J.D. Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

 

I read this mainly because it had begun to feel a bit weird that I hadn't, given the shadow it casts across various stretches of popular culture. Having been found in the pocket of the bloke who murdered John Lennon, and then again in the fictional narrative of Margaret Thatcher's aspiring assassin in Grant Morrison's St. Swithin's Day, I'd always assumed Catcher to be about a neurotic outsider who flips and consequently pops an innocent with a firearm - the blueprint for all those school shootings. Thankfully it isn't anything quite so obvious and the general concept of both teenagers and their inherent disgruntlement was still very much in development back in 1951.

So Holden Caulfield isn't the tidily modular rebel who rejects whatever you've got on principle, but rather is someone who has failed to connect with aspects of his own existence - like a more freewheeling version of Roquentin from Sartre's Nausea, the first English translation of which had appeared just two years earlier, it might be noted. My own stepson had a couple of years at one of those supposedly prestigious military academies to which Americans with too much money send their offspring, and so I recognise Caulfield's environment, finding it both reassuring and depressing that someone else identified the exact same problems with such places over seventy years ago. Caulfield isn't a bad student, or a kid with any  psychological issues which would today be medicated to drooling oblivion. It's simply that he's just smart enough to recognise bullshit when he sees it and struggles to reconcile himself to what is expected of him, most of which is predicated on the existence of a noble world full of grand achievements, aspirations, and fine men delivering speeches in front of marble columns, as distinct from a world made entirely of bullshit. He's been taught to hold truth as among the highest of virtues and so cannot help but revolt against that which it reveals. In practical terms, this amounts to his dropping out of school and vanishing off into the wild, blue yonder over the course of a weekend, as told in rambling first person with endless digressions and passing distractions in Caulfield's own distinctive if occasionally limited turn of phrase. You might argue the case for it being a more populist Nausea with Caulfield, lacking Roquentin's philosophical rhetoric, obliged to define his disconnection in more familiar terms, or terms with which I was more familiar at least.

It isn't a literary precursor to Ill Bill's Anatomy of a School Shooting, despite the reputation, being concerned with cause more than dramatic effect, and I doubt it would have endured so well were that the case.

The Dreamthief's Daughter

Michael Moorcock The Dreamthief's Daughter (2001)
I had no plans to read beyond the first six tidily collated Elric books given that everyone's favourite albino sword swinger sits at the very edge of my field of thematic interest, and wouldn't get a second glance from my direction were it anyone other than Moorcock; but I had four of the six and needed to fill the gaps, and this was on the same eBay page as the other two, so fuck it, I thought.

The Dreamthief's Daughter turns out to be a big, fat novel rather than short stories welded together in a slimmer volume, but serves as a good example of Moorcock's tendency to stretch genres beyond breaking point in the name of keeping things interesting. This one inhabits his celebrated and frequently imitated multiverse, without which we probably wouldn't have had the Moore or Morrison versions, and the camera is pulled back so as to reveal Elric as inhabiting just one segment. Another segment, which may or may not be where we live, is occupied by Ulric von Bek, an Elric variant who has the misfortune to witness the rise of Adolf Hitler, which is itself tied in with goings on in the war between the forces of Law and Chaos. If this is sounding a bit familiar, you're possibly thinking of one of numerous cheap, less satisfying imitations, because Moorcock merely joins dots while resisting the temptation to reveal that Hitler was actually working for those outer space robot people, or Cthulhu, or the three-legged bloke on the Manx flag. Nope - these Nazis are the real thing, driven by exactly the same bullshit which seems to have enjoyed a recent resurgence in popularity out here in the real world. This presents a canny balancing act given the celebrated Nazi love of mystical bollocks remaining bollocks in the context of a novel featuring actual magic swords.

Perhaps my overfondness for reading, as a child, had made me too familiar with all the old arguments used to justify the mortal lust for power. The moment the moral authority of the supernatural was invoked, you knew you were in conflict with the monumentally self-deceiving, who should not be trusted at any level.

Thus we get an Elric book which seems to channel Abraham Merritt - given how much time is spent underground - gets the absolute best from its genre, has quite a lot to say, and keeps Nazi Germany in horrifying perspective without turning the fuckers into generically cool bad guys to be booed and hissed like the empire in Star Wars. Possibly ironically, given my opening paragraph, this may even be the best Elric book I've read.

Lanark

Alasdair Gray Lanark (1981)
Generally speaking, I've grown a little jaded with novels featuring characters who are aware of inhabiting a work of fiction, because the conceit seems to have become so ubiquitous of late as to suggest that shitheads are getting in on the action. It's one of those post-modern tricks that fucking everyone does because it's easy, and it suggests philosophical depth without the pesky requirement of actual groundwork undertaken, and anyone pointing out the emperor's lack of clothing will usually find themselves branded a thickie. Each new example of a character turning to the imaginary camera to directly address an audience now reminds me of my stepson assuming he'll blow our minds by explaining how Deadpool, a Marvel superhero from the nineties, breaks the fourth wall. I wouldn't mind but he hasn't even read the comics, just watched some green haired YouTube gamer twat opining about them.

For anyone who didn't get the memo, or who may still be buzzing from the euphoria of this amazing discovery and the attendant honour of getting to tell the rest of us about it, fictional or metafictional characters who don't occasionally address the reader - or wink at the camera or otherwise comment on the story in which they have become involved - have been with us since before the novel was even a thing. It might even be suggested that characters who remain unaware of someone else writing their lives are the more recent anomaly in terms of literary history. I assume that at least one of you will have heard of William Shakespeare…

Anyway, I'd been wondering about all this after Lance Parkin wrote about what he termed - by his own admission, for the sake of convenience - the Gray Tradition, a genre encompassing writers such as Philip K. Dick, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison and others known to turn up within their own narratives. Of course, terming it the Gray Tradition might seem akin to proposing that Don Quixote belongs to the Deadpool Tradition but, as Parkin explained, he was mostly just thinking aloud, and his model arguably incorporates more than just the basic furniture of Menippean satire, hence his efforts to map it out, whatever it is.

Lanark figures here for a number of reasons, not least being the chapter wherein Lanark meets the author who then describes some of what he's been trying to do with this book. Lanark is himself also a pseudo-autobiographical stand-in for the author. His story, one which spans from youth to old age, takes place in the city of Unthank, which may or may not be an afterlife of sorts. Lanark, hardly likely to miss the suspension of normal laws of cause, effect, and common sense, speculates that Unthank may even be Hell - although it seems to bear closer resemblance to the frozen underworld of many pre-Christian cultures, albeit with a generous helping of Kafka - but the precise nature of Unthank isn't so important as what it says about our own world.

Our own world, or at least Alasdair Gray's experience of the same, is detailed in the two central books of this four-ish part novel as the life of Duncan Thaw, a young Glaswegian who attended art school in the late fifties. Thaw paints murals - as did Gray - but finds himself at odds with his tutors, his contemporaries, and much of his social environment; and his life culminates in his painting the book of Genesis across the interior of a church scheduled for demolition. Thus, much like humanity born in the Biblical garden, the great work is doomed before it's even started.

Very few men are as nasty to their children as you are to yours. Why didn't you give me a railway station to decorate? It would have been easy painting to the glory of Stevenson, Telford, Brunel and a quarter million Irish navvies. But here I am, illustrating your discredited first chapter through an obsolete art form on a threatened building in a poor province of a collapsing empire.

Thaw's mural seems to echo both the history of Glasgow, and by association the history of human civilisation, and the writing of the novel itself; and this was the point at which I noticed just how much Lanark foreshadows Alan Moore's Jerusalem - which now strikes me as amounting to Lanark rewritten with more ornate guitar solos and very little of the actual heart or soul.

As to what Lanark is about, it's about everything, or is at least about more than can be summarised in a single paragraph; but if there's truly any overarching theme, its constitution is touched upon when Lanark argues with Ozenfant in the final chapter.

'You are a liar!' cried Lanark. 'We have no nature. Our nations are not built instinctively by our bodies, like beehives; they are works of art, like ships, carpets, and gardens. The possible shapes of them are endless. It is bad habits, not bad nature, which makes us repeat the dull old shapes of poverty and war. Only greedy people who profit by these things believe they are natural.'

It's a long book - nearly six-hundred pages - because it's about everything, stated in organic, evolving terms rather than just ticking all the salient points one by one from a list, Alan. Much of it is frankly fucking peculiar, but it's all familiar. Some of it drags, just as real life occasionally drags, but it's all part of the process, making Lanark as much of an essential read as anything can be described as an essential read; and even if whatever conclusions we draw may seem pessimistic or depressing, there's a great joy in embracing something which is at least truthful.

1963

Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, Rick Veitch & others 1963 (1993)

From where I was stood at the time, 1963 looked like Image Comics experimenting with the possibility of printing something that wasn't shit - which was fairly surprising. It took the form of six comic books, all written by Alan Moore, all different titles purportedly belonging to a shared continuity which was obviously a satire on the Marvel universe as it had been in the sixties. It was deliberately hokey, emphasising the more amusing aspects of the caped sixties - the occasionally rabid patriotism, the pathological fear of commies, the casual misogyny and so on. It was hardly an original idea, having been done in Mad magazine about every three or four months*, usually with a version of Wolverine sprouting knives, forks and spoons from his knuckles - amongst other side-splitters doubtless thrashed out during a few hours on the golf course; and of course Grant Morrison reckons it was all inspired by that issue of his Doom Patrol, which seems unusually narcissistic even by his standards.

The point of this was not quite satire, or not exclusively so, but that the six titles would interconnect, culminating in an eighty-page special wherein Mystery Inc., Tomorrow Syndicate and the rest battle it out with the horrible then contemporary Image characters with ninja swords and too many angry lines on their faces - Deathstabber, Kill Squad and those guys; and thus would we learn that the gritty realism of 1993 was but the kid fuel of 1963 seen from a different angle, or summink. No-one seems to agree on what the point was, or would have been had the special ever seen print, and it's difficult to tell from these six existing comic books. As to why the series was never wrapped up as intended, no-one seems able to agree on that either. This was the point at which Alan Moore decided he'd had enough of superheroes, and you can kind of tell, but it doesn't seem to be entirely his fault that the engine ran out of steam.

Whatever the case may be, and ignoring rumours of various persons other than Alan Moore having readied the missing final piece for imminent publication, 1963 reads - as stated - as a satire on sixties Marvel, without quite slipping over into parody. The individual issues are mostly enjoyable enough in their own right without it all feeling entirely cynical, excepting Horus, Lord of Light which is simply dull, dull, dull by terms which could never be levelled at the Mighty Thor upon which it provides a tangential commentary. It helps that the style is familiar more than the characters, so we have N-Man who, for example, is spun from nuclear accidents which inexplicably bestow strange powers, but he can't really be mistaken for the incredible Bulk or any of those other creaking parodies; but the more one reads into this, additionally delving into the faux text articles, adverts, and letters pages, it begins to feel pretty much like a rant against Stan Lee and the comic book industry in general; and while the rant may well be justified, it gets fucking boring because the overpowering alliteration and digression just ain't that funny and it begins to feel like an embittered fist shaken at clouds, or even Moore's little gang sniggering amongst themselves. So 1963 was sort of self-defeating in that for all that it does, it wasn't actually anywhere near so much fun as, off the top off my head, Roy Thomas' All-Star Squadron from approximately the same era, likewise harking back to a golden age, and so rigorously square as to make 1963 seem like the work of Marcel Duchamp.

Shame.

Mind you, we got a couple of pin-ups from Melinda Gebbie, so that was a scoop, obviously.

*: It probably wasn't but it felt that way, and I'm possibly thinking of Frantic.

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.

Invasion!

Keith Giffen, Bill Mantlo, Todd McFarlane & others Invasion! (1989)
This was one of those massive crossover jobs which comic book publishers tend to impose on their respective casts of characters to an approximately yearly schedule, or at least they did. Perhaps wary of playing the alternative universe card every single fucking time - although if that was ever a concern it's presumably since gone flying out the window - DC here fell back on the traditional alien invasion narrative just like mother used to make, complete with Dominators, a race bearing coincidental but nevertheless effectively malevolent resemblance to the yellow perils of less enlightened times. The idea is that the Green Lantern Corps, guardians of the DC galaxy, have been nobbled by some means or other leaving the field open for an alliance of extraterrestrial bad guys to step in with a final solution to the superhero problem. Earth is an unusually fertile source of superheroes, you see, and those caped guys are forever foiling the plans of various alien warmongers. Invasion! actually does quite a nice job of accounting for why so many superheroes are from Earth, and even why an explosion in a laboratory isn't always a bad thing - probably because playing the mutant card would have seemed a bit obvious, not to mention lacking in originality.

Invasion! is therefore about as good as you will expect it to be, depending on what you've taken from the above. As with caped fare in general, there's the usual level of cheese and implausibility; but if you can work through the pain, it's surprisingly satisfying - and entertaining, and well stocked with big ideas, albeit big slightly silly ideas. It was the Independence Day of comic books, I guess, and similarly reliant on sheer scale more than it was on individual stories - as epitomised by panels of massed superheroes flying at vast spaceships, their numbers so great as to necessitate them being drawn as a huge cosmic asparagus spear in which one can faintly pick out the shapes of tiny capes. Most of the art is handled by Todd McFarlane, and while he's no Jack Kirby and his Superman is a bit too much in the direction of Basil Wolverton, he communicates sheer scale very well, so the first two issues are actually a hoot - although you should probably keep in mind that I enjoyed Independence Day.

Unfortunately the war is won by the end of the second issue, leaving the finale to focus on the human tragedy of the aftermath which is all a bit ham-fisted. Scott from the Doom Patrol pegs it as a gratuitous result of the Dominators' gene bomb, saving Grant Morrison from having to include him in his post-dadaist revision of the team chronicles; as do some other generally unpopular characters whose names I've forgotten and may not have known in the first place. Portentous vows are made at various funerals, boo hoo, and so on and so forth. It feels like an afterthought and seems disproportionately extended, presumably because it would have seemed weird had issue three dropped from eighty pages to the fifteen which were probably all it needed.

The US military was gearing up for all manner of foreign soil japes back in 1989, notably the invasion of Panama with one eye on whatever seemed to be kicking off in the Gulf, Afghanistan, and so on; and Invasion! accordingly feels somewhat like an unreconstructed appeal to the sort of patriotism which might facilitate such things, amounting to a massive three issue grunt of sometimes you just gotta do the right thing, and without too much of that pesky liberal stuff getting in the way. This doesn't make it a bad comic so much as an unintentionally amusing one, at least with the benefit of hindsight, and it at least remains a refreshing change from alternative universes killed off in a narrative following the logic of a William Burroughs novel with less emphasis on men's bottoms; which doesn't necessarily make it a good comic either, but I've read much, much worse.

Kid Eternity

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

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

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

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

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

Crisis on Infinite Earths

Marv Wolfman & George Pérez Crisis on Infinite Earths (1985)
Sometimes if I find something I'm reading a bit joyless, a bit of a chore, I'll take a break halfway through and read something else for the sake of a breather. This time it's Melville's Moby-Dick which has been kicking my ass, and so much so that I took a short holiday around the halfway mark. I'm now taking another break even though I have just one hundred pages to go, because it's like reading a novel written by William Sanderson's portrayal of E.B. Farnum in HBO's Deadwood. There was an entire chapter discussing maritime rope, for fuck's sake, which is why Crisis is the eighth thing I've read which isn't Moby-Dick even as the same remains glued to my bedside table with the tenacity of that nine-incher which no amount of sink plunging can force around the s-bend.

Anyway, Crisis on Infinite Earths was a little before my time in terms of my comic book habit, and I never really felt the need to backtrack. It was an attempt to rationalise, streamline and reset the DC Comics universe of Superman and the rest so as to spare us the indignity of having to read stories about Krypto the Superdog or Batman drawing his pension, because that would be like, you know, ridiculous. I can see the sense of the idea, although it seems a bit redundant given that the DC Comics universe of Superman and the rest remained pretty fucking ridiculous even without all those alternate realities making the place look untidy. From where I'm stood, this caped stuff tends to work best when emphasising something other than the fact of everyone wearing leotards whilst biffing criminals and returning the stolen wallet to the millionaire, and DC always had a much harder time rising above its inherently wholesome ideals than the competition. Even if the point of Crisis was the excision of talking ducks and crime fighting dogs that we might feel at least a little more grown up when seen reading the thing in mixed company, Wildcat and the Joker still somehow made it past the interview stage. Wildcat is a superhero whose mask features not only cat ears but also whiskers and a cleft upper lip, and this Joker is the guy who leaves comedic clues to his crimes for Batman to solve.

That said, I generally have a lot of time for Marv Wolfman, and he does what he can with the material. I'm not a massive fan of George Pérez and while his art can be occasionally gorgeous, I've always found it a bit too clean somehow. Crisis sort of works in that it deals with events on such epic scale whilst juggling a cast of thousands so that nothing amounts to much more than a passing glimpse of something huge, which probably wouldn't work with a more refined focus; and in keeping everything moving, it tells a story with the tone of hearsay, lending the saga a mythic quality - a tale of war amongst the Gods, which is approximately what it is, despite most of those Gods being essentially ludicrous. There's a problem in so much as that we all know where the story is going so all of those caped types firing rays at one another page after page feels somewhat inconsequential. Much of the story was intended to rewrite its own continuity so that actions would have consequences and couldn't be conveniently written off as having occurred on Earth-180 or wherever; so it's ironic that the epic conflict should feel so arbitrary and lacking in consequence, being just what superheroes do so that we know they're superheroes - an endless repetitive loop of days saved on a Biblical scale.

The inevitable introduction tells us how important Crisis was, how it was the first of its kind, and how it was so much classier than Marvel's Secret Wars; and true enough Secret Wars is pretty fucking stupid and nowhere near so elegant as this, at least in the rendering; but frankly, Secret Wars was a lot more fun with different things happening from one issue to the next, so it didn't really matter that Klaw seemed like a guy who had hit his head and stumbled off the set of Crackerjack. While Crisis on Infinite Earths is readable and reasonably entertaining, or at least more entertaining that Herman Melville describing different types of harpoon, it's kind of underwhelming and it's certainly nothing like so deep as Grant Morrison might have you believe.

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.

Inferno

 

Grant Morrison, Mark Millar & Carlos Ezquerra Inferno (1993)
I was still buying 2000AD regularly when this saga was first published; I re-read some of it a couple of years ago after snapping up those Summer Offensive issues on eBay - mainly for the sake of Big Dave, and yet none of it rings any significant bells; and now I've bought it again as a collected edition—sorry, graphic novel—so as to give it a fair crack of the whip. I say saga but I actually mean a story lasting twenty issues of the galaxy's greatest which therefore probably wouldn't stand up in comparison to, off the top of my head, Beowulf.

Anyway, the main thing I've taken from this, and which I'd forgotten, is that Judge Dredd in its heyday was mostly a comedy, or at least satire, sharing more in common with those ludicrous hard man strips in the early issues of Viz than it did with any caped American fare. In a totalitarian future society where one might be executed by a monosyllabic uniformed nutcase for littering, chuckles were never far away. Dredd himself is therefore horrible, which is the point, his principal virtue being that he's absolutely consistent and ruthlessly honest by his own draconian terms. The weekly strip therefore usually seemed to work better in short, sharp bursts of ultraviolent slapstick, and earlier attempts at lengthy stories spanning multiple issues worked best when they kept this in mind - I still have fairly good memories of the Cursed Earth and Judge Caligula tales, although admittedly it's been a while.

However, fifteen or so years down the line, it was beginning to look a bit thin, at least to me, which was presumably why I stopped buying. Dredd works better as a Ramones album than as some sprawling conceptual Tolkien with firearms cycle exploring the limits of his grim, frowning universe, because that universe isn't really very interesting unless it's funny. Mark Millar's Purgatory develops the background of a prison break in a penal colony on one of Saturn's moons, and Grant Morrison's Inferno brings the escaped violent psychopaths to Mega City One - which they take over because what else would they do? So they act like escaped violent psychopaths - a handful of whom have somehow managed to oust the government of a city of eight-hundred million - Judge Dredd busts heads and saves the day, as usual.

I like Mark Miller but Purgatory is high on primary colours and low on redeeming features even by his standards, and Inferno reads like Grant Morrison was mostly just trying to pay off a phone bill. It would be saved by Carlos Ezquerra's mostly gorgeous artwork, but even that has begun to stray into caricature by this point, with Chief Judge McGruder having sprouted what looks like a loaf of bread where her nose used to be.

It's not bad but it feels somewhat like a strip going through the motions, and the inclusion of Millar's pleasantly ludicrous six-page I Hate Christmas serves mainly to remind us what Judge Dredd should look like.

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.

Yesterday's Tomorrows

 

Rian Hughes, Grant Morrison, Chris Reynolds and others
Yesterday's Tomorrows (2010)
I remember thinking Grant Morrison's Dare was amazing at the time, but apparently not so amazing as to keep me from flogging all my issues of Revolver on eBay; then, more recently, I found this which reprints the same along with other things by Rian Hughes. This is going to be a bit painful because I've met Rian Hughes and he's a friend of at least one friend - or was - and he seems a decent guy, and I genuinely love his design work; but this ain't great.

Dare retains the initial thrill I recall experiencing thirty years ago, or whenever it was, but then suddenly stops as though they ran out of shocking things to do with the poor cunt and decided just to cut to the explosion. It probably wasn't so obvious in monthly instalments, but read in one sitting it comes across as comically weak. This was the era of the comic growing up, Rupert Bear dealing crack in Nutwood and so on, so naturally the latest version of Dan Dare turned him into a metaphor for the failure of England's dreaming and a colonial embarrassment who buddies up to Morrison's version of Thatcher. Here she's even more like Mosley than the real one and her big scheme is to win votes by solving a national food shortage, all endorsed by Dare, so it would seem; and the cheap food source is produced by a biological monstrosity made out of recycled members of the unemployed and resembling four giant penises penetrating four vast vaginal orifices to yield a cheap nutritious Pot Noodle style substance somewhat resembling spunk. It's all a bit exhausting, and our Thatcher substitute is quite naturally business partners with the Mekon. Morrison did this much better in St. Swithin's Day, The New Adventures of Hitler, and probably almost everything else he's ever written; and while Dan Dare might be a relic of a certain era with all sorts of discredited cultural baggage in tow, I'd say it's a bit of a stretch to call him a bully. Even Belardinelli's Dan Dare as Sid Vicious seems ultimately more faithful and certainly less insulting.

Yet, such were my tastes back in 1990 that Rian Hughes art was enough to carry the thing; except with hindsight I realise that it's mainly the deco buildings and the tailfins which do the heavy lifting, with the figures seeming almost intrusive. Unless reduced to design elements seen in the distance, Hughes' people are awkward, angular, and seem forced, as though they're deco buildings trying to look like people; and the lines which serve the landscape so well remain consistent for the sake of the design, despite being ill-fitted to anything organic, particularly the human face. One can see what he was getting at - possibly something with the elegance of Fougasse - but Hughes' figures are sabotaged by the style to which he was apparently committed.

Regrettably, I felt the same about the rest - strips reprinted from Mauritania and elsewhere. The figure work is awkward, despite its best efforts, and painfully so, reducing the potential for anything truly expressive, turning it all into an exercise in retro-cool with little discernible substance. The Lighted Cities is sort of atmospheric, probably because it's short; The Science Service is barely comprehensible, and I've already read Really & Truly once this decade, which was more than enough. There's also some sort of Raymond Chandler adaptation but I couldn't face it.

Design-wise, I'd say Rian Hughes is right up there with Neville Brody and Malcolm Garrett, but the cartoon strips unfortunately weren't all they could have been.

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.

The Mystery Play

Grant Morrison & John J. Muth The Mystery Play (1994)
I'm pretty sure I had this at the time but it didn't leave much of an impression due to an ongoing bout of comic book indigestion. Anyway, I'm better now, so here we are again. Muth's photorealist watercolours are at the most breathtaking I've seen, and Morrison reigns in his usual excesses to tell a proper grown-up story with allegories and everything. Comic book mythology being what it is, I can't help feeling this may have been written in the spirit of showing that silly Alan Moore once and for all, which may even inform the final scene wherein the gruesome reality of the tale we've just read is sold for presumably underwhelming development to some television dude coincidentally named Alan; and yet, for the sake of argument, show him it does in so much as that I can't really imagine himself achieving such lightness of touch without all the component parts having been nailed to some labyrinthine flow chart, somewhat spoiling the effect.

The narrative spins around the contemporary setting of a mystery play in which someone murders the bloke playing God, so God is dead, and without so much as a nudge, a wink, or anyone screaming do you see what I'm saying? in your face. The detective who seeks the truth of the murder is himself revealed to be hardly lacking in sin for which he's literally crucified, thus ultimately bringing salvation to the town, although there's a question mark hanging over whether the salvation provided has actually made anything better. As for what any of this might be saying, I guess it's saying quite a lot of things, and none of them so regulated or clearly defined as to be ticked off on an imaginary list as job done. The potential for ambiguity is why it works, and why it feels crafted rather than merely assembled - as with a piece of music, you simply have to read the thing, because descriptions - including this one - will be something else entirely; and neither a Mason nor a Lovecraftian space octopus to be seen.

The Shipeater

Rob Carter & Jamie Ortiz The Shipeater (1979)
Starblazer was a twice monthly digest sized comic book published by D.C. Thompson running from 1979 to 1991 and featuring, so I gather, a single story each issue, so not much in the way of recurring characters or scenarios. I'm not sure I'd even heard of it until long after its passing and have no memory of having seen it in any newsagent when I was a kid. It seems to have been roughly the same format as all of those Commando type things I avoided like the plague so I probably wouldn't have been looking on that particular rack; but apparently it suffered from terrible distribution, and I expect that, had I ever seen a copy, I almost certainly would have bought it, or at least thought about buying it. Apparently first formulated in 1976, by 1979 when it hit the stands, or a stand somewhere, it nevertheless looked somewhat like those Beano people hoping to wet their beaks in the 2000AD bird bath.

Anyway, I found this one in Oxfam in Coventry and couldn't really not buy it for obvious reasons. As with other offerings from the same stable, neither writer nor artist receive credit so I had to look up their names online. The art of Jamie Ortiz actually seems vaguely familiar, although it's probably more likely that he shares certain stylistic traits with other presumably Hispanic artists, notably Redondo. There's a touch of various Mikes who drew for 2000AD, outstanding dynamic figure work, and great use of shadow; and it has to be said that for all D.C. Thompson's supposed faults as publishers, they tended to employ artists who could actually draw - possibly excepting Grant Morrison in a later issue of this same organ - as distinct from IPC whose annuals were often cursed with eye poppingly wonky sub-fanzine level work. They also had a copy of the 1980 Dan Dare annual in that same Oxfam and it was pretty ropey.

As a story, The Shipeater is your basic modular opera with space cops solving space mysteries, the sort of thing which could quite easily be recycled as the aforementioned Dan Dare or Captain Scarlet or any of those; but there are some pleasantly weird, wonky ideas here which, combined with the wonderful art, make for the sort of thing which would have absolutely blown my nuts off had I chanced upon it back in 1979; and which remains a pleasure to read now that I'm a fat old man sat at the PC in just my underpants.

Apparently there's a shitload of this material due for a reprint, so that will definitely be one to look out for.

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.

2000AD Summer Offensive

Grant Morrison, Mark Millar and others 2000AD Summer Offensive (1993)
Not a collection, in case anyone was wondering - but eight back issues of the comic nabbed from eBay and dating from a year or so before I gave up on the galaxy's greatest and flogged my entire collection to Skinny Melink in Lewisham. I remember Big Dave being great, and as something which is obviously never going to get a reprint, and the Summer Offensive sounded fun as I applied myself to Wikipedia in an effort to jog my memory of having read the thing.

The idea was to hand the editorial reins over to Grant Morrison, Mark Millar and John Smith for a couple of months just to see what would happen - these being three writers who had distinguished themselves with sparky, volatile strips characterised by a reluctance to play it safe, or summink. Maybe someone was hoping to revive that wave of lucrative outrage which had greeted 2000AD when it first appeared in the seventies.

Big Dave is as horrible as I recall it being, and therefore justifies this return visit. It's essentially real world Biffa Bacon from Viz turned up to eleven, working mainly because it really doesn't have any redeeming features whatsoever and constitutes a psychological portrait of the worst aspects of nineties Britain, and because Steve Parkhouse's artwork is gorgeous, possibly the best he's ever drawn. Big Dave arguably defies criticism by already being everything bad you could possibly say about it.

Then there's the rest, none of which I was able to remember from the first time I read this stuff back in the nineties, and now I know why. Morrison and Millar's version of Judge Dredd isn't bad but it's no Cursed Earth, and only really feels like Dredd because of Carlos Ezquerra's characteristically exceptional artwork, which I guess at least distracts from a story which might otherwise seem fairly average; and the Indian Judge is named Bhaji and comes fitted with speech patterns very much in the vein of Apu from the Simpsons, so that's a bit of a bore.

Back in April, I wrote a satirical thing called 2000AD After I Stopped Reading which proposed a number of strips which may or may not have featured in the comic since I lost interest, informed mainly by sarcasm and vague memories of the formulaic composition of some of 2000AD's lesser series. Anyway, Mark Millar's Maniac 5 and John Smith's Slaughterbowl read unfortunately as though they were expanded from vague ideas I came up with when taking the piss. Maniac 5 looks amazing, having been drawn by Steve Yeowell, but that's all; and while Slaughterbowl isn't entirely without worth, John Smith has written much better, and it reads as though the other two were egging him on, insisting he make it even more offensive; which I suppose at least conceals its parentage in those earlier future sport strips which were mostly just Roy of the Rovers with jetpacks.

I'd say Really & Truly is as bad or worse than I remember it having been, except I had no memory of ever having read it; so it's as bad or worse than I would have remembered it being had I been able to remember having read it, which wasn't the case. It's like a conversation with a pothead, the word wow in faux psychedelic lettering dragged out over eight agonising instalments, or hits if you prefer, man. Groovy. The plot - and it should be noted that were I to frame the word plot as it applies here between accordingly ironic quotation marks, the necessary degree of irony would demand that said quotation marks be of such scale as to force the rest of my text right off the edge of the screen - is almost identical to that of Everyman and shares similar affectations of nadsat, drugs, and self-consciously quirky characters on a really amaaaaaaazing trip, meaning it's unreadable and a criminal waste of Rian Hughes.

So that was the Summer Offensive - Big Dave, a cover version of Judge Dredd, a couple of participation award winners, and a strip which really, really wanted to be Philip Bond's Wired World from Deadline, which was itself a massive pile of wank: not very zarjaz at all, it has to be said.

The Crossing Line

Fabian Nicieza etc. The Crossing Line (1990)
'Back on the Shakespeare, I see,' observed my wife as I lay in bed reading my sad little mylar bagged stack of Avengers comics. I didn't blush because there didn't seem to be much point. I freely admit that I bought the six issues of The Crossing Line because I was rifling through the used comic book racks at Half-Price when I noticed one of these with guest starring Alpha Flight proclaimed on the cover.

'Ooh Alpha Flight!' squealed the little voice within, and they had four of the six issues there in the racks which seemed nice and tidy, and for just a dollar a pop, and it was easy enough to find the other two online, and why the fuck not? In any case, half of my facebook friends list - admittedly the half I've unfollowed so that I don't have to read their characteristically inane reportage on cosplay, Funko Pops, or watching four thousand episodes of Charmed in a single sitting - are either Harry Potter fans, grown men presently engaged with a Puffin Books reading marathon, or people who are actually able to discuss what Steven Moffat was trying to say in such and such a terminally shite Who episode, so fuck you!

Anyway, I've been trying to read The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, and Jesus Christ it's boring. It hasn't quite reached Heinlein standards of loathsome which is why I'm still dutifully ploughing through page after page of space opera tedium, but I needed a break, and this seemed sufficiently unlike The Mote in God's Eye as to serve as a palate cleanser. Being a kid's superhero comic from the nineties, it quite naturally takes itself far too seriously, but no more so than Mote's wearying starship commanders responding to security breaches and other important sounding military shit.

The Crossing Line is a story of terrorists hijacking a British nuclear submarine, and how the mighty Avengers rush to the scene to save the day only to find themselves embroiled in a massive clusterfuck with Canadian and Russian superhero teams who had the same idea, just as the forces of Atlantis once again decide to wage war on the surface dwellers. There are probably about five persons with speaking roles in the entire story who don't have super-powers, or who haven't acquired super-powers by the last issue, so it's like that Simpsons comic in which the power plant blows up, irradiating the entire town of Springfield, transforming everyone into superheroes. It's deeply fucking ludicrous, but is a lot more fun than A Mote in God's Eye, and the fact of almost every single character being able to fly or to shoot beams from their hands roughly shuffles the story closer to science-fiction than most caped material; and besides, describing this as deeply fucking ludicrous implies that there's such a thing as the ponderous superhero equivalent of Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge, which there really isn't.

By my understanding, the appeal of eighties Marvel lay in its being a huge shared universe viewed only one small piece at a time through reading the comics and trying to work out who was who, what they could do, and what the hell was going on; so storytelling aside, it appealed to anyone who liked to collect sets of things as a kid, anyone who ever decided that their Shogun Warrior model kits could inhabit the same continuity as Micronauts action figures. That's how this stuff first drew me in, and how it still works up to a point. I'm older and wiser, but it's still kind of interesting trying to work out who the fuck these other Avengers were supposed to be, given that I don't even remember them from back in the day and otherwise recognise only Captain America and the Vision.

Whilst Fabian Nicieza has written some ropey stuff in his time, he always had something interesting going on, and was distinguished amongst the Marvel script droids of his era as someone with a distinctive style, even with themes common to his writing - specifically a pronounced tendency to draw from the real world politics of the time in ways which seem quite perceptive once you get past the people in costumes cracking jokes whilst fighting. This also means that we get to see not only George W. Bush in a nineties Marvel comic, but even the Thatch!

The Crossing Line is, as I guess we have probably established, ridiculous, although it differs only from more recent Grant Morrison efforts in method rather than substance, but it doesn't matter. It does everything it sets out to do and held my attention for a couple of hours without inducing either depression or embarrassment. I doubt anyone will ever collect this material as a graphic novel, but maybe it's fine as a stack of six comic books.

Fantastic Four: 1234

Grant Morrison & Jae Lee Fantastic Four: 1234 (2002)
This is pretty much Morrison doing a Dark Knight on the Fantastic Four, safistacated storytelling, inner demons, lots of rain and lightning, familiar superheroes as mysterious, mythic, even Godlike, and I guess it does it very well in so much as that I didn't not enjoy it. Yet at the same time, it reminds me of all those other things Morrison wrote that I can't be bothered to think about, Batman and Green Lantern and the rest - elegant, efficient, beautifully crafted, but…

I'm presently buying back a whole shitload of American comics I bought in the eighties then got rid of in the nineties, five or six a week from an online shop seeing as they're inexplicably still pretty cheap for the most part, and generally seem to have stood the test of time - keeping in mind that they weren't pretending to be anything other than kid's comics. One of those I've not yet read is an old Fantastic Four annual which I picked up mainly because it ties in with the Days of Future Present story which ran though a couple of the X-Men books. I had a quick look at the thing when it came in the mail: the Fantastic Four are back from some previous adventure to discover the Baxter Building mysteriously transformed, and this isn't even a Fantastic Four with which I am familiar because the line-up includes the She-Hulk, a female version of the Thing, and Ben Grimm back in human form. I'm sure it will prove to be be ludicrous, brightly coloured, and with far too many thought bubbles and villains announcing what they plan to do, but even now I'm more intrigued to find out what goes on in that story and why the Thing has tits than I was by anything in 1234. Back when I was a full-time Marvel zombie, I recall Grant Morrison getting misty-eyed over the weirdness of comics in the sixties, notably that one where the Flash spends an entire issue of his own book as a paving slab; and in comic book terms, 1234 leaves me longing for the weirdness, not to mention all the stupid, colourful fun, of the late eighties.

It's not a bad book, but - well, you know…

Judge Dredd: Crusade

Mark Millar, Carlos Ezquerra & Mick Austin Judge Dredd: Crusade (1995)
Grant Morrison is credited as co-writer of Crusade, but it feels a little like something he may have mumbled in the pub which Mark Millar expanded into a ten part story. A ship returns from deep space apparently with a message from God - which sounds like Morrison's sort of thing - and the rest is a pie fight amongst Judges of various futuristic nationalities as they scramble to the site of the ship's crash landing, each hoping to be first to hear the good news. The Japanese Judge ends up committing hari-kiri, the Irish Judge is already on the sauce when first we meet him, and the Indian guy is called Judge Bhaji; so yeah - my guess would be that this is mostly Mark Millar's doing. I'm ordinarily a fan, although when Millar's writing is bad, it's fucking awful. His version of Dredd mostly reads as though he's taking the piss, but Crusade and Frankenstein Division - the other story here - are mostly saved by gorgeous art. Mick Austin had moved on from drawing people with giant heads and his art was at this point approaching a painterly elegance suggestive of the classic sixties artists who drew for Eagle, TV21 and the like; and the late, great Carlos Ezquerra drew Frankenstein Division, so obviously it's amazing.

It's been a while since I read Judge Dredd, and I was a little taken aback by its singularity of purpose. Judge Dredd is the very opposite of anything which marketing executives would describe as character driven, which is why it works and has proven so enduring. Judge Dredd himself is essentially a massive fucking cunt, but a ruthlessly consistent one so we always know where we stand with him, which is a rare and admirable quality. The strip comprises Dredd punching the rest of the characters over and over, page after page, indiscriminately dishing out desserts both just and unjust whilst shouting, and so it's a lot like listening to a Ramones album in so much as that it's a Ramones album and there's not much joy to be had in arguing with it. At times it approaches Viz levels of absurdity, and the cynicism is of such density as to go into negative figures and come out the other side looking peculiarly sanguine. Considering that it's more or less 1984 with greater emphasis on leather and motorbikes, there's something strangely uplifting about Dredd.