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.

Accident Man

Pat Mills, Tony Skinner, Duke Mighten & others Accident Man (1993)
Accident Man, as some of you may remember, first appeared in the short-lived and wilfully outrageous Toxic! comic. I flogged my back issues of the same a while back whilst raising funds for the move to Texas, but I recall that of all the strips in Toxic! this one had at least raised the odd smile, and so this collection - comprising all of the material from Toxic! as well as a later Dark Horse miniseries of which I was unaware - ended up on my Amazon wish list. The truly weird moment came when my wife gave me this for our wedding anniversary, and I read Duke Mighten's dedication in the frontispiece which significantly credits his college lecturer Richard Straley with having set him on the right track and keeping him focused. The thing is that this same Richard Straley happens to be my uncle, that is to say my father's older brother, except none of us knew he even existed until about five years ago when someone made the connection whilst researching our family tree and discovered that our grandmother had given birth to a child during the second world war, prior to my father, and that said child had been put up for adoption. So what this adds up to is the peculiar thought - at least peculiar to me - that I was reading this stuff back in the nineties entirely unaware of it having been drawn by a student of an uncle I did not yet know I had.

It's a small world, innit!

Accident Man is an odd one even by Pat Mills' standards, a character so morally bereft and generally horrible as to make Marshal Law seem quite a nice guy, and who ends up doing good almost in spite of himself, or at least good defined as just deserts served unto persons even more repulsive than he is. Accident Man is, roughly speaking, corporate crime hoist by its own petard, with the bad guys as monsters in contrast with which even Mike Fallon's single-minded devotion to self-gratification seems almost pure or ascetic, or at least consistent. Mike Fallon, the hitman of the title arranges murders resembling accidents for money, this and the designer labels which such money can buy being the only things for which he really cares; and this forms the substance of his horrible character whilst providing the humour which glues the whole thing together.

I decided the fifteen grand YB8 just didn't cost enough. And in a world of starving millions, I really needed the twenty-five grand model.

It's a peculiar mash-up of Patrick Bateman and Robin Hood as our Republican party reptile goes after capitalist targets more commonly seen as enemies of the traditionally left-wing, but it works specifically because it's so big and dumb and funny, foreshadowing the broad brushstroke shock tactics of both Mark Millar and Grant Morrison to some extent.

I know it's poor form to speak ill of the dead, but it has to be said that the late Martin Edmond's art on the initial run really wasn't great, although it sort of works in so much as a consistently poor artist probably works better than a variety of different artists from one instalment to the next, and the writing just about holds it all together. John Erasmus - whose name is misspelt on the cover, I couldn't help but notice - gave a somewhat improved performance, or at least something amounting to Martin Edmonds as drawn by David Lloyd; but Duke Mighten steals the show with his elegant and peculiarly stylised linework perfectly suiting the mix of designer fetishism and art deco violence.

Accident Man is one of those things that really shouldn't have worked, and wouldn't have done had there been any genuinely weak links in the chain; but happily, although flawed, and although falling short of being a masterpiece, it has a charm all of its own, even if charm probably isn't quite the right word.