Interzone 217/8 (2008)

I bought these back when I was trying to get a handle on the current state, as was, of the science-fiction short story. I went to Borders on Tottenham Court Road one Saturday afternoon and came back with the latest issues of Analog, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov's Science Fiction magazine, and Interzone. Of these four, Interzone was the only homegrown publication, the others being American, and I'm afraid it didn't make much of an impression on me beyond that I liked it more than Analog - which isn't saying a lot. I'd hoped it would blow me away because, being English, I was rooting for the home team.

Revisiting issue 217 fifteen years later, I find that my initial impression remains more or less unchanged. There's nothing actually bad here, and it has its good points, but somehow it's difficult to get excited about any of this. A Google search for Karen Fishler, whose Africa somehow warranted the front cover, brought up only dimly related hits, mostly former readers opining that Interzone was way past its best and subscriptions would not be renewed. These gripes were from 2004 from what I could tell, so I don't know if this issue was more of the same, or even representative of a return to glory.

To get the grousing out of the way, the art is mostly knocked up on a computer and faintly unpleasant in the same way as early seventies art from that year when everyone discovered the airbrush, but never mind. The fiction is mostly decent, or at least readable. The aforementioned Karen Fishler's Africa reads somewhat like Jack Kirby at his most portentously cosmic without the pictures, which doesn't quite work for me. Paul G. Tremblay's The Two-Headed Girl and The Ships Like Clouds, Risen By Their Rain by Jason Sanford are both engagingly weird, but probably not quite enough to justify second or third helpings. Only Paul McAuley's Little Lost Robot had enough zing to pin his name to my inner corkboard for future reference. If Fishler was channeling Kirby, then Little Lost Robot has a strong hint of Pat Mills in its DNA and seemed to warrant my picking up his novel, Whole Wide World when I chanced upon a copy. I'd read his Eye of the Tiger a few years earlier and thought it was complete bollocks, and Whole Wide World was unfortunately not all I'd hoped it might be; so the best thing here is also the best thing I've read by an author whose work I haven't otherwise enjoyed - which hardly seems like a recommendation.

The review section devotes more pages to film and telly than seems entirely warranted, although said reviews are at least well written, beautifully argued, and certainly a cut above the mumbling generally found in the back pages of other digest magazines*; and Torchwood gets a filetting so thorough that I punched the air.

Sorry kids, but it was fucking garbage and anyone who enjoyed it should feel bad about themselves.

Actually, I'm not sorry in the slightest.

Despite the above, I somehow dutifully picked up the issue which followed, and despite the wonderful cover art by Warwick Fraser-Coombe, it's taken me fifteen years to get around to reading the thing - which is probably the fault of the previous issue.

Anyway, for what it may be worth, 218 is a little more convincing than 217, comprising six short stories which at least rate better than not actually bad - although Hannu Rajaniemi's His Master's Voice admittedly felt somewhat like every other box-ticking cyberpunk page filler I've ever read. This one was a Chris Beckett special, so we get three from him along with an interview which, I felt promised a lot more than his fiction delivered. It sounded great, but didn't quite come together in the pages which followed, although it's difficult to say quite why in so much as that Beckett's writing clearly did everything promised on the tin. My best guess is that it somehow felt like science-fiction written by a social worker, that being the author's day job. All the same, Rat Island, the last of the three, probably would have won me over had it been reproduced in isolation; or would have inspired a more vigorous winning over, I suppose I mean. There's enough here to warrant the assumption that he may well have written something amazing at some point.

*: Probably also a cut above the mumbling you're reading right now.

The Human Torch and the Thing

Stan Lee, Larry Leiber, Jack Kirby, Dick Ayers & others
The Human Torch and the Thing (1965)
As with the Daredevil collection I tackled back in 2022, I picked this up mainly in the name of research, and contrary to the impression given by Marvel Firsts last week, Stan and the lads hit the ground running with at least a few of the debut titles of their superhero revival. The Human Torch was apparently deemed so popular as to warrant a solo strip in the pages of Strange Tales. With half the page count of an issue of the Fantastic Four, much less juggling in terms of characters, and less pressure given that Doctor Strange was presumably held responsible for half of the sales, Johnny Storm's solo scrapes stuck to the fairly predictable formula of a succession of bank jobs and jewellery heists undertaken by traditional hoods with a few bells and whistles thrown in for the sake of the superhero theme. The heavy lifting is done by cheap gags, outrageous novelty, and the sort of peculiar twists of imagination which Bob Burden was apparently channelling in Flaming Carrot, an eighties book which I'm beginning to realise was a tribute at least as much as it was ever a parody. This was the era of Paste Pot Pete, a villain who carries a giant pot of glue around with him, a man with the power of all paste who, for example, at one point fashions a formidable pair of binoculars utilising lenses made from a special clear paste. In another issue we meet the Plantman, an individual resembling Harvey Pekar who has invented a dubious looking device with which he hopes to increase the IQ of certain plants; but the device is struck by lightning and grants him power over all plants, which he discovers when he exclaims well, fan my hide, obliging an adjacent bush to do so with its leaves. Also we have the real Sandman, a villain who turns into sand and is therefore significantly more interesting than Neil Gaiman's wispy personification of various Cure albums.

It's bollocks, but it's entertaining bollocks which gets away with it because it's for actual kids and it doesn't care, although being beautifully drawn by Jack Kirby, Dick Ayers, Bob Powell and others doesn't hurt either. Also, Strange Tales #105 brought us what I believe to be the single greatest panel of the entire sixties:

 

Just look at the fucking size of that piece of cake.

What's that you say? Johnny, who is technically still a child, has gone after the Wizard, a dangerous superpowered criminal, all on his own. Fuck him! I'm eating!

That said, being relatively short, the Torch's strips were at least as repetitive as old school Scooby Doo and are probably best appreciated at the rate of one a month between the years of 1961 and 1970 by persons under the age of ten. I'm unable to tick any of these boxes so I zoned out here and there, but not enough to present any sort of indictment on the ludicrous charm of these tales. Did I mention that the Beatles show up in one of the later issues?

 

No prizes for picking Ringo out of the line-up. The poor sod's hooter is so massive that it won't even fit in the second panel.

As with anything which Stan Lee claimed was bigger than the Bible, the Quran, the Torah and the complete works of Shakespeare blended into a single shining masterpiece, the solo adventures of the Human Torch don't quite live up to the hype, but this collection is still mostly great and goes some way to accounting for why Marvel took off as it did.

Marvel Firsts: the 1960s

Stan Lee, Jack Kirby & others
Marvel Firsts: the 1960s (2011)
This collects all those first issues or first appearances and is therefore where it all began, assuming we can agree on what it is. I've been engaged in an attempt to understand the evolution of caped adventures and this seemed a better gamble than collected editions of any single title, running as it does in chronological sequence from the  1961 debut of the Fantastic Four through to the first issue of the Silver Surfer in 1968, and with a lot of the stuff we've forgotten about in between.

The Marvel revolution is generally characterised as Stan Lee and Jack Kirby combining existing comic book genres into a single continuity, then having everybody turn up in everyone else's books. The existing (and failing) genres which went into the mix included romance, horror, humour, superhero, and monster comics. The first issue of the Fantastic Four pushes most of those buttons, not least the cover featuring a giant and vaguely reptilian thing smashing its way up through the asphalt, gargantuan claws reaching out to ensnare the puny surface dwellers - duplicating the cover of pretty much every issue of Tales to Astonish prior to Hank Pym discovering he could talk to ants. Inside we get super-science, rocketry, the hot-rod loving teenager, wisecracks, and the Invisible Girl ticking all of the usual chick boxes in requiring the protection of the lads.

Most surprising for me has been the realisation of just how shaky were the first stirrings of the Marvel universe, because Stan Lee telling me how the first issue of the Fantastic Four was at least on par with War and Peace to a monthly schedule apparently wormed its way into my subconscious. Unless War and Peace - which I've never read - is actually fairly ropey, in which case fair play.

Fantastic Four #1 has all sorts of wonderfully screwy things going on, but it has the rhythm of hesitant first steps with Stan and Jack - but mainly Jack - making it up as they go along, jamming disparate elements together and hoping it will work. It doesn't feel confident and lurches along much like the strips of the thirties and forties, as does the first allegedly pulse-pounding issue of the Avengers, in case anyone was wondering. This isn't really a criticism given the likelihood of anything living up to Stan's hyperbole, but it's engaging for reasons besides those promised by the cover, or at least was to me. Further clues as to the balance of the Lee and Kirby partnership may be found by comparing Lee's typewritten synopsis for Fantastic Four #1 - also included here - with what was published, and it looks a lot like Jack was doing his best to give the thing a bit of a dynamic, a quality which isn't conspicuous in Lee's vague, even apologetic stage directions.

Stranger still, the wild west comics running contemporaneous to the early superhero stuff are by far the best material in at least the first half of the collection, their obvious confidence presumably deriving from established traditional styles. However, as the years pass, we can see our caped pals catching up and cohering into something which seems to know what it's doing, and Silver Surfer #1 is legitimately a masterpiece of the form.

This has been less exciting but more educational than I expected, which is nice.

Kirby - King of Comics

Mark Evanier Kirby - King of Comics (2008)
I've read several versions of the story of how Stan Lee created Marvel Comics and is directly responsible for more or less everything, ever, and it seemed like high time I took a look at what was happening on the other side of the wall, Jack Kirby being the man who drew a humongous number of those comics which Stan may or may not have written. I found Kirby's art a bit weird when I was a kid and resident of the age group for which they were intended. There was something about his art, but I found the figures weird, forever reaching forward out of the page, smiling hard like John Wayne with that single dazzling white tooth spanning the entire width of the grin. All the same, he obviously made a huge impression judging by how much I loved some of those strips, even though his style had become the standard - from where I was stood - which is probably why 2000AD seemed like such a breath of fresh air.

However, my appreciation has grown in recent years, partially through a better understanding of what Kirby was doing, when he was doing it, and how starkly it contrasted with what everyone else had been doing up until that point. You may already know that Kirby created and even wrote a lot of the stuff for which Stan Lee has been given credit, and sometimes so much credit as to relegate his artist to some talented monkey who was able to hold a pen without dropping it on the floor; and if you're a regular working class person such as like what I am, you'll probably recognise the pattern because getting stiffed by the boss is the story of our lives. This isn't to suggest that Lee was without talent or failed to put in the work but, let's face it, it was mostly Jack. I'm not sure comics as we know them today wouldn't have happened without Jack in the right time and place, but at best it would probably be a completely different landscape.

Evanier's book, which may be one of the greatest things I've read on the subject of the comics biz, balances a sensitive, sympathetic biography with just the right quota of lovingly reproduced artwork to illustrate the tale without it becoming some luxurious portfolio, which most of the other Kirby books seem to be from what I can tell. As a friend and colleague of Kirby, Evanier is particularly well qualified to tell the man's story, and he does so with an incredible warmth which never slides over into sentiment or arse kissing. He paints Kirby as someone you would like to have known, with whom you would have wanted to hang out - or at least I would: imaginative, seriously talented, and above all just a regular working class guy trying to get by, who wanted to do a good job. Weirdly, Kirby puts me in mind of Ray, a former work colleague of mine - English, but the same generation, who bore a more than passing resemblance and who was likewise no stranger to getting stiffed by the boss. This biography accordingly left me with a few feelings I don't normally get from the accounts of the lives of people I've never met. It felt sort of personal, key to which might be Street Code, one of Kirby's very few - possibly only - autobiographical strips, eight pages shining a light on his having grown up under circumstances of grinding poverty during the depression. It's almost Harvey Pekar and has some of the same power.

I can't actually think of anything more useful, or even more coherent to say, but this is a frankly fucking incredible book about an incredible guy who, from my point of view, was one of us.

The Death of Captain Marvel

Jim Starlin, Stan Lee, Steve Englehart & others
The Death of Captain Marvel (1982)
I may be wrong, not least because I don't care enough to bother looking it up, but I think The Death of Captain Marvel may have been the first graphic novel, or at least the first comic book to be labelled as such on the grounds of being square bound with fancy paper and a higher price tag, although really it's still a comic book. The idea that it might be aimed at a more mature audience, by some definition, came later, but I'll return to that.

This being a 2018 reprint, we also get five or six issues of the comic book as background to himself snuffing it during the main feature. This is good news because we get three issues worth of the first Captain Marvel story written by Stan Lee and Roy Thomas, and drawn by Gene Colan. It's superheroism as space opera, more or less, or arguably Superman rewritten as superheroic space opera given the detail of our man - an alien who passes for human - finding himself unusually enhanced once arriving on our planet. It's nothing life changing but has retained a certain power through the art of Gene Colan - surely one of the most underrated comic book artists of our time - who duplicates Kirby's monumental dynamism with his own expressionist realism to equally great effect. If his art seems hastily rendered, it doesn't seem to matter given the depth of the mood and that the reader can pretty much feel every punch and explosion.

Later issues included here date from the mid-seventies period of the comic book having grown up, as demonstrated in Jim Starlin's thoroughly peculiar Warlock and Rich Buckler's Deathlok the Demolisher - to name but two; except it didn't quite extend to Captain Marvel. Doug Moench and Pat Broderick's version is not without a certain screwy charm, but it's not Starlin's Warlock by a long shot, and, strangest of all, Starlin's Death of Captain Marvel isn't Starlin's Warlock by a long shot either. It pulls some of the same cosmic moves which were doubtless very much appreciated by one's older brother and his doobie rolling pals, but the art is anatomically clunky in places, pretty much top end fan stuff - and I've never regarded the term fan art as a compliment - suggesting as it does that this person 1) has never taken a life drawing class and 2) probably listens to a lot of Yes. Starlin, much as I love the man's work, compensates with fussy lines and an excess of detail, but it doesn't really help.

Also, particularly when compared to Warlock, the story could almost be an episode of Star Trek with more capes. It's one of those deals attempting to answer the question of why Superman doesn't end world hunger, but thanks to all the space fags and the fact of Tales from Topographic Oceans having been stuck to the turntable since October, it's a fairly safe, conservative, and even self-involved version of the question: what if Captain Marvel had cancer, just like in the real world? The answer is pretty much incorporated in the title, in case you were wondering, meaning we get scenes of the entire pantheon of Marvel superheroes all stood around the Captain's bed looking sad, interspersed with bouts of crying and the Beast asking why, Lord why? He had so much to live for.

It's not the worst thing you'll ever read, but it's burdened with the emotional sophistication of an episode of the Six Million Dollar Man and lacks the flair to capitalise upon its own essentially ludicrous narrative, even before we get to the art not being anything like so mind-blowing as Starlin's otherwise much deserved reputation might promise. Somehow, Gene Colan drawing Captain Marvel punching a giant robot who says things like know you this: he who would oppose me - - must be annihilated! has a lot more soul.

Daredevil

Stan Lee, Wally Wood & others Daredevil (1965)
The constitution of Marvel's great innovation - that which stamped its mark firmly on the public consciousness back in the sixties - hadn't really occurred to me, nor perhaps been expressed so well, until I read Douglas Wolk's All of the Marvels. It wasn't simply the timing of the superhero revival, breaking out during a significant lull in the popularity of Superman, Batman and others. It was the blending of superheroes with other popular forms of the day, the romance, monster, humour, and horror comics - or what horror comics had become in the wake of Wertham's purge. It seems so obvious now, and I have no idea why I hadn't already seen it. Of course, it isn't that Superman's adventures had failed to incorporate elements of romance, humour, or whatever, but the emphasis seems more pronounced in those post-Fantastic Four Marvel titles where no issue passes without the necessity of secret identities causing a testosterone implosion in someone's trunks, or yet another subterranean monster whose name ends with a vowel finds his way to the surface. That said, it seems a safe bet that the shocking dynamism of Kirby and Ditko should also be considered a factor, rendering the blend all the more dramatic by having it seem to almost leap off the page.

Unfortunately, they can't all be classics, and while Daredevil doubtless went on to great things, his first steps were pretty subdued when compared to those of the Fantastic Four, Avengers, X-Men and so on. This is because Daredevil - or specifically the first eleven issues as collected here - feels very much as though, having blown everyone's mind with the Hulk and the rest rendered as a series of explosive, angular punch-ups bordering on Vorticism, the Bullpen may have been wondering if there was still any mileage left in the traditional formula, hence something which is approximately a cross between Spider-Man and Batman - neurosis, doomed romance and weird powers combined with metropolitan decay and otherwise conventional detective stories.

I guess there was some mileage, although most of 1964 and 1965 were spent messing with the formula and not quite getting it right. The art is decent, mostly great, and occasionally stunning, yet pedestrian compared to Kirby - descriptive rather than expressive; and the ideas are as wacky as you like, but suffer from the means of their communication which is excessively wordy even by Marvel standards of the time and leaves the reader wading through verbiage for relatively little reward given that most of the verbiage is describing what we can see with our own eyes.

The premise of Daredevil, namely that a man blinded by some vaguely radioactive material will develop his other senses to a superhuman degree, while no more unlikely than any other implausible Marvel origin, tends to appear more and more ludicrous the closer you look. So Daredevil's endless account of his own powers as he reads a newspaper by feeling the ink on the page or decides that it sounds like the woman who just came into the room is wearing a red coat serve to highlight the inherent absurdity of his abilities rather than leaving us awestruck, as I suspect was the intention. Additionally, the whole notion of the sightless compensated with amazing hearing or sense of smell seems a bit Ricky Gervais in 2022, but never mind.

More than its contemporaries, the early Daredevil feels a little like a throwback to strips of the previous decades, the era of bank heists and henchmen and criminal masterminds revealed to be unscrupulous city councilors; and the weirder details work against themselves, somehow serving to emphasise the conservatism of the title. That said, early Daredevil wasn't actually bad, and certainly had both charm and potential; although in 2022 is probably mainly interesting as an historical piece.

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.

Shogun Warriors

 

Doug Moench, Herb Trimpe & others Shogun Warriors (1980)
As a kid growing up in the late seventies, I was obsessed with Micronauts, but inevitably there was a limit to how many of those things I could buy given the economics of pocket money and that the more extravagant figures and their vehicles didn't seem to be available in the UK. I'd seen boxes of Monogram's Shogun Warriors model kits on the shelves, but they looked slightly ridiculous - exaggerated and improbable figures when compared to the Alan Bennett documentary which constituted the world of the Micronauts. Running out of vaguely futuristic stuff to accumulate, I eventually caved in and bought one out of curiosity - Grandizer, I think. I glued all the bits together, painted him, stood him amongst my Micronauts then tried to imagine what they might be talking about. I'd thawed to the Shogun Warriors, although even I had to admit they didn't really do much. They could raise their arms, turn their heads, and a couple of them were able to fire plastic missiles or even their fists, but that was about it. Not knowing what else to do, I bought the other five over the next few months, or however long it took.

 

Then I spotted a Shogun Warriors comic book in the newsagent, issue four of this thing to be specific. It was American and therefore part of a world I didn't fully understand, and it wasn't in quite the same league as 2000AD or even the weekly Star Wars comic, but there was no getting away from the fact of it featuring giant robots. I don't think I had realised they were supposed to be on the same scale as Godzilla until I read the comic book. I bought an issue whenever I saw it, amassing a gappy collection of just five or six issues determined by an unfamiliar publishing schedule and the unreliability of my being able to find a copy.

Now, forty years later, all becomes clear, not least where Danguard Ace and Combatra had sprung from and why Raydeen was the only one I recognised from his model kit. The Shogun Warriors were a line of die-cast robot figures marketed in the US by Mattel, a pantheon from which the six larger Monogram kits were drawn. Most of them began life as Japanese kids' cartoons - as is probably fucking obvious - only to be bundled together under the Shogun banner at Ellis Island, meaning that our Shogun Warriors were actually, it could be argued, forerunner to the Sense of Right Alliance, the superhero team formed when Superman, Spider-Man, Shrek, and Lightning McQueen from Cars came together in the name of justice 'n' stuff.

 

Anyway, this isn't an - ugh - graphic novel, because the publishing rights to licensed characters are apparently a logistical nightmare in legal terms, not least with the three Shoguns starring in this book belonging to different licensees; so it's doubtful that the comics will ever be reprinted, meaning my only option was to buy a stack of back issues - which was easy enough because they're still cheap and it was cancelled after issue twenty; and so here I am at the age of fifty-six reading a pile of comic books about giant robots routinely saving the world from other giant things.

I don't recall being particularly knocked out by the comic even at the time, although it seemed to have something. Trimpe's artwork reminded me a lot of Jack Kirby, seeming faintly ridiculous and simplistic to my untutored eye, and there's a lot of corn here, not least that the Shogun Warriors are pitted against bad guys who are aware of being evil and even rejoice in the same - but it doesn't fucking matter because - duh - giant robots, you idiot! In case it isn't already clear I'm hereby invoking a variation on the Godzilla defence which neutralises criticism by virtue of the fact that he's Godzilla. If that doesn't work for you, maybe you shouldn't have dropped out of law school.

Anyway, the story begins with our three main guys Richard Carson, Ilongo Savage and Genji Odashu. They all have exciting, action-packed jobs - movie stuntman, test pilot and so on - somehow making them obvious choices for Shogun operators, and thus are they spirited away to the hidden base of the Followers of the Light somewhere in the Japanese countryside. The Followers of the Light are a group of ancients, possibly immortal and not entirely human - even though one of them resembles Graham Linehan and smokes a pipe. They fought evil during the previous Chaos War then went into suspended animation, only reviving now that the sorcerous Lord Maur-Kon is back in business. The Followers of the Light have built three giant robots with which to fight evil, but the robots can only be operated by pilots sat inside their massive frowning metal heads, much like the Numskulls from the Beezer.

It's the same sort of ham-fisted pop mythology as informs the Godzilla movies, and it works because it takes itself absolutely seriously, fully expects you to be entertained, and because giant robots. If it seems pale and superficial in comparison to - off the top of my head - Thomas Hardy's Mayor of Casterbridge, then you may have missed the point, the point being giant robots. It may also be worth noting that our Shogun Warriors, aside from being direct ancestors of the otherwise fucking ridiculous* Transformers, provided a shitload of inspiration for the movie Pacific Rim, and not just the enormous robot exoskeletons. Pacific Rim is pretty much Shogun Warriors with swearing and oil stains.

To finally get to the point, Shogun Warriors may not have been the greatest comic book ever published, and it's hard to imagine it having endured beyond these twenty issues without eventually becoming repetitive, but it nevertheless had a hell of a lot of charm. For all of his simplistic lines and shapes, Trimpe does a great job of conveying sheer scale, and after a few issues one begins to realise that he isn't just doing a Jack Kirby. If the influence is obvious, not least in the exhausting dynamism bursting from each page, his figures - amongst other aspects - are significantly less exaggerated, allowing for a sense of contrast which Kirby didn't always achieve. If it's not always easy to pinpoint Trimpe's strengths, sharp contrast is provided by Steven Grant and Mike Vosburg's fill-in issue which conspicuously lacks the charm or imaginative flair of Moench and Trimpe. As with the Ramones back catalogue being similarly resistant to analysis, there's something very satisfying here, even absorbing, and to the point that it seems only natural to feel slightly sorry for everyone involved when the run comes to its end. Moench gave Richard, Ilongo and Genji a slightly more formal send off in Fantastic Four #226, finally revealing that Raydeen, Combatra and Danguard Ace had been destroyed. It made for a surprisingly depressing coda, which itself underscores the sense of idiot joy communicated in the pages of the comic during its short run. They'll probably never get a reprint, but they shouldn't be forgotten.

*: There has never been a really good reason for a massive futuristic robot from outer space to disguise itself as a truck, aside from that Convoy would have been a better movie.

Phoenix

Jeff Rovin, Sal Amendola & others Phoenix (1975)
Phoenix was somehow one of the first three American comics I ever saw with my own eyes. There was the first issue of this, then Marvel's Worlds Unknown #4 and Astonishing Tales #35, respectively dating to January 1975, November 1973, and May 1976. I have no idea which came first and they were, in any case, encountered second hand at jumble sales rendering those dates of publication more or less irrelevant. Anyway, the point is that although I'd read plenty of black and white UK reprints of Spider-Man, the Inhumans and the like, these were the first actual US comics I saw, and I was fascinated by their size - smaller than I was used to, full colour throughout, and obviously aimed at readers slightly older than myself.

That issue of Astonishing Tales featured the penultimate chapter of Rich Buckler and Bill Mantlo's Deathlok which had an effect tantamount to slipping a Stooges album into my ABBA, Wurzels, and Wombles playlist of the time. Phoenix represented slightly less terrifying territory than ...And Once Removed From Never, but still made a massive impression on me, enough so for its influence to have been felt in at least a few things I've written since*.

To start at the beginning, Phoenix was one of a number of titles published by Atlas, a short-lived mid-seventies company founded by Martin Goodman after he sold Marvel Comics to Perfect Film & Chemical in 1972. Goodman had been a big name in the funny books since the thirties, having famously brought us Captain America and the Marvel imprint itself, amongst other things, and Atlas was going to be a rival to the big two. Atlas would mean that Goodman was still very much in the game, and it would succeed by taking risks rather than simply duplicating what Marvel and DC had been doing.

The company hit the ground running, chucking a whole bunch of titles at the public in a short space of time, but nothing really stuck as Goodman hoped and the operation folded within the year. Colin Smith has written in engrossing detail about the short, unhappy life of Atlas Comics.

Yet of all Atlas' debut titles, Phoenix remains, paradoxically, both the most puzzling and the least intriguing. For writer/editor Jeff Rovin and artist Sal Amendola's storytelling displayed little familiarity, beyond the most obvious of conventions, with the then-dominant traditions of superhero comics. Nor did their work seem to deliberately hark back to redundant approaches to costumed crime fighter tales either. Neither rooted in the present or the past, Phoenix failed to offer any convincing measure of the superhero genre's pleasures and satisfactions. Underneath its glossy surface, it appeared to be a comic that was approaching its subject matter in an almost entirely random manner. In that, it was as if Rovin and Amendola had been shown a few random covers featuring a sci-fi flavoured superbloke before being told to emulate whatever virtues they perceived there. Perhaps Phoenix was an attempt to produce something that broke, to one degree or another, with superhero tradition. But if so, it stumbled because it failed to reflect a grasp of whatever the conventions were that Rovin and Amendola wanted to challenge.

I have a different take on the title, doubtless tinted by my first encounter all those years ago, and yet Smith is absolutely right about its failure as a comic book.

Phoenix, as is probably obvious, was a superhero title, but one which took a different tone, seemingly attempting an unprecedented sense of realism relative to previous superhero books, and it had a cold, pragmatic tone. It wasn't going to hold our hand. Our hero is technologically augmented during an encounter with aliens, but these aliens are the Deiei, essentially a variation on the creatures described by abductees in the UFO lore of the time but with certain identifiable human characteristics. They're aliens from Shatner's Star Trek or even Dan Dare more than they're Kree, Skrull, or Dominators. They initially seem to belong to a universe which is more or less our own, wherein Phoenix is the only superhero, and in which miraculous powers require at least some explanation - albeit one rooted somewhere within the grey areas of pseudoscience and its attendant mythologies. This was part of what appealed to me at the age of twelve or thereabouts - Phoenix seemed to take place in a world which might exist, or at least which could not yet be fully ruled out so easily as those places where insect bites bestow abilities regardless of physiology. Phoenix felt like part of the same world as the ponderous science-fiction cinema of the seventies with its jumpsuits, moral quandaries, and somber mood.

Sal Amendola had already drawn his fair share of Batman, Aquaman and others, yet - as Colin Smith suggests - his art on Phoenix seemed to ignore many of the conventions of sequential story telling. To my eyes, it looks more like illustration than comic art in the traditional sense, which worked fine for me because it seemed to suit the tone of the book, and worked at least as well as the strips in, off the top of my head, Doctor Who annuals, which similarly seemed to lack precedent - as though drawn by persons who had never read a comic strip.

Given that I distinctly recall my discovery of Phoenix, Deathlok and Worlds Unknown occurring prior to 2000AD showing up, these three seemed to represent a consistent, vaguely adult vision in contrast to Dan Dare and The Whizzers from Space - both of which retained an awful lot of schoolboy DNA - and the strips in TV tie-in annuals which always felt like button pushing crowd pleasers for all their otherwise admirable qualities.

Sure enough, Phoenix is wonky, massively uneven, and riddled with inconsistencies, none of which mattered to me when I was twelve, and even now I can still feel the faint residual glow of what first drew me to this material. There remains some appeal in a superhero strip which refuses to wave the magic wand without having a really good reason, or which at least suggests this was part of the original proposition. By issue three, we've had sufficient peculiar Biblical allusions to suggest some impending revelation - Phoenix is casually likened to Jesus Christ, he parts the waters, and so on; then Satan himself is unmasked as a renegade Deiei as part of an arc which feels somewhat in debt to Richard S. Shaver; and the letters page appears, and it seems everyone is on board...

Then issue four is upon us, following three in which the standard did indeed seem to dip, and Phoenix is reborn as the Protector with a whole new costume by an intergalactic council of Kirby knock offs. Apparently the bold new direction wasn't paying off after all, and Ric Estrada couldn't even be bothered to make his flashback panels look like anything which had happened in previous issues.

 

Phoenix was a good idea which simply could have been done a lot better. There are some beautifully arresting images in at least the first issue, and if the narrative is all over the place, I've probably read too much van Vogt to be troubled by the inconsistency or the wild leaps of logic which don't actually make a whole lot of sense. I once wrote and drew a nine panel superhero parody wherein the main character experiences four sequential secret origins in rapid succession, one after the other, but it turns out Gary Friedrich got there before me, and probably got paid for it too.

*: 1987's Berserker, a comic strip which went through various incarnations - including one drawn by Charlie Adlard - before I realised it was a non-starter, was more or less a rewrite of Phoenix with a big helping of Richard S. Shaver thrown in for seasoning. Also, The Sixth Day, a short story from 2007 which appears in The Great Divide makes a number of references to the Phoenix comic book.

Marvel Comics - the Untold Story

Sean Howe Marvel Comics - the Untold Story (2012)
After several versions of the life of Stan Lee, only one of which was written by the man himself, I get the impression I probably should have started with this thing. Sean Howe answers just about every question I had, including those I'd assumed probably weren't worth asking. His attention to detail is exhaustive and impartial - so far as I'm able to tell. I've seen online mutterings about the Untold Story having given Jim Shooter, Marvel's editor-in-chief from 1978 to 1987, something of a battering, but nothing written here seems massively unfair or uneven, and credit is freely given where it's due.

Howe's account begins with Martin Goodman's Timely Comics, sinks its teeth in with the tenacity of a bull terrier, and doesn't let go until we're caught up to the present day. The picture revealed is broad yet coherent, with the grinding inevitability of the corporate appetite countered by reminders of why Marvel worked, when it did work, and often in spite of itself. This matters - at least in so much as any of this matters - because our collective memory of the comics biz and its role in popular culture is revealed as comprising at least as high a quotient of received wisdom and strategic mythology as Stan Lee's somewhat unreliable version of events. The idea that the comic book ever needed to grow up, for one example, seems to be an answer to a question that didn't need asking; and while it's clear that the average age of the target reader has varied from one decade to the next, the notion of the figure steadily increasing up until the revelation of Alan Moore's Watchmen is obviously bollocks in light of Marvel having been such a huge hit with the beatnik community in the sixties, and then the brain stretching likes of Starlin's Warlock - amongst many others in the seventies. Indeed, our idea of the juvenile comic book - to which superheroes with drink problems was apparently the antidote - seems to have formed in the late seventies as a reaction to Starlin, Gerber and the rest in the form of Godzilla, Star Wars and Shogun Warriors tie-in material. I'm generalising here, but it's nothing like so clear cut as all those Time Out articles told us.

Much needed testimony regarding what was once so great about Marvel is offset by unflinching reportage of the artists and writers getting screwed over and over and over from one decade to the next, even with the understanding that work-for-hire was never anything more than an assembly line. We presumably all know about Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, and inevitably they're just the tip of a heartless corporate iceberg specialising in using them up, wearing them out, and asset stripping their legacy. Some of it is heartbreaking, not least realising that Chris Claremont's departure from the X-books back in '91 actually was the betrayal it resembled from the outside; and that Rob Liefeld got to revamp Captain America at some point in the mid-nineties after his previous anatomical bowdlerisations had driven me away from the medium; and while we're here…

Before Grunewald left for his weekend home on August 9, he grabbed a preview copy of Rob Liefeld's Captain America #1. It was Grunewald's favourite Marvel character; until a few months earlier, he'd either written or edited every issue since 1982. On Monday morning, rumours started flying around the offices, confirmed by an 11AM email from Terry Stewart. 'It's with my deepest and most profound regret that I inform you that Mark Grunewald passed away unexpectedly early today at home,' the note began. The cause of death was a heart attack.

Grunewald was forty-three, a non-smoker who exercised regularly, and I didn't even realise he was dead. I always liked his work. I'm not saying that the art of Rob Liefeld finished him off, but you really have to wonder.

This is a thick book, and quite a tough read for anyone with any interest in comic art - emotionally speaking, but thank fuck someone wrote it.

The Golden Age of Marvel Comics

Bill Everett, Jack Kirby, Joe Simon & others
The Golden Age of Marvel Comics (1997)
I'm still half-engaged in researching the history of Marvel for something I'm soon to be working on, which I probably shouldn't mention in case I get bored of the idea and it never happens; but thankfully it's a loose form of research allowing for general impressions picked up from a greatest hits collection such as this. I'm not sure I have the patience to hunt down expensive reprints incorporating everything right down to the adverts for sea monkeys. I'm not sure I would have the patience to read them, for that matter.

Marvel, as you probably know, began life as Timely Comics publishing its first title just a year after Superman first hit the news stands, so the myth of Marvel having been the lively young marmoset stealing the dinosaurs eggs derives mainly from their having changed the name so many times prior to Stan Lee - or possibly Jack Kirby - introducing acne and difficult homework assignments to the traditional superhero strip in 1961. This is what some of that stuff looked like before the characters took to agonising over teenage concerns.

It's probably fair to say that Lee's big idea - or possibly Kirby's big idea - at the beginning of the sixties was to shift emphasis from story to character, prior to which we had illustrated equivalents to the radio serials of the time wherein mostly hard boiled heroes identify bad guys before punching them squarely on the jaw, thus saving the day. The bad guys here were mostly boggle-eyed Nazis, shifting to boggle-eyed reds after the war, so it's fairly repetitive, trades mostly in clichés, and you can usually see the punchline forming before you've made it to the second page. About three quarters of the stories collected herein revolve around the theft of secret plans. Nevertheless, even within this fairly limited formula, there was a lot of invention, some truly screwy twists of imagination, and even at its most peculiar, the art is rarely less than arresting with panel after panel slapping the reader in the face with its relentless dynamic action. Later Marvel favourites such as Captain America, the Human Torch, the Vision, and the Sub-Mariner began here, and the latter is particularly interesting as he evolves from a triangular headed morally ambiguous enemy of mankind - more or less Tarzan underwater - to whatever he became in the sixties, which at least remained a far cry from the square-jawed guy who foils diamond heists to a daily schedule.

I'm not massively familiar with this era of comic book publishing, and for all their early promise, I guess Marvel were never quite so wild as - for one example with which I'm familiar - Planet Comics, and if there's some weird stuff here, there isn't anything which comes close to the like of Fletcher Hanks; yet there's a lot of charm, even if a little goes a long way, and I'd still rather look at this than Roy Lichenstein's version - or even Neil Gaiman cleverly subverting these tropes towards the usual ends.

Also, having read this lot, Bob Burden's Flaming Carrot now makes one fuck of a lot more sense.

two Stan Lee biographies

Stan Lee & George Mair
Excelsior! The Amazing Life of Stan Lee (2002)
While my own personal jury remains out regarding how much credit Lee deserves for strips co-created with Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and others - because we'll probably never know for sure - the other extreme by which Stan was just some lucky schmo who happened to be in the right place at the right time seems equally unfair. Excelsior! is his side of the story, with linking paragraphs wedged in by George Mair so as to keep it all from degrading into a sort of Borscht Belt James Joyce; and while his side of the story is mostly well known, it's nevertheless worth preserving because it's enlightening and often genuinely funny and Lee comes across as a nice guy with the best of intentions. The extent to which this is the facade of some scheming snake oil retailing mastermind could be debated, but I suspect that if it were a facade, he would have done a better job of it.

 

Abraham Riesman True Believer (2021)
On the other hand, there's True Believer which has the advantage of not actually being written by Stan himself and accordingly paints a quite different picture. Thankfully, it doesn't seem to be anything you might term a hatchet job. Credit is given where due, as is the benefit of the doubt, but the bottom line is that this is a scrupulously thorough warts and all biography of a life which is revealed as having been, so it could be argued, mainly warts; which isn't to suggest that Stan was necessarily a bad guy or that he fucked kids or any of that sort of thing, but there's a point at which self affirmation crosses over into something more like mania. I would guess Stan understood this, hence the winning combination of boasting tempered with self-deprecating cornball humour of the stripe which makes Excelsior! so readable.

The creative ratio of Lee to Kirby or Ditko to be found in all of those characters for which he is famed remains debatable, although the success of the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man and the rest is surely at least in part down to Lee's tireless promotional bounce and general inability to shut the fuck up, even for just a second. So he's to be credited for something, and True Believer does as good a job as anything I've read of trying to pinpoint what that might have been. Oddly enough, I feel as though I've known at least a few Stans in my time, albeit none with quite the same level of charm or ability to generate money from thin air, but I recognise the type and this passage, referring to POW - one of our boy's later, admittedly shabbier enterprises - struck an uncomfortably familiar chord.

If Stan had doubts about his own abilities, he certainly didn't let them show. In fact, POW was presenting an image of the octogenarian Stan as a creative powerhouse, capable of churning out a wealth of ideas that could be converted into lucrative entertainment properties. However, POW's primary product was announcements.

Of that which emerged from the mind of Stan Lee in the latter years, most seems to have been on the level of Alan Partridge's Monkey Tennis, with very little transcending the press releases about how great it was definitely going to be. One of the few exceptions was an animated series called Stripperella about a crime-fighting pole dancer with massive tits which, as evidence of Stan's wild imagination as something existing autonomous of Kirby, Ditko or whoever else was sat at the drawing board that afternoon, is pretty fucking thin; but you can't keep a good man down, as they say, and that was Lee's superpower, roughly speaking, coupled with an inability to monitor his own strengths and weaknesses. Comic book history has remembered the archetypal Stan Lee piece as Captain America leaping out of the page with a massive grin and an improbably distended sense of perspective, yet it should probably be one of the captioned photographs from You Don't Say. This one idea - if you can truly call it an idea - to which Stan returned time and again was that of stock photos to which he added side-splitting captions. He published a magazine along these lines in 1963, and there were a couple of others issued to a generally mixed reception a bit later, and yet it was something he tried to get happening over and over like Gretchen's use of the term fetch in Mean Girls, this sort of thing:

 

If you now need to go and change your pants, damage control the coffee fountain, maybe take a shower or whatever, I can wait.

Bizarrely, Stan doesn't seem to have been able to tell the difference between the Fantastic Four battling an underground civilisation led by an evil genius, and a photograph of Jimmy Carter amended with a comic observation about golf, which is ultimately tragic. As, I guess, was his life in certain respects, most of it being spent looking for something he probably never found, believing manic optimism alone would eventually bring it within reach, and failing to recognise anything with which he'd been involved as having been of value - contrary to whatever ludicrous bluster he may have committed at the time. He clearly wasn't a saint by any description, nor even anyone particularly remarkable, but he probably deserved better than he got; and it's hard to imagine there will ever be another account balancing sympathy with unflinching honesty as this one does.

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.

West Coast Avengers

John Byrne & others West Coast Avengers (1990)
More eighties superhero comics, but nothing to do with comfort food this time - these made the list because they were written and drawn by John Byrne and are therefore the bollocks. I say these rather than it because this is a run of comic books rather than the same collected as a - cough cough - graphic novel; and even if they were, it still wouldn't be a graphic novel, it would be a collection of comic books, and it would be a collection of comic books because there's nothing wrong with comic books, even comic books which haven't grown up.

I'm sure we all know who the Avengers are by now. This title dates from an era during which there were so many Avengers that they had to siphon a few of them off into a separate team with its own title; and what distinguishes this one is that it was, as already stated, written and drawn by John Byrne, a man with an unusually profound understanding of what makes this sort of thing work, namely the soap opera aspect combined with the juvenile love of things in sets which can be mixed and matched. Caped types foiling bank robberies had begun to look a bit comical by this point in comic book history, hence the soap aspect with an assortment of fantastic beings pitched against one another, or else pulled apart to see what makes them tick. Byrne pulled the Vision apart during his tenure, to memorable effect, then messed with the Scarlet Witch by revealing that her children were imaginary constructs brought about by her ability to manipulate probabilities.

Byrne's comics tend to succeed on their own terms, rather than by, for example, giving Spiderman a dose of the clap. He combines solid, surprisingly conservative storytelling with truly screwy ideas and genuine magic is born of the contrast while remaining faithful to the form, juvenile though it may well be. Byrne takes scrappy throwaway concepts and retells them with the gravity of legends, and should probably be mentioned in the same sentences as the likes of Kirby and others, even if we're mainly talking about the art.

Unfortunately, the baroque intertwined narrative he'd built up here came to an abrupt end with issue fifty-seven due to a disagreement with his editor, following which he downed tools in protest. I'm told Roy Thomas wrapped it all up a few issues later, but I think I prefer the truncated genius of Byrne's run with all of the loose ends left hanging. Considering all which has been sold in the name of the Avengers over the last three decades, I really wonder if it was ever again as good as this.

Iceman

J.M. DeMatteis & Alan Kupperberg Iceman (1985)
This was a four-issue limited series from before the comic grew up - an era for which I've been feeling increasingly nostalgic. Iceman, as you may know, was from the first line-up of the X-Men, the sixties incarnation which quietly blew my mind before I was old enough to be certain that these weren't real people. He's a fairly obvious attempt to duplicate some of that Human Torch magic but it worked for me; and I guess it still works for me considering I've just read this thing.

Iceman is one Bobby Drake, essentially a variant on Peter Parker, Richard Rider and others. He's a teenager, old enough to be a role model, but not so old as to seem inscrutably adult to anyone under twelve. He's slightly neurotic, and his adventures tend to be seasoned with thought bubbles full of stuff about not wanting a career in accountancy, contrary to the wishes of parents, and the potentially terrible consequences of what will happen if some girl discovers he's really a super-powered mutant; and so on and so forth. If the Marshall McLuhan references seem a bit thin on the ground, it's because Iceman is approximately aimed at twelve-year old boys.

As such, whilst it's hardly life-changing, the series nevertheless does its job very well - telling a story which is surprisingly unpredictable given the rigorously traditional mechanism of its telling. Visiting his parents, Iceman realises that he fancies the girl next door. Naturally she turns out to be a time-traveller fleeing from a terrible authoritarian father figure, unwittingly instigating a series of events which result in Bobby Drake accidentally murdering his own father before he's born, subsequently ceasing to exist and ending up in a realm of non-existence. It's actually a bit like Faction Paradox if Faction Paradox had been created by Jack Kirby in the late sixties; and it could be argued that the series is really just a series of hoops through which Iceman is made to jump, but who cares?

Kupperberg's art is a little uneven, but comes into its own with those peculiar Kirby-inspired outer realms, and DeMatteis keeps you reading, all the while presenting just enough of a glimpse of a truly peculiar background cosmos to demonstrate why Marvel were consistently shitting all over the rivals back in the mid-eighties.

Mister Miracle

Tom King & Mitch Gerads Mister Miracle (2019)
Just over a month ago I wrote about an Avengers comic book, suggesting that to describe it as ludicrous would imply that there's such a thing as the ponderous superhero equivalent of Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge, which there really isn't. Whilst I haven't actually had cause to revise this opinion, it turns out that there actually is a ponderous superhero equivalent of Samuel Beckett, and it's Tom King's version of Mister Miracle.

Mister Miracle is some kind of super escape artist, a sort of cosmic Houdini with a cape born from the peculiarly vivid imagination of Jack Kirby as part of his Fourth World mythology. The aforementioned Fourth World never really featured in anything I read, so I don't fully understand what it's about beyond that it's something to do with Apokolips, New Genesis, the New Gods, and Darkseid's search for the anti-life equation which will eliminate free will across the universe; so the whole deal is about a million times weirder and more interesting than most of the rest of DC's jock-infested whitebread canon, and at the risk of seeming repetitive, there's something very van Vogt about it all.

Here we see our escape artist fail a suicide attempt and father a child with Big Barda, then war breaks out on New Genesis and Darkseid demands custody of the child as a price for ending the war. The more dramatic, far-fetched, cosmic elements of the story occur in the background almost to the point of being off the side of the page, and as such come across as belonging to something truly vast and unknowable, having been spared the diminishing effects of a sharper focus. Yet even when we can see the fighting, battles we wouldn't understand conducted with bizarre technology, these details are just background noise, of no more significance than a car journey or a trip to the drug store. The real story is that of Scott and Barda having a kid, sleepless nights, trips to the hospital, the sort of stuff you would more expect to find in something written by Harvey Pekar and told with the same muted tone: it's the small details which matter, which is the whole point of the story.

The art is gorgeous too, in case anyone was wondering, tender realism which emphasises the strangeness of certain events unfolding in the background, and doing so without anyone jumping up and down screaming look at me, I'm weird! This thing is simply beautiful, and possibly even the greatest comic book ever published, or at least I'm having trouble recalling anything which has impressed me more right now. As for Watchmen and other beacons of supposed graphic eloquence, Mister Miracle makes most of them look like Scrooge McDuck.

The Man Called Nova

Marv Wolfman, Sal Buscema, Carmine Infantino & others
The Man Called Nova (1979)
My first encounter with Marvel was at junior school. Mark McFarland showed me a couple of loose pages presumably torn from the back covers of English Marvel reprints, magazine size but glossy with full colour images of Iron Man, Dr. Strange, Captain America and others. It was the first I'd heard of these characters and I found them fascinating and bizarre, and I was apparently young enough to be uncertain as to whether or not these were actually real people. I understood that they crossed over into each other's stories, and were logically therefore distinct from the imaginary characters seen on Doctor Who, Star Trek and so on. There was a mystery here.

By October, 1977 I was old enough to have realised that the Marvel universe was a fictitious creation spread across a number of titles, and Marvel UK was printing Rampage. It seemed like a good place to start given that I could afford both Rampage and 2000AD on my pocket money, and whilst the other Marvel titles looked amazing, I doubted I'd be able to pick up stories which had already been running for several years. Anyway, Rampage was where I first read the adventures of Nova, so I picked up this collection out of the usual blend of nostalgia and curiosity.

I'm now at least four decades past the reading age for which it was written, but it remains a nevertheless pleasurable experience. Nova is the typically implausible tale of a neurotic American teenager who inherits the powers of a centurion in the galaxy spanning Nova Corps and thusly fights crime - an obvious choice given that he lives in a neighbourhood where a bank robbery takes place roughly every four hours. Muscles bulge as pantomime bad guys deliver portentous speeches, and combat is embellished with strings of creaking puns and comic put downs, so there's a lot to The Man Called Nova which is almost painfully familiar; but its appeal comes from the telling in combination with numerous weird little deviations from the supposed formula.

For a start, where the art is good, it's good enough to eclipse a few lapses in narrative momentum. The first two issues, drawn by John Buscema and inked by Joe Sinnot, are as startling as anything by Jack Kirby; and while Carmine Infantino's run on the final ten issues prior to cancellation occasionally suffers from ill-fitting inks, where the balance is struck, it's frankly fucking incredible; and at its best, Infantino's Vorticist space opera is breathtaking to the point that it almost doesn't matter what he's drawing.

Nova was written by Marv Wolfman, so it's not entirely shoddy, and that which Infantino illustrated was seldom entirely without some charm of its own. As has been said before, Nova is basically Spiderman what with his agonising over grades and family life, but Wolfman avoided a straight photocopy, throwing in peculiarities such as Richard Rider - who inherits the mantle of Nova - being something of a dimbulb with his high school nemesis cast as the one with the brain and the exam results.

Moore, Morrison and others have often praised the archetypal weird sixties comic book in which the Flash spends an entire issue as a paving slab - for one example - but I'm beginning to wonder if there was truly ever such a thing as the dull, workmanlike comic book against which the former is routinely compared as an idiosyncratic explosion of wild imagination. The seemingly unpromising Man Called Nova gets pretty screwy in places, such as when our hero visits Marv Wolfman at the Marvel offices to discuss what will be coming up in forthcoming issues; or when Bobby Rider builds a robot Sherlock Holmes - complete with deerstalker and pipe - tasked with deducing what his elder brother gets up to in the evening. Additionally, there's a slightly sketchy quality to the storytelling, one which may only be apparent over multiple issues, but which gives an impression of plot details occurring without obvious cause, and there is much which seems left unexplained - not least being where the fuck Shuffles - Nova's peculiar Huggy Bear analogue - came from. For whatever reason, this causal deficit, rather than being to the detriment of the story, simply enhances its unpredictable rhythm.

The Man Called Nova could have been tighter or more consistent and maybe it would have lasted beyond twenty-five issues. Maybe it's the loose narrative swerves and possibly unwitting hokey touches which doomed it to an early cancellation, yet it is this same texture which makes the book engrossing four decades later; and if it was never going to win awards, Nova is anything but the generic superhero landfill you might have anticipated.

Nemo: River of Ghosts

Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill Nemo: River of Ghosts (2015)
This isn't quite Alan Moore's absolute final work in the comic book medium, but it's probably close enough as to make little difference now that he's retiring in hope of dedicating more time to anything which isn't Batman; and like The Roses of Berlin, it seems to constitute a farewell of sorts, or at least is about its own status as the end of a road. As for Moore moving on...

I am sure there is probably a very good reason for the hundreds of thousands of adults who are flocking to see the latest adventures of Batman, but I for one am a little in the dark for what that reason is. The superhero movies - characters that were invented by Jack Kirby in the 1960s or earlier - I have great love for those characters as they were to me when I was a thirteen-year-old boy. They were brilliantly designed and created characters, but they were for fifty years ago. I think this century needs, deserves, its own culture. It deserves artists that are actually going to attempt to say things that are relevant to the times we are actually living in. That's a long-winded way of me saying I am really, really sick of Batman.

Here we have an aging Nemo facing death, a woman whose past constitutes a river of ghosts, so to speak; and she's still fighting the immortal Ayesha from H. Rider Haggard's She, whose immortality prevails thanks to Nazis, Rotwang, and various nasties borrowed from elsewhere, fictional and otherwise.

Let us continue with our tour. Doctor Mengele will next present his biological facility… where we create all you younger versions of previous legends.

See, that's probably a metaphor for the fact that even in 2018, we still haven't tired of reinventing Spiderman. There's a bit of a contradiction here in that this refutation of the endless recycling of culture is itself formed of recycled culture, albeit from discontinued lines; and if the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was ever a genuine reinvestment in storytelling as art rather than commodity, then it might be argued that it's all relative and Nemo is only a more artisanal* Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice served on square plates and washed down with real ale decanted into one of those Mason jars with a handle stuck to it. Maybe I'm thinking too hard about this one. Maybe that's why Moore is moving on.

Anyway, River of Ghosts is fun, as you would probably expect, not least for the inclusion of Hugo Hercules - the first cartoon superhero, it has been suggested, therefore folding the history of this particular genre into a neat ouroboros but for the fact of it being hard to avoid reading him as Desperate Dan. References to obscured or partially lost realms of fiction are as thorough as ever, or exhausting as ever depending upon how you look at it. As Nemo reports, I'm told that this is their last breeding colony, I turned the page, and there they all were - the Creatures from the Black Lagoon from the 1954 Universal movie with curious predictability, which suggests we may have run this idea into the ground by this point. Still, it was fun while it lasted.

*: I apologise to each and every reader for my use of this word.