Secret Wars

Jim Shooter, Mike Zeck, Bob Layton & others
Secret Wars (1984)
I became vaguely aware of this one when I noticed an issue of the Marvel UK reprint in my local newsagent. I'd been off the comics for a while and hadn't even bothered with 2000AD since about 1980, never mind the caped stuff. I thought it looked lame, even desperate with all those superheroes crowded together on the cover. It seemed to suggest that those responsible had run out of ideas and were now pushing the novelty of lurid combinations of characters in a last bid attempt to keep the magic alive, sheer force of quantity over quality - like a superhero version of the Godzilla movie, Destroy All Monsters but without the charm. A couple of years later, as I discovered comic books afresh, I asked Charlie, my Marvel comic acquisition advisor, whether Secret Wars had been any good. It was okay, he told me, but was basically one massive crowd of super types yelling let's get them, before running across the plain and having a fight with a rival crowd of super types, over and over for the full twelve issues.

Now that I've finally read the thing, I can confirm that this is more or less what happens. It seems to have been plotted by a method which entailed watching a couple of small boys smashing their extensive collections of action figures together while doing all the sound effects and explosions with their mouths.

As it turns out, action figures were a significant part of the creative process which brought us Secret Wars. DC Comics had recently had a bunch of their superheroes issued as action figures by Kenner Toys and were doing quite well from it. Marvel made a deal with Mattel for their own range, but Mattel insisted there would need to be some massive attention grabbing crossover event to sell the thing - which DC hadn't required due to Superman and Batman having maintained a fairly high profile thanks to movies and television.

The premiss of Secret Wars is that a mysterious, omnipotent intelligence identified only as the Beyonder abducts a bunch of Marvel superheroes and sets them up on a world he's made out of bits of other planets specifically so that they can all have a massive scrap with a bunch of Marvel bad guys. Although Secret Wars is remembered as the first such mammoth crossover event of its kind, it could be argued that the first was probably the Avengers-Defenders War waged across alternating issues of their respective titles back in 1973. DC's Crisis on Infinite Earths appeared shortly after in 1985, but had been in development at least since the December 1981 issue of the Comics Journal wherein it was referred to as a forthcoming twelve part series affecting the entire DC universe.

This being said, the notion of some Godlike being spiriting disparate groups of abductees away to a mysterious realm and having them fight had been around for a while, at least since 1969's War Games by Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke which, being a Doctor Who serial, means they had almost certainly nicked it from someone else, possibly Fritz Leiber's change war tales or Andre Norton's Defiant Agents; and I'm sure the idea informs something written by A.E. van Vogt, although I can't remember what. I myself first encountered the plot in Fredric Brown's Arena from a 1944 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, although admittedly I specifically encountered the 1973 comic strip adaptation by Gerry Conway and John Buscema in Worlds Unknown #4, which I found in a jumble sale held at my junior school and which was probably the first American Marvel comic I'd ever seen.

 

Anyway, Secret Wars comes about due to a seemingly all-powerful intelligence from a universe beyond our own - hence the name of its sole inhabitant - discovering a pinhole, accidentally created by the Molecule Man, through which he is able to view our reality. In his own realm, the Beyonder is the universe, so naturally he has a lot of questions about what he sees on our side of the cosmic fence and is particularly curious about desire. For some reason he deduces that the best way to develop an understanding of desire is to have a bunch of caped types beat the crap out of each other, which at least spared us investigations of a kind which would have ensured that pow! the comic book grew up a full two years ahead of Alan Moore's schedule, even if having the Beyonder watch what happens when a man and a lady like each other would have made a bit more sense.

Amongst the abductees we find most of the X-Men, excepting Kitty Pryde who gets left behind on Earth so as to give Colossus something to do - specifically mooning around whining about how much he misses his uncomfortably youthful girlfriend, before finding solace in the arms of an alien woman named Ƶsaji, an inhabitant of one of the planets from which the Beyonder made Battleworld, and with whom Colossus shares no common language excepting possibly the language of lurve. Ƶsaji talks in abstract squiggles so, honestly, I'm not even sure how we know her name. Ƶsaji may even mean piss off, metal bollocks in whatever language she speaks.

The Beyonder restores Professor X's legs to full working order, presumably because Battleworld features neither roads nor paving that we can see and therefore falls some way short of wheelchair friendly. He also assigns Magneto to the superhero team, much to the general bemusement of numerous members of both the Avengers and the Fantastic Four, not least Hawkeye who comes to resemble Enoch Powell for at least a couple of panels. Here Magneto was still very much in the habit of explaining his fiendish plans and then cackling accordingly, in addition to which Rogue - who recently fought Captain America and pals in Avengers annual #10 - now numbers among the X-Men, inspiring much grumbling about mutants coming over here and taking our jobs from those whose super-powers were earned during honest laboratory experiments gone horribly wrong just as nature intended. The mutants therefore form a splinter group, seemingly for the sake of keeping the peace, even though they're not thrilled about Magneto's presence either. At this point, the plans which Magneto tended to explain in preface to cackling usually defined him as a militant advocate of mutant rights, although not so much as to prevent him from trying it on with the undeniably human Wasp; so presumable we're seeing the beginning of his rehabilitation as someone who doesn't actually hate regular humans quite so much as he did in the old days.

The story is, as already described, something which may as well have been plotted by a method which entailed watching a couple of small boys smashing their extensive collections of action figures together while doing all the sound effects and explosions with their mouths; despite which, there's a lot of invention taking place with all sorts of narrative swerves of a kind you might not expect in this sort of story. Possibly most surprising of all is the genuinely ominous implication of unimaginable power invoked herein in spite of Marvel's track record of invoking something even more huge and cosmically omnipotent than the last guy roughly every six weeks, at least since Jim Starlin drew his first paycheck back in 1972.

The conclusion might be deemed something of an anticlimax, and doubtless seemed so to the Goodreads fucknugget who criticised this graphic novel on the grounds of it seeming fairly childish, like something aimed at kids. The Beyonder sends everyone home and we're not quite sure whether or not there will be another issue because the fighting seems to have stopped, and we don't even know whether our cosmic architect actually learned anything about desire, or even whether he at least got a kick out of all the superheroes shooting rays at each other. This leaves us with just the Thing alone on Battleworld, taking a break from the Fantastic Four and having decided to stick around, wondering what he's going to do with the rest of his life. On the other hand, this unusually ponderous ending seems to be something which would have worked in a novel, and nevertheless works better than whatever face-punching spectacular we were probably expecting; and there's actually a lot of Secret Wars which feels as though it wants to be novel when it grows up, or at least that it has read one at some point. Doctor Doom comes over as unusually philosophical during the last two issues, for example.

Secret Wars is hardly life-changing, but for what it is, it does its job without looking too stupid; which is itself impressive given that we're talking about what is essentially a marketing campaign.

Phoenix

Jeff Rovin, Sal Amendola & others Phoenix (1975)
Phoenix was somehow one of the first three American comics I ever saw with my own eyes. There was the first issue of this, then Marvel's Worlds Unknown #4 and Astonishing Tales #35, respectively dating to January 1975, November 1973, and May 1976. I have no idea which came first and they were, in any case, encountered second hand at jumble sales rendering those dates of publication more or less irrelevant. Anyway, the point is that although I'd read plenty of black and white UK reprints of Spider-Man, the Inhumans and the like, these were the first actual US comics I saw, and I was fascinated by their size - smaller than I was used to, full colour throughout, and obviously aimed at readers slightly older than myself.

That issue of Astonishing Tales featured the penultimate chapter of Rich Buckler and Bill Mantlo's Deathlok which had an effect tantamount to slipping a Stooges album into my ABBA, Wurzels, and Wombles playlist of the time. Phoenix represented slightly less terrifying territory than ...And Once Removed From Never, but still made a massive impression on me, enough so for its influence to have been felt in at least a few things I've written since*.

To start at the beginning, Phoenix was one of a number of titles published by Atlas, a short-lived mid-seventies company founded by Martin Goodman after he sold Marvel Comics to Perfect Film & Chemical in 1972. Goodman had been a big name in the funny books since the thirties, having famously brought us Captain America and the Marvel imprint itself, amongst other things, and Atlas was going to be a rival to the big two. Atlas would mean that Goodman was still very much in the game, and it would succeed by taking risks rather than simply duplicating what Marvel and DC had been doing.

The company hit the ground running, chucking a whole bunch of titles at the public in a short space of time, but nothing really stuck as Goodman hoped and the operation folded within the year. Colin Smith has written in engrossing detail about the short, unhappy life of Atlas Comics.

Yet of all Atlas' debut titles, Phoenix remains, paradoxically, both the most puzzling and the least intriguing. For writer/editor Jeff Rovin and artist Sal Amendola's storytelling displayed little familiarity, beyond the most obvious of conventions, with the then-dominant traditions of superhero comics. Nor did their work seem to deliberately hark back to redundant approaches to costumed crime fighter tales either. Neither rooted in the present or the past, Phoenix failed to offer any convincing measure of the superhero genre's pleasures and satisfactions. Underneath its glossy surface, it appeared to be a comic that was approaching its subject matter in an almost entirely random manner. In that, it was as if Rovin and Amendola had been shown a few random covers featuring a sci-fi flavoured superbloke before being told to emulate whatever virtues they perceived there. Perhaps Phoenix was an attempt to produce something that broke, to one degree or another, with superhero tradition. But if so, it stumbled because it failed to reflect a grasp of whatever the conventions were that Rovin and Amendola wanted to challenge.

I have a different take on the title, doubtless tinted by my first encounter all those years ago, and yet Smith is absolutely right about its failure as a comic book.

Phoenix, as is probably obvious, was a superhero title, but one which took a different tone, seemingly attempting an unprecedented sense of realism relative to previous superhero books, and it had a cold, pragmatic tone. It wasn't going to hold our hand. Our hero is technologically augmented during an encounter with aliens, but these aliens are the Deiei, essentially a variation on the creatures described by abductees in the UFO lore of the time but with certain identifiable human characteristics. They're aliens from Shatner's Star Trek or even Dan Dare more than they're Kree, Skrull, or Dominators. They initially seem to belong to a universe which is more or less our own, wherein Phoenix is the only superhero, and in which miraculous powers require at least some explanation - albeit one rooted somewhere within the grey areas of pseudoscience and its attendant mythologies. This was part of what appealed to me at the age of twelve or thereabouts - Phoenix seemed to take place in a world which might exist, or at least which could not yet be fully ruled out so easily as those places where insect bites bestow abilities regardless of physiology. Phoenix felt like part of the same world as the ponderous science-fiction cinema of the seventies with its jumpsuits, moral quandaries, and somber mood.

Sal Amendola had already drawn his fair share of Batman, Aquaman and others, yet - as Colin Smith suggests - his art on Phoenix seemed to ignore many of the conventions of sequential story telling. To my eyes, it looks more like illustration than comic art in the traditional sense, which worked fine for me because it seemed to suit the tone of the book, and worked at least as well as the strips in, off the top of my head, Doctor Who annuals, which similarly seemed to lack precedent - as though drawn by persons who had never read a comic strip.

Given that I distinctly recall my discovery of Phoenix, Deathlok and Worlds Unknown occurring prior to 2000AD showing up, these three seemed to represent a consistent, vaguely adult vision in contrast to Dan Dare and The Whizzers from Space - both of which retained an awful lot of schoolboy DNA - and the strips in TV tie-in annuals which always felt like button pushing crowd pleasers for all their otherwise admirable qualities.

Sure enough, Phoenix is wonky, massively uneven, and riddled with inconsistencies, none of which mattered to me when I was twelve, and even now I can still feel the faint residual glow of what first drew me to this material. There remains some appeal in a superhero strip which refuses to wave the magic wand without having a really good reason, or which at least suggests this was part of the original proposition. By issue three, we've had sufficient peculiar Biblical allusions to suggest some impending revelation - Phoenix is casually likened to Jesus Christ, he parts the waters, and so on; then Satan himself is unmasked as a renegade Deiei as part of an arc which feels somewhat in debt to Richard S. Shaver; and the letters page appears, and it seems everyone is on board...

Then issue four is upon us, following three in which the standard did indeed seem to dip, and Phoenix is reborn as the Protector with a whole new costume by an intergalactic council of Kirby knock offs. Apparently the bold new direction wasn't paying off after all, and Ric Estrada couldn't even be bothered to make his flashback panels look like anything which had happened in previous issues.

 

Phoenix was a good idea which simply could have been done a lot better. There are some beautifully arresting images in at least the first issue, and if the narrative is all over the place, I've probably read too much van Vogt to be troubled by the inconsistency or the wild leaps of logic which don't actually make a whole lot of sense. I once wrote and drew a nine panel superhero parody wherein the main character experiences four sequential secret origins in rapid succession, one after the other, but it turns out Gary Friedrich got there before me, and probably got paid for it too.

*: 1987's Berserker, a comic strip which went through various incarnations - including one drawn by Charlie Adlard - before I realised it was a non-starter, was more or less a rewrite of Phoenix with a big helping of Richard S. Shaver thrown in for seasoning. Also, The Sixth Day, a short story from 2007 which appears in The Great Divide makes a number of references to the Phoenix comic book.

The Dark Knight Returns

Frank Miller, Klaus Janson & Lynn Varley The Dark Knight Returns (1986)
As for Pow! the comic book growing up, I guess this was approximately where it all started, at least in terms of public perception. Watchmen is better remembered but this came first by about six months. Excepting Viz, I'd stopped reading comics, having given up on 2000AD back in 1980 and not really thought about it since. I found it odd when I overheard my friends Charlie and Garreth talking about comic books, specifically Batman of all things. What the fuck? I opined, and so Garreth lent me a prestige format issue of Frank Miller's version of Batman so as to impress upon me that it was significantly different to the version of Batman who routinely found himself caught in giant mousetraps; so that was probably the start of my comic book habit, or a significant contributing factor.

I haven't read this in probably twenty years, and have been reluctant to do so of late for fear of what I might find, given Frank Miller's apparent recent transformation into Ron Swanson; but Kafka was boring me shitless, and I'd already resorted to Grant Morrison's All-Star Superman by way of light relief, so Batman seemed like the next logical step. As everyone in the universe knows, The Dark Knight Returns is essentially grittily realistic Batman or, to fine tune the definition, if Batman were a real person, then he would almost certainly have to be something in this direction and the most pertinent questions would be whether there's any real difference between a homicidal maniac and a homicidal maniac claiming to be the good guy. All the moral baggage - or absence thereof - one might anticipate given that it's Frank Miller at the typewriter is already there and very much packed, which I probably didn't notice last time around, being a bit slow on the uptake for most of the eighties; and yet The Dark Knight Returns remains as powerful as ever because Miller's view of the world is, at worst, simply massively pessimistic, and is communicated without even hinting at any sort of agenda. Batman fights crime, as we would expect, but is himself a criminal as he freely admits, and a particularly violent one. Everything else is on us, depending on whether or not we're cheering every time he kicks someone's head in or breaks their fingers. Miller isn't suggesting that any of this is good so much as that there's a certain inevitability which comes with certain situations, and particularly so when we start asking questions about morality, justice and all that good stuff. The Dark Knight Returns is therefore a post-Vietnam Batman, one left permanently changed by a conflict which blurs established notions of what the right thing may be. It's dark and unpleasant because anything else would be dishonest, and maybe you're not actually supposed to be cheering along like some fucking simpleton.

So never mind Batman, this really was a whole new deal, not least in terms of how the story was told, further distancing the familiar names from their primary colour origins. If not conventionally beautiful, it's difficult to look away from the scratchy expressionist lines, with the story structured just loosely enough as to feel organic, quite unlike the rigidly mathematical progression of Watchmen, and hence somehow more truthful regardless of the presence of the guy from outer space. I've never been a massive fan of Batman or his specific type - the freelance cop who beats up the ne'er do well and returns the stolen wallet to the millionaire - but just for once someone actually got it right, and this was that book, and I suspect Frank Miller is probably a more complicated individual than we realised, at least in so far as that he's since apologised for Holy Terror.

Sandman: Preludes & Nocturnes

Neil Gaiman etc. Sandman: Preludes & Nocturnes (1989)
I was quite excited by Gaiman's Sandman when it first appeared, and not least because of Dave McKean's covers which I regarded as amazing. I said as much to Charlie Adlard seeing as he was sort of my comics advisor at the time, and was a little surprised when he made sniffy noises. His objection, as I understood it, was that McKean's work failed to live up to the hype for a number of reasons, and I realised that he was right, much as it pained me to admit it. McKean's art is necessarily impressionistic because his drawing ability is fairly limited. He's good with lighting, which compensates for a multitude of sins; and he tends to favour certain colour combinations which create a striking effect regardless of what one does with them. It's mostly shorthand and distraction, but no-one notices because they're too busy boggling at electrical components and scraps of underwear stapled to the page. Bill Sienkiewicz did it first and did it better, but Bill Sienkiewicz really can draw and his visual experiments are conducted through choice rather than necessity. Of course, McKean's work isn't bad by any means, although it's certainly not wildly original. He has a wonderful sense of design, but as such has more in common with Vaughan Oliver than the aforementioned Sienkiewicz.

Anyway, I kept on buying Sandman, month after month, even past the point at which I was buying it in the hope of it eventually getting better again, which it didn't. Then in 2009 I flogged the lot, having decided I'd rather have the money, although I always remembered those early issues as having been something good.

So here we are again, and yes, I still enjoy those first issues, but not so much as was once the case. I've read too much Gaiman to ever get myself back to factory settings. He pushes buttons in the same way that Dave McKean pushes buttons so as to distract from the inherent weaknesses of the structure, which is probably why those covers seem such a good fit. He's doing an Alan Moore in the same way that McKean was doing a Bill Sienkiewicz. To be fair, he does more than just push characters through some Alan Moore algorithm, and he writes dialogue beautifully - at least some of it - but everywhere else, all I see are tricks, shortcuts, and sleight of hand distracting from what feels as much like recycled material as anything by J.K. Rowling. The mood suggests something specifically written with fans of the Cure in mind, all cobwebs and bits of antique jewellery; and allusions to literature come and go as props, like a James Joyce held open at no particular page for minute after minute as you wait for a certain someone to come through the door and be duly impressed; and then every once in a while, it pushes the weird horror button just to keep us on our toes

Somewhere in Basildon a maniac with a bacon slicer has made ice cream out of his own arse. He's serving it to little kids.

Shocked, aren't you?

Narrative works by pushing buttons, but it really shouldn't be quite so obvious if it's done right. Even just the fucking title, Preludes & Nocturnes…

Seriously?

Seriously?

Additionally, the art isn't overly great either, and the one thing in Sandman's favour is that it is at least consistent for the run of these first eight issues. It may have been drawn as an expressionist homage to those same horror comics which eventually led to the likes of Swamp Thing - and most of this story rummages around in Alan Moore's version of the Swamp Thing mythology, seeing as I didn't already mention that - but to me it looks like, at best, a promising eighties fanzine, everyone with massive wonky heads like Thunderbirds puppets, and facial expressions last seen drawn in biro on the back of a school exercise book amongst the logos of late seventies heavy metal bands.

Having said all that, I still enjoyed this one, and almost as much as I probably enjoyed it back in 1989, but I enjoyed it as an efficient impersonation. It's good, but if Sandman changed your life, that says more about your life than it does about the power of Gaiman's writing. Preludes & Nocturnes, my arse...

The Walking Dead

Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard & Tony Moore

The Walking Dead compendium one (2015)
I've been reluctant to approach the Walking Dead for a long time, mainly because I've known Charlie Adlard since we met at Maidstone College of Art back in 1842, and I would have felt awkward had it turned out to be rubbish. Additionally, I've seen three episodes of the television adaptation, and while I can appreciate it as a quality product, I otherwise didn't like it at all. One episode featured humans kept as food animals for a cannibal enclave in its post-apocalyptic world, and what with all the hyper-realistic rotting corpses, it was all just a bit too stomach-churningly repellent for me. Then someone gave me this housebrick for Christmas, collecting the first forty-eight issues, thus forcing my hand.

I'm not sure I really understand horror, or at least I don't understand the kind which engages itself mainly with making you throw up for the sake of making you throw up. It seems pointless, even childish; and besides which, whatever atrocity or violation one might attach to the end of a stick and waggle in the viewer's face will usually have some historical or literary precedent in which it makes a lot more sense through having a context other than ewww gross with knobs on. Even Whitehouse were more than just cackling and scary faces.

To both my surprise and relief, not only is the Walking Dead about more than just zombies and beheadings, but the zombies are arguably the least important element of the equation, really just a function of the environment. The comic is about people trying to survive in a world in which they have once again become subject to the laws of nature, and how this changes them, and what that says about the rest of us - Lord of the Flies without a safety net. It's relentless, gruesome and brutal in ways you may not even have anticipated, and yet because the horror is stylised in Charlie's powerfully expressive black and white art, its impact is retained without the gore eclipsing or diminishing the power of the narrative or what the story is trying to do. The television show probably does the same thing, but I personally found it difficult to see past hyper-realistic CGI organs pulsing and splattering all over the screen. Additionally, the starkly monochrome comic strip form allows for silence and contrast, which is what this sort of story really needs in order to work.

When I first met Charlie we were both on a film course, albeit a film course with aspirations to fine art, and among the work he'd shown at his interview was - if I'm remembering this correctly - Sweet Dreams, a zombie horror filmed on Super 8mm and featuring various school friends shambling around local woodland beneath layers of Halloween make-up purchased from Boots; so he's been tied up with the undead for a long time. It was mostly his fault that I got hooked on American comics - not that I'm complaining - and by the end of the eighties we were collaborating on various strips - some more convincing than others, myself writing and Charlie drawing - with the intention of breaking into the comics industry; so you can probably appreciate why I would have felt awkward picking up the Walking Dead and deciding I didn't like it. Thankfully, it turns out to be a masterpiece, a genuinely intelligent story occasionally sailing a bit too close to the truth for comfort, but in just the right way, and with art perfectly matched - powerful and moody with a brooding European sensibility despite the influence of - making an educated guess - Walt Simonson and Mike Mignola. Earlier issues struggled with the occasional dialogue bubble crammed with just a little more exposition than seemed necessary, but otherwise it's impossible to find fault with this book.

Doom Patrol #1

Gerard Way & Nick Derington Doom Patrol #1 (2016)
I very rarely review either single issues of a comic or anything freshly squoze from the presses - partially because I tend to wait until I have some sort of confirmation for a comic book not being a massive pile of shit before I'll grudgingly shell out for a collected edition, and partially because I just don't read comics like I used to; but this is the first of a new run of Doom Patrol, which feels like a special occasion.

Back in the nineties, Doom Patrol was the first thing Grant Morrison did which could be described as fucking brilliant in a way that not even Zenith had managed. It had been a superhero book in the sixties, albeit a fairly weird superhero book, and Morrison rewrote the thing as unrestrained Dadaism, possibly as a reaction to the increasing emphasis on superheroes making sense in the wake of Watchmen. The title was revived again about a decade later, but I can't even remember who was supposed to be involved and I'd more or less given up on comics by that point. I know I haven't heard much that is good about that more recent Doom Patrol; but anyway, now we have this...

I first heard that Gerard Way was writing comics when Charlie Adlard told me. Charlie draws The Walking Dead and was surprised to have found himself sharing a convention table with the former singer of My Chemical Romance. 'He's quite a nice bloke though,' he reported with the expression of a man surprised to find himself saying such a thing. Neither of us liked My Chemical Romance, but Way's earlier Umbrella Academy was decent, according to Charlie.

Clearly the lad gets Doom Patrol and what made it work, so this is no reversion to superheroes with neatly modular problems, and with not the faintest whiff of X-Men about it either. Way clearly gets why Morrison's Doom Patrol worked and has somehow invoked the same disjointed brilliance without it feeling like a cover version. Derington's art is happily understated, suggesting freewheeling European comics rather than anything with too many spandex clad ninjas swearing vengance. It's maybe a bit Tintin, a bit Rian Hughes, and otherwise perfectly suited to the tone of this thing.

As we rejoin the gang, Robotman has been in yet another automobile accident and is reduced once again to just a head; Casey Brinke's singing, tap-dancing telegram has accidentally blown-up her room-mate; Danny the Street is about to be launched as a meat-style consumer product, and there's a possibility that our universe might be just a microcosm within some vast existential doner kebab. I've no fucking clue what is going on or what is likely to happen next, but for the first time in over two decades, I'll be heading back to the comic shop in another couple of weeks to find out.

X-Men: E is for Extinction

Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely & others
X-Men: E is for Extinction (2002)
I've a feeling this may have been the one which got me back into reading comic books, and more significantly into actually buying comic books. As the nineties broke for half-time, the number of monthly titles I could be bothered to pick up had dwindled to just a few Vertigo efforts which I'd been following with ever-decreasing levels of enthusiasm. Then came Preacher in which Garth Ennis bravely experimented with references to that time we drank a million pints of Guiness and ended up in this really amazing Irish pub with this bloke playing one of those Irish tambourine things and we were all singing Pogues songs and we were sooo pissed and it was like really wild so it was and we were sooo hungover it was untrue as a substitute for narrative, and Morrison's Unreadables which was shit; and my comics habit began to feel like I'd found myself cornered by the world's most boring wanker at some party I hadn't really wanted to go to in the first place. Thusly did I pack it in.

Almost a decade later, probably not too many months before I committed to obsessively penning reviews of everything I read, I found this collection misplaced in some corner of the book store which patently wasn't comics and picked it up out of simple curiosity.

'So this is still going,' I scoffed to myself, feeling older and wiser before noticing that it was written by Grant Morrison. I'd had no idea he'd become quite so mainstream whilst I'd been looking in the other direction. X-Men was a superhero title which had once pissed over most of the competition, historically speaking, and the thought of it having been written by the author of the wonderful Zenith and Doom Patrol intrigued the shit out of me. I skimmed through the collection there in the shop, making sure it wasn't just an incoherent sequence of references to Aleister Crowley. It wasn't, and there seemed to be much to suggest that I'd be able to follow the story despite not having bothered with an X-Men comic since about 1992.

I loved the X-Men at least since junior school when the classic Lee and Kirby material had been reprinted in black and white in the back pages of something or other; and then again in about 1985 when shopping at the Maidstone branch of Safeway with Charlie Adlard, I noticed a comic bearing the same title with an individual I didn't recognise on the cover.

'Who the hell is that?' I wondered out loud.

'That's Wolverine,' Charlie told me, revealing a previously unsuspected interest in comic books.

'What does he do?'

'He has these metal claws,' Charlie explained, and so I bought the thing and became immediately addicted. This was the Chris Claremont run on X-Men. As a writer, Claremont had certain weaknesses - not least a propensity for way too many thought bubbles crammed with proto-emo corn - but he was always a fucking great storyteller. Over the next couple of years I became obsessed, faithfully following the ever-expanding catalogue of mutant titles until the whole edifice eventually began to collapse under the weight of its own overextended marketing. Suddenly Claremont was no longer involved, and Rob Liefeld was, and the formerly wonderful New Mutants had been cancelled, and it all seemed like a massive waste of everyone's time. It really felt as though Marvel were taking the piss, and so I took my wallet elsewhere.

Amazingly, Morrison's X-Men turned out to be every bit as good as I had hoped. He'd reigned in his own more self-indulgent tendencies and really tapped into the essence of what made the book so great back in its heyday, back when Chris Claremont had been pulling the sort of wacky twists which just shouldn't have worked and making it seem effortless - turning the bad guy into a hero, resurrecting the dead and so on: all the stuff which has become commonplace and prosaic in the tiresomely mannered storytelling of modern film and television and other media aspiring to be film and television. Morrison seemed like a natural for this book, pulling off all sorts of convoluted continuity derived intrigues without the off-putting fan-wankery so often associated with the form. It's soap opera with explosions, and is at least as much science-fiction as it was ever about leaping tall buildings in a single bound. Superheroes tend to entail a certain degree of wish fulfilment of the kind which appeals to outsider types, and the success of X-Men was always rooted in this idea, perhaps more so than has generally been true of the genre as a whole. You might wish for Superman or one of those others to sweep down, fix your broken glasses and retrieve your dinner money from Gripper Stebson, but you knew full well that you could never be like him, you weirdo. The X-Men, on the other hand, were similarly outcast and - once over the initial hump of expectations associated with a 1960s mainstream comic book - it wasn't even about fighting crime. X-Men was always about survival, about getting from A to B without having your head kicked in. Even if the readers weren't actually strange mutants with peculiar powers, they may as well have been so far as our Gripper Stebsons were concerned. Accordingly Morrison's X-Men is an appeal for tolerance and an indictment of the censorious and religious right as representative of everything which is wrong with society; and the message is somehow written in block capitals without so much as a whiff of preachy, which is some feat.

Even with the massive chins of Frank Quitely, this is a raw and unalloyed joy to read. It's at least as solid as anything Chris Claremont ever wrote and is amongst Morrison's very best - right up there with Zenith and Doom Patrol if you ask me.

Bodies

Si Spencer, Dean Ormston, Phil Winslade & others Bodies (2015)
The usual disclaimers about potential lack of impartiality should probably be registered, given that I first encountered Si Spencer as one of three people involved with the publication of Sideshow Comics, and Sideshow Comics, if I remember correctly, was the first place in which I was published. In fact, I suspect it was also the first place in which both myself and Charlie Adlard - he of Walking Dead megastardom - were published, if that's of interest to anyone.

Si seems to have done pretty well for himself since then, and I nearly fell out of my chair when I noticed his name beginning to turn up during the credits of Eastenders. I haven't seen much of his writing for comics, but recall being impressed quite early on by a story from Sideshow, drawn by John McCrea, in which a terrifying nightclub bouncer with fists the size of hams is revealed to be a big old softie by a quietly ingenious twist I won't reveal just in case it's ever reprinted. I can't remember enough of Spencer's stint on Eastenders to comment, but Bodies at least reveals a similar light touch by which supposed outsiders and oddballs are found to occupy quite different, even inverse roles by the close of the tale; and just to be clear, I don't mean anything quite so cock obvious as the bad guy saving the day or any of the other generic twists we've all grown to anticipate with decreasing enthusiasm over the years.

Bodies makes a fairly simple observation, but one that is particularly worth making in the current political climate, namely that the us and them dialogue employed by the more reactionary elements of English society - usually for political gain - makes no sense, and has never made sense, and never will make sense; because English society is not so much inclusive of the outsider as exclusively composed of the same. This could have gone horribly wrong as funny looking weirdos have feelings too, but the fine narrative balance holds back from sloganeering, allowing the story and its cast to speak for themselves. This they do to great effect, despite the potential for confusion arising from the structure of four related tales occurring in four separate eras, revolving around not so much dead bodies as the same dead body. Happily it's all carried along by the momentum of its own surrealism - possibly allegories I failed to spot - rather than attempting any Alan Moore style jigsaw. It bewilders in places, but in an endearing way and never quite at the expense of the story, and it doesn't need to be a problem providing you keep in mind that this is a story which tells you stuff, and probably shouldn't be mistaken for either From Hell - with which it shares peripheral territory - or anything otherwise too literal. Bodies is a comic which really does work like a novel - and by novel I don't mean a sequence of words describing Spiderman catching some bad guys - and the art is great, seeing as I didn't already mention that detail.

Magic Words - The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore

For some time there's been a certain rivalry between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison, roughly speaking the two most celebrated comic book writers of the British Isles; or at least there's been a certain  rivalry in terms of Morrison sniping at Moore every two or three months, occasionally having Batman say something like you know, Robin, I've always regarded bearded men from the English town of Northampton as little girls - which is of course very clever - whilst Moore generally appears to take no notice barring an infrequent rolling of eyes. Comic book enthusiasts being comic book enthusiasts have come to regard this rivalry with relish in some instances, somehow imagining it to be on par with the beef between Pac and Biggie, or at least the beef between Master P and Pastor Troy - which was something that happened out there in the real world in case you were wondering; and so we have examples like that of the individual presently writing his print-on-demand book about the mystic war between Moore and Morrison representing the two major currents of English culture, for what that may be worth. Whilst I'm reluctant to further expand this particular notional bullshitplex, it's out there now, and it isn't going back in the box any time soon, so what the fuck...

Lance Parkin Magic Words - The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore (2013)
I met Alan Moore at a comic convention in Coventry in 1989. This is not to directly contradict Lance Parkin's assertion that Moore had ceased attendance of comic conventions a few years earlier, having tired of two hundred drooling fanboys following him into the toilet every time he tried to do a poo. The convention held on the campus of Lanchester Polytechnic just opposite the steps of Coventry Cathedral was barely advertised and very poorly attended with guests almost outnumbering punters. At the time, Charlie Adlard and myself were attempting to break into comics with material which I'd written and Charlie had drawn, and so we were working the convention circuit in our own small way. Alan Moore had, I would guess, just turned up for a grin given his native Northampton being only thirty miles away, and so his name had not appeared on any publicity material. Scarcely able to believe our luck, Charlie and I approached him, our hands quivering as we held out photocopied samples of our work for his mighty approval. My own hands were particularly aquiver as they conveyed unto Him a copy of a strip I'd drawn taking the piss out of obsessive comic fandom which featured Moore as a character, and which would never have happened had I not spent a couple of years chuckling over the material he'd drawn for Sounds music paper:

Larger version here.

Alan Moore accepted our offerings, flicking through as we made the usual apologies submitted when in the presence of greatness, and began with 'well, Charlie and Lawrence, here's what I have to say to you,' in thoroughly genial tones before delivering an encouraging fifteen minute speech on the topic of sticking to your artistic guns and not letting the bastards grind you down. With hindsight I realise this encounter seems particularly astonishing given its dating to a period during which Moore had supposedly turned his back on snotty little turds such as ourselves asking him when we can expect Watchmen vs. X-Men; and contrary to received wisdom, he was lovely.

We also spoke to Garth Ennis - who was similarly a nice guy, although I dislike everything he's done since Crisis - and Neil Gaiman - who was just a bit rude - and then suddenly a couple of years later, Charlie became sickeningly rich and famous as artist for The Walking Dead and others.

Anyway, moving on from issues of fame by spurious association with international megastars, there's this biography which paints a seemingly faithful picture of Alan Moore, from what I can tell, and it appears that the man himself is happy with Lance Parkin's account, which has to be a recommendation.

The great strength of Magic Words is in the fine balance which is struck, acknowledging Moore's triumphs whilst keeping its feet firmly on the ground. I'm a fan of much of his work, but he's done a few things I really haven't enjoyed, even that I would regard as a waste of time; and so it's appreciated that no attempt is made to sell every last eccentricity as symptomatic of genius, or to suggest that Alan Moore is incapable of making huge mistakes. Lance Parkin allows the reader to judge each aspect of Moore's work on its own terms which does much to distance the man from his possibly overinflated reputation, and the resulting portrait is fascinating - someone prepared to take risks rather than who necessarily always knows what he's doing; and after several hundred pages, it's hard not to admire the guy, and perhaps to admire him even more than his comics. Even the deal of Moore declaring himself a magician is handled with grace, clarity, and absolute honesty considering how ridiculous it may seem in most contexts, which is hugely refreshing given the sort of po-faced nebulous bollocks that's usually spouted in the name of the subject, as I'll come to later.

There may have been previous books, or at least essays, on the life and work of Alan Moore, although I've not read any. I've seen one online person whining about how Magic Words doesn't really cover any new ground or go into enough detail, although I'd say there's most likely plenty of new material here for anyone who doesn't weigh seven-hundred pounds or spend eighteen hours a day having online arguments about Power Girl's costume - sorry if that comment seemed judgey or made anyone feel a little bit inadequate; and I can't really see how more detail could be achieved without giving Alan Moore a colonoscopy. In any case, I don't know why you would need more detail than is given here.

As biographies go, this is pretty much perfect. I found it fascinating. I also found it significant that Magic Words, which for the sake of argument could probably be considered the definitive work on Alan Moore, is written by someone other than Alan Moore, which contrasts with Grant Morrison's Supergods - the work of an author who seems almost pathologically obsessed with how the rest of us see him, who often becomes the subject of his own stories, and whose equivalent tome is thus, quite naturally, a semi-autobiographical history of the superhero genre; and to be clear I find this significant because Alan Moore's comics tend to have a subject besides their author's navel.

Further whining here.

Elektra: Assassin

Frank Miller & Bill Sienkiewicz Elektra: Assassin (1987)
By the time I made it to art college, 2000AD had turned a bit shit thanks to dross like The Mean Arena and Meltdown Man, so I packed it in on the grounds of my subscription having become a financial extravagance and a possible hindrance to the likelihood of my enjoying sexual intercourse with nude ladies. I soon realised that, regardless of whether or not I read comics, no nude art college lady was particularly likely to jump my bones mainly because I had the wrong haircut - actually the haircut later popularised by members of Nirvana - so I thought fuck it, and went back to the comics again.

This was partially the fault of Charlie Adlard, then making Super 8mm zombie films as part of the same course. He'd given me a lift home and we stopped off at Sainsbury's for a pint of milk when I noticed an X-Men comic in the magazine department - Uncanny X-Men #211 for the benefit of anyone to whom such things might be important. I bought it out of rampant curiosity, having lost touch with the X-Men roughly when I was eight. Charlie filled me in on what had been happening at Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters in my absence, happily without recourse to any of that shit about comics growing up or whatever. I responded well to Chris Claremont's Mutant Massacre saga, so Charlie wrote me a prescription for Watchmen, The Dark Knight, and Elektra: Assassin, thus introducing me to the astonishing artwork of Bill Sienkiewicz.

Back before Frank Miller found himself forced into reincarnating as Ted Nugent by the commie pantywaistery of freedom-hating pinko liberals like myself and almost everyone I know, he wrote some pretty snappy comic books, and I'd argue the case for Elektra: Assassin being the snappiest. It was produced very much as a collaboration, the definitive and final scripts drawn up in response to what the artist had done for earlier drafts - Sienkiewicz's art being so distinctive, so powerful, that a script failing to acknowledge whatever had started happening on the page since Bill got to work with his crayon would inevitably look out of step.

All the weird effects that have been employed in comic book art since the 1980s, photocopies and objects taped or even bolted onto the page, panels looking to Gustav Klimt or abstract expressionism rather than Jack Kirby - I'm hazy on the precise details of who did what first, but I never saw anything of the kind before Bill Sienkiewicz embarked upon the experiments that were to provide Dave McKean with his entire career. Elektra: Assassin is neither deep nor particularly profound, a basic action thriller, well told with all sorts of big grisly ideas and psychological touches; and elevated to the status of Art with a capital A by the means of its telling. For those who need it, there's probably a message about corrupt politicians and the advent of spin, although with hindsight there's something a little bothersome about the villain being an evil and conspicuously liberal presidential candidate, what with Miller recently denouncing Adolf Hitler as a mommy's boy bleeding heart faggot and all.

Still, best to remember him when he wasn't a reactionary old tosser, when he worked in tandem with true genius to produce stuff like this. Elektra: Assassin is probably one of the greatest things Marvel ever did.