Manhattan on Mars

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?

Who Plunders the Pirates?

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

Reviews: Deadpool/GLI Summer Fun, Martha Washington Dies

Deadpool/GLI Summer Fun Spectacular issue 1, written by Fabian Nicieza and Dan Slott, lettering by Dave Lanphear, editor Nicole Boose, cover by Paul Pelletier, Dave Meikis and Will Quintana, 39 pages of strip, Marvel Comics, September 2007, US$3.99
Features: Squirrel Girl, art by Kieron Dwyer, colour by Pete Pantazis
Deadpool and the Great Lakes Initiative “Drunk with Power”, art by Nelson, colour by Giulia Brisco
Big Bertha and Deadpool “A Date with Density", pencils by Paul Pelletier, inks by Dave Meikis, colour by Will Quintana
Flatman and Deadpool “Fight or Fold?”, art by Clio Chiang

It’s nice to see that that, although so many of its core super-hero titles are being bound ever tighter into cross-continuity big events, Marvel continues to publish titles that provide lighter-toned stand-alone stories: not just the Marvel Adventures line, but the likes of Spider-Man Family, Hulk and Power Pack, X-Men: First Class and the occasional special about the third-rate super-heroes from the Great Lakes, of which this is the latest.

It’s a bit of a mixed bag. A major problem is the presence of the repulsive psychopath Deadpool. It is possible to make casual, amoral slaughter funny, but it’s hard and requires a careful balance of tone. Deadpool’s repeated killing of Mr Immortal raises a laugh, because we know Mr Immortal will recover (the clue is in his name), and because repetition of an absurdity is an old comedy standby. But the gratuitous killing of a passing character called Grasshopper right at the end is just plain nasty and leaves the book with a bad aftertaste (but see the comments section for more on this - added 16 July).

“Drunk with Power” is the weakest thing here, laboured and stolid in plot, dialogue and artwork. “A Date with Density” is nimbler on all counts, but still rather pedestrian.

“Fight or Fold?” is lovely little throwaway piece, with light, dancing artwork from Chiang.


But the best thing here is the Squirrel Girl sequence. Nicieza and Slott skewer the dark, gloomy, adolescent tone of the Civil War period Marvel comics, but still provide a coherent story about a delightful, upbeat character that works for those of us who haven’t read the Civil War books. Dwyer’s compositions are clear and fluid, finished with a rough, energetic line. It’s a shame about the ending, but otherwise, these two stories easily justify reading this comic.


Oh, and a message to toy manufacturers: please tool up a model Squirrel-A-Gig right now. Well, when you've finished with those librarian figures, anyway.


Martha Washington Dies by Frank Miller (writer), Dave Gibbons (artist), Angus McKie (colourist), Diana Schutz (editor), 17 pages of strip, Dark Horse Comics, July 2007, US$3.50

In which Martha Washington dies, surprisingly enough; in a blaze of light, at the age of one hundred, after speechifying a bit. No man-eating badgers are involved.

Miller provides an uneventful coda to the Martha Washington series, with touches as unsubtle as the previous episodes (“And now the barbarians sing their chants and set off their bombs and pray for the Armageddon we’ll never let them have”), but without the jokes. Gibbons’ artwork is as meticulous as ever.

I have seen some online criticism of Dark Horse for publishing something so inconsequential. But this chapter will serve a purpose by providing a definitive end to the upcoming omnibus The Life and Times of Martha Washington in the Twenty-First Century. For those who already have the preceding stories in one form or another, this separate publication is surely a positive and helpful thing, staving off the Hobson’s choice of expensive duplication or incomplete story.

Not in Previews

The latest issue of Previews includes a relisting of the trade paperback collection of Albion, the underwhelming attempt by Leah Moore, John Reppion and Shane Oakley to launch the back catalogue of comics characters from British publishers Odhams, Fleetway and IPC onto the American market.

The blurb says, “Reoffered to coincide with Albion Origins, solicited in the Titan Books section of this Previews”.

No such volume appears in the Titan Books section, either in the US bit or in the Previews UK listings at the back. It looks like this volume of reprints – which John Reppion says will include Janus Stark, House of Dolmann, Cursitor Doom and Kelly's Eye - has been bumped down the schedule to make room for a collection of the Norwegian goth-girl humour strip Nemi. Ah, the indignities of age.

Update
Amazon has Brian Bolland's cover for Albion Origins, and gives a publication date of 16 October (though Amazon's listed publication dates often turn out to be wrong).

(Click to enlarge.)

Picture
Albion cover by Dave Gibbons, DC Comics/Wildstorm
Albion Origins cover by Brian Bolland, Titan Books

British Comics: A Quick Guide for Visitors, Part Two

See also Part One: Background and Periodicals

The simplest way to run through the various reprints, trade paperbacks, manga, annuals and other books of comics available in the UK is to take you through an imaginary bookshop. So, imagine that you have just entered a large branch of a major chain like Waterstone’s.

As before, I’d welcome corrections, expansions, and different opinions.

Manga
A big comics section may be given over to manga. Almost without exception, these will simply be the US editions from Viz Media, Tokyopop and Dark Horse, whether the originators are from Japan, the US or Germany (though a few US translations are licensed to British publishers like Gollancz and Harper-Collins).

The “almost” allows room for The Mammoth Book of Best New Manga, a 540 page anthology of mostly new (or previously only web-published) material from a large number of creators, mostly, but not exclusively, based in the UK. A volume came out in 2006, edited by Ilya, who I remember as a small-press cartoonist back in the 1980s, and was published by Robinson, who are responsible for a stable of Mammoth Books of Best New prose stories (eg one for SF, one for horror) which are published annually. The hope seems to be that the manga volume will be too.

Incidentally, the term “manga” is being used here very loosely: some of these cartoonists have only microscopic traces of Japanese influence in their bloodstreams.



Graphic Novels
This will probably have a section of a similar size to that for manga, and will contain a mixed bag of material.

There will be a range of US titles from DC, Vertigo, Image and Marvel. But in addition to the US Marvel trade paperbacks, there will also be titles by Panini, who handle Marvel’s European business. These include some unique editions of US material (paperback editions of the Lee/Ditko Spider-Man run in colour, Runaways in full-sized paperbacks), as well as reprints of material originated by Panini and its predecessor Marvel UK.

The latter include Death’s Head, the original Chris Claremont/Herb Trimpe version of Captain Britain from the 1970s, and lots of Doctor Who. My pick of the Doctor Who series would be Dragon’s Claw, featuring Tom Baker’s Doctor. This not only contains page after page of prime Dave Gibbons artwork, but also Mick McMahon’s splendidly quirky “Junkyard Demon”.


US art comics will often be well-represented in this section, sometimes in UK editions by respected mainstream book publisher Jonathan Cape. For example, we got a paperback edition of Alison Bechdel’s Fun House last year (but never did get a hardback edition, that I saw). Cape also publishes work by UK literary comics authors like Bryan Talbot (such as Alice in Sunderland) and Posy Simmonds, as well as Ethel & Ernest, a moving memoir of his parents by Raymond Briggs, best known for his nuclear tragedy When the Wind Blows and his albums for children, such as Fungus the Bogeyman.


But on the whole, the literary or consciously artistic approach is a field in which British comics are lacking, possibly because of the absence of any UK equivalent of Fantagraphics, Top Shelf or Drawn and Quarterly.

If you are lucky, you might also find some of the humorous literary adaptations and collected comics of Hunt Emerson, published by Knockabout Books, on these shelves too. See here for my views on The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.


There is also likely to be a fair selection of Rebellion’s 2000AD books. These are either slim albums of recent material, such as Ian Edginton and D’Israeli’s seaborne horror strip Leviathan, or big fat volumes of classic series from the 1970s and 1980s, including Judge Dredd, Strontium Dog and the peerless satire on religious and racial bigotry, Nemesis the Warlock.


Possibly even fatter are the volumes from Carlton Books reprinting war stories from Commando Picture Library.


Titan Books’ various reprint series are available wherever Diamond distributors spreads its tentacles, but are also to be found in bookshops. A highlight is Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun’s heavily researched and moving series about the Great War, Charley’s War. The best-looking are the reprints of the 1950s SF series Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future. Other reprints from boys’ comics have stalled after one volume each of The Spider (retitled King of Crooks to avoid infringing the copyright of the US pulp character) and The Steel Claw. But an anthology volume called Albion Origins is apparently in the works.


Titan is also compiling two classic newspaper strip adventure series, the adaptations of the James Bond novels, and Peter O’Donnell’s great female adventurer, Modesty Blaise. The latter is now well into Enric Badia Romero’s run as artist, but see if you can track down some of the earlier volumes featuring the strikingly stylish artwork of Jim Holdaway.



Humour
The humour section of the bookshop will be where you can find reprints of British newspaper strips as, apart from one or two series based around football (soccer, if you must), they now all embody both meanings of the word “comic”. Humour is too individual for me to lay down the law, so you are best off browsing, but two I’d recommend you take a look at are Charles Peattie and Russell Taylor’s Alex about an amoral, selfish merchant banker, and, above all, Steve Bell’s biting political strip If…,with its brutal, powerful artwork.


The humour section seems also to be where bookshop staff shelve things they don’t know where else to place. Over the last year, I have noticed here a big reprint volume selected from the 1950s girls’ comic Girl (imaginative title, eh?) and a set of imaginary biographies of characters from boys’ sports comic strips.



Children’s books
This is where you will probably find the English language editions of the great Franco-Belgian comics series Asterix and Tintin. These are the only European comics you are likely to find in a British bookshop, unless the graphic novels section has some NBM or First Second translations for the American market. Cinebook has been translating some other classic European comic albums, including the Lucky Luke and Blake and Mortimer series, but I have yet to see these in an ordinary bookshop.

In the autumn, the annuals will start to appear. Most of these are hard-back, extra-long editions of the regular comic periodicals, though there will also be editions devoted solely to popular characters (such as The Bash Street Kids from The Beano), and annuals devoted to currently popular films and TV series that do not necessarily have their own regular comics. Some comics – including 2000AD - do not have associated annuals any more. Look before you buy: not all of these have much, if anything, by way of comic strip content these days. Annuals are aimed at the Christmas market; after Christmas, they can generally be found for a couple of months at greatly reduced prices, and are then taken off sale.


This year, I have noticed for the first time some large format paperbacks labelled as “summer annuals”, but these all seem to be activity books with no comics content.

I’m guessing, but the children’s section may be where the Bumper Book of Look and Learn will turn up. See Steve Holland’s post about it. Look and Learn was a children’s educational magazine, but for our purposes it was also the home of The Rise and Fall of the Trigan Empire, a magnificent planetary romance painted by Don Lawrence. The one or two collections published years ago now go for a bomb on eBay, and the only current editions are lavish Dutch ones that require a second mortgage to buy. Apparently, the Bumper Book will include a complete Trigan Empire story.


There will also be a wide range of illustrated children’s books, some with comic strip content. Take a look at Terry Deary’s Horrible Histories series, discussed here. Beyond that, I’m not well informed about children’s books. It might be worth having a browse through the “picture books” section, if your preferred definition of “comics” is broad enough.


Art
Finally, don’t leave the bookshop before looking in the art section. You never know what will be shelved there. I’ve seen Robert Crumb and Little Nemo in Slumberland here recently. And you can always buy a book about Hogarth and wallow in his sequential print series.



Comics shops
Comics shop may have some or all of the above, though they tend to be light on children’s books and rarely stock annuals.


Update, 8 June: added a mention of Raymond Briggs and Ethel & Ernest.

Pictures and panels
The Mammoth Book of Best New Manga, edited by Ilya, cover by Neill Cameron, published by Robinson Books, 2006; interior panels from Bulldog: Empire by Jason Cobley and Neill Cameron, and Princess at Midnight by Andi Watson

Doctor Who: Dragon’s Claw, cover by Dave Gibbons, published by Panini Books, 2004; interior panels from Doctor Who “Junkyard Demon” by Steve Parkhouse (writer and letterer), Mike McMahon (pencils), Adolfo Buylla (inks) and Alan McKenzie (editor)

Ethel & Ernest: A True Story by Raymond Briggs, published by Jonathan Cape, 1998 (paperback 2002)

Aliens Ate My Trousers! by Hunt Emerson, published by Knockabout Books, 1998

Leviathan by Ian Edginton (script), D'Israeli (art) and Tom Frame (letters), published by Rebellion, 2006

The Complete Nemesis the Warlock volume 1, cover by Kevin O’Neill, published by Rebellion; interior panels from Nemesis the Warlock Book Three by Pat Mills (writer), Kevin O’Neill (artist) and Steve Potter (letters)

Commando: True Brit, published by Carlton Books, 2006. Cover image downloaded from Carlton Books

Charley's War by Pat Mills (writer) and Joe Colquhoun (artist), published by Titan Books. Cover image downloaded from Titan Books

Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future: The Man from Nowhere, cover and interior panels by Frank Hampson, published by Titan Books, 2007. Cover image downloaded from Titan Books

The Steel Claw: The Vanishing Man, cover by Brian Bolland, published by Titan Books, 2005; interior panels by Ken Bulmer (writer) and Jesús Blasco (artist). Cover image downloaded from Titan Books

Modesty Blaise: The Black Pearl, cover by Jim Holdaway, published by Titan Books, 2004; interior panels from Modesty Blaise “The Killing Ground” by Peter O’Donnell (writer) and Jim Holdaway (artist)Cover image downloaded from Titan Books

If … Marches On by Steve Bell published by Methuen, 2006

The Best of Girl, published by Prion Books, 2006; interior panels from Wendy and Jinx “The New Headmistress”, written by Stephen James, drawn by Peter Kay, and Vicky and the Vengeance of the Incas, written by Betty Roland and drawn by Dudley Pout. Cover image downloaded from Carlton Books

Doctor Who: The Official Annual 2007, published by BBC Books, 2006

The Rise and Fall of the Trigan Empire, art by Don Lawrence, scanned from The Trigan Empire, published by Hamlyn Books, 1978. This panel is probably not from the story to be featured in the Bumper Book of Look and Learn

A Harlot’s Progress plate 2, by William Hogarth, 1732, scanned from Mark Hallett Hogarth, published by Phaidon Books, 2000

Old Flanagan's Blog of Impractical Cats

The next episode of Doctor Who on BBC1 (which should be broadcast on Saturday unless the FA Cup semi-final overruns) is set in New New York in the year 5 billion plus, and brings back the race of the cat-nuns from last year’s “New Earth”. Then, on Monday, 2Entertain will release the region 2 DVD of “Survival”, the last story of the 1963-1989 run, which is full of cheetah-people.

Cat people have had a long history in folklore and fiction. Gustave Doré produced this picture of one of the best-known, Puss-in-Boots, from the 17th century tale by Charles Perrault, in 1863.



Sadly, by this time Doré had given up creating comic books. (See the bottom half of this article by Patricia Mainardi on the 19th Century Art Worldwide site for more about his comics career.)

I was going to suggest that anthropomorphic cats made their way into comics with Tiger Tim, created by Julius Stafford Baker for The Rainbow in 1903. But Paul Gravett’s book, Great British Comics, says that Baker was inspired by a series begun by James Swinnerton in 1897. Here’s an example from Coconino Classics, signed 1918 and published in 1919. You may want to spend a while poking around that treasure trove of a site, but be sure to come back here, won’t you?



Swinnerton and Mr Jack were American, but Tiger Tim wasn’t even the first recurring cat character in British comics. That seems to have been Stripes, from the Chowgli and Stripes series in Illustrated Chips, which began in 1899. (Chowgli, an African boy, was presented with the appearance and speech patterns that late Victorian prejudices required, but he was still the hero of his own strip.)



The style of the cartooning is such that I’m not sure if Stripes was anthropomorphic or not. Probably not. But he did speak, which counts for something.

Cat people turned up early in science fiction comic strips, with Buck Rogers (and, in the panels below, Wilma Deering) meeting the Tiger Men from Mars in 1930.



Flash Gordon proceeded to meet the Lion Men of Mongo in 1934.



The Doctor has met a few cat people in comic strips. Here he encounters Big Cat of the Freefall Warriors, a team of stunt pilots.



The strangest story to feature the Doctor and cat people was probably “Menace on Metalupiter”. It appeared in the Doctor Who Annual 1977 (published in 1976), when the publishers, World Distributors, were attempting to minimise costs by hiring artists who had not only never seen Doctor Who, but appeared to be unfamiliar with the concept of comics too. At least they had a few publicity stills of Tom Baker to work from.

The Doctor has decided to visit his friends on the planet Metalupiter. He thoughtfully shows Sarah and Harry a photograph.



Can’t work out what that picture is supposed to show, even if you have clicked to enlarge it? Me neither, and I’ve been puzzling over it for 30 years. Off and on, that is. I don’t want you to get the impression I’m obsessive, or anything.

The TARDIS arrives, and the crew go off to look for the locals.



No, I can’t work out what happened in that panel either. The Doctor then captures one of the local Metalupitrons, described as “cat-faced robots” and soon finds the trouble.



The cat-faced robot, called Puskeet, is soon able to explain what is going on. The planet has been invaded by aliens, who want to turn the whole world into fuel crystals.



I think we all know how it feels to have our memories replaced with rubber, don’t we?

The Doctor tries to stop the aliens, but is held back by their brain-scrambling ray (which the writer and artist may have tried on themselves first). But don’t worry, Puskeet turns up to save the day. Note that although the captions describe Puskeet, the pictures are of the alien invader. Or, at least, so I assume. A caption describes the alien as “four-armed”, but this chap seems only to have two.



No, I’ve no idea what happened in that last panel. The tale concludes with a masterpiece of bad storytelling.



Why the sudden close-up of the Doctor’s eyes? Why does Sarah conclude that the Metalupitrons are charming? Why is every single figure facing the wrong way to lead you through the panels? Who knows?

The good thing about this story is that it provides such an absolute low of incoherent storytelling that everything else pales by comparison. Whenever I find myself annoyed by bad panel progression and narrative non-sequiturs, I ask myself, “But is it as bad as ‘Menace on Metalupiter’?” and I feel much more at ease.


Panels and pictures from:
Perrault’s Fairy Tales, illustrated by Gustave Doré, 1863, reprinted in The Doré Gallery: His 120 Greatest Illustrations, Dover Publications, 1998

Escapades of Mr Jack by James Swinnerton, 1919, from Coconino Classics

Chowgli and Stripes “Chowgli and Stripes Take a Dangerous Ride”, from Illustrated Chips issue 467, 12 August 1899, reprinted in Denis Gifford Victorian Comics, George Allen & Unwin, 1976

Buck Rogers in the 25th Century “Tiger Men of Mars” by Phil Nowlan (writer) and Dick Calkins (artist), 1930, reprinted in Robert C Dille (editor) The Collected Works of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, A&W Visual Library, 1969

Flash Gordon “On the Planet Mongo” by Alex Raymond, 1934, reprinted in Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon volume 1, Checker Book Publishing, 2003

Doctor Who “Doctor Who and the Freefall Warriors” by Steve Parkhouse (writer) and Dave Gibbons (artist and letterer), Doctor Who Magazine issue 56, September 1981, reprinted in Doctor Who: Dragon’s Claw, Panini Books, 2004

Doctor Who “Menace on Metalupiter”, uncredited, in The Doctor Who Annual 1977, World Distributors, 1976