Mindless Ones

Crime comics, genre, anxieties about, that’s stuff you should leave at the door. I want to talk about a dead girl and a tragic young man.

Stray Bullets #1 is that rarest of beasts in the dark woods of serialized fiction, a first issue that’s on a par with the best of the run. David Lapham doesn’t need to find his stride, he hits the ground running, in fact his biggest problem as the series progresses is sustaining the quality, and perhaps the purity, of the early issues. I’d argue he’s largely succeeded, but that’s a topic for another post.

Here be spoilers…

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‘A Caper A Day Keeps the Batman at Bay’ – Batman 312, 1979

This is pretty much the first Batman story I remember reading. Back in the late 80’s, you could buy reprinted Batman stories in British editions, available in most newsagents. In the backwater village I grew up in, this was pretty much it for exposure to American comics (I remember getting hold of a battered Secret Wars comic from a jumble sale that seemed like the Holy Grail to a kid raised on Beano and Beezer). Obviously 2000ad was around but that would come a little later. But these reprints were mining Batman’s seventies heyday, so there were stories by Len Wein and Denny O’Neil, and glorious art by Neal Adams, Jim Aparo et al. We were firmly in hairy chested lovegod Bat-territory, so stories inevitably involved Talia, ski-slopes, underground lairs, and Batman in full player mode. Although there was a smattering of grit in the comically hardboiled narration, these stories were colourful, dynamic and swinging – a disco era Batman hanging in his Penthouse apartment, who was definitely getting laid more than in the barren Aids scare 80’s. Oh sure, he was still grieving over his dead parents, but he was also doing the Batusi down at Studio 54.

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‘It’s just superhero poetry’

Grant Morrison

Okay, I don’t have a link to it, but somewhere at the back of the collected Rogan Josh edition Milligan has a bit of a waffle about how you should read his book. I don’t know why it’s there – perhaps Karen Berger insisted on it, or maybe he just felt a mite uncomfortable about throwing it out there into the greasy mitts of the phillistines – but, regardless:

Who gives a flying fuck how to read this great shit?

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So I was blithering on in the original post’s comments about the secret message embedded in that super sexy scene with Mystique, and thought it would be nice to share my thoughts with a wider audience.

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BOOO! And TEARS! For all of you who haven’t heard Dave Campbell, comic commentator extraordinaire, is shutting his blog down for good.

Cheers, Dave. You were, are, and will always be an inspiration.

(Will get on and post something more substantial in the very near)

So, to the business of this weeks comics. One-word summary at the end.

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Did you know that 2000AD is scoring* 8 or maybe 9 out of 10 at the moment?

That’s really quite a good score. Not as good as this:

but probably the highest the last surviving bastard of UK genre comics has managed since the Summer Offensive, back in the hot dog days of 1993, when Morrison, Millar and Smith were handed the title’s reins for a glorious 8-week silly season which took the comic back to its rollicking, inflammatory best. Last week, for the first time in too long, I put Prog 1581 down and that taste of wasted chances and pointless filler, the sensation anyone who’s picked it up lately must know, was entirely absent.

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