to recall a couple of actual dead babies and the term is used as a slightly bewildering expletive by a couple of the characters, but that seems too obvious a correlation given these being of no greater consequence than any of the other routinely transgressive occurrences passing along on Brucie's literary conveyor belt without anybody really caring one way or the other.

Dead Babies describes a house full of Hooray Henries and prototype Sloane Rangers, mostly over-moneyed sixties burnouts, getting shitfaced and screwing each other in a variety of increasingly baroque configurations with no clear separation as to how much of it is hallucinatory. They're all irredeemably horrible, with the possible exception of the aforementioned Keith, and much of the novel reminds me of dismal eighties parties where I spent most of the evening trying to avoid the attentions of some speeding fucknugget determined to lecture anyone who would listen about either Jim Morrison or William sodding Blake. Also, there's gratuitous animal abuse for some reason or other.

Of course, it's beautifully written and is as such sort of compelling, but I still have no idea as to what end or what I'm supposed to do with any of this. I can see why the late Simon Morris was a fan to the point that I found myself unconsciously awaiting narrative punctuation from a list of Dr. Hook's ten greatest albums, but it left me as cold as almost all J.G. Ballard I've ever tried to read, and I get the impression ol' Jimmy may have been an influence to some extent. The aforementioned Simon Morris described Amis' London Fields as a pointless narrative that's like a joke without a punchline, while London Fields strikes me as the much better book, like Dead Babies done right, written by someone who wanted to write a book rather than just wave his dobber in your face for a couple of hundred pages. I expect Kenneth Clark would have described Dead Babies as absolutely ghastly - due to that doubtless being Marty's intention - and I'm inclined to share that view. In televisual terms it's Abigail's Party repopulated with the cast of Lindsay Anderson's If… without the nuance of either, the written equivalent of those bloody awful Allen Jones paintings of boobs squozen forth between rubber straps.

The tragedy is that I can't even bring myself to hate it. I've read much, much worse, and Dead Babies is just kind of dull but for the poetry of its composition. I suppose it would be a very boring world if we all liked the same thing.

Annihilation Factor

 

Barrington J. Bayley Annihilation Factor (1972)
Bayley's second novel features one of those star spanning galactic empires loosely resembling Tsarist Russia wherein different planets are ruled by kings and daily life occurs with a sort of imperial elegance, although thankfully not to the point of delineating those most delightful and diverting excursions of a gentleman with an ostentatiously elaborate name who conducts his business whilst rather fancifully attired in a bronze top hat to which the contents of a grandfather clock have been most felicitously affixed.

Ahem.

The presence of Castor Crakhno, a character alluding to Nestor Makhno - a founding father of the anarchist movement - presents the possibility of commentary on either the Russian revolution or some episode of equivalent vintage, as does King Maxim - Maxim being short for Maximilian, because I'm sure there was an historical Maximilian in there somewhere; but it's either way above my head or I'm simply spotting patterns which probably aren't there. The novel seems to be about free will - possibly - in how it may relate to the transcendence of the material plane 'n' stuff.

'You fool, there is no freedom,' Peredan chuckled. 'The material universe is a trap whose meshes we cannot escape, however much we try. Throughout history men have held such ideas as you have belatedly discovered, due to some fastidious aversion you appear to have. But the universe always mocks at these ideas. It always has something more strange, more monstrous than we can deal with—such as the Patch.'

Bayley's novels always seem to be spun upon a single and cinematically weird element - sentient hosiery, war waged between different eras, funny animals piloting spaceships or whatever. In Annihilation Factor it's the Patch, a vast presumably sentient field which moves through space devouring everything in its path. The Patch turns out to be something akin to Phil Purser-Hallard's City of the Saved but spends most of the novel as some remote nihilist force feared from afar - one which can be controlled by masturbation; despite which Bayley still doesn't quite manage to achieve escape velocity with this one.

It may be that I wasted too much time trying to decode Castor Crakhno, leader of a nihilist anarchist movement called Death to Life, which doesn't really work for me because the two tendencies would appear to contradict one another, at least here, and Death to Life sounds a little too close to a Two Ronnies take on placard waving revolutionary politics - Down With Knickers and that sort of thing. Also, the novel is so bogged down with endless exposition of one form or another that it becomes difficult to keep track of who is who and what's happening. It all pulls together in the end as we discover what the Patch is supposed to be, but it's a satisfying ending to an otherwise underwhelming, if mercifully short, novel. I still say Bayley was one of the greats, but Annihilation Factor isn't one I'd put forward in support of the argument, which is a pity because it should have been, given what it tries to do.

Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future

 

Frank Hampson Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future (1951)
I picked up a few of these collected editions for pennies back in the nineties in some remaindered book store and only recently realised I'm still yet to read them all; and this particular one - collecting a year and a half's worth of Eagle strips amounting to the first Dan Dare story - is now several hundred quid on eBay, so that's nice, or possibly just weird.

My Dare standard was formed early on from a stack of Eagle annuals my dad passed onto me when I was a kid and probably at the right age to appreciate them without any of the strip's shortcomings getting in the way. The shortcomings aren't really anything worth getting too upset about given that this was a children's strip from the fifties, published by a man of certain religious convictions, and which probably shouldn't be judged by whatever standards one might apply to, off the top of my head, the oeuvre of J.G. Ballard; but it nevertheless feels like this first epic represented an experiment in progress with Dare still finding his feet, not least in a technical sense. What doubtless worked well as seventy-seven snappy weekly instalments seems a little jittery when digested in just a couple of sittings; and strangest of all is that the lettering - of all things - is particularly ropey, suggesting panels of artwork drawn to some vague notion of a script, complete with speculative speech bubbles which were either too large, too small, or poorly situated once time came to add the dialogue. It's not a massive problem, but it's something which requires a little getting used to whenever yet another explanation wanders out of its balloon to spill across the background. Also, in the absence of original artwork, the reproduction in this volume - taken directly from issues of the comic - tends to look a little overexposed here and there, which is a shame because Hampson's drawings were obviously painstaking and beautiful. I'm sure this was the best they could do in 1988, but it's nevertheless odd that the whole should seem so technically uneven in comparison even to the American comics of the time.

Still, I'm not complaining because even poor reception is unable to diminish the imagination and inspiration which informed this thing, even as it took these first faltering steps. Of course, it's Biggles in space and is as such an expression of the values of its time. The attitudes are entirely colonial and patriarchal, derived from a notion of authority figures as essentially decent, even altruistic. Sir Hubert Guest huffs and puffs when he realises he's sharing his spaceship with a woman and that the cabin will doubtless soon be full of washing lines strung with her unmentionables, but he gets over it, and Professor Jocelyn Peabody is at least spared the more traditional indignity of providing brainlessly imperiled eye-candy fit only to be rescued from the clutches of beastly foreign types. Venus is more or less colonial Africa but its people are treated with sympathy and, excepting the Mekon himself, ideology is the villain rather than those in its sway. The Treens recall colonial attitudes towards black Africans up to a point, but don't seem inherently malign and their bad guy status comes mostly from a misguided devotion to the ruthless logical superscience of the Mekon - not too hard to work out where that came from so close to the second world war. I gather this story was written back when Venus was still considered potentially habitable, and even that Arthur C. Clarke was consulted regarding the composition of the complex alien ecosystem and civilisation into which Hampson deposited our heroes. So even if we only experience the background detail in passing, it's convincing.

Naturally there are a few narrative howlers, my favourite being the fact that the Mekon had a full-sized replica of an Earth city built apparently just for the look on the faces of his human captives when he gratuitously blows it up. There's also the final battle to consider. The Treens are revealed as hating sports - just like the bad eggs they are - and have therefore destroyed all of their horse equivalent animals many years before as scientifically inefficient, or something like that. Spotting these details as a weakness, Space Fleet wins the day by shipping battalions of horseback fighters to Venus to storm Mekonta, the capital - specifically grenadier guards and a whole shitload of Tom Mix inspired cowboys direct from Texas. It's the sort of plotting which doubtless filled the heads of small boys in the fifties and is patently fucking ridiculous, but scores highly on its raw peculiar charm.

Following on from those Eagle annuals, I renewed my acquaintance with Dan Dare when 2000AD reincarnated him as Sid Vicious back in 1977, a version which seems not too fondly remembered and which has been criticised as a ropey, opportunistic besmirchment of the values represented by the original strip. While it's true that Belardinelli's Dare may have been a revision slightly too far, it's interesting to note that Hampson's Dare was itself likewise occasionally ropey, hamstrung by technical problems, and nothing like so confident as we may choose to remember. However, the art was great, and its generous, altruistic spirit still resonates regardless of contemporary wibbling concerns about things being of their time in the usual pejorative sense. I don't actually know if anyone ever found the original artwork since this edition was put together, or even if any efforts may have been made towards restoration in the intervening years, but Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future remains worthy of preservation, regardless.

Essential Defenders volume one

Roy Thomas, Steve Englehart, Sal Buscema & others

Essential Defenders volume one (1974)

My guess would be that someone at Marvel noticed all those extraneous superheroes they had laying around making the place look untidy and decided to hoover a few of them up into brand new superteams, just like the Avengers, so as to maximise something or other. Then a couple of years later they reprinted this one in black and white weekly instalments in a UK comic called Rampage. I'd recently experienced something of an epiphany for the form, having discovered 2000AD just a few months earlier. I'd always felt well disposed towards Marvel from afar, but there were too many titles and most of them had been going for yonks. Rampage therefore represented an opportunity to get in on the ground floor. Each week featured half an issue of the Defenders plus reprints from the Nova comic book. It was pretty great as I recall, but went monthly after less than a year, changed format and lost me to the extent that I almost forgot all about it - which was weird. When John Byrne introduced Xemnu the Titan to his run on She-Hulk at the end of the eighties, I knew the guy looked sort of familiar but had no idea where I'd seen him.

So I picked this up partially as an experiment to see how much I could remember forgetting, if you see what I mean, and partially because I'm a middle aged man who is screened for colon cancer to a yearly schedule so it seems only natural that I should be purchasing seventies superhero comics aimed at twelve-year old boys.

Marketing aside, the premise of the Defenders was the assemblage of supertypes who otherwise tended to go it alone - Dr. Strange, Prince Namor, and the Hulk for starters, meaning a lot of what transpires is usually the other two trying to explain things to the big green thickie in hope that he'll thump someone. This big fat paving slab additionally kicks off with issues of solo comics which foreshadow events in the initial run of the Defenders, and it makes for a surprisingly satisfying and thematically consistent whole. Additionally, it's all quite revealing in terms of what made Marvel tick in the early days, or at least what made it so much more appealing than all those frowning boy scouts and hall monitors over at the distinguished competition. Marvel's roots, at least on the evidence of this lot, seem to lay with all those horror comics that Wertham had pulled from the shelves. Marvel's superheroes always seemed to have a bit more texture to me, and it seems because they're mostly Gods and monsters, misfits who could never have held down normal jobs as mild-mannered reporters; and thus do we open with a sixties issue of Dr. Strange which quotes H.P. Lovecraft and introduces the Nameless One, a two-headed extra-dimensional tosspot who seems very clearly descended from the weird fiction of the twenties and thirties. In fact, even once we fully ease into the era of men in tights, or at least the era of a percentage of those men present wearing the same, the Defenders remains satisfyingly odd and quite difficult to predict.

The art is mostly top shelf, and is particularly striking in black and white, and Ross Andru and Bill Everett's work on A Titan Walks Among Us! from Marvel Feature #3 is downright gorgeous even aside from being the place where I obviously first met Xemnu - and boy, some of those panels leapt right off the page to kiss me in the centre of the forehead.

Additionally we have the Avengers-Defenders war, which drags on a bit, but is probably significant in foreshadowing all those headachey multi-title and allegedly sense shattering crossovers of the eighties, Secret Crisis and all that; despite which, this thing is still very much to be recommended. I thought it would probably be at least an interesting curiosity, but it's fucking magnificent for the most part.

Jongor of Lost Land

Robert Moore Williams Jongor of Lost Land (1942)
This has been a very pleasant surprise. The cover seems to promise Tarzan with the serial numbers filed off, which is sort of what it is, a bit, but not quite. Much as I love the work of Robert Moore Williams - what I've read of it - I'm under no illusions regarding his membership status within the canon of science-fiction sausage machines churning them out back in the thirties and forties, so it was difficult to get too excited about the prospect of this one beyond the possibility of the author's characteristic narrative brainfarts to liven things up.

In the negative, it's kind of pulpy, but we knew that and wouldn't be reading if it was a problem. You can probably guess at least some of what happens just from the cover.

And yes, it really is more or less Tarzan, but Tarzan under the influence of Abraham Merritt rather than Edgar Rice Burroughs, meaning we get a Shaver-esque degenerate race which has inherited the lost city of a once great civilisation, superscientific crystals of power, mysterious rays, mind control, dinosaurs borrowed from The Lost World, and a story which is short, punchy, genuinely weird and massively satisfying. It takes peculiar random swerves as do most of Robert Moore Williams' books, but he's reigned it in a little with this one keeping it all on the coherent side of crazy, more or less; and, frankly, it's better written than Tarzan, greatly more imaginative, and almost completely lacking in any equivalent to Burroughs' dull racist chortling over the slapstick antics of dumb savages. Jongor is astonishingly original for something composed almost exclusively of familiar pulp tropes.

Jaws

Peter Benchley Jaws (1974)
This is probably a bit off the beaten track for me. I've never seen the movie and tend to steer clear of thrillers, but I vividly remember a copy of the Sphere paperback knocking around the house when I was a kid, so I assume my mother must have read it at some point; plus being the sort of thing I wouldn't ordinarily read, my curiosity is piqued. It's good to surprise yourself every once in a while.

Well, it isn't the relentless thriller described by the cover, unless you're thrilled by the prospect of entire chapters given over to awkward dinner parties where guests struggle to make small talk, or lengthy scenes of men who don't really like each other stood upon beaches wondering what the fuck they're going to do. In fact, I'd propose that it's not even a book about a massive shark, but will refrain from such definitive statements on the grounds that the novel itself seems to keep changing its mind about what it wants to be.

What it isn't, is a blockbusting page-turner calculated to shift units, or at least it's difficult to discern such intent within its DNA. If scoring low as poetry, Brenchley's prose is efficient and well lubricated, but with enough of a flourish to elevate the whole above what one might expect of the form, at least barring the occasional intrusion of the peculiar.

But Meadows had reason to believe that the girl was on drugs and that she was being supplied by the son of a Polish potato farmer.

Quint inexplicably yelling, I see your cock, you bastard, at the shark in chapter fourteen probably also deserves a mention here.

The characters are somewhat modular - police chief, journalist, mayor and so on - but not so much as to seem implausible; and there are a few instances of the novel being wearily of its time - notably the black rapist we hear about early on, and Ellen Brody's unlikely sexual fantasies - being raped and working as a prostitute, both ideas which seem to have crossed over from bathroom magazines of the seventies rather than from the heads of actual women. I wasn't wild about the cat being killed on whichever page it was either, but aside from these details, it's not a bad novel, just one with a bit of an identity crisis. I get the impression Benchley may have set out to write something a bit more Steinbeck given the strong focus on how the arrival of a massive shark impacts on the small town folks of Amity, those whose livelihood is very much seasonal and reliant on the annual flood of tourists. At certain points it almost feels like an ecological novel, specifically a warning, and one which seems unusually pertinent given the current pandemic. I assume there may be parallels with Moby Dick - which I haven't read - and if Jaws is a monster movie, it's the heavily allegorical 1954 version of Godzilla more than it's anything else.

This being said, Jaws switches tack to soft porn, then horror from one chapter to the next - not quite to the point of schizophrenia, but enough to let the reader know this was someone's first novel, albeit a pretty decent one in most respects. The final chapters steer a bit too close to animal-snuff for my tastes but could have been worse, and Benchley eventually regretted any influence he may have had on the subsequent gratuitous slaughter of sharks in the wild and became a conservationist.

The Stillness in the Water would have been a better title though.

Cock & Bull

Will Self Cock & Bull (1992)
I've always regarded 1993's My Idea of Fun as Self's debut novel, but coming back to Cock & Bull after at least a couple of decades, I realise it was this. It's actually a pair of novellas, Cock and Bull - hence the title, and even without a recurring character, the two comprise the yin and yang of a central theme which might be seen to lack balance were it further bifurcated. That theme, for what it may be worth, is genitalia - the organs which have driven human society forward from the very beginning by one means or another. No-one could possibly accuse Self of lacking ambition, but how the hell does one write about cocks and fannies without all the centuries old accumulation of bullshit, porn, and ideology getting in the way and defeating its own analysis? Self deftly defuses context by shifting everything a few feet to the left, and so we have Carol who finds she has grown a penis in Cock, and the eponymous star of Bull who wakes one morning to find a working vagina has opened up behind his knee just above the calf - the placement seeming necessary so as to circumnavigate the possibility of anything so reductionist as straightforward transgender fiction, Cock & Bull being closer in spirit to Kafka's Metamorphosis. It's about the smelly, wrinkly biology and how we deal with it, how we square it up with the fictions by which we've deodorised our toilet parts.

'There is that horror and its interaction with another horror. The bloody horror of gynaecological fact. Modern horror films are all blood and the membranous stria of bio-goo. But really they have simply rendered external what is at the core of our dearest friends. They have just turned inside out the sock of feminine biology.'

That being one perspective given herein, specifically by the Oxford don who narrates Cock to the author as they meet on a train like characters in a Graham Greene short story; but not even the bias of the author himself, the one recording this narrative, is exempt from scrutiny as the don seemingly glares out of the page to observe:

'You're typing me, boy, aren't you? You're turning me into something that I'm not. An amusing character, an oddity, a type!'

A couple of pages later we read that:

Carol and Dan's life was thus exactly like literature: thin and pulped into existence. They floated in vacuou, cut off from parents, isolated from one another. Since there was no other conduit to direct them into the corpuscular circulation of society, while the current was on they flew like filings towards the healing magnet.

This tendency to populate the novel with smaller models of itself achieves an admittedly gruesome climax in the person of Razza Rob, the foul stand-up comic.

'Razza is an ironist. You probably didn't notice' - but naturally, Bull gritted mentally, you did - 'but all these cunt jokes are just that: cunt jokes. They aren't jokes about women at all. They have nothing to do with women. Razza is cutting the archetypal cunt out of the woman - and displaying it for the world to see, and appreciate, that it's just a cipher - an empty category on to which people project their own distorted attitudes. After all, what's a hole once one removes it from the ground?'

Naturally, with horrible inevitability Razza Rob is subsequently revealed as entirely bereft of irony, and Juniper's somewhat forced rationalisation seems particularly timely given certain contemporary narratives wherein sexuality - and usually female sexuality - is divorced from biology in resumption of nineteenth century ideas about those feminine lady-brains.

Self's conclusion seems neatly summarised by the pejorative meaning of the title, although this is hardly a neatly binary discussions drawing yes, no, good, or bad conclusions, and as such it might arguably provide clues as to where so many of us get it wrong. The novel is an illusory medium which probably shouldn't be too easily mistaken for either anything directly allegorical or even conclusive regarding human society, but Self's satire comes about as close as we're likely to get in this instance, and it also helps that it's fucking funny for reasons which Razza Rob wouldn't have understood.