Rorschach

Tom King, Jorge Fornés & Dave Stewart Rorschach (2021)
I've mostly steered clear of all the Watchmen stuff which hasn't been drawn by Dave Gibbons. I somehow ended up with a copy of a Comedian comic book written by one of those young lads who writes fucking everything these days, and aside from the obligatory labyrinthine foreshadowing it was about as good as I expected it to be; the HBO TV series was mostly a decent effort, I guess, aside from recycling the story Alan Moore had already told; but this grabbed me, partially because it doesn't actually look like a Watchmen spin-off, and of course, it's Tom King.

For those of you requiring spoilers at this juncture, grow up.

This isn't the ginger nutcase from the original run, but rather a later individual or individuals inhabiting the same universe who assume the mantle, one of whom is hired to assassinate a presidential candidate. The comic book follows a detective who tries to work out what the fuck is going on. The trail of clues leads to conspiracy theorists who believe that a blank tape contains messages from the original Rorschach, and the guy currently behind the wibbly-wobbly mask seems to be Steve Ditko with the serial numbers filed off, creator of a comic book clearly based on Ditko's Objectivist hero, Mr. A - himself a forerunner to Alan Moore's remix of the character. So there's also a commentary on aspects of the comics industry and its cultural significance, with both Otto Binder and Frank Miller showing up as themselves, specifically as Rorshach conspiracy theorists. There's a lot to unpack, as the saying goes.

Anyway, the artwork is gorgeous and it's wonderfully moody, beautifully written - at least in terms of pace and dialogue - but also thematically dense and ponderous. Even if you were paying close attention, a second or third reread may be necessary for full appreciation, although this shouldn't count against Rorschach which ultimately rewards the effort.

1963

Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, Rick Veitch & others 1963 (1993)

From where I was stood at the time, 1963 looked like Image Comics experimenting with the possibility of printing something that wasn't shit - which was fairly surprising. It took the form of six comic books, all written by Alan Moore, all different titles purportedly belonging to a shared continuity which was obviously a satire on the Marvel universe as it had been in the sixties. It was deliberately hokey, emphasising the more amusing aspects of the caped sixties - the occasionally rabid patriotism, the pathological fear of commies, the casual misogyny and so on. It was hardly an original idea, having been done in Mad magazine about every three or four months*, usually with a version of Wolverine sprouting knives, forks and spoons from his knuckles - amongst other side-splitters doubtless thrashed out during a few hours on the golf course; and of course Grant Morrison reckons it was all inspired by that issue of his Doom Patrol, which seems unusually narcissistic even by his standards.

The point of this was not quite satire, or not exclusively so, but that the six titles would interconnect, culminating in an eighty-page special wherein Mystery Inc., Tomorrow Syndicate and the rest battle it out with the horrible then contemporary Image characters with ninja swords and too many angry lines on their faces - Deathstabber, Kill Squad and those guys; and thus would we learn that the gritty realism of 1993 was but the kid fuel of 1963 seen from a different angle, or summink. No-one seems to agree on what the point was, or would have been had the special ever seen print, and it's difficult to tell from these six existing comic books. As to why the series was never wrapped up as intended, no-one seems able to agree on that either. This was the point at which Alan Moore decided he'd had enough of superheroes, and you can kind of tell, but it doesn't seem to be entirely his fault that the engine ran out of steam.

Whatever the case may be, and ignoring rumours of various persons other than Alan Moore having readied the missing final piece for imminent publication, 1963 reads - as stated - as a satire on sixties Marvel, without quite slipping over into parody. The individual issues are mostly enjoyable enough in their own right without it all feeling entirely cynical, excepting Horus, Lord of Light which is simply dull, dull, dull by terms which could never be levelled at the Mighty Thor upon which it provides a tangential commentary. It helps that the style is familiar more than the characters, so we have N-Man who, for example, is spun from nuclear accidents which inexplicably bestow strange powers, but he can't really be mistaken for the incredible Bulk or any of those other creaking parodies; but the more one reads into this, additionally delving into the faux text articles, adverts, and letters pages, it begins to feel pretty much like a rant against Stan Lee and the comic book industry in general; and while the rant may well be justified, it gets fucking boring because the overpowering alliteration and digression just ain't that funny and it begins to feel like an embittered fist shaken at clouds, or even Moore's little gang sniggering amongst themselves. So 1963 was sort of self-defeating in that for all that it does, it wasn't actually anywhere near so much fun as, off the top off my head, Roy Thomas' All-Star Squadron from approximately the same era, likewise harking back to a golden age, and so rigorously square as to make 1963 seem like the work of Marcel Duchamp.

Shame.

Mind you, we got a couple of pin-ups from Melinda Gebbie, so that was a scoop, obviously.

*: It probably wasn't but it felt that way, and I'm possibly thinking of Frantic.

Dan Dare - the 2000AD Years volume two

Chris Lowder, Gerry Finley-Day, Dave Gibbons & others
Dan Dare - the 2000AD Years volume two (2016)
Here's the rest of the Joe Strummer version of Dan Dare, namely the stuff which didn't fit in volume one. The collection is thus unfortunately lacking Bellardinelli's fascinatingly peculiar interpretation of the character and is therefore a little dry by comparison - not quite Jacob's crackers, but something in that direction. This version of Dare doesn't square too well with the original, which we can probably take as given and instead concentrate on what it does have going for it.

One thing it had going for it was that it seemed wild and original when I was thirteen, so the nostalgia compensates for what is now revealed as having been pretty thin. This volume divides mainly into the second half of the Lost Worlds storyline and Servant of Evil. Lost Worlds was an episodic Star Trek variant with more explosions and generic schoolboy nihilism, which works in places despite the limitations of the form, particularly the gorgeous full page splashes of Waterworld. Lost Worlds ends with a massive explosion because I guess they couldn't come up with a better resolution, following which an amnesiac Dare is recruited by the Mekon and so becomes a Servant of Evil. This storyline has been criticised for not going anywhere, then ceasing after umpteen weeks with the promise of a conclusion which never came; and while it suffers from some of the same conventions as Lost Worlds - and whoever thought of giving Dan a super powered glove and making him into the chosen one was obviously an idiot - it also seems to be an attempt to do something a bit more satisfying, even mythic, than yet another planet of slimies blown up every few weeks concluding with final panel puns based on which item of starship canteen fare is now banned due to a resemblance to whichever alien race has just been driven to judicious extinction. My guess is that Servant was an attempt to turn Dan into Star Wars, or thereabouts, and for the most part it sort of worked, or at least worked on me when I was thirteen, which I suppose is what mattered.

Kingsman: The Secret Service

Mark Millar, Matthew Vaughn & Dave Gibbons

Kingsman: The Secret Service (2012)
Here's another one which began life as a comic book and a film adaptation, both at the same time, born from a conversation between Mark Millar and some bloke who was something to do with a couple of X-Men films. I'm not really interested in the film and hadn't even heard of it, but I've got a lot of time for Mark Millar. I know he's perpetrated some utter shite, but when he's good he makes the rest look like wankers.

Of course, if you're not already a fan of Mark Millar, this probably isn't going to be the one to effect your conversion. The violence is gratuitously elabourate, and Miller's delight in broad, pointedly crass brushstrokes executed in the name of uncomfortable chuckles is as much in evidence as it ever was. Beyond that, there's actually a point to this one, if you're interested. It's a spy thriller bordering on farce which transposes a ruffneck Peckam yoot to the champagne and casinos environment of James Bond and the rest; which could have turned out like something from Viz but actually makes some fairly profound observations about class and our expectations. Broadly speaking, The Secret Service is a critique of misanthropy, both the kind demonstrated by the bad guy striving to depopulate the planet for the greater good, and that of a society in which it has somehow become acceptable to demonise working class kids from Peckham as hopeless chavs, amongst other pejoratives. Here we see the working classes as essentially decent - give or take some small change - quick witted and resourceful, which makes a nice change from the usual sneering over Burberry caps and twocked car stereos. I find this particularly refreshing, having actually lived in Peckham - which is where our story begins - and worked with people who may as well be walk on parts herein, aside from the obvious distinction of their having had jobs; so I feel a little protective about the residents of certain bits of south-east London and, against all odds, Mark Millar has somehow managed to avoid getting me all wound up. I'm not convinced that Dave Gibbons was a great choice of artist as his style seems a little clean given the general rhythm of the story, but on the other hand he appears to have done his research to the point that even if certain scenes aren't actually Peckham in the strictest sense, I can immediately recognise where the photographs he obviously used as reference material were taken; which gave me a bit of a warm feeling, and even a craving for a can of Dunn's River Nurishment.

Martha Washington Saves the World

Frank Miller & Dave Gibbons
Martha Washington Saves the World (1999)
Last time I thought about it, Give Me Liberty seemed like the best thing Frank Miller had done - the jewel in the proverbial crown of a generally great writer; but the last time I thought about it was probably somewhere around the end of the previous century, back when I made a weekly trek to the local comics shop to buy this kind of thing. I haven't read any Frank Miller since then, and have accumulated a vague impression of him as the guy who wrote that comic about big-titted prostitutes getting murdered, and who courageously spoke up for the rights of corporate America as it stood defenceless against bearded Vegetarians with banners upon which hurtful remarks had been scrawled in angry letters. I believe the crux of Miller's argument ran thus:

Wake up, pond scum. America is at war against a ruthless enemy. Maybe, between bouts of self-pity and all the other tasty tidbits of narcissism you've been served up in your sheltered, comfy little worlds, you've heard terms like al-Qaeda and Islamicism.

I'd take a guess and say his racist seventy-year old nan from Cheltenham probably wrote those words, filling in for her famous grandson while he was otherwise engaged in composing dialogue for fictional big-titted prostitutes, but I could be wrong. Furthermore, it turns out that Martha Washington Goes to War - which I seem to remember enjoying at least as much as I enjoyed Give me Liberty - is somehow based on Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, which can't be good.

Give Me Liberty is set in a dystopian future America - or the present, I suppose it might be argued - and follows the life of one of its most underprivileged and generally shat upon daughters. She somehow survives the ghetto, joins the peace corps, and makes her own way to er - greatness, I suppose. The broad appeal of the saga, at least for me, was the contrast of harsh political realism with the absurdity of events on the world stage spiralling out of control in  Martha Washington Goes to War, and then by the time we get to the final part, she's out in space meeting aliens. The narrative of this one is more or less a mash up of Rendezvous with Rama and 2001: A Space Odyssey, both by Arthur C. Clarke, so at least he's borrowing from the best.

Beyond these details, Martha's latest war is waged against Venus, a global artificial intelligence which now seems to control almost everything. As a story it's okay, but it doesn't quite do enough to keep my mind off the unsavoury possibility of this being some Libertarian rant about either the evils of socialism or the right to bear arms; and I can't tell if this is something Miller has embedded in the narrative, or just my reading it from a perspective other than that with which I read the earlier instalments. On the other hand, no big-titted prostitutes were eviscerated in the telling of this story and Dave Gibbons artwork is as gorgeous as it has ever been, so I guess it gets a thumbs up. All the same, I can't help wonder whether I've either missed something, or - on the other hand - might be overthinking it. As a strong, black female lead written without sexual overtones, Martha is great, but her story seems to have thinned out somewhat after the initial Give Me Liberty segment, and a little voice inside me keeps hinting that she might only ever have been Frank Miller's beard, in a manner of speaking; but like I say, maybe I'm overthinking it.

Dan Dare - the 2000AD Years

Pat Mills, Massimo Belardinelli, Dave Gibbons & others
Dan Dare - the 2000AD Years volume one (2015)
In his introduction, Garth Ennis writes that while 2000AD's 1977 reinvention of Dan Dare as a generic action hero may have annoyed purists, we all loved him because we were too young to have read the original in Eagle and he was our Dan Dare - the we here equating to my generation. The thing is, I'm not sure this is strictly true. I was myself very much familiar with the earlier Dan Dare through a stack of Eagle annuals inherited from my dad who had read the comic when he was a kid; and even after it had been cancelled, Dan remained sufficiently popular as to warrant his own Fleetway annuals. I still have the one which came out in 1973 reprinting The Red Moon Mystery and Safari in Space; so most of us knew who he was, I would say.

That said, I'm probably just splitting hairs, because the return of Dan Dare was why I started buying 2000AD, and the main reason why I continued to buy it during those first couple of years. I've seen it argued that Dan Dare as Sid Vicious and then Joe Strummer has been somewhat relegated to the basement of comic book history simply because it wasn't very good. After all, this is the Dare who kicks your ass, hangs out with ne-er-do-wells, and says rude words such as stomm and possibly even drokk. In defence of our boy, I've also seen it argued that if you look closely you will notice that the Eagle version of the strip was also badly written juvenile piffle despite those lovely pictures.

Well, I have had a look and it simply isn't true. Rather this seems to be a case of someone being unable to tell the difference between something which is badly written and something which is simply aimed at a fairly young audience. The Hampson and Bellamy Dare may be a little stilted due to having been delivered in a million instalments of just one and three-quarter pages each; and old Dan was stylistically very much of its time, but it never pandered and should at least be credited with concessions made to yer actual proper science and a surprisingly progressive attitude towards persons other than the white, English, Christian, and male. Most notably it didn't seem to require that there be either an explosion or someone firing a gun every three panels.

Tharg's Dare is bewildering and inept by comparison. The stories are vehicular to massive implausible ideas such as the Biogs with their living spaceships, and in terms of plot the stories verge on Scooby Doo levels of thin. No less than two tales in this collection conclude with food gags punning whichever generic menace has been defeated in the preceding panels - one of Dan's crew remarks that he's built up quite a hunger following the team's escape from a desert planet of living sand, and so Bear jokes that he will happily eat anything except a sandwich; and I can even remember a third one of these - a no cauliflower cheese for me zinger which concluded a story presumably scheduled for reprint in the second volume.

Bear is the huge Russian ex-cosmonaut Dan hires as a general puncher of faces. He refers to himself in third person and, like many of the characters, often describes what he's doing for the benefit of the reader - 'Stava! Bear's astro-axe spikes the alien guns,' as we watch him swing the aforementioned nuclear-assisted axe into the mechanism of some alien weapon; in this case a weapon belonging to the Starslayers who live on a planet called Starslay and who are ruled over by their Dark Lord, who actually knows he's a bad guy. I have no idea how or why the axe is nuclear-assisted. It just is, okay?

It's not simply that new things are always rubbish. Tharg's Dan Dare really was a poor effort compared with the original, at least in terms of narrative relationship with its readers. Aside from the name and the fact of his being recognised by the Mekon, he may as well have been Dredger or Hellman or John Probe or any other generically grizzled action hero from a seventies comic; and yet knowing all of the above, I can't help but love this stuff in spite of itself.

The key is, I suppose, the art combined with those previously mentioned massive implausible ideas - the Biog's living technology, the Shepherds, the Two of Verath in his hollow planet, the Roman-style vampires and their heart-shaped spaceships. This stuff once blew my mind on a weekly basis in a way that not even Doctor Who could manage, and so much so that I never noticed how there was hardly a story underneath. Now that I'm fifty, the same tales have lost some of their initial impact, but the shortfall is made up with massive blasts of memory sherbert going off every few panels. Nostalgia alone shouldn't really be enough to save a strip, which is where the art comes in. Belardinelli's figures were often ropey, but you don't really notice here, and he was at his absolute weirdest drawing the Sid Vicious version of Dare in those early progs - bordering on the Hieronymous Bosch of the comic strip; and it looks so fucking amazing that it doesn't seem to matter that the dialogue - mostly bloody awful as it is - should be reduced to something like background music, a sort of word condiment sprinkled across the artwork for the sake of flavour. The same roughly applies to the Dave Gibbons version which, if not quite so visually arresting, has enough of a pleasantly chunky quality to compensate for crappy or even non-existent narrative.

A few years later, a version of Eagle returned and reclaimed Dan Dare for its own. I had a look at the thing, but despite the admittedly bed-wettingly gorgeous art of Ian Kennedy, it seemed like a boy band version of the character, a pointless exercise in recreating the original magic by following the same recipe which failed because the rest of the universe had long since moved on; and this was why Dan Dare worked so well in 2000AD, because I was twelve and it absolutely nailed the spirit of its time, for better or worse.

Having only just found out that Belardinelli is no longer with us, this also comes as a wonderful reminder of just how magnificently weird his art was at its best. I can't help feel that had somebody pushed him in the general direction of a life drawing class or two, he might have been remembered with the sort of reverent tone generally reserved for the likes of Kirby, Ditko and Moebius.

Fashion Beast

Alan Moore, Antony Johnson & Facundo Percio
Fashion Beast (2013)
I had no idea this even existed until I saw it in the used book store, it being something Malcolm McLaren requested from Moore presumably in an effort to hitch his wagon to yet another rising cultural star, having probably read an article entitled Pow! The Comic Grows Up in Time Out. It was supposed to be a film, but I didn't realise it had ever gone further than a conversation, never mind anything of substance sufficient for transformation into a comic book. I'm not sure quite how to take this, given that its worth seems predicated on the popular image of McLaren as a lovable inventive rogue, as opposed to just a bit of a cunt; and even Moore seems to buy into this in his introduction, which if nothing else is at least consistent with his own clueless sub-Russ Abbott take on punk rock in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Moore describes his meeting McLaren just as gingerbollocks was posing for Sun photographers in the wake of having lost his court case against the surviving Sex Pistols, and he speaks of the man in the terms with which we've all become roughly familiar always with a touch of the uproarious English pantomime tradition... Aladdin's uncle proffering new lamps for old, which for me sort of loses sight of why the fucker was in court in the first place, specifically for ripping people off, for his habit of making a parasitic living off those doing the actual work; not unlike DC Comics farming out Watchmen to persons other than Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons in some respects.

Never mind.

I'm sure he was a lovely bloke in person.

Fashion Beast was therefore a script for a film, written by Alan Moore and based on something or other by McLaren - I suspect no more than the fucking title and a reference to Beauty and the Beast as worth ripping off given his usual methodology; it could just as easily have been Monkey Tennis or Youth Hostelling with Chris Eubank. Anyway, Fashion Beast reads mostly as Alan Moore with flashes of McLaren's distinctively repetitive brand of complete cobblers showing through every once in a while: blah blah Dickensian urchins blah blah fashion blah blah sex blah blah young kids on the street blah blah London fashion blah blah blah playful and subversive etc. etc. Antony Johnson has clearly done as much as he can to turn this into something for page rather than screen, and while it's better than it probably has a right to be, and holds some historical interest in the context of Moore's career, in essence it remains nevertheless a mostly unpolishable turd.

The sexual ambiguity of the principal characters work very well, and there are some snappy lines of dialogue as you would expect, and there's a great speech about the medium being the message around the halfway mark; but otherwise it's a bit of a mess. The art is of promising fanzine standard at best, too many scratchy lines, figure work developed whilst reading comic books rather than attending a life-drawing class, and characters all wearing one of just three available facial expressions - regular pout, pissed off, or surprised. The beast turns out to be quite hunky - a real dreamboat in fact - which kind of misses at least some of the point I would have thought, and the fashions as illustrated suggest no actual research undertaken regarding the fashion industry or its history, even without taking into account that no-one sane or interesting ever gave two shits about the fashion industry or considered it in any sense important. Had they got, for example, Duke Mighten to draw this, they might just have had something, but they didn't, so here it is. I suppose at least they held back from giving Rob Liefeld a call.

Fashion Beast is true to McLaren's oeuvre in so much as he trots out the usual boggle-eyed observations about Dickensian London and Situationism, and then gets someone else to do the work; which isn't something I'd offer as a recommendation.

Tom Strong

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

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

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

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

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

Doctor Who Classics Omnibus

Pat Mills, John Wagner, Steve Moore, Grant Morrison & others
Doctor Who Classics Omnibus volume one (2010)
Perhaps inevitably, I was once quite the fan of Doctor Who, right up until its 2005 reinvention which, for me at least, missed all the major points of what had made the series so enjoyable in the first place; and then I found my disappointment somewhat polarised by the repellent fervour with which so many embraced the revival, a fervour which often seems indistinguishable from bullying from where I stand, and bullying offered in support of opinion presented as doctrine, received wisdom reiterated as fact.

The wonderful thing about Doctor Who is that it can allow for the telling of almost any kind of story.

That's just one example; and it might work if accounting for novels like Campaign or The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, but these are usually some way off the radar of those for whom Doctor Who is beyond criticism. I have no idea who first said those words, and I'm amazed they can be restated year after year without anyone actually pausing to ask themselves what is actually meant, whether it might be true, or whether it's just another flavourless lump of hyperbole wheeled out because it sounds vaguely more authoritative than the one about my dad being bigger than your dad. What it appears to mean, so far as I am able to tell, is that being as the Doctor can go anywhere in time and space, the settings may vary a great deal without stretching credibility too thin, additionally allowing for some liberties to be taken with the narrative. You could probably say much the same of Star Trek, not that it would necessarily be any more true as a statement. Stories set in fictional environments or from the viewpoint of a minor character are not necessarily indicative of wild narrative anarchy, and certainly not when every last one boils down to the magic Doctor Who telly man having adventures in his TARDIS whilst occasionally reminding us to be nice to those who are a little bit different. Maybe I'm wrong, and Doctor Who really does allow for the telling of almost any kind of story, in which case I assume I must have missed the equivalents to Finnegans Wake, Rendezvous with Rama, Heart of Aztlán, Lady Chatterley's Lover or all those other Doctor Who stories which didn't frame everything in relation to a time traveller having adventures whilst human companions are captured and find themselves having to ask what's happening, Doctor?

So the wonderful thing about Doctor Who is more likely that it can allow for the telling of almost any kind of story, excepting stories of which any aspect is of greater importance than the main character, which actually leaves quite a lot that Doctor Who can't do without looking ridiculous.

Anyway, that's just one aspect. My point - quite aside from Doctor Who merely being a television serial from which a mighty ocean of merchandising has sprung forth, just as Softly Softly and On the Buses were merely television serials - nothing was ever the better for being taken more seriously than it deserved.

Nostalgia guided the hand that picked this from a pile of cheapies in a branch of Borders just before the retail chain imploded, specifically the nostalgia of having read about half of the strips collected herein when they first appeared in Doctor Who Weekly back in the early 1980s. The Iron Legion, The Star Beast, City of the Damned and others - they were great at the time, just as you might expect from 2000AD regulars like Pat Mills and Dave Gibbons, but returning to these now that I'm fat and in my forties, it's difficult to get beyond their being written for a slightly younger audience than at least those early 2000AD strips which have generally stood the test of time. The ideas are nice enough for all the predominance of primary narrative colours, and Dave Gibbons' artwork is beautiful, but it's the kind of shorthand storytelling wherein panels are captioned so as to describe what is quite clearly seen to be happening without any real need for such descriptions. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's just that I'm a fully grown man and it no longer works for me, not least because the mere presence of that mysterious traveller in time and space known only as etc. etc. does not in itself hold my interest. The thing is, as children's comics go, there are plenty which retain some appeal in later years mainly through having refrained from too much talking down to their readers - Asterix the Gaul, Dan Dare, at least some of what 2000AD published - besides which these strips read sadly like ham-fisted promotional material such as you might find printed on the wrapper of an ice lolly. Neither content, vintage nor the presence of a Doctor Who logo is really enough to justify describing these stories as classic, although I've no doubt there are many people out there prepared to wage dreary online wars in their defence. There may even be one or two reading this review, getting ready to fulminate, having never before taken any interest in either Pamphlets of Destiny or the novels I've written about herein, but this is Doctor Who we're talking about and it must therefore be debated with all due reverence, which I really feel proves my point about things being taken more seriously than they deserve.

Of course, it could be argued that this is also what I have myself done when I could just have said Doctor Who Classics Omnibus is all right if you're about ten, but even then you'd be better off with some Judge Dredd or whatever.

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.