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.

The Forgotten Planet

Murray Leinster The Forgotten Planet (1954)
I read this as one of two novels assembled in a big fat collection along with a bunch of short stories. The collection is called Planets of Adventure because all of the stories occur on other planets. Where the adventure comes in is not yet obvious and based on this first one, the thing may as well have been named Planets of Explanation. I suppose I should at least be happy that the common theme is the intergalactic setting rather than characters, as with Leinster's Med Ship books.

The forgotten planet of the title is at an approximately Carboniferous stage of development, having been seeded by ships from Earth which left behind a load of insects, plants, and so on to turn the otherwise barren world into something with an ecosystem. Then another ship crashed there several thousand years ago and our story follows the progress of their distant descendants, who have devolved to something below even a basic stone age level of civilisation by this point. We follow the gang across their foggy wasteland of bugs and fungus grown to gigantic proportions and no-one even speaks until the final third of the novel. Mostly it's descriptions of insects doing things qualified by references to what Earth scientists used to claim regarding the life cycle of such and such an invertebrate, and occasionally our grunting survivors find themselves having to fight off a giant spider. It's more or less a novelisation of a nature documentary, with added cavemen for the sake of focus. It's also three short stories bolted together, of which the first two were written in the early twenties when Leinster was just getting started. Being Leinster, they're nicely written but almost certainly had much greater impact in the twenties than they do now that giant spiders and the like have become somewhat prosaic.

It therefore felt a little like reading a novel about paint drying, although is not entirely without worth and is at least better than Lindsay Gutteridge's fucking awful Cold War in a Country Garden which does more or less the same thing with less charm.

Paresis

Isabelle Nicou Paresis (2002)
I imagine the deal of translating an entire novel from its original language - in this case French - must be a colossal headache, and one which more or less guarantees that the work had to be pretty special in the first place in order to warrant translation. Paresis, Nicou's first novel, certainly seems to qualify, and we should be doubly glad because, being fairly esoteric and philosophical, I doubt this one is likely to be Amphetamine Sulphate's chart smashing hit single - which I state as a judgement on the audience rather than the book.

Once again, I know what it's about, or know what I think it's about, but am unlikely to be able to furnish any description which really does it justice because, put simply, you just have to read the thing. I've noticed a degree of griping on social media of late along the lines of Amphetamine Sulphate having settled into a rut of publishing transgressive confessionals and not much else. The accusation doesn't really stand up to scrutiny, and Paresis is something else altogether for what that may be worth - existential philosophy as approximately linear fiction and so, I suppose, sort of traditional in that respect. Nicou seemingly spent many years studying phenomenology and so seems a good fit for the imprint, given the number of titles which have explored the gulf which divides the human body and our understanding of the same.

To clarify in more tactile terms, there's a lot of self-harm here, all mixed up with sexuality, self-loathing, and all that good stuff, despite which it defies almost all of the convenient categories which might be proposed by such ingredients. I'm not sure it's even what people usually mean by transgressive as I found only the final paragraph truly disturbing in isolation. There's masochism, although that may be too loaded and misleading a term, and as with most Amphetamine Sulphate titles, it's not really about the sex so much as it is about the power, or lack thereof, and is therefore in an entirely different class to bullshit such as the Story of O. I guess the bottom line is that Paresis pulls the reader through the sensations and memories of its narrator as she falls to pieces, affording a delirious limited view such as might be seen between bandages, and so allows us to understand perspectives which might otherwise send us all running for the hills; and it does all this in just over a hundred pages.

I'm hugely impressed.

Adolf Hitler - My Part in His Downfall

 

Spike Milligan Adolf Hitler - My Part in His Downfall (1971)
I read this - and this very same copy - when I was fifteen and doubtless pissed myself with laughter. I read it again at some point in the nineties and was left with a vague impression of it being relatively sober in comparison to Milligan's subsequent war memoirs, as though he was still trying to write a proper grown up autobiography without being quite sure why. Now I've read it again and have gone back to my initial reaction, or at least something more in that direction. I haven't actually pissed myself with laughter, but I've chuckled because it's often funny, and the humour has aged well for me. It may also be significant that the last Milligan I read was Puckoon, which mostly tried too hard and failed. However, Puckoon was a novel where Adolf is autobiography, and autobiography describing what must have been a truly terrifying time, freeing the author from the onus of delivering one gag after another, instead allowing his humour to settle in a more natural configuration across the events of the early forties.

It's fascinating for me because I lived within walking distance of the Milligan family home in south-east London for more than a decade, so the account opens on what is very much familiar territory. It's also fascinating because this is the second world war as seen from ground level, from what is very much an authentic working class perspective, part of a narrative which has become very much sidelined in recent times, not least by the current appetite for the past recontextualised as cutesy heritage product in service of some exhausting contemporary dialogue - and if you're waiting for the diatribe about momentary lapses of judgement such as Curry & Chips or the Pakistani Daleks, then you may actually be part of the problem.

There were the deaths of some of my friends, and therefore, no matter how funny I tried to make this book, that will always be at the back of my mind: but, were they alive today, they would have been first to join in the laughter, and that laughter was, I'm sure, the key to victory.

The victory he's referring to was - obviously - over Adolf Hitler, Fascism, screaming Nationalism, and the drive to reduce human society to a black and white world of good and evil with dogmatic and definitive answers to complex issues reducing the need for actual cognition. I'm sure we're all aware of the traditional role of the funny man as jester, the one who uses humour to express that which might be otherwise frowned upon. Well, Milligan's work still fulfils that role with devastating wit, humanity, chilling insight, and even poetry. We should try not to forget that.

Nine Tales of Raffalon

Matthew Hughes Nine Tales of Raffalon (2017)
My initial impression of the Raffalon tales first featured in Fantasy & Science Fiction were of a sword and sorcery take on E.W. Hornung's Raffles the Gentleman Thief. The author himself happened upon this observation and set me straight, explaining that he regarded the setting of his tales as renaissance more than medieval and what I misread as significantly influenced by Jack Vance's Dying Earth novels. This made a lot of sense once I read Vance's Rhialto the Marvellous which inhabits the distant future of Earth's final years with magic having returned to human society, which has itself resumed a mostly pre-technological economy. Anyway, it turns out - as I now realise - that I hadn't fully grasped the proverbial stick and that the Raffalon stories quite deliberately inhabit the very same world as Vance's magicians; so it all makes sense now.

Rather than merely playing with someone else's train set or indulging in mimicry, Hughes explores aspects of the Dying Earth which Vance didn't seem to touch on, at least not in Rhialto the Marvellous. Where Rhialto at least inhabits the surreal world of reality warping wizards, Raffalon relies upon his wits to get him by in the semi-feudal lowlands of craftsmen and wandering pugilists; and it works because Hughes writes with the sort of elegant wit and wild invention which worked so well for Vance, whilst retaining what I've come to recognise as absolutely his own voice. Raffalon is funny without feeling the need to pull faces, and the stories wrap the reader up in all sorts of logistic knots before leading us to conclusions we could never have predicted, all of which makes for immensely satisfying reading, high on roughage and essential vitamins. Fantasy has never really been my genre of choice, but Raffalon is an exception, and I can confidently say it's because it's rare to find an author so convincing or so well versed in his craft as is Hughes.

Without Feathers

Woody Allen Without Feathers (1972)
I have no illusions regarding the possibility of Woody Allen having turned out to be an absolute shocker - before anyone feels compelled to begin a sentence with don't you realise that... but I remember when he was funny, and I remember reading this book when it had cartoon Woody as a plucked chicken on the cover and laughing my ass off.

I have decided to break off my engagement with W. She doesn't understand my writing, and said last night that my Critique of Metaphysical Reality reminded her of Airport. We quarrelled, and she brought up the subject of children again, but I convinced her they would be too young.

It still makes me laugh, even that punchline. I'm still not sure that I believe in cancel culture as an actual thing, but I sure am tired of new puritans attempting to police my reading habits, almost to the point of actively seeking out that which has inspired a thousand whiny blogs; but, as I said, I'm here mainly because I wanted to find out whether it was still funny, and whether it had ever been funny. I have some vague recall of Allen's Love and Death being side-splitting when first I saw it, and yet it barely raised a smile during a more recent viewing.

Revisited in 2021, Without Feathers reveals itself as surprisingly formulaic with most of these reprinted New Yorker articles reliant upon the same peppering of the grandiose with small change absurdities as has served Monty Python, Spike Milligan, Vic, Bob and many others so well. Allen has a good sense of conversational dialogue, so mostly it works without the author grinning, winking, and digging you in the ribs every thirty seconds - which you wouldn't want, for obvious reasons. I've seen it suggested that Allen is essentially a creep, and that even this persona of the nerdy autodidact who ain't getting any represents a calculated projection designed to lure the vulnerable with their defences duly lowered; which may well be the case, but has no bearing on the fact of Without Feathers being still mostly funny. Furthermore, both The Whore of Mensa and Death, his Kafka-inspired one act play, are surprisingly profound, and enough so as to inspire the wish that things had turned out different - even with the possibility that maybe we're only talking about his later films being a bit more watchable.

For what it may be worth, Off the Wall is still a great album.

Essential Defenders volume two

Len Wein, Steve Gerber, Sal Buscema & others
Essential Defenders volume two (1976)
The material in the previous massive volume finished before the Defenders' first sense shattering encounter with the Wrecking Crew, a team of demolition themed supervillains led by a guy who brains people with a crowbar. This was a story I was able to remember reading during childhood which must therefore be deemed classic - just like all those five star Terrance Dicks masterpieces - and thusly did I make purchase of this second volume, oh stout yeoman of the bar, collecting material dating to no later than 1976. The Defenders, as my fellow Dennis Nordens will fondly remember, were a bunch of superheroes who just happened to hang out together rather than a formal team - Doctor Strange, the Hulk, Prince Namor, the Silver Surfer, Valkyrie - who used to make me feel a bit funny in the trousers when I were a lad - Nighthawk, Luke Cage, and others.

Although the gang are settling into a bit of a crime-fighting, foe-bashing routine in this one, it's not without a certain sparkle of inspiration even if the shine has come off the sheer weirdness of earlier issues to some extent. Unfortunately, the problem seems to be that most of these issues are written by Steve Gerber, and while he's undoubtedly inventive, he tends to bog the strip down with an exhausting quota of exposition, mostly in chatty Marvel Shakespearean to the point of it becoming a chore. It may have worked in monthly instalments, but issue after issue in quick succession begins to feel like homework, and there's so fucking much of it that a couple of issues apparently needed actual pages of just prose text set in two columns as they would be in a digest. The problem becomes rudely obvious when three significantly lighter issues of Marvel Team Up written by Gerry Conway punctuate the main sequence of the title comic.

All the same, this was still well worth a look, and the punch up with the Wrecking Crew was at least as much fun as I remember it being. Luke Cage seems a bit of a blaxploitation cliché with hindsight, but Marvel redeemed itself by at least featuring black characters, even setting the Defenders against an overtly racist white nationalist organisation at one point, while class and privilege are criticised by agency of Nighthawk - actually one of those eccentric millionaire turned nocturnal crime fighter types; not that you would read this for the sake of social justice issues unless you're a fucking idiot. As with much of what Marvel produced in the seventies, this stuff was actually pretty weird on close inspection, and so retains most of its charm.