Rorschach

Tom King, Jorge Fornés & Dave Stewart Rorschach (2021)
I've mostly steered clear of all the Watchmen stuff which hasn't been drawn by Dave Gibbons. I somehow ended up with a copy of a Comedian comic book written by one of those young lads who writes fucking everything these days, and aside from the obligatory labyrinthine foreshadowing it was about as good as I expected it to be; the HBO TV series was mostly a decent effort, I guess, aside from recycling the story Alan Moore had already told; but this grabbed me, partially because it doesn't actually look like a Watchmen spin-off, and of course, it's Tom King.

For those of you requiring spoilers at this juncture, grow up.

This isn't the ginger nutcase from the original run, but rather a later individual or individuals inhabiting the same universe who assume the mantle, one of whom is hired to assassinate a presidential candidate. The comic book follows a detective who tries to work out what the fuck is going on. The trail of clues leads to conspiracy theorists who believe that a blank tape contains messages from the original Rorschach, and the guy currently behind the wibbly-wobbly mask seems to be Steve Ditko with the serial numbers filed off, creator of a comic book clearly based on Ditko's Objectivist hero, Mr. A - himself a forerunner to Alan Moore's remix of the character. So there's also a commentary on aspects of the comics industry and its cultural significance, with both Otto Binder and Frank Miller showing up as themselves, specifically as Rorshach conspiracy theorists. There's a lot to unpack, as the saying goes.

Anyway, the artwork is gorgeous and it's wonderfully moody, beautifully written - at least in terms of pace and dialogue - but also thematically dense and ponderous. Even if you were paying close attention, a second or third reread may be necessary for full appreciation, although this shouldn't count against Rorschach which ultimately rewards the effort.

Daredevil

Stan Lee, Wally Wood & others Daredevil (1965)
The constitution of Marvel's great innovation - that which stamped its mark firmly on the public consciousness back in the sixties - hadn't really occurred to me, nor perhaps been expressed so well, until I read Douglas Wolk's All of the Marvels. It wasn't simply the timing of the superhero revival, breaking out during a significant lull in the popularity of Superman, Batman and others. It was the blending of superheroes with other popular forms of the day, the romance, monster, humour, and horror comics - or what horror comics had become in the wake of Wertham's purge. It seems so obvious now, and I have no idea why I hadn't already seen it. Of course, it isn't that Superman's adventures had failed to incorporate elements of romance, humour, or whatever, but the emphasis seems more pronounced in those post-Fantastic Four Marvel titles where no issue passes without the necessity of secret identities causing a testosterone implosion in someone's trunks, or yet another subterranean monster whose name ends with a vowel finds his way to the surface. That said, it seems a safe bet that the shocking dynamism of Kirby and Ditko should also be considered a factor, rendering the blend all the more dramatic by having it seem to almost leap off the page.

Unfortunately, they can't all be classics, and while Daredevil doubtless went on to great things, his first steps were pretty subdued when compared to those of the Fantastic Four, Avengers, X-Men and so on. This is because Daredevil - or specifically the first eleven issues as collected here - feels very much as though, having blown everyone's mind with the Hulk and the rest rendered as a series of explosive, angular punch-ups bordering on Vorticism, the Bullpen may have been wondering if there was still any mileage left in the traditional formula, hence something which is approximately a cross between Spider-Man and Batman - neurosis, doomed romance and weird powers combined with metropolitan decay and otherwise conventional detective stories.

I guess there was some mileage, although most of 1964 and 1965 were spent messing with the formula and not quite getting it right. The art is decent, mostly great, and occasionally stunning, yet pedestrian compared to Kirby - descriptive rather than expressive; and the ideas are as wacky as you like, but suffer from the means of their communication which is excessively wordy even by Marvel standards of the time and leaves the reader wading through verbiage for relatively little reward given that most of the verbiage is describing what we can see with our own eyes.

The premise of Daredevil, namely that a man blinded by some vaguely radioactive material will develop his other senses to a superhuman degree, while no more unlikely than any other implausible Marvel origin, tends to appear more and more ludicrous the closer you look. So Daredevil's endless account of his own powers as he reads a newspaper by feeling the ink on the page or decides that it sounds like the woman who just came into the room is wearing a red coat serve to highlight the inherent absurdity of his abilities rather than leaving us awestruck, as I suspect was the intention. Additionally, the whole notion of the sightless compensated with amazing hearing or sense of smell seems a bit Ricky Gervais in 2022, but never mind.

More than its contemporaries, the early Daredevil feels a little like a throwback to strips of the previous decades, the era of bank heists and henchmen and criminal masterminds revealed to be unscrupulous city councilors; and the weirder details work against themselves, somehow serving to emphasise the conservatism of the title. That said, early Daredevil wasn't actually bad, and certainly had both charm and potential; although in 2022 is probably mainly interesting as an historical piece.

Marvel Comics - the Untold Story

Sean Howe Marvel Comics - the Untold Story (2012)
After several versions of the life of Stan Lee, only one of which was written by the man himself, I get the impression I probably should have started with this thing. Sean Howe answers just about every question I had, including those I'd assumed probably weren't worth asking. His attention to detail is exhaustive and impartial - so far as I'm able to tell. I've seen online mutterings about the Untold Story having given Jim Shooter, Marvel's editor-in-chief from 1978 to 1987, something of a battering, but nothing written here seems massively unfair or uneven, and credit is freely given where it's due.

Howe's account begins with Martin Goodman's Timely Comics, sinks its teeth in with the tenacity of a bull terrier, and doesn't let go until we're caught up to the present day. The picture revealed is broad yet coherent, with the grinding inevitability of the corporate appetite countered by reminders of why Marvel worked, when it did work, and often in spite of itself. This matters - at least in so much as any of this matters - because our collective memory of the comics biz and its role in popular culture is revealed as comprising at least as high a quotient of received wisdom and strategic mythology as Stan Lee's somewhat unreliable version of events. The idea that the comic book ever needed to grow up, for one example, seems to be an answer to a question that didn't need asking; and while it's clear that the average age of the target reader has varied from one decade to the next, the notion of the figure steadily increasing up until the revelation of Alan Moore's Watchmen is obviously bollocks in light of Marvel having been such a huge hit with the beatnik community in the sixties, and then the brain stretching likes of Starlin's Warlock - amongst many others in the seventies. Indeed, our idea of the juvenile comic book - to which superheroes with drink problems was apparently the antidote - seems to have formed in the late seventies as a reaction to Starlin, Gerber and the rest in the form of Godzilla, Star Wars and Shogun Warriors tie-in material. I'm generalising here, but it's nothing like so clear cut as all those Time Out articles told us.

Much needed testimony regarding what was once so great about Marvel is offset by unflinching reportage of the artists and writers getting screwed over and over and over from one decade to the next, even with the understanding that work-for-hire was never anything more than an assembly line. We presumably all know about Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, and inevitably they're just the tip of a heartless corporate iceberg specialising in using them up, wearing them out, and asset stripping their legacy. Some of it is heartbreaking, not least realising that Chris Claremont's departure from the X-books back in '91 actually was the betrayal it resembled from the outside; and that Rob Liefeld got to revamp Captain America at some point in the mid-nineties after his previous anatomical bowdlerisations had driven me away from the medium; and while we're here…

Before Grunewald left for his weekend home on August 9, he grabbed a preview copy of Rob Liefeld's Captain America #1. It was Grunewald's favourite Marvel character; until a few months earlier, he'd either written or edited every issue since 1982. On Monday morning, rumours started flying around the offices, confirmed by an 11AM email from Terry Stewart. 'It's with my deepest and most profound regret that I inform you that Mark Grunewald passed away unexpectedly early today at home,' the note began. The cause of death was a heart attack.

Grunewald was forty-three, a non-smoker who exercised regularly, and I didn't even realise he was dead. I always liked his work. I'm not saying that the art of Rob Liefeld finished him off, but you really have to wonder.

This is a thick book, and quite a tough read for anyone with any interest in comic art - emotionally speaking, but thank fuck someone wrote it.

two Stan Lee biographies

Stan Lee & George Mair
Excelsior! The Amazing Life of Stan Lee (2002)
While my own personal jury remains out regarding how much credit Lee deserves for strips co-created with Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and others - because we'll probably never know for sure - the other extreme by which Stan was just some lucky schmo who happened to be in the right place at the right time seems equally unfair. Excelsior! is his side of the story, with linking paragraphs wedged in by George Mair so as to keep it all from degrading into a sort of Borscht Belt James Joyce; and while his side of the story is mostly well known, it's nevertheless worth preserving because it's enlightening and often genuinely funny and Lee comes across as a nice guy with the best of intentions. The extent to which this is the facade of some scheming snake oil retailing mastermind could be debated, but I suspect that if it were a facade, he would have done a better job of it.

 

Abraham Riesman True Believer (2021)
On the other hand, there's True Believer which has the advantage of not actually being written by Stan himself and accordingly paints a quite different picture. Thankfully, it doesn't seem to be anything you might term a hatchet job. Credit is given where due, as is the benefit of the doubt, but the bottom line is that this is a scrupulously thorough warts and all biography of a life which is revealed as having been, so it could be argued, mainly warts; which isn't to suggest that Stan was necessarily a bad guy or that he fucked kids or any of that sort of thing, but there's a point at which self affirmation crosses over into something more like mania. I would guess Stan understood this, hence the winning combination of boasting tempered with self-deprecating cornball humour of the stripe which makes Excelsior! so readable.

The creative ratio of Lee to Kirby or Ditko to be found in all of those characters for which he is famed remains debatable, although the success of the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man and the rest is surely at least in part down to Lee's tireless promotional bounce and general inability to shut the fuck up, even for just a second. So he's to be credited for something, and True Believer does as good a job as anything I've read of trying to pinpoint what that might have been. Oddly enough, I feel as though I've known at least a few Stans in my time, albeit none with quite the same level of charm or ability to generate money from thin air, but I recognise the type and this passage, referring to POW - one of our boy's later, admittedly shabbier enterprises - struck an uncomfortably familiar chord.

If Stan had doubts about his own abilities, he certainly didn't let them show. In fact, POW was presenting an image of the octogenarian Stan as a creative powerhouse, capable of churning out a wealth of ideas that could be converted into lucrative entertainment properties. However, POW's primary product was announcements.

Of that which emerged from the mind of Stan Lee in the latter years, most seems to have been on the level of Alan Partridge's Monkey Tennis, with very little transcending the press releases about how great it was definitely going to be. One of the few exceptions was an animated series called Stripperella about a crime-fighting pole dancer with massive tits which, as evidence of Stan's wild imagination as something existing autonomous of Kirby, Ditko or whoever else was sat at the drawing board that afternoon, is pretty fucking thin; but you can't keep a good man down, as they say, and that was Lee's superpower, roughly speaking, coupled with an inability to monitor his own strengths and weaknesses. Comic book history has remembered the archetypal Stan Lee piece as Captain America leaping out of the page with a massive grin and an improbably distended sense of perspective, yet it should probably be one of the captioned photographs from You Don't Say. This one idea - if you can truly call it an idea - to which Stan returned time and again was that of stock photos to which he added side-splitting captions. He published a magazine along these lines in 1963, and there were a couple of others issued to a generally mixed reception a bit later, and yet it was something he tried to get happening over and over like Gretchen's use of the term fetch in Mean Girls, this sort of thing:

 

If you now need to go and change your pants, damage control the coffee fountain, maybe take a shower or whatever, I can wait.

Bizarrely, Stan doesn't seem to have been able to tell the difference between the Fantastic Four battling an underground civilisation led by an evil genius, and a photograph of Jimmy Carter amended with a comic observation about golf, which is ultimately tragic. As, I guess, was his life in certain respects, most of it being spent looking for something he probably never found, believing manic optimism alone would eventually bring it within reach, and failing to recognise anything with which he'd been involved as having been of value - contrary to whatever ludicrous bluster he may have committed at the time. He clearly wasn't a saint by any description, nor even anyone particularly remarkable, but he probably deserved better than he got; and it's hard to imagine there will ever be another account balancing sympathy with unflinching honesty as this one does.

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl

Ryan North & Erica Henderson The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl (2015)
I sometimes forget that my comic habit, such as it is, is largely restricted to that which I recall having read as a kid, or which I missed first time around, or which I once had but got rid of during one of my infrequent purges; so in all honesty, my impression of the current state of the art is vague at best, garnered either from news items posted on facebook, or the occasional bewildering stumble around Android's Dungeon in search of something old and familiar. My local comic shop isn't really called Android's Dungeon, but I feel strongly that it should be because it would be preferable to Heroes & Fantasies, which is the actual name.

Modern comics, at least the mainstream stuff, seem to be mostly self-referential superheroes drawn by people who grew up reading either manga or things drawn by Rob Liefeld; and they appear to be aimed squarely at comic book obsessives far more than they were when I was buying the things, back in the old days when everything was better than it is now. I've read a few that were okay, if nothing amazing, and a few that were fucking horrible; and I browsed Before Watchmen in the store and just couldn't see the point at all, but then what do I know?

On the other hand, there's Squirrel Girl, formerly best known as star of all those twenty shit superheroes lists which could once be found simply by randomly lobbing a brick at the internet - you probably know the deal: Arm Fall Off Boy, Matter Eater Lad, all those other guys. As it happens, Squirrel Girl's debut - written and drawn by the talented but undeniably cranky Steve Ditko and handily included in this collection - is indeed a bit on the crap side, truth be told; or if not crap than there's something very difficult to love about it, a faintly unpleasant tone stemming from the ambiguity as to whether we're laughing at or with our patently ludicrous not-quite-a-heroine.

Girls and squirrels - dude, that's so gay etc. etc.

In context, the revived Squirrel Girl feels like both a revelation and a stroke of genius, territory clawed back from the grimacing ninjas with the Japanese swords, throwing stars and the one-liners which actually aren't that funny. It's a reminder that comics can still be for kids, seeing as we've apparently lost sight of that detail. She's still ridiculous of course - with her squirrel powers and a theme song patently nicked from Spiderman; but she's ridiculous by the same terms as the rest of us, because we're all ridiculous to one extent or another and it isn't necessarily a bad thing. Naturally, it's a funny book because it wouldn't work otherwise, but at least it's on our side in a way I'm not convinced that the Ditko version ever really was. The humour will be familiar from all of those Buffy episodes and more or less everything that presently comes out of my thirteen-year old stepson's mouth, but it's warm and well-intentioned; and of course, being Marvel, it's also kind of square - lame observations qualified as humour with a suffix of right, guys? and that sort of thing - but not in a bad way, and not everything has to be Johnny Ryan's Retard Hitler. Personally I take it as a very encouraging sign regarding the collective soul of the human race that a comic such as this can still get published.

Please, Marvel, don't let Grant Morrison anywhere near it.

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.

Frankenstein, Agent of SHADE: War of the Monsters

Jeff Lemire & Alberto Ponticelli
Frankenstein, Agent of SHADE: War of the Monsters (2012)
With great characters, a solid story and perfectly fitting artwork, Frankenstein, Agent of SHADE remains one of DC's best books, it says here on the back cover, which really makes me wonder how bad the shit ones must have been. Jeff Lemire wrote an approximately decent run on Animal Man, and the premise of this sounded like the right kind of stupid so I just had to take a look. Of course, Grant Morrison used the DC version of Mary Shelley's monster in Seven Soldiers of Victory, which I recall as being a thing of wonder even though I can't actually remember anything else about it, much less whether the Frankenstein episodes were anything special.

For what it may be worth, I gather that Shelley's monster wandered the Earth for some time following the events of her book - at least according to DC lore - before eventual recruitment by one of those typically shadowy government agencies you always hear about, in this case the Super Human Advanced Defence Executive. Thusly does he now wander the Earth writing wrongs with the help of his Creature Commandos, respectively a mummy, a Dracula, a werewolf, and a woman from the black lagoon.

Seriously.

I gather some of this stuff was in Seven Soldiers but as I say I can't remember any of it, and reading up on Wikipedia ringeth no bells. As an aspiring mangafied Ditko tribute, it probably could have worked had Lemire upped either the surrealism or the stupidity, but he hasn't, instead writing the sort of generic combination of face punching scrapes and weird science you used to get in X-Men spin-offs in the eighties, back when we were still pretending that twelve-year old boys read this stuff. It tries dark, but can't quite seem to work out just what it wants to do and ends up as Hanna-Barbera written by someone who really should have been escorted from the premises before he got anywhere near the room with the typewriters.

'I never did like these things. They always gave me the willies,' comments Warren the werewolf as the Creature Commandos engage in a pagga with the android Humanids, one of many fights characterised by one-line zingers traded back and forth amongst combatants.

'You know what I always say, Furball,' quips Velcoro the vampire, whose name I can't keep myself from reading as Velcro, 'never trust anything that don't bleed!'

Do you really always say that, Velcoro?

Do you really?

Oddly, Frankenstein himself - seeing as we've apparently given up pointing out that this was the name of the creator rather than the guy with the bolt through his neck, because that's like soooooo boooooring - is relatively faithful to Shelley's surprisingly erudite creation, at least in comparison to most of the other versions we've had over the years, but somehow it just isn't enough. It could be that I'm just too old for this sort of thing, and in reading it I am essentially attempting to persuade programs which have run without a problem for years to work on Windows 10; but then I had no problem with the big fat eighties Captain America collection I bought last year, and that one was definitely written for kids. Alberto Ponticelli's artwork achieves Mike McMahon levels of gorgeousness and gorgeousity made flesh, and yet remains hamstrung by the weaker links of everything else in the book; although the contrast is reduced by the seventh issue in which someone called Walden Wong inks Ponticelli's pencils in the style of one of those mid-nineties 2000AD artists who couldn't actually draw, the big eyes Armoured Gideon bloke for example, whatever his name was - the guy who made everyone look like extras from Garfield.

Frankenstein, Agent of SHADE isn't terrible, but it's surprisingly average considering what went into the recipe. If it was really ever one of DC's best books, then I'd say DC are probably screwed, although to be fair the claim represents a similarly poor fit to the book having been cancelled following issue sixteen. I suppose it would be a boring world if we all liked the same thing, and clearly some people liked this. One bloke on Goodreads described it as Hellboy by way of Philip K. Dick, which probably works if you've never read at least one of those, but whatever - it worked well enough for him, I guess.

Star Wars: A Long Time Ago...

Archie Goodwin, Carmine Infantino & many, many others
Star Wars: A Long Time Ago...
Doomworld (1978)
Dark Encounters (1980)
Resurrection of Evil (1981)
This time it was J.G. Ballard boring me shitless, in combination with which a load of personal aggravations - significantly one of the cats breaking her leg - conspired to reduce my attention span as applied to literature which is probably important and good for you but isn't much fun to actually read; and these three collections were just sat there promising comforting retreat into a less troublesome past, so...

I was twelve when Star Wars came out, and naturally I was excited about the whole thing before I'd even seen it. I'd read the two giant-sized Marvel specials - weird collectors editions the size of tabloid newspapers - and I'd read that first issue of Starburst, and a couple of those other tie-in making of magazines they just couldn't get into the newsagents fast enough. I was excited because this was a film which looked like real life rather than special effects, even Gerry Anderson special effects. The robots seemed like real robots, as did the spacecraft; and I know we had 2001: A Space Odyssey, but no-one ever really understood what the hell happened in that film, and the adventures of Luke Skywalker promised to be significantly more exciting. Star Wars didn't disappoint when it arrived, although on close inspection I realised it somehow lacked the bite of the strips I'd begun to follow in 2000AD comic; and neither did the action figures disappoint, nor Star Wars Weekly which reprinted the two collectors editions and then went off somewhere else altogether, following its own trajectory.

These three volumes collect the first fifty or so issues of the American comic, as reprinted in shorter weekly helpings in the English version. Star Wars Weekly was never anything like so essential as 2000AD for me as a kid, although some of the back up strips came fairly close - Warlock, Guardians of the Galaxy,  Micronauts and so on. The main feature seemed variable, and suffered from each episode having been broken down into awkward lengths for the sake of a weekly schedule, but it still had its moments, or so I recall, although nostalgia has bitten me in the ass before...

A New Hope as it has since become known, adapted by Roy Thomas and Howard Chaykin - apparently drawn using a nail on a sheet of hardboard - is pleasant enough, and interesting for its featuring the first version of Jabba the Hut as played by Graeme Garden of The Goodies. With the adaptation out of the way, the story takes a brief detour through a slightly shite but hugely enjoyable Han Solo version of The Magnificent Seven, before really getting into gear with Archie Goodwin and Carmine Infantino at the controls. But for a few digressions and fill-in issues, the first two volumes of these collections more or less represent a continuing story, one which deftly avoided doing too much which could be contradicted when The Empire Strikes Back came out. The story is nicely paced, laying down intriguing plot points far in advance of their being required to explain anything, and delivering regular big ideas sufficient to keep it interesting. Of course, one problem with the comic is that it tends to expose Star Wars lack of any actual characters, or at least no-one deeper than they killed his mum and dad and now he wants revenge, or the rough and ready outlaw with a heart of gold and the like. This isn't really a problem in the film, at least not in the first one, given that scale and spectacle were the main point; and it did both pretty well, so all you really needed from anyone was at the level of the lowly farm boy who had a date with destiny. Whilst the comic strip could never really hope to achieve the scale of the celluloid, it had the next best thing in the form of Carmine Infantino's weird angular style, a sort of Vorticist translation of traditional Japanese art. Doomworld - set around a city-sized sailing ship rigged together from the trunks of underwater trees on a planet without dry land - impressed the shit out of me when I was a kid, and amazingly it has stood the test of time, albeit as something patently angled towards younger teenagers; and subsequent episodes of Luke and pals battling representatives of the House of Tagge actually work better than I remember them doing, possibly benefiting from being read over a few more concentrated sittings. Inevitably there's a degree of clunk and cliché because it's Star Wars, but I swear Carmine Infantino's art could be some of the most beautiful stuff Marvel have ever published, regardless of yer Kirbys and yer Ditkos, so it seems churlish to roll one's eyes at yet another creaking instance of C3PO testily pointing out that R2D2 has just made him look a right cunt.

Sadly it wasn't to last. Al Williamson's art on the adaptation of The Empire Strikes Back is beautiful but, as with the film, the fucking thing doesn't actually have a story.

Luke is over here, then he's over there.

Let's hope he doesn't run into Darth Vader.

Oh shit - look what they did to Han Solo.

The End.

Even as an easily satisfied teenager I thought it was bollocks and stopped buying the comic, which seems to have been the right choice going by the remainder of the third volume. Having adapted Empire, it's as though the story fell and hit its head and was never quite the same again. Carmine Infantino's beautiful art gets buried beneath the linework of a roster of lesser talents, Archie Goodwin drops in and out of the mix, and we get a succession of shorter, less ambitious adventures, essentially filler material. Luke and Leia guest in a dinosaur-infested Doug McClure vehicle, or a story from the 1974 Star Trek annual, or Larry Hama's impressively dire The Third Law in which her nibs goes to the banking planet to take out a loan so the rebels can buy more X-Wing fighters; and oh what a coincidence, Darth Vader just happens to be there as well, making a loud farting noise as Leia meets with the chancellor, waving a hand in front of his face and commenting, 'I would say there was a Brussels sprout on the end of that one, your royal highness.'

That doesn't happen, but it comes close in places. The Third Law isn't actually a Davy Jones strip from Viz, but it could have been.

Never mind. Nothing lasts forever, and the point to remember is just how good the first two volumes are. Apparently they're not considered Star Wars canon, but really - who gives a shit? I'd still take Doomworld over almost anything which has appeared on the big screen since the first one.

Fourth World: Mister Miracle volume two

Jack Kirby Fourth World: Mister Miracle volume two (1974)
I seem to have heard loads about Kirby's Fourth World without ever quite working out what it was, beyond the greatest story ever told, apparently. A cursory level of research revealed it be some massive cosmic scale saga originated by the man who effectively invented Marvel Comics, or at least who effectively invented how Marvel Comics looked in the 1960s and 1970s providing you pretend Steve Ditko never happened. Fourth World was what our boy cooked up once he got tired of Stan Lee's alliterative bullpen and went to work for DC, creating an entirely new mythos spread across a series of titles looking forward to comics as something other than just newsstand fodder - well, this is what the internet seems to think, which is probably why I had somehow taken the impression of Fourth World being revolutionary beyond human imagination, sort of like Aeschylus with capes and people who behold things over yonder instead of merely looking at them.

Unfortunately none of the proverbial hot cakes were ever invoked as a result of Fourth World sales figures, and by the time Kirby came to produce these last eight issues of Mister Miracle, cancellation loomed, obliging him to wrap up a much larger story whilst trying to take the book off in its own direction in the hope of staying afloat; so this is probably a somewhat shitey place to start with this Fourth World stuff, but anyway...

Okay. Given that what we're dealing with here is caped superhumans having fights with evil looking men who turn out to be as dastardly as their moustaches imply, lumpy looking henchmen called Lefty, and other elements that wouldn't seem too inconsistent with your average episode of Scooby Doo, it's probably an idea to remind ourselves of context when referring to Fourth World as revolutionary. It isn't Kierkegaard, it's a comic book tailored for the enjoyment of small children who also like Batman; but true enough, it is a very good comic book tailored for the enjoyment of small children who also like Batman.

Thing is, I'm not really even sure what makes it good. Having little of the apparently impressive Fourth World back story related in earlier titles for reference, I'm left with just the adventures of a superhero escape artist repeatedly cornered by criminal types. In terms of narrative it's hokey as fuck and yet somehow transcends the limitations of its genre, the terrible science, the bad guys failing to get away with it due to meddling kids. Possibly it's not so much the stories - which should by all rights be nothing special - so much as how they're told, the even pace, the economy of language, and most significantly, the astonishing art. More than any other comic artist I can think of, Kirby seems to represent some sort of pinnacle and as such is most at home right there on the page - it would just seem arch and insincere given the Roy Lichtenstein treatment. It's too much its own thing, which is probably why none of Kirby's imitators ever really achieved the same sort of reputation.

Cough cough. Herb Trimpe.

Kirby's panels are crowded with detail and yet often seem surprisingly simple, clear solid forms reaching out towards the reader and a tremendous sense of depth. It's odd, and even quite ugly in places, but more in the way of that accomplished, expressive brand of ugly associated with Modigliani and certain Cubists. I think I read most of this collection with my mouth hanging open. Much as I hate to repeat what everyone else has been saying for years anyway, Kirby's art really was amazing.

Essential Warlock

Roy Thomas, Jim Starlin, Gil Kane and others Essential Warlock (2012)
Know you this, that Marvel's Adam Warlock comic got off to an impressive start as an ambitious parable of a Christlike superhuman saving an alternate Earth from both its wrathful creator and his errant fallen angel, the wolfish Man-Beast, the proverbial serpent in Eden and source of all this world's ills. It began in obvious homage to Jack Kirby's cosmic scale, written with an assumption of intelligent readership, and pulling no Marvel Shakespearian punches with plenty of lo, yonder, and yet where words may fail of hearing may not soundless rage prevail?

Where such affectations sometimes come off as just plain ridiculous, Roy Thomas makes them work with lines favouring genuine gravitas over mere pomposity - including at least two words I actually had to look up - and with such aplomb that even when the inevitable group of denim clad 1970s teenage sidekicks show up, whilst the integrity of the strip bends a little under the strain of the more prosaic dialogue of I dig and don't crowd me, Dave, the whole remains strong, perhaps even a little richer for the contrast. With Gil Kane's fantastic Kirby-inspired artwork, the earliest issues seem very substantial, even referencing black power and Chicano issues without going all Ben Elton, and generally carrying themselves with the dignity of good quality children's fiction - the stuff an adult can read without wincing or looking like a complete cock. Dammit - the opener is so good you don't even mind that the snake-headed guy is named Kohbra.

Unfortunately, after the first few issues, Roy Thomas and Gil Kane handed over the title to lesser talents and the book lost its distinguishing qualities, recycling the same story over and over - always Warlock's battle against the Man-Beast or his minions, teenage sidekicks serving mainly as hostage opportunities, and with the Marvel Shakespearian now seeming faintly absurd: the orchestra had begun to regret the kebabs consumed the previous evening, but luckily the Cockney Rejects were available to fill in on the second act of Die Walküre - if that makes any sense whatsoever.

Then along came Jim Starlin, alternately influenced by Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby and Michael Moorcock, transforming Warlock into a weird and wonderful superhero space opera which I suspect may borrow somewhat from Kirby's Fourth World, except I'm unfamiliar with Kirby's Fourth World aside from a few slightly underwhelming issues of Mister Miracle by which I recognise the villainous Thanos as an obvious stand-in for Kirby's Darkseid. This Starlin version of Warlock was reprinted in the UK in Star Wars Weekly which is where I first encountered it, as one of a number of back-up strips that were slightly more engaging than the title feature. Even with my being no stranger to the nutty stuff thanks to Tom Baker on the telly and 2000AD comic, Starlin's Warlock struck me as particularly weird - vampiric soul gems, a wisecracking troll, an ally who falls in love with death and hopes to win her over by destroying the universe, anatomically bizarre aliens, and the main villain being Adam Warlock's future self just like in The Trial of a Time Lord more than a decade later; all drawn in the spirit of an age of concept albums recorded by bands dressed as wizards.

Returning to these stories forty years after they first appeared, whilst not quite so amazing as they seemed to my twelve year old self - art and script trying just a bit too hard on occasion - they remain nevertheless impressive, and certainly superior to all but possibly the initial Roy Thomas and Gil Kane run. Additionally, I'd wager at least one testicle on this version of Warlock being a significant influence on the young Grant Morrison. All those elements of his early Gideon Stargrave strips not directly inspired by Moorcock seem to have come from Starlin; and whilst we're here, with hindsight even Alan Moore's Roscoe Moscow carries more than a faint whiff of the same.

Unfortunately, once Adam Warlock rejoined the wider Marvel universe in the last few issues reprinted here, it all went back to extended fight scenes with assorted superheroes explaining the plot to one another in Marvel Shakespearian as the Beast exclaimed oh my stars and garters whatever the hell that was supposed to mean. It's a sad end to a story which, for at least a few issues, managed to raise itself up above the standard Marvel landfill of the time.

Reprinting no less than twenty-seven 1970s comics in a single volume as thick as a housebrick and retailing for mere pennies, Essential Warlock is well worth a look - mostly classic material, and the filler at least provides an insight into why X-Men was such a hit when Chris Claremont took over in 1975.