Rorschach

Tom King, Jorge Fornés & Dave Stewart Rorschach (2021)
I've mostly steered clear of all the Watchmen stuff which hasn't been drawn by Dave Gibbons. I somehow ended up with a copy of a Comedian comic book written by one of those young lads who writes fucking everything these days, and aside from the obligatory labyrinthine foreshadowing it was about as good as I expected it to be; the HBO TV series was mostly a decent effort, I guess, aside from recycling the story Alan Moore had already told; but this grabbed me, partially because it doesn't actually look like a Watchmen spin-off, and of course, it's Tom King.

For those of you requiring spoilers at this juncture, grow up.

This isn't the ginger nutcase from the original run, but rather a later individual or individuals inhabiting the same universe who assume the mantle, one of whom is hired to assassinate a presidential candidate. The comic book follows a detective who tries to work out what the fuck is going on. The trail of clues leads to conspiracy theorists who believe that a blank tape contains messages from the original Rorschach, and the guy currently behind the wibbly-wobbly mask seems to be Steve Ditko with the serial numbers filed off, creator of a comic book clearly based on Ditko's Objectivist hero, Mr. A - himself a forerunner to Alan Moore's remix of the character. So there's also a commentary on aspects of the comics industry and its cultural significance, with both Otto Binder and Frank Miller showing up as themselves, specifically as Rorshach conspiracy theorists. There's a lot to unpack, as the saying goes.

Anyway, the artwork is gorgeous and it's wonderfully moody, beautifully written - at least in terms of pace and dialogue - but also thematically dense and ponderous. Even if you were paying close attention, a second or third reread may be necessary for full appreciation, although this shouldn't count against Rorschach which ultimately rewards the effort.

Day of the Giants

Lester Del Rey Day of the Giants (1959)
Firstly, the flying saucers shown destroying a city with rays of some description on the cover appear nowhere in the novel. Weirdly, I find this sort of inattention to detail on the part of a publisher often serves to indicate that something truly special is to be found behind the wildly misleading painting; and so it is here. I can't say anything I've read by Lester Del Rey ever truly blew my nuts off, but there was always, I felt, a lot of promise, enough so as to suggest there might be a genuine classic hidden somewhere in the back catalogue. It might be this one.

Our story transports an average farmhand and his twin brother to Asgard, realm of the Norse Gods of legend. Ragnarok is approaching and so the Gods are recruiting, and the twin brother has the makings of a hero. Unfortunately our guy was caught up by accident, and being as Asgard doesn't take kindly to non-heroic types, he strives to make himself useful so as to avoid the wrath of his hosts. This he does by teaching them about gunpowder, how to make hand grenades, uranium-235, and other martial innovations which had never occurred to them, Asgard being a stubbornly traditional society. He also undertakes some pruning and restores Yggdrasil, the world tree, to full health; and his advanced weaponry aids in the defeat of the frost giants at the end.

It probably doesn't sound like much, aside from predating Marvel's similarly urbane version of Asgard by a few years, and the story approximately distills Lord of the Rings down to a snappier 128 pages - unassuming rustic type travels far to battle terrible power and so on and so forth; but the telling seals the deal. Where the one about how the chess club loser defeats the thickies, so beloved of Asimov and others, is almost a genre in its own right, Del Rey writes something which almost feels like Simak in its good natured understatement - no lecturing, no speechifying, and Leif Svensen really is just a regular guy, as distinct from the former star of the Charles Atlas adverts created in revenge for some high school wedgie which Isaac the author can neither forgive nor forget. Asgardian magic is explained, or at least accounted for, without any stretching of points or ill-fitting lectures about protons, and most of the book is simply our man titting about in Asgard, making sense of things, and teaching dwarves about firearms. There's no hint of questing, nor of any attempt to get the reader's pulse racing, and it's funny without telling jokes. I particularly enjoyed the portrayal of Loki as amiable and witty, but long-suffering given most of his peers being mainly about the mead and fighting; and by the time he nips back to Earth to bring back cartons of fags for Leif and his twin, I was sold. It's fantasy without the hey nonny no, or science-fiction which remembers that it also has to tell a story, which it does before delivering a lesson about conservatism, tradition, and the importance of taking chances; so it's a great story, well told, and it even has something to say. Wonderful.

I always suspected he had one like this hidden away somewhere.

Adolf Hitler

John Toland Adolf Hitler (1976)
I've read this as research for something or other which will hopefully be in the bag by the time you read this, and which was itself indirectly inspired by Jimmy Carr Destroys Art, a sort of book burning game show hosted by the enduringly unpleasant Carr. The show was produced by Channel 4 who purchased one of Hitler's watercolours for £11,500 so that a studio audience could decide whether or not to have it destroyed, thus posing deeply philosophical questions about whether it's possible to separate the art from the legacy of its creator. I don't suppose anyone suspected that so thoughtful a presentation could ever be viewed with such controversy.

Naturally the internet exploded in response, and I would regard most of the criticism I've seen as entirely justified, although it has since emerged that the painting which ended up shredded was almost certainly a fake. My personal view is that whether or not it is possible to differentiate the art from the artist doesn't really matter, but that book burning or equivalent is never a good look because it's better to understand evil, or that which we have come to perceive as evil, than to settle for screaming this is evil in the face of anyone who happens to ask; because those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, as George Santayana wrote, although admittedly I actually thought that one was a Jim Jones original. The thing about destroying the evidence, particularly in the case of Adolf Hitler, is that it facilitates mystery and even mythology, neither of which are much use in preventing the re-occurrence of the same shit.

Further to this, we seem to have a great many monsters these days, and whilst it's difficult to deny that Hitler became the very definition of monster, it limits the possibility of him ever having been just some bloke. This means that we've somewhat lost the ability to spot the emergence of monsters in our own time, because we can't accept that people very much like ourselves were complicit in the deaths of six-million or more Jews; and so those describing immigrants as cockroaches, for one example, are often overlooked as simply persons with strong opinions who just happen to love their country.

Additionally, Hitler's monstrous qualities should be self-evident without having to have it spelled out for us in the name of viewing figures. Lazy fuckers attempting to score points by drawing our attention to monsters whilst screeching don't you think this is terrible? Well, don't you? Don't you? have really begun to bore me shitless. So, I said to myself, let's discover Hitler.

Toland's biography seems to be viewed as the best of the bunch by someone on the internet, so that's why I picked it. The review I read emphasised Toland's attempts to maintain an impartial view, which sounded promising given that I'm reasonably familiar with the arguments against. The arguments against, as summarised and simplified by a million wearying science-fiction scenarios, are that he was a bit of a loser, a sad, sad man who couldn't paint, was chucked out of art college and spent his youth as a homeless for a while - the wrong sort of homeless, rather than the noble victim types we tend to prefer - and he made for a cowardly soldier during the first world war. Also he hated Jews despite probably being half-Jewish, only had one bollock, suffered from uncontrollable farting, couldn't get it up, and no-one liked him. Ha ha. What a loser!

Unfortunately none of this turns out to be entirely true. Although he was repeatedly rejected by the art schools to which he applied and thus never actually had the chance to be chucked out, and he was mostly self taught, the notion that he had no artistic ability whatsoever is patently untrue - which could also be said of many of us. He was distinguished and even decorated for his soldiering during the first world war, and was popular amongst his comrades. His ballbag seems to have contained the traditional quota of bollocks so far as we are able to tell, and the story of his unidentified paternal grandfather being Jewish seems to have been a story told by his enemies, and as is probably obvious, he made quite a few of those.

More curious still is the question of his antisemitism which, from what Toland describes, seems to have been poorly defined at best. He had Jewish friends in his youth, and was eternally grateful to the Jewish doctor who treated his mother's cancer, and his antisemitism seems to have been conditional, something on roughly the same level of my own grandmother's culturally characteristic regard of black people - gushingly favourable if a black person had been friendly to her in the supermarket, but otherwise synchronised to whatever she'd read in the Sun that week. I haven't read Mein Kampf and have no desire to do so, but it sounds very much like an expression of the early Nazi party's struggle to gain the popular vote - a convenient fulcrum by which to get bums on seats with a promise of saving the country from those bad people over there, specifically by associating the perceived threat of Communism with something a bit more tangible, namely funny foreigners. This isn't to diminish the awful influence of Mein Kampf, but it seems significant that Hitler himself came to regard his book as incoherent populist drivel which nevertheless got the job done. More startling still is that as the party graduated to being the only option on the ballot sheet, the awful treatment of Germany's Jewish population was never quite subject to full support, meaning the reduction of the historical narrative to racist Germany unanimous against former friends and neighbours isn't entirely accurate, and more closely resembles the sort of bullshit that - for example - the western Muslim community has had to endure in recent times. In other words, never mind the claim that it couldn't happen here, because it actually is happening, meaning we as a society need to be seriously fucking vigilant about what comes next.

At least during the thirties, it seems the Reich was keen to downplay the antisemitic aspect of its program in pursuit of a more respectable image, one less likely to sour diplomatic relations with other countries, hence Hitler's disowning the thuggish brownshirt element around 1934 in furthering the support of the respectable middle and upper classes. The Kristallnacht of 1938 in which Jewish homes, businesses and places of worship were ransacked or destroyed seems to have been mainly a spontaneous uprising by the brownshirts, and one about which many of the higher-ups felt distinctly uncomfortable, and which Göring* in particular regarded as insane given the significant role of Jewish business within the larger German economy.

So the antisemitism would seem to have been an expedient use of existing prejudices which spiralled out of control as the Nazis, and particularly Hitler, fell more and more in love with their own mythology. I state this not to diminish its significance, but rather to illustrate that the pattern is something we should immediately recognise rather than dismiss as something which can't happen again because we're much nicer these days.

Toland suggests that had Hitler died in 1937, he probably would have been remembered mostly as a great statesman and orator, which doesn't seem such a stretch given that we've tended to overlook antisemitic or similar tendencies amongst other historical leaders simply because, for whatever reason, we haven't chosen to remember them as monsters.

The strangest, most unexpected detail I take from this biography has been that Adolf Hitler was personable, funny, reasonably intelligent, self-effacing and likable providing you were on the right side of the argument. He was clearly a little odd and self-absorbed as a young man, which hardly makes him unique, but rendered him prone to mysticism and an intuitive faith in what he thought should be right to which he adhered regardless of objective reality. It's therefore not entirely surprising that he more or less completely lost it by the end, thus becoming the monster we remember.

Toland's biography is nine-hundred pages, which is a long time to spend immersed in the most terrible period of human history, but it's mostly fascinating - excepting a few instances of inner circle politics and policy wibbling back and forth for more pages than seems quite necessary. Surprisingly, everyone comes out of it a little better than you might expect, which is also chilling because, as I say, these people were not exceptional and most of them seem unfortunately familiar. It is specifically this rendering of the Third Reich and its cast of colourful characters as approximately regular people which leaves this era seeming, if anything, more horrifying than has been made apparent by the contemporary denouncement of monsters; because it isn't Darth Vader or the Daleks. It's us, regardless of how righteous you may deem yourself to be. We did this.

This must not happen again.

Someone somewhere will read the above and find themselves unable to tell the difference between what I've written and an affirmation of Adolf Hitler being a great man who simply made poor choices, probably additionally pointing out that actually he was a monster; and so it will happen again.

*: I think it was Göring. It's difficult keeping track of them all.

Flight 714

Hergé Flight 714 (1968)
Several people have told me I shouldn't be reading Tintin just as I shouldn't be reading the works of others on the list. Hergé was a collaborator and Nazi sympathiser, you see, except as per fucking usual he actually wasn't, just as it is with those other persons on the roll call of individuals denounced due to the contemporary equivalent of Rik from the Young Ones jumping up and down and screaming, look at me, everybody, I found one, because that's apparently all it takes. That said, I probably shouldn't mention that I picked this up as light relief from John Toland's nine-hundred page biography of Adolf Hitler on the grounds that it gets a bit depressing once you hit 1942.

Apparently I just did. Never mind.

I grew up on a farm in the middle of the rural English nowhere, and every two weeks or so we were subject to a visit by a mobile library. I was just about big enough to cope with the steps and would climb up into the rear of the truck, lined with shelves, and toddle off towards the back where they kept the children's books. The cover of this one really grabbed my attention, and so it served as my introduction to Tintin, an obsession which kept me going for the next couple of years. I came to prefer Asterix, but at the time I felt the cover of Asterix in Spain seemed smug and frivolous, whereas Tintin took itself just seriously enough to appeal to me as I struggled to make sense of the world. So this is possibly where it all started, whatever it may be.

Hergé - not actually a Nazi sympathiser by any meaningful description unless you believe my opening paragraph makes me one - seemed to be on a mission to educate his audience, to send them to far flung places and cultures without patronising them, and to portray those cultures and encounters with realism and a degree of sympathy, formative efforts predating The Blue Lotus notwithstanding. Of course, Tintin wasn't actually journalism and took an occasionally speculative digression - sending the gang to the moon for one example, and Flight 714 for another.

If Destination Moon skates fairly close to the hard science-fiction of Arthur C. Clarke, this one gets even weirder in drawing on the theories, such as they are, of Robert Charroux who significantly influenced Erich von Däniken. So not only do we have the discovery of hidden subterranean temples constructed by ancient astronauts, but also telepathy, and a lift back to civilisation facilitated by flying saucer, albeit in hallucinatory terms.

This was Hergé's penultimate Tintin adventure, assembled following failure to relaunch as an abstract artist, while significantly disgruntled by the success of Asterix, and himself somewhat bored of his own characters. This much is roughly apparent from Flight 714 only barely having a story - and the title names the flight they didn't take because they ended up on this one - with nothing so complex as the intrigue and espionage of previous escapades; and the paranormal element feels a little as though Georges was simply trying to keep himself invested. Additionally, some of the background material, notably the then fairly trendy supersonic passenger jet, were drawn by assistants.

Nevertheless, despite all that's stacked against it, Flight 714 is a great book - just stranger than we'd come to expect. The slapstick is never far away, never overdone, and remains funny throughout; and the pacing is such that it never feels as though we're treading water, waiting for the next scene, even where the lack of obvious direction has become apparent; and of course the art is, as ever, outstanding.

Even as the comeback album its author didn't really want to record, Flight 714 stands with the best of them, and enough so as to have retained its charm half a century later.