The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys: National Anthem

Gerard Way, Shaun Simon & Leonardo Romero
The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys: National Anthem (2021)
I'd been meaning to at least have a look at this since I read Umbrella Academy, although it turns out this isn't even the thing I've been meaning to read. From what I understand, the Killjoys began life in Gerard Way's head as the idea of a comic book which was expanded into an album by My Chemical Romance, and The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys, the original Dark Horse title, was either a companion piece or a sequel to the album. National Anthem on the other hand is apparently closer to Way's vision before it was turned into a record, so it isn't book two or even early demos, but something else entirely. My Chemical Romance continue to sound like the Bay City Rollers to me, and I still haven't read the version which was published back in 2013, so I've just had to let this one live or die by its own strengths.

It's fucking phenomenal, as it turns out. I've come to think of Umbrella Academy as wearing the influence of Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol very much on its sleeve - although this may well be a memory forged by the underwhelming TV adaptation more than by Gabriel Bá's comic book - but National Anthem feels like its own thing. The influences feel more akin to points of reference or allusions - as with Umbrella Academy, to be fair - incorporating pop art, surrealism, They Live, European comics, art cinema, Wacky Races and the Banana Splits just for starters. The narrative is so heavily allegorical that that there's not much point trying to root it in anything other than its own somewhat bendy reality, at the heart of which is a thoroughly teenage war against the forces of growing up and turning into your parents. It could have fallen flat on its arse but the telling is so beautifully literate and screwy as to prove irresistible. In fact it's so literate that it's quite difficult to follow in places, which is possibly why it works so well - suggesting glimpses of a fully formed and working, albeit thoroughly peculiar reality rather than explaining everything into tedious oblivion. The worst of the forces of evil, for example, seems to be a gang of smartly dressed young men called Books on Tape, who draw their power from the books they constantly listen to, which is all the explanation you get and, honestly, all you really need.

The art is thoroughly gorgeous, for what it may be worth, like Daniel Clowes illustrating the Dark Knight Returns as someone from Alternative Press observed. This one comes pretty close to perfection in comic book terms.

Fantastic Stories of Imagination July 1966

Sol Cohen (editor) Fantastic Stories of Imagination July 1966 (1966)
Here we are with another one of these, and mostly reprints this time for some reason, excepting Chad Oliver's Just Like a Man, which is relatively readable and set on a planet so indistinguishable from Earth as to actually have lions. The point is anthropological, focusing on the absolutely fascinating means by which Oliver's alien lemurs failed to evolve into anything resembling humanity. My use of the term absolutely fascinating in the previous sentence may contain trace elements of sarcasm.

David V. Reed first enquired as to Where is Roger Davis? back in 1938, the answer apparently revealing that those swastika toting hordes about to sweep across Europe may have been aided by Martians. It's one of those first person account tales impersonating  private correspondence which opens with I know you're not going to believe this, but the other night as I charged my trusty meerschaum with a goodly plug of tobacco… To be fair, that sentence doesn't appear in the story because I just made it up, but somehow it feels as though it did. Also, the Martian invasion force comprises just three of them, which is probably understandable when you're trying to make a kid's show on the cheap, but—oh never mind.

Simak's The Trouble with Ants is one of those short stories which was eventually included in City, which is approximately a novel; and I know it won a million awards and that it's Simak and I generally love Simak without exception or reservation, but I've always found City a little overrated with its cast of talking dog and their robot pals just a little too silly to work. This one is about how the talking dogs and their robot pals realise that you have to be careful with ants, otherwise they develop technology. I sort of wonder if Cliff was experiencing trouble with his heating that month, because City suggests the influence of certain powerful fumes. I'm told it can get a bit nippy at times up there in Wisconsin.

Almost Human by Tarleton Fiske, who was actually Robert Bloch, author of Psycho, tells of an innocent robot corrupted by the kind of toughs commonly portrayed by James Cagney and who end each statement with a quasi-interrogatory see, see. It's readable, if nothing life-changing, see.

Theodore Sturgeon's The Way Home is short and pleasant but didn't make much sense - or maybe I mean didn't seem to have a point - but never mind because the last two pretty much justify the entrance fee. Henry Kuttner's Satan Sends Flowers is one of those tales where someone has an actual conversation with the devil and is very satisfying; leaving just Isaac Asimov's Satisfaction Guaranteed, which apparently I've read before although I don't remember it. It's one of his Susan Calvin things, but herself is thankfully only a secondary character. Being written by Asimov in 1951, we probably shouldn't be too surprised to meet a housewife who just wants to keep her home clean and her man happy, which I'm sure will have gone down a storm with the usual Goodreads wankers. I sometimes find this sort of thing a bit painful, and true enough, when Asimov falls on his arse, he falls hard; but here the focus on the actual thrust of the story - yet more robot stuff - is of such elegant precision that blaming Asimov for a) the fifties and b) having been born as someone other than Andrea Dworkin seems both unfair and a bit of a waste of time, tantamount to whining about Silas Marner seeming dated.

I'm still not sure why Fantastic went tits up. I guess maybe there were just too many of these things and not enough readers coughing up to a monthly timetable.

Phoenix

Jeff Rovin, Sal Amendola & others Phoenix (1975)
Phoenix was somehow one of the first three American comics I ever saw with my own eyes. There was the first issue of this, then Marvel's Worlds Unknown #4 and Astonishing Tales #35, respectively dating to January 1975, November 1973, and May 1976. I have no idea which came first and they were, in any case, encountered second hand at jumble sales rendering those dates of publication more or less irrelevant. Anyway, the point is that although I'd read plenty of black and white UK reprints of Spider-Man, the Inhumans and the like, these were the first actual US comics I saw, and I was fascinated by their size - smaller than I was used to, full colour throughout, and obviously aimed at readers slightly older than myself.

That issue of Astonishing Tales featured the penultimate chapter of Rich Buckler and Bill Mantlo's Deathlok which had an effect tantamount to slipping a Stooges album into my ABBA, Wurzels, and Wombles playlist of the time. Phoenix represented slightly less terrifying territory than ...And Once Removed From Never, but still made a massive impression on me, enough so for its influence to have been felt in at least a few things I've written since*.

To start at the beginning, Phoenix was one of a number of titles published by Atlas, a short-lived mid-seventies company founded by Martin Goodman after he sold Marvel Comics to Perfect Film & Chemical in 1972. Goodman had been a big name in the funny books since the thirties, having famously brought us Captain America and the Marvel imprint itself, amongst other things, and Atlas was going to be a rival to the big two. Atlas would mean that Goodman was still very much in the game, and it would succeed by taking risks rather than simply duplicating what Marvel and DC had been doing.

The company hit the ground running, chucking a whole bunch of titles at the public in a short space of time, but nothing really stuck as Goodman hoped and the operation folded within the year. Colin Smith has written in engrossing detail about the short, unhappy life of Atlas Comics.

Yet of all Atlas' debut titles, Phoenix remains, paradoxically, both the most puzzling and the least intriguing. For writer/editor Jeff Rovin and artist Sal Amendola's storytelling displayed little familiarity, beyond the most obvious of conventions, with the then-dominant traditions of superhero comics. Nor did their work seem to deliberately hark back to redundant approaches to costumed crime fighter tales either. Neither rooted in the present or the past, Phoenix failed to offer any convincing measure of the superhero genre's pleasures and satisfactions. Underneath its glossy surface, it appeared to be a comic that was approaching its subject matter in an almost entirely random manner. In that, it was as if Rovin and Amendola had been shown a few random covers featuring a sci-fi flavoured superbloke before being told to emulate whatever virtues they perceived there. Perhaps Phoenix was an attempt to produce something that broke, to one degree or another, with superhero tradition. But if so, it stumbled because it failed to reflect a grasp of whatever the conventions were that Rovin and Amendola wanted to challenge.

I have a different take on the title, doubtless tinted by my first encounter all those years ago, and yet Smith is absolutely right about its failure as a comic book.

Phoenix, as is probably obvious, was a superhero title, but one which took a different tone, seemingly attempting an unprecedented sense of realism relative to previous superhero books, and it had a cold, pragmatic tone. It wasn't going to hold our hand. Our hero is technologically augmented during an encounter with aliens, but these aliens are the Deiei, essentially a variation on the creatures described by abductees in the UFO lore of the time but with certain identifiable human characteristics. They're aliens from Shatner's Star Trek or even Dan Dare more than they're Kree, Skrull, or Dominators. They initially seem to belong to a universe which is more or less our own, wherein Phoenix is the only superhero, and in which miraculous powers require at least some explanation - albeit one rooted somewhere within the grey areas of pseudoscience and its attendant mythologies. This was part of what appealed to me at the age of twelve or thereabouts - Phoenix seemed to take place in a world which might exist, or at least which could not yet be fully ruled out so easily as those places where insect bites bestow abilities regardless of physiology. Phoenix felt like part of the same world as the ponderous science-fiction cinema of the seventies with its jumpsuits, moral quandaries, and somber mood.

Sal Amendola had already drawn his fair share of Batman, Aquaman and others, yet - as Colin Smith suggests - his art on Phoenix seemed to ignore many of the conventions of sequential story telling. To my eyes, it looks more like illustration than comic art in the traditional sense, which worked fine for me because it seemed to suit the tone of the book, and worked at least as well as the strips in, off the top of my head, Doctor Who annuals, which similarly seemed to lack precedent - as though drawn by persons who had never read a comic strip.

Given that I distinctly recall my discovery of Phoenix, Deathlok and Worlds Unknown occurring prior to 2000AD showing up, these three seemed to represent a consistent, vaguely adult vision in contrast to Dan Dare and The Whizzers from Space - both of which retained an awful lot of schoolboy DNA - and the strips in TV tie-in annuals which always felt like button pushing crowd pleasers for all their otherwise admirable qualities.

Sure enough, Phoenix is wonky, massively uneven, and riddled with inconsistencies, none of which mattered to me when I was twelve, and even now I can still feel the faint residual glow of what first drew me to this material. There remains some appeal in a superhero strip which refuses to wave the magic wand without having a really good reason, or which at least suggests this was part of the original proposition. By issue three, we've had sufficient peculiar Biblical allusions to suggest some impending revelation - Phoenix is casually likened to Jesus Christ, he parts the waters, and so on; then Satan himself is unmasked as a renegade Deiei as part of an arc which feels somewhat in debt to Richard S. Shaver; and the letters page appears, and it seems everyone is on board...

Then issue four is upon us, following three in which the standard did indeed seem to dip, and Phoenix is reborn as the Protector with a whole new costume by an intergalactic council of Kirby knock offs. Apparently the bold new direction wasn't paying off after all, and Ric Estrada couldn't even be bothered to make his flashback panels look like anything which had happened in previous issues.

 

Phoenix was a good idea which simply could have been done a lot better. There are some beautifully arresting images in at least the first issue, and if the narrative is all over the place, I've probably read too much van Vogt to be troubled by the inconsistency or the wild leaps of logic which don't actually make a whole lot of sense. I once wrote and drew a nine panel superhero parody wherein the main character experiences four sequential secret origins in rapid succession, one after the other, but it turns out Gary Friedrich got there before me, and probably got paid for it too.

*: 1987's Berserker, a comic strip which went through various incarnations - including one drawn by Charlie Adlard - before I realised it was a non-starter, was more or less a rewrite of Phoenix with a big helping of Richard S. Shaver thrown in for seasoning. Also, The Sixth Day, a short story from 2007 which appears in The Great Divide makes a number of references to the Phoenix comic book.

So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away

Richard Brautigan So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away (1982)
This was Brautigan's final novel, one which supposedly foreshadows his suicide in 1984 - which I don't quite buy. So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away is told from the perspective of a twelve-year old boy who accidentally shoots his only friend and spends the rest of his life regretting that he didn't spend what little money he had on a hamburger rather than bullets on that unfortunate day. If not without humour, it's nevertheless a solemn, introspective novel lamenting the advent of a world which no longer makes so much sense as it once did, and while the author did indeed shoot himself in the head, two whole years had passed and you could pick almost anything from Brautigan's body of work as a foreshadowing of his demise.

Of those I've read, of all Brautigan's novels this one does seem a little more specific in its focus, less-meandering than he can be; and it's a sombre read with its doubtless autobiographical focus on extremes of poverty and the impermanence of existence, hence - I suppose - the somewhat tenuous suggestion that it could count for a suicide note. Whatever the case may have been, it's an astonishing and powerful piece of writing which once again raises the question of how Brautigan, whose voice is nothing if not distinctive to the point of being absolutely his own, managed to keep from repeating himself or writing the same novel over and over. I suspect had he been writing a couple of decades earlier, his posthumous reputation would have been colossal by this point.