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.

The Screaming

Daniel Bristow-Bailey The Screaming (2020)
At just sixteen pages, The Screaming might appear almost too brief for any sort of meaningful write up, particularly given that it's a single issue comic book painting a brief psychological portrait rather than telling a story in the sense of anything which could be transposed to telly with Ross Kemp in the title role; but the thing is too beautiful - although that may not be quite the right term - to slip past without notice. It's properly printed with a colour cover, albeit one that's mostly shades of grey and brown, with an interior which picks up every subtlety of scratchy pencilwork in contrast to the violent splatter of ink and a truly harrowing combination of light and dark. The Screaming is a phone call about a dream, incorporating the dream itself, and all framed within a psychological landscape bleeding to the very edge of the page. It's short and very intense with a power comparable to visually related(ish) efforts by the likes of Bill Sienkiewicz or Ted McKeever, and actually doesn't need to be any longer. In fact it's possibly one of the best small press comics I've ever seen, all things considered.

Seek ye the tome yonder.

Sandman: Preludes & Nocturnes

Neil Gaiman etc. Sandman: Preludes & Nocturnes (1989)
I was quite excited by Gaiman's Sandman when it first appeared, and not least because of Dave McKean's covers which I regarded as amazing. I said as much to Charlie Adlard seeing as he was sort of my comics advisor at the time, and was a little surprised when he made sniffy noises. His objection, as I understood it, was that McKean's work failed to live up to the hype for a number of reasons, and I realised that he was right, much as it pained me to admit it. McKean's art is necessarily impressionistic because his drawing ability is fairly limited. He's good with lighting, which compensates for a multitude of sins; and he tends to favour certain colour combinations which create a striking effect regardless of what one does with them. It's mostly shorthand and distraction, but no-one notices because they're too busy boggling at electrical components and scraps of underwear stapled to the page. Bill Sienkiewicz did it first and did it better, but Bill Sienkiewicz really can draw and his visual experiments are conducted through choice rather than necessity. Of course, McKean's work isn't bad by any means, although it's certainly not wildly original. He has a wonderful sense of design, but as such has more in common with Vaughan Oliver than the aforementioned Sienkiewicz.

Anyway, I kept on buying Sandman, month after month, even past the point at which I was buying it in the hope of it eventually getting better again, which it didn't. Then in 2009 I flogged the lot, having decided I'd rather have the money, although I always remembered those early issues as having been something good.

So here we are again, and yes, I still enjoy those first issues, but not so much as was once the case. I've read too much Gaiman to ever get myself back to factory settings. He pushes buttons in the same way that Dave McKean pushes buttons so as to distract from the inherent weaknesses of the structure, which is probably why those covers seem such a good fit. He's doing an Alan Moore in the same way that McKean was doing a Bill Sienkiewicz. To be fair, he does more than just push characters through some Alan Moore algorithm, and he writes dialogue beautifully - at least some of it - but everywhere else, all I see are tricks, shortcuts, and sleight of hand distracting from what feels as much like recycled material as anything by J.K. Rowling. The mood suggests something specifically written with fans of the Cure in mind, all cobwebs and bits of antique jewellery; and allusions to literature come and go as props, like a James Joyce held open at no particular page for minute after minute as you wait for a certain someone to come through the door and be duly impressed; and then every once in a while, it pushes the weird horror button just to keep us on our toes

Somewhere in Basildon a maniac with a bacon slicer has made ice cream out of his own arse. He's serving it to little kids.

Shocked, aren't you?

Narrative works by pushing buttons, but it really shouldn't be quite so obvious if it's done right. Even just the fucking title, Preludes & Nocturnes…

Seriously?

Seriously?

Additionally, the art isn't overly great either, and the one thing in Sandman's favour is that it is at least consistent for the run of these first eight issues. It may have been drawn as an expressionist homage to those same horror comics which eventually led to the likes of Swamp Thing - and most of this story rummages around in Alan Moore's version of the Swamp Thing mythology, seeing as I didn't already mention that - but to me it looks like, at best, a promising eighties fanzine, everyone with massive wonky heads like Thunderbirds puppets, and facial expressions last seen drawn in biro on the back of a school exercise book amongst the logos of late seventies heavy metal bands.

Having said all that, I still enjoyed this one, and almost as much as I probably enjoyed it back in 1989, but I enjoyed it as an efficient impersonation. It's good, but if Sandman changed your life, that says more about your life than it does about the power of Gaiman's writing. Preludes & Nocturnes, my arse...

Plastic Forks

Ted McKeever Plastic Forks (1990)
I was sufficiently invested in the minutiae of the comics industry back in 1990 to recall Ted McKeever being pushed as the new Bill Sienkiewicz, or at least that's how it felt at the time. Bill Sienkiewicz introduced something not unlike Dadaist collage to the comic books and remains one of the greatest artists to ever dabble with the medium, maybe even the greatest on a good day. Ted McKeever's art doesn't actually share much in common with that of Sienkiewicz beyond the occasionally scratchy line, but existed at a related tangent to what more or less everyone else was drawing in caped terms - think expressionist splatters and the influence of European cinema rather than mild-mannered reporters vanishing into phone booths.

Plastic Forks was issued in five luxuriously printed installments of sixty pages each, flogged on eBay when I needed the money, then repurchased more recently once I'd built up sufficient regret over the sale; but now that I have them back, I realise why I couldn't remember much about Plastic Forks, namely that I probably only read it once. I also realise why I only read it once. It's a tale of lives reduced to commodity, made disposable like plastic forks - the scientists of the tale as much as the animals upon which they perform terrible experiments towards dubious ends. The dynamic of the story spins from one of the scientists becoming the victim of his own experiments, followed by four issues of running around in pursuit of redress.

The artwork is mostly breathtaking, hallucinatory and expressionist, all contrast and jagged edges; which works beautifully as a vehicle for the industrialised cruelty of the tale, but which falls short when broaching the more tender concerns of the humans at the mercy of the machine. Another problem is that McKeever's illustration occasionally borders on abstract, leaving room for ambiguity when it's working on behalf of the story, but simply bewildering when it fails.

Doctor Henry Apt's coffee spray on page seven of the second issue is one example, a reaction to a detail of overheard conversation which becomes apparent later and meanwhile sends the reader thumbing back in hope of working out what he or she missed. So the story suffers from an impressionistic quality which seems at odds with what it's trying to do, combined - regrettably - with blandly utilitarian dialogue which feels like a self-conscious afterthought: I only hope I can cut through in time, or it's a long shot, but the only way to find out if it works is to try it, and the like. McKeever could have used a collaborator, or at least a more interactive editor.

Plastic Forks does what it does, looks fucking astonishing, but simply could have been a lot better. It's probably unfair to compare it to Sienkiewicz' Stray Toasters, but Stray Toasters was great because Sienkiewicz worked as hard on telling a story as he did on illustrating it. By comparison Plastic Forks feels like wonderful art in search of an author.

Devlin Waugh: Swimming in Blood

John Smith, Sean Phillips & others
Devlin Waugh: Swimming in Blood (2004)
I bought the Judge Dredd megazine for a while then eventually drifted away without really taking any of it with me, and certainly nothing resembling either nostalgia or pronounced affection for anything I'd read therein. It wasn't that it was bad so much as that it just didn't do a lot for me, and so I picked up this reprint principally because it's John Smith, a writer I always thought had more potential than that for which he has generally been given credit.

Devlin Waugh was proposed as Noel Coward as played by Arnold Schwarzenegger and takes the role of one of those demon-hunting exorcist types in the Judge Dredd universe. It's a bit of an obvious idea in some ways - one of those characters bolted together from a combination of dramatically absurd contradictions - and yet it sort of works and even succeeds, because John Smith generally seems to know what he's doing and has a talent for working the essentially ludicrous without quite letting it all slip over into the realm of Bugs Bunny. That said, Swimming in Blood was a bit of a shaky start - nice ideas which don't quite come together in what is basically a generic eighties action movie, and while Devlin Waugh as Terry Thomas is a delight, there are a few points where Smith's revelling in Wildean dialogue forms self-conscious clots in what is already turning out to be a bit of a plod; and a plod further encumbered by the unsavoury note struck when Waugh exposes his darker side - his sadistic impulses and a deeply unappealing misanthropy expressed in his regard of the mutant inmates of Aquatraz as a vile slurry of inhuman filth.

Additionally, Sean Phillips artwork was really muddy and inconsistent on this one, torn between imitating Simon Bisley and Bill Sienkiewicz - as was fucking everyone at that end of the nineties - but without the basic understanding of human anatomy which allowed those guys to get away with it. Phillips has never been my favourite artist, but this is fanzine level stuff compared to what he's drawn since - a fair quota of which has been at least reasonably breathtaking.

Fetish, the second story in the collection, works much better. Being a Dredd saga in which Waugh features, with the shift of focus working in the character's favour, allowing for the kind of mystery which is somewhat lost when he's grinning away and describing something as utterly ghastly on every other page. Ajibayo Akinsiku's art suffers from some of the same issues of contrast and basic figure work as that of Sean Phillips, and he draws Dredd as a chin wearing a helmet, but his better pages are mind-bogglingly hallucinatory. I have some reservations about the story using Africa in pretty much the same way as everyone else uses Africa - the dark, scary continent of mystery and nature red in tooth and claw - but Fetish is nevertheless a thoroughly satisfying effort showcasing the best of everyone involved.

Waugh finally convinces in A Mouthful of Dust with the art of Michael Gaydos perfectly attuned to the story it tells, sort of like Eddie Campbell with less scratching about.

Finally, there are a couple of prose stories in support of my feeling that comic book writers either need to stick to strip fiction, or accept that unillustrated text really isn't just a comic strip without artwork, or the hard-boiled voice-over delivered in short sentences at the beginning of something starring Bruce Willis.

And now he was dead. Cut and mutilated. Lying in a cold locker in a cold Monaco morgue. Dead like all Devlin's other friends. Like Pedro and Sanchez and Joel. Like dear old Bunny Beaumont. Like all the others.

William Burroughs got away with it, but if you're not William Burroughs and particularly if you're writing this kind of prose, use a comma, because distinguishing cut and mutilated as a sentence in itself just looks like you can't fucking write. John Smith patently can write - although both of his prose stories in this collection have essentially the same plot - but the occasional text stories you used to get in 2000AD specials were always pure arseache.

So that's been a fair bit of whining on my part, none of which alters the fact that I enjoyed this one a lot. That which this collection has in its favour greatly outweighs a few blanks fired here and there, and John Smith having delivered a not so much openly as rampantly gay character in the form of a mainstream comic strip without a trace of tokenism has to be applauded; and he did it with humour and genuine wit, and - if memory serves - just ahead of the curve regarding not only demon-hunting exorcist types, but vampires as good guys.

Stray Toasters

Bill Sienkiewicz Stray Toasters (1988)
As I recall, Stray Toasters emerged during the post-Watchmen media frenzy over graphic novels and how the comic had grown up, was no longer just for kids and so on. Nevertheless I rushed out and bought this, doubtless frothy of mouth and sweaty of palm, and principally because it was Bill Sienkiewicz and his artwork on both Elektra: Assassin and New Mutants had blown my nuts off, figuratively speaking. For those to whom the name may seem unfamiliar, Sienkiewicz arguably elevated mainstream comics - or at least some comics produced by mainstream publishers - to the level of art and design, specifically art and design by Russell Mills or Vaughan Oliver. A typical Sienkiewicz page - were there ever such an animal - might feature his scratchy and beautifully observed line drawing, painting, photography, collage and found objects attached by means of glue or staples, needle and thread or even screwed onto the medium. Stray Toasters for example makes use of transistors, circuit boards and the like. The effect is visually mesmerising, and it's an approach for which Dave McKean is probably more widely known, but for my money Bill Sienkiewicz did it better and first.

In addition, Stray Toasters is written by Sienkiewicz which presumably thus allowed both narrative and visuals to develop together in organic fashion, one inspiring the progress of the other. His writing seems to work by similar terms to his art - suggesting rather than stating, as is most obvious in his use of narrative clouds wherein swarms of disjointed words or phrases summarise a state of mind much in the way of Burroughs' cut-up technique.

The story, so far as I am able to tell, follows criminal psychologist Egon Rustemagik's efforts to unravel a murder case possibly involving a vengeful robot constructed from - amongst other things - a toaster by a small and quite possibly autistic boy - with no distinction made between the metaphorical and the presumably literal. It's difficult to tell quite what is happening, not for lack of narrative direction so much as too many narrative directions all pointing down different paths, although this heavy layering of text and subtext is really what makes Stray Toasters work as a graphic novel in the true sense of the word - as opposed to being just a stack of back issues of Secret Wars all wrapped up in a fancy cover.

I have to wonder if Stray Toasters is in certain respects autobiographical, at least in a symbolic sense, what with the emphasis on themes relating to parenting. Stray Toasters hints at children reduced to consumer commodity, something to be left on a shelf in the garage once they have ceased proper function; and the emphasis on toast - the one hot meal which even the most dysfunctional parent is usually able to prepare for its little darling - seems to underscore the idea of parental love which, if sorely deficient, is at least genuine. This might be extended to a wider critique of society as represented by masochistic attorney Harvard Chalky and nightmarish surgeon Dr. Montana Violet, and further suggested by the observation and commentary of Phil, a demon on vacation from hell in the style of The Screwtape Letters of C.S. Lewis; but as with anything, this thematically loose and often surreal interpretation may depend on the individual reader. As a narrative, Stray Toasters roughly works with the obscure logic of a Max Ernst painting - all suggestion and hints towards some darker occurrence off the edge of the canvas, and with little communicated by straightforward means.

For just a few months, the comic book actually did grow up, and this was what it looked like, and Lordy how I wish we could have had a few more like Stray Toasters since.

Mind of My Mind

Octavia E. Butler Mind of My Mind (1977)
It seems fair to say that black female science-fiction writers are fairly thin on the ground, and since Octavia Butler passed on in 2006, they've been sadly thinner on the ground to the tune of one, although I say that not so much for the sake of ticking any particular diversity box as the simple fact of her having been a fairly exceptional author and someone who really should have achieved wider recognition than she did.

Mind of My Mind was her second novel, and second of a series telling a much larger story spanning thousands of years in the lives of a roughly dynastic breed of telepaths. It's probably not what you would call hard science-fiction - as if that really matters - and oddly, it reminds me a little of Chris Claremont's New Mutants comic back when Bill Sienkiewicz was drawing thoughtful tales of young people struggling with weird powers, a book that had strayed a long way from standard superhero pastures, although then of course some idiot invented Rob fucking Liefeld and everything turned to shit. The details of the tale, the actual story onto which Mind of My Mind is bolted isn't that remarkable and, it might be argued, was later done to greater effect in Stephen Baxter's Coalescent; but Butler had a wonderfully persuasive narrative voice, a pleasantly gritty blue collar feel which was nevertheless able to convey subtle points without any of the usual showing off or ham-fisted allegorising one might expect of a novel such as this. In other words, she drew on her experience as a black woman without trading on her ethnicity as a virtue in itself, thus allowing for the sort of  communication of ideas which can sometimes be a problem with novels wherein such issues are raised.

Mind of My Mind is quite complex in terms of subject, being about relationships, power and coercion. Whilst some ideas regarding slavery enter the equation, there's much more going on here, with a dynamic in which the owned are simply obliged to accept their servitude to a master who seems at times quite likeable. There's no dramatic breaking of chains in the face of a scowling despot, nothing so obvious to intrude or detract from what is actually being said; and what Butler may have been saying is probably up to individual reader. I've seen this book criticised for raising issues and then failing to deal with them, but this strikes me as a basic misunderstanding, the assumption that a black woman writer is necessarily obliged to make bold, shouty statements just in case any of us had failed to realise that racism is bad, like in one of those stories where we set down the book and exclaim to ourselves hang on, these poor robots are being treated just like they used to treat the slaves!

I think my only criticism of Mind of My Mind is that the voice of the narrator is significantly more engaging than that of any of the subsidiary characters, all of whom get their fifteen minutes, but it's nevertheless a great book.

Elektra: Assassin

Frank Miller & Bill Sienkiewicz Elektra: Assassin (1987)
By the time I made it to art college, 2000AD had turned a bit shit thanks to dross like The Mean Arena and Meltdown Man, so I packed it in on the grounds of my subscription having become a financial extravagance and a possible hindrance to the likelihood of my enjoying sexual intercourse with nude ladies. I soon realised that, regardless of whether or not I read comics, no nude art college lady was particularly likely to jump my bones mainly because I had the wrong haircut - actually the haircut later popularised by members of Nirvana - so I thought fuck it, and went back to the comics again.

This was partially the fault of Charlie Adlard, then making Super 8mm zombie films as part of the same course. He'd given me a lift home and we stopped off at Sainsbury's for a pint of milk when I noticed an X-Men comic in the magazine department - Uncanny X-Men #211 for the benefit of anyone to whom such things might be important. I bought it out of rampant curiosity, having lost touch with the X-Men roughly when I was eight. Charlie filled me in on what had been happening at Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters in my absence, happily without recourse to any of that shit about comics growing up or whatever. I responded well to Chris Claremont's Mutant Massacre saga, so Charlie wrote me a prescription for Watchmen, The Dark Knight, and Elektra: Assassin, thus introducing me to the astonishing artwork of Bill Sienkiewicz.

Back before Frank Miller found himself forced into reincarnating as Ted Nugent by the commie pantywaistery of freedom-hating pinko liberals like myself and almost everyone I know, he wrote some pretty snappy comic books, and I'd argue the case for Elektra: Assassin being the snappiest. It was produced very much as a collaboration, the definitive and final scripts drawn up in response to what the artist had done for earlier drafts - Sienkiewicz's art being so distinctive, so powerful, that a script failing to acknowledge whatever had started happening on the page since Bill got to work with his crayon would inevitably look out of step.

All the weird effects that have been employed in comic book art since the 1980s, photocopies and objects taped or even bolted onto the page, panels looking to Gustav Klimt or abstract expressionism rather than Jack Kirby - I'm hazy on the precise details of who did what first, but I never saw anything of the kind before Bill Sienkiewicz embarked upon the experiments that were to provide Dave McKean with his entire career. Elektra: Assassin is neither deep nor particularly profound, a basic action thriller, well told with all sorts of big grisly ideas and psychological touches; and elevated to the status of Art with a capital A by the means of its telling. For those who need it, there's probably a message about corrupt politicians and the advent of spin, although with hindsight there's something a little bothersome about the villain being an evil and conspicuously liberal presidential candidate, what with Miller recently denouncing Adolf Hitler as a mommy's boy bleeding heart faggot and all.

Still, best to remember him when he wasn't a reactionary old tosser, when he worked in tandem with true genius to produce stuff like this. Elektra: Assassin is probably one of the greatest things Marvel ever did.