Doctor Who Classics Omnibus

Pat Mills, John Wagner, Steve Moore, Grant Morrison & others
Doctor Who Classics Omnibus volume one (2010)
Perhaps inevitably, I was once quite the fan of Doctor Who, right up until its 2005 reinvention which, for me at least, missed all the major points of what had made the series so enjoyable in the first place; and then I found my disappointment somewhat polarised by the repellent fervour with which so many embraced the revival, a fervour which often seems indistinguishable from bullying from where I stand, and bullying offered in support of opinion presented as doctrine, received wisdom reiterated as fact.

The wonderful thing about Doctor Who is that it can allow for the telling of almost any kind of story.

That's just one example; and it might work if accounting for novels like Campaign or The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, but these are usually some way off the radar of those for whom Doctor Who is beyond criticism. I have no idea who first said those words, and I'm amazed they can be restated year after year without anyone actually pausing to ask themselves what is actually meant, whether it might be true, or whether it's just another flavourless lump of hyperbole wheeled out because it sounds vaguely more authoritative than the one about my dad being bigger than your dad. What it appears to mean, so far as I am able to tell, is that being as the Doctor can go anywhere in time and space, the settings may vary a great deal without stretching credibility too thin, additionally allowing for some liberties to be taken with the narrative. You could probably say much the same of Star Trek, not that it would necessarily be any more true as a statement. Stories set in fictional environments or from the viewpoint of a minor character are not necessarily indicative of wild narrative anarchy, and certainly not when every last one boils down to the magic Doctor Who telly man having adventures in his TARDIS whilst occasionally reminding us to be nice to those who are a little bit different. Maybe I'm wrong, and Doctor Who really does allow for the telling of almost any kind of story, in which case I assume I must have missed the equivalents to Finnegans Wake, Rendezvous with Rama, Heart of Aztlán, Lady Chatterley's Lover or all those other Doctor Who stories which didn't frame everything in relation to a time traveller having adventures whilst human companions are captured and find themselves having to ask what's happening, Doctor?

So the wonderful thing about Doctor Who is more likely that it can allow for the telling of almost any kind of story, excepting stories of which any aspect is of greater importance than the main character, which actually leaves quite a lot that Doctor Who can't do without looking ridiculous.

Anyway, that's just one aspect. My point - quite aside from Doctor Who merely being a television serial from which a mighty ocean of merchandising has sprung forth, just as Softly Softly and On the Buses were merely television serials - nothing was ever the better for being taken more seriously than it deserved.

Nostalgia guided the hand that picked this from a pile of cheapies in a branch of Borders just before the retail chain imploded, specifically the nostalgia of having read about half of the strips collected herein when they first appeared in Doctor Who Weekly back in the early 1980s. The Iron Legion, The Star Beast, City of the Damned and others - they were great at the time, just as you might expect from 2000AD regulars like Pat Mills and Dave Gibbons, but returning to these now that I'm fat and in my forties, it's difficult to get beyond their being written for a slightly younger audience than at least those early 2000AD strips which have generally stood the test of time. The ideas are nice enough for all the predominance of primary narrative colours, and Dave Gibbons' artwork is beautiful, but it's the kind of shorthand storytelling wherein panels are captioned so as to describe what is quite clearly seen to be happening without any real need for such descriptions. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's just that I'm a fully grown man and it no longer works for me, not least because the mere presence of that mysterious traveller in time and space known only as etc. etc. does not in itself hold my interest. The thing is, as children's comics go, there are plenty which retain some appeal in later years mainly through having refrained from too much talking down to their readers - Asterix the Gaul, Dan Dare, at least some of what 2000AD published - besides which these strips read sadly like ham-fisted promotional material such as you might find printed on the wrapper of an ice lolly. Neither content, vintage nor the presence of a Doctor Who logo is really enough to justify describing these stories as classic, although I've no doubt there are many people out there prepared to wage dreary online wars in their defence. There may even be one or two reading this review, getting ready to fulminate, having never before taken any interest in either Pamphlets of Destiny or the novels I've written about herein, but this is Doctor Who we're talking about and it must therefore be debated with all due reverence, which I really feel proves my point about things being taken more seriously than they deserve.

Of course, it could be argued that this is also what I have myself done when I could just have said Doctor Who Classics Omnibus is all right if you're about ten, but even then you'd be better off with some Judge Dredd or whatever.

The Authority Volume Two: Under New Management

Warren Ellis, Bryan Hitch, Mark Millar & Frank Quitely

The Authority Volume Two: Under New Management (2000)
I seem to have heard a lot about Warren Ellis, but nothing more detailed than yeah, he's really good. I recall wincing at his Lazarus Churchyard strip in the understandably short-lived Blast!, and considering that back in 1991 it only took an X-prefix or references to Aleister Crowley to fool me into believing I had experienced quality product, that must have been some serious wank. Even the name Lazarus Churchyard - if it was music you just know it would have been some post-ironic steampunk-goggle-wearing technogoth toss buried under four tons of digital reverb. I browsed a copy of Warren's apparently amazing Transmetropolitan in a comic shop at some point, but it bore an uncanny resemblance to self-consciously edgy cyberpunk landfill so I presumed it had nothing to offer. I could be wrong, but y'know...

The Authority is a revisionist superhero series, because if there's one thing the world needs, it's another team of super-powered cartoon characters with tidily flawed personalities and erectile dysfunction...

Okay - bit harsh maybe. The Authority actually isn't bad, and no-one could possibly deny that the art is beautiful, although the Warren Ellis issues reprinted here - and keep in mind that he created this title in the first place - do little to contradict or expand favourably upon my impression of him as a writer. Snappy lines punctuated by entire pages bereft of dialogue can work, or it can read like shorthand cool - the comic book equivalent of underlighting one's face by flashlight whilst pulling stern expressions and growling Shakespeare with a German accent. I mean it's okay, but it's a bit obvious.

The key to writing superheroes used to be in getting Doctor Octopus to a branch of Subway so as to have Spiderman crack jokes specifically tailored to the situation about knuckle sandwiches or whole wheat rolls of justice or whatever, and this is surely just the ergonomic modern equivalent. I have no idea whether Warren Ellis is currently working on some steampunk title, or whether he's pooped out a fucking Torchwood novel, but I wouldn't be surprised at either.

However, once we come to the Mark Millar issues reprinted herein, things definitely look up. For some time Millar was allegedly known within the comics trade as - if you'll excuse the schoolyard sexual politics - Grant Morrison's bum boy in reference to the obvious influence of baldy's writing, unless of course those two really were engaged in red hot manly action. Millar may well be no more than the Poundland Grant Morrison, or it could be that they both tend to to laugh at the same jokes; but either way he's still immensely entertaining, writing loud and stupid without losing any of the more delicate touches - even doing a bit of a Pat Mills with a thinly disguised parody of Marvel's Avengers. If it's value brand Grant Morrison, then at least it forges the Grant Morrison who used to tell stories rather than just photocopying a pair of Genesis P. Orridge's underpants and give you a spooky look meaning it's all connected!

To pause for a moment of potentially monumental pretension, in Studies in Classic American Literature D.H. Lawrence wrote:

An artist is usually a damned liar. Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

Even with a slightly poor fit in terms of Mark Millar being writer rather than critic, he nevertheless does a good job of saving this tale from its creator. Frank Quitely still has some weird shit going on with all those massive chins, but never mind.

Marshall Law: Fear and Loathing

Pat Mills & Kevin O'Neill Marshall Law: Fear and Loathing (1989)
Pat Mills is of course the man who invented British comics but isn't Alan Moore - or something along those lines: the creator of 2000AD, Judge Dredd, and other names from a list as long as your arm or longer. Cutting his teeth on populist weeklies requiring stories which moved quickly in short, sharp bursts of six or seven pages, he soon developed a style entirely his own characterised by bold subversive statements, black humour, and dialogue so brash as to read like an exercise in seeing what he could get away with.

If that suggests the comics equivalent of The Sex Pistols, or at least Crass with jokes, neither should Pat Mills' work be regarded as lacking sophistication. Marshall Law is a superhero comic about hatred of superheroes, their inherent elitism and the double standards. It's a massive, hilarious contradiction which throws all manner of Freudian shit into the mix, belches Jonathan Swift flavoured cheeseburgers in your face, and, like most of Pat Mills' comics, actually bothers to say something.

Of course, dealing in big statements about the evils of society, it may fire off target from time to time - notably where stereotypically chaste female characterisation is countered with women as sexually voracious clichés; it's not so much that it's annoying as that it hints at a slightly weird overcompensation born largely of male insecurity, and it's ambiguous as to what the writer is trying to say; but this is a minor observation. I recall this sort of heavy-handed feminism coming over as sometimes misjudged in Third World War, but then Third World War is hardly likely to be remembered for its wit, chuckles being some way removed from its purpose. Marshall Law on the other hand is positively dripping with sarcasm, and yes that is a form of wit, and so it holds together quite nicely.

Kevin O'Neill's Disney-Vorticist artwork is as always bizarre, anatomically brutal, and weirdly fascinating, a perfect companion to the narrative to the point that Marshall Law could not possibly have been drawn by anyone else. Aside perhaps from Grant Morrison taking over Doom Patrol, 1989 was an otherwise unremarkable year in terms of the comics mainstream, so Marshall Law stood out as  seriously weird shit when it first appeared, and two decades later, it has lost none of its power. If Watchmen was a clenched fist in a velvet glove, Marshall Law is a prune-juice enema.

I'm saying that's a good thing.

Judgement Day

Alan Moore, Rob Liefeld, Gil Kane and others Judgement Day (1998)
It took the combined might of Garth Ennis and Neil Gaiman to cure my comic habit, at least as regular reader rather than someone who might pick up the odd half price collected edition every once in a while. One might argue that both Ennis and Gaiman are in fact, considerable talents who have brought much that is both refreshing and original to the field, but one would, in this case, be wrong.

Yes; it is that simple.

Rob Liefeld did much the same job a few years earlier, driving me away from superhero titles. It probably wasn't just him, and it can't have helped that my once beloved X-Men had split into about forty different comics, a development which was, I felt, taking the piss in terms of presumed brand loyalty; but it definitely didn't help that Rob Liefeld's X-Force was so astonishingly shite even by the standards of the time, all grimacing women with titanium knockers and no feet; he couldn't even draw a guy in a suit without it looking like the poor fucker had shit himself from guzzling too many steroids. The best thing that ever came out of Rob Liefeld's career was Grant Morrison's colossal pisstake Doom Force, possibly the most sarcastic comic book of all time.

And yet...

Whilst there's not one word of a lie in Progressive Boink's 40 Worst Rob Liefeld Drawings, there's nevertheless something weirdly fascinating about his anatomically wonky showroom dummies. His art is so bizarrely stylised that it sometimes seems like criticising its numerous failings might be tantamount to throwing out all your AC/DC records because they don't sound like Laurie Anderson. So I picked this up on the off chance of Alan Moore somehow making it work, sort of like Eno drafted in to remix The Macc Lads. Youngblood was Liefeld's own creation for Image Comics, a typically nineties team of scowling superpowered ninja types - superheroes with guns and knives always seemed to be missing a trick to me, but there you are - probably less annoying than Garth Ennis or Neil Gaiman, but that's hardly a recommendation. Alan Moore did his best to make it interesting, adding several millennia of back story,  bringing in a few artists who weren't Liefeld to show you how things would have looked done properly, and most notably telling a tale which seems to accuse Liefeld's generation of producing shite comics, which of course they did. I can't help but wonder whether Liefeld noticed that he was drawing a story which seems to question his own competence, but being as his introduction praises Judgement Day as a sequel to Watchmen, I guess not. It's far from being Alan Moore's greatest, but is entertaining enough in its own way.

New Statesmen

John Smith & Jim Baikie with Sean Phillips & Duncan Fegredo unfortunately New Statesmen (1989)
Ah... the late 1980s when dance music wore sharp pastels and was easily identified by the ocean of reverb added to its snappy Yamaha RX15 drum machine; and when industrial music was essentially the same with the addition of taped televangelists proclaiming that Jesus doesn't like bummers - a conceit which even Cabaret Voltaire had abandoned by about 1984. I was surprised that the understanding of all Americans being homophobic rapture-happy bible bashers didn't really creep into comics until much later, at least not until Garth Ennis first mistook Quentin Tarantino's burger anecdotes for dialogue. There was of course Pete Milligan's run on DC's Shade the Changing Man which taught us that if you're at the Klan rally chewing rib whilst debating whether the subject of the latest public execution is either some no good son of a bitch or a real all-American hero yes siree, then you're probably in Texas.

In 1988, the Mighty Tharg, extraterrestrial editor of 2000AD, launched Crisis, a fortnightly comic featuring John Smith's first major series, New Statesman. Smith was, aside from a few one off efforts, something of an unknown quantity in 1988 so New Statesman, roughly speaking a dissection of US politics, was a bold undertaking, and one that Smith carried off well, complete with psychotic televangelists and yet happily without presenting either America or Americans as inherently evil because hey... McDonalds mkay! This earns my approval because, having moved here, Texas as the land of serial killing Baptists has come to look somewhat embarrassing in 2012. Let the country that is entirely without  xenophobic sibling-marryers cast the first cliché.

John Smith's foreword apologises for New Statesmen being an early work, bogged down with purple prose and trying far too hard to out-serious Watchmen, but there's really no need. Whilst it's true that the narrative is somewhat elusive in places, this works in the book's favour, tantalising with evocative dialogue and a subtext requiring the sort of reader involvement more commonly associated with the written word than graphic novel - a term I've never liked, but one that is for once appropriate. What some may regard as murky plotting, whether deliberate or otherwise, serves to reinforce the realism of the story, having more in common with an anecdotal and interpreted experience of daily life than the ruthless jigsaw puzzle narratives of Alan Moore, to name but one obvious example.

The art by Jim Baikie is similarly beautifully suited - solid, atmospheric, and limber; so it's a shame that some of New Statesman was drawn by Sean Phillips and Duncan Fegredo, both turning in pages that look like they were given to the work experience kid whilst Jim was on his break. Both Phillips and Fegredo went on to better things, it could probably be argued, although Philips never really struck me as anything better than competent, and Fegredo always seemed too messy. Unfortunately what we have here appears to be their really early work. It's clumsy, ugly, fanzine level stuff at best, and chapter five, page four is in particular so painful that it should win awards.

Aside from a few chapters having been drawn by people who very much weren't Jim Baikie, New Statesmen remains rewarding two decades later, refreshingly short on clichés, and all that is good  is so good as to cancel out crappy art bringing down the average.