First Flight

Chris Claremont First Flight (1981)
I tried and I tried and I almost did it, but with forty pages to go, my reading glands rebelled and my hand reached for something else as though under the influence of some mysterious external force. I've got a lot of time for Chris Claremont, the man who wrote the X-Men comic book for seventeen years, but whoever told him to try his hand at a novel should take a long, hard look at themselves. I first noticed this title on the shelves of Half Price Books about a decade ago, and I've never been tempted because, to judge a book mostly by its Top Gun-esque cover, it looked fucking terrible.

Well, what do you know?

Somewhere under here, there's a decent story in the general vein of Heinlein, and Claremont knows how to put a sentence together; but pull back and you'll notice that the arresting image he's conjured is actually sprayed on the side of a van heading for Los Angeles with the best of the Doobie Brothers blasting from the eight track and the driver, who would probably benefit from a trip to the barbers, has just addressed you as man. The problem is that where Claremont has been father to many a beautifully written comic book, they're mostly written in collaboration with artists, and if I've taken anything from First Flight it's that the art of a good Claremont story does a share of the heavy lifting. It's not actually bad, but once we've established the narrative with snappy dialogue, it feels as though something is missing, that we should be staring at some galaxy-spanning vista drawn by John Byrne or whoever; because as it stands, the prose communicates very little of the wonder of space travel or our first encounter with an alien species, instead leaving the reader with a vague feeling of it having happened. I found myself drifting off because the characterisation is the only thing which holds the attention, and the characterisation is actually a lot like what I read in those X-Men comics all those years ago. At one point I noticed that our people were on a different spacecraft, having apparently made the transference while I was thinking about something else.

While, we're here, notice how the cover depicts spunky young pilots climbing into their individual starfighters - or summink - ready to scramble, or whatever it is that starfighters do. Well, whatever is going on here, isn't actually in the book so far as I can tell.

Essential Defenders volume one

Roy Thomas, Steve Englehart, Sal Buscema & others

Essential Defenders volume one (1974)

My guess would be that someone at Marvel noticed all those extraneous superheroes they had laying around making the place look untidy and decided to hoover a few of them up into brand new superteams, just like the Avengers, so as to maximise something or other. Then a couple of years later they reprinted this one in black and white weekly instalments in a UK comic called Rampage. I'd recently experienced something of an epiphany for the form, having discovered 2000AD just a few months earlier. I'd always felt well disposed towards Marvel from afar, but there were too many titles and most of them had been going for yonks. Rampage therefore represented an opportunity to get in on the ground floor. Each week featured half an issue of the Defenders plus reprints from the Nova comic book. It was pretty great as I recall, but went monthly after less than a year, changed format and lost me to the extent that I almost forgot all about it - which was weird. When John Byrne introduced Xemnu the Titan to his run on She-Hulk at the end of the eighties, I knew the guy looked sort of familiar but had no idea where I'd seen him.

So I picked this up partially as an experiment to see how much I could remember forgetting, if you see what I mean, and partially because I'm a middle aged man who is screened for colon cancer to a yearly schedule so it seems only natural that I should be purchasing seventies superhero comics aimed at twelve-year old boys.

Marketing aside, the premise of the Defenders was the assemblage of supertypes who otherwise tended to go it alone - Dr. Strange, Prince Namor, and the Hulk for starters, meaning a lot of what transpires is usually the other two trying to explain things to the big green thickie in hope that he'll thump someone. This big fat paving slab additionally kicks off with issues of solo comics which foreshadow events in the initial run of the Defenders, and it makes for a surprisingly satisfying and thematically consistent whole. Additionally, it's all quite revealing in terms of what made Marvel tick in the early days, or at least what made it so much more appealing than all those frowning boy scouts and hall monitors over at the distinguished competition. Marvel's roots, at least on the evidence of this lot, seem to lay with all those horror comics that Wertham had pulled from the shelves. Marvel's superheroes always seemed to have a bit more texture to me, and it seems because they're mostly Gods and monsters, misfits who could never have held down normal jobs as mild-mannered reporters; and thus do we open with a sixties issue of Dr. Strange which quotes H.P. Lovecraft and introduces the Nameless One, a two-headed extra-dimensional tosspot who seems very clearly descended from the weird fiction of the twenties and thirties. In fact, even once we fully ease into the era of men in tights, or at least the era of a percentage of those men present wearing the same, the Defenders remains satisfyingly odd and quite difficult to predict.

The art is mostly top shelf, and is particularly striking in black and white, and Ross Andru and Bill Everett's work on A Titan Walks Among Us! from Marvel Feature #3 is downright gorgeous even aside from being the place where I obviously first met Xemnu - and boy, some of those panels leapt right off the page to kiss me in the centre of the forehead.

Additionally we have the Avengers-Defenders war, which drags on a bit, but is probably significant in foreshadowing all those headachey multi-title and allegedly sense shattering crossovers of the eighties, Secret Crisis and all that; despite which, this thing is still very much to be recommended. I thought it would probably be at least an interesting curiosity, but it's fucking magnificent for the most part.

Wolverine

 

Chris Claremont, John Byrne, Larry Hama etc. etc. Wolverine (1991)
Not a graphic novel, not a collected edition, just a big stack of comic books like you would read when in bed with the measles, or a hangover if you're a little bit older. The story, as I've definitely already mentioned on more than one occasion, is that I was once a massive sucker for caped comic books, then sold my entire collection during a sudden fit of what I imagined to be maturity. It's a decision I've always regretted and have finally set right, having spent the last couple of years buying them all back - mainly thanks to the fact that none of them ever ended up quite so collectible - and by association, expensive - as we were told would be the case.

When it finally happened, Wolverine as a regularly monthly title didn't make much of an impression on me, as is possibly indicated by my having re-bought entire runs of X-Men, X-Factor, and New Mutants* before I even remembered that there had ever been a regular Wolverine title, and one to which I subscribed and presumably read. Anyway, I picked up a few and realised that yes, I actually had enjoyed the thing well enough, thereby justifying another couple of hundred dollars spunked away at Lone Star Comics in the name of nostalgia, albeit an admittedly vague form of nostalgia.

Anyway, Wolverine was essentially everything Charles Schulz had warned us about in his Peanuts strip back in 1952.

Unfortunately, a homicidal nutcase whose superpower is stabbing people proved somewhat limited in terms of what kind of stories might be told, and so Wolverine was written as a man wrestling with inner demons, which at least allowed for bit more wiggle room. Frank Miller and Chris Claremont had already done a lot to flesh out the character both in the main X-Men comics and in related spin-offs, and Claremont got the regular book off to a fairly decent start, essentially turning Wolverine into a hard-boiled detective and letting him run loose in an old Terry and the Pirates strip. It worked well, and was at least more engaging than the endless cycle of growling and stabbing which it could have been, and which a few of the readers had seemingly expected.

That said, a few of Claremont's plot points were somewhat bewildering - possibly due to this being just one of fifty other books he was writing to a monthly schedule, and the whole thing came across as kind of dry at times what with the rigorous adherence to Wolverine as film noir. Peter David and then Archie Goodwin took over from Claremont after ten issues, roughly maintaining the same mood and general standard, even allowing for bursts of humour. Considering the vigour with which Marvel had been milking the X-cow at least since the second half of the eighties, the actual quality of Wolverine is surprising and impressive, although I suppose if they were throwing money at any title, it was going to be this one; and so the art is likewise mostly exceptional as one would expect of John Buscema, John Byrne, Klaus Janson, Marc Silvestri and others. However, I couldn't help but notice that this stuff reads a lot better when you sit down with a big stack of comics and binge the lot in just a couple of sittings. It played its cards just a little too close to its chest for a monthly schedule - as I vaguely seem to recall - which is probably why I'd forgotten so much of it, including even the point at which I gave up and stopped buying the thing.

Having no idea of where I'd originally jumped ship, and being reluctant to buy a run of back issues where the cut-off point might leave me hanging in the middle of an unfinished story, I re-bought the book up to and including issue fifty on the grounds of it being a round number and not too deep into the period beyond which these comics had mostly turned to shite in a grimacing cross-hatched effort to tap into some of that old Rob Liefeld magic. Now, having actually read the things, it seems I've made the right decision, both in drawing the line at issue fifty and in dumping the book when I did first time round. Larry Hama's run on the last twenty or so of these restores a lot of the humour and peculiar novelty which had either been missing or else was stood in the corner pretending to be Mickey Spillane during previous episodes. On one level, Hama turned Wolverine into sixties telly Batman, having Logan fight his own android double while trying to save the life of a bomb disguised as a cute little girl with pigtails and a lisp programmed to blow him into pieces; but for all Hama's wit and invention, it becomes obvious that all those letter-writing twerps complaining about the lack of stabbings have had their way. Various X-Men begin to turn up as crowd pleasing guests with increasing frequency, and by now it's the grimacing nineties X-Men in those bondage costumes covered in pockets, utility belts and holsters and all the women with massive tits and no waist; and inker Dan Green seemed to be doing his best to make Silvestri's pencils resemble something from the Image stable.

Wolvey's secret origin, you won't fucking believe it, deffo the real thing this time, not a dream, grimace grimace, black ops, even more fucking cross-hatching and random pockets, more black ops, clandestine government organisation, foil stamped edition also available blah blah blah…

Wolverine was never really in competition with The Taming of the Shrew, in case anyone missed that particular memo, but this was a decent, even classy book for a while, regardless of having sprung from Marvel's increasingly rabid attempts to take its readership for every last penny - although I gather much worse was to come, and a mere fifty new X-titles hitting the racks each week now seemingly represents a model of restraint by comparison. Inevitably there were lapses, notably the bewilderingly shit Lazarus Project issues featuring art by Barry Kitson whom I seem to recall as having contributed to my giving up on 2000AD back in the eighties; but these were exceptions rather than the rule. Otherwise, for my money, these issues belonged to the final flowering of the American superhero comic before it grew up and became an absolute fucking bore, having mistakenly assumed a massive body count and increasingly baroque forms of slaughter to be pretty much tantamount to adulthood. Those vicious little letter page gorehounds got their way, effectively killing off the thing they purportedly loved, then themselves most likely grew up to be cops, security guards and right-wing politicians, so I'd guess.

Still, it was nice while it lasted.

*: Well, entire runs of the readable stuff, my cut-off point being around 1991, beyond which most of them had turned to shite.
 

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.

Doom Patrol

John Byrne, Doug Hazlewood & Terry Austin Doom Patrol (2006)
This is a stack of eighteen comic books picked up in continuation of my efforts to catch up with all those versions of the Doom Patrol which happened while I was looking the other way, and comprising a story John Byrne began during his run of Justice League comics. The strangest thing here was Byrne's decision to ignore all previous versions of the book, starting again at the beginning as though we'd never before met any of these characters. There's an editorial in the first issue explaining how this return to year zero has been effected so as to tell new stories without any crippling continuity getting in the way, although I have to say that John Arcudi seemed to do fine with the previous run of Doom Patrol, taking it somewhere entirely different without any need of a reset button; and for all its finer points, I still can't help feel that Byrne simply didn't want to deal with all that weird homoerotic Dadaism.

That said, I suppose there's an argument that Hans Bellmer and the Marquis de Sade probably don't belong in a children's comic; and so far as taking Doom Patrol back to its roots with stories thematically faithful to the Arnold Drake version, Byrne does a decent job without descending into pastiche. This is as mainstream as the book has ever been, although it's still reasonably weird when compared to - off the top of my head - silver age Superman. The premise suffers a little from somewhat modular Thunderbirdsisms with the tidily secret base from which the team go forth to fight crime and effect rescue operations, but this is at least a little offset by the characters, old and new, with their brain transplants, four-armed gorillas, friendly Confederate ghosts, and so on - and not forgetting a pleasing sidestep into alternate Doom Patrol realities somewhere around issue fourteen. John Byrne is quite good at this sort of thing, essentially pulling the characters apart, working out what makes them tick, and then spinning stories from whatever he's found - which he did to great effect with Alpha Flight back in the eighties; but apparently he's not very good at dialogue, which really shows in the wake of Chris Claremont having co-written those issue of Justice League which foreshadowed this book. It's not that the dialogue is bad so much as that it lacks Claremont's flair and thus exposes the fact that we're actually reading what may as well be a peculiar take on Scooby Doo. Characters think about what they're doing within their thought bubbles as they're doing it, or they describe that which we can see with our own eyes, or they point out that they would have got away with it were it not for that meddling Doom Patrol.

Despite this, Byrne's Doom Patrol has enough going on to keep it engagingly odd and even gripping, and the only problem is simply that it could have been better.

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.

JLA: The Tenth Circle

Chris Claremont & John Byrne JLA: The Tenth Circle (2004)
As I said back in August, I've been catching up with neglected incarnations of the Doom Patrol, and this is where the John Byrne version was born, immediately prior to a couple of years appearing in their own title. I had a feeling I wasn't going to like this much, and a few online reviews suggested it all seemed a bit childish, as though written for kids. Happily I was wrong on the first count, and as for the second one, well - seeing as how this is a Justice League of America comic book in which Superman has a scrap with a vampire, what the fuck did you expect?

Okay. I had other reservations too, notably how John Byrne has always had a thing for what I seem to remember him calling big stick heroes, so in other words, big, colourful, and sunny just like when I were a lad. Like Teddy Roosevelt, they carry a big allegorical stick with which they duff up the bad guys, and they probably won't have much in the way of dark secrets. There's nothing inherently wrong with such ideas, but in context of Doom Patrol, the essence of Byrne's revival seems oddly Republican in its apparent revision of established continuity, starting again from the beginning so that we no longer have to think about all that weird Morrison stuff with men wearing dresses and drugs and all manner of related beastliness. That said, I haven't actually read Byrne's run on Doom Patrol as yet, so I'll have to suspend judgement a little longer.

On the other hand, I've always enjoyed John Byrne's work. It's easy on the eye, and there's something pleasantly chunky and tidy about his art. It's traditional and clean, almost classical in comic book terms; and yet in apparent contrast to such unashamedly mainstream appeal, he's always been quite good at weird, notably in West Coast Avengers and those early issues of Alpha Flight.

Anyway, here we have a vampire called Crucifer who bites Superman, thus placing him under some kind of hypnotic thrall. He's a vampire very much in the traditional sense, as seen in Murnau's Nosferatu, and he wants to bring all the other vampires back from the  tenth circle of Hell, to which they've been banished by Wonder Woman's people. Luckily the Justice League of America are on the case, as is some mysterious new group of slightly odd supertypes led by a dude in a wheelchair. So, yes, it almost certainly was written for kids, which I nevertheless found a pleasure, and I'm in my fifties.

It's been a while since I read anything by Chris Claremont, and the dialogue is very obviously his, with sentences broken up and splattered all around the frame in strings of speech balloons, pensive dialogue boxes, and unapologetic use of thought bubbles; because in case any of us should have forgotten, this is a comic book, not Crime & Punishment. I'd grown weary of Claremont's dialogue by the end of his run on the X-Men back in the nineties, always trying too hard and coming across like the idea of teenagers seen in a late eighties Rod Stewart video, but it could just be that he was overworked. In any case, whilst this may not strive for the sophistication of one of those grown-up comic books by Garth Guinness, Claremont writes a beautifully smooth read, pulling you right into the story from the first page and keeping your attention firmly pinned in place. There's nothing particularly profound in this collection, except that it's beautifully rendered, rounded, and very, very satisfying. It never needed to do anything more than it already does.

Ultimate X-Men volume three

Mark Millar, Chuck Austen, various Kuberts, some other guys...
Ultimate X-Men volume three (2001)
I suppose I could save myself the effort of writing this review by referring you to its predecessor, as found here. Pretty much everything I said in June applies here, but possibly moreso. I guess the last three X-Men movies were based on the Millar version, and they were decent as movies but this is a comic book; and while it's fine to reinvent characters and situations every so often - if you really must - there really needs to be a reason for the revision beyond just revision. Whilst many elements of those early Chris Claremont issues of X-Men may now seem clunky, dated, and packed so full of corn one might almost think they were aimed at - titter! snurf! - eight-year old boys, they did their job and they did it well. I liked Storm as a po-faced weather-Goddess and Wolverine as Ernest Borgnine with claws. They didn't need to be sulky smart-arsed eye-rolling text-messaging teenagers, particularly not as part of a team comprised exclusively of the same. It's not like they were particularly rich or well-rounded as characters to begin with, but at least you could tell them apart from one another.

Here we get a mash-up of the Proteus storyline from 1979 and the first appearance of Legion in New Mutants, but with more whining and Buffyisms; and it's okay and it does its job very well, but I still can't see why anyone bothered. Betsy Braddock gets recycled as yet another generically deadly telepathic female - a development which can fuck right off; and then there are two issues of revisionist Gambit back story, still with the total arseache of everything written in that annoying phonetic rendering of Cajun which really should have been made illégal by maintenant, mon cheri. I always found Gambit a tedious non-character anyway, so his revival negates the one thing this version had going for it.

I usually like Mark Millar's writing except for when I don't, but this is the first time I've found it workmanlike and bland. For all its flaws, the Claremont run from John Byrne through to Marc Silvestri makes this thing look like Monster High. Grant Morrison's run was pretty radical in some respects, but it worked because he kept his eye on what made the thing great in the first place.

The Vision: Little Worse Than a Man

Tom King & Gabriel Hernandez Walta

The Vision: Little Worse Than a Man (2016)
I'd never heard of Tom King, nor Gabriel Hernandez Walta - whom I assumed to be related to the Love & Rockets brothers, but seemingly isn't - and, aside from enjoying a couple of John Byrne issues of West Coast Avengers about a million years ago, I never really gave too much of a shit about the Vision as a character. Nevertheless, Little Worse Than a Man caught my eye when Jonathan Dennis posted that he'd been reading it on facebook, and there it was in Barnes & Noble looking all intriguing and shit, and I'd made it to page-three-hundred of The Snoring Void and felt as though I deserved a treat, and the girl working the counter said I've been meaning to read this one, which seemed like a good sign.

The bad news, by some definition, is that this is just half of the story, and I gather the other six issues will be collected once they've been published; but otherwise - holy shit!

The Vision, in case anyone requires a recap, is a synthetic man created by Ultron so as to screw with the Avengers - technically a synthezoid, and that's apparently totally different to an android. Oh yes it is. He sports an eye-watering red and green colour scheme; he can fly, walk through walls, shoot lasers and all of the rest; his sentence structure is overly analytical and hence unintentionally amusing, much like Data from Star Trek or Mr. Logic from Viz comic, and now he wants more than anything to be human, or like a human - just a regular guy who mows his lawn and pays taxes.

Naturally I was expecting laffs aplenty in roughly the same vein as an episode of The Munsters, but this is something much better. The excessive logic jokes are all there as Mr. and Mrs. Vision settle in and the two Vision kids attend the local high school, but the story is handled with such loving attention to detail that the laughter feels wrong, almost cruel, and the story slowly escalates into quiet psychological horror. It's that thing about how we are more repulsed by a close approximation of humanity than a patently unrealistic one, because the fear is so much more profound when risen from that split second it takes us to tell the difference between that which is human, and that which isn't. The more the Visions try to fit in, the more David Lynch it gets and the less we notice we're reading a superhero book. In fact, it feels more like science-fiction in the Philip K. Dick tradition - a genuinely rare thing given that most supposedly Dickian fiction seem to have been identified as such by people who may not have read his books but nevertheless consider Blade Runner to be one of the greatest movies ever made, which it really isn't.

Like nothing else I can think of, this book is both hilarious and yet absolutely chilling, often within the space of the same speech bubble, and the artwork is gorgeous. This might even be the best thing Marvel have ever done.

Star Lord: Guardian of the Galaxy

Chris Claremont, John Byrne, Carmine Infantino & others
Star Lord: Guardian of the Galaxy (2014)
Nostalgia does it again. Naturally Mrs. Pamphlets and I took Junior to see Guardians of the Galaxy, assuming it would probably be one of those films we could all enjoy to a greater or lesser extent, as indeed it was. I had relatively fond memories of the Guardians of the Galaxy strip as reprinted in the back pages of Star Wars Weekly when I was Junior's age, but of course neither Martinex nor the fat guy from Jupiter were anywhere to be seen in the big screen adaptation, and Yondu had somehow grown up to be the ornery neighbour from The Waltons; and more confusing still was the presence of Star Lord as portrayed by the lead singer of Mouse Rat. Apparently it's all something to do with Dan Abnett, a man whose work is probably not for me given the girth of his bibliography and the presence therein of a Torchwood novel, but anyway the point is that I had similarly fond memories of the Star Lord strip, also from the back pages of Star Wars Weekly; and so here we are.

Star Lord, as I hadn't realised because Marvel UK chose not to reprint the more ropey material, was Steve Englehart's vision of an astrologically based cosmic superhero. Thankfully the character was soon rescued from its creator by Chris Claremont and John Byrne, which was where both myself and Star Wars Weekly came in. Star Lord was supposedly an attempt to write a comic with the sophistication of a novel, but a comic by the standards of 1976 specifically with the sophistication of a novel by Robert Heinlein; so as a graphic novel I suppose the guys beat more or less everyone but Will Eisner to the term, albeit with a strip which nevertheless reads like something aimed at precocious twelve-year old boys who listen to Boston.

When your starship captain wears a cape, gauntlets, and something on his head resembling a tiny model of a supersonic aircraft, then you know you're still very much in the Marvel cosmos, as distinct from Jim Starlin's Warlock which inhabited a similar realm as seen through a ton of drugs. Claremont overwrites as always with text heavy pages of soul-searching rhetoric written in the portentous tones of Leonard Nimoy addressing the main character.

Did you seek to raise a wry smile with your dandy turn of phrase and casual sarcasm, Lawrence Burton? Was it that passing pleasure which you didst sought?

Additionally, the stories are kind of thin and generic, with a surprisingly high quota of large breasted women in bikinis with affiliations to rebel or revolutionary forces, and those talkative alien bartenders who happily describe the entire socio-economic history of their respective planets to the alien dude in the funky costume. Star Lord predated Star Wars by about a year, which is probably why it flopped, having taken its best shot before the audience was really there; but it's roughly the same ball game, even to the point of beating the Lucas series to one of its major punchlines a few years ahead of time. Neverthless, Claremont somehow gets away with it - as he so often did - and for all his laboured corn, he keeps things moving in a way which holds one's attention and never feels quite so stodgy as it probably should, doubtless aided by John Byrne's generally wonderful art and Carmine Infantino's striking, almost Vorticist linework in the later strips.

Following Chris Claremont, Doug Moench took over the caped typewriter and the saga reverts to generic Marvel landfill of a kind which may well do the job if you're about eight, but seems otherwise unremarkable. The strip returned yet again in the nineties resembling one of the more forgettable series you might have seen in issues of 2000AD from the same era, but beyond a neat explanation as to the working of Star Lord's otherwise preposterous element gun, it all feels a bit pointless with innocent planets menaced by bad guys for the sake of our hero having someone to save whilst agonising over whether or not he's doing the right thing. Sadly, more than half of the collection fulfils all the promise of its bloody awful cover, but fuck it - never mind the filler; anything reprinting Carmine Infantino's breathtaking run on this strip is justified in my book.

JLA: New World Order

Grant Morrison, Howard Porter & John Dell

JLA: New World Order (1997)
Grant Morrison's Invisibles pretty much drove me away from comics, or at least mainstream American comics. It probably didn't help that most of the titles I regularly read were either cancelled or by some other means encrappened towards the second half of the nineties, but The Invisibles really drove the nail into the coffin - the equivalent of a long haired 1970s teenager walking to school with a Gentle Giant album under his arm, obviously no bag so as to ensure all can see what a deep thinker he is, what an untameable and sexy intellect lies beneath those spots; Robert Anton Wilson recycled by the man who, without any apparent trace of irony, later likened Alan Moore's Watchmen to sixth form poetry in a move bearing some comparison with that time Russell Brand called Justin Lee Collins an unfunny fucker.

Aside from the obvious point that twenty-three really is just the number that stops twenty-two getting its soup all over twenty-four at numbers' dinner time, and nothing else, mystical or otherwise metaphysical or philosophical systems with no basis in objective reality are fine whilst they provide a useful way of viewing the world - note emphasis on word useful. I suppose the neo-Discordian bollocks of which Morrison is clearly a fan might be viewed as useful if you prioritise tattoos, hallucinogenics, piercings, and Genesis P. Orridge over things of real value; or if you really need to differentiate yourself from those sheep who wear black clothes and listen to the Sisters of Mercy without actually being like really profound or understanding how there's no such thing as coincidence because it's all connected blah blah blah yap yap yap bellyache bellyache bellyache rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb ...

So when Grant Morrison went mainstream, taking over the Justice League of America comic in 1996, I was somewhat hopeful of his having noticed that The Unreadables was in fact complete bullshit and that he might have thus decided to turn over a new leaf in a flurry of contrition. Unfortunately Aztek, another mainstream superhero title he created at roughly the same time, turned out to be pants so I didn't bother with JLA. The idea was fine, and I always liked the approach John Byrne took with his big, bold reinvestment of golden age comic heroes, an approach which gave even titles like Alpha Flight a peculiarly mythic quality; but, for Byrne - who in case anyone needs reminding is pretty much beyond reproach as a comic artist - big and bold was his thing rather than an angle.

I guess Grant Morrison was finding his feet with JLA, experimenting with the mainstream and its attendant lack of irony as opposed to deconstructing the mainstream; and the problem is that it's just not very good. The art is functional - although Superman with a mullet is a terrible idea - but the dialogue and narrative lack the snappy flourishes of even drivel like The Invisibles. It reads like a comic book trying to get in touch with its own inner-1983 issue of Firestorm the Nuclear Man.

Thankfully he went on to much better things, but this was a real low point; and it probably wouldn't have been quite so bad if this lumpen humourless bollocks hadn't been the replacement for Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis' wonderful predecessor.