Reviews: Inanna’s Tears, Metal Men

Inanna’s Tears issue 1, “Tamer of the Me”, written by Rob Vollmar, illustrated by mpMann, Archaia Studios Press, August 2007, 27 pages of strip, US$3.95

Anyone producing fiction about the past faces the question of whether to emphasise the similarities with or differences from the reader’s present. Vollmar and mpMann’s comic is about the most remote era still accessible to us in history: the age of the city-states of Sumer in what is now Iraq, four to five thousand years ago.

They tackle that basic question by emphasising the continuity of emotion, while making the context alien. Thus, the story concerns the replacement of the En, the priest-king ritually married to the city’s titulary goddess, Inanna: alien enough. But it is also a story of a form of romantic triangle, of the tension between love and duty, and of political machinations. Language is formal, theatrical and archaic, but does not fall into Stan Lee pastiche. The art depicts convincing reconstructions of ancient styles, in a washed-out Mesopotamian light of earthy tones (only the apparent villain of the piece, Belipotash, wears anything as bright as brick red), but it employs a loose brush line and a cartoonist’s range of expression. Only the lettering and word balloons jar – too regular and computer-generated. But that is a very minor point.


This issue is essentially about establishing the situations and conflicts that will drive the remaining four issues. It ends with a dramatic twist. Unfortunately, the back cover blurb gives this away completely. If it’s not too late, don’t read the back first.


Metal Men issue 1, Chapter 1 “Et in Arcanium Ergo”, Chapter 2 “Theories of Realitivity”, Chapter Three “To Serve With Love”, by Duncan Rouleau (writer and artist), based on ideas by Grant Morrison, with Moose Baumann (colourist), Pat Brosseau (letterer) and Eddie Berganza (editor), DC Comics, October 2007, 22 pages of strip, US$2.99

By rights, I should have enjoyed this comic a lot more than I did. It fully embraces the preposterous silliness of the super-hero genre, juggles alchemy and weird science, and is delivered by a cartoonist in full command of his craft as a draughtsman. There is no need to have read any DC Comics before to understand what is going on, and the main tone being attempted is humorous, rather than portentous or shocking.

Unfortunately, the key word there is “attempted”, because this all falls a little flat. Look at the puns in the chapter titles – the meaningless Latin and the unpronounceable “realitivity”; try to make the repeated phrase “Hypo-Hyper Flux” trip off your tongue, rather than stumble. None of it quite works. Whacked-out Morrisonian pop-science-in-a-blender can be a lot of fun if integrated into the action, but not if delivered as a multi-page lecture, as it is here.


This isn’t a bad comic – it displays more wit, good spirits and artistic skill than most DC Universe titles – but it all does seem a little leaden, when it should be mercurial.

Uncollected: The New Adventures of Hitler

Now that Dare - Grant Morrison’s and Rian Hughes’s dystopian take on Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future - has been republished as part of Yesterday’s Tomorrows: Rian Hughes Collected Comics, maybe it is time for a reissue of Morrison’s other strip for the Revolver/Crisis stable of would-be mature comics from 1990: The New Adventures of Hitler.


Working with artist Steve Yeowell and a team of colourists – of whom, more later – Morrison tells of a visit paid by Hitler in 1912 to his half-brother, Alois, in Liverpool. The half-brother is real; the visit, fictional, a conceit already used by Beryl Bainbridge in her novel Young Adolf.

Where Bainbridge wrote black comedy, Morrison and his confederates produce something more bizarre. Hitler is in England to find the Holy Grail – which he does, after a fashion, with the aid of John Bull and his incontinent pet bulldog. He believes that a trolleybus is trying to kill him. He hallucinates constantly – not just the image of John Bull, but late 20th century pop singers in his bedroom closet, and men wearing tiny chairs for shoes.


It is not a wholly successful work. It certainly conveys an atmosphere of mental illness, capturing the shabby, mundane reality that permeates the grandiose dreaming. It is consistently amusing (Alois, for example, dreams of world domination … of the market for safety razors). But the parallels drawn between the Nazis and the British Empire are glib claptrap, and the details of Hitler’s delusions and hallucinations often seem arbitrary. Why are Morrissey and John Lennon singing in Hitler’s wardrobe? Are they meant to similar cases of provincial men with artistic ambitions, successes to contrast to his failure? Are they symbols of his ultimate irrelevance? Or just a piece of random wackiness?


So why am I so keen to see this reprinted? It’s the art, you see. A team of colourists variously credited as “the Spock Whitney Quartet”, “Brian, Dougall and Mr Rusty”, “your Mum”, or, more prosaically “Nick Abadzis, Steve Whitaker and John Buckle” plaster over Steve Yeowell’s drawings with thick, richly textured patterns. This adds to the air of hallucinatory mundanity: we see as through a lava lamp darkly, but the patterns are those of Edwardian endpapers and wallpaper, the lower middle class mechanical offspring of the arts and crafts movement.


Unfortunately, the printing wasn’t up to the job. In places, the patterns leave Yeowell’s drawings illegibly obscured (I've used Photoshop to make the scans here a little clearer). So what I want is not just a reprint, but a high-quality, remastered, art-paper reprint that doesn’t see the inks soak up and blend so much.


Fat chance of that, I suppose. But a man can dream. Or hallucinate.

Panels
The New Adventures of Hitler, written by Grant Morrison, drawn by Steve Yeowell, lettered by Gordon Robson, coloured by Nick Abadzis, Steve Whitaker and John Buckle, edited by Steve MacManus, Crisis issues 46-49, June to August 1990

Fun with Shelving

Belgians in the Congo
Taking their cue from Borders, Waterstone's bookshops have responded to the Commission for Racial Equality’s attack on Tintin in the Congo by reshelving it in the “graphic novels” section in the grown-ups' part of the shop - just in time for it to be eligible for the “3 books for the price of 2” offer currently applying to all graphic novels. So, thanks the the CRE, you can now get your helping of mid-century racial sterotypes cheaper than ever.

When the law of unintended consequences strikes, it really strikes.


Just tragic
WH Smith seems to have split its biography section in two. One half is still called “biography”. The other is called “tragic life stories”. Perhaps we could smuggle in some Joe Matt or Ivan Brunetti.


Moment of pride
This post is the ninth most popular search result for "her pet ocelot". My life is complete.


Okay, I lied about the “fun” part.

Review: Phonogram - Rue Britannia

Phonogram: Rue Britannia by Kieron Gillen (story) and Jamie McKelvie (art and lettering), Image Comics, 2007, 138 pages of strip, US$14.99

David Kohl is a phonomancer, a magician whose power is focused in music, particularly, in his case, the Britpop movement of the 1990s. Kohl learns that someone is planning to resurrect Britannia, goddess of Britpop, but in zombified form. As events progress, Kohl finds his memories and tastes changing, putting his very identity at risk.

The first chapter of this story – which was originally issue 1 of the pamphlet series – is a glorious tribute to the power of popular music. It refers at length and explicitly to a batch of singles by Sunderland popstrels Kenickie (who were strangely omitted from Bryan Talbot’s otherwise comprehensive tour of Mackem culture in Alice in Sunderland). But even if you are wholly unfamiliar with “Come Out 2Nite” - a state you should change as soon as possible - you can understand what this sequence means by reference to any pop songs that have ever spoken directly to you.


Then it all takes a turn for the worse. Well, a couple of turns, really. One is in the artwork. Jamie McKelvie’s art has a quiet, clear-line style that is fine for the more mundane parts of the storyline, a visual equivalent of the dry, deadpan voices of Luke Haines (of the Auteurs) or Damon Albarn (of Blur). But as Kieron Gillen’s script turns more to the mystical, McKelvie’s only recourse is to use grey tones instead of black for the more hallucinatory aspects, such as the “Memory Kingdom” where Kohl talks with Britpop idols. It’s a missed opportunity, especially when Blur turn up and you start to wonder what Albarn’s flatmate Jamie Hewlett might have done with this material. McKelvie is also none too strong on likenesses: I spent several pages wondering why Kohl was being guided through the Memory Kingdom by a young Elton John, before realising that this was supposed to be Luke Haines, songwriter and singer of the Auteurs.

And this is indicative of the second wrong turn: Phonogram becomes too specifically about Britpop, and, in particular, about the interpretation of Britpop favoured by Kohl.

For those of you who missed it, in the early to mid 1990s, the pallid boys with guitars in Britain started to produce songs with whistleable tunes and audible lyrics. In part, this was a reaction to the popularity of American grunge a few years earlier. Hence “Britpop” – British, not American, pop more than rock. Hair was shorter, clothes sharp in the mod tradition. For a while, this caught the mood of the public, and Britpop bands, most prominently Blur, Oasis and Pulp, thrived in the record sales charts and the playlists of BBC Radio 1. And then it ended. Fickle public taste moved on; the pallid boys were accused of selling out and decided to make their music more wilfully obscure and difficult; and, most catastrophically of all, the new Blair government tried to co-opt Britpop for political ends. The Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport even published a book called Cool Britannia. No pop movement could survive that.

Phonogram’s perspective on this period takes its cue from the so-called “inkies” of the time: the NME (formerly the New Musical Express) and Melody Maker, two music magazines published weekly on low-grade newsprint. Their target readership was pop music snobs, more concerned that their record collections should be credible than danceable. I know, dear reader, for I was that snob – but ten or more years older than most readers, so less likely to be taken in by the inkies’ latest round of hype, scorn and scene-building

Much of Phonogram’s plot revolves around Kohl’s attempt to defend this perspective against an assault by a rival group of music-centred magicians called retromancers, who want to produce a simpler version of the memory of Britpop which they can peddle at 1990s nights at clubs and theme pubs. This, it seems, threatens Kohl’s own memory and, indeed, identity. It seems that, in Phonogram, there is only room for one, definitive, memory of the past, and this is something to be contested.


This is where I part company with Phonogram. “But it wasn’t like that. Blur vs Oasis and nowt all else.” Well, indeed, to Kohl and Gillen and me. But possibly not to those who preferred The Sun to the NME, and certainly not to schoolchildren of 1995, shouting the names of their favourites at each other the week the two bands released their new singles simultaneously. And their views are as valid as ours, especially given that one of the defining traits of Britpop was that it was actually popular, unlike so much indie guitar music. I remember once, browsing in HMV, Oasis’ “Wonderwall” came on the in-store radio. Every single person I could see was singing along under their breath. Would they have sung along to the Auteurs’ “Unsolved Child Murder”? Probably not. That doesn’t mean that they misremember Britpop, but that it was always something different for different people. By championing a more complex picture of Britpop, Phonogram favours a less complex picture of culture and memory.

And, for that matter, a less complex picture of the longer-term development of British pop music. Phonogram describes Britpop as “the second flowering of British guitar pop”. So what was the first? The sixties? It’s hard to dispute the claims of the Beatles and the Stones. But, hold on, the first issue’s cover is a pastiche of the sleeve of Elastica’s debut album, which was heavily influenced – to say the least – by 1970s punk and new wave bands like Wire and the Stranglers. Was there no flowering then? And if no further flowerings are to be allowed, where does that leave the current wave of commercially successful guitar pop bands like Franz Ferdinand or the Arctic Monkeys? (Kohl does at least mention the last of these, though in condescending terms.) It is hard to esacpe the impression that this is just special pleading on the part of a music scene that happens to be the one that meant most to the character.


Several times in Phonogram, Kohl’s fellow phonomancers warn him that it is a mistake to hang his own identity on a long-dead phase in music, and you expect that the resolution of the story might involve him learning and growing past this. But instead, he reaffirms this narrow definition, mellowing only to the extent that he now accepts that he always did like some songs by unfashionable groups like Echobelly and Sleeper. So a story that starts as a hymn to the potency of cheap music become something more crabbed and cliquey, a defence of hipster superiority and a denial of the right of people to enjoy music however they may. Perhaps, when Gillen was writing about those Kenickie singles, he should have heeded the mickey-taking of “Punka” (lyrics taken from Lyrics Download ):

Hey Punka (hey!), how're you doin'?
Hey Punka (hey!), are you staying true to you?
Cos that's what Punkas do.
I wanna be a Punka too.
And if your friends all bitch, you're a Punka (Punka!),
If your life is kitsch, you're a Punka (Punka!).
I'm a Punka too.

Hey Punka (hey!), I've got ambition.
Hey Punka (hey!), my one wish is to
Be as punk as you when I grow up,
If Punkas ever do grow up.
And if your hits all miss, you're a Punka (Punka!),
If you dance like this, you're a Punka (Punka!).
I'm a Punka.

P-U-N-K-A (Punka!)
Lo-fi songs are great (Punka!)
P-U-N-K-A (Punka!)
We never learnt to play, cos we're Punka!
I wanna be a Punka too,
When I grow up if Punkas ever do,
I wanna be
P-U-N-K-A (Punka!)
Underground cliché (Punka!)
P-U-N-K-A (Punka!)
We always want to stay, hey! (Punka!)
I wanna be a Punka too,
When I grow up, if Punkas ever do,
And play guitar like
[Guitar break]

1-2-3-4!
P-U-N-K-A (Punka!)
P-U-N-K-A (Punka!)
Lo-fi songs are great (Punka!)
P-U-N-K-A (Punka!)
Don't you want to play, Punka?

I wanna be a Punka too,
When I grow up, if Punkas ever do,
I wanna be like you.

Even so, Phonogram is not a complete loss. Gillen is good at creating simple but memorable supporting characters, such as Kohl’s oblivious friend Kid-with-Knife, or the hermit Indie Dave, who keeps himself warm by burning old seven-inch singles. And there is a major sub-plot about a woman who has given up listening to music, leaving behind as a ghost her old obsession with the Manic Street Preachers and their guitarist and lyricist, Richie Edwards, which is much more touching, humane and uplifting than the main plot. The resolution of the subplot closes the book. If the rest of it had maintained the tone of the first chapter and the last few pages, I would have been much happier.

Uncollected: Heros the Spartan

Over at Yet Another Comics Blog, Dave Carter asks what omnibus editions we’d like to see.

Well, I’m not too keen on omnibuses as such: I’d rather have books that I can hold open without having to undertake a course of weight training first. But there is one comic collection I’d very much like to see but probably never will: Heros the Spartan, written by Tom Tully and drawn by the incomparable Frank Bellamy, the supernaturally-tinged story of a Roman soldier, born in Sparta, posted to a monster-haunted ancient Britain.

One problem with reprinting Heros is its format: it appeared stretched across the centrespread of the tabloid sized Eagle comic, treating the whole area as a single page. The landscape pages of Frank Miller’s 300 - a story and format inspired by Heros - are not much more than a quarter of that size.

(Click to enlarge)

Even so, Bellamy’s work on the Thunderbirds comic strip from TV21, which used the same format, has been reprinted several times, at least in part. But Thunderbirds has a life of its own, as demonstrated by the existence of an ongoing comic even now. Heros never stuck in the popular consciousness like his stablemate Dan Dare. I guess that if anyone was going to reprint the strip, it would have been to cash in on 300, with Frank Miller cover quotes.

Frank Bellamy – The Checklist says that one Heros story, “The Island of Darkness”, was reprinted last year by Douglas Shaw, but my Google-fu has failed to turn up any more information about either Shaw or the reprint. I guess I’ll have to ask.

It would still be nice to see the whole thing. If my quick calculations are right, all of Heros the Spartan would fit on to only about 100 big, wide pages. Even at 360mm by 580mm, that needn’t be a wrist breaker.

Panels
Heros the Spartan by Tom Tully (script) and Frank Bellamy (art), Eagle Annual 1966, Odhams Books, 1965

Page of Heros the Spartan downloaded from an art dealer a while ago – I’m afraid that I didn’t note the name or URL

Grant Morrison Explains It All

Courtesy of the instant drawing functioning of our imaginary correspondent’s iPhone, we present an exclusive comic strip transcription of Grant Morrison’s explanation of his plans for DC’s next big crossover event, Final Crisis, straight from the DC Nation panel at the San Diego Comic-Con.






Any resemblance between these dispatches and panels from Zenith “Phase III/4: Facts and Figures” by Grant Morrison (script), Steve Yeowell (art) and Kid (lettering), 2000AD prog 630, 10 June 1989, is entirely due to polyvalent retrochronicity at an omniversal level. Or copying.

Webcomics by Whedon, Geary and others

Dark Horse is posting comics at MySpace. This first vitual issue of Dark Horse Presents includes new work by Rick Geary, Joss Whedon, Gabriel Bá and Fabio Moon, among others. Found via The Beat.


Fun fact: Gerard Way cannot spell "brakes".

New Doctor Who Comic from IDW

Newarama reports that IDW will begin publishing "later this year" a new Doctor Who comic, to be written by Gary Russell (script editor on the TV series, who ran the Big Finish Doctor Who audio plays) and drawn by Nick Roche (whose work I don't know - he has, apparently, been working on the new Transformers comic for Titan magazines).

That makes four different licensed Doctor Who comic strips running simultaneously, unless Battles in Time is finished before this one starts. Surely that must be some sort of record?

Update, 28 July There are interviews with Russell and Roche, and a number of Roche Doctor Who sketches, posted on Comic Book Resources.

Reviews: Doctor Who, Crécy, Buffy

Doctor Who Magazine issue 385, “Bus Stop!” by Rob Davis (story), John Ross (art), James Offredi (colours), Roger Langridge (letters), Clayton Hickman and Scott Gray (editors), Panini Magazines, 22 August 2007, 9 pages of strip (out of 68), £3.99

Of the three regular licensed Doctor Who periodicals, Doctor Who Magazine is the one aimed mostly at adult readers. The comic strip runs only to a handful of pages each issue, but this time out it’s worth a look even if you aren’t particularly interested in the articles, because “Bus Stop!” is possibly the best Doctor Who strip published since the TV series returned to the screen.

It’s an inconsequential, one-off story about assassins trying to kill a future president by bumping off his ancestor, the present day Mayor of London. But although slight, it captures the upbeat energy and invention of the modern TV show without either the stodginess of storytelling that tends to weigh down the Magazine strip or the toothless, anodyne feel that usually disarms the strip in Doctor Who Adventures (on which Ross is the regular artist). Despite catching the TV tone, it remains resolutely a comic strip, using devices, such as keeping the Doctor off-panel for the opening page of his conversation with a bus passenger, that would not work on the small screen but which do work on the printed page.


Good stuff. I hope that we see more from this team.


Crécy by Warren Ellis (story), Raulo Caceres (artwork) and Felipe Massafera (cover), Avatar Press/Apparat, July 2007, 44 pages of strip, US$6.99

This is the Anglo-American way of war: stay as far away from your enemy as possible, and kill him before he can get near you. Before the cruise missile, before the Lancaster bomber or the Martini-Henry rifle, the way to do that was with the longbow. Handled by a skilled archer, it had a greater range, penetration and rate of fire than any personal weapon before the twentieth century. Muskets replaced it, not because they were inherently more effective, but because any untrained idiot could fire one, whereas it took years of practice to be a longbowman. At Crécy in 1346, the flower of French chivalry met the longbow for the first time, and died. This was in the early days of the Hundred Years War – in truth, perhaps just a particularly intense stage in the 750-year war that began with the triumph of the Bastard in 1066 and ended with the crushing of the Monster in 1815.

Warren Ellis’ story is a monologue by an English longbowmen, anachronistically aware of the 21st century readership he is addressing. His language is foul, and so are his attitudes, but his blunt, coarse honesty keeps the reader on side as he explains why and how the English are fighting in France, while the humour, scatology and xenophobia keep things from getting too schoolmasterly. His account is reasonably accurate, if you discount a far more complete sense of national identity than existed in the fourteenth century, and it is both informative and cruelly entertaining.


In keeping with Avatar’s house style, Cacares’ artwork suggests that much more time has been spent on elaborate rendering than on composition, but it is serviceable.

In comparison with Crécy, the old-school true war stories reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Best War Comics seem bloodless in more senses than one.


Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight issue 5, “The Chain” by Joss Whedon (script), Paul Lee (pencils), Andy Owens (inks), Dave Stewart (colours), Richard Starkings & Comicraft’s Jimmy (letters) and Scott Allie (editor), cover by Jo Chen, Dark Horse Comics, August 2007, 22 pages of strip, US$2.99

A new Slayer is recruited to impersonate Buffy, going underground (literally) to intimidate a demon lord with the power of Buffy Summers’ reputation. “There’s always a name … The name can inspire terror, awe, sometimes great things…”

The name on the credits is Joss Whedon. So … how do we know that he actually wrote this?

Better than Supergirl (2)

Along with lots of work by other artists, Comic Art Community has a huge collection of convention sketches by Adam Hughes. As you might guess, 99% of it is cheesecake (the other 1% is mostly Star Wars). But what is really impressive is the way his strong sense of design permeates even these rush jobs.


This Super-Lois is a fine example. You could almost imagine it as a Fleischer cartoon title card (if those were vertically oriented), with a spot on Shuster-styled face and more than a hint of Rosie the Riveter. The heart-shaped emblem also reminds me of the St Trinian’s school badge, but that must be coincidence.

Mary Marvelman Makes Me Feel Old

So, to recap: 1954 saw the end of L Miller and Sons’ supply of Captain Marvel and Marvel Family comics to reprint for the British market. They turned to Mick Anglo to come up with a substitute, the Marvelman Family.


Anglo replaced Captain Marvel with Marvelman, and Captain Marvel Jr with Young Marvelman. His biggest change was to replace Mary Marvel with a boy, Johnny Bates, Kid Marvelman.


So perhaps it is only appropriate that Mary Marvel is now recapitulating the character development Alan Moore devised for Johnny Bates when he revived the Marvelman strip.


The thing is, Marvelman came back in 1982 – a quarter of a century ago. Countdown and the Mary Marvel plotline are drawing not just on that, but on other developments in superhero comics that all date back to the 1980s: structurally (the company-encompassing crossover, pioneered with Crisis on Infinite Earths; weekly publication, as attempted with Action Comics), thematically (darker and gloomier plotting and characterisation supposed to appeal to older readers) and even technically (the page as a stanza, the replacement of thought balloons and third-person narration by first person caption boxes).

Go back another 25 years from 1982 and you’re in 1957. Even the journeyman superhero comic book writers of the 1980s had ambitions beyond merely emulating the work of Gardner Fox or, for that matter, Mick Anglo. They had absorbed the developments made by Lee and Kirby, Denny O’Neil and Steve Englehart, among others, in the 1960s and 1970s.

Alan Moore said that the purpose of his America’s Best Comics imprint was to reassemble superhero adventure comics, after deconstructing them in Marvelman and Watchmen. Grant Morrison seems to share that project, especially in All-Star Superman, and I’d guess that it was also the intention behind DC’s One Year Later plan. But too many writers seem to have gone back to taking inspiration from their well-thumbed copies of The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen and – if they’re lucky enough to have them - Marvelman.

That’s the rationalised version. The original, stream-of-thought version of this post ran, “Christ, Moore's Marvelman started twenty-five years ago? Where did the time go? God, I feel old. And everything was better when I was young. Bah!” So my ramblings may be a little skewed by self-pity and nostalgia today.


Pictures and Panels

Marvel Family issue 3, cover by CC Beck and Pete Constanza, Fawcett Comics, July 1946, taken from the Grand Comics Database

Marvelman Family issue 1, L Miller and Sons, October 1956, cover taken from Superbrits

Mary Marvel issue 9, cover by Jack Binder, Fawcett Comics, February 1947, taken from the Grand Comics Database

Marvelman Family “Marvelman Family and the Invaders from the future” by Mick Anglo (script) and Don Lawrence (art), Marvelman Family issue 1, L Miller and Sons, October 1956, reprinted in Marvelman Special issue 1, Quality Communications, 1984

Marvelman “When Johnny Comes Marching Home …” by Alan Moore (writer) and Garry Leach (artist), Warrior issue 3, July 1982

Countdown issue 47, cover by Ed Benes, DC Comics, June 2007, taken from the DC Comics website

Portrait of Mademoiselle X

Jo Chen has provided a series of striking and beautifully finished covers for Dark Horse’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight comics, and all I’ve done is poke fun at Buffy’s apparent height, or Willow’s strange wardrobe.

So I thought that I’d point out the virtues of the latest Chen cover to be posted, as part of Dark Horse’s solicitations for October. The composition’s a little awkward, but Chen has caught the faces perfectly, applying just the right amount of exaggeration to Faith’s hooded eyes and cynical mouth (and perhaps a little more exaggeration to her bust). But what I really like is the way that, for a story about Faith infiltrating high society, Chen has nicely evoked the spirit of John Singer Sargent in the black dress and dark pearly background. Classy stuff. Or possibly extreme kitsch. You decide.