Skizz

Alan Moore & Jim Baikie Skizz (1994)
I drifted away from 2000AD at some point after Alien Cultures, the second Skizz story, and before The Gunlords of Omega Ceti, the final part of the saga, if we're calling it a saga. I'd actually forgotten Alien Cultures had happened, but never mind.

Skizz was born from the English comics tradition of vaguely copying whatever was popular with the kids at the time, the tradition which filed the serial numbers from Jaws, Rollerball, and the Six Million Dollar Man to bring us Hook Jaw, Death Game 1999, and M.A.C.H. 1. Skizz was therefore Spielberg's ET in Birmingham with a hint of Boys from the Blackstuff; except it ended up as so much more, and certainly a thing in its own right, at least for the duration of that first black and white story written by Alan Moore.

Skizz is very much a children's story from a children's comic, but has stood the test of time and my transformation into a fat old man sat at the computer in just his underpants, because Moore kept in mind who he was writing for without talking down to them; and it remains a joy to read even three decades later in a different country. The story is simple enough - genial alien stranded on Earth becomes pals with some kids and is menaced by authority figures. I'd say it's your traditional Children's Film Foundation narrative except I'm not sure I actually ever saw any of their efforts outside of the occasional clip on Screen Test, but that's how it reads, and is as such a familiar form in the history of British comics. It's the working classes pitted against elitist or otherwise authoritarian figures, as were more or less everyone from Alf Tupper to the Bash Street Kids.

Moore's Skizz was perfect, and probably should have been left alone, but it wasn't. The further adventures were written by Jim Baikie, artist on all three, and a genuinely wonderful artist. As a writer, he was better than might be expected. The dialogue, the pace, and the big ideas of the later tales are wonderful, taking Skizz to weird new places and commendably avoiding a simple repeat of what Moore had written; and I seem to recall it working as weekly episodes of five or so pages, but read in one sitting, the problem becomes apparent. The problem is that once you get past Skizz in quarantine for having eaten a yoghurt, time-travelling alien Teddy boys and the rest, there isn't actually much of a story holding any of the big ideas together, and what there is suggests composition by committee in a pub about thirty minutes before closing time with notes scribbled on the back of a fag packet, everyone pissing themselves with laughter as each new ludicrous suggestion is belched forth, ending with everyone stumbling home, giggling, and vowing that no fucking fucker's gunna mess about with this afuckinmazing thing which has been born upon this drunken evening. This, for me, was the problem with a lot of the stuff which got published in 2000AD around the time of Armoured Gideon and Hewligan's bloody awful Haircut. The mag had forgotten who was reading, or maybe it just couldn't tell any more. Even Judge Dredd shows up in an episode of The Gunlords of Omega Ceti, reading very much like Jim had either run out of big ideas or was past caring; which is a massive shame because, as I say, the art is gorgeous throughout.

So the collection looks fantastic, but two thirds are a bit of a dog's dinner up close, trying too hard and forgetting what they was looking for in the first place on a Steven Moffat scale of corpulent indulgence. Most frustrating of all is that it almost worked, and maybe would have done had they just roped in Jamie Delano or someone to talk Jim down from those high ledges.

Phoned-In Adventures from the DC Universe

Alan Moore etc. Phoned-In Adventures from the DC Universe (2011)
What the fuck, I thought, it's Alan Moore - how bad could it be?, and so here we are again. I wondered about those issues of Green Lantern, Vigilante and other historically unremarkable DC titles written by the lad with the beard, having failed to notice them in their day. Specifically I wondered about them a little later by which time I was approaching thirty and somehow still young enough to be able to read X-Men spin-offs without wincing. Had I picked up the material collected here when it was new, I probably would have thought it amazing, but in 2016 I am no longer quite so comfortable extending the benefit of the doubt because a bloke in a cape is fighting crime.

DC Universe - to give the book its actual but arguably less descriptive title - collects old issues of Batman, Superman, Secret Origins and everything else Moore ever wrote for DC comics which wasn't Swamp Thing. There's nothing I'd call genuinely terrible. On the other hand there's a limit to how much you can reasonably expect from a comic about a vigilante who fights crime, drug dealers, drug dealing pimps, drug dealers who sell drugs to the kids on the street, and who calls himself Vigilante; and his superpower is that he has a gun with which he shoots drug dealers who commit crime, I suppose. You can tell that Moore is making the best of it, struggling to work with what is essentially crappy material, but you can also tell that while his heart wasn't really in it, that lecky bill wasn't going to pay itself. Even with generally great art, most of this is roughly as good as a decent run of Tharg's Future Shocks in 2000AD. I've read the Superman strips before in a black and white eighties collection called The Man of Tomorrow, and they're decent for what they are, but what they are now seems underwhelming even given that I'm about four decades past the reading age of the target audience.

The second half of the book derives from comics originally published by companies which were ultimately assimilated by the great DC Comics Borg Cube - much to Alan Moore's public displeasure - mostly relating to Jim Lee's WildCATS about which I know next to nothing. Surprisingly I found this stuff a little more engaging, which I suppose may be down to the less familiar territory and Moore having been granted license to do the sort of thing he does best. Voodoo, centred around some WildCATS character of the same name, is fairly enjoyable as yer typically brainy mainstream Moore fare, although it probably helps if you can pretend it isn't a story about murdered strippers drawn by someone with a massive collection of Bratz dolls. Then there's Deathblow which is incomprehensible and more or less bereft of dialogue, but is nevertheless justified by Jim Baikie's wonderful moody artwork.

Even when he's phoning it in, Alan Moore still makes most of the competition look like wankers. DC Universe is a reasonably enjoyable exercise in barrel scraping which should under no circumstances be mistaken for Homer's Odyssey just because author of Watchmans, V of the Vendettas blah blah blah...

New Statesmen

John Smith & Jim Baikie with Sean Phillips & Duncan Fegredo unfortunately New Statesmen (1989)
Ah... the late 1980s when dance music wore sharp pastels and was easily identified by the ocean of reverb added to its snappy Yamaha RX15 drum machine; and when industrial music was essentially the same with the addition of taped televangelists proclaiming that Jesus doesn't like bummers - a conceit which even Cabaret Voltaire had abandoned by about 1984. I was surprised that the understanding of all Americans being homophobic rapture-happy bible bashers didn't really creep into comics until much later, at least not until Garth Ennis first mistook Quentin Tarantino's burger anecdotes for dialogue. There was of course Pete Milligan's run on DC's Shade the Changing Man which taught us that if you're at the Klan rally chewing rib whilst debating whether the subject of the latest public execution is either some no good son of a bitch or a real all-American hero yes siree, then you're probably in Texas.

In 1988, the Mighty Tharg, extraterrestrial editor of 2000AD, launched Crisis, a fortnightly comic featuring John Smith's first major series, New Statesman. Smith was, aside from a few one off efforts, something of an unknown quantity in 1988 so New Statesman, roughly speaking a dissection of US politics, was a bold undertaking, and one that Smith carried off well, complete with psychotic televangelists and yet happily without presenting either America or Americans as inherently evil because hey... McDonalds mkay! This earns my approval because, having moved here, Texas as the land of serial killing Baptists has come to look somewhat embarrassing in 2012. Let the country that is entirely without  xenophobic sibling-marryers cast the first cliché.

John Smith's foreword apologises for New Statesmen being an early work, bogged down with purple prose and trying far too hard to out-serious Watchmen, but there's really no need. Whilst it's true that the narrative is somewhat elusive in places, this works in the book's favour, tantalising with evocative dialogue and a subtext requiring the sort of reader involvement more commonly associated with the written word than graphic novel - a term I've never liked, but one that is for once appropriate. What some may regard as murky plotting, whether deliberate or otherwise, serves to reinforce the realism of the story, having more in common with an anecdotal and interpreted experience of daily life than the ruthless jigsaw puzzle narratives of Alan Moore, to name but one obvious example.

The art by Jim Baikie is similarly beautifully suited - solid, atmospheric, and limber; so it's a shame that some of New Statesman was drawn by Sean Phillips and Duncan Fegredo, both turning in pages that look like they were given to the work experience kid whilst Jim was on his break. Both Phillips and Fegredo went on to better things, it could probably be argued, although Philips never really struck me as anything better than competent, and Fegredo always seemed too messy. Unfortunately what we have here appears to be their really early work. It's clumsy, ugly, fanzine level stuff at best, and chapter five, page four is in particular so painful that it should win awards.

Aside from a few chapters having been drawn by people who very much weren't Jim Baikie, New Statesmen remains rewarding two decades later, refreshingly short on clichés, and all that is good  is so good as to cancel out crappy art bringing down the average.