Kingdom Come

Mark Waid & Alex Ross Kingdom Come (1996)
I'd stopped reading the caped stuff when this was first published and only found out about it a couple of weeks ago. The reason I stopped reading the caped stuff was due to the entire mainstream comics biz having taken to impersonating Rob Liefeld, or at least Todd McFarlane, and it had all begun to look like a massive pile of wank from where I was stood. Nearly three decades later I realise I wasn't the only one to feel that way, and Kingdom Come features a host of established DC superpersons who, having reached retirement age, find themselves significantly bemused at the younger generation of bloodthirsty cyborg assassins wielding shuriken swords and way too much angry crosshatching. It's a weird one because it's approximately an epic war between, on one side, the traditionally wholesome and brightly coloured comic book heroes of the fifties - hence the non-ironic cameo by Krypto the Super Dog - and all that fucking awful shite inspired by Liefeld and his buddies; so on at least one level it's pitched firmly against not so much the comic book growing up (which it sort of didn't in any case) as what it grew into, told by both means and medium far removed from the newsstands and legitimately juvenile audience whose legacy it directly represents. So it's Miller's Dark Knight flipped to more positive and progressive aspirations - or possibly where Alan Moore would have gone with 1963 had he finished the thing.

In caped terms, I didn't always get DC, generally preferring Marvel and usually rolling my eyes during streamed documentaries identifying the difference as being that DC deals in legends, man; but now having read and re-read a few of the various Crisis books - and re-reading is essential because they are otherwise often incomprehensible - I think I understand the distinction. Marvel superheroes tend to be Gods and monsters which also happen to be ourselves with all of our baggage and characteristic failings. DC superheroes are, for the most part, more remote, something to which I suppose we aspire rather than which we become. There are numerous exceptions to this generalisation, but that's what I take from Multiversity, Infinite Crisis, and now this; and it's why, I would suggest, those Marvel movies have generally been more watchable than the DC jobs, because everything looks epic if you throw enough CGI at it, so movie-epic isn't that impressive in and of itself.

Anyway, this works because although the story is probably not actually anything special, being masses of caped folks flying angrily at each other whilst shooting rays from their outstretched hands for two-hundred pages, the art is genuinely breathtaking; and so breathtaking that even the most ridiculous aspects of the genre are rendered with sublime grace and beauty as befits tales of the Gods and their kin. Accordingly Kingdom Come also demonstrates why it's mostly a waste of time trying to transfer this stuff to the big screen. The strapline about how you'll believe a man can fly never really worked for me because I could see it was just some guy in a leotard hanging from a near invisible wire, but Kingdom Come is, on the other hand, unusually persuasive.

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.

Psi-Force

Danny Fingeroth, Fabian Nicieza, Mark Texeira & others
Psi-Force (1989)
I'm gearing up for a mammoth read of every single mutant book published by Marvel up until about 1991 - the point at which it all went tits up so far as I'm concerned - which I plan to write about as I go, an enterprise which will probably take up at least a year. My currently reading this, the complete run of a single comic book, should therefore be considered training, although it also constitutes homework to some extent. I retain a vague impression of Fabian Nicieza having been in some way culpable to it all going tits up, and yet I remember enjoying his run on Psi-Force; so I'm taking stock of my own powers of recall, amongst other things, one of those other things being that I needed light relief from Genet.

Anyway, as you may recall, New Universe was one of Marvel's earlier concessions to pow! the comic book growing up, adding a new layer of realism to its standard fare in the same way that the Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four once added a new layer of realism to the primary colours of their predecessors back in the sixties. So the New Universe was our world to which the Bullpen introduced superheroes - or at least persons with unusual powers - and let things happen as they might have happened in what we recognise as real life, give or take some small change. It may be a waste of time looking for industry parallels, but Star Brand was probably the New Universe version of Superman with Spitfire as Iron Man, DP7 as the X-Men, and so on. Psi-Force were possibly also the X-Men, or maybe a hybrid of the X-Men and Voltron, the giant robot formed from a group of smaller robots. Anyway, there were five of Psi-Force, each with psychic abilities which our New Universe seems to have assumed were possibly real even before the white event gave everyone powers; and under certain conditions the five combine to create a giant winged composite being called the Psi-Hawk.

Fantastic though this may seem, Psi-Force managed to go a full year without trying to dress anybody in spandex or having them answer to a superhero name. Our five psychics are teenage runaways whose powers have left them no option but to hit the road, and so they've all ended up in San Francisco at a home for missing kids, which perhaps provides early clues as to why the New Universe went tits up at the end of its third year. The comic had grown up in so much as that we had unlikely powers without anyone deciding to be Batman, but it was otherwise business as usual in terms of modular teenage angst communicated through thought bubbles and excessively wordy captions describing what you can see on the page and have presumably already worked out for yourself; and our five Psi-Force kids comprise the angry loner, the inevitable athletic black guy, the shy but well meaning foreigner who doesn't always understand what's going on, the snooty Asian girl who is obsessed with clothes, and the much younger awkward four-eyed brainiac. Take away their powers and it's The Breakfast Club. They don't actually drive around San Francisco solving crimes with the help of a sandwich eating dog, but it wouldn't seem out of character if they did.

Yet Psi-Force isn't entirely without redeeming qualities. The story is well told and inventive within certain limits, if a little more wordy than it needed to be during its first year; and Mark Texeira's art is fucking gorgeous - enough so as to negate the occasional hint of the kind of cheese inevitably generated when secretive government agencies are on the hunt for moody teenagers with unusual powers.

Fabian Nicieza stirred things up when I guess sales figures made it apparent that the New Universe was proceeding with maybe a little too much caution, and that it might be possible to ramp things up without giving everyone a cape. As a writer, he's since become something of a big deal, not least as the creator of Deadpool, but I found him uneven - at least his early writing. Whatever was happening always seemed to be the work of some secretive government agency, the kind which gets about in black helicopters. It conspicuously felt as though notes had been taken from reading comics by Alan Moore and Frank Miller, notably the stuff about screwing up the lives of your characters. In fact, it conspicuously felt as though Nicieza's influences were limited to other comic books and maybe a couple of action movies. It felt like fanzine level writing with influences as placeholders for inspiration.

Yet, even in his first published work on Psi-Force, there's something sparky trying to break free from the confusion of Nicieza learning on the job. The ideas are weirdly engaging, even when it's obvious where he got them and what he did to twist them into something less transparently derivative; and so we end up with Psi-Force kidnapped and held prisoner at the Siberian Project, a secretive Soviet government agency which strives to turn mutants paranormals into an elite fighting force, and it almost works.

The problem here, at least by the end of the run, is that hardly anyone was reading so I guess the company was reluctant to spend money on any of the New Universe books, and the art is fucking terrible, possibly the worst I've seen in something which wasn't actually drawn in biro then photocopied; and passing references to conflict in Afghanistan aren't quite enough to make it seem all grown up and plausible.

Chains generally being as strong as their weakest links, the best one can say of Fabian Nicieza's run on Psi-Force was that he almost got away with it despite almost everyone else letting the side down; and the best one can say of Psi-Force as a whole was that Mark Texeira's art was wonderful and that it tried its best, and at least succeeded in communicating its own potential even if the stuff dripping out of the spigot at the other end wasn't always great. Having said that, I nevertheless thought it was amazing at the time, and sometimes that's all you need. Not everything has to be King Lear.

Wolverine

 

Chris Claremont, John Byrne, Larry Hama etc. etc. Wolverine (1991)
Not a graphic novel, not a collected edition, just a big stack of comic books like you would read when in bed with the measles, or a hangover if you're a little bit older. The story, as I've definitely already mentioned on more than one occasion, is that I was once a massive sucker for caped comic books, then sold my entire collection during a sudden fit of what I imagined to be maturity. It's a decision I've always regretted and have finally set right, having spent the last couple of years buying them all back - mainly thanks to the fact that none of them ever ended up quite so collectible - and by association, expensive - as we were told would be the case.

When it finally happened, Wolverine as a regularly monthly title didn't make much of an impression on me, as is possibly indicated by my having re-bought entire runs of X-Men, X-Factor, and New Mutants* before I even remembered that there had ever been a regular Wolverine title, and one to which I subscribed and presumably read. Anyway, I picked up a few and realised that yes, I actually had enjoyed the thing well enough, thereby justifying another couple of hundred dollars spunked away at Lone Star Comics in the name of nostalgia, albeit an admittedly vague form of nostalgia.

Anyway, Wolverine was essentially everything Charles Schulz had warned us about in his Peanuts strip back in 1952.

Unfortunately, a homicidal nutcase whose superpower is stabbing people proved somewhat limited in terms of what kind of stories might be told, and so Wolverine was written as a man wrestling with inner demons, which at least allowed for bit more wiggle room. Frank Miller and Chris Claremont had already done a lot to flesh out the character both in the main X-Men comics and in related spin-offs, and Claremont got the regular book off to a fairly decent start, essentially turning Wolverine into a hard-boiled detective and letting him run loose in an old Terry and the Pirates strip. It worked well, and was at least more engaging than the endless cycle of growling and stabbing which it could have been, and which a few of the readers had seemingly expected.

That said, a few of Claremont's plot points were somewhat bewildering - possibly due to this being just one of fifty other books he was writing to a monthly schedule, and the whole thing came across as kind of dry at times what with the rigorous adherence to Wolverine as film noir. Peter David and then Archie Goodwin took over from Claremont after ten issues, roughly maintaining the same mood and general standard, even allowing for bursts of humour. Considering the vigour with which Marvel had been milking the X-cow at least since the second half of the eighties, the actual quality of Wolverine is surprising and impressive, although I suppose if they were throwing money at any title, it was going to be this one; and so the art is likewise mostly exceptional as one would expect of John Buscema, John Byrne, Klaus Janson, Marc Silvestri and others. However, I couldn't help but notice that this stuff reads a lot better when you sit down with a big stack of comics and binge the lot in just a couple of sittings. It played its cards just a little too close to its chest for a monthly schedule - as I vaguely seem to recall - which is probably why I'd forgotten so much of it, including even the point at which I gave up and stopped buying the thing.

Having no idea of where I'd originally jumped ship, and being reluctant to buy a run of back issues where the cut-off point might leave me hanging in the middle of an unfinished story, I re-bought the book up to and including issue fifty on the grounds of it being a round number and not too deep into the period beyond which these comics had mostly turned to shite in a grimacing cross-hatched effort to tap into some of that old Rob Liefeld magic. Now, having actually read the things, it seems I've made the right decision, both in drawing the line at issue fifty and in dumping the book when I did first time round. Larry Hama's run on the last twenty or so of these restores a lot of the humour and peculiar novelty which had either been missing or else was stood in the corner pretending to be Mickey Spillane during previous episodes. On one level, Hama turned Wolverine into sixties telly Batman, having Logan fight his own android double while trying to save the life of a bomb disguised as a cute little girl with pigtails and a lisp programmed to blow him into pieces; but for all Hama's wit and invention, it becomes obvious that all those letter-writing twerps complaining about the lack of stabbings have had their way. Various X-Men begin to turn up as crowd pleasing guests with increasing frequency, and by now it's the grimacing nineties X-Men in those bondage costumes covered in pockets, utility belts and holsters and all the women with massive tits and no waist; and inker Dan Green seemed to be doing his best to make Silvestri's pencils resemble something from the Image stable.

Wolvey's secret origin, you won't fucking believe it, deffo the real thing this time, not a dream, grimace grimace, black ops, even more fucking cross-hatching and random pockets, more black ops, clandestine government organisation, foil stamped edition also available blah blah blah…

Wolverine was never really in competition with The Taming of the Shrew, in case anyone missed that particular memo, but this was a decent, even classy book for a while, regardless of having sprung from Marvel's increasingly rabid attempts to take its readership for every last penny - although I gather much worse was to come, and a mere fifty new X-titles hitting the racks each week now seemingly represents a model of restraint by comparison. Inevitably there were lapses, notably the bewilderingly shit Lazarus Project issues featuring art by Barry Kitson whom I seem to recall as having contributed to my giving up on 2000AD back in the eighties; but these were exceptions rather than the rule. Otherwise, for my money, these issues belonged to the final flowering of the American superhero comic before it grew up and became an absolute fucking bore, having mistakenly assumed a massive body count and increasingly baroque forms of slaughter to be pretty much tantamount to adulthood. Those vicious little letter page gorehounds got their way, effectively killing off the thing they purportedly loved, then themselves most likely grew up to be cops, security guards and right-wing politicians, so I'd guess.

Still, it was nice while it lasted.

*: Well, entire runs of the readable stuff, my cut-off point being around 1991, beyond which most of them had turned to shite.
 

Wolverine / Kitty Pryde & Wolverine

Chris Claremont, Frank Miller & Al Milgrom
Wolverine (1982)
Kitty Pryde & Wolverine (1984)
As I may have mentioned, I was once something of a Marvel zombie, particularly where all those X-books were concerned. I bought and collected them religiously up until the point at which Rob Liefeld came on the scene and it all went down the toilet. Then, feeling a little uncomfortable about how much of the stuff I'd accumulated, I flogged the lot for not nearly enough back in the nineties, an act of Cromwellian reform which I've regretted ever since; at least up until about two years ago when I noticed how this shit is still pretty cheap and easy to find now that we've invented the internet. So I've re-bought more or less everything I once owned then sold, and filled in a few gaps along the way.

Accordingly I have a big stack of Wolverine back issues which I intend to tackle fairly soon, but I thought I'd start here for the sake of keeping things tidy - two limited series dating from before the lad graduated to his own regular comic book, four and six issues respectively, the earlier one having been collected during the initial excitement of the graphic novel, the comic growing up, and all of that good stuff.

At the heart of most superhero comics you'll find the world's biggest square wearing a fucking leotard and foiling a bank robbery, so those comics I'd consider the most successful have tended to work in spite of the genre, usually by doing things in such a way as to distract from the world's biggest square wearing a fucking leotard and foiling a bank robbery, or else by doing something slightly different. The X-Men comics, for example, border on science-fiction by focussing on the sheer weirdness of superheroes, emphasising their outsider credentials - potentially at odds with the status quo rather than necessarily supporting it through the foiling of bank robberies. Wolverine, as a character, took this one further through being a dangerous, homicidal nutcase, an outsider even amongst outsiders. I'm sure you all know who he's supposed to be and what he's supposed to do, but it's possibly worth remembering that initially, this was all he did - the unstoppable mutant dude who gets the red mist and stabs everyone in the room. It was one dimensional and somewhat limiting in terms of story because his response to any situation could only ever be to slice everyone into pieces, so Chris Claremont and Frank Miller decided to open things up a little.

1982's Wolverine sends our man to Japan and redefines him as a failed samurai, as a man striving to become something better than just the guy who loses his shit and slices everyone into pieces. Superheroes had come fitted with their own inner demons at least since the sixties when the Mighty Thor lost all faith in his own ability to select an insurance policy combining peace of mind with genuinely competitive rates; so Wolverine's hero journey was nothing particularly new but for the way in which it was told, borrowing from film noir and martial arts cinema which - again - if not exactly new, represented a refreshing further abstraction from the superhero genre. I'm possibly unique in having no particular interest in Japanese culture besides Godzilla movies. I therefore can't vouch for how well Claremont and Miller do Tokyo, and it may well be hokey as fuck given Claremont's version of London as seen elsewhere, but it works for me. It remains a kid's comic, or at least a precocious teenager's comic, but it does the job through never talking down and by maintaining a certain level of emotional intelligence, and Frank Miller's art is nothing if not cinematic.

 

Kitty Pryde is a character who had been hanging around the pages of the X-Men books for a while, seemingly another abstraction from the conventions of the genre in her failure to have settled upon either an action figure super-identity or costume. Kitty Pryde & Wolverine approximately repeats the previous hero journey in the service of granting Kitty a little more substance than just reader identification. Al Milgrom has drawn some truly ropey stuff in his time, but sort of gets away with this, rendering a slightly sketchier version of what Miller drew in the previous book, albeit without quite the same fine-tuned sense of design, picture space, and so on. Kitty Pryde & Wolverine fumbles the ball a little compared with its predecessor, taking a little too long to do its thing then closing with a ludicrously generic slap-up feed, suggesting Miller's input was fairly crucial.

Neither of these titles were life changing, but they did what they set out to do extremely well for the most part, expanding the form into something a bit more engaging than foiled bank robberies. They were something with a sense of art beyond what one might expect from unit shifting entertainment factories.

I continue to find Chris Claremont's writing fascinating because what he does seems fairly straightforward and mainstream - nothing too avant-garde, nothing particularly weird, certainly no obscure references to Marcel Duchamp - and yet his style is distinctive, immediately recognisable, and it hooks the reader into whatever is going on like few other comic book authors have managed, hence, I would argue, the phenomenal success of all those X-books back in the eighties. Some of what he writes should logically be as corny as shit given the stories to which the words are applied, and yet he always finds a way around stating the obvious without even drawing attention to such dodges.

Neither of these two series were ever really examples of the comic book having grown up, but they didn't need to be, and they work just fine on their own merits.

The Dark Knight Returns

Frank Miller, Klaus Janson & Lynn Varley The Dark Knight Returns (1986)
As for Pow! the comic book growing up, I guess this was approximately where it all started, at least in terms of public perception. Watchmen is better remembered but this came first by about six months. Excepting Viz, I'd stopped reading comics, having given up on 2000AD back in 1980 and not really thought about it since. I found it odd when I overheard my friends Charlie and Garreth talking about comic books, specifically Batman of all things. What the fuck? I opined, and so Garreth lent me a prestige format issue of Frank Miller's version of Batman so as to impress upon me that it was significantly different to the version of Batman who routinely found himself caught in giant mousetraps; so that was probably the start of my comic book habit, or a significant contributing factor.

I haven't read this in probably twenty years, and have been reluctant to do so of late for fear of what I might find, given Frank Miller's apparent recent transformation into Ron Swanson; but Kafka was boring me shitless, and I'd already resorted to Grant Morrison's All-Star Superman by way of light relief, so Batman seemed like the next logical step. As everyone in the universe knows, The Dark Knight Returns is essentially grittily realistic Batman or, to fine tune the definition, if Batman were a real person, then he would almost certainly have to be something in this direction and the most pertinent questions would be whether there's any real difference between a homicidal maniac and a homicidal maniac claiming to be the good guy. All the moral baggage - or absence thereof - one might anticipate given that it's Frank Miller at the typewriter is already there and very much packed, which I probably didn't notice last time around, being a bit slow on the uptake for most of the eighties; and yet The Dark Knight Returns remains as powerful as ever because Miller's view of the world is, at worst, simply massively pessimistic, and is communicated without even hinting at any sort of agenda. Batman fights crime, as we would expect, but is himself a criminal as he freely admits, and a particularly violent one. Everything else is on us, depending on whether or not we're cheering every time he kicks someone's head in or breaks their fingers. Miller isn't suggesting that any of this is good so much as that there's a certain inevitability which comes with certain situations, and particularly so when we start asking questions about morality, justice and all that good stuff. The Dark Knight Returns is therefore a post-Vietnam Batman, one left permanently changed by a conflict which blurs established notions of what the right thing may be. It's dark and unpleasant because anything else would be dishonest, and maybe you're not actually supposed to be cheering along like some fucking simpleton.

So never mind Batman, this really was a whole new deal, not least in terms of how the story was told, further distancing the familiar names from their primary colour origins. If not conventionally beautiful, it's difficult to look away from the scratchy expressionist lines, with the story structured just loosely enough as to feel organic, quite unlike the rigidly mathematical progression of Watchmen, and hence somehow more truthful regardless of the presence of the guy from outer space. I've never been a massive fan of Batman or his specific type - the freelance cop who beats up the ne'er do well and returns the stolen wallet to the millionaire - but just for once someone actually got it right, and this was that book, and I suspect Frank Miller is probably a more complicated individual than we realised, at least in so far as that he's since apologised for Holy Terror.

Deathlok the Demolisher

Rich Buckler, Doug Moench & others Deathlok the Demolisher (1976)
Excluding English black and white reprints, the first American comics I can recall are Marvel's Worlds Unknown #4 and Astonishing Tales #35, and the first issue of Phoenix from the short lived Atlas Comics, dating respectively from November 1973, May 1976, and January 1975. These turned up at some sort of jumble sale held at my school, Ilmington C of E Junior and Infants, possibly on more than one occasion. I seem to recall the two Marvel comics being found together, but I'm not sure about Phoenix. Anyway, they were in colour with stories of filmic aspiration spread across a much higher page count than that to which I was accustomed. As science-fiction, they made The Whizzers from Space in the Topper seem slightly ridiculous. They made a huge impression.

Deathlok was a cyborg, and a surprisingly gruesome creation for Marvel, but this was the seventies and America was still trying to process the Vietnam war and the rise of its own counterculture; so Deathlok is a much darker spin on square-jawed Steve Austin. It wasn't quite a case of rebuilding him - seeing as he was actually killed and was therefore a stiff, but they augmented him with robotic parts, put a computer in his head, and reanimated the dead bits with preservative in the hope of slowing his deterioration. Most depressing of all is that having been revived, the computer prevents him from killing himself, leaving him no choice but to serve as a programmable assassin. You can see how it might have left him feeling a bit grumpy.

Deathlok the Demolisher was set in a post-apocalyptic America and is therefore approximately a mash-up of Shelley's Frankenstein, I Am Legend and its big screen reincarnation as The Omega Man, plus a whole load of countercultural ill-will. We're at some distance from truth, justice and the American way.

Deathlok is the warrior let down by his country, the soldier who becomes aware of his own place within an industrial process, and the parallels with those returned or otherwise from the Vietnam war are difficult to miss.

All the places Janice - my wife - and I went to when I was normal! All of it - gone. The restaurants, theaters, everything that was precious to me - gone.

So, as is probably obvious, the Deathlok of Astonishing Tales was one of those strips pitched beyond the traditional Marvel audience, more in the direction of your older brother with his prog rock albums and Farrah Fawcett posters. It was ponderous, vaguely cerebral, and not afraid to unsettle its readership - maybe not Crime and Punishment but certainly a few stages on from Superman's brightly coloured adventures; and most notably, much of issue #35 occurs within a computer generated reality - possibly not quite the first but substantially predating the popularisation of cyberspace by William Gibson and others, and even predating Tom Baker pottering around within the matrix in The Deadly Assassin later that same year.

The only problem with this version of Deathlok is that he exists mainly for the sake of his post-apocalyptic environment and what it said about the present, as was, so he doesn't actually have much to do beyond a series of ambiguous missions, betrayals, and ensuing pontification. Buckler, Moench and others seemingly realised this and tried to jazz the story up with increasingly implausible twists, but only end up muddling things. Deathlok the Demolisher only ever needed to be a hero journey, or rather an antihero journey, in the same way that Heart of Darkness is about the progress more than the destination. Instead we find Deathlok restored to full humanity in a clone of his original body, except the cyborg body remains sentient so that now we have two of them. Then some minor point of continuity demands that this cyborg is only a copy of Deathlok, who has actually been elsewhere all along, following up some mission or other.

They should have quit while they were ahead but inevitably they didn't, so Deathlok returns a couple of years later to have adventures with Spiderman and the Fantastic Four, which works about as well as would Frank Miller's Dark Knight travelling back in time to hang out with sixties telly Batman. To paraphrase Hank Hill, you're not making Spiderman better, you're just making Deathlok worse. There were ten good issues before it all turned to shit and contradiction, but those issues were mostly amazing, Keith Pollard notwithstanding, and arguably unlike anything Marvel published before or since. Sometimes, no matter how good your intention, you just can't bring them back.

The Last Days of Animal Man

Gerry Conway, Chris Batista & Dave Meikis
The Last Days of Animal Man (2010)
It looked good in the shop: Brian Bolland covers making knowing reference to Grant Morrison's thoroughly mental run on the book, pleasantly clean lines from Batista and Meikis, and the intriguing possibility of a popular character shoved through the narrative mangle as happens in most of the best caped stuff - Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, Mark Grunewald's Captain America handed his P45 and so on...

What we have here is Buddy Baker losing his powers, which translates as a comic book having a mid-life crisis, but one written quite definitively for an audience with a reading age of about twelve. So we also have super-types fighting whilst talking, angry villains swearing vengeance and doing that face you do when you're trying to push out the first turd to take its leave of your bottom in five or six days, and we have a sense of humour which makes your average episode of Friends look like Jerry Sadowitz, and all adding up to a load of horseshit about the importance of family and being yourself. I suppose it might seem unfair, my taking such issue with something so obviously aimed at younger readers, but on the other hand I've read plenty of stuff aimed at kids which managed to do its job just fine without expecting me to make allowances; so balls. The Last Days of Animal Man isn't the worst comic book I've ever read, but it almost makes those bloody awful Jerry Prosser issues seem mysterious and alluring.

Most positive reviews I've seen of this thing seem to focus on the guest appearance of a Green Lantern who is actually a whale, which is a nice idea, but no substitute for being able to tell a story, or at least a story other than the same fucking one wheeled out for every film in which Michael J. Fox ever appeared.

Batman: I Am Gotham

Tom King, David Finch & others Batman: I Am Gotham (2017)
I have to confess I've never really given much of a shit about Batman. I loved The Dark Knight Returns obviously, not only because both art and writing were great, but because a character who routinely smashes kneecaps as means to a judicial end only really works as an antihero; but Tom King's Vision was the possibly the greatest comic book I've ever read, and celebrated children's entertainer Barnaby Salton reckoned I should give this a go, and I was feeling fat, unwell, and incapacitated due to a combination of interrupted sleep, chicken in walnut sauce, and one of those shakes you can use to grout bathroom tiles. I needed the reading equivalent of comfort food, the sort of thing my mummy would have brought back from the shops for me if I was poorly - hence Batman, even though it's probably the very last thing my mother would have brought back from the shops for me. I would have more likely ended up with Thomas Hardy or one of the Brontës.

I Am Gotham is beautifully written with concise prose applied sparingly - no thought bubbles or inset panels of exposition, their modern equivalent - and the art is beautiful, so it's distinctly filmic in terms of pacing, atmosphere, and how little it gives away or pauses to explain itself. Aside from anything else, this additionally tends to suggest that the comic book has become merchandising to the CGI-heavy superheroic television serial, of which there are now a great many, although I very much doubt this being intentional or conscious. Here Batman saves lives, gets caught up in fights, is made subject to governmental skulduggery, endures the occasional crisis of conscience and so on; and whilst it's beautifully done and atmospherically powerful, it didn't feel that satisfying. In fact it felt a bit like one of those television shows, just with a bit more artistic integrity, and I've yet to see one of those television shows I liked. I saw twenty minutes of The Flash the other night. It was fucking shit.

Anyway, while I felt as though I spotted what I presume to be one of King's enduring themes - namely great power as something terrible in the hands of persons who don't know what to do with it, as we saw in Little Worse Than a Man, ultimately this one didn't really quite seem to be about anything, which I found a little unsatisfying. Then of course I now realise that I Am Gotham is just the first of a three part story, so it's really just getting warmed up. Interviewed online, Tom King was asked of all of Batman's qualities and attributes, what's the one that really speaks to you?

To me, it's his mortality. It's the idea that he could die—that he's human. There's something about Superman and Wonder Woman that says to me that they go on forever. If you came to Earth one hundred years from now, Superman and Wonder Woman would still be here. But Batman's like one of us, right? He can die. He has that risk factor to him, and every time he goes out at night, he faces that and still triumphs over it. That just makes him the most human character in the DCU to me, the idea that he's not a god. He lives among the gods and tries to do his best.

So okay, fair enough. I can see this one may well be going somewhere and I guess I'll be picking up the rest. It may not get off to quite such an arresting start as The Vision, but it still pisses over most other versions of Batman I've seen.

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.

The Vision: Little Better Than a Beast

Tom King & Gabriel Hernandez Walta
The Vision: Little Better Than a Beast (2016)
Here's the second half of the story for which the first half was collected as Little Worse Than a Man, and which I suggested might be the best thing Marvel have ever published. Little Worse Than a Man seems to be the story of a family of robots settling down and attempting to blend in with regular folks, except with a very different tone to how that may sound and somehow managing to turn those chuckles and overly logical misunderstandings into something both poignant and chilling. Little Better Than a Beast completes the title quotation from The Merchant of Venice, presenting a conclusion which seems initially shaky in how it relates to what has gone before, until you realise that it's simply because all humour has been stripped from the increasingly harrowing psychological drama. It's not that the jokes aren't there, but you'd have to be lacking something fairly basic to keep on finding them funny - which, by the way, is probably deliberate. The dynamic of the story derives from the relentless and guileless optimism of inherently flawed people, or at least beings. That which makes them human in turn destroys and debases their humanity.

As you might gather from the above, it's quite easy to forget that this is still essentially a superhero book, and we're reminded when various Avengers appear - notably an Iron Man these days looking one hell of a lot like Robert Downey Jr. I'm not entirely sure whether it's down to the beautifully understated art, the narrative depth, or a combination of the two, but when the capes start flapping it's actually kind of shocking, almost frightening in the same way that The Dark Knight Returns was frightening back when it first hit the stands; and we are reminded that, realistically speaking, superheroes would be fucking terrifying if they were real.

Thankfully though, superheroes are hardly the point of the story. The point might be simplified as the gulf between that which we would like to be and that which we cannot help being, although by the same token Hamlet is probably just a play about a bloke who sees a ghost. You really need to read this one to appreciate it. For a book full of flying guys with capes, this story feels at least as dark as anything written by Michael Gira for a Swans album, and there are a few moments which I found just plain horrible and yet unfortunately necessary; so fuck it: like I said before, this is probably the best thing Marvel have ever published.

Batman Incorporated

Grant Morrison & Jim Nick Nick Davidson Batman Incorporated (2012)
Ever since Stewart Lee described him as such, I can't quite pull back from thinking of the guy as Batman the children's character, and probably because I've never really found him that interesting. Although I haven't read it in a while, I recall loving Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns in which our man is portrayed as a vicious nutcase, which seems about right. He's more or less a vicious nutcase here, but a vicious nutcase inhabiting a story which may as well be derived from the goofy 1960s television show, albeit a version of the  goofy 1960s television show without much in the way of humour.

The story is that Batman, having decided that crime is a disease and that there's only one cure and so on and so forth, trains a whole team of international Batmans so as to cure the disease of crime on a global scale. It starts well enough, and seems beautifully told regardless of whatever it is that's actually being told, and then it sort of gets lost in an undifferentiated mush of narrative and stuff you might understand if you're some kind of Batman expert, which I'm not. I'm all for showing rather than telling so as to instil a comic book with the portentous atmosphere of a Fassbinder film, but occasionally it helps to tell your audience what the fuck is happening, particularly when what you're showing is mainly ingenious plot points and obscure references to Jorge Luis Borges punctuated with scenes of Batman kicking someone's head in. It tends to give the impression that the point of this comic is principally as a vehicle for Jim Davidson's beautifully cinematic illustrations of Batman descending upon ne'er-do-wells from tree, balcony or tall building and then kicking their heads in; so it's more or less Judge Dredd, except there's a point to Judge Dredd and it's usually funnier.

Come to think of it, I very much enjoyed Keith Giffen's Batman in the old Justice League comics, but then the point of that Batman was giving the other characters something to take the piss out of.

Raving Communist that I apparently must be, the thing I took from Batman Incorporated is more or less the same thing I take from Donald Trump's presidential campaign - tough on crime but protect your investment in the causes of crime, so let's get the drug dealers and kick their heads in and shit. Chavs too - let's add them to the list whilst we're here, the greedy bag-snatching work-shy fuckers.

Conversely, I suppose you might point out that we also have a Native American Batman here - which is a nice idea - and Morrison takes the trouble to explain in the appendix how he identifies and empathises with the slow genocide of the native American because he went to a reservation and it was a lot like some parts of Glasgow.

Great.

Well, it's not so much an appendix as pages of Jim Davidson's preliminary sketches, mostly of amazing new character sensations - some of whom you'll miss if you blink whilst reading the actual comic - notarised by Morrison listing the obscure 1950s issue of Detective Comics in which they first appeared.

Also there are schoolgirls wearing stockings and suspenders, like they do. Phwoaar! Eh? Eh? They love it!

I have no idea what I've just read, but it wasn't for me.

Jim Davidson didn't really draw it by the way. I just couldn't be arsed to type out the four million names of those who did, although they all did a really tremendous job.

Great.

Head of State

Andrew Hickey Head of State (2015)
Full disclaimer: I painted the cover. I sort of know the author, and in fact he asked me if I wanted to read an earlier draft of this novel prior to publication - which I declined as I dislike reading off a screen and wanted to wait for the finished thing; and I get massive shout outs and nuff respeck on the closing page. My impartiality may therefore be somewhat open to question blah blah blah...

Fuck it. This is a great book, and I'm pretty sure that has nothing to do with any of the above any more than it derives from the stark contrast of my having recently emerged from an agonising trawl through all four-billion chapters of Perdido Street Description - I mean Perdido Street Station.

Actually, to be honest, I passed on the offer of getting to read the earlier draft because I was a little worried that I wouldn't enjoy it and would thus find myself in the awkward position of disliking the work of someone I generally admire, and the entire internet would become an expanded version of Father Ted's increasingly uncomfortable encounters with novelist Polly Clarke, author of Bejewelled with Kisses. Andrew had sent me a few excerpts in the vague hope of providing some inspiration for the cover image, or maybe just for the sake of feedback, and I noticed the entire thing appeared to be written as a series of first person accounts, and that one of those accounts took the form of the self-conscious blog entries of a young journalist, somewhat irritating self-conscious blog entries to my mind. It all seemed so heavy-handed that I really wasn't sure there was any advice I could give, for the same reason that I'm not sure I could really give any useful advice to China Miéville aside from write a better book. On the other hand, despite these misgivings, I've read Andrew's fiction before, and also his non-fiction which itself demonstrates a profound understanding of how fiction works, and his track record has been pretty fucking great, so I assumed and hoped it would all work out in the end with further rewrites, which it did and with knobs on.

I had a feeling that, regardless of the above, Head of State would have plenty going for it once polished up a bit, but I had no idea it would pupate into something quite so solid, quite so impressive as it has. Andrew wrestles prose with the skill of a master of many years standing, setting narratives against one another, lightly scenting passages with secondary and even tertiary levels of meaning, nesting stories within stories, even speaking directly to the reader without so much as a hint of either points or literary ability stretched beyond natural reach. It may help that behind all of the curtains, Head of State is a fairly simple story at least some of which is about the means by which that story is told, and the way in which the story is told actually constitutes a fairly essential plot detail. It's the kind of thing Grant Morrison has tried to do in comics on occasion, but here it works better, related with a somehow friendlier tone by an author who seems quite keen that the reader should understand what he is trying to say; and to further extend the analogy, of all the Faction Paradox novels published since This Town Will Never Let Us Go, in certain respects Head of State seems the thematically closest to the writing of Lawrence Miles, albeit a slightly happier Lawrence Miles who listens to the Beach Boys. I should probably stress at this point that Head of State doesn't read so much inspired by as in sympathy with. It's very much Hickey's own thing, and does much which eludes other writers, not least being that Rachel Edwards' somewhat irritating self-conscious blog entries are actually supposed to be irritating and self-conscious and as such work perfectly within the context of the whole. Similarly impressive is our token conspiracy driven right-wing gun nut written as a rounded, believable, even sympathetic character rather than a check-list of hate-filled clichés driving around in an El Camino with Kiss on the tape deck. Andrew's powers of characterisation are such that even the most unpleasant characters speak to us on some level without need of the whining qualification of oh he's only racist because when he was just a kid... which is entirely consistent with what I understand to be Andrew's generally humanist view that the great majority of people are essentially decent in some respect, regardless of evidence to the contrary; and whilst we're here, his clear and erudite understanding of the American political landscape makes a refreshing change from the usual sub-Frank Miller bollocks.

Looking at the individual pieces, this is an incredibly ambitious novel, not least in terms of how it is written, and there's an awful lot which could have gone horribly wrong, but it's the tidiest piece of work I've read in some time.

Red Son

Mark Millar, Dave Johnson, Kilian Plunkett & some other guys
Superman: Red Son (2003)
...and this is what I love about Mark Millar: just when you think you've had it with the guy and those stories in which he's basically waggling his dong at the local vicar, picking up Red Son for the first time is enough to wash away even the most unpleasant lingering stench - even the athlete's foot strength fetor of The Ultimates.

Red Son rewrites Superman for a world in which the well-worn origin story of escape capsules conveying infants from doomed planets occurs in the Soviet Union rather than the United States, roughly inverting the entire history of the cold war. Whilst Millar's understanding of the Communist USSR as described here probably isn't significantly deeper than it was in his wilfully ludicrous Red Razors strip of years gone by, neither is it precisely the crowing refutation of Socialism one might expect of an American publisher. This politically soft focus works quite nicely in maintaining the fidelity of all the grey areas necessary for the story to work, so we are forever caught between no-one quite being the bad guy, or anything objectively heroic.

With Superman in his corner, Stalin facilitates the spread of Communism across the globe, not so much through force as by means of natural economic and political evolution. That America in its isolation remains the supposed voice of freedom seems irrelevant as it is reduced to a state paralleling that of the former Soviet Union at the point of collapse, as it was in the real world. Without a single slogan fired or any of the gratuitously nasty crap for which Millar has become unfortunately famed, Red Son holds a mirror up to contemporary America and shows us - us seeing as I've been here for nearly five years now - and shows us what the last century felt like for everyone else, or at least for those on the receiving end of our foreign policy.

Millar seems to specialise in narrative details which anyone in their right mind would reject as unworkable - the big, the brassy, and the incredibly stupid; and his talent is to be found in holding everything together in such a way as to conceal just how ridiculous or overambitious it really is. When he gets it right, as he does here, it's a wonder to experience - a perfectly oiled machine taking all sorts of unexpected turns with poetic grace, seemingly the end result of a process of winnowing down all the details to just those which achieve perfection. Red Son falls a little way short of carrying the weight and intense atmosphere of Miller's Dark Knight, but really only a little way.

Stray Toasters

Bill Sienkiewicz Stray Toasters (1988)
As I recall, Stray Toasters emerged during the post-Watchmen media frenzy over graphic novels and how the comic had grown up, was no longer just for kids and so on. Nevertheless I rushed out and bought this, doubtless frothy of mouth and sweaty of palm, and principally because it was Bill Sienkiewicz and his artwork on both Elektra: Assassin and New Mutants had blown my nuts off, figuratively speaking. For those to whom the name may seem unfamiliar, Sienkiewicz arguably elevated mainstream comics - or at least some comics produced by mainstream publishers - to the level of art and design, specifically art and design by Russell Mills or Vaughan Oliver. A typical Sienkiewicz page - were there ever such an animal - might feature his scratchy and beautifully observed line drawing, painting, photography, collage and found objects attached by means of glue or staples, needle and thread or even screwed onto the medium. Stray Toasters for example makes use of transistors, circuit boards and the like. The effect is visually mesmerising, and it's an approach for which Dave McKean is probably more widely known, but for my money Bill Sienkiewicz did it better and first.

In addition, Stray Toasters is written by Sienkiewicz which presumably thus allowed both narrative and visuals to develop together in organic fashion, one inspiring the progress of the other. His writing seems to work by similar terms to his art - suggesting rather than stating, as is most obvious in his use of narrative clouds wherein swarms of disjointed words or phrases summarise a state of mind much in the way of Burroughs' cut-up technique.

The story, so far as I am able to tell, follows criminal psychologist Egon Rustemagik's efforts to unravel a murder case possibly involving a vengeful robot constructed from - amongst other things - a toaster by a small and quite possibly autistic boy - with no distinction made between the metaphorical and the presumably literal. It's difficult to tell quite what is happening, not for lack of narrative direction so much as too many narrative directions all pointing down different paths, although this heavy layering of text and subtext is really what makes Stray Toasters work as a graphic novel in the true sense of the word - as opposed to being just a stack of back issues of Secret Wars all wrapped up in a fancy cover.

I have to wonder if Stray Toasters is in certain respects autobiographical, at least in a symbolic sense, what with the emphasis on themes relating to parenting. Stray Toasters hints at children reduced to consumer commodity, something to be left on a shelf in the garage once they have ceased proper function; and the emphasis on toast - the one hot meal which even the most dysfunctional parent is usually able to prepare for its little darling - seems to underscore the idea of parental love which, if sorely deficient, is at least genuine. This might be extended to a wider critique of society as represented by masochistic attorney Harvard Chalky and nightmarish surgeon Dr. Montana Violet, and further suggested by the observation and commentary of Phil, a demon on vacation from hell in the style of The Screwtape Letters of C.S. Lewis; but as with anything, this thematically loose and often surreal interpretation may depend on the individual reader. As a narrative, Stray Toasters roughly works with the obscure logic of a Max Ernst painting - all suggestion and hints towards some darker occurrence off the edge of the canvas, and with little communicated by straightforward means.

For just a few months, the comic book actually did grow up, and this was what it looked like, and Lordy how I wish we could have had a few more like Stray Toasters since.

Marshal Law: Kingdom of the Blind

Pat Mills & Kevin O'Neill Marshal Law: Kingdom of the Blind (1990)
Pat Mills and a group of other 2000AD luminaries formed Apocalypse Limited at the end of the 1980s as an alternative to what mainstream British comics publishing avenues were available at the time. It was felt that 2000AD had lost its bite to some degree, and Toxic! - the first regular Apocalypse title - was an attempt to bring some of that back; a doomed attempt as it happened. Whether the strips were just a little too abrasive for their own good, or it was the conspicuously weekly episodic division of longer stories clearly written with one significantly larger eye on American reprints, the public weren't buying, and the publisher folded.

About a year prior to the launch of Toxic!, Apocalypse Limited staked out its territory with this one off Marshal Law special which, I suspect, may also have served as a sort of toe of gratuitous violence dipped in the publishing waters: no longer obliged to answer to editors at either Epic or Fleetway, Pat Mills wanted to see how far he could push it.

Well, that's my theory anyway. I have no idea whether it's actually true, but it seems plausible when you compare the tone of Kingdom of the Blind to that of Marshal Law Takes Manhattan, the previous wacky adventure of that zany leather-clad cop with all the barbed wire wrapped around his right arm. Marshal Law is, for the uninitiated, Pat Mills' superhero comic about how much he loathes superheroes, and possibly the weirdest and perversely funniest thing Kevin O'Neill has ever drawn.

Where previous stories administered Chinese burns to Superman and the Marvel Comics pantheon respectively, Kingdom of the Blind dissects Batman; and much as I loved The Dark Knight Returns, it really does leave Frank Miller looking like a bit of a cunt, not that he's needed much help on that score of late. It's funny, bitterly sarcastic as you would expect, and this time quite phenomenally gruesome in its raking over the hitherto unexposed depths of psychological bullshit inherent in its target. Marshal Law was never going to work as an acceptable substitute for Betty and Veronica, but this one's tough going even by Mills' standards, almost bordering on joyless during flashbacks to Scott Brennan's childhood. In addition, the conclusion feels a bit tacked on in lieu of better ideas - the aspirationally poignant death of Kiloton. It's not so much that he isn't a sympathetic character - although he isn't - as simply that this sort of thing doesn't really work in postscript to such a barrage of bile.

Still, not perfect but good stuff for the most part.

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.