Doom Patrol

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Swamp Thing: Family Tree

Scott Snyder, Yanick Paquette, Marco Rudy & others
Swamp Thing: Family Tree (2013)
I sort of enjoyed the first seven issues of the revived Swamp Thing comic as assembled in Raise Them Bones, but somewhere in this collection it just seemed to stop doing whatever it was doing that worked for me. The artwork is beautiful, at least for the first half and very much in the vein of John Totleben; but then we whizz off somewhere else to reinvent Anton Arcane and it turns into something which looks like it's sort of trying to not resemble cutesy big-eyed manga shite with Alec Holland as a blue-eyed Kurt Cobain variation from some sappy 1990s autobiographical comic, but not trying very hard; and it isn't quite so bum-violatingly agonising as the Camden-Archieisms of Philip Bond or Jamie Hewlett, but it's closer than I would like. Annoyingly this particular weak-link exposes the other one, namely that the writing probably could have used a bit more elbow grease. The horror aspect is fine, and all very Alan Moore up to a missed point, said missed point being that Moore's horror worked in his version of Swamp Thing because it was played off the contrast with a well-written prosaic reality, scenes focussing on the minutiae of the every day and familiar so as to root the story in something we vaguely recognise. This version of Swamp Thing is, on the other hand, just one horror scenario after another tooled so as to resemble some kind of narrative. It lacks the aforementioned contrast and is, after a while, unsatisfying, reading much as though referring only to previous comics, films, or - shudder - games in the same genre.

The drooling abomination that is Anton Arcane bursts into the shack. 'What, no hug for your Uncle Anton, Abigail?' he slobbers.

'I've got your hug right here,' she growls just like Sigourney Weaver, levelling her shotgun at the monster. By hug she means two barrels of hot leaden death, you see.

Clever.

Maybe I'm just too old for this, but I don't think so. I can read the earlier issues of Swamp Thing without wincing - the issues which came out when I was roughly somewhere within the age group at which they were aimed. This is just lazy writing, media which refers almost exclusively to previous versions of itself.

Supergods - Our World in the Age of the Superhero

Continued from here.

Grant Morrison Supergods - Our World in the Age of the Superhero (2011)
I've had this one for a few months but haven't quite been able to face reading it for fear of coming across some point so annoying as to drive me to a reaction like that lorry driver who famously kicked in his television set when the Sex Pistols used some of those street-credibility words on the Today programme. Grant Morrison has written at least two of my all-time favourite comic books, and at least one that I've loathed almost more than anything else I've ever read. From Zenith to Doom Patrol, the boy could do no wrong in my view, and although I'd read the tripe he'd had published in Near Myths back in 1978, that was clearly early material produced before he'd learned how to stop being a tosspot which could thus be dismissed as uncharacteristic, or so I believed. Unfortunately when The Unreadables was published, it became suddenly and painfully obvious that Morrison himself hadn't regarded Gideon Stargrave or Time Is a Four Letter Word as clumsy formative fumblings so much as the purest, undiluted strain of what he'd really been trying to say; and what he'd really been trying to say was look at me - I'm weird and a bit mysterious. See me walking to school with a Gentle Giant album under my arm. I could have put it in a carrier bag, but then you wouldn't have been able to see what the album was, or to appreciate that I'm not like other boys.

For sake of further contrast with Alan Moore - returning to the theme of the supposed eternal duality of two comic book writers - I briefly encountered Grant Morrison at a comic convention in London in 1990 or thereabouts. My friend Carl and I were crossing a road outside the hotel at which the convention was held when we ran into Rian Hughes, designer turned comic artist for Morrison's version of Dan Dare. Carl knew Rian fairly well and all three of us had worked for Million Dollar, a company set up by Trevor Myles who had sold the Let It Rock store on the King's Road to Malcolm McClaren. Accompanying Rian was a weasely looking person in black clothes and sunglasses who stood at a sulky distance busily sucking his cheeks in. 'This is Grant,' announced our mutual acquaintance, and the penny immediately dropped. We said hello, but he gave no reply. He didn't even turn to look at us. I couldn't tell if he really wanted to be elsewhere or was simply effecting studied indifference, and I found it peculiar to come face to face with a writer whose work I admired with such passion and to find myself unable to get over the impression of him being a complete tosser.

It was a first impression of course, but then so was that of Alan Moore a year earlier, and both encounters, regardless of whatever behind the scenes details had shaped them, now seem consistent with other aspects of the work and conduct of these two very different writers. In particular it seems telling that whilst Morrison has publicly made an issue of his having hit the big time as a comic book professional back when Moore was still drawing cartoons of Elvis Costello for the NME, the point seems dubiously made given the quality of the work. I haven't seen whatever masterpiece Morrison wrote for Starblazer, but the Near Myths material was frankly fucking shocking, particularly when compared with Moore's lumpy yet enthusiastically witty Roscoe Moscow and The Stars My Degradation drawn for Sounds music paper only a year or so later.

Furthermore, it might be argued that the supposed parallels expose the futility of drawing such comparisons between the two writers in the first place. Alan Moore has always been essentially an underground comix artist in the tradition of Robert Crumb, Bill Griffiths and others, albeit an underground comix artist who dabbles with the mainstream. Morrison on the other hand has only ever really aspired to the mainstream, to produce superhero and similarly operatic material which occasionally borrows from counter-cultural sources. To suggest that he either works in Moore's shadow, or conversely that his work is in some way artistically superior to that of Moore is bollocks, and meaningless bollocks. Whilst Morrison's attempts at subversion are no doubt sincere, he appears to miss the irony of so much of his yappy counter-cultural bleatings being owned and distributed by Time Warner. His supposed narrative subversion serves as window dressing, a stance which walks the walk in pursuit of a particular aesthetic, and his poor judgement is revealed in Supergods by, amongst other things, the apparent inability to distinguish a William Burroughs novel from a 1960s Batman comic.

Anyway, let's start at the beginning.

Supergods is two or maybe three different books seamfully woven into a single stream of consciousness of the variety that most would classify as thinking aloud. It isn't really about our world in the age of the superhero, and nor does it explain what masked vigilantes, miraculous mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville can teach us about being human, or at least no more so than any book purporting to relate ancient wisdom ever contains much that is old or in any meaningful sense wise. It's a selective history of superhero comics mashed up with Morrison's autobiography and some sort of peculiar self-help thing, presumably for the sake of a sense of narrative progress. As a history of superhero comics, it's reasonably engaging up until the publication of Watchmen providing you don't mind its being written from such an obviously subjective perspective and can overlook the occasional excess of editorial bullshit - the four colour printing process likened to alchemy, Captain Marvel's origin described as Shamanic and so on, the sort of thing one begins to imagine read aloud by Peter Cook:

As distinct as they were, Superman and Batman would eventually become friends. This future meeting would inaugurate the dawn of the shared DC comics universe—an immense virtual reality inhabited by fictional characters, spanning decades and hundreds of thousands of pages, with its own rules, laws of physics, and alternative forms of time. The first emergent comic book universe began with this grand separation of light from dark, is from isn't, this from that, up from down, in a kabbalistic, Hermetic symmetry. The first light had cast the first shadow.

A kind of alchemy was under way.

I read this passage out loud to my wife as we sat in bed one evening with our respective books. She had asked why I kept sighing.

'Jesus,' she exclaimed. 'How can you read that shit?'

Morbid fascination I suppose, and the most mystifying revelation is that whilst Morrison weaves prettily descriptive metaphors around his analysis of superheroes, he doesn't actually understand them as well as he seems to believe; and his understanding, such as it is, is hardly of sufficient complexity to warrant four-hundred pages. Morrison's superhero is an Olympian ideal to which we aspire, Godlike, something nice and bright with which to illuminate our thoughts as we live in the shadow of the atomic bomb, civil unrest, cancer, and ELO reforming to record a new album. He seems to miss the point that what makes our fictional superhuman interesting is not that he or she is super but that he or she is human, a mirror of ourselves which is able to overcome that which is otherwise beyond us. This goes right back to Gilgamesh who can be defined not by his supernatural heritage so much as by the fact of his being human and therefore very much like the rest of us. Ancient Gods were depicted as anthropomorphic figures rather than the disembodied forces they represented because it allowed our ancestors a better means of understanding them. The front cover of Action Comics issue one - as discussed by Morrison at such length as to yield the suggestion that even the whitewall tyre in the bottom right is trying its best to get away from the destructive muscleman - is significant not because some powerful force is destroying a car, but because that force resembles ourselves.

Much of what follows on from the dissection of the cover of the first ever issue of Action Comics relies heavily on Morrison's interpretation, which is fine in the context of autobiography, but can be irritating whilst the book seems unable to decide quite what it wants to be when it grows up. The author superimposes his own agenda upon the history of comics, which works providing we're all agreed upon the genius of the Beatles, John Lennon, Timothy Leary and others employed in service of dubious comparison, but for those of us who aren't agreed, it comes across as lazy, even slightly inane in a few instances. Allen Ginsberg, for example, I seem to recall as being the beat poet who wrote Howl, proudly homosexual, a big fan of the old space fags and a pal of William Burroughs. Maybe he did write a few issues of Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen but I definitely don't remember his having done so, and I would suggest comparisons may be stretching a point at least as much as all those hey, comics aren't just for kids articles of the late 1980s. It seems almost like excuses, like Mystic Baldy needs a more profound reason to be writing about what are mostly no more and no less than comic books aimed almost exclusively at young children, as though he fears that we view him as a grown man reading something frivolous and juvenile, on which note...

I get the impression Grant Morrison has given a great deal of thought to how he is perceived by others, even that this may be his main motivation - the presentation of an image concordant with how he would wish to see himself. His own comics are, in my estimation, at their best when they're all surface - Doom Patrol, barely mentioned here, is essentially a series of surreal gags without any particular strong message. The star of Zenith seemed to take pride in his own lack of substance. Even Seven Soldiers, for all the panoramic scenarios into which we may read meaning was a series of reference points which worked in so much as they served the illusion of satisfying depth, inspiring but not necessarily answering some meaty questions. There's nothing wrong with liking the Ramones more than Jethro Tull, but there's a lot of contradiction here, not least being Morrison's understanding of Alan Moore's Watchmen which I read as a quest for flaws made in order to support a hypothesis of Watchmen as inferior work. Morrison dubiously attributes to Alan Moore that which he has himself done on numerous occasions, and nothing like so well because his own counter-cultural credentials run no deeper than David Beckham wearing a Crass T-shirt. Most of his career has been a Gentle Giant album artfully placed in the crook of an elbow as he heads out of the door to school, hence The Invisibles, a stupid person's idea of deep and meaningful.

For the purposes of Supergods, an additional problem is that whilst Morrison may be prone to inspired bursts of raw poetry on the page of a comic book, he writes the prose of a complete cunt. Much of this reads like the autobiography of some footballer or Katie Price, and as such might as well be retitled Grant Morrison's How I Done It. This becomes particularly apparent during numerous paragraphs in which he desperately explains to us how cool he is or aspires to become, for example describing Zenith who shagged page three girls and pursued a vapid, style-conscious, utterly vacuous existence of the kind that I was still convinced I coveted. As juvenile aspiration this is probably no big deal:

Reading interviews from the time makes my blood run cold these days, but the trash talk seemed to be working and I was rapidly making a name for myself. Being young, good-looking, and cocky forgave many sins, a huge hit British superhero strip did the rest and proved I could back up the big talk.

Know what I mean, Harry? Unfortunately he doesn't seem to learn from any of this and continues to measure success in terms of space-age bachelor pad music and the latest CDs from Paris and Tokyo DJs played in my house of magic, swirling lights, and designer chairs. He revels in the friendship of cartoonists from the more self-consciously hip end of the spectrum, becoming drinking buddies with Philip Bond, Jamie Hewlett and other cutesy Camden-based peddlers of twee illustrated lists of fave bands, men who had, like, done it with real girls and everything; which must have been well weapon, yeah?

I'd also just met my wife, Kristan, a stunning, brainy blonde who dressed like Barbarella to go to the pub, worked as a corporate insurance broker, and read Philip K. Dick.

Oh wow, Grant, and a blonde too! If nothing else this proves that even if you do spend weekends filing your Superman comics in strict alphabetical and sequential order whilst wearing underpants bought for you by your mum, you're definitely not saaad and clearly have no trouble getting fit birds to nosh you off in cool clubs and that. How we envy and admire you, you complete fucking cock.

Worse is to come as he morphs from Katie Price, to Bez out of the Happy Mondays, to Deepak sodding Chopra, somehow having missed the memo that lengthy accounts of hallucinations experienced whilst off your tits on acid are invariably pure arseache for anyone other than the person who did the actual tripping, and that one should probably try to avoid taking drug-fuelled encounters with God too seriously. Grant of course regards his own visions as revelations on the grounds that they occurred specifically to him, thus allowing such mind-bending insights as:

I felt sure that in some way what we call consciousness would turn out to be the long-sought unified field.

Yeah, that's probably it. Typically and annoyingly so for one who spends so much time banging on about a wide-eyed sense of child-like wonder at colourful costumed characters unsullied by the dark, cynicism of that Alan Moore, he seems convinced that events or ideas have genuine significance by virtue of their specifically having occurred to him - basically the worst sort of religious thinking by which nothing is conceded value on its own terms: the Grand Canyon is not a spectacle due to geological factors, it is a spectacle either because I'm here to see it or because Jesus is love:

Because the numinous is everywhere, we need to be reminded of it. We live among wonders. Superhuman cyborgs, we plug into cell phones connecting us to one another and to a constantly updated planetary database, an exo-memory that allows us to fit our complete cultural archive into a jacket pocket. We have camera eyes that speed up, slow down, and even reverse the flow of time, allowing us to see what no-one prior to the twentieth century had ever seen—the thermodynamic miracles of broken shards and a puddle gathering themselves up from the floor to assemble a half-full wineglass.

Sure that's amazing, but so are pussy cats, the night sky, planting and growing vegetables in your own allotment, reading a book about rocks, putting on a clean shirt, chicken fried steak at Jim's diner, a good night's sleep, and all the other less glamorous daily experiences. It's the guy who whines that books are booooooring, who is able to understand the profound only when it is saturated in novelty, garnished with explosions and flashing lights, who has not yet learnt to find wonder in anything, instead insisting it must be delivered to him in a fucking sippy cup designed by Philippe Starck. It's the clueless tosspot Doctor Who fan sneering at Mike Leigh because real stuff is like y'know, it's like boring and shit, yeah?

Every man and every woman is a star, wrote Aleister Crowley, little suspecting how literal those words might become in his prophesied new Aeon of Horus. With cameras everywhere, even on our personal computers and phones, we may as well be actors, performers, and stars in some filmic archive of the microscopically commonplace—every gesture, every frown recorded, filed away in some CCTV surveillance central AI that might as well be Braniac, recording us down to the last byte and love bite before he shrinks Las Vegas into a jar and routinely demolishes Earth on December 21, 2012.

Just because there's a resemblance, doesn't mean it's the same thing, or that the resemblance is meaningful. It has remained a source of surprise to me that people continue to take this sort of recycled Robert Anton Wilson material seriously, and I say that as someone who believes that the subterranean Mexican post-mortem realm of Tlalocan is real in all senses that matter; but of course, as stated at least once, it isn't so vital that what Grant Morrison writes is cool, as that we regard it as cool, yeah? In terms of sheer poetry of imagination, he may well be the greatest comic book writer we've ever had, but as to whether any of it means anything is in the eye of the beholder.

My theory is that Grant, I would suggest a possibly insecure individual, wanted more than anything to achieve fame by means other than anything reliant upon possession of a personality in which he did not have full confidence. He wished to be admired in the same way he had admired Moorcock or the members of some fucking awful psychedelic band, and so he worked at presenting the same mystique in both comics and music. Perhaps perceiving what he interpreted as a kindred spirit in Alan Moore, he reached out, hoping to find his praise returned by someone whose work he deemed genuinely inspirational. Alan Moore, possibly a little creeped out by the attention of someone he understood to be a bit of a goon - and perhaps with some justification - told him to piss off; and the rest has been butthurt all the way.

I'll really show that Alan Moore this time, as he rolls up his sleeves and writes another hilariously ironic tale of a wisecracking superpowered acid casualty buggering a suspiciously bearded kiddy fiddler from the town of Northapmtno.

Supergods would be a decent read if it were written by someone else - Andrew Hickey for example, but Morrison's strengths are to be found in his fiction, which is probably ironic on some deeply tedious level.

Red Razors

Mark Millar, Steve Yeowell & Nigel Dobbyn Red Razors (1995)
It's hard to know where to start with this one, the comic book equivalent of a family-size bag of Morrisons' own brand cheese footballs. It's set in that version of twenty-second century Russia in which the Soviet Union endured, as did its furtive fixation with all things western, specifically all things 1970s western to the point where the only clue as to culture and geography is the occasionally gratuitous afterthought of a hammer and sickle slapped on either a building or someone's hat. There's a Church of Elvis, a talking horse called Ed, a Starsky and Hutch themed nightclub complete with Huggy Bear, references to Top Cat, Laverne & Shirley, Scooby Doo, on and on and on. It borders on exhausting for the same reason that comedian Peter Kay became unbearable when he gave up telling jokes in preference for gurgling who remembers fondant fancies? over and over like some peculiarly senile man-toddler. The thing that hurts most is that I know I've done this exact same thing: if you have no story to tell, just keep coming with those hilariously knowing references to the amusingly crap and dated, and maybe no-one will notice. It's probably what kept Deadline magazine going, or at least the careers of Jamie Hewlett and Philip Bond, respectively artists of Tank Girl and the truly excruciating Wired World, the strips which dared to name the fave bands of those involved every three fucking panels. Hey kids, who wants to check out The Wonder Stuff?

I'll pass, thanks.

Yet I still find it impossible to dislike Red Razors - the story of a Soviet psychopath turned instrument of rough justice, in case it wasn't obvious. It's fucking stupid, but it's almost so stupid that it comes out the other side, which is probably helped by the wonderful art of Steve Yeowell who just about manages to do the job of telling the joke with a straight face. There's still a gap in there, a place where certain elements don't quite connect because the story can't work out whether or not it should have been drawn by Paul Sample or Gilbert Shelton; but by the time Millar wheels out Vic Reeves' and Bob Mortimer's Judge Nutmeg as a radioactive mutant dispensing harsh sentences for crimes such as stepping on the cracks in the pavement, it's easier to just give in and go with it.

The Hunt for Red Razors drawn by Nigel Dobbyn doesn't really fare so well. The references to Multi-Coloured Swap Shop have been toned down, but the art doesn't quite fit. It's not that it's bad, but the guy was clearly just starting out and still had some way to go; and I suppose the same was true of Millar himself - Red Razors feels rushed, unlike either Saviour or Insiders so far as I recall, and rushed  to the point of having one of those panels so beautifully parodied in Viz wherein a crowd is stood to one side offering commentary on the action:

Razors is pretty tough! Spike broke his ribs and he's still fighting!

Yes, Barry. Thanks for that.

People tend to get a bit misty-eyed with the Judge Dredd mythos from which Red Razors is derived, possibly because it's enduring and English, and whilst much of it is undeniably great, readers tend to forget all the deadline-driven landfill like The Secret Diary of Adrian Cockroach Aged 13½ Months. I'm not really sure where Red Razors sits on the scale, because the whole thing really is frankly fucking stupid, but as I say, it's so stupid it kind of works, and as such it's very difficult to dislike.