Total Eclipse (1988)

 

I've a feeling more or less every comic book publisher has done one of these crossover things at one point or another, and while I can't be arsed to check, I suspect Eclipse Comics may have been the first to go down that road outside of the big two, unless we count single page Crumb strips featuring both the Checkered Demon and Spain Rodriguez drawn by himself. The deal is to get all of your superheroes tangled up in a single massive story at once, which was possibly trickier for Eclipse due to company policy of allowing creators to retain the rights to their characters and so make a bit of money out of it whenever someone buys a comic; but it was probably worth the effort here, and Marv Wolfman, who arguably started it all with DC's Crisis on Infinite Earths is a great choice for writer.

Total Eclipse conspicuously follows some of the same path as Crisis with caped types united against a threat to everything ever, albeit by a different route and towards different ends. Where the point of Crisis was, in part, to simplify and rid the DC universe of talking dogs and all which prevented us from taking Superman absolutely seriously, Total Eclipse doesn't give a shit and actively teams its darkest characters with Destroyer Duck, the Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters and whatever the fuck Beanish of Beanworld is supposed to be. It works too, embracing the joyously ludicrous without feeling the need to apologise, because it's all ludicrous, even Miracleman - who wasn't rendered any less ludicrous when Alan Moore replaced the magic words and ancient wizards with misuse of advanced alien technology - just differently ludicrous. Ludicrous doesn't have to be a bad thing unless you're voting for it.

The story is that Zzed, a man who has lived forever and now wants only to die decides to destroy the universe in the hope of cashing in his own chips by association. He intends to achieve this by lining all the heavenly bodies up to form the most total eclipse of all time, because that will bring about the end of everything for some reason. Unfortunately for his purposes, it serves only to turn him into a different kind of superhero named Dr. Eclipse, although this cheers him up somewhat and he decides he wants to go on living. By this time however, Nine Crocodile, mortal and powerful enemy of Aztec Ace is helping out with the proposed end of the world and so keeps the ball rolling. Beyond these details, I didn't actually understand much of what was happening, but it seemed like fun so I didn't mind, very much enjoying what read like an A.E. van Vogt version of Crisis which could be appreciated as surrealism as much as anything. The Miracleman episodes are enjoyable, and I'm left with the feeling I  should have been reading Doug Moench's Aztec Ace back in the day. Of at least equivalent interest is the extended autobiography of Dean Mullaney, founder and publisher of Eclipse, running as an appendix to each of the five issues for the sake of perspective, from which I gather Eclipse had a more fundamental influence on the entire comic biz than I realised - the only downside being that all this fecking manga may actually be their fault, but never mind.

My only criticism is that Will Blyberg really should have been inker for more than just the first two issues, but it's a minor niggle for something so full of sparks and which clearly shamed the big two into being a bit less crap.

James D. Hudnall & David Lloyd - ESPers (1985)

As one of de yoots dem back when I first got sucked into a comic shop, the big three publishers were Marvel and DC with Eclipse Comics bringing up the rear. Eclipse looked initially exciting because I'd never heard of them, but - excepting Alan Moore's Miracleman - nothing much grabbed me on closer inspection and ESPers was one of those titles which didn't grab me, possibly because I was a very superficial person. I'm coming back to it now for the first time as homework of sorts, in preparation for re-reading James D. Hudnall's run on Marvel's Alpha Flight for Beautiful Mutants, my magnum opus which will be read by three people if I'm lucky, with one of those people being me. I'm also getting around to ESPers in vague hope of correcting a poorly quantified deficit in the general flow of publishing karma. I briefly met Hudnall at some comic book thing back when he'd just had Lex Luthor: the Unauthorized Biography published by DC, about which he was obviously excited while I stood there mumbling my gormless enthusiasm for Alpha Flight, additionally throwing in one or two mutant themed questions that most twelve-year olds would have been too self-conscious to ask. Then years fly by and I come to notice that Hudnall passed on in 2019 which, tenuous though my connection undoubtedly may be, seems shitty and unfair even to me. He was a nice guy who seemed to have great potential as a writer, at least of comic books, and I don't even know if he made a living at it.

So it goes.

I hadn't even realised ESPers, the name of which I remember well, was one of his, specifically his first book. To be fair, it's not the most solid start to a career, and the first of the five issues collected here remind me that I was left underwhelmed by at least the first two issues of Hudnall's Interface, which I now discover to have been the continuation of ESPers. The stylistic influence of both Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns is tangible in the tone of what kicks off in much the same way as so many first efforts tend to kick off*. I suppose you could call it a high-tech thriller, albeit one from an era in which the Sinclair ZX81 was not yet old enough to be deemed hilarious, so it has the slightly exhausting focus of Lynda La Plante channelled by someone who probably wasn't quite ready to be teamed up with David Lloyd. ESPers, as I half suspected at the time, answers the question, what if we had the X-Men in the real world, albeit allowing for a fairly loose grasp on what constitutes the real world - no costumes, no codenames, no aliens, and their powers are either telepathy or something similar and - you know - that stuff is kind of real if you squint a bit, maybe; plus it's the real world as seen in Bond movies, with some bad guys planning to detonate an atomic bomb in the middle of the Lebanon. Plus each issue closed with two pages of a related ESPer prose story of which the two paragraphs I managed were barely readable - although to be fair, comic book writers rarely make decent novelists, which is fine because it goes both ways.

However, by the fifth issue, you realise you've been reading for pleasure rather than out of duty, and even if you still have no fucking clue who any of these people are supposed to be, it somehow leaves you wanting more; or has done with me. I guess Hudnall was learning on the job here, and apparently learning fast, and while ESPers doesn't say much about anything in particular, it finishes superior to anything with which it might have been initially compared when you started; and the art is gorgeous, obviously.

His run on Alpha Flight was fucking great, by the way.

*: It has certain things in common with Berserker, which was my own first effort along depressingly similar lines and yet another real world superhero. It took me two months to produce the first seven pages, at which point I thankfully realised that it was garbage. A later version was drawn by Charlie Adlard but nothing came of it because I still hadn't come up with a story.

Neil Gaiman & Dave McKean - Signal to Noise (1989)

 

What exciting times they were. Neil Gaiman turned up seemingly out of nowhere and everything he wrote was amazing, and there was suddenly a lot of it about, so much so that it was difficult to keep track of it all. This one was serialised in The Face, which I browsed in WHSmith but didn't buy because it was The Face and I've never really given a shit about exciting young designers and how they've revolutionised trousers yet again. But I've always liked the title, Signal to Noise, and all that it seemed to promise, so I always intended to read this, assuming it would eventually be collected because it's Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, and so here we are.

Signal to Noise is the short tale of a film director ready to begin work on a film about the end of the previous millennium when he discovers he has cancer and only months to live. He's never going to finish this latest undertaking, which now seems crucial in view of his impending mortality; and yet he finishes it because what else is there to be done?

That's the story in full, more or less, and it's nothing earth shattering but it's beautifully told, poignant, and thought provoking without any of the dreary goth twinkle which would come to inform and infect Gaiman's subsequent writing. It takes the form of a comic strip in so much as that time unfolds across a series of sequential images with the occasional speech bubble, but it arguably has more in common with Robert Rauschenburg or William Burroughs than Batman, at least in how it's told. It's ingenious, often beautiful, and with surprisingly little suggestion of anyone doing an Alan Moore or a Bill Sienkiewicz; but somehow it falls short of the hype. It's great, but not life-changing because, I suppose, we all hoped they'd both go on to even better things, which didn't really happen. So Signal to Noise is a lavish but brief promise of what might have been but wasn't. All the same, it's nice to go back to a time when I could read something by Neil Gaiman without giving myself a headache from the constant involuntary rolling of my eyes.

It's funny that he's never written anything starring a bloke who works on the bins or in a biscuit factory, wouldn't you say? I wonder why that should be.

Neil Gaiman & Dave McKean - Black Orchid (1989)

 

Back in April, 2018 my long-standing regret at having got rid of so much of my comic book collection back in the nineties achieved critical mass, driving me to buy them all back again. I spent twenty dollars a week at the Lone Star Comics online store, knowing it would take a long time but not dwelling on that particular detail. I bought back every issue of anything I regretted having sold in the first place, filled in all of the gaps, and hunted down everything I would have bought had I known about it at the time; and now, just this week, the mission is completed with the purchase of these three prestige format issues of Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's Black Orchid. I may still buy the occasional comic book, but probably not regularly given that there doesn't seem to be anything much that I like these days. Weirdly, it does actually feel like an achievement.

Given how I've since come to regard the work of both Gaiman and McKean, and given the possibility of juvenile nostalgia tinting my judgement, Black Orchid seemed like a bit of a gamble. It isn't that either Nelly or the Davester lack talent, but I strongly feel that both have been massively overrated, having achieved popularity during an era when the comic biz was engaging in one of its most rabid periods of searching for the next superstar creator to fill Alan Moore's winkle pickers. Gaiman's writing sometimes felt a little like Alan-Moore-by-Numbers and eventually went full Tim Burton with the twinkly stuff; and while Dave McKean has always had a wonderful sense of design, he looked a little like a Bill Sienkiewicz tribute act for a long time, and I found it difficult to get past that.

However, going back to what was the start, at least for me, before I'd begun to notice any of the traits which eventually became irritating, I'm really glad to have this one back because it's magnificent. You can really see why these two had to spend the next couple of years beating them off with a shitty stick*.

If Neil Gaiman was truly channelling Alan Moore in Black Orchid, it's no longer so obvious as it may have seemed at the time. He imposes structure and rhythm in the style of Moore - switching between variations of six and eight panel pages, and to great visceral effect with the jukebox sequence in book one - but the narrative has a more natural, understated pace giving greater contrast to its dramatic hits than does the jigsaw plotting of Watchmen and the like. Dave McKean likewise keeps it simple, with powerful use of limited colour palettes and generally holding back, allowing the intimacy of his lines and composition to do the heavy lifting - which also reveals his style to be quite unlike that of Bill Sienkiewicz, regardless of whatever else he may have glued to the page in the years that followed.

Of course, Black Orchid is nevertheless caped stuff which also features Batman and Lex Luthor, and was spun out into a Vertigo series which I don't remember being up to much and therefore haven't bothered with this time around; but the telling borders on European art cinema - and the good kind - moody, inspiring, occasionally nightmarish, surreal and yet paradoxically realist at the same time. This may even have been their finest hour for my money.

*: I realise this is an unfortunate turn of phrase given details of Neil's various hobbies which have emerged since I wrote this review.

John Lydon - Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs (1993)

 

I had a feeling this one might not have stood the test of time quite so well after I read Lonely Boy, and although it probably isn't quite such a riot as Steve Jones' account, it's pretty fucking good and remains a refreshing alternative to the usual bollocks about how the Pistols were actually the Raoul Vaneigem of their day - or what amounted to the usual bollocks for a long time - not to mention all that Malcolm's masterplan shite to which a few idiots still seem to subscribe.

That said, Rotten has the initially off-putting cadence of one of those as told to autobiographies, but you get used to it and the stuff that matters is what's said more than how it's been set down. Of course, Rotten has fallen out of favour of late thanks to both Country Life butter and his vocal expressions of admiration for both Nigel Farage and Donald Trump. Whilst I'd suggest that the Country Life thing only constitutes a betrayal if you've ever mistaken the man for Joe Strummer - and I doubt even Alan Moore managed that leap - the chuckling praise for complete shitbags seems entirely consistent with everything else he ever said in pursuit of annoying those who deserve to be annoyed as much and as often as feasibly possible.

A lot of people feel the Sex Pistols were just negative. I agree, and what the fuck is wrong with that? Sometimes the absolute most positive thing you can be in a boring society is completely negative. It helps. If you're not, you show weakness, and you must never do that.

Having never experienced any desire to belong to any club that would have me as a member, I really felt that I got what the Pistols were about from the moment I first went around my friend Sean's house and, instead of listening to Remember You're a Womble as we usually did, he somehow had a copy of that pop record with all the rude words; and so, regardless of the music, I've never understood why there are still people who don't get the Pistols, persons who presumably never developed any sort of inherent scepticism regarding those claiming to have our best interests at heart. Is it not just common sense?

With this in mind, it's worth noting that Rotten incorporates statements and even entire chapters from others who were around at the time, even where Lydon's own testimony is contradicted. If you don't understand why anyone would do that in their own autobiography, you probably need to read this and to keep reading it until you're no longer a twat.

Sorry. That's just how it is.

The Dreamthief's Daughter

Michael Moorcock The Dreamthief's Daughter (2001)
I had no plans to read beyond the first six tidily collated Elric books given that everyone's favourite albino sword swinger sits at the very edge of my field of thematic interest, and wouldn't get a second glance from my direction were it anyone other than Moorcock; but I had four of the six and needed to fill the gaps, and this was on the same eBay page as the other two, so fuck it, I thought.

The Dreamthief's Daughter turns out to be a big, fat novel rather than short stories welded together in a slimmer volume, but serves as a good example of Moorcock's tendency to stretch genres beyond breaking point in the name of keeping things interesting. This one inhabits his celebrated and frequently imitated multiverse, without which we probably wouldn't have had the Moore or Morrison versions, and the camera is pulled back so as to reveal Elric as inhabiting just one segment. Another segment, which may or may not be where we live, is occupied by Ulric von Bek, an Elric variant who has the misfortune to witness the rise of Adolf Hitler, which is itself tied in with goings on in the war between the forces of Law and Chaos. If this is sounding a bit familiar, you're possibly thinking of one of numerous cheap, less satisfying imitations, because Moorcock merely joins dots while resisting the temptation to reveal that Hitler was actually working for those outer space robot people, or Cthulhu, or the three-legged bloke on the Manx flag. Nope - these Nazis are the real thing, driven by exactly the same bullshit which seems to have enjoyed a recent resurgence in popularity out here in the real world. This presents a canny balancing act given the celebrated Nazi love of mystical bollocks remaining bollocks in the context of a novel featuring actual magic swords.

Perhaps my overfondness for reading, as a child, had made me too familiar with all the old arguments used to justify the mortal lust for power. The moment the moral authority of the supernatural was invoked, you knew you were in conflict with the monumentally self-deceiving, who should not be trusted at any level.

Thus we get an Elric book which seems to channel Abraham Merritt - given how much time is spent underground - gets the absolute best from its genre, has quite a lot to say, and keeps Nazi Germany in horrifying perspective without turning the fuckers into generically cool bad guys to be booed and hissed like the empire in Star Wars. Possibly ironically, given my opening paragraph, this may even be the best Elric book I've read.

Lanark

Alasdair Gray Lanark (1981)
Generally speaking, I've grown a little jaded with novels featuring characters who are aware of inhabiting a work of fiction, because the conceit seems to have become so ubiquitous of late as to suggest that shitheads are getting in on the action. It's one of those post-modern tricks that fucking everyone does because it's easy, and it suggests philosophical depth without the pesky requirement of actual groundwork undertaken, and anyone pointing out the emperor's lack of clothing will usually find themselves branded a thickie. Each new example of a character turning to the imaginary camera to directly address an audience now reminds me of my stepson assuming he'll blow our minds by explaining how Deadpool, a Marvel superhero from the nineties, breaks the fourth wall. I wouldn't mind but he hasn't even read the comics, just watched some green haired YouTube gamer twat opining about them.

For anyone who didn't get the memo, or who may still be buzzing from the euphoria of this amazing discovery and the attendant honour of getting to tell the rest of us about it, fictional or metafictional characters who don't occasionally address the reader - or wink at the camera or otherwise comment on the story in which they have become involved - have been with us since before the novel was even a thing. It might even be suggested that characters who remain unaware of someone else writing their lives are the more recent anomaly in terms of literary history. I assume that at least one of you will have heard of William Shakespeare…

Anyway, I'd been wondering about all this after Lance Parkin wrote about what he termed - by his own admission, for the sake of convenience - the Gray Tradition, a genre encompassing writers such as Philip K. Dick, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison and others known to turn up within their own narratives. Of course, terming it the Gray Tradition might seem akin to proposing that Don Quixote belongs to the Deadpool Tradition but, as Parkin explained, he was mostly just thinking aloud, and his model arguably incorporates more than just the basic furniture of Menippean satire, hence his efforts to map it out, whatever it is.

Lanark figures here for a number of reasons, not least being the chapter wherein Lanark meets the author who then describes some of what he's been trying to do with this book. Lanark is himself also a pseudo-autobiographical stand-in for the author. His story, one which spans from youth to old age, takes place in the city of Unthank, which may or may not be an afterlife of sorts. Lanark, hardly likely to miss the suspension of normal laws of cause, effect, and common sense, speculates that Unthank may even be Hell - although it seems to bear closer resemblance to the frozen underworld of many pre-Christian cultures, albeit with a generous helping of Kafka - but the precise nature of Unthank isn't so important as what it says about our own world.

Our own world, or at least Alasdair Gray's experience of the same, is detailed in the two central books of this four-ish part novel as the life of Duncan Thaw, a young Glaswegian who attended art school in the late fifties. Thaw paints murals - as did Gray - but finds himself at odds with his tutors, his contemporaries, and much of his social environment; and his life culminates in his painting the book of Genesis across the interior of a church scheduled for demolition. Thus, much like humanity born in the Biblical garden, the great work is doomed before it's even started.

Very few men are as nasty to their children as you are to yours. Why didn't you give me a railway station to decorate? It would have been easy painting to the glory of Stevenson, Telford, Brunel and a quarter million Irish navvies. But here I am, illustrating your discredited first chapter through an obsolete art form on a threatened building in a poor province of a collapsing empire.

Thaw's mural seems to echo both the history of Glasgow, and by association the history of human civilisation, and the writing of the novel itself; and this was the point at which I noticed just how much Lanark foreshadows Alan Moore's Jerusalem - which now strikes me as amounting to Lanark rewritten with more ornate guitar solos and very little of the actual heart or soul.

As to what Lanark is about, it's about everything, or is at least about more than can be summarised in a single paragraph; but if there's truly any overarching theme, its constitution is touched upon when Lanark argues with Ozenfant in the final chapter.

'You are a liar!' cried Lanark. 'We have no nature. Our nations are not built instinctively by our bodies, like beehives; they are works of art, like ships, carpets, and gardens. The possible shapes of them are endless. It is bad habits, not bad nature, which makes us repeat the dull old shapes of poverty and war. Only greedy people who profit by these things believe they are natural.'

It's a long book - nearly six-hundred pages - because it's about everything, stated in organic, evolving terms rather than just ticking all the salient points one by one from a list, Alan. Much of it is frankly fucking peculiar, but it's all familiar. Some of it drags, just as real life occasionally drags, but it's all part of the process, making Lanark as much of an essential read as anything can be described as an essential read; and even if whatever conclusions we draw may seem pessimistic or depressing, there's a great joy in embracing something which is at least truthful.

Kingdom Come

Mark Waid & Alex Ross Kingdom Come (1996)
I'd stopped reading the caped stuff when this was first published and only found out about it a couple of weeks ago. The reason I stopped reading the caped stuff was due to the entire mainstream comics biz having taken to impersonating Rob Liefeld, or at least Todd McFarlane, and it had all begun to look like a massive pile of wank from where I was stood. Nearly three decades later I realise I wasn't the only one to feel that way, and Kingdom Come features a host of established DC superpersons who, having reached retirement age, find themselves significantly bemused at the younger generation of bloodthirsty cyborg assassins wielding shuriken swords and way too much angry crosshatching. It's a weird one because it's approximately an epic war between, on one side, the traditionally wholesome and brightly coloured comic book heroes of the fifties - hence the non-ironic cameo by Krypto the Super Dog - and all that fucking awful shite inspired by Liefeld and his buddies; so on at least one level it's pitched firmly against not so much the comic book growing up (which it sort of didn't in any case) as what it grew into, told by both means and medium far removed from the newsstands and legitimately juvenile audience whose legacy it directly represents. So it's Miller's Dark Knight flipped to more positive and progressive aspirations - or possibly where Alan Moore would have gone with 1963 had he finished the thing.

In caped terms, I didn't always get DC, generally preferring Marvel and usually rolling my eyes during streamed documentaries identifying the difference as being that DC deals in legends, man; but now having read and re-read a few of the various Crisis books - and re-reading is essential because they are otherwise often incomprehensible - I think I understand the distinction. Marvel superheroes tend to be Gods and monsters which also happen to be ourselves with all of our baggage and characteristic failings. DC superheroes are, for the most part, more remote, something to which I suppose we aspire rather than which we become. There are numerous exceptions to this generalisation, but that's what I take from Multiversity, Infinite Crisis, and now this; and it's why, I would suggest, those Marvel movies have generally been more watchable than the DC jobs, because everything looks epic if you throw enough CGI at it, so movie-epic isn't that impressive in and of itself.

Anyway, this works because although the story is probably not actually anything special, being masses of caped folks flying angrily at each other whilst shooting rays from their outstretched hands for two-hundred pages, the art is genuinely breathtaking; and so breathtaking that even the most ridiculous aspects of the genre are rendered with sublime grace and beauty as befits tales of the Gods and their kin. Accordingly Kingdom Come also demonstrates why it's mostly a waste of time trying to transfer this stuff to the big screen. The strapline about how you'll believe a man can fly never really worked for me because I could see it was just some guy in a leotard hanging from a near invisible wire, but Kingdom Come is, on the other hand, unusually persuasive.

Secret Wars

Jim Shooter, Mike Zeck, Bob Layton & others
Secret Wars (1984)
I became vaguely aware of this one when I noticed an issue of the Marvel UK reprint in my local newsagent. I'd been off the comics for a while and hadn't even bothered with 2000AD since about 1980, never mind the caped stuff. I thought it looked lame, even desperate with all those superheroes crowded together on the cover. It seemed to suggest that those responsible had run out of ideas and were now pushing the novelty of lurid combinations of characters in a last bid attempt to keep the magic alive, sheer force of quantity over quality - like a superhero version of the Godzilla movie, Destroy All Monsters but without the charm. A couple of years later, as I discovered comic books afresh, I asked Charlie, my Marvel comic acquisition advisor, whether Secret Wars had been any good. It was okay, he told me, but was basically one massive crowd of super types yelling let's get them, before running across the plain and having a fight with a rival crowd of super types, over and over for the full twelve issues.

Now that I've finally read the thing, I can confirm that this is more or less what happens. It seems to have been plotted by a method which entailed watching a couple of small boys smashing their extensive collections of action figures together while doing all the sound effects and explosions with their mouths.

As it turns out, action figures were a significant part of the creative process which brought us Secret Wars. DC Comics had recently had a bunch of their superheroes issued as action figures by Kenner Toys and were doing quite well from it. Marvel made a deal with Mattel for their own range, but Mattel insisted there would need to be some massive attention grabbing crossover event to sell the thing - which DC hadn't required due to Superman and Batman having maintained a fairly high profile thanks to movies and television.

The premiss of Secret Wars is that a mysterious, omnipotent intelligence identified only as the Beyonder abducts a bunch of Marvel superheroes and sets them up on a world he's made out of bits of other planets specifically so that they can all have a massive scrap with a bunch of Marvel bad guys. Although Secret Wars is remembered as the first such mammoth crossover event of its kind, it could be argued that the first was probably the Avengers-Defenders War waged across alternating issues of their respective titles back in 1973. DC's Crisis on Infinite Earths appeared shortly after in 1985, but had been in development at least since the December 1981 issue of the Comics Journal wherein it was referred to as a forthcoming twelve part series affecting the entire DC universe.

This being said, the notion of some Godlike being spiriting disparate groups of abductees away to a mysterious realm and having them fight had been around for a while, at least since 1969's War Games by Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke which, being a Doctor Who serial, means they had almost certainly nicked it from someone else, possibly Fritz Leiber's change war tales or Andre Norton's Defiant Agents; and I'm sure the idea informs something written by A.E. van Vogt, although I can't remember what. I myself first encountered the plot in Fredric Brown's Arena from a 1944 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, although admittedly I specifically encountered the 1973 comic strip adaptation by Gerry Conway and John Buscema in Worlds Unknown #4, which I found in a jumble sale held at my junior school and which was probably the first American Marvel comic I'd ever seen.

 

Anyway, Secret Wars comes about due to a seemingly all-powerful intelligence from a universe beyond our own - hence the name of its sole inhabitant - discovering a pinhole, accidentally created by the Molecule Man, through which he is able to view our reality. In his own realm, the Beyonder is the universe, so naturally he has a lot of questions about what he sees on our side of the cosmic fence and is particularly curious about desire. For some reason he deduces that the best way to develop an understanding of desire is to have a bunch of caped types beat the crap out of each other, which at least spared us investigations of a kind which would have ensured that pow! the comic book grew up a full two years ahead of Alan Moore's schedule, even if having the Beyonder watch what happens when a man and a lady like each other would have made a bit more sense.

Amongst the abductees we find most of the X-Men, excepting Kitty Pryde who gets left behind on Earth so as to give Colossus something to do - specifically mooning around whining about how much he misses his uncomfortably youthful girlfriend, before finding solace in the arms of an alien woman named Ƶsaji, an inhabitant of one of the planets from which the Beyonder made Battleworld, and with whom Colossus shares no common language excepting possibly the language of lurve. Ƶsaji talks in abstract squiggles so, honestly, I'm not even sure how we know her name. Ƶsaji may even mean piss off, metal bollocks in whatever language she speaks.

The Beyonder restores Professor X's legs to full working order, presumably because Battleworld features neither roads nor paving that we can see and therefore falls some way short of wheelchair friendly. He also assigns Magneto to the superhero team, much to the general bemusement of numerous members of both the Avengers and the Fantastic Four, not least Hawkeye who comes to resemble Enoch Powell for at least a couple of panels. Here Magneto was still very much in the habit of explaining his fiendish plans and then cackling accordingly, in addition to which Rogue - who recently fought Captain America and pals in Avengers annual #10 - now numbers among the X-Men, inspiring much grumbling about mutants coming over here and taking our jobs from those whose super-powers were earned during honest laboratory experiments gone horribly wrong just as nature intended. The mutants therefore form a splinter group, seemingly for the sake of keeping the peace, even though they're not thrilled about Magneto's presence either. At this point, the plans which Magneto tended to explain in preface to cackling usually defined him as a militant advocate of mutant rights, although not so much as to prevent him from trying it on with the undeniably human Wasp; so presumable we're seeing the beginning of his rehabilitation as someone who doesn't actually hate regular humans quite so much as he did in the old days.

The story is, as already described, something which may as well have been plotted by a method which entailed watching a couple of small boys smashing their extensive collections of action figures together while doing all the sound effects and explosions with their mouths; despite which, there's a lot of invention taking place with all sorts of narrative swerves of a kind you might not expect in this sort of story. Possibly most surprising of all is the genuinely ominous implication of unimaginable power invoked herein in spite of Marvel's track record of invoking something even more huge and cosmically omnipotent than the last guy roughly every six weeks, at least since Jim Starlin drew his first paycheck back in 1972.

The conclusion might be deemed something of an anticlimax, and doubtless seemed so to the Goodreads fucknugget who criticised this graphic novel on the grounds of it seeming fairly childish, like something aimed at kids. The Beyonder sends everyone home and we're not quite sure whether or not there will be another issue because the fighting seems to have stopped, and we don't even know whether our cosmic architect actually learned anything about desire, or even whether he at least got a kick out of all the superheroes shooting rays at each other. This leaves us with just the Thing alone on Battleworld, taking a break from the Fantastic Four and having decided to stick around, wondering what he's going to do with the rest of his life. On the other hand, this unusually ponderous ending seems to be something which would have worked in a novel, and nevertheless works better than whatever face-punching spectacular we were probably expecting; and there's actually a lot of Secret Wars which feels as though it wants to be novel when it grows up, or at least that it has read one at some point. Doctor Doom comes over as unusually philosophical during the last two issues, for example.

Secret Wars is hardly life-changing, but for what it is, it does its job without looking too stupid; which is itself impressive given that we're talking about what is essentially a marketing campaign.

Strange Adventures

Tom King & Mitch Gerads Strange Adventures (2021)
Adam Strange is a regular guy who finds himself randomly and instantaneously beamed to the distant planet of Rann, there to fly around wearing a jetpack solving science-fiction crimes with just his wits and his trusty laser pistol. He was an old school character from before pow! the comic book grew up, one I first encountered in Alan Moore's version of Swamp Thing wherein it was revealed that the sexy naked ladies of Rann were literally queuing up for a go on Strange's mighty Earth penis. Whether or not pow! the comic book had grown up by this point is probably debatable, but issues were sold only to older boys and girls who had - you know - done it.

I'm now at the stage where I'd probably pick up The Adventures of Jeff Lynne and ELO were it produced by Tom King and Mitch Gerads, so I found Strange Adventures irresistible. I know some Toms have been better than others. Rorschach wasn't quite what I'd hoped it would be and Batman could have been better, but this one is up there with his best.

I remain mostly unconvinced that the comic book ever truly needed to pow! grow up, mainly because it usually translates into Red Tornado taking crack and then having a wank behind some bins; but Strange Adventures shows us how it's supposed to work. The art is gorgeous, suggesting bande dessinées rather than the usual manga-influenced tripe, and the telling is nothing if not cinematic, invariably leaving it up to the reader to work out what the hell is happening.

What the hell is happening is that this version of Adam Strange is involved in a war. It wouldn't be anything new but for King writing with all the nuance necessary to describe actual conflict, doubtless drawing from his own experience in Iraq. The revelation of Strange having engaged in less than chivalrous acts during the heat of battle comes as no great surprise, but the supplementary revelation of the deed being very much what it looks like rather than a dream or fake news is genuinely shocking. Ordinarily we'd ask how he's going to get out of this one, and he doesn't; yet this isn't one of those jobs where we know that pow! the comic book has grown up because we can quite clearly see Superman killing a homeless person for chuckles. Rather, the startling message is that terrible things happen during war, and usually so terrible that no amount of squinting can ever draw forth some tidily moral lesson about good and evil, getting one's hands dirty, omelettes requiring broken eggs or whatever other bullshit we keep telling ourselves. So King's Adam Strange isn't a hero, or if he is, he's a hero who goes to war and fails to come out of it smelling of roses - the whole point being that no-one does.

Strange Adventures resembles a comic book but reads like a novel, and a fairly substantial novel too.

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.

1963

Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, Rick Veitch & others 1963 (1993)

From where I was stood at the time, 1963 looked like Image Comics experimenting with the possibility of printing something that wasn't shit - which was fairly surprising. It took the form of six comic books, all written by Alan Moore, all different titles purportedly belonging to a shared continuity which was obviously a satire on the Marvel universe as it had been in the sixties. It was deliberately hokey, emphasising the more amusing aspects of the caped sixties - the occasionally rabid patriotism, the pathological fear of commies, the casual misogyny and so on. It was hardly an original idea, having been done in Mad magazine about every three or four months*, usually with a version of Wolverine sprouting knives, forks and spoons from his knuckles - amongst other side-splitters doubtless thrashed out during a few hours on the golf course; and of course Grant Morrison reckons it was all inspired by that issue of his Doom Patrol, which seems unusually narcissistic even by his standards.

The point of this was not quite satire, or not exclusively so, but that the six titles would interconnect, culminating in an eighty-page special wherein Mystery Inc., Tomorrow Syndicate and the rest battle it out with the horrible then contemporary Image characters with ninja swords and too many angry lines on their faces - Deathstabber, Kill Squad and those guys; and thus would we learn that the gritty realism of 1993 was but the kid fuel of 1963 seen from a different angle, or summink. No-one seems to agree on what the point was, or would have been had the special ever seen print, and it's difficult to tell from these six existing comic books. As to why the series was never wrapped up as intended, no-one seems able to agree on that either. This was the point at which Alan Moore decided he'd had enough of superheroes, and you can kind of tell, but it doesn't seem to be entirely his fault that the engine ran out of steam.

Whatever the case may be, and ignoring rumours of various persons other than Alan Moore having readied the missing final piece for imminent publication, 1963 reads - as stated - as a satire on sixties Marvel, without quite slipping over into parody. The individual issues are mostly enjoyable enough in their own right without it all feeling entirely cynical, excepting Horus, Lord of Light which is simply dull, dull, dull by terms which could never be levelled at the Mighty Thor upon which it provides a tangential commentary. It helps that the style is familiar more than the characters, so we have N-Man who, for example, is spun from nuclear accidents which inexplicably bestow strange powers, but he can't really be mistaken for the incredible Bulk or any of those other creaking parodies; but the more one reads into this, additionally delving into the faux text articles, adverts, and letters pages, it begins to feel pretty much like a rant against Stan Lee and the comic book industry in general; and while the rant may well be justified, it gets fucking boring because the overpowering alliteration and digression just ain't that funny and it begins to feel like an embittered fist shaken at clouds, or even Moore's little gang sniggering amongst themselves. So 1963 was sort of self-defeating in that for all that it does, it wasn't actually anywhere near so much fun as, off the top off my head, Roy Thomas' All-Star Squadron from approximately the same era, likewise harking back to a golden age, and so rigorously square as to make 1963 seem like the work of Marcel Duchamp.

Shame.

Mind you, we got a couple of pin-ups from Melinda Gebbie, so that was a scoop, obviously.

*: It probably wasn't but it felt that way, and I'm possibly thinking of Frantic.

Deadman

 

Mike Baron & Kelley Jones Deadman (1989)
The closer I get to actually finishing Moby fucking Dick, the harder it becomes. I'll open the book, set my eyes to yet another droning chapter, and before I know what's happening, I'm half way through something more enjoyable - even anything more enjoyable given that it's a massive fucking category encompassing every book ever written except for Moby-Dick and possibly the works of Dostoyevsky. This time it was Deadman, specifically a single story spanning a couple of prestige format series - two issues each - published '89 and '92 respectively.

Deadman is the creation of Arnold Drake, who also came up with the Doom Patrol, and is similarly at odds with the mainstream caped milieu upon which he occasionally intrudes. His superpower is that he's dead - hence the name and the red costume with a big white D on the front. Specifically, he's a crime-solving ghost, or at least that's the resume. The supernatural is a realm where DC Comics always fared quite well, not least since Alan Moore knotted all of the various characters together into a single spooky continuum during his run on Swamp Thing, and which arguably resulted in the founding of the Vertigo imprint. I liked Vertigo, but I still think their best stuff happened before they felt like they had to give it a special name - Mike Baron's Deadman, for example.

Firstly, the art of Kelley Jones is incredible, drawing on the expressionism of all those pre-code horror comics to render something which is as much its own visual language as Giger's biomechanics - to which it's a sort of swampy, mushroom festooned rural cousin. Mike Baron's writing further abstracts the story from its distant caped origins to forge what I suppose you might call tender horror, allowing a crushing sense of pathos to a character who may as well be the contents of a butcher's shop window and without any obvious aesthetic contradictions. Deadman falls in love with another ghost, it all goes horribly wrong, and ludicrous though it probably should be, it still does its job better than Herman Melville evidently did his. This is one of those things which I had on eBay for a while, but no-one bought it presumably due to none of the usual attention grabbing names being involved. This has at least meant that I haven't had to buy the thing twice - as happened with a few of the comic books I ended up selling - but seems like a sad indictment on the taste of the comic buying public.

Marvel Comics - the Untold Story

Sean Howe Marvel Comics - the Untold Story (2012)
After several versions of the life of Stan Lee, only one of which was written by the man himself, I get the impression I probably should have started with this thing. Sean Howe answers just about every question I had, including those I'd assumed probably weren't worth asking. His attention to detail is exhaustive and impartial - so far as I'm able to tell. I've seen online mutterings about the Untold Story having given Jim Shooter, Marvel's editor-in-chief from 1978 to 1987, something of a battering, but nothing written here seems massively unfair or uneven, and credit is freely given where it's due.

Howe's account begins with Martin Goodman's Timely Comics, sinks its teeth in with the tenacity of a bull terrier, and doesn't let go until we're caught up to the present day. The picture revealed is broad yet coherent, with the grinding inevitability of the corporate appetite countered by reminders of why Marvel worked, when it did work, and often in spite of itself. This matters - at least in so much as any of this matters - because our collective memory of the comics biz and its role in popular culture is revealed as comprising at least as high a quotient of received wisdom and strategic mythology as Stan Lee's somewhat unreliable version of events. The idea that the comic book ever needed to grow up, for one example, seems to be an answer to a question that didn't need asking; and while it's clear that the average age of the target reader has varied from one decade to the next, the notion of the figure steadily increasing up until the revelation of Alan Moore's Watchmen is obviously bollocks in light of Marvel having been such a huge hit with the beatnik community in the sixties, and then the brain stretching likes of Starlin's Warlock - amongst many others in the seventies. Indeed, our idea of the juvenile comic book - to which superheroes with drink problems was apparently the antidote - seems to have formed in the late seventies as a reaction to Starlin, Gerber and the rest in the form of Godzilla, Star Wars and Shogun Warriors tie-in material. I'm generalising here, but it's nothing like so clear cut as all those Time Out articles told us.

Much needed testimony regarding what was once so great about Marvel is offset by unflinching reportage of the artists and writers getting screwed over and over and over from one decade to the next, even with the understanding that work-for-hire was never anything more than an assembly line. We presumably all know about Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, and inevitably they're just the tip of a heartless corporate iceberg specialising in using them up, wearing them out, and asset stripping their legacy. Some of it is heartbreaking, not least realising that Chris Claremont's departure from the X-books back in '91 actually was the betrayal it resembled from the outside; and that Rob Liefeld got to revamp Captain America at some point in the mid-nineties after his previous anatomical bowdlerisations had driven me away from the medium; and while we're here…

Before Grunewald left for his weekend home on August 9, he grabbed a preview copy of Rob Liefeld's Captain America #1. It was Grunewald's favourite Marvel character; until a few months earlier, he'd either written or edited every issue since 1982. On Monday morning, rumours started flying around the offices, confirmed by an 11AM email from Terry Stewart. 'It's with my deepest and most profound regret that I inform you that Mark Grunewald passed away unexpectedly early today at home,' the note began. The cause of death was a heart attack.

Grunewald was forty-three, a non-smoker who exercised regularly, and I didn't even realise he was dead. I always liked his work. I'm not saying that the art of Rob Liefeld finished him off, but you really have to wonder.

This is a thick book, and quite a tough read for anyone with any interest in comic art - emotionally speaking, but thank fuck someone wrote it.

Violator

Alan Moore, Bart Sears & Greg Capullo Violator (1994)
Here's another one I'd never heard of through having given up on comics, or most comics, around the end of 1991. It's billed as one of the greatest things Alan Moore ever wrote by the online advertising, but I'm suspecting a certain bias given that they obviously wanted me to buy the thing - although the sales pitch worked so I did, for what it may be worth. This dates from the period during which Moore had become thoroughly browned off with DC due to the publication of the Watchmen Babies meet Archie crossover, while still needing to pay off a substantial phone bill incurred through calling the Post Office Dial-a-Disc service in order to hear Whigfield's Saturday Night over and over and over. The Image Comics boys had seen the sense of having their drawings of massive tits, angry faces and explosions scripted by some guy who could do word stuff good, and so here we are.

Violator is a demon at large on earth in the form of a member of Insane Clown Posse, apparently, and a character who first appeared in Todd McFarlane's Spawn; and Spawn is what happened when pow! the comic book grew up - lavishly crosshatched goth-metal art beautifully reproduced on glossy pages, swearing and a shitload of gratuitous violence in what otherwise may as well have been a seventies comic book about a guy in a cape. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Nevertheless, Violator is a lot of fun. It's fucking stupid, but as I say, it's a lot of fun and Moore clearly had a blast with the dialogue, although I'm guessing he probably zipped it off in the caff one morning while waiting for his egg and chips. There's a story, sort of, but only just, which doesn't really matter because Violator is, roughly speaking, D.R. & Quinch reimagined as a track on an Insane Clown Posse album, which I say as someone with quite a few Insane Clown Posse albums. It falls some way short of being one of the greatest things Alan Moore ever wrote, but it's better than Jerusalem.

Psi-Force

Danny Fingeroth, Fabian Nicieza, Mark Texeira & others
Psi-Force (1989)
I'm gearing up for a mammoth read of every single mutant book published by Marvel up until about 1991 - the point at which it all went tits up so far as I'm concerned - which I plan to write about as I go, an enterprise which will probably take up at least a year. My currently reading this, the complete run of a single comic book, should therefore be considered training, although it also constitutes homework to some extent. I retain a vague impression of Fabian Nicieza having been in some way culpable to it all going tits up, and yet I remember enjoying his run on Psi-Force; so I'm taking stock of my own powers of recall, amongst other things, one of those other things being that I needed light relief from Genet.

Anyway, as you may recall, New Universe was one of Marvel's earlier concessions to pow! the comic book growing up, adding a new layer of realism to its standard fare in the same way that the Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four once added a new layer of realism to the primary colours of their predecessors back in the sixties. So the New Universe was our world to which the Bullpen introduced superheroes - or at least persons with unusual powers - and let things happen as they might have happened in what we recognise as real life, give or take some small change. It may be a waste of time looking for industry parallels, but Star Brand was probably the New Universe version of Superman with Spitfire as Iron Man, DP7 as the X-Men, and so on. Psi-Force were possibly also the X-Men, or maybe a hybrid of the X-Men and Voltron, the giant robot formed from a group of smaller robots. Anyway, there were five of Psi-Force, each with psychic abilities which our New Universe seems to have assumed were possibly real even before the white event gave everyone powers; and under certain conditions the five combine to create a giant winged composite being called the Psi-Hawk.

Fantastic though this may seem, Psi-Force managed to go a full year without trying to dress anybody in spandex or having them answer to a superhero name. Our five psychics are teenage runaways whose powers have left them no option but to hit the road, and so they've all ended up in San Francisco at a home for missing kids, which perhaps provides early clues as to why the New Universe went tits up at the end of its third year. The comic had grown up in so much as that we had unlikely powers without anyone deciding to be Batman, but it was otherwise business as usual in terms of modular teenage angst communicated through thought bubbles and excessively wordy captions describing what you can see on the page and have presumably already worked out for yourself; and our five Psi-Force kids comprise the angry loner, the inevitable athletic black guy, the shy but well meaning foreigner who doesn't always understand what's going on, the snooty Asian girl who is obsessed with clothes, and the much younger awkward four-eyed brainiac. Take away their powers and it's The Breakfast Club. They don't actually drive around San Francisco solving crimes with the help of a sandwich eating dog, but it wouldn't seem out of character if they did.

Yet Psi-Force isn't entirely without redeeming qualities. The story is well told and inventive within certain limits, if a little more wordy than it needed to be during its first year; and Mark Texeira's art is fucking gorgeous - enough so as to negate the occasional hint of the kind of cheese inevitably generated when secretive government agencies are on the hunt for moody teenagers with unusual powers.

Fabian Nicieza stirred things up when I guess sales figures made it apparent that the New Universe was proceeding with maybe a little too much caution, and that it might be possible to ramp things up without giving everyone a cape. As a writer, he's since become something of a big deal, not least as the creator of Deadpool, but I found him uneven - at least his early writing. Whatever was happening always seemed to be the work of some secretive government agency, the kind which gets about in black helicopters. It conspicuously felt as though notes had been taken from reading comics by Alan Moore and Frank Miller, notably the stuff about screwing up the lives of your characters. In fact, it conspicuously felt as though Nicieza's influences were limited to other comic books and maybe a couple of action movies. It felt like fanzine level writing with influences as placeholders for inspiration.

Yet, even in his first published work on Psi-Force, there's something sparky trying to break free from the confusion of Nicieza learning on the job. The ideas are weirdly engaging, even when it's obvious where he got them and what he did to twist them into something less transparently derivative; and so we end up with Psi-Force kidnapped and held prisoner at the Siberian Project, a secretive Soviet government agency which strives to turn mutants paranormals into an elite fighting force, and it almost works.

The problem here, at least by the end of the run, is that hardly anyone was reading so I guess the company was reluctant to spend money on any of the New Universe books, and the art is fucking terrible, possibly the worst I've seen in something which wasn't actually drawn in biro then photocopied; and passing references to conflict in Afghanistan aren't quite enough to make it seem all grown up and plausible.

Chains generally being as strong as their weakest links, the best one can say of Fabian Nicieza's run on Psi-Force was that he almost got away with it despite almost everyone else letting the side down; and the best one can say of Psi-Force as a whole was that Mark Texeira's art was wonderful and that it tried its best, and at least succeeded in communicating its own potential even if the stuff dripping out of the spigot at the other end wasn't always great. Having said that, I nevertheless thought it was amazing at the time, and sometimes that's all you need. Not everything has to be King Lear.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Archie Goodwin, Walt Simonson & Klaus Janson
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1978)
Having been obsessed with science-fiction and flying saucers as a kid, I'd pretty much already decided Close Encounters was the greatest movie of all time before I even bought this adaptation at my local newsagent, let alone seen the thing - partially based on my sincerely held belief that it revealed the truth and was probably made so as to get us all accustomed to the idea of extraterrestrial life, meaning we wouldn't shit ourselves when the big day came - as it definitely would. Unfortunately, as I eventually came to realise, once you subtract this emotional upswell of belief from the equation, Close Encounters barely even counts as a story, the plot being bloke sees flying saucer and believes they are real, which they are. Much as I loved the movie as a kid, probably mostly thanks to Doug Trumbull, by the time Spielberg issued the remix with an extra ten minutes of Richard Dreyfuss crying, even I'd begun to doubt.

So what am I to make of a comic book impersonating something which was never as amazing as I maybe thought it was, and which doesn't even have the advantage of all which Mr. Trumbull wrought with squeezy bottles and bits of Airfix kits, and which I bought entirely because I remember having it as a kid?

Well, a lot of memory sherbert went off, as you might expect, but it's additionally interesting for the reason that I had no idea who Walt Simonson or Klaus Janson were at the age of thirteen; and if they would go on to draw better, even here you can feel the formative greatness emanating from the page. The double page splash of the mothership near the end is not only fucking gorgeous but an entirely acceptable substitute for Doug Trumbull. It helps that Archie Goodwin always knew his way around a typewriter, and was particularly a master at the sort of chatty narrative which Alan Moore had banned because comic book panels which pretend to be a fancy foreign film will always be much cooler, so what story there is to be had, is told well, and - crucially - is told in about thirty minutes as distinct from a patience testing couple of screen hours. It was a decent film for the most part, but a decent film mainly because it distracts you from its own massively sappy message about what happens when you wish upon a star; and somehow I prefer the comic book.

Junk Mail

Will Self Junk Mail (2006)
I'm still not quite able to process some of the opprobrium levelled at this guy, much of which seemingly amounts to he ain't one of us, he's from a posh school and he uses all those big words to look clever but he ain't. The most coherent version of this argument, at least that I've found, seems to be something about how we've all been conned into buying the idea of Will Self as a dangerous anti-establishment figure when actually he writes for the Observer and once consumed heroin on the Prime Minister's jet; ergo what mugs we are! I suppose it's an argument of sorts, although it prompts the question of just who you do regard as a dangerous anti-establishment figure - Alan Moore? Stewart Home? Doctor Who? Some guy in a fucking band? Do you even know what the fuck you're talking about? One might just as well argue that we've all been conned into buying the idea of Will Self as Batman's nemesis and the scourge of Gotham City for all the sense it makes.

Failure to creep into the Houses of Parliament clutching a large sphere of black metal with a fuse and BOMB printed on the side notwithstanding, Self's writing, even with all of those long, difficult to understand words, is rarely less than astonishing, illuminating whatever subject he's chosen to pick apart with such high definition focus of intent and meaning as to make the journalistic norm appear somewhat impressionist; which is what makes him such a delight to read, almost regardless of subject. It's rare to come across arguments so well defined. Junk Mail assembles journalistic pieces from newspapers, magazines, exhibition catalogues, and even British Airways' slightly ludicrous High Life freebie, but the themes benefit from a similar focus to that which informs Self's fiction, or at least his satire given that it doesn't seem entirely fair to call it fiction considering the escapist connotations of the term. The only major difference is that the writing in Junk Mail is less one layer of allegory compared to My Idea of Fun, How the Dead Live and so on, and here we actually get to meet Traci Emin, Morrissey, Andrea Dworkin and others in person, and get to understand them a little better than we might have done otherwise. He even somehow manages to make Liam Gallagher and Damien Hirst seem marginally less twatty.

Anyway, while it's debatable whether or not Self cuts a dangerous anti-establishment figure - pretending for the sake of argument that it's even a meaningful term - he nevertheless succeeds in seeing through the bullshit of modern existence, and communicating what he's seen in a form which reaches a wide audience, even if it's maybe not quite so wide an audience as dangerous anti-establishment rebel leader Luke Skywalker in all those Star Wars samizdat movies. Even if you have to look up a few long-haired words here and there, Self's writing will always reward anyone making the effort, and for something vaguely amounting to cuttings swept up from the studio floor, this may even be one of his best. Additionally there's the bewildering accusation of arrogance, presumably once again founded on the use of words we might have to look up in a dictionary; and it's bewildering because Junk Mail is nothing if not self-effacing - literally, come to think of it - and the fact of the man's writing having personality is never allowed to obscure whatever he's writing about. Even where dark and harrowing, the clarity of this man's testimony is, as always, a joy to read.

The Time Travellers

Simon Guerrier The Time Travellers (2005)
This was one of the final Who novels to be published before the thing returned to the screen in 2005 and therefore belongs to the era of proper Who to my way of thinking. Additionally it has helped me clarify what I mean by proper Who, at least for the sake of argument, which boils down to this. Proper Who took place in a vastly mysterious universe and told stories which could only ever reveal one small part of the picture at a time, usually by looking past the main character to whatever was happening around him, so the main character was never quite the focus so much as the lens - even when whatever we were looking at seemed to represent some aspect of his own role in the greater story of this imagined universe; and although some of the weirder details were occasionally explained or hinted at - as with The Three Doctors, Lungbarrow, or Alien Bodies - that which was revealed seemed only to deepen the mystery by posing further questions. I'm not suggesting this was anything intentional on the part of the producers, but this was how it looked to me and why it usually worked.

New Who, on the other hand, rewrote the mission statement with a main character who became focus rather than lens, like a cool older brother*, someone of whom dimwits on forums claimed that the Doctor is always good as though it were part of some manifesto, essentially reducing him to yet another dull adventurer. New Who is proper Who reimagined by Tim Burton, or someone aspiring to Tim Burton's formulaic brand of surrealist whimsy, with changes made based on the findings of focus groups and committees. It's slick, corporate, targetted, and even its fans refer to it as a franchise, a property, a concern; as distinct from earlier versions scraped together by cranky radiophonic outsiders who probably would have ended up homeless had they not managed to con their way into the BBC. There's no real mystery in new Who, because everything you need is right there on the screen in big snowflake swirls of magic and wonderment. His name is actually Darren Who, and he's quirky and kind of zany but always good, and he went to school with the Master. One day he did a drawing of a horse, and the Master said it was shite which caused young Darren Who to experience feelings of sadness and low self-esteem, and from thence forth he didst vow that never again would the forces of evil blah blah blah…

You may disagree, but you'd be wrong. Soz.

Anyway, I know it's all product, and the usual alarm bells sounded with unusual volume at Guerrier's resume, which is extensive and seemingly exclusively Who related, excepting a pair of novels tying in to other culty telly franchises; and a Sapphire & Steele audio drama.

Sapphire & Steele…

Jesus fucking Christ…

Anyway, there appears to be a multitude of writers of this general career driven type, each one just itching to tell an untold and entirely negligible story of some television Who companion about which we'd otherwise forgotten for reasons which actually aren't that difficult to understand, and ordinarily you couldn't pay me to read their work, not after that shit about how Davros created the Daleks because someone called him names when he was a kid; but, I remember liking The Time Travellers a lot, and statistically speaking, there has to be at least one of these guys who can actually fucking write, yes?

Simon Guerrier is that man, it seems. The story is actually a bit of a mess, as is possibly inevitable given all of the potential paradoxes upon which the story is built, but it works because it's well told. Guerrier's prose is, I suppose, efficient, if not really given to flights of poetic fancy, but at the same time it commits none of the usual sins of Who obsessives, imagining that writing is somehow a bit like talking, or like a portentous cinematic voiceover; and he eschews both clichés and button-pushing sentiment. The Time Travellers is clearly the work of someone who actually knows how to write, which shouldn't be taken for granted.

Of course, certain expectations come with the book being a Who novel, which is fine. Guerrier strongly invokes the mood of something which could easily have been on the box back in 1964 and yet wasn't, without it feeling like a self-conscious period piece - or like it would rather be telly for that matter; and his story works on a sort of vintage logic, kind of like old programmes run on the latest operating system, which is even a little impressive given the once prevalent temptation to do an Alan Moore by forcing the innocents of yesteryear through the contemporary wringer, turning Pogle's Wood into a popular dogging spot, for one example. Except Guerrier actually does this by transposing sixties telly characters to a fairly harsh version of London in the year 2006 with Canary Wharf, the DLR, mobile phones and so on, but gets away with it by telling the story on their terms, rendering the contemporary as something weird and borderline Orwellian.

The cover says it all, really - more unsettling modernism than a hook in the commercial sense, a suggestion of mood which promises only further questions. Within a year these books would have photographic covers of the stars, reaching out to punters and figuratively asking would you like to come on an adventure with me? It was all downhill after this, downhill and right into the crapper.

I really wish Guerrier would write something which hadn't been on the box in some form.

*: Or indeed sister. I don't have any problem with the recasting of the Doctor as female beyond the existing problems I've had with the television show since 2005.

The Dark Knight Returns

Frank Miller, Klaus Janson & Lynn Varley The Dark Knight Returns (1986)
As for Pow! the comic book growing up, I guess this was approximately where it all started, at least in terms of public perception. Watchmen is better remembered but this came first by about six months. Excepting Viz, I'd stopped reading comics, having given up on 2000AD back in 1980 and not really thought about it since. I found it odd when I overheard my friends Charlie and Garreth talking about comic books, specifically Batman of all things. What the fuck? I opined, and so Garreth lent me a prestige format issue of Frank Miller's version of Batman so as to impress upon me that it was significantly different to the version of Batman who routinely found himself caught in giant mousetraps; so that was probably the start of my comic book habit, or a significant contributing factor.

I haven't read this in probably twenty years, and have been reluctant to do so of late for fear of what I might find, given Frank Miller's apparent recent transformation into Ron Swanson; but Kafka was boring me shitless, and I'd already resorted to Grant Morrison's All-Star Superman by way of light relief, so Batman seemed like the next logical step. As everyone in the universe knows, The Dark Knight Returns is essentially grittily realistic Batman or, to fine tune the definition, if Batman were a real person, then he would almost certainly have to be something in this direction and the most pertinent questions would be whether there's any real difference between a homicidal maniac and a homicidal maniac claiming to be the good guy. All the moral baggage - or absence thereof - one might anticipate given that it's Frank Miller at the typewriter is already there and very much packed, which I probably didn't notice last time around, being a bit slow on the uptake for most of the eighties; and yet The Dark Knight Returns remains as powerful as ever because Miller's view of the world is, at worst, simply massively pessimistic, and is communicated without even hinting at any sort of agenda. Batman fights crime, as we would expect, but is himself a criminal as he freely admits, and a particularly violent one. Everything else is on us, depending on whether or not we're cheering every time he kicks someone's head in or breaks their fingers. Miller isn't suggesting that any of this is good so much as that there's a certain inevitability which comes with certain situations, and particularly so when we start asking questions about morality, justice and all that good stuff. The Dark Knight Returns is therefore a post-Vietnam Batman, one left permanently changed by a conflict which blurs established notions of what the right thing may be. It's dark and unpleasant because anything else would be dishonest, and maybe you're not actually supposed to be cheering along like some fucking simpleton.

So never mind Batman, this really was a whole new deal, not least in terms of how the story was told, further distancing the familiar names from their primary colour origins. If not conventionally beautiful, it's difficult to look away from the scratchy expressionist lines, with the story structured just loosely enough as to feel organic, quite unlike the rigidly mathematical progression of Watchmen, and hence somehow more truthful regardless of the presence of the guy from outer space. I've never been a massive fan of Batman or his specific type - the freelance cop who beats up the ne'er do well and returns the stolen wallet to the millionaire - but just for once someone actually got it right, and this was that book, and I suspect Frank Miller is probably a more complicated individual than we realised, at least in so far as that he's since apologised for Holy Terror.