Strange Adventures

Tom King & Mitch Gerads Strange Adventures (2021)
Adam Strange is a regular guy who finds himself randomly and instantaneously beamed to the distant planet of Rann, there to fly around wearing a jetpack solving science-fiction crimes with just his wits and his trusty laser pistol. He was an old school character from before pow! the comic book grew up, one I first encountered in Alan Moore's version of Swamp Thing wherein it was revealed that the sexy naked ladies of Rann were literally queuing up for a go on Strange's mighty Earth penis. Whether or not pow! the comic book had grown up by this point is probably debatable, but issues were sold only to older boys and girls who had - you know - done it.

I'm now at the stage where I'd probably pick up The Adventures of Jeff Lynne and ELO were it produced by Tom King and Mitch Gerads, so I found Strange Adventures irresistible. I know some Toms have been better than others. Rorschach wasn't quite what I'd hoped it would be and Batman could have been better, but this one is up there with his best.

I remain mostly unconvinced that the comic book ever truly needed to pow! grow up, mainly because it usually translates into Red Tornado taking crack and then having a wank behind some bins; but Strange Adventures shows us how it's supposed to work. The art is gorgeous, suggesting bande dessinées rather than the usual manga-influenced tripe, and the telling is nothing if not cinematic, invariably leaving it up to the reader to work out what the hell is happening.

What the hell is happening is that this version of Adam Strange is involved in a war. It wouldn't be anything new but for King writing with all the nuance necessary to describe actual conflict, doubtless drawing from his own experience in Iraq. The revelation of Strange having engaged in less than chivalrous acts during the heat of battle comes as no great surprise, but the supplementary revelation of the deed being very much what it looks like rather than a dream or fake news is genuinely shocking. Ordinarily we'd ask how he's going to get out of this one, and he doesn't; yet this isn't one of those jobs where we know that pow! the comic book has grown up because we can quite clearly see Superman killing a homeless person for chuckles. Rather, the startling message is that terrible things happen during war, and usually so terrible that no amount of squinting can ever draw forth some tidily moral lesson about good and evil, getting one's hands dirty, omelettes requiring broken eggs or whatever other bullshit we keep telling ourselves. So King's Adam Strange isn't a hero, or if he is, he's a hero who goes to war and fails to come out of it smelling of roses - the whole point being that no-one does.

Strange Adventures resembles a comic book but reads like a novel, and a fairly substantial novel too.

The Sheriff of Babylon

Tom King & Mitch Gerads The Sheriff of Babylon (2016)
Given that it has somehow taken me five years to get around to bagging and reading the second collection of this twelve-issue comic book, I've just re-read the whole thing from issue one onwards. In fact, I've re-read it twice in consecutive sittings because, much like real life, it's occasionally confusing and difficult to work out who is on which side; and because it seemed to warrant it.

Tom King worked for the CIA and spent five months in Baghdad after the fall of Saddham Hussein. The Sheriff of Babylon isn't really autobiographical, but has the cadence of human existence doing what it can in terrible situations. This terrible situation was, of course, the war; and King's experience of the war, as informs this story, suggests that the principal casualty - which I suppose you might say we've been referring to as truth for the sake of argument - is the notion of there ever having been an us and them. War, the book seems to suggest, atomises combatants into a million disconnected individuals, each just trying to survive, with allegiances sworn in peacetime rendered meaningless by shitbags on both sides of the divide. The allegiances cautiously struck in this tale - Chris the US military contractor, Nassir who was Saddham's favourite cop, and Saffiya, whose entire family were executed by Saddham's favourite cop - could only have come about during wartime. The story attempts to solve the murder of a single individual in a country busily fighting itself, where the lives of single individuals mean nothing, and therefore mean everything. It's occasionally difficult to keep track of who probably shouldn't have done what because this isn't one of those Punisher stories about guns, grunting, and clearly defined moral codes; all of which is the great strength of this work fuck it - this masterpiece.

The art is astonishing, distinctly filmic, and never overplays its hand. One might imagine that The Sheriff of Babylon would be better suited to film given that it seems to impersonate one in certain respects; but I'm not convinced. Some of what occurs is too awful, and the horror would overpower the narrative, turning it into something it never set out to be. Gerads beautiful yet harrowing art, on the other hand, removes the story from its own reality just enough to allow for its telling without the body count getting in the way.

You remember all that stuff about pow! the comic book grows up? Well, this is what it looks like.

Astounding

Alec Nevala-Lee Astounding (2018)
In addition to being a biography of John W. Campbell, Nevala-Lee's account also serves as a potted history of Astounding magazine and the birth of modern science-fiction - all three being inextricably knotted together. Obviously Astounding wasn't the only digest, but once Gernsback had left the table, it was the one with the widest influence which gave us the greatest authors of the form, notably Asimov, Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, A.E. van Vogt and others.

As with Gernsback's Amazing Stories, Campbell's impetus was futurism and invention at least as much or arguably more so than it was literary. He was an ideas man more than a writer, and so as editor of Astounding Stories of Super-Science, he farmed his ideas out to those he trusted to do a better job, usually preferring to focus on columns and editorials covering technological advances and innovations of the day and what he hoped would come next. Science-fiction was still burning off the energy of the nineteenth century discovery of progress as something which might be observed within a single human lifespan and the idea that we might actively direct where it was headed. Evolutionary theory had inevitably inspired the notion of supermen, and Campbell and Hubbard in particular were keen to lead the way in this respect.

The success of Astounding and of its greatest writers probably accounts for why science-fiction has become synonymous with film and television more so than with the written word, which is a shame in my view, but was most likely inevitable. More surprising is just how much of Astounding has extended itself into the present, notably the first science-fiction fan clubs of the thirties and forties foreshadowing the worst aspects of today's social media, and of course Hubbard's pseudo-religion which might arguably serve as a metaphor for much of the wider capitalist society it inhabits - which is depressing given that the Dianetics from which it was born didn't seem entirely without merit.

Anyway, as you may be aware, Campbell seems to have been a fairly unpleasant character, and Nevala-Lee does an exceptional job of balancing the myth against the reality, unflinching in describing the man's worst qualities without presenting an impediment to appreciation of what he got right, even where it was for the wrong reasons. Honestly, no-one comes out of this saga smelling of roses, although I'm left considerably more sympathetic towards Robert Heinlein - providing I don't have to read Stranger ever again; but it's a story which really needs telling given the generally unreliable testimony of science-fiction enthusiasts, because it's worth remembering that this terrible man nevertheless had great ideas, and - while we're here - L. Ron Hubbard really knew his way around a typewriter, seeing as we've apparently forgotten that detail as well*.

Astounding is surprisingly exciting, weirdly depressing, and yet fascinating; and it also explains why I've never yet fully enjoyed an issue of Analog, which was successor to Astounding and always felt as though there was something unpleasant lurking at its conservative little heart.

*: Curiously it turns out that Hubbard never particularly cared for science-fiction, which possibly explains that ropey story about Xenu and reincarnated aliens dropping bombs into volcanoes. His favourite genre, so it turns out, involved pirates and the high seas. It's a shame no-one told Tom King before he sat down to write Rorschach.

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.

Mister Miracle

Tom King & Mitch Gerads Mister Miracle (2019)
Just over a month ago I wrote about an Avengers comic book, suggesting that to describe it as ludicrous would imply that there's such a thing as the ponderous superhero equivalent of Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge, which there really isn't. Whilst I haven't actually had cause to revise this opinion, it turns out that there actually is a ponderous superhero equivalent of Samuel Beckett, and it's Tom King's version of Mister Miracle.

Mister Miracle is some kind of super escape artist, a sort of cosmic Houdini with a cape born from the peculiarly vivid imagination of Jack Kirby as part of his Fourth World mythology. The aforementioned Fourth World never really featured in anything I read, so I don't fully understand what it's about beyond that it's something to do with Apokolips, New Genesis, the New Gods, and Darkseid's search for the anti-life equation which will eliminate free will across the universe; so the whole deal is about a million times weirder and more interesting than most of the rest of DC's jock-infested whitebread canon, and at the risk of seeming repetitive, there's something very van Vogt about it all.

Here we see our escape artist fail a suicide attempt and father a child with Big Barda, then war breaks out on New Genesis and Darkseid demands custody of the child as a price for ending the war. The more dramatic, far-fetched, cosmic elements of the story occur in the background almost to the point of being off the side of the page, and as such come across as belonging to something truly vast and unknowable, having been spared the diminishing effects of a sharper focus. Yet even when we can see the fighting, battles we wouldn't understand conducted with bizarre technology, these details are just background noise, of no more significance than a car journey or a trip to the drug store. The real story is that of Scott and Barda having a kid, sleepless nights, trips to the hospital, the sort of stuff you would more expect to find in something written by Harvey Pekar and told with the same muted tone: it's the small details which matter, which is the whole point of the story.

The art is gorgeous too, in case anyone was wondering, tender realism which emphasises the strangeness of certain events unfolding in the background, and doing so without anyone jumping up and down screaming look at me, I'm weird! This thing is simply beautiful, and possibly even the greatest comic book ever published, or at least I'm having trouble recalling anything which has impressed me more right now. As for Watchmen and other beacons of supposed graphic eloquence, Mister Miracle makes most of them look like Scrooge McDuck.

Batman: I Am Suicide

Tom King, Mitch Gerads & others Batman: I Am Suicide (2017)
I've worked out what I dislike about superhero comics - not all superhero comics, because obviously I'm partial to a few of them, but the central flaw inherent to the genre. At the risk of stating the obvious, superhero comics - as first envisioned in the thirties or whenever - appealed to the powerless, or those who saw themselves as powerless by presenting a fantasy of something big enough to get the better of the school bully or whatever other terror, real or imagined, might give one cause to fear leaving the house. The superhero is essentially a cop, but a perfect cop, one who will transcend the laws and red tape of small men to give that bully a bloody nose. He's there for the snitch, for the angry loners who feel helpless in their own homes because thieves, rapists, even communists are everywhere, just waiting to pounce. He's there to beat up the dirty crook, and return the stolen wallet to that rich guy, that wealth provider, that creator of jobs. He's there to defend capitalism, the status quo, and authority whilst allowing us a safe fantasy about wild cards and visionaries who don't play by the rules. He's there to normalise the system which keeps us in place.

I think this occurred to me as I was watching the Suicide Squad movie on a plane - a truly awful film and possibly one of the worst I've ever seen. Suicide Squad is about a bunch of superpowered criminals who work for the government, getting sentences reduced in payment for espionage and the usual shit which secretive government agencies supposedly undertake. Suicide Squad comprises mostly psychotic killers and their obedience is secured by each being implanted with a bomb which can be blown at any moment. There's a scene where one of them gets lippy, but is silenced as Amanda Waller, their boss, holds up an iPad. We see six or seven icons on the screen of the iPad, each an image of a member of the squad. All she has to do is to touch the icon on the screen and one of them dies. The point is illustrated when this happens to a character called Slipknot. Lacking humour, and additionally featuring appalling overacted pantomime character Harley Quinn - Tank Girl as the magic pixie kinderwhore who'll either suck your dick or kill you, Suicide Squad feels like the normalisation of torture, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and human lives reduced to expendable military commodity.

Suicide Squad helped me to identify what I dislike about DC comics, and have always disliked about DC comics, at least in a general sense. The quality of superhero fare, at least for me, is dependent on how far it has come from being authoritarian tales of good cops for the paranoid and insecure. The success of Marvel has mostly been in their treating the genre as soap opera, as with most of those mutant titles, and so the best superhero comics do something other than ferrying an endless string of unfortunates to their penitential just desserts, if they do that at all - Doom Patrol, Animal Man, Keith Giffen's Justice League, Swamp Thing and so on; and this is why DC, even before I developed critical faculties, always seemed dated and stuffy. Marvel was Adam Warlock, weird mutants, and all manner of strange shit, whilst glancing in the other direction it mostly seemed to be Batman doing what he'd always done, and if enduring popularity has left him looking undeniably iconic, he's still a wealthy cop beating up criminals in preservation of the status quo, and the best anyone can do is at least try to make the story more interesting by use of lighting; but too much lighting and it ceases to be Batman, and there, in the shadows, I always get the feeling I can see the gun nut who lives a couple of blocks from me, who posts on our neighbourhood forum warning against local ISIS cells and Obama still coming for our firearms. By comparison, Judge Dredd at least has the decency to take the piss out of itself.

Nevertheless, the ever classy Tom King does what he can with what he's been given, at least moving this story on from what we saw in the first volume, doing his best to keep things interesting. The tough cop aspect is further downplayed as he tries to examine Batman as something human and vulnerable, and in doing so making a little more sense, or at least poetic sense, out of that fucking ridiculous origin story - dealing with bereavement by dressing up as a flying mammal and fighting crime. Similarly most of what happens is played out as a freakish fight between monsters, thus mostly avoiding the parallels and clichés I mentioned earlier. I'm not too sure the sequence of him nobbing Catwoman really said anything which needed saying, but this is probably about as good as a Batman comic is ever likely to be in so much as that it at least makes an effort.

The Sheriff of Babylon

Tom King & Mitch Gerads The Sheriff of Babylon volume one (2016)
Tom King once worked for the CIA, and as such his CV seems fairly atypical for a comic book writer, although it could also be argued that the sheer quality of his writing also makes him fairly atypical. This one, set in Iraq in the immediate wake of the fall of Saddam, may not be directly autobiographical but is clearly drawn from experience. You can really tell that he was there and that he knows what he's talking about.

The story follows the hunt for the killer of a young Iraqi undergoing training as a provisional cop, one death in the middle of a city which remains a warzone. However, that The Sheriff of Babylon is more or less a whodunnit is easily overlooked, such is the raw force of the environment and the circumstances of its creation. I suppose you might even argue that Baghdad itself is the main character.

The art is astonishing, as are the dialogue and characterisation, and so much so as to leave you wondering if you'll ever be able to go back to reading a regular comic book. This is how people actually talk, and King and Gerads make us feel as though we're there in the room. It's a story told about a situation so shitty that you simply can't tell stories about it, and yet it's happening here with a breathtaking lightness of touch, and even jokes - just like real life.

Considering all the horrible bullshit spouted over Iraq, the Middle East, and Islam with no actual experience or qualification to inform those most visibly engaged with the spouting, I'd suggest that everybody needs to read this book.

Batman: I Am Gotham

Tom King, David Finch & others Batman: I Am Gotham (2017)
I have to confess I've never really given much of a shit about Batman. I loved The Dark Knight Returns obviously, not only because both art and writing were great, but because a character who routinely smashes kneecaps as means to a judicial end only really works as an antihero; but Tom King's Vision was the possibly the greatest comic book I've ever read, and celebrated children's entertainer Barnaby Salton reckoned I should give this a go, and I was feeling fat, unwell, and incapacitated due to a combination of interrupted sleep, chicken in walnut sauce, and one of those shakes you can use to grout bathroom tiles. I needed the reading equivalent of comfort food, the sort of thing my mummy would have brought back from the shops for me if I was poorly - hence Batman, even though it's probably the very last thing my mother would have brought back from the shops for me. I would have more likely ended up with Thomas Hardy or one of the Brontës.

I Am Gotham is beautifully written with concise prose applied sparingly - no thought bubbles or inset panels of exposition, their modern equivalent - and the art is beautiful, so it's distinctly filmic in terms of pacing, atmosphere, and how little it gives away or pauses to explain itself. Aside from anything else, this additionally tends to suggest that the comic book has become merchandising to the CGI-heavy superheroic television serial, of which there are now a great many, although I very much doubt this being intentional or conscious. Here Batman saves lives, gets caught up in fights, is made subject to governmental skulduggery, endures the occasional crisis of conscience and so on; and whilst it's beautifully done and atmospherically powerful, it didn't feel that satisfying. In fact it felt a bit like one of those television shows, just with a bit more artistic integrity, and I've yet to see one of those television shows I liked. I saw twenty minutes of The Flash the other night. It was fucking shit.

Anyway, while I felt as though I spotted what I presume to be one of King's enduring themes - namely great power as something terrible in the hands of persons who don't know what to do with it, as we saw in Little Worse Than a Man, ultimately this one didn't really quite seem to be about anything, which I found a little unsatisfying. Then of course I now realise that I Am Gotham is just the first of a three part story, so it's really just getting warmed up. Interviewed online, Tom King was asked of all of Batman's qualities and attributes, what's the one that really speaks to you?

To me, it's his mortality. It's the idea that he could die—that he's human. There's something about Superman and Wonder Woman that says to me that they go on forever. If you came to Earth one hundred years from now, Superman and Wonder Woman would still be here. But Batman's like one of us, right? He can die. He has that risk factor to him, and every time he goes out at night, he faces that and still triumphs over it. That just makes him the most human character in the DCU to me, the idea that he's not a god. He lives among the gods and tries to do his best.

So okay, fair enough. I can see this one may well be going somewhere and I guess I'll be picking up the rest. It may not get off to quite such an arresting start as The Vision, but it still pisses over most other versions of Batman I've seen.

The Vision: Little Better Than a Beast

Tom King & Gabriel Hernandez Walta
The Vision: Little Better Than a Beast (2016)
Here's the second half of the story for which the first half was collected as Little Worse Than a Man, and which I suggested might be the best thing Marvel have ever published. Little Worse Than a Man seems to be the story of a family of robots settling down and attempting to blend in with regular folks, except with a very different tone to how that may sound and somehow managing to turn those chuckles and overly logical misunderstandings into something both poignant and chilling. Little Better Than a Beast completes the title quotation from The Merchant of Venice, presenting a conclusion which seems initially shaky in how it relates to what has gone before, until you realise that it's simply because all humour has been stripped from the increasingly harrowing psychological drama. It's not that the jokes aren't there, but you'd have to be lacking something fairly basic to keep on finding them funny - which, by the way, is probably deliberate. The dynamic of the story derives from the relentless and guileless optimism of inherently flawed people, or at least beings. That which makes them human in turn destroys and debases their humanity.

As you might gather from the above, it's quite easy to forget that this is still essentially a superhero book, and we're reminded when various Avengers appear - notably an Iron Man these days looking one hell of a lot like Robert Downey Jr. I'm not entirely sure whether it's down to the beautifully understated art, the narrative depth, or a combination of the two, but when the capes start flapping it's actually kind of shocking, almost frightening in the same way that The Dark Knight Returns was frightening back when it first hit the stands; and we are reminded that, realistically speaking, superheroes would be fucking terrifying if they were real.

Thankfully though, superheroes are hardly the point of the story. The point might be simplified as the gulf between that which we would like to be and that which we cannot help being, although by the same token Hamlet is probably just a play about a bloke who sees a ghost. You really need to read this one to appreciate it. For a book full of flying guys with capes, this story feels at least as dark as anything written by Michael Gira for a Swans album, and there are a few moments which I found just plain horrible and yet unfortunately necessary; so fuck it: like I said before, this is probably the best thing Marvel have ever published.

The Vision: Little Worse Than a Man

Tom King & Gabriel Hernandez Walta

The Vision: Little Worse Than a Man (2016)
I'd never heard of Tom King, nor Gabriel Hernandez Walta - whom I assumed to be related to the Love & Rockets brothers, but seemingly isn't - and, aside from enjoying a couple of John Byrne issues of West Coast Avengers about a million years ago, I never really gave too much of a shit about the Vision as a character. Nevertheless, Little Worse Than a Man caught my eye when Jonathan Dennis posted that he'd been reading it on facebook, and there it was in Barnes & Noble looking all intriguing and shit, and I'd made it to page-three-hundred of The Snoring Void and felt as though I deserved a treat, and the girl working the counter said I've been meaning to read this one, which seemed like a good sign.

The bad news, by some definition, is that this is just half of the story, and I gather the other six issues will be collected once they've been published; but otherwise - holy shit!

The Vision, in case anyone requires a recap, is a synthetic man created by Ultron so as to screw with the Avengers - technically a synthezoid, and that's apparently totally different to an android. Oh yes it is. He sports an eye-watering red and green colour scheme; he can fly, walk through walls, shoot lasers and all of the rest; his sentence structure is overly analytical and hence unintentionally amusing, much like Data from Star Trek or Mr. Logic from Viz comic, and now he wants more than anything to be human, or like a human - just a regular guy who mows his lawn and pays taxes.

Naturally I was expecting laffs aplenty in roughly the same vein as an episode of The Munsters, but this is something much better. The excessive logic jokes are all there as Mr. and Mrs. Vision settle in and the two Vision kids attend the local high school, but the story is handled with such loving attention to detail that the laughter feels wrong, almost cruel, and the story slowly escalates into quiet psychological horror. It's that thing about how we are more repulsed by a close approximation of humanity than a patently unrealistic one, because the fear is so much more profound when risen from that split second it takes us to tell the difference between that which is human, and that which isn't. The more the Visions try to fit in, the more David Lynch it gets and the less we notice we're reading a superhero book. In fact, it feels more like science-fiction in the Philip K. Dick tradition - a genuinely rare thing given that most supposedly Dickian fiction seem to have been identified as such by people who may not have read his books but nevertheless consider Blade Runner to be one of the greatest movies ever made, which it really isn't.

Like nothing else I can think of, this book is both hilarious and yet absolutely chilling, often within the space of the same speech bubble, and the artwork is gorgeous. This might even be the best thing Marvel have ever done.