Ficciones

Jorge Luis Borges Ficciones (1956)
Fuck me - this one took some doing, having been punctuated by the autobiography of a Sex Pistol, a Longshot collection, and a couple of issues of Marshall Law, all read for light relief because after a number of days which had been shite to varying degrees, I felt as though I deserved to enjoy my bedtime reading. I'm a little surprised at my having had this reaction. The last two Borges I tackled were great, and I was told this was the one I really needed to read, the solid gold hit single, so to speak.

Borges writes short pieces of surrealist fiction, often in the form of reviews of imaginary books, texts, or authors, which blur the lines between imagination and reality, prompting all sorts of peculiar questions about whether we're reading the story or it's reading us. I'm sure you get the idea. While Ficciones is patently at least as atmospheric as whatever I read in Labyrinths and The Book of Sand, at least as rich in imagery, and as wild in terms of existential questions, it nevertheless felt like homework. The stories seem, generally speaking, to inhabit more cerebral narratives than those in Labyrinths, which at least wrapped their ideas around a sense of space or something physical, thus giving my poor brain something more to work with; or at least that's the impression I had, and I could be wrong, and it may simply be that I simply should have saved this one for evenings in a more receptive frame of mind.

I still enjoyed this, and particularly Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote and Three Versions of Judas, but I have a feeling I should have enjoyed it a lot more than I did.

Longshot

Ann Nocenti & Arthur Adams Longshot (1986)
Here I am again with the reading equivalent of comfort food, or even the reading and looking at pictures equivalent of comfort food. Shitty occurrences temporarily brought me down and I just couldn't cope with Borges. This was originally purchased during my time as a Marvel zombie, then sold, then bought again once a mid-life crisis expressed itself as nostalgia for the Marvel zombie days, the innocence, the excitement of some new character showing up, all that good shit…

Longshot isn't the worst, but it hasn't aged quite so well as others of its vintage. Actually, it's far from the worst and is mostly readable, a decent story ever so slightly handicapped by its own telling. Longshot is a relentlessy chipper superguy, a character whose creation alludes to more innocent, wholesome times. He's a former slave escaped from a cruel media-fixated dimension, blessed with good luck powers, and the six issues collected here are about his escape and subsequent attempts to get along in our world, or at least the Marvel version of our world. Buckles are swashed with some frequency, and it feels as though Ann Nocenti was probably a fan of The Never Ending Story and its like. We have mullets aplenty, and we live in a world of leg warmers and pizza as a guilty pleasure, so yeah - this one was never aimed at fifty-four-year old men with Sleaford Mods albums such as myself. However, the most unexpected element is that it feels like a fanzine, or at least an eighties indie comic, the work of people who were still very much learning as they went along. There's way too much dialogue cluttering up each page, suggesting overcompensation, and Arthur Adams artwork was still surprisingly clunky and uneven at this point, some hints of what was to come, but quite a few figures suggestive of Ian Gibson characters as drawn by Rob Liefeld. Of course, given those responsible, it's not without redeeming features. You just have to keep your eye open for them.

Tom Strong

Alan Moore, Chris Sprouse, Alan Gordon & others
Tom Strong book one (2000)
Interviewed in the Guraniad last November, Alan Moore made some people a bit cross by suggesting that the sequentially delineated escapades of costumed super champions were mostly a big mound of wank:

I haven't read any superhero comics since I finished with Watchmen. I hate superheroes. I think they're abominations. They don't mean what they used to mean. They were originally in the hands of writers who would actively expand the imagination of their nine to thirteen year-old audience. That was completely what they were meant to do and they were doing it excellently. These days, superhero comics think the audience is certainly not nine to thirteen, it's nothing to do with them. It's an audience largely of thirty-forty-fifty-sixty-year old men—usually men. Someone came up with the term graphic novel. These readers latched on to it; they were simply interested in a way that could validate their continued love of Green Lantern or Spiderman without appearing in some way emotionally subnormal. This is a significant rump of the superhero-addicted, mainstream-addicted audience. I don't think the superhero stands for anything good. I think it's a rather alarming sign if we've got audiences of adults going to see the Avengers movie and delighting in concepts and characters meant to entertain the twelve-year-old boys of the 1950s.

This more or less reiterates what Moore said in another interview - which I can't seem to track down - asking something along the lines of how many times the general public really need to see Peter Parker bitten by a radioactive spider over and over again. All fair comment, although, as Daniel O'Mahony has pointed out, it might have carried a bit more weight had Moore not spent the previous couple of decades harking back to the more wholesome superhero comics from when he were a lad and it was still the old days and everything was better than it is now. I'm not fully convinced there's a contradiction here; well, not exactly, and yet something doesn't quite sit right.

Tom Strong appears to be Supreme done properly, a character revised right back to the source and in the process losing the Rob Liefeld associations, both legal and the bad mojo of scowling superdudes with too many lines on their faces. It's a conflation of Superman and things like Doc Savage, I suppose, overtly aimed at a nine to thirteen year-old readership and thus roughly carrying the tone of something from 2000AD before the Mighty Tharg started printing it on fancy paper. The art is breathtakingly gorgeous, and it's both imaginative and wonderfully crafted just as you would expect, but the bottom line for my forty-eight year old ass is that Tom Strong is also very, very familiar, recycled tropes done respectfully and those pastiche interludes in the style of comics from the forties and fifties, as seen in Supreme; so it doesn't really do anything surprising. It's an old song played well, although I kind of wonder how a nine to thirteen year-old would find it, assuming one could be prised away from his or her iPad for long enough to sit through an issue of Grandad describing how he used to love going to see the Daredevils of the Red Circle serial at the picture house.

Tom Strong is wonderful of its kind, I guess, but as a fat old man I found it somehow underwhelming, and not quite sufficiently charming for the author to get away with doing the Supreme thing a second time around; and the Aztecs of a parallel Earth tale is bollocks, as such things usually are, depicting Quetzalcoatl literally as a winged serpent, confusing Mexica iconography with that of Xochicalco, El Tajín and Teotihuacan - because it's all the bleedin' same, innit - and filling Aztec speech bubbles with glyphs which are actually just strings of day names. Given the medium and the genre, I didn't expect a Henry Nicholson level of authenticity, but given the author, I had hoped it could have at least demonstrated a bit more effort than an episode of fucking Sliders. Also I'm afraid I found the talking gorilla somewhat irritating.

The Authority volume four: Transfer of Power

Mark Millar, Tom Peyer, Arthur Adams & others
The Authority volume four: Transfer of Power (2002)
Somebody or other - possibly Alan Moore but I wouldn't swear to it - once made some comment about the art of storytelling being in screwing up the lives of your characters as much as possible and then spending the rest of the narrative getting them back into shape. Actually, it probably wasn't Alan Moore, or if it was, he might have been offering that as an observation on a trend rather than advice; anyway, the important point is that it's become something of a cliché. In fact I'm not actually sure that much of that caped stuff really does anything else at the moment; not that I would know admittedly, this being my impression based solely on giving up on X-Men comics all those years ago after roughly the fifth time they killed off the entire cast. Nothing ever being the same ever again becomes surprisingly repetitive after a while.

Nevertheless this is roughly what Mark Millar and Tom Peyer - whoever he may be - have done here. The Authority, in case it needs stating, is a revisionist superhero title that attempts to answer those questions like how come Superman never puts his talents to ending world hunger? by having a team of relatively believable super-types who actually do take it upon themselves to cure all the ills and evils of society. This of course places them in the somewhat Olympian position of an authority higher than that of all Earth's governments combined, hence the title; and inevitably said governments are none too happy about the arrangement, and so in this volume they have the Authority smushed once and for all then replaced with their own more obedient team of superpowered Uncle Toms.

In some ways it's become a bit of a cock-obvious story these days, a basic update of when Captain America lost his job to the Super Patriot back in 1986, and one to file away alongside tales of secret government organisations who gather up all the stuff that UFOs leave behind; but Mark Millar is such a dab hand at this that Transfer of Power may as well be the first time this particular story has been told. On paper, the basic plot sounds like pure caped cheese, but the end result is just plain chuffin' wonderful and an absolute joy to read. Mark Millar once again reheats a McDonalds' cheeseburger and serves it as haute cuisine, and I don't really know if there's anything more to be said aside from yowza!