That Really Does Remind Me Of This: Grand Storytelling, & Something Of The Opposite, In 2000 AD Prog 1690 & Megazine # 298

1. "Yet Trouble Came"

If there were a prize for the most affecting panel in this week's 2000AD, and, sadly, there isn't, it would be awarded for the contents of the very first frame on display in "Damnation Station: Even Heroes Fail" part 1. If ever there was a panel which best illustrated that terrible line from the Book of Job (3.26, St James translation) - "I was not in safety, neither had I rest, yet trouble came" - then this would be it. Caught suspended in time and constrained in space, placed right there in the still centre of a long and narrow panel-frame, poor June Akiwara co-exists quite unknowingly on the precipice of a very final disaster while trapped in the eternal second that constitutes her very private despair


But we discussed that panel last time out, so perhaps the reader's eye might drop down the page just an inch or two to the second panel of this tale, where the returning recon ships close in on the crowded landing bay. It's a remarkable panel, it really is, for all that it at first glance appears to be a disposable stage in page one's sequence. (It would be a misguidedly simple business to remove this second panel and have the reader's gaze jump from "You okay?" in 1:1 to "Let's just get this done, okay?" at 1:3; no plot-points would be missed, no apparently essential visual data excluded, and indeed the scene would be speeded up.) But, firstly, the panel's construction is perfect for the job at hand. In the foreground, June stands with her back to the reader, accentuating her lack of engagement with the world, her focus on the job to come, and perhaps the blank state of her social soul. Even her word balloons, by Ellie De Ville, push away her colleague to the right as he tries to engage her, incompetently, in conversation. Before her, in the middle ground, the normality of the occasion is stressed with a crowd of station workers preparing themselves to unload, and presumably even clean and maintain, the incoming ships. This is simply standard procedure in an absolutely normal day, we're being told, the mundane business of an everyday occasion. It's so mundane, indeed, that the eye isn't even allowed to register the figures of the workers as anything except indistinct outlines. (Mr Davis simply and effectively shows them as vague, brown blurs.) And then in the panel's background, just as if they were aircraft stacked up waiting to land at any modern airport, await the shuttles themselves, silver blobs against the backdrop of stars. They have the stillness of great powerful machines which appear to hang in the sky even as they close through distance at considerable speed. And they also have that capacity of speeding metal in the sky to appear to be something other quite different to what they are. Are those angels or birds of prey? Their indistinct appearance calls to mind those amateur films of 9/11, where the mind finds it hard to register that that really is a plane, an ordinary we've-seen-it-a-thousand-thousand-times aeroplane, and then suddenly, that plane has obviously broken free of the rules of where planes should be and is suddenly heading for - no, it's hit the - no, it can't have ..... it looked so harmless ....

And what we have in 1:2 is that first sight of the fall, the still prelude to the ultimate violation of the everyday that in retrospect, and only in retrospect, carries such an awful and apprehensive shiver, and worse, with it. Yet, in real-time, at first, the violation appeared to be nothing of consequence at all.


It calls to mind what David Plotz (*1) calls the "marvellous story" of how Elijah challenged the idolatrous rule of King Ahab and, after the small matter of slaughtering the 850 priests of Baal, redeemed the land to the extent that God ended the drought that he'd had everyone suffer for their ruler's sins. (Kings I: 18:42-45)

"And Elijah went to the top of Carmel: and he cast himself down upon the earth, and put his face between his knees, And said to his servant, Go up now, look towards the sea .... Behold, there ariseth a little cloud out of the sea, like a man's hand ... And it came to pass that the heaven was black with clouds and wind, and there was a great rain." (*2)

Mr Plotz is of course quite right to nail the line "A cloud as small as a man's hand is rising in the west" as containing that key phrase which brings the whole business to life. That fundamental mystery of perspective, the idea that what appears to be an inconsequential and distant trifle easily blotted out by "... a man's hand ... " can swiftly be revealed as a cataclysmic engine of terrible ends, is so elegantly expressed there. Sadly for June, however, those little silver sun-reflecting recon ships as small as a shattered woman's hand aren't rain-clouds, and it isn't the beneficent end of a drought that's their mission.

*1 - David Plotz - "Good Book" - I'm absolutely not a man of any Book, unless it's the collected essays of George Orwell, but whether you're religious or not, Plotz's walkthrough of the Bible from beginning to end is as informative as it is entertaining, even if the wise-crackery can scratch away the patience at times.
*2 - Plotz takes his single line from one of the many translations he uses in his book. I've given a little more for the sake of context and lifted it from the St James translation, because, well, you would, wouldn't you?

2. "Why Me, Niles?"


Putting to one side the inescapable suspicion that the unseen "Niles" Dredd is speaking to - at 1:1 of Mr Wagner and Mr Ezquerra's "Mega City Justice Part 4" - should be the pretentious Jungian with the hopeless crush on his brother Frasier's housekeeper, and I swear I'd pay even more good money to see that, it's worth tipping the blogger's hat to the audacious establishing shot that opens up this week's episode of "Old Stoneyface Goes To Mega-City One". In many ways, it's all too easy to take Mr Ezquerra's shots of the Big Meg for granted; there's been so very many of them over almost 35 years of 2000AD that the reader can be no more surprised by their quality than, for example, the fact that that bassist on those Beatles' records really does play some interesting runs. But that first panel in particular stuck in my mind this week, and so I wanted to worry away at it in order to work out why. After all, there's nothing too conspicuously splendid about it, is there, so why should it have snared my attention?

It's a standard-issue long shot, made slightly more interesting from Mr Ezquerra's choice to place the skyway that Niles and Dredd are standing on so high up in the frame. That resulting sense of great height and considerable isolation immediately if subtly engaged my interest, for I'm not a man who handles even the flatlands of East Anglia without the occasional wave of stomach-clenching vertigo, oh yes, and, look, there's nothing holding that skyway up. It's a standard trope of Mr Ezquerra's depiction of the megalopolis, of course, those ribbons of concrete stretched as if caught between the great Citi-bloks, but the fact of a skyway with no visible, or even conceivable, means of support still gets my attention. And then, in the background, is the quite beautiful use of colour to show how Mega-City One has all the bright and rusty loveliness of a distant oil refinery at night, that odd juxtaposition of the aesthetically appalling fact of the urban vileness with the grand appeal of its scale and power. I simply can't avoid the belief that in many ways, Carlos Ezquerra's art is better than it's ever been, which would be a remarkable testament to his powers of perseverance as much as his artistry after so many years.


And, of course, something as subtly odd as this panel prompts questions, and not just ones about how that road-thing stays up there. Does the fact that the two Judges are scheming on the skyway signify that they're walking a kind of tightrope in their own lives as well as far above the ground with their political machinations, or are we being told that they're deciding the fates of hundreds of millions of citizens - and Muties - while being quite unengaged with the everyday lives of the city? Are we watching men bravely stepping onto the moral highground or noting them rising to power uncaringly above the heads of their fellow women and men?

Well, who knows? As Freud is reputed to said, and yet never apparently did as far as the historical record is concerned, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. But it still makes the craft of that single panel all the more endearing to wonder what else it might be saying, even if what it actually is achieving without such indulgences is more than enough in itself.

3. " ... A Rifle Hanging On The Wall ... "


It's one thing to remember Checkov's dictum that a rifle shown to an audience in chapter one must be shown firing in chapters two or three, and another to present said "rifle" in the form of a Judge Department ration-can several pages before fatally dropping said can from orbit into the chest of a mangy old Cursed Earth prophet. And I do so love a good punchline that doesn't cheat, that's been set up while hiding the clues in plain sight, with all the care of a creative team striving succesfully to control the playing out of their gag while maintaing the progression of their main plot-line. Reading through Simon Spurrier and Peter Doherty's "Judge Dredd: Grudsent" the first time, my eye was drawn to the initial appearance of the cup-come-orbital-weapon at 7:4, and I even attempted to read the writing on it. Though my old eyes could only focus tightly enough to decide that the first word on the label of the can might be "ration" and the second "beans", the fact is that I was interested by the cleverness of what appeared to be no more than the digital placement of a label onto such an everyday item. That Mr Doherty's really working hard even at the details, I thought, not wondering why the ration can had been placed at such a point in the panel that the eye was inevitably coming to rest upon it while reading the conversation between the Tracker-Judge at the panel's left and Dredd himself at pane'sl right. (In fact, there's a double snare there, because the can stands before the window showing the curve of the Earth too, and windows are there for looking through in comic books, especially when they're windows in space.) And that's so clever, isn't it, that we should be trapped into noticing an apparently inconsequential prop without there ever being a suspicion that said ration-can would soon be heading Earth - and prophet - wards.

Checkov, therefore, needed to have given his dictum a little bit more detail about rifles hanging on walls. He ought to have said that if we subtly show our "rifle" as a ration-can of beans, well, we've probably conned everybody anyway, and we can fire that can off whenever we Grud well like.

Splendid timing, gentleman, and splendid foreshadowing too. I do love a damn good trick.

4. "I Think You've Got A Taste For Killing ... "

I. Last time out, I more-or-less promised you that I wouldn't be carping on at Bill Savage's adventures anymore, and as I like to think of myself as an honest man, I'd better apologise right now for what's to come. Because I really did mean to show, if not a touch more respect, then a greater measure of restraint where "Savage" is concerned, but it's very hard to do so when faced with the billion-ton avalanche of bilge and tosh that's on show this week in "Savage: Crims" part six. Because it is tosh. It's absolute tosh, and it's got to stop! Yes, it does! It's the comic-book equivalent of that bassist bloke from the Beatles leaving the band and going on to release record after record of irredeemable, yes, tosh after seven years of sublimity. Yes, "Savage" to Pat Mills is what "Mary Had A Little Lamb", or perhaps more accurately "Give Ireland Back To The Irish", is to Paul McCartney. (Indeed, it's not even of the equivalent quality of the Frog Chorus or "Ebony And Ivory". It's that awful.) "Savage" is nothing more than a number-one court example of 100%-pure creative hubris, of an incredibly talented bloke with a ferociously impressive back catalogue slumming it while mistaking his complacency for the purity of self-expression.

It's tosh!

II. I have no problem with indomitable hero narratives per se, but I do when there's not even the slightest wink of irony existing in the space between the page and the reader's mind. Those high-concept, low-IQ Arnie Schwarzie blockbusters of the Eighties at least mostly carried the sense that the makers knew as well as we did that this was all ludicrous nonsense. There was a wink here, a genre inversion there - "Remember I promised to kill you last?" - that kept all the macho and bemuscled mayhem from becoming high-budget snuff movies. But there's no winking at the camera in "Savage", no ironic distance in Big Bill the Anti-Bourgeois Butcher's adventures. The whole construction of the strip relies on us accepting that Bill is stronger than everyone else, and better than everyone else, and effectively invulnerable, and so "Savage" demands that we either take a literal pleasure in Bloody William's slaughtering, or we sod off. Because without taking Savage The Slayer's side in this story, there's nowhere else to stand. Can we associate with the mindless, characterless Volgs, or the nonces? We certainly can't, so there's only Bill. And I don't feel clean even reading about the swine, let alone letting him function as my point-of-view character.

Take the sequence on page 4 where Bill and the nonce-killing Littlejohn run into a dastardly Volg roadblock. Now, Mr Goddard works incredibly hard on this scene, and to no little effect. The reader who doesn't flinch when the windscreen shatters under a hailstorm of bullets (4:4, above) is either fatally desensitised to violence, or just, perhaps, a regular reader of "Savage". But the art in the panel itself is simply too successful in showing what happens what happens when two ordinary blokes in an unarmoured car with hand guns come under fire from at least five soldiers with automatic weapons and two machine-guns mounted on heavily armoured vehicles. (Checkov might have said that we shouldn't show machine-guns on army vehicles without having them spitting a few hundredweight of death out by the second panel, and he'd have been right, too.) The truth of 4:4 is that Bill and Littlejohn are dead. That panel actually shows it. There is simply no way out, even by, er, Bill pushing himself out of the car while firing his pistol, which is what we're actually shown. And because the strip relies on a tight-sphinctered "realism", we're not allowed to imagine that "our" boys got lucky, for either this is a realistic and brutal reality we're observing, or "Savage" as a script is a sad little joke which wants its gritty realism without the realism part. The minute the appropriately named B.S. can dodge a few hundred bullets, he's not human at all. Indeed, the only way this scene could work is if there was some knowing cartoon edge to the carnage, but there isn't. In 4:5, for example, Bill and Littlejohn are not just fighting back, they're winning, for in 4:6 they're taking out those soft and how-did-they-conquer-their-own-spare-bedroom Volgs, causing the soft-capped officer to declare "Devils!", when of course he should be shouting for his armoured cars to get those dead men in a crossfire, leaving their already-dead bodies so full of shot they'd give a raven lead-poisoning.

By 5:2, the armoured cars have even disappeared from sight, the Volgs on foot are down to three men, and they've been pinned down by Bill and Littlejohn's hand guns, despite "our" heroes constantly giving away their position by having a detailed conversation as they go, before escaping improbably away into the night. (The Volgs have armoured cars, but not helicopters or light aircraft with heat-tracing technology, which would be very odd for a police state, would it not?)

III. Oh, come on, Col, I hear you say, in addition to the word "tosser". It's just a comic book. It's just fun. And that's a perfectly acceptable reading, given that no text has a single meaning and so on, blah-blah-blah. But you'd also be wrong. This is a ugly piece of work, celebrating a cold blooded and graphic take on spurious hard-man machismo. There's no convincing characters, no humour, and little logic. (Those armoured cars? They were obviously there, because I saw them, I did, so why they didn't just rat-a-tat-tat Bill and Littlejohn into a thousand pieces is beyond me.) Where Spurrier and Doherty subtly constructed their tale so that carefully-placed and apparently-irrelevant tiny details took centre stage at the story's end, here the armoured cars that have been explicitedly placed panel-centre are simply ignored. It's not just offensive in its content, this "Savage", it's offensive in its sloppy, the dog-ate-my-homework-so-I-had-to-write-it-again-on-the-bus scripts.


If Bill Savage is to work, properly work as more than just an unintentionally dumb page-turner, as it's currently written, then it can only do so if it's drawn as a children's cartoon. Then the art can compliment the stupidity and unpleasantness of the script while creating some intellectual space for the reader to fall back into without gasping "Irony! Irony! For Grud's sake, irony". But "Savage" has to made into a joke, because it simply can't be engaged with as a serious piece of work. This is a dishonest comic strip; scratch the surface and awful, if in places only slothful, things tumble out of it. I can't imagine how long it took to write, though I have my darkest suspicions, but I can imagine how long it took to edit. Would a new scripter for 2000 AD be allowed to turn this quality of work in? Really? Honestly?

It's Pat Frakking Mills, for Grud's sake, I know, I know, and I'm very well aware his work sells, and I know that he was for many years a quite brilliant editor and writer. But if he must churn out this type of ugly, bloody pot-boiler, can we at least not have gaggles of policemen going missing without ever being referred to again, or armoured cars doing something more than nothing at all, or even characters whose appeal relies upon something more admirable than the ability to jog unscathed through solid walls of flying bullets?


Actually, no. Let me change that. What I meant to say was; "Can we have an end to "heroes" who seem to me to be indistinuguishable from SS men, from the kind of brute to whom ethnic cleansing is a weekend away from the grind of the working week?"

And when those righteous aliens are through with "Damnation Station", can they please move onto Saint William The Just Right Hand Of God, and Littlejohn the Nonce-Killer? Because that would be a bloody killing field I could vigorously and vicariously engage with.

IV: Or: if this is a straight-forward, grim'n'gritty thriller, then it's a dull and unforgiveably sloppy piece of work, in itself and by comparison with much of the other work in 2000AD and the Megazine too. And if it's satire, then it's so close to the thing that it's satirising that it might as well be that thing, which, considering how nipple-deep our culture is in ill-considered macho jerk-off gun-porn, is unfortunate, to say the very least.

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