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

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

Nearly Men

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

Five Superheroes since 1950

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

Panel Games

What Do Elvis and Judge Dredd Have In Common?

The Judge Dredd story in this week’s 2000AD tells of a boy called Klein, rescued from his violent and abusive father by Judge Dredd, who grows up to be a violent and abusive Judge. Mostly, the story is told through fairly blatant captions (“He’d never realised how much he looked like his father”), but occasionally the art is allowed to make its own, more subtle, points. Here, Judge Klein tries out his hero’s trademark sneering lip, suggesting that it is not just his father who is the malign influence on his life.


Panel: Judge Dredd “Cycle of Violence” by Robbie Morrison (script), Cliff Robinson (art), Chris Blythe (colours) and Annie Parkhouse (letters), 2000AD prog 1549, Rebellion, 8 August 2007


Five-a-side What, Exactly?

Here’s a passage from this month’s Batman.


Now, five-a-side soccer is a common enough game, but I’ve never heard of five-a-side rugger. Did the Scottish writer Grant Morrison type that the English character the Knight was holding a football, meaning the round thing, only to be misinterpreted by American artist JH Williams III? Or is this a clue that the Knight may not be all he seems (one of several in the issue, such as Batman’s statement that his presence “seems so unlike me”, or the way that Williams draws Wingman’s hands with the same angular fingers he uses for the Saul Bass-style double-page outline of the hand of mystery villain the Black Glove)?

Panel: Batman issue 667, “The Island of Mister Mayhew” by Grant Morrison (writer), JH Williams III (artist), Dave Stewart (colourist), Ken Lopez (letterer), Peter Tomasi and Mike Marts (editors), DC Comics, August 2007

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

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.

The Other Cyd Child

One of the tidbits of information in the extras included in Titan’s series of Modesty Blaise reprints is that original artist Jim Holdaway had a set of reference photos taken to help him with the fight scenes, modelled by European women’s judo champion Cyd Child.

Child also worked as a stunt artist, and often doubled for Diana Rigg in The Avengers. So, stretching a point, you could say that she played both Modesty Blaise and Emma Peel, which is quite an achievement.

The history of The Avengers in comics was covered in an article by Ian Wheeler, John Freeman and Dez Skinn in Comic International issue 201, and is the subject of a fine web-site, The Avengers Illustrated.

Among my pitifully small collection of issues of TV Comic is issue 720, from October 1965, which marked the start of a seven-year run of The Avengers, off and on.


(Is it just me, or should those dialogue balloons be read manga-style?)

Some of the TV Comic strips were reprinted for the American market by Gold Key. Although the indicia name the single issue they produced as The Avengers, the cover carries the title John Steed, Emma Peel, presumably to avoid confusion and trademark conflicts with Marvel’s super-hero team. The Avengers Illustrated shows the photographic covers, but here is how the newly-coloured interior art appears.


By far the best comic strip version of The Avengers ever put into print was the mini-series Steed and Mrs Peel (which also features Tara King), published by Eclipse Comics and Acme Press between 1990 and 1992, and written and drawn by Grant Morrison and Ian Gibson, perhaps the most perfect combination of creators and subject that I can think of. Confusingly, the back-up strip, about Mrs Peel’s reunion with her husband, was also drawn by Gibson, though it was written by Anne Caulfield. The back-up is quite amusing, but not a patch on the main feature, “The Golden Game”.

Again, The Avengers Illustrated only shows the covers, so here is a sample of the interior.


“The Golden Game” is a clever and witty story, and deserves a trade paperback if anyone can get the reprinting rights.


Panels
The Avengers, first instalment, art probably by Pat Williams, TV Comic issue 720, 2 October 1965

John Steed, Emma Peel “The Roman Invasion”, art probably by Pat Williams, from The Avengers issue 1, Gold Key, 1968, reprinted from TV Comic

Steed and Mrs Peel book 1, “The Golden Game” part 1 “Crown and Anchor” by Grant Morrison (writer), Ian Gibson (artist), Ellie de Ville (letterer) and Dick Hansom (editor), Eclipse Comics and Acme Press, 1990

Empty Spaces

Marvel Comics is content to present its trade paperback collections as what they are: collections of stories that originally appeared in shorter periodicals, complete with covers, titles and credits. DC, on the other hand, wants to pretend that it is producing proper books. Covers are relegated to the back of the volume, along with other supporting material like concept sketches and author interviews. And, nowadays, titles and credits are deleted from splash pages.

Mostly, this is merely ugly and irritating. Sometimes, it is worse. Take, for example, the opening page of “Frankenstein in Fairyland”. Above is how it first appeared in issue 4 of Frankenstein. Below is how it appeared in Seven Soldiers of Victory, Volume 4.

So, instead of the narration building to the climax of “Can you imagine … Frankenstein in Fairyland,” we are given instead the dying fall of “Can you imagine…” And we are left to wonder what it is that we should imagine.

Presumably not an imaginary story. Because this is what the editors of DC Universe: The Stories of Alan Moore have done to the opening page of “Whatever Happened To The Man of Tomorrow?”


Whereas the Frankenstein omission could have been an oversight, here we can only conclude that someone at DC thought that it was worth sacrificing this …

… for an expanse of yellow space.

These are some of the worst examples that I have noticed. But there are plenty of stories that I have read only in trade paperback collections. So who knows what I have missed?



Panels: “Frankenstein in Fairyland” by Grant Morrison (writer), Doug Mahnke (artist), Nathan Eyring (colourist) and Phil Balsman (letterer), Frankenstein 4, DC Comics, May 2006.

“Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?” by Alan Moore (writer), Curt Swan and George Pérez (artists), Gene D’Angelo (colourist) and Todd Klein (letterer), Superman 423, DC Comics, September 1986.

Your Future’s Been Stolen By Your Past

Down The Tubes, a terrific site for anyone interested in British comics, reports that Knockabout Books will be publishing in July a collection of comic strips drawn by Rian Hughes, called Yesterday’s Tomorrows. Among other things, this will reprint Hughes’ Science Service (written by Down the Tubes’ editor, John Freeman), and his satirical Dan Dare strip, written by Grant Morrison, from Revolver magazine.



As you can see from these scans, Hughes’ work is informed by a strong architectural and design sense. I’d guess that he was strongly influenced by Dutch comics artist Joost Swarte. Like Swarte, he seems to mainly work in design these days, so it is good to see these strips again.

The collection’s title holds a double meaning. Obviously, Hughes’s science fiction styles borrowed heavily from modernism and mid-twentieth century poster art, and all but shout “retro” at us. But Yesterday’s Tomorrows also reminds me of a different long-gone past, full of optimism about the future, when, in those far-off days around 1990, it seemed that relatively sophisticated comics like Revolver, or Escape or Deadline, could thrive in high street newsagents. Foolish dreams!

Panels (top to bottom):
The Science Service, story and art by Rian Hughes, script by John Freeman, Atomic Comics/Acme Press/Eclipse Books, 1989.
Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future, script by Grant Morrison, art by Rian Hughes, letters by Ellie De Ville, Revolver 3, Fleetway, 1990.