You Look Like Death

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

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

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

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

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

Sympathy for the Devil

 

Daniel Bristow-Bailey Sympathy for the Devil (2020)
I'm still sort of waiting for Daniel Bristow-Bailey to return to the written word, given the promise of 2016's The Ruins, but I'm not inclined to complain about his subsequent focus on comic strips, of which this is the latest, because his ability with a crayon is, so it turns out, comparable to his ability with a keyboard. So comparable, in fact, that it seems almost unfair. There must be something he can't do, surely.

Sympathy for the Devil is approximately the book of Genesis retold as Mike Judge's Office Space. If it's not clear what I mean by that, we open with a celestial board meeting wherein Lucifer suggests dinosaurs be repurposed as something he's decided to call birds, while Michael - clearly one of God's golden boys - poo-poos the idea, pointing out that they'll only shit everywhere, which hardly seems like the sort of thing anyone is likely to want in the proposed earthly paradise. You may already know what happens next, but the telling is something new, beautifully paced, and with Bristow-Baileys' illustration looking better than ever - combining the weight and depth of Jean Giraud with the looser, more expressive quality of maybe Edward Ardizzone. Sympathy is genuinely one of the best looking independent comics I think I've seen, possibly ever.

Buy it here, my child.

Starlight

Mark Millar & Goran Parlov Starlight (2014)
There probably isn't a whole lot I can say about this one beyond just wow. Someone or other described it as Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven with Buzz Lightyear in the lead - which seems pretty close - although it reminds me more of Flash Gordon, what with the alien world of castles, giants, elves, and at least one princess deposed by an intergalactic despot. It could have been awful, but Parlov's art lends everything a timeless, statuesque grace in the vein of Giraud and those guys, whilst Millar's writing is perfect, understated, and touching, telling a story which is mainly about an old war horse making peace with age and the death of his wife. Starlight is probably what Alan Moore's Tom Strong should have been.

Weapon X

Barry Windsor-Smith Weapon X (1991)
I missed this one first time around, having given up on Marvel a few months earlier from what I can recall - probably a good thing as Weapon X, had I seen it, might have sucked me right back in, it being the absolute opposite of all that Liefeld inspired crap which was dragging the medium down into a grimacing slurry of katana swords and improbably massive tits. Weapon X is exactly the sort of thing which first got me hooked on all those caped books.

For those who've been living in a monastery since 1974, Wolverine is a character rather than a superhero, a violent feral mutant with the ability to recover from almost any injury no matter how disgusting. It's surprisingly difficult to trace his lineage back to Superman or any of his sunny pals, and Wikipedia points out that Wolverine is one of a certain superhero archetype which seems to have emerged in the wake of the Vietnam war. Since he first appeared in an issue of the Incredible Hulk, Marvel had kept the origin of the character vague and mysterious, occasionally hinting at his being the reluctant fruit of some dubious military experiment, and for a while there was a lot of mileage in all of this muttering and whispering. Of course, what with Marvel being Marvel and the whole deal with how you won't believe your fucking eyes as we finally reveal the pulse pounding secret origin of whoever inherited amazing powers from an ancient sorcerer this week, the mystery wasn't to last; and by now, had I been paying attention, I probably would have known what brand of underpants Wolverine was wearing when they squirrelled him off to that secret laboratory. Anyway, back to 1991 when we still didn't really know…

Barry Windsor-Smith, writes, draws, and doesn't give a whole lot away, telling this story in generally impressionistic style with hints requiring the reader to join the dots - snatches of dialogue combined with images from other parts of the story as a sort of narrative collage, no thinky bubbles, no one explaining what they're doing for the sake of an easy ride. Weapon X is disorientating, brutal, and beautiful, one of the most elegant looking comic books I've seen and at least of a standard equivalent to the work of Jean Giraud. The disorientation serves the atmosphere of the tale rather than obscuring the sequence of its events, which are in any case loosely familiar from Frankenstein, The Island of Doctor Moreau, and even Jurassic Park, I suppose. The end result makes even the more commonly praised examples of the medium seem clunky and childish, and yes, even Watchmen and its like.

Weapon X was originally serialised in Marvel Comics Presents, a biweekly anthology which I vaguely recall as having been otherwise somewhat ropey; which is indicative of what I loved about Marvel at the end of the eighties, specifically the sheer variety of ideas and quality without anyone feeling the need to slap a warning on the cover reading grown-ups only, no kids allowed! As the comic book became a teenager, wearing long trousers, listening to Gentle Giant albums and trying really hard to enjoy them, Marvel - at least for a while - was just getting on with doing what it had always done to the best of its abilities. Too bad it all went tits up.

Propellerman

Matthias Schultheiss Propellerman (1993)
I now realise that I've had this for a full quarter century and only now have I read the thing in its entirety, which feels thoroughly peculiar and a bit like time travel. It was one of those titles which the guy at my local comic shop habitually added to the bag of stuff set aside for me - mostly whatever X-Shite or Vertigo titles I had on my list, plus anything else they thought would probably be up my street. Propellerman seemed to qualify for this latter category, although they forgot to pop the second issue in my bag and by the time I noticed, it had vanished from the shelves leaving me with seven of an eight issue series which I never got around to reading because I was waiting for the missing piece of the jigsaw; and I somehow never quite got around to looking for a copy until a couple of months ago. So here we are at last.

Schultheiss, both writer and artist, instils his work with a pronounced European sensibility evoking Jean Giraud, RanXerox, Heavy Metal magazine, and particularly evoking films such as Delicatessen and Acción Mutante in the case of Propellerman, which was his take on the superhero genre, roughly speaking. I say roughly speaking because there's a fair bit of Blade Runner and even Total Recall in here, although unfortunately the latter is expressed mainly as peculiar dialogue of the kind we used to hear when Arnie acted beyond his comfort zone, attempting to convey emotions born of desires other than revenge - here thinking mainly of der chillingly stilted you know I luff you, baby Douglas Quaid reports whilst romping mit his fake vife for to have sexy fun time, ja?

In Propellerman's favour, it's beautifully drawn for the most part, wildly imaginative, and the story is fucking bonkers. On the other hand, everyone has the same weirdly lumpy face - roughly Pete Burns after the collagen injections as drawn by Richard Corben - and the dialogue mostly reads as either a lousy translation or conversation with an excessively literal African gentleman.

For days I've searched for this house. Finally I've found it. The house belonged to the man from my memory. He lived here. Everything else I've forgotten. The house is dilapidated and vacant.

I've had the pleasure of knowing several African gentlemen who spoke in such a way, so I'm not criticising their English grammar so much as pointing out that it's a poor fit for this comic. Anyway, the above is all crammed into a single speech balloon, and most of the characters have this habit of treating us to a full summary of the situation each time they speak, even going so far as to helpfully describe their own actions as they're doing them. After a while it becomes a little exhausting, and those Corbenesque faces start to get on your nerves, and you begin to wonder how the hell a Samurai warrior ended up in the cast, and what the fuck with the ancient Egyptian steam-powered robot some guy just dug up?

It has a lot going for it, but it could have been so much better with just a few tweaks, although tellingly I notice Jerry Prosser's name mentioned in some sort of editorial capacity, Jerry Prosser having been the author of the final issues of the Vertigo's Animal Man, which were frankly fucking shite, so maybe he's to blame.

Nice, but hardly worth waiting a quarter of a century to read the thing.

Oh well.

Nameless

Grant Morrison & Chris Burnham Nameless (2016)
Just to get it out of the way before anyone writes a tittering ten-volume slipcased comparison of the parallels, yes, I suppose this might be Grant Morrison revisiting H.P. Lovecraft because he saw Alan Moore do it; and I suppose the confessional we both liked the idea of creating a 'Lovecraftian' horror story without recycling H.P. Lovecraft, might indeed be suffixed with unlike certain other writers, not mentioning no names or nuffink; but otherwise, let's all just get over it. No conspicuously bearded Machiavellian allegories to see here, and aside from anything else, this might be one of the best things Morrison has done, possibly.

Oddly, more than anything, Nameless reminds me of Johan Harsted's 172 Hours on the Moon at least in terms of locale and atmosphere, although it's otherwise much better, obviously; and while it's a different story, arguably closer to all those films in which Bruce Willis saves the earth from collision with an asteroid, Nameless ticks quite a few of the same boxes as The Taking of Planet 5 by Simon Bucher-Jones and Mark Clapham. In fact, if you don't mind that we have Titans and Outsiders rather than Great Houses and the enemy, this is the closest we've had to a Faction Paradox comic book since Image's Lawrence Miles title went tits up back in 2003.

So what's it all about, Alfie?

We have an asteroid, possibly a chip off the old destroyed fifth planet, about to hit Earth, and which can only be understood in mystical terms, hence the astronauts covered in protective sigils; and it's fucking scary, and you'll just have to read it because that's all I'm going to give away. The art comes from another one of those guys who isn't quite all of the way there with his faces, but the whole is otherwise of such elaborate beauty that you don't mind in the least, and which almost gives the book the weight of something by Jean Giraud. The narrative is more like a piece of music than any conventionally linear scrape in space with rockets and monsters, and Morrison's afterword states this as having been intentional, which is nice because it works so well, doing that Nic Roeg thing of making sense despite that it feels like it shouldn't. There's also a heaping helping of mystic horseshit, but nothing which is allowed to get in the way of the story, and it all holds together beautifully without requiring that we skip to the reference section at the end of the book.

That said, I could have lived without the details borrowed from Mayan culture, presumably by way of Carlos Castaneda given the loose way in which terms such as tonal and nagual are tossed around regardless of original meaning in the actual language from which they derive; but the book works so well that I even got over that hump. Damn that Grant Morrison. Why can't they all be this good?

Dan Dare - the 2000AD Years

Pat Mills, Massimo Belardinelli, Dave Gibbons & others
Dan Dare - the 2000AD Years volume one (2015)
In his introduction, Garth Ennis writes that while 2000AD's 1977 reinvention of Dan Dare as a generic action hero may have annoyed purists, we all loved him because we were too young to have read the original in Eagle and he was our Dan Dare - the we here equating to my generation. The thing is, I'm not sure this is strictly true. I was myself very much familiar with the earlier Dan Dare through a stack of Eagle annuals inherited from my dad who had read the comic when he was a kid; and even after it had been cancelled, Dan remained sufficiently popular as to warrant his own Fleetway annuals. I still have the one which came out in 1973 reprinting The Red Moon Mystery and Safari in Space; so most of us knew who he was, I would say.

That said, I'm probably just splitting hairs, because the return of Dan Dare was why I started buying 2000AD, and the main reason why I continued to buy it during those first couple of years. I've seen it argued that Dan Dare as Sid Vicious and then Joe Strummer has been somewhat relegated to the basement of comic book history simply because it wasn't very good. After all, this is the Dare who kicks your ass, hangs out with ne-er-do-wells, and says rude words such as stomm and possibly even drokk. In defence of our boy, I've also seen it argued that if you look closely you will notice that the Eagle version of the strip was also badly written juvenile piffle despite those lovely pictures.

Well, I have had a look and it simply isn't true. Rather this seems to be a case of someone being unable to tell the difference between something which is badly written and something which is simply aimed at a fairly young audience. The Hampson and Bellamy Dare may be a little stilted due to having been delivered in a million instalments of just one and three-quarter pages each; and old Dan was stylistically very much of its time, but it never pandered and should at least be credited with concessions made to yer actual proper science and a surprisingly progressive attitude towards persons other than the white, English, Christian, and male. Most notably it didn't seem to require that there be either an explosion or someone firing a gun every three panels.

Tharg's Dare is bewildering and inept by comparison. The stories are vehicular to massive implausible ideas such as the Biogs with their living spaceships, and in terms of plot the stories verge on Scooby Doo levels of thin. No less than two tales in this collection conclude with food gags punning whichever generic menace has been defeated in the preceding panels - one of Dan's crew remarks that he's built up quite a hunger following the team's escape from a desert planet of living sand, and so Bear jokes that he will happily eat anything except a sandwich; and I can even remember a third one of these - a no cauliflower cheese for me zinger which concluded a story presumably scheduled for reprint in the second volume.

Bear is the huge Russian ex-cosmonaut Dan hires as a general puncher of faces. He refers to himself in third person and, like many of the characters, often describes what he's doing for the benefit of the reader - 'Stava! Bear's astro-axe spikes the alien guns,' as we watch him swing the aforementioned nuclear-assisted axe into the mechanism of some alien weapon; in this case a weapon belonging to the Starslayers who live on a planet called Starslay and who are ruled over by their Dark Lord, who actually knows he's a bad guy. I have no idea how or why the axe is nuclear-assisted. It just is, okay?

It's not simply that new things are always rubbish. Tharg's Dan Dare really was a poor effort compared with the original, at least in terms of narrative relationship with its readers. Aside from the name and the fact of his being recognised by the Mekon, he may as well have been Dredger or Hellman or John Probe or any other generically grizzled action hero from a seventies comic; and yet knowing all of the above, I can't help but love this stuff in spite of itself.

The key is, I suppose, the art combined with those previously mentioned massive implausible ideas - the Biog's living technology, the Shepherds, the Two of Verath in his hollow planet, the Roman-style vampires and their heart-shaped spaceships. This stuff once blew my mind on a weekly basis in a way that not even Doctor Who could manage, and so much so that I never noticed how there was hardly a story underneath. Now that I'm fifty, the same tales have lost some of their initial impact, but the shortfall is made up with massive blasts of memory sherbert going off every few panels. Nostalgia alone shouldn't really be enough to save a strip, which is where the art comes in. Belardinelli's figures were often ropey, but you don't really notice here, and he was at his absolute weirdest drawing the Sid Vicious version of Dare in those early progs - bordering on the Hieronymous Bosch of the comic strip; and it looks so fucking amazing that it doesn't seem to matter that the dialogue - mostly bloody awful as it is - should be reduced to something like background music, a sort of word condiment sprinkled across the artwork for the sake of flavour. The same roughly applies to the Dave Gibbons version which, if not quite so visually arresting, has enough of a pleasantly chunky quality to compensate for crappy or even non-existent narrative.

A few years later, a version of Eagle returned and reclaimed Dan Dare for its own. I had a look at the thing, but despite the admittedly bed-wettingly gorgeous art of Ian Kennedy, it seemed like a boy band version of the character, a pointless exercise in recreating the original magic by following the same recipe which failed because the rest of the universe had long since moved on; and this was why Dan Dare worked so well in 2000AD, because I was twelve and it absolutely nailed the spirit of its time, for better or worse.

Having only just found out that Belardinelli is no longer with us, this also comes as a wonderful reminder of just how magnificently weird his art was at its best. I can't help feel that had somebody pushed him in the general direction of a life drawing class or two, he might have been remembered with the sort of reverent tone generally reserved for the likes of Kirby, Ditko and Moebius.

Jupiter's Legacy

Mark Millar & Frank Quitely Jupiter's Legacy (2015)
All I can say is Blimey! I've always liked Mark Millar's writing, or at least some of his writing, and I've always felt he had great potential; except every so often there would be something slightly shit or just plain fucking horrible and it would suddenly feel like the good stuff probably came about by accident. Throw sufficient numbers of starving transsexual Cambodians forced to consume their own dead fathers' AIDS infected penises on live television at the wall, and eventually one of them will stick and form a pattern which reminds you of Watchmen.

Jupiter's Legacy is yet more revisionist superheroics - caped types with superpowers in a world which behaves more or less like our own, at least in comparison to wherever Spiderman is supposed to live. It's been done a million times before, and yet here it is again but with such snappy vigour as to make it read like a new thing. I can't even tell how he does it, beyond that Millar seems to have an ear for natural dialogue, a great sense of timing, and a good understanding of how people work. Of course there are a couple of horrible moments as you might expect, but still nothing as bad as the slashfest of all that stuff drawn by those who look up to Rob Liefeld as an artistic role model. Millar's gore is repulsive because that sort of thing should be repulsive more than it should ever resemble something cool from a console game.

Jupiter's Legacy riffs on the whole great power equating to great responsibility equation and tries to answer the question of why Superman doesn't ever seem to get around to ending world hunger, our reliance on fossil fuels, or anything else which actually matters. This isn't a new idea, but it feels as though it is, or at least fails to resemble anything else of its kind which I can remember reading. It's a story of human - or rather superhuman frailty told on an epic scale without any of the usual pomposity or attempts to fool the reader with generic grandeur; and Frank Quitely's art is the best I've seen it, invoking the stately dynamism of Moebius and the like, and even the chins seem to be mostly under control.

As I read this I thought to myself Mark Millar is beginning to make Alan Moore and the rest look like hacks, which I know can't possibly be true even if it felt like it was. I wouldn't say Jupiter's Legacy is the greatest superhero comic ever written, but it's possibly the greatest superhero comic written since the previous greatest superhero comic ever written.

JLA: Earth 2

Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely JLA: Earth 2 (2000)
I wouldn't have bothered, but I actually thought this was the one Andrew Hickey wrote about in his fascinating analysis of Morrison's Seven Soldiers of Victory, which it wasn't.

Never mind. It seems decent anyway, or at least a massive improvement on Morrison's JLA: New World Order which was mainly about Superman growing a mullett. The art is mostly wonderful and redolent of Jean Giraud or Gaetano Liberatore except still with those fucking chins making everyone look like Jimmy Hill, Sammy Davis Jr. or Bruce bloody Forsyth. The story is paced so as to be readable and entertaining - as opposed to wilfully obscure and irritating - although I have no idea what the hell any of it is supposed to be about. Superman and pals travel to a mirror Earth in which everything good is bad and vice versa, and so the looking glass Justice League are dedicated to crime, murder, evil, the music of Jeff Lynne and so on. Superman and pals inevitably attempt to stomp the bad guys, but can't because this is a universe in which the bad guys always win; so they do something bad and win the day after all. So reality, both here and in our own universe, is dictated by narrative, which itself is a function of storytelling and hence human perception. as above, so below... er...

That's all I've got.

I'm sure there's more to it given Morrison's usual preoccupations, but it wasn't obvious to me, and I didn't care enough to feel like working it out. Earth 2 is very enjoyable, but probably makes more sense if you have more invested in caped stuff than I do.

The Authority volume three: Earth Inferno

Mark Millar, Frank Quitely & Chris Weston
The Authority volume three: Earth Inferno (2001)
Just for the sake of a recap, The Authority, created by Warren Ellis - the most talented writer ever to sit down in front of a computer with a nice cup of tea, a packet of biscuits, and a freshly ironed thinking cap - is the most violently innovative comic ever published, effectively inventing the superhero genre, for there were no superhero comics prior to The Authority.

No there weren't.

Sarcasm aside, The Authority is frequently cited as the first big-screen superhero book, or at least it's cited as such in the three places I've looked, one of these being the back cover of an earlier volume. This amounts to admittedly beautifully drawn pages of costumed types throwing planets at each other, or something similarly reliant on scale, combined with a dearth of the requisite captions, subtitles, or thought bubbles by which our living God might lament how Ellie-Sue never seems to notice him in class on account of only having eyes for that big bully, Brad Bradford. It's the sort of thing that I would impertinently suggest is a piece of piss if you've got a decent artist on board, just as it's a piece of piss making spooky music if you have a good microphone, a ton of reverb and a stack of shitty teenage poems about skulls and skeletons and stuff; so I'm saying that I don't really buy The Authority as anything particularly startling, or at least as anything that hasn't already been done by Jean Giraud thirty years ago; or even Jack Kirby, I suppose it could be argued.

That said, as is often the case with that which appears wrought by simple means, it takes genuine skill to get it right, and Mark Millar continues to impress in this respect, even when teamed up with Frank Quitely, the natural shoe-in for that long awaited Jimmy Hill and Lionel Richie crossover graphic novel. Whilst much of Earth Inferno superficially resembles the biggest Hollywood action blockbuster ever to be shoved up the Andromeda galaxy's back passage with a fist made out of purest anti-time - it works in ways far beyond the means of all those noisy, soulless Bruce Willis vehicles, achieving scale with great art and conveying tone through the magic of genuine wit and knowing when to shut up; as opposed to ramping up the orchestra into an endless cycle of empty emotional crescendos punctuated by jokes about not losing face as someone has their face sliced off with a penisary quantum laser.

I know I'm about a decade late to this party, but Mark Millar really does seem to make the work of so many other comic book writers read like fanzine level tailored-to-order hack work, as unfortunately indicated by shorter back up strips from Joe Casey, Paul Jenkins, and Warren Ellis included in this collection, none of which are terrible, but none of which I can actually recall in any detail despite only having read them yesterday evening.