Gad, Sir! Comics!

Rude words in classic comic strips

2008-03-10T21:05:00.002Z

Because I’m feeling distinctly puerile today …

So, a kilo-bugger; that must be, what, equivalent to a thousand ordinary buggers?

Panel
From Winsor McCay Dream of the Rarebit Fiend: The Saturdays (Checker Book Publishing Group, 2007), originally published under the pen-name Silas in the New York Evening Telegram sometime between 1906 and 1911.

Fun with numbers

2008-03-06T06:32:00.004Z

I’m not remotely competent to weigh in to the argument about BookScan sales figures begun by Brian Hibbs in this “Tilting at Windmills” column. But one sentence switched my mental points on to another track.

Brian wrote, “As a periodical comic book, the first issue of Buffy seems to have sold at least 158,437 copies.” That figure is icv2’s estimate of sales in the direct market (comic shops) in North America, as supplied by Diamond Comic Distributors. Now, that caught my eye, because Doctor Who Online reported this on 14 February:

Doctor Who Adventures Magazine holds onto its place as #1 Children's Magazine [in the UK]. The latest ABC figures show that the magazine's circulation achieved 154,989 from July-December 2007. This is up 44.1% compared to the same period in 2006, where the magazine's circulation was a respectable 107,577.

So, very similar numbers, then. Except that the UK is a lot smaller than North America. Using UN estimates, the population of the UK is a little over 60 million, that of the USA about 306 million, with Canada adding another 33 million; taken together, about five and a half times the size. In addition, Doctor Who Adventures was published every two weeks in the period measured (it has since gone up to weekly), whereas Buffy the Vampire Slayer was monthly, with slippage, and later issues sold fewer copies.

So, relatively speaking, the best-selling media-tie-in comic in the UK last year sold at least eleven times better than the best-selling media-tie-in comic in North America. Those sales were mostly to children, through non-specialist shops such as newsagents and supermarkets, the market that North American publishers have largely given up in favour of notional adults like me who go to comics shops.

Of course, this isn’t an entirely fair comparison. Doctor Who is currently quite preposterously popular over here. The Christmas episode had the second largest audience of any television programme broadcast in the UK in 2007, while the series as a whole made the top ten for the year. Buffy, on the other hand, was always a marginal show on a minority network, and there have been no new episodes since 2003. So its comic incarnation can hardly be expected to sell as well. We need something that is about equally popular in both countries.

How about The Simpsons comics? The latest figures I have found for the UK edition are from 2006, and show it selling an average of 134, 631 copies every four weeks*. Does the American edition shift the 740,000 copies a month that it would need to match up?

*Update 9 March Average circulation 133,086 copies in July-December 2007, according to the ABC (Audit Bureau of Circulations) figures just posted by Steve Holland.

Panels
Doctor Who “Hot Metal” Part 2, script by Christopher Cooper, art by John Ross, colours by Alan Craddock, letters by Paul Vyse, Doctor Who Adventures issue 49, BBC Magazines, 31 January-6 February 2008

Not adding to the stockpile of puns on the word “canon”

2008-03-05T20:25:00.003Z

A few weeks ago, Chris Mautner started an attempt to define what might constitute a canon of comics. Timothy Callahan followed up with a longer list. Chris returned to the subject here, and there have been further comments from Heidi MacDonald and John Holbo.

My first reaction on looking at Chris’s and Tim’s lists (somewhat unfairly, as Timothy at least is explicit that he is attempting to set out a canon of American comics) was something along the lines of, “Gad, Sir! How can there be a comics canon that includes nothing by Hergé, Leo Baxendale or Osamu Tezuka?”

Further reflection on my reaction, and the comics I’d be tempted to canonise, leads me to suggest the following definition:

“Comics canon Those comics which the commentator drawing up the canon has read and been influenced by, minus a few that he or she finds too embarrassing to mention, plus a few that he or she would like people to think that the commentator had read and appreciated.”

At least, that’s how I’d go about it. I suppose that a canon should really arise from debate leading to some sort of consensus, but I don’t think that F R Leavis paid much attention to anyone else’s opinion, do you?

Picture
“Canon Fodder” from 2000AD, art by Chris Weston, pinched from 2000AD Online. Oh, damn, it’s a pun!

Stars of page and screen

2008-03-04T18:28:00.004Z

Last month saw the anniversaries of the first appearances of two major characters from twentieth-century pop culture: 100 years of Billy Bunter, and 75 years of Doc Savage.

There is sometimes a sharp intake of breath from offended comics fans when they catch the likes of Marvel describing its core business as managing trademarked characters and other intellectual properties, rather than publishing comics. But, really, appearing in different media is a mark of cultural success, and always has been. Herakles and Theseus cropped up in poems and plays, as statues and on friezes, on vases and on coins. And, sometimes, versions from other media have swamped the original. Mary Shelly lived to see her philosophical, vengeful creature replaced by an incoherent rampaging monster in stage versions of Frankenstein.

Billy Bunter and Doc Savage first appeared in prose fiction magazines; a species that is now almost extinct (though the death of the magazines did not mean the end of prose fiction, any more that the possible death of periodical comics will mean the end of comics as a form). But I first met Bunter in the comic strip which ran in Valiant from 1963 to 1976, and Doc in George Pal’s 1975 movie version . Although I did later read reprints of some of the original stories from both series, that wasn’t until after I had encountered DC’s 1980s Doc Savage comics.

As well as prose fiction, comics and movies, Doc appeared on the radio; and Bunter on both radio and television. The time for both is probably passed. Doc Savage is altogether too simplistic a hero for modern tastes – Superman without the thrill of flight or the bizarre love triangle. J K Rowling’s Hogwarts revived children’s fantasy, but does not seem to have spawned more stories about mundane boarding schools. Both remain strong images, but are probably fated to remain suitable mostly as knowing references in the likes of Planetary and The Black Dossier.

Pictures and panels

“Billy Bunter”, art by Reg Parlett, from Valiant, IPC Magazines, 3 June 1967

Doc Savage issue 1, cover by Adam and Andy Kubert, DC Comics, November 1987, image taken from the Grand Comics Database

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier by Alan Moore (writer), Kevin O’Neill (artist), Ben Dimagmilaw (colourist), Bill Oakley and Todd Klein (letterers) and Scott Dunbier (editor), America’s Best Comics/Wildstorm/DC Comics, 2007

Frayed ends Buffed up

2008-03-03T07:32:00.004Z

It would seem from Jo Chen’s cover to Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 issue 16 (found via Blog@Newsarama) that Joss Whedon is planning a crossover with his series Fray, which, you will recall, dealt with the adventures of a Slayer in a Blade Runnery far future. This is not too much of a surprise, given that the Big Bad of Season 8 wants to rid the world of magic, while Fray has already told us that it happened. (Click to enlarge, of course.)

But let’s hope that there’s more to it than tying up dangling continuity threads.

Incidentally, what’s Karl Moline up to these days?

Pictures and Panels
Cover to Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 issue 16 by Jo Chen

Page from Fray issue 3, created and written by Joss Whedon with Karl Moline (penciller), Andy Owens (inker), Dave Stewart (colourist), Michelle Madsen (letterer) and Scott Allie (editor), Dark Horse Comics, August 2001

A wise fool

2008-03-02T17:35:00.005Z

Supposedly (though it fits suspiciously well into English idiom), Confucius once said, “A wise man speaks because he has something to say; a fool speaks because he has to say something.”

It would seem that my fit of wisdom is passing. Normal foolishness can now be resumed.

Pictures and panels
An example of the heartbreakingly bleak Garfield without Garfield strips created by removing the cat from Jim Davis’s originals (link via the Ephemerist)

Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey Action Philosophers: The Lightning Round, Evil Twin Comics, July 2007

Mother’s Dog

2008-03-02T17:07:00.005Z

It’s Mothering Sunday today here in the UK (now more commonly called “Mother’s Day”, under the influence of the celebration held in the US and elsewhere in May).

My own mother passed away many years ago now, but I’m feeling sentimental, so here are a couple of examples of her favourite comic strip, Fred Basset.

Fred Basset was created by Alex Graham and started running in the Daily Mail in 1963. Graham died in 1991, after drawing about 9,000 strips, but the series has been continued by other hands, including his daughter. It’s notable for a gentle humour, rooted in accurate observation of canine behaviour (at least if the Jack Russell terrier we kept when I was a boy is any indication). The first strip above is far from representative, but I never could resist a morsel of metatextuality.

Links
Alex Graham entry at the Lambiek Comiclopedia
Fred Basset on Wikipedia
Gallery of Fred Basset collection covers
Toonhound entry on Fred Basset
Toonopedia entry on Fred Basset
Latest Fred Basset strip

Pictures
Fred Basset strips by Alex Graham from the Daily Mail, 1977, reprinted in Fred Basset: The Hound that’s Almost Human No.27, Associated Newspapers, no date given

Dandy surprise

2008-02-13T19:48:00.002Z

As a random purchase this week, I picked up a copy of the current issue of The Dandy (no 3439, 31 January - 15 February 2008, D C Thomson), and was pleasantly surprised to find that it was almost entirely restored to being a traditional comic, with only half-a-dozen pages of non-comics material. However, it’s described on the cover as an “Awesome Mega-Comix Special”, so this may not last. This issue is only on sale for another day or two, so rush out now and inflate the sales figures!

The highlight is a two-page guide to drawing comics by Jamie Smart.

A slightly less rigorous analysis of the form than that offered by Thierry Groensteen, but fun nonetheless.

Gone from a world he never made

2008-02-12T19:46:00.001Z

Steve Gerber has died, aged only 60. His was one of the most distinctive voices in comics, and he did more than most to expand the range of what letterpress, mass retail comics could cover in the days before the opportunities and disappointments of the direct market. Tom Spurgeon has an obituary.

Panel
“Cry Turnip!”, written by Steve Gerber, illustrations by Frank Brunner, inking by Steve Leialoha, lettering by Tom Orzechowski, edited by Marv Wolfman, Howard the Duck issue 2, Marvel Comics, March 1976, reprinted in Essential Howard the Duck Volume 1, 2002

Manhattan on Mars

2008-02-04T20:59:00.000Z

Crater on Mars, photograph reproduced from The Daily Telegraph web-site, 2008:

Crater on Mars, panels reproduced from Watchmen by Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons and John Higgins, 1987:

It’s either a coincidence or a quite remarkable marketing effort for the upcoming movie …

Update, 5 February Oops. It seems that I have been misled by the Telegraph running that story a little late. Over 20 years late, in fact. (See the comments section.)

Next on Gad, Sir! Comics!, the startling news that it looks like there is a man in the Moon. And, hey, don't those stars form a line that's a bit like a plough?

Is he dead, then? Poke 'im with a stick to find out

2008-02-04T20:46:00.000Z

Hhrmmhm! Oh, sorry, I must have dozed off. Now, where was I?

Oh, yes, Judy Drood, girl detective.

(panel from Mad Night by Richard Sala, Fantagraphics Books, 2005)

In issue 287 of The Comics Journal, Bill Sherman writes of Judy Drood in his review of The Grave Robber’s Daughter that “her name evokes both Nancy Drew and ancient Celtic rituals”.

It took that issue of The Comics Journal a month to cross the Atlantic, and it has taken me a few weeks to get around to reading it all, so by now Bill Sherman is probably fed up with people reminding him of Charles Dickens’s final, unfinished, novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

So far as I know, Dickens made up the name “Drood”. Certainly, if you Google it, you’ll find no real people in the first couple of hundred hits. His manuscript notes show that he started with the name “Brood”, and played with variants such as “Brude” and “Drude” before settling on “Drood”.

None of which means that Sherman (or Sala, for that matter) can’t come up with his own associations, of course.

Incidentally, the cover illustration reproduced above is probably more pored-over than any other picture drawn to accompany any of Dickens’s works, in the hope that it might provide clues to how Dickens would have finished the story. It is by Luke Fildes, who shortly thereafter gave up illustration work to concentrate on portrait painting, ending up as a member of the Royal Academy and a Knight to boot. But I have to say that his illustrations are generally very stiff and bland, and hardly deserve to be considered alongside the work of his predecessors on Dickens’s novels, Cruikshank and Phiz. Indeed, next time you find yourself wondering why a first-rate comics writer like, say, Grant Morrison, is so often lumbered with second-rate artists, remember that it happened to the most successful novelist of the nineteenth century, too.

My makeup is dry and it clags on my chin

2008-01-18T23:18:00.000Z

“We found that clowns are universally disliked by children. Some found them quite frightening and unknowable,” said Dr Penny Curtis from the University of Sheffield, who conducted a study of the best way to decorate children’s wards in hospitals. (BBC News story)

Judy Drood, girl detective, knows how to deal with frightening, unknowable clowns.

And it’s just about time for Friday Night Fights too. Won’t someone help Bahlactus to take off his crown?

Panels
Richard Sala The Grave Robber’s Daughter, Fantagraphics, 2006

Hoot, Crowd!

2008-01-16T20:39:00.000Z

“New British Comics”. Now, there’s a phrase that I don’t get to type often enough.

The second series of Torchwood, the anagrammatic skiffy-in-Cardiff TV show spun-off from Doctor Who, begins tonight on BBC2. Maybe this year there will even be some episodes which don’t involve one member of Torchwood betraying the others to get hold of an alien artefact for the benefit of his/her current boy/girlfriend. Then, next week (according to Down the Tubes) or next month (according to Titan’s own website), Titan launches a new Torchwood magazine, to be issued every 4 weeks, making 13 issues a year. It’ll mostly be articles, but there will also be a comic strip, initially to be written by Simon Furman and drawn by S L Gallant. Down the Tubes has details of other upcoming contributors. Cover image taken from the FPI blog.

Sadly, it looks as though Steve Holland is right that Wasted will be made up of drug humour comics. But they’ll be drug humour comics overseen by Alan Grant (he of 2000AD, the best uncollected run of Batman stories and assorted Scottish literary adaptations), so they may not be quite as tedious as usual. Nice cover by Frank Quitely, too, demonstrating that he can draw people who don’t look like Marlon Brando. Sometimes.

Review: Teen Titans Lost Annual, JLA Classified, The Spirit

2008-01-15T21:05:00.002Z

Last week was retro week in American comics, or at least it was in those periodicals that I bought.

Teen Titans Lost Annual Issue 1 (how many of these do they have lying around?), “President Kennedy Has Been Kidnapped!!” by Bob Haney (writer), Jay Stephens (pencils), Mike Allred (inks), Laura Allred (colours), Gasper Saladino (letters), Dan Raspler & Steve Wacker (editors), cover by Nick Cardy, coloured by Dave Stewart, 48 pages of comics plus 6 pages of sketches by Nick Cardy, US$4.99, DC Comics, March 2008

In 1962, the Teen Titans learn that John F Kennedy has been kidnapped by aliens and brainwashed by them into acting as their war leader.

This story – neither lost nor an annual, but an Elseworlds special which DC initially decided was unsuitable for publication – was the last comic to be written by Bob Haney before his death in 2004. Haney has become something of a cult figure among comic bloggers, who have mined for humour the preposterous illogicalities of his plots, the inconsistency of his portrayals of characters with those of other writers, and, above all, his clunky attempts to write hipster dialogue. For this special, Haney consciously pastiched himself, playing up those aspects of his old work that have been the target of so much ridicule. In that way, this is his very own All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder; only, blessedly, over and done with in one go. There is something dizzying about watching an old man trying to caricature the way that his middle-aged self hoped to write like a teenager for the entertainment of children: all the ages of man in one pamphlet.

Stephens and Allred capture the spirit of 1960s DC art all too well: tasked with drawing such self-consciously absurd ideas as mods in outer space and flying hairy rockers, they give us designs as dull and flat as anything that Curt Swan or Sheldon Moldoff would have produced.

JLA Classified Issue 50, “High Frontier: That Was Now, This Is Then” Part 1 by Roger Stern (writer), John Byrne (penciller), Mark Farmer (inker), Rob Clark Jr (letterer), Allen Passalaquia (colourist) and Mike Carlin (editor), cover by Joshua Middleton, 22 pages of comics, US$2.99, DC Comics, Early March 2008

A big, arrogant monster attacks the JLA Watchtower on the Moon and beats everyone up. No, really, that’s all that happens.

More proof that you can’t go home again comes from this story by Roger Stern and John Byrne, which recaptures the style of their work in the early 1980s, before superheroes ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge proffered by Miller and Moore. A straightforward beat-em-up story, with plodding dialogue in which heroes explain their powers as they use them, characterisation is by thought balloons, and there is even one of those big round-shouldered creatures with which Byrne used to fill the pages of Alpha Flight and Superman. But enough decompression has set in to make this more inconsequential than, for example, any of the issues of Captain America that Stern and Byrne did together. Nothing much happens here: the villain attacks and knocks out most of the League, and J’onn J’onzz thinks he remembers him; and that’s it. Perhaps it will read better when all the parts have been published, but at the moment, this seems like half a 45 RPM record playing at 33 and a third (hey, I can be retro too).

The Spirit Issue 12, “Sand” by Darwyn Cooke (script, pencils and flashback inks), J Bone (inks), Dave Stewart (colour), Jared K Fletcher (lettering), Ben Abernathy (editor), 22 pages of comics, US$2.99, DC Comics, January 2008

The Spirit meets his long-lost childhood sweetheart, Sand Serif, now a hardened criminal.

Darwyn Cooke bows out of the Spirit revival with what Will Eisner would have called a “refry” of Eisner’s two-part story from January 1950. That, in itself, was a salvage job on the lead story from Eisner’s abortive comic book, John Law, Detective, and replacing Law with the Spirit produced a rather unconvincing retcon at the time. Cooke’s story, appearing only 12 issues into the run rather than 502, does less violence to the existing backstory, and the page-to-page and panel-to-panel flow is better than Eisner’s cut-and-paste job. But Eisner realised something that Cooke seems to have ignored. For we readers to care, we must not just be told that Denny Colt loved Sand Serif, we must ourselves see something in her that could justify that love. So Eisner made her an ambivalent character, with a ruthless shell but a conflicted conscience. Cooke makes her hard throughout. A telling example: in both versions of the story, Sand’s associate Dr Vitriol kills a man. In Eisner’s version, Sand deducts $50,000 from Vitriol’s share of the loot “for the widow of the cop you shot last night”. In Cooke’s version, she withholds payment altogether and keeps everything herself because Vitriol’s killing of Hussein Hussein of Interpol may have “brought down [heat] on us”.

What makes this issue affecting, though, is not so much the story it tells, as a touch Cooke uses in the telling of it. In the flashback sequences, he (and colourist Dave Stewart) beautifully evoke the feel of Eisner’s later works: the fluid, whole-page layouts, the misty cityscapes, the loose strokes of thickly-brushed hatching, and a muted brown colour-scheme to recall the sepia-on-cream printing of A Contract With God and Other Tenement Stories. This was the way that Eisner looked back on his own life, and it is a fitting way to end a series that could never help recalling him.

Fougasse on the phone again

2008-01-14T20:21:00.001Z

While I still have that book out, here's some more mastery of body language (and facial expression too, this time) from Fougasse. Same source as yesterday. Click to enlarge, of course.

Delay in communication

2008-01-13T16:17:00.000Z

Sorry about the blogging silence. My brain cells have been so swamped by common cold germs that I've been about as able to communicate effectively as the man in this finely observed and beautifully cartooned strip by Fougasse (originally from Punch, I think, and reproduced here from William Hewison The Cartoon Connection: The Art of Pictorial Humour, Elm Tree Books, London, 1977).

Comeback of the Year So Far

2008-01-07T20:54:00.000Z

(Well, the year is only a week old.) From the generally rather adorable Teen Titans Year One:

The Flips previously appeared in Teen Titans back in 1965.

With a classy act like that, how could they ever have been forgotten?

Panels
Teen Titans Year One issue 1, “In the Beginning …” part 1, written by Amy Wolfram, art by Karl Kerschl, Serge Lapointe and Steph Peru, letters by Nick J Napolitano, edited by Eddie Berganza, DC Comics, March 2008

“The Return of the Teen Titans”, story by Bob Haney, art by Nick Cardy, originally published in Showcase issue 59, DC/National Comics, November-December 1965, reprinted in Showcase Presents Teen Titans volume 1, DC Comics, 2006

Don’t remember him for this

2008-01-06T17:49:00.000Z

So far as I know, the only connection that the writer George MacDonald Fraser, who died last week aged 82, ever had with comics was that he co-wrote the script for the 1985 movie adaptation of Red Sonja. Not his finest hour, though he never disowned the film.

The notices of Fraser’s death (such as this one in The Daily Telegraph) have largely concentrated on his Flashman novels, in which he placed the villain of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, still a cowardly bully, but now also a lecherous cowardly bully, at the scene of numerous events of the nineteenth century. They are well worth reading – the sort of fiction that doesn’t require you to use your brain much, but also doesn’t require you to have it removed from your head and locked in a cupboard in another room in case it protests while you’re reading.

Although Fraser became a full-throated reactionary in later life, the Flashman books started as very much a product of late-1960s sensibilities, exposing the self-serving hypocrisy of earlier generations, with added sex and a wardrobe that customers of “I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet” would kill for. Or, at least, run away red-faced and pretend to have killed for. But if Flashman was a cousin of Tony Richardson’s Charge of the Light Brigade, Fraser’s work was also a clear descendent of Sir Walter Scott’s. Ivanhoe, too, presented a cracking new adventure story as being the product of recently uncovered historical papers, and mixed established fictional characters with new creations and actual historical people and situations. Fraser may have had less impact on the world than Scott, but at least he got his history straighter.

Entertaining though the Flashman stories are, my favourite books by Fraser are not part of any series.

Quartered Safe Out Here is Fraser’s book of war memoirs. They are unusual in that they reflect the life of a private soldier in front-line service, but one who was also a fine professional writer. They also deal with a relatively unfamiliar front of the Second World War: Britain’s campaign against Japan in Burma (reconquering the British Empire is not as popular a subject as, say, defending western civilisation against its own worst monstrosities).

The Hollywood History of the World is a lavishly illustrated account of what the American film industry, and its British tributary, has collectively got right and wrong in its portrayals of world history from One Million Years BC to Full Metal Jacket. While he has a lot of fun with mistakes and distortions, Fraser’s basic position is that, “There is a popular belief that where history is concerned, Hollywood always gets it wrong – and sometimes it does. What is overlooked is the astonishing amount of history Hollywood has got right, and the immense unacknowledged debt which we owe to the commercial cinema as an illuminator of the story of mankind.”

The Pyrates is a vastly silly romp, which throws together every imaginable cliché of pirate stories, with copious anachronisms and a narrator who likes to point out the conventions of stories like these as he goes along. This is Fraser’s funniest book. He tried to repeat the trick with what is, presumably, his last novel, The Reavers, which is set in Anglo-Scottish border country in the Elizabethan era, and draws upon the research that Fraser, a native of Carlisle, undertook for his non-fiction book The Steel Bonnets and his earlier, more serious, novel The Candlemass Road. The glaring flaw is that there aren’t any clichés and conventions to border reiver stories, because the subject matter is neither clichéd nor conventional; so The Reavers doesn’t really measure up to The Pyrates.

By the way, that’s the pirate queen Sheba on the cover, described by Fraser as looking “like something out of Marvel Comic”. Singular. Not really his field, then. Did Flashy ever read Comic Cuts, I wonder?

Pictures
Brigitte Nielsen in Red Sonja (directed by Richard Fleischer, 1985)

Cover illustration by John Rose to the 1984 Pan Books edition of The Pyrates by George MacDonald Fraser

A New Year’s Resolution kept for one day, at least

2008-01-01T20:53:00.000Z

I promise not to bother you with stuff like this too often, but one of the resolutions I made this year was to get back into the habit of drawing. I bought the BBC’s Complete Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare on DVD as a Christmas present to myself this year, so here’s a sketch I made of Anthony Quayle as Falstaff while watching Henry IV Part 2 this evening. Not too bad given that I haven’t held a pen or pencil to do anything but write since April, but I definitely need to improve the way I draw hands.

Happy New Year, A’body (Snore)

2008-01-01T00:16:00.000Z

Panels
Oor Wullie, art by Dudley D Watkins, The Sunday Post, 30 December 1945, reprinted in The Broons and Oor Wullie, 1936-1996, DC Thomson, 1996

2007: Long, long, long

2007-12-31T17:00:00.000Z

I posted a while back about the short comics that I liked most in 2007. Now it’s the turn of their longer brethren, each filling at least one separate publication.

This isn’t a “best of 2007” as such, because my tastes aren’t catholic enough to compile one of those, and because I haven’t read everything that might be a candidate for such as list. But here are some of the longer comics, newly published in serial or book form in 2007, that I particularly enjoyed.

Bryan Talbot Alice in Sunderland. A remarkable catherine-wheel essay. My seven-part review starts here.

John Rogers, Raphael Albuquerque and others Blue Beetle. Cheeringly good-spirited superheroics. I reviewed an issue here.

Joss Whedon and Georges Jeanty Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8: The Long Way Home. The best adaptation of a television series into comics since at least the heyday of TV21. I reviewed the opening story here, and individual issues here and here. The second main storyline, written by Brian K Vaughn, was a relative disappointment, given its lack of character humour and Georges Jeanty’s inability to draw a good likeness of lead slayer Faith.

Warren Ellis and Raulo Caceres Crécy. An idiosyncratic (and foul-mouthed) history lecture, reviewed here.

Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips Criminal. Straightforward, noir-ish crime stories – a staple genre in any other medium, but a rarity in comics. Brubaker and Phillips’s work would be good enough to shine even if there was a glut of them. I reviewed one issue here.

Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang Dr 13: Architecture and Mortality. Postmodern fun and games, with appealing clear-line artwork. I reviewed it here.

Adam Warren Empowered. The first volume, at least (reviewed here), is an inventive exercise in having your cheesecake and eating it too. The second volume tones down the metatextual games and seems much sleazier for it.

Warren Ellis and Ben Templesmith Fell. Taut, grim policiers. Templesmith’s art works even better depicting the mundane than it does dealing with the undead.

Simone Lia Fluffy. One of the strengths of comics as a medium is the ease with which it can deploy the unreal to give new perspectives on the familiar. Here, a talking rabbit provides Lia with a lens through which to examine parenthood and emotional commitment.

Andi Watson Glister. Frothy and magical. I reviewed the first issue here. The third makes a smooth turn into perfectly-pitched folk tale territory, complete with repetitive tasks and, seasonally enough, the robin as an emblem of resurrection.

Paul Grist Jack Staff. Grist’s sparkling unconventional storytelling is a delight every time, and the use of obvious avatars of old British boys’ adventure comics characters hits my nostalgia buttons. There’s a review of one issue here.

Jeff Parker and Juan Santacruz Marvel Adventures: The Avengers. Funny, inventive and each story self-contained in one issue. Jeff Parker’s work here and on X-Men First Class suggests that superheroics can still be a valid genre for casual readers. One of the best issues was reviewed here.

Warren Ellis and Stuart Immonen Nextwave: Agents of HATE. Superhero comics with all the humour, violence and wild invention of prime 2000AD. Sadly missed.

Andi Watson and Simon Gane Paris. A romance with beautifully appropriate artwork. My review is here.

Joann Sfar and Emmanuel Guibert The Professor’s Daughter. Not new, but newly translated into English. A beautifully painted pulp horror rom-com. Reviewed here.

James Turner Rex Libris. Wacky, literate and visually unique. I reviewed one issue here.

Nick Bertozzi The Salon. A fine piece of storytelling, with something to say about creativity, too. I reviewed it here.

Posy Simmonds Tamara Drewe. The stuff of literary prose fiction, with jokes and pictures. Simmonds’s best long-form work to date. I reviewed it here.

Lewis Trondheim and Fabrice Parme Tiny Tyrant. Not new, but newly translated into English. A glowing jewel of a children’s comic, reviewed here.

Rick Geary A Treasury of Victorian Murder: The Saga of the Bloody Benders. Geary’s meticulous but off-kilter non-fiction series moves into the nineteenth-century American countryside to find it just as disturbing as the cities.

Nicholas Gurewitch The Trial of Colonel Sweeto and Other Stories. A compilation of Gurewitch’s Perry Bible Fellowship strips (see the link in the web comics section of the side-bar). Simultaneously funny and disturbing; a Terry Gilliam in candy colours.

Various The Wallace and Gromit Comic. Gone, alas. See this review for why I miss it.

DVD Extra

2007-12-30T20:53:00.000Z

Doctor Who Online reports that one of the extras on the DVD release of the Doctor Who story “The Time Meddler”, due in February, will be:

Stripped for Action - The First Doctor - a look at the First Doctor's comic strip adventures. Features interviews with artist Bill Mevin, comic historians Jeremy Bentham and John Ainsworth, as well as former DWM Editors Gary Russell & Alan Barnes.

Mevin drew the Doctor Who comic strip in TV Comic from October 1965 until April 1966, and so is roughly contemporary with “The Time Meddler”. The last piece of art I saw from him was a new cover he provided for Doctor Who Classic Comics issue 15 (January 1994), which reprinted that Christmas story I blogged about a few days ago.

Ainsworth wrote the definitive catalogue of the old Doctor Who comic strip, Vworp! Vworp!, which also ran in Doctor Who Classic Comics. Bentham is more of an all-round Doctor Who buff than specifically concerned with the comics. (He is also, I gather, related to the famous utilitarian philosopher of the same name, who, among other things, invented a kind of prison called a Panopticon – a name later used for the Time Lord capitol. Small cosmos, isn’t it?) Russell, as well as being a former editor of Doctor Who Magazine (and of Doctor Who Classic Comics), is writing the upcoming Doctor Who comic from IDW.

So it’s a decent set of interviewees. I hope they follow this up with instalments on the other Doctors.

Lack of Christmas Spirit

2007-12-30T11:42:00.000Z

According to the “DC Nation” page in The Brave and the Bold issue 9, this is one of the titles out this week that we should all be rushing to buy.

Except, of course, that it doesn’t exist. I don’t think that it was ever even solicited. The listing for The Spirit issue 13 in the October issue of Previews has a blown-up panel of the Spirit kissing Silk Satin where the cover should be, and the blurb describes a set of short stories about the series’s femmes fatales. Far from issue 13 being out this week (or last week, as I think that The Brave and the Bold may itself have been delayed), even issue 12 won’t be out until mid-January.

Still, let’s hope that the material intended for this issue doesn’t just disappear, but that it’s published next year. If nothing else, I’d like to see something better than a tiny, fuzzy reproduction of that Darwyn Cooke cover.

Update, 3 February Much to my surprise, issue 13 was published, with that Christmas cover, at the end of January 2008. The lead story was about Hallowe'en. No, I don't get it, either.

What I’ve been doing today when I could have been blogging

2007-12-28T16:38:00.001Z

Except that I don’t have a cat, so I’ll be eating the cheese myself.

Panel
Vampire Loves “Could Cupid Care Less?” by Joann Sfar, translated by Alexis Siegel, First Second, 2006 (original French publication 2001)

I’m Gonna Spend My Christmas With a TARDIS

2007-12-24T11:45:00.000Z

Since its revival, Doctor Who has become as much of a part of Christmas broadcasting as the Morecambe and Wise Show, celebrity guests and all.

It was not always so. Discounting spin-offs (the wretched K-9 and Company saw K-9 singing “We Wish You A Merry Christmas”), Doctor Who had just one Christmas episode in its original 26-year run. “The Feast of Steven” (named after one of the Doctor’s travelling companions at the time) was broadcast on Christmas Day 1965. Famously, it concluded with the Doctor turning to the camera, raising a glass, and saying, “Incidentally, a Happy Christmas to all of you at home.”

That same year, TV Comic also treated us to a Doctor Who Christmas story. I think that it is fair to say that anyone who was old enough to watch the TV show would have found this comic strip too juvenile. The TARDIS lands the Doctor and his grand-children, John and Gillian (fixtures of the comic strip until well into Patrick Troughton’s time), in a snow-covered land. These are non-consecutive panels.

Actually, the children all wanted Daleks, but TV21 had the rights to those, so TARDISes it is.

Fortunately, the Doctor has brought a magic box with him, which can magically replicate toys. Yes, a magic box. Well, two of them, luckily enough.

Because while Santa is replicating toy TARDISes, the Doctor and his grand-children run into the wicked Demon Magician of the Forest.

They have to use the magic box to shrink polar bears …

… enlarge squirrels …

… and melt killer snowmen.

Silly, isn’t it? I mean, even a five-year old is going to have difficulty accepting a story in which the Doctor carries round a single, unexplained tool which just happens to be able to do whatever the plot needs at any given moment.

Oh. Right.

Incidentally, a Happy Christmas to all of you at home.

Panels and pictures

Doctor Who “A Klytode Christmas” Part 1 by Trevor Baxendale (script), John Ross (art), Alan Craddock (colours), Paul Vyse (letters), Doctor Who Adventures Issue 44, BBC Magazines, 6 December – 12 December 2007

Off-screen photographs from “The Feast of Steven” (BBC TV, 25 December 1965) taken from The Doctor Who Missing Episode Nexus

Doctor Who, art by Bill Mevin, TV Comic issues 732-735, 25 December 1965 to 15 January 1966, reprinted in Doctor Who Classic Comics issue 15, 15 January 1994

Illustration by Mike Collins and David A Roach to Doctor Who “The Hopes and Fears of All the Years” by Paul Cornell, Daily Telegraph, 22 December 2007

Paper boy

2007-12-22T15:24:00.000Z

In case you’re reading this in Britain on Saturday and the newsagents are still open, here are a couple of reasons to buy the daily papers.

The Daily Telegraph has a new Christmas Doctor Who short story by Paul Cornell (author of the TV episodes “Father’s Day” and “Human Nature/The Family of Blood”), called “The Hopes and Fears of All the Years”. It’s not comics, but it is illustrated by long-term Doctor Who comic strip artists Mike Collins and David Roach. You can also find the story online here, with one of the illustrations. But not this one. Note the pure Frank Bellamy shading on the sonic screwdriver!

The Guardian’s “Weekend” magazine section carries a two page strip by Simone Lia (author of Fluffy) about an aggressively virtuous woman and her (ahem) guardian angel.

Meanwhile, in the “Review” section, the regular feature “Writer’s Rooms” is given over to Posy Simmonds, who provides a half-page illustration and hand-written text. She reveals herself to be a fan of the brushwork of the late great political cartoonist David Low, and now that she mentions it I can see the influence on her own linework. (Click to make legible.)

I couldn’t find either of these on The Guardian website, though you’re welcome to have a search. But the “Comic” section is given over to a two-page Christmas puzzle picture by “Lorenzo” (possibly Lawrence Etherington), which can be found at the mostly empty DFC website.

2007: We like short shorts

2007-12-19T22:14:00.000Z

“Best of the year” lists have been mushrooming, but, understandably, most of them tend to emphasise longer, more substantial works: graphic novels, collected editions and ongoing series. Here, by contrast, are some of the shorter pieces of comics I have enjoyed through the year, none of them long enough to fill a single issue. (But you can, at least, click the pictures below to make them bigger.)

”You’re A Good Man, John Stuart Mill” by Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey. Not all of van Lente and Dunlavey’s Action Philosophers (Evil Twin Comics) worked for me, either as entertaining comics or as potted accounts of the thought of major philosophers. But this spot-on Charles Schulz pastiche hit both targets perfectly.

Mark Waid’s super-hero origin stories from 52. As superhero comics sank into a congealed mass of stodgy continuity, Waid performed small miracles every week by boiling down the essence of each of DC’s main cast and presenting it in just two pages. It didn’t hurt that the series attracted artists like Brian Bolland and Adam Hughes, long lost to the more lucrative field of cover illustration, back to telling stories instead. Here are Waid and Hughes on Wonder Woman, from 52 issue 12.

My Own Genie by Jamie Smart. British children’s humour comics have long been refreshingly free of moral didacticism. If My Own Genie was a TV series, Lula, after wishing for something selfish and irresponsible, would have to put it right, while learning a Valuable Life Lesson. In The Dandy, she can just compound the mayhem, while having a good time. It helped that the once-staid publisher D C Thompson is willing to publish artwork as wild as that provided by Smart. This example is from The Dandy Summer Special 2007, as the strip was sadly missing from the regular title for most of the year.

”Maggie La Loca” by Jaime Hernandez (Love and Rockets Vol 2 Issue 20, Fantagraphics). If brother Gilbert is the Gene Kelly of comics, all flash and effort, Jaime is the Fred Astaire: he makes it all look so simple that it’s easy to underestimate the amount of talent, skill and craft he employs. Plus, I’ve got a soft spot for long-running fictions that age their characters in real time.

Tom Gauld’s letter column illustrations from The Guardian. Weird little flights of fancy that brighten my Saturdays. This one is from 1 December.

Eleanor Davis’s pieces in Mome (Fantagraphics) are often the highlights of this consistently interesting and well-produced anthology. Their unsettling charm makes me wonder if this is how the first generation of comfortable burghers felt when reading the earliest, unbowdlerised Grimm folk tales. These panels are from “Stick and String” in Mome issue 8.

Bryan Talbot’s 3-page History of British Comics, using his Alice in Sunderland style and published by The Guardian to accompany the BBC’s Comics Britannia TV series. I missed this when it came out. For the next few days, my every conversation began, “You didn’t happen to buy The Guardian on Saturday, did you?”

The Mini Marvels, by Chris Giarrusso, appear seemingly at random and often unheralded in various Marvel comics. Really, they should get the cover every time, because Giarrusso’s kiddy versions of the Marvel superheroes are a charming delight, matched only by Jeff Parker’s occasional short X-Men strips with Colleen Coover. This panel comes from “Hulk Date”, which appeared in Spider-Man Family issue 3.

Jack Black from Viz comic. Of all Viz’s parade of grotesques, nothing quite captures the true, vindictive, self-righteous, Daily Mail-reading face of modern Britain quite like Jack Black.

And a Merry Christmas to you, too

Take the Hyacinth Challenge

2007-12-18T21:46:00.000Z

Dick Hyacinth is paying for the five-minute argument, and who am I to quibble? (Yeah, I know he says it’s a fake, but let’s try it and see.)

Says Dick, “Newspaper strips set back the comics industry/medium 50 years: Because they were so much more prestigious and lucrative than comic books, the most talented cartoonists gravitated towards newspapers rather than comic books. Newspaper strips are an excellent format with many advantages, but there are limits to what one can achieve in three or four panels. Furthermore, newspapers made comics a wildly popular form of art in the United States, but also conditioned the public to think of comics as disposable. Comics as a medium and an industry would have been better off if left to struggle in the comic book format. Such a Darwinian landscape would have forced cartoonists to produce more ambitious material sooner.”

Now it is rare that history provides perfect counter-examples, but in the case of anglophone comics, the British and American experiences are pretty much mirror images.

In the USA, comic strips first proliferated in the newspapers in the 1890s. It wasn’t until the 1930s that separately published and sold comic books became commonplace. In the UK, comics as separate publications took off in the 1880s, but it wasn’t until the 1920s that comic strips started appearing in newspapers. In Britain, comic strips appear in a handful of national newspapers, there are no syndicates to allow anyone to make a living by selling strips to local papers, and the newspaper comic strip is just too small to syphon off talent on a large scale.

So, if the Hyacinth hypothesis holds, Britain should have been the home to more ambitious comics material earlier than the US. Not so. Apart from a few imitators of the US undergrounds, it wasn’t until the 2000AD generation grew up in the 1980s that Britain started producing artistically ambitious comics, with the possible exceptions of the works of Raymond Briggs, who never worked in either periodical comics or newspapers, and Posy Simmonds, who has since been able to use newspaper serialisation as the basis for ambitious and complex works such as Tamara Drewe.

So Dick needs to look elsewhere for reasons why American comics were held back relative to bandes dessinées and manga. My own preferred culprit is the Comics Code Authority. In the 1950s, EC and some others were providing a generation which had spent World War Two reading The Boy Commandos and learning from Will Eisner how to repair Jeeps with comics which could have broken through into more adult and ambitious forms. But America took a collective political decision not to go down that route.

Of course, you could argue with that.

Panel
The Adventures of Mr Stanley Deadstone and Company art by Tom Browne, from The Halfpenny Comic, issue 1, 22 January 1898, reprinted in Denis Gifford Victorian Comics, George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1976

Soft Boys

2007-12-16T11:58:00.000Z

So, which one's Robyn Hitchcock?

Panel
The Beano All-Stars "Santa's Little Helpers", art by Robert Nixon, as reprinted in The Beano issue 3411, DC Thomson, 15 December 2007

DC Presents All-Rape Western

2007-12-15T18:50:00.000Z

One good reason to avoid the Palmiotti and Grey revival of Jonah Hex has been the frequency with which rape has featured in their stories. It’s as monotonously repetitious as gore and dismemberment in a Geoff Johns comic, or the death of leading characters at the hands of Judd Winnick, but even more distasteful.

Now, at least Jonah Hex was always supposed to be at the nasty end of the spectrum of westerns, though long-time writer Michael Fleisher used to keep things more varied. But a revival of Bat Lash, DC’s answer to Bret Maverick? With stories by co-creator and noted humourist Sergio Aragones? And drawn by John Severin, a veteran of the days when American comics were suitable for children? That’s got to be different, surely? That’s going to be banter and frolic, right?

Apparently not.

The problem, I think, lies with DC’s branding strategy. Compared to Marvel, DC as a company publishes a much greater variety of material. But with Marvel, everything – cartoon capers with Franklin Richards, standard superheroics, adaptations of The Iliad - comes with that big white-on-red Marvel brand.

DC, on the other hand, subdivides its publications into a range of imprints each of which has a very consistent tone. Johnny DC emulates television animation. Vertigo is about applying modern urban sensibilities to the fantastic (or, in the case of Northlanders, to the historic). Minx brings you stories of girl outsiders who find social acceptance without compromising their individuality. And CMX … well, to be honest, I’m not sure what kind of manga CMX prints, not having read any, but from their adverts it hardly seems to be casting its net very wide in Japanese stylistic waters.

So there can be western comics under DC’s DC Universe imprint, but it seems that they have to have the tone of their standard superhero books. Out with the banter and frolic, and bring on the blood and the pain and the rape. Because that's what the DC bullet stands for, now.

Do you think they could start an imprint for people who are sick of that?

Panel
Bat Lash Issue 1 “Guns and Roses” Chapter 1 “Splendor in the Sage”, by Peter Brangvold and Sergio Aragones (writers), John Severin (artist), Pat Brosseau (letterer), Steve Buccellato (colourist), Rachel Gluckstern and Michael Wright (editors), DC Comics, February 2008

Review: Tamara Drewe

2007-12-13T18:47:00.000Z

Tamara Drewe by Posy Simmonds, 126 pages of comics, Jonathan Cape, 2007, £16.99

Unlike Woody Allen, Posy Simmonds has had no problem moving away from the early, funny stuff to more complex, serious works. Of course, it helps that she hasn’t left the humour behind. If her portrayal of defunct Britpop band Swipe in Tamara Drewe is much less broad than that of Hugh Janus and the Dropouts in Mrs Weber’s Diary, there is still plenty of sly social observation here, as well as an appreciation of the farce of everyday life. Key revelations are overheard from the toilet. One of the two tragedies with which the book ends flirts with the absurd (and involves a herd of cows). And although Simmonds told the Comics Journal recently that she regretted ending her previous book, Gemma Bovery, with a joke about Jane Eyre, she still brings Tamara Drewe to a close with a punchline.

Like Gemma Bovery, Tamara Drewe is based on a well-known work of nineteenth-century literature, in this case Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd, with Tamara herself as a counterpart of that novel’s heroine, Bathsheba Everdene. The plot revolves around the disastrous effects of her relationships with two unsuitable men, while ignoring the virtues of a salt-of-the-earth local (Andy Cobb, here standing in for Hardy’s Gabriel Oak). But Simmonds shifts the emphasis away from Tamara, by presenting events from the viewpoints of three other characters – Beth Hardiman, the wife of one of the men Tamara becomes involved with, Casey Shaw, a local teenager, and Glen Larson, an academic who wants to be a novelist, who resembles Joubert in Gemma Bovery in both physical appearance and narrative role – the apparent outsider whose tangential involvement may be crucial to the plot (he also shares a name with the American TV producer responsible for The Six Million Dollar Man and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, but I assume that is a coincidence).

All three of these characters contribute extensive prose monologues, whereas Tamara’s inner thoughts are revealed only partially through excerpts from a vacuous column she writes for a newspaper (none of which we see whole). A wide range of other devices is used to convey information alongside the conventional comic strip sections: magazine articles, e-mails, texts, mobile phone photos ... All are seamlessly integrated, helped by the compatibility of clear bodytype and Simmonds’ meticulous hand-lettering and her calm, measured compositions and fluid lines. Even effects such as blurring out text have been achieved without the jarringly different style that would be produced by recourse to easy Photoshop filters. Simmonds is able to deploy complicated layouts using these diverse elements on the broader-than-usual pages without creating confusion about what to read next. (Gemma Bovery was on narrower-than-usual pages, each being the product of the column widths in The Guardian newspaper in which the stories were originally serialised.)

Throughout, Simmonds displays her familiar virtues: sharp observation, impeccable draughtsmanship, a rare ability to convey character though the details of expression and dress, speech pattern and body language. The plot is meticulously constructed and paced. I have mentioned before, though, that while I admire Simmonds’s craft, I am often left cold by her subject matter.

And Tamara Drewe is, like Gemma Bovery, a tale of the privileged urban English engaging in adultery in what they hope to be a rural idyll. But Tamara Drewe broadens the social perspective by drawing in a group of local teenagers with nothing to do all day but hang around in bus shelters and throw eggs at passing cars. It can be hard to sympathise with the self-destructive self-absorption of the more familiar middle-class characters here, but the way that boredom and romantic fantasy play out for their younger, poorer, less experienced counterparts is much more affecting.

The later, humane stuff. And still funny.

Graveyard of Lost Posts

2007-12-11T20:11:00.000Z

While you’ve been looking at a static, un-updated blog, I’ve been filling my hard drive with unuseable posts.

There were several attempts to review recent comics (such as the Hibernia reprint of The Thirteenth Floor, written by John Wagner and Alan Grant and drawn by José Ortiz, above), but there wasn’t really anything interesting or amusing that I wanted to say about them.

There was my attempt, sparked by a remark by John Sutherland to the effect that the price of hardback novels had remained constant as a share of average income throughout the twentieth century, to see if the same was true of The Dandy over its seventy-year life. But while my rough calculations suggested that 2d (old pence – 240 of them to the pound) in 1937 was indeed about the same proportion of weekly GDP per head as £1.99 is now, that post fell apart when I realised that The Dandy now only comes out every two weeks, and is, for the first time, a different price from The Beano (95p), so I wasn't comparing like for like. In any case, I was unsure about the figures I was using for GDP, as national accounts data only began to be collected the way they are now after World War Two, and for population, as neither 1937 nor 2007 was a census year. And I couldn’t find the exact quotation from John Sutherland, either. Fell at three successive fences, that one.

And there was the humorous post, attempting to link this poll, showing that a quarter of Britons could not name Bethlehem as Jesus’s birthplace, with Cat Sullivan’s “Merry Xmas, Jesus” strip in the new issue of Viz (no 171, Christmas 2007, below). Maybe include some sarky remark about how “don’t know” was actually the most accurate answer, given that the whole Bethlehem story is such an obvious and clumsy ret-con. But I couldn’t make it sing.

And then there was the self-pitying post about how I couldn’t write any good posts this last week. Just be thankful I spared you that one.

Oh … Right.

Anyway, a review of Tamara Drewe should be along shortly. I’ve got things to say about it. Interesting or amusing things? You’ll have to be the judge.

The Indy Dandy

2007-12-03T19:53:00.001Z

The first issue of The Dandy was published a little over 70 years ago, cover-dated 4 December 1937. To mark the anniversary, publisher DC Thomson has provided UK newspaper The Independent with a history in comics form of The Dandy and its younger sibling, The Beano.

I couldn’t find this on The Indy’s web-site, so here are scans. Click to enlarge, of course.

It’s good to see that Dudley D Watkins, Davey Law, Leo Baxendale and Ken Reid (and The Dandy’s first editor, Albert Barnes, for that matter), are all credited. It’s a pity, though, that the people who wrote and drew this particular strip are left anonymous.

Update, 11 December Lew Stringer identifies the artist on the anniversary strip as Ken Harrison.

Butterflies (or “Gad! I actually agree with Geoff Johns!”)

2007-12-02T20:48:00.000Z

Here’s Geoff Johns, interviewed for Newsarama, May 2007, about the 52 parallel worlds just unveiled at the end of the story of 52.

"Right now, they're just out there. 52 earths. That's all. And you'll start to see them here or there, but the goal really is, like the end of the issue said, 'It's a world full of possibilities.' We don't want any rules on our stories. So let's be able to tell stories of all sorts of different things."

DC Comics has decided to list them instead, also on Newsarama.

DC editorial: where they believe that butterflies are much prettier after they’ve been gassed and pinned to a board.

Panels
Doom Patrol “The House That Jack Built” by Grant “And no crossovers! Each of the parallel universes should exist in its own separate stream with no contact from the others…” Morrison (writer), Richard Case (penciller), Scott Hanna (inker) and John Workman (letterer), Doom Patrol Issue 24, July 1989, reprinted in Doom Patrol: Crawling from the Wreckage, DC Comics, 2004

Review: Angel – After the Fall

2007-12-01T21:22:00.001Z

Angel: After the Fall Issue 1, “After the Fall” Chapter 1, plotted by Joss Whedon and Brian Lynch, scripted by Brian Lynch, illustrated by Franco Urru, coloured by Ilaria Traversi, lettered by Robbie Robbins, edited by Chris Ryall, cover by Tony Harris, 27 pages of comics, IDW Publishing, November 2007, US$3.99

It’s probably unfair to reach judgements after just one issue, but it’s still harder to resist the temptation to compare IDW’s new Angel series, After the Fall, the first to show us what Joss Whedon thinks happened after the end of his TV series, with Dark Horse’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 8: The Long Way Home, which did the same for its big sister (and which I rather liked).

And the similarities are striking.

First, there is a shift of scale and setting to something that could not be managed on a TV budget. Buffy is now leading an army of slayers based in a Scottish castle; Angel is riding a dragon over a Los Angeles that has been sucked into Hell.

Second, there is an excess of recurring characters and a reluctance to move on from those already left behind. So, in the last TV episode, Wesley Wyndham-Price was killed as decisively as any character could be. He’s back here, admittedly as a ghost, but with more dialogue than pretty much anyone else. Gunn is back too. And we get Connor. And Electro-Gwen. And Angel’s werewolf girlfriend. And Wolfram & Hart. True, Spike is being held back for next issue, and Illyria and Harmony haven’t turned up yet, but that may just mirror the structure of The Long Way Home, in which Giles and Willow only appeared in later issues. It’s odd that a professional writer should seem to be writing fan fiction about his own creations, but then Joss Whedon often comes across as his own biggest fan (if we discount the outright certifiable).

Third, like Buffy, Angel seems now to have discarded the idea of an overarching metaphor. This is a particular shame in Angel’s case, as it was only in its last season on TV that it settled upon a satisfactory approach, using supernatural stories to address the compromises of adult working life.

But alongside these similarities are major differences in the level of craft on display.

The big change from Buffy is that the Angel comic only has Whedon as a co-plotter. He shares the plot with Brian Lynch, who also writes the script. Lynch gives us page after page of macho posturing and dull threats, with only a smattering of wit. Odd touches of quirky originality – a telepathic fish, apparently carried over from Lynch’s earlier Spike comic – are counterbalanced by such tired clichés as a harem of women in chains and a group of men forced to fight as gladiators. Lynch is a television writer by trade, but, unlike his colleague, he does not seem yet to have mastered writing in his new medium. It’s often unclear who is providing the first-person narrative caption boxes, for example, and their relationship to the pictures is unsteady, neither juxtaposed nor properly supportive. The shock ending is undermined as much by bathetic final words as by the difficulty of recognising the character in the last panel (it took me two reads, and I am not the most casual and inattentive of readers. Perhaps it would have helped if artist and colourist had followed the script’s hints about co-ordinated clothes).

Franco Urro’s artwork is often sketchy, but mostly serves the narrative, apart from a curious addiction to panels showing characters standing in straight lines left-to-right, looking out at the reader. Perhaps this is some sort of parodic reference to the “power shots” that always ended the TV show’s title sequences, but it is so artificial as to pull you right out of the story.

The big problem with the art – as has been the case on most IDW comics that I have seen, apart from those with colour art produced by Ben Templesmith – is the crude and muddy Photoshop colour and effects that quite overwhelm Urro’s already non-too-robust drawing. This seems to be a house style, so I am not inclined to blame Ilaria Traversi too much for it.

Altogether, not an inspiring start. I’ll give it another issue, but I remember watching the dismal, incoherent and leaden fourth television season of Angel (the one with Cordelia giving birth to an evil goddess) as the biggest act of misplaced loyalty to a TV show that I’ve committed since mid-1980s Doctor Who, so I am reluctant to repeat the mistake in comics.

Last Dan Dare Post for Now

2007-11-30T17:12:00.000Z

It occurs to me that, of the list I posted of Gary Erskine’s illustrious predecessors on Dan Dare, the work of Ian Kennedy might not be well known outside the UK.

Kennedy has been a professional comics artist since the 1950s, lately noted mainly for his covers for DC Thomson’s long-running digest-sized war comic Commando. His entry in the Lambiek Comiclopedia can be found here. Below is a page from one of his Dan Dare stories.

That story, and the cover, were Ian Kennedy’s contributions to the Dan Dare Annual 1987 (published by Fleetway in 1986). Dan Dare was appearing in a revival of the weekly comic Eagle at the time. Two other strips in the annual were drawn by Kennedy’s fellow veteran comics artist, and sci-fi illustrator, Ron Turner.

Turner’s style hadn’t changed much since his work on Rick Random thirty years earlier. As a result, his Dan Dare looks less like a 1980s revival than a comic from the 1950s of some parallel world in which Dan Dare was created by an artist with more Vargo Statten than Biggles in his bloodstream. Though Kennedy's comics career had started only four years after Turner's, there seem to be decades between them.

Emulating the Wrong Bit of the 1950s?

2007-11-30T07:11:00.000Z

Something was nagging at me while reading Garth Ennis and Gary Erskine's revived Dan Dare (which is entertaining enough stuff - a little too much sitting around taking potshots at New Labour's style of politics, perhaps, but Erskine does better than I might have expected in the unfair competition he has to engage in with the memory not just of Frank Hampson's artwork, but with that of Frank Bellamy, Massimo Belardinelli, Dave Gibbons and Ian Kennedy too). Then it struck me.

Everyone is white. Most worryingly, this is true of everyone in Dan's own fantasy idealised England too.

I hope that this turns out to be a plot point, and not just casual sloppiness on the part of Ennis, Erskine and colourist Parasuraman A. It would certainly be an odd assumption given Virgin Comics' Indian base.

Panels
Dan Dare issue 1 "Under an English Heaven", script by Garth Ennis, Art by Gary Erskine, colour by Parasuraman A, letters by Rakesh B Mahadik, editor Charlie Beckerman, Dan Dare created by Frank Hampson

Credit Where It’s Due

2007-11-29T20:12:00.000Z

Although the adverts in Previews for upcoming issues continue to omit it, the first issue of the new Dan Dare comic has the right credit at the top of the list:

Thank you, Virgin Comics.

Who Plunders the Pirates?

2007-11-28T20:09:00.000Z

As they were no doubt supposed to do, the teaser photographs from the upcoming film of Watchmen have wafted a warm breeze of reassurance over comics fans. “Look,” they say, “We are being faithful to the comic. Why, there’s even that boy reading Tales of the Black Freighter.”

And yes, that is a detail faithful to the disembodied story. But in the move from one medium to another, much of its meaning has washed away.

You’ll recall that, in Watchmen, two changes from our world have a myriad of consequences, large and small. Because some oddballs actually did become costumed vigilantes in the 1940s, and because one genuine super-powered being appeared in 1960, geopolitics are different, the economics of energy are different – and so are matters of taste in styles of clothes and methods of smoking tobacco.

One consequential change is in comics. In an America with real superheroes, no-one wants to read about them in comic books. So, instead, the dominant genre is the pirate story. This is a particularly effective move on the part of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, because it brings home directly to the reader that the very comic he or she is reading is the product of contingency; that the fact that Watchmen is a superhero comic is itself a product of the odd chances of history; that chance is everywhere in this garden of forking paths.

On film, this direct address must be lost. If cinema had a single dominant genre, then something similar could be done by having characters watch films from a wholly different genre instead. But the first condition simply does not apply, and that news-stand photo suggests that the film-makers have not attempted to find such a parallel.

In addition, time has undermined the choice that Moore and Gibbons made. In the mid-1980s, pirate stories were a moribund genre that never really had been that popular (how many issues did EC’s Piracy last?). A pirate story with overtones of supernatural horror, like Tales of the Black Freighter, was a real oddity that paralleled the strangeness of the superhero story which comics readers so took for granted. But now a mix of pirates and supernatural horror doesn’t seem strange at all. Even the most goldfish-memoried movie-goer will be reminded of Johnny Depp and Keira Knightley fighting CGI’d monsters on the Black Pearl. The oddity is lost.

So, in the end, Tales of the Black Freighter becomes a minor piece of set dressing, the equivalent of a poster advertising an unfamiliar perfume. The mere whiff of Nostalgia.

Picture
Photograph of Watchmen, taken from Warner Brothers, found via the Forbidden Planet International Blog

Peter Haining and Spring-Heeled Jack

2007-11-27T20:40:00.000Z

I read the latest issue of Hellblazer, which features an appearance by the early-Victorian urban legend Spring-Heeled Jack, on the same day that I read that Peter Haining had died. It was something of a coincidence, as the last of Peter Haining’s books that I had read was The Legend and Bizarre Crimes of Spring Heeled Jack (Frederick Muller Limited, London, 1977), which I picked up at the Tynemouth book fair a few weeks ago – though, since I have read fewer than twenty of the, roughly, two hundred books that Haining wrote or edited, there may be more to come.

The Legend and Bizarre Crimes of Spring Heeled Jack is a typically frustrating example of Haining’s work. It is a non-fiction book, but is hugely unreliable. Several incidents are written up in novelistic detail which cannot possibly have been available in the sources – indeed, as Mike Dash points out here, the incident with which Haining opens the book, an attack by Jack on a barmaid in Blackheath, seems to have no source. He may simply have made it up – it’s hard to tell, as Haining gives no notes, sources or bibliography. He takes third hand accounts – the sort of “friend of a friend” story that forms the very core of urban mythmaking – as solid evidence; and he devotes a lot of attention to the theory that Jack was the Marquis of Waterford, on the familiar assumption that any mysterious figure must really be someone famous or aristocratic, or both, because that is the better story. (Andy Diggle, by the way, uses the same identification in that Hellblazer issue).

And yet there is a lot of material here that would not have seen print without Haining. His discussion of Jack’s place in popular culture, for example, seems sound, and I will be plundering it in an upcoming post about Spring-Heeled Jack’s life in comics.

And so it is with the rest of his work. For every sloppily-compiled anthology of Victorian horror stories with no details about first publication, there is a book about penny dreadfuls which considers publication and authorship in detail. For every collection of otherwise hard-to-find horror and pulp illustrations, there is a scissors-and-paste book about Doctor Who full of popular misconceptions.

The lesson, I suppose, is to handle Peter Haining’s legacy with care. But, by all means, do handle it.

A personal recollection of Peter Haining, and an interview with him, by Steve Holland, can be found on Steve’s Bear Alley blog.

Pictures and panels
Hellblazer issue 238, “The Smoke” by Andy Diggle (writer), Daniel Zezelj (artist), Lee Loughridge (colourist), Jared K Fletcher (letterer) and Casey Seijas (editor), DC Comics, January 2008 (I must have slept through the New Year celebrations)

Cover to Peter Haining The Legend and Bizarre Crimes of Spring Heeled Jack, Frederick Muller Limited, 1977, reproducing an illustration from Spring-Heel’d Jack, The Terror of London, Newsagents’Publishing Company, 1840s

Following the Herd

2007-11-26T18:43:00.000Z

I suspect that this tells you only that I’m using a lot of long words and complicated sentences.

It doesn’t tell you if I’m using them correctly.

(Found via Eddie Campbell’s The Fate of the Artist blog. Apparently, they read Erasmus in High School in Australia, or something.)

Depends on How You Look at It

2007-11-24T12:57:00.000Z

In my review of The Book of Other People, I wrote about the tendency in literary circles to elide prose and comics. Stephen Abell, writing in The Times Literary Supplement, thinks they are both in thrall to moving pictures:

"The prevailing imaginative resource for the modern short-story writer is not literature, but film: A. L. Kennedy’s superb ‘Frank’ is set in a cinema; Daniel Clowes’s tiresome ‘Justin M. Damiano’, a graphic story (what he has called elsewhere a ‘narratoglyphic picto-assemblage’), is about a film critic; Thirlwell’s Nigora can also list her life in terms of ‘all the films which she had seen with her father’; and so on. Moments in characters’ lives are, therefore, described as if they were framed segments from a movie: ‘chemical flare-ups in the brain chemistry, arresting moving images (his analogy came from photographic film)’, as Zadie Smith puts it in her own story. The book can be seen as a sort of literary YouTube, a series of short, revealing clips of its characters."

The complete review is here.

Panel
The Spirit “Death by Television” by Darwyn Cooke with J Bone (finishes), Dave Stewart (colours), Jared Fletcher (letters), Ben Abernathy (editor), The Spirit issue 10, DC Comics, November 2007 (not from the book under discussion)

RIP, Verity Lambert

2007-11-23T18:42:00.000Z

I learned of the death of Verity Lambert, best known as the first producer of Doctor Who, from Tim Chapman’s comment on my post celebrating that programme’s anniversary; and I considered taking the post down as a mark of respect, especially given the lettering on the cake in the illustration. But no: that picture exists because of the pleasure that Verity Lambert’s work gave, and continues to give, to millions of people around the world, and that is what should be remembered.

And it wasn’t just Doctor Who. After leaving that series, she helped to bring us, in one capacity or another, programmes such as Adam Adamant Lives!, The Naked Civil Servant, Rock Follies, Minder, Widows, Rumpole of the Bailey, GBH and Jonathan Creek (and also Eldorado, but de mortuis nihil nisi bonum and all that).

Much is said these days about how diverse and inclusive the new Doctor Who is. But when Verity Lambert started the show in 1963, it was quite the breakthrough for a young woman to become the producer of a BBC drama series – and she followed it up by appointing a young Asian man, Waris Hussein, to direct the first story. Lambert’s subsequent career shows how valuable that breakthrough was.

There’s an obituary here. Read it, raise a glass, and go and watch an episode of your favourite Verity Lambert production. It’s “An Unearthly Child” for me.

Doctor Who is 44 today…

2007-11-23T07:02:00.001Z

… and I can think of absolutely nothing interesting about the number 44.

So, instead, here’s a lovely drawing by Roger Langridge from the 35th anniversary comic strip, published in Doctor Who Magazine issue 272 (Marvel UK, 1998), and reprinted in Doctor Who: The Glorious Dead (Panini Books, 2006). It’s worth clicking-to-enlarge for all the figures in the crowd. I particularly like the Sontaran impersonating Grimly Feendish.

Happy anniversary, Doctor Who!

Fantastic Four: The Lost Adventure

2007-11-21T18:32:00.000Z

So called because Fantastic Four: The Held Back To Use As A Spoiler For Kirby’s DC Debut And Then Mutilated Before Publication Adventure wouldn’t fit on the cover.

Still, I’m glad that Marvel are publishing it. This is the story that Kirby pencilled for Fantastic Four issue 102, but which Marvel held back for publication in issue 108, to coincide with Kirby’s first issue of New Gods (the story that Kirby intended for issue 103 appeared in issue 102 instead). As published in issue 108, however, Kirby’s story was badly cut up and rewritten. John Morrow managed to reconstruct most of Kirby’s pencils (and explain what had happened), and published them in The Jack Kirby Collector. Marvel has since reprinted his reconstruction in volume 10 of Marvel Masterworks: The Fantastic Four, and will be reprinting it again here, along with a version newly completed by Stan Lee and Joe Sinnott.

I hope that Lee manages to recreate more of the feel of his late 1960s scripting than he did for The Last Fantastic Four Story, and that the panels missing from the pencils are filled in sympathetically. But am I feeling maudlin, or does this seem like another case of Stan Lee tidying up the loose ends before he takes his leave?

Cover picture taken from Comic Book Resources

Sod’s Law sub-clause 304(b)

2007-11-20T19:06:00.000Z

No sooner do I pontificate about mainstream book reviewers being interested in theme, plot and character, not technique, than John Mullan posts an article for The Guardian about how Alasdair Gray’s cover and illustrations for his own novel Lanark: A Life in Four Books illuminate his work (in more senses than one). A whipped dog, I shall growl only that it has taken twenty-six years since publication for the press to notice.

Curiously, my copy of Lanark, a 1987 Paladin paperback edition, has a completely different cover, also by Gray, and taken from the title page to Chapter 4. Perhaps the nude lady was too much for Paladin's editors. It obviously draws on the imagery of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, but it has been too long since I read the book for me to comment otherwise.

Review (of sorts): The Book of Other People

2007-11-19T21:14:00.001Z

The Book of Other People, edited by Zadie Smith, covers by Charles Burns, Hamish Hamilton, 2007
Features (alongside prose stories): “Justin M Damiano” by Daniel Clowes
“J Johnson: A Writing Life” by Nick Hornby and Posy Simmonds
“Jordan Wellington Lint to the Age 13” by Chris Ware
19 pages of comics, plus a 5-page illustrated story (out of 296 pages), £16.99

The Book of Other People is a collection of stories and descriptions of new fictional characters, complied by Zadie Smith (author of White Teeth) and sold in aid of Dave Eggers’s charity 826 NYC, which helps children to write. It contains a number of stories by current luminaries of Brit Lit and the McSweeney’s crowd (such as AL Kennedy, Adam Thirlwell, Eggers, Jonathan Lethem).

It also contains two comic strips and an illustrated account written by Nick Hornby and drawn by Posy Simmonds of the life of a writer, told through his books’ author bios and author pictures. This is neatly done and amusing, and only a little sad (true, he does end up ghosting non-books by talent show winners, but he seems to have a rich family life). Hornby steers him through career changes that are perhaps too sharp, but Simmonds superbly captures both the author's ageing and his changing attitudes.

Daniel Clowes’s “Justin M Damiano” is a typically acute but sour piece about a self-righteous self-appointed film critic, while Chris Ware’s “Jordan Wellington Lint” also stays well within its author’s usual emotional range – at the end which encompasses sadness and despair, rather than disgust and self-contempt.

Smith’s introduction draws no attention to any differences between these and the purely prose offerings of the other contributors. But although the theme of the book is “making people up”, there are no attempts to do this in other ways which could be reproduced in print: no poems, for example, or portraits, except for Charles Burns’s cover drawings. Similarly, an anthology called War Without End, published by the Stop the War Coalition and United for Peace and Justice, and which happened to be shelved near The Book of Other People at Blackwell’s bookshop, places non-fiction comics work by Joe Sacco alongside prose journalism (and nothing else) without comment.

This is of a piece with the tendency for newspapers to lump reviews of graphic novels in with the book, and particularly fiction, reviews. It is sometimes remarked upon that critics in these mainstream outlets rarely discuss the artwork in graphic novels, but, then again, they rarely discuss the effects of the use of language in prose fiction either. They dine on the three courses of theme, plot and character, leaving the critics of visual arts and poetry to gnaw on the use of image and word.

Is this a fair treatment? Are Clowes and Ware essentially doing the same things as prose writers? Reading “Justin M Damiano”, it is tempting to think so. Clowes gives us a portrait of self-deceiving self-absorption, delineated by a particular sequence of events. There are a couple of comics techniques here that could only be paralleled clumsily in prose – Clowes shows Damiano’s lack of attention to what others are saying by obscuring their speech balloons behind his captions, and makes a point about fantasy and memory by having Damiano cast a waitress who he has just seen as his ex-girlfriend in an imaginary movie. But on the whole, the same story could be told in prose with a minimum of adaptation.

Ware is something else again. He is not attempting anything straightforwardly mimetic. His abstracted, diagrammatic approach to baby Jordan’s earliest encounters with language, for example, surely bears little direct relation to the nature of a small child’s sensory experience or thought processes. And yet it lays bare the experience in a clear and strangely affecting way.

If this highly structured, evocative, yet non-literal approach has any close relation in the land of only-words, it is surely poetry, not prose (though it would be one hell of a job to translate from one medium to the other). And yet poetry lies outside The Book of Other People’s ambit, while Ware’s comics work does not.

One last note: this book is published in aid of a charity established by Dave Eggers, the man behind McSweeney’s. It was in an issue of McSweeney’s that Michael Chabon raised his standard against the dominance of “the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth, revelatory story”. But that is, on the whole, what The Book of Other People provides. Chabon is not among the contributors; nor are any of his collaborators on The Escapist comic books. I don’t recall that there was any poetry in them, either.

The Unread Thing

2007-11-19T21:07:00.000Z

I gather that The Book I Cannot Acquire includes a pastiche Cthulhu story in the style of PG Wodehouse.

This has, of course, been done before, in Scream for Jeeves by PH Cannon. Let Bully tell you all about it.

“The Standard Comic Sign …”

2007-11-16T23:27:00.000Z

Every Friday, the British newspaper The Independent runs a full page article about some work of art. This week, it’s the painting “The Big Night Down The Drain” by Georg Baselitz (pictured in a scan from the paper). Not coincidentally, the Indy is currently sponsoring a Baselitz exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

Tom Lubbock writes, “… the cartoony elements of the picture – the wanker’s big head, his tight little spot of a mouth, his tiny, upturned eyeballs (the standard comic sign of a masturbator in ecstasy) – all contribute to the feeling of low farce.”

Hold, on, there’s a standard comic sign of a masturbator in ecstasy?

You know, I really don’t want to check up on that proposition.

Doctor, Doctor

2007-11-15T21:37:00.000Z

On Friday night, BBC1 will broadcast “Time Crash”, a seven-minute Doctor Who episode, as part of the annual Children in Need charity telethon. The rest of the evening will no doubt be given over to the usual mix of showbiz backslapping and maudlin handwringing. But the Doctor Who episode is likely to be worth a watch and a donation: it is by Steven Moffat, who has written some of the very best episodes of the revived series: “The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances”, “The Girl in the Fireplace” and “Blink”. The hook is that Peter Davison will be reappearing as the fifth Doctor, alongside David Tennant’s tenth Doctor.

There’s something about charity appeals that brings multiple Doctors running. True, the last Doctor Who contribution to Children in Need, two years ago, was Tennant’s first solo outing. But back in 1983, “The Five Doctors” was broadcast as part of the appeal, and in 1993, the then-dead series was brought out of retirement for the night of Children in Need with the bizarre runaround “Dimensions in Time”, which was sunk under the weight of its gimmicks. Not only did every surviving Doctor appear (plus truly tasteless waxwork busts of William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton), but so did as many of the old supporting cast as could be found, and every monster suit that could be dredged up. And it was a crossover with the popular soap opera EastEnders. And it was filmed in a new 3-D technique that required constant horizontal motion across the scene. Little wonder it was rubbish. But it probably raised some money.

The BBC’s other regular telethon is Red Nose Day, held every two years for the charity Comic Relief. Doctor Who cropped up in 1999 with “The Curse of Fatal Death”, an extended spoof which achieved the rare double of being both funny and faithful to the original, largely because it, too, was written by Steven Moffat. And this one, agin, featured multiple Doctors – all-new ones, this time, played by Rowan Atkinson, Jim Broadbent, Richard E Grant, Hugh Grant and Joanna Lumley.

Appropriately enough, Comic Relief has occasionally spawned comics. In 1993, Fleetway published The Comic Relief Comic. This too featured multiple Doctors, in a two-page crossover with Dan Dare, drawn by John Ridgway, a long-term artist on the comic strip for Marvel UK’s Doctor Who Magazine.

But more than that, the amount of crossover and collaboration on this comic beggars belief. The next few paragraphs are simply lists, because I can think of no better way of getting across the scale and scope of the thing. Remember, this was all in sixty pages, including covers.

The plot was by Richard Curtis (of Four Weddings and a Funeral), Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison. The editors were Richard Curtis, Neil Gaiman and Peter Hogan.

The script was by (deep breath) Dan Abnett, Mike Collins, Richard Curtis, “the Dandy and Beano team”, Al Davison, Jamie Delano, Garth Ennis, Dick Foreman, John Freeman, Neil Gaiman, Melinda Gebbie, Bambos Georgiou, Dave Gibbons, Igor Goldkind, Lenny Henry. Peter K Hogan, Alan Martin, Mark Millar, Peter Milligan, Grant Morrison, Paul Neary, John Smith, Si Spencer and “the Viz team.

And then there were the artists: Jeff Anderson, Jim Baikie, Simon Bisley, Philip Bond, Robin Boutell, Dougie Braithwaite, Mark Buckingham, Dondi Cox, Steve Dillon, D’Israeli, Hunt Emerson, Phil Gascoigne, Melinda Gebbie, Dave Gibbons, Martin Griffiths, Jamie Hewlett, Graham Higgins, David Hine, Bernie Jay, Paul Johnson, Nigel Kitching, Barry Kitson, David Lloyd, Mike McKone, Steve Parkhouse, Edmund Perryman, Sean Phillips, Warren Pleece, Arthur Ranson, John Ridgway, Will Simpson, Bryan Talbot, “the Viz team”, Phil Winslade and Steve Yeowell.

Had enough yet? Tough, ‘cause here’s a list of the celebrities and characters featured (at least the ones I recognise): Roger Mellie, the Man on the Telly, Lenny Henry (as himself and as Theophilus P Wildebeeste), Jonathan Ross, Griff Rhys-Jones, Alfred Hitchcock, Charlie Drake, Edmund Blackadder, Judge Dredd, Dan Dare, Captain Britain, Desperate Dan, Bruce Forsyth, the Teenage Mutant “Something” Turtles, Michael Caine, Dawn French, Ben Elton, Cliff Richard (the singer, not the Buffy artist), Alf Garnett, Anneke Rice, Thunderbirds, Digby, the Mekon, Treens, the first seven Doctors, Ace, Leela, Susan, K9, Ice Warriors, Cybermen, Draconians, the “Rover’s Return” pub from Coronation Street, Dennis the Menace and Gnasher, the Bash Street Kids, Esther Rantzen, Noel Edmonds, Terry Fuckwitt, the Fat Slags, Sid the Sexist, Johnny Fartpants, Biffa Bacon and family, Spoilt Bastard, Buster Gonad, Billy the Fish, the Pathetic Sharks, Superman, the Hulk, Spider-Man, Wonder Woman, Doctor Strange, the Fantastic Four, Green Lantern (Hal Jordan and Guy Gardner), Thor, Daredevil, Swamp Thing, Captain America, Blue Beetle, Fire, Iron Man, Batman, the Silver Surfer, Wolverine, the Young Ones, the Spanish Inquisition (Monty Python version), Tommy Cooper, Benny Hill, Lurcio from Up Pompeii!, Sid James and Barbara Windsor, Mr Humphries, the cast of On the Buses (God help us!), Tony Hancock, Vic and Bob, Norman Wisdom, Morecambe and Wise, Basil Fawlty, Sybil Fawlty and Manuel, Dick Emery, Buster Keaton and WC Fields.

So, with all that, was it any good? Well … no, not really. Too many cooks, and too many ingredients make for an indigestible mess.

But, hey, like it says on the cover, “all proceeds to Comic Relief.” And it is certainly a curiosity.

There’s no statement about where the proceeds were to go from sales of this year’s Comic Relief tie-in, Beano Max Issue 1, and it’s tempting to conclude that publishers DC Thomson had cynically bought a license as an exercise in promoting the launch of their new comic, a monthly spin-off from the Beano. Notably, there is no collaboration with other comics publishers here. Jonathan Ross and various other BBC presenters appear, but the only fictional characters to be seen who are not owned by DC Thomson are Wallace and Gromit, who share a poster with Dennis the Menace and Gnasher, and, yet again, Doctor Who. In “The Invasion of Bash Street”, Class 2B is menaced by a Dalek teaching assistant. The Dalek is overcome when the kids force-feed it school dinners (bringing it out in red nose-shaped boils), and the Doctor drops by to pick it up.

Despite my suspicious grumbles, this is a much more enjoyable read than the Comic Relief Comic. It’s a good, solid, straightforward children’s humour comic with a few guest stars.

The lesson of all this? Even if it is for charity, keep it simple. Don’t go overboard on the crossovers.

Unless you’ve got Steven Moffat writing.

And now, a message from Amazon.com

2007-11-15T20:02:00.000Z

"Hello from Amazon.com.

We're writing about the order you placed on [details removed]
(Order# [details removed]). Unfortunately, the release date for the item(s) listed below has
changed, and we need to provide you with a new delivery estimate based on the new release date:

Alan Moore (Author), Kevin O'Neill (Illustrator) "The League of
Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier" [Hardcover]
Estimated arrival date: 12/03/2007 - 12/13/2007

We apologize for the inconvenience caused by this delay."

Got that? That book you all bought yesterday and have been reading and blogging about? It doesn't actually exist yet, according to Amazon.

The phrase "adding insult to injury" springs to mind.

Update, 17 November Still, things could be worse. Oh, hold on ...

Hello from Amazon.com.

Unfortunately, an unexpected delay from our supplier may prevent us from delivering some items in your order placed on [details removed] (Order# [details removed]) by December 24. Other items that may be in stock will still ship separately, with no increase in your total shipping charges.

Alan Moore (Author), Kevin O'Neill (Illustrator) "The League of
Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier" [Hardcover]
Estimated arrival date: 12/10/2007 - 12/28/2007

... Yes, they are worse.

Astonishing or Uncanny?

2007-11-13T19:16:00.000Z

I’ve noted before that Joss Whedon is giving a distinctly X-Men flavour to his Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 comics, but this cover to issue 11 is the most straightforwardly superheroic yet.

Leaping across urban rooftops?* They’ll all be in yellow spandex by the end of the series, you mark my words.

* Admittedly, that’s more like Batman than the X-Men. Is anyone up for All-Star Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Her Army of Girl Wonders?

Picture
Cover to Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 Issue 11 by Georges Jeanty, taken from the Dark Horse Comics February 2008 listing posted at Comic Book Resources

Highly Critical Language

2007-11-12T11:59:00.001Z

The latest “Everyone’s A Critic” column on Blog@Newsarama asks whether comics critics shy away from discussing art because of a lack of an art-critical vocabulary, and whether the language of comics criticism needs specialised terms of its own. Unfortunately, I cannot now get Blog@Newsarama to load, so here is what I had prepared for the comments section.

Is criticism of art in comics inhibited by ignorance of art-critical vocabulary? More likely, it reflects a lack of engagement with, and sensitivity to, drawing and colour. Much of the vocabulary of art criticism simply takes straightforward concepts and gives them an Italian label. If I write of Alex Toth’s chiaroscuro, or the challenge of inking Gene Colan’s sfumato pencils, I gain nothing over writing of Toth’s organisation of light and dark on the page, or of Colan’s hazily shaded pencilling. Of course, there are also many terms that have no direct use in comics criticism. There is not much call for discussions of the support or of the impasto of the paint.

Usually.

Colour theory is a little harder to express in concise English, but that is not, I think, why I tend to neglect colour when I write about comics: rather, I am not very sensitive to colour, and tend to have little interesting to say about it. But if I did witter on about “complementary colour” or somesuch, at least a hypothetical confused reader could look the term up in the dictionary and find a definition that applies precisely.

Dangers emerge when we borrow terms that do not make a perfect fit with comics, and either carry misleading overtones or change their meaning as a result. This is particularly true of the language of film criticism. If we talk about “camera angles”, we imply the existence of an objective mechanism recording something that already exists, which is, generally speaking, not a good description of a comics artist. If we talk about “cutting” and “panning”, we get tangled in the different relationships that cinema and comics have with time. For example, in a film, a pan must be a movement through both time and space. In a comic, a sequence of panels showing physically adjacent parts of a scene need not have any fixed chronological pattern.

Now, there are many comic books that seem to want to be second-rate impersonations of cinema – I have even seen “it looks like a storyboard” used as praise – but I doubt we can put the blame for that onto intellectual limitations fostered by an inappropriate and limited critical vocabulary. Limited ambition for, and understanding of, the medium, and abasement before the most pervasive and financially successful means of telling stories of our age, are much more likely culprits.

Do we need a comics-specific language of criticism? As suggested already on the Blog@ thread, we already have some terms, such as panel, gutter and word balloon. But if I were to start using entirely different terms – frame, space, speech container – it wouldn’t take long for an alert reader to catch on. It might, however, suggest to that reader that I was not be familiar with what I was writing about. But a specialist vocabulary is often used to exclude outsiders as much as to aid rapid communication among insiders, which does not seem to me to be desirable for a marginal and disreputable artform like comics. Our criticism should be accessible to outsiders, on the rare occasions that they encounter it.

I have yet to read Thierry Groensteen’s The System of Comics (it is in the queue behind a couple of huge books, Jenny Uglow’s biography of Hogarth and Vic Gatrell’s more general account of eighteenth-century English satire, so it may be a while before Groensteen gets his turn), but I am instinctively dubious of the need to indulge in a sudden orgy of neologism. If terms are needed, they will no doubt emerge, but it is surely better if they do so organically.

Having said that, I do sometimes wish for a term which, like “cinematic” or “poetic” suggests a medium which is making the most of its own resources. “Comic booky” is used to insult productions in other media by suggesting that they are silly, gaudy and shallow. But, then again, “prosaic” and “theatrical” are usually used as insults, and both prose and theatre manage to stumble on somehow.

Update, later that day: Added link to the original post, now that I can load Blog@Newsarama again.

Panels
The Critics by John Fardell, Viz, 2000, reprinted in Viz: The Bag of Slugs, IFG/Fulchester Industries, 2002

“Zzutak: The Thing that Shouldn’t Exist!!”, script by Stan Lee, art by Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, originally published in Fear issue 3, reprinted in Monster Masterworks, Marvel Comics, 1989

Review: Paris

2007-11-12T07:55:00.000Z

Paris, written by Andi Watson, drawn by Simon Gane, SLG Publishing, 2007, 128 pages, US$10.95

Juliet, an American art student in Paris in the 1950s, is hired to paint a portrait of Deborah, an English debutante. The two girls fall in love.

With a plot outline like that, you probably have a good idea of where this is going: either Juliet and Deborah will defy society, but end up living happily ever after, with Juliet recognised as an artistic genius; or they will defy society but be crushed by stifling bourgeois conformity, possibly with one of them dying. It all depends on whether the switch is set to “romance” or “tragedy”.

Actually, the story takes a rather different tack. Juliet’s portraits are not recognised as great art by anyone, and when she switches to the dominant American mode of abstract expressionism, that isn’t a great artistic success either, though it serves to reunite her with Deborah. Deborah, in turn, seems to acquiesce in an arranged marriage of convenience, which will leave both her and her husband free to pursue their own romantic interests. It seems to be a story of finding happiness through accommodation with an unsympathetic society, rather than through rebellion, which is a refreshing change. This point is, however, ambiguous: Deborah’s decision is not shown, and thereafter she is drawn with gloves, so that we cannot tell if she is wearing a ring. If you prefer the heights of romance, you can read the story as if she rejected the marriage and ran off to America to find Juliet. But that would be so much less interesting.

The main themes of the book are nicely anticipated by Watson and Gane in the opening sequence. Juliet walks through boulevards packed with mid-century Parisian clichés, all marked by sprays of small, sharp, pointed leaves.

Then we get our first sight of Deborah. She is wearing a bodice decorated with patterns of flowers with short, sharp, pointed petals, connecting her visually with the leaf motif we associate with Paris and Juliet. Her aunt then tells her to cover up her underclothes (and thus, to conceal her relationship-to-be).

A drawback of the book is that neither Juliet nor Deborah comes across as a strong, distinctive character. The supporting characters – Deborah’s ghastly traditionalist aunt and louche brother, Juliet’s bohemian friends – come across more powerfully: they are one-dimensional, but their single dimensions are clear and familiar.

But the strongest character is the one in the title: Paris itself, as limned by Gane’s quirky, blocky line. There are frequent splash pages in which Gane suppresses perspective, giving all the bustle and activity of the city equal status with the action of the lead characters. The lettering, too, reinforces the line and mood of the drawings.

So strong is the association of drawing style and location that it actually becomes something of a liability in the final chapter, in which Deborah returns to England and Juliet to America. Boxy, modern Manhattan, in particular, looks wrong laid out in the crooked lines of the Old World. But this is a small price for the visual pleasure provided by the book as a whole.

Wishing for a Better 'Ole, 2007

2007-11-11T09:43:00.000Z

Here is probably the best known cartoon of the Great War. (Click to enlarge.)

Here is its less well-known sequel, first published between the Armistice, 89 years ago today, and the signing of the Treaty of Versailles.

Less well-known; less funny; more desirable a reflection of reality.

Pictures
Fragments from France by Captain Bruce Bairnsfather, reprinted in The Best of Fragments from France, compiled and edited by Tonie & Valmai Holt, Phin Publishing, 1978
(Apologies for the slightly blurred second cartoon: a few pages in my copy of this book are printed off-register)

Short Attention Span

2007-11-06T18:58:00.000Z

This is a belated addition to the argument about whether or not trade paperback (or hardback) collections of comics series should be brought out hard on the heels of their original serialised publication. It was begun by Brian Hibbs, who worries that too prompt or certain a collection damages periodical sales. His position was opposed by, most clearly, Christopher Butcher, who does not think that potential sales of collections should be inhibited to artificially protect the periodicals.

Now, unlike Brian and Chris, who are both successful retailers, I have little knowledge of consumer behaviour. I only know my own, which may well be untypical. But I do know that I am much more likely to buy a collected edition of a series that is still fresh in my mind, whether or not I read it in serialised form. Leave it too long, and my attention will have wandered over to the latest shiny object.

Some confirmation that this is not too unusual comes from another medium. Over the weekend, there were two prestigious new feature-length productions broadcast on British television: on the BBC, the latest play by Stephen Poliakoff, Joe’s Palace; on ITV, a new adaptation of A Room with a View. DVDs of each were on sale in high street shops on Monday.

Prestigious or not, neither of these is likely to have been rushed out to beat the pirates, who have bigger, Hollywood, fish to fry. More probably, the marketing men have realised that their best option for maximising sales is to make the programmes readily available to those who saw the broadcasts and decided they’d like a copy to keep, and to those who missed them, but read about them in the next day’s newspapers, or heard about them from friends. Even a short delay, and they’d just be two more anonymous titles on the classic TV racks.

Nothing in comics is quite that immediate, though a lot of it is timebound. For example, it would be wise of DC to rush out a collection of the two-page origin strips from 52 and Countdown rapidly, while they are still current. Because, attractive as many of them are, there is no way I am buying the rest of Countdown in order to get them.

Panels
Spoilt Bastard, reprinted in Viz: The Bag of Slugs, IFG/Fulchester Enterprises, 2002

“Bang!” Goes Another Fifth of November

2007-11-05T21:30:00.000Z

As the whizzes, pops and bangs scare the seagulls on another Bonfire night, either celebrating or lamenting Guy Fawkes’ failure to blow up the King and Parliament*, here are some panels that have probably popped up on more than one blog today. I’m sorry to break up the layout, but they are, at least, in gloriously stark black and white, as artist David Lloyd intended.

That the clock tower apparently blows up in silence, and that the fireworks are accompanied by no whizzes, pops or bangs, is a reminder of another of Lloyd’s intentions. As he put it when interviewed for the Comics Britannia TV series:

”The idea of getting rid of thought balloons and sound effects was motivated by me wanting to get people to read comics who didn’t normally read comics, because one of the things that often puts people off is the “Bam! Pow! Zap!’ stuff. Everybody knows that when a gun goes off it goes ‘Bang!’, so you don’t actually need to tell them, not if they’re intelligent adults. And thought balloons were a kind of artificiality that you don’t get in any other kind of entertainment.”

We’ll leave aside for the moment the question of whether people who don’t normally read comics were ever likely to pick up Warrior issue 1, with its gaudy cartoon cover. In the longer run, many such people probably have read the collected paperback V for Vendetta.

We’ll also leave aside the dismissal of thought balloons, save to note that novels also frequently recount their characters’ thoughts, and that many a dramatist or screenwriter who has had to resort to soliloquy or voiceover must have envied comics having so neat a device to let readers into their protagonists’ heads.

For the moment. let’s stick with sound effects. Lloyd’s collaborator on V for Vendetta, Alan Moore, carried the aesthetic of omitting thought balloons and sound effects forward into Watchmen, one of the two comics most influential on subsequent anglophone adventure stories. The abolition of thought balloons proved to be a very successful meme, partly because Moore, and Frank Miller in The Dark Knight Returns, simultaneously provided an alternative: the first-person narrative caption box. But sound effects have proved harder to eradicate, even though, as Lloyd notes, they are at the heart of the easy mockery sub-editors pour into every mainstream headline about comics. Why?

In part, it is because Lloyd is surely wrong about sound effects being unnecessary. What if that gun went off in the next room or was hidden inside a bag? What if the point the cartoonist wanted to convey was how loud (or how soft) it sounded to the characters? What if what is being shown in the pictures is not a familiar action? Nothing is as simple and effective as writing down the sound, and it is, on the face of it, no more artificial than writing down in a word balloon the sounds the humans are making.

And yet, sound effects often do seem silly. We tend to blame memories of the 1960s Batman TV series for the derision heaped on “the ‘Bam! Pow! Zap!’ stuff”. Yet there was a reason why the TV producers singled out sound effects for the on-screen treatment. After all, they didn’t put up intertitles to display Adam West’s dialogue in word balloons. The reason, I think, is that onomatopoeia is naturally funny. Consider how much less amusing it would be if Thurber’s references to Walter Mitty’s “ta-poketta-poketta” were all replacing by descriptions of a jerky, rhythmic sound instead.

So we seem to be at an impasse. Sound effects are often needed, but may be inherently risible. I wonder, though, if some clues to a way out could be presented by manga?

Manga, as presented in the USA, are often published in a half-translated form. The aspect of this most remarked upon is that they generally retain an orientation that requires reading the page from right to left. But it is also common practice to leave sound effects in situ but untranslated.

The effect, at least to a non-reader of Japanese, is that the panel alerts the reader to the fact that a sound is being made, but leaves us to decide for ourselves what that sound is. This can be remarkably effective (your idea of how the sound of a zipper or an approaching train should best be rendered probably differs from mine – here we can each interpolate our ideal), and though it lacks specificity, it avoids the onomatopoeia trap. I’m not suggesting that anglophone cartoonists should letter their sound effects in Japanese, but perhaps some literally non-literal approaches might be suggested by the manga effect.

Anyway, the whizzes, pops and bangs have now died down outside my window, so I’ll take advantage of lack of sound effects to get some sleep.

* For a reminder of what Robert Catesby and his stooge, the real Guy Fawkes, were trying to do to the Palace of Westminster, click here.

Panels
V for Vendetta Chapter 1 “The Villain” by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, Warrior Issue 1, Quality Communications, March 1982 (Cover: Laser Eraser and Pressbutton drawn by Steve Dillon)

The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service Volume 3 by Eiji Otsuka (story) and Housui Yamazaki (art), English-language edition published by Dark Horse Comics, 2007

More about The DFC

2007-11-03T16:18:00.000Z

I had forgotten, when I posted about The Guardian's comic section strip Robot Girl being a feature of an upcoming comic called The DFC, that Rich Johnston had posted about it in Lying in the Gutters back in September:

"David Fickling Books, publishers of Lyra's Oxford, are publishing a new anthology comic. Called The DFC, it will be subscription only and feature a mix of genres. One named is Robot Girl, another is by His Dark Materials' Phillip Pullman."

A bit more poking around turned up this thread on the Google Group "Graphic novels in libraries UK", about a presentation David Fickling gave in July about his plans. The main additional information is that political cartoonist and children's book illustrator Chris Riddell is also a contributor.

Which leaves one more question.

Is it really a good idea for David Ficking Books to use stylised male genitalia as a logo?

The First Hundred Years are the Hardest

2007-11-02T19:28:00.001Z

Happy 80th birthday, Steve Ditko!

Panels
From a story reprinted without title or credits in Doctor Who Weekly issue 39, Marvel UK, 1980, art by Steve Ditko

Miss What?!?

2007-11-02T19:06:00.000Z

How on Earth did this get published in a comic for small children?

Panel
Blinky’s Mad Movies “King Kong”, art by Nick Brennan, The Dandy Annual 2007, DC Thomson, 2006 (yes, I’m a year late in noticing)

An Excuse for an Otherwise Gratuitous Picture

2007-11-01T21:34:00.000Z

News from Variety, by way of Blog@Newsarama: Joss Whedon is working on the scripts for Dollhouse, a seven-part TV series starring Eliza Dushku, due to be broadcast by Fox TV next year.

It’s good to see that Whedon can still get paid employment in Hollywood. But the last time he tried to combine running a TV show with writing comics, we got gaps of up to thirteen months between issues of his Fray mini-series. Let’s hope that Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 is not similarly affected.

Picture
Cover by Jo Chen to Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 issue 9, showing Eliza Dushku as Faith

Hallowe’en

2007-10-31T20:15:00.001Z

From ghosties

and ghoulies

and long-leggedy beasties

and things that go bump in the night

good Lord protect us.

(First published by Walter de la Mare as an old Scottish prayer in Come Hither, 1923)

Panels
My Dead Girlfriend Volume 1 “A Tryst of Fate” by Eric Wight, Tokyopop, 2006

Buster Gonad and his Unfeasibly Large Testicles, art by Simon Donald, I think, reprinted in Viz: The Sausage Sandwich, John Brown Publishing, 1991

Daredevil “Stilts” by Frank Miller (scripter/storyteller), Klaus Janson (penciller/inker/colourist), Sam Rosen (letterer) and Dennis O’Neil (editor), Daredevil issue 186, September 1982, reprinted in Daredevil Visionaries: Frank Miller Volume 3, Marvel Comics, 2001

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume 2 by Alan Moore (writer), Kevin O’Neill (artist), Ben Dimagmaliw (colourist), Todd Klein (letterer) and Scott Dunbier (editor), America’s Best Comics, 2002-2003

Review: Eduardo Risso’s Tales of Terror

2007-10-31T06:55:00.000Z

Eduardo Risso’s Tales of Terror
Features eleven stories written by Carlos Trillo, art by Eduardo Risso, translation by Maria Barrucci, lettering by Jason Ullmeyer, no original publication details given, Dynamite Entertainment, 2007, 154 pages of comics, US$14.99

At first, it seems unfair to put only Eduardo Risso’s name above the title, as every one of these stories is written by his frequent Argentine collaborator Carlos Trillo. But then again, it is probably not the stories themselves that will lead anyone to buy this book. They are efficient little shockers, of the school of EC Comics, with ironic O Henry twist endings, but without EC’s air of moral retribution. Most of the characters are pretty nasty, and many of the set-ups are clichéd (a marriage between a vampire and a werewolf, for example). The most affecting tale concerns a mummy’s boy forced by his mother into becoming a torturer’s assistant – and I’m sure you’ve already guessed who he will end up having to torture.

No, it is Risso’s art that provides the best reason for buying this book. It is an art that thrives on the tension between fluid shapes and precise delineation, between fine line and solid shadow. When Risso draws a wobbly line, we know that it shows not uncertainty, but the clear edge of a wobbly shape. The composition contains the same dynamic pull. Sometimes, Risso uses a simple grid, but the panels are out of balance, their contrasts of dark and light, weight and emptiness spinning the reader giddily across the page. More often, the panels float more freely, but they are always perfect rectangles, anchoring the moment.

All of this benefits enormously from being reproduced in crisp, unadorned black and white. Something of the strength of Risso’s draughtsmanship is diluted in the colours of 100 Bullets or Batman. But here, he can show his mastery of chiaroscuro, with displays such as this page, on which an invisible woman performs a striptease.

So perhaps calling it Eduardo Risso’s Tales of Terror is only fair after all.

Reading the Reads

2007-10-30T18:37:00.000Z

There seems to be an opinion at large – evident in the comments section of Heidi MacDonald’s infamous “whither storytelling?” post at The Beat - that anglophone comics are split into the polar opposites of superheroes and autobiographical art comics. But looking at the list of the ten most recent comics I’d read which I posted yesterday, I see that none of them falls into either category (except possibly Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD, depending on how you define “superhero”). The dominant genre, if there is one, is social comedy.

As it happens, that list was atypically light on periodicals. If I expand the list to include the floppies I bought and read last week, that adds one fully fledged superhero title (X-Men First Class), but also horror (Hellblazer), TV sci-fi spin-off (Doctor Who Adventures), rude adult comedy (Viz) and satire (the comic strips in Private Eye).

Limp conclusions? First, that there’s a wide diversity of comics material available, even if it doesn’t always get the sales or recognition it deserves (though Doctor Who Adventures and Viz are, I think, in first and third places in the UK comics sales charts). Second, that I’m lucky, at least from a comics-reading perspective, to live in the UK, where I can get almost everything published in North America and domestic products as well. Third, that I buy far too many comics.

Panel
Posy Simmonds True Love, Jonathan Cape, 1981

Recent Reads

2007-10-29T22:50:00.000Z

Once again, I’m going to use a subject suggested by Tom Spurgeon’s Five on Friday feature as an excuse to throw together a random mix of observations, each too inconsequential for a post in its own right. Plum pudding or mess of potage? You decide.

I’m going to expand the theme of “the last five comics you read, good or bad” to the last ten.

10. Posy Simmonds True Love
Eddie Campbell blogged about this book and wrote, “In a better world, you'd read my affectionate recollection and immediately go out and buy a copy.”

I’d like to think I’m making the world a little better.

9. Jules Feiffer Jules Feiffer’s America: From Eisenhower to Reagan
I have long underestimated Feiffer as a draughtsman. Based on my memories of reading his Village Voice strips (published over here by The Observer), I had categorised him alongside Thurber as a writer who also drew a bit, rather than as a cartoonist. But there is some very fine drawing and cartooning here, with solid and effective composition and a particular understanding of the uses of repetition. Feiffer gets a remarkable amount of weight out of his nervous lines, particularly in his gnarled caricatures.

8. Andi Watson Glister Issue 2: “House Hunting”
Somehow, when I reviewed the first issue of Watson’s charming children’s fantasy, I failed to notice how reminiscent his drawings were of the work of the classic children’s illustrator Edward Ardizzone, especially in the quality of line. So I’ll mention that here instead.

7. Ilya (ed) The Mammoth Book of Best New Manga Volume 2
Sadly, I am coming to the conclusion that I don’t really like the most obvious elements of manga – the pacing, the melodramatic “acting” of the characters, the graphic devices used to convey emotion, and, above all, the ubiquity of pointy-faced goggle-eyed androgynes. There are manga that I do enjoy a lot (Lone Wolf and Cub, Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, Ranma 1/2), but that is probably despite their common stylistic ticks, rather than because of them. Volume 2 in Constable & Robinson’s series is, on the whole, more faithful to the surface elements of clichéd manga style than Volume 1, and I found less to enjoy in it. It is probably no coincidence that by far my favourite comic strip here is Laura Howell’s The Bizarre Adventures of Gilbert & Sullivan, which may render its characters in a style somewhere pitched between chibi and Rumiko Takahashi, but which does so on top of a structure that is pure Leo Baxendale.

6. Rick Veitch Army@Love Volume 1 The Hot Zone Club
There are some good satirical side-swipes here, and a solid handling of narrative. But just as a million and one books, films and comics about the Vietnam war pay no attention to the Vietnamese, Army@Love treats America’s wars in the Middle East as being entirely about Americans. The natives of the fictional country of Afbaghistan appear only as targets and set decoration, except for a small family whose supporting role is to disrupt the marriage between two more important (because American) characters. There’s a huge flaw in the central conceit of the comic: the army is using a hedonistic lifestyle as a recruitment tool, but it is also trying to keep it secret. How do you use a secret in your recruitment ads? But look at this panel which addresses the desire for secrecy.

The implied belief – which may be the character’s, but which may also be Veitch’s own – is that what was shocking about Abu Ghraib was the embarrassment caused by the lack of self-control among Americans, not the torture and humiliation suffered by the Iraqi prisoners. There’s a difference, and its an important one.

5. Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, John Severin, Jim Steranko and others Marvel Masterworks: Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD Volume 1

4. John Aggs Robot Girl

3. The Beano Issue 3404
Something of a relaunch, with a higher price, all of 99p, a Dennis the Menace strip that ends on a cliffhanger, and two new series: London B4 12 (is that a pun on the lost Lon Chaney silent horror movie London After Midnight, and if so, how many 11-year olds will get it?) and Tales of Johnny Bean from Happy Bunny Green, which uses twee stylings, including the return of the libretto, recounting the whole story in narrative captions, to tell a tale of juvenile delinquency. The art is by the versatile Laura Howell, looking quite different here from her manga. She also provides inks to Hunt Emerson’s pencils for Ratz.

The inside front page provides quite a break from publisher DC Thomson’s tradition of leaving the comics’ creators in anonymity: it lists “top stories” (six out of fifteen this issue) and actually credits the artists. That leaves nine strips uncredited, and the writers’ names are still nowhere to be seen, but at least it’s a step out of the nineteenth century.

2. Scott Adams Dilbert
The first book I ever read about cartooning was The Cartoon Connection by William Hewison, then art editor of Punch. He came up with several categories of cartoon humour, one of which was “Recognition Humour: Recognition Humour at its most humble is straightforward reportage heightened very slightly by a dash of theatricality; here the cartoonist plucks at our sleeve and points to an ordinary everyday event, and as we are looking he flashes a beam of torchlight at it. The edges become sharper, the shadows darker, the action a little more exaggerated – we see that this very familiar thing is suddenly more significant.” Most days, Dilbert shines that torch with precision. (On the other days, it goes to Elbonia.)

1. Andy Riley Roasted

Sometimes Wishes Come True

2007-10-29T07:00:00.000Z

Reviewing The Mammoth Book of Best War Comics, I wrote, “Perhaps we can hope for a Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics or Horror Comics or Romance Comics...”

The introduction to The Mammoth Book of Best New Manga Volume 2 says, “Joining Best New Manga on the shelves is War Comics, Horror Comics and very soon Crime Comics: all of them thick as a brick with tons to read.”

The tense suggests that The Mammoth Book of Best Horror Comics should be out already, in time for Hallowe’en, but Constable & Robinson’s ad in The Bookseller gives a release date of 24 January 2008 (with Crime Comics following in June). But so long as the nights are still long and dark, I’m not complaining.

The blurb at Amazon.co.uk - I take no responsibility for its accuracy - says, “In over 500 pages, this book collects the finest tales of terror from the past sixty years of comic book publishing. It encompasses all eras of the genre, from the 'weird menace' horror of the perennially popular 1950s pre-Code comics published by EC, to the dark modern gems of the 90s and 2000s. Discover the tales that drove the American youth of the 1950s into a frenzy and resulted in legislation to put an end to their gruesome content - the pre-Code comic book macabre that was Dark Mysteries, Chamber of Chills, Weird Terror and Journey into Fear. Contributors from these early years include Bernie Wrightson, master adapter of Lovecraft, Mary Shelley and Stephen King; Mike Kaluta, the man behind The Shadow, Metropolis, and The Spawn of Frankenstein; and Rudy Palais, the EC artist responsible for such twisted works as Marching Zombies. Modern contributions include Pete Von Scholly's The Graveswellers (the man behind The Shawshank Redemption, The Mask, and The Green Mile), David Hitchcock's self-published Immortal - A Vampire Tale (creator of the Jack the Ripper comic Whitechapel Freak), Thomas Ott's G.O.D. from Greetings from Hellville (acclaimed Swiss noir artist), L” – yes, it breaks off suddenly at the initial letter L, presumably interrupted fatally by some shambling thing from beyond …

Pictures
Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics cover by José Muñoz taken from The Bookseller

Mammoth Book of Best Horror Comics Cover taken from the Constable & Robinson web-site

Review: Marvel Masterworks – Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD

2007-10-28T21:22:00.000Z

Marvel Masterworks: Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD, Volume 1
Features:
Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD “The Man for the Job!” by Stan Lee (writer), Jack Kirby (artist), Dick Ayers (inks), Artie Simek (letters)
Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD “Find Fury or Die!” by Stan Lee (script), Jack Kirby (layouts), John Severin (art), Artie Simek (letters)
Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD “The Prize Is … Earth!” by Stan Lee (story), Jack Kirby (layouts), John Severin (art), Artie Simek (letters)
Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD “Sometimes the Good Guys Lose!” by Stan Lee (writer), Jack Kirby (layouts), John Severin (art), Sam Rosen (letters)
Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD “The Brave Die Hard!” by Stan Lee (writer), Jack Kirby (layouts), Joe Sinnott (art), Artie Simek (letters)
Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD “The End of Hydra!” by Stan Lee (story), Jack Kirby (layouts), Don Heck (pencils), Joe Sinnott (inks), Artie Simek (letters)
Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD “Operation: Brain Blast!” by Stan Lee (writer), Jack Kirby (art), Frank Ray (inks), Sam Rosen (letters)
Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD “Who Strikes at – SHIELD?” by Stan Lee (writer), Jack Kirby (pencils), Mike Demeo (inks), Artie Simek (letters)
Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD “To Free a Brain Slave” by Stan Lee (story), Jack Kirby assisted by Howard Purcell (art), Mike Demeo (inks), Artie Simek (letters)
Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD “The Day of the Druid!” by Stan Lee (writer), Jack Kirby (designer) Howard Purcell (pencils), Mike Demeo (inks), Sam Rosen (letters)
Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD “Lo! The Eggs Shall Hatch!” by Stan Lee (writer), Jack Kirby (designer) Don Heck (pencils), Mike Demeo (inks), Sam Rosen (letters)
Captain America “Them!” by Stan Lee (words), Jack Kirby (art), Frank Giacoia (inks), Artie Simek (letters)
Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD “When the Unliving Strike!” by Stan Lee (script), Jack Kirby (layouts) Don Heck (pencils), Mike Demeo (inks), Sam Rosen (letters)
Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD “The Enemy Within!” by Stan Lee (script), Jack Kirby (layouts) Don Heck (pencils), Mike Demeo (inks), Sam Rosen (letters)
Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD “Death Before Dishonor!” by Jack Kirby (script and layouts) Don Heck (pencils and inks), Sam Rosen (letters)
Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD “The End of AIM!” by Jack Kirby (layouts), Denny O’Neil (script), Ogden Whitney (art), Artie Simek (letters), Stan Lee (editor)
Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD “Hydra Lives!” by Stan Lee (script), Jack Kirby (layouts) John Buscema (pencils), Frank Giacoia (inks), Sam Rosen (letters)
Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD “Overkill!” by Stan Lee (script), Jack Kirby (layouts) Jim Steranko (art), Sam Rosen (letters)
Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD “The Power of SHIELD!” by Stan Lee (script), Jack Kirby (layouts) Jim Steranko (art), Sam Rosen (letters)
Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD “The Hiding Place!” by Roy Thomas (script), Jack Kirby (layouts) Jim Steranko (art), Sam Rosen (letters), Stan Lee (editor)
Fantastic Four “The Hate-Monger!” by Stan Lee (writer), Jack Kirby (artist), George Bell (inker), Artie Simek (letterer)
reprinted from Fantastic Four issue 21 (1963), Tales of Suspense issue 78 (1966) and Strange Tales issues 135-53 (1965-1967), 281 pages of comics (including cover reprints), Marvel Comics, 2007, US$54.99

That’s a huge and cumbersome contents listing, but the credits bring home two things: first, that Nick Fury went through a widely fluctuating set of artists in its first two years, and, second, that Jack Kirby never gave up on it, always proving layouts, sometimes providing full pencils, and once even providing the script (in a reasonable pastiche of Stan Lee’s style, rather than the fractured dignity of his scripting and text pieces of the 1970s). Kirby had been happy enough to pass the parent series Sgt Fury and His Howling Commandos over to other artists, just as he had done with so many others. Was there something in SHIELD that he wanted to nurture? As things turned out, he hung on until the most worthy of his replacements on any of his series was available.

Colonel Fury the spy was introduced as a CIA agent in the Fantastic Four issue for November 1963, two months after OSS agent Reed Richards had cropped up in Sgt Fury. That story appears at the end of this volume, though it is omitted from the index. At this stage, Fury has two eyes and no gadgets. It’s tempting to see this version as a response to Connery-era Bond, while most of the volume takes its cue from the slightly wilder tone of The Man from UNCLE, and Steranko is, by the end, just starting to nudge in aspects of his exercise in style which we can see as a response not just to pop-art and op-art, but to The Avengers. That’s The Avengers where the long hair is worn by Mrs Peel, not by the Mighty Thor, of course.

Steranko’s version is what dominates our image of SHIELD nowadays, but this volume kicks off with a very different look, with the solidly realistic draughtsmanship and lush but controlled linework of John Severin as the first artist to work over Kirby’s layouts. Fury, Tony Stark, Dugan and their cohorts never looked more at ease in ordinary street clothes and on ordinary streets. But Severin only lasted three issues, and the rotating teams of artists who succeeded him never managed to give the strips a character of their own.

The stories floundered too. After a strong start with SHIELD’s initial confrontation with Hydra, things just got silly. Exuberantly daft inventiveness can be one of the glories of comics, but it is harder than it looks. When subterranean druids start attacking their enemies with flying mechanical eggs, the result is as clunkingly unamusing as a fourth series Monty Python sketch. Things perk up a little with the AIM plotline, but it is uncomfortably close to a rerun of the initial Hydra story.

Steranko turns up for the last three stories here, but is constrained by working over Kirby’s layouts and to scripts by Stan Lee and Roy Thomas. With the next issue, Kirby would be gone and Steranko would take over plots and layouts and, soon after, scripts, turning Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD into one of the most distinctive and memorable pieces of entertainment of its times. But that’s a story for subsequent volumes.

Reproduction in this volume seems fine, crisp and clear. Colouring uses flat tones. I don’t know how faithful they are to the original colour guides, but certainly the Steranko issues look more consistent and coherent than they did under the rather overwhelming modelled computer colour of the 2000 reprint volume of his Strange Tales run. Marvel is to be commended for including not just the Fantastic Four Fury story, but also the Captain America crossover which forms part of the AIM storyline.

Unexpected Comics: The Observer

2007-10-28T13:17:00.000Z

Just a quick note, while it’s still on sale, to point out that the magazine section of today’s edition of The Observer contains a four-page comics story spun off from the regular single-tier strip Roasted by Andy Riley.

I couldn’t find it on The Observer website, but, then again, I can never find anything on The Observer website.

Panels
Roasted “Markings” by Andy Riley, The Observer Magazine, 28 October 2007

Happy Birthday, Leo Baxendale

2007-10-27T22:14:00.000+01:00

I’d have missed this, if it wasn’t for the Comics Reporter: today is the 77th birthday of Leo Baxendale, the brilliant and influential comics artist who created (among others) Little Plum, The Three Bears, Minnie the Minx, the Bash Street Kids, Grimly Feendish, the Badtime Bedtime Books and Baby Basil, which was another of The Guardian’s forays into comic strips. Together with writers whose names I still don’t know, Baxendale was responsible in one way or another for getting on for a quarter of all the reasons I started reading comics in the first place.

So, happy birthday, Mr Baxendale! This blog is largely your fault!

Panel
Minnie the Minx, art by Leo Baxendale, The Beano, 1950s, reprinted in Dandy and Beano: Famous Faces from the Comics, DC Thomson, 1992

The Guardian’s The Comic

2007-10-27T16:18:00.000+01:00

Now this looks promising: a new comics section in The Guardian, the UK national newspaper that regularly employs such luminaries as Posy Simmonds, Steve Bell and Martin Rowson (and, less regularly, a range of interesting cartoonists from Biff to Tom Gauld), and whose sister Sunday paper, The Observer sponsored the Comica short story competition alongside Britain’s leading mainstream graphic novel publisher, Jonathan Cape. Of course, below the fold, the front-page blurb explains that “The Comic” is intended for kids, but even so, that’s a good track record.

What you actually get is the single centre sheet of The Guardian’s “Family” section, folded twice to make eight half-tabloid pages. Five of those pages are used for competitions and other child-friendly filler. The remaining three pages contain a comic strip, Robot Girl versus the Universe! episode 1, by John Aggs. It is drawn in an anime-inspired style - and yes, I do mean “anime”, not “manga”: it looks like a series of screenshots. It tells of a United Earth spaceship being overrun by Robot Girl’s robots – and yes, again, I mean “tells”, because we see almost none of this: most panels just show the bridge crew shouting things like “We’re under attack,” or “The shields are failing.” We don’t see the robots overrunning the ship at all. Actually, it’s a little difficult to make out even the spaceship or the bridge crew, as the colour work is too dark and over-rendered for newsprint, and everything comes out muddy (I’ve punched up the brightness and contrast for the panel below). It looks a lot clearer as a series of PDFs at The Guardian Unlimited website, which I found after I'd done the scans.

Overall, quite The Disappointment

Update, later that day Lew Stringer reports that Robot Girl will be part of The DFC, "a new weekly anthology comic coming soon" - now, that's a phrase you don't see too often these days.

Panel
Robot Girl versus the Universe! episode 1 by John Aggs, The Guardian 27 October 2007, “The Comic” section

Something in their Form that Dooms them

2007-10-23T18:20:00.000+01:00

Douglas Wolk’s book Reading Comics: How graphic novels work and what they mean was reviewed in brief in the Times Literary Supplement last week by Jon Barnes, a novelist. Here’s an extract.

“Despite the medium’s burgeoning seriousness and respectability, it has a quality which seems to lend itself to colourful heroics, something innate in the form that persuades it to return to caped melodrama.”

“A quality … something innate”. Not very rigorous analytically, is it? It is a singularly odd innate “something” that fails to persuade capes to manifest in comics in Britain, France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Mexico, and Argentina. Indeed, it seems to be a “quality” only of comics from the United States of America. One might even think it was a product of some historical contingency, such as, to pick an example entirely at random, a self-censoring Comics Code that neutered all genres other than superheroics. But that is far too concrete. Let us fall back upon airy metaphysics instead.

Now, I won’t deny that comics is a medium that does lend itself to colourful heroics, but it has that in common with, oooh, every other narrative medium and quite a few non-narrative ones too. Better, perhaps, to conclude that colourful heroics have a quality that appeals to the human imagination, sometimes.

I wonder if, had he been given a book to review that drew largely on examples from British comics, Barnes would have concluded that there was something innate in the form that persuades it to return to monochrome slapstick?

I expect better than this from the TLS.

Panel
Lewis Trondheim demonstrates something innate in the form that makes it return to black and white autobiographical meditations using funny animal tropes, while discussing artists whose work can rarely be described as colourful heroics, “At Loose Ends” part 1, Mome issue 6, Winter 2006-07. Original French edition 2004, I think.

Nearly Men

2007-10-22T07:30:00.000+01:00

As usual, I was way too late to contribute anything to Tom Spurgeon’s call to "Name Five Near-Versions of a Character You Like, At Least a Little Bit" for his “Five for Friday” feature at The Comics Reporter. His original list (Wonder Tot, Bizarro, Calvin’s Clones, Gaard and Captain Marvel’s Squadron of Justice – Fat Marvel, Tall Marvel and Hill(billy) Marvel) is here, and responses of nimbler folk in the Blogosphere are here.

Some comics creators love this sort of stuff. Consider Grant Morrison, who gave us Acid Archie, the loved-up version of Lion comic’s stalwart Robot Archie, a mundane set of New Gods (subsequently ignored by DC Comics like the rest of his work on Seven Soldiers except, curiously, his new version of Klarion the witch-boy), and these guys, who featured in just a few panels of Animal Man, but who have always stuck in my mind.

Who needs a Justice League when you can have a Love Syndicate?

Then there’s Alan Moore, with his multiple versions of Tom Strong and Supreme, and a whole multi-verse full of analogues of Captain Britain. One of those even got his own spin-off strip in Mad Dog, a special issue of the 1980s ‘zine Dogma. Meet the hero of Oceania, Captain Airstrip One, in a story largely written in Newspeak.

Paul Grist is another serial offender. It seems that every other character in Jack Staff has an analogue in old British comics or TV. Or, in this case, a comics writer with a fondness for creating multiple near-versions of his characters.

Did it just get recursive in here?

(Yes, I know that’s only three. I missed the train, so why worry about the terms of the ticket?)

Panels
Animal Man “Crisis” by Grant Morrison (writer), Chas Truog and Doug Hazlewood (artists), John Constanza (letterer), Tatjana Wood (colourist) and Karen Berger (editor), Animal Man issue 23, DC Comics, May 1990

Captain Airstrip One by Alan Moore (writer), Chris Brasted (pencils), SMS (inks), SMS, Quill and Simon Meacock (letters), Dogma 10: Mad Dog, Oddmags, 1985

Jack Staff volume 2 issue 10 by Paul Grist (writer/artist) and Craig Conlan (colours), Image Comics, May 2006

Flogging a Horse that is Not So Much Dead as Absent Altogether

2007-10-21T20:31:00.000+01:00

Coincidence strikes. No sooner do I make one (erroneous) post about comic strips in Playboy that I find this when sitting down with a copy of Jules Feiffer’s America - From Eisenhower To Reagan (edited by Steven Heller, Alfred A Knopf, 1982):

"In 1958, my first collection of cartoons was published, on the basis of which Hugh Hefner offered me $500 a month to draw for Playboy. Since the [Village] Voice still did not pay contributors, it was the first regular money I made doing the work I cared about. My attitude was often non-Playboy or anti-Playboy. Rather than object, Hefner suggested ways of making my points stronger. In addition to his better-known qualities, he was a wonderful cartoon editor, the best I’ve ever had."

That last encomium seems all the more remarkable when we remember that Feiffer’s very first “cartoon editor”, back when he was working on Clifford for The Spirit Section, would have been Will Eisner. But, then again, I assume that Feiffer would have been paid for Clifford and his Spirit scripts, so this may just be a case of conveniently ignoring a professional pre-history which wouldn’t fit with the marketing of Jules Feiffer’s America as a 25th anniversary volume. Or maybe Hefner really was a better cartoon editor than Eisner. Perhaps he could have had a second career at the Kubert school of cartooning if the whole porn-mag-and-men’s-clubs empire had failed.

Hey Look What Isn’t There

2007-10-21T10:14:00.001+01:00

The other day, I picked up a copy of Harvey Kurtzman’s autobiography, My Life as a Cartoonist.

It’s a small, slim book with a few notes about his working techniques and an account of his life and career that puts a positive face on everything and skates over the difficult bits, such as the reasons for his departure from Mad.

And it doesn’t mention Little Annie Fanny at all.

Now, My Life as a Cartoonist was published in 1988, by which time Kurtzman had been working on his contribution to the “undressed girl as Candide” genre for a couple of decades. How long exactly? I decided to check the Wikipedia entry on Harvey Kurtzman.

And it doesn’t mention Little Annie Fanny at all.

(Update, later that day: Yes, it does, in the opening section. Let this post stand as a monument to my sloppy reading. My apologies to Wikipedia and its authors.)

Fortunately, there is a separate Wikipedia entry on Little Annie Fanny itself, which confirmed that I hadn’t dreamed up Kurtzman’s strip, and both Lambiek and Denis Kitchen’s web-site were more thorough. Kurtzman had produced Little Annie Fanny for Playboy for even longer than I had thought, from 1962 to 1988. It was, by far, the longest cartooning gig of his career.

So why the reticence?

It may be that the wiki-author was embarrassed that his artistic hero had laboured so long on a girly strip for a porn magazine. Mr Wiki also seems to set great stall by the Comics Journal’s collective opinion of Kurtzman (his five strips in their top 100 of the twentieth century are cited with pride). Perhaps the fact that Kurtzman chose to break with the Journal-approved practice of working as a lone cartoonist at his drawing board, instead setting up a studio to produce Little Annie Fanny, also puts it beyond the pale.

It shouldn’t. The finished Little Annie Fanny may have been the work of many hands, and the fingerprints of, say, Will Elder can be seen in the modelling, or Jack Davis in the caricature, but the storytelling, pacing, rapid-fire gag cracking, layout and movement are all pure Kurtzman. Aesthetically, it’s as much his as any Hey Look strip, and probably more so than some of his EC work.

It’s harder to think why Kurtzman himself should have been quiet. He was certainly happy to talk to Will Eisner at length about his working methods on Little Annie Fanny in an interview in 1981. Perhaps he intended his autobiography for a family audience and didn’t think that Little Annie Fanny was an appropriate subject. Or perhaps it is more than a coincidence that My Life as a Cartoonist came out in the same year that Little Annie Fanny ended. The strip-specific Wikipedia entry says that “Kurtzman ended the strip in 1988 when he felt he had run out of story material,” but perhaps there were some more awkward circumstances that Kurtzman didn’t want to talk about. Does anyone out there know?

Pictures and panels
Cover to Harvey Kurtzman My Life as a Cartoonist, Byron Preiss Visual Communications and Minstrel Books, 1988. Photograph by Ben Asen with drawings by Kurtzman

Little Annie Fanny pencil rough by Harvey Kurtzman, 1968, published in Will Eisner’s The Spirit issue 31, Kitchen Sink Comix, October 1981

Little Annie Fanny by Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder with Jack Davis and Larry Siegel, Playboy, June 1968, reprinted in Playboy’s Little Annie Fanny, Volume 1: 1962-1970, Dark Horse Comics, 2000

The Big Red One

2007-10-17T19:01:00.000+01:00

I read somewhere that the producers of the 1970s TV series The Incredible Hulk briefly considered painting Lou Ferrigno red rather than green, on the grounds that red was the colour of rage.

In the end, they decided that changing the Hulk’s colour would be a step too far. Perhaps fortunately, they did not follow through the logic of their emotional colour-coding. “Please don’t make me envious; you wouldn’t like me when I’m envious.” It just doesn’t sound right. does it?

Anyway, the new red Hulk unveiled in Marvel’s solicitations for comics on sale in January should at least provide some new variants for the toy manufacturers. Just one thing, though. If green Hulk always wore purple trousers, shouldn’t the standard comics rule (secondary colours with secondaries; primaries with primaries) apply, so that red Hulk wears bright blue?

Picture
Cover illustration to Hulk issue 1, Marvel Comics, January 2008. Art by “Edex”, which is Ed McGuiness on pencils and I can’t remember who on inks. Scan pinched from Comic Book Resources

Hungry for More

2007-10-14T17:31:00.000+01:00

One of the more interesting news stories of last week was DC’s press release about Jack Kirby’s Fourth World Omnibus Volume 4, which can be found on Newsarama.

It seems that this volume will include both “Even Gods Must Die” from the Baxter paper New Gods reprint series issue 6 (1984) and a restored, 24-page version of what eventually became the graphic novel The Hunger Dogs, newly inked from Kirby’s pencils by his preferred collaborator of the 1970s and 1980s, Mike Royer.

This may prove quite a challenge. As set out in issue 6 of The Jack Kirby Collector (TwoMorrows, July 1995), the sequence of events in the mid-1980s was something like this:

• DC commissioned Jack Kirby to write and pencil a new 24-page story to conclude their new reprint of New Gods.

• DC did not like the story that Kirby gave them (call it “version 1”, though it apparently had the title “On the Road to Armagetto”), supposedly because it was too final, at a time when DC was planning to license out the New Gods as toys. They told Kirby to rework it, and at the same time commissioned a graphic novel to follow it.

• Kirby reworked “On the Road to Armagetto” and sent it to Royer, who inked and lettered it. Call this “version 2”.

• DC now changed their minds, and decided to fold “On the Road to Armagetto” into the graphic novel itself. Kirby reused 23 pages of the earlier story, but not necessarily in the original order, and built another 38 pages around them. Royer was unavailable, so the extra pages were inked by D Bruce Berry.

At the time, DC and Marvel believed that, to be respectable, graphic novels would have to follow the format of the European graphic album (much as they now believe that they can reach the manga readership with Johnny DC and Marvel Adventures if only they shrink the pages to match). Bizzarely, rather than enlarge the Kirby/Royer pages, Kirby and Berry were given the originally sized pages and told to fill in the margins to fit the new format.

The whole package was handed to Greg Theakston to colour. Theakston decided that Royer’s and Berry’s inks were incompatible, and reinked the lot as well. The resulting hodge-podge was published in 1985 as The Hunger Dogs. Call it “version 3”.

Here is the only page that I have in multiple versions: Kirby’s pencils, Royer’s inks, and the final published version. Note how the expanded area of the picture weakens the force of its composition, tips the explosion from "impressive" into "over the top", and turns a crowd into a queue. Note, too, how Royer's inks preserve the thoughtful expression on Darkseid's face, while Theakston's obliterate it.

• Meanwhile, DC still needed something to finish off the reprint New Gods issue 6, so they commissioned yet another 48-page story, “Even Gods Must Die” to fill in the gap, and to lead into The Hunger Dogs.

Which leaves a few questions.

First, which version of “On the Road to Armagetto” will DC be publishing – version 1 or version 2?

Second, “Even Gods Must Die” was written to fit with version 3. Is it compatible with version 1 or version 2?

Third, if DC are planning to publish the 24 pages of either version 1 or version 2 how will they make either fit with the rest of version 3, which will apparently also be in the Omnibus? Are we effectively seeing the creation of a version 4 for volume 4 of the 4th World?

I guess we’ll have to wait and see. Volume 4 will apparently also feature the entries that Kirby drew of his Fourth World characters for Who’s Who. Ironically enough, several of these are variants he redesigned for the very toy line that scuppered “On the Road to Armagetto”, and which would later form the basis of two mini-series called Super Powers which Kirby would pencil but not write, in possibly the artistic nadir of his entire career.

Super Powers is not included in the Omnibus, leaving those two series as the only stories about the New Gods that Kirby worked on not to be collected. Still, perhaps that's for the best.

Pictures and Panels
The Hunger Dogs, DC Graphic Novel number 4, 1985, cover by Jack Kirby and Greg Theakston

New Gods “On the Road to Armagetto", written and pencilled by Jack Kirby, this page first published in The Jack Kirby Collector issue 6, TwoMorrows, July 1995

New Gods “On the Road to Armagetto", written and pencilled by Jack Kirby, inked and lettered by Mike Royer, this page first published in The Jack Kirby Collector issue 6, TwoMorrows, July 1995

The Hunger Dogs, DC Graphic Novel number 4, 1985, written and pencilled by Jack Kirby, inked by Mike Royer, D Bruce Berry and Greg Theakston, coloured by Greg Theakston, Bill Wray and Tony Dispoto, lettered by Mike Royer, edited by Joe Orlando

More on Robin Hood

2007-10-13T21:25:00.000+01:00

Lew Stringer seems to have been particularly disappointed with the BBC’s new Robin Hood Adventures magazine, accusing it of dumbing-down horribly. Since Lew is normally inclined to defend the current state of the British comics industry, seeing evolution where others see decay, this is pretty damning.

He is particularly puzzled by the huge divergence between the style of the comic strip (comedy) and the style of the TV show from which it is spun-off (melodrama). It is indeed a particularly stark example, but changes of tone are common in transition between the media. I have noted before that the Doctor Who Adventures comic strip, while it captures some of the zest and energy of the television programme, has none of its darkness or romance. The reasoning is presumably that these elements are not suitable for children – but the children are only reading the comic strip because they like the TV programme of which those elements are a part. This puzzled me when I was a boy, and it puzzles me now. (I suppose there are some cases where a child aspires to watch a television programme which is indeed unsuitable for him or her, and makes do with a comic adaptation as a substitute, but that is unlikely to be the case with Robin Hood or Doctor Who.)

Something similar affected a previous adaptation of a TV Robin. In an interview with Look-In: A Tribute to the Junior TV Times, writer Angus P Allan recalled, “My relationship with the comic ended slowly. It began with the increasing editorial pressure to diminish and finally ban all violence, at whatever level. I cannot now imagine why Look-In continued to pay for the rights to A-Team while forbidding me even to show a pistol in the strip. Insane. And when the editor bought Robin Of Sherwood and asked me to write it without bows and arrows … well! The ensuing argument resulted in getting my own way, but I had to promise to use arrows only to send messages or convey climbing lines to castle battlements. What a nonsense! It was at that time that Look-In began to fall heavily in circulation, and no wonder. I don't agree with blood and gore and mindless violence at all, but kids love a bit of mayhem, and God knows there's enough of the real thing around.”

The reasoning of editor Colin Sherbourn is set out in this interview on the same site.

I’m sad to note that Angus Allan died last month. There’s an obituary at the bottom of this page.

Anyway, enough with this! I’m unlikely to spend £1.99 for another two pages of Robin Hood comic strip per issue. Instead I’ll be saving my pennies for the Book Palace’s forthcoming collection of all the Frank Bellamy-drawn Robin Hood strips from Swift, as announced by Steve Holland on his Bear Alley blog.

Panels and pictures
Illustration by Paul Cemmick from Robin Hood Adventures issue 1, BBC Magazines, 10-23 October 2007

Robin of Sherwood, script by Angus P Allan, art by Mike Noble, colour by Arthur Ranson, Look-in, scan taken from The Gerry Anderson Complete Comic History

Robin Hood and his Merry Men, from a page of Frank Bellamy artwork from Swift circa 1956, scan downloaded from an art dealer’s page so long ago that I can so longer remember where it was

Friday Night Fights: Back on the Grid

2007-10-12T23:06:00.000+01:00

More nine-panel fretwork, but whereas last time out Jack Kirby gave us the classic fluid moves of superhero “action”, Eddie Campbell here conjures up an ugly little scuffle, in which narrator and focal character Alec MacGarry ends up trading no blows at all.

I’m not sure that the switch from the appropriately confused jumble of viewpoints in the first four panels to the static point of view in the next four is entirely effective, although the change probably makes the joke of Alec’s lack of involvement in the actual fight rather clearer. And I love the hands on the end of the looping caption pointers.

It’s more violence for Bahlactus, whose appetite is never sated.

Panels
Alec – Love and Beerglasses: More Episodes from the Life of Alec MacGarry by Eddie Campbell, Escape Publishing, 1985 (strip dated March 1983)

Well, It Can’t Be Worse Than The TV Show

2007-10-11T21:19:00.000+01:00

In case anyone was wondering whether the polybagged first issue of the BBC’s new Robin Hood Adventures magazine might contain a comic strip … yes, it does, but only two pages' worth.

The strip is produced in an out-and-out humorous style by Craig Donaghy ("words") and Paul Cemmick ("illustrations"). It is obviously aimed at a very young readership, right down to numbering the panels in sequence, but seems a competent and lively piece of work.

The magazine also contains several photo strips retelling bits of television episodes using captured frames. Judged as fumetti, these are clumsy and awkward, but that is only to be expected when the source pictures were not intended for this use.

Addendum, 12 October The combination of that art style and the subject of Robin Hood seemed awfully familiar, and now I realise why: Paul Cemmick also drew the cartoons and comic strips for the spin-off books from Tony Robinson's children's comedy series Maid Marian and her Merry Men (1989-1994). Has the BBC got the two confused? Can we expect a cross-over? Crisis in Infinite Sherwoods!

That cover image taken from Capricorn Books, which has several others too. Samples of Cemmick's artwork for the comic strps inside can be found at his own web-site (scroll down).

Tales from The Chap

2007-10-10T20:47:00.000+01:00

Stop me if you already know about this one.

The Chap is an odd little magazine (17cm by 24cm – shouldn’t it be in some imperial size?) ostensibly published for tweedy, pipe-smoking gentlemen to read while sinking back in a leather armchair at the club, in between expeditions to the Congo or the North Pole. Its tone is very much tongue-in-cheek. Articles in the current issue (no 35, September-November 2007) range from a straightforward appreciation of the television series Adam Adamant Lives! to a faked-up set of instructions for assembling an Ikea gothic folly.

Curiously, it would seem that one unexpected aspect of chappishness is an appreciation of comics. Not only does regular feature “Am I Chap or Not?” include a photograph of Alan Moore at his wedding, but the caption writer clearly assumed that The Chap’s readers would be well aware of Moore’s claim to fame, and did not need an explanation of his profession. So much for the Daily Telegraph’s “peculiarly unsung triumph”.

More significantly, The Chap devotes three pages each issue to a comic strip, The Chronicles of Mordecai Villiers, story by Donald Twain, art by the suspiciously named Borin Van Loon. This is produced by collage, from old book and magazine illustrations.

I can’t claim that Villiers is an unalloyed success. The humour is rather forced and arch, much like the rest of the magazine, and the writing is sufficiently disjointed to compound the problems of panel-to-panel continuity inherent in the collage approach. But, still, I can’t think of anyone else currently working in the space between Max Ernst and Biff; so, if that sounds appealing, do give it a look.

On the subject of Max Ernst, my belated thanks go to my friends Phil and Janie for sending me a copy of the Dover Books edition of his Une Semaine de Bonté, a story told entirely in surreal collages, which Ernst described solely as a “roman” (novel). I’m sure that Eddie Campbell would appreciate the absence of a qualifier there.

I was amused to note that Ernst first published Une Semaine de Bonté as a series of five pamphlets, in 1934. Just like a real comic book! But anyone waiting for the trade would have been disappointed, as Dover’s 1976 edition claims to have been the first collection.

Pictures and panels
Covers to The Chap issues 34 (June-August 2007) and 35 (September-November 2007)

Page from The Chronicles of Mordecai Villiers “The Luxuriant Toupée of Sir Elton John” part 1, The Chap issue 34 (June-August 2007)

Cover to Max Ernst Une Semaine de Bonté, Dover Books, 1976

So See-More-Able

2007-10-07T21:03:00.000+01:00

Thanks to a flurry of evening meetings for work, I’m a bit behind with matters blog-related, so I only just read this entry on Blog@Newsarama:

"Law & Order creator Dick Wolf and Disturbia director D.J. Caruso are teaming up to adapt Max Allan Collins’ Johnny Dynamite for television.

Variety reports that the series will employ the same green-screen technology used for the movie 300 — a first for network television, should the show be picked up."

A first for US television, perhaps, but Brits with long memories may recall the BBC’s 1982 adaptation of the Daily Mirror comic strip Jane, a comedy about a woman who continually loses her clothes while foiling German spies in World War Two.

Green-screen – or Blue-screen, or Chromakey, or Colour Separation Overlay (CSO), call it what you will – had been used by the BBC ever since they adopted colour video cameras. It was used to insert pictures behind newsreaders, and it was used for special effects on series such as The Goodies and Doctor Who. The results were not always impressive. In 1978, about a third of the Doctor Who serial “Underworld” was recorded by inserting live actors into model caves, reputedly because the set designer had blown his entire budget on a single spaceship control room. Bits of the actors disappeared in the process, and they all had yellowish lines surrounding them.

By the early 1980s, the problem of successfully isolating the foreground image from the flat coloured background had been solved. But there was still no way of creating realistic imaginary backdrops cheaply. Matte painting was an elaborate and slow process, modelwork always looked like modelwork, and the modern standby of computer-generated imagery was not yet available.

Jane solved this problem by embracing it. The backdrops, and even some of the props, were high-contrast line black and white drawings, with a little added spot colour. The action was framed as if taking place within comic-strip panels: sometimes with two or more panels onscreen at once. Common devices from comic strips, such as sometimes putting figures in plain black silhouette (originally intended to lend some variety to a three-or-four panel tier) are replicated. Batman-style written sound effects were eschewed, but thought balloons were used to show us how Jane’s pet dachshund, Fritz, reacted to events.

Jane was made in five episodes of ten minutes each. Ideal for YouTube, you might think, and, indeed, you can find the first series starting here. Although that’s a QuickTime-sized image of an off-air VHS recording with Danish subtitles, it does give a reasonable idea of how the programme looked on-screen.

Unless you have a particular fetish for mid-twentieth-century ladies’ underwear (or for lead actress Glynis Barber, who shot this in-between her roles in Blakes 7 and Dempsey and Makepeace), you’ll also find that, even in ten minute chunks, the serial gets dull rather quickly. It is probably one of the most faithful strip-to-screen adaptations ever, being an amalgam of two wartime stories from the Daily Mirror, “Hush-Hush House” (January-April 1940) and “Jane’s Rival” (October 1940 – May 1941), but what had seemed funny and racey to readers in the 1940s appeared rather quaint in the 1980s. Given the artificiality of both the plot and the way it was presented on screen, it is hard even to get too worked up about the series’ blatantly sexist and exploitative premise.

Even so, the series seems to have struck a chord. At the time it was made, the comic strip had not appeared in the Daily Mirror in decades. But over the next few years, there was a second TV serial (sometimes called “Jane in the Desert”), a theatrical movie, Jane and the Lost City, which was filmed on conventional locations and was, generally speaking, as complete a waste of celluloid as could be imagined, and, in 1985, a revival of the comic strip itself, apparently at the insistence of the Mirror’s new owner, the well-known crook and bully Robert Maxwell.

The combination of live-action and line-drawing backgrounds wasn’t repeated, so far as I can recall, outside of children’s programmes such as Jackanory. But it was a worthwhile experiment, and, taken on its own terms, produced an effect rather more charming, and rather less bumptious and overwhelming, than its present-day CGI successors.

(The title of this post, by the way, comes from the theme tune to Jane, written by Neil Innes, late of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band and the Rutles. He rhymes it with “You’re adorable”.)

Pictures
Glynis Barber in Jane, BBC, 1982

Jane “Jane’s Rival”, script by Don Freeman, art by Norman Pett, Daily Mirror, February 1941, reprinted in Jane At War, Wolfe Publishing, 1976

There’s No-one Quite Like Grandma

2007-10-06T10:26:00.000+01:00

I posted a while back about the statues of Desperate Dan, Minnie the Minx and Andy Capp, and the proposed statue of Wallace and Gromit. The comments section turned up two more examples of comics character statues: Andy Gump in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and Lobey Dosser in Glasgow. Jeremy Briggs also posted about the Lobey Dosser statue at Bear Alley.

Here’s another one I missed: a statue in Ipswich of Carl Giles’ Grandma character, from his long-running series of large single panel cartoons in the Daily Express (overseas readers may recognise her as Red Sophia’s mother from Cerebus, the character being another of Dave Sim’s appropriations).

This one was mentioned by Brendan McGuire on the Comics UK Forum, and I found that photo via Google on Ian Knight’s web-site A Celebration of Giles. Ian has more photos and a lot more information about the statue and its setting (outside a pub called The Giles Tavern). Lots of Giles cartoons, too - go treat yourself.

Seminal Sputnik

2007-10-04T19:23:00.000+01:00

It was fifty years ago this day that the launch of Sputnik 1, the world’s first artificial satellite, began that long-ago and fantastical era we called “the space age”. It was a time of imagination, of engineering marvels, and, eventually, of bored disillusionment.

The Sputnik programme would go on to give us exciting new ways of killing dogs, and the United States’ panicked reaction began a space race in which the Soviet Union and the USA competed to produce projects that were often dazzling, sometimes useful and sometimes monumentally wasteful. One such project was led by Dr Reed Richards.

Always remember: no Sputnik, no Fantastic Four.

And no cosmic-powered apes, either.

Panels
Fantastic Four issue 1, “The Fantastic Four!” by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, with inks and letters by Art Simek, Marvel Comics, November 1961, reprinted in Marvel Masterworks Volume 2: The Fantastic Four, reprinting Fantastic Four Nos 1-10, Marvel Comics, 1987

Fantastic Four issue 13, “The Fantastic Four Versus the Red Ghost and his Indescribable Super-Apes”, story by Stan Lee, art by Jack Kirby, inking by Steve Ditko, lettering by Art Simek, Marvel Comics, April 1963, reprinted in Marvel Masterworks Volume 6: The Fantastic Four, reprinting Fantastic Four Nos 11-20, Marvel Comics, 1988

Burning Down the Houses

2007-10-01T21:06:00.000+01:00

It isn’t comics, but I couldn’t let mention of the burning of the Houses of Parliament in 1834 go by without bringing in JMW Turner. Probably the greatest of all English artists (admittedly not a crowded field, unless you adopt Wildstorm’s definition of “fine art”), Turner watched the fire from a boat in the Thames, and made four paintings of it.

Pictures
JMW Turner The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16th October 1834, oils, 1835, now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Scan from Webmuseum Paris

JMW Turner Burning of the Houses of Parliament, oils, 1835, now in the Cleveland Museum of Art. Scan from Magellan’s Log

JMW Turner Burning of the Houses of Parliament, watercolour, 1834 or 1835, scan taken from In Defence of Marxism

JMW Turner The Burning of the Houses of Parliament, watercolour, 1834 or 1835, now in the Tate Museum, whence this scan

V for Vendetta Chapter 1, “The Villain" by Alan Moore (script) and David Lloyd (art), Warrior issue 1, Quality Communications, March 1982

Racing Back to the Starting Line

2007-09-30T20:16:00.000+01:00

Just over a month ago, I posted a picture Jack Kirby had drawn of Ally Sloper, whom I described as “probably the first recurring comics character”.

Wrong.

Sloper first appeared in Judy in 1867. Poking around the Early Comics Archive maintained by Andy Konky Kru at BugPowder, it is possible to identify several earlier candidates. I was aware of Richard Doyle’s Brown, Jones and Robinson, but had somehow got it into my head that it was only published as a book (like Töpffer’s M Vieuxbois). But no, it was a series published in Punch in 1850 and then collected in 1854.

The Early Comics Archive also has several adventures of one Mr Briggs, by John Leech, dating from 1850 and 1851, more of Leech’s Tom Noddy from 1855, and four stories of Mr Peter Piper by John Tenniel from 1853.

Was any of these the first recurring comics character? I’m not confident enough to say. Anyway, this is reducing art history to the level of the Guiness Book of Records. Appreciate them for what they are. Tenniel’s art on Peter Piper is particularly enjoyable, mixing looser, more cartoony shapes than his Alice illustrations or caricatures with the same meticulous rendering.

But staying at that low level for a moment, John Leech was, of course, responsible for one unchallengeable first: the first time the word “cartoon” was used to denote a humorous picture, rather than a preparatory drawing for a painting, fresco or tapestry. He even labelled it “Cartoon No 1”.

There’s a bit of a shaggy dog story here. It starts when Parliament burnt down in 1834. There was no Guy Fawkes to blame this time. A dry summer had turned the tally sticks – medieval wooden tax returns – stored in the basement into perfect kindling. A stray spark set it all burning.

As the new Palace of Westminster was being built (the one still used by Parliament today), paintings and frescos were commissioned to decorate it. The cartoons – in the old sense of preparatory drawings – were put on display. The magazine Punch thought that there were better uses for the government’s money than spending it on art for the rulers. At the time, the humorous drawings that appeared in Punch were called “cuts”, short for “woodcuts”, from the printing technique. A full page was given over to “the Big Cut”, the principal satirical picture of the issue, and John Leech was the artist designated to draw it. This is what he came up with for the issue dated 15 July 1843.

There were five more numbered “cartoons” in this sequence, and by the end of it, Punch’s staff had renamed “the Big Cut” as “the Cartoon”. The name soon spread to the other humorous cuts, though the earlier term was still common enough in 1890 for Alfred Harmsworth to name one of his new ha’penny picture-story papers Comic Cuts.

The Cartoon – with the definite article and a capital “C” – was a fixture of Punch for the next 150 years. Among Leech’s successors on the Cartoon was that same John Tenniel who drew Mr Peter Piper. When I first read Punch in the 1970s, the Cartoon was the responsibility of Trog, who also drew the comic strip Flook in the Daily Mail and a weekly political cartoon in The Observer. Trog was the pen name of jazz musician Wally Fawkes.

So at least one Fawkes prospered from the destruction of Parliament.

You may now groan.

Panels
Ally Sloper “Some of the Mysteries of Loan and Discount” by Charles Ross and Marie Duval, Judy, 1867, reprinted in Ally Sloper: A Moral Lesson, 1873, and taken here from the Early Comics Archive, which reproduces the full strip and many more.

“How Mr Peter Piper Was Induced to Join in a Bear-hunt” by John Tenniel, 1853, taken from the Early Comics Archive, which reproduces the full strip.

John Leech “Cartoon No 1”, Punch, 15 July 1843, reprinted in William Hewison The Cartoon Connection: The Art of Pictorial Humour, Elm Tree Books, 1977

Self-portrait with Flook by Wally “Trog” Fawkes, from the Camden New Journal report of his retirement

Instructions

2007-09-30T10:44:00.000+01:00

a) Go here.

b) Consider how many such drawings DC had erased while Kirby was working on Jimmy Olsen.

c) Weep a little.

(Yes, I’m linkblogging. It’s Sunday morning, and I’m still in my pyjamas, drinking coffee. The work ethic will kick in later.)

It’s One of Those “Ooh, Look What’s in Previews” Posts

2007-09-29T17:34:00.001+01:00

I’m not going to bother with Dark Horse, DC, Image or Marvel, because they’ve already had their solicitations up on Newsarama and Comic Book Resources for weeks. But here is some unexpected and interesting-looking stuff from that section of Previews where it’s easy to miss things, because your eyelids are now getting as heavy as your arms after leafing through the first few hundred pages.

Hill & Wang
Rick Geary J Edgar Hoover: A Graphic Biography. Although I am always wary of the difficulty of separating fact from reconstruction from imagination in non-fiction comics, I am also always bowled over by the way Geary recounts his Treasury of Victorian Murder stories, and it is good to see him branching out. This is labelled “Not available in Canada, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia and the UK.” I suppose it is only appropriate that a biography of J Edgar Hoover should involve curtailing the free movement of information. One for Amazon, then.

Houghton Mifflin
Frederik Peeters Blue Pills: A Positive Love Story. Bart Beaty wrote earlier this year, “For six years when people ask me ‘What is the book that you think most needs to be translated from French to English?’ my answer is always the same: Pilules Bleues, the true story of a young man and his romance with a woman living with HIV.” So this is good news for ignorant anglophone monoglots like me.

Titan Books
Willie Patterson and Sydney Jordan Jeff Hawke Volume 1: Overlord. In the 1980s, Titan published two volumes of this beautifully drawn science fiction newspaper strip, which originally ran in the Daily Express from 1954 to 1975. This volume reprints all three stories from the 1980s Book 1, plus the first story from the 1980s Book 2, so, once again, Titan are skipping over the first thirteen stories in the series. The solicitation art (below right) is a nasty bodge of one of Brian Bolland’s covers from the previous reprints (below left). Let’s hope that they change it for the actual cover. Whatever my gripes, this is still well worth getting for the actual content.

Friday Night Fights: Jack-in-a-Grid

2007-09-28T23:10:00.000+01:00

The trusty old nine-panel grid can be used to achieve a huge array of effects.

Here, with no variation in panel shape of size, no change in type of shot, and no backgrounds, Jack Kirby forces us to concentrate on the dynamics of the two figures in motion.

(It's a shame that the colourist didn't get the point, changing colours with each panel and building to a deep red two panels before the end of the fight, with nowhere for the intensity to go but down.)

They’re fighting for Bahlactus, and the new bout of Friday Night Fights.

Panels
Fighting American “Poison Ivan” by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, from Fighting American issue 3 Prize Group, October-November 1954, reprinted in Fighting American, Marvel Comics, 1989

Peter Pan and the Lost Comics

2007-09-25T20:20:00.000+01:00

On the voiceover, Armando Iannucci is talking about comics for adults. But on the screen, there’s a big picture of Judge Death.

Hello, cognitive dissonance!

The overt argument of the third and last of the BBC’s Comics Britannia documentaries, “Anarchy in the UK”, was that comics had grown up. But everything conspired to remind the viewer of how far comics still cling to childhood. 2000AD was originally designed for 12-year olds. Unusually, its readers did not give up the comic in puberty, but went on reading it through their – OK, then, our - teens, twenties, thirties and forties. That allowed 2000AD’s creators to build up the satire and the violence, and eventually to add in a little sex. But the tastes of those 12-year olds formed its foundations and still determine its basic structure.

There’s a similar consideration about most of the other comics featured last night. Viz not only uses the style of DC Thomson and IPC children’s humour comics, but much of its own humour is thoroughly juvenile. Small children would enjoy the fart jokes of Johnny Fartpants, while Roger Mellie is just that boy on the bus shouting “bogies!”, but with a more extensive vocabulary. Much was made of Deadline’s connection to the rave scene, a pop culture movement that rejected adult responsibility and idealised ravers as loved-up children. The featured works of Alan Moore are elaborate and complex stories – but about superheroes and the heroines of classic children’s books.

Mind you, that impression was partly due to the selection of material. In my mind’s eye, I pictured an alternative arrangement that put 2000AD, Warrior and Watchmen into an extended version of last week’s documentary about (in part) boys’ adventure comics. My imaginary new third instalment would, instead, consider how Raymond Briggs had used the techniques he developed in his comic albums for children to address genuinely adult concerns in Ethel and Ernest (by way of When the Wind Blows). It would trace Posy Simmonds’s development of newspaper comic strips – always intended for adults – into works such as Gemma Bovery and Tamara Drewe. It would cover the undergrounds and Hunt Emerson, the small press scene and Eddie Campbell, the growth of British-produced manga and webcomics. And it could conclude with the two big British commercial successes this year – not just Alice in Sunderland, but also Simone Lia’s Fluffy.

Because, sometimes, there’s nothing more grown-up than a talking rabbit.

Panels
Roger the Dodger and his friend Tommy attempt to impersonate an adult. Non-consecutive panels from a story reprinted in Dandy and Beano: Famous Faces from the Comics (DC Thomson, 1992). Art by Ken Reid, I think.

Varoomshka

2007-09-24T21:35:00.000+01:00

Another book that I picked up in the secondhand shops on Saturday was a 1972 collection of John Kent’s satirical comic strip Varoomshka.

The series and its eponymous heroine adapted their name from that of Veruschka, a top model of the period, best known now for her brief appearance in Antonioni’s Blow-Up (she’s the woman being straddled by David Hemmings on the poster), and for being photographed in elaborate trompe-l’oeil body paint.

Varoomshka first appeared in 1969, on the tail-end of a vogue for Candide-like adventures in which scantily- or un-clad young women acted as innocent witnesses to the vicissitudes of contemporary society. Other examples include Little Annie Fanny, Phoebe Zeitgeist and, most obviously, Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg’s Candy.

Compared to these, Varoomshka was relatively mild. Unlike Candy or Barbarella, she was not sexually assaulted repeatedly, nor was she as literally objectified as Phoebe Zeitgeist. Mostly, she merely acted as a decorative witness to the words and actions of caricatured politicians of the day (and to be fair, Kent’s unmodulated line and use of clear open space, matching the style of girls’ comics of the day, can be very decorative). Sometimes, however, she was more completely integrated into the story, as here.

I think we can all guess how that tale turned out.

Artists have, of course, long used allegory as an excuse for producing pictures of naked women. Additionally, British newspaper comic strips have a well-established tradition of undressing their heroines: consider Jane in the Daily Mirror or George and Lynne in the Sun. So which rag ran Varoomshka?

That’s right, it was the Guardian, bastion of British social democracy and cultural liberalism. Little wonder that, according to Kent’s obituary, many of the staff there objected strongly to the presence of the strip. And it wasn’t just the sexual politics that was an odd fit. In this sequence, Varoomshka goes to the cinema, to see a film about an African republic whose leaders are, basically, Prime Minister Ted Heath and his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Anthony Barber, in blackface.

Sometimes it is sobering to remember that such things were acceptable comic discourse within my lifetime. But it is reassuring to note how many of the politicians in the book are now so thoroughly forgotten that I can’t recognise them at all. The strips remind us, too, of how many discarded options and contingencies litter the path of history, as Kent uses Varoomshka to object to (never fulfilled) plans to sell off BBC Radio 1, or to the prospect of a deal with the illegal white minority government of Rhodesia. Presumably these must have seemed like genuine possibilities at the time.

Kent would go on to produce a number of comic strip political satires for Private Eye, but mostly without the half-dressed women.

Dudley D Sick Boy

2007-09-24T18:06:00.000+01:00

What with Comics Britannia and the two documentaries about The Broons and Oor Wullie, I’ve seen this photo of Dudley D Watkins (artist for those strips as well as Desperate Dan and Lord Snooty) an awful lot these last few weeks.

And every time I think, “Jings," (I'm trying to keep with the spirit of the thing,) "He looks like Sick Boy from Trainspotting.”

Is it just me?

Pictures
Photo of Dudley D Watkins taken from this site about him.
Photo of Johnny Lee Miller as Sick Boy from this site

Secondhand Supes

2007-09-23T21:13:00.000+01:00

I went browsing yesterday in the two remaining secondhand bookshops in Whitley Bay, Bay Books and Oliver’s. One of the books I came away with was the 1983 British Superman Annual, which reprinted the trilogy of stories by Len Wein and Jim Starlin from DC Comics Presents issues 27-29 (cover-dated November 1980 to January 1981) that introduced the alien super-villain Mongul. There’s also a Superboy story by Cary Bates and Bob Brown.

A major selling point was the cover by Brian Bolland. Twomorrows later reprinted it for an article in Draw! about the artwork produced for British DC reprint annuals, but they printed it in monochrome. This allowed them to misidentify the floating head at top left as Darkseid. But it’s not him, or Thanos, either. I wonder if Jim Starlin is throwing himself into the upcoming Death of the New Gods in the hope of getting rid of Darkseid, and so covering up his artistic tracks.

Coincidentally, the illustration on the endpapers is an undistinguished piece by Dave Gibbons, who would go on to draw Mongul in his most memorable outing, “For the Man Who Has Everything”, written by Alan Moore.

The stories are quite fun. One point of note is that, after Superman has screwed up and allowed Mongul to get the key to the star-sized weapon platform Warworld, he turns to Supergirl for “heavy duty super-help”. Supergirl soon demonstrates that she is more level-headed than her cousin.

It’s not a characterisation I expect to see any time soon in the current run of Supergirl.

Pictures and Panels
Superman Official Annual 1983, cover by Brian Bolland, London Editions Magazines, 1982

Superman and Supergirl “Warworld!” by Len Wein (scripter), Jim Starlin and Romeo Tanghal (artists), Ben Oda (letterer), Jerry Serpe (colourist) and Julius Schwartz (editor), DC Comics Presents issue 28, DC Comics, December 1980, reprinted in Superman Official Annual 1983, London Editions Magazines, 1982

Five Superheroes since 1950

2007-09-23T12:45:00.000+01:00

Over at the Comics Reporter, Tom Spurgeon asked on Friday for nominations for five good superheroes created since 1950 and not published by DC, Marvel or Image. Unfortunately, he wanted replies the same day, so I’m going to treat this as a meme instead.

1. Marvelman
Created by Mick Anglo for L Miller and Sons, 1954
Created anew by Alan Moore and Garry Leach for Warrior, Quality Communications, 1982

I admit to having only an historical interest in Mick Anglo’s original (if we can call a knock-off of Captain Marvel “original”). It was crude and ugly stuff even by the standards of its day, and even when drawn by future great Don Lawrence. Moore’s version was something else again, taking Nietzchean claims of transcending morality seriously, examining the social and political consequences of the übermensch, and doing it with meticulous story construction and genuinely literate, if still mannered, words. It didn’t hurt that Garry Leach’s artwork, at once penumbral and crackling with energy, mimetically realistic and convincingly other, made my teenage eyes pop. His successors – even John Totleben – never quite lived up to the start Leach gave the series. If you’ve only ever seen Eclipse’s crayoned-in colour reprint under the name Miracleman, you owe it to yourself to track down the black and white originals in Warrior. Copies are still available cheaply, I think.

Marvelman and its pseudonymous continuation by Eclipse spawned swarms of inferior imitators, who borrowed only the darkness and brutality. It also helped convince the comic industry that “superhero comics for adults” was not an oxymoron, leading to the current climate of rape and dismemberment at DC and clumsily obvious political allegory at Marvel. But to blame Marvelman for Penance, Tony Stark and Superboy-Prime would be unfair. Taken by itself, it is still one of the most interesting works in the genre.

2. Zenith
Created by Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell for 2000AD, Fleetway Publications, 1987

In part, this was Morrison’s riposte to Marvelman. Here, the morally serious superhumans who want to reshape the world are the source of danger and disaster. It is Zenith, who just wants to be famous and get laid, and, above all, hippy-turned-Thatcherite Peter St John, who wants to accumulate conventional political power for himself, who emerge as the heroes, alongside brain-damaged robot Acid Archie.

Steve Yeowell has a following, but I'm not part of it, so the pleasure for me here is in Morrison’s writing. It is refreshing to find him treating sympathetically views about the benefits of self-interest more commonly associated with Samuel Johnson or Adam Smith, and indulging in nostalgia for old British comics rather than Silver Age americana, while already throwing out catherine-wheel sparks of mad science and narrative bravura.

3. Jack Staff
Created by Paul Grist for Dancing Elephant Press, 2000

And speaking of British comics nostalgia … In truth, I find Jack Staff the character one of the least interesting in Jack Staff the comic, but that is because it is overflowing with charming, compelling characters like Becky Burdock (Vampire Reporter), the staff of Q, Alfred Chinard and Bramble and Son. Grist draws his cast’s natures with the same deceptively simple elegance that he draws his pictures. Above all, his storytelling, integrating layout and narrative in complex, experimental ways that seem simple and natural when read, makes this not just one of the best superhero comics around, but one of the best comics, full stop. The frequent, smoothly integrated, appearance of characters drawn from 1960s and 1970s British comics and TV is just a particularly pleasing garnish for the ageing Brits among the readership.

Jack Staff is now published by Image, but wasn't created for them.

4. Fighting American
Created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby for Prize Group, 1954

Enough with these black-and-white Britons! It’s time for the superhero genre to return to the country of its origin and to its lifelong master and his principal accomplice. Again, Fighting American is a comic in which its lead character is the least interesting, overshadowed by the gallery of grotesques brought to life by Simon and Kirby, like Doubleheader, Hotski Trotsky, Poison Ivan and Rhode-Island Red. As political satire, this is little more than name-calling, but the stories burst with an energetic silliness. I have a very soft spot for the 1950s artwork of Kirby and his studio, which retains the smooth, heavy shading of the 1940s, but in service to more disciplined compositions. I gather that there were several Fighting American revivals by other hands in 1990s, but really, what’s the point of that? The value of the original is in the work of its creators and its response to the times.

5. The Incredibles
Created by Pixar Studios under the direction of Brad Bird for Disney, 2004

This entry is a cheat in two senses: it isn’t a comic, and it covers five superheroes, not one. But Pixar here demonstrated that animation could create cinematic superheroes who suffered from neither the ponderousness nor the camp foolishness that tend to afflict their live-action counterparts. The characters are charming, the story is funny, and you can amuse yourself with the paradox that an argument in favour of meritocratic elitism is being presented in the most lowbrow and populist of genres and media.

Pictures and panels
Marvelman “… A Dream of Flying” by Alan Moore (script) and Garry Leach (art), Warrior, Quality Communications, March 1982

Zenith “1. Dropping In” by Grant Morrison (script), Steve Yeowell (art) and Mark King (lettering), 2000AD prog 536, Fleetway Publications, 22 August 1987

Endpiece from Jack Staff: Yesterday’s Heroes by Paul Grist, Dancing Elephant Press, 2002

Fighting American issue 4 “Operation Wolf” by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, Prize Group, October-November 1954, reprinted in Fighting American, Marvel Comics, 1989

The Incredibles DVD sleeve by Pixar Studios, Disney, 2005

Girl Flight! Kitty Hawke and Worrals of the WAAF versus Angela Air Hostess

2007-09-19T21:12:00.000+01:00

Speaking on this week’s instalment of BBC4’s Comics Britannia, “Boys and Girls”, Jodi Cudlipp, a former member of the editorial staff of Hulton Press’s comic Girl, had this to say: “I thought from the very beginning that Kitty Hawke was wrong … I said, no, this is not the thing that girls of today want … You want stories about animals, or something like a ballerina.”

Kitty Hawke and Her All-Girl Air Crew was the original lead comic strip of Girl , appearing on the front page in full colour from the first issue in November 1951. Modelled to some degree after Dan Dare, the big hit of Eagle, Kitty Hawke was the story of the adventures of a group of women running a charter aeroplane company in the (then) present day.

Reportedly, it went down badly. Marcus Morris, founder of Eagle and Girl, later recalled, “We had received reports that quite a number of girls were reading Eagle and drew the wrong conclusion: we had made Girl too masculine. We therefore made it more romantic in its approach, more feminine. I worked on the theory that you should be a good deal more personal in your motivation in a girls’ paper. The adventure and the danger can be there but the reason for it must be the search for a long-lost uncle or father. If you can add a fair amount of personal rivalry, jealousy and a very close friendship, so much the better. We applied this theory to Girl and sales picked up. Before long they reached 650,000 and stayed there“ (quoted in Sally Morris & Jan Hallwood Living with Eagles: Marcus Morris, Priest and Publisher, Lutterworth Press, 1998).

Part of the revamp was that Kitty Hawke was dropped. The message seems clear: Cudlipp was right. Girls did not want stories about adventurous aviatrices.

Except that, over the previous decade, Captain W E Johns had written and published no fewer than eleven (prose) books about Flight Officer Joan Worralson of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, starting with Worrals of the WAAF in 1941, previously serialised in Girl’s Own magazine. Like her more famous male predecessor, Biggles, Worrals was a pilot known by an abbreviation of her surname, had a sidekick nicknamed after her physical appearance (“Frecks”, rather than “Ginger”), and showed an alarming propensity to stumble on spy rings while on routine missions. There was no romance, Worrals’s family never showed up, and she acted for King and country rather than personal interest.

So why the difference? Perhaps Hulton Press was wrong to conclude that girls did not want stories of this type – perhaps they just did not like Kitty Hawke in particular. Or perhaps boys were buying the Worrals books.

Changes in society provide a more likely explanation. The last Worrals book was published in 1950, just before Kitty Hawke’s abortive flight. Worrals had made her debut in wartime. The girls who read the books were likely to have mothers or other female relatives serving in the armed forces, while others worked in the factories. These were people to be respected and emulated.

By the early 1950s, demobbed men had replaced many of the women in civilian occupations, and the Treasury was struggling to pay for all the men still in the armed forces – women auxiliaries were well down the list of priorities. Class consciousness reasserted itself. For a woman to go out to work was now a sign of economic necessity for her family, rather than for the country. In the middle classes, and those who aspired to be middle class, it was a stigma for a married woman to work. Significantly, the Hulton Press’s expensive titles were aimed at these middle class families, and were reputedly often bought by parents for their children rather than by the children themselves. The parents knew what values they wanted to nurture.

It was no disgrace for single women to work, but only in supposedly feminine occupations. Girl did eventually produce another flying, green-uniformed heroine. But Angela, Air Hostess was not in charge: she wasn’t flying the plane, or dictating the terms of her own adventures. She was right at the bottom of the pecking order, and preoccupied with romance and jealous rivals.

On the whole, the animals and the ballerinas were probably a better bet.

Panels and pictures

Kitty Hawke and Her All-Girl Air Crew, art by Ray Bailey, Girl issue 1, November 2 1951, Hulton Press, scan taken from the Lambiek Comiclopedia

Uncredited illustration from Worrals Carries On by W E Johns, Lutterworth Press, 1942

Angela, Air Hostess written by Betty Rowland, drawn by Dudley Pout, reprinted in The Best of Girl, Prion Books, 2006

Kirby Comes Clean

2007-09-18T18:37:00.000+01:00

”The dialogue is terrible! But they mean every word of it!”

Panel
Mister Miracle issue 4, “The Closing Jaws of Death!", written, drawn and edited by Jack Kirby, inked by Vince Colletta, DC Comics, September-October 1971, reprinted in Jack Kirby’s Fourth World Omnibus volume 2, DC Comics, 2007