Strange Adventures

Tom King & Mitch Gerads Strange Adventures (2021)
Adam Strange is a regular guy who finds himself randomly and instantaneously beamed to the distant planet of Rann, there to fly around wearing a jetpack solving science-fiction crimes with just his wits and his trusty laser pistol. He was an old school character from before pow! the comic book grew up, one I first encountered in Alan Moore's version of Swamp Thing wherein it was revealed that the sexy naked ladies of Rann were literally queuing up for a go on Strange's mighty Earth penis. Whether or not pow! the comic book had grown up by this point is probably debatable, but issues were sold only to older boys and girls who had - you know - done it.

I'm now at the stage where I'd probably pick up The Adventures of Jeff Lynne and ELO were it produced by Tom King and Mitch Gerads, so I found Strange Adventures irresistible. I know some Toms have been better than others. Rorschach wasn't quite what I'd hoped it would be and Batman could have been better, but this one is up there with his best.

I remain mostly unconvinced that the comic book ever truly needed to pow! grow up, mainly because it usually translates into Red Tornado taking crack and then having a wank behind some bins; but Strange Adventures shows us how it's supposed to work. The art is gorgeous, suggesting bande dessinées rather than the usual manga-influenced tripe, and the telling is nothing if not cinematic, invariably leaving it up to the reader to work out what the hell is happening.

What the hell is happening is that this version of Adam Strange is involved in a war. It wouldn't be anything new but for King writing with all the nuance necessary to describe actual conflict, doubtless drawing from his own experience in Iraq. The revelation of Strange having engaged in less than chivalrous acts during the heat of battle comes as no great surprise, but the supplementary revelation of the deed being very much what it looks like rather than a dream or fake news is genuinely shocking. Ordinarily we'd ask how he's going to get out of this one, and he doesn't; yet this isn't one of those jobs where we know that pow! the comic book has grown up because we can quite clearly see Superman killing a homeless person for chuckles. Rather, the startling message is that terrible things happen during war, and usually so terrible that no amount of squinting can ever draw forth some tidily moral lesson about good and evil, getting one's hands dirty, omelettes requiring broken eggs or whatever other bullshit we keep telling ourselves. So King's Adam Strange isn't a hero, or if he is, he's a hero who goes to war and fails to come out of it smelling of roses - the whole point being that no-one does.

Strange Adventures resembles a comic book but reads like a novel, and a fairly substantial novel too.

The Sheriff of Babylon

Tom King & Mitch Gerads The Sheriff of Babylon (2016)
Given that it has somehow taken me five years to get around to bagging and reading the second collection of this twelve-issue comic book, I've just re-read the whole thing from issue one onwards. In fact, I've re-read it twice in consecutive sittings because, much like real life, it's occasionally confusing and difficult to work out who is on which side; and because it seemed to warrant it.

Tom King worked for the CIA and spent five months in Baghdad after the fall of Saddham Hussein. The Sheriff of Babylon isn't really autobiographical, but has the cadence of human existence doing what it can in terrible situations. This terrible situation was, of course, the war; and King's experience of the war, as informs this story, suggests that the principal casualty - which I suppose you might say we've been referring to as truth for the sake of argument - is the notion of there ever having been an us and them. War, the book seems to suggest, atomises combatants into a million disconnected individuals, each just trying to survive, with allegiances sworn in peacetime rendered meaningless by shitbags on both sides of the divide. The allegiances cautiously struck in this tale - Chris the US military contractor, Nassir who was Saddham's favourite cop, and Saffiya, whose entire family were executed by Saddham's favourite cop - could only have come about during wartime. The story attempts to solve the murder of a single individual in a country busily fighting itself, where the lives of single individuals mean nothing, and therefore mean everything. It's occasionally difficult to keep track of who probably shouldn't have done what because this isn't one of those Punisher stories about guns, grunting, and clearly defined moral codes; all of which is the great strength of this work fuck it - this masterpiece.

The art is astonishing, distinctly filmic, and never overplays its hand. One might imagine that The Sheriff of Babylon would be better suited to film given that it seems to impersonate one in certain respects; but I'm not convinced. Some of what occurs is too awful, and the horror would overpower the narrative, turning it into something it never set out to be. Gerads beautiful yet harrowing art, on the other hand, removes the story from its own reality just enough to allow for its telling without the body count getting in the way.

You remember all that stuff about pow! the comic book grows up? Well, this is what it looks like.

Mister Miracle

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

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

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

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

Batman: I Am Suicide

Tom King, Mitch Gerads & others Batman: I Am Suicide (2017)
I've worked out what I dislike about superhero comics - not all superhero comics, because obviously I'm partial to a few of them, but the central flaw inherent to the genre. At the risk of stating the obvious, superhero comics - as first envisioned in the thirties or whenever - appealed to the powerless, or those who saw themselves as powerless by presenting a fantasy of something big enough to get the better of the school bully or whatever other terror, real or imagined, might give one cause to fear leaving the house. The superhero is essentially a cop, but a perfect cop, one who will transcend the laws and red tape of small men to give that bully a bloody nose. He's there for the snitch, for the angry loners who feel helpless in their own homes because thieves, rapists, even communists are everywhere, just waiting to pounce. He's there to beat up the dirty crook, and return the stolen wallet to that rich guy, that wealth provider, that creator of jobs. He's there to defend capitalism, the status quo, and authority whilst allowing us a safe fantasy about wild cards and visionaries who don't play by the rules. He's there to normalise the system which keeps us in place.

I think this occurred to me as I was watching the Suicide Squad movie on a plane - a truly awful film and possibly one of the worst I've ever seen. Suicide Squad is about a bunch of superpowered criminals who work for the government, getting sentences reduced in payment for espionage and the usual shit which secretive government agencies supposedly undertake. Suicide Squad comprises mostly psychotic killers and their obedience is secured by each being implanted with a bomb which can be blown at any moment. There's a scene where one of them gets lippy, but is silenced as Amanda Waller, their boss, holds up an iPad. We see six or seven icons on the screen of the iPad, each an image of a member of the squad. All she has to do is to touch the icon on the screen and one of them dies. The point is illustrated when this happens to a character called Slipknot. Lacking humour, and additionally featuring appalling overacted pantomime character Harley Quinn - Tank Girl as the magic pixie kinderwhore who'll either suck your dick or kill you, Suicide Squad feels like the normalisation of torture, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and human lives reduced to expendable military commodity.

Suicide Squad helped me to identify what I dislike about DC comics, and have always disliked about DC comics, at least in a general sense. The quality of superhero fare, at least for me, is dependent on how far it has come from being authoritarian tales of good cops for the paranoid and insecure. The success of Marvel has mostly been in their treating the genre as soap opera, as with most of those mutant titles, and so the best superhero comics do something other than ferrying an endless string of unfortunates to their penitential just desserts, if they do that at all - Doom Patrol, Animal Man, Keith Giffen's Justice League, Swamp Thing and so on; and this is why DC, even before I developed critical faculties, always seemed dated and stuffy. Marvel was Adam Warlock, weird mutants, and all manner of strange shit, whilst glancing in the other direction it mostly seemed to be Batman doing what he'd always done, and if enduring popularity has left him looking undeniably iconic, he's still a wealthy cop beating up criminals in preservation of the status quo, and the best anyone can do is at least try to make the story more interesting by use of lighting; but too much lighting and it ceases to be Batman, and there, in the shadows, I always get the feeling I can see the gun nut who lives a couple of blocks from me, who posts on our neighbourhood forum warning against local ISIS cells and Obama still coming for our firearms. By comparison, Judge Dredd at least has the decency to take the piss out of itself.

Nevertheless, the ever classy Tom King does what he can with what he's been given, at least moving this story on from what we saw in the first volume, doing his best to keep things interesting. The tough cop aspect is further downplayed as he tries to examine Batman as something human and vulnerable, and in doing so making a little more sense, or at least poetic sense, out of that fucking ridiculous origin story - dealing with bereavement by dressing up as a flying mammal and fighting crime. Similarly most of what happens is played out as a freakish fight between monsters, thus mostly avoiding the parallels and clichés I mentioned earlier. I'm not too sure the sequence of him nobbing Catwoman really said anything which needed saying, but this is probably about as good as a Batman comic is ever likely to be in so much as that it at least makes an effort.

The Sheriff of Babylon

Tom King & Mitch Gerads The Sheriff of Babylon volume one (2016)
Tom King once worked for the CIA, and as such his CV seems fairly atypical for a comic book writer, although it could also be argued that the sheer quality of his writing also makes him fairly atypical. This one, set in Iraq in the immediate wake of the fall of Saddam, may not be directly autobiographical but is clearly drawn from experience. You can really tell that he was there and that he knows what he's talking about.

The story follows the hunt for the killer of a young Iraqi undergoing training as a provisional cop, one death in the middle of a city which remains a warzone. However, that The Sheriff of Babylon is more or less a whodunnit is easily overlooked, such is the raw force of the environment and the circumstances of its creation. I suppose you might even argue that Baghdad itself is the main character.

The art is astonishing, as are the dialogue and characterisation, and so much so as to leave you wondering if you'll ever be able to go back to reading a regular comic book. This is how people actually talk, and King and Gerads make us feel as though we're there in the room. It's a story told about a situation so shitty that you simply can't tell stories about it, and yet it's happening here with a breathtaking lightness of touch, and even jokes - just like real life.

Considering all the horrible bullshit spouted over Iraq, the Middle East, and Islam with no actual experience or qualification to inform those most visibly engaged with the spouting, I'd suggest that everybody needs to read this book.