Deadman

 

Mike Baron & Kelley Jones Deadman (1989)
The closer I get to actually finishing Moby fucking Dick, the harder it becomes. I'll open the book, set my eyes to yet another droning chapter, and before I know what's happening, I'm half way through something more enjoyable - even anything more enjoyable given that it's a massive fucking category encompassing every book ever written except for Moby-Dick and possibly the works of Dostoyevsky. This time it was Deadman, specifically a single story spanning a couple of prestige format series - two issues each - published '89 and '92 respectively.

Deadman is the creation of Arnold Drake, who also came up with the Doom Patrol, and is similarly at odds with the mainstream caped milieu upon which he occasionally intrudes. His superpower is that he's dead - hence the name and the red costume with a big white D on the front. Specifically, he's a crime-solving ghost, or at least that's the resume. The supernatural is a realm where DC Comics always fared quite well, not least since Alan Moore knotted all of the various characters together into a single spooky continuum during his run on Swamp Thing, and which arguably resulted in the founding of the Vertigo imprint. I liked Vertigo, but I still think their best stuff happened before they felt like they had to give it a special name - Mike Baron's Deadman, for example.

Firstly, the art of Kelley Jones is incredible, drawing on the expressionism of all those pre-code horror comics to render something which is as much its own visual language as Giger's biomechanics - to which it's a sort of swampy, mushroom festooned rural cousin. Mike Baron's writing further abstracts the story from its distant caped origins to forge what I suppose you might call tender horror, allowing a crushing sense of pathos to a character who may as well be the contents of a butcher's shop window and without any obvious aesthetic contradictions. Deadman falls in love with another ghost, it all goes horribly wrong, and ludicrous though it probably should be, it still does its job better than Herman Melville evidently did his. This is one of those things which I had on eBay for a while, but no-one bought it presumably due to none of the usual attention grabbing names being involved. This has at least meant that I haven't had to buy the thing twice - as happened with a few of the comic books I ended up selling - but seems like a sad indictment on the taste of the comic buying public.

(R)evolution

Gary Numan (R)evolution (2020)
I've always had a lot of time for the Numan and never really bought into the idea that he ever truly fell off, so to speak. Some of his greatest albums, at least to my ears, were those which seemingly went more or less direct to the bargain bin, Berserker and Strange Charm for example. The late eighties were a bit fucking rough for me personally, and it was significant that I couldn't actually afford to buy new records for a couple of those years, which is how I came upon Strange Charm - which really got me through that rough patch. It's sad to realise that the man who recorded it now regards it as a bit of a dud, and even more depressing to read that the one occasion of This is Love getting airplay was followed by Steve Wright taking the piss out of it for being saaaaaaad.

I've always loathed Steve Wright, the unfunny fucker.

Anyway, this is a showbiz autobiography reading, as they tend to do, very much like a showbiz autobiography with the cadence of something dictated; which doesn't really matter because Numan is an interesting guy and he avoids the pitfalls which usually render this sort of thing unreadable. I'm not sure how this relates to Praying to the Aliens, the previous and now out of print account, but it doesn't feel as though anything has been left out. Numan recalls his initial rise and subsequent - and eventually temporary - fall from grace in fascinating and self-deprecating detail without mistaking record sales for artistic achievement. He's aware that the media thought he was weird, and remains thankfully unapologetic, even disinclined to portray himself in a necessarily flattering light. Above all, the aspects of this account which I hadn't anticipated are the amiable tone and the sense of humour. He doesn't really tell jokes, but he's naturally funny, and the narrative begins to feel a little like something that happened to a character played by Tony Hancock or perhaps even Robin Askwith after a few chapters - it's something in how Numan's enduring, perhaps naive optimism contrasts so dramatically with the string of custard pies which life seems to have flung in his face to a regular schedule, and not even in terms of anything so prosaic as record sales. I'm talking punchlines, like the Florida gig where an overhead waste pipe somehow broke and showered the sound desk with actual shite. It's a mercy that our man has been able to laugh at this kind of thing because the book is packed with it and to the point of reading like Davy Jones drawing the exploits of some comedically unlucky character in the pages of Viz. I expected mostly boasting, self-importance, and a million written variations on those tracks - of which there was one on each album for a while - about how the press hates Gary Numan but that's fine because Gary Numan doesn't care even though this is yet another song about how much he doesn't care; but this is a warm, genuinely thoughtful, and frequently funny book. As rock star autobiographies go, it doesn't quite top Steve Jones' Lonely Boy, but it comes surprisingly close.

Kid Eternity

Grant Morrison & Duncan Fegredo Kid Eternity (1991)
I bought it when it first came out as three prestige format books - as I seem to recall them being termed. I read it once, didn't understand it, then eventually flogged it on eBay. I moved to the United States, and now I've bought it again reasoning that it couldn't have been that bad, surely?

It isn't, but I see why I only read it once then flogged it.

Kid Eternity was some golden age character, a small boy who lived on a boat with an old sea captain who could summon up historical persons from beyond the grave - presumably George Washington and some other guys, but mainly George Washington - to help him foil nautical bank robberies or fight monsters or whatever it was he did for a living. Fast forward to the early nineties and pow - the comic book had grown up and thus was every other creaky old cape botherer from the forties and fifties deemed ripe for revival as an edgy, angst ridden Tarantino knock off; and DC comics had stood Grant Morrison in front of one of those automatic tennis ball launchers - but loaded with money - because he was a terrible infant, for which I'm sure there's probably some French term.

Duncan Fegredo's art is frequently beautiful, and there are some incredible panels in this thing; but I've often found him too dark in a general sense, with page after dark brown page obscuring whatever the hell is supposed to be happening and to whom in an amorphous wash of muddy paint splatter and scratchy lines. This wouldn't be a problem if Morrison hadn't left so much of the actual story telling up to the art, presumably for the sake of mood. I mean, it's not entirely awful, and most of it's easy enough to follow if you're paying attention and don't mind not knowing what the fuck is supposed to be happening until long after it's happened; but, with the best will in the world, it's DC's pseudo-mystical cosmos divided into chaos and order beefed up with a shitload of chaos magic bullshit of the kind favoured by people who own way too many Coil albums* and who take them far too seriously - people who, like Grant, genuinely believe that dark matter, the missing mass of the universe could be human consciousness; and we learn that during his golden age youth, Kid Eternity was actually being bummed flat by that horny old kiddy-fiddling sea captain, because why wouldn't he be? There's also a recurring sequence about urban legends, but it's anyone's guess how it relates to the whole. Kid Eternity is better than the Invisibles, for which it reads like a warm up act, but that's not saying much. It has some really nice ideas, but much of the flavours are lost in the soupy whole.

*: By my estimation I'd say that nobody really needs more than no albums by Coil.

Crisis on Infinite Earths

Marv Wolfman & George Pérez Crisis on Infinite Earths (1985)
Sometimes if I find something I'm reading a bit joyless, a bit of a chore, I'll take a break halfway through and read something else for the sake of a breather. This time it's Melville's Moby-Dick which has been kicking my ass, and so much so that I took a short holiday around the halfway mark. I'm now taking another break even though I have just one hundred pages to go, because it's like reading a novel written by William Sanderson's portrayal of E.B. Farnum in HBO's Deadwood. There was an entire chapter discussing maritime rope, for fuck's sake, which is why Crisis is the eighth thing I've read which isn't Moby-Dick even as the same remains glued to my bedside table with the tenacity of that nine-incher which no amount of sink plunging can force around the s-bend.

Anyway, Crisis on Infinite Earths was a little before my time in terms of my comic book habit, and I never really felt the need to backtrack. It was an attempt to rationalise, streamline and reset the DC Comics universe of Superman and the rest so as to spare us the indignity of having to read stories about Krypto the Superdog or Batman drawing his pension, because that would be like, you know, ridiculous. I can see the sense of the idea, although it seems a bit redundant given that the DC Comics universe of Superman and the rest remained pretty fucking ridiculous even without all those alternate realities making the place look untidy. From where I'm stood, this caped stuff tends to work best when emphasising something other than the fact of everyone wearing leotards whilst biffing criminals and returning the stolen wallet to the millionaire, and DC always had a much harder time rising above its inherently wholesome ideals than the competition. Even if the point of Crisis was the excision of talking ducks and crime fighting dogs that we might feel at least a little more grown up when seen reading the thing in mixed company, Wildcat and the Joker still somehow made it past the interview stage. Wildcat is a superhero whose mask features not only cat ears but also whiskers and a cleft upper lip, and this Joker is the guy who leaves comedic clues to his crimes for Batman to solve.

That said, I generally have a lot of time for Marv Wolfman, and he does what he can with the material. I'm not a massive fan of George Pérez and while his art can be occasionally gorgeous, I've always found it a bit too clean somehow. Crisis sort of works in that it deals with events on such epic scale whilst juggling a cast of thousands so that nothing amounts to much more than a passing glimpse of something huge, which probably wouldn't work with a more refined focus; and in keeping everything moving, it tells a story with the tone of hearsay, lending the saga a mythic quality - a tale of war amongst the Gods, which is approximately what it is, despite most of those Gods being essentially ludicrous. There's a problem in so much as that we all know where the story is going so all of those caped types firing rays at one another page after page feels somewhat inconsequential. Much of the story was intended to rewrite its own continuity so that actions would have consequences and couldn't be conveniently written off as having occurred on Earth-180 or wherever; so it's ironic that the epic conflict should feel so arbitrary and lacking in consequence, being just what superheroes do so that we know they're superheroes - an endless repetitive loop of days saved on a Biblical scale.

The inevitable introduction tells us how important Crisis was, how it was the first of its kind, and how it was so much classier than Marvel's Secret Wars; and true enough Secret Wars is pretty fucking stupid and nowhere near so elegant as this, at least in the rendering; but frankly, Secret Wars was a lot more fun with different things happening from one issue to the next, so it didn't really matter that Klaw seemed like a guy who had hit his head and stumbled off the set of Crackerjack. While Crisis on Infinite Earths is readable and reasonably entertaining, or at least more entertaining that Herman Melville describing different types of harpoon, it's kind of underwhelming and it's certainly nothing like so deep as Grant Morrison might have you believe.

The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys: National Anthem

Gerard Way, Shaun Simon & Leonardo Romero
The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys: National Anthem (2021)
I'd been meaning to at least have a look at this since I read Umbrella Academy, although it turns out this isn't even the thing I've been meaning to read. From what I understand, the Killjoys began life in Gerard Way's head as the idea of a comic book which was expanded into an album by My Chemical Romance, and The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys, the original Dark Horse title, was either a companion piece or a sequel to the album. National Anthem on the other hand is apparently closer to Way's vision before it was turned into a record, so it isn't book two or even early demos, but something else entirely. My Chemical Romance continue to sound like the Bay City Rollers to me, and I still haven't read the version which was published back in 2013, so I've just had to let this one live or die by its own strengths.

It's fucking phenomenal, as it turns out. I've come to think of Umbrella Academy as wearing the influence of Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol very much on its sleeve - although this may well be a memory forged by the underwhelming TV adaptation more than by Gabriel Bá's comic book - but National Anthem feels like its own thing. The influences feel more akin to points of reference or allusions - as with Umbrella Academy, to be fair - incorporating pop art, surrealism, They Live, European comics, art cinema, Wacky Races and the Banana Splits just for starters. The narrative is so heavily allegorical that that there's not much point trying to root it in anything other than its own somewhat bendy reality, at the heart of which is a thoroughly teenage war against the forces of growing up and turning into your parents. It could have fallen flat on its arse but the telling is so beautifully literate and screwy as to prove irresistible. In fact it's so literate that it's quite difficult to follow in places, which is possibly why it works so well - suggesting glimpses of a fully formed and working, albeit thoroughly peculiar reality rather than explaining everything into tedious oblivion. The worst of the forces of evil, for example, seems to be a gang of smartly dressed young men called Books on Tape, who draw their power from the books they constantly listen to, which is all the explanation you get and, honestly, all you really need.

The art is thoroughly gorgeous, for what it may be worth, like Daniel Clowes illustrating the Dark Knight Returns as someone from Alternative Press observed. This one comes pretty close to perfection in comic book terms.

Fantastic Stories of Imagination July 1966

Sol Cohen (editor) Fantastic Stories of Imagination July 1966 (1966)
Here we are with another one of these, and mostly reprints this time for some reason, excepting Chad Oliver's Just Like a Man, which is relatively readable and set on a planet so indistinguishable from Earth as to actually have lions. The point is anthropological, focusing on the absolutely fascinating means by which Oliver's alien lemurs failed to evolve into anything resembling humanity. My use of the term absolutely fascinating in the previous sentence may contain trace elements of sarcasm.

David V. Reed first enquired as to Where is Roger Davis? back in 1938, the answer apparently revealing that those swastika toting hordes about to sweep across Europe may have been aided by Martians. It's one of those first person account tales impersonating  private correspondence which opens with I know you're not going to believe this, but the other night as I charged my trusty meerschaum with a goodly plug of tobacco… To be fair, that sentence doesn't appear in the story because I just made it up, but somehow it feels as though it did. Also, the Martian invasion force comprises just three of them, which is probably understandable when you're trying to make a kid's show on the cheap, but—oh never mind.

Simak's The Trouble with Ants is one of those short stories which was eventually included in City, which is approximately a novel; and I know it won a million awards and that it's Simak and I generally love Simak without exception or reservation, but I've always found City a little overrated with its cast of talking dog and their robot pals just a little too silly to work. This one is about how the talking dogs and their robot pals realise that you have to be careful with ants, otherwise they develop technology. I sort of wonder if Cliff was experiencing trouble with his heating that month, because City suggests the influence of certain powerful fumes. I'm told it can get a bit nippy at times up there in Wisconsin.

Almost Human by Tarleton Fiske, who was actually Robert Bloch, author of Psycho, tells of an innocent robot corrupted by the kind of toughs commonly portrayed by James Cagney and who end each statement with a quasi-interrogatory see, see. It's readable, if nothing life-changing, see.

Theodore Sturgeon's The Way Home is short and pleasant but didn't make much sense - or maybe I mean didn't seem to have a point - but never mind because the last two pretty much justify the entrance fee. Henry Kuttner's Satan Sends Flowers is one of those tales where someone has an actual conversation with the devil and is very satisfying; leaving just Isaac Asimov's Satisfaction Guaranteed, which apparently I've read before although I don't remember it. It's one of his Susan Calvin things, but herself is thankfully only a secondary character. Being written by Asimov in 1951, we probably shouldn't be too surprised to meet a housewife who just wants to keep her home clean and her man happy, which I'm sure will have gone down a storm with the usual Goodreads wankers. I sometimes find this sort of thing a bit painful, and true enough, when Asimov falls on his arse, he falls hard; but here the focus on the actual thrust of the story - yet more robot stuff - is of such elegant precision that blaming Asimov for a) the fifties and b) having been born as someone other than Andrea Dworkin seems both unfair and a bit of a waste of time, tantamount to whining about Silas Marner seeming dated.

I'm still not sure why Fantastic went tits up. I guess maybe there were just too many of these things and not enough readers coughing up to a monthly timetable.

Phoenix

Jeff Rovin, Sal Amendola & others Phoenix (1975)
Phoenix was somehow one of the first three American comics I ever saw with my own eyes. There was the first issue of this, then Marvel's Worlds Unknown #4 and Astonishing Tales #35, respectively dating to January 1975, November 1973, and May 1976. I have no idea which came first and they were, in any case, encountered second hand at jumble sales rendering those dates of publication more or less irrelevant. Anyway, the point is that although I'd read plenty of black and white UK reprints of Spider-Man, the Inhumans and the like, these were the first actual US comics I saw, and I was fascinated by their size - smaller than I was used to, full colour throughout, and obviously aimed at readers slightly older than myself.

That issue of Astonishing Tales featured the penultimate chapter of Rich Buckler and Bill Mantlo's Deathlok which had an effect tantamount to slipping a Stooges album into my ABBA, Wurzels, and Wombles playlist of the time. Phoenix represented slightly less terrifying territory than ...And Once Removed From Never, but still made a massive impression on me, enough so for its influence to have been felt in at least a few things I've written since*.

To start at the beginning, Phoenix was one of a number of titles published by Atlas, a short-lived mid-seventies company founded by Martin Goodman after he sold Marvel Comics to Perfect Film & Chemical in 1972. Goodman had been a big name in the funny books since the thirties, having famously brought us Captain America and the Marvel imprint itself, amongst other things, and Atlas was going to be a rival to the big two. Atlas would mean that Goodman was still very much in the game, and it would succeed by taking risks rather than simply duplicating what Marvel and DC had been doing.

The company hit the ground running, chucking a whole bunch of titles at the public in a short space of time, but nothing really stuck as Goodman hoped and the operation folded within the year. Colin Smith has written in engrossing detail about the short, unhappy life of Atlas Comics.

Yet of all Atlas' debut titles, Phoenix remains, paradoxically, both the most puzzling and the least intriguing. For writer/editor Jeff Rovin and artist Sal Amendola's storytelling displayed little familiarity, beyond the most obvious of conventions, with the then-dominant traditions of superhero comics. Nor did their work seem to deliberately hark back to redundant approaches to costumed crime fighter tales either. Neither rooted in the present or the past, Phoenix failed to offer any convincing measure of the superhero genre's pleasures and satisfactions. Underneath its glossy surface, it appeared to be a comic that was approaching its subject matter in an almost entirely random manner. In that, it was as if Rovin and Amendola had been shown a few random covers featuring a sci-fi flavoured superbloke before being told to emulate whatever virtues they perceived there. Perhaps Phoenix was an attempt to produce something that broke, to one degree or another, with superhero tradition. But if so, it stumbled because it failed to reflect a grasp of whatever the conventions were that Rovin and Amendola wanted to challenge.

I have a different take on the title, doubtless tinted by my first encounter all those years ago, and yet Smith is absolutely right about its failure as a comic book.

Phoenix, as is probably obvious, was a superhero title, but one which took a different tone, seemingly attempting an unprecedented sense of realism relative to previous superhero books, and it had a cold, pragmatic tone. It wasn't going to hold our hand. Our hero is technologically augmented during an encounter with aliens, but these aliens are the Deiei, essentially a variation on the creatures described by abductees in the UFO lore of the time but with certain identifiable human characteristics. They're aliens from Shatner's Star Trek or even Dan Dare more than they're Kree, Skrull, or Dominators. They initially seem to belong to a universe which is more or less our own, wherein Phoenix is the only superhero, and in which miraculous powers require at least some explanation - albeit one rooted somewhere within the grey areas of pseudoscience and its attendant mythologies. This was part of what appealed to me at the age of twelve or thereabouts - Phoenix seemed to take place in a world which might exist, or at least which could not yet be fully ruled out so easily as those places where insect bites bestow abilities regardless of physiology. Phoenix felt like part of the same world as the ponderous science-fiction cinema of the seventies with its jumpsuits, moral quandaries, and somber mood.

Sal Amendola had already drawn his fair share of Batman, Aquaman and others, yet - as Colin Smith suggests - his art on Phoenix seemed to ignore many of the conventions of sequential story telling. To my eyes, it looks more like illustration than comic art in the traditional sense, which worked fine for me because it seemed to suit the tone of the book, and worked at least as well as the strips in, off the top of my head, Doctor Who annuals, which similarly seemed to lack precedent - as though drawn by persons who had never read a comic strip.

Given that I distinctly recall my discovery of Phoenix, Deathlok and Worlds Unknown occurring prior to 2000AD showing up, these three seemed to represent a consistent, vaguely adult vision in contrast to Dan Dare and The Whizzers from Space - both of which retained an awful lot of schoolboy DNA - and the strips in TV tie-in annuals which always felt like button pushing crowd pleasers for all their otherwise admirable qualities.

Sure enough, Phoenix is wonky, massively uneven, and riddled with inconsistencies, none of which mattered to me when I was twelve, and even now I can still feel the faint residual glow of what first drew me to this material. There remains some appeal in a superhero strip which refuses to wave the magic wand without having a really good reason, or which at least suggests this was part of the original proposition. By issue three, we've had sufficient peculiar Biblical allusions to suggest some impending revelation - Phoenix is casually likened to Jesus Christ, he parts the waters, and so on; then Satan himself is unmasked as a renegade Deiei as part of an arc which feels somewhat in debt to Richard S. Shaver; and the letters page appears, and it seems everyone is on board...

Then issue four is upon us, following three in which the standard did indeed seem to dip, and Phoenix is reborn as the Protector with a whole new costume by an intergalactic council of Kirby knock offs. Apparently the bold new direction wasn't paying off after all, and Ric Estrada couldn't even be bothered to make his flashback panels look like anything which had happened in previous issues.

 

Phoenix was a good idea which simply could have been done a lot better. There are some beautifully arresting images in at least the first issue, and if the narrative is all over the place, I've probably read too much van Vogt to be troubled by the inconsistency or the wild leaps of logic which don't actually make a whole lot of sense. I once wrote and drew a nine panel superhero parody wherein the main character experiences four sequential secret origins in rapid succession, one after the other, but it turns out Gary Friedrich got there before me, and probably got paid for it too.

*: 1987's Berserker, a comic strip which went through various incarnations - including one drawn by Charlie Adlard - before I realised it was a non-starter, was more or less a rewrite of Phoenix with a big helping of Richard S. Shaver thrown in for seasoning. Also, The Sixth Day, a short story from 2007 which appears in The Great Divide makes a number of references to the Phoenix comic book.