Kid Eternity

Grant Morrison & Duncan Fegredo Kid Eternity (1991)
I bought it when it first came out as three prestige format books - as I seem to recall them being termed. I read it once, didn't understand it, then eventually flogged it on eBay. I moved to the United States, and now I've bought it again reasoning that it couldn't have been that bad, surely?

It isn't, but I see why I only read it once then flogged it.

Kid Eternity was some golden age character, a small boy who lived on a boat with an old sea captain who could summon up historical persons from beyond the grave - presumably George Washington and some other guys, but mainly George Washington - to help him foil nautical bank robberies or fight monsters or whatever it was he did for a living. Fast forward to the early nineties and pow - the comic book had grown up and thus was every other creaky old cape botherer from the forties and fifties deemed ripe for revival as an edgy, angst ridden Tarantino knock off; and DC comics had stood Grant Morrison in front of one of those automatic tennis ball launchers - but loaded with money - because he was a terrible infant, for which I'm sure there's probably some French term.

Duncan Fegredo's art is frequently beautiful, and there are some incredible panels in this thing; but I've often found him too dark in a general sense, with page after dark brown page obscuring whatever the hell is supposed to be happening and to whom in an amorphous wash of muddy paint splatter and scratchy lines. This wouldn't be a problem if Morrison hadn't left so much of the actual story telling up to the art, presumably for the sake of mood. I mean, it's not entirely awful, and most of it's easy enough to follow if you're paying attention and don't mind not knowing what the fuck is supposed to be happening until long after it's happened; but, with the best will in the world, it's DC's pseudo-mystical cosmos divided into chaos and order beefed up with a shitload of chaos magic bullshit of the kind favoured by people who own way too many Coil albums* and who take them far too seriously - people who, like Grant, genuinely believe that dark matter, the missing mass of the universe could be human consciousness; and we learn that during his golden age youth, Kid Eternity was actually being bummed flat by that horny old kiddy-fiddling sea captain, because why wouldn't he be? There's also a recurring sequence about urban legends, but it's anyone's guess how it relates to the whole. Kid Eternity is better than the Invisibles, for which it reads like a warm up act, but that's not saying much. It has some really nice ideas, but much of the flavours are lost in the soupy whole.

*: By my estimation I'd say that nobody really needs more than no albums by Coil.

Enigma

Peter Milligan & Duncan Fegredo Enigma (1993)
I bought this at the time but missed a few crucial issues, which rendered the whole enterprise more or less incomprehensible, although I was nevertheless left with the vague impression of a quality piece of work; and so here I am again with the collected version, complete with an introduction in which Grant Morrissey bangs on about his famous friend Peter Milligan proving that there's still plenty to be done with the superhero genre if you have a bit of imagination, contrary to the claims of certain people who think they're really ace but they aren't, not mentioning no names or nuffink...

Digested in just a couple of sittings, it becomes quickly obvious why I recall Enigma as incomprehensible, namely that it really does work more like a novel than a comic book in the traditional sense - a graphic novel, if you will. The information is too gradual to build and too reliant on a cumulative understanding to be be split into eight monthly helpings punctuated by real life. Digested in this form, the build up is magnificent - a truly peculiar story of seemingly imaginary characters from a slightly odd comic book breaking out into the real world whilst potentially serving as metaphors for repressed sexuality and all the guilt which comes with it. It's weird yet feels rooted in our reality - probably for the sake of contrast - and Duncan Fegredo's artwork is gorgeous, possibly the best thing he's ever drawn.

Then Milligan sort of blows it in the last chapter - or issue eight of the original series if you prefer - with a conclusion equivalent to revealing that all this strange stuff happened when Morgan the Mystic messed up some spells and let Quargon the Incorrigible loose in our universe, thus reducing all which has gone before to David Blaine drawing an eye on the palm of his hand and silently showing it to Eamonn Holmes whilst pulling an enigmatic expression in answer to some question or other. Of course, this may well be the very thing which caused Grant Morrissey to fulminate about the daringly audacious bolditude of his famous friend Peter Milligan, but to me it reads like Peter just couldn't even be arsed to say it was all a dream or whatever. In other words, he spends eight issues establishing that this place is the real world whilst pulling the same mysterious faces as David Blaine, and the punchline is that it isn't.

'Wouldn't you say that's pretty weird?' he croons to his readers with a flashlight held beneath his chin so as to create a spooky effect, one eyebrow raised in homage to all the usual suspects.

Dunno.

'Spose so.

MPH

Mark Millar & Duncan Fegredo MPH (2015)
I just can't stop buying these Mark Millar collections. There's something addictive about his writing, the sharply sarcastic tone, the occasional splash of the bold and crass offered without either apology or irony. Maybe it's simply that he puts a bit of elbow grease into the job, creating stories with some purpose beyond good guys catching bank robbers - subtext and theme without anything so self-conscious as the kind of overly-laboured and increasingly generic layering which you'll probably find in even Scrooge McDuck comics these days, if such things still exist. Of course, as has been noted on one or two occasions, Millar has been known to shoot himself in the foot from time to time with touches of shock effect which miss the tone and end up being simply repulsive, or at least no more meaningful than a meme involving tits posted in the self-consciously wacky section of droningatheism.com/forum. Happily MPH steers well clear of the usual rape threats, or even anything in that general and contentious direction, so maybe the lad is beginning to learn from his mistakes, or just getting old and mellow. In any case, it leaves us with something which ably demonstrates the strength of Millar's storytelling, and specifically without the safety net of the spectacularly stomach-churning pasted over any narrative hole. Graphic novel is an overused term, but for once it applies. MPH really does feel like a novel.

Of course, it's essentially a superhero tale spun around a drug which turns the user into either the Flash or Quicksilver, depending on one's frame of reference, but it doesn't feel like a superhero tale. In fact it's closer to Bonnie and Clyde or maybe Robin Hood, framing its supposedly criminal anti-heroes simply as people who happen to have received the shitty end of the capitalist stick in expressly Marxist terms; and as such these people are generally quite likeable without the need for any heavy-handed moralising or overstated pathos. I've a feeling this may be a first for Mark Millar.

Even better is that he could have just left it there, with the karmic balance left nice and simple by giving the po' folks their mountain of stolen gold and luxury apartments, but instead he follows the idea through to a very satisfactory conclusion. We already know that money is the root of all evil, but the idea nevertheless comes as a welcome surprise in this story, and without anyone having anything chopped off whilst some other guy films it.

I'm generally well-disposed towards Mark Millar regardless of how much he sucks when he gets it wrong, but I have to say, MPH is more or less perfect.

New Statesmen

John Smith & Jim Baikie with Sean Phillips & Duncan Fegredo unfortunately New Statesmen (1989)
Ah... the late 1980s when dance music wore sharp pastels and was easily identified by the ocean of reverb added to its snappy Yamaha RX15 drum machine; and when industrial music was essentially the same with the addition of taped televangelists proclaiming that Jesus doesn't like bummers - a conceit which even Cabaret Voltaire had abandoned by about 1984. I was surprised that the understanding of all Americans being homophobic rapture-happy bible bashers didn't really creep into comics until much later, at least not until Garth Ennis first mistook Quentin Tarantino's burger anecdotes for dialogue. There was of course Pete Milligan's run on DC's Shade the Changing Man which taught us that if you're at the Klan rally chewing rib whilst debating whether the subject of the latest public execution is either some no good son of a bitch or a real all-American hero yes siree, then you're probably in Texas.

In 1988, the Mighty Tharg, extraterrestrial editor of 2000AD, launched Crisis, a fortnightly comic featuring John Smith's first major series, New Statesman. Smith was, aside from a few one off efforts, something of an unknown quantity in 1988 so New Statesman, roughly speaking a dissection of US politics, was a bold undertaking, and one that Smith carried off well, complete with psychotic televangelists and yet happily without presenting either America or Americans as inherently evil because hey... McDonalds mkay! This earns my approval because, having moved here, Texas as the land of serial killing Baptists has come to look somewhat embarrassing in 2012. Let the country that is entirely without  xenophobic sibling-marryers cast the first cliché.

John Smith's foreword apologises for New Statesmen being an early work, bogged down with purple prose and trying far too hard to out-serious Watchmen, but there's really no need. Whilst it's true that the narrative is somewhat elusive in places, this works in the book's favour, tantalising with evocative dialogue and a subtext requiring the sort of reader involvement more commonly associated with the written word than graphic novel - a term I've never liked, but one that is for once appropriate. What some may regard as murky plotting, whether deliberate or otherwise, serves to reinforce the realism of the story, having more in common with an anecdotal and interpreted experience of daily life than the ruthless jigsaw puzzle narratives of Alan Moore, to name but one obvious example.

The art by Jim Baikie is similarly beautifully suited - solid, atmospheric, and limber; so it's a shame that some of New Statesman was drawn by Sean Phillips and Duncan Fegredo, both turning in pages that look like they were given to the work experience kid whilst Jim was on his break. Both Phillips and Fegredo went on to better things, it could probably be argued, although Philips never really struck me as anything better than competent, and Fegredo always seemed too messy. Unfortunately what we have here appears to be their really early work. It's clumsy, ugly, fanzine level stuff at best, and chapter five, page four is in particular so painful that it should win awards.

Aside from a few chapters having been drawn by people who very much weren't Jim Baikie, New Statesmen remains rewarding two decades later, refreshingly short on clichés, and all that is good  is so good as to cancel out crappy art bringing down the average.