Robo-Hunter: Day of the Droids

 

John Wagner, Alan Grant & Ian Gibson
Robo-Hunter: Day of the Droids (1982)
While Verdus seemed like an essential purchase, this collects material which I vaguely remembered reading as a kid, and there it was in the store next to the first volume so it seemed worth a punt. Day of the Droids didn't make quite such an impression on me first time round, and I can see why. It does a job and it has its moments, but it reads somewhat like an attempt to repeat the formula - our man Sam on a one-man mission to put down an entire robot revolution, albeit this time back home on Earth. The sheer absurdity which made Verdus work is still in evidence, but here it feels a little as though Wagner was scrabbling around for things to send up. The cheery stupidity of Hoagy, Sam's assistant, is sufficiently chucklesome, but the robot version of Woody Allen's version of the Mafia feels a bit of a stretch, or at least it did to me and still does. As a whole, Day of the Droids is entertaining as fuck, yet falls some way short of the surrealist riot which was Verdus. I don't quite follow why anyone would have built pinstriped robot hoodlums, and Ian Gibson had apparently reached the point by which he couldn't be arsed to make them look even vaguely mechanical so we may as well be looking at extras from Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Also we have Carlos Sanchez Stogie, a robot cigar created because IPC had adopted an anti-smoking policy, so Wagner came up with a robotic alternative to Sam's usual cigar based - it says here - on Carlos Ezquerra. Although Stogie is a lot of fun and it could be argued that Wagner here predicted e-cigarettes, I can't help but feel a little sorry for Ezquerra. I never met the man but I'm sure there was more to him than pronounceeng everytheeng like thees with occasional references to tacos.

I've seen it suggested that Alan Grant's run on Robo-Hunter was where it all went downhill, and yet his Beast of Blackheart Manor - the second strip in the collection - avoids the pitfalls of Droids for all that it's more or less Scooby Doo with robots. Grant actually manages to do something slightly different with Sam Slade and Gibson's art is clean, tight, and more dramatic. It's hard not to wonder whether somebody complained about Day of the Droids' gradual slide into sketchy panels full of wavy lines resembling a sort of amalgamation of Monet and Carl Barks.

Beyond this I have no coherent recollection of later Robo-Hunter strips beyond something headachey drawn by that bloke who drew everyone as massive pairs of eyes surrounded by cross-hatching, so if it was Alan Grant's fault, Blackheart Manor thankfully wasn't necessarily any indication of what was to come.

Robo-Hunter: Verdus

John Wagner, Ian Gibson & José Luis Ferrer Robo-Hunter: Verdus (1979)
I just couldn't leave this one in the book store. The pull was too powerful. I grew up reading 2000AD from issue twenty onwards and this was, in my opinion, one of the very best things from those early years before the comic grew up and Judge Dredd took to dropping the occasional reference to Baudelaire. Robo-Hunter was Sam Slade, a man who hunted robots as is probably obvious from the title. Here, in his debut strip, he travels to an entire planet of robots.

Seriously, what more could you fucking ask for?

More or less every single page of this thing was like stepping on a memory sherbert landmine, and best of all is that somehow this comic strip about a man who shoots robots which is very clearly targetted at twelve-year old boys and which makes not one single reference to a Portishead album remains an absolute delight when read in Trump year IV by a fifty-five year old man. Even the jokes are still funny.

I think it works because Robo-Hunter takes itself approximately seriously whilst also being completely fucking stupid, and joyously so. I'd forgotten, for example, how Sam is held prisoner by BO, the unfortunately designated sewer robot, and is required to play Robopoly in order to win his freedom. Robopoly is robot-themed Monopoly complete with tiny robots as playing pieces. BO's pieces cheat, and so Sam bribes the tiny robot coppers inhabiting the board game's jail to knobble his opponent. You simply never had that sort of attention to detail in Blade Runner.

Verdus heaps absurdity on absurdity as it goes on, somehow without ever seeming cynical, culminating in robot religious leaders arguing in the robot parliament, and one of them is a mechanical Rabbi doubtless drawn from the films Woody Allen made when he was funny and arguably less creepy; and it works because Gibson's art has just enough elasticity to stretch to such ludicrous excesses without losing its dramatic footing. He was never quite one of my favourite artists, and I don't even like to think about those later strips which seemed to be mostly just wavy lines approximating women resembling Daisy Duck, but he had the balance just right with this one, keeping those loose lines in check with large areas of black or letratone.

I sort of object to the whole thing about spoilers, because if the matter of whether or not the butler did it is pivotal to your enjoyment of whatever it is you'd rather not have spoiled, then you're probably watching some shit allegedly bingeworthy TV show rather than engaging with genuine culture; but, even though Robo-Hunter is pushing forty, I'll refrain from telling you how it ends in case you don't already know because I'd forgotten the ending - which is actually quite weird and shocking and is probably indicative of why Robo-Hunter could only ever have been born from the pages of 2000AD. I guess I'd forgotten how great this comic used to be when they got it right. Sometimes it really was the galaxy's greatest, and this was one of those times.

Longshot

Ann Nocenti & Arthur Adams Longshot (1986)
Here I am again with the reading equivalent of comfort food, or even the reading and looking at pictures equivalent of comfort food. Shitty occurrences temporarily brought me down and I just couldn't cope with Borges. This was originally purchased during my time as a Marvel zombie, then sold, then bought again once a mid-life crisis expressed itself as nostalgia for the Marvel zombie days, the innocence, the excitement of some new character showing up, all that good shit…

Longshot isn't the worst, but it hasn't aged quite so well as others of its vintage. Actually, it's far from the worst and is mostly readable, a decent story ever so slightly handicapped by its own telling. Longshot is a relentlessy chipper superguy, a character whose creation alludes to more innocent, wholesome times. He's a former slave escaped from a cruel media-fixated dimension, blessed with good luck powers, and the six issues collected here are about his escape and subsequent attempts to get along in our world, or at least the Marvel version of our world. Buckles are swashed with some frequency, and it feels as though Ann Nocenti was probably a fan of The Never Ending Story and its like. We have mullets aplenty, and we live in a world of leg warmers and pizza as a guilty pleasure, so yeah - this one was never aimed at fifty-four-year old men with Sleaford Mods albums such as myself. However, the most unexpected element is that it feels like a fanzine, or at least an eighties indie comic, the work of people who were still very much learning as they went along. There's way too much dialogue cluttering up each page, suggesting overcompensation, and Arthur Adams artwork was still surprisingly clunky and uneven at this point, some hints of what was to come, but quite a few figures suggestive of Ian Gibson characters as drawn by Rob Liefeld. Of course, given those responsible, it's not without redeeming features. You just have to keep your eye open for them.

Steed & Mrs. Peel

Grant Morrison, Anne Caulfield & Ian Gibson Steed & Mrs. Peel (2012)
You would think I might have learned my lesson by now but nooo, here I am again. Oooh oooh Grant Morrison - this could be interesting - fucking idiot. I didn't bother with this thing first time around as an Eclipse Comic because I never really gave that much of a shit about The Avengers, or even the sixties in general for that matter. I still sort of like The Prisoner, but mainly because it's mental, and because its decade serves as a setting rather than a self-conscious manifesto. I've probably seen The Avengers at some point, but it was never really my sort of thing.

Moz turns in an efficiently generic tale at about the level of one of those other strips you might find in 2000AD. It's clever enough in its own way but, let's face it, this sort of twee swinging sixties shite more or less writes itself - bowler hat, village green, dolly bird, antique car, giant spinning top, obscure childhood reference, man wearing spectacles with octagonal lenses, Mary Poppins, menacing fairground encounter, and any combination thereof amounting to the sort of ennatainment landfill which makes even fucking steampunk seem wildly adventurous. Anne Caulfield's story is about the same except it doesn't really add up or make any sense whatsoever, plus the supposedly south American references were so aggravatingly wrong I can only assume they were made in homage to sixties telly getting everything arse about tit - dinosaurs existing at the same time as Fred Flintstone and so on.

You probably don't care, but Caulfield's Deadly Rainbow begins with the story of a lost Amazonian Inca tribe drawn in the style of the Mixtec Tilantongo Annals and borrowing the iconography of the same - trapeze and ray year markers, step pyramids, the God Tlaloc, even hand gestures once signifying specific narrative events here reduced to just some shit that looks cool. Inca culture didn't really intrude upon the Amazon basin, and nor did it have any clearly documented contact with the Mixtec culture found more than two thousand miles to the north; and those south American cultures really aren't all the same bleedin' thing innit, and the only common ground between the Mixtecs and the Inca were sun worship and metallurgy, more or less. If this was a comic book depicting some long lost tribe of ancient Egyptians leaning heavily on longboats, those helmets with the horns that they all used to wear, and a hammer-weilding God of Thunder, we would have collectively told the artist to fuck off.

Speaking of which, the artist is Ian Gibson, who was great back when he first started drawing RoboHunter, but by this point he seems to be filling pages with wavy lines and the occasional appearance of a character who I think is probably Daisy Duck, although it's difficult to tell for sure. As some complete knob is quoted on the back cover, if you're a fan of the property, I have a feeling you'll love it, and so you probably will. For me the most telling element of such praise is the term property, because that's all this really is - a series of familiar trademarked signifiers produced from a spigot in compliance with your entertainment requirements, so pay the fuck up, suckers.

The Ballad of Halo Jones

Alan Moore & Ian Gibson The Ballad of Halo Jones (1986)
I followed 2000AD more or less from the beginning, or at least from prog #21 onwards, simply because that was the first issue I saw in Gibbons' newsagent; but I caught on quick and cashed in a bag of toy cars against the previous twenty issues with some kid at school who is probably still kicking himself. I remained faithful until roughly October 1980 at which point the comic slid into a somewhat shitey period with the advent of unreadable tosh like Meltdown Man and The Mean Arena, although it's probably no coincidence that it was also around this time that I discovered punk rock, Devo, and record shops. Several years later some guy at art college gave me a stack of more recent issues because he didn't want to just throw them away, and my addiction reasserted itself. It would be overly generous to say that the comic had grown up in my absence, but Mean Arena was nowhere to be seen, and it had at least stopped being quite so shit, and there was this story called Halo Jones.

In case it isn't obvious how radical The Ballad of Halo Jones seemed at the time, or at least how radical it seemed to me, here was a strip about urban boredom and shopping trips gone horribly wrong with an almost exclusively female cast smuggled into a comic specialising in stories about tough men who hunt down renegade robots, tough robots who hunt down renegade aliens, renegade men who hunt down tough dinosaurs, alien dinosaurs who...

...well, you get the picture I'm sure.

Meanwhile in the 1990s, I ended up selling my entire stash of progs - about fifteen years' worth - to Skinny Melinks' comic shop in Lewisham for what seemed a slightly insulting sum, probably a fucking tenner or thereabouts, and all because I'd met a girl who had agreed to let me have sexual intercourse with her. This later became a source of regret, at least until history repeated and someone else gave me a free stack of old progs, and once I got beyond the raw nostalgia, I realised that a lot of those stories worked better when you still belonged roughly to the age group at which they were targeted; or you can never go home as both Thomas Wolfe and Mark E. Smith have observed under entirely different circumstances.

Thankfully, not least because this collection was a Christmas present, The Ballad of Halo Jones has endured as a story where Moon Runners and Colony Earth sort of haven't. It comes as a shock reading something so conspicuously episodic requiring a punchline every five or six pages, but it's still pretty damn satisfying despite that. Alan Moore has, I would guess, always had a thing for soap opera, at least if Big Numbers, Top 10, and even Watchmen are anything to go by - his stories as a rule being about people dealing with circumstances rather than the circumstances themselves. To this end Halo Jones is closer in spirit to one of the more eccentric Mexican telenovelas than any of the tales of renegade justice dinobots hunting down tough maverick mutants with which it once shared a cover. The events are massive, but no more massive to Halo than anything experienced by the reader out here in the real world, relatively speaking, and the themes are both timeless and immediately familiar - the uneasy transition to adulthood, the desire to escape from the crushing circumstances of one's childhood environment, the subsequent lack of direction, and the inevitable realisation that things are not going to get better. It's an extraordinarily depressing tale, regardless of it being told by means of jokes, weird aliens, and a ton of fancy ideas. The story - divided into books one to three - is, for my money, encapsulated best by a single caption near the opening of the third book:

Records of her movement over the next few years are incomplete, yet reveal a pattern of increasing desperation... as if she were pacing the galaxy trying to get out.

Yes, I know the feeling, and that's precisely why I ended up in Texas; and just as I bagged a happy ending thank you very much, so too does Halo it seems, which somehow justifies all the preceding crap of the big, horrible journey.

Aside from the conspicuously episodic feel of the first book, I think the only other surprise is Ian Gibson's artwork which definitely worked better on the low quality paper of the weekly comic as I remember. It's not that it's bad so much as that it's often very, very sketchy and overly stylised as though the characters are torn between hasty fashion design and the pouting offspring of Donald Duck. It lacks the clarity of the similarly wavy and otherwise superior Jesus Redondo, although there's a marked improvement in the third and final book for some reason. That said, I still can't imagine this working so well with any other artist at the wheel, although I could have done without hearing about the Halo Jones hamburger shot collector's art that almost went on sale at some convention or other.

Classic is an overused adjective in the crazy biz of comics, but entirely justified in this instance.