Brats Bizarre originally ran in Toxic!, the relatively short-lived British weekly aiming to recapture some of the magic which had gone missing from 2000AD, and which remained unfortunately incomplete once the comic vanished from the shelves. I had no idea those responsible took the strip to Epic Comics for a four-issue series, and only made this discovery about a month ago.
Following the similarly acidic Marshall Law, Brats Bizarre finds Pat Mills squeezing further poison from the superhero spot and somehow without repeating himself. It's horrible and it's supposed to be horrible, and was perfectly suited to Duke Mighten's arrestingly stylised Art Deco graphics providing insight into how it might have been had Aubrey Beardsley been born half a century later and ended up working for DC or Marvel, should any of us have been pondering that one. In the generically dystopian near future of muscular super-powered cops in capes enforcing the status quo, the Brats Bizarre are amoral super-powered outcasts, freaks in the truest sense of the term, degenerates, and proud examples of any other pejorative you care to invoke. Unlike the traditional Marvel outcast who reads books and is therefore unpopular at school, Brats Bizarre were the weird and perverse children of a literary tradition which probably owes more to de Sade or Burroughs than to Siegel and Shuster, and was honestly one of the best strips to have appeared in Toxic!
So of course it was exciting to discover it had been expanded upon, continued and all wrapped up, and in terms of the story it's done fairly well for the most part, although the ending wherein the Brats are revealed as at least morally consistent, ultimately becoming role models for the corporate super-schills who have been trying to kill them - it feels a bit Breakfast Club and strikes an odd note. Unfortunately, none of this quite works without Duke Mighten, whom I gather was probably either busy or not interested when the reboot came up. He draws the first issue, which starts again from scratch rather than simply reprinting the Toxic! material, his work embellished by Anthony Adhikary, Colin Fawcett, and Paul Scott, the three of whom then illustrate the remaining three issues under their own steam. Working with Mighten, their contributions seemed a little fussy but work as a faux-Giraud embellishment of Mighten's art, if a poor second to the elegant simplicity of what he drew and painted for Toxic!; but without his contribution, the art is - sorry - mostly fucking abysmal requiring particular focus on the writing as a distraction from its raging ineptitude, except somehow the writing doesn't quite work without Duke Mighten.
What a fucker.
Apparently this either inspired or at least foreshadowed The Boys, although even in this state it was many times better from what I've seen of both the Garth Ennis book and its inevitable Netflix adaptation. This could have been a beautiful thing, but never mind.
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