Riddle me this: why are so many writers completely at a loss when it comes to E. Nigma?

Poodle has noted that the Batman TV show of the 60s has been something of a touchstone in his rogue’s review considerations, and you know what? I completely agree that it should be. Many of you will worry that the camp fun therein is at odds with the skein of grim ‘n’ gritty darkness that runs through Batman at his best, but I put it to you that your inner child experienced that show as deadly serious, and that’s what we’re trying to tap into here: the way it felt to you as a kid, which as far as I’m concerned is completely at odds with flooding the Batverse with all out silliness.

The Riddler of the TV show always made me uneasy. There was something very wrong with this slippery man that hid behind the question mark, building deathtraps and giggling like a child. In fact puzzles themselves were worrisome. My Grandad’s cheerful, yellow bumper puzzle books were at heart mysterious. At the time my mother was regularly reading me Greek myths, and I knew with certainty that those friendly cartoon characters that ushered me towards maze entrances weren’t to be trusted. At the centre of the labyrinth something dark and secret lurked, at once frightening and exhilarating. Further into the books matchstick men hung from matchstick nooses, and cryptic crosswords muttered their inscrutable clues with oracular force. Even the dot-to-dot lattices were pregnant with powerful revelations, always threatening much more than a jagged representation of Micky Mouse’s head. Always a disappointment when the numbers ran out and the picture was complete, as if the introduction of a few more elements would bring some transcendental force to bear and unlock a hidden reality.

Yeah, to my five-year-old brain puzzles were something more than distractions. When I grew up I wanted to build impossible mazes and stock them with bizarre and often terrifying creations: traps, monsters, and fiendish brainteasers. After being exposed to D&D my obsession switched to dungeons, but the principle remained the same - I still wanted to explore the places where we lose our way, and harness the unknown. In my tweens when I encountered The One Game, a television series based around a character trapped within the nightmarish machinations and manipulations of an enigmatic mastermind, the puzzle’s existentialist and mystical connections were concretised. Did we live in a deterministic reality, or could its code somehow be cracked? Was the mysterious universe that unfolded around me moving towards some sort of totality, some hidden truth, a kind of dot-to-dot in macrocosm? Sure it sounds pretentious, but think about where we find puzzles and the tasks they’re set and it all starts to look a little less so. In our fiction we have the Da Vinci Code guarding *ahem* profound religious truths, in science the magical properties of quantum encryption threaten to lock our secrets away in multidimensional prisons. The riddle of the Sphinx, the koans of the Buddhists, the liar paradox of Epimenides, the maze and the Minotaur, etcetera, etcetera. In fact it’s only in relatively recent history that puzzles (in particular the riddle) have been seen as mere diversions, or sources of uncomplicated humour. Certainly the Anglo-Saxons and the Norse didn’t view them that way, and neither did the Ancient Greeks, with both culture’s utilising the unique properties of the puzzle to educate and, in a bolder move, gesture towards profound truths.

Do ya see where I’m going with this?

It’s as if the Riddler has somehow suffered the same fate as his pet puzzles - he’s been trivialised and subsequently rejected as a worthy villain. There’s some truth in that, I reckon, but the problem is probably compounded by something far more straightforward. It’s the same difficulty faced by all the Batvillains: writers, in common with the rest of us, like to follow the path of least resistance, meaning that threats that aren’t purely physical or obvious tend not to get much play. It takes imagination, an interest in the character, and hard work to tease out the place of a riddling baddie in a world of broken backs, weaponized fear gas, guns and terms like vigilante. How does a “silly” character like the Riddler function in that oh-so-serious space - do you turn him into another *YAWN* psychopath? Beef him up with venom? Have him retire? Make the character reflect upon the tragedy of his own dumbness and go straight?

No thanks. Let’s get back to basics.

The last writer to present the Riddler as a viable threat was Jeph Loeb in his Hush story-arc, where he has the character work with the (truly atrocious and profoundly unconvincing) eponymous villain to bring Batman down. Now, I might not be Loeb’s biggest fan, but I think it’s fair to say he tapped into something key to getting the Riddler right. Yeah he was super-smart - he figured out Batman’s identity and manipulated a host of A-list characters - yeah he was tricksy, yeah there were riddles, but none of that’s what really counts. Indeed, it’s fair to say that Loeb got something very important wrong with his portrayal of the character, in that his Riddler didn’t announce himself, didn’t openly challenge Bats to a battle of wits, failed to be the showman we all expect him to be. Loeb would probably argue that he was sketching a cleverer Riddler, one that refused to let his psychological foibles undermine his devious plans, and he’d have a point. Paul Dini certainly seems to be convinced. His Riddler brings back the ostentation but eschews crime altogether, instead he’s set himself up as Batman’s not-entirely-honest competition - a brilliant and showy private-eye intent on out sleuthing the World’s Greatest Detective. An unraveller of riddles as opposed to a puzzle-setter. But what Dini doesn’t have a handle on, what Loeb understood, is that if the Riddler is about anything he’s about mystery.

What’s strange about the Hush arc is the redundancy of the principal villain. To my mind Nigma, taken seriously, would have been the perfect fit, but for some odd reason Loeb didn’t trust him to sell the story on his lonesome, and instead had him back up an ill conceived anti-batman. Reimagining the arc with the Riddler at the helm is easy enough, however, and points the way towards exactly the kind of Riddler I want to see: one that haunts the Batman. His presence all pervasive, ambient. Only tenuously, and occasionally linked to a physical body. Rather he should manifest through labyrinthine schemes, puzzles, riddles and elaborate deathtraps. To take the idea further, the Riddler’s presence should engender such a profound degree of uncertainty that Batman’s entire environment starts to seethe with suspiciousness. For an example of the kind of thing I mean, check out the lastest issue of RASL (#2 reviewed by Bobsy below), in which the titular, dimension hopping character starts to worry that his last jump didn’t in fact bring him home, just somewhere worryingly similar. Jeff Smith builds the paranoia to exquisite levels, so much so that ostensibly innocuous panels - a cigarette burning down, RASL sleeping - are transformed into abstract representations of the unknown, and positively hum with foreboding. Morrison (again with the bloody Morrison) appeared to be tapping into the same idea in DC One Million where he imagined the Riddler of 1000,000 years hence literally as the scenery, a semi-sentient Riddle City.

The problem faced by the majority of writers is that they’ve become far too caught up in psychology - in explaining the Riddler in those terms. In that light of course the character comes off badly. Only an idiot would leave clues for Batman to find, surely? It goes without saying that writers would struggle with a guy hell bent on undermining himself. That more often than not the temptation would be to paint him as ineffectual, a second rate villain, or, I dunno, a PI, perhaps.

I should add here that just because I think psychologising characters can be a bad thing in that it can lead one away from some really interesting stuff (the Joker as a sickness, say), and force one into narrative cul-de-sacs, I am categorically not out to deny the Riddler any kind of personality. It’s just that the sort of personality I’d offer him would be impressionistic as opposed to realistic. To go back to the TV show, Frank Gorshin’s Riddler would be the obvious jumping off point. Like all the Batvillains brought to the small screen in the 60s, you wouldn’t want to argue that Gorshin’s creation was anything like a real person - that there was a recognisable bloke beneath all that manic cackling and wild gesticulation. But nevertheless the character made a huge impression on the audience, and continues to resonate today. In fact I’d go as far as to argue, based on no evidence whatsoever, that the reason the Riddler has any kind of Bat-cachet is largely down to his prancing telly presence 40 years ago.

If the baddies of the TV show were anything they were show offs, celebrity monsters, with Gorshin’s Riddler somehow managing to outshine the lot of them. In that way Gorshin’s interpretation has much in common with the Riddler’s earliest comic book appearances, where the Prince of Puzzles was nothing if not powerfully ostentatious, showy. And that’s the line into the character I’d want to take: the showman who uses Gotham City as his stage. The Riddler’s crime’s and attendant puzzles are essentially epic performance pieces - giant typewriters, and skyscrapers his gargantuan props. This is a Riddler who’s as smart as any of those mad science villains, but who hasn’t slaved his brilliance to anything as pedestrian as scientific discovery. No, he’s an artist, a creative genius, a producer who always gets the world’s most talented superhero to pull out his best performances. It doesn’t matter that Batman often “wins”, it’s the taking part that counts, the work itself. Besides, it’s not like any prison is going to hold the Riddler for long, and, who knows, perhaps that’s exactly where he wants to be.

Remove the focus on the Riddler as a man, absorb him into the text and you get something else entirely: a quintessential (perhaps the quintessential) Bat-threat: the mystery waiting to be solved. Think about it, there should be no greater challenge to the World’s Greatest Detective’s deductive abilities than the Riddler, no tougher puzzles to crack. As Bane is to physicality the Riddler should be to mystery. What I’m proposing here isn’t particularly radical. As I’ve noted above, the Riddler’s presence has a long and venerable history of being articulated outwith his body. The notion that the Riddler should infect all the panels of a given comic is simply the recognition that his puzzles are as much part of him as his arms and legs, and that puzzles are non-local in that they permeate the stories that house them. In detective fiction the real antagonist is always the mystery at hand - I’m proposing a deliberate and carefully articulated blurring of the lines of distinction between the character and games he sets in motion. A Riddler that literally embodies mystery.

I want to be taken back to those intricately patterned crossword puzzles, pentagonal number games, and haunted treasure hunts. I want the Riddler from Batman’s early years to make a return. The one whose origin story failed utterly to explain or account for what he had become*, and the grandiose nature of the threat he posed. A Riddler at home standing astride the rooftop of Gotham Museum, hands on hips, head thrown back, back lit by a skyscraper’s illuminated windows, spelling out the letters of some gargantuan brainteaser. I want a Riddler that hurtles out of the shadows to cast his puzzle-nets, and makes impossible escapes that even the Batman can’t decipher. A King of Conundrums whose schemes trap the Caped Crusader in their dark twisting labyrinthine depths: plans within riddles within riddles within plans. I want that One Game feeling of not knowing if the game is played out. Did the Dark Knight defeat the Creepy Quizzer or is it - to paraphrase Nolan’s Joker - all part of the plan? I want to see Batman baffled, bemused, and beffuddled by exquisite, terrifying deathtraps built from interlinked question marks, not all of which are physical.

I want the man who giggles in the centre of the maze. I want the mystery.

Riddle me that.

*Just as the Joker’s origin story (if it can be called that) utterly fails to explain him away.

I’m very definitely not the best choice for a weekly reviewer. I’m extremely narrow in terms of the number of comics I’ll pick up each week (prefering to buy trades and graphic novels as opposed to individual issues), and I really dislike most of what passes for superhero fiction, so I’ve opted out of sharing any responsibility for our regular (!?!) review section, but it doesn’t look like anything’s going to emerge this week unless I man up…

And here we are.

Another reason I shy away from reviews is because, if I am reading about mainstream superheroes, I’ll mainly have my nose buried in one of Grant Morrison’s, and I’m absurdly uncritical when it comes to his stuff. Sure, I think New X Men was pretty poo, but generally speaking the man can do no wrong. So if it’s balanced criticism you want then you might have come to the wrong place. No, I’m afraid that we’re going to have to start from the position that Batman 678 is awesome and work out from there. Which is cool because, well, I suspect that so far RIP actually has been no holds barred, honest to goodness, objectively good right from the off.

So 678 finds an amnesiac Bruce Wayne on the streets undergoing a full on breakdown, loaded on ‘weapons grade meth’ and heroin, while his superpals attempt to evade capture by the Club of Villains, and Dr Hurt makes himself at home in the batcave. Simple, eh? Well probably not given the confusion that has, since last Wednesday, riven the internet. Typically, people are divided on the book. There are those of us who love the morrisonian bat-weirdness that seeps out of the still wet (if you squint hard enough) psychedelink, through our fingertips and out into our bloodstream, and then there’s the people who, well, don’t. I think the most common criticism is the one that’s dogged Grant since he started on Batman - that the book’s difficult to understand, especially without an obsessive knowledge of bat-continuity.

Well I say ‘balls’ to that.

I don’t have a particularly strong handle on any superhero’s continuity, but even though 678’s last panel saw me scratching my head and whadafugging, I still got a thrill from it. Because there’s two ways to respond to the Batman of Zur en Arrh - angry head scratching, or happy head scratching. You either enjoy high strangeness or you don’t, and I’m firmly on the GIVE ME MORE ZEBRA BATPEOPLE! side. I especially love the way Grant has, throughout his run, balanced these elements with the grimungritty ones - it’s a real testament to his ability as a writer. And what a great thematic and narrative starting point - the problem of making sense of the entirety of batman’s life without resorting to universe destroying meta narratives like Crisis, and thereby evading the question altogether! Where other writers see an intractable poser worthy of the Riddler, Morrison just sees possibilities. I know who I’d rather hang with. And anyway, you don’t really need to have the outer space Batman explained away - you can just chalk up the bizzare costume change as the latest indication that Bruce Wayne’s undergoing a psychotic episode. The lovely Mario on Barbelith provided this link to help get the final scene into context, but what help is it really? Does it force what’s happening now to make any more sense, or does it just add texture and colour, but ultimately more LSD to the kool-aid? All we really need to know is that Batman’s had some weird adventures in his time and this might have something to do with it. And that we’re very afraid of anyone in spandex who’s tipped that far over the edge.

There’s some nice resonances going on in the book too. The whole having to start from nothing thing mirrors Chill’s words in 673 when he complains about rich kids having it all handed to them and coming up from the street. There’s also the fact that Bruce has, by the end of 678, become the homemade superscary whose rampage he stopped just two issues ago. Morrison’s putting the ‘but he couldn’t do it if he wasn’t rich!’ argument to the test. And Batman’s winning: the autopilot street fighting;
the tiny aside about his accent and his hair (I love the mental image of Bruce wayne at the salon [he only ever let's Cindy cut his locks - he just doesn't trust the rest.... I mean he tried Timothy once, but it was a disaster!]) that indicates that even with his mind overthrown he’s still the world’s greatest detective and he’s fighting back. Heck, even the candy-coloured batman he later becomes, whilst a little worrying, is a sure fire sign that there’s still a superhero in there.

Bruce’s journey across town is classic, mythic Morrison territory. Batman in the underworld, interfacing with all the deep bizzareness that buzzes around in the gutters of the batverse, finally succumbing to its distorting, mind wrenching power. He’s finally taking that last perilous step down the Joker’s ‘rabbit hole’, and he’s got good guides in the shape of Honor Jackson, Batmite and the bat radia. The point is, if we want to see Batman pushed to the limits psychologically then what better bat-totems to employ than those that have typically signified the stranger reaches of his world? These are the things that go bump in the night/come to the rescue when you’re exploring the frontiers of the character and what makes him tick - the denied, forgotten, wonderful and childlike creations that most creators want to shove under the carpet. The secret language of the bat-fairies. You can’t help wondering if, after making friends with the crazyness and his own darkness, Bruce’ll have the same reaction to the Joker’s poisons as everyone else. Perhaps the laughing toxin will just give him a serious dose of sense of humour.

There have been further complaints that some of Morrison’s stories fail as individual issues - that they’re so steeped, by this point, in the overarching narrative that the uninitiated will find the book pretty impenetrable. Well, yeah, maybe, but the those of us who are following Batman regularly are being rewarded with an intricately plotted and layered bat-novel the likes of which we’re unlikely to see again, plus a massive expansion of the batverse generally. Normally Morrison likes to make quick asides to cool concepts and riffs on the characters he’s writing, but in Batman, because he’s really going with the long form approach, he’s fleshing these ideas out issue by issue. The black Casebooks are introduced with a quick nod, and would work as a throwaway reference to a fun, titillating idea, but Morrison continues jamming on them from one ish to the next, until they’re not just simply an obvious answer to the inevitable question ‘how does Batman assimilate all the weird stuff?’, or even just the delicious propostion that he puts pen to paper re his cases anyway, but that they’re written not solely for the purposes of detective work, but also as entertainment (see Jason scoffing the popcorn in this issue!) and autobiography (’it’s important to keep a record - nobody’s ever done this before…’). In 678 we finally get a glimpse of what goes on inside - although it’s arguable we already have in the Joker prose story and, well, in every batbook employing a hardboiled monologue - and it’s both funny (see the monster’s dimensions clearly worked out for proof) and deadly serious at the same time. Indeed, another revelation implicit in all this is that, whatever it’s become now, the grim narrator bit appeared to have began as a way for Bruce to get into character. That was until he ceased to be able to kick it when he was out of the costume…

Morrison demonstrates more and more effortless understandings of Batman, his psychology and his mission every month. It’s not all there shouting at you like Denny O Neil’s bat-commentary with it’s endless, empty waffling about ‘the dark heart of the night’ etc., it’s gentler and sometimes takes a bit of digging. It’s there in Honor Jackson’s comments about Bruce having ‘kind eyes’, and, in 678, when he describes him as ‘one of those mystery men roaming from town to town helping people’, or in the way the Black Casebooks acknowledge the Robin’s as vital lynchpins for Batman’s sanity. For such a loud, pulpy, fighty book, there’s an enormous amount going on under the covers, and Morrison allows us to do some of the figuring out ourselves, never afraid to jar, as with the ‘kind eyes’ example above, with traditional notions of bat-identity. I mean, don’t you think it’s fucked up that it surprises us and feels a little strange when someone sees in Bruce Wayne, not just a darque avenger, but a real life, in the flesh SUPERHERO?

Look, I completely know the book can be a bit scrappy, and it always reads better the 3rd time, but each issue is often soooo tonally different from the next, there’s always superhero action (a fucking rarity in comicbooks nowadays), it’s audacious, generally moves really fast and, frankly, Morrison has the voice of Batman down. I’m of the opinion that he literally sits at the keyboard and just lets the character speak through him. Never a bum note. That could be a bad thing if Morrison was a lazy writer - the book could just degenerate into hackery - but I don’t think he is. All I get from this comic is that Morrison’s having a brilliant time playing with the best toy in the toy box and he’s delighting in the childlike pleasure of trying to provide rationales for all the weirder bat-toys too.

I only wish to God he’d dress Bats up in those special outfits we saw in his third issue. Pure bloody action figure awesomeness. Morrison can make most things work - he always provides lovely spins on why people would want to dress up in funny outfits. Take Doctor Hurt swanning around in Thomas Wayne’s old duds this ish, for example.

*Brrr*

So, anyway, if you don’t like Grant’s Batman, 678 isn’t going to change your mind - it’ll probably only see you entrenched deeper in your little dug-out of the bat-war. But, you mutherfuhs, you’ve had your silly-arse trenchcoat pain for years now - move over and make some room for the rest of us!

Because you lovely people are linking here looking for our rogue’s reviews, here’s a round-up

Rogue’s Review #1: Harley Quinn

Rogue’s Review #2: Catwoman

Rogue’s Review # 3: The Penguin

Rogue’s Review #4: Bane

The idea here is to find alternative or better ways of making characters work, so even if you’re not interested in, say, The Penguin, I urge you to check out Poodle’s thoughts. Without wishing to blow our own trumpet, I think he’s done a truly amazing, often hilarious, job.

Who would have thought that Bane could be my new favourite bat-villain? Weird.

More to come in the very, very near future.

In 2005, when I was 29, I underwent a second teenhood, and my flat at the time was more like a non-stop party than anything resembling a home. Seriously. You couldn’t get any sleep on a Friday night, and when you’re expected to go to work at 10 o clock the next day, that’s no fun at all. Having said that, I really enjoyed rolling in four hours afterwards and joining in with the drug-bleached bedlam. There’s no way, just three short years later, I could keep up with myself then, and that’s probably for the good, but it doesn’t change the fact that it was a great deal of fun while it lasted. Obviously we had very little money, and we were all boys, so the flat was always a fucking state and the decor and furnishings were sparse and basic to say the least. Inspite of this, however, I was always fairly house-proud - I just had to figure out how to spruce up the living room cum kitchen on a tight budget.

So I raided my comic book collection and 100% came to the rescue.

This flaming whirlwind of a punk-chick (tho’ admittedly twas the B&W version) danced frenziedly above the bachanalian antics taking place in the lounge for a good year and half before I cleaned up my act and was finally edged out the flat and into my girlfiend’s by a pile of washing up a mile high and a come-down that would never end. She was more than just a cool, cheap, 6ft by 4 blow up adorning the beer stained walls of our ultimate bachelor pad, she was a talisman, a good luck charm, a sigil holding the flaming nights and days together. She was as much a part of what I might now loosely term ‘my social group’ as any of the freaks and weirdos sprawled out on my floor. She was the soundtrack on the stereo condensed into the four walls of an exploded comic panel.

She was ROCK!

And it’s not as though she’s alone. There’s a grand tradition of comicbook characters gazing down on bachanlia, from the bereft lovers of Roy Lichtenstein, their tears pooling on the floors of the galleries that comprised the 60s New York art scene, to the reality defying creations of Kirby and Steranko bellowing some terrible warning concerning a threat from beyond out of the flyers and rave posters of the same period right through to the second Summer of Love in 1989. And speaking of flyer art - mid 90s Hoxton bars and clubs would have looked completely different if it wasn’t for Jamie Hewlett. And then came Gorrilaz… Comics, cocaine, cigarettes and alcohol have long been bedfellows, so it’s strange that so few comics writers incorporate music into their creations.

Hmmmm.

Why is this? To begin with, comics are a silent medium, but I would go even further. I’m fairly certain that the fact that comic books fans have such a weird, touchy relationship with notions of *cool* has a lot to do with it too. And music is always bound up with fashion. There’s always an element of showing off - of demonstrating one’s credentials - in comic books revolving around tunes. There’s the feeling that the author might be trying to push his or her idea of what we should be listening to on us - that they’re setting themselves up as arbiters of taste - and some comic fans, who’ve spent a great deal of time being pushed around by said arbiters, naturally find themselves quite hostile to this idea. That said, I think there might be a geographical and temporal component to this too. Afterall, a great many of us grew up with books like 2000AD and Deadline which revelled in their hipness. In the late 80s and early 90s Zenith referenced everything from Morrisey to George Michael to acid house, and you could practically hear the Rolling Stones blasting out of Tank Girl’s tank. So perhaps british fandom’s cooler with it. We expect Morrison to blather on about how much he likes crap like Goldfrapp - it comes with the territory - but I think Americans who were raised on a frugal diet of Marvel and DC may have a different attitude. In fact I suspect some of them will be tuning out around about now….

Regardless of fandom, there’s been a smattering of notable musicky comics put out in the zeroes - Phonogram, everything by Paul Pope, one I KNOW I’m forgetting, Cameron Stewart and Ray Fawke’s soon to be released Apocalipsticks and of course Dave Lapham’s excellent Young Liars. Yeah, yeah, I’m biased from the get go - I fucking love the book - but nevertheless I’m going to attempt a fair and balanced assessment of Lapham’s comicbook hit list. Before I do, though, I just want to quickly nod to the difference between Lapham and Matt Fraction’s approach (for more on Matt’s take, see Collected Irritant Soundtracks 1): Lapham understands that two tunes just about covers the time it takes to read a comic book - it’s more realistic. By pairing down the book’s aural dimension in this way, Lapham draws more attention to the music than Fraction. Because the songs can be slotted into the reader’s reading span, they really signpost themselves as a soundtrack - and ‘Why these warblings? Why not others?’ becomes the question. The answer must be that these tunes are thematically important - that they fill out the characters and the stories somehow. That they contain information. A kind of sonic colouring in. The soundtrack informs and is informed by the comic’s content in a far more enveloping and saturating way than in Fraction’s Iron Fist story. It’s less gimmicky and more a key, though optional, component of the reading experience. I get the feeling Lapham really wants us to stick these songs on the stereo as we thumb our way through the character’s lives. Anyway, hopefully we’ll discover some interesting shit going on in the feedback. That or some weird satanic commands.

Throughout Stray Bullets‘ run, Dave was ever-present at the controls of the letter column cultivating for himself a hard-arsed, ‘fuck you weird fanboy!’, dare I say it, punk rock persona (does anyone remember that amazing post about fighting zoot suiters and Dave’s response - perhaps the most awesome thing to happen to a letters page since Charles J Sperling?) and his tastes for grimy nightclubs, druggy parties, low level criminality and all things rawk has always been evident in his work, but it’s never quite come together the way it has in Young Liars. For those fules amongst you who haven’t picked it up yet (inspite of fairly ringing endorsements from the supreme arbiters of taste over on this here website), Young Liars tells the story of six of the titular bullshitters - Sadie (a girl with a bullet in her brain and absolutely no self control or inner monologue), Danny (her obsessive, angsty ‘boyfriend’, protector and keeper) Runco (a rich kid slumming it), Donnie (a *yawn* drug addicted tranny with a heart of gold), Annie X (an, again with the *YAWN*, eating-disorder ravished, washed up model) and Cee Cee (a groupie) - and what happens to them when Sadie escapes with Danny from the repressive, sexually deviant, ultra-violent clutches of her maniac, billionaire, chain-store owning Father’s compound and out into the New York party/clubbing scene, with daddy’s weird and evil minions, the Pinkertons, hot on their trail. We’re only four issues in, so that’ll have to do as an overview for the time being, but obviously we’ll be progressing through each of the issues in this here piece, so it’ll probably accrete a little more detail along the way….

SPOILERS ALERT!

I yawned a little there, didn’t I? Well perhaps I shouldn’t have. Lapham’s nothing if not a master of characterisation and I’m sure each of the protagonists will be fully fleshed out before we get to the end. Those of them that survive that is. And anyway, Dave wants a bunch of easily accessible characters to get us into the book. These guys are readymade ciphers/bridges for the world he wants to immerse us in - we can worry about little details like depth later. TBH he’s already proven himself in this area by subverting the idea of the sexy, sassy, wank fantasy heroine by making her brain damaged. Sadie’s one part superhero, but, as I’m sure we’ll see later, two parts victim, and Danny’s obsession with her mirrors the ugly fanboy who gets off on the supposed emancipated womanhood of Tank Girl etc, but secretly thrills at the idea of owning them. So, yeah, Lapham’s already muddying the surfaces. Shut up critics. But I’m getting distracted again. That’s not what I wanted to talk about.

I wanted to talk about how their little gang is really a band.

I mean, with a bunch of cardboard cutout, scenester archetypes like this, what else could they be? Sadie’s the frontman with her insane ‘tude and Joplin styled warblings, Annie X the stick-like keyboard player, Runco’s the bassist, Donnie’s on drums and Danny’s the lead guitarist/manager. Oh and Cee Cee’s still a groupie. Sure, they don’t actually play anything - they’re not literally a band - but their little unit, with its twisty relationships, fucked-up internal politics and powerplays, over the top histrionics, massive egos and drugs, is pure Spinal Tap. And their stories are their songs. After superteams, the band is an obvious point of focus for comic writers - you’ve a ready-made reason for a group of people to hang together and share adventures, a springboard for all kinds of mayhem, and in the end isn’t a band just the JLA for mature readers? Bands enjoy a kind of real world heroic status, don’t they? They’re the closest we can imagine getting in our lifetimes to the realm of myth, etc., they’ve got the super abilities too: sex appeal, charisma, the power to invade and control the minds and pants of a million screaming fans. Yep, it makes perfect sense that Lapham’s ploughing this furrow for a little bit o’ dollar at the mo’, even if the band thing’s an implicit, as opposed to explicit, thematic ingredient.

So what are they playing on the stereo? What’s throbbing away behind their lives?

Well if you were to go by the information on the cover of issue 1, with Sadie, fist aloft, demanding ‘Are you ready for this?’, you might assume it’s those early 90s chart topping, non-ravesters 2 Unlimited (DON’T! CLICK! THE! LINK!), but a quick flick of the page reveals the issue’s real theme songs…

This is, for the snarling Lapham, something of a strange choice for an opener. Don’t get me wrong, I love 80s Bowie - whatever anyone else thinks, I’m firmly down with Let’s Dance, China Girl, Blue Jean, The Magic Dance et al (Personally I think from early to midway through the 80s Bowie manages to sucessfully pre-empt and channel the whole icy-modern(love)ist but fierily earnest tone that dominated most of the decade - his transformation from heroin addled Thin White Duke to alien yuppie is one of his most interesting permutations), but does Lapham really dig on this shit? Well obviously he does! I’m not suggesting he has to love every song that resounds out of Young Liars, but I’d find it pretty mysterious if he wasn’t down with the opening track. And it makes sense too, not just because Sadie’s all about the dancing, but because Lapham’s comics always seem to locate themselves, as the Beast has already pointed out, in some weird temporal hinterland, ostensibly positioning themselves within a fixed time-zone, but nevertheless always reeking of various different decades. It might have something to do with the way Stray Bullets bounced around in time, but there was always the feeling that you didn’t quite know where you were.

Let’s Dance’s video seems to tell the story of an imaginary life bestowed upon a pair of poor, young aboriginal lovers by a pair of red shoes. Well the red shoes aren’t in evidence in the comic book, but the fantasy love affair between Sadie and Danny very much is. It is an affair, like that of the couple in the video, that must eventually reveal itself as a crock of shit. There are powerful forces of oppression ranged against them, forcing them not to get ideas above their station, and, anyway, Danny’s just taking advantage of a mentally ill young woman, and the red shoes that in Hans Christian Andersen’s story keep the young heroine dancing, dancing, dancing forever are poisonous and will eventually kill her, just as the bullet lodged in Sadie’s skull is pressing on her fun-centres now but will ultimately work its way through her spinal cabling. It’s a great tune, but there’s something stark and cold at the heart of it, and in that it serves as not just a guhroovy initial aural foray, but it also articulates the doom awaiting our heroes just over the horizon.

Fuck knows if Lapham’s seen the video or if he intends this level of analysis, but there are certain resonances that seem to work.

Moving on…

It’s nice to see Dave making some concessions to modernity. For those of you that missed it, Atlas by Battles was one of last years crossover anthems. The relentless, geometrically progressing stomp of its beat, its cyclicality, means it has more in common with a techno record than rock ‘n’ roll, but rock it is - math rock. That Lapham’s introducing his book with this stomper causes one to sigh with relief - phew! so many comic writers come off as grizzled old rockers with Stooges records endlessly repeating on the stereo, that it comes as a pleasant surprise when one of them turns out to actually like new music. It’s slightly conspicuously *new* however. I think Dave’s quite self-conciously beaming out the message that he’s still listening, although it was a very popular tune, really, and it doesn’t display any real underground or indie cred. But points for trying, Dave. It does make you want to dance.

And that’s the point really, isn’t it? I suppose that the first issue is as close to untroubled good times as our ragtag gang are likely to get for some time. It sums up the exuberant, mindless - wordless - hedonism of the dancefloor, the sheer excitement and breakneck pace of the comic (Liars really moooves - it’s like one big chase scene: from small town america, to the big city, to the hospital, to the cruise ship and ultimately to Spain in ish 5, not to mention the fact that, just like in Lapham’s other work, we’re still bouncing around in time every other panel…) and limitless freedom of Sadie’s deranged head. It’s this stuff without the danger, cautionary warnings and the moral caveats, and I think that’s as important a statement to make about the world the players move in as all the other stuff - it’s sometimes a great deal of fun. It’s a nod to the pure, unadulterated, consequence free high times before the necessary comedown.

Wait a minute! Did I say ‘consequence free’? Hmmm. Maybe there’s another way of looking at Atlas and its marching beat. It does put me in mind of soldiers marching to war, and Young Liars does, y’know, contain an awful lot of fighting. By the time we get to the end of the first issue, the police have shown up at the nightclub and a bar-room brawl ensues…. After that a gang of violent punks turn up to flatten Sadie for slicing up one of their own…. And then it’s the Pinkertons turn…

So moving onto issue 2.

Scene shift, and suddenly it’s Austin Texas two years before the events that introduced the book. Issue 2 tells the tale of how Danny and Sadie first met, how he ‘rescued’ her from a lascivious local gangbanger and how, when her father caught wind of the fact that she’d snuck out of the compound to go to a gig, he saw to it that the Pinkertons burnt the venue down with everyone inside and killed Danny’s Mother, best friend and disabled brother as a reprisal for showing his little girl a good time. Grim stuff.

And there’s a couple of fairly tunes playing in the background. First of all: Suicide and Frankie Teardrop.

I admit it, I think Suicide are the tits. Frankie Teardrop’s no Ghost Rider or Cheree, but it’s damn good all the same. And damn miserable. Miserable, portentous and threatening. Suicide inhabit a weird place where the spirit of rockabilly collides and fuses with the burgeoning electronic scene of the late 70s - where a traditional, warm, sound finds itself lost in a tangle of cavernous, echoing synth riffs and stark drum patterns and, understandably, the vocal gets somewhat paranoid and edgy as a result. Bowie’s Let’s Dance exhibits a similar tendency, but it’s the pop-lite version - Suicide really go to town. It’s quite literally music to top yourself to.

So it’s perfect for an angst ridden teenager. So far, in the space of four comics, we’ve seen Danny attempt suicide no less than 3 TIMES! Twice in reality and once in his imagination. Two of these instances, when he fantasises about drinking a bottle of bug killer because his band’s fallen apart and when he puts a gun to his head because he can’t get to the aforementioned concert, occur in issue 2. Danny may well be the narrator of much of the piece, but he’s a deeply subjective, untrustworthy one and by this point, if we hadn’t come to this conclusion already, Lapham’s keen to drive home that he’s a bit of an arsehole, full of self-loathing and deeply manipulative. ‘how would they feel if I killed myself because I didn’t get my way?’, he seems to ask. And that’s the thing about the song. It tells the story of a man who, having had his way (under very dodgy circumstances) with a young woman, is set upon by a group of thugs working for her Father, but escapes, and, later, decides to top himself. The lyrics pursue, via caption boxes, our young protagonist from panel to panel, and we’re left in no doubt that Lapham intends us to view ‘Teardrop as Danny’s theme tune. He uses every available opportunity to take advantage of Sadie (in this issue, when he carves out their friendship when she’s high and drunk and later, after she’s taken a bullet, when he sets himself up as her self-appointed guardian) and brings down the wrath of Papa Wonderwall on everyone he knows. But, hey!, Frankie Teardrop’s the subject of a pop song - he’s tragically heroic, mythic even - and I’m certain that’s the way Danny likes to view himself too. The star of his own personal drama.

Like I said: arsehole.

I’ve never spent much (read: ‘no’) time on You Will Know us by the Trail of the Dead. And now I know why. They’re not crap exactly - the tune has a nice fuzzy guitariness, a pleasing, spiralling riff and sputtering drum line - but his voice reminds me of Liam Gallagher. There’s something so generic about it - a teenager’s eye view of how a rock vocal should sound. So off I go on a quick web-trawl for their music and what do i find? Okay, the Liam-voice isn’t in evidence elsewhere, but they’re still not quite doing it for me. Hmmph. No matter how hard they try to crank it on tunes like Caterwaul, TOD never really ROCK OUT!!!111!!!23!. I just like my guitar music a little dirtier, to be honest. But I know the amerindieana soundscape of the nineties wouldn’t be the same without them, so I grudgingly tip my hat to Trail of Dead as a bit of Lapham album filler.

Even though there’s something quite annoying about them.

I can’t prise much sense out of the lyrics, either, so it’s pretty difficult to draw any conclusions with regards to their relationship with the text. All I really feel, looking at them now, is slightly irritated. Lots of waffle about

‘I fear that you would never be
Every song in the world for me…’

and

‘…For not seeing heaven like you would see;
Why is a song a world for me?’

Jesus. I think, in the case of Another Morning Stoner at least, the Oasis comparison gets more and more accurate by the minute. Absolute doggerel. I suppose that just about sums up Danny’s emotional landscape. You can just imagine him writing love letters to Sadie in the same vein. Frankly, though, I think the song’s content has fuck all to do with anything - it’s the titles that nail it. Another Morning Stoner speaks for itself, doesn’t it? Danny, pre-Young Liars, in a nutshell. And then there’s the name of the band! Yes indeed, you will know them by the trail of the dead.

But are we talking about the Pinkertons [who the fuck are these guys? - ed] or our star crossed couple?

Whoever it signifies, issue 2 ends with a trail of bodies a mile long.

And it stretches all the way to #3.

Oh man, Wire rule and Strange is one of their best tunes. That grinding, gravelly wash of guitar, the way his voice tilts between menacing and camp, the scary noises sidling out of the shadows at the end…. Fuck Trail of Dead, basically. Lapham needn’t provide me with a reason for this one because it’s basically just fucking skill, but Strange fits very nicely thanks.

‘There’s something strange going on tonight
There’s something going on that’s not quite right
Joey’s nervous and the lights are bright
There’s something going on that’s not quite right

There’s something going down that wasn’t here before
Keep your eyes glued to the floor
No one’s gonna save your life
Something strange going on tonight

There’s something going on that wasn’t here before
Keep your eyes glued to the floor
No one’s gonna save your life
Something strange going on tonight

There’s something strange going on tonight
There’s something going on that’s not quite right
Joey’s nervous and the lights are bright
There’s something going on that’s not quite right…’

Okay, Joey has nothing to do with anything but the song sums up the paranoid atmosphere of 3 completely. quick plot precis: the gang find themselves drop kicked from one hair-raising scuffle to another, and eventually, after escaping the club, wind up in a hospital ward where Donnie recovers after ODing. But that’s not the end of their problems. It turns out the ‘Doctor’ who shows up to check on hir is actually one of the Pinkertons [explain these guys away a bit more! -ed] and, after Danny blows his brains out, the whole lot of them wind up on a cruise ship headed for Spain and the mysterious treasure Runco’s been prattling on about since mid-way through the first ish. Understandably, because no-one up until this point has any idea about Sadie and Danny’s past, the group begins to fray at the seams as the mutual distrust hits boiling point. As readers we sympathise, because we’re almost as in the dark as the rest of them. Sure, we know Sadie’s Dad’s a weird psycho and, in many ways, she’s the ultimate shut-in. We know that Danny and Sadie have some fucked up shit they’re running away from. But that doesn’t mean we’ve really got a handle on just how DEEPLY fucked up the Pinkertons are.

Here, take a look at one.

Mr. Brownbag’s private army/detectives are the scariest comic creation since Lapham’s Roy (and if you haven’t met him yet, then GO THE FUCK OUT AND BUY SOME STRAY BULLETS!). The way they go all out with the masters of disguise schtick, their fake nose-glasses, taches and funny accents, it’s like some ghastly spy film parody - pure Peter Sellers and Casino Royale - but for real. It’s just so creepy. The way they lurk in their funny outfits around every corner - the impossibility of ever giving them the slip. As Sadie points out - ‘They could be one of us!’. There’s something Port Merionesque about their inescapability and their oddball pantomininess, and they’re especially frightening when contrasted with just how normal everything else in the comic is. Sure, there’s the mega-violence and the bullet in the brain and all, but, until it comes Pinkerton time, it all seems somehow plausible. And then that guy wanders into Danny’s store asking questions. You can just feel the hairs on his neck standing to attention as he describes the memory. I’d want the fuckers conclusively dead too - like some terrible, plastic faced Mr. Punch thing in a nightmare.

There’s something strange going on tonight.

It’s not quite right.

If I was Donnie, Annie, Ceecee or Runco, I’d just fucking run, because those spooky sounds at the end of the song are the noise the Pinks make as they come lurching out of the corners of the world we know….

[Happy now, ed - Amy]

Evil snoops to one side for a minute, what the hell is this?

I think I’ve got an idea what Lapham’s going for here, but I don’t know if it works for me. ‘Mad World’ captures the feeling that, with 3, for most of the cast the world’s been turned on its head. It’s also in keeping with the cool, spare eightiesness of some of what’s come before. It seems to nod to the neon smothered, unfriendly sidewalks floodlit by the shop fronts of all night eateries and 24 hour stores at four in the morning, racing for the taxi to the after-party. The drizzled glow of streetlights in a lonely city. All that jazz.

But the horn stabs.

But Tears for fucking Fears.

I don’t know - I’d've gone with West End Girls or something if I wanted to achieve the same effect. The original’s waaay better than the bloody Gary Jules version, but Mad World’s still, in some overwrought, embarrasingly earnest way, extremely annoying. Just check the plonker rave dancing like a machine, before it was fashionable, in the video.

In Brighton, inspite of the fact that we’re the home of innovative, moving and shaking club nights like Thirteen Monsters and It Came From the Sea, most of us, even those of us who are tangentially pals with the people who run these things, have an overdeveloped taste for all things retro. Perhaps it’s because our little London by the sea’s always been a mod mecca, or maybe it’s because we’re just a bunch of neophobic, philistine anti-funs, but, whatever the reason, I almost groaned when I saw Dave had included Rocks Off. And then it hit me. The Stones and Rocks Off have soundtracked so many mashed up nights and days and nights and days again in my life that it would be a crime not to include this grooving, flat-can-of-tepid-beer-with-a-dog end-floating-in-it of a tune in Young Liars. Mayhap the Stones are the lightning rod for all early to mid thirty-something debauchery the world over.

I’m sure that’s what they’d have us believe anyway.

Regardless, listening to it for the billionth time, without the hedonism, reminds me that I actually love this tune. It’s absolutely brilliant - a kaftan and chiffon coated brawl in hippy saloon central - ecstatic, carnivalesque and sexy. And sexy’s what counts here. Danny and Sadie spend a good part of three fucking each other. It’s the first time Danny’s got his leg over and he’s a happy man. Just don’t mention the fact that by this point we suspect Danny may be responsible for Sadie’s brain trauma and this is all make believe anyway. Don’t understand me too quickly, their bodies really are smooshing, it’s just that in the real world, before the shooting, Sadie had a very complicated relationship with her would be lover - one that probably wouldn’t have resulted in bedroom gymnastics. It took actual brain damage for Danny to get a chance with herl. I’m not saying that there isn’t a real, powerful, relationship between these two characters, just that what’s really going on with them is extremely complicated and, like the man says, ‘I (Danny) only get my rocks off when I’m sleeping’, or some sideways world where the geek gets the mentally disturbed girl. Danny’s living out a fantasy. It seems real - she looks, feels, tastes and smells like the woman of your dreams - but that’s all it is, a dream.

The trad rock ‘n’ roll (noticeably the only trad rock in the soundtrack so far) flavour of Rocks Off also riffs pleasingly with Ceecee and her (perhaps slightly damaged) lifestyle as a wannabe star-fucker. It conjures up images off stadium rock excess - suitcases full of red, green and yellow pills, tablets, tabs and white powders, couples slumped in the shadowy blue corners of the party snogging, swimming pools with empty bottles of champagne floating in them and groupies, groupies, groupies. Well in 3 Cee finally comes to the conclusion, after a little tete-a-tete with a bunch of crusty, flaking herselfs twenty years hence, that her vocation might be something less than 100% desirable. Perhaps Dave’s aware of just how apt the tepid beer metaphor really is. The attitude the Stones embody is fun, but it’s also ooold, played out and starting to smell a bit off. I enjoy it a whole lot, but it denies getting wrinkly, even though its boobs are sagging and its boozy paunch is showing, and there’s something disturbingly necrophilic about the love affair some of us have with it.

And finally:

Aaaah, more up to the minute music, but again, slightly obvious and more than a little disappointing. I’ve just this minute played it to my girlfriend to make double sure, and quick as you like she confirmed my worst fears:

‘Sounds like a run of the mill pop song.’

I knew there was a reason I didn’t rush out and buy The Rapture’s last album. I felt somehow guilty and wrong about it at the time, but I now know I’d've felt even more guilty and wrong if I had bought it. Pieces of the People we Love just isn’t a patch on anything on Mirror or Echoes. Where’s the clanging, cacophonous New York sound that encouraged remixes from a producer as raucous and difficult as Kid 606? Where are the notes from the underground? Gone forever it seems, and there’s a radio friendly chart-topper in their place. Oh well. It’s catchy and all that but I’ll probably forget about it in a month. I’m too depressed to even bother connecting the dots with the comic - the fragments of each other that the characters can lay claim to, Danny’s sense of entitlement to, and ownership of, Sadie and what he actually gets, the self-destructive quality of their relationships, blah - so I think this might be a good place to bow the hell out.

Boo, Rapture! BOO!

We’ll bid farewell to our noble heroes as they wash up on the shores of southern Europe with the promise of more music/comic reviews next time around.

So what do I think of Lapham’s selection? Do I really find his soundtrack irritating? Well, yeah, Tears for Fears and the Rapture niggle a bit, but overall the tunes are fairly solid and at least he’s made it possible for the reader to have a crack at music and comic at the same time, unlike Fraction whose attempt at fusing the two is little more than a curio. I also really enjoy the way the tunes texturise the text. The information isn’t too hard and fast - it’s not too literal. The music just gently douses the scenes with mood and makes the contents of the panels glow a little more brightly. And the overall effect is of a consistent emotional and atmospheric throughline supported by a bunch of records that resonate convincingly with one another.

Having said that, I think I share some of Bobsy’s reservations about this kind of enterprise - I’m not sure I like the way a tune hijacks the meaning and feel of a comic, especially when it’s a crap one. I’m also aware of how ephemeral hipness really is and I’m wary of a comic that concerns itself with anything as temporary and fickle as pop. Lapham tries to counter this by going for songs that, although sometimes a little offbeat and obvious only to poncy musos like myself, are timeless - classics, or instant classics - and in large part, to me at least, he succeeds, but that doesn’t mean a Fluo Kid won’t just see him as another boring old fart and their appreciation of the comic will inevitably suffer because of it.

Which leads me on to:

If I’m brutally honest I think I could posit another reason why people like me find something irritating about music pushing in comicbooks: in the end we might feel that we know better than the creator, and that’s just a let down. We might hate their taste or just feel they’ve no idea what’s on the kid’s stereos at the moment. We might watch them flail about trying to connect with the yoot and prove how up to the minute and relevant they are and cry and cry because, godamnit, good comics writers are like brilliant bands - we don’t want to see them trip up or reveal their fallibility! Lapham must always be excellent! Always much, much cooler than me in every way! He musn’t like bad Rapture records! King Mob must atone for Kula Shaker-gate by grinding his i-pod into the craggy floor of that fucking mesa! Thankfully there’s only a few wronguns in what amounts to a pretty good track listing, so I don’t mind him telling me what to put on the stereo (too much). Okay, okay I know there’s an element to it that’s purely altruistic - he wants to introduce the uninitiated to a world of good shit - but contained within that urge, as I muttered darkly above, is a statement about how he knows what you should be listening to. But you should listen to Suicide, Wire, David Bowie, The Rolling Stones and Battles, fanboy, because they’re all pretty bloody good. So all’s well that ends well.

But believe me when I tell you my alternative soundtrack’s better.

There’s a party at my (very pretty) flat this weekend coming. It’ll be pretty heavy. I promise to give Danny and the gang your love when I see them, and I think I’ve got a good idea what they might be playing on the stereo.

P.S. I know Young Liars is a TV on the Radio song, I just can’t be bothered to offer any more bloody opinions. Go and listen to it yourself. It’s alright. It probably has something to do with the comic.

Other comics that came out LAST week.

Rasl #2
Written and drawn by Jeff Smith

I’ve never read Jeff Smith before, an admission here in comics land tantamount to buggering yourself with a mahogany log with the word ‘IDIOT’ scratched on it. Got the first Rasl based on the ‘indie guy doing a genre book’ hook, and liked it a lot. For me, comics are like ice cream – lots of good flavours, but basically there’s just vanilla. All the rest are interesting, it’s nice that they’re there, providing colour, richness and variety, but they’re never really what you crave. In comics, vanilla is superheroes (oh the layers of irony in that sentence.) Or perhaps vanilla is action-oriented genre books generally. Whatever, it’s always great when an idiosyncratic, non-mainstream creator joins the action playpit for a bit – it’s a bit like adding organic Cornish clotted cream to the recipe DIE METAPHOR DIE.

As Quh-thurg said in his review of issue 1 the thing with Rasl is the physicality of it, like the body dismorphia issues lurking in the standard superhero book have been foregrounded to the degree where they become subject, plot and metaphor all at once. Physical space and form, whether figured in the flat, blank (New Mexican?) landscape, occasionally punctuated by mesas and outland city structures; or in the warped, reptilian nastiness of our suspicious MIB from issue 1; in the jacked-up and sexualised bodies of Rasl and the women he meets in this issue; or even in the labyrinth motif this issue introduces, is very much the meat and drink of this comic.

In issue 2 Rasl finds his way home but finds himself becoming increasingly threatened and displaced, the disquiet and tension nicely illustrated by the foot-shot Picasso, a literally multidimensional cubist painting, which later becomes even further disconnected from itself. This is what that indie thing does which your fightbooks so often lack: simple, well-constructed and salient metaphors and other images supporting the narrative thrust. It shouldn’t be too much to ask or regularly expect, and again a really good comic saddens me with the fresh anamnesis of how rare it is. Clotted cream, man (DIE!)

Smith, to his credit, as if saying ‘this is is just too easy’, keeps the dialogue sparse, and the panels wide, squared-off and somehow always empty. He avoids almost any exposition and uses nearly comically generic dialogue to pass as the comic’s pseudo-scientific underpinnings, all ‘thermo-magnetism’ and the old fave ‘quantum theory’. These latter elements, combined with the labyrinth thing, the parallel universes deal, and the vague allusions to determinism give away Smith’s otherwise hidden schmindie leanings and seem tacked-on, which is a bit of a shame. Another comic with a barely-subterranean discussion about how the human emotional personality is ultimately as unknowable and unpredictable as a fundamental particle’s superposition is not something I need.

The overground message however, which paradoxically could be manifesting somewhere beneath the author’s conscious narrative intent at this stage, is far more interesting, while being something much less familiar and easily expressed: something about the goodness of poisons; the physical toll of attachment; and the tacit but unavoidable truths of being possessed of and possessed by animal biology.

All this in a thrilling, throbbing muscle comic filled with menace and the threat of imminent peril, as beefy, compelling and exciting as a James Cameron flick. Until Jeff Smith turns to homeopathy*, make mine Rasl.

*And even afterwards.

Hellblazer #245
Written by Jason Aaron
Drawn by Sean Murphy
Published by Vertigo

I pick one up every year or so – this one got the nod from shop-man and is written by current wunderkind Aaron, so it seemed like a good place to take my semi-regular sample of this much cherished and much ignored title. I was encouraged as soon as I flicked through it, thanks to the efforts of colourist Lee Loughridge. As I remember it, since around the start Will Simpson’s art tenure years ago, Hellblazer’s single worst feature has been the default colour palette of dull browns and dirty earth tones, as if every shade should somehow complement Constantine’s trenchcoat. These muddy hues are not the colours of horror. The colours of horror are blacks and reds and purples, and Loughridge gets this perfectly. If he’s been on the title for any amount of time, I may even be tempted to go pick-up some back issues.

The rest of the issue fits the improved colour scheme perfectly. It’s a grisly standalone two-parter that yet gets to handjob old-school fans by riffing freely off the events of ‘the Newcastle incident’, the worst and bloodiest episode of Constantine’s somewhat sanguine life. It follows the traditional Hollywood horror model, as some incredibly annoying American kids go somewhere they shouldn’t and get royally fucked for their troubles. It starts light, with an excellent gag about the eternal UK/US accents debate, but gets bad fast. The payoffs and punishments in this issue are the strongest and most vivid horror moments I’ve seen in a comic since the twins’ severed heads awoke in The Walking Dead (if you don’t know what I’m talking about then you’ve not read The Walking Dead, because you couldn’t possibly have forgotten it, and you should go and check that out very soon).

Before I go on to unreservedly recommend this comic as the best issue of Hellblazer I’ve read in literally years and years, I’m afraid I have to mention a certain incident on page 8. Regular readers will know that only one thing will stop my gushing praise in full flight, and that is, yes I’m afraid so, a soundtrack. Every motherfucker’s doing it, apparently. Jason Aaron, every hot young new thing of him, does quite well to embed the soundtrack listing inside the text of the issue itself, with a ‘casual’, Tarantino-esque conversation between the doomed youth as to the identity of ‘the perfect punk song’, almost as if he feels a little guilty at the intrusion into his readers’ aural independence. As well he should. One of the problems with the soundtrack idea, for me, is the alienation - how punk - that it can evoke - what if I don’t like these songs, when I’m effectively being told I should like those songs? Somehow, it makes the comic feels a little less mine, and I paid my two quid fair and square goddammit. I don’t want to dwell on this tiny aspect of this ace little bastard of a book and moan on about the songs Aaron’s characters try to impress me with, so let’s do it quickly with bullet points:

• There is punk, and there is punk rock. The Damned/X-Ray Spex/Vibrators songs mentioned here are all punk rock, and arguably not very punk at all.
• For me, punk rock begins with the opening chord of New Rose by The Damned and ends with teh final snarl of never mind the Bollocks.
• Punk rock is mohawks and army boots and rough cider and biker jackets and three chords in three minutes and safety pins and ripped denim. And, like all those things, a bit crap thirty years later.
• Altenatively, punk is basically paraphraseable as ‘do what you want how you want fuck anyone else’, and so the greatest punk record is Fear of Music by Talking Heads.
• The cool punks in this issue, in mistaking punk rock for punk, are equally as misguided as the fucking-a-dead-dog uncool punk who likes Green Day.
• This is the perfect punk song. There need be no other:

Forget me and my grumpy aging ‘proper punk’ moaning. Just treat yourself to this book - if you’ve ever loved Hellblazer, and I know you have, then you’re going to love this.

Two out of two so far. Can it get any better? Only if…

Punisher MAX 58
Written by Garth Ennis
Drawn by Goran Parlov
Published by Marvel Comics

With the sharpness and darkness of Hellblazer, Jason Aaron demonstrates, and not for the first time, that he’s probably the only person curently in the game who might possibly be able to follow up Ennis’ Punisher run. Only two issues after this one. It’s basically an impossible act to follow and a big problem for Marvel. Their solution, to have rotating teams on an arc at a time, bringing in writers from the world of crime fiction, can only feel like a stop-gap measure, and in all likelihood, unless Ennis can be convinced to return, the book will be lucky to last eighteen months without him. Getting a novelist in for the recent Annual didn’t work, and it’s doubtful anyone new to the medium is going to have much luck balancing the tricky crime/war/serial killer/superhero/social realist genre elements that Ennis has so skilfully mixed on his run.

It’s important to say it out loud again: Ennis’ Punisher MAX is the greatest comic of the decade, full stop. Nothing else in the medium has faced the dark and dirty realities at play in this fucked-up century with comparable insight, purpose and narrative drive. Even if you look outside the comics village, there’s The Wire, and there’s Punisher MAX, and that’s it. A serious comic for a serious planet, with, helpfully, the tightest fights and hottest explosions you’ve ever held in your hands.

58 is a typically masterful exhibition of two talents at the top of the game. Ennis is so confident and in control of the pacing he can fill the gap between a bomb-trigger being flicked and the resultant explosion with a six-page cut, completely away from the central plot to a slow series of captioned ‘photographs’ enriching the story with references to the book’s overarching historical and thematic contexts. Goran Parlov uses these big wordless panels to dazzle with another display of his unique metahuman talents: Look at the ‘photo’ of John Chadwick on page 9. As your eyes flick from his eyes to the mouth, the picture fucking moves and Chadwick actually smiles at you. And that’s incredible.

So there we go, that’s the comics got last week. No Morrison, no capes, no crossovers or events, no autobiographical reflections on the pressures and perils of la vie artistique, no ‘I’m crap at getting girls’ - just three delinquent funnybooks, roughly slouching towards you and begging to be read.

Persepolis, graphic novel and movie reviewed.

Autobiography has become the life blood of mid-ground comic books. Sometimes the lives recalled are woven into the fabric of dramatic and horrific events of global historical importance, sometimes the events described are decidedly quotidian. In American Splendor (Vertigo, 2008 ) – which often immortalises lives of no particular consequence other than the fact that they are being lived by human beings – author Harvey Pekar rants, ““I’ve done a lot of stuff in my life I’m not proud of but at least…” and then lists such non-acts as “never got high and shot my wife in the head” and “never conned my country into a needless war to boost my ego”.

It was while reading Persepolis (Jonathan Cape, 2006) – Marjane Satrapi’s collected autobiographical tales of life in and in self imposed exile from Iran - that I suddenly realised my own life was probably going to be best evaluated by what I haven’t done. I haven’t tortured a man with a burning hot iron, or hung a woman or cut another human being into pieces. Neither have I, as Satrapi has, had a friend die during a roof top flight from armed militia nor had one’s dress sense publicly questioned by guardians of the Islamic Cultural Revolution.

On the other hand, I do remember confronting school teachers as a child much as Satrapi did. Once, my French teacher asked a young French boy to read a passage from our class text book. We were then asked to applaud him. I refused on the grounds that, of course he read the text fluently, he was French. Later labelled by the teacher as part of the “desert” of children who were slow learners, I argued that if I could understand French I wouldn’t need to be taught it and that was the teacher’s job.

Transfer such behaviour from a Welsh private school and place it in an Iranian state school during the Islamic revolution and such middle-class precociousness takes on a distinctly political edge. Satrapi’s conflicts with her teachers focus on: being taught revisionist history that seeks to forget the past, the impossibility of taking life drawing classes without looking at the male model and the Islamic fundamentalist dress codes that are hypocritically imposed more strictly for women than for men.

In her introduction to Persepolis, Satrapi gives readers a brief history of Iran. It takes us from the second millennium B.C. and the founding of the Iranian nation in the seventh century B.C. through successive invasions by Arabs, Turks and Mongolian invaders to, in one mighty bound, the Twentieth Century and Britain’s post World War Two support for the Shah..

One effect of Satrapi’s introduction is to make it seem as if Iranian history has authored Satrapi’s life, or at least given it its significance. However, I would argue that the influence is the other way round and that it is Satrapi who has taken Iran’s history and has actively made the past significant from the point of view of the here and now. But then Satrapi is influenced by dialectical materialism and I’m influenced by Phenomenological/Hegelian Marxism so I would say that [of course you would! - ED].

Persepolis is explicitly about memory. Satrapi herself offers Persepolis as a public memorial to commemorate the lives lost in that history., “I don’t want those Iranians who lost their lives in prisons defending freedom, who died in the war against Iraq, who suffered under various repressive regimes, or who were forced to leave their families and flee their homeland to be forgotten”.

But, ultimately, an autobiography is about the person writing it. As social historian Carolyn Steedman has written (Past Tenses) “In the autobiography, or in the telling of a life story in a pub…the person there, leaning up against the bar, or in another place, writing a book, is the embodiment of something completed …a human being.” Such forms of recollection can therefore be seen as a process of gathering together again the fragments of a life and turning them into a narrative with the self as protagonist and product.

Much of Persepolis is about Satrapi becoming a young woman and coming to terms with how that h
is defined for her, by Islamic fundamentalism and patriarchy and by herself. In doing so, her story stands as an example of a process that a German feminist collective have called ‘female sexualization’ (Haug et al, 1987). In part, this is the socialization of women into an identity with sexuality as it defining core. For Satrapi this requires her to overcome the norms and strictures of her Iranian up bringing. So, at a party in Vienna, she is turned off by public displays of affection and is horrified when she over hears cries of pleasure coming from her host’s bedroom- “My God, they were in the middle of……having sex!”. Next day, she finds the sight of the man in his underpants is embarrassing and comical.

Female sexualization also involves adopting ‘body techniques’ by which women attend to the training, manipulation and grooming of their bodies so that their ‘inherent’ sexuality is made visible to others. For Satrapi this process is complicated by her country’s fundamentalism which prescribes what is and is not acceptable for a woman. Satrapi details the ways in which wearing make-up becomes not an act of oppression as it would be seen by feminists at the time in the West but an act of resistance. She criticises one group of Iranian women for looking “like the heroines of American TV series, ready to get married at the drop of a hat” but then, on reflection, realises “that making themselves up and wanting to follow western ways was an act of resistance on their part.”

Inevitably, much of Satrapi’s account focuses on wearing the veil. Slight differences in the way the veil is worn become signs of resistance. Individuals also become skilled in interpreting a woman’s body beneath the veil from the way the garment hangs. So a bump at the back of a head scarf signals that a woman has a pony tail underneath. One Mullah at college even allows Satrapi to redesign the veil to fit the fashion for long, wide trousers.

Female sexualisation also involves women coming to see and evaluate themselves from the perspective of men. I imagine the feminist collective being appalled at Satrapi’s vision of a liberated self. After a page of leg waxing, hair plucking, a perm and applying make up Satrapi flirtatiously presents herself to us as “a sophisticated woman”. However, this is partly the result of the way the norms of femininity in the West, however patriarchal, act as a source of resistance to the norms of Islamic fundamentalist culture for Satrapi and her women friends.

Although the fundamentalist regime has rules governing men’s appearance, it is clear that the focus of the regime’s attention is the regulation of women’s sexuality. At a lecture on ‘Moral and Religious Conduct’, the young Satrapi stands up and confronts this hypocrisy. “Why,” she asks, “ is it that I, as a woman, am expected to feel nothing when watching these men with their clothes sculpted on but they, as men, can get excited by two inches less of my head scarf?”

For the German feminist collective memory plays a key role in the subordination of women. Women’s memories, they argue, have been colonized by patriarchal ideology. One effect of this is to forge a unity between a woman’s present, subordinate self and their childhood past by creating a false chain of cause and effect and papering over the cracks and contradictions of the life course. The collective challenge this by showing how past memories of conflict and resistance to male power can be recovered by collectively shared remembering.

Satrapi’s personal account certainly traces continuities with her childhood self. But her recollections are precisely about conflicts, crisis and personal questioning. Satrapi represents herself as critically reflective. As a child she questions all forms of authority, including God. Where she doesn’t understand situations she turns to reading Karl Marx in cartoon form and Simone De Beauvoir. She also listens to her family’s stories of political oppression and observes how they are treated.

However, there is a powerful infantilization of Satrapi’s identity at work in Persepolis. The first book (‘The Story of a Childhood’) focuses directly on Satrapi as a child but even the second volume ‘The Story of a Return’ signals a return to her childhood land. The movie makes this infantilization even more explicit. Although told in flashback while the adult Satrapi is at Orly airport, the end credits feature a snippet of dialogue between her childhood self and her grandmother. Satrapi is ever the daughter, ever the grandchild.

Satrapi’s illustrative style is also childlike, as if Studios Herge had decided to reproduce the adventures of Tintin as a series of wood block prints. Satrapi is also the author of children’s books and, at times, she casts herself as a shy child watching the adult world of sex, drugs and rock n’ roll as if it were a gang of big kids in a playground. Her dilemma is: should she join in, stand and watch or simply run away?

But this infantilization can also be seen as an ideological position. As Erving Goffman pointed out long ago in Gender Advertisements (1976) our culture often represents women as children even in the way women pose for photographs.

On one page Satrapi contrasts a group shot of her friends’ veiled public persona with their ‘fashionable’ westernized private appearance. In the public drawing one of the veiled women adopts the canted stance that Goffman sees as typical of women’s public display of submission to male authority. Although canting is a natural gesture of subordination, evidenced in the behaviour of dogs, it is human nature to invest such gestures with complex meanings.

Goffman argues that images like this are ritualised displays of that represent social norms, in particular alignments of power relations between men, women and children. Such displays dramatize alignments of power as physical alignments of, for instance, body position, between individuals of different status. Goffman calls such ritual displays in advertising ‘mock-ups’ and exploits the different meanings of the word ‘mock’ in his analysis.

To mock is a humorous act of ridicule. Women adopting this canted position in advertisements are doing so playfully. There is a humour here, evidenced by the women’s flirtatious smiles. However, mock ups are also simplified prototypes or models of behaviour to be enacted later. Like mock exams they are preparations for the real thing. Mock canting is preparatory to situations where subordination ceases to be a game.

Of course the figure of the child has often been evoked in fairy tails (The Emperor’s New Clothes) and in cultural politics (Walter Benjamin) as a position from which society can be criticised and opposed. But to criticize a political system a child would have to be particularly knowing. Satrapi might argue that she was as a child, although she humorously recaptures the rampant egotism of small children-as a child she imagines herself to be the last prophet of God and vows to banish pain from the world. Children are also powerless. While adopting the position of a child gives Satrapi critical purchase there is also little sense that she is actually empowered.

At the end of the day, we are left with an image of Satrapi dressed in black sitting and smoking. Her austere clothing part a sign of her place as an internationalized intellectual and part an Iran ex-patriot forever exiled from her homeland.

If there is one area that she does feel able to make a change then it is in her chosen life as a cartoonist. One of Satrapi’s stated aims is to challenge the way Iran, in her words, “this old and great civilization” is represented in public and discussed “mostly in connection with fundamentalism, fanaticism and terrorism.” In this, I am not sure she entirely succeeds.

Comic books have joined military intelligence reports and package holidays as one of the main ways in which those of us in the West come to know foreign lands, their history and people. Certainly, Satrapi puts a human-or cartoon face on actual Iranians an important counterpoint to the howling mobs usually seen on newsreels. Most of the people we come to know and care for in her story are her friends and family. In part, Satrapi wants her book to be a memorial as much as a memoir.

Persepolis therefore carries a self imposed burden of representation and reviewers quoted on the back cover emphasise its pedagogical role. “Persepolis will teach you more about Iran….than you could learn from a thousand hours of television documentaries and newspaper articles” writes Mike Haddon while Natasha Walter of the Independent on Sunday adds that the book condenses “a whole country’s tragedy into one poignant, funny scene after another.”

Certainly, within Persepolis’s pages, we meet individuals recognisable as human beings who appear to be just like us. In particular we meet Satrapi herself who is identifiable because, in a sense, many of her personal experiences are shared by us all: her childhood imaginings of possessing god-like powers (she imagines herself being the last prophet), her defiance of school teachers, her naughty behaviour (Satrapi owns up to having been a bit of a bully at times) and her adolescent experiences of growing pains, experiments with drugs and sex and painful decisions along the path to adulthood.

However, the autobiographical form constrains as much as it enables. Carolyn Steedman has usefully discussed the tensions between history and autobiography as ways of knowing the past. For Steedman, history is an empirical activity of checking records, triangulating data, cross referencing facts. History lies often unknowable beyond the life of the historian.

In contrast, autobiographies are phenomenological in that their contents – the people we read about, the events that occur- are granted existence and meaning by a writer’s consciousness and their use of narrative conventions from the point of view of the ‘here and now’. In Persepolis, Satrapi does give life to the Iran of her past but those granted individuality tend to be her family and friends.

The difficulty is that torturers, fundamentalists and soldiers opposing armies undoubtedly have personal stories too as difficult as it is to think of a father, for instance, branding and killing a human being by day and then going home to his family at night. Here the various fundamentalist regimes appear, as they must have appeared to Satrapi herself, as anonymous albeit not entirely faceless representatives of an oppressive regime. The effect of this is to reinforce dominant Western representations of Iran as a land in the grip of a totalitarian regime supported by a fundamentalist mass rather than to challenge them.

Satrapi’s point of view is also a class position. She makes no secret of and takes pleasure in her location among an Iranian savant guard intelligencia with links to royalty. Her resistance against the Iranian regime is therefore class inflected and we learn that Islamic Fundamentalism is supported mainly by the working and peasant classes of Iran, here represented largely as a shadowy mob.

Satrapi’s identification with her fellow countrymen is imagined (as opposed to imaginary) and I feel uneasy about the equivalence that she draws between her own personal fate – forced to leave her family- and the fate of those political activist who are killed standing up for their beliefs or who die as agents in or casualties of war. While Satrapi’s own life puts a human face on Iran it can’t stand for all Iranians.

Although Satrapi details the lives of those who resist successive regimes, it is clear that the regimes’ ideologies permeate every aspect of life, regulating the kinds of behaviour deemed appropriate in public and private. The truth on offer here is that fundamentalism; fanaticism and terrorism have pervaded Satrapi’s life and structure her personal narrative. Despite herself, Satrapi’s story paints a picture of everyday life in Iran that exactly conforms to expectations in the West.

Now that Persepolis has been made into a movie (on general release in the UK at time of writing) it may be hoped that Satrapi’s story will get wider exposure. Unfortunately the showing I went to could optimistically be described as half full except it was almost entirely empty. Of course I saw Persepolis on a blazing hot summer’s day in Brighton, Britain’s premier weekend holiday destination where families would rather be anywhere than inside.

The local Odeon has the hardest seating I have ever experienced in a cinema but they provided, in the manner of church pews and school benches, an appropriately austere position from which to view the film. Persepolis has been feited by film critics but often, I suspect, because they compare it with the offerings of Pixar and Disney.

There are some notably successful moments. The look of the film develops Satrapi’s black and white comic book drawings into dramatic chiaroscuro effects. And, when the young Satrapi’s father tells her how the British installed the Shah as an emperor, the events are played out as a kind of shadow puppet play. A scene where Satrapi is interrogated by the women’s branch of the guardians of the Islamic revolution has her tormentors veiled bodies writhe like black serpents.

Elsewhere, moments of comedy are doodled around the fairly sombre proceedings as the animation team attempt to inject the joy de vive that seems natural to animation. -through a window we glimpse Satrapi covered in soapsuds from washing dishes, her landlady’s already grotesque dog takes a joyful pee in the street etc. But these moments are few and far between and the film has the worthy, slightly pedagogical feel of one of S4C’s Animated Shakespeare shorts.

As I left the cinema an enthusiastic usher asked me if the film was good as it looked “unusual”, but I couldn’t bite my tongue and advised them to read the comic book instead.

Check this out. One of the greatest icons in the Mindless Hall of Fame and Mirrors writing a teeny-Beebies cartoon, with interactive online games and super-psychic timetraveller vampire detectives in a flooded future London.

It’s called Meta4orce, and you can watch the whole lot here (possibly. I gather some geographical limitations may apply to BBC stuff.) The intro graphics and that are nice, but the animation’s kind of flat and cheap, not going much beyond stand-blink-talk. However, the inevitable themes are all present and correct: gorgeous gamine adolescents unsure of their bizarrely sprouting new abilities and the wrenching existential crises wrought thereby. Violent introspection and doomed identities sure to follow, as well as some witty wordplay, a few crushing put-downs, and a lovely, tragic-romantic sensibility.

In case you are truly mindless and that didn’t give it away - it’s written by Peter Motherfuckingilligan.