Ed Pinsent - Henrietta (1995)

 

Subtitled The Pirate of Love, I'll admit I picked this up because of the adults only warning on the cover supplemented by a list of transgressive acts depicted within. Whatever I imagined didn't seem like the sort of thing Ed Pinsent would have drawn and so I was naturally curious. Thankfully Henrietta isn't like anything I imagined and the adults only tag seems mainly precautionary, given our living in an age of persons deeply traumatised by exposure to anything they didn't want to see. Rather than following in the lineage of Oh Wicked Wanda!, the book's more potentially contentious elements are probably closer to the spirit of Rabelais and are, in any case, details rather than the driving force of the enterprise.

Just as aspects of quantum mechanics appear to crumble under the weight of their own description, I feel Ed Pinsent's strips work best as read because attempts to describe what he does will usually unwittingly hammer the narrative into a shape which is mostly in the eye of the beholder, so I'll keep this minimal: Henrietta is a tempestuously libidinous redheaded woman who visits a certain bull in his dreams and who additionally spends time as the captain of a pirate ship. At one point she has sex with an octopus, which is conducted with more charm than anything else you're likely to find at the end of such an ill-advised Google search.

Pinsent's art inhabits what may as well be its own cosmology, with tales told therein relating to mainstream equivalents at much the same kind of tangent as did the Residents to the rest of the music industry in the seventies. It isn't weird as such, or at least no more weird than the art of Edwards Ardizzone, Gorey, or Campbell with whom it shares a similarly whispy quality, as though its reality could be carried away on a sharp gust of wind. It could probably be dismissed as streaky marks on paper but for this ephemeral or hallucinatory quality pinned down with surprising gravity by the strength of its own conviction, by its consistency of vision and belief in whatever it happens to be saying; and the effect is even more powerful in full colour, as is Henrietta.

So we have a sort of myth, or something mythic which follows its own logic with an almost classical sensibility informing its prevalently nautical atmosphere. It's funny and often moving without anything reading too much like a performance, and startles with occasional asides which seem like they should break the spell but never do. I felt as though I could hear waves and the sound of someone honking away on an accordion as I read, and was left with a sensation of having learned something touching and profound which probably wouldn't translate into words, hence the pictures; and crucially, I would suggest that this tale couldn't be told in any other way than what you have here, for adaptation would only result in a different animal altogether, which - if you ask me - is the measure of true art.

Thar she blows!

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.

Deadface

Eddie Campbell Deadface (1988)
I've not read Neil Gaiman's American Gods, but it always sounds suspiciously similar to this earlier work in an admittedly different medium, with which I'm certain he must have been familiar. Then again, I don't suppose Eddie Campbell can have been the first to tell tales of peculiarly urbane mythological persons in a contemporary setting but, you know…

Deadface is Bacchus, the ancient Roman God of wine, revelry, and the like, now of sufficient toothly length as to resemble William Burroughs in his later years, hence Deadface, although Campbell doesn't actually make use of the title anywhere in the story so I suppose it was simply deemed snappier than Bacchus. I encountered this one when the hippy guy who ran my local comic shop - above what is now the Cafe Milano in Chatham - decided I might benefit from a few titles without an X- prefix and turned me onto this and the likewise excellent Trouble with Girls. I return to it now whilst wrestling with Roger Zelazny's similarly theological Lord of Light, a great book, but a tough read when you have other shit getting in the way, as I have had.

Anyway, Bacchus is essentially a wrinkly old sea captain who spends his days drinking wine and spinning yarns, although the yarns are mostly things we'd recognise as mythology, and whenever he removes his cap it's difficult to miss the horns. Drama intrudes upon the Mediterranean serenity of our tale when it emerges that there are still a couple of others knocking around from the old days, Joe Theseus and the Eyeball Kid, the monstrous and yet oddly charming grandson of Argus. I get the impression this comic may have been played by ear from one issue to the next, depending on what story Campbell felt like telling; at least judging by how Bacchus himself is quickly sidelined in this title which at least alludes to him even if it doesn't actually carry his name; which I suppose may also have been in response to the pressures of publishing an independent black and white comic in the late eighties. Deadface was wrapped up and cancelled with issue eight, and while the run taken as a single whole tends to wander a bit in terms of focus, it's nevertheless satisfying.

Deadface succeeded mostly on the strength of tone and atmosphere. It's leisurely paced and mature, not given to ostentatious attempts to blow our minds, and thus is it able to carry the premise of those Greek and Roman Gods having been real people without seeming silly. In fact, it seems to expand and update the mythology with a veracity which makes all of Grant Morrison's hooting and hollering about his spandex Supergods appear hysterical and childish, if you can imagine that. Eddie Campbell's art is harsh, angular, and never quite what you'd call easy on the eye, but there's something fascinating about it, particularly this eighties vintage with the scratchy lines and stark blocks of letratone. Deadface looks and feels like a comic descended directly from book illustration, like neither Action Comics, Superman nor any of that other branch ever happened. Some momentum is lost in the later issues inked by Ed Hillyer who, whilst not without talent, seems less distinctive and somehow more mainstream than Campbell as an artist; which isn't to say that they're bad, because - at the risk of committing hyperbole - Eddie Campbell's touch is such as to elevate everything else in the vicinity, and even when you get the impression he's winging it, the results remain staggering.

Devlin Waugh: Swimming in Blood

John Smith, Sean Phillips & others
Devlin Waugh: Swimming in Blood (2004)
I bought the Judge Dredd megazine for a while then eventually drifted away without really taking any of it with me, and certainly nothing resembling either nostalgia or pronounced affection for anything I'd read therein. It wasn't that it was bad so much as that it just didn't do a lot for me, and so I picked up this reprint principally because it's John Smith, a writer I always thought had more potential than that for which he has generally been given credit.

Devlin Waugh was proposed as Noel Coward as played by Arnold Schwarzenegger and takes the role of one of those demon-hunting exorcist types in the Judge Dredd universe. It's a bit of an obvious idea in some ways - one of those characters bolted together from a combination of dramatically absurd contradictions - and yet it sort of works and even succeeds, because John Smith generally seems to know what he's doing and has a talent for working the essentially ludicrous without quite letting it all slip over into the realm of Bugs Bunny. That said, Swimming in Blood was a bit of a shaky start - nice ideas which don't quite come together in what is basically a generic eighties action movie, and while Devlin Waugh as Terry Thomas is a delight, there are a few points where Smith's revelling in Wildean dialogue forms self-conscious clots in what is already turning out to be a bit of a plod; and a plod further encumbered by the unsavoury note struck when Waugh exposes his darker side - his sadistic impulses and a deeply unappealing misanthropy expressed in his regard of the mutant inmates of Aquatraz as a vile slurry of inhuman filth.

Additionally, Sean Phillips artwork was really muddy and inconsistent on this one, torn between imitating Simon Bisley and Bill Sienkiewicz - as was fucking everyone at that end of the nineties - but without the basic understanding of human anatomy which allowed those guys to get away with it. Phillips has never been my favourite artist, but this is fanzine level stuff compared to what he's drawn since - a fair quota of which has been at least reasonably breathtaking.

Fetish, the second story in the collection, works much better. Being a Dredd saga in which Waugh features, with the shift of focus working in the character's favour, allowing for the kind of mystery which is somewhat lost when he's grinning away and describing something as utterly ghastly on every other page. Ajibayo Akinsiku's art suffers from some of the same issues of contrast and basic figure work as that of Sean Phillips, and he draws Dredd as a chin wearing a helmet, but his better pages are mind-bogglingly hallucinatory. I have some reservations about the story using Africa in pretty much the same way as everyone else uses Africa - the dark, scary continent of mystery and nature red in tooth and claw - but Fetish is nevertheless a thoroughly satisfying effort showcasing the best of everyone involved.

Waugh finally convinces in A Mouthful of Dust with the art of Michael Gaydos perfectly attuned to the story it tells, sort of like Eddie Campbell with less scratching about.

Finally, there are a couple of prose stories in support of my feeling that comic book writers either need to stick to strip fiction, or accept that unillustrated text really isn't just a comic strip without artwork, or the hard-boiled voice-over delivered in short sentences at the beginning of something starring Bruce Willis.

And now he was dead. Cut and mutilated. Lying in a cold locker in a cold Monaco morgue. Dead like all Devlin's other friends. Like Pedro and Sanchez and Joel. Like dear old Bunny Beaumont. Like all the others.

William Burroughs got away with it, but if you're not William Burroughs and particularly if you're writing this kind of prose, use a comma, because distinguishing cut and mutilated as a sentence in itself just looks like you can't fucking write. John Smith patently can write - although both of his prose stories in this collection have essentially the same plot - but the occasional text stories you used to get in 2000AD specials were always pure arseache.

So that's been a fair bit of whining on my part, none of which alters the fact that I enjoyed this one a lot. That which this collection has in its favour greatly outweighs a few blanks fired here and there, and John Smith having delivered a not so much openly as rampantly gay character in the form of a mainstream comic strip without a trace of tokenism has to be applauded; and he did it with humour and genuine wit, and - if memory serves - just ahead of the curve regarding not only demon-hunting exorcist types, but vampires as good guys.