The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys: California

Gerard Way, Shaun Simon & Becky Cloonan
The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys: California (2013)
Okay, so this is the book I assumed National Anthem would be. National Anthem was a more recent rendering of the original story which became both this and an associated album by My Chemical Romance or, if you prefer, one of them is The Dark Knight Returns where the other is Adam West braining the Joker with a giant inflatable clown shoe. That being said, you can sort of read California as referring to National Anthem a decade or so down the line, with the populace of the latter having become something amounting to urban legends. At least that's how it seemed to me.

Here we have one of those futuristic dystopias of vaguely Orwellian thrust, albeit filtered through Andy Warhol with elements of Mad Max and Walter Hill's Warriors. Society has become a parody of the consumerist present - although as to how much of it is truly a parody is open to debate. The corporation runs everything and the sex robots of Battery City have their own religion predicting the apocalyptic return of the mighty mechanical Destroya. You get the picture.

Naturally we have rebellious outsiders opposed to the status quo, which is where the Killjoys come in, except this one flips the usual script by revealing that life with the idealistic freedom fighters really ain't that great either; unwittingly echoing the current state of internet discourse wherein shitbags occupy the full extent of the political spectrum leaving the rest of us more or less ideologically homeless.

It's massively pessimistic whilst also being a breath of fresh air, and is beautifully told with the narrative sophistication of Philip K. Dick but in a visual medium. Cloonan's art reminds me a little of those horrible Deadline folks of days gone by, except it's much, much better and actually cute where appropriate rather than just turning in twee Hernandez impersonations. I can't quite bring myself to acknowledge it being related to an album by My Chemical Romance, possibly because in terms of mood it seems closer to Bowie's Diamond Dogs to my eyes, or possibly ears. Yet, despite being tied in with the music of a band I honestly can't listen to, this version of the Killjoys is pretty much perfect in every way.

You Look Like Death

Gerard Way, Shaun Simon & I.N.J. Culbard
You Look Like Death (2021)
While it would be a generalisation to suggest that I dislike modern comics - or all comic books published during the last thirty years, to really ramp it up a few notches - there are always exceptions, and it's rarely so much that I actively dislike newer titles as that I just can't get excited about them. I still generally think comics were better when they were cheap, stupid, populist, rarely aimed at anyone with a mortgage, and printed on crappy paper - back before anyone had decided what comics are and replaced weird surprises with collectability, limiting the things to sale in stores into which no-one sane could possibly wish to venture*.

On the other hand, the Umbrella Academy is one of the few things that genuinely ticks my boxes. This one collects six issues of a solo title centred upon Klaus, the guy who communicates with the dead, and is wonderful in pretty much every sense. Here Klaus, ejected from the family home with his allowance discontinued, attempts to get by in Hollywood. This version of Hollywood hasn't quite let go of the glamour of the thirties and forties; some of the characters are talking chimpanzees - thankfully no explanation given; and there's a fairground catering to vampires, specifically the kind who wear black cloaks with a red satin lining. So we have the logic of Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol - the supposed influence of which is looking ever thinner - applied to a version of Los Angeles which is almost the place we saw in Bill Griffith's very first Zippy the Pinhead strips - and all drawn with beautifully expressive yet clean lines suggesting Moebius having a go at Tintin.

I'm sure you saw the television series. It was watchable, but felt like a misreading of the Umbrella Academy as the usual sparkly Tim Burton-Neil Gaiman bollocks. It should have been more like You Look Like Death, except it couldn't because as a comic book, the Umbrella Academy is already where it needs to be, and asking a few pizza-scoffing square-eyed bingemonkeys to fit it in between the all day Babylon 5 marathon and season fifty of Superman's Pool Cleaner in one sitting is hardly an achievement.

It may still be a little too soon to start calling Gerard Way a genius, and I doubt I'll ever see the appeal of My Chemical Romance, but You Look Like Death is a genuinely wonderful thing.

*: I am aware of virtual comics which you download directly onto your GamePornPad and even - ugh - webcomics, but remain generally unconvinced.

The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys: National Anthem

Gerard Way, Shaun Simon & Leonardo Romero
The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys: National Anthem (2021)
I'd been meaning to at least have a look at this since I read Umbrella Academy, although it turns out this isn't even the thing I've been meaning to read. From what I understand, the Killjoys began life in Gerard Way's head as the idea of a comic book which was expanded into an album by My Chemical Romance, and The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys, the original Dark Horse title, was either a companion piece or a sequel to the album. National Anthem on the other hand is apparently closer to Way's vision before it was turned into a record, so it isn't book two or even early demos, but something else entirely. My Chemical Romance continue to sound like the Bay City Rollers to me, and I still haven't read the version which was published back in 2013, so I've just had to let this one live or die by its own strengths.

It's fucking phenomenal, as it turns out. I've come to think of Umbrella Academy as wearing the influence of Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol very much on its sleeve - although this may well be a memory forged by the underwhelming TV adaptation more than by Gabriel Bá's comic book - but National Anthem feels like its own thing. The influences feel more akin to points of reference or allusions - as with Umbrella Academy, to be fair - incorporating pop art, surrealism, They Live, European comics, art cinema, Wacky Races and the Banana Splits just for starters. The narrative is so heavily allegorical that that there's not much point trying to root it in anything other than its own somewhat bendy reality, at the heart of which is a thoroughly teenage war against the forces of growing up and turning into your parents. It could have fallen flat on its arse but the telling is so beautifully literate and screwy as to prove irresistible. In fact it's so literate that it's quite difficult to follow in places, which is possibly why it works so well - suggesting glimpses of a fully formed and working, albeit thoroughly peculiar reality rather than explaining everything into tedious oblivion. The worst of the forces of evil, for example, seems to be a gang of smartly dressed young men called Books on Tape, who draw their power from the books they constantly listen to, which is all the explanation you get and, honestly, all you really need.

The art is thoroughly gorgeous, for what it may be worth, like Daniel Clowes illustrating the Dark Knight Returns as someone from Alternative Press observed. This one comes pretty close to perfection in comic book terms.

The Umbrella Academy: Hotel Oblivion

Gerard Way & Gabriel Bá
The Umbrella Academy: Hotel Oblivion (2019)
Some time has passed since the first two instalments of the story, so I hope to God there'll be more to follow - as I seem to recall being the promise - and that this isn't the end of the saga, called back into publication by the popularity of its own television adaptation; and I hope to God specifically because it's wonderful, and also because it ends on a truly peculiar note which only raises further questions.

The first series of the television adaptation was sort of decent - albeit as a haphazard mash up of the first two books leaving the second series without much to do, hence the application of creative license, but the creative license of corporate telly imagineers which left the thing looking a bit of a dog's dinner and another one for the Tim Burton skip of mannered eccentricity. Picking up this volume and reminding oneself of what the source material does really brings home what a poor second the television adaptation was, even during its better moments. Its true - as has been said - that Gerard Way tends to expect his audience to pay attention, so we don't get anything spelled out and the reader is required to either remember who everyone is, or at least skip back to remind themselves every once in a while; but the effort we put in is rewarded. As with - off the top of my head - Pat Mills' Marshall Law, this isn't quite a superhero book in the traditional sense because the caped types are mostly extras, part of the landscape more than anything - something weird half-seen around a corner rather than pinned out in the glare of yet another headachey origin story; and it works because, aside from anything, the artwork is fucking gorgeous - sort of like Jack Kirby if he'd been born in France or summink.

Hotel Oblivion is grade one Surrealism in the truest sense - as distinct from what usually passes for the same these days - and feels very much like a graphic equivalent to Cocteau's Orphée and its type what with half of its narrative spent somewhere which feels very much like a modern take on some underworld from classical mythology; and it has themes, mostly pertaining to abandonment, shitty parenting and so on. There's a lot to get your teeth into if you're prepared to put in the work. I just hope this isn't the end of it.

Doom Patrol: Weight of the Worlds

 

Gerard Way & others Doom Patrol: Weight of the Worlds (2020)
Weight of the Worlds turned out to be the grand finale and I believe the Young Animal imprint ceased to be soon after - which seems a telling indictment given that, despite poor sales killing off the comic book, there's an expensive looking TV adaptation which has lasted two series at the time of writing. I haven't seen it because it resembles a million other grunting caped shows if the trailer is any indication.

Way's version of the Doom Patrol was quite heavily populated by this point, so there was a lot going on and most of it thoroughly peculiar; but it never becomes a problem, unless you're unable to read without having every last secret origin spelled out for you. The story, based on what sense I could make of it, tells of the gang's adventures in both outer space and within the internal reality of Danny the Ambulance. It's mostly completely illogical and makes a point of tripping itself up every few pages, apparently for the sake of keeping readers on their toes, but it works beautifully if you just hang on and make an effort to enjoy the ride without worrying too much about the sort of shit that comic book twats habitually worry about. For what it may be worth, I particularly enjoyed Flex Mentallo's battle with a pair of sentient alien swimming trunks - so that's one to look out for.

The art is absolutely gorgeous even with a different artist for each original issue, which otherwise doesn't always work but makes perfect sense here given the narrative shifts from one episode to the next. Also worth noting is that with Weight of the Worlds, Way's Doom Patrol no longer felt quite so much like an homage to Grant Morrison and had really become its own thing, which you apparently didn't bother to buy so now it's dead. Nice going, fuckers.

Doom Patrol

Gerard Way & Nick Derington Doom Patrol (2018)
It came back and it was mostly wonderful, and then it was cancelled because no-one bought it. This isn't one of those graphic novels you're always hearing about - which are actually just a bunch of comic books stuck together with selotape - but the twelve issues of the thing which came out one at a time before it went tits up. Having given up on comic books many, many years ago, then cautiously returned to the form more recently, it seemed like time to do the right thing, to support my local comic book store, to support the comic book industry, and to loyally buy the fucker right from the stands each month rather than wait a couple of years for the graphic novel.

It turns out that one aspect of getting old is that new things often tend to look shit, and this is how it has been for me and the comic book industry, generally speaking. I liked comics when they were a bit crap, when they were kind of cheap and wouldn't seem out of place mixed up with issues of Take-a-Break magazine in a dentist's waiting room. I liked comics before half the store came to resemble Chinese cartoons or European cinema, when they were printed on crappy paper, and when they were read by people who bought them because they liked to read comic books rather than through a desire to belong to some larger community of sad fucking wankers. These days - as I should probably get used to saying - the comic book seems to be the least important part of the store which is otherwise filled with memorabilia and box upon box of grotesque collectible bobble-headed caricatures which must surely have been designed with children under the age of two in mind. Assuming this is what the younger generation actually want, this is why I sometimes have difficulty not regarding the whole fucking lot of them as essentially ridiculous.

Anyway, I tried to buy Doom Patrol each month just like I would have done in the good old days when everything was much better than it is now, but half the time it was delayed, or it was sold out because they hadn't bothered to set a copy aside for me as they had said they would; or at the other extreme, I accidentally bought the same issue twice because a few of them had eight or nine variant covers - keeping the investors and collectors happy no doubt. I even tried buying a couple of other Young Animal titles just to be a sport but gave up because they just didn't seem like anything special. Thus did I accumulate a collection of about eight of the twelve issues of Way's Doom Patrol which came out before it got cancelled because no-one was reading, and which I didn't bother reading because I obviously only had two thirds of a story and was saving myself for when I'd found the missing issues; except the back issues weren't even turning up at my usual online comic book retailer, begging the question of what the full fucking print run had even been - fifty copies?

Anyway, I finally filled in the gaps so here we are at last.

This was mostly a great run. The influence of Grant Morrison is difficult to miss, but this Doom Patrol was more than just a well-played cover version, possibly equating to the stranger excesses of pop art in relation to Morrison's free form Dada, given Way's greater investment in disposable consumer culture and action figures. That said, it's a shame he seems to have ignored Rachel Pollack's run on the book given its spiritual compatibility with what we have here; and it's nothing like so shocking in 2018, or at least 2020, as was Morrison's Doom Patrol back in the nineties, possibly because for all the superior artwork, quality paper, and CGI effects, it's difficult to get past the variant covers, the collectibility, and the possibility of it having been bankrolled as something in which you invest rather than actually read, or enjoy, or which fuels your running around the back yard with your little pals with towels around your shoulders. Where this sort of comic book was once punctuated with adverts for chewing gum or model kits or Hostess Twinkies, now it's shaving products, graphic novels (mostly Batman) and bingeworthy television shows (also mostly Batman).

This was a great comic, and the fact of it falling on its arse probably tells you everything you need to know about mainstream comic book publishing as it stands in 2020.

I saw some knacker slagging this off as incomprehensible on Goodreads, illustrating his point - whatever it may have been - with references to something called Rick & Morty, which is apparently a cartoon like you see on the telly, one of those things beloved of all the really important YouTube people.

Prosecution rests, m'lud.

Fallen Angels

Jo Duffy Fallen Angels (1987)
Here's another children's comic book to which I turned, having found my brain ill-equipped to cope with D.H. Lawrence after ten in the evening, another children's comic book which I flogged back in the eighties then recently repurchased in a flurry of nostalgia fueled by the realisation that I'm getting rid of this because I'm a big boy now is an essentially childish position. Fallen Angels was an eight-issue series which fell some considerable way short of classic, but was nevertheless readable, and which remains readable thirty years after the sell-by date.

Fallen Angels applies mutants to whatever you would call that trope wherein a bunch of orphans buddy together as a lightly criminal gang for scrapes and japes, as seen in various Dickens things and probably more recently in Marvel's Runaways, except I've neither read the comic nor seen the TV show and am probably unlikely to do either at any point soon. The art is efficient, if a little uneven in places, and would almost certainly have worked better in black and white. The writing is occasionally hokey, explains a bit too much in places, and the routine of reintroducing the characters anew every single issue becomes quickly annoying; and yet the enterprise, once you get past noticing that the furniture wouldn't have seemed out of place in a Michael J. Fox vehicle, is essentially fucking mental, and endearingly so.

Sunspot and Warlock of the New Mutants join a gang which seems suspiciously reminiscent of the Double Deckers, or even the Banana Splits, other members including a pair of super-powered lobsters and Devil Dinosaur, who is an actual dinosaur. The gang has been brought together by Ariel - who reputedly gave Shakespeare the inspiration for the character of the same name in The Tempest - a native of the Coconut Grove, which seems to be an alien place rather than specifically a planet. Being an alien place, the Coconut Grove is stereotypically cool by terms which made sense in 1987 - somewhere between jheri curls and the first Madonna album; and lessons about being who you are, true to your friends and all that shit are inevitably delivered before we get to the final page, none of which is so trite as to detract from this being Morrison era-Doom Patrol or even Umbrella Academy, albeit with the sleeves of its jacket rolled up to the elbows like that twat in Miami Vice; which is why it's a lot of fun and I enjoyed reading it. That's all there is to it.

Milk Wars

Gerard Way, Steve Orlando & others Milk Wars (2018)
I bought the first one then waited patiently for further issues, and before I knew what had happened, the fucker had already been collected as a trade paperback. I'd assumed it was to be just some Doom Patrol crossover affair, so I suppose that's where I went wrong. It turns out to be a Young Animal crossover affair, specifically all the characters from Gerard Way's Young Animal imprint getting to play ball with Batman and the like.

It starts well with the Doom Patrol arriving in a humongously square version of the DC universe in which the ordinarily feral Lobo wears a cardigan, smokes a pipe, and takes pride in his lawn; and then the rest of the story is told though combinations of less interesting characters as written by persons other than Gerard Way. It doesn't quite go completely tits up, but there's a distinct sag. I don't really see the appeal in Mother Panic, and Batman as mild-mannered vicar is probably funnier if you care about Batman; and the subsequent chapter told through Wonder Woman and Shade just isn't very interesting, and has the added disadvantage of resembling a million other contemporary comic books.

I go into my comic shop, and everything is on fancy paper with lavish printing with all manner of CGI effects applied to the coloration, and the art is technically gorgeous but for that it all resembles a confluence of manga, bandes dessinées, and nineties independents, because - pow -the comic has now grown up to such an extent that it's slightly ashamed of being a superhero book, and Blue Beetle must therefore aspire to European cinema, or at least to something drawn by the Hernandez brothers. I think I liked the superheroes a little better when they were crap, and cheap, and when they knew who their audience were.

Anyway, that's what the Wonder Woman sequence looks like, with a bit of cutesy Hallmark card physiology thrown in.

The arrival of Cave Carson at least serves to bring us up to speed on what we've been reading, summarising the narrative glossolalia of previous pages, until we're back with Gerard Way and the Doom Patrol for the conclusion.

The story seems to be about the homogenisation of assorted DC characters, specifically the tension between wildly creative modes of storytelling as spun by wacky individuals, and the corporate and formulaic, specifically the corporate and formulaic which demands that continuity take precedence over creativity, and which reboots the DC universe every couple of years so that we don't have to think about Superman drawing his pension. It's a nice idea, and a story worth telling, but rings about as true as U2's political activism given that DC are owned by Warner, which rather leaves Milk Wars looking a little like the very thing it attempts to criticise. It's nice that they take the piss out of the fucking Funko Pop! thing - a worthless phenomenon if ever there was - but doing so doesn't make DC a samizdat guerilla outfit; and I'm only focusing on this aspect of the book because - well, they brought it up.

On the positive side, Gerard Way is as entertaining as ever and there's a lot to like about this book, but it sags in the middle and some of it is simply incomprehensible hipster noise.

Doom Patrol

Keith Giffen, Matt Clark, John Livesay & others Doom Patrol (2011)
Here's another stack of comics, specifically a run which lasted twenty-two issues before cancellation, and with which I'm only just catching up in 2018. Giffen's version of the Doom Patrol followed on from John Byrne's 2004 version which dispensed with all the weird stuff and started afresh. Infinite Crisis - which I've never read - apparently revised Byrne's revision, meaning Giffen gets to play with Crazy Jane, Arani Caulder, and even characters from the John Arcudi run. He also rationalises Byrne's resurrection of Rita Farr, which is handy because that one decision seemed otherwise a bit crap at the time. Giffen even squishes Grunt and Nudge, both inherited from Byrne, within the first five pages of issue one, which scans as though it was probably at least a little cathartic. Read as a single body of work, this version isn't quite so satisfying as those of Grant Morrison, Gerard Way, or even Giffen's own run on the Justice League, but it's otherwise decent and the art is mostly wonderful.

My only criticisms would be that the narrative occasionally seems to wander into a room and forget what it went in for, and that the additional Metal Men strips - running for the first seven issues in the back of the book - somewhat disrupt the rhythm, at least from the point of view of the reader working his way through a stack of the things piled up on the bedside table. In isolation, Metal Men is very much a thing of great wit and beauty, as you would expect from Giffen once again working with J.M. DeMatteis and Kevin Maguire, his partners on the aforementioned Justice League. The problem is that it's slow and wordy, each panel crammed with dialogue - albeit wonderfully witty dialogue, visually sharing more in common with Windsor McCay than the caped fare in which it is rooted; and Metal Men is perfect as it is, but nevertheless sits heavily in one's reading stomach after relatively breezy instalments of Doom Patrol. Metal Men probably should have been its own book, except of course no-one would have bought it because it's too ludicrous.

As for wandering into rooms and forgetting what we went in for, I suspect Giffen's admittedly infrequent narrative Condor moments result partially from my never having read Infinite Crisis; which brings me back to the subject of revision, continuity, canon, and so on.

I still don't understand why DC feels the need to reboot every five or so years, and I don't believe that anyone likely to pick up a Batman comic in 2018 is really going to give a shit about the character having been around since 1939, or that Bruce Wayne should logically be a septugenarian by now. I was heavily into Claremont-era X-Men comics at the end of the eighties, before it all went down the crapper; and what made those books so readable - at least for me - was that they felt more akin to a soap than generic caped twats fighting crime; and whilst X-Men may well have been bogged down with continuity, it was the continuity which made it work, which gave the narrative a semblance of plausibility - even just minor details like someone reading a newspaper with a headline about what happened to Iron Man in a different comic, a thousand inconsequential strands of faux cause and effect stretched out across the entirety of Marvel's flimsy three-colour reality, just like the real world with all its loose ends and footnotes that never quite add up. The idea that Cyclops should have been in his fifties because he'd hung out with beatniks at the Coffee A Go-Go as a teenager in those early issues simply didn't matter because all of the heavy-lifting was done by the story; which in turn brings me to why I was never entirely sold on DC comics.

Shortly after discovering Marvel, and then Alan Moore's Swamp Thing, I picked up other DC books from the newsagent just to see what they were about. Blue Devil was funny, but that was about it for me. Even in the eighties, most of what I saw felt like a throwback to the sixties or earlier - corny as fuck supertypes throwing on a garish leotard and deciding to fight crime with a sprinkling of generic angst for the sake of texture, the sort of problems you imagine grown-ups must encounter if you're about eight. Most of it made Jim Shooter's Marvel look like Jean-Paul Sartre. Fast forward to the twenty-first century, and many of these issues of Doom Patrol showcased sample pages from whatever else DC was publishing at the time - Magog, Teen Titans, innumerable Batman variations, the Flash, plus there's an issue of Secret Six I picked up because the story crosses over with Doom Patrol - and it all looks fucking awful, like they've just about caught up to the seventies, but the worst of the seventies and with shittier art. Maybe that's why they keep rebooting all the time, having failed to realise that Alzheimer's Superman isn't actually the problem. There's not much point giving Blue Beetle a cellphone and a facebook account if the calendar is otherwise still stuck at around half past 1974. This would mean that the good stuff - Doom Patrol, Giffen's Justice League, and a couple of Vertigo titles - have been exceptions proving the rule, which is probably why the good stuff keeps getting cancelled: because the readership would rather have shite like Secret Six or Harley Quinn*.

Oh well. I suppose that's just how it goes.

*: I acknowledge that this criticism is founded upon my never having read a single issue of Harley Quinn, but frankly it looks fucking wank, like DC attempting to cross Jamie Hewlett's Tank Girl with that bloody awful Insane Clown Posse comic book that came out back in 2000, drawn by someone who presumably regarded Todd McFarlane's Spawn as the greatest story ever told; and Tank Girl was also pure shite while we're on the subject.

Doom Patrol

John Arcudi, Tan Eng Huat & others Doom Patrol (2003)
Not a collected edition or an - ugh - graphic novel, but a big old stack of comic books just as nature intended. I don't think this one did very well judging by the fact of it never having been reprinted. In fact I wasn't even aware of its existence until someone pointed out that DC had attempted to revive Doom Patrol a couple of times prior to the current version written by Gerard Way; and thusly intrigued I've been hunting them down, issue by issue.

John Arcudi's version of the Doom Patrol began back in 2001 and lasted twenty-two issues. I've no doubt it was a tough act to follow the Grant Morrison and Rachel Pollack versions of the comic, but Arcudi managed it fairly well by acknowledging the weirdness without necessarily duplicating it. It's probably closer to the caped mainstream than the book had been since Kupperberg, but it's still pretty odd. John Arcudi wrote The Mask for Dark Horse and you can sort of see his stamp, not least in the ongoing saga of the Doom Patrol menaced by the spirits of ancient Chinese demons trapped in a suit of armour, although admittedly my experience of The Mask is based exclusively on having seen the film with Jim Carrey a couple of times. Arcudi replaces whoever was left standing at the end of Rachel Pollack's run with neurotic superpowered teenagers, much like those we saw in New Mutants I suppose, but with the twist being that they really are a bunch of useless, whining emo fuckers, and as such are actually quite likeable - as distinct from teens who successfully fight crime whilst agonising over whether they'll pass their exams. It's initially difficult to see why this was even called Doom Patrol, but the book really comes into its own after a few issues, feeling very much a legitimate continuation of the mythology.

This is greatly aided by Tan Eng Huat, artist on all but three issues of the run. His figures are sometimes a little awkward, as are his faces, but the overall effect wrought with all those sleek little lines tidily splayed across the page is wonderful, and much, much greater than the sum of its parts. His art resembles that of some of those people taken on board 2000AD during the early nineties, sort of raw and untutored but otherwise working in spite of shortcomings - like the late John Hicklenton with a vague manga influence sent to a couple of life drawing classes; and I wouldn't ordinarily even notice the work of letterers or colouring people, but Bob Lappan and Dave Stewart really made this thing what it was. The lettering in particular somehow reminds me of both Glenn Baxter and Windsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland, very much enhancing the peculiar, haunting atmosphere of the enterprise.

In all honesty, I picked this up expecting it to be awful, Doom Patrol restored to wholesome mainstream tedium with all of the strangeness sanded down so as to facilitate sales boosting guest appearances by Superman, but it's as good a sequel to the Pollack run as anyone had a right to expect, and it's a real pity it didn't last.

The Umbrella Academy: Dallas

Gerard Way & Gabriel Bá The Umbrella Academy: Dallas (2009)
I was interviewed for a podcast called Raconteur Roundtable. They were mostly interested in my Faction Paradox novel, Against Nature. The interview was conducted over Skype, and it was fun but exhausting. My original intention had been to present the brooding, unflappable façade of a sort of English Henry Rollins but without the weightlifting, but I suspect I came across more like Suzanne from Orange is the New Black. I kept catching myself in the webcam feed, going cross-eyed and whirling my hand in the air whilst feebly scrabbling to make the word stuff come out good.

That night, I was woken at three in the morning by the cellphone I never use - except to receive sales calls which aren't even for me - beeping to let me know that it needed recharging so that I may receive more calls from people trying to sell car insurance to my mother-in-law. I then found myself unable to get back to sleep until about 6.50AM, having lain awake for several hours giving full consideration to just how mad I sounded during the interview, and whether it would be practical to trace the invention of the beep which a phone makes when it's low on juice at three in the fucking morning back to a single individual and to smash their kneecaps with a hammer. I got up at seven to feed the cats, then went straight back to bed for yer actual sleep and a couple of hours of weird, unpleasant dreams in which Adrian Meredith, my junior school bully, coerced me into buying his girlfriend's gold necklace back from the pawn shop to which he had flogged it.

I woke at ten to discover that Jello the cat had shredded an entire bog roll for the third day running, and so I was not in the sunniest of moods, in contrast to the rest of Texas which was already 98° in the shade. I needed coffee, toast, and the routine of my daily hour or so of reading, but I couldn't face Vonnegut's dreary debut novel. I needed comfort food, so to speak, something colourful and fun requiring no expenditure of brain cells, and so I picked this.

The more I read by Gerard Way, the more I appreciate that he's very much doing his own thing. Obviously there are traces of Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol, but Umbrella Academy somehow manages to be even more esoteric without ever quite descending into non-sequiteurs. The story ducks and weaves like Nic Roeg, Bill Burroughs, or any reference to weird European cinema you care to make, whilst also doing something suspiciously reminiscent of a garish Saturday morning cartoon serial; and where with Morrison, you can occasionally spot the gaps and sense how pleased with himself he gets over certain layered references, Way has none of that awkward self-consciousness, just confidence and expertise. The story is fucking peculiar, and the art is gorgeous. I've no idea what any of it's about, but it made my day much, much better than it had been.

The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite

Gerard Way & Gabriel Bá
The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite (2008)
To cut to the chase I really enjoyed this, which I mention so as to save readers the effort of skipping down in search of the point at which I'm not slagging something off. However, a huge rant came to me just as I finished reading, inspired by but only indirectly relating to The Umbrella Academy - actually no more than an expansion upon themes found in my usual rant - and I really need to get it out of my system so here we go. We will return to The Umbrella Academy following the next couple of paragraphs.

There's a dominant aesthetic which has emerged from western culture at the end of the twentieth century which I'll refer to as Titterism for the sake of convenience, and Titterism because its lowest forms suggest a person tittering as they photoshop, for example, a robot riding a penny-farthing whilst somehow imagining themselves to be a font of creative wit. I could be wrong but I suspect it all started when the Cure, having recorded the excellent Seventeen Seconds and Faith, turned to shit, although this may simply be when I first began to notice. I suppose it might be dated to the time Robert Smith spent playing guitar for Siouxsie & the Banshees then presumably came back with the wrong end of their aesthetic stick to record shite like The Love Cats and The Caterpillar. Titterism seems to have been born through a recontextualisation of Lewis Carroll, and in the wake of Robert Smith's pioneering work found expression in the art of Vaughan Oliver who famously set Victorian typefaces across blurred photographs of someone's grandma using a mangle. This led thematically to Dave McKean using rusty screws purchased from an antique shop to fix dead leaves to the cover of Sandman comics, and arguably to the stories contained in those comics and written by Neil Gaiman; and then to everything else whipped up from some tastefully blurred aspect of Victoriana or its associated images of childhood - Harry Potter, Doctor Who, steampunk, Peaky fucking Blinders, Tim Burton, you name it...

Gadzooks, chaps - why methinks 'tis one of those computing engines so fashioned as to resemble a gentleman and - oh my - he's riding a jolly old boneshaker! By the Lord Harry, what a to-do! What will they think of next?*

The appeal of Titterism - as I will continue to call it until it feels right - is not difficult to appreciate. We respond for the same reason we still respond to Dada and Surrealism, art movements to which much Titterist work appears to aspire. It looks interesting because it seems incongruous in the age of computer-driven mass communication. It looks incongruous because it looks conspicuously hand crafted and hints at values with which we are no longer fully connected; so contrast is the key element - hence what you get when you google steampunk Dalek. It's a space age robotic alien from the future, and yet it's powered by - tee hee - cogs and flywheels, so let the titters commence. No creative ability is required, just the capacity for standing an object next to its thematic opposite. This is probably why this whole thing has come about now, scored to the rise of information technology which allows those without clearly quantified artistic vision to endlessly quote, cut, paste, and rearrange what has gone before. Dada and Surrealism did the same but in sharp contrast to still strongly defined aesthetics of craft and beauty which modernism had only just begun to address, so the act of collage was itself a statement even before we consider any philosophical dimensions invoked by Tristan Tzara, Max Ernst, André Breton and others. The collage served subversion rather than tittering novelty the appeal of which is that it looks funny innit! Like everything, the subversion has been stripped of content and commodified as Titterism. It's old and weird and it reminds us of that which had content beyond the basic aesthetic, which saves us the trouble of thinking about it for longer than it takes to read this sentence.

So that is why I dislike Titterism. For every individual who understands exactly what they're doing and is able to offer art of some intrinsic value beyond mere collectibility, there are a million other cunts busily dangling Bulldog Drummond from a dirigible and expecting to get paid for it. This is partially why I browsed The Umbrella Academy in the book store two or three times before actually buying it. It looked potentially intriguing, but it looked like Titterism, a bit Tim Burton in places. I've tried with My Chemical Romance but I never really understood that emotional children music - as it's called - and The Black Parade still sounds like a noisier, more whiny Bay City Rollers to my ears; so the appeal of a Titterist comic book written by their singer did not seem obvious; but, I'd still have bought the first issue of the new Doom Patrol comic a couple of weeks back had it been written by Ben fucking Elton, never mind Gerard Way; and it was good, so of course I just had to read this.

The Umbrella Academy is a group of seven, slightly bizarre super-powered children, and whilst it skates close to the edge, occasionally threatening to slide over into a full blown Titterfest of monocles, penny-farthing bicycles, and Christmas puddings with sixpences in the middle - it has enough momentum and weird invention to get away with it, and ultimately to succeed with flying colours. On the surface of it, it's almost a homage to Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol - and if you enjoyed that you'll almost certainly enjoy this - but maintains its own distinctive voice through, oddly enough, a seemingly more pronounced European aesthetic, or enough so as to imply that Way has sat through more than his fair share of bewildering black and white films with English subtitles. So it manages to feel significantly less mainstream than Morrison's Doom Patrol, thanks in part to Gabriel Bá's wonderful artwork falling somewhere between Tintin and Ted McKeever.

Aside from some muted wibbling noises about shitty parenting, it admittedly doesn't actually do a whole lot beyond looking amazing, but that doesn't have to be a problem, and it does more than just titter. If you really need it, The Umbrella Academy's surrealist short-circuiting of expectation might quite easily be taken as an end in itself. It throws interesting shapes, and is at heart deeply fucking stupid, but then all the best comic books usually are.

*: I could churn out this shit all day if anyone's interested: five cents a word but all reasonable offers will be considered.

Doom Patrol #1

Gerard Way & Nick Derington Doom Patrol #1 (2016)
I very rarely review either single issues of a comic or anything freshly squoze from the presses - partially because I tend to wait until I have some sort of confirmation for a comic book not being a massive pile of shit before I'll grudgingly shell out for a collected edition, and partially because I just don't read comics like I used to; but this is the first of a new run of Doom Patrol, which feels like a special occasion.

Back in the nineties, Doom Patrol was the first thing Grant Morrison did which could be described as fucking brilliant in a way that not even Zenith had managed. It had been a superhero book in the sixties, albeit a fairly weird superhero book, and Morrison rewrote the thing as unrestrained Dadaism, possibly as a reaction to the increasing emphasis on superheroes making sense in the wake of Watchmen. The title was revived again about a decade later, but I can't even remember who was supposed to be involved and I'd more or less given up on comics by that point. I know I haven't heard much that is good about that more recent Doom Patrol; but anyway, now we have this...

I first heard that Gerard Way was writing comics when Charlie Adlard told me. Charlie draws The Walking Dead and was surprised to have found himself sharing a convention table with the former singer of My Chemical Romance. 'He's quite a nice bloke though,' he reported with the expression of a man surprised to find himself saying such a thing. Neither of us liked My Chemical Romance, but Way's earlier Umbrella Academy was decent, according to Charlie.

Clearly the lad gets Doom Patrol and what made it work, so this is no reversion to superheroes with neatly modular problems, and with not the faintest whiff of X-Men about it either. Way clearly gets why Morrison's Doom Patrol worked and has somehow invoked the same disjointed brilliance without it feeling like a cover version. Derington's art is happily understated, suggesting freewheeling European comics rather than anything with too many spandex clad ninjas swearing vengance. It's maybe a bit Tintin, a bit Rian Hughes, and otherwise perfectly suited to the tone of this thing.

As we rejoin the gang, Robotman has been in yet another automobile accident and is reduced once again to just a head; Casey Brinke's singing, tap-dancing telegram has accidentally blown-up her room-mate; Danny the Street is about to be launched as a meat-style consumer product, and there's a possibility that our universe might be just a microcosm within some vast existential doner kebab. I've no fucking clue what is going on or what is likely to happen next, but for the first time in over two decades, I'll be heading back to the comic shop in another couple of weeks to find out.