Mastodonia

Clifford D. Simak Mastodonia (1978)
Mastodonia seems slightly unusual within Simak's body of work in so much as that while it makes use of many of the man's characteristic tropes, the tone is perhaps more serious and sober than one might anticipate. So we have time travel and an extraterrestrial presence, but neither gnomes, robots, nor mischievous woodland sprites, and it's written with the same sense of practicality and realism I seem to recall having informed 1980's The Visitors*; and it's quite dark even by Simak's occasionally pessimistic standards.

Interviewed by Darrell Schweitzer in Amazing Stories, Simak spoke of the difficulty of writing a genuine alien being, one betraying no obviously anthropomorphic features informed by what a human author is able to imagine. It was clearly something to which he gave some consideration, and he did quite a good job with Catface in Mastodonia, an alien quite unlike those which more often tend to spring from the human imagination and accordingly described in mostly abstract or visionary terms. Catface is marooned in a typically Simakian wilderness, the same Willow Bend as we've visited in  previous novels, and he busies himself by creating time roads, passages through to earlier stages of Earth's history. Simak is riffing on themes and ideas he already explored in Small Deer, The Marathon Photograph, Project Mastodon and others, here achieving some philosophical depth with the greater page count and exploration of well trodden, familiar territory.

So Asa Steele, our guy, finds himself able to visit prehistoric Wisconsin by agency of Catface, striking what seemed an ominous note, at least to me, when he facilitates excursions for big game hunters keen to bag a triceratops. I say that it's an ominous note because for most of the novel, it's quite difficult to discern where Simak stood on the subject of overfinanced arseholes destroying critters for fun; so it's a relief when karma catches up with the big game hunters towards the end, which unfortunately still leaves Steele's slightly unsavoury efforts to treat the time roads as untapped commercial enterprises; but then we don't always have to like our main character for him to do his job.

Still, aside from foreshadowing Jurassic Park, I suppose, I'm not sure any of the above quite constitutes the point of this one, at least not directly. I suspect some of this may be the older metropolitan Simak wrestling with his own nostalgia for the rural simplicity of Millville to which he never returned.

'I'm that nutty Steele kid, who came back to the old hometown, and they're suspicious of me and resentful of me and most of them don't like me. They're friendly, certainly, but they talk about me behind my back. They don't like anyone who isn't bogged down in their particular brand of mediocrity. It's defensive, I suppose. In front of anyone who left the town and came back short of utter defeat, they feel naked and inferior.'

For Steele, Pleistocene Wisconsin seems to become the pastoral ideal central to so much of Simak's science-fiction, the tranquil Eden to which he returns, and which he will inevitably spoil because he's human and he needs to make a living. Thomas Wolfe's assertion that one can never go home may not seem complex or even particularly profound in 2017, and although it's not the first time Simak batted it around, it's rendered a surprisingly powerful statement in the pages of Mastodonia. There's a lot to chew on in this one, even before we get a glimpse of Catface's point of origin - where he began rather than where he was born - much of it relating to Simak's ideas regarding a universal fellowship of living things. It all ties in, and as with the work of any of the greats, you'd do better to just read the novel than have it explained to you.

*: Whilst we're here, I know Denis Villeneuve's film Arrival is based on Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang but it sure reminds me of Simak's Visitors.

The Ballad of Halo Jones

Alan Moore & Ian Gibson The Ballad of Halo Jones (1986)
I followed 2000AD more or less from the beginning, or at least from prog #21 onwards, simply because that was the first issue I saw in Gibbons' newsagent; but I caught on quick and cashed in a bag of toy cars against the previous twenty issues with some kid at school who is probably still kicking himself. I remained faithful until roughly October 1980 at which point the comic slid into a somewhat shitey period with the advent of unreadable tosh like Meltdown Man and The Mean Arena, although it's probably no coincidence that it was also around this time that I discovered punk rock, Devo, and record shops. Several years later some guy at art college gave me a stack of more recent issues because he didn't want to just throw them away, and my addiction reasserted itself. It would be overly generous to say that the comic had grown up in my absence, but Mean Arena was nowhere to be seen, and it had at least stopped being quite so shit, and there was this story called Halo Jones.

In case it isn't obvious how radical The Ballad of Halo Jones seemed at the time, or at least how radical it seemed to me, here was a strip about urban boredom and shopping trips gone horribly wrong with an almost exclusively female cast smuggled into a comic specialising in stories about tough men who hunt down renegade robots, tough robots who hunt down renegade aliens, renegade men who hunt down tough dinosaurs, alien dinosaurs who...

...well, you get the picture I'm sure.

Meanwhile in the 1990s, I ended up selling my entire stash of progs - about fifteen years' worth - to Skinny Melinks' comic shop in Lewisham for what seemed a slightly insulting sum, probably a fucking tenner or thereabouts, and all because I'd met a girl who had agreed to let me have sexual intercourse with her. This later became a source of regret, at least until history repeated and someone else gave me a free stack of old progs, and once I got beyond the raw nostalgia, I realised that a lot of those stories worked better when you still belonged roughly to the age group at which they were targeted; or you can never go home as both Thomas Wolfe and Mark E. Smith have observed under entirely different circumstances.

Thankfully, not least because this collection was a Christmas present, The Ballad of Halo Jones has endured as a story where Moon Runners and Colony Earth sort of haven't. It comes as a shock reading something so conspicuously episodic requiring a punchline every five or six pages, but it's still pretty damn satisfying despite that. Alan Moore has, I would guess, always had a thing for soap opera, at least if Big Numbers, Top 10, and even Watchmen are anything to go by - his stories as a rule being about people dealing with circumstances rather than the circumstances themselves. To this end Halo Jones is closer in spirit to one of the more eccentric Mexican telenovelas than any of the tales of renegade justice dinobots hunting down tough maverick mutants with which it once shared a cover. The events are massive, but no more massive to Halo than anything experienced by the reader out here in the real world, relatively speaking, and the themes are both timeless and immediately familiar - the uneasy transition to adulthood, the desire to escape from the crushing circumstances of one's childhood environment, the subsequent lack of direction, and the inevitable realisation that things are not going to get better. It's an extraordinarily depressing tale, regardless of it being told by means of jokes, weird aliens, and a ton of fancy ideas. The story - divided into books one to three - is, for my money, encapsulated best by a single caption near the opening of the third book:

Records of her movement over the next few years are incomplete, yet reveal a pattern of increasing desperation... as if she were pacing the galaxy trying to get out.

Yes, I know the feeling, and that's precisely why I ended up in Texas; and just as I bagged a happy ending thank you very much, so too does Halo it seems, which somehow justifies all the preceding crap of the big, horrible journey.

Aside from the conspicuously episodic feel of the first book, I think the only other surprise is Ian Gibson's artwork which definitely worked better on the low quality paper of the weekly comic as I remember. It's not that it's bad so much as that it's often very, very sketchy and overly stylised as though the characters are torn between hasty fashion design and the pouting offspring of Donald Duck. It lacks the clarity of the similarly wavy and otherwise superior Jesus Redondo, although there's a marked improvement in the third and final book for some reason. That said, I still can't imagine this working so well with any other artist at the wheel, although I could have done without hearing about the Halo Jones hamburger shot collector's art that almost went on sale at some convention or other.

Classic is an overused adjective in the crazy biz of comics, but entirely justified in this instance.