The New Adventures of Hitler

Grant Morrison & Steve Yeowell The New Adventures of Hitler (1990)
I flogged all my copies of Crisis a while back, a decision I haven't had much cause to regret beyond the loss of John Smith's New Statesman - which in any case has since been collected - and the four issues containing The New Adventures of Hitler; which is why I tracked them all down on eBay, seeing as we're obviously not going to get a reprint any time soon with the current political climate undecided as to whether Hitler was actually a bad guy or just someone with some very interesting ideas who went about things the wrong way.

As you may recall, this first appeared in some Scottish arts magazine called Cut and in doing so inspired the resignation of its star columnist, Pat Kane of bewilderingly awful pop duo Hue & Cry. Kane objected that the strip represented a combination of gratuitous shock whilst simultaneously declawing the figure of Adolf Hitler to repackage him as a harmlessly entertaining tit - seemingly a contradiction, but never mind...

Labyani makes the point that fascism wasn't just a standard relationship between producers and consumers of cultural commodities; Jews in the death camp were the actual raw materials of such a process, their bodies being shovelled out of the gas chambers and industrially converted into soap, lampshades, toothbrushes. 'Of all the images of fascism this was the one which Nazis did not dare disseminate,' says Labyani, 'but it must always remain the image by which fascism defines itself.'

The New Adventures of Hitler constitutes an image of fascism which fascists, past and present, would quite like to be seen around: the Fuhrer's early life portrayed like J. Alfred Prufrock's, all bourgeois bumble and angst; references to hip pop music and comics culture; surely then, not such a monstrous man, nor such monstrous times?

The objections seem initially sound, but are unfortunately based on a very specific, somewhat loaded interpretation of no more than the first six pages.

For those who didn't get the memo, these New Adventures occur during a possibly apocryphal but certainly formative era of Hitler's existence, spent mooching off his more successful half-brother in Liverpool, England between the wars. He's basically an unemployable twat with delusions of grandeur, a profoundly underwhelming individual such as any of us might encounter - as based on what we actually know of the man. The point of this is not refutation of the myth of Hitler as a monster - as Pat Kane believed - but illustration of the monster as someone with whom we may already be familiar, someone who walks amongst us empowered and transformed by toxic mythology. It's the mythology of which we should be scared you see, because - as even Alan Moore will tell you - it's the symbols and metaphors which do the most damage. Discussion of Hitler, even as a clown, therefore seems preferable to the kind of enforced silence which fosters the mystery, maybe even the frisson of forbidden fruit, the thing which they don't want you knowing about…

Anyway, the point of this tale is that Adolf's legacy, all that bullshit about the Holy Grail and destiny, very much endures in the present political climate - at least since Thatcher - and that the dreams of this awful little man with a runny bottom weren't entirely put to bed in 1945, contrary to the publicity. It seems like something which needed to be said, and it's said beautifully here in a strip which feels like a peculiar combination of Hogarth and de Chirico, atmospherically speaking - despite the smart-arsed colorisation*.

Third World War and the other stuff in these issues of Crisis is about as good as I remember it being, but Hitler is a masterpiece, and so darkly comic that it's not actually funny. Anyone who comes away from the strip with a higher opinion of its star was probably already on the wrong side of the argument.

*: I recall a phone conversation with Aidan Potts of Inkling magazine describing how two of his colleagues - one possibly being Steve Whitaker - had landed the cushy number of colourising the previously black and white strips for publication in Crisis. 'They're taking the piss,' Aidan chortled, 'using wallpaper samples and everything.' I never really understood why I was supposed to have considered this such a wizard wheeze.