Sex Warrior

Pat Mills, Tony Skinner & Mike McKone Sex Warrior (1993)
Before we get bogged down in dreary consideration of Sex Warrior, let us briefly turn to Whoopee, and specifically the issue of the children's comic dated to the 12th of January, 1985. The cover was a parody of 2000AD with Leo Baxendale's Sweeny Toddler masquerading as Judge Dredd. Chris Browning posted a reproduction of this cover on facebook, inspiring the following exchange.

Lawrence: I had no idea Whoopee endured beyond the seventies.

Chris: Mid-eighties is when great news for our readers! meant it was eaten by Whizzer and Chips, itself eaten in due time by Buster which was the final one of the stable...

Lawrence: I remember those great news issues. They never were. I'm still slightly pissed off at losing Star Lord after all these years, and even Tornado come to think of it.

Chris: My friend with whom I cooked up the Cheeky-ITMA theory was the one who pointed out that after the first time you saw great news!, you were pretty much cynical about the words from that point on. Kind of prepares you for the adult world, I guess

Lawrence: I jumped ship at prog 181 with 2000AD. It just seemed to be repeating itself, plus I'd left home and gone to college so it was an all around upheaval, and the quality of paper on which it was printed seemed worse than ever, and then came Meltdown Man and The Mean Arena...

Chris: 2000AD tends to work well when half of it repeats itself allowing for slightly madder flights of fancy. This is why Dan Abnett is the Terrance Dicks of 2000AD. Old safe hands occasionally manage something miraculous, mostly are just very good at writing variations of the same stuff whilst not becoming stale - see Pat Mills who, with a few exceptions, feels like a lunatic who got obsessed with paganism and anarchy and is just bellowing at you. The current Tharg, Matt Smith, is good at this ratio. It's why we've had Brass Sun and Scarlet Traces and some variety snuck in behind the back of the luddites

Lawrence: That's a great description of Pat Mills, even though that's sort of why I enjoy his best stuff. There was a Grant Morrison interview in which he was weighing in with his thoughts on the comic book profession, overcoming his characteristic reticence, and in which he said something like, that was when Pat Mills took a bit of a funny turn, which always amused me. I mention this mainly because I've just picked up the two issues of Sex Warrior which Pat Mills wrote for Dark Horse, and in which he tries far too hard, as usual.

Chris: Occasionally you read a bit of Pat Mills where you go, That’s it! That’s the one I liked as a kid! - the most recent ABC Warriors and Savage stuff has been a bit more focused because he's enjoying Howard Quartz as the big bad and channelling his usual bugbears into all that. Even the last Slaine was readable; but then you get Blackblood talking about fake news and it's like being bludgeoned all over again.

Lawrence: He's like the nutty friend of a friend who sets bus shelters on fire and is massively funny despite how hard you might try to dislike him, and yet you kind of don't want him as your own actual buddy.

Chris: Yeah, pretty much. I mean Finn, Black Siddha and American Reaper are among the worst things I have ever, ever read; but then there's this:

Lawrence: I vaguely remember disliking Finn because he reminded me of half of the people I knew at art college. I'll remain blissfully ignorant about the other two.

Chris: American Reaper is photo realist nonsense which, bizarrely, featured comedy metal band the Darkness in it, briefly. Black Siddha is basically Finn, but Asian and with jokes about corner shops and curries among the wanging on about the Goddess

Lawrence: That whole deal of identifying with Asian culture by explaining how much you love curry always irritated the hell out of me.

Chris: Black Siddha turned up in the free floppies with the Megazine, surely as some sort of keep Pat happy contractual obligation. Someone recently wrote in asking why the prog was publishing two Pat stories at once, saying surely one is enough at the best of times? A brave, brave man, that.

Sex Warrior began life in the pages of Toxic! with somewhat muddy-looking art by Will Simpson, and I have an anomalous memory of having sold a Dark Horse reprint of the same on eBay - anomalous because this version is drawn by someone else, is the only limited series to feature the character outside of Toxic!, and I have no memory of ever having read it. Anyway, assuming that this was the thing I once flogged on eBay - allowing for someone having mucked about with the time stream or summink - I now understand why I didn't feel the need to hang onto this one first time around. The art significantly improves on what I recall of the Simpson version which, if not without merit, always seemed to have the chromatic palate of playgroup Plasticine after a few months heavy usage; but otherwise everything you need to know is more or less covered in the above conversation. The premise of a war waged between the young and the old had potential, but for all intents and purposes, Chris Donald did it better back in the October 1985 issue of Viz.

Also, the cover of issue two is awful in ways even Rob Liefeld could barely manage.

Eye of Terror

Barrington J. Bayley Eye of Terror (2000)
Shortly after plucking this one from the shelves at Half Price, I noticed it was a tie-in novel, and one of a series to which Dan Abnett has also contributed. This didn't strike me as a particularly good omen, although to be fair I had no idea what Warhammer 40,000 was supposed to be, and it's Barrington Bayley, so it must have something going for it, surely…

However, my first impressions seemed to bear out my fears, as briefly spunked out all over facebook.

It's pretty bloody awful - a novel which aspires to be a table full of little metal figures surrounded by grown men rolling funny-shaped dice in the basement of the mother of the one with the biggest beard. I bought it because it's Barrington Bayley, and Barrington Bayley is fab and weird, but this reads like something written to pay a hefty phone bill - such a waste of a genuine talent. Maybe it gets better. I'll give it another fifty pages.

It was embarrassing once I realised that a couple of my facebook friends were into that whole gaming business. It's not a pursuit which had ever inspired me towards any strong opinion, but what opinions I had were formed back in 1987 when some beardy dude at art college tried to recruit me into his Dungeons & Dragons enclave. He described the rules, most of which seemed to be about him controlling everything and everyone, and it didn't sound much like fun as I would recognise it. The guy was clearly a tosser and so that very much coloured my judgement of anything involving funny shaped dice; also, there's not many things I dislike so much as a novel which really, really wishes it were telly, so the prospect of a novel that wants to be a fucking game seemed depressing beyond reason.

I vividly recall the impression garnered from the first fifty pages which inspired the above facebook comment - far too many adjectives, an overly choreographed fight every five minutes, and all set in one of those Larry Niven universes full of alien bars wherein things with two heads get drunk, stab you, or attempt to interest you in the services of a prostitute with six tits and two fannies; but I persisted, and it got better, and after a while it began to feel like Barrington Bayley again.

The Warhammer 40,000 universe may as well be the same one inhabited by Nemesis the Warlock in 2000AD, roughly speaking, grimy pseudo-medieaval military science-fiction with Tolkien, Lovecraft, and a load of other squelchy influences thrown in; and therefore clearly entirely compatible with the sort of weirdness in which Bayley specialised. Eye of Terror is mostly space marines possessed by demons, Chaos Gods, stomach-churning transformations, and all manner of things which would probably lose a ton of advertising revenue were they to turn up in Star Wars. I don't know what it's about, if it's really about anything, but it becomes vivid and even gripping as the story finds its pace. Strangest of all, disbelieving that something so good should have begun on such poor footing, I skipped back to the beginning and could find nothing of the material which had inspired my initial groaning. Either I acclimated to the novel or the book itself changed as I was reading it.

Very weird.

Star Lord: Guardian of the Galaxy

Chris Claremont, John Byrne, Carmine Infantino & others
Star Lord: Guardian of the Galaxy (2014)
Nostalgia does it again. Naturally Mrs. Pamphlets and I took Junior to see Guardians of the Galaxy, assuming it would probably be one of those films we could all enjoy to a greater or lesser extent, as indeed it was. I had relatively fond memories of the Guardians of the Galaxy strip as reprinted in the back pages of Star Wars Weekly when I was Junior's age, but of course neither Martinex nor the fat guy from Jupiter were anywhere to be seen in the big screen adaptation, and Yondu had somehow grown up to be the ornery neighbour from The Waltons; and more confusing still was the presence of Star Lord as portrayed by the lead singer of Mouse Rat. Apparently it's all something to do with Dan Abnett, a man whose work is probably not for me given the girth of his bibliography and the presence therein of a Torchwood novel, but anyway the point is that I had similarly fond memories of the Star Lord strip, also from the back pages of Star Wars Weekly; and so here we are.

Star Lord, as I hadn't realised because Marvel UK chose not to reprint the more ropey material, was Steve Englehart's vision of an astrologically based cosmic superhero. Thankfully the character was soon rescued from its creator by Chris Claremont and John Byrne, which was where both myself and Star Wars Weekly came in. Star Lord was supposedly an attempt to write a comic with the sophistication of a novel, but a comic by the standards of 1976 specifically with the sophistication of a novel by Robert Heinlein; so as a graphic novel I suppose the guys beat more or less everyone but Will Eisner to the term, albeit with a strip which nevertheless reads like something aimed at precocious twelve-year old boys who listen to Boston.

When your starship captain wears a cape, gauntlets, and something on his head resembling a tiny model of a supersonic aircraft, then you know you're still very much in the Marvel cosmos, as distinct from Jim Starlin's Warlock which inhabited a similar realm as seen through a ton of drugs. Claremont overwrites as always with text heavy pages of soul-searching rhetoric written in the portentous tones of Leonard Nimoy addressing the main character.

Did you seek to raise a wry smile with your dandy turn of phrase and casual sarcasm, Lawrence Burton? Was it that passing pleasure which you didst sought?

Additionally, the stories are kind of thin and generic, with a surprisingly high quota of large breasted women in bikinis with affiliations to rebel or revolutionary forces, and those talkative alien bartenders who happily describe the entire socio-economic history of their respective planets to the alien dude in the funky costume. Star Lord predated Star Wars by about a year, which is probably why it flopped, having taken its best shot before the audience was really there; but it's roughly the same ball game, even to the point of beating the Lucas series to one of its major punchlines a few years ahead of time. Neverthless, Claremont somehow gets away with it - as he so often did - and for all his laboured corn, he keeps things moving in a way which holds one's attention and never feels quite so stodgy as it probably should, doubtless aided by John Byrne's generally wonderful art and Carmine Infantino's striking, almost Vorticist linework in the later strips.

Following Chris Claremont, Doug Moench took over the caped typewriter and the saga reverts to generic Marvel landfill of a kind which may well do the job if you're about eight, but seems otherwise unremarkable. The strip returned yet again in the nineties resembling one of the more forgettable series you might have seen in issues of 2000AD from the same era, but beyond a neat explanation as to the working of Star Lord's otherwise preposterous element gun, it all feels a bit pointless with innocent planets menaced by bad guys for the sake of our hero having someone to save whilst agonising over whether or not he's doing the right thing. Sadly, more than half of the collection fulfils all the promise of its bloody awful cover, but fuck it - never mind the filler; anything reprinting Carmine Infantino's breathtaking run on this strip is justified in my book.