Clint was found, after a little befuddled craning and turning while doing that exaggerated ‘I am looking for something’ look, not beside the sci-fi/movie/comic mags that the cover tries to pass itself off as, but a whole shelf over, next to the lads mags and Madgadget Monthly. Is this a local thing, slip of shelfstacker’s wrist, or deliberate placement, on WHSmiths’ no-doubt nationally co-ordinated layout plans? This seemed at first like a straight up simple mistake - word with someone in sales, get it sorted for the next issue. But after a read of the Great British boys’ comic’s best last hope… maybe not so sure.

Kick Ass 2 itself, while we’re here, just briefly, looks bright and brash  on the bigger paper, and thanks to that and Millar’s assured ease with the characters and universe it flows along in it’s snappy, irresistibly annoying way and ends far too quickly. Kick Ass’s narrative mode doesn’t allow for 8 mere pages to establish any sort of rhythm, and in that kind of breaks its own most basic belief: More is More. (And here we get less.)

If there’s a good general rule about comic readers, perhaps just a common characteristic that might join them together (and I don’t mean obsessively reading & buying since they were old enough to go to the shops on their own fans, I mean normalish people who might not have decided in advance that comics aren’t for them and they just don’t feel comics at all cheers, but are what you might call ‘interested and sympathetic bystanders’, or ‘potential customers’) then it’s that they think that they are jolly clever sorts. The intellectual conceitedness of either the casual, occasional, weekender or hardcore members of the geek horde is never something to underestimate. Do not talk down to geeks. Do not pretend to geeks that geeks are like everyone else and will be satisfied reading tossed-off, barely literate articles about aspects of the world that they either don’t care about or know more about already. Do not try to convince geeks that they are the lowest common denominator, because they will simply walk to another part of the newsagents and buy a magazine from there.

There are a handful of articles in Clint, maybe 20 pages or so. From a comics point of view this is good – 4/5ths of Clint is pure strip. The articles are there to serve several functions: to extend the reading experience so that a read through of Clint will occupy getting on for an hour of your life, like a proper magazine should. To show to salespeople who might have written off selling comics, but are willing to experiment with a new comic-magazine hybrid. Most importantly, they are to provide a bit of background, real-world context for casual readers of the magazine who don’t understand what its brand is about. In Clint’s case, this means reporting on a world that speaks to the same set of broad interests and impulses that appeals to potential customers, to normalise the fact that what they are holding and reading is basically that most awful of modern things: a comic. They should convey the message: ‘Do you like (e.g.) zombie movies? If so, this comic-magazine is for you!’ And, importantly, essentially, see above, it has to do this without tying a knife to the toe of a size twelve boot and taking a running kick at the ballsack of the readership’s intelligence.

Unfortunately, the articles in Clint are all Doc Martens and Stanley blades. To start with the best, there is a good interview between Martin Mor and Jimmy Carr, and on account of it being structured like a simple, straightforward chat about the ins and outs of being a standup comedian, by two people sharing a lot of experience in the game, you get a good insider’s view of its nuances and details. Then there’s an article about Charles Manson. My wife has been a ghoulish follower of the Manson story ever since her goth days, and even learnt something new about the case regarding the celebrities the Family would have targeted after Tate and Polanski. She has been walking around the house doing an unconvincing Tom Jones impression ever since, saying ‘great load of mad old hippies, runnin’ around trying to chop my clackers off, isn’t it’ in her best Welsh accent. Points to that article for this alone.

The rest though, seriously, they’re barely readable. Without exception dull, poorly written, unimaginative, unoriginal… and for thickos. Not for kids or inexperienced comics readers, just for the world’s legions of grown-up, signed-up, card-carrying thickety-thick thickwit thicky thickos. People, in other words, who don’t read, and don’t want to read, comicbooks. Treating Clint’s readers as if they’re, well, Nuts readers, might be a semi-deliberate editorial decision, and is almost certainly a mistake. There is a big enough market attached to the sci-fi/fantasy hobbyist sector of the newsagent to comfortable accommodate Clint, but buddying up/competing with the terminal decline scaredyman’s wankrags like Nuts and Zoo? That’s a bad decision, one which I can only hope is rectified quickly before Clint becomes yet another noble failure. (Although, if it does stick to this route, the word ‘noble’ won’t really apply, will it?)

The strips themselves… the snippet of Kick Ass 2 we get is a strange thing. Is this a sequel to the first series, or to the movie, or to both? I can’t remember the ending of either well enough to know what details line up with what. That’s cool though – from the off KA was conceived as a multimedia event, desperately happy to cross over into and trample on any platform brave enough to take it on. The franchise’s journey hasn’t left it unchanged – the stresses of the trip from page to screen and back again have toughened it up somehow, made it, and I appreciate this may be difficult to imagine, even more crass. It could be a simple case of sequelitis, where the volume on all the trademark moves gets turned up to twelve. It could be the fact that Hollywood beats out even the noble, honest, benevolent caring and thoughtful comicbook industry on a dumb-to-dollar ratio. It could be Millar winding things up to build that strange maelstrom of unreported controversy and general nonspecific buzz he seems to find so comfortable by dropping in a few ‘he said what?!’s. But whatever the reason – jokes about learning difficulties? Jokes about domestic abuse? I know I’m an old man, came of age at the height of political correctness and happy for it, but hose gags give me the ick a bit, and taken in conjunction with the spirit of some of the articles in this issue, bearing in mind which magazines I found this one next to (Nuts and Zoo, rather than SFX, SciFiNow and Death Ray, where the market for a modern newsstand comic will be found), feels a bit like a step into a school of culture I’m really not all that comfortable with. Remember – girls are people too!

Still, Kick Ass 2 as a read still has its predecessor’s attitude and sheer gleeful gonzo momentum. And it looks great on the big paper – this is a far better place to go to get your Romita fix than the latest Avengers bollocks or whatever. funny for a guy who is so bullpen, Romita still finds extra dimensions of style and weight to add to his more ‘personal work’. Later chapters are clearly going to be feature big splashes of overweight men dressed in lycra masks and capes bashing each other in with golf clubs and stuff, and I won’t pretend to you for an instant that I won’t be interested in seeing that. The 8-page chapter in this issue of Clint is over far too quickly.

The next Millar strip is Nemesis #1 reprinted in its entirety. I’ve ell changed my tune on this. Nemesis is brilliant. Mcniven’s carnage absolutely sings on the big glossy paper, and the rollicking yah-boo script seems much more at home blown up to A4 too. This is where Nemesis was meant to be, and could go on to be Clint’s signature strip.

On to Ross & Edwards’ Turf. I never got through the first issue of the US pamphlet, and really struggled for the first page or two of this second go. Then, about mid way through page 2 I got the bright idea of reading the story with Jonathan Ross’ vice in my head like he’s doing one of his to-camera bits on Film 90, putting the extra ‘w’s in myself, the lot. It suddenly made a lot more sense, and the next few pages passed a lot more happily. But then, even then, with the new, familiar and friendly narrative voice, and the big paper giving Edwards’ art room to find itself among the bubbles and captions, Turf just buried itself under all the words and the simple fact that this first chapter at least is actually quite a slow, ponderous tale, relying heavily on extraneous narrative detail and an awkward, digressive writing style. It was just too much to carry on with. I hereby promise the world I will have another crack at reading all of Turf issue 1 before the next Clint arrives, but I’ve not been having much luck with it so far.

Boyle, Muir and Michael Dowling’s twisted supervillain knockabout Rex Royd is so slight and slippery it’s almost impossible not to read, almost over before you’ve realised you’ve started it. The Ennis and Morrison influences are impossible not to spot if (and you are) you’re sad enough to know about them already, and they contribute to a kind of touchingly misanthropic (it’s the disappointment, the hopeful faith abandoned that makes misanthropy so cuddly, by the way) bad drug vibe that makes this the most interesting strip in the issue. If Clint is supposed to be 2000AD moved along a generation, then Rex Royd is the one which makes sense of that claim in a textual-comparison sense: a little more obscene, a little more bratty, and even more insouciant than anything typical of Tharg’s stable, certainly in its recent dadrock years. It’s nothing too memorable, nothing to especially treasure, but something to unaccountably recall and grin about when you’re drunk and weaving your way home, mere instants before you’re happyslapped by the local hoodies. (Remember hoodies and happyslapping? Aw, sweet. It’s like a Noughties nostalgia show and… Oh no. Hang on - actually, I think I may have inadvertently hit upon something: Clint is quite a lot like a Noughties Best Of… clip show. And that may not be a particularly reassuring thing.)

The final strip is a short called The Diner  by Manuel Bracchi. If Rex Royd is attitudinally (drokk vs. fuck) and stylistically (absorbing US comic influences vs. denying them altogether) a step on from 2000AD, then this is unfortunately a step back. Millar’s commitment to getting unknowns to fill the spaces between the celebrities is a great move, the most laudable thing about Clint itself. (Imagine the alternative – get in a load of 2000AD jobsworths to do some hilarious ‘over-the-top’ gag strips to warm the cockles as we slouch in our bedsocks into this cosy new decade… hardly bears thinking about.) It’s just a Future Shock, but it has no middle and no real twist: There’s Zombies!! And a man takes one out and tries to convince everyone There’s Zombies!! And they don’t believe him but the twist is: There’s Zombies!! As a finished piece it’s clearly missing a scene or two to make it hold together, something which the Millarworlders should have mentioned on the various submissions threads over there. There’s some great work on that thread, and it seems odd that this was the one chosen to open the proceedings with. Oh, the Huw Edwards thing?

Joke of the year mate. Keep at it Clint, good to see someonehaving a fucking good crack at it.

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Andrew and Steven in

KNIGHTS OF THE REALM

Part 3

The book Dream Date by Tim Leopard and Fraser Geesin is available from Running Water Press or from Amazon.

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i’m not sure this is a really straight ahead argument, so much as it is a series of reflections and ruminations, and i’m sorry it’s all in lower case. it’s a bad habit, one of which zom, probably quite rightly, does not approve.

horror is rarely done right in comics, but occasionally, in the right hands, some books not only hit the mark but splinter the arrow already stuck there. upon a recent reread of the first collection of alan moore’s swamp thing i was struck by just how disturbing it was, especially after having just tutted skeptically at harlan ellison ranting about ‘escalating levels of terror [such a strong word]‘ and other hyperbole in the foreword, and with this being my twoogleplex millionth swampy go round (i wasn’t expecting many surprises basically), because it came as such a shock when parts of the book made me feel so wrong.

‘downtown, elderly ladies carry their houseplants out to set them on the fire-escapes, as if they were infirm relatives or boy kings.’

the image the narration paints of a weakling humanity subserviant to its plant rulers always got to me. in just two panels moore turns the world on its head, and suddenly we’re not the centre of universal teleology anymore - all hail the mandrake prince with his crown of fronds, vegetable-still in the pouring rain on his window ledge throne above the world! and we know right away moore isn’t really interested in blood and guts and that more often than not the scares in this book will serve specific rhetorical and philosophical ends, intended as they are not simply to repulse but to destabilise.

so we’re reading a mature readers book then.

the mild existential tilt of these captions foreshadows the more dramatic turn swamp thing undergoes later on, when he discovers never was human. and his profound and hopeless claustrophobia, his sense of being lost, buried beneath alien skin, is articulated by (albeit displaced into) the mr. sunderland-trapped-in-his-building thread bookending the story, the whole book suffused in a feeling of ‘I WANT TO GET OUT!’

and this is before moore gets onto the body horror that’ll feature strongly in the next episode. that’s nastier for me than the mind stuff. okay, i’ve experienced the soul destroying terror of consciousness invasion by hostile fungal entities intent on replacing my mind with their own - what self respecting teenager hasn’t had a bad trip? but thats just it, i was a teenager then. back then my body was clearly invulnerable so madness figured much more prominently in my rogues’ gallery than, say, disease. not so nowadays.

swamp thing’s is a body that doesn’t know what it is, flickering between subject and object, from man of moss to mossy simulacra, eyes pooling with rainwater. this is the horror of finding oneself trapped in a body where it’s all foreign, all that bark and stuff, none of it *should be there*, least of all selfhood. so it’s the reification of the mental dread expressed earlier, sure, but also equally revolting on its own, physical, terms, and when woodrue actually eats swamp thing’s tuber, it’s like someone cannibilising your tumour. wrong in so many ways. absolutely disgusting. obviously this conflict is resolved by the end of the first story arc as the titular hero begins the process of giving up alec holland, but this only serves to highlight the floronic man’s dilemma, the roles having now reversed. whereas initially it is swamp thing who cannot *choose* between the red and the green, in the end it is woodrue who is revealed as divided, thorns protruding awkwardly through his spray on humanity. a broken wicker man.

so that’s all horrible and we haven’t even mentioned ‘timber’ yet.

but there’s disappointment also.

while the second issue’s dream sequences detailing swamp thing’s attempts to cling on to his non-existent humanity have charge, they’re nowhere near as powerful as cliff steele’s personal psychopalypse in the pages of grant morrison’s doom patrol #58, in the land of the cuckoo, half a decade later, which i think builds powerfully on the basic framework moore provides, employing far more potent imagery and a subtler grasp of its themes and use of symbolism than its predecessor. perhaps moore’s imagination, while beautiful and crystalline, can’t keep up with the freewheeling dreamstuff, which, i accept, can lead its exponents, lynch and morrison being the most obvious examples, headlong into a creative car-wreck, but which in the end really moves me, and i think this is a clear achilles heel.

while one can pull apart cliff’s adventures in the land of the cuckoo and inspect the pieces (the heavy duty machinery behind the scenes of everything, the walls and his skin = his body; the bugs = the mindless automaton he’s afraid he is, the terror of depersonalisation, etc.), the story conjures the profound sense of the irreducible, the uncanny, which for it to play right on an emotional level it has to contain. moore’s attempt seems a bit dry in comparison. perhaps this is because he’s relatively new to comics at this point, but i’d argue, as i have many times before, that moore has an innate ability to ground even the most highfalutin ideas, that he makes too much sense of them, that they (clock)work too well, and that in the end this doesn’t help with the horror. his universe is too benevolent, too human afterall.

or so i thought. until i picked up neonomicon, a book the aforebabble would suggest moore’s approach is entirely unsuitable for, seeing as its focus is the cthulhu mythos, something that must always remain irreducible in keeping with its themes.

i needn’t have worried.

i think everyone agrees there’s one big scare in the neonomicon, but that i think we can agree is all a horror story needs to be a success, and even prior to that i had the feeling i was in good - calloused and taloned - hands. perhaps it was the weird theatricality full stopped by a blood freezing stare of the infected detective at the beginning, the idea of a dead body desecrated by medieval monkey demons (medieval demons rule. much more carnivalesque and scary than their latter day counterparts), or the way the staid, straightforward artwork and call of cthulhu plotting and tropes played off against the many-angled nightmare waiting in the wings, but, regardless, by the time we reached the courtyard and the mural, i was primed for the big guns. i mean, WHAT. IS. THAT. THING?

talk about collapsing the boundaries between subject and object….

a dreadful angel of the north, with robe and wings of mud and hair, warden at world’s edge, beyond whom only sky and an endless carpet of mountains. who knew the end of everything world would be so nonsensical and dismal? the dismal, that’s something that doesn’t get dealt with much in horror. the terrible futility embodied by this scene, a universe that is too bleak, too dreary, and on an epic scale, always there…. waiting, even in our brightest cities, in the throbbing heart of the world we made, down some grotty alleyway, out into a junkie strewn courtyard, the graffiti door swings wide. this is some masterful stuff by moore, the way as the cop approaches the mural expands to fill the panel, so that by the time she reaches carcosa brears could be there, the fourth wall collapsed. the sequence sums up perfectly the hopeless inevitabilty of lovecraft’s stories, where at first we only glimpse the gloomy cracks which in the end will swallow us whole.

all of us.

you can feel brears’ trepidation as she approaches. she can feel tomorrow locking into place around her, carcosa’s idiot babbling drawing her in, until she can reach out and… and at that point you want to puke. we’ve seen writers’ play with our undimensionality in relation to the great old ones before, however there’s something about carcosa being reduced to a two dimensional paint-smear that really drives the point home, and i suspect it’s not only the idea, but, credit where credit’s due, something about the aforementioned staid art, its apparent inviobility, that hones the moment’s edge. our reality is paper thin and will tear easily in two on the day cthulhu rises, bursting through the surface. poor lost carcosa has found his way there already, nothing left now but a hiroshima shadow scrawled across the flimsy partition separating us…and them. armageddon is here and the courtyard is the area outlying ground zero.

and even more so juxtaposed with the silly antics of cthulhu’s teen fanbase over there at zothique. there’s no pun laden punk rock where that ‘tree thing’ lives, no music, nothing we’d recognize at all. horror is always more powerful set against comedy, or at the very least whimsicality, and especially the kind moore’s aiming for here, the horror of the absence of humanity. because silliness, humour and whimsicality are human notions. in this way the neonomicon reminds us of what will be lost and how cold it is out there.

now, a couple of caveats. i haven’t read the courtyard itself for some time, so i don’t know whether or not moore undermines the horror here with too much rationalisation/tidiness, also i have no idea where this story is heading, and the same problem could lie in wait for it further down the line… but this issue… this issue sings like nyarlothep on the day of four motion, the alarm bell sounding ‘this is forever’.

and, finally, that’s another thing moore and gets right that you rarely see in horror stories of any kind: alarm. the stomach torpedoing jolt of waking up to an altogether hostile reality. because obviously people don’t respond to supernatural terror by shopping for a chainsaw, rather they’re lost for words, they call on the bright gods they never really believed in before (’oh christ help us…’), the only gods they have, paper tigers to ward off demons, and they struggle to get the words out for the vomit pushing at the base of their throat. even without moore’s dialogue, brears’ thousand yard stare says it all. this is it. it’s all over. and i felt it.

so, in short, this isn’t just run of the mill stuff. and even in the little ways in which it is - the basic CoC adventure setup - this, it seems to me, only adds to the horror. the classical scenario structure serves is transparent enough that the story never gets in the way of the horror. it streamlines everything like a bullet aimed directly at that terrible wall. it serves the book’s gloomy fatalism, the sense of final destination, very well. i suppose if i had any complaints they would centre on the idea implied in the last panel (which shows the city embedded in a survival dome), which may suggest there’s going to be some kind of sci-fi resolution to all this. i don’t really want resolution in a straightforward sense. i want ideas that won’t fit neatly in my head. so come on alan, lets not make this too neat. let’s go out screaming like the ghost of alec holland.

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Andrew and Steven in

KNIGHTS OF THE REALM

Part 2

The book Dream Date by Tim Leopard and Fraser Geesin is available from Running Water Press or from Amazon.

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Of course, neither myself nor anyone writing inside the walls of this blog are going to have a problem with nonsense, be it outright nonsense, stupid nonsense, or nonsense for nonsense’s sake. It’s a Marvel comic, nonsense is what it does best, and it is the best there is at what it does. But what about nonsense mad enough to think it’s Important? Or nonsense sane and brittle enough to knows it’s nonsense but try to pass itself off as Important? Are both of those things not high art crimes?

Shield #3 by Jonathan Hickman and Dustin Weaver (Marvel)

This book has its fans, who will love this because it renders unto these Fans a vivid and energetic Service. A ‘Fan Service’, if you will (if those fans are fans not only of the the mighty Marvel manner but also of cheap readings of Renaissance and Enlightenment history). These mysterious Fans of the Dan Brown/superhero genre-hopping funnybook (because no-one demanded it!) are in extreme danger of Missing The Point, especially in regard to the Da Idiot Code stuff – the reason these alter-history bestsellers work is because they offer unusual insights into the function of the historical consensus. Destabilising the grown-up world’s memory of itself, exposing its partiality and reminding the powerless that history is a nightmare that can be woken from, is fun because of the way its stories change the backdrop of our everyday reality.

Changing the backdrop of the Marvel Universe isn’t fun in the same way, not because there aren’t people out there who don’t interact with it as seriously as they do with the real world out here - there are probably some who love Pete Parker’s crazy old aunt even more than their own – but even they would hopefully recognise that the history of the Marvel U is already totally mutable, prone to constant revision and insertion. Changes in the way we view history take even longer to change than history itself. Changes in the way we view Marvel’s history have never taken any longer than the width of a single panel of comic page.

Therefore, to place these universes side by side for easy comparison, that Newton was an alchemist is intriguing because it provides a new perspective on the evolution of science, and how two apparently differing worldviews can exist side by side. That Newton was a supervillain isn’t very intriguing, because that Newton exists in a place where everyone is either a supervillain or a superhero, and the fact that the former was chosen probably says more than it should about the way certain debates surrounding science and theology are currently being framed in the USA than anything about how a real live historical man who single-handedly overhauled our species’ knowledge of the universe should have his name thrown around by a modern fighting comic.

With these issues solidly unresolved and leaving a great big dialectical gap in its conceptual undercarriage we just get a printpresspunk superhero comic whose scenes never quite connect with each other, with the real world, with its own fictional context, with anything at all really. Further hindered by overly fussy art that emphasises the book’s unappealing habit of making portentous and pious melodrama out of silly spectacle, Shield needs to smoke a cigar and connect with its inner Fury pretty damn quick.

Age of Heroes #4 by Elliott Kalan and Brendan McCarthy (Marvel)

(There are actually two strips in this comic – one of which is a nice, coffee-shoppy two-pager by Joe Casey and Nathan Fox which makes a pleasing and timely call for the repositioning of the concept of the supervillain, something which has been somewhat overlooked in the past ten years of ever-greater inspection and valorisation of their more heroic counterparts.)

The other one, well, I don’t know about this one, so I’m going to have to ask… Is it a bit racist? I don’t know enough about how Native American peoples are currently faring in the USA’s social discourse. I presume there’s plenty of talk if you look for it about the way NA cultures interact with whitey’s, and hopefully this story makes its contribution, feeding into those debates without pissing on anyone’s moccasins too cruelly.

I’m just trying to frame this story’s last panel in a way that makes a bit more sense to me personally. I haven’t got much material to go on, but imagine that Aucaneck is an old Kerryman, who has substituted his household shrine’s picture of the Madonna with one of Billy Orange (hence the pic of the plank above, an easy one for Paul Cornell’s much-anticipated 100 British supervillains, by the way), or Olly Cromwell (‘forget the famines and military attacks on the civilian populace, he was a great parliamentarian and that’s good enough for me’), or Captain Britain even… Yeah, it would be kind of offensive, wouldn’t it?

Captain America isn’t Uncle Sam, after all. He doesn’t represent America as such, he represents American militarism, a very specific (and enormously unappealing) subset of the nation-state’s overall character. Maybe the reading needs to be taken a bit further though – look at Auckaneck’s asshole Christian son. Maybe he’s supposed to be Auck’s punishment for severing his family’s presumably ancient connection to their traditional icons in favour of an Aryan marine in an icecube, like a bored British housewife in 1943, happy to drop and swap her old knickers for a new pair of nylons and some gum.

Despite the apparently cosy and affirmative ending, maybe this strip is deceptively pert: Can Auck’s adoption of the supersoldier-as-deity be seen as a comment on today’s disproportionately high rates of military service among young Native Americans? (Which is predicated, I guess, please note again the massive levels of ignorance I am bringing to this issue, on high poverty rates among NA communities, and the employment and education benefits currently offered to those willing to risk being shot at or blown up to protect the Afghan poppy crop.)

I have no idea where to come down on this strip. I’m enjoying thinking about it though, which suggests that maybe, after my recent plea, in Neil Kalan, the Mac is finally being teamed with a worthy writer. Good.

(Nice art too, unsurprisingly. Tempers this recent Marvel style of his with some nods towards a naive, ‘tribal’ kind of look, plus a restrained, muted palette that tones the emotional surface of the story just right.)

Hellblazer #270 by Peter Milligan, Giuseppe Camuncoli and Stefano Landini (Vertigo)

Ah right, yes I get it, it was very obvious actually: With Shade in the comic, Hellblazer becomes like a Shade comic. Overt fealty to the book’s horror roots is given just the most cursory nod in this latest, splendid little issue, before we prance into a tightly paced, soapy depiction and discussion of some (not-too) complex relationship/personal identity issues. I can’t imagine anyone picking this comic up and not enjoying it for that. I give this comic five of those dot-in-circle madness bubbles. I’ll be glad to get back to the shocks and scares next issue, because Milligan is great at them, even though he’s clearly not all that comfortable in the genre, and even more happy when Shade returns with the lovely Epiphany in a few issues time. If DC–proper is going to somewhat ungraciously demand the return of all the properties it handed over to Vertigo back when we were children, then this little crossover and its soon-to-be sequel is an excellent way of letting Shade, on the one hand, be a Mature madman one last time and, on the other, repositioning him as a thoroughly modern mainstream Phantom Stranger for the twenty-first century.

The Bulletproof Coffin # 3 by David Hine & Shaky Kane (Image)

This comic is – not like drugs because that’s such a perfectly, pathetically blah thing to say about something, nothing, or anything even - but certainly somehow psychoactivating. Something in those oceanic colours and thick blank lines pokes you right in the brain like a much-loved sibling in the mood to annoy. All the very best comics do this (and let’s get this straight: Bulletproof Coffin is the very best comic), leaking inky rainbows straight into your eyes where for its 32 page duration you and she (the very best comics are always girls) merge in some - less than beautiful and often borderline abusive but still crazy hot for all that – symbiosis of page & person. Like plugging your brain into a computer that won’t be made for a hundred years, this sexy synergy creates a brand new nervous system for this imaginificent Third Beast, heightening cognitive acuity, speeding autonomic response intervals and enabling you to hear the hidden language of lizards, as well as giving you abs of steel ripped enough to scar your lover’s paperthin body. Careful not to tear the corner there.

Once successful bonding has been completed, the new org/an/ism enters a new and unexplod state of existence, a scorched desert of the unreal, strewn with the infinite treasures of a million irradiated plastic nick-nacks and priceless free giveaways, a strange environment traversable only in impossible machines from the dreams of a heavy metal Heath Robinson. Its hostile physics can only be endured by the native tank girls and paradaxical swifty boys through protective suits of primary colour and animal insignia.

All in all in all just a dream, Bulletproof Coffin offers a laser-focussed commentary on the relationship between the Comic and its loyal, helpless, debased Fanman, betraying a depth of psychological insight that betrays the impeccable outward gaudiness, that makes you wince in sympathy for Hine’s psychiatrist, priest or local barman as they learn: All children are war-crazed zombies, and All wives look better in leopard print, just as All comics are better with a bit of that early-90s newsagenty madcap flavour.

Bulletproof Coffin is an upstart restart switch for the human soul. When you read it, you will never be the same again, so read it, because there’s a better brighter you inside this book, and they’re begging for a right good seeing to.

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Andrew and Steven in

KNIGHTS OF THE REALM

Part 1

The book Dream Date by Tim Leopard and Fraser Geesin is available from Running Water Press or from Amazon.

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Gary Lactus and myself recently went along to the Hypercomics exhibition being held at the Pump House gallery in Battersea Park. It’s part of the excellent Comica festival a truly diverse celebration of comics culture, which has been running since 2003. It featured the work of four very different comics creators: Warren Pleece, Daniel Merlin Goodbrey, Dave McKean and Adam Dant. But what exactly is ‘Hypercomics’? Well, why not allow the exhibition’s curator, erstwhile British comics legend, creator of the legendary Escape magazine and all round decent bloke, Paul Gravett fill us in…

Q: Daniel Merlin Goodbrey provides a definition for ‘hypercomics’ in the exhibition programme, but I was wondering if you could provide your own definition of the term?

I think the key to Hypercomics is their ability to branch off into multilinear yet interrelated storylines and push against the traditional constraints of the page format or panel layouts we’re used to. Comics have been defined for so long by their print incarnations, and even now most webcomics conform to individual ‘pages’ within the standard rectangular computer screen. Hypercomics explore where the medium might be heading next, especially with the growth of iPhones, iPads and other Readers and the scope of greater interactivity. I’m convinced that there’s massive potential still to be unlocked in how we create and experience ‘the shapes of comics to come’.

Q: How did the exhibition come about? How did you settle on the artists who exhibited?

Exhibitions Officer at Pump House Nick Kaplony knew about the Comica Festival and contacted me about a year ago to start developing a comics-related show. From a long list of candidates, the four artists were selected to create contrasting content. To secure the funding, at least one of the four had to come from exhibiting in the contemporary art gallery scene, so that was one criterion that brought in Adam Dant. I was aware of Dave McKean’s and Warren Pleece’s previous gallery-orientated projects along these lines - Dave’s Coast Road show in Rye and Warren’s Montague Terrace digital media show in Brighton - and thought they would be ideal. And from the outset I wanted Daniel Merlin Goodbrey as the UK’s true techno-guru of rigourous comics experimentation. Daniel was closely involved back in 2003 at the start of Comica with the still-remarkable collaborative PoCom or Potential Comics wall which was shown in the ICA Concourse Gallery. You can see it here: http://e-merl.com/pocom.htm

Q: The Pump House is a great location - did you find the space before deciding on the exhibition? Are there any plans to take the exhibition anywhere else?

You’re right, it’s a hidden gem, a quirky four-floor tower tucked away in Battersea Park, in fact it really was a huge tall pump house built in 1861, 250 years ago next year. The location came first and came to me. I saw it as defining the exhibition, as both a space and a setting, and I asked all four artists to respond in some way to it in their pieces, imagining their stories around it, creating an alternative existence, past, present or future, for the building.

Q: I noticed a flyer for an upcoming book by Warren and Gary Pleece, to be published by Escape Books - could you tell us a bit about this? Is this the first publishing you’ve embarked upon since the mid/late 80’s? What else is on the horizon?

Yes, The Great Unwashed is the first graphic novel to come from the reformed Escape Books. Other projects are percolating nicely at the moment. The original Escape Magazine from 1983-1989 had a major influence on comics and not just in the UK. In 2010 the need for a new Escape has become very clear, a new model and new focus to help advance comics still further. The Hypercomics show is actually part of that movement, because Escape is not only about comics in ink and paper, but also digital and gallery forms. More advance info will be forthcoming on www.escape-books.com if you sign up for our Newsletter.

Q: You’ve been curating the Comica Festival since 2003. How do you feel about it now? Have you achieved what you set out to?

Comica is not like most other comics festivals. I may curate it, but it’s constantly open to input and ideas from other individuals, institutions, groups and venues, it’s flexible, undefined by one space, discipline or approach to the medium. Comica may have been started by me in collaboration with John Dunning, then Film Promotions Manager, at the ICA back in 2003, but it can happen anywhere and in partnership with anyone. I also like the fact that it can respond whenever and wherever opportunities arise, as with Hypercomics now, or earlier this year inviting Daniel Clowes and Chris Ware over. There are still lots of projects and international guests I’d like to programme for the future and I welcome suggestions. This year’s Comica is different again, with one major element being a three-month exhibition and related programme I am curating right now for the London Print Studio Gallery on innovative graphic novels. As well as showing original artworks, it’s a show as much about demonstrating and expanding the processes of making and printing comics, using every technique from etching, litho, silkscreen to the latest digital options and escaping the page entirely.

Q: Some of the artists in the exhibition have a strong connection to the small press - Warren Pleece and Daniel Goodbrey in particular - and part of the Comica festival is the Comiket Small Press event. What do you like about the small press?

That small press connection is certainly true about Pleece and Goodbrey - but it’s also true of McKean and Dant who both started out by self-publishing, Meanwhile from McKean and Donald Parsnips Daily Journal from Dant. And of course both Pleece and Goodbrey have been published by regular American comics publishers too. When Nick Kaplony and I started to work out a programme of related events for Hypercomics, we both hit on the idea of an independent comics fair early on, because there’s so much innovative and interesting material being produced now, it’s going through a real resurgence. Of course, not everything from the small press is automatically brilliant, and exactly the same is true in the American mainstream genres, or autobiographical comix, manga, or bande dessinée. Good stuff is out there everywhere and it’s exciting to discover it sometimes at its earliest stages within the small press scene.

Gary Lactus: The Pump House Gallery is a pleasing brick of a building, allowing four artists a room each on every floor.

Upon entering the Pump House we were greeted by Warren Pleece’s animated piece Montegue Terrace.  A comfy sofa and a coffee table with pertinent objects on it sits in front of a screen.  To the left of this projection is an entryphone with four buzzers on it.  Each button triggers one of four scenes from inside the titular block of flats.  The animation is minimal but effective with Pleece’s heavy brushwork simplified to more of a clear line style.  The animations are atmospheric, employing appropriate sound scapes.  The puppeteer works away whilst puppets twitch and organs in jars move when he’s not watching.  An old lady sits alone with a shortwave radio broadcasting in morse code.  The pamphlet fills in the picture a little more, providing us with names and potted histories of the individuals depicted on the screen.  On a wall next to the screen is mounted preview panels of the forthcoming Graphic novel by Warren and his brother Gary Pleece.  As an installation, Montegue Terrace works best as a promo for the garaphic novel.  What do you think, Beast?

I agree. I love Pleece’s brushwork, and Montague Terrace looks like a fine piece of work. It was a nice atmospheric beginning to the exhibition, with the faint music and sound of air-raid sirens filling the space, but I would have liked Pleece to go a bit further with the interactivity. Still, any Scott Walker reference in life is welcome innit?

Gary Lactus and I were discussing Pleece in the wankily overpriced pub afterwards (don’t worry readers, we soon loaded up on cheap lager and bad samosas and decamped to Battersea Park to watch the ducks like a couple of tramps) and we were both in agreement that he sums up an era when British indy comics seemed vaguely adult and sexy. You’d see the Pleece Bros’ excellent ‘Velocity’ advertised in the back of CRISIS and Deadline, along with Hewlett and Martin’s pre-Tank Girl ‘Atomtan’ and Nick Abadzis’ ‘Hugo Tate’. The aesthetic they developed seems to be fully realised in ‘Montague Terrace’ with it’s depiction of a very English tower block peopled by washed up pop stars and menacing magic rabbits. I look forward to reading more.

GL: The Archivist by Daniel Merlin Goodbrey is an experiment in non linear storytelling.  The art is of a pleasingly computer aided graphic nature.  Each of the three pieces presents the viewer with a grid of panels linked by various reading fronds which guide the eye away from the standard left to right, top to bottom order.  Some panels have more than one of these panel bridges, asking the reader to choose which direction to take.  This was a canny use of the space as such a format wouldn’t work in book form.  Unfortunately for me, Goodbrey is asking a lot of someone to stand there and put the time and effort into following these stories.  Perhaps a comfy chair and some opera glasses could have made for a more immersing experience.

TBMD: Yeah, again I agree, although there was something very iconic and satisfying about Goodbrey’s use of colour, and his minimal repetitive style. I was reminded of James Turner’s ‘Nil: A Land Beyond Belief’ published by SLG a while back. The rigid grid of panels offered a dense and multi-stranded reading experience. I suspect that the narratives may have performed some Ouroboros-like move and ended up back where you started, although, as Lactus says, it required a fair amount of concentration. People’s natural inclination to drift through exhibitions ay prevent the strips true charms from revealing themselves. Nonetheless, it was a lovely pop-toned, well-balanced art space. Clean, crisp and maybe a little dry. Goodbrey is clearly a funny, talented creator with bags of talent and ideas.

GL: Dave McKean’s The Rut impressionistically told a tale of a random violent act using media too numerous to mention.  Numbered images in the panel windows outside the room lead the viewer in, along the floor, into mid air, into a large digital print in an ornate frame then off into nebulous sculptures, drawings and a deer’s taxidermied head painted bright red.  The piece tells the story from many perspectives, inside, outside, past and present with an overarching theme where McKean draws parallels between the violence of men and rutting stags.  Anyone familiar with McKean’s self written work such as Cages will not be surprised to find that much of the writing here was maybe a touch oblique but overall, The Rut was the winner for me.

TBMD: Yup. McKean (perhaps unsurprisingly) embraced the gallery space and concept fully and delivered a visually stunning mixed media treat. I’m not the world’s biggest McKean fan - I find his photoshop work over-rendered and aesthetically cluttered. I’m much more dawn to his bold, scratchy ink-work. ‘The Rut’ featured some truly exceptional drawings, and the simple technique of placing the work ’suspended’ in perspex with the restrained typography on the surface created a lovely effect of timelessness and memory. His sculpture work was equally as impressive, and managed to convey the violence at the heart of the anecdote in a fresh and disturbing fashion.

McKean really took the idea of the comic page exploded across a 3 dimensional space and ran with it, delivering a piece that told a tale of adolescnt violence in a poetic,brutal and beguiling fashion. The writing was a bit purple though.

GL: The Library of Doctor London by Adam Dant occupied the fourth and final level of Hypercomics.  All four walls were furnished by painted canvasses depicting book shelves.  Each section was labeled with a London borough and a Latin medical term relating to an area of the body’s functions, respiratory, digestive, epidermic, etc.  The book spines followed each theme accordingly.  Some of the sections were empty.  Whether this was intentional or simply a result of running out of time on this ambitious project is unclear.  It’s a lovely format but the visual impact was slightly dulled by the uniform colouring of all the books.  Unfortunately the point of the piece remains unclear and lacked emotional resonance.

TBMD: Hmmm. Yes. Whilst I’d give props to Dant for his esoteric knowledge and multi-layered vision of London, the piece lacked a visual punch and left Lactus and myself a little underwhelmed. I love cultural excavations of London so I should be the target audience for this I guess. I’m using to reading Iain Sinclair and feeling adrift in the dense cultural references and allegories, but his razor sharp turn of phrase and visceral word play can carry you through even the most obscure passages. Dant’s work clearly had a ton of thought behind it but it was lost on a couple of cavemen like us. That said there was a pleasingly musty feel about the ‘library’ and it particularly suited it’s location at the top of the Pump House.

GL: Overall this was a brave and rewarding exhibition which sought to break new ground and in some ways succeeded.

TBMD: Certainly. A throroughly pleasant way to spend the afternoon and a very creditable attempt to do something different with a comics of exhibition. Four very different artists tackling the brief in a very interesting way.

——————————–

Also, it would be remiss of me to mention that the Comica Comiket, showcasing some of the finest independent and small press UK comics and zines, is on Sunday  22nd August at the very same Pump House Galery in Battersea Park. Details can be found here: http://www.comicafestival.com/index.php/events/detail/comica_comiket/

I’ll be there selling ‘Terminus’ and tap-dancing for small change. If you’re in the area come on down.

Thanks to Paul Gravett with his assistance.

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TERMINUS BOOK 3: ONE LAST WILD WALTZ

16 more full colour strips. The latest volume in the popular series.

£4.00 (+ £2.00 p&p UK and Europe, £4.00 p&p US and international)

Hop on over to THE SHOP at MILK THE CAT to purchase.

It’s this season’s most essential item. It’s on Oprah’s reading list*

Oh yeah, and you can still get copies of Book 1: Rabbit Season, Duck Season and Book 2: How Did I get here? while you’re there.

(*Oprah Dumpton, the crazy lady who sits in the park yelling at clouds)

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The book Dream Date by Tim Leopard and Fraser Geesin is available from Running Water Press or from Amazon.

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• Graham Linehan tweeted a link the other day to 75 Action Comics covers that are worth their weight in gold. I was diverted for a good twenty minutes.

• Here’s a treat from The Comics Journal.  It’s a video visit to Hope Street Studios in Glasgow where we get to see Frank Quitely work on his fancy shmancy computer doing some lovely drawing.  All Star Superman colourist Jamie Grant is also featured. Probably worth mentioning while we’re here that Mindless cohort iamus is part of the Hope Street gang, and I’m sort of sorry that time he went up to see them at Jamie’s invitation and I never, I kind of regret, but also, I think they maybe expected you to have a talent of some sort and I’d only have brought a bottle of wine, so maybe some relief there too.
• Lastly, courtesy archaeologist of the half-remembered Joe McCulloch, in his must-always-read This Week in Comics column, some amazing Italo-beats with Neil Gaiman, shyly perving on some devil girl. Oh, Neil.

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The book Dream Date by Tim Leopard and Fraser Geesin is available from Running Water Press or from Amazon.

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Clayface

Me: so why do you like Clayface so much then?
The Boy: He’s scary
Me: But what’s scary about him
The Boy: He’s got goop
Me: But what’s scary about goop?
The Boy: Carnage and Venom have got goop, and there’s no man.
Me: No man inside Clayface, you mean?
The Boy: Yes. He hasn’t got a man.

Me: What’s good about Clayface?
Amy: I’m thinking of a story where you could have a dead body buried inside him. Maybe even in a coffin.

I struggled long and hard with this one until I realised that Clayface isn’t a character, he’s something that happens to you. I can’t imagine a Clayface story arc being up to much, the obvious and done to death route is to go all snoretragic, loss of humanity, etc… but personally I think I’d aim for a few panels where someone (perhaps the little girl in the panel above) is dragged screaming into its earthy darkness and play out the consequences. Clayface isn’t a monster that I want to understand, I don’t want a POV shot or interiority, you don’t identify with walking graves, you have people get buried alive in them, and you make sure that you make the getting buried alive sequence is suitably terrifying and distressing.

Clayface is a one or two issue, all horror bat-foe, and that’s that. He’s a horrible inevitable event like death. There is no man.

Cluemaster

Fuck Cluemaster

Next: finally the Ds

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Sinatoro: It’s a roadtrippy movie due for global release in 2012, written & directed by the team of Grant Morrison (we heart 4evs) and Adam Egypt Mortimer (video director bloke man).

It was announced just the other week at the San Diego Comic-Con with an emphasis on obviously how rad-awesome-skill it’s going to be, but also promises of how original new, innovative etc. the whole production is going to be, from promotion to the shoot to the DVD commentary no doubt. (We’ll do that by the way: exclusive superfan commentary by us for the Blu Ray 2-disc edition, yeah? Who could say no?) What this means for a no-cash indie flick like this is, inevitably, crowdsourced marketing with a viral twist. ‘X-Ray Cinema’ someone called it, not the next step on from 3D with added cancer risk, but referring presumably to the avowed full disclosure & transparency from the production team that we’re told will be part and parcel of the movie’s gestation.

Here are the basics, spreading linkmulch around like the finest organic man-manure:

Web: Sinatoro.com
Faceplace: Facebook.com/sinatoro
Twitter: Twitter.com/sinatoro

(Plenty links on those pages above to some interviews at IO9, CBR and other places, which we’ll no doubt be referring to a bit throughout this post, some of which go in to the movie in some depth, given how nascent the whole project still is. The total disclosure thing seems genuine at least, although time will tell if this approach has been wise - I still want the movie to surprise me, ‘know? Whatever, good for them because they’ve been busy, putting the word out there proactively, which hopefully means they have been able to find backers, rather than the reverse. [which it might! - Zom])

So far so un-unusual ho-hum…. ah, who’re we kidding? it would be easy, too easy to be sniffy about this shameless grab to keep their promo costs down, but come on: this is Grant Morrison and his chum -  our hearts were theirs years ago. We’re going to take them at their word: stick the accumulated Sinatoro stuff through the usual Mindless Ones Dot Com reading machine, and see what comes out the other side.

Poster first. Like the whole concept so far, it hints at a lot while giving away very little. Black soulstuff escaping from the spacesuit-shell of an astronaut, somehow incongruously transplanted from the Sea of Tranquility to the Mother Road itself, Route 66, somewhere in or near the Mojave desert.

Seasoned Moz watchers will immediately think of a few things. Everyone knows you go crazy when you go into space. Apocryphally, astronauts were selected on their lack of susceptibility to the strange powers of metaphor - being blindsided by the moon or watching earthrise apparently too intense for anyone of even a remotely poetic sensibility to experience without cracking up entirely. All of the surviving moonwalkers came back… different, with even the PR-friendly, level-headed Aldrin telling tales of UFO encounters on his journey.

The lost astronaut, the space traveller (outer- or inner-) who goes too far out and comes back changed is a staple of late C2oth SF,  figuring both the literal spacemen of the Apollo programs and subsequently, and their contemporary psychonauts who journeyed in the opposite direction. You’ll remember Johnny Zhivago, fucked on the vodka he’s somehow drinking through his helmet, in the back of Really & Truly’s shaggin’ wagon; and the buzz-cut drunk in the bar who tells Flex Mentallo that the superheroes are real.

The problem here, the problem everywhere, is one of gravity. In the extropian worldview that Moz hasn’t explored explicitly since the nineties but has leaked out in his other work since the Invisibles/Flex days (Flex trade = soon btw. Good.) the force of gravity is like an Old Testament Jehovah, the master and enemy of man, constantly getting in the way, constantly fucking things up, constantly dragging everyone back to earth with a vicious bump. Evolution is a journey upward. The millions of years between the seabed amoebae and the first fish crawling ont the land was one step. Earth-life’s next  is to go beyond the planet’s gravity well and into a post-gravitational existence. It seems likely that flesh may have to be shed, dissolved into black smoke perhaps,  in order for this journey to become viable. Astronauts who experience low- or no-gravity conditions for an extended period of time come back strange because they have fundamentally changed- they are post-gravitational organisms. In going into space, one does not encounter aliens - one becomes an alien.

One of the most explicit nods the interviews have given us, something those used to wandering apparently without aim or end in the dense atmospheres of GMs best comics will be familiar with, is the Bardo narrative, the post-death experience. Liberation Through Cinema During The Intermediate State. Sinatoro, if it is anything , is dead. If Sinatoro exists in the Bardo, beyond life incarnate, post-gravitational conditions can be expected. Up will be down. Black will be white. Nothing will be as it seems.

Sinatoro is said aloud to sound like ‘Sinatra’, deliberately calling out to the memory of Ol’ Blue Eyes, the dynamic ‘O!’ modification at the end giving with a pulpy comic-book scifi emphasis, like poor Max Thunderstone’s personal creed, mashing Buddhism, Machismo and maybe even Bushido to give the warrior-geek religion of ‘Buddhismo!’ Frank last appeared in a GM comic, but very obliquely, in the crossword in Seven Soldiers #1. Q: To do is to be or to be is to do? A: Do Be Do Be Doooo…. The popularly conceived postmortem separation of body and soul which Sinatoro appears to take as its base precept is precisely of this Cartesian nature. Sinatra Sr’s publicly-held life-story revolves around a similar Janus-like paradox: What Frank ‘was’ was the blue-eyed crooner, the emodiment of America’s best values, good to his mother, gracious to his friends and strangers alike,  singer with a voice that could move tyrants to tears. What Frank ‘did’ was beat his wives, mix with the mob to counteract his momma’s boy image,  treat Sammy Davis like shit, ruin his incredible talent with booze and cigs because he thought it made him tough… He did it his way. Come the end, the final journey, we all do it our way.

(The best Sinatra is Nancy of course, though even she is at risk of being rinsed of any meaning by the on going grind of repackaged dead nostalgia - did I imagine her giving one of her dad’s handkerchiefs to Simon Cowell as some awful tribute, in return for a good seat on American Idol? Please tell me I did…  Nancy’s candypop-sheen-over-dusty- deep-West-rock vibe is likely to find a resonant tone in Sinatoro also. See below, however. Nancy also stars in Speedway, the best Elvis movie. Extra points for featuring a young Bill Bixby, threatening to Hulk out at any moment and nick Elvis’ sandwich.)

It’s not til you hear it said out loud that ‘Sinatoro’ takes on those associations though. The word itself, the glyph, the letters alone, have their own distinct resonance. Why the extra ‘o’? Why make the word so easily bisect into Sina Toro? It doesn’t take long for the pig etymology machine to turn ‘Sina Toro’ into ‘Chinese Bull’, a precise description of the thing currently killing America, and hence an extremely provocative title for a Western/road movie, those being the two quintessential USian genres. Capital has lately found a home even more amenable to its blank desire - the centralised, authoritarian and socially codified Eastern economies providing even less resistant channels for the progress of its colonisation of Earth. The death of the American empire - an empire won through the superiority of the image as weaponry - will be the great death explored throughout Sinatoro. Lao Tse was last seen several hundred years ago, riding a bull, heading West.

Side note: The movie’s obvious cinematic spiritual predecessors:

There’s been a certain amount of chat about the film so far, but nothing of that key ingredient in any hipster road movie - the music. The important choice here seems to be the time-honoured one - score or songs? Backroom Mindless thought is leaning towards giving the job to  a modern solo electro-ambient hero like the never-hipper oneohtrixpointnever, maybe Christian Fennesz‘ guitar-glitch or something from Cali-raga droner James Ferraro. The sonic landscape of American psychedelia is pure rock though, with its favourites and standards and essential refrains. The best way to ensure the movie has both a classic, unified theme and space to include the tunes it’s going to be impossible not to feature in a morbid road movie (Don’t Fear the Reaper) is to give the gig to an instrumental turntablist like Phillip Jeck who will be able to fold the rock hooks and spacious Western atmospherics into a single cohesive score.

Side notes: Things Sinatoro MUST NOT have #1: An astronaut, or anyone wearing moonboots, trudging down the freeway with ‘These boots were made for walking’ playing over the top. NO

Things Sinatoro MUST NOT have #2: ‘The hero wakes up with no memory and finds an Ace of Spades in his breast pocket… with a bullet hole in it!’  Let’s not have it too much like a video game, eh? Whenever I play games they always seem to involve lots of getting stuck in corners, looking at my shoes, and shooting holes in walls. NO.

And that’s about all we’ve wrung so far from the available material. There will, we have little doubt, be more to say in the coming months.

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The book Dream Date by Tim Leopard and Fraser Geesin is available from Running Water Press or from Amazon.

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Before you go any further you should read (or remind yourself of) what Amy had to say about her in his ancient Rogue’s Review. It’s a little bit woolly in places but it’s also full of great ideas and he covers most of what I have to say here and then some. Not only that, he manages, in true Poodle style, to anticipate popcrime and Morrison’s it all happened approach to the bat-characters, but instead of focusing on Bruce he spends his energy on Selina. His take on her relationship with Holly is especially cool.

Stop heading down. His is better. Go read and come back.

Now me:

As much I enjoyed Brubaker’s run, I contend that the character has been sanitised. Yes she remained an ex-prostitute, and Ed didn’t shy away from some small stabs at social relevance, but ultimately it’s not the social issues, as much as it’s nice to see them get an airing, or Catwoman’s past life in the sex trade that concern me, it’s the lack of this:

I like characters who are difficult, they’re interesting, but interesting can prove a problem if you’re a superhero. Batman can weather a smidgen of forceful personality because his humanity is such a big part of his appeal, Superman less so. Superman just needs to be good in some nebulous way. Spider Man can suffer interminably and like the ladies, but the second he gets a bit political or starts to exemplify a more active, less genre-led morality (see his recent willingness to kill and maim Kraven), you risk complaints. Before you even get into a conversation about superheroes as icons rather than characters, or actualizations/representations of principles or moral arguments or whatever, there’s the reality of servicing high dollar value corporate entities month in month out to contend with, a reality which doesn’t leave much room for contentious human quirks.

Partially because of lesser expectations when it comes to sales, anti-heroes like the modern day Catwoman get a lot more wriggle room, and as someone who was brought up on 2000AD I want my anti-heroes with as much spice as possible. It doesn’t get more challenging that Dredd taking out a mugger with a hi-ex bullet or Nemesis’ nigh-on psychotic crusade against humanity, or, heading across the pond, Amanda Waller’s lethal control freakery, or the Punisher, but it doesn’t get much more stimulating, either. That isn’t too say that I want Catwoman to start murdering civilians, but I would love for someone to bring back a bit more of the supervillain, to be more concerned with the whether or not the character is compelling than whether or not she’s likeable.

There’s a reason why she carries a whip, wears skin tight plastic, and beats up on men. There’s a reason why she spent so many hours strapping Batman, that paragon of masculinity, into deathtraps. There’s a reason why she bestrode the world in the pop-criminal guise of a cat, an animal that won’t be tamed. Miller has Catwoman locked as a dominatrix almost from the get-go, and while the idea of a dom villainess is hardly original I don’t remember it ever being thoroughly hashed out in the modern superhero genre - it has real potential. Miller’s Catwoman, despite possessing some admirable qualities, is hard-faced, bossy and rude, she’s reckless, and she may or may not have much time for men. Like Miller’s Batman, she proves that you don’t have to be merely likeable to be attractive. Quite the opposite.

Without losing sight of her better nature, I’d go further. I’d ratchet up the panther-eyed mistress, deliberately make the audience uncomfortable. I’d make her by turns more conspicuously selfish, distant and vicious. I’d play up her recklessness, the thrillseeker with the night air on her face. Writers, most notably Brubaker, have tried to bring out some of these elements, but they always fall shy of taking any real risks. There’s always a feeling that Selina should learn from her mistakes, or at the very least that she should view certain actions as mistakes. The Catwoman I have in mind wouldn’t necessarily see what happened to her sister in the hands of Black Glove as in any way her fault, and my Selina Kyle, as much as she loves Holly, would still be prepared to take risks with her life if she thought the pay off warranted it. I want a fiercer Catwoman, a more showy Catwoman, one that demands to be the centre of attention and that likes nothing more than to trample the competition beneath her stiletto boots. I want to see the fangs, to feel that she’s dangerous and predatory, not merely tough and devious. This Catwoman’s soundtrack is Venus in Furs.

There is of course an unspoken assumption here, that we want Catwoman to have her own book, that we want her to be the star of the show rather than the mysterious femme fatale. The two, it seems to me, are to some extent mutually exclusive, although I could imagine a writer pulling a just when you thought you knew who you were dealing with out of the hat to considerable effect, I’m not sure that kind of approach is sustainable with her in the role of the protagonist. Mind you, Carter Beats the Devil makes a very good case for the opposition on that score, so maybe it would be workable (has there ever been a protagonist more consistently mysterious than Carter?). Either way, mystery is an integral part of my idealised Catwoman. As Amy points out Catwoman isn’t just a criminal, she’s a super-thief, more than a match for Batman, in his words “the Harry Houdini of crime” (or better yet the Dorothy Dietrich. She’s the one character who can give Batman a run for his money in the disappearing stakes, both in the interior and exterior sense, the one villain it should be perilously difficult to lockdown, both in the pen and in life. The character’s totem and noir underpinnings scream out for this approach, and while writers like Brubaker have taken us some of the way there I maintain that the Catwoman gracing the racks is far too knowable for my liking.

And if Catman can have a Catmobile, which according to Gail Simone he can, then Catwoman demands a Kittycar.

Next: Clayface

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Neonomicon 1 by Moore and Burrows

If you’re like me, god bless you, you’ve probably got this one categorised as a bit of a tangent, an afterthought, an offshoot: something fallen or transplanted from the great bearded tree. It’s in-story atmosphere and the means of its conception, production and release are all very much off the beaten track of Mooriana – it doesn’t fit with the current counter-cultural ringmaster thing, or seek to explain the magical world of magic worlds through transcendental psychedelic (in)formalism. It’s not Promethea, it’s not AWP, it’s not the League – it just doesn’t fit the pre-‘retirement’ roadmap at all. This, you’ll then quickly realise, is exactly the point. Neonomicon’s existence performs at least two functions in this regard: firstly, it is about going back to the roots. Can you strip all of the overt Moorian signifiers out of the writing, and turn in an effective, unfussy genre piece – can you still deliver the goods when it’s not All About You? And secondly, it looks at all the baroque burlesque excess, and says:  Show us why we need that. Show us what the world, show us what your mind, stripped of all that colourful nourishment, would feel like.

Allowing for that, the apparent faults – being several and glaring, and hardly worth noting one-by-one – can be assimilated comfortably by the strip in so far as they are a) stock generic devices and/or b) well established authorial tics, here flattened by over-familiarity and in-story context. The success of the issue hinges on none of this, but on the presence or otherwise of that slight pit of nausea, the uneasy tremble in the hand as you place the book back in the coffee table.  The last few pages of this issue of Neonomicon are a cedrtain success in that regard, a stiff shot of clear, cold horror – Someone here clearly knows what they are doing…

Maybe two someones in fact: Burrows’ stiff, skeletal figures and flat, precise tiers, stacked grey upon grey, are like a silted rivermouth – wading through their treacherous depths saps time and energy, dragging the narrative painfully onward. Initially this deadweight lassitude is simply off-putting, but becomes in the final pages both a dramatic counterpoint to the frantic confusion of the protagonists and a poetic figuration of the threat itself. This inertia, this entropy, this crushing relentless gravity, is the subjective sense impression of the first stage of Contact. The waves of deadening, affectless pressure are the psychic and oceanic turbulence as He stirs before awakening.

Oh, and what about those guys with the armour in the interview room? Why were they so keen to cover their faces? Bbbrrr. I give this comic four shivers and a shake.

House of Mystery 27 by McCarthy

It looks fucking glorious by the way - he’s doing spectacular splash pages between this and Fever, best in the business, of course, all this goes without saying, but…:

This comic (or six certain pages of it anyway, which are kind of a standalone thing but are also apparently part of the wider issue as well, though not having read the rest of the issue I couldn’t be sure) is a PSYCHEDELIC comic. It isn’t set in 19th Century London (nitrous oxide); fin-de-siecle Paris (wormwood and anhalonium); 1980s Manchester (e’s and wizz) (cringe); the mushroom-munching European festivals of the mid-Noughties (erm, mushrooms)  or time-immemorial Amazon Basin (a pharmacopeia more vast than even your comic collection blud). No, it’s set in late ‘60s Vietnam, and has an American soldier tripping in the bush, where he meets a stereotype and YAWWWWWNNNNNN oh my god so boring please someone find Brendan McCarthy a decent writer soon, one for whom ‘psychedelic’ doesn’t mean ’60s Americana’ (BMac having been guilty of feeding this impression himself in Fever, with its reliance on Ditko and the milieu he hated so much while shaping so much. You can argue, as P-Orridge and others have before, that to look back to a time that looked forward is not in itself a reactionary measure, but can provide useful progressive perspectives. I would say, while reserving the right to change my mind, that back is back, and that internet, genetics, neuroscience and global finance have changed the world so utterly since the 68ers had their moment that we are just going to have to create a new future for our children without using Nehru jackets and paisley shirts as a template. Which is a shame because fashion sometimes gets things so right that they are just too precious to be snagged on the spokes of the style-wheel as it cycles round again…  those things just aren’t coming back in).

Look, here’s the thing, McCarthy is a ‘psychedelic’ artist, not because his work looks like Strawberry Alarm Clock posters, though it sometimes does, nor that the lines and colours really come alive when the reader’s Mash is definitely Off, though they do, nor even that it looks like the artist is partial to his medicine himself, though who knows or cares? It’s because, inside his work, within those panels themselves, there appears to the reader, no matter their state of chemical imbalance, to be little distinction made between what is Real and what is Imagined. Very, very simply put: inside his drawings, Dreams and Real Life look like the Same Thing. That is it. It is not about drugs or youth insurrection or the cultural landmarks and social priorities of the immediate postwar generation. It is about something far more timeless and universal, more personal and precious – it is about the space between your ears - how you live it and love in it and share it with the host of myriad strangenesses in there, and how differently identical it is to the solid world out here.

But we need to get McCarthy on a proper book soon, otherwise this little 2010 return is just going to be a blip for the biographers to explain away. What we really need, is a company he’s worked for recently, with a writer, maybe one he’s worked with before on some of the best comics in the world, on a book that is plastic enough to encompass a variety of tone and theme contiguous with the artist’s ongoing preoccupations…

Hellblazer 269 by Milligan and Camuncoli

You had this with the India arc – you get it with any Milligan story that goes beyond three issues really – but there’s a point where you can almost feel the midway sigh as the energy goes out of it, and the summoning of the extra effort that it will take to get the bloody thing written and over and done with. So it is with this issue – Shade is here now, and the build up was so exciting that it now feels as if he hasn’t got anything to do – Constantine ends up using him as a glorified Chas, cheap public transport in a natty coat. It’s not great for propelling the story along, but we haven’t seen Shade in such a long time it’s only the most churlish of readers who’s going to get cross about him just standing still and soaking up the ink for a bit, doing his crazy (no)thing.

While we were up to our nuts in blood and guts and existential terror just a couple of issues ago, Shade’s arrival has heralded a more picaresque tone, with our heroes knocking about in the pub, having little superhero battles, swapping banter and trying not to go insane, business as usual with just a pint or two, and maybe a chaser, of the lifeblood of the book having drained away. It’s fine though, an issue that’s hard to dislike, much as it is hard-to-remember all of, beyond ‘It’s got Shade in it! Woop! Nice coat! – Epiphany’s subplot gets moved along, Lenny gets some killer lines in, a couple of coppers are dealt with in hugely satisfying fashion, and, well, tell you what - go an buy this comic and look at the art, and let a strange thought creep across your mind: Maybe this book needs Brendan McCarthy less than he needs it y’know – Giuseppe Camuncoli is doing OK all by himself…

Batman 701 by Morrison and Daniel

We talk about these things sometimes, and while I am only too pleased to open the bat-room door to the rainbow beasts and space medicine and clonesons and Batmites and BatUFOs and Batdogs and all the Bat-rest of it, my contention remains that those poppy/Silver Age/ Weird/insert your preferred term here elements of the Bat-mythos are not where the true insanity lies. What strikes me as far stranger is the story of the man who ho-ho dresses up like a flying rodent and wages a war on crime using latex masks and a magnifying glass, and brassknuckles and tasers and ropes, and carries a Bataclava in his belt for emergencies,  who has perfected the art of sneaking off silently because it makes his closest ally look silly, who spends entire nights unmoving atop stone gargoyles because it fits his mood, who lies for days in dumpsters earwigging the Gotham corner boys’ chatter, who spends hours hanging on to stalalgmites while being read the financial pages because if you don’t keep the finger strength up with hard practise every day then that kind of urban free-climbing just isn’t possible.

For me, the closer Batman gets to being normal, the closer the reader gets to realising just how mental the whole thing is.

Because the first thing Batman does after undergoing an ordeal Batman: RIP like is take the piss out of his beaten-up butler is neck a bowl of soup* and say ‘Hand me my submarine’. No sobbing or crying or thumb-sucking, just ‘Hand me my submarine’. Who spends three days in bed coming down from the weaponised drugs his enemies have been firing at him. And in minutes is on the videophone to Superman who’s pretending not to notice the gunshot damage on his friend’s clothes, and is all ‘Um, we need someone who can think things through…?’

This issue does have a kind of throwaway, filler, mood-piece feel to it, until six months from now when we inevitably realise that a vital clue to Dr. Hurt’s identity is hidden in plain view in this issue (by the way, my current theory is that Dr Hurt is daddy Thomas Wayne from another universe, who got knitted into ours during the Final Crisis. All that flashback on the first three pages of B&R #13 really, really happened, just not in our world - that Knight chess piece keeps cropping up, and in Moz  chess = different universes overlapping) but because of all that, for all the reality-checking moments (Ellie, the annoying walk home, Alfred’s uncanny ‘he’s home’ sixth sense, their banter, breakfast, the sub, the hangover, the brood, the quick realisation and acceptance of the fact that the world might be coming to an end, again, and that maybe only he can fix it, with his own death…) this is another cool Bat-issue, no doubt about it. Batfans dig this day.

And let’s give the Daniel his due, because it wouldn’t be fair to talk about this issue and not – he’s a very different artist to what he was just one issue ago, which was itself a long way on from how he was a year or two back – the chunky, rugged, ruffled, over-muscled look he has for this issue is really nice – Jim Lee, Doug Mahnke and several other influences I’m too dumb to know all coming together at once. It fits the earthy, downtime mood of the issue while also picking up and enhancing the precarious, doom-laden undertones of the overarching story - we’ve seen what happens next, and this seems to free Daniel up a bit - he onlyneeds to communicate the feelings, not the intricate track of the plot and the essential incidental.

Sometimes, heed ye, spoiler worriers, knowing how a story ends just gives the middle bits a chance to breathe.

(*The batboys like their food spicy, because they are boys, and because spice makes you tough. Next time they go to the UK, I would like to see them have dinner at Cyril & Beryl’s because I hear the raffish Earl of Wordenshire does a mean, superhot curry – oh yes, I would dearly love to read Knight Fahl…

…sorry. Honestly though, the ‘Rogan Gosh’ pun I was going to try and crowbar in would have been even worse.)

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Originally I thought the better batmobile Grant’s been building was a metaphor for a new Bruce Wayne, which it is, but I didn’t give any thought to what that would mean… Probably some sort of fusion of bat and bruce after some terrible ordeal, with links to the ten eyed men exorcism and the thogal retreat, but that’s as far as it went. I just figured Grant would wrap his run after that and some other writer would immediately drag us kicking and screaming back to the land of FENESTRATE-ME-ZSASZ!

I was being stupid.

It was obvious we’d need to see the batmobile in action, the new vehicle for Bruce’s war on crime, if only because the idea contains so much story potential. In fact it probably contains more potential than any plot device so far. What batfan wouldn’t have to see where Bruce was going next, a Bruce with his shit together, utilising every weapon available to him? Because so far he’s amassed quite an arsenal: the 99 Miagani, the Club of Heroes, the extended bat-family, and… are the Outsiders still on the payroll?

See, this is where I have a problem with the internet’s constant, whining refrain of ‘unoriginality!’. Yes, we’ve read Kingdom Come and Dark Knight and we’ve seen Bruce extend his reach with mutants, robots and Red Robins, but, and this is the thing, it was only for a few bloody panels in the former and the end point for the latter. No writer yet has actually explored this idea in any detail, probably because of the inflexibility of the bat office, and, yes, because it would take big, big balls. If I was ever to interview a creator on a massive book, and was guaranteed an honest, thoughtful, non-pr driven response, the first question I would ask them would be ‘How intimidating is it?’ I think it would be terrifying, and to genuinely take the book to a new place, while finely balancing the direction with the demands the character (read: his audience and history) places on you, probably the most daunting thing of all.

And, yeah, the grittYIsts probably have a right to feel afraid, because what does Batman, Inc. promise us? A fuller absorption of characters some fans would like to keep at arms length into the main batbooks, a return of the globe trotting batman who needs to keep tabs on every area of his operation, elements of the first person shooter aesthetic(!), a full blown out of the shadows and into the light bat army (or at the very least a far less creepy, far more conspicuous operation), and the aforementioned return of bruce wayne to the equation, bringing all of his resources to bear on the bat mission. This is the worst, because the grittyists don’t like Bruce Wayne. They deny he even exists.

(And who can blame them, seeing as Batman himself seems to agree, only just now in Morrison’s run describing him as ‘..a shallow, reckless mask of a man who never grew up’. Aaah, but Batman was always going to be a bit biased, wasn’t he? An unintegrated Batman, that is.)

Anyway, just some thoughts, and I’ll leave you with one to chew on. What kind of enemies would a bat-army fight? Maybe there was something in that ‘population explosion’ business after all.

Escalation.

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The book Dream Date by Tim Leopard and Fraser Geesin is available from Running Water Press or from Amazon.

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You can pick up a copy of the SUN RA book from the Headpress website, which features essays, interviews, diatribes and comics about the legendary skronk-master himself…well worth a look.

Until the next time, true beleivers, MAKE MINE FREE JAZZ!!!

The ever lovin’ Beast.

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The book Dream Date by Tim Leopard and Fraser Geesin is available from Running Water Press or from Amazon.

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