Mindless Ones

“What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Time War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

With apologies to Francis Fukuyama

The End of Time is a resignation letter.

2008 was, artistically if not commercially, the nadir of Doctor Who. By this point, a series which, when it returned, had seemed fresh and vibrant, had become barely coherent, with each episode being little more than a set of effects set-pieces strung together with no thought for logic and topped off with a couple of ‘comedy’ moments and some over-the-top emoting. While Russell T Davies was regularly describing the series as “the best drama in the world”, there was precious little drama in it any more.

Midnight was a very welcome exception.

or

If a white wealthy talented American male can make it out there, so can damn well anyone!

Readers of good conscience peek at their Paul Pope comics through tense and cringing fingers.

Because yes, you’ll be pleased to know, it’s important to note, but when it comes to fighty, flighty, punchy-jumpy, there is still no one who springs into mind (maybe Rafael Grampa but let’s not even) who can do that great comicsy Pope trick, that thing, the rugged and robust capture of action-motion he can do, that stack of photos falling through the panel skin while you look, but still solid and full of weight,  thing.

It is a shiveringly good signature move that makes your fan man go into a full hard, and it is still there in this Haggard West comic. (West as in The West, Haggard as in haggard – the title is a double entendre, minus one, see below)

But you have to read it through your fingers. Anyone with a more than passing moody pout out of a car window on the desert (or is it a city?)  highway familiarity with his work is always going to read his comics tense, knowing at any given second the author is going to interrupt this uniquely rendered and quite marvelously flowing scrap to embark on an exploration of the somewhat laughable but also cruel, sadistic, economically and historically illiterate and sadly popular political philosophy (guffaw) of libertarianism, made famous and fashionable in the US several decades ago by accelerationist Soviet deep agent Ayn Rand.

You might have read Haggard West and thought to yourself, ‘Hey, there were no characters in this comic called Yahek or Mon Vises, so he left the politics for babies out of it this time!’ If so, a) you don’t exist b) you can’t be that dim c) what comic were you reading again?

Haggard West is dead!

Who can save the city? Who can save the superhero now?

We’ve been here before, in an not-identical but broadly analogous form, after the crash of 1929. How do we reinvigorate the tired and emotional economies of Anglo-American capital? Legalise booze, sure, bring that revenue back into the mainstream – that’s a no brainer.

What apparently is a bit more of a brainer is promoting an idea of virtuous militarised aryan youth to inject the necessary vim and vigour back into the enfeebled action men of the shiny city. No one would be daft enough to make an icon-fetish out of muscular fighting Nordic virtue and try to frame it as the mythopoesis of a viable political subjectivity, would they? Not again?

BLOODY HELL COMICS WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH YOU LATELY?

There could be super dark black irony at work here of course, forming an effective and bold historical critique, drawing a neat parallel with the current moment…

…but it’s not very likely really, is it? END

Appendix 1-

The suspicion – forlorn hope – that there might be a sardonic commentary at work is prompted by the Battling Boy preview pages. Our plucky young lad – with superpowers, the son of a god remember – is sort of given a solo challenge, a stand on your own two feet neanderthal rite of passage thing, face this by your own mettle tested or fall, all that shite. But the god of adventures has packed a trunk full of priceless godly adventuring shit for you – you don’t even have to pack it yourself!

On reflection, it is unfortunately impossible to imagine even in the fullest depths of drugged reverie a libertarian with that kind of self awareness, or a sense of humour. This from the class of thoroughbred free market idealogues whose inherited wealth conveniently never remembers the Marshal Plan…

Appendix 2-

Battling Boy is out soon! Preview pics below…

etc.

The pleasure here comes not only in having some beautifully textured visuals to help you through the awkward, self-serving language; but also from the strange tension in seeing one of medium’s most idiosyncratic and defiantly independent artists work with a text that both belongs to everyone, and in some sense lies at the root of so many commonly held social and cultural structures. Crumb has spent several lifetimes somehow convincing the world that by sticking to his personal vision – repellent and antisocial as that so frequently was- he was somehow serving a greater collective good, by clearing space where the pure freedom of the artist might flourish. No matter how arseholeish the art he’d fill it with, that space itself performed a transcendent function – a dream of freedom, even a freedom to support racist or misogynist repression – that many sections of postwar Western culture sincerely believed it needed to have. Maybe they were even right.

Strange to pick Genesis then, a book that justifies its own archaic madnesses and hardcore rhetoric of obsolete social evil by appeals to divine authority and the vicissitude of historical longevity itself. Crumb takes its toxic content (and legacy) and tries to turn it into pictures and words alone, as if they don’t touch or connect to anything, as if this book, like his own back catalogue, should only ever be understood as harmless marks on paper and nothing else. If Genesis, with its holy massacres, its hatred of women and nature can be redeemed on artistic merit alone, maybe Crumb can too.

And if he just wanted to turn a new audience on to a founding text of the occidental canon, then maybe he could’ve picked a book that wasn’t such a cunt, y’know?

Despite all that, two points of genuine brilliance worth mentioning:

The limb-rocking, pre-curse serpent in Eden reworked as cosmic horror and Sitchinian(?) paranoiac scifi:

And perhaps the funniest panel Crumb’s ever drawn – the looks on the guys’ faces as they’re queueing up to go into the tent. Oh yeah, all us dudes have got to be circumcised from now on, God says, ‘kay?.

Were those later Cerebus issues that I never read as good as this?

Brief and hasty thoughts after listening to this rather interesting Roundtable Discussion from 2011 on Romero’s Dawn of the Dead…

[You already know if vague meanderings about zombie movies are your thing so stop here or shuffle on as you prefer.]

Ballard (Mentioned in discussion c. –40 mins)

An interesting avenue of conjecture lies in imagining a conclusion to Dawn and it’s central private shopping mall utopian imaginary, minus the aggressive intervention of Blades, Sledge and the rest of the biker gang (see below) which provokes the films dramatic finale. The inevitable outcome here is mentioned already during the roundtable: pure Ballard.

Left to fester in the mall, the survivors’ molecular neosuburbia would have atomised rapidly, losing its structure to the dissipating pull of mathematical entropy as our survivors retreated further and further retreating into their private dystopian interiors:

Francine behind the false wall of their enclave, nursing her baby, perched upon a nest of ripped-up cardboard boxes.

Peter burrowing ever deeper into the mall’s guts, crawling the ventilation shafts and access hatches, digging at the walls and chewing the electric  cables.

Stephen with his weathered flight jacket, binoculars and empty rifle, stalking the rooftop, unable to return to the plastic vaulted sky below.

The shops lying terrifying and empty again, except for when the moon is full and Fran and Pete would meet on the main concourse to fuck, while Stephen peers through the skylight.

Zombie children (c. –23 mins)

This scene is recapitulated in 28 Days Later, in which Cillian Murphy’s character walks through almost exactly the same scene, killing a rage-infected child, out of sight of his fellow survivors. Boyle/Garland choose this taboo-within-a-taboo as a key turning point for his character, beyond which he kills no more of the infected victims, choosing instead to identify with them and eventually adopting their methods as a means of overcoming the remnant militarism of dead Britain.

This seems to suggest dead children as given cause and justification for the entwined problems/solutions each film poses and represents: GET MAD=GO ZOMBIE

Bikers (c. –15mins)

Led by Tom Savini himself, who used the …Dead movies  to transfigure his traumatic memories of Vietnam War horror into celluloid spectacle, thereby changing the decomposing face of cinema forever, the biker gang within the film’s model represent the coming intrusion of post-Fordist labout and neoliberal capital, crashing the postwar party of settled and endless bourgeois plenty.

The bikers are literally deterritorialised – piratical and nomadic – and better adapted to survive within the available niches of the postapocalyptic ecology than our bored and barricaded survivors: they are playful with the undead, having developed new perversions and sexual subjectivities with the zombies (and mannequins) as their focus.

Despite their anarchic surface and apparent disdain for the commodified desires and familiar comforts of the hastily re-improvised nuclear family, they are only interested in the mall for what they can extract from it. Their belief in might-makes-right and reinscription of archaic gender roles makes the vision of a human future where they are most fit uncomfortably primitive…

Scholars attempting to trace precisely the cataclysm that is known variously as “the Time War”, “the War in Heaven” and “the Wilderness Years” have placed the events of July 2000 at the centre of the mystery surrounding that most ambiguous of events.

While the Eighth Doctor Adventures had taken over the Doctor Who name and character, the Virgin New Adventures series hadn’t given up. In fact, freed from being a Doctor Who series, at least in name, it had something of a late flourishing.

The stories instead followed the character of Bernice Summerfield

By 1993, Doctor Who is a potential, rather than an actuality. The TV show has been off the air long enough that it could realistically be revamped, not just brought back. It’s not a TV series any more, but an idea for a TV series — an idea which can be done in many different ways.

Particularly, there were two ways that the series could be dealt with. The first, and perhaps the most obvious, was to make it ‘darker’ and more ‘cult’.

This was the tack taken by The Dark Dimension

Answering! the gjallahorn blown by a respected campaigner of old. Scorning! the gnarled admonishing finger of grumpy teach and his selfblind pretensions to impartiality:

Jupiter’s Legacy is really a very dull, very poor indeed, comic, F-minus, forced, tired, artificial, very disappointing, get the fuck out of my house. Sapped of all grace and mana by over repetition of zombified tics and gestures: laughably inept in its socioeconomic analysis: not even pathetic in its yearning for the world of five years plus past: idolatrous in its devotion to the never-there assurances of the old American century? Everything you’d expect of its famous author-shyster. These few years, no one with a soul to save or a clue about anything important has stepped across the threshold of number 10, and no honourable man could ever drop his knee before the Queen of Evil.

But don’t take Frank Quitely’s drawings with you, for pity’s pain.

a) Fancy a drink captain, you unprofessional fuck? What drink? The one in your hand! Look really closely. Yeah there, take a sip. You can’t? It hasn’t been set up properly? The continuity and detail of this scene is entirely tossed off? Forget it cap, someone can go back and draw it in your hand later, sfine.

b) Magic sliding towards you wall? Is that? I mean, these are new, fashionable glasses, so maybe I’m, but come on, really? When Quitely was alive he’d nail the 3D modeling and that tricky perspective. It is possible instead nails have been run in to his poor dead hands prior to commencing work on this comic.

c) Sometimes I wonder if the dialogue in this comic could be any more dogshit? As for the pictures, don’t worry about any kind of aesthetic clarity, and for fuck sake make sure you don’t get any rough energy in there either.

PS – no nudery, just prudery. More fucking blood you prick, this is for kids!

Mark Millar’s writing is so bad it makes the art go bad, basically. Here’s hoping by christ for a resurrection of Frank Quitely before he has any more high profile superhero work coming out…