Review: Alice in Sunderland – Part 4: Impersonations

Click here for Part 1: Introduction
Click here for Part 2: Antecedents
Click here for Part 3: Style










Click here for Part 5: Structure

Panels contain images from the book under review

Review: Alice in Sunderland – Part 3: Style

Click here for Part 1: Introduction
Click here for Part 2: Antecedents











Click here for Part 4: Impersonations

Panels contain images from the book under review, plus
Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, Kitchen Sink Press, 1993

Review: Alice in Sunderland - Part 2: Antecedents

Click here for Part 1: Introduction












Click here for Part 3: Style

Panels contain images from the book under review, plus
Lights Out For The Territory: 9 Excursions in the Secret History of London by Iain Sinclair, Granta Books, 1997
Asterix at the Olympic Games, by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo, 1968, translated by Anthea Bell and Derek Hockridge, Brockhampton Press, 1972
Lud Heat and Suicide Bridge by Iain Sinclair, 1975 and 1979, omnibus edition published by Vintage, 1995
From Hell Volume 2 by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, Mad Love Publishing, June 1993
Shadowplay – The Secret Team by Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz, in Brought To Light: A Graphic Docudrama, Titan Books, 1989
The Mirror of Love by Alan Moore (writer), SR Bissette and Rick Veitch (artists) in AARGH!, Mad Love Publishing, 1989
From Homogenous to Honey by Neil Gaiman (script), Bryan Talbot (pencils), Mark Buckingham (inks), Steve Craddock (letters) in AARGH!, Mad Love Publishing, 1989

Review: Alice in Sunderland - Part 1: Introduction

Alice in Sunderland by Bryan Talbot, cover by Jordan Smith, Jonathan Cape, 2007, 318 pages of strip, £16.99









Click here for Part 2: Antecedents

Panels contain images from the book under review, plus
Martin Rowson The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Picador, 1996

Time’s Fool

Saturday’s Doctor Who story on BBC1 features an appearance by William Shakespeare. Rose met Dickens on her first trip to the past, Martha meets Shakespeare, so it’ll be Chaucer for the next travelling companion, I suppose.

Shakespeare was also a character in the last Doctor Who Magazine comic strip to feature the ninth (Ecclestone) Doctor. In keeping with the unusually close relationship between the TV show and its ancillary fiction, the same writer, Gareth Roberts, wrote both that comic strip and the TV episode.





If Roberts has maintained his characterisation of Shakespeare as a lecher, I wonder if we will learn tomorrow that Martha was the dark lady of the sonnets?


Panels from:
Doctor Who “A Groatsworth of Wit” Part 2, by Gareth Roberts (story), Mike Collins (pencil art), David A Roach (inks), James Offredi (colours), Roger Langridge (letters), Clayton Hickman & Scott Gray (editors), Doctor Who Magazine issue 364, 4 January 2006

Reviews: Buffy, Detective Comics, 2000AD

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 issue 2: “The Long Way Home” Part 2 by Joss Whedon (script), Georges Jeanty (pencils), Andy Owens (inks), Dave Stewart (colours), Richard Starkings and Comicraft’s Jimmy (letters), cover by Jo Chen, Dark Horse Comics, April 2007, 24 pages of strip, US$2.99

I’ll do a proper review of this opening story once it concludes. For the time being, I’ll note that this is another entertaining issue, with a clever introduction to a dream sequence, but also with a baffling willingness of mortal enemies to stand around and chat.

Georges Jeanty and Andy Owens’s art continues to impress. They don’t manage a good likeness of Andrew, but otherwise handle everything Whedon throws at them, from mass battle scenes to the nicely-captured expressions on the faces of these two new Slayers. Note, too, the way that the extended final panel makes the reader look down, just as the characters do.




Detective Comics issue 831: Batman “Kind of Like Family” by Paul Dini (writer), Don Kramer (pencils), Wayne Faucher (inker), John Kalisz (colourist), Jared K Fletcher (letterer), Peter Tomasi (editor), cover by Simone Bianchi, DC Comics, June 2007, 22 pages of strip, US$2.99

With the first trade paperback collection out, this seemed like a good time to sample an issue from Paul Dini’s run on Detective Comics, which I had previously neglected. It turns out to be an OK, basic superhero story, in which Scarface busts Harley Quinn out of Arkham Asylum, and various double-crosses occur. There is none of the zing I had expected from the co-creator of the animated Batman.

Similarly, the artwork is pedestrian, even stodgy, though this panel had a bit of zip.



So it looks like that Batman: Detective trade paperback will stay at the shop.



2000AD prog 1531, Rebellion, 4 April 2007, 28 pages of strip, £1.75
Features: Judge Dredd “Origins, part 19: Army of the Damned” by John Wagner (script), Carlos Ezquerra (art), Annie Parkhouse (letters)
Savage, Book Three “Double Yellow” part 6 by Pat Mills (script), Charlie Adlard (art), Ellie de Ville (letters)
Robo-Hunter “Casino Royal” part 5 by Alan Grant (script), Ian Gibson (art), Simon Bowland (letters)
Sinister Dexter “The Last Thing I Do” part 4 by Dan Abnett (script), Simon Davis (art), Ellie de Ville (letters)
Nikolai Dante “Hellfire” part 6 by Robbie Morrison (script), Simon Fraser (art), Gary Caldwell (colours), Annie Parkhouse (letters)

This is a tired, backward-looking issue, featuring the same old characters by the same old creators. Not that the veterans can’t do great work: but, this time, all inspiration seems long since dried up.

Dredd is an inevitability, of course. Unfortunately, the strip is currently bogged down in a long would-be epic, rather than firing off the short, sharp satirical squibs the format and character do best. This panel did manage to raise just about my only smile of the issue.



The rest of the recurring series could do with being rested or dropped, to give the writers and artists invigorating new challenges. Fresh series, and some fiery, cocksure new creators, are desperately needed.

Buck Rogers in the Workers’ Paradise

The Look-In Picture Strip Archive is a splendid enterprise aimed at collecting the comic strips that appeared in the so-called “Junior TV Times” in the 1970s and 1980s. Look-In was a mix of strips and articles, the former mostly based on TV series that appealed to boys (though I do remember a strip based on Follyfoot Farm), the latter being generally about pop groups who appealed to what we would now call “tween” girls.

Some of the comic strips were in black and white, but others were full-colour, printed on good quality paper in the photogravure tradition of Eagle, TV21 and Countdown. Look-In would be the last comic produced this way until new technology drastically reduced printing costs.

The Look-In Picture Strip Archive contains prime comics work by John M Burns, Mike Noble, Arthur Ranson, Martin Asbury and Jim Baikie. So far it only covers examples from Sapphire & Steel, Space:1999, The Tomorrow People and Terrahawks, but the archive now has a complete run of Look-In’s adapatation of the TV version of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. Given that there were only two pages a week to play with, the stories, by Angus P Allan, were inevitably crude and the characterisation perfunctory, but in this case that was a good match with the TV show. The art, by Asbury, Ransom and Noble, was mouth-watering. Here is a sample page by Ransom (as ever, click to enlarge). The archive pages are bigger, being 300 dpi scans.



One thing always struck me about the TV series. It was fairly clear that the Earth of the 25th century was a totalitarian state. It was ruled by an oligarchic council of computers. Press blackouts of emergencies were commonplace. Food was provided by a food directorate, energy by an energy directorate. All trade had to pass through a strictly policed narrow corridor through the planet’s force field. We saw no independent economic or political activity on Earth. Buck had no job – he turned down employment by the defense directorate – but he still had an apartment, clothes, food and a robot servant, so either there was a generous welfare state or, more likely, senior apparatchiks like Wilma and Dr Huer could work the system to provide for their toy-boy.

And what did Buck do? He tried to teach people to boogie and play table tennis, albeit not at the same time. Wouldn’t Jim Kirk have overthrown this society in, oh, about 45 minutes?

Batmeme

Brandon at Random Panels set this one going (and has already had lots of better responses).

Buyer Beware

While browsing in the local Oxfam bookshop today, I found a 2002 Corgi edition of Philip Pullman’s Count Karlstein in which all the comic strip elements had been replaced by prose. Anyone interested in looking at the example of semi-comics I discussed earlier should be careful about what edition they get hold of.

Monday Miscellany

Weighty Tome
I am still reading and pondering Bryan Talbot’s Alice In Sunderland: An Entertainment. I’ll post a review later in the week, but in the meantime, have a look at the review by Jog, which chimes with what I have read of the book so far.



One thing that strikes you about Alice even before you begin to read is what extraordinary value it represents as an artefact. I know it is philistine to consider the value of books by the yard, but for £16.99 – about the price of a typical hardback prose novel - you get a 330 page, full colour, 28 by 20 cm volume. The blessed thing weighs 1.4 kilograms.

In an article in the Sunday Times last month, Bryan Appleyard suggested that the recent commercial success of graphic novels owed something to the arrival on the international publishing scene of cheap Chinese printers. Dan Franklin of Jonathan Cape, the UK publishers of Talbot’s new book, reckoned that the British edition of Jimmy Corrigan would have cost about £30 or £40 a copy if it had been printed anywhere else. Who knows what Alice in Sunderland would have cost?

So give a cheer for globalisation, and say a prayer that not too many four-year-old bookbinders were pressed into service to bring us our cheap reading pleasure.

Kow-towing to the Mainstream Media
Speaking of British national newspapers, today’s issue of The Guardian reviews the first issue of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8. Reviews of graphic novels in the upmarket national press are becoming, if not commonplace, then unexceptional, but it’s a rare thrill to find a monthly pamphlet reviewed as a piece of story-telling like this (as opposed to the press coverage of Captain America issue 25, which concentrated on the event of Cap’s death, rather than the way the tale was told). A pity that a witless sub-editor should write "what a shame it's only a comic," when the reviewer, Emily Watson, is much more even-handed.

Update
I wrote earlier that Viz now has “a circulation of about 150,000 or 250,000 depending on who you talk to”. Steve Holland has posted some more up-to-date sales estimates to his blog, Bear Alley, putting Viz’s sales at around 95,000: a big drop, but still enough for it to be the third best-selling comic in the UK. Visit Steve’s blog to find out the top two.

Foreshadowing: a Masterclass
This panel of Batwoman in her secret identity was published by DC Comics in 1963:



Is that planning ahead, or what?


Panel from:
Batman “Prisoner of Three Worlds” by Bill Finger (writer), Sheldon Moldoff (penciller) and Charles Paris (inker), Batman issue 153, February 1963, reprinted in Batman: The Greatest Stories Ever Told Volume 2, DC Comics, 2007

An April Fool

(Click to enlarge.)



"What the Hell goes on," Sam the Hippie?



Why, he’s a British Intelligence agent, of course! Isn’t it obvious?



Panels from:
Modesty Blaise “Death of a Jester”, by Peter O’Donnell (story) and Enric Badia Romero (art), Evening Standard, 1971, reprinted in Modesty Blaise: The Green-Eyed Monster, Titan Books, 2005

Doctor Who: The Comics of Doom

Doctor Who returns to BBC1 tonight, for the third series since the programme was revived, the twenty-ninth in total.

If that number impresses, so does the longevity of the official comic strip in Doctor Who Magazine (formerly Doctor Who Monthly, and before that Doctor Who Weekly), which will notch up 28 consecutive years of publication this October. That’s on top of the almost 15-year run of Doctor Who comic strips in various Polystyle Publications titles (TV Comic, Countdown and TV Action), starting in 1964, and the sporadic appearance over the last 40-odd years of comic strips in annuals published by World Distributors, Marvel, Panini and the BBC.

There are currently three official Doctor Who comic strips running – in Panini’s Doctor Who Magazine, in the BBC’s own Doctor Who Adventures and in GE Fabbri’s Doctor Who Battles In Time, a magazine tied-in to the collectable card game.

All three strips have responded to the exuberant tone of the new TV series by throwing in as much wackiness as possible. But they have tended to neglect the accompanying darkness and horror. Doctor Who is probably the most joyful programme on television, but it achieves that by starkly contrasting its embrace of life with what is possibly the highest body count of any TV series ever. And perhaps the merely dead are better off than those who have been possessed, chopped up to repair spaceships, or “upgraded” into Cybermen.

The strip in Doctor Who Magazine tends to have rather stolid artwork, usually by Mike Collins, but most recently by Martin Geraghty. This is perhaps unsurprising. The strip takes up only 10 pages in a 68 page magazine sold more to fans of Doctor Who than to fans of comic strips. They are likely to value fidelity to the surface appearance of the programme above any attempt to use expressive techniques to try to capture its tone.



Doctor Who Adventures is aimed at younger children. John Ross’s art, like that in many modern children’s comics, is clear, bright, uncluttered and unshaded. It is much more lively than the art in Doctor Who Magazine, but, like the scripts, it aims only to capture the light of Doctor Who, not the shade.



I haven’t seen much of Doctor Who Battles in Time. The short cartoon strips seem to aim at a similar tone to those in Doctor Who Adventures, but the ones I have seen are less accomplished. No penciller is credited for the current story.



There’s no reason why at least some of these strips shouldn’t continue for years to come. There’s no sign of a Torchwood strip, and we’ll have to see what happens to The Sarah Jane Adventures. In the meantime, a little more adventurousness in the Doctor Who comics wouldn’t come amiss.


Panels (from top):

Doctor Who “The Warkeeper’s Crown” Part Three, by Alan Barnes (story), Martin Geraghty (pencils), David A Roach (inks), James Offredi (colours), Roger Langridge (lettering), Hickman & Gray (editors), Doctor Who Magazine issue 380, Panini, 28 March 2007

Doctor Who “The Snag Finders” Part One, by Trevor Baxendale (script), John Ross (art), Alan Craddock (colours) and Paul Vyse (letters), Doctor Who Adventures issue 26, BBC, 29 March – 14 April 2007

Doctor Who “Beneath The Skin”, written by Steve Cole, inks by Lee Sullivan, colours by Alan Craddock (no penciller, letterer or editor credited), Doctor Who Battles In Time issue 12, GE Fabbri, 2007