Transit

Ted McKeever Transit (1987)
This was where he started. I was aware of its existence but had my head buried in mutant books, so it's taken me a while. The biggest surprise, at least to me, is that you can actually see McKeever learning on the job, developing his style over the course of the original five-issue run; and as learning curves go, this one was dramatic. The first five pages are ropey as fuck, resembling something that a not especially promising graffiti artist might have had printed in Deadline; but the shadows deepen and the bodies take on a more expressionist angularity as McKeever dispensed with the hip-hop munchkins, and everything is in place by the time the art needs to take on any heavy lifting.

The narrative wobbles here and there, finding its feet. It's nothing mind-blowing - corrupt officials, sociopathic evangelists and so on, but with pleasantly odd flourishes of imagination to keep it from sinking into the generic. In places it feels a little like moody artwork in search of a story, but that's okay. These were early days and the atmosphere carries the story with ease, and it's easy to see that Ted McKeever was clearly destined for greater things.

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.

Junk Culture

 

Ted McKeever Junk Culture (1997)
I gave up on the Vertigo imprint around 1996 because they seemed to have run out of anything worth publishing, which is annoying because it means that I missed this. I gather humanity as industrial commodity may be a theme running through a lot of McKeever's work - with which, by the way, I'm only loosely familiar. It informed Plastic Forks and here it is again; except where I felt Plastic Forks seemed to sprawl a little, this is just two issues and is tight as fuck. Also, McKeever's occasionally random narrative swerves are far more effective in this more confined space, creating a truly weird dynamic rather than feeling as though he's making it up as he goes along - as he has admitted he often is - and has just thrown something absurd into the mix to see if it works.

Junk Culture is a fairly familiar story in terms of people as commodities, nothing startlingly original and hardly worth mentioning here, but the way it's told is astonishing and powerful - violent, expressionist, and even comical. The new thing which McKeever brought to the table was therefore not the actual story so much as how it would feel. This one packs a fairly serious emotional punch transposing the industrial violence to what may as well be the town from those Back to the Future movies, yet without going all self-consciously David Lynch. It may even be one of the greatest things Vertigo ever published, and the art is amazing, obviously.

The Screaming

Daniel Bristow-Bailey The Screaming (2020)
At just sixteen pages, The Screaming might appear almost too brief for any sort of meaningful write up, particularly given that it's a single issue comic book painting a brief psychological portrait rather than telling a story in the sense of anything which could be transposed to telly with Ross Kemp in the title role; but the thing is too beautiful - although that may not be quite the right term - to slip past without notice. It's properly printed with a colour cover, albeit one that's mostly shades of grey and brown, with an interior which picks up every subtlety of scratchy pencilwork in contrast to the violent splatter of ink and a truly harrowing combination of light and dark. The Screaming is a phone call about a dream, incorporating the dream itself, and all framed within a psychological landscape bleeding to the very edge of the page. It's short and very intense with a power comparable to visually related(ish) efforts by the likes of Bill Sienkiewicz or Ted McKeever, and actually doesn't need to be any longer. In fact it's possibly one of the best small press comics I've ever seen, all things considered.

Seek ye the tome yonder.

Plastic Forks

Ted McKeever Plastic Forks (1990)
I was sufficiently invested in the minutiae of the comics industry back in 1990 to recall Ted McKeever being pushed as the new Bill Sienkiewicz, or at least that's how it felt at the time. Bill Sienkiewicz introduced something not unlike Dadaist collage to the comic books and remains one of the greatest artists to ever dabble with the medium, maybe even the greatest on a good day. Ted McKeever's art doesn't actually share much in common with that of Sienkiewicz beyond the occasionally scratchy line, but existed at a related tangent to what more or less everyone else was drawing in caped terms - think expressionist splatters and the influence of European cinema rather than mild-mannered reporters vanishing into phone booths.

Plastic Forks was issued in five luxuriously printed installments of sixty pages each, flogged on eBay when I needed the money, then repurchased more recently once I'd built up sufficient regret over the sale; but now that I have them back, I realise why I couldn't remember much about Plastic Forks, namely that I probably only read it once. I also realise why I only read it once. It's a tale of lives reduced to commodity, made disposable like plastic forks - the scientists of the tale as much as the animals upon which they perform terrible experiments towards dubious ends. The dynamic of the story spins from one of the scientists becoming the victim of his own experiments, followed by four issues of running around in pursuit of redress.

The artwork is mostly breathtaking, hallucinatory and expressionist, all contrast and jagged edges; which works beautifully as a vehicle for the industrialised cruelty of the tale, but which falls short when broaching the more tender concerns of the humans at the mercy of the machine. Another problem is that McKeever's illustration occasionally borders on abstract, leaving room for ambiguity when it's working on behalf of the story, but simply bewildering when it fails.

Doctor Henry Apt's coffee spray on page seven of the second issue is one example, a reaction to a detail of overheard conversation which becomes apparent later and meanwhile sends the reader thumbing back in hope of working out what he or she missed. So the story suffers from an impressionistic quality which seems at odds with what it's trying to do, combined - regrettably - with blandly utilitarian dialogue which feels like a self-conscious afterthought: I only hope I can cut through in time, or it's a long shot, but the only way to find out if it works is to try it, and the like. McKeever could have used a collaborator, or at least a more interactive editor.

Plastic Forks does what it does, looks fucking astonishing, but simply could have been a lot better. It's probably unfair to compare it to Sienkiewicz' Stray Toasters, but Stray Toasters was great because Sienkiewicz worked as hard on telling a story as he did on illustrating it. By comparison Plastic Forks feels like wonderful art in search of an author.

The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite

Gerard Way & Gabriel Bá
The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite (2008)
To cut to the chase I really enjoyed this, which I mention so as to save readers the effort of skipping down in search of the point at which I'm not slagging something off. However, a huge rant came to me just as I finished reading, inspired by but only indirectly relating to The Umbrella Academy - actually no more than an expansion upon themes found in my usual rant - and I really need to get it out of my system so here we go. We will return to The Umbrella Academy following the next couple of paragraphs.

There's a dominant aesthetic which has emerged from western culture at the end of the twentieth century which I'll refer to as Titterism for the sake of convenience, and Titterism because its lowest forms suggest a person tittering as they photoshop, for example, a robot riding a penny-farthing whilst somehow imagining themselves to be a font of creative wit. I could be wrong but I suspect it all started when the Cure, having recorded the excellent Seventeen Seconds and Faith, turned to shit, although this may simply be when I first began to notice. I suppose it might be dated to the time Robert Smith spent playing guitar for Siouxsie & the Banshees then presumably came back with the wrong end of their aesthetic stick to record shite like The Love Cats and The Caterpillar. Titterism seems to have been born through a recontextualisation of Lewis Carroll, and in the wake of Robert Smith's pioneering work found expression in the art of Vaughan Oliver who famously set Victorian typefaces across blurred photographs of someone's grandma using a mangle. This led thematically to Dave McKean using rusty screws purchased from an antique shop to fix dead leaves to the cover of Sandman comics, and arguably to the stories contained in those comics and written by Neil Gaiman; and then to everything else whipped up from some tastefully blurred aspect of Victoriana or its associated images of childhood - Harry Potter, Doctor Who, steampunk, Peaky fucking Blinders, Tim Burton, you name it...

Gadzooks, chaps - why methinks 'tis one of those computing engines so fashioned as to resemble a gentleman and - oh my - he's riding a jolly old boneshaker! By the Lord Harry, what a to-do! What will they think of next?*

The appeal of Titterism - as I will continue to call it until it feels right - is not difficult to appreciate. We respond for the same reason we still respond to Dada and Surrealism, art movements to which much Titterist work appears to aspire. It looks interesting because it seems incongruous in the age of computer-driven mass communication. It looks incongruous because it looks conspicuously hand crafted and hints at values with which we are no longer fully connected; so contrast is the key element - hence what you get when you google steampunk Dalek. It's a space age robotic alien from the future, and yet it's powered by - tee hee - cogs and flywheels, so let the titters commence. No creative ability is required, just the capacity for standing an object next to its thematic opposite. This is probably why this whole thing has come about now, scored to the rise of information technology which allows those without clearly quantified artistic vision to endlessly quote, cut, paste, and rearrange what has gone before. Dada and Surrealism did the same but in sharp contrast to still strongly defined aesthetics of craft and beauty which modernism had only just begun to address, so the act of collage was itself a statement even before we consider any philosophical dimensions invoked by Tristan Tzara, Max Ernst, André Breton and others. The collage served subversion rather than tittering novelty the appeal of which is that it looks funny innit! Like everything, the subversion has been stripped of content and commodified as Titterism. It's old and weird and it reminds us of that which had content beyond the basic aesthetic, which saves us the trouble of thinking about it for longer than it takes to read this sentence.

So that is why I dislike Titterism. For every individual who understands exactly what they're doing and is able to offer art of some intrinsic value beyond mere collectibility, there are a million other cunts busily dangling Bulldog Drummond from a dirigible and expecting to get paid for it. This is partially why I browsed The Umbrella Academy in the book store two or three times before actually buying it. It looked potentially intriguing, but it looked like Titterism, a bit Tim Burton in places. I've tried with My Chemical Romance but I never really understood that emotional children music - as it's called - and The Black Parade still sounds like a noisier, more whiny Bay City Rollers to my ears; so the appeal of a Titterist comic book written by their singer did not seem obvious; but, I'd still have bought the first issue of the new Doom Patrol comic a couple of weeks back had it been written by Ben fucking Elton, never mind Gerard Way; and it was good, so of course I just had to read this.

The Umbrella Academy is a group of seven, slightly bizarre super-powered children, and whilst it skates close to the edge, occasionally threatening to slide over into a full blown Titterfest of monocles, penny-farthing bicycles, and Christmas puddings with sixpences in the middle - it has enough momentum and weird invention to get away with it, and ultimately to succeed with flying colours. On the surface of it, it's almost a homage to Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol - and if you enjoyed that you'll almost certainly enjoy this - but maintains its own distinctive voice through, oddly enough, a seemingly more pronounced European aesthetic, or enough so as to imply that Way has sat through more than his fair share of bewildering black and white films with English subtitles. So it manages to feel significantly less mainstream than Morrison's Doom Patrol, thanks in part to Gabriel Bá's wonderful artwork falling somewhere between Tintin and Ted McKeever.

Aside from some muted wibbling noises about shitty parenting, it admittedly doesn't actually do a whole lot beyond looking amazing, but that doesn't have to be a problem, and it does more than just titter. If you really need it, The Umbrella Academy's surrealist short-circuiting of expectation might quite easily be taken as an end in itself. It throws interesting shapes, and is at heart deeply fucking stupid, but then all the best comic books usually are.

*: I could churn out this shit all day if anyone's interested: five cents a word but all reasonable offers will be considered.