Analog September 2008

Stanley Schmidt (editor) Analog September 2008 (2008)
This was the first issue of Analog I ever bought, and it probably wasn't a great place to start. I've long held The Last Temptation of Katerina Savitskaya by Henry G. Stratmann to be the worst short story I've ever read. Coming back to it fifteen years later, I realise it's not quite so painfully didactic as I recall, and online research reveals the author to be an almost certainly above average decent guy whom I find difficult to square with this particular example of his writing. Last Temptation reads like fundamentalist Christian science-fiction written by someone who prefers movies to books and who might be more at home churning out romance novels. The story is that mysterious and powerful aliens have moved Mars into a lower orbit around the sun, somehow rendering it habitable, but only two people are allowed to visit - a man and a woman, and maybe you can see where this is heading. She's deeply religious. He comes from a more scientific background and is portrayed as cynical - although it seems he's simply a realist to me. The two of them discover a giant pyramid within which they are subjected to a number of spiritual and moral trials seemingly to determine whether or not humanity will be allowed to colonise. On this, my second reading, the story isn't quite so simplistic as I've made it sound, but as with much fiction driven by religious ideology, it feels as though we're playing with a stacked deck, are perhaps even subject to a certain level of condescension, and the symbolism seems at least as heavy-handed as painfully allegorical episodes of sixties Star Trek - although I sort of enjoyed Stratmann replacing the apple in the Garden of Eden with a radish, for what it may be worth.

That being said, it's better than I remember and, I would guess, is more likely a philosophical tale which suffers from the necessary fine balance having eluded its author, rather than the Bible-thumping sermon for which I took it in 2008. It doesn't help that a couple of deferential references to romantic fiction do nothing to prevent it reading like the same, or the number of times Stratmann invokes a specific TV show or movie.

He looked up at the towering structure and growled, 'A pyramid on Mars. With our luck, we'll find Sutekh waiting for us inside.'

'Who?'

Martin smiled mischievously. 'That's right.'

I'm sure that works for most of those who would get the reference, and who would then go on to declare the author a genius in the tradition of literary giants such as Terrance Dicks, but it didn't do a lot for me. I still find The Last Temptation of Katerina Savitskaya vaguely annoying, but after this second reading I've warmed to the idea that Stratmann has probably written better.

Elsewhere in the magazine we find an article about nanotechnology which I didn't really understand and three further short stories which, if not terrible, mostly had me hoping the next one would be better, which it wasn't. We close with one of those review columns which simply relates a detailed plot outline of each title under discussion, then part two of the presumably novel length Tracking by David R. Palmer. Tracking is written in an experimental first person narrative shorthand which tends to eschew pronouns and articles so as to presumably mimic the sensation of experience, so it reads like Chris Claremont's thought bubbles from eighties issues of X-Men. It sort of works once you're used to it, but forty pages seems like a lot and I gave up after about twenty.

The best thing about this were Stanley Schmidt's editorial and his memorial to Arthur C. Clarke. In fact, even his response to some letters page dingus accusing him of expressing eugenicist sympathies in a previous issue is more interesting than the rest of it. I guess this explains why I never became a regular reader.

New Mutants Forever

Chris Claremont, Al Rio & Bob McLeod
New Mutants Forever (2011)
Chris Claremont had already returned to the X-Men in 2009 with X-Men Forever, a title continuing the story from which he'd been unceremoniously unplugged back in 1991 when it was discovered that some readers disliked issues in which the X-Men girls go shopping and felt there weren't sufficient stabbings. Here he does the same with the New Mutants, although there are different circumstances to the end of his original run, notably that - so far as I understand it - he simply didn't have time to keep it going given everything else he was writing at the time, and handed the keys over to Louise Simonson who was at least on his side. I'm not sure this one really needed to happen by quite the same terms as X-Men Forever, but it's mostly fun with Claremont playing to his not inconsiderable strengths.

I can see the logic of utilising the trusty crayon of Bob McLeod given his status as co-creator, but I have to admit he's never been one of my favourites; and Al Rio's art looks very much as though he attended the Bob McLeod school. There's nothing wrong with McLeod's art and, to paraphrase what somebody or other once said of Tony Hadley, that's what is wrong with his art. It's very clean and clear, and it gets the job done, but it gets the job done with a limited range of variant facial expressions and not much you could describe as dynamic. Still, the magic of Claremont is that he can worm even the most preposterous shite into your subconscious and have you swear you've been watching Citizen Kane, sidestepping the problem of clichés - of which one should probably expect a number given that New Mutants is one of those caped titles - by splashing them about regardless with just enough spin and distraction to get away with it.

Here we have the New Mutants battling Red Skull and his Nazi pals in a version of Rome which has somehow survived the last twenty thousand years in isolation in the Amazon basin. Red Skull turns Cypher into a boggle-eyed version of himself who stands around in just his y-fronts agonising about this most ludicrous of transformations; and even the swastikas resemble something from the Beano; but not once does it inspire the question of why anyone bothered. It's no Demon Bear Saga, but New Mutants was a great book and this collection effortlessly reminds us why.

First Flight

Chris Claremont First Flight (1981)
I tried and I tried and I almost did it, but with forty pages to go, my reading glands rebelled and my hand reached for something else as though under the influence of some mysterious external force. I've got a lot of time for Chris Claremont, the man who wrote the X-Men comic book for seventeen years, but whoever told him to try his hand at a novel should take a long, hard look at themselves. I first noticed this title on the shelves of Half Price Books about a decade ago, and I've never been tempted because, to judge a book mostly by its Top Gun-esque cover, it looked fucking terrible.

Well, what do you know?

Somewhere under here, there's a decent story in the general vein of Heinlein, and Claremont knows how to put a sentence together; but pull back and you'll notice that the arresting image he's conjured is actually sprayed on the side of a van heading for Los Angeles with the best of the Doobie Brothers blasting from the eight track and the driver, who would probably benefit from a trip to the barbers, has just addressed you as man. The problem is that where Claremont has been father to many a beautifully written comic book, they're mostly written in collaboration with artists, and if I've taken anything from First Flight it's that the art of a good Claremont story does a share of the heavy lifting. It's not actually bad, but once we've established the narrative with snappy dialogue, it feels as though something is missing, that we should be staring at some galaxy-spanning vista drawn by John Byrne or whoever; because as it stands, the prose communicates very little of the wonder of space travel or our first encounter with an alien species, instead leaving the reader with a vague feeling of it having happened. I found myself drifting off because the characterisation is the only thing which holds the attention, and the characterisation is actually a lot like what I read in those X-Men comics all those years ago. At one point I noticed that our people were on a different spacecraft, having apparently made the transference while I was thinking about something else.

While, we're here, notice how the cover depicts spunky young pilots climbing into their individual starfighters - or summink - ready to scramble, or whatever it is that starfighters do. Well, whatever is going on here, isn't actually in the book so far as I can tell.

Mutant Genesis

 

Chris Claremont & Jim Lee Mutant Genesis (1991)
Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in…

Having finished a somewhat exhausting and extended bout of proofreading, I finally claw back some time in which to take a look at what books Santa brought. I begin with Will Self's memoir - which is absorbing and a joy to read - and then this turns up in the mail just as I come to the end of the first part, and suddenly I'm Principal Skinner admiring Ralph Wiggum's display of Star Wars action figures in that Simpsons episode. Look, I hear myself thinking as I gaze at the cover, it's the Beast, and there's Nightcrawler, and why - Psylocke is there too, because apparently I'm still twelve.

After seventeen years, Chris Claremont ceased writing the X-Men in 1991, having become massively disillusioned with what Marvel wanted to do to his characters. I recently discovered the existence of 2009's X-Men Forever, a title wherein Claremont continues the story he would have told had he stayed with the book, thus overwriting whatever the hired hands came up with in his absence; and specifically continuing the story from his final three issues, collected here and retroactively labelled Mutant Genesis for the sake of the sales pitch. These issues were actually the first three of 1991's X-Men, then the brand new collectible companion title to the long running Uncanny X-Men. I used to have them but it really felt like the whole thing had gone tits up, so I sold them and didn't bother restocking during my recent campaign of buying back all the stuff I've flogged on eBay. Anyway, I sort of can't not at least take a look at X-Men Forever, and I therefore bought this as a refresher.

I remember this thing as a complete dog's dinner, and so much so as to have bequeathed me no memory of what happens besides various angry looking mutants flying through the air, page after page after page. What happens is the death of Magneto. Claremont began the rehabilitation of Magneto, the previously somewhat generic supervillain, back in Uncanny X-Men #150, eventually transforming him into a sympathetic character on the grounds of it making for a more interesting, even more plausible story than the usual cycle of superpowered battles and evil cackling. Marvel sort of lost its mind around the beginning of the nineties, noticed how well all those X-books were selling and decided to cash in by upping the marketing campaign and turning the books into something which missed the whole point of why we'd bothered reading them in the first place. Thus was Claremont, the architect of the book's success, reduced to providing snappy dialogue for the story Jim Lee - a proven seller if ever there was - wanted to tell, and the story Jim Lee wanted to tell was mostly a resumption of superpowered battles and evil cackling with Magneto reverting to his nefarious ways so as to keep Rob Liefeld from feeling a bit gay when leafing through a copy in the store.

Amazingly, reading this thing three decades later, I realise it's not bad. It doubtless helps that I'm reading while curious to find out what happened, as distinct from praying it makes some fucking sense without my having to read ten other titles as part of the publisher's increasingly transparent attempts to empty out my wallet. I say not bad, although the story is standard caped stuff demonstrating little of the imagination or flair which had brought the X-books through the previous decade; but Claremont's dialogue carries the whole thing, lending even the most stupid plot twists a sense of gravity - maybe not quite turning a small boy smashing his action figures together into Shakespeare, but certainly something in that direction; and even the restoration of evil Magneto is somehow convincing.

Jim Lee's art is, just as I remember - more or less Rob Liefeld with more than just three facial expressions and without the wonky anatomy - but it doesn't really matter because Claremont's dialogue does all of the heavy lifting; and does it with astonishing grace given that he was effectively filling out his own P45 here. It's a tragedy of sorts in so much as that 1991's X-Men #1, reprinted here, remains the single biggest selling issue of a comic book of all time, and was written pretty much under protest by a man who had to wait another two decades before he was able to finish the story as he wanted it, but it's a testament to his ability that he was able to deliver this swan song in such fine voice.

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.

Essential Defenders volume two

Len Wein, Steve Gerber, Sal Buscema & others
Essential Defenders volume two (1976)
The material in the previous massive volume finished before the Defenders' first sense shattering encounter with the Wrecking Crew, a team of demolition themed supervillains led by a guy who brains people with a crowbar. This was a story I was able to remember reading during childhood which must therefore be deemed classic - just like all those five star Terrance Dicks masterpieces - and thusly did I make purchase of this second volume, oh stout yeoman of the bar, collecting material dating to no later than 1976. The Defenders, as my fellow Dennis Nordens will fondly remember, were a bunch of superheroes who just happened to hang out together rather than a formal team - Doctor Strange, the Hulk, Prince Namor, the Silver Surfer, Valkyrie - who used to make me feel a bit funny in the trousers when I were a lad - Nighthawk, Luke Cage, and others.

Although the gang are settling into a bit of a crime-fighting, foe-bashing routine in this one, it's not without a certain sparkle of inspiration even if the shine has come off the sheer weirdness of earlier issues to some extent. Unfortunately, the problem seems to be that most of these issues are written by Steve Gerber, and while he's undoubtedly inventive, he tends to bog the strip down with an exhausting quota of exposition, mostly in chatty Marvel Shakespearean to the point of it becoming a chore. It may have worked in monthly instalments, but issue after issue in quick succession begins to feel like homework, and there's so fucking much of it that a couple of issues apparently needed actual pages of just prose text set in two columns as they would be in a digest. The problem becomes rudely obvious when three significantly lighter issues of Marvel Team Up written by Gerry Conway punctuate the main sequence of the title comic.

All the same, this was still well worth a look, and the punch up with the Wrecking Crew was at least as much fun as I remember it being. Luke Cage seems a bit of a blaxploitation cliché with hindsight, but Marvel redeemed itself by at least featuring black characters, even setting the Defenders against an overtly racist white nationalist organisation at one point, while class and privilege are criticised by agency of Nighthawk - actually one of those eccentric millionaire turned nocturnal crime fighter types; not that you would read this for the sake of social justice issues unless you're a fucking idiot. As with much of what Marvel produced in the seventies, this stuff was actually pretty weird on close inspection, and so retains most of its charm.

Wolverine

 

Chris Claremont, John Byrne, Larry Hama etc. etc. Wolverine (1991)
Not a graphic novel, not a collected edition, just a big stack of comic books like you would read when in bed with the measles, or a hangover if you're a little bit older. The story, as I've definitely already mentioned on more than one occasion, is that I was once a massive sucker for caped comic books, then sold my entire collection during a sudden fit of what I imagined to be maturity. It's a decision I've always regretted and have finally set right, having spent the last couple of years buying them all back - mainly thanks to the fact that none of them ever ended up quite so collectible - and by association, expensive - as we were told would be the case.

When it finally happened, Wolverine as a regularly monthly title didn't make much of an impression on me, as is possibly indicated by my having re-bought entire runs of X-Men, X-Factor, and New Mutants* before I even remembered that there had ever been a regular Wolverine title, and one to which I subscribed and presumably read. Anyway, I picked up a few and realised that yes, I actually had enjoyed the thing well enough, thereby justifying another couple of hundred dollars spunked away at Lone Star Comics in the name of nostalgia, albeit an admittedly vague form of nostalgia.

Anyway, Wolverine was essentially everything Charles Schulz had warned us about in his Peanuts strip back in 1952.

Unfortunately, a homicidal nutcase whose superpower is stabbing people proved somewhat limited in terms of what kind of stories might be told, and so Wolverine was written as a man wrestling with inner demons, which at least allowed for bit more wiggle room. Frank Miller and Chris Claremont had already done a lot to flesh out the character both in the main X-Men comics and in related spin-offs, and Claremont got the regular book off to a fairly decent start, essentially turning Wolverine into a hard-boiled detective and letting him run loose in an old Terry and the Pirates strip. It worked well, and was at least more engaging than the endless cycle of growling and stabbing which it could have been, and which a few of the readers had seemingly expected.

That said, a few of Claremont's plot points were somewhat bewildering - possibly due to this being just one of fifty other books he was writing to a monthly schedule, and the whole thing came across as kind of dry at times what with the rigorous adherence to Wolverine as film noir. Peter David and then Archie Goodwin took over from Claremont after ten issues, roughly maintaining the same mood and general standard, even allowing for bursts of humour. Considering the vigour with which Marvel had been milking the X-cow at least since the second half of the eighties, the actual quality of Wolverine is surprising and impressive, although I suppose if they were throwing money at any title, it was going to be this one; and so the art is likewise mostly exceptional as one would expect of John Buscema, John Byrne, Klaus Janson, Marc Silvestri and others. However, I couldn't help but notice that this stuff reads a lot better when you sit down with a big stack of comics and binge the lot in just a couple of sittings. It played its cards just a little too close to its chest for a monthly schedule - as I vaguely seem to recall - which is probably why I'd forgotten so much of it, including even the point at which I gave up and stopped buying the thing.

Having no idea of where I'd originally jumped ship, and being reluctant to buy a run of back issues where the cut-off point might leave me hanging in the middle of an unfinished story, I re-bought the book up to and including issue fifty on the grounds of it being a round number and not too deep into the period beyond which these comics had mostly turned to shite in a grimacing cross-hatched effort to tap into some of that old Rob Liefeld magic. Now, having actually read the things, it seems I've made the right decision, both in drawing the line at issue fifty and in dumping the book when I did first time round. Larry Hama's run on the last twenty or so of these restores a lot of the humour and peculiar novelty which had either been missing or else was stood in the corner pretending to be Mickey Spillane during previous episodes. On one level, Hama turned Wolverine into sixties telly Batman, having Logan fight his own android double while trying to save the life of a bomb disguised as a cute little girl with pigtails and a lisp programmed to blow him into pieces; but for all Hama's wit and invention, it becomes obvious that all those letter-writing twerps complaining about the lack of stabbings have had their way. Various X-Men begin to turn up as crowd pleasing guests with increasing frequency, and by now it's the grimacing nineties X-Men in those bondage costumes covered in pockets, utility belts and holsters and all the women with massive tits and no waist; and inker Dan Green seemed to be doing his best to make Silvestri's pencils resemble something from the Image stable.

Wolvey's secret origin, you won't fucking believe it, deffo the real thing this time, not a dream, grimace grimace, black ops, even more fucking cross-hatching and random pockets, more black ops, clandestine government organisation, foil stamped edition also available blah blah blah…

Wolverine was never really in competition with The Taming of the Shrew, in case anyone missed that particular memo, but this was a decent, even classy book for a while, regardless of having sprung from Marvel's increasingly rabid attempts to take its readership for every last penny - although I gather much worse was to come, and a mere fifty new X-titles hitting the racks each week now seemingly represents a model of restraint by comparison. Inevitably there were lapses, notably the bewilderingly shit Lazarus Project issues featuring art by Barry Kitson whom I seem to recall as having contributed to my giving up on 2000AD back in the eighties; but these were exceptions rather than the rule. Otherwise, for my money, these issues belonged to the final flowering of the American superhero comic before it grew up and became an absolute fucking bore, having mistakenly assumed a massive body count and increasingly baroque forms of slaughter to be pretty much tantamount to adulthood. Those vicious little letter page gorehounds got their way, effectively killing off the thing they purportedly loved, then themselves most likely grew up to be cops, security guards and right-wing politicians, so I'd guess.

Still, it was nice while it lasted.

*: Well, entire runs of the readable stuff, my cut-off point being around 1991, beyond which most of them had turned to shite.
 

Captain Britain: Birth of a Legend

Chris Claremont, Gary Friedrich, Herb Trimpe & others
Captain Britain: Birth of a Legend (2011)

While I've very much been a fan of the Alan Davis version of the character, I've remained largely ignorant of his previous incarnation. I just about remember seeing the Captain Britain weekly advertised on the telly back in 1976, specifically the first issue which came with a free mask which was actually just half of a union jack printed on a bit of cardboard with holes for eyes. Even at the age of eleven I had difficulty seeing the appeal. I'm not sure I ever actually saw an issue of the comic. Something about the enterprise struck me as trying too hard and there was something a bit unpleasant about that weird mask which covered the lower half of his face.

As you probably know, Captain Britain was born when Marvel had the big idea of giving us blokes of Englishland a character of very our own, as distinct from black and white reprints of their American comics. Chris Claremont had been born in London and grew up in the US reading imported issues of Eagle, and Herb Trimpe was apparently living in Cornwall, so I guess that seemed close enough at the time. The problem with it is that, much as I suspected, it was trying too hard.

Firstly, everything was nevertheless done in New York - according to Wikipedia - meaning the deadlines were apparently cunty, and keeping in mind this was a weekly comic produced by a company more accustomed to monthlies with different members of the creative team on different continents and the internet not yet invented; and English comic book publishing tradition necessitated stories told in instalments of seven pages at a time. It's probably a minor miracle that it's not a complete heap of crap.

While I'm sure Captain Britain may have worked as a weekly, at least for a time, these seven-page punch-ups were never intended to be read in a single sitting. The narrative is unusually compressed even by the standards of seventies Marvel, and the action is almost continuous which becomes quickly exhausting. There's even a self-conscious jokey editor's note about it somewhere around issue twenty, by which point the whole thing has begun to feel a little like Dave Smith's Captain Captured from Viz #18 and I had trouble recalling whether our boy had actually taken a five-minute breather since Merlin turned him into a stripier Captain America on that fated night back in the first pulse-pounding issue.

In addition to this, a certain degree of Britface is probably inevitable given the creative team being torn as they were between delivering something recognisably in the Marvel superhero tradition whilst identifiably belonging to the country in which it was published, and hopefully without just being Spiderman with the references switched. Perhaps inevitably, it tries too hard and simply comes across as a bit weird with Britspeak delivered with an ostentatious flourish every few panels. Everyone is either a bloke or a bird and they all read the Times, even the bloomin' cabbies, and references to the pub and something called soccer come faster than a speeding lorry! Cops think about how they're not allowed to have guns during bank robberies. The battle with the Nazi-revivalist Red Skull goes on for what feels like a million issues and begins to suggest maybe someone back at the bullpen noticed all those British war comics and figured it might be one way of tapping into the market, and Red Skull quite naturally kidnaps the Prime Minister - apparently Jim Callaghan, but with a touch of Wilson and even Heath from certain angles; and of course the Queen makes a showing, having been hypnotised by the Manipulator who wants her to lead the Royal Navy into battle against the small African nation from which he was recently deposed. I mean it's nice that Marvel wanted to do something for its loyal British readers, and it is at least sincere, thus avoiding the smug cynicism of Austin Powers and the like, but it's fucking hard to read this stuff if you're actually from England and older than ten.

The actual stories are so ropey that it's weird, which is probably what saves the thing. Captain Britain's battle with Lord Hawk, for one example, makes no fucking sense whatsoever. Professor Scott was some friend of the family, a teacher who jacked it in due to students taking the piss out his Catweazle-esque appearance and outmoded views. His one pleasure was falconry except, as we all know, all of the hawks in England have been killed off by pollution - every last one. Brian - that being Captain Britain's secret identity - designs and builds Scott a radio-controlled robot hawk in the hope of cheering him up. Scott instead goes mental and roams the country as Lord Hawk somehow using his normal-sized radio-controlled bird to destroy power stations and other polluting bastions of modernity.

'The air will once more be pure as it was in the past,' he tells his radio-controlled bird in one panel with a villainous leer on his face, 'in the glorious days of knighthood and ladies fair when noble birds like yourself filled the skies and hunted without choking on polluted air!' He may as well be talking to a model aircraft.

Anyway, this frankly confused senior citizen and operator of what may as well be a model aircraft takes on Captain Britain, the man who designed and built the thing which may as well be a model aircraft, and which was originally a present given in the hope that it might cheer the ungrateful fucker up a bit; and somehow Lord Hawk is enough of a match for Captain Britain for the whole thing to last five issues. More than anything, the comic feels like a distended version of one of the ludicrous superhero strips in Viz, back when it was funny, which is ultimately why it remains readable. It's mostly fucking stupid, but the art is generally decent - members of the royal family notwithstanding - and it's doing everything it can to keep you entertained because it really, really, really wants you to like it. It's not difficult to see why 2000AD blew it out of the water about six months into its initial run, but this first, undeniably shaky version of Captain Britain is nevertheless worth remembering and is not without its own non-ironic charm.

 

 

Wolverine / Kitty Pryde & Wolverine

Chris Claremont, Frank Miller & Al Milgrom
Wolverine (1982)
Kitty Pryde & Wolverine (1984)
As I may have mentioned, I was once something of a Marvel zombie, particularly where all those X-books were concerned. I bought and collected them religiously up until the point at which Rob Liefeld came on the scene and it all went down the toilet. Then, feeling a little uncomfortable about how much of the stuff I'd accumulated, I flogged the lot for not nearly enough back in the nineties, an act of Cromwellian reform which I've regretted ever since; at least up until about two years ago when I noticed how this shit is still pretty cheap and easy to find now that we've invented the internet. So I've re-bought more or less everything I once owned then sold, and filled in a few gaps along the way.

Accordingly I have a big stack of Wolverine back issues which I intend to tackle fairly soon, but I thought I'd start here for the sake of keeping things tidy - two limited series dating from before the lad graduated to his own regular comic book, four and six issues respectively, the earlier one having been collected during the initial excitement of the graphic novel, the comic growing up, and all of that good stuff.

At the heart of most superhero comics you'll find the world's biggest square wearing a fucking leotard and foiling a bank robbery, so those comics I'd consider the most successful have tended to work in spite of the genre, usually by doing things in such a way as to distract from the world's biggest square wearing a fucking leotard and foiling a bank robbery, or else by doing something slightly different. The X-Men comics, for example, border on science-fiction by focussing on the sheer weirdness of superheroes, emphasising their outsider credentials - potentially at odds with the status quo rather than necessarily supporting it through the foiling of bank robberies. Wolverine, as a character, took this one further through being a dangerous, homicidal nutcase, an outsider even amongst outsiders. I'm sure you all know who he's supposed to be and what he's supposed to do, but it's possibly worth remembering that initially, this was all he did - the unstoppable mutant dude who gets the red mist and stabs everyone in the room. It was one dimensional and somewhat limiting in terms of story because his response to any situation could only ever be to slice everyone into pieces, so Chris Claremont and Frank Miller decided to open things up a little.

1982's Wolverine sends our man to Japan and redefines him as a failed samurai, as a man striving to become something better than just the guy who loses his shit and slices everyone into pieces. Superheroes had come fitted with their own inner demons at least since the sixties when the Mighty Thor lost all faith in his own ability to select an insurance policy combining peace of mind with genuinely competitive rates; so Wolverine's hero journey was nothing particularly new but for the way in which it was told, borrowing from film noir and martial arts cinema which - again - if not exactly new, represented a refreshing further abstraction from the superhero genre. I'm possibly unique in having no particular interest in Japanese culture besides Godzilla movies. I therefore can't vouch for how well Claremont and Miller do Tokyo, and it may well be hokey as fuck given Claremont's version of London as seen elsewhere, but it works for me. It remains a kid's comic, or at least a precocious teenager's comic, but it does the job through never talking down and by maintaining a certain level of emotional intelligence, and Frank Miller's art is nothing if not cinematic.

 

Kitty Pryde is a character who had been hanging around the pages of the X-Men books for a while, seemingly another abstraction from the conventions of the genre in her failure to have settled upon either an action figure super-identity or costume. Kitty Pryde & Wolverine approximately repeats the previous hero journey in the service of granting Kitty a little more substance than just reader identification. Al Milgrom has drawn some truly ropey stuff in his time, but sort of gets away with this, rendering a slightly sketchier version of what Miller drew in the previous book, albeit without quite the same fine-tuned sense of design, picture space, and so on. Kitty Pryde & Wolverine fumbles the ball a little compared with its predecessor, taking a little too long to do its thing then closing with a ludicrously generic slap-up feed, suggesting Miller's input was fairly crucial.

Neither of these titles were life changing, but they did what they set out to do extremely well for the most part, expanding the form into something a bit more engaging than foiled bank robberies. They were something with a sense of art beyond what one might expect from unit shifting entertainment factories.

I continue to find Chris Claremont's writing fascinating because what he does seems fairly straightforward and mainstream - nothing too avant-garde, nothing particularly weird, certainly no obscure references to Marcel Duchamp - and yet his style is distinctive, immediately recognisable, and it hooks the reader into whatever is going on like few other comic book authors have managed, hence, I would argue, the phenomenal success of all those X-books back in the eighties. Some of what he writes should logically be as corny as shit given the stories to which the words are applied, and yet he always finds a way around stating the obvious without even drawing attention to such dodges.

Neither of these two series were ever really examples of the comic book having grown up, but they didn't need to be, and they work just fine on their own merits.

Fantasy & Science Fiction #676

Gordon Van Gelder (editor) Fantasy & Science Fiction 676 (2008)
Back in 2008, I decided to educate myself regarding what science-fiction* there was to be had beyond Philip K. Dick - of whom I'd already read a fair bit - and Who novels. I'd taken to picking up whatever I could find which looked interesting, mostly from charity shops, and so became familiar with Asimov, Simak, van Vogt and others; but still I felt the need to know what was going down on the mean streets of science-fiction literature right now, right at this moment, or right at that moment in this case, so I got my ass to Borders and picked up the September issues of Analog, Asimov's Science Fiction, and this one, Fantasy & Science Fiction, which seemed to be the best of the bunch.

This issue featured Paolo Bacigalupi's Pump Six, which I thought was fucking amazing, and which compelled me to buy at least a couple of his other books, and which seems even more amazing twelve years later, not least because it describes the sort of profoundly sickening environmental decline which has actually been coming true right outside our windows.

Even better was Carolyn Ives Gilman's Arkfall which makes fairly profound observations about the human condition and specifically how we relate to each other, but makes them quietly and without any shouting in one of the weirdest, most unsettling environments you could imagine, at least without invoking quantum theory. This one really affected me when I read it, and I've just noticed my having failed to read anything else by the woman, so I'll try to put that one right.

Elsewhere in the mag, Jim Aiken's Run! Run!, Robert Reed's Salad for Two, and Laura Kasischke's Search Continues for Elderly Man are decent, and probably in that order; leaving us with one of those tales told as a series of letters sent back and forth between the two protagonists which I couldn't be arsed to read, and Rand B. Lee's Picnic on Pentecost, which opens with the planet has a face like a dead circus performer, but then did nothing else to keep me from skipping ahead. To be specific, the story is mostly told by means of that Claremont-speak which attempts to fakesimulateinvoke thought by running words words words together in a cloying-annoying way - sillystupidcrappy - and which once endangered the narrative integrity of many an X-Men comic back in the day, so I couldn't be arsed to read that one either. All the same, with Pump Six and Arkfall together in this single volume, you tend not to notice a couple of duds. This issue may not quite be where it all began for me, but it was certainly where something began.

*: Referring here to the written word because I generally couldn't give a shit about film or TV, or at least ceased to do so around this time.

Doom Patrol

John Byrne, Doug Hazlewood & Terry Austin Doom Patrol (2006)
This is a stack of eighteen comic books picked up in continuation of my efforts to catch up with all those versions of the Doom Patrol which happened while I was looking the other way, and comprising a story John Byrne began during his run of Justice League comics. The strangest thing here was Byrne's decision to ignore all previous versions of the book, starting again at the beginning as though we'd never before met any of these characters. There's an editorial in the first issue explaining how this return to year zero has been effected so as to tell new stories without any crippling continuity getting in the way, although I have to say that John Arcudi seemed to do fine with the previous run of Doom Patrol, taking it somewhere entirely different without any need of a reset button; and for all its finer points, I still can't help feel that Byrne simply didn't want to deal with all that weird homoerotic Dadaism.

That said, I suppose there's an argument that Hans Bellmer and the Marquis de Sade probably don't belong in a children's comic; and so far as taking Doom Patrol back to its roots with stories thematically faithful to the Arnold Drake version, Byrne does a decent job without descending into pastiche. This is as mainstream as the book has ever been, although it's still reasonably weird when compared to - off the top of my head - silver age Superman. The premise suffers a little from somewhat modular Thunderbirdsisms with the tidily secret base from which the team go forth to fight crime and effect rescue operations, but this is at least a little offset by the characters, old and new, with their brain transplants, four-armed gorillas, friendly Confederate ghosts, and so on - and not forgetting a pleasing sidestep into alternate Doom Patrol realities somewhere around issue fourteen. John Byrne is quite good at this sort of thing, essentially pulling the characters apart, working out what makes them tick, and then spinning stories from whatever he's found - which he did to great effect with Alpha Flight back in the eighties; but apparently he's not very good at dialogue, which really shows in the wake of Chris Claremont having co-written those issue of Justice League which foreshadowed this book. It's not that the dialogue is bad so much as that it lacks Claremont's flair and thus exposes the fact that we're actually reading what may as well be a peculiar take on Scooby Doo. Characters think about what they're doing within their thought bubbles as they're doing it, or they describe that which we can see with our own eyes, or they point out that they would have got away with it were it not for that meddling Doom Patrol.

Despite this, Byrne's Doom Patrol has enough going on to keep it engagingly odd and even gripping, and the only problem is simply that it could have been better.

Fantastic Four versus the X-Men

Chris Claremont, Jon Bogdanove & Terry Austin

Fantastic Four versus the X-Men (1987)
I chose this as light bedtime reading on evenings when it seemed like Philip K. Dick's Exegesis might be a bit too much, which could justifiably be characterised as a retreat into childhood - although I was twenty-two when I first read this and not technically a child, just emotionally behind and lacking in worldly experience.

I brought the occasional Marvel comic back from school when I was a kid, usually borrowed from a friend. I quite specifically recall my mother sneering with unusual severity at the cover of Spiderman Comics Weekly #111, which would have been January 1975*, and which imprinted on me the idea that these things were trashy, shameful, and therefore forbidden. Normally she wouldn't have seen the comic but I had to get a parental signature so that I could join FOOM, or Friends of Old Marvel.

I didn't really go anywhere near superheroes after that, excepting a few issues of the Defenders and something or other reprinting the Inhumans. 2000AD and Doctor Who met most of my science-fiction needs and didn't seem to draw quite such opprobrium, possibly because there was no-one wearing a cape on the cover, meaning they could therefore be smuggled past the border patrol as something faintly cultural by virtue of not being American.

Then within about a year of leaving home at the age of eighteen, it suddenly dawned on me that I could now read that caped shit until my eyes hurt, and there was no-one to stop me. Furthermore, I now had the means to buy many different titles thus enabling me to keep track of what the fuck was going on in the wider Marvel universe. Part of the appeal of the Defenders had been the glimpse it afforded of a more expansive but otherwise mysterious narrative. I slipped into monthly expeditions to Forbidden Planet up in that London, usually spending about fifty quid at a time. I accrued a massive collection of American comics. Then around '92 it became obvious that I had to shed some of what I had accumulated for practical reasons, and it was mostly the Marvel stuff. Rob Liefeld had become involved and the current titles had all turned to shite, plus it seemed like a clean break might not hurt - kicking the habit as though it were an actual chemical addiction, all or nothing, and most of the caped stuff went.

Thirty years later, my curiosity has built such a head of steam that I've started buying back all those issues I once owned, which as mid-life crises go is probably healthier than sports cars or banging teenagers. The element of curiosity is my specifically wondering how bad those comics really could have been given that they clearly meant a lot to me at the time; and would the magic, whatever it was, have endured? Strangely, it has in most cases, despite my now reading these things with more brain cells at my disposal, being arguably more educated and more emotionally developed. I cleared out the caped stuff because it struck me as childish and therefore symptomatic of my own immaturity, and of course I held onto all that sophisticated stuff by Alan Moore and the rest; but only now have I noticed that this was itself an immature perspective.

I'm reading Watchmen instead of X-Factor. I'm a big boy now!
 

Anyway, I read the Mephisto limited series a few nights back. It was a lot of fun, but definitely a children's comic, and there's not much more to be said about it. Fantastic Four versus the X-Men is likewise a children's comic, but one written by Chris Claremont which might therefore be seen to epitomise everything which drew me to the genre and then kept me reading.

The story is fairly simple. Shadowcat of the X-Men is unwell and only Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four has the scientific knowhow to save her, but he experiences a crisis of confidence and refuses, fearing he will only make the situation worse. Dr. Doom, mortal enemy of just about everyone but also a brilliant scientist steps in, offering to cure Shadowcat; and they all have a fight.

Where Claremont succeeded was emphasising the soap opera aspect of these stories, and either sufficiently downplaying the more ludicrous elements of the genre so as to keep them from getting in the way, or else disguising them as something more like science-fiction. So maybe the superpowers, mutant or otherwise, are preposterous, but by passing our guys off as sympathetic monsters, we never have to think about the truly stupid stuff such as why anyone would dress up as a bat in response to the death of their parents, or even the absurd frequency with which strangers need rescuing from burning buildings. Instead of something which pulls towards the status quo of upholding justice and jailing bad guys, the world of our mutant superheroes is actually pretty fucking weird with plenty of wiggle room for shifting moral foundations, playing on the sort of subjects which will tend to preoccupy all but the most stupid teenagers. This dovetails nicely with that thing about comic book narrative being a case of messing up everyone's lives and then trying to get them straightened out - reforming the villainous Magneto as a sympathetic character for one. Claremont did this a lot, but framed his dilemmas in such a way as to present the illusion of there being something real at stake. Here we have Shadowcat, whose molecules are drifting apart, faced with her own extinction, and the writing, pacing, timing and art are so perfectly judged as to evoke genuine tragedy.

Claremont writes in the tradition of Stan Lee, moving his story along with a third person subjective narrator prone to rhetorical questions in Marvel Shakespearian.

Did you really think to do that much, Reed Richards?

As narrative, it's the opposite of Warren Ellis trying to fool us into thinking we're watching a film. It's chatty and probably a bit camp, but as with anything, you have to make some effort to work with the genre rather than expecting Sartre with capes and superpowers - an approach which will lead only to disappointment.

Here Claremont tells a story spelled out in huge, brash brush strokes with everything sign posted and plenty of sentiment, and somehow he gets the balance absolutely right, resulting in a story which is never too much or too little of anything, meaning that while it remains a book which seems obviously aimed at ten-year old boys, I can still read it at the age of fifty-three without feeling like I'm watching Dora the Explorer; because the elements which keep it interesting - the shock of the weird and the soap opera - don't speak to any one specific reading age.

I'm really glad that I grew up so much as to be able to read this sort of thing again.

*: I had to look this up, scanning through page after page of internet to find a cover I recognised. This search has additionally brought to my attention the fact of this particular issue having been drawn by Gil Kane, so I probably shouldn't have placed so much stock in my mother's verdict on this occasion.

The Chrysalids

John Wyndham The Chrysalids (1955)
Without it really having resulted from anything resembling a plan, it seems I've been reading my way through the oeuvre of John Wyndham during the course of the last decade, and so - barring a few oddities and outliers such as Plan for Chaos, of which I've never seen a copy - it seems I've saved the best for last. This one's a cracker.

The Chrysalids occurs in a puritanical post-apocalyptic society reduced to a mediaeval way of life. We've survived nuclear holocaust but mutation is rife, and mutants are to be driven out with evangelical zeal; so the novel tells the story of a couple of those mutants with an emphasis which one might regard as owing a debt to van Vogt's Slan, and which certainly foreshadows Chris Claremont's X-Men comics. In fact, The Chrysalids seems to foreshadow one fuck of a lot, more or less everything Terry Nation ever wrote, quite a few subsequent takes on life after the bomb, The Handmaid's Tale and so on. The years 1949 through to the publication of this novel saw a significant upsurge in nuclear weapons research and testing across the globe, and it seems very clear that the potentially terrible consequences occupied Wyndham's thoughts.

As ever, his great strength as a writer is in the global picture as seen through the eyes of a minor player, at a more personal, almost provincial level, and so The Chrysalids doubles up as a classic children's novel about a boy saving his younger sister from a bullying father. Even better is that Wyndham held back from any of the stuff which spoiled at least a few of his books, the creaking humour and the tone which unfortunately inspired Brian Aldiss to coin the term, cosy catastrophe. This one is more than just a yarn.

'Purity,' I said. 'The will of the Lord. Honor thy father. Am I supposed to forgive him? Or to try to kill him?'

The answer startled me. I was not aware that I had sent out the thought at large.

'Let him be,' came the severe, clear pattern from the Zealand woman. 'Your work is to survive. Neither his kind, nor his kind of thinking will survive long. They are the crown of creation, they are ambition fulfilled, they have nowhere more to go. But life is change, that is how it differs from the rocks, change is its very nature.'

See? That one still works today. In fact I'd say it's quite pertinent right now given the upsurge of those who want to ship the rest of us off to labour camps or worse.

I've read a ton of science-fiction over the last decade or so, and I think I'm approaching the point at which I will have read just about everything I'm ever going to feel inclined to read of the genre; so my future may hold significantly fewer crappy seventies paperbacks with airbrushed spacecraft on the covers, and if this turns out to be the case, I'm fucking glad this one made it onto my shelves before the shutters went down, because it's one of the very best.

Doom Patrol

Keith Giffen, Matt Clark, John Livesay & others Doom Patrol (2011)
Here's another stack of comics, specifically a run which lasted twenty-two issues before cancellation, and with which I'm only just catching up in 2018. Giffen's version of the Doom Patrol followed on from John Byrne's 2004 version which dispensed with all the weird stuff and started afresh. Infinite Crisis - which I've never read - apparently revised Byrne's revision, meaning Giffen gets to play with Crazy Jane, Arani Caulder, and even characters from the John Arcudi run. He also rationalises Byrne's resurrection of Rita Farr, which is handy because that one decision seemed otherwise a bit crap at the time. Giffen even squishes Grunt and Nudge, both inherited from Byrne, within the first five pages of issue one, which scans as though it was probably at least a little cathartic. Read as a single body of work, this version isn't quite so satisfying as those of Grant Morrison, Gerard Way, or even Giffen's own run on the Justice League, but it's otherwise decent and the art is mostly wonderful.

My only criticisms would be that the narrative occasionally seems to wander into a room and forget what it went in for, and that the additional Metal Men strips - running for the first seven issues in the back of the book - somewhat disrupt the rhythm, at least from the point of view of the reader working his way through a stack of the things piled up on the bedside table. In isolation, Metal Men is very much a thing of great wit and beauty, as you would expect from Giffen once again working with J.M. DeMatteis and Kevin Maguire, his partners on the aforementioned Justice League. The problem is that it's slow and wordy, each panel crammed with dialogue - albeit wonderfully witty dialogue, visually sharing more in common with Windsor McCay than the caped fare in which it is rooted; and Metal Men is perfect as it is, but nevertheless sits heavily in one's reading stomach after relatively breezy instalments of Doom Patrol. Metal Men probably should have been its own book, except of course no-one would have bought it because it's too ludicrous.

As for wandering into rooms and forgetting what we went in for, I suspect Giffen's admittedly infrequent narrative Condor moments result partially from my never having read Infinite Crisis; which brings me back to the subject of revision, continuity, canon, and so on.

I still don't understand why DC feels the need to reboot every five or so years, and I don't believe that anyone likely to pick up a Batman comic in 2018 is really going to give a shit about the character having been around since 1939, or that Bruce Wayne should logically be a septugenarian by now. I was heavily into Claremont-era X-Men comics at the end of the eighties, before it all went down the crapper; and what made those books so readable - at least for me - was that they felt more akin to a soap than generic caped twats fighting crime; and whilst X-Men may well have been bogged down with continuity, it was the continuity which made it work, which gave the narrative a semblance of plausibility - even just minor details like someone reading a newspaper with a headline about what happened to Iron Man in a different comic, a thousand inconsequential strands of faux cause and effect stretched out across the entirety of Marvel's flimsy three-colour reality, just like the real world with all its loose ends and footnotes that never quite add up. The idea that Cyclops should have been in his fifties because he'd hung out with beatniks at the Coffee A Go-Go as a teenager in those early issues simply didn't matter because all of the heavy-lifting was done by the story; which in turn brings me to why I was never entirely sold on DC comics.

Shortly after discovering Marvel, and then Alan Moore's Swamp Thing, I picked up other DC books from the newsagent just to see what they were about. Blue Devil was funny, but that was about it for me. Even in the eighties, most of what I saw felt like a throwback to the sixties or earlier - corny as fuck supertypes throwing on a garish leotard and deciding to fight crime with a sprinkling of generic angst for the sake of texture, the sort of problems you imagine grown-ups must encounter if you're about eight. Most of it made Jim Shooter's Marvel look like Jean-Paul Sartre. Fast forward to the twenty-first century, and many of these issues of Doom Patrol showcased sample pages from whatever else DC was publishing at the time - Magog, Teen Titans, innumerable Batman variations, the Flash, plus there's an issue of Secret Six I picked up because the story crosses over with Doom Patrol - and it all looks fucking awful, like they've just about caught up to the seventies, but the worst of the seventies and with shittier art. Maybe that's why they keep rebooting all the time, having failed to realise that Alzheimer's Superman isn't actually the problem. There's not much point giving Blue Beetle a cellphone and a facebook account if the calendar is otherwise still stuck at around half past 1974. This would mean that the good stuff - Doom Patrol, Giffen's Justice League, and a couple of Vertigo titles - have been exceptions proving the rule, which is probably why the good stuff keeps getting cancelled: because the readership would rather have shite like Secret Six or Harley Quinn*.

Oh well. I suppose that's just how it goes.

*: I acknowledge that this criticism is founded upon my never having read a single issue of Harley Quinn, but frankly it looks fucking wank, like DC attempting to cross Jamie Hewlett's Tank Girl with that bloody awful Insane Clown Posse comic book that came out back in 2000, drawn by someone who presumably regarded Todd McFarlane's Spawn as the greatest story ever told; and Tank Girl was also pure shite while we're on the subject.

Captain Britain

Alan Moore & Alan Davis Captain Britain (1984)
I didn't even realise this had been collected until I saw it tucked away on a shelf, and I hadn't considered that it even would have been collected due to Alan Moore's habit of wishing cancer and AIDS unto ten generations upon those who doth reprint the stuff he wrote before he became an actual wizard and acquired all sorts of dark and mysterious powers by which he might smite his enemies; in fact he even wrote an introduction to this 2001 collection, words amounting to gosh, I'd forgotten about this old thing. What larks!

I'd actually read most of this, I think, at one point or another, but I can't remember where so it's nevertheless nice to have it back. Captain Britain, as we all know, was Marvel's attempt to infiltrate the land of fog, mist and Bash Street Kids on something approximating its own terms, because Chris Claremont had been on holiday to Englishland when he was a kid or summink. Then Alan Moore took it over and tried to make it more interesting. I can't be arsed to check the chronology, but if this predates the stuff he wrote for Warrior, then it can't have been by much, because you can really tell that he's learning on the job for the first couple of instalments with half a ton of florid and quite unnecessary wordage crammed into each panel. It reads as though it lacks confidence, but even stranger is that the art of Alan Davis seems to be similarly in the process of finding its feet. In fact, such are the first couple of episodes that they feel strangely like a continuation of The Stars My Degradation from Sounds but without the knob gags.

Needless to say, Captain Britain isn't the greatest work by any of those involved, but it's decent, imaginative, a lot of fun, and curiously prescient of what was to come in certain respects.

JLA: The Tenth Circle

Chris Claremont & John Byrne JLA: The Tenth Circle (2004)
As I said back in August, I've been catching up with neglected incarnations of the Doom Patrol, and this is where the John Byrne version was born, immediately prior to a couple of years appearing in their own title. I had a feeling I wasn't going to like this much, and a few online reviews suggested it all seemed a bit childish, as though written for kids. Happily I was wrong on the first count, and as for the second one, well - seeing as how this is a Justice League of America comic book in which Superman has a scrap with a vampire, what the fuck did you expect?

Okay. I had other reservations too, notably how John Byrne has always had a thing for what I seem to remember him calling big stick heroes, so in other words, big, colourful, and sunny just like when I were a lad. Like Teddy Roosevelt, they carry a big allegorical stick with which they duff up the bad guys, and they probably won't have much in the way of dark secrets. There's nothing inherently wrong with such ideas, but in context of Doom Patrol, the essence of Byrne's revival seems oddly Republican in its apparent revision of established continuity, starting again from the beginning so that we no longer have to think about all that weird Morrison stuff with men wearing dresses and drugs and all manner of related beastliness. That said, I haven't actually read Byrne's run on Doom Patrol as yet, so I'll have to suspend judgement a little longer.

On the other hand, I've always enjoyed John Byrne's work. It's easy on the eye, and there's something pleasantly chunky and tidy about his art. It's traditional and clean, almost classical in comic book terms; and yet in apparent contrast to such unashamedly mainstream appeal, he's always been quite good at weird, notably in West Coast Avengers and those early issues of Alpha Flight.

Anyway, here we have a vampire called Crucifer who bites Superman, thus placing him under some kind of hypnotic thrall. He's a vampire very much in the traditional sense, as seen in Murnau's Nosferatu, and he wants to bring all the other vampires back from the  tenth circle of Hell, to which they've been banished by Wonder Woman's people. Luckily the Justice League of America are on the case, as is some mysterious new group of slightly odd supertypes led by a dude in a wheelchair. So, yes, it almost certainly was written for kids, which I nevertheless found a pleasure, and I'm in my fifties.

It's been a while since I read anything by Chris Claremont, and the dialogue is very obviously his, with sentences broken up and splattered all around the frame in strings of speech balloons, pensive dialogue boxes, and unapologetic use of thought bubbles; because in case any of us should have forgotten, this is a comic book, not Crime & Punishment. I'd grown weary of Claremont's dialogue by the end of his run on the X-Men back in the nineties, always trying too hard and coming across like the idea of teenagers seen in a late eighties Rod Stewart video, but it could just be that he was overworked. In any case, whilst this may not strive for the sophistication of one of those grown-up comic books by Garth Guinness, Claremont writes a beautifully smooth read, pulling you right into the story from the first page and keeping your attention firmly pinned in place. There's nothing particularly profound in this collection, except that it's beautifully rendered, rounded, and very, very satisfying. It never needed to do anything more than it already does.

Doom Patrol

John Arcudi, Tan Eng Huat & others Doom Patrol (2003)
Not a collected edition or an - ugh - graphic novel, but a big old stack of comic books just as nature intended. I don't think this one did very well judging by the fact of it never having been reprinted. In fact I wasn't even aware of its existence until someone pointed out that DC had attempted to revive Doom Patrol a couple of times prior to the current version written by Gerard Way; and thusly intrigued I've been hunting them down, issue by issue.

John Arcudi's version of the Doom Patrol began back in 2001 and lasted twenty-two issues. I've no doubt it was a tough act to follow the Grant Morrison and Rachel Pollack versions of the comic, but Arcudi managed it fairly well by acknowledging the weirdness without necessarily duplicating it. It's probably closer to the caped mainstream than the book had been since Kupperberg, but it's still pretty odd. John Arcudi wrote The Mask for Dark Horse and you can sort of see his stamp, not least in the ongoing saga of the Doom Patrol menaced by the spirits of ancient Chinese demons trapped in a suit of armour, although admittedly my experience of The Mask is based exclusively on having seen the film with Jim Carrey a couple of times. Arcudi replaces whoever was left standing at the end of Rachel Pollack's run with neurotic superpowered teenagers, much like those we saw in New Mutants I suppose, but with the twist being that they really are a bunch of useless, whining emo fuckers, and as such are actually quite likeable - as distinct from teens who successfully fight crime whilst agonising over whether they'll pass their exams. It's initially difficult to see why this was even called Doom Patrol, but the book really comes into its own after a few issues, feeling very much a legitimate continuation of the mythology.

This is greatly aided by Tan Eng Huat, artist on all but three issues of the run. His figures are sometimes a little awkward, as are his faces, but the overall effect wrought with all those sleek little lines tidily splayed across the page is wonderful, and much, much greater than the sum of its parts. His art resembles that of some of those people taken on board 2000AD during the early nineties, sort of raw and untutored but otherwise working in spite of shortcomings - like the late John Hicklenton with a vague manga influence sent to a couple of life drawing classes; and I wouldn't ordinarily even notice the work of letterers or colouring people, but Bob Lappan and Dave Stewart really made this thing what it was. The lettering in particular somehow reminds me of both Glenn Baxter and Windsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland, very much enhancing the peculiar, haunting atmosphere of the enterprise.

In all honesty, I picked this up expecting it to be awful, Doom Patrol restored to wholesome mainstream tedium with all of the strangeness sanded down so as to facilitate sales boosting guest appearances by Superman, but it's as good a sequel to the Pollack run as anyone had a right to expect, and it's a real pity it didn't last.

Ultimate X-Men volume three

Mark Millar, Chuck Austen, various Kuberts, some other guys...
Ultimate X-Men volume three (2001)
I suppose I could save myself the effort of writing this review by referring you to its predecessor, as found here. Pretty much everything I said in June applies here, but possibly moreso. I guess the last three X-Men movies were based on the Millar version, and they were decent as movies but this is a comic book; and while it's fine to reinvent characters and situations every so often - if you really must - there really needs to be a reason for the revision beyond just revision. Whilst many elements of those early Chris Claremont issues of X-Men may now seem clunky, dated, and packed so full of corn one might almost think they were aimed at - titter! snurf! - eight-year old boys, they did their job and they did it well. I liked Storm as a po-faced weather-Goddess and Wolverine as Ernest Borgnine with claws. They didn't need to be sulky smart-arsed eye-rolling text-messaging teenagers, particularly not as part of a team comprised exclusively of the same. It's not like they were particularly rich or well-rounded as characters to begin with, but at least you could tell them apart from one another.

Here we get a mash-up of the Proteus storyline from 1979 and the first appearance of Legion in New Mutants, but with more whining and Buffyisms; and it's okay and it does its job very well, but I still can't see why anyone bothered. Betsy Braddock gets recycled as yet another generically deadly telepathic female - a development which can fuck right off; and then there are two issues of revisionist Gambit back story, still with the total arseache of everything written in that annoying phonetic rendering of Cajun which really should have been made illégal by maintenant, mon cheri. I always found Gambit a tedious non-character anyway, so his revival negates the one thing this version had going for it.

I usually like Mark Millar's writing except for when I don't, but this is the first time I've found it workmanlike and bland. For all its flaws, the Claremont run from John Byrne through to Marc Silvestri makes this thing look like Monster High. Grant Morrison's run was pretty radical in some respects, but it worked because he kept his eye on what made the thing great in the first place.