The Communist Bullpen

August 16th, 2011

So, it kind of started like this between he and me, yr ever-lovin’ Botswana Beast, the O-rriginal Eyeball, and there’s more but I’m fuctifano how to get all these trackbacks on the twtr, so look for yourselves, if you really want. Joel (that’s his tumblr) is a pwopa Marxist on the speed-dial and who knows; maybe he can diagnose and cure comics’ endemic corporate thievery better than a ragtag bunch of libertarians? My inclination’s to think this eminently likely.

Dare you look ahent the curtain, at a world inverted?! Come then, brave traveller, beneath the cut!!

an-imaginary-story

It’s unsurprising that the editors decided to pull the text above out of it’s original introductory caption box and give it’s own page in the anniversary edition of Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow, transforming it into a full blown preamble.

This is what Wikipedia has to say about the closing sentence, Alan’s Moore’s last word on and celebration of Superman:

“This is an Imaginary Story… Aren’t they all?” The legend is a triple entendre:

  1. It could be interpreted that the story is non-canonical.
  2. It could be interpreted that the story is canonical, since all comic books are “imaginary stories”, so it is as valid as any “official” Superman comic
  3. It could be interpreted that the story is canonical, but for this incarnation of Superman, as the upcoming John Byrne reboot would render the earlier series as “imaginary”.[citation needed]
  4. It could be interpreted that that the story is the end of the Earth-One Superman had the Crisis on Infinite Earths never happened.

Isn’t that a quadruple entendre? Whatever. There’s something missing from that list. It’s what gives the line it’s awesome fuck yeahness, but as it doesn’t speak directly to comics it doesn’t surprise me that it often goes overlooked. Yes, Moore was quite possibly concerned that the Superman stories of his youth had just been relegated to the bin of history by Crisis on the Infinite Earths, yes he could be railing against the strictures of canon, but personally I’ve always read that line as a celebration, not just of a certain view of Superman or a certain incarnation of Superman, but of the imagination full stop.

After all, isn’t Superman, the guy who can do anything, the superhero who best encapsulates all that’s good and beautiful about the infinite possibilities of the imagination?

It’s unlikely that the Alan Moore of the mid-eighties had quite such well-formed views on the subject of meaning and story as he does today – to the best of my knowledge he didn’t talk much about Idea Space in interviews back then – but to suggest that he put great stock in fiction doesn’t strike me as much of stretch, in fact I see the line above as evidence that his thoughts were heading in the direction that would ultimately bring us From Hell and Promethea.

When Moore writes “aren’t they all” he is putting Superman stories in the same broad category as the Bible, Noddy, personal historical narratives, and the mythology of predatory paedophiles, which isn’t to say that he’s explicitly arguing that all stories are of equal importance, just that stories have the potential to be very powerful indeed, and that, hopefully, this one is amongst the best. This point is reinforced by the juxtaposition of the legend with the opening splash page featuring a memorial statue of Superman.

Memorial statues carry with them connotations of timelessness, of permanence, of stories that cannot and should not be forgotten.

Being: the second of two short posts building up to a third, slightly more impressive one.

It’s no secret that Alan Moore’s Dodgem Logic zine has its faults – my fellow Mindless Ones have talked about them a bit here and here already – but it seems to me that the short comic strips by comedian Josie Long exemplify the magazine at its worst.

Well, I say they’re comics, but they provide none of the pleasures that one associates with the medium, so they only really exist as an example of the “I know comics when I see them” nature of the form (Scott McCloud, consider yrself warned!):

You can do anything with words and pictures, but maybe you should try a bit harder than this...

The above excerpt comes from ‘Love’, the Josie Long strip that graced the first issue.  In fairness, this is probably the worst comic Long has contributed to the magazine – her recent re-coloured, re-dialogued Ikea instruction diagrams reached the levels of mild amusement you’d find in the absent scribblings of a troubled friend.  Whereas this comic, well, it’s a fifty panel pile-up of squished text and ever squishier faces.  I almost feel like I should apologise for putting such horrible images and colours up on the Mindless Ones site, to be honest with you.

Click here to see my put on a full suit of armour to attack a fudge sundae!

Being: the first of two short posts building up to a third, hopefully more substantial one.

This series of posts is supposed to be all about mirrors and vanity, so what better way to start than by quoting something I said in the comments to this Phonogram review?  Cast your mind all the way back… to December 2009!

I like The Phonogram – it shows me something I like to recognise, namely, me!

I hate The Phonogram – it shows me how stupid that bit of me really is.

Which is why it’s good, and why I love it, and why this review gets to the core of The Singles Club better than any other (though Nina’s review was also very good, if far harsher). I’ll be happy to see more issues, and sorry to see it end.

Still, it’s a bit of a prick at times, The Phonogram.

Sometimes, I don’t think it likes me as much as I like it…

How does the song go? Oh yeah: “I taught myself the only way to vaguely get along in love/ Is to like the other slightly less than you get in return/ I keep feeling like I’m being undercut…

Of course, much as I admire these tricky qualities in Jamie McKelvie and Kieron Gillen‘s Phonogram, and much as I’ll always be grateful to them for dedicating an issue of their fanzine-as-fantasy-comic to a defiantly minor group like The Long Blondes, I’ve always known where to find the best example of this trick in all of comics.

I'm not going to have time to properly get into it here, but Jamie McKelvie's art was just so perfect for Phonogram, with its cast of fragile characters trying so damned hard to pose their thoughts into reality. Suffice it to say, if you got McKelvie to draw a working diagram of the universe I'd expect it to be boys who like

Indeed, even back in December 2009, when I was young and naive and actually pretty cowardly about these things, I was still careful to give tribute to The King:

But then I thought of Alec – The King Canute Crowd: “yeah, all these books were written about you!” That Eddie Campbell’s a clever bastard, you know – I don’t think there’s a better laid trap in all of comics than that page.

And yeah, I’ll stand by that statement!

Wanna find out what’s through the looking glass? Click here and all will become clear! Well, mostly!

ALTERNATIVE TITLE: WHO WILL SURVIVE IN AMERICA?!

Here’s the soundtrack. You know what to do.

So, Deadpool Max then. Kyle Baker does the art,  David Lapham’s on script duties.  Never mind the fact that Deadpool is a Rob “Fucking!” Liefeld character turned comedy Wolverine turned corporate ubiquity – is the comic any good?

Bloody right it is!

This is a picture of Deadpool as a demon, as tattooed on a gangster's cock. This comic is published by Marvel, and thus by Disney, which makes it all feel a little naughtier, doesn't it?

(Yeah, okay, it’s a little bit late to write about these books as if they’re a fresh discovery, I know.  As Marc Singer once said, “if you’re going to review a new-release comic two weeks after it was a new release, you’d damn well better have something to talk about” – so, hey, just imagine how great this must be if I’m still willing to post it now!  On Christmas Eve!)

Find out what other secrets are stuffed in Santa’s sack! You know you want to!

golden_nuggets

Because what the world needs now, is another end of year list…

Read the rest of this entry »

Little Big Numbers

November 16th, 2010

OR: Alec – How to be an Artist, and why some stories are just too fucking massive not to be told

Another thing I remembered, and I don’t think I ever mentioned it to Alan, but I always felt a certain resentment that Billy the Sink got Big Numbers and blew it while i was stuck drawing Jack the bloody Ripper for ten years (I once described it as a penny dreadful that costs thirty five bucks). I stand by my opinion that Big Numbers was the superior idea and would have been Alan’s masterpiece. Of course it is also true that Sienkiewicz is a world class illustrator and there’s no way I could have done a job that complicated in 1992. I could have taken a crack at it later (post-Birth Caul/Snakes and Ladders), and offered, but Alan wasn’t up for that. I love the ease with which Bill shifts from photographic mode to outright loony tunes. The separated Gathercoles remembering their courtship and early marriage is a masterstroke (pages 19-21). That’s an odd note at the bottom of page 29 where he slips back into his Moon Knight style.

(Eddie Campbell on Alan Moore and Bill Sinkiewicz’s Big Numbers)

The first time you read Eddie Campbell’s Alec – How to be an Artist, you might find yourself wondering why Campbell spends so much time on the story of how Alan Moore and Bill Sinkiewicz’s proposed masterpiece, Big Numbers, never added up to much in the end.

I mean sure, it’s a good story – the fact that a project so well conceived with so much talent behind it could not come together for more than three issues (only two of which were published!) is just plain baffling.  More than that, it’s good gossip!

More on Alec – How to be an Artist/more fun with fractals after the cut!

Note how reassuring Wonder Woman is trying to be here. Unfortunately, as a royal demigoddess, she always trouble staying this side of patronising, and her apparently innocuous choice of words betrays the concern she’s trying so hard not to burden the room with. All the ‘Black Alert… End of Time… Resourceful Batman’ stuff is common enough for Monday night around the Justice League dinner table, but certain words give you an indication as to the social subtext of this meeting. Everything from her serious eyebrows to her deliberate use of reassuring, gently authoritative keywords (‘Officially… Naturally We Don’t Want To Alarm Anyone… But We All Know… We’ll Have To Assume…’) says one thing: Don’t let the children think they’re in charge.

Because honestly, these days Tim ‘Henman*’ Drake is the kind of guy it’s impossible not to patronise.

*See what I did there with the ‘Henman’ thing? It’s double clever of me, because obviously there’s the Tim Henman: Famous English Tennis Loser connection, but also Hen-Man, which is an appropriately stupid name for a spurned ex-sidekick needily clinging to pointless avian themes for his choice of grown-up supername, unintentionally demonstrating just how unsuccessfully he’s ‘moved on’ from the whole, y’know, ‘abandonment thing‘ thing…

THIS IS HOW IT’S GOING TO WORK. Plenty blather in recent weeks about the reactionary impulses at work in DC’s decision to get rid of all its Bronze (I call it ‘Early Dark’ but ‘whatever, Steve Trevor’)/Dark/Prismatic Age legacy heroes and replace them with the resurrected Silver Age versions, in a bid to placate the SEETHING, ever-chubbier fanman and his desire for everything to be just like it was when he was a child.

(Minus the constant stream of free electronic NUDITY, I’m guessing.)

[Please note we fully accept the non-existence of the Legion of EviL Fan-Men stereotype. With the cultural dominance of the superhero over the early 21st century very well secure, these arguments, these embarrassments, are very much a relic of another age, and performed here very much in the spirit of a historical battle re-enactment society (and don’t get me started on those losers, with their ‘going outside’ and ‘hanging around with other people’ and ‘getting some fun and healthy exercise’). The caricature is being deployed in the current post merely for cosmic effect, a convenient and pitiful rhetorical ghost to lazily lob some poor jokes and manufactured anger at. To reiterate: It’s just a bit of fun. I am as ill-shaven and portly as anyone, and as will become all too apparent my opinions on superheroes are both delinquently partial and barely worth the (very) spare calorie it takes to type them. With those caveats safely in place, read on, if you’ve got the arse for it.]

blue-douche

It’s a World Cup of superheroes old and new, minus the tournament aspect, or any relation to football. Still, using the words World Cup in a post has got to be OK for the Google rankings at the moment, eh readers?