Nigel Kitching & others - The Light Brigade (1990)

 

This may seem a bit of a stretch as reviews go - not even a stack of comic books, but a strip featured in an anthology title which was dead in the water by the eighth issue; so The Light Brigade was never finished, which is a shame.

The Light Brigade first appeared in the late and much missed Martin Skidmore's Trident - a bi-monthly which lasted a little over a year - and was arguably the lead strip given its featuring on three of the eight covers, notably those drawn by both John Ridgeway and Alan Davis. Eddie Campbell's superb Bacchus has obviously done much better in the long run, but The Light Brigade, co-created with Neil Gaiman - although his involvement was limited to the first instalment - felt like the potential hit single.

It's a cyberpunk comic strip hitting all of the points you would expect to find in a cyberpunk comic strip, but dating from 1989 - way before the rise of the internet. It wasn't the first, didn't do anything which hadn't already been done in a William Gibson novel, and in the wake of the movie Tron, I've no doubt everyone from the X-Men to Biffo the Bear had toppled some virtual corporate edifice in cyberspace by this point; but The Light Brigade nevertheless feels early, like the first expression of something new, as was, without quite having dated in the usual way. The story, such as it is, tells of four individuals, underwhelming urban nobodies in real life, waging a VR war as magically punky pirates; and it would probably be bollocks were it not for Nigel Kitching.

I gather Kitching went on to international renown as artist on the Sonic the Hedgehog comic book - which seems, by the way, a peculiarly logical development; but back in 1989 he was drawing this, Mark Millar's Saviour, and not much else that I'm aware of. His art tended to the starkly angular and expressionist while conveying a lightness of touch equal, I would argue, to that of Eddie Campbell elsewhere in the mag. We get a few fill-in episodes from adjacent artists, Nigel Dobbyn, D'Israeli and so on, each of which squares so beautifully with the whole as to come and go without the usual sense of disruption or looming deadlines. So I guess it's all down to Kitching's writing, which is well paced, erudite without waffling, and prone to sparking off new and delightfully wacky ideas above and beyond anything you would expect of punky pirates fighting Richard Branson in cyberspace. It was at least as good as anything in 2000AD that year.

Unfortunately, excepting Bacchus, it was significantly better than the rest of Trident for the most part -  a black and white newsprint anthology which never quite found its identity and was neither 2000AD, Deadline, nor the small press. It had its moments - notably a couple of strips by Denny Derbyshire - but was firing off in too many directions with too many weak links - not least being the terrible art of Lowlife. Thus did Trident fall from the edge after just one year, going the way of most attempts to sell not-quite-mainstream comic books to the English. I don't suppose The Light Brigade will ever be finished, but it should be remembered at least.

The Saviour

Mark Millar, Daniel Vallely & Nigel Kitching
The Saviour (1990)
I don't remember whether this came before Insiders or very shortly after, but it was in any case the first comic which seemed to propel Mark Millar in the general direction of the radar - and a brave undertaking by Leicester's Trident Comics, putting themselves out there with this title and fingers crossed that all that late eighties fan enthusiasm for things which weren't actually the X-Men hadn't been just so much hot air. I remember the sense of excitement fairly well, so it all seems a little sad with hindsight, particularly given that Trident's Martin Skidmore is no longer with us. I met him a few times and he was a lovely guy, and even though Trident went tits up with tragic inevitability, one can hardly fault his ambition.

The Saviour lasted six issues and the story remains incomplete, although I gather Millar may have recycled some elements in American Jesus. This book collects the first five issues, presenting a fairly well rounded if obviously open ended chapter describing a second coming wherein our universally adored Lord and Saviour, is actually the man downstairs taking his revenge in the body of Jonathan Ross. It's more complicated than that, obviously, and although I suspect that Jesus is back but is actually someone else is probably its own genre by now, this was either the first, or is at least the first that I remember. The real Jesus has returned too in Saviour, albeit as an itinerant stoner no-one takes seriously, but - and here I make no apologies for revealing a plot twist in a book that got cancelled thirty fucking years ago - even the real Jesus turns out to be someone else.

I vaguely recall mumblings about the artwork being crap, and that's what killed it, and the same mumblings can naturally be found in contemporary form on Goodreads, but such mumblings are as unto the bleatings of those without sight to see, my child. Daniel Vallely was patently still finding his art-feet but his stark black and white almost photorealist images remain shocking and chilling, and if you can't see the beauty in Nigel Kitching's stark McKeever-esque expressionism, you can go fuck yourself, quite frankly.

I don't suppose there's much chance of ever seeing this thing concluded now, but it's at least nice that we have enough to reveal the full extent of its promise. When they started up a year or so later, Vertigo Comics really should have been all over this one.