Nigel Kitching & others - The Light Brigade (1990)

 

This may seem a bit of a stretch as reviews go - not even a stack of comic books, but a strip featured in an anthology title which was dead in the water by the eighth issue; so The Light Brigade was never finished, which is a shame.

The Light Brigade first appeared in the late and much missed Martin Skidmore's Trident - a bi-monthly which lasted a little over a year - and was arguably the lead strip given its featuring on three of the eight covers, notably those drawn by both John Ridgeway and Alan Davis. Eddie Campbell's superb Bacchus has obviously done much better in the long run, but The Light Brigade, co-created with Neil Gaiman - although his involvement was limited to the first instalment - felt like the potential hit single.

It's a cyberpunk comic strip hitting all of the points you would expect to find in a cyberpunk comic strip, but dating from 1989 - way before the rise of the internet. It wasn't the first, didn't do anything which hadn't already been done in a William Gibson novel, and in the wake of the movie Tron, I've no doubt everyone from the X-Men to Biffo the Bear had toppled some virtual corporate edifice in cyberspace by this point; but The Light Brigade nevertheless feels early, like the first expression of something new, as was, without quite having dated in the usual way. The story, such as it is, tells of four individuals, underwhelming urban nobodies in real life, waging a VR war as magically punky pirates; and it would probably be bollocks were it not for Nigel Kitching.

I gather Kitching went on to international renown as artist on the Sonic the Hedgehog comic book - which seems, by the way, a peculiarly logical development; but back in 1989 he was drawing this, Mark Millar's Saviour, and not much else that I'm aware of. His art tended to the starkly angular and expressionist while conveying a lightness of touch equal, I would argue, to that of Eddie Campbell elsewhere in the mag. We get a few fill-in episodes from adjacent artists, Nigel Dobbyn, D'Israeli and so on, each of which squares so beautifully with the whole as to come and go without the usual sense of disruption or looming deadlines. So I guess it's all down to Kitching's writing, which is well paced, erudite without waffling, and prone to sparking off new and delightfully wacky ideas above and beyond anything you would expect of punky pirates fighting Richard Branson in cyberspace. It was at least as good as anything in 2000AD that year.

Unfortunately, excepting Bacchus, it was significantly better than the rest of Trident for the most part -  a black and white newsprint anthology which never quite found its identity and was neither 2000AD, Deadline, nor the small press. It had its moments - notably a couple of strips by Denny Derbyshire - but was firing off in too many directions with too many weak links - not least being the terrible art of Lowlife. Thus did Trident fall from the edge after just one year, going the way of most attempts to sell not-quite-mainstream comic books to the English. I don't suppose The Light Brigade will ever be finished, but it should be remembered at least.

Lazarus Churchyard

Warren Ellis & D'Israeli Lazarus Churchyard (2001)
As you may recall, Lazarus Churchyard was approximately the main feature in Blast!, a monthly anthology comic which lasted for seven issues back in 1991 at the height of the hoohaa of the comic having grown up - meaning Batman was suddenly allowed to say rude words and kill the occasional paedophile. Blast! had replaced Speakeasy, a mag about comics rather than specifically featuring them, which pissed me off because I liked Speakeasy, and Blast! wasn't actually that good. Lazarus Churchyard sounded like something which couldn't quite decide whether it wanted to be in either 2000AD or Deadline, and even the name seemed to be trying far too hard to be weird, like one of those lazy steampunk juxtapositions - Jedediah P. Mainframe or whatever; plus it's Warren Ellis. Apparently his work is amazing, except for the stuff I've tried to read, which is weird.

Anyway, Nick Sweeney seemed to rate this thing and suggested I give it another go, and then a week later I happened across this collection in Half Price Books, which seemed too timely a coincidence to ignore.

To be fair to Warren Ellis, Lazarus Churchyard is pretty much him finding his feet as a writer, learning on the job, so to speak. It's more or less a list of shocking or startling juxtapositions like one of those Sigue Sigue Sputnik songs which is just a tally of futuristic sounding things - dead man butterfly effect sex toy foetal heroin and so on; and Lazarus Churchyard - Keith Richards reimagined as that Sisters of Mercy album which no-one bought, the one with Tony James on bass - moves from one startling thing to another, then to another, and that's the story. I'm a little cynical regarding this narrative technique because I was once involved in an unfortunately similar enterprise, so I can tell when a comic book writer is trying to distract from the possibility of his having no fucking clue what he's doing. The ability to gift one's characters with sardonic or ostentatiously edgy observations is not the same thing as being able to tell a story.

However, none of this takes into account the art of D'Israeli, which is rich, angular, and absolutely breathtaking, and so much so as to take up most of the slack; and some of what we have here is surely sufficient to warrant his canonisation in one of those greatest of all time lists. Therefore, unless I'm just making excuses, the problem with Lazarus Churchyard may actually be to do with expectations, specifically my expectations. It seems to present itself as something profound and revealing when actually it's just a Ramones album which ticks the boxes you would expect it to tick, and ticks them very well. It's nothing deep - it's simply a list of things which seem cool or interesting, and I guess maybe that's enough.