Kingdom Come

Mark Waid & Alex Ross Kingdom Come (1996)
I'd stopped reading the caped stuff when this was first published and only found out about it a couple of weeks ago. The reason I stopped reading the caped stuff was due to the entire mainstream comics biz having taken to impersonating Rob Liefeld, or at least Todd McFarlane, and it had all begun to look like a massive pile of wank from where I was stood. Nearly three decades later I realise I wasn't the only one to feel that way, and Kingdom Come features a host of established DC superpersons who, having reached retirement age, find themselves significantly bemused at the younger generation of bloodthirsty cyborg assassins wielding shuriken swords and way too much angry crosshatching. It's a weird one because it's approximately an epic war between, on one side, the traditionally wholesome and brightly coloured comic book heroes of the fifties - hence the non-ironic cameo by Krypto the Super Dog - and all that fucking awful shite inspired by Liefeld and his buddies; so on at least one level it's pitched firmly against not so much the comic book growing up (which it sort of didn't in any case) as what it grew into, told by both means and medium far removed from the newsstands and legitimately juvenile audience whose legacy it directly represents. So it's Miller's Dark Knight flipped to more positive and progressive aspirations - or possibly where Alan Moore would have gone with 1963 had he finished the thing.

In caped terms, I didn't always get DC, generally preferring Marvel and usually rolling my eyes during streamed documentaries identifying the difference as being that DC deals in legends, man; but now having read and re-read a few of the various Crisis books - and re-reading is essential because they are otherwise often incomprehensible - I think I understand the distinction. Marvel superheroes tend to be Gods and monsters which also happen to be ourselves with all of our baggage and characteristic failings. DC superheroes are, for the most part, more remote, something to which I suppose we aspire rather than which we become. There are numerous exceptions to this generalisation, but that's what I take from Multiversity, Infinite Crisis, and now this; and it's why, I would suggest, those Marvel movies have generally been more watchable than the DC jobs, because everything looks epic if you throw enough CGI at it, so movie-epic isn't that impressive in and of itself.

Anyway, this works because although the story is probably not actually anything special, being masses of caped folks flying angrily at each other whilst shooting rays from their outstretched hands for two-hundred pages, the art is genuinely breathtaking; and so breathtaking that even the most ridiculous aspects of the genre are rendered with sublime grace and beauty as befits tales of the Gods and their kin. Accordingly Kingdom Come also demonstrates why it's mostly a waste of time trying to transfer this stuff to the big screen. The strapline about how you'll believe a man can fly never really worked for me because I could see it was just some guy in a leotard hanging from a near invisible wire, but Kingdom Come is, on the other hand, unusually persuasive.

Invasion!

Keith Giffen, Bill Mantlo, Todd McFarlane & others Invasion! (1989)
This was one of those massive crossover jobs which comic book publishers tend to impose on their respective casts of characters to an approximately yearly schedule, or at least they did. Perhaps wary of playing the alternative universe card every single fucking time - although if that was ever a concern it's presumably since gone flying out the window - DC here fell back on the traditional alien invasion narrative just like mother used to make, complete with Dominators, a race bearing coincidental but nevertheless effectively malevolent resemblance to the yellow perils of less enlightened times. The idea is that the Green Lantern Corps, guardians of the DC galaxy, have been nobbled by some means or other leaving the field open for an alliance of extraterrestrial bad guys to step in with a final solution to the superhero problem. Earth is an unusually fertile source of superheroes, you see, and those caped guys are forever foiling the plans of various alien warmongers. Invasion! actually does quite a nice job of accounting for why so many superheroes are from Earth, and even why an explosion in a laboratory isn't always a bad thing - probably because playing the mutant card would have seemed a bit obvious, not to mention lacking in originality.

Invasion! is therefore about as good as you will expect it to be, depending on what you've taken from the above. As with caped fare in general, there's the usual level of cheese and implausibility; but if you can work through the pain, it's surprisingly satisfying - and entertaining, and well stocked with big ideas, albeit big slightly silly ideas. It was the Independence Day of comic books, I guess, and similarly reliant on sheer scale more than it was on individual stories - as epitomised by panels of massed superheroes flying at vast spaceships, their numbers so great as to necessitate them being drawn as a huge cosmic asparagus spear in which one can faintly pick out the shapes of tiny capes. Most of the art is handled by Todd McFarlane, and while he's no Jack Kirby and his Superman is a bit too much in the direction of Basil Wolverton, he communicates sheer scale very well, so the first two issues are actually a hoot - although you should probably keep in mind that I enjoyed Independence Day.

Unfortunately the war is won by the end of the second issue, leaving the finale to focus on the human tragedy of the aftermath which is all a bit ham-fisted. Scott from the Doom Patrol pegs it as a gratuitous result of the Dominators' gene bomb, saving Grant Morrison from having to include him in his post-dadaist revision of the team chronicles; as do some other generally unpopular characters whose names I've forgotten and may not have known in the first place. Portentous vows are made at various funerals, boo hoo, and so on and so forth. It feels like an afterthought and seems disproportionately extended, presumably because it would have seemed weird had issue three dropped from eighty pages to the fifteen which were probably all it needed.

The US military was gearing up for all manner of foreign soil japes back in 1989, notably the invasion of Panama with one eye on whatever seemed to be kicking off in the Gulf, Afghanistan, and so on; and Invasion! accordingly feels somewhat like an unreconstructed appeal to the sort of patriotism which might facilitate such things, amounting to a massive three issue grunt of sometimes you just gotta do the right thing, and without too much of that pesky liberal stuff getting in the way. This doesn't make it a bad comic so much as an unintentionally amusing one, at least with the benefit of hindsight, and it at least remains a refreshing change from alternative universes killed off in a narrative following the logic of a William Burroughs novel with less emphasis on men's bottoms; which doesn't necessarily make it a good comic either, but I've read much, much worse.

Ground Zero

Peter David, Todd McFarlane, Erik Larsen & others Ground Zero (1988)
I never really felt one way or the other about the Hulk, but picked this up because it includes issue 340, an X-Men crossover which otherwise costs several hundred dollars these days. Before we proceed any further, here's what someone called Aurora thought of it on Goodreads:

I haven't read much Hulk, and this is pretty much why. The basic metaphor of Hulk and Bruce Banner is only so interesting, and there just isn't much else here. Also! The art is sooo bad. Everyone has mullets! The X-Men show up and Wolverine and Rogue have mullets!

Yeah, I sort of enjoyed it but I can't really disagree with that. Ground Zero wasn't quite pow! the comic book growing up, but its voice had broken, it couldn't talk to girls, and it was still playing with action figures while dreading any of its pals finding out. It's written by Peter David whom I recall as being not without certain qualities, although for some reason his only regular title which I can recall off the top of my head was when he turned X-Factor into a vehicle by which to bag sales for all those other mutants usually seem hanging around in the background of better stories. David kept these seven collected issues reasonably interesting in terms of doing weird things with the characters, which probably wasn't easy given that the villain combines a porno-moustache with a giant throbbing brain and is seemingly aware of being a villain. At one stage he transforms a couple of the Hulk's enemies into monsters named the Rock and the Redeemer, then later finds it advantageous to betray the pair, and so we see a memo added to the to do list on his fancy computer screen in futuristic Asimov font so as to ensure that he doesn't somehow forget to stitch them up like kippers:

LIE TO ROCK AND REDEEMER.

What a wrong 'un, he is!

Unfortunately though, the art isn't great and the best I've ever been able to say about Todd McFarlane's work is that he's consistent. He's not the worst, and true enough some of those Spider-Man covers had something, but his figures are clunky, resembling Stretch Armstrong dolls pulled into uncomfortable taffy shapes which no amount of crosshatching can conceal; and there's not much variation from his three basic expressions - surprise, anger and glee on faces with otherwise more than a touch of Archie about them and which don't really gel with the mood of the book. He draws a decent grey Hulk but has difficulty with anything that's supposed to look like a person. Bruce Banner here resembles the Archie version of Harry Potter, for example.

That said, Ground Zero is good enough to leave me wishing it had been better, which is, I suppose, a recommendation.

Violator

Alan Moore, Bart Sears & Greg Capullo Violator (1994)
Here's another one I'd never heard of through having given up on comics, or most comics, around the end of 1991. It's billed as one of the greatest things Alan Moore ever wrote by the online advertising, but I'm suspecting a certain bias given that they obviously wanted me to buy the thing - although the sales pitch worked so I did, for what it may be worth. This dates from the period during which Moore had become thoroughly browned off with DC due to the publication of the Watchmen Babies meet Archie crossover, while still needing to pay off a substantial phone bill incurred through calling the Post Office Dial-a-Disc service in order to hear Whigfield's Saturday Night over and over and over. The Image Comics boys had seen the sense of having their drawings of massive tits, angry faces and explosions scripted by some guy who could do word stuff good, and so here we are.

Violator is a demon at large on earth in the form of a member of Insane Clown Posse, apparently, and a character who first appeared in Todd McFarlane's Spawn; and Spawn is what happened when pow! the comic book grew up - lavishly crosshatched goth-metal art beautifully reproduced on glossy pages, swearing and a shitload of gratuitous violence in what otherwise may as well have been a seventies comic book about a guy in a cape. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Nevertheless, Violator is a lot of fun. It's fucking stupid, but as I say, it's a lot of fun and Moore clearly had a blast with the dialogue, although I'm guessing he probably zipped it off in the caff one morning while waiting for his egg and chips. There's a story, sort of, but only just, which doesn't really matter because Violator is, roughly speaking, D.R. & Quinch reimagined as a track on an Insane Clown Posse album, which I say as someone with quite a few Insane Clown Posse albums. It falls some way short of being one of the greatest things Alan Moore ever wrote, but it's better than Jerusalem.

Deadpool Classic volume two

Joe Kelly, Ed McGuinness & others Deadpool Classic volume two (1997)
Deadpool was part of what drove me away from the caped stuff back in the very early nineties, one of a number of generic vigilante types surfing in on a wave of witless wisecracks and terrible art courtesy of Todd McFarlane, Rob Liefeld and others. Years later I found myself bewildered from afar to note the popularity of a character I remembered only as one of many reasons why it didn't matter that Marvel had cancelled New Mutants. Still, my stepson seemed to be very much a fan, and against expectation I thought the film was fucking great, and my friend Steve suggested that the early issues were worth a look.

I had this collection on hand for the sake of light relief whilst wading through Alan Moore's turgid Jerusalem - not a great choice as it happens. The jokes aren't anything like so funny as I hoped, and the art is horrible. Everyone looks as though they're made of brightly coloured beach balls. It's drawn in that cutesy manga style which infects fucking everything these days. Half of the characters resemble a WeeMee or something from Deadline. It all feels like the comic book equivalent of autotune.

Maybe I'm just too old.

Maybe Deadpool just isn't very good after all.

You live and learn.

Blood Feud

Alan Moore, Tony Daniel & Kevin Conrad Blood Feud (1995)
I have to wonder just how much Alan Moore must have hated DC that he ended up as beard in residence at Image Comics; and yes, I'm aware of Image having redeemed themselves in recent years, but Lordy they published some horrendous shite back in the day.

Spawn wasn't necessarily a bad idea, but then it's probably debatable as to whether the resurrected instrument of dark vengeance ever really counted as an idea beyond something gruesome for Todd McFarlane to draw. I read those three issues Grant Morrison wrote, because Grant Morrison wrote them, and they were okay if nothing amazing. Blood Feud is a four-issue series wherein Spawn's eldritch trousers come to life and have a fight with him, handily recycling the saga of Spiderman having a scrap with his own costume - actually a shape-changing alien called Venom - another McFarlane masterpiece. Alan Moore was drafted in to write the thing, presumably because him do word stuff good, so there are some nice ideas here and there, and the dialogue doesn't suck so hard as it might. I'm not even sure McFarlane was involved beyond some editorial capacity, but it feels as though he was.

The problem is that the art is fucking horrible, just really awful. As with certain others who caught a ride on the Image monster truck, it's comics drawn by people who learned to draw comics by reading and copying comics and nothing else, unless you count a video game. It's all crosshatching and lurid detail distracting from the figurework of someone who never took a life drawing class, or who took a life drawing class but spent most of it reading earlier issues of Spawn. Faces are awkward knots of muscle concealing too many teeth, and there's so much baroque embellishment it's not always immediately obvious what's even happening on the page; but nothing, not even voice balloons wherein dramatic words like blood and dead are printed red, can conceal the fact that the artist can't fucking draw. Terms such as highly stylised or exaggerated don't cut it as excuses either. This isn't Pablo Picasso finally concluding it's okay to paint a woman's eyes on the side of her head. This is cartooning subject to the same process of reductive recursion as has resulted in wildstyle graffiti art and the logos of black metal bands; and the concept is at about the same level as hey, wouldn't it be cool if the covers of all those Iron Maiden albums were a comic book?

Then again, on the letters page we find thirteen-year old Chase Samsel opining that another problem is this thing where you and Greg Capullo both pencil - it looks queerer, okay? Cut it out. Which I suppose neatly summarises audience expectation, specifically that they're happy providing it doesn't look all queer 'n' shit.

The best which can be said of Blood Feud is that it allowed Alan Moore to buy food and to stay alive long enough to write something better.

See what I mean?

Doom Patrol

Keith Giffen, Matt Clark, John Livesay & others Doom Patrol (2011)
Here's another stack of comics, specifically a run which lasted twenty-two issues before cancellation, and with which I'm only just catching up in 2018. Giffen's version of the Doom Patrol followed on from John Byrne's 2004 version which dispensed with all the weird stuff and started afresh. Infinite Crisis - which I've never read - apparently revised Byrne's revision, meaning Giffen gets to play with Crazy Jane, Arani Caulder, and even characters from the John Arcudi run. He also rationalises Byrne's resurrection of Rita Farr, which is handy because that one decision seemed otherwise a bit crap at the time. Giffen even squishes Grunt and Nudge, both inherited from Byrne, within the first five pages of issue one, which scans as though it was probably at least a little cathartic. Read as a single body of work, this version isn't quite so satisfying as those of Grant Morrison, Gerard Way, or even Giffen's own run on the Justice League, but it's otherwise decent and the art is mostly wonderful.

My only criticisms would be that the narrative occasionally seems to wander into a room and forget what it went in for, and that the additional Metal Men strips - running for the first seven issues in the back of the book - somewhat disrupt the rhythm, at least from the point of view of the reader working his way through a stack of the things piled up on the bedside table. In isolation, Metal Men is very much a thing of great wit and beauty, as you would expect from Giffen once again working with J.M. DeMatteis and Kevin Maguire, his partners on the aforementioned Justice League. The problem is that it's slow and wordy, each panel crammed with dialogue - albeit wonderfully witty dialogue, visually sharing more in common with Windsor McCay than the caped fare in which it is rooted; and Metal Men is perfect as it is, but nevertheless sits heavily in one's reading stomach after relatively breezy instalments of Doom Patrol. Metal Men probably should have been its own book, except of course no-one would have bought it because it's too ludicrous.

As for wandering into rooms and forgetting what we went in for, I suspect Giffen's admittedly infrequent narrative Condor moments result partially from my never having read Infinite Crisis; which brings me back to the subject of revision, continuity, canon, and so on.

I still don't understand why DC feels the need to reboot every five or so years, and I don't believe that anyone likely to pick up a Batman comic in 2018 is really going to give a shit about the character having been around since 1939, or that Bruce Wayne should logically be a septugenarian by now. I was heavily into Claremont-era X-Men comics at the end of the eighties, before it all went down the crapper; and what made those books so readable - at least for me - was that they felt more akin to a soap than generic caped twats fighting crime; and whilst X-Men may well have been bogged down with continuity, it was the continuity which made it work, which gave the narrative a semblance of plausibility - even just minor details like someone reading a newspaper with a headline about what happened to Iron Man in a different comic, a thousand inconsequential strands of faux cause and effect stretched out across the entirety of Marvel's flimsy three-colour reality, just like the real world with all its loose ends and footnotes that never quite add up. The idea that Cyclops should have been in his fifties because he'd hung out with beatniks at the Coffee A Go-Go as a teenager in those early issues simply didn't matter because all of the heavy-lifting was done by the story; which in turn brings me to why I was never entirely sold on DC comics.

Shortly after discovering Marvel, and then Alan Moore's Swamp Thing, I picked up other DC books from the newsagent just to see what they were about. Blue Devil was funny, but that was about it for me. Even in the eighties, most of what I saw felt like a throwback to the sixties or earlier - corny as fuck supertypes throwing on a garish leotard and deciding to fight crime with a sprinkling of generic angst for the sake of texture, the sort of problems you imagine grown-ups must encounter if you're about eight. Most of it made Jim Shooter's Marvel look like Jean-Paul Sartre. Fast forward to the twenty-first century, and many of these issues of Doom Patrol showcased sample pages from whatever else DC was publishing at the time - Magog, Teen Titans, innumerable Batman variations, the Flash, plus there's an issue of Secret Six I picked up because the story crosses over with Doom Patrol - and it all looks fucking awful, like they've just about caught up to the seventies, but the worst of the seventies and with shittier art. Maybe that's why they keep rebooting all the time, having failed to realise that Alzheimer's Superman isn't actually the problem. There's not much point giving Blue Beetle a cellphone and a facebook account if the calendar is otherwise still stuck at around half past 1974. This would mean that the good stuff - Doom Patrol, Giffen's Justice League, and a couple of Vertigo titles - have been exceptions proving the rule, which is probably why the good stuff keeps getting cancelled: because the readership would rather have shite like Secret Six or Harley Quinn*.

Oh well. I suppose that's just how it goes.

*: I acknowledge that this criticism is founded upon my never having read a single issue of Harley Quinn, but frankly it looks fucking wank, like DC attempting to cross Jamie Hewlett's Tank Girl with that bloody awful Insane Clown Posse comic book that came out back in 2000, drawn by someone who presumably regarded Todd McFarlane's Spawn as the greatest story ever told; and Tank Girl was also pure shite while we're on the subject.

Lobo: Portrait of a Bastich

Keith Giffen, Alan Grant & Simon Bisley
Lobo: Portrait of a Bastich (1992)
Six hundred pages worth of Aleister Crowley's short stories can be a tough mountain to climb, so I've taken a break about halfway through and am refreshing my palate with something which, it might be argued, could be considered the thematic opposite of Crowley's laboured symbolism. Lobo is an extraterrestrial bounty-hunter and parody of the sort of angry over-the-top violent loner types which began to infest caped comicdom during the nineties. Lobo goes out of its way to offend, shares most of its basic values with Beavis & Butthead, and is probably one of the more stupid things I've read this year; and yet it's great because it's done right and it works. Simon Bisley's artwork is as ludicrous as ever, comically violent and presumably fuelled by death metal and hard liquor, but there's nevertheless something oddly beautiful about it all - a fine balance is struck with fiddly detail in all the right places and heavy, solid figures. It almost carries the authority of classical painting and as such makes every other clown who ever drew a scowling muscleman firing a gun larger than himself entirely redundant. Although the two four-issue miniseries collected here may have set out to rip huge streaks of piss out of the art of Todd McFarlane and Rob Liefeld, the thing works because those involved so obviously loved what they were doing; so despite a superficially similar penchant for those kicking-peoples'-heads-in gags, Portrait of a Bastich feels almost wholesome in comparison to the somewhat cynical and nasty Skrull Kill Krew to which I subjected myself t'other week.

I actually bought these when they came out back in the 1990s, then reluctantly sold them on eBay when raising funds for my move to Texas, and it's great to have them back in the collection. Portrait of a Bastich is, roughly speaking, Motorhead in space written by Douglas Adams but without the smarm, and it's very, very funny.

Better get back to old grumpy bollocks now I suppose...