2000 AD: That Reminds Me Of This

And So, Farewell!

2010-10-30T00:09:00.000-07:00

Most every Monday from next week onwards, as long as my subscription copies arrive, I'll be posting a review of the new editions of both 2000 ad and the Megazine on my other blog, TooBusyThinkingAboutMyComics. I hope anyone who's found something of interest in the pieces which have been published here will consider dropping in there at some time in the future. But this blog will be closing down from today. For awhile, I'll post the new weekly pieces here after I've put them up on TooBusy, with the comments disabled on ThatRemindsMeOfThis, but there'll be nothing new published here from now on.

I'm tremendously grateful to everyone who has on occasion dropped in on this blog. Thank you for popping over. It's been an absolute privilege to have you visit.

I can't say how much I appreciate the comments that some folks have been so kind as to leave. If I were to list names, it'd make it seem as if I thought those good people were part of the story of this blog, but of course, this blog was just an infinitesimally tiny part of theirs. What's more, I'm absolutely honoured that that was so.

Finally, for whatever little it's worth, my gratitude and sincere admiration is owed to the creators who've been so good as to leave a comment here, who've Twittered a gracious word or posted a link or mentioned the blog in a podcast and suchlike. To write your names would be to namedrop, and your tolerance and support, to whatever much-appreciated degree, shouldn't be turned into an advert for this blog's once-existence. Thank you very much for being so kind.

A splendid time is wished from me to everyone who's reached this last line in this last entry on this little blog, of which I find I've been very fond. I shall miss it.

Thank you and good night!

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Two Fine Moments: "Low-Life" from 2000 ad 1707 & "Judge Dredd: Idle Hands" from the Megazine 303

2010-10-21T00:27:00.000-07:00

1. from 2000 ad 1707:- "Low Life: Hostile Takeover" part 8, writer:- Rob Williams, artist:- D'Israeli

I. I'm with Dirty Frank. There's definitely more going on than even this week's showdown with Thora has revealed. Them bad 'uns of the Yakuza may be a powerful presence in Mega City One, but it's hard to see how they could outfight the Justice Department. After all, the Judges aren't merely a massively-armed military force, they're the state as well, and history tells us that well-organised, fascist states that are willing to kill without restraint tend to win the argument when those criminal elites not within their ranks challenge their power.

So, why is Thora claiming that continuing to work within the Justice Department won't result in the defeat of the Yakuza?

But that conundrum feels like a legitimate snare rather than an unintended confusion, and it's remarkably easy to have faith that "Low Life" will deliver on its unanswered questions after last week's excellent episode that set the strip solidly on course after a somewhat shaky start.

II. From set-up to page-turner, the sequence of five panels on the first page of "Low-Life" this week is undoubtedly one of my favourite single sides of work by a creative team in 2010 so far. Describing as it does the beginning of an incredibly tense meeting between Dirty Frank and Thora at the top of a vertiginously-tall skyscraper, it proves once again that fine comic-book storytelling needn't rely on the likes of mass brawls and eye defocusing special effects to capture the reader's attention. In fact, it's undoubtedly a scene that ought to be placed in a text-book entitled "How To Write And Draw Comic Books", and placed under the heading of "How to choose a setting to emphasise the drama of events". After all, Mr Williams could have chosen for Frank and Thora to have their conversation anywhere, but placing it in such an unfamiliar and isolated setting, and one so very high in the air, clearly establishes what an exceedingly dangerous game it is that both Judges are playing. For whoever loses in this apparent conflict between loyalty and expediency, it's a very long way down.

What's more, setting events so far above the streets of the Low Life also highlights how disconnected Thora is from the people she's claiming to represent and protect, as well as how isolated Frank is from his natural element of the hard and broken world below. Everybody's out of their element, and there's the overwhelming sense that no good at all can come from the situation.

III. The establishing shot at 1:1 is perhaps Mr D'Israeli's best of the series so far, though his opening panel in Hostile Takeover's first chapter is perhaps a more elegant piece when taken in isolation. Yet here his design is so precise and compelling that the reader's eye is carried from speech balloon to rooftop, before it's plunged downwards to the complex of buildings and chimneys above the episode's logo and title, a fall which accentuates how very, very far down it is to street level. Then the eye is caught and guided upwards again by the smoke trails until the reader fixes once more upon the tiny, terribly exposed figures on the landing-pad far above the world.

It's a textbook example of how an apparently static panel can be brought to the fullest measure of life by using a careful composition to guide the reader's attention around what might at first glance appear to be something of a passive and uninvolving scene.

IV. The panel-to-panel continuity is similarly carefully structured and discreetly effective. Dirty Frank's look of utter disconcertment at his distance from Terra firma in the second panel is a further wonder, emphasising his insecurity as he stares downwards into the man-made abyss that's the city in the page's first frame. And the placement of his windblown locks so that they're breaking through the border of the frame to his left and being caught and pulled on by the clouds at the top of the first panel seem to indicate that he's about to be blown, or thrown, or pulled off of the rooftop, a suspicion intensified by presence of the mocking Judges in the background behind him.

Finally, Mr D'Israeli and Mr Williams surely deserve top marks for the least kinetic and yet most compelling page-turner of 2010 at 1:5. With Thora's head to the left of the panel, and poor heart-broken Dirty Frank stranded and surrounded to the right, and with that endless city waiting beyond and between them, the reader's left in no doubt that relationships are being quietly but utterly shattered here. Even the way in which the panel reads, from Thora's silent and sorrowful expression to Frank's bowed body, to the sparse and deeply moving words "Thora...This is ... disappointing", and then back to Thora again, helps to trap the reader in the awkward and upsetting moment. (*1)

There's not more than 50 words on the whole page, and yet those five panels, individually and in sequence, are so elegantly saturated with information and emotion. Look again and there's something else worth noting that the reader didn't notice on the third or fourth pass ....

*1:- In fact, looking at this beautiful page again as I scanned it this morning, I realised that it's one of the relatively few pages that I would love to own, or even a good copy of such. This is no badge of sycophancy, as I've been something of a consistent critic of this run of Low-Life up until last week, but this is such good work. In fact, since I'm obviously into the "imagining-selling-a-kidney-or-two" school of thought to be able fund my acquisitions, I'd also invest in the script too; can't have one without the other. One day, and a few original Low cartoons too, perhaps.

from Judge Dredd:Megazine 303:- "Judge Dredd: Idle Hands" writer:- Al Ewing, artist:- John Higgins

Look, there's a group of sword-carrying, stage-makeup wearing terrorists from an "Over-Achievers Club" charging into a stadium full of tens of thousands of slovenly folks who're curious about a new religion that legitimises idleness. The Over-Achievers, with a motto inspired by Ovid and members dedicated to the act of murder while simultaneously writing bodice-rippers and longing for their watercolours, skip and sway their way to the slaughter dressed as the Gentlemen Nobles from "The Mikado" while singing that opera's opening lines.

It's clever. It's funny. It's silly. It's well staged and it made me laugh.

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What Was Once Violent Is Now Nice:- A Passing Comparison Between "Judge Dredd: Megazine" 303 & 2000 ad prog 2

2010-10-18T04:25:00.000-07:00

In which the blogger takes a moment to begin a comparison between this month's Megazine and 2000 ad # 2, which marked, as everybody reading this will know, the first appearance of Judge Dredd.

1. Violence And Brutality

I. For most of the lead characters in 2000 ad prog 2, the business of being a hero involves little that's more complex than being able to humiliate and then kill your opponents. What's more, it's the humiliation that often seems to be the most important part of representing the forces of virtue and order against barbarian intruders, aliens, cop-killing criminals and the like. In "Invasion", for example, the patriotically oak-balled Bill Savage is dedicated to riding Britain of the invading hordes of Johnny Foreigner, but his taunting of the enemy Volg before he kills them off seems to be an unduly important part of the ritual business of resistance to him. "Laugh this off, twinkletoes!" he shouts as he takes his shotgun to a pub where dastardly Communist-Fascist forces are making loyal Englishmen, and one sole woman, sing for their bottles of brown ale. Later, there's an even less imaginative "You want some too, eh, sunshine?" spat out by Savage to set up another brutal killing, but it's obviously an important component of hard man etiquette, to mock before murdering, and any jape is no doubt better than none at all.

And much of 2000ad prog 2 is concerned with the pleasures of verbally emasculating the foe, any foe, before wiping them out regardless of whether the enemy is resisting or not. Dan Dare, for example, enters the fray in his strip with a cry of "Cowardly scum! Fight like a man -- hand to hand!", and this despite the fact that the creatures he's facing down aren't men, but human-looking aliens, and that they're only doing their job as security on the alien spacecraft that young Dare's stowed away on. But this insulting before shooting is a code of practise that's honoured by Judge Dredd too, who, having cunningly distracted his criminal prey by sending his Lawmaster after them without him on it, then rather counter-intuitively announces his presence by asking if they're "Looking for me, lawbreakers?"

The killing that inevitably follows such japing is astonishingly blood-free, but the humiliation of being taunted first is obviously what really hurts. The Cossack that's gunned down by Savage in the process of what looks like folk-dancing sustains the tiniest sprinkling on blood on his tunic, while the scum of the earth shot by Dredd have apparently fallen painlessly to the ground before the fatal bullets have hit their unmutilated bodies. Even the dinosaur-hunting cowboys of "Flesh" meet their terrible end, by being crushed by dinosaurs and minced in giant lizard-burger machines, in a goreless fashion; we see their terror, but never the pink and scarlet insides of their skin.

II. These are stories where much of the reader's pleasure is presumed to lie in the moment between the signalling of a terrible end and its arrival. Hidden from sight for so long in children's comics, as much as books and TV, the very fact of a unkind death in the early 2000 ad, along with fellow weeklies such as "Battle" and "Action", seems to be expected to function like a rude noise in a classroom or a stupid face pulled at a church service; it's very existence mocks the rules and seriousness of a child's everyday life. And so it doesn't matter what the protagonists are actually fighting for, and whether the heroes will survive; the stories themselves aren't particularly important at all. What matters is the mockery and the violence that's quite literally on the page for violence's sake. Mach-1, for example, a cyborg super-agent, hurls a terrorist out of a plane without the very slightest attempt having been made to restrain him and bring him home for debriefing. No, this is the 6 Million Dollar Man with a 00 license, after all, and so when he warns his enemy in the last panel of page 3 that "Right, chum, you've got about 20 seconds to learn how to --- ", the reader knows that something illicitly thrilling's going to follow, and quickly too. And, of course, the page is turned and the reader is faced with a a sentence-finishing cry of "Fly!", as in "... you've got about 20 seconds to learn how to fly!", and there's the antagonist being hurled out of the plane and into freefall above London.

III. There are only two exceptions to this rule of jest and slaughter. In "Flesh", the brilliance of the strip's set-up is that the story contains not one but two set of victims set against each other, meaning that death can arrive at any moment to any side and the reader can always enjoy the murder of cowboys by dinosaurs, or dinosaurs by cowboys. The endlessly dinosaur-chewed cowboys who're earning their pay hunting burger meat for a beef-denuded future can be associated with as they're ripped, gored and crushed, while, on the other hand, the great dinosaurs themselves, as innocent as they're blood-thirsty, can elicit our sympathy as they're harvested, processed and sent by time-machine f0rward towards tomorrow's dinner tables. The wisecracks may be less prevalent in "Flesh", but there's more than enough death to compensate for the lack of them.

Only in "Harlem Heroes" is there an absence of men with guns threatening terrible deaths and issuing macho wisecracks. Instead, the violence in Harlem Heroes is ritualised into sporting combat, and the jeopardy in the strip is focused on winning, and indeed surviving, the game of Aeroball rather than blasting some faceless enemy into the dirt. There would be death and cruel mockery to come, no doubt, but for now the strip's enemies were poverty, dangerous equipment, and impulsive street children enticed into professional sport.

IV. Violence in the Megazine is of course a quite different matter to that presented in its parent publication from 33 years and more before. For where violence is shown in the Megazine, it tends to be either presented humorously with some restraint, such as in the deaths of the light-opera singing Overachievers Club in "Judge Dredd: Idle Hands", or placed before the reader with no attempt to hide the horror of the business of bloodletting.

Certainly, no lead character in the Megazine appears to be going out on their adventures with the deliberate intention of mocking and then killing their opponents. Instead, and regardless of whether the genre of the strip involved is more serious or humorous, death is a serious matter which protagonists only deal out when there's no other choice at all. In "Hondo-City Justice", for example, the climax to a long-running serial brings but two panels of gore and death, of a head exploding and then of a decapitated torso bleeding out on the pavement. There's no sign of bravado or good humour on display from Cadet Asahara after she's finished off her enemy either; killing is here neither funny nor exciting, but simply necessary if sadly unavoidable. And in "Lily Mackenzie", a six page firefight is portrayed in the least heroic light possible. The business of killing is, again, forced upon our protagonists, and it's a fearful and disturbing business. Nobody is throwing around banter when the firing begins, and they're certainly not doing so when the carnage is over. Lily, for her part, and despite her being the most effective fighter on the field of battle, is absolutely devastated by the consequences of her actions in the slaughter. Death, it seems, isn't funny or thrilling to Lily at all.

V. But it's not just that the business of comic-book fighting and killing is so different today from the 2000 ad of March 1977. Equally noticeable is how little violence there actually is in relative terms in the pages of the Megazine. Where most pages in 2000 ad prog 2 end with either a violent page-turner or the promise of bloody acts to come, entire strips in the Megazine pass by with very little attention being given to fighting and suffering at all. "Judge Dredd: Idle Hands", for example, may contain two panels showing a riot, but the point of those scenes is to accentuate how irredeemably disorderly Mega City One's citizens are rather than to take pleasure in watching citizens maim each other.

Violence may be regularly shown and used to a variety of ends in the Megazine 303, but violence in itself isn't the point of any of the strips on show.

VI. It's a desperately unrepresentative business, picking two comics separated by almost three and a half decades, and at random too, and then comparing them as if definitive judgments about the passing of time and the development of the craft can in any way be established. And I'm well aware that if one of the strips in the Megazine this month had been, for whatever reason, similar to the recent Sinister Dexter or Savage strips from recent 2000 ad's, the conclusions I'm about to make would have been radically different.

But I suspect that the general truth is that the nature of the hero, and of course the definition of heroism itself, has changed quite fundamentally since those very first experimental issues in 1977. For one thing, the role of protagonist is no longer reserved for men. As we've discussed here recently, male leads are actually outnumbered by female ones in today's Megazine, with only Dredd of four strips this month possessing an X-Y chromosome. Furthermore, it's a far, far more common business for lead characters to come from something other than a wholly-Caucasian background, as Lily Mackenzie and the entire Japan-based cast of Hondo-City Justice would testify. (The Harlem Heroes strip in 2000 ad was laudably a strip about Black Americans, but it functioned unconsciously as something of a ghetto within the comic, wherein non-White communities might be respectfully portrayed without coming into contact with the White worlds elsewhere in the comic. *1)

But just as important as the widening of the range of representations that can be cast as "heroic" has been the change in what it means to a heroine or hero. There's something both laugh-outloud absurd and disturbing about the machismo of those early strips. It's not just the almost-total absence of women, who appear as just two background figures in the whole comic. In truth, it's the gleefulness in which male violence is celebrated in public spaces, the relish by which the purpose of a strip is not to develop character or resolve plot so much as to show men laughing about hurting and killing other men. The second issue of 2000 ad presents today a nightmare land where the snares built into pages in order to maintain reader's attention are more often than not constructed around unexpected, meaningless and supposedly-chucklesome deaths. Dinosaurs fall on men, men shoot men, men shoot dinosaurs; those actually are the stories, rather than components of them.

But there's no enthusiasm for the depiction of cruel if bloodless killing in this month's Megazine. Heroes don't kill there at all unless they have to, and the idea of joking before shooting seems for awhile at least to have fallen out of style. And so, for all that there's a remarkable sense of continuity between the comic with the very first appearance of Dredd and the magazine which bears his name in October 2010, a most fundamental change in the morality of the tales appears - appears - to have taken place. For it's not simply that the unreconstructed male hero has, at least for this month, largely disappeared from view. It's that 2000 ad and the Megazine have become, forgive me, a far more pleasant and a quite frankly far nicer kind of comic book.

I know. A sweeping generalisation from a very limited amount of research. Still ...

*1:- A risky statement, I know, but I'm only discussing that single prog, and, yes, I'm aware of the debate about Dredd's intended racial origins.

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How Dirty Frank Won My Heart:- Rob Williams & D'Israeli's "Low-Life" In 2000 ad Prog 1706

2010-10-13T01:28:00.000-07:00

1.

Like a man who's survived all that fuss with the red and green lenses and is finally presented with an optician's prescription which makes the world look far clearer than it'd been for a long while before, the seventh chapter of "Hostile Takeover" by Rob Williams and D'Israeli provided this now-happy reader with three moments that've transformed the serial from being less than the sum of its parts into a convincingly beguiling tragi-comedy.

2.

It was laughing at the panel to be found at 4.2 - below - that made me realise I was changing my mind about "Low Life". And it was a great howl of a laugh, actually, the kind of unexpected and joyous whoop that marks a change of heart if not yet opinion, because no story that's quite as funny as that in part can be entirely disregarded as a whole.

It was a laugh rooted in the incongruity of Dirty Frank rolling off a brilliant punchline immediately after a panel depicting a gruesome massacre, a bloody business which was instantly revealed as the straight man for Frank's gag as much as a grisly plot-point in its own right. And just as the fact of the massacre set up the black comedy of Dirty Frank's joke, so does his apparent buffoonery provide the comic-book jaded reader with a means to engage with the butchery. After all, mass-killings are far, far more prevalent than everyday kindnesses in comic books, and as a consequence the slaughter of all those dubious gentlemen from the East is unlikely to move an audience more familiar with comic book bloodshed than comic book kisses. But by grounding Dirty Frank's outburst in humour, in the reader's grinding experiences of Twenty-First century air-travel, the audience is elbowed out of the banal business of another bloody scene of future butchery. Instead, memories of the casual callousnesses of budget airlines compels a strange and sideways measure of sympathy for the victims of the Judges' execution squad; we've not been sprayed with bullets, or anything in any way comparable to that fate, of course, but it is possible at a not-too-considerable stretch to imagine those cheap-fare companies joking about how such a problem-solving strategy as machine-gun fire might resolve their never-ending struggle to dehumanise their wretched customers. As Mr Williams has Dirty Frank say;

"Heavy Firepower! Murder! Screams! The culling of the innocents!" (Beat: new speech balloon) "Economy class at its natural solution!"

Well, it is, isn't it, and for the first time I was convinced that Frank was worth listening to, that he was more than merely a vehicle for some rather sad outsider humour. His ludicrous cry of "Gott In Himmell!", for example, issued at his first sight of the bloodbath, only makes the whole business more amusing as well as more shocking. More amusing, because Dirty Frank is revealed as man who's so disordered he's reduced to expressing himself as an SS officer stereotype from a Sixties war comic, and more shocking, because he's the only character on view who can make the Mega City One of 2132 ad as affecting for us as any human enterprise should be for a reader.

Or to put it another way, he's the Fool, the audience's co-conspirator, who knows what he can't express and who expresses it clearly to the gallery, who's too disordered and too wise in his madness to inhabit his world without revealing its hypocrisies and its sufferings too, and who stands for "us" in the midst of all of those who belong to "them".

Which is not, I'd contend, as a reader new to Dirty Frank and "Low-Life", a role he's been effectively fulfilling in "Hostile Takeover" up until this point. Until now, he's just been a fool amongst many others, not The Fool, more pronounced in his foolishness than his fellows but hardly a character that might be used to illustrate Fo's belief that "Comedy makes the subversion of the existing state of affairs possible."

For in truth, Dirty Frank has come across too often in "Hostile Takeover" as a gelded, disordered eccentric used mainly to deliver up drollery, as if mental disorder was funny in itself, and the strip's suffered for it.

3.

Of course, a joke's just a joke, and even a well executed one doesn't of itself bring a comic strip into focus and make it function as it might. But then, that single joke isn't the only element of "Hostile Takeover" that helps ground the story and compensate for whatever confusion and underachievement has come before. For this week has also brought with it the emergence of Dirty Frank as a point-of-view character who's more than a confused and rather emasculated bystander. Rather than being a baffled and rather piteously peripheralised figure, Frank is here shown both taking the lead and grasping truths that his more typical fellows can't. In that, he's more than just the outsider who can communicate the meaning of his world humorously to us in ways denied to the other citizens of 2132 ad. He's also starting to fulfil the role of the knight errant, and far more a Chandleresque protagonist than a Cervantian one too, and so now he's become our hero as well as our representative in the strip.

It's a point that can be illustrated at 7.2.5, where our disordered hero is shown being tailed by several of his fellow oddities from the Wally Squad. There we're at last shown in clear focus that, despite his mental infirmity, Frank has skills which his fellows lack beyond his unquestioned bravery, dedication to the job, and unintended predeliction for quipping. Alone as he is in the sensory overload of a Big Meg street, Dirty Frank has the capacity to focus his attention upon details which escape all of those around him. He can spot and categorise the corruption that's escaped the unthinking observers, that hidden and unpleasant truth that the more respectable and supposedly sane members of society can't. Indeed, even his fellow members of the Wally Squad can't fully grasp what he perceives and processes. "Why does Thora want is following Frankie anyway?" asks Judge Coil at 1:3, "Aside for the obvious reason: to observe a complete lunatic at large in order to avoid eventually becoming like him?" But Thora, and presumably those lined up with her, know that Frank's a more substantial man than Coil suspects, a truth that's evidenced by the "complete lunatic"'s private investigations.

And if he's at his lowest ebb by the last page of this tale, there's also the sense that our Frank's got everything he'll need to close this matter successfully. He's his skills, his conscience, his unconscious ironic distance, and now, through daring and sacrifice, he's earned his chance to deal with the dragon in her lair.

4.

So, Dirty Frank's now more precisely placed as our representative in 2132 ad, and he's explicitly established with the unfamiliar reader as a protagonist of some substance. More than just a loyal if mind-battered foot-soldier, he's the Detective Fool, and the balance of the strip has shifted from being a rather muddled narrative to one in which Frank is placed centre-front and worthy of being there. And, in combination with those two components, there's a third matter to be found in "Hostile Takeover: Part Seven" which defines Dirty Frank as a figure of greater substance than he previously seemed; his untypical and uncompromising integrity. "These are Dirty Frank's comrades of longstanding. Justice should be their myopic goal", Frank records in his "case notes" at 2:5, and, as a result of displaying such probity, he's transformed into Serpico and Avila and Ciello, "our" man against all of "them". Before he was one of a gang, or he seemed to be, and now he appears to be the only one capable of stopping his "comrades" from the worst of crimes. And though there's a great deal of reason to doubt whether Thora's game is as nefarious as it's seeming at the moment, it's effectively Dirty Frank against everyone else, which of course marks him out as the last honest gunslinger in town.

In truth, he's a believer, a man committed to his service and its principles, clear-minded in the terms of his duty even as he's somewhat confused as to everything else. The very presence of that word "comrades" in his notes reveals both his naive integrity and his vulnerability, his desperate need to trust those around him just as he surely can't rely on Mega City One's citizenry itself. And regardless of what I might think of the fact and principles of the Judicial State, the expression of Frank's devotion to his duty while others fatally betray their comrades lends him an absolute dignity that ennobles the character and ensures that I'll be reading carefully next week.

5.

It's not that Dirty Frank should have by necessity stood revealed as "Hostile Takeover"'s sole apparent hero from the tale's first chapter, strong and competent and shiningly decent. After all, heroes need to be confused, and sidelined, and rendered helpless, so that the pleasure of their fightback and the catharsis of their victory is intensified. But this story was confused in itself, and particularly for the new reader, as we've discussed before, and the need for a clear heroic centre to the tale increased as "Hostile Takeover" became more challenging and opaque. After all, if a plot is slippery and hard to make sense of, an engaged and sympathetic point-of-view protagonist gives the reader something to hold onto, as any who love the occasional mystery or thriller can testify. But to provide a tale without either clear plot or straight-forward protagonist when chapters are being doled out in tiny weekly installments is to risk losing both the momentum of the tale and the enthusiasm of the reader.

But a Dirty Frank who's suddenly active, if somewhat beaten-up, and following his own agenda, who's uniquely competent and fiercely honourable, who's Serpico-ised to the degree he has no allies at all, and who's a Fool that speaks for us all rather than a fool in his undies eating popcorn, is a character that serves to lock every other narrative component securely and satisfyingly around him. After all, we'll put up with any degree of confusion if the likes of a Marlowe or a Shardlake or a Rebus is there at the centre of things, or actively searching for the centre of things.

Up until this week, Dirty Frank has seemed placed more at the edge of events than the heart of the tale itself, and perhaps that's where he'll be when next Saturday rolls around. But for the moment, "Hostile Takeover" seems like his story rather than a series of plots occuring to a large number of characters which will, eventually, be tied together in one fashion or another, and the tale is all the stronger for being more obviously that of Dirty Frank's.

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"But, Why?" :- Some Concerns From The Blogging Margins Concerning 2000 AD prog 1706

2010-10-11T02:04:00.000-07:00

1.

What is this thing, this "2000 ad", that it should sold using the cover to this week's issue? What is its target audience, and how might they be attracted by this latest in a rarely-interrupted sequence of bizarrely unenticing covers?

What other science-fiction adventure comic, full of werewolves and zombies, future-cops and space-opera pulp shenanigans would so consistently present itself to the world with such a lack of commercial ambition, such an absence of zest and zip, such a strange counter-intuitive passivity where the business is surely the grabbing of the reader by the throat while insisting that they must now, right now, read this comic!

Indeed, what mainstream science fiction product from any medium fighting for its life in today's marketplace would consistently position images such as the above on its cover? After all, it's not just this is a relatively limp, if pleasant and competently-executed, painting, it's also that it doesn't even accurately describe what's inside the prog itself.

2.

What is it that this cover is telling the reader to expect from the interior of this comic? Well, there's a castle, a blasted heath, a ghostly and yet handsome head looking fondly on, a windswept and heart-heavy man in 19th century dress aiming a gun; why, it's a gay Gothic romance about to end in tragedy! (Perhaps the owner of t'mill is about to be shot for letting the floating head die when he tried to protect his ancestral land from the encroachment of industrialisation?) And though I really would buy a gay comic book Gothic romance tragedy, I really would, for its audacity and its difference as well as its capacity to annoy the homophobic irritants of this world, a gay Gothic romance is not what awaits the reader herein.

Perhaps, the thought occurs, this cover is a homage to those strange girls comics which once haunted the newstands, The Buntys and Mistys, the contents of which some kind folks have been good enough to explain to me on this very site. But, then, why would anybody do that? Why would an editorial team sign off on a cover that hearkened back to a genre which died long ago for want of readers? Surely that would be evidence of the kind of mouth-swallowing-tail inter-textuality which marks a decadent and commercially unambitious enterprise?

3.

It is, I fully recognise, quite a lovely design in many wistful and nostalgic ways, but it does seem to be the product of a mentality which has abandoned the business of catching the eye and quickening the pulse of the casual buyer, given that the only hint of action is buried at the bottom left-hand corner of the piece, the area of a cover most likely, I'd've thought, to be most obscured on a rack or shelf.

It's a strange business, this cover. The chap at bottom-left isn't even immediately identifiable as Dante, for he looks older and bereft of humour and dash, so it's obvious that the cover isn't aimed at diehard fans who know what they like and insist on getting what they recognise. And yet, the cover is so locked into a long-dead romance genre that it's hardly reaching out to anyone beyond the hardcore reader who'll buy the comic regardless of what's on the front of it.

In essence, it's neither directly targeting the established fanbase nor designed to attract a new one, and it seems instead to exist in a strange non-commercial space where the self-referential objet d'art might exist and not prosper.

4

But what most concerns me is that the cover seems to be not only disconnected from potential audiences, but from the content and indeed traditions of 2000 ad. For surely the pages of "The Master Of Kronstadt: part 2" herein contained more than enough arresting, exciting and quite frankly absurd images for the least engaging of artists to create a eye-shocking and exciting cover from. (*1)

Consider; there's a beautiful blond vampire in military jodhpurs who's trying to bite to death a science-fiction villain with heat-projecting powers while one-pilot laser-firing bombers attack a castle between two towers of which Dante is swinging, as Dante of course would, to save the day!

*1:- that's no coded slight directed at Mr Davis and his art, which I've consistently expressed a strong liking for within these entries.

5.

Now, what is going on here, that such an incredible source of quite frankly fun imagery is being ignored for a cover which can't even gather the force to portray the antagonist as anything other than rather handsome and ghosty in a dead Mr Darcy way? (You'd never guess that that apparition of a face represents the bad guy of the piece, would you?) Is it that folks are ashamed or even ignorant of the magazine's pulp roots, and of the vigour that a fusion of low culture and high ambition generates? Has research indicated that open conflict or an accurate reflection of the comic's contents serves as a purchasing turn-off? Is the bottom left corner of a page really the place to put the only tepid hint of threat on a cover? For, to be frank, this is just the latest in a fairly long, rarely interrupted sequence of covers which would be pretentious if they weren't so lacking in ambition and content and verve.

It's a science-fiction adventure comic book, this 2000 ad. If it's Dante's turn for a cover, I'd say that it'd be a good idea to have;

(1) an immediately recognisable Dante,
(2) an eye-catching and arresting design which doesn't have such a subdued pallet,
(3) a beautiful uniformed and teethsome vampire, a cruel heat-firing villain and our hero half-flying to the rescue,
(4) and a laser-firing plane and exploding castle too.

Because the sense of a comic book which has abandoned the search for casual buyers and indeed much of its ambition and subversive daring shines dully off a great many of these recent covers. It's as if nobody wants to reach out, laugh heartily, demand the reader's attention and reaffirm that some kinetic and profane enterprise is still being carried through here.

For it's not that the illustration isn't competent. Of course it is. It's just dull compared to the form and content that might be there, and it feels weary as well as stylish, unnecessary as well as considered, and irrelevant rather than vital. It belongs in a coffee-table book where gifted artists pay their respects to 2000 ad by imagining what the comic would have been like if it'd been a western, or a crime book, or, yes, a gay and rather fey Gothic romance.

6.

After a year of psychopaths torturing and killing people in small rooms, of Maybe and Skinner and the remarkably predictable if at times entertaining behaviour of their breed, now we have, oh dear, another apparent psychopath torturing people in a small room in "Judge Dredd". Worse yet, for the sake of the reader who's wearily familiar with the whole trick, here we have another bad guy strapping down and torturing a Judge, which also happened, oh, exactly two weeks ago. In fact, it was just two weeks ago that we were also shown Dredd taking responsibility for a Cadet too, meaning that the various rushes of deja vu that are jumping me at this moment are struggling to do anything more profound than baffle their victim with their many competing cries for attention.

And it doesn't matter if next week shows that everything isn't as we think it may be, because the effect of a cliffhanger promising more of the same after so much more of the same is to neuter the mind's ability to want to engage with what's coming. And this is especially so after last week's tale by AL Ewing, which shockingly didn't actually have one of these damn psychopathic villains so much as a group of typical Big Meg citizens behaving, in a finely exaggerated way, as typical people do, with all the jealousy, ambition, desire, and stupidity of the unpsychopathic life. Once, the key business of "Judge Dredd" was to show how the world imposed by the Judges upon the ordinary woman and man was taking typical human frailties and intensifying them even as Dredd and his breed claimed they were protecting law and order. Now we're so often away from the realm of the typical and so regularly lost in the well-worn paths of the pathological that, quite frankly, Judge Dredd's adventures are becoming, whisper it, somewhat boring.

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Six Things I'd Like To See Happen In "Age Of The Wolf"

2010-10-07T01:57:00.000-07:00

1.

I'd like to see Rowan develop more of a substantial and individual personality. It's laudable and brave to create and present a lead character who, beyond an untypical degree of skill on a motorbike, is as everyday and unremarkable as most of us out here in the real world are. But Rowan is so very, very average that she's very, very uninteresting, and giving her magical powers doesn't of itself make her any more compelling a character. She's passive unless she's forced to act, she seems to lack an interior life, she has no apparent desires or ambitions, and she's not spoken a single witty line or expressed one out-of-the-ordinary idea in the six chapters we've known her. As a consequence, it's particularly difficult to empathise with her character or sympathise with her situation.

2.

I like to see the individual chapters of "Age Of The Wolf" constructed so that there's a more substantial change of mood both within them and between them. At the moment, disaster follows disaster without any intervening change of pace or mood except for the fact that events keep becoming bleaker and more destructive. In truth, there's only two types of scenes that we've seen in the 30 or so pages that've been printed so far. In the first, Rowan doesn't understand what's happening to her, and she's passive. She might be confused or upset, comforting a friend, talking to a stranger or weeping before her dead mother, but she's essentially an uninspiring bystander. In the second, she's running away from wolves or running towards an island, which at least is an active business, but it's not an inspiring one, because there's a limit to how interesting a chasing wolf can be when it can't ever win, or a beckoning island when we've little idea of what's waiting there.

I'd like to see moments of humour as well as those of terror, respite and reflection as well as escalation and fear, victory as well as defeat, and, particularly, some moments of light to break up all that darkness.

3.

I'd like to see "Age Of The Wolf" evolve away from being the comic book equivalent of a chase movie. For there's a sense that the reader is simply watching a woman running away from a wolf towards an island, and there's little to make us think that Rowan won't survive the pursuit, give or take a hand or two. After all, there's a limit to how many times a big wolf can be thwarted before the wolf itself seems like an embarrassment rather than a menace, and after 6 episodes, the business of always running and yet somehow never being caught has become rather wearing.

4.

If Rowan would benefit from being fleshed out and made more interesting, then the tale as a whole could do with a supporting cast beyond the similarly flat Pete. The brief appearance of Rowan's whinging, deceased Mother provided some other focus of attention, though it can hardly be said that she was a character so captivating that the readership might long to see her again. She was, in truth and I believe by intent, thoroughly irritating, and it's to be hoped that the big bad baddie of this tale isn't just effectively a self-involved and uncaring middle-class sitcom mother.

And given that all we have to represent the forces of disorder are Rowan's mum and a mute and conspicuously ineffective wolf, the introduction of some more compelling antagonists would greatly excite the interest, just as Rowan as a heroine would benefit from some friends and allies who were more engaging than the one-note, London-Eye-climbing Pete.

5.

This has been an end of the world story where so few people are on show that the battle seems already lost. It would very much help to get a sense that life beyond Rowan and Pete is still extant and, in particular, worth worrying about. The little we've seen of the survivors so far has left them seeming both emasculated and unworthy of making it through this catastrophe, which is a shame, because if we can't care for the mass of the victims in a tragedy, we can't care for their world or the possibility that it might one day be restored.

6.

It would very much help this reader if each individual chapter of "Age Of The Wolf" was constructed in a way that was more deliberately calculated to compel the audience's attention. For example, the key final panels on each page in Chapter 6 are remarkably uninvolving and unenticing. The trick of an effective page turner, of course, is that it presents an enigma of some sort within the context of a scene that's interesting in itself. But consider, for example, the final panel of page one, where we're shown two faces looking fearful, but we're not provided with any clue about what they're frightened about. Two frightened people in an already fraught situation doesn't constitute an enigma so much as business as usual, and that panel required more than that to inspire the reader to turn the page with some alacrity.

Page five, for one, does at least end on a genuine enigma, but it's a mystery that's diluted by the fact that the reader can have no idea what's happening. Blood seems to be causing flowers to grow, but is it the blood from the wolf's mouth or from Rowan's stump that's doing this? And why might we be interested in flowers growing from blood, when we've been given not a hint of why this might be important? It's as if we're supposed to be fascinated in a strange phenomena simply because it's strange, but the reader needs more information in order to care about the likes of fast-growing flowers, because, in themselves, they're just not that interesting a chapter-closing incident.

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It Made Me Laugh Because It Made Me Laugh:- Al Ewing & Andrew Currie's "Judge Dredd: Harry Sheemer, Mon Amour"

2010-10-05T00:35:00.000-07:00

1.

I laughed out-loud at "Harry Sheemer, Mon Amour", and several times too, something I rarely do where comic books are concerned. I laughed when Harry spat out his drink at 2:6, and when he set up Doonan at 3:4/5; at a ratio of one laugh-out-loud moment for every three pages, this has to be, in its own undemonstrative fashion, one of the most amusing stories I've read this year. And yet, for all that it reads as the broadest and least consequential of farces, it well deserves its punning title too. For underneath the ribaldry, it's a story of how life is, yes and with mournful sighs, a procession of unhappy endings, a litany of self-destructive longings, and a process of common sense being constantly overpowered by petty ambition and belittled by the weight of history.

Take out the gags and the murders, add some war footage and a few more poignant silences, and there is indeed a rather miserable black and white art-house movie here.

By which I don't mean to say that "Harry Sheemer, Mon Amour" isn't actually funny. Quite the contrary, for it's far more Runyan than it ever is Resnais. But, as always, there's a keen sense that Mr Ewing is a man who's found that neither good will nor license has furthered his long-term happiness. Look, Mr Ewing's stories seem to keep saying, people are stupid and self-destructive and then they're stupid and self-destructive all over again! Can you believe it?

It's a sense that's reinforced by Dredd's denouement, where the Judge expresses a fierce, if again punning, relief that he and love are strangers to each other, as if the business of feeling and wanting and the process of acting accordingly will inevitably end in buckets and buckets of tears.

2.

I. Part of what I enjoy so much about Mr Ewing's short tales is that he writes to the page. By that I mean that each side of story functions as an independent chapter of a longer piece, with its own introduction, conclusion, and sequence of plot-points leading without digression from the first panel to the last. Each page, therefore, has its own identity, and there's rarely if ever a sense that plot is being strung together without reference to structure. It means that Mr Ewing's individual pages, let alone each completed story, always feel satisfyingly constructed without being too skinny on plot, or, indeed, too over-elaborate either. In "Harry Sheemer, Mon Amour", for example, only the final page feels slightly too static and story-heavy, with too little happening visually while a great deal is explained rather than being illustrated. (The re-animate-the-dead computer programme certainly appears out of the blue here and feels a touch tacked on because of that, despite explaining the events that have gone before.) It's a common problem with mysteries, of course, of which this tale ultimately reveals itself to be one, the talkative final scene full of explanations and twists which can feel somewhat stodgy after all the action and reversals that have come before.

Perhaps more play needed to have been made of Dredd's closing statement by Mr Ewing and Mr Currie, of his response to the shallow ambitions and fatal consequences of the whole business, so that the force of his contempt and perhaps even bafflement closed proceedings with a greater degree of dynamism. In the absence of some final twist to achieve such a closing punch, the last page feels, despite its virtues, somewhat more like an epilogue than a climax.

II. It is well worth, however, flicking back through "Harry Sheemer, Mon Amour" from the conclusion to note how beguiling the last panels on nearly all of the proceeding pages are, a much under-valued trick that writers and artists often pay too little attention to. Others may produce final panels which encourage the reader to turn the page by generating an enigma or two without remembering to make those panels interesting in and of themselves. But the first four page-turners here by Mr Ewing and Mr Currie are absolutely compelling, and there's a change of tone from each to the other, from suspense to good-humour and back again, which helps to keep the story from feeling monotonous. Page one, for example, closes on the serious note of Sheemer impending murder, page two on the cruelly-amusing death-plunge of Darren, page three on Sheemer's fantastically inappropriate attempt to hit on Suspect after her boyfriend has been shot dead, and so on.

3.

I. I don't think I've come across the work of Andrew Currie before, but at his best, he shows himself to be that rarest of creatures, the artist that can be very funny without reducing the world he's depicting to a cartooneque absurdity. The Mega-City One of this tale might be an absurd environment, and the events that occur within that locale quite farcical, but we take the whole business far more seriously than we might because his characters are always ones we might recognise from our own experience. For example, Vernon's both laughable as well as thoroughly intimidating, and Harry's a faithless little weasel who's still shown to be crafty enough to earn some measure of respect to garnish our contempt for him. That raised eyebrow, for example, on Harry's self-satisfied face at 3:4 is a wonderful touch, just as Harry's rigid focus on his ashrodisiomania at 3:1 counter-balances how daft he looks in his grey smalls. As ridiculous as Harry's ambitions and actions are, we're always being reassured by the art as well as the script that his life is as serious a business to him as it is a squalid and murderously self-obsessed existence to the reader, which means that the tale always successfully feeds a little tragedy into the chuckles.

What's more, Mr Currie's command of his character's body-language is a treat, such as at 2:5, where he shows a capacity to delineate two bodies in a state of relaxation, a rare skill indeed among many modern-day artists, who as a breed often find it hard to draw anybody that isn't tensing up as if to leap through a wall at the slightest provocation. (That relaxation just makes the following panel, where Harry and Doonah are utterly shocked by the screams of Darren as he plummets to his death, all the funnier.)

Most pleasingly of all, Mr Currie and Mr Ewing as a team know that comedy isn't about words and silliness so much as words and actions occurring within a specific environment that the reader can picture for themselves, and trace out the progress of events within. So often, comic book humour relies on talking heads or explanatory captions to convey the meaning of supposedly-humorous events. Artists, it seems, can sometimes mistake the presence of confused characters and situations in the scenes they're drawing with a requirement to make their art confusing too.

A perfect example of the clarity of the storytelling to be found in this collaboration can be found at 3.5, above, where the action proceeds from right to left even as the story progresses from left to right. The first thing we see is Doonan, his screaming face appearing before us straight after a panel in which his "friend" Harry has set him up, then Vernon throwing Doonan across the street, and then Dredd aiming a gun at Suspect's lover; everyone's moving, and yet the action is never confusing, and the space in which the events are occurring is clearly described.

Essentially, we know what's happening, to whom, in what order and where, a rarer luxury than might always be recognised.

4.

One of the clevernesses that I most admire about "Harry Sheemer, Mon Amour" is the fact that it ends up being all about Dredd. For though the Judge is in barely a third of the tale, his capacity to survive and even prosper in Mega-City One is neatly illustrated by the contrast of his cloned and self-contained nature with the self-indulgent and passionate mindlessness of those he's supposedly protecting and serving. Everyone else sees Hayley for what she appears to be, whereas Dredd, freed from much of the obsessionally sexual drives provided by nature and amped up by culture, perceives her in terms of what she's actually done rather than what she looks like. Only he can start to live up to the law, it seems, because only he's been bred to do so, to be seperate from the people and the society he polices. The rest of humanity, who haven't been so constructed, are out there living their lives as Harry and Hayley did, shallow, and usually, if perhaps not always, rather idiotically too.

It's funny, you see, because, in the end, there's nothing funny about it at all.

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The Valiant Hypocrites & The Hopeless Protagonists: Heroes Pretending To Be Heroes, Or Not, in 2000AD Prog 1704

2010-10-01T06:01:00.000-07:00

1.

It's an odd thought, or at least it is to me, to realise that the comic book heroes I turn to for my mindless escapism these days are no more in charge of their own lives than I am mine. I have no idea how I managed to miss that fact. I'd always assumed that the stories of wish fulfillment that I was willingly retreating into were in truth presenting some considerable measure of my wishes being fulfilled. But it turns out that I seem like to enjoy reading about characters who are incredibly frustrated, disappointed in what they've become, unhappy at their life's work, and compelled by duty to pretend to be someone somewhat different from themselves in order to live up to the expectations and needs of others.

Bloody Hell. What am I wasting my money on with my 2000AD subscription? I might as well just take photographs of my own life, paste them up on the 'puter and pretend that what I'm looking at is a heroic enterprise worthy of being immortalised in a comic strip rather than a life spent stumbling and plodding along just like everyone else's.

2."Defoe: A Murder Of Angels, Part 5" writer: Pat Mills, artist: Leigh Gallagher

I. "Who else would want the job but people like us? The lowest of the low." asks Defoe of his comrades this week (3:6-7) as they mow down the front rows of the endless hordes of levitating zombies. Even given my limited experience of the potato-skulled ex-Roundhead, it does seem safe to conclude that he's not just unhappy in his work, but in every other aspect of his life as well, if life he has away from the zombie-killing and the occasional pint.

It's not simply those damn zombies, or even the fact that he's surrounded by allies that he either doesn't trust, or respect, or both. It's not even the fact that he's reduced, in his attempts to save one little corner of the world from the undead, to sweet-talking an alcoholic magician with offers of free beer in return for the necessary assistance which will keep him alive. Most of us are surrounded to one degree or another by poltroons and knaves, and if we don't exactly have to bargain alcohol with the Ravenmaster, there's something of the sort going on with some influential individual or other out there "among them English", as Eli Lapp says to John Book at the end of "Witness". But Defoe is triple-burdened, locked in such a state of physical exhaustion and spiritual malaise that even his less-disastrous hours look far, far worse than most of our most challenging ones. Alienated by the natural order of the world and it's "overwhelming majority" of "fools", broken by the tragic loss of his family, and dismayed by the absence of the Leveller's vision of a democratic and republican England, Defoe would still be a miserable and bitter man even were every single zombie to disappear from England in the space between his next two pistol shots.

II. Time was when heroes had the autonomy to pick and choose their fights, and indeed much of what they did with their free-time too. At worst, most of even the anti-heroes had a cause to serve and be forced to salute to which the reader if not the characters themselves might believe in. But Defoe has nothing to live for except the business of killing the zombies and those who seek to profit from them. Zombie-killing is a less a mark of heroism for his character than the only thing he's got left to do that might profitably fill his hours. It's closer to a hobby in some ways than it is a mission, for what else would he do? It's a business that at times blots out the thoughts of what once was and what'll never be for him. Certainly, his isn't a fate which will lead to him sharing, with either enthusiasm or resignation, the lives of the better sort who find privilege in the England of Kings, those "painters, librarians and ladies companions" (3.5), for it's not as if Defoe has embarked upon a career that will advance his own interests into the rulling class or its flatterers.

He's where he is because he's where he is. There's not really anywhere else for him to go.

III. Of course, the old Leveller would never want to be anywhere other than standing with the lowest of the low, for what else are the most beloved of the Lord and worthy of England? Defoe's where he is because it's where he believes he deserves to be, and where no doubt he feels he ought to be too. But it's a strangely helpless place to find a comic-book hero, with no hope, damn little power, and no status quo to restore or kingdom of justice and promise to create beyond his own temporary survival. Most other characters in 2000AD have at least a cause to believe in and to actively serve, and even, in the case of the various Judges, a State to participate in. But Defoe doesn't seem to be a man with anything much to serve at all, not even in the terms of his own standards and conscience. He's just an individual like so many out here in the real world, serving his time, filling his hours, doing what he can as bravely as he might, and persevering because that's what people do. In that, he's not much of a traditional hero at all, and for a comic book lead placed in what appears at first glance to be the role of line-leading protagonist, he's as emasculated in his world as most of us are in ours.

3.

"Yet let's be content, and the times lament, you see the world turn'd upside down."

4.

The received explanation for the relative unpopularity today of the traditionally square-jawed and decent-minded breed of action hero, from Dan Dare to Superman, is that the audience no longer believes in the ideals of a peaceful and polite world which those characters represent. I wonder if that's so. Perhaps it's not that we don't believe in truth, justice and whatever national way you care to mention, but that we can't delude ourselves in these days that any political system would permit us to act according to those more innocent beliefs. It's not that we've lost our simple-hearted, and perhaps simple-minded, faith in what might once have been labelled "goodness", but that we've gained the knowledge that states are founded upon hypocrisy and compromise and stupidity, realism and factionalism and self-interest, and that if Mr Deeds does ever indeed go to town, he'll either ends up corrupted or heading home with a heart saturated with disillusionment.

Kal-El and Colonel Dare aren't too good for us, perhaps, but they may be too good for any version of the world that we can strain to believe in.

What a perfect symbol, therefore, for such a state of pragmatic and principled pessimism is Defoe, a man that has tried his very best to be a good husband, a good father, a responsible democrat, and a loyal man of God, and who's now reduced to the business of striving not to get eaten by zombies.

5."Nikolai Dante: City Of The Damned, Part 5" writer: Robbie Morrison, artist: Simon Fraser

I. It's this previously-unrecognised preference for the politically powerless hero that leads me, at least in part, to hope that Nikolai Dante hasn't transformed himself from broken drunkard to hero of the people and the single-handed winner of wars in the space of around 5 pages over the past 2 episodes of "City Of The Dammed". For if Dante has just been a little down-in-the-mouth for the last few chapters, and if he's capable of rousing himself back to full psychological health through the means of a few frowns from his mother and the pained suffering of his ex-comrades, then he's obviously not been suffering to the degree that it had seemed. In fact, if he can knit himself together that quickly and that effectively, then I'm less impressed by his marvellously heroic return than I am contemptuous of his bar-room self-indulgence over the past few months. No trauma that can be shaken off so completely can be considered to have been truly traumatic, unless the assault on Vladivostok just happened to coincide with the end of Dante's period of psychological instability, a happenstance too fragile in its unlikelihood to sit easily with this reader at least.

II. Of course, I realise that it's most likely that Dante's cry of being "too cool to kill" is intended to mark the return of the heroic Nikolai to the fullest measure of his former state-humbling powers, but I do hope not. Perhaps I'm so used to sympathising with heroes that are victims of their lives, prisoners of their own fate, that I can't switch the mental gears to cope with a character who can overcome the worst of disasters with a few months off boozing, a touch of guilt-tempered determination and a considerable slice of derring-do. Or perhaps I can't believe in a man who can practically single-handedly charge and collapse lines of laser rifles, who can, in a high-tech world, turn battles through his individual martial valour. For although Nikolai Dante is by his very design intended as a throwback to a more innocent tradition, of Flynn and Fairbanks Jr, there's something somewhat distasteful about the idea of a man who is indeed "too cool to kill!". For if we're supposed to care about the dangers inherent in the fighting experienced by Dante and his cast, then we need to believe that there's some danger there rather than an insubstantial bun-fight. And if we've retreated all the way back to the simple narrative physics that presents us with the equation "ND (our man) + B (Bravery) + RC (The right cause) = V (victory)", then we've travelled back to the times when simply being one of us and in possession of a pair of testicles was the same as being invulnerable and virtuous.

III. It's certainly an uncomfortable business, to be reading of Dante's life-preserving coolness while watching crowds of previously hopeless female warriors cheering him on. Couldn't one of them have been so brave, so cool, perhaps? After all, Dante has no high-tech protection anymore, so what does protect him from death on the battlefield that couldn't protect any other character?

Why should we believe that this man can turn battles simply by his presence, by his idiot habit of charging headlong into lines of ray-gun wielding professional soldiers?

It's not just a daft business, this rot about war being some great big sport for the bravest man to turn. It's an untruth that encourages the thought that victory goes to the daring and good and the noble of blood, and defeat to the unworthy and timid and common, and it's the kind of thinking that I'd have thought would have long disappeared from our comic books.

For if "Nikolai Dante" is a strip which wants us to be moved by Dante's psychological collapse, and to take his enemies seriously as they murder their way across Vladisvostk, then it also has to take the business of war seriously too. Otherwise, the mental despair seems as thin and sentimentally cheap as the fighting does, and the whole often-entrancing confection collapses under its own lack of weight.

III. But perhaps there's hope that "City Of The Damned" is as complex and brutal as Dante has often been as a strip this year. Perhaps the panel of Dante whipping the bad guy's head into pulp is telling us something about our hero's state of mind? Could it be that his bravery is a forced and necessary bravado, and might the unpleasant violence applied to the execution of Ushakov be a measure of Dante's despair rather than his war-winning masculinity?

Because a bare-chested, unbloodied and battle-turning Dante, a hero simply because he's a hero too cool to kill, simply reflects that rather distasteful myth that war is won by playground daring and goodness, but a Dante who's pretending to be heroic, or who's been so brutalised himself that he's lost his moral core, and even his desire to take care of himself, would be a far more interesting figure.

That Dante would be a man of and for our times too, trapped at the top of an embattled hierarchy just as Defoe is trapped at the bottom of his, trying to win something worthwhile from an impossible situation while struggling to retain a measure of his faith while doing so.

Like we do, in our own little and mostly unremakable ways.

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2000AD 1704 & "Iron Man: The Movie"; How Judge Dredd & James Rhodes Didn't Speak Their Mind & Were All The More Moving Because Of It

2010-09-28T00:41:00.000-07:00

1.

Every once in a while I'll catch the first of Jon Favreau's "Iron Man" films as it fills up the slack hours of the Sky Movies schedule. Mostly, I'll let it play with the sound turned low and my attention focused elsewhere, for I've little interest in watching the punch-ups for a sixth or seventh time, while the scenes under the mountains of Afghanistan always stuck me as overly-worthy. In fact, for all I'd argue that "Iron Man" is one of the finest superhero movies ever, if not the finest, it's only the character moments that I can still watch over and over again. Pepper Potts electrocuting Stark as she cack-handedly inserts a new artificial heart into him, insisting that he never asks that of her again, and being told in return that Tony has no-one else he can turn to. Stark himself glad-handing the military brass as his weapons flatten the landscape of a nation which will soon come very, very close to bearing his unmarked grave. And my favourite scene, and possibly the single most touching and yet appropriately underplayed moment in any superhero movie that I can think of, wherein Tony Stark is finally rescued from the desert he fled into when escaping captivity. It's a scene completely stolen by Terrence Howard as James Rhodes, who, as Robert Downey Jr's Tony Stark collapses in exhaustion to his knees, places a single and unshowy arm protectively round his friend's shoulder and, without misty eyes or sentimental expression, tells Stark;

"Next time you ride with me, alright?"

It's a scene I adore, a scene that I get misty-eyed and sentimental over every time, because it tells the viewer everything they'd ever need to know about the friendship between these two characters, and yet it doesn't do anything as banal or wearing as state its case directly or expressing its meaning explicitly. Rhodes may be declaring his love for Stark, but he's not doing anything as unlikely and overbearing as saying so. What's more, he's alluding to all the depth of fondness that his military heart can't easily express within an everyday statement which establishes very clearly how he views the relationship between the two men. For there's no doubt that he respects Stark as a genius, but he's aware that his friend is also a dilettante and a narcissist, and Rhodes carries an absolute conviction that Stark needs a strong self-disciplined man who's extremely good with very big guns to protect him. When it comes to matters of the intellect, Rhodes may well on occasion defer to Stark, but in any situation more threatening than the purchasing of breakfast in a suburban Burger King, Rhodes regards himself as the alpha male. It's his job to look after Tony, it's a responsibility he assumes without qualification, and he intends to keep the man away from harm as much as he can do from now on.

In fact, there's the strong sense that Rhodes considers Stark something of an idiot, that he's caught between a long-experienced frustration with Stark and an emasculating anger at the situation his friend has become embroiled in. There's that shadow of a weary father boiling down all the various rules of what to do here and what not to do there into a simple, forceful statement that might, just might, keep the little tyke before him out of trouble for a day or two more;

"Next time you ride with me, alright?"

Yet in his restraint, we're also being told that this is a man for whom emotions aren't easily recognised or expressed, and because of that, the very fact that he's so awkwardly communicating himself physically as well as through something of a wisecrack becomes all the more moving. And it's such an incredibly succinct statement of the relationship between the two men that it's remarkable that Marvel Comics haven't noticed how ably it defines how each might relate to the other in the Marvel Universe too. Rhodes, it seems, considers himself to be Tony Stark's older brother, in awe of the "kid's" gifts, and yet absolutely convinced that the neighbourhood bullies, or the Mandarin and the Melter, or whomever, will steal Stark's lunch money as well as his repulsor rays if the good Lieutenant Colonel isn't around.

But how very much less affecting and indeed interesting would the scene have been if Rhodes had been given the following words, if the character had been required to state what he thought and felt literally and precisely rather than being permitted to dance so briefly and movingly around the business of being honest to himself as much as Stark;

"I've been worried sick. I've missed you and I've blamed myself for your predicament. You don't know how to look after yourself, but I do and I should have done better. I'll get you home and we'll make sure you never get hurt again. Or else."

2. "Judge Dredd: The Skinning Man: Part 5" writer:-John Wagner, artist:-Ben Willsher

There's some considerable part of this narrative restraint and emotional inhibition in Judge Dredd's discussion with the wounded Cadet Connors in the last chapter of "The Skinning Room" in this week's Prog. Connors has been impaled by the psychopathic Skinner and lies shaking on the floor of Reysk as Dredd approaches him;

"Doesn't look too bad. Med wagon's on its way. Maybe next time, Connors, you'll come in a little sooner with the daystick."

If the reader were unfamiliar with the character of Dredd, these words would read as flat and uncaring, but they're of course anything but, and the key to making sense of them lies firstly in the order in which Dredd expresses the two clauses of his brief statement. If the admonition to Connor about being too sparing with his application of violence had come first, the Cadet could have no doubt expected censure, if not expulsion, from the Academy as a consequence of his behaviour during this case. But

by placing the reassuring, if apparently disinterested, statement from Dredd that the terrible wound "Doesn't look too bad." first, we're aware that Dredd is expressing, as best as his autistic sensibilities can, concern and sympathy. For we know that Dredd himself wouldn't be able to hide any extreme disappointment had he felt that the Cadet had proven himself bereft of the Right Stuff, and we can be sure that Dredd's undemonstrative attempt to reassure the lad is rooted in professional respect rather than good manners and bourgeois compassion. (Dredd, of course, can express frustration, anger and disappointment far easier than any more unexpectedly revealing and empathetic emotion, which is why the slightest kindness on his part is always so telling.) A Dredd who was unhappy with Connors would find it next to impossible to say anything nearing the coffin-plate reassurance that he offers here, but he's letting Connors know that he's got a career ahead of him as well as a life, and so what seems like the least that any Judge could say to the Cadet in such a situation is in fact for Dredd a rather substantial and even somewhat emotional gesture.

And his advice about the night stick can be read, in that context, as Dredd's way of protecting the Cadet against future harm far more than it is criticism for its own sake.

But the mind shudders at the possibility that a lesser writer might have produced the following;

"Hang on, son. It's serious, but help's on the way. You'll live, I won't let you die, and if you learn from this, you'll make a great judge."

The screen-caps from the first Iron Man movie were found at http://www.leavemethewhite.com/index2.html. My sincerest thanks to whoever did the hard work there.

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What I Don't Know Has Hurt Me: An Influence Map Of An Ignorance Of British Comics

2010-09-23T01:29:00.000-07:00

Concluding the brief look at Influence Maps begun yesterday on TooBusyThinkingAboutMyComics;

1.

What's possibly most revealing about these Influence Maps, no matter how awfully executed, is what's so obviously absent from them. (*1) For anybody glancing at the one above, for example, would be quite right in concluding that I haven't been particularly interested in British comic books at all. And though I can't say that that's a thought that I've been consciously mulling around in the past few decades, it's indisputably true, and it was especially so during the Sixties and Seventies, when I should've been gaining a taste for the indigenous fare. Yet, as a boy, I couldn't wait to leave the world of the Beano and the Victor from the cornershop newsagents behind, and despite my willingness to read just about anything I could with words and pictures placed together within the same panels, I'd always, always, reached for the glossier American product first.

*1:- The shameful explanation for how distastefully tacky my Influence Maps are is discussed over at m'other blog, TooBusyThinkingAboutMyComics, for whatever that's worth

2.

It's only now that I regret my lack of interest in British comics, for I'm absolutely sure that I've missed out on connecting with material which is not only of quality, but also redolent of a British culture that's now as lost as my own past is. For I've become more and more aware as time has progressed that the much of the mainstream of British comics that once seemed so unimpressively saturated with jingoism and complacency was at least in considerable part composed of as much rebelliousness as it was of deference.

It's a thought, I must admit, that first started to grow a tail and splash around when I re-read book 3 of "Zenith" in the mid-1990s, for I was so incredibly moved by the appalling deaths meted out to the analogues of the likes of Billy The Cat and Desperate Dan that it dawned on me that I must have cared far more for the characters than I had ever realised.

But those endless Commando booklets had never captured my attention, and the apparent tedium of yet another season with Roy Race escaped my powers of perseverance, and so I never even thought to check out "Battle" and "Action" in the mid-Seventies, because I just assumed that it'd be more of the same "Achtungs" and chirpy working-class cockney cannon fodder. As a consequence, I've never even succeeded in engaging with "Charley's War" on an emotional level, which is why it's shamefully missing from the map above, though I assure you, I'm working on the matter.
3.

It's rather late in the day to realise how I regret not possessing the clear-minded recall and expert knowledge of UK comics displayed by the likes of Steve Holland (*2) and Lew Stringer. (*3) Until this afternoon, I'd simply not thought of how utterly ignorant I am where the comic book history of my own country is concerned, and now I find myself suspecting that for every much-read volume of "Dan Dare" and each well-thumbed copy of "Toxic" starring "Marshal Law", there'll have been any number of characters worth mourning the passing of, and, indeed, daydreaming the resurrection of too. And I sit here, with Paul Gravett and Peter Stanbury's estimable "Great British Comics" beside my keyboard, wondering where on earth do I start, and how?

*2:- Do, if you don't already, visit his "Bear Alley" site, and you can use the UK Blog of Honour link to your right to do so.
*3:- And his "Blimey!" is another must-frequent blog, again accessible to your right.

Your suggestions of any much-missed British comics and Brit-com characters, from small-press to "Commando", would of course be very much welcomed in the comments below.

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There's No "Me" In Critic: Some Questionable Comments & Selfish Reflections On 2000 AD & Prog 1703

2010-09-21T02:54:00.000-07:00

In which the blogger concludes with some disturbing comments received, and begins with some disturbing thoughts generated by himself, and, in-between, discusses how his judgements of "Judge Dredd", "Defoe" and "Age Of The Wolf" surely aren't to be trusted;

I.

Sometimes I almost convince myself that I've got a "platform". The sheer habit of writing blog after blog starts to create in my mind, if surely not in yours, the beginning of a feeling that I've got something to say. Perhaps it's impossible to write a long sequence of pieces without that touch of unintended hubris creeping in, because why continue doing anything if you've convinced yourself, albeit quite rightly, that what you're doing is of absolutely no consequence at all? The very act of writing, and of constructing some kind of semi-reasoned argument, seems, by its very process, to start to corrupt the mind, to slowly convince it that it's engaged on a mission of some importance rather than merely the business of filling up the day with doodles and digressions.

It's a terrible creeping delusion, and to find it nibbling around on the periphery of my awareness is both disappointing and disconcerting. After all, I didn't set out to think of myself as a writer at all, because, of course, I'm patently not. I started blogging, as I've written before, to sharpen my mind and install some sense of discipline into what had become a rather formless life. But to find myself reading the most recent 2000AD, and making a list of the problems I thought I'd found there, without differentiating between those issues which had a limited basis in some more objective judgment and those which were self-evidently nothing more than a reflection of my own taste was seriously worrying.

For if I do have a few problems with this week's prog, the overwhelming majority of them are simply a matter of opinion, and the rest have but a few more atoms of objectivity to support them. And given that I seem to be slowly starting to think that I ought to be presenting some kind of statement of fact here, or even more worryingly, that I might even be beginning to think that what I write is in some way factual in itself, it's obviously time for the blogger to start writing some quite indefensible, if mild, opinions. Because to adopt a few positions that can't be shored up against the simplest of attacks is to perhaps get back to basics and remember that my blogging here isn't about producing "defensible" arguments at all.

It's just about writing down a few opinions, to sharpen the mind and add some discipline to the otherwise often-formless days.

II.

And if you've scanned your way through the above and wondered what the hell this has got to do with you, well, you're right. It hasn't got anything to do with you at all. It's about me reminding myself that I'm straying far too close to the dreaded self-importances, and if it takes the small measure of the publicly-shameful self-importance presented above to inoculate me against a far more serious dose of the same problem, then "mea culpa".

But this all means that part of me is beginning to think that there's an audience for this blog, and that I ought to worry about whether they might find these pieces "interesting", and that's yet another sign of the creeping madness. For there of course isn't any such thing as an "audience" here. Madness! There's a few kind folks that pop in every once in awhile to kill a few minutes of time, but they're not a "niche" or a "demographic"or, Grud help them and me, an "audience", and if I'm writing what I am in the hope of retaining the mythical attention of a mythical audience, then I'm surely going quietly barking.

And without realising it either.

Another good reason, I can't help but suspect, to be writing something here that can't appeal to anyone but myself, and to continue it with a look at some ridiculously personal quibbles of importance only in the context of my own taste which I stumbled into while reading an otherwise-perfectly acceptable issue of 2000AD.

Thank you for coming, should you have got this far: Goodbye!

III.

Blogging corrupts, and lots of blogging corrupts, er, lotsly.

IV. "Judge Dredd: The Skinning Room Part 4" - writer: John Wagner, artist: Ben Willsher

The major problem with "The Skinning Room" is that we've only just finished six months in the company of the psychopathic P. J. Maybe, and now we're watching his less charming and less intelligent sibling-in-psychopathy Skinner murdering according to compulsion and screwing up the disposal of key evidence just as Maybe has done before. Despite being on the surface quite different beasts, Maybe and Skinner are both driven by the same fundamental psychology and so there's a sense here not of deja vu, but of a rather grinding repetition. Worse yet, Skinner comes from the far less entertaining branch of the psychopathic fraternity. He can't make us laugh, or shock us with his audacious schemes, or even make us something of a co-conspirator through his quite-literally captivating charisma. For though both he and Mayor Maybe are squalid and depraved creatures, Maybe's exceptionally entertaining to watch, and Skinner considerably less so.

But there are grounds for my not enjoying "The Skinning Room" which I feel far less secure in arguing. For example, I'm not always comfortable with Mr Willsher's artwork, though he rarely produce even single panels which are unclear and at different purposes to the script. Indeed, there's but a single confusing example in his pages in Prog 1703 where he comes close to losing this reader's attention, and that's at 1:4, where I'm still unsure what environment the Judges are charging into beyond the fact it's full of bad guys firing off some very heavy hand-,held ordinance indeed. Yet there I'm mindful that Mr Willsher been given seven panels and fair degree of information to deliver on that single page, and so perhaps a degree of imprecision might justly be forgiven under such circumstances. Elsewhere, there's not a shred of anything confusing about the work at all.

And yet while there are indeed some effective panels by Mr Willsher on display, such as the atmospheric exterior shot of Rysek at 6.1, the artwork as a whole seems overly dark and his scenes often seem at first glance to be confused and lacking the illusion of depth. Much of this stems from Mr Willsher's habit of surrounding all his figures with equally-thick black outlines, and from his tendency to place great blocks of shadow and relatively little background detail into each panel. It's a style which leaves this reader often struggling to work out where the front and the back of a scene is, an effect which can be very effective, as with the confusion that accompanied the beating of prisoners on Titan a few weeks ago, but which generally makes me wish there were some more light in his panels and a greater subtlety of line-work. It's a business which is complicated further by his habit of producing disconcerting low-angle shots presented on the tilt, such as at 2:3 and 4:6, for if it's already relatively difficult to read an artist's style, presenting the reader with yet more challenges is probably not the wisest option.

And yet I know that the above is to a significant degree simply my opinion. The story was told, the information was provided, and I suspect that the rather nasty content of the Skinner thread might well have made me think less of Mr Willsher's work than I might otherwise have done.

5. "Age Of The Wolf: Part 5" writer: Alec Worley, artist: John Davis-Hunt

As imaginatively written and staged as Rowan's flight from the great werewolf was in this week's episode, I found myself perplexingly detached from the whole matter. On reflection, I suspect this was because I felt pretty damn sure that Ms Morrigan wasn't going to be caught, and that if she was, she wasn't going to end up eaten or even considerably savaged. Under those conditions, the jeopardy in the tale plummets, and I had found myself ignoring the chase and rather noting the background's details of London such as Westminster Bridge, and wondering why it was so empty of abandoned traffic, when I should've been concerned for Rowan . The solution to this problem, if problem it can even be defined as, would perhaps have been to provide Rowan with a winning supporting character or two who could be savaged or murdered. After all, I can't help but suspect that the past few episodes of "Age Of The Wolf" have suffered from the fact that the Earth has supposedly been significantly depopulated while we've seen little of the carnage at all. A touch more time spent on the scene Rowan faced last week at the crossroads between Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street, perhaps, might have mitigated the sense that the world's ended without the terrible details of such having occurred almost totally off-screen

But then, personal experience and taste constantly meddles with any attempt to engage with a tale on it's own virtues. For example, although I find it unthinkingly easy to buy into a London-wide, if indeed a world-wide, plague of werewolves, the fact of two ordinary human beings climbing the London Eye in a snowstorm while scared and shocked is somewhat beyond even my abilities to embrace. And given that Pete and Rowan are surrounded by werewolves, who might be expected to find climbing a considerably easier task than a couple of rather unimpressive human beings might, I'm not sure it was a wise move at all to run that risk of falling for so little prospective safety.

Still, I'm wracking my brains for where I'd head to in the middle of central London should this particular end-of-all-things occur to me, and I'm quite drawing a blank. Perhaps it's just my congenital vertigo which is interfering in my enjoyment of the story.

The blogger's objectivity derailed by a rather pathetic neurosis? How ridiculous.

6. "Defoe: A Murder Of Angels, Part 4" writer: Pat Mills, artist: Leigh Gallagher

I think I can even nail down how my own recent experience has distorted the process of reading this week's "Defoe", which remains in itself by far and ahead the best thing currently being published in 2000AD. For I've been spending weeks upon weeks over on my other blog trying to make sense of the storytelling styles adopted by writers such as Jeph Loeb, Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Millar, and to my astonishment I can't help but feel there's actually considerable method in those scripts which can often read at first as if they're rather thin and shallow. And part of the process of learning to "read" these scripts is the business of noting how these writers identify the most arresting visual scene in the proceedings before focusing on presenting that in a one or more spectacular single-page splashes. It's a business that Pat Mills certainly doesn't indulge himself in here in "A Murder Of Angels", and with only six pages to play with in each chapter, he's indisputably right to do so. And yet, by chance I've trained my mind to focus upon the most eye-catching visual image in any tale, and so I can't help regretting that the business of Ezreel being devoured by the great alligator is passed by so swiftly.

This is quite contrary to my own principles about storytelling, because I've always admired writers and artists who got on with delivering the tale without taking indulgent side-trips off into the unnecessary set-piece. But habit changes what we are, and against our own best wishes too, and now I find myself wanting to know and see more of how Ezreel responded to his desperate situation, and of the details of the hacking apart of the beast, and - and this really does mark my corruptions - something of the scene of poor Ezreel's remains as they lay within the alligator's body.

Scenes as wonderfully macabre as this are incredibly rare, and having been won over to thinking of comics as being as much a visual medium as a literary one, the opportunity to fully exploit this horror seems to me to have been missed, despite some marvellously repellent panels from Leigh Gallagher.

But once again, that's nothing but opinion, and it's one that I wouldn't have accepted from anyone else without some internal wincing just a few weeks ago myself. A foolish consistency might well be the hobgoblin of little minds, (*1) but an unknowing lack of consistency in a half-critic such as myself strikes as an unimpressive matter as well as a bellowing wake-up too.

*1:- It's Emerson, I know. I'm not reduced to passing off Emerson quotes as my own quite yet.

7.

"Nothing much matters very much, and few things matter at all." Alfred Balfour once mournfully declared, as he would, having lived a life of privilege and power where little inconveniences such as the next meal or the rent could rarely have crossed any part of his mind at all. But it's strangely the things which don't matter which can distort the thinking the most substantially. Neighbours shouting over who's grown the largest vegetables, strangers fighting over unintended disrespectful glances in kebab shops, the Christmas number one; in a world of endless meaningless distraction, it's so unthinkingly easy to to connect "I believe" with "Anybody should give a damn".

And of course they shouldn't. I don't, and the whole business of ignorance and irrelevancy struck me yesterday as I spent a few minutes reading over a couple of quite straight-forwardly hateful and frighteningly uneducated comments I'd received in a response to a piece about Judge Dredd written and posted months and months ago. (Believe me, it's not old news to some folks, even if it certainly is to you and I.) Here's the most recent response to my daring statement that fascism is a bad idea, though I've of course removed the name of the gentleman who sent it;

"I don't understand why people insist on repeating what Churchill said, as though it has any argument or sense behind it. He was nothing but a power-mad talker. Democracy has indeed shown little value in itself, and the State in general exhibits all the traits you assign to 'fascism' and 'nazism'. The democratic state is just a variant of the Jacobin Progressivism that gave us Fascism, National Socialism and Communism. Communists used to be called social democrats, Marx was considered a social democrat. There are many 'fascist' regimes with better records than the fire-bombing Americans and English; whose external imperialism put the Nazis and Soviets to pale."

At the time, I was shocked not just with the astonishingly ignorant comment, despite it being a typical product of what arrives here in the comments box anytime I express a loathing for fascism, or a preference for what might rather piously be termed "social justice". No, I was appalled less by the statement that "There are many "fascist" regimes with better records ....", which is obviously the gabbling of a bigot and a fool, than by the fact that anyone would bother sending such bigoted foolishness to a blogger such as myself who so obviously despises the very sentiments being

expressed, especially since the writer doesn't seem to have ever appeared on my Statcounter before and hasn't since. Why throw such fury into the interblogospherenet without even wanting to know if it had arrived and been responded to? Why slosh such ill-educated dreck up in the direction of a bloke who evidently couldn't give a toss? (I counted 6 factual inaccuracies and one statement placed out of context as a misdirection before I gave up caring. How about you? Oh, those well-regarded and successful fascist regimes ....) At what point does it become obvious that the world isn't listening and that it shouldn't be either?

And then I thought, before deleting the original comment from my blogger account, that I piffle on all day myself, and if I don't argue for the worthlessness of democracy or the virtue of fascism, well, it's still piffle.

Mea culpa.

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A Quiet Revolution:- The Matter Of Gender In Judge Dredd: The Megazine # 302

2010-09-17T00:21:00.000-07:00

Part 2, and continued from Wednesday's piece;

If there's any hesitation that marks my willingness to celebrate this far more explicit measure of respect for women in the most recent issues of 2000 AD and the Megazine, then it's rooted in the fear that the next wave of features in each comic might return the reader back to the largely male-dominated world which has so often been the status quo before. For the fact is that this current spread of strong, if thankfully not inter-changeable, female leads could be an accident of commissioning and scheduling, could merely represent the best or indeed the only strips available at any one time. And it would be a genuine disappointment to discover in the coming weeks that what seemed like a growing commitment to a far more interesting and a far more socially just approach to storytelling was simply an illusion created by editorial necessity and the pressures of scheduling.

And yet it does seem unlikely that that could be so, for there's simply too many unexpectedly impressive female roles in these past few issues across both comics. In the most recent Megazine, for example, three out of five strips feature women as the lead character, and a fourth, the anthology series "Black Museum", stars a woman in the protagonist's role too. It's hard to see how that can be an accident, and indeed all but the most rabid separatist could hardly complain if the ratio of male to female leads was shuffled around to ensure that more men were placed into the spotlight in future. (*1)

*1:- How I'd love to read of someone furiously complaining that Matt Smith's editorship of the Megazine displays a marked prejudiced against men. I get some very, shall we say, odd and eminently deletable comments when I discuss gender and race on this blog, so why shouldn't the far more estimable Mr Smith?

2. "Judge Dredd: Twenty Years To Midnight" writer: Al Ewing, artist: Henry Flint

One of the strategies which it seems obvious that Al Ewing takes in order to avoid inadvertent insensitivites in his scripts is simply to quietly insert folks of different genders, sexualities, races and ethnicities into his stories as a statement of support for the fact of diversity in itself. It's an approach that Henry Flint collaborates with in an extremely effective way in "Twenty Years To Midnight", where race as well as gender is represented as a given of everyday life rather than a marker of either difference or deviance, and Judge Beeny, for example, is shown only as a highly capable female Judge of colour. It's an approach which insulates Mr Ewing and Mr Flint against even the most petty-minded criticism of the representations shown in their work. In fact, it strikes me that even someone trying to score the cheapest of points by claiming that the reappearance of the aged and Maggo-esque Mrs Gunderson is a childish joke at the expense of both the elderly and women in general would have to argue their way around the fact that Beeny herself possess the xx chromosome and Dredd is well into his pensionable years.

A touch of care can defuse even the most insane of PC nit-pickers.

3. "Lily Mackenzie & The Mines Of Charybdis: part 5:- creator: Simon Fraser

There’s no getting away from it. Lily’s absolutely starkers again, for the third time in five chapters, and I can't say that I'm absolutely sure why she and her shy sidekick Cosmo have been shown stripped naked in such a full-on manner in this month's chapter, though I'm aware that it's got alot to do with showing how the elite of Charybdis regard all human life beyond their own as commodities. But why this needed to involve showing her and Cosmo stripped quite so utterly naked, and in such a repeatedly explicit fashion, I don't know, for if the point is to show how inhumane the onlookers are, surely our gaze ought to be upon them and not Lily? As it is, the full-frontal depictions of Lily seem to make the reader a member of the gang of bastards staring at her, with our gaze mimicking theirs, and I’m absolutely sure that that wasn't the intent of the scene at all. Yet I don't want to be staring at Lily and her enforced nakedness, I don't want to be party to the humiliation of her, even though she shows herself strong enough to turn a measure of the tables against these heartless vultures. And perhaps if we hadn’t seen Lily so naked so often before, in the shower and in the suspended animation chamber, the use of her nudity here might not have jarred as much as it did, though I suspect that that's not the case. I wish Mr Fraser had suggested Lily’s nakedness to us rather than presented us with the details of it. If anybody could’ve done that through the subtleties of design, it’s Simon Fraser.

Yet I'm torn about the whole matter, because I'm not oblivious to how Mr Fraser shows Lily rising above the gaze of her persecutors while defining herself and her rights through her defiance and her good left hook, and I'm conscious that the scene was intended to show Lily's strength rather than to reduce her to a naked plaything. And given how soberly the other female leads in the Megazine are depicted, it might be argued that a touch of unnecesary if well-intentioned nakedness here is neuttralised as a questionable business by what's shown happening, and not happening, in the strips elsewhere. Perhaps Lily's lack of clothes might even stand as a component of a variety of female representations rather than as a example of some debatable thinking?

Well, I'm not sure I'm convinced by my own counter-argument there, but I will say that the sheer quality and good-heartedness of Mr Fraser's work, in combination with how women are presented elsewhere in this month's Megazine, would make such a debating point far easier to maintain than would've been possible even a brief few months ago.

4. "Hondo-City Justice: Part 3" writer:- Robbie Morrison, artist:-Neil Googe "A Judge's First Duty" writer:- Michael Carroll, artist:- Tiernen Trevallion

I'm determined to write a piece about "Hondo City Justice" in the next few weeks, so perhaps here I might just note that both it and this months "Tale From The Black Museum" feature strong and admirable women in lead roles that men would have as likely as not occupied in years gone by. In "A Judge's First Duty", Judge Leland is as hard as nails, a Judge's Judge, in charge of a training mission of Cadets into the Cursed Earth. Judge Aiko Inaba in "Hondo City Justice" is a similarly bright and able fighter, though her authority, and therefore her independence, is more compromised by the bureaucracy she's shown operating within. It's a pleasing thought that neither of them are one-dimensional stereotypes fighting the bad guys while wearing the tightest of trousers. There's even a difference of ethnicity and age between them which makes each character utterly distinct from the other, and it's that, in addition

to their obvious competency, that prevents the content of their respective tales from being easily defined as "womens" stories. "Hondo-City Justice", for example, is saturated with images of youth and schools, which might in other hands have led to Judge Inaba functioning more as teacher or a mother-figure in the narrative than a Judge. And in "A Judge's First Duty", I suspect that tales of the situation Judge Leland finds herself in might have been crafted in previous decades to incorporate the cliche of the proud and dangerous lioness protecting her young, defenceless cubs. But Leland is shown loyal to the law far and above any concern for her cadets, and Inaba is a determined policewomen seeking the solution to a mystery rather than trying to occupy a maternal role in the text. It's all a most refreshing business to note.

5. "Anderson: Psi Division: The House Of Vyle Part 3" writer:- Alan Grant, artist:-Boo Cook

And finally to Judge Anderson, a stalwart of 2000AD's female roles for almost as long as the comic itself has been published. Yet she's always a been a character which concerned me as much as I wanted to applaud her achievements and expertise, for there always was something of the stereotypically beautiful and yet caring blonde about her. It was Dredd, after all, who functioned as the hard-headed muscle and Anderson the intuitive psychic, Dredd the unimaginative peacemaker-through-violence and Anderson the deeply-concerned maternal figure, Dredd the male soldier who's so much the essence of his duty that we don't even see his face and Anderson was his lovely often-assistant who's so facially entrancing that she doesn't even wear a helmet on duty.

But many of those concerns evaporated long ago as the cast of the Justice Department filled up with a small army of admirably and quite distinct female characters. When the only female Judge carrying a strip is stereotypically thin, blonde and empathetic, it's a stereotype. When there's a host of different female characters, Anderson becomes an individual marked out from the rest by the very factors which would in her isolation mark her out as slightly toxic.

I particularly enjoyed Mr Cook's work here when he presented Anderson as someone who wasn't an eternal 25, who was beautiful but no longer youthful for all of her unmarked blondeness. (After all, if Dredd's pushing 70 and more, what's Anderson now? She must be in her late forties at the very least.) Panels such as those at 8.3 and especially 9.4, shown above, display an Anderson whose undoubted beauty is beginning to harden into the drawn skin and determined lines of an older and far more wise and capable woman, and it suits the character very well indeed. The eye passes over without engaging with the kind of characterless attractiveness displayed at 5.1, but the adding of a few years on her face elsewhere grants Anderson the appearance of well-earned authority and experience which her scripts have always tended to emphasise anyway. And Mr Cook's Anderson is already a far more distinct beauty than the Psi-Cop is often represented as, her face compacted and elongated, her chin far smaller than her long head might seem to demand and somewhat jutting too, and her nose flat against her face and refusing to sweep down and upwards at its tip in a regulation ski-jump of cuteness. Where his art adds the tautness of the years and the lines of decades of duty and concern, Anderson becomes so much more an individual and so far less a stereotype, and thereby even more of an asset to the cast of Mega-City One's finest.

6. And In closing...

Short of the most improbable sex-change for Judge Dredd himself, the Megazine simply can't star any more women in lead roles within its pages than it has this month. Four out of five strips with a female lead marks a highwater event that only an idiot or a disordered ideologue would want maintained. But, for all of that, it's a situation worth noting and applauding, for though it may be an example of what's been a common occurrence in the Megazine's history, it's not been so during these past nine months while I've been a subscriber, and it made me laugh out loud to realise how audacious Mr Smith and his creators were being while all involved avoided making a loud and self-important noise about the matter.

Which is, after all, the way it should be. In a sane world, we wouldn't think twice about whether a character was male or female or indeed any of the individual identities between the two supposed poles, for treating the genders with fairness would be a given, and the quality of each individual story and the strength of its characters in the context of that the only matter of importance up for debate.

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Three Cheers For 2000 AD !!!:- The Matter Of Gender In 2000 AD prog 1702

2010-09-15T09:37:00.000-07:00

1. Three Cheers For 2000AD and The Megazine!!!

Having spent what feels now like a considerable amount of time over the past eight-and-more months expressing disappointment with how gender has been represented in the pages of 2000AD and The Megazine, it's worth making a great deal of fuss about the current state of affairs where female leads are concerned in this week's publications from Rebellion. And I'm delighted to be in the position of wanting to make such a fuss, and of such a fuss being richly deserved, but I'm forced to admit that I don't quite know how to do it. For I'm somewhat confident where analysing texts is concerned, although I'm ready to admit that I could and should do such in a far more disciplined fashion, and I'm fairly accomplished at pointing an accusing finger and listing off presumed outstanding sins, but it's hard to know what to say when the editorial office at Rebellion is doing such a self-evidently good job in representing women in its current strips, as is obvious in 2000AD Prog 1702 and The Megazine # 302. In the end, anything beyond "three cheers" and "huzzah!" feels somewhat redundant, for a detailed reading of the situation would inevitably seem to be on one level or another a carping one, would by its very nature throw up this problem or that, and therefore fail to capture the overwhelming sense of a developing fairness and respect which these pages display. For of 10 strips currently running in the two comics, 5 of them have female leads, and all of them this week with the exception of "Defoe", which is in itself amusingly portraying it's title character as an idiot drunk bloke in a bar, have at least one strong female character occupying a position of respect and power in the narrative.

Good for you, Rebellion! Three cheers for 2000AD and the Megazine! Let's hope that this inclusive programme continues and develops into other key areas such as age, race, ethnicity and a greater number of winning Scotswomen and men in these pages.

2. "Age Of The Wolf: Part 3" writer: Alec Worley, artist: John Davis-Hunt

"Age Of The Wolf" has featured nothing but a few female lead and supporting characters since its beginning three weeks ago, and with the exception of a wounded male cook and his four pleading words in chapter 2 prior to his being finished off by a very large werewolf, we've not even heard from a man in the strip at all. It's a radical position to take in what's traditionally been a male dominated comic, and it's all the more welcome for it. It's also refreshing that our protagonist Rowan Morrigan is neither a stereotypical hardhead, a bloke in female clothing, or a simpering princess in search of a king of one sort or another to settle down with. I'm not sure that I'm convinced by her taste for Motorhead and evening meets at race-tracks yet, but after three chapters, she comes across as convincingly unremarkable while being laudably determined and thoroughly impressive while dodging werewolves on her motor-bike.

And it's worthwhile pointing out that as the number of female protagonists in 2000AD increase, so the need for any of them to stand as an ideal representation of "woman" declines. So, Rowan can quite understandably weep when confronted with the return of her dead mother and the apparent end of the world and not seem to be demeaning her gender with any supposed stereotypical weakness, for elsewhere her fictional sisters are displaying a wide range of qualities themselves. In effect, the more women we see, the less any of them need to be role-models.

Or; a touch of "political correctness" reduces the need for the politically correct.

3. "Low-Life: Hostile Takeover: Part 3" writer: Rob Williams, artist: D'israeli

As the chapters of "Low-Life" progress and the back-story of the strip becomes more understandable to the newcoming reader, I find myself becoming considerably fond of Dirty Frank and, in particular, Thora, who I hope isn't as dead as the end of chapter 1 would seem to indicate. For Thora is both endearing in her authority and competence, exactly the woman one would want to see after the disaster that befalls Frank and the unfortunate Aimme in chapter 3, and a considerable relief in the manner in which she wears her years and her lack of stereotypical beauty. There's such a wretched homogeneity of appearance present in so much of the art of American and British comics, and it's a wearying quality, for it both weakens the verisimilitude of the world being portrayed and the reader's trust of the characters we're being shown; after all, where in our experience of real life is virtue correlated with beauty and youth and steroid-fed muscles?

4. "Nikolai Dante: City Of The Damned; part 3" writer: Robbie Morrison, artist; Simon Fraser

The placing of women in "heroic" texts as characters threatened by, or indeed physical victims of, sexual violence is all too-often a pernicious business. The reader is trained from childhood to expect the fearsome situation to be solved by the arrival of some bemuscled and handsome male protagonist, and the women is expected to collapse with gratitude and perhaps even a worrying rush of sexual desire into the arms of her protector. The very appearance of the woman threatened with sexual violence is often so fetishised that the association of male violence with a sexualised take on female vulnerability becomes a form of insidious pornography in itself. But in this week's "Nikolai Dante", Jena Makarova's appearance while threatened by Dmitri Romanov is modest and could in no fashion at all appear titillating to any but the least clear-thinking mind. And her knife-in-hand assault on her persecutor is one marked by an admirable bravery, given what Romanov has already done to half the strip's cast, and determination. She already is a victim of Dmitri's vileness, but Jenna is certainly no "victim".

Let's hope that her future is written in such a way that her escape from Romanov, if such should arrive, isn't reliant entirely on some dashing hero and his true-serving musculature.

Elsewhere in "Nikolai Dante", Mr Morrison and Mr Fraser also present the second strong and apparently capable older woman in this week's 2000AD, namely the title character's "Mama", Katarina Dante. And, as with Thora, the appearance of a woman who wears her age with dignity without being depicted as stretched-tight and squint-eyed with plastic surgery and self-starvation is a marker of a slow-developing maturity in these pages. In fact, Mr Fraser's depiction of Madame Dante carries with it that rarest of results from a comic book artists skills, namely a depiction of an older person which shows how vigarous they were as a youth without diminishing the reality of the experience and, yes, decay that age has brought.

Such is the measure of strength of character shown by these two very different female characters in "Nikolai Dante", and only the most rabidly political correct nit-picker could object to the highly sexualised and exceedingly naked Lulu and her fellow clothesless frolickers in the last eight panels of this week's episode. For given that women are characterised within this chapter as being far more than passive erotic objects, who can object if a voracious taste for group sex should be an area of keen interest to one of this book's female antagonists?

5. And Elsewhere ....

I've tried to play fair in this quick review of the female characters in this week's 2000AD, and have therefore stayed close to the criteria I've used before when discussing gender in this blog. Consequently, I've not mentioned the strong and able Judge Riggs in this week's "Judge Dredd", who despite her strength and initiative seems about to become a victim of Skinner the serial killer, a worryingly traditional female role which I hope next week's episode will deconstruct. It's not that there's a problem with a woman being shown to be a victim of crime, given all the various women and their varying characters and situations on show this week, but Riggs is at the moment a supporting character who may well exist solely to function as a victim, and perhaps I feel less comfortable cheering her in that role than I do the other characters mentioned above. It's not that she's a regressive representation, but she's not one that I could place before, say, a class of social science students and not expect to hear some challenging questions about.

But overall, and including Judge Riggs in the span of interesting and varied women on show, what a change in the way this issue of 2000AD represents the matter of gender. There are women of all ages, of quite different statuses and power, in jeopardy and representing the forces of order, and even that thorny issue of beauty and youth is being engaged with to a degree. And if the battle won't be won until the slim-hipped and winsomely winning vision of the younger women is replaced at least in part by a less stereotypical version of what attractiveness is, still what's on show here is a considerable step forward compared to some of the quite frankly ugly and derogatory representations on show just a few weeks ago.

Whether this reflects a conscious change of attitude as regards representations of gender on the part of some of the editorial staff and creators of 2000AD, or whether an accident of scheduling and changing taste has created the appearance of such a change, is certainly beyond my ability to know. But what I can say is that this comic book feels healthier, and fairer, and far more interesting. Three cheers for 2000AD, for this week marks a considerable corporate and creative step forward, and, for what little it's worth, I'd love to be able to issue another volley of such "huzzahs!" in each of the coming weeks too.

next; a similarly effusive look at this week's Megazine, because if I'm going to moan when things look worrying, I ought to cheer when the opposite is true!

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What's Being Broken, Who's Going To Fix It, And Why Should We Care? Inclusive & Exclusive First Chapters And Fresh Starts in 2000AD 1700 &1701

2010-09-10T04:29:00.000-07:00

1.

In the admirable Lawrence Block's quite excellent "Writing The Novel", he focuses his attention upon the realities of producing popular fiction in the marketplace of the modern day. It's a fantastic antidote to the pretentious Hampstead twaddle of so many literary how-to-do-it manuals, which seem designed to give fragile flowers on Creative Writing courses a sense of their own poetic importance rather than advising folks on how to produce some saleable work. Take the following, for example, from the "Getting Started" chapter;

"... the first chapter does indeed sell the book. If it is to do so successfully, the reader must be caught up in the story as quickly as possible. Things must be going on in which he can become immediately involved. If you can open up with action, physical or otherwise, so much the better."

Block of course knows of what he speaks. An amazingly prolific as well as a thoroughly able writer, he's regularly quoted by Ian Rankin as being one of his pleasures and inspirations. And if his advice is absolutely pertinent to the contemporary mainstream novel, then I'm sure we'd all agree that it'd be expected to be even more so to the present-day comic book, especially when the unique situation of 2000AD is considered. With its five exceptionally short chapters of serial comic-book fiction all fighting for prominence in a product that's so anachronistically out-of-step with its modern competitors, the need for a new strip to hit the ground running in 2000AD is surely all the more pressing.

2.

But it's obviously not enough to simply begin a tale with a great big bang or a massively intriguing question mark. Too much spectacle, and too many questions, and the audience won't understand why it is that they're supposed to care about all this noise and mystery. Instead, readers need be quickly told what it is that's in danger and given some sense of who's going to put things right, or at the very least they've got to be convinced that they have been given such information, even if it's all a misdirection. (Perhaps most famously, "Psycho" of course begins as a movie starring Janet Leigh as Marion Crane, an office worker on the run after stealing the considerable sum of $40 000 from her boss. It's only when she reaches Bates Motel that the audience begin to realise that this isn't Marion's movie at all; enter Norman the serial killer, and his mother.) Catching the audience's attention, therefore, requires a statement, a snare, a dramatic or highly compelling incident, while maintaining the audience's attention involves enmeshing that focus in an unanswered question or two about why the world's gone wrong, what's at stake, and who might be looked towards to turn things back to the good.

And, in the particular case of 2000AD, it helps if the above can be delivered in the first 5 or 6 pages or so, particularly in an "all-change, new-reader-please" issue such as 1700. Certainly it's a brave writer who willingly and willfully abandons these principles. Al Ewing did so to a degree in this year's "Damnation Station", of course, and it was part of a determined process of constantly and playfully subverting his audience's expectations. A risky business, undoubtedly, and one which may explain why bouquets weren't originally thrown up into the firmament for the strip. Yet it was undertaken in a deliberate fashion to a specific purpose by Mr Ewing, who knew that 2000AD possessed what's in effect a captive as well as a dedicated audience, and that they'd persevere with unorthodox material through their trust of him and the comic itself.

But most folks, however, and that might include Mr Ewing himself, are perhaps best off mostly keeping to the well-trodden path of traditional-style openings, making sure that they add a nifty little hop to their stride as they progress down what is to some degree an inevitably familiar path.

Wham, Bam, Thank You, Mam. Or, indeed, Monsieur.

3. "Judge Dredd: The Skinning Room: parts 1 & 2":- writer John Wagner, artist Ben Willsher

I. We're thrown straight into the ninth circle of Hell in the very first page of "The Skinning Room: part 1", where ex-acting Chief Judge Sinfield is shown being introduced to the violence of the world of the work gangs on Titan. It's a scene which lasts but a page, and though it's full of threat and brutality, it's impact seems diminished by the very speed at which the whole situation is hurled without context at the reader, and then so quickly turned away from too. Anybody who doesn't know what Titan is, however, and how it functions in the world of the Judges, might well be quite thrown by the scene, which despite a small amount of necessary info-dumping in the first panel at 1:1, doesn't have the space to explain itself within. In truth, the first few pages of "The Skinning Room" are an introduction for the 2000AD insider, for the reader who knows why noses are missing on Titan and why this Sinfield bloke should be so hated by his fellows, and as such it works very well. But as a opening strip in a re-launch issue where some new readers might've been tempted into reading their very first 2000AD, I rather doubt that it would work, especially given that it's followed by two pages of sedate politicking between seated Judges in a conference room.

And the decision to give the scene with Sinfield so little time and space reflects an attitude on the part of Mr Wagner which I find continually surprising. For he's created this marvellously repellent and yet utterly compelling fascist, and yet he constantly refrains from giving the reader the schadenfreude at Sinfield's fall and further fall that they must surely desire and, perhaps, even deserve. The acting-Chief Judge's rule took up months upon months of page-time, and yet his removal was achieved in pretty much an-episode and a half. And I for one, and I can't believe I'm alone, want to see him suffer. The nose-removal? I'd like to see it, and alot more too. It seems a strange decision to spend so long showing a man causing so much misery to his fictional fellows, and at the very least some considerable irritation to the reader, and to then ignore giving out the details of that character's comeuppance, no matter how temporary that comeuppance might be.

II. If the first chapter of "The Skinning Room" is far more demure and continuity-minded than might be expected, it's still, in its own terms, something of a genuine delight. The story dovetails with and expands upon the detail as well as the broader arcs of long-established continuity, from the mutie expulsions through Sinfield's attempts to shore his rule up with demagoguery to the paranoid climate of suspicion that the ex-acting Chief Judge created within the Judges ranks. But it is a slow business, and the rather commonplace appearance of another surrogate Ed Gains in a strip that's just had a year's worth of the psychopathic P. J. Maybe is another "fresh-start" decision which seems rather odd. (Skinner and Maybe are of course different classes of psychopath, but they're still grounded in the same condition, and it's an immensely familiar one too.)

And so for all its virtues, and I've been singing the praises of "The Skinning Room" in recent weeks, this is a first chapter which could only really exist in a long-standing magazine such as 2000AD. It's perfectly adapted to serve the needs of the comic's long-established readership, but does it serve the purpose of helping to give 2000AD a boost in sales in the wider market? Surely the events of the second chapter of the strip in prog 1701 were far more suited to the needs of a series-opener, for the bloody business of the Judges crackdown in Sector 50 would've proved far more shocking and involving than any of the three scenes in chapter 1 could. The events of the Council, Sinfield's arrival on Titan, and Skinner's introduction could've then been delivered either later or threaded in part throughout the scenes of the slaughter of Sector 50's street criminals.

Such a decision to surrender a touch to commercialism by rearranging something of the order in which events were shown to occur needn't have confused the reader about what this story was about. After all, Mr Wagner has seeded the story with four disturbed equilibriums which need restoring, but the sense of any one of them doesn't rely upon the sequence in which they're placed. (There's the loss to Dredd of his relative autonomy on the streets, and the threat to Titan's order with Sinfield's arrival. There's the damage done to unfortunate individuals by Skinner and the decline in lawfulness in Sector 50 and the Big Meg as a whole.) And the complexities of the narrative are in any case simplified by the fact that Mr Wagner only presents with the one candidate for putting the world to rights, namely Judge Dredd himself.

So nothing would've been lost by starting the story with a touch more shock and awe.

4.

I can't help but wonder whether 2000AD is excitable and popularist and disposable and shocking enough today. I have a lingering suspicion that the writing is far more influenced by a literary rather than a commercial sensibility these days, and that something of the vigour and spark of the earlier and more kinetic days of the comic may be getting lost. With John Wagner, an undeniable master of comic book writing, there remains the sense that occasional chances for maximising the impact of his stories are being lost, as perhaps indicated here and in the astonishingly swift and deflating ending to "Tour Of Duty". It's not that his work isn't splendid; the praise I've written regularly on this blog before should fully support the general and quite-justified admiration for his story-telling. And nor is it a matter of wanting Dredd's world to be characterised by unnecessary spectacle and mindless sentimentality. But it is an issue of whether the most is being made of the potential that's there, and perhaps the question of whether the writers of 2000AD pay enough attention to the twin virtues of clarity and energy is worth asking.

5. "Low-Life: Hostile Takeover: Part 1" - writer:- Rob Williams, artist:- D'israeli

The key question is whether the first episode of "The Skinning Room" was structured in such a way as to ensnare new readers while clearly informing them about Dredd's world. And in the absence of a survey answering the question in any representative fashion, all I can do is speculate that I'd imagine that it wouldn't.

It's a problem that can be found elsewhere in the prog, with only "Defoe" serving as a strip apparently designed to both inform and attract new readers while satisfying the long-term audience too. And perhaps the most surprising example of this problem of difficult-to-engage-with first episodes is to be found in Rob Williams and D'israeli's "Low Life", where I myself was completely lost as a reader within 7 panels.

It's a strange thing to say of one of Mr Williams scripts, to suggest that its impenetrable to all but the longterm fan, for that seems to say that he's a writer who pays little attention to his audience's needs, and little could be further from the truth. His scripts for "Ichabod Azrael" were, for example, fine examples of the craftsman's care, constantly and successfully answering the challenge of having a remorseless killer as a story's antagonist while placing in him in a space usually occupied by the narrative's hero. Yet in "Low-Life", a pleasingly reflective and question-

inspiring first page is followed by three scenes which seem both quite disconnected from the teaser and badly lacking in background information and context. Yes, the very idea of a tall and powerful transvestite robot is funny, and the idea that somebody would defend the machine's right to transgress bourgeois morality is amusing too. But if the reader doesn't know where the scene is set, or who the cast, is or what they're doing, then the scene is all gag and no meaning. (*1)

And the final scene in part 1 of "Hostile Takeover", where one Dirty Frank seemingly connives in the murder of one Thora would be shocking if the chapter had given the slightest indication of who the characters were in relation to each other, or indeed in relation to themselves. Add to that the confusion caused by having a Judge be so astonishingly corrupt in front of a huge number of witnesses, any one of which could pass a lie-detector test and thereby end his sorry talewith a single-ticket trip to Titan, and the whole beautifully-drawn confection served almost as a post-modern experiment; how to create a coherent narrative from four scenes when only two of them seem to be clearly connected?

For this wasn't a case of a strip where a debate might be held about the placement and emphasis given to certain incidents. This was a strip by creators I greatly admire which made no sense at all to anybody not already in on the set-up. In its design, it served to exclude anyone new to the experience of "Low-Life", and that can hardly have been the intention at all. Yet, I couldn't tell you what the status quo of this story was, or how it might have been violated, though Thora's death, whoever she is, hardly looks like a good thing well done. And if Dirty Frank appears to be the strip's protagonist, there's little sign of how he can ever put the world back to rights so far.

*1 - The conversation closing on an acceptance of robot's sexual and gender rights led me to believe that I was looking at the scripts protagonists, for example, when much of the opposite seems to have been so.

6.

The key issue is, I believe, the degree to which the stories in 2000AD are intended by editorial fiat to be inclusive, and both welcoming and inticing to new as well as old readers, or exclusive, serving only the needs of a long-standing fan community. Certainly, the first approach needn't alienate older fans, but the second will definitely preclude the chances of 2000AD gaining very many new devotees at all.

And as a key component of an "inclusive" approach, these first chapters are important, they really are, even when the vast majority of the audience is already committed to the comic regardless, and perhaps a greater awareness of that might bring even more potential subscribers into the fold, a point of some importance to everybody's future, I might presume, creators, publishers and readers alike.

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The Mysterious Words Of Mark Millar (2000AD Blog Edition)

2010-09-08T06:49:00.000-07:00

First off, a quick apology to you if you’ve popped in here thinking this is a new essay or review or whatever. I’m sorry, but it’s actually a request for some help as regards Mark Millar and the research I’m doing about him at the moment. I really do hope that this doesn't seem like a bit of a cheat to the innocent visitor. I guess it is. But I assure you that I don’t intend to be doing very much of this asking for assistance business in the coming months, and new pieces which don't involve asking for help will be up on this blog in the very near future indeed

The truth of the matter is that I’m on the hunt for old interviews, press packs, podcasts and whatever else might help me get a better grasp on Mr Millar’s work. I’m reading “Saviour” at the moment, for example, and it strongly looks to me as if it were either influenced in both its form and content by “Crisis”, or even perhaps written with half-an-eye to appearing there. But I can’t say, because I don’t know, and I don’t feel like peddling supposition as insight! So, if anybody knows of any interviews which are slightly off the “Wizard” track, which I mostly already have amongst others, particularly as far as the more-distant past is concerned, I’d be grateful to know about them. Perhaps they’re archived somewhere on the net that I’m ignorant of? Maybe there were some old British fanzines such as BEM or FA that I need to keep an eye out when they come up on E-Bay or whatever? And should there be a book not currently listed by Amazon that contains Millar-relevant material that I might have missed with my birthday tokens, I’d love to know. Your advice would be very welcome. (That single-sided "Sonic The Hedgehog" fanzine interview? I'd love to see it.)

The key to this is that nobody should never over-estimate my common-sense!

Of course, I’m not looking to scrounge material, I can’t afford to buy stuff off-the-cuff and I can’t encourage the sharing of material illegally. And I’m not being disingenuous there either. I think this is probably a project that I ought to do the old-fashioned, boy scout and above-board fashion. And anyway, it’d be a damn cheek to suggest anything else to the contrary. This is research that’ll have to be done the careful and patient way, but then, that’s how I was trained to undertake investigations in the old days, before the net or any other modern wonder. I think I’m going to enjoy the process!

I should say that I intend to eventually put up a proper bibliography of Mr Millar’s work, including references to interviews and so on, so there should be something for the curious to access in the end in return for you poor folks reading this, if you’ve even got this far. And I wouldn’t blame you if you hadn’t.

I hope the day goes well folks. I’ll be back soon with some new material and as always encourage you to contribute to the comment boxes for any of the pieces here-in; I very much appreciate you doing so. And I promise this site won’t become a regular scrounge-fest, though I fear occasional begging for information may occur. But rarely, I absolutely promise!

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That Other Pat Mills: "Defoe: A Murder Of Angels" in 2000 AD Progs 1700 and 1701

2010-09-07T00:59:00.000-07:00

It seems that the other Pat Mills has been taking responsibility for the first two scripts for "Defoe: A Murder Of Angels", returned to 2000AD in the past few weeks as part of the line-up introduced in Prog 1700. Perhaps his identical twin Pat Mills was simply too burned out from the strain of psyching himself up to write the endlessly dubious and pointless adventures of Bloody Bill Savage, or perhaps the two of them simply have an agreement that the market needs some top-notch Pat Mills every three or four serials in order to keep the brand alive.

Whatever the reasoning that motivated the twins to divvy up the workload so that the more enervating of the team has now moved aside, the reader can only be grateful for the return of the more Pat Mills-like of the Mills brothers. The evidence of his reemergence, perhaps from creating another raft of hopefully-profitable and rewarding creator-owned properties, is everywhere in these first dozen or so pages of "Defoe". Even the cliffhanger for the first chapter, showing Defoe about to execute Bodie, one of his zombie-killing comrades, sets up a conflict-intensifying debate in the following episode, an example of taut and disciplined storytelling largely absent from "Savage", where episode-closing conundrums appeared and disappeared without consequence time after time.

Perhaps the most marked difference with "Defoe" when compared to this year's "Savage" and "ABC Warriors" is the care and indeed joy that's been taken in creating the detail of the alternative past of 1669. In the most recent sixteen chapters of "Savage", for example, Britain under the shiny leather heels of the Volg invaders seemed little different from the Britain of today beyond the lack of modern popular technology, the distant presence of robot warriors, and the sense that it's always raining on the poor coffee-shop owners of the Old Kent Road. Whatever leaps of imagination that might have been taken to detail the socio-economic changes marking this alternative-England as meaningfully different to ours, where the beastly foreigners haven't yet crushed the British constitution if not the bloody Bulldog spirit, had remained unleapt. Similarly, the future Mars of the last ABC Warriors tale was conspicuously bereft of those characteristically bright-minded flourishes that mark the best work of the more accomplished Mr Mills. All that sparkled there in the text beyond big robots hitting big robots, without either big robot coming out on top, was the concept of a capitalist economy forced to constantly recycle its old technology under new brand-names, because there was nothing new that hadn't already been invented for the marketplace. It's the kind of clever idea which might have appeared and been discarded in a single episode of the first five books or so of "Nemesis", and it's hard to get used to the modern-day conceptual parsimony of recent Millesian scripts. Linking up the last chapter of "Savage" to the arcana of ABC Warriors continuity, and in a way that's inconsistent with previous stories, isn't so much an example of a richer script as a continuity pile-up.

But "Defoe" is already a bravura display of continuous cleverness, and so much better for it. There are few writers who can match the cleverer and more enthusiastic Mr Mills when his brain is linking concept to concept with imagination and the wit of the perpetually outraged. And it's not just that this Mr Mills has his characters discussing the changed history of this strange zombie-infested seventeenth century, such as when Defoe and Bodie debate the events of an unfamiliar naval mutiny of 1648. It's also that the connective tissue of this world is being thickly spun as Mr Mills writes so that we get more than just a past with a huge number of the undead on board and slavering. Rather we're told of the economics of factory farming using the zombies, and the use of their shattered bodies to make undead-bread for their fellows. There's even his developing lexicon of everyday 1669 slang, which has logically and inevitably evolved to deal with the new social phenomena which zombification has caused, my favourite of which is the term "reeking", or the practise of, shall we say, intimate congress with a zombie by a member of the not-dead classes.

Into these sharp and witty scripts can be found the usual horde of characters which have become more and more ubiquitous in the scripts of the Mr Mills over the decades. Yet here each of the cast are given an absolutely distinct visual identity, courtesy of the quite excellent Leigh Gallagher, and individual personalities and speech patterns too. Unlike in "Savage", where one criminal/rebel merged into another, and therefore did nothing in the narrative but sludge it up with similar-looking and similar-sounding one-notes, here it's possible to imagine that any two or three of Defoe's band could be thrown together at random and spun off into their own adventures. These men and women are as interesting as they are different, and it's possible to imagine the splendidly potatoe-headed Defoe himself disappearing without any narrative momentum being lost.

Finally, though Defoe retains much of the scowling machismo and pig-headedness of Bill Savage, it's a far more engaging trait for a man of the Commonwealth to possess. There's little more tedious than the political correctness which places the appropriately nice gender stereotypes of the 21st century back into period clothes for historical adventures, but Defoe could well be a man of his time, or at least this version of his epoch. He's as stout-hearted and unreconstructed as we'd expect of a passionate Roundhead and Leveller, violent, bad-tempered, and possessed of the Puritan's capacity to divide the world immediately up into good and bad while instantly damning the latter. Let's hope that Defoe proceeds to thoroughly appal us with his unanachronistic ways, in addition to slaughtering a few hundred gross of the undead.

Yet, underneath the relief inspired by these two chapters, there remains the lurking suspicion that this Mr Mills has only stepped in for the plot-setting pages of Defoe before passing the adventure back to his brother, who'll presumably soon be rested up from the inanity-overload that was the sixteen long chapters of "Savage". How disappointing would that be, if the smartness and concision disappeared between one episode and the next, and all that was left was one group of macho warriors firing guns at another without anything of consequence seeming to have been achieved at all amdist all the empty fist-waving?

"Defoe: A Murder Of Angels": so far, damn good. Thank you, Mr Mills, and, no, no thank you, not you, not the other Mr Mills.

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Over And Above The Call Of The Plot: Some Digressions On The Writer’s Craft in “Judge Dredd: The Skinning Room: Part 1” in 2000AD Prog 1700

2010-09-03T03:18:00.000-07:00

Judge Dredd: The Skinning Room: Part 1 – writer: John Wagner art: Ben Willsher

I. Like a man with Asperger’s Syndrome forced to turn away from his obsessions and required to focus on the irrelevancies and waffling of everyday life, Dredd sits sulking and disconnected in this first part of “The Skinning Room” while suffering as his colleagues debate the governance of Mega-City One, and, rather splendidly on the part of Mr Wagner, doesn’t come out of the process looking entirely admirable at all.

It would’ve been so easy for Mr Wagner to reduce the members of the Judges Council Meeting here to a gaggle of bureaucratically-minded morons. Cheap laughs would’ve been easy to solicit and Dredd could’ve been contrasted heroically with the idiots who run the Big Meg. Yet Dredd isn’t entirely our man at the high table here, because it’s impossible to view his fellow council members as simply being career-obsessed, desk-content apparatchiks. Yes, it’s enough to make anybody who’s ever sat through a “management meeting” or suffered as part of a “steerage committee” roll their eyes in time-slowing horror when Chief Judge Francisco asks one of his colleagues whether she has “.. the quotes on that trouser contract .”. But elsewhere, Dredd’s less street-happy colleagues seem quite sensible, or at least they do when considered in the context of the unavoidable fact that they’re the effective rulers of an absolutely insane fascist dictatorship. But though Dredd himself isn’t truly listening to what’s being said around him, there are laudable discussions being quietly conducted in his distracted presence. The issue of whether the Department should inform the citizenry about Sinfield’s corruption and sentence, for example, is a lovely touch that shows just how Mr Wagner thinks about the minutiae of his story, and of where to place it so that Mega City One is shown to be more than just another monolithic futuristic state, where the government works like clockwork until Dredd needs to kill some usurper or other.

And no matter how Dredd repeats “Yet another council meeting.” to himself with all the despair of the utterly bored, the assembled body is more than happy to listen to his plans for a typically-Dreddheaded crackdown on crime, and to support it too. Perhaps some of that is the fact that Dredd himself will be out of their hair for awhile if they commission him to beat up huge swathes of the unsuspecting masses in Sector 50, but there’s also a genuine willingness to engage with the debate from the perspective of their infinitely less office-friendly colleague. The truth is, they’re much more respectful to old Joe and his opinions than he is to them, and that touch saves him as a character from being nothing more than Dirty Harry trapped in a San Franciscan Police Department strategy seminar. Dredd is far, far more nuanced that Mr Callahan ever was, though of course, Dredd’s also had almost 35 years of comic books to become so.

The truth revealed again here by Mr Wagner is that the cloned mind of Dredd really does possess something of an autistic mind. He’s been bred and trained to fulfil one particular duty and he has no interest in life beyond it. Human life is utterly defined for Dredd by that narrow span of social interaction specified by his Law, and he wouldn’t want it any other way. That all becomes particularly obvious when Dredd’s finally called to express himself. Previously contemptuous of everyone else’s agenda, and quite disconnected from their politicking, he’s instantly animated and willing to engage in his own speech and his own contentions when the chance to arrest folks in huge numbers, and personally too, comes up. His language may be different to theirs, but his willingness to grasp political power when it suits him is no different at all. (It may be that he wants less power than they do, but he still wants every atom of the power that he can get to run his life the way he wants to. Dredd is not what a modern job reference would define as a “team player”.) His short sentences are punctuated by a hammering rhythm, each point marshaled like a sequence of road blocks hemming in a dangerous speeding motorist more and more, until his fellows have no choice but to agree with his recommendations, though I suspect they would've done so anyway.

“Zero tolerance. Maximum publicity.”

If the difference between Dredd and the vast majority of his fellow Judges is a constantly repeated theme throughout the strip’s history, then this is an admirable and effective way to re-emphasise the point without repeating exactly the same scenes as before.

II. It’s impossible to not notice the symmetry between the mutilated Sinfield surrounded by his fellow baying prisoners on Titan (2.1) and Dredd sitting alienated from his fellow Judges during the Council meeting, (2.2) both shots ably rendered by Mr Willsher. (Sinfield is quite at the centre of attention on Titan, and it may be there's an echo here of a future acclamation of him by his fellows.) So, perhaps a rebellion on Titan led by Sinfield, then, and perhaps Dredd won’t find his comrades among the Earthbound Judges quite as reliable, or maybe as effective, as those noseless recidivists Sinfield gathers from amongst his new off-world acquaintances?

Just a thought.

Where Are We Now And Why Should We Care? Some Establishing Shots In 2000AD 1700

2010-08-31T11:19:00.000-07:00

1.

There was a time when courses for teachers delivering Film and Media Studies were never complete until some speaker or other from the cutting-edge of theory had conspiratorially declared the death of the establishing shot. Modern audiences, we escapees from schools and colleges would be informed by those who knew, have seen so much film, sat before so many TV programmes, that they no longer require a grounding in where the coming events are about to occur. They can construct their own version of where it's all at through a visual, well-trained and unconscious process of osmosis, grabbing one perspective from a few frames here and then another from those there as the super-fast edits flash away before them.

Apparently, we don't need those time-slowing and patronising establishing shots. We can construct for ourselves a mental map of, for example, the bridge of the Enterprise, and it's a process which becomes all the more apparently enjoyable for the challenge of blinking away the lens-flare and the shaky-cam shots.

2.

But there's a great deal of things that I don't supposedly need that I very much enjoy, and the establishing shot is most definitely one of those. Static and old-fashioned it may be, but that doesn't mean that it isn't still a potentially enjoyable and informative tradition. After all, I want to know where I am before the zombies start their assault on the Tower, or the prisoners begin to beat on Sinfield, and I enjoy the luxury of pausing and focusing and knowing exactly what the lay of the land is before the end of the world begins again.

3.

The panel above from Worley and Davis-Hunt's "The Age Of The Wolf" isn't a classical establishing shot, of course, as a very strict and bloody-minded textbook would have it, not least because the characters have already started their actions by the time we readers are invited to view the scene. But the opportunity is surely being presented here to ground us in the everyday reality of the strip, in the terrace houses, cattery and, most affectingly to a bloke in exile from London, the tower blocks glimmering through the snow in the background. (Mr Davis-Hunt's colours are particularly effective here, evoking the unreality that snow falling through artificial light creates at evening time, as it makes real life look less like itself and more like the product of some rogue special effects team.) If this isn't quite an establishing shot, it's close to one, and for me the stage-set here was far more beguiling than, quite understandably, the still-unfamiliar players were.

It's such a well-observed scene, describing a plausible urban reality rather than aping the comic-book conventions of how to fake such, and it made me care about the characters on show, because if their world is real, then the chances are that the people placed in it will be real to the reader too.

4.

Of course, there's no reason why a scene can't begin in the middle of the action, with the reader's confusion evoking the disconcertion suffered, so all the literature tells us, by those in conflict. It's just that the decision to use an establishing shot or not has to be the choice of the creators rather than modern-day convention and post-modern dogma. In the first shot of this week's rather splendid initial chapter of "Defoe: A Murder Of Angels", for example, Mr Mills and Mr Gallagher immediately establish the sense of intense jeopardy by showing the Tower Of London surrounded by a vast army of zombies. But the decision to delay the battle itself in the strip doesn't so much slow the action as allow the awareness of jeopardy to be ratcheted up, while also giving space for characters to be introduced, conflicts created, and the wonderfully insouciant-when-faced-with-zombies tone of the fighting men and women laid down.

And, anyway, aren't you more interested in how Defoe and his soldiers react to the prospect of the encroaching undead army than simply watching yet another zombified punch-up?

5.

Comics can establish and hold a stillness that film rarely if ever can, especially in the context of the modern mainstream blockbuster, where the school of Michael Mann insists that thy audience shall never wince nor blink without missing a cut. Whatever the genre, it's doubtful that the reflective establishing shot above, which opens Rob Williams and D'Israeli's "Hostile Takeover", could ever be held as long and as still in a movie as I enjoyed staring at it this morning. The slightest movement in the sky or flicker of light on film would've become in part the point of scene for the viewer, for movement is nearly always the business of the story on screen. But a quiet and beautiful establishing shot such as this in a strip restores to the reader the autonomy which only comics can offer, that control over the eye's passage from panel to panel which determines how time passes on the page.

And so it's not just that this scene is wonderfully effective in establishing the privilege and yet sadness of the young woman therein, or that it clearly places events within the context of the familiar architecture of Mega City One on display outside her gilded cage. It's also that the choice of stillness to launch a new story shows a faith in the willingness of the reader to follow a tale that's not front-loaded with punches and accompanied by sound effects and explosions. A quietly traditional establishing shot is, in its own way, a marker of an agreement between creators and readers that the story is the thing and the surface flash welcome only as long as it accompanies something of depth too.

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Prog 1699; The Really Good Things! A Blogger Repents Of Seeming So Negative, Without Repenting Of A Single Word He Said

2010-08-26T01:01:00.000-07:00

1. And On The Other Hand, There's Not A Fist, But A Smiley Face

It's a point that I've no doubt referred to before, but it's so telling that the word "criticism" has come in English to mean "saying something bad" and the word "critic" become synonymous with the image of a pontificating and self-aggrandising bastard.

It may be true, mind you, for a large number of critics and for the most substantial degree of time, but "criticise" is simply a word that describes the business of analysing. It doesn't mean "to have a go", though having a go may well be what a critic chooses what to do. Though my students, to give but some tens of hundreds of examples, would never believe it, criticism isn't by it's very nature a negative process, and even the presence of a negative write-up doesn't mean that the work concerned lacks fine qualities or that the critic, for want of a better phrase in the context of blogging, has something against the creators and their craft.

And though last time I was decidedly grumpy about 2000AD and it's current standard of representations, I awoke this morning, read some splendidly inspiring and informative comments left on the blog, and thought "I bloody love this comic book".

Which I do.

And so, before a piece for my other blog which makes me feel so nervous I'm not even going to think about it for awhile, and which those who read that blog might want to make a pass over and raise an eyebrow about tomorrow, I wanted this morning to just jot down some things about Prog 1699 which I really did love.

It's a slight but keenly felt piece of blogging, I do know, for I'm up against it, for reasons tomorrow's blog will reveal, but I woke up charged and I wanted to simply state that, whatever its problems, this is, as Agent Dale Cooper might have said, a damn fine comic even when it's less damn fine than it can be.

2. "Hit The Deck" - cover to prog 1699, artist Boo Cook

There's such a sense of joyful energy in Mr Cook's cover to this week's prog. It's that pronounced sense of both zest and threat which makes the cast of "The Red Seas" positively demand the reader's attention. Look! That's Douglas Fairbanks as Captain Jack, isn't it, and I love how cleverly Mr Cook has added a shadow line to Jack's upper lip so that it gives the impression at first glance of being a Fairbankian moustache! This is a virile and rather intimidating Jack, and if his face is a homage to Fairbanks, then his trouser's contents are surely a tribute to Errol Flynn. His pose contains all the verve of the supremely confident man, his balance before charging as threatening as his smile is charming, and his bastardised English Naval uniform really does pass as stylish rather than a cast-off pressed into everyday service. I want to read more about this man.

Similarly, his colleagues each carry their own energy and their own story. A few of us have been talking in the comments recently, for example, about that fearsome depiction of Captian Sarita on Mr Cook's cover. She too should be carrying her own series tomorrow. And the truth of the cover is that all characters need to be represented with vigour, with a sense that they and the artists presenting them are possessed of such enthusiasm for the whole business that the page can barely hold the work in place without its contents intruding into the real world. It doesn't matter if a character is stoical or flamboyant. The best Dredds may have often been solid and uncommunicative, but they were drafted in such a fashion that the reader almost expected the Judge's head to turn of its own accord towards us and demand "What are you looking at?".

And within Boo Cook's cover, another truth about Captain Jack and his crew is made more obvious to this reader still relatively new to their adventures. These folks are intimidating, and they're more than capable of doing some serious damage.

Grand stuff. More please.

3. "Judge Dredd: A Home For Aldous Mayo" writer Al Ewing, artist PJ Holden

If there's one thing that I feel is often lacking in many of 2000AD's stories recently, it's a sense that emotions are being discussed as much as plot-lines are being worked through. For though stories, despite the baleful tradition of Bloomsbury, don't necessarily have to be concerned with presenting a three-dimensional portrait of human beings and their condition, they do mostly need to evoke feelings which the reader can be touched by and relate to in some way to their own experience. And one of the chief virtues of Al Ewing's writing is that he presents us with an emotional core in each of his stories, a fact which can be forgotten to a degree under all those transgressive notions of women with breasts for heads and their like. Underneath his radical surface, Mr Ewing is the most traditional of writers. It's not that he doesn't want to push the envelope in both content and form, for he does, but he knows, absolutely knows, that writing for humans involves writing about them. That's why I'm always relieved when I see his name in the credits box, and it was a welcome surprise to do so this week.

And "A Home For Aldous Mayou" isn't simply about the Rosebud moment at the end of page 6, where we discover the truth of the ancient scientist's invention. It's about the sense that Mr Ewing and Mr Holden skillfully evoke of two times, the longed for past and the dreadful present, running simultaneously and separated by a barrier which physics, and wishful thinking, might bridge if only we could apply ourselves with more focus and fervour. There can't be anybody who hasn't played over the events of their past searching for that one moment, that Groundhog Day equation, which would have linked "x" to "y" and caused "happiness" to have been generated. And this is a story about lost things, not just for Aldous, but for Mega-City One too. Because the old domestic world was flattened with Booth's missiles, and what's left is the Justice Department that poor lost Mayou is co-opted in. It's all that's left, and, of course, and tragically, it isn't enough. Neither Tek-Judge Donaldson in 2070 nor Judge Dredd in 2132 can offer Mayou a home, though they both promise one, and though both believe sincerely that what they're doing is a kindness as well as a necessity.

But everything's been lost, and it can't be rebuilt, and since works of craft link themselves together in our minds in that way that different periods of the time stream in reality don't, the last lines of "The Great Gatsby" seem to me to be indivisible from Mayou's appearance in 6.3, where Mr Holden draws the desperate and weeping man declaring; "If only I could finish it."

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

That vast reserves of effort expended by Mayou beating against the current for that long must have quite exhausted the man. Wouldn't it you and I, and doesn't it?

4. "The Red Seas: Hell &High Water: 12" script: Ian Edginton, art Steve Yeowell

Mindless macho bravado has a shelf life where my own tastes are concerned, and the must-consume-by date on that product was passed around November 1985. I've rarely met a problem away from the football pitch which can be solved by a clenched fist, some gritted teeth, and a cry of "C'mon lads", and that strategy didn't work that well on the pitch either, to be honest. (There's a lovely story of the superb Dutch team in the European Championships of 1988 hearing England in their changing room shouting and swearing with their patriotic determination before the game between the two sides that year. The Dutch just sat and caught a few moments of peace before slaughtering England 3-1; the score didn't reflect their superiority, and with that should have gone the myth of the plucky Brit and the passionless Continental.) And this was all brought back to me by the quiet shot of Captain Jack's crew reorientating themselves after their leader's apparent death at 10.4 by Mr Yeowell. Nobody's raising their fist to the heavens and nobody's crying vengeance. Truth to tell, these folks are exhausted, emotionally and physically, as people are after combat, and so the determination to carry on with what had been agreed before the apparent disaster is all the more laudable and moving.

"We stick with his plan. It's what he would've wanted."

People do speak in platitudes formulated into cliches when they're upset. I certainly do, and I suspect that the same is true for you. And the man who can barely stand, for weariness and heartbreak, who stares at the deck and yet still finds the energy and authority to argue for contining the work; well, there's an under-stated pluck there that I admire.

A little thing, for sure, but then comics are about those little details as much as any atomic bombs and death rays.

5. "Strontium Dog: The Life & Death Of Johnny Alpha" script: John Wagner, art Carlos & Hector Ezquerra

I absolutely adored the Stone Wizard's and their mastery of Middenface's dialect from the moment I first scanned this week's"Strontium Dog" while attacking the Splendid Wife's splendid Saturday morning breakfast. On reflection, Mr Wagner had spotted that the episode was going to fall flat if it contained only McNulty's impassioned speech for Johnny Alpha's resurrection, and in fact a dash of humour was necessary to counterbalance McNulty's blunt-speaking Scottish sentimentality, a quality I have and which all my relatives have too. Providing that balance with a running gag that's far more the Goons than Monty Python, and welcome for it, is the icing on the cake for me where this climatic chapter is concerned.

But knowing that a dish needs a sprinkle of spice and knowing which one and how much to add of it is the craft, and I'll not be so stupid as to quote the jokes that achieved the effect, because to do so would be to lift them out of context. But the truth is that the self-importance and authority of the Stone Wizards as delivered in Mr Wagner's take on the Scot's tongue is howlingly funny just for the juxtaposition of power and dialect that it offers. Oh, well, one quote;

"We'll huv the goolie oota there afore youse can say hoots ma lumps!"

Perfect!

And it's not the only structural feature that Mr Wagner builds into the tale which shows how brilliant a writer he is. For he knows what all the other comic book writers of the past 50 years haven't where it comes to resurrecting characters, which is the dead can't be brought back to life without destroying the whole emotional force of their own passing unless another well-loved character is made to suffer as part of the deal. Death is far too serious a matter to be reduced to the status of a plot-twist and rendered as ineffective a barrier to the return to life as an unlocked revolving front door on a poorly guarded prison. And so that's why we've watched McNulty's character being developed to a previously unseen degree over the past few weeks, and why our sympathies have been so deliberately engaged by his drinking and our empathy by his guilt and grief over his dead friend.

He was being prepared for the sacrifice, just as Feral was when they overfed him.

Still, what if the Stone Gods have put Middenface's soul into Johnny's body? Now, that would a way of throwing everything up in the air, wouldn't it?

6. "Savage: Crims:- Part 15" script:- Pat Mills, art:- Patrick Goddard

There is one scene in this week's Savage which has stayed with me. It's the penultimate page, where Big Bill is discussing the delayed invasion of Britain in his stockroom with an American agent. And nothing much happens in the page's 7 panels, and there's no over-emotional drama of any depth there, and there's not even a robot or two to come crashing through the wall. Even that damn plot-confection of a tiger's nowhere to be seen, for a page at least.

But what there is a sense of men living in a mundane part of a fantastic world, and that always causes the science fiction trinkets of a strip to become suddenly more impressive and exciting just because they're glimpsed against a background recognisable to us as the "real world". Mr Goddard's art is particularly effective here, even down to those little details which ground the reader, such as the brackets on the shelving at 5:1 and the bleach bottle before Savage's brow at 5:6. These are suddenly real men in an ordinary world, and Savage's momentary despair at the cancelled operation to free Wales and then England is made all the more touching for it. And here, for just about the only time in this long series, I caught the glimpse of a character I'd like to read about.

For some reason, I heard rain when I read this page again. Persistent November rain, the kind that makes you think that there's nowhere to go even when you don't want to stay inside.

It all felt real to me.

7. Wha's The Point, Hen?

It's just that the presence of a negative doesn't preclude the fact of a positive, or at least it doesn't where talking about comics are concerned. And though this blogger, this no-nothing and of-no-influence-and-rightly-so blogger, moans away, it doesn't mean that the experience of 2000AD hasn't been worthwhile and enjoyable.

Not at all.

Bring on 1700.

Thursday 6.40 am, before the day began.

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End Of An Era? - The World & All The People In It in 2000 AD Prog 1699

2010-08-24T02:06:00.000-07:00

1. What Keeps Mankind Alive?

I. And so back to an old problem, because the old problem just isn't going away.

II. Where are the women and girls, where are the people of colour and the cultures which wouldn't have been familiar to many in Britain in February 1977 when 2000AD was first published?

III. Why are the pages of 2000AD still stuffed full of white men and nubile white women, to the point where Frank Quitely's Megazine cover of Judge Inaba reproduced on this back of this week's prog even now has the power to surprise with its representation of a specific ethnicity?

IV. After all, we're just a few days away from Prog 1700, and, as always with these neat and apparently significant numbers, we're being promised grand and good new things. All of which would mean that the stories in this week's prog are the end of a line, the last evidence of a previous editorial vision now sweeping themselves away in order to make space for the new worlds.

And since we're on the edge of these incoming new worlds, I thought it might be useful to take a last look at the old one and how humanely its been comporting itself where the presentation of the overwhelming majority of the human race is concerned. Is 2000AD now a comic book which works admirably to represent in a kind and unpatronising light the great mass of humanity? Or is it still a white boys club, allowing a few non-white men and women into its pages now and then as evidence of what an unkind mind might regard at best as window-dressing, and what a kind mind might view as an uncaring ignorance?

Because it is of course at the endings of the serial adventure melodrama that right and wrong are sorted one from the other, that virtue is established and rewarded, that evil is identified and punished. And what better place to search for the folks who are far less commonly represented within the pages of 2000AD than here at the closure of epics, where we really are being told who matters and who's being permitted to carry a blunderbuss or two in the background.

And who doesn't appear at all.

2. "Judge Dredd: A Home For Aldous Mayou" script: Al Ewing, art:- PJ Holden

I. With just six speaking roles on offer for the six pages of "A Home For Aldous Mayou", Al Ewing and PJ Holden have avoided simply casting a string of standard-issue white males in their tale. There was, for example, no reason beyond the obvious point of showing the world as it is and displaying a touch of sensitivity to the issue of race in representing Tek-Judge Henry Donaldson as a physically-impressive and charismatic Black American, but they've done so, and it's that kind of mark of respect to the idea of diversity which makes this moving tale all the more touching on the second read. Donaldson carries with him none of the baggage that's often ascribed to black characters. He doesn't speak in slang, he doesn't refer to an experience of the streets and crime, and he carries his knowledge, authority and competence well. That Mr Holden portrays him with the muscular physique which so commonly accompanies Black male stereotypes can in no way be read as laziness or insensitivity on his part. Absolutely the contrary, of course. Donaldson's a Judge, after all, and needs to carry with him in Mr Ewing's narrative the muscular presence of the new order, as well as functioning as a indomitable presence towering over Mayo and symbolising the fate which the hapless scientist will be coerced into.

And when Donaldson tries to console Mayou after the scientist has lost his family, there's a compassion to what he says as well as an blunt awkwardness which creates an individual character quite free of being anchored to any preconceptions. In fact, Donaldson may be a Judge, and therefore a representative of a state which I've not the slightest good word for, but he's recognisably the type of person we'd all like to find offering us a "home", even if it is in truth no home at all, when the absolute worst happens.

II. The decision by Mr Holdon to portray the Mayou family using the media shorthand for the kind of middle-class Jewish intellectual family encountered in just about every film about Freud and turn-of-the-20th-century Vienna pays dividends too. The combination of the nostalgia evoked by the sepia-tinted (*1) panels showing 2070, all book-lined walls instead of computers and TV screens, all facial hair and waistcoats and bow-ties, is a useful trick for immediately informing the reader that this is a long time ago, even for those who don't grasp the meaning of the date presented in the very first panel. It's a use of a media-informed visual stereotype which demeans no-one and serves the story well, for there's no doubt that the Mayou family is, despite the bickering of the parents, a group of admirable and able men and women, as indeed Mr Ewing's story demands that they must be.

*1 - an effectively-applied effect by colourist Chris Blythe

III. The strip is a little less surefooted where gender roles are concerned. Marla Mayo is the only female character on show and she does come across a something of a frowning shrew demanding that her husband serve his family and not his career. But then, this is a story about lost families, and there's nothing that Marla says that isn't actually actually viable, though she is still a character defined by her role as a mother and wife and in opposition to Mayou's immersion in the world outside the family home. But the story, after all, demands that Aldous denies his wife's pleas to stay with her so that he might forever regret his choice that led him away from the moment of his family's end. It's just that her positioning as the mother nagging the husband wanting to work while holding a child seems rather stereotypical, a point that's buttressed by her being the only woman in the tale. Perhaps Marla might have expressed her desire to have her husband with his family in less emotional terms, and perhaps she might have been portrayed in way which was less obviously evokative of women's traditional gender roles.

But it's not a major criticism, and it only need stand at all when the strip is taken in the context of this week's 2000AD as a whole. It may be that casting Judge Linley as a women might have presented a contrast to the traditional model of maternal femininity that Marla presents. After all, there's nothing in any way that's wrong about a woman who cares for her children in a traditional domestic sphere, it's just a problem if that's the only woman on show with a speaking role in a particular week except for the very beautiful Precious Matson in "Strontium Dog"

But that's a minor point about a well-executed and touching tale, which at 6 pages barely had wiggle-room for the moving plot, and it certainly isn't Mr Ewing or Mr Holden's job to balance out the representations of race and gender in 2000AD as a whole: that's the job of the editorial office. And there's no sexism on show here, just a sense of a small opportunity lost, and of a blogger trying to make sure he's as hard on everyone as he's going to be on some of what's to come.

3. "The Red Seas: Hell &High Water: 12" script: Ian Edginton, art Steve Yeowell

I. To be honest, there's been so little energy invested in informing the new reader about the character of Captain Jack's crew that I still haven't got a good grasp on who's who and, especially, why. And because of that, identifying whether certain characters come from a different racial or ethnic group to those in the typical 2000AD strip is often as difficult here, to be honest, as identifying whether they've a distinctive personality or not. It's all very vague. Still, on the evidence of this issue before me, one or two characters who aren't recognisably white and traditionally Western make fleeting appearances in these 10 pages. "Mr Omar", whoever he may be, gets to blow up a few demons in a single panel at 2.1 and calmly accepts the praise for doing so with a Eastwoodian "No problem". Perhaps, given his name, he might not be a citizen of the United Kingdom from the 18th century, though given the cosmopolitan nature of London and the nation's major ports back then, he may have very well been so. And it appears that that's the Black English Chevalier Augustus fixing the flying boat at 2.5 and 6.4, though he gets but one three word speech balloon while groaning at a colleague as he does so. Finally, what I believe is Julius, a Black English lad, appears in a single panel at 10.4 holding his head and asking "So what do we do now?". Those are the ways in which the non-mainstream white members of the Red Sea's cast put their shoulders to the cause of justice and so-forth in the 52 panels and 10 pages in prog 1699. Or to put it another way, they appear as background characters in but 4 panels.

Obviously, give or take the very odd gunburst and some tinkering with the Pegasus's motor, they needn't have been there at all.

II. However, that's nothing compared to the fate of the women in the cast of "The Red Seas" in this closing episode. Quite frankly, they disappear almost entirely from the story, and they were hardly being given equal status before. But now the real fighting's here, it's time for the boys, the white boys, to show who's boss. And with the exception for a single unnamed and pretty character shouting "Jack!" in concern for His Charmingness at 7.1, before silently looking concerned (8.2) and then lastly, and again silently, standing in the background with her mouth wide open in shock (10.6), there's no women here at all.

Just the pretty one in the background, looking winsome and somewhat concerned, and, I now realise as I type this, a silent and upset middle aged woman behind the dog's head at 10.4, and nowhere else.

III. Of all the strips in 2000AD, "The Red Seas" has in many ways some of the most considerable potential for filling up its cast with just about anyone who isn't a white European male.

Two-headed talking dogs, for heaven's sake, fit in just splendidly there.

But then, these stories in 2000AD are all fantasies. If the writers so wanted, if the artists were so motivated, they could fill up these pages with whoever they cared to.

IV. I have no idea who that fearsome South East Asian female warrior is on Boo Cook's splendidly kinetic cover to this week's prog. Clearly forceful as a person and worthy of respect as a swordswoman, how splendid it would have been to find a character like that in this week's "The Red Seas".

Or perhaps she is in this week's episode, just without the sword, or indeed, the force of character.

Looking pretty.

4. "Strontium Dog: The Life & Death Of Johnny Alpha" script: John Wagner, art Carlos & Hector Ezquerra

I. "Strontium Dog" has always dealt with prejudice as, for example, the X-Men have, through metaphor, through presenting an outsider group facing appalling prejudice and encouraging the audience to empathise with their experience. And it would seem churlish to attack the lack of members of minority non-white groups (*2) in the cast of this week's closing chapter, especially considering how McNulty's plea to the Stone Wizards constantly references the persecution he and his fellows mutants have suffered.

But on its own, this approach surely dances around the problem of race and ethnicity in 2000AD. As part of a unified approach, where some strips actually also - gasp - show folks who aren't white, or surrogate white, or polite Western middle-class, or a middle-class fever-dream of the London working class, then the "metaphor-approach" would add some variety to the business of diversity.

But if all we have is the metaphor, then it feels as if 2000AD considers itself to be living in some kind of Apartheid state, where issues can only be approached at a tangent, through symbols rather than bald statements.

Which is how it all feels at the moment, though I know it's not so. Yet it's as the reader is inhabiting, for all its good and ill, 21st century Britain, with its many different cultures and races, gender and sexual roles, and 2000AD sits uneasily in the late 1970s, hardly daring to engage with, or even acknowledge, that this isn't a white, middle-class world anymore.

2000 AD, just like it's title, is living in the past, and excellent and humane strips such as "Strontium Dog" lose some of their value when placed in a context where they're part of but a few strips acknowledging difference.

*2 - In the context of the United Kingdom, of course

II. Well, for a young and beautiful woman who could've been nothing but window-dressing, Precious Matson has proven an impressively bright and capable woman in TLADOJA so far, with no sign of any trading on her sexuality at all beyond her evident shapeliness and beauty. (Ah. Some trading on her sexuality then.) And, given her mutant physique, it's yet more evidence of how Mr Wagner is capable of creating the most absurd characters, male or female, and yet simultaneously investing them with dignity too. It means that his tales have the potential to veer off into comedy or tragedy without ever seeming to violate the nature of the characters involved. Matson can be a restrained academic or a scantily-dressed undercover nightclub dancer with an obvious difference and both approaches are feasible.

But again, it's another example of how "young and beautiful" and "young and slightly more maternal" are the only speaking female roles on stage in this week's pages.

II. However, in terms of authority and competence, Matson has certainly been the central figure of this tale, a role nearly always allocated to a male in 2000ad, while McNulty has functioned as the emotional focus of what's going on. It's a lovely reversal of gender expectations; McNulty cries and can't cope with his emotions, while Matson focuses on the practical business of coping with the here and now. And given that this tale has effectively involved only three major speaking parts, it stands as a rare example in the current run of strips of women making up 33% of the major character roles in a serial strip.

Or, one in three major roles inSD was a beautiful young woman. It's progress, yes, but not as we know it, and certainly not as we'd want to know it, in what we laughing refer to as the real world.

And though the end of the tale obviously required a sacrifice of McNulty to return Johnny Alpha, or even for the Scotsman to be reincarnated as Johnny Alpha, it would have been heartening to see Matson have some part to play in this chapter other than running to Alpha's resurrected frame and shouting "Johnny", especially since a cry of "McNulty" might have been appropriate too. For it was once again a bloke's bravery that carried the day, and a bloke's sacrifice which seemed to have won the hour, and though I'd not argue for McNulty's death to have been diminished in its prominence, it would have heartening to have Matson do more than stand around and hope.

III. Wouldn't it be really invigorating to see a few more women in 2000AD who aren't so young and nubile. Perhaps we might one day come again across the odd ordinary looking female character, or even one beyond the age of around 25. (After all, there's no problem with ordinary looking men, let alone ordinary-looking middle-aged and elderly ones.) (*3)

And what if those different and slightly-more realistic women were written and drawn by human beings who weren't - sharp intake of breath - blokes, or even white blokes?

*3 - Credit to "The Red Seas" here, I should say, for we did see an impressive woman of mature years there looking not unlike Joan Sims just a few weeks ago, and she was certainly carrying some considerable authority. It was to be hoped that she wouldn't simply disappear once the fighting began to get up-close and bloody, but sadly she did.

5. "Savage: Crims:- Part 15" script:- Pat Mills, art:- Patrick Goddard

I. Oh, dear. Not a single woman in sight in this week's Savage, and last week's threat to rape Bill's wife is repeated here too.

It's an incredibly unpleasant business, this use of sexual violence as a threat to incite the hero to prove his masculinity by kicking the would-be rapist in the testicles.

II. As for something other than white males in this concluding chapter, well, no. There is "Uncle Gino", the pencil moustached Italian from the catering trade, and there's some other criminal chappies who could well be Italian stereotypes themselves.

But Savages' world is as utterly white as it's completely male. And though there was a huge amount of exposition about the ethnic origins of many of the various criminals who've wandered through this never-ending tale in an episode many months ago, those details never came within a typewriter of later informing the story either in its essential, or indeed inessential, details.

It all feels thoroughly unhealthy, and I'm glad it's over. Read through the chapter again and just note: nothing but blokes, nothing but white blokes, no-one except for Uncle Gino who isn't a skull-faced killer.

And I bet he puts powdered glass in the coffee of nonces too.

6. Quo Vadis

This is science-fiction, isn't it, in its broadest and most playful sense? And anything at all is possible in popular science fiction, yes? Space ships, time travel, aliens.

So how come we can't even seem to imagine being more accommodating to the overwhelming majority of the human race then?

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2000 AD 1698 & JUDGE DREDD MEGAZINE 301:- LOOKING AROUND FOR GOOD THINGS TO SEE, & FINDING THEM TOO

2010-08-20T04:44:00.000-07:00

1. When Friday Comes

It's been a long long week out here in the windswept east of England, but Friday's here and I'm opting to be positive. The deadlines have been met, my torn back's repairing itself, and even the new puppy is beginning to be able to tell the difference between peeing on the floor of the downstairs toilet and using the whole wide world outside as a bathroom instead.

Good puppy. Very good puppy.

And these are the moments when I simply don't feel like being negative about anything at all, let alone 2000AD, despite the presence there-in of strips which have recently, shall we say, tasked me. (And, anyway, I'm not sure how I might express my opinions of some of the stories in both this week's Prog and Megazine without either repeating myself again or falling back upon very bad manners indeed in order to expel some very bad vibes, mmaaann.) Luckily, there's a tradition on this blog that I can fall back at such a time, namely that of the "Some Fantastic Place" pieces. And for anybody who hasn't come across such an entry here, and who might be wondering whether I'd suddenly been taken by the dawning of the hippy-hearted age of Aquarius, here's a quote from a previous SFP review which explains the ground-rules of what's to come;

"It's really tough working out how good a comic is. So this time, let's not bother. Let's take a more relaxed and emotional path to evaluation. Let's do away with all pretense at intellectual analysis and abandon all critical thought, fanboy indignation and continuity cop-ness. Let's just start looking for good things. Little good things, perhaps, just tiny nuggets of fun. Imaginative single panels, witty snatches of dialogue, unexpectedly appropriate sound effects. All the things we would have noticed and treasured when we had less comic books to indulge in and far more time on our hands."

It's time for some sincerely positive thinking, I believe. Everything else can wait for tomorrow, or the day after the day after that.

2. "Lily Mackenzie" - writer/artist Simon Fraser (Megazine # 301)

At last Simon Fraser has given us some compelling reasons why we should admire Lily Mackenzie beyond a somewhat petulant if ultimately admirable determination to search for her lost brother on Charybdis. In fact, within four pages of this month's chapter, I found that I'd quite lost my reservations, as previously expressed, about this strip and its lead character. For when Lily explains the detail of how the terra-forming of Charybdis is functioning, and when she rhapsodises to Cosmo Judd about why she's so heartened to see a particular butterfly on the planet's surface, the reader suddenly realises that this woman is actually tremendously bright. She doesn't simply understand the details of the processes by which an unfriendly eco-system is made habitable to humans, though that's an winningly impressive business in itself. (I've always admire smart people with half-decent hearts.) No, she's also able to make a charming aesthetic judgment about the choices of fauna made by the scientists who designed the terra-forming process, and so she's revealed as somebody who can apply what she knows as well as a woman with a great deal of information at hand.

And it's a clever conceit to have Lily show herself to be so knowledgeable and adapted to life at the bottom of the gravity well. It changes her whole relationship to Cosmo, who has previously, and somewhat worryingly, been the dominant one in their partnership, mostly because he's known how things work up there on the tramping spaceships. Now it's Cosmo that's out of his element, and left feeling even more emasculated than before, while it's Lily's mind which comprehends the majority of what we see.

OK. Now I respect her. Her beauty has suddenly become a quality possessed by a bright woman rather than a beautiful woman's most significant quality.

3. "Judge Dredd: The Slow Walk":- writer Rob Williams, artist Boo Cook

Comic book creative team in marriage-disrupting incident shock horror!

Well, sort-of. The splendid Wife responded to my chortling at the above panel late last night as she was trying to drift off to sleep, with the slightest, and yet telling, frown and a wounding "tut". Yet, it is an inherently amusing panel, as I might have tried to explain to her were the circumstances less inappropriate, with that great clumsy armoured suit striding away slowly from the atypically helpless judges. (It's the fact that the contraption seems so primitive, and quite likely to topple over, juxtaposed with the Judges impotence, which tripped the chortling out of me.) What's particularly interesting is how Mr Cook's horizontal panel "reads" just as a film would, from left to right in what serves as the comic book equivalent of "real-time. And it's such a relatively under-used technique, to have both action and a character's response to it in the same frame in this fashion. And that's a shame, of course, but then it takes some chops to pull such a scene off. Here, the use of the vanishing point to the far right of the panel frames the journey that the reader's eye is going to make, the use of perspective convincingly places the armour close enough to be significant and yet far enough away to be obviously escaping, and the events of the action - from Judge to Judge to escapee - are laid clearly out in sequence. It's something which Ian Gibson, for example, used to regularly pull off, but I wonder if enough artists and writers are conscious that such a trick can be put to good use?

3. "Judge Dredd: The Natural" writer Gordon Rennie, artists Graeme Reid/Gary Erskine

There's no doubt that there's something of both quality and promise in Mr Rennie's Dredd scripts. If "The Natural" suffers from an unduly sentimental conclusion that might have been improved if the whole story had been told from the cyborg assasin's perspective, the tale as a whole is absolutely alive with bright ideas and impressive moments. The page above is a prime example of that, and the more I study it, the more impressed I am too with the work of Mr Reid and Mr Erskine in illustrating it, for the page as a whole serves as a wonderful piece of misdirection. In the first panel, the reader most probably registers Aaron Johnson as running on a track. It's his movement that catches our eye, and though there are lane-directions behind him, they could be part of a futuristic race-track. Even by the second panel, there's no hint that Johnson's anywhere other than we might expect him to be. But by the fourth panel, and its audacious high angle shot, it's revealed that Johnson's striding along a Mega-City highway which is being kept clear for him by two lines of Lawmasters and a couple of Justice Department tanks too. It's such a clever and amusing declaration of how seriously the Judges take their own authority, that the whole business of that part of the city should be placed second to their symbolic protection of Johnson's "rights". As an expression of the anal authoritarian mind, it's hard to beat, though any citizen lacking riches in our society who's under threat might envy such a commitment to protect if not actually serve.

I also thoroughly enjoyed the idea that the Judges have specific terminology for techniques to incapacitate disobedient Fatties. I don't know if Mr Rennie came up with "bellywheel shot", or if it's part of Dredd lore, but it made me chuckle. Whatever reservations I have about Mr Rennies' plotting, I'm absolutely convinced that he'll rack up a gross of fine Dredd tales before he's finished.

4. "SAVAGE: CRIMS" Part 140 - writer Pat Mills, artist Patrick Goddard

After 14 chapters of "Savage:Crims", after 14 chapters of machismo and Sweeney-esque violence, the most effective incident of the whole footweary saga arrives with not a punch being thrown or gun being fired. Instead, there's a masterful claustrophobia about the scene presented in the scan above, where an unknown man arrives without explanation, says one word in response to Savage's presence, and then disappears with one word more. Even my jaundiced mind immediately wanted to know who this bloke was, and why the slime of the underworld seemed so respectful of him, and what question it was that he was answering with that single "No."

I'd pay to see a single chapter based around this one incident. An apparently irrelevant conversation between Savage and the others upstairs, while downstairs arrives a stranger. Nothing is said, he wanders through the house, his very presence is one great threatening enigma.

Mindless violence is commonplace and easy to depict. Menace is much rarer, and a quality to be savoured wherever it's effectively summoned up. So, a "huzzah" for Mr Mills and Mr Goddard, especially for the panel where, without the reader quite knowing why, that cupboard is opened and an everyday iron is reached for.

5. Frank Quitely's Cover To The Megazine # 301

I'm so taken by the elegance of Mr Quitely's composition for this cover. The drawing itself is as impressive and affecting as we've come to expect from him, but a shot of a character from behind that shows so much of her back and so little of movement might be thought to risk being a somewhat static academic exercise to place on the front of the Megazine. How inspired, therefore, was the choice to divide the cover into four triangles by the placement of the two blades on show, and to show the one closest to the reader's eye as side-on and razor-edged thin so that Aiko Inaba isn't obscured by that component of the framing device. With such an apparently-simple, and yet profoundly ingenious, solution at hand, Mr Quitely has ensured that everytime the eye rests upon the cover, it jumps from one triangle to the next in order to construct the complete picture, meaning that the portrait constantly carries the excitement of movement without straining to convey such.

6. The Mike McMahon Collection - Free With Megazine # 301 !!!!!!!

It's a sad comment on the marketplace that the folks at Rebellion have decided that this material can be given away free with the Megazine rather than being sold in leather-bound collector's editions for the faithful to daily experience without the pretense of ever truly understand "how" the stories therein have been depicted. Certainly, I lack the language to even begin to fake an understanding of Mr McMahon's utterly unique and profoundly impressive work collected here-in. But, I do have a little story about the Splendid Wife which might pass as relevant. For I came in after walking that hound of a puppy that's invaded my quiet life to be faced with the Splendid Wife relaxing and quite unexpectedly reading this collection of Mike McMahon's work. This is in itself something of a surprise; the Splendid Wife is not a lover of comic books, and certainly not a fan of the punch-ups and ray-guns of 2000AD. What she is, however, is an educational advisor to local junior schools, and she loves well-written and enchantingly drawn children's books. And if "Tour Of Duty" or "The Cursed Earth" would have sat undisturbed on the front room table while she was waiting for the dog to bring me home, "Howler" caught her eye and held her attention.

She thought it was fascinating work, which of course it is. But she doesn't care a whit for 2000 AD or anything associated with it. Which makes the compliment all the more profound.

It's free with the Megazine this month. I know you're going to buy it anyway, but if by chance the motivation to acquire it escapes you, try to remember this. It's Mike McMahon, it's peerlessly good, and the Splendid Wife enjoyed it.

Go fetch, surely.

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Some Thoughts On Prog 1697: "Strontium Dog" Takes The Line Far Ahead The Field Again

2010-08-17T00:41:00.000-07:00

1. "Judge Dredd: The Connoisseur" Part 3:- writer:- Gordon Rennie, artist:- Karl Richardson

I. Something far more interesting stirs in the third and concluding part of "The Connoisseur" in Prog 1697. For the nameless, and rather commonplace, alien vampire which has been picking off some of Mega-City One's more everyday and objectionable citizens here starts to display qualities quite distinct from the all-too-familiar gloating confidence that we've been trained to expect of such monsters, whether they're human or otherwise.

II. Stabbed with what's literally bone-crunching force through the ribs and into the heart by the indomitable Dredd, who I doubt anyone had feared the slightest for after the preceding Prog's cliffhanger, the Connoisseur starts to experience an existential crisis which unexpectedly claws a measure of qualified sympathy for him from this previously disengaged reader. What was before simply a rapacious and self-obsessed killer, stealing extreme emotional experiences from his victims in the most cliched fashion, is now revealed as a doomed and ancient creature fated to never experience emotions other than hunger unless it accesses them through the process of murder. And because of this alienation from itself, even the Connoisseur's death at Dredd's hand becomes something which it welcomes, bringing with it as it does the only other feeling - beyond the intense longing of hunger - that the monster has ever generated for itself; dread.

III. There's an unshiftable suspicion that this whole story was in part reverse-engineered from the punchline in that final panel , from that story-closing pun of "Dread." And usually such deliberate and obvious cuteness results in this reader shrugging and moving on. But there was more than that pun going on here.

IV. I do think it's regrettable that the only truly sympathetic qualities on display in all of the three chapters of "The Connoisseur" should have appeared only in the final episode. More puzzling still is the fact that the pitiful nature of the monster was only made explicit after Dredd had already so obviously defeated his opponent. If we'd been allowed to feel a seasoning of pity in addition to fear in the earlier chapters, the whole business would have counted for more, because the reader would have had an emotional stake in both sides of the fight, even given that ten rounds of "Dredd v Alien-Vampire" will always be a bout that we'll want the man in the shiny helmet to win. For with the application of some greater precision of foreshadowing, an opportunity could have been created to make the reader care for, as well as despise, this essentially disgusting and irredeemable protagonist. And it's a genuine pity that our capacity to empathise with this Connoisseur was only truly engaged at the end of the piece, when the fighting was already over, and the intensity of the situation's jeopardy already punctured.

2. "The Red Seas: Hell & High Water" Part 10:- writer:- Ian Edginton, artist:- Steve Yeowell

I. There's a terrible suspicion of cheating going on in this week's chapter of everyone's least-objectionable non-piratical pirates, though of course I mean that the cheating's occurring on the part of the strip's creators rather than Captain Jack's noble little mariners. For we've had the apparent invincibility of the Devil's ship signed up for weeks now, just as we're told in this particular chapter that Jack's tiny flying ship "The Pegasus" is " ... no battleship. She's fleet to be sure. But one direct hit ...". Well, given the firepower of the Devil and the vulnerability of the flimsy if fast flying boat, we might expect things to turn out badly when the Pegasus charges straight for the Devil's horns. We certainly have our expectations raised of a significant little tussle. For the first time in the series, the stakes appeared to be uncertain, and this reader was genuinely interested in how this unlikely confrontation would play out.

But no. The scene merely resolved itself out in a straight-forward and tensionless fashion;

the Pegasus flies at its opponent
the Devil's ship fires at The Pegasus
Pegasus easily dodges the cannon-shot
and then fire is projected from the snout of the metal model of a horse which supports the Pegasus's blades
which - get this - flies right down the barrel of one of the Devil's cannons
blowing up a large section of the evil ship of death

And that's it, really. No devious strategy, plot-reversals or interesting twists of fate. The little flying ship raced at the big bad sailing one and everything worked out fine, except for one last and no-doubt minor discomforting circumstance, which we'll touch upon in a moment.

Oh, well.

II. Within the context of the world's least challenging impossible confrontation, Steve Yeowell has presented us with a touching panel at 3:2, showing the Pegasus approaching its prey like a rickety little Swordfish closing on the Bismark, its fragile gondola swaying fiercely to one side while a volley of shot is fired towards it. But beyond that, and Yeowell and Edginton's obvious efficiency, there's nothing to care about on show whatsoever. And so when Jack declares that the Pegasus has " .. copped one in the arse! We're going down!", all this reader could think was that for all the fuss, nobody's going to get hurt and those lovely pirates are just going to land safely on the deck of the Devil's flag-ship.

There may be a little bump when they tumble across the deck and land at the Devil's feet.

I could be wrong. I don't really care. Next!

3. "Sinister Dexter: The Why-Shaped Cut" Part 5:- writer:- Dan Abnett, artist:- Anthony Williams & Rob Taylor

I. There are blokes that I know nothing about in this week's "Sinister Dexter" killing other blokes that I know nothing about. There also seems to be robots doing the same. One of those robots looks like an adolescent girl from a Tokyo "School Disco" Friday night out. Who cares? There are gruesomely wounded men bleeding to death, but the scenes lack either pathos or even the can't-help-but-laugh compulsion of a Mark Millar gross-out. So, who does care?

II. Oh, and Sinister and Dexter suddenly pull out their big guns and look rather dangerously heroic at 4:4, which surely can't be the intention. I was just hoping it was the freeze-frame before they got theirs, but strangely the story went on despite all my most fervent hopes. Still, the fact that this tale didn't end there did allow us to be shown a scene of a crowd fleeing the "super-casino" at 5:1, where all of a sudden the clientele of this classy joint seems to be made up of bog-standard customers to a Sainsbury supermarket on a Saturday afternoon circa 1982, all t-shirts and pull-overs and cheap if undemonstrative haircuts. It's the oddest aesthetic choice yet on this strip.

The future. It's far stranger a place than we've ever imagined.

4. "Savage: Crims" Part 13:- writer:- Pat Mills, artist:- Patrick Goddard

I. There are some things in life which always retain their essential quality, advertisers assure us, and here comes "Savage: Crims" to prove that point. Consider, if you can raise the energy to do so, the apparently terrifying explosion that closed the last chapter. Now, guess what? It wasn't that terrifying after all. "I managed to limit the explosion ...", says Syd Barret the physicist, and Savage quips "Yeah. I think you just exorcised the monster, Max."

Well, I'm glad that the explosion only hurt the bad guys, and that the cliffhanger wasn't actually a cliffhanger at all. That's a relief.

II. When faced with the wretchedly po-faced, macho-sentimentality of the scene in which Bearded Bloke, one of Savage's inter-changeable comrades who at least had facial hair to mark him out from the others, the reader requires, as Wilde said of the passing of Little Dorrit, "... a heart of stone to read the death ... without dissolving into tears ... of laughter."

Me, I laughed.

5. "The Life And Death Of Johnny Alpha" Part 9:- writer:- John Wagner, artist:- Carlos & Hector Ezquerra

I. Thankfully, Mr Wagner knows that catharsis shouldn't be immediately followed by some really big comic-book explosion or the like, and so this week's "Strontium Dog" is a quiet if necessary affair, relying on our fondness for the characters and fascination for their mission to carry us through. It does, and once again "The Life And Death Of Johnny Alpha" is surely beyond question the finest thing on display within 2000 AD's cover.

II. Nothing speaks so eloquently of how Mr Wagner and Team Ezquerra care about their work as the detail of the scene in the marketplace on the planet Zen on page three, where we see Middenface communicating with an alien using what looks like a portable recorder from the early Nineties. Earplug in his right ear, an unimpressively functional microphone catching the alien's words and translating them, Middenface's engagement in the slow process of extracting information from the locals grounds the science-fiction of the tale in a mundane reality. It's a relief to be placed in a world where there's a touch of thought in how everyday life is presented, rather than one where killer schoolgirl robots and identical rebels go through their killing paces like battery-toys set off years ago and left to bump endlessly against each other without ever quite running down.

III. Nothing so marks out a writer as a master as his willingness to avoid grand sentimental gestures where the suffering of his characters is concerned. How easy would it have been for a poorer storyteller to have McNulty abandon the bottle in the aftermath of Feral's immolation, and how unconvincing that would have been. (Poor McNulty knows himself that he's too far gone to be simply shocked into abstention, though maybe what's coming in the final episode might manage that.) Instead, we're presented with an unostentatious and moving scene where Matson demands that McNulty stops drinking and he replies with the quietly heart-breaking statement that;

"I'm sorry, Hen. That's somethin' I cannae promise. I'm no gauny lie to ye, an' I'd be lyin' if I said I would."

It's a sequence of panels that's free of dramatic statements, thankfully, but the sorrow and weariness caught by Team Ezquerra at 1:3 and 1:4 tell us all we need to know about how awful a business McNulty's alcoholism is. And when he replies to Matson's insistence that he "... just keep it under control. For me. Please." with the shattered man's response of "Aye. I could maybe dae that.", we're made to care for the character more than anyone else presented to us in these pages since the ending of "Damnation Station". For I doubt Matson quite understands what she's demanding of her colleague, though her request is an absolutely necessary one.

But Middenface knows what she's asking, and he knows his limits too.

It doesn't take bells and whistles to make these characters more real, more emotionally compelling. But it does take the master craftsman's competence.

III. Finally, I've never seen night-time evoked so effectively as it is in the last few pages here. The colouring is beautifully restrained, creating through its subtle pallet of mostly drained greens a sunless world lit clearly by a massive moon and parched of its daylight colours. The sense of an impending occasion, and perhaps doom, is evoked but never overstated. We know something's coming, but we also know that it isn't going to arrive just yet.

We're so often told that comic books can show us pretty much anything an artist cares to present us with. Giant spaceships, giant monsters, giant guns, and giant giants. And yet it's remarkable how rarely a sense of place is created. Oh, characters move around, walls and tables and even, yes, giants are shown, and occasionally shadows fall and a vanishing point is put to good use. But perhaps the reader might flick through the other stories in this week's Prog and ask themselves what time of day it is in the other strips, or what the weather was like, or how the character's physically felt to be in the environment they've been placed into.

Ah. I thought so.

Still, this was a job really well done by Team Ezquerra. How easy it can be to take their work for granted, so consistent is it in its excellence, and how glad John Wagner must be that their collaboration remains intact.

6. And In Closing

My apologies for the lack of new content on this blog for the past eight days. I've been working on a book-pitch that I was unexpectedly invited to make, a significant business, I'm sure you'd agree. Yet I did keep feeling that I ought to be writing down a few thoughts about this week's Prog, and so I have. I'll be back later this week to discuss Prog 1698. For whatever that's worth, I do hope you might consider popping over for a few minutes around then.

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Not In Love! Absent Emotions, "Sinister Dexter", "Savage" & 2000 AD 1696:- Part 4 of - huzzah! - 4

2010-08-09T12:34:00.000-07:00

Continued, and concluded, from last Friday;

1. "Sinister Dexter: The Why-Shaped Cut: Part 4"

I. Character

I. I wonder if anybody else who's new to "Sinister Dexter" and who's as similarly ignorant of the back-story, is finding it as hard as I am to care the slightest whit for it. Finding a point-of-view character is proving quite impossible, and instead this new reader has been scanning the pages desperately looking for anyone at all to care about. Sadly, none present themselves. In fact, there's not the slightest trace of any emotion or character motivation more warming that the grimace on the very fat man's face at 1.1 and 1.3. (Strangely, exactly the same art is used in both panels, and oddly, despite the presence of 9 speaking roles in a crowded story, no-one thinks to mention old very-chubby-bloke's name either. These are surely basic matters in serial fiction. If you've only got 5 pages, don't re-use the same picture unless there's a reason for it, and there's no obvious one on show. And if your story is knee-deep in major characters who unfamiliar readers can't easily recognise by name, make sure they're given one.)

Perhaps the fact that no-one in "Sinister Dexter" is in the slightest bit appealing is a deliberate technique of alienation adopted by Mr Abnett. Perhaps he and artists Mr Williams and Mr Taylor are keen for us to avoid sympathising with one criminal or another, and it may well be that we're supposed to feel contempt for the whole damn pack of them. (If so, it's worked: I do.) But without any human interest on show, with nothing but info-dumps and the sight of one unappealing criminal I'm unfamiliar with being suckered by some other unfamiliar and unappealing characters, there's nothing to snare the reader's heart. For as far as I can see, the audience for "Sinister Dexter" is expected to enjoy watching this tale of various teams of shallow and grimacing thugs maneuvering around each other for its own sake. And I can't grasp what could be so compelling about such a familiar and uninteresting story, for if everyone's a moral vacuum, and if the world they inhabit is similarly a moral vacuum too, and if no-one's endearing even to anyone else on the page, then why should I care about them killing each other? Oh, I'd like to see them all wiped out, including the title characters, but do we have to watch it happening while being expected to get a little tingly about gangster cliches shooting at each other? Can't there just be a very big bomb, a series reboot, and then the very, very capable Mr Abnett can write a story rather than a predictable progression of tired plot points.

Certainly, he might consider pacing his tale more carefully so that his script doesn't need to be full of static figures delivering reams of dialogue. It just amazes me that a fantastic professional such as Mr Abnett would produce panels so unhelpfully and unproductively jammed full of words. For it might be that that great grey whale of a criminal on page 1 is indeed an interesting bloke, but squeezing his head into crowded panels such as 1:3, where he shares a small rectangular frame with 50 words, isn't going to encourage the reader to concentrate on what's being said. And his stylish and shop-window dummy assistant - the black woman wearing glasses and sporting a spectacular pony-tail - quite drowns in dialogue at 1:4, where a panel half the side of the one before has an unbelievable 62 words in it! (All that can be seen between word balloons is a tiny woman's head, a tinier pair of naked flabby male calves and a tiny and largely-naked porn actress apparently preening herself while, appropriately, her head is covered by plot-gabble.) Yet turn the page and the large panel at 3:3 is quite empty of both dialogue and indeed informing information too. (See below.)

II. Spectacle & Jeopardy

I. I'm similarly baffled about why any reader who's ever watched an old episode of "Miami Vice", let alone any of "Las Vegas", will be enticed into the future world on display in "The Why-Shaped Cut". If the creators of a 2000 AD strip have all of the science-fiction tradition to draw on, why does the world they're presenting have to seem so redolent of a dull night out in a Blackpool casino in 1991? That may constitute a form of retro-charm, but it seems counter-productive to present a cruel future in terms of the prosaic details of the recent past. Even the technology on display seems more reminiscent of the day-before-yesterday than any conceivable future; guns are still very obviously BBC-wardrobe standard issue, and that wall of TV monitoring screens at 2:1 is obviously so ancient that the criminal bosses running this casino are in truth either skint or huge fans of antique tech. (What, no holograms?)

And sadly the truth is that many parts of the visual design of this future haven't been integrated into a coherent aesthetic. "Polly Alloy" seems obviously to have stepped straight out of the least inspired Manga of the last 30 years, yet in 2:4 she shares a panel with what looks like a pair of Azraels from DC's mid-Nineties nadir. It's a discontinuity which jarred this reader right out of the story, for I saw unreconciled design elements rather than a coherent world before me. And if the world isn't remarkable or coherent, nothing that approximates jeopardy within it can be of any interest at all.

Who cares who gets hurt and by whom?

II. To me, the most disturbing element of the spectacle in this episode is the fact that much of it is naked and nubile female flesh. If this is a joke, I can't see who it's aimed at. The young large-breasted women with the spectacularly thin waists who are undertaking the unpleasant task of massaging fat lad in 1:1 show no signs of being anything other than content in their role. (See the scan at the head of the page.) You'd certainly never be able to read their situation as being part of a sexually exploitative system which has obviously outlawed any woman who isn't (a) young, (b) beautiful, (c) stages and (d) happy to walk about at best in skin-tight clothes with lots of their body on display. But you'd hope that the creators would want to make such a point when showing so much female flesh is such a pornographic fashion. Oh, well, perhaps they're robots, though that wouldn't make any point about the exploitation of sexuality unless the audience were actually told so. Or perhaps their happy complicity in their appearance and their expressions are merely a sign that this criminal world has reduced everyone to a sexualised commodity.

Or perhaps this is a strip full of shallow and rather grubby cheesecake, from the short-skirted Japanese-Aryan robot-child, whose breasts are so tellingly prominent at 2:5, onwards. How informing it seems to be that every man on show is middle-aged and far from beautiful, though that's certainly not the rule where the young women are concerned. But then, that's no doubt part of the irony of the strip.

But it looks like cheesecake, it really does. Even the stronger members of the female cast, for all their competence and authority, are dressed in their skinnies and popping in and out all over the place like porn actresses. And because there's nothing in the script or the art to indicate that it isn't cheesecake, well, what else can it be? Irony isn't something that can be buried in a text and left there to sleep. It has to be worked, placed in the story so that it's made obvious, to a greater or lesser degree, what point is being established here. Yet I can see no ironic intent on show at all. And if no deliberate point is being made here, then those representations of women are there to titillate, and the text slips right between "The Sun" and the porn industry, nestling in that place in the unreconstructed consciousness where women are sex objects and the reader is expected to think "she's sexy" rather than "she's been presented as an adolescent masturbationary fantasy".

Well, perhaps all these issues have been given some context in "Sinister Dexter" long ago. But such context hasn't been explicit while I've been reading this particular story, and so all I see is a crowd of pimps and prostitutes acting as if their way of life is fascinating and normal and worthy of our attention.

And so it might be, as a piece of sociology or a serious work of literature investigating the human condition. (Hell, why not present it in the blackest of comedies with a serious moral purpose?) But this is a standard-issue, shoot-'em-up comic book, and all the guns and ass are apparently no more there to make a serious point about sex and gender than the cake-stand on the last page is there to advertise Mr Kipling's.

Which means that a serious point gets made anyway, and not a pleasant one either.

III. Plot Reversal

If the characters are utterly unengaging, and in fact repellent without a trace of fascination, and if the sense of spectacle is commonplace and uninvolving, then it doesn't matter whether there's any spin placed upon the reader's expectations or not. And for this reader at least, it didn't.

Actually, this reader either suffered a sense of humour by-pass immediately before reading this chapter or there's something wrong going on here. Not through anyone's intention, but then, that's so often the way, isn't it, the road to Hell being what it is and so on.

IV: I'm the only one who feels this way, aren't I?

2. "Savage: Crims: Part 13"

I. Character

From pornography to the pornography of masculinity and violence, and this time out we get some strange gags about homosexuality too. Now, Pat Mills is undoubtedly no homophobe, but since there's nothing positive being said about gay men in "Savage: Crims", it all feels rather awkward. Firstly, we have one of our dumb criminals killing a Volg soldier because he feels a pass is being made at him. Then, we have our dumb criminal defending himself against his comrades who're angry that he's blown their cover, saying: "Sorry, Joe, but he said I was beautiful! I don't take that from anyone!" And finally, another dumb criminal laughingly declares "That's not what I've heard, dear boy. Methinks you doth protest too much". Now, fair enough, these men are thugs, but then, so is pretty much everyone in "Crims", and closing an incident with a man making a homophobic jibe after an homophobic murder, and having him laughing without any retort from elsewhere, seems a touch insensitive. It's especially so because, as mentioned, there are no other traces of non-traditional sexuality in the strip elsewhere, or in 2000AD at all in Prog 1696, "Damnation Station" having sadly ended, meaning that the only events relating to being gay in "Crims" involve the mindless slaughter of a man for the sin of being a homosexual and an anti-gay joke thrown out later in the murderer's direction.

And yet, all it would've taken to make sure that the meaning of this was absolutely locked into a positive light would have been to have shown Savage grimacing and whispering "Bastards" not-quite under his breath. Sometimes, it's not just about trusting the audience to read the text in a unprejudiced light. Sometimes it's about planting a supportive marker in the story to ensure there's no possible confusion at all.

Still, I suppose homophobia is a character trait, meaning that it's getting a little easier to tell Savage's vile little guerrilla band apart.

II. Elsewhere, the only other sign of a distinct if wearily familiar and shallow personality trait is displayed by "Max", who's been transformed from Syd Barrett into a tuned-in Mr Spock in just two episodes, and who now spouts techno-babble in great bubbles of text. Sadly, the scientist-Max is no more convincing than hippie-Max was, and the question remains why that two-issue digression on Eel Pie Island ever existed. What did it add to this story at all beyond irrelevancies?

2. Spectacle & Jeopardy

I. There's no denying that the underground setting of Chapter 13 raises the sense of jeopardy in the strip. The fear of discovery, the claustrophobia of the tunnels, the anxiety of not quite understanding how to complete the mission; it's all transmitted effectively in Mr Mill's strip and especially in Mr Goddard's art, where he's achieved a minor miracle in making miles of pipes and wall-panels seem sinister and confining without ever being boring. (Similarly, the scenes in the control room, which effectively involve no more than a few men looking at screens, are made involving by the careful balance of shadow and electric glare, which leaves our men looking exposed and interrogated by the very machinery they're trying to commandeer.)

II. Finally, the deliberate pacing in Mr Mill's strip that takes us through the activation of the Volg's sabotaged teleportation beam to the disaster of their of being cruelly mis-materialised is thoroughly engrossing. And in just the one panel at 5.7, Mr Goddard effectively provides a very crowded panel of horrors which functions as a grotesquery marking a significant victory for what's supposed to be "our" side.

It's a shame that I'd be almost as happy to see the same fate dished out to Savage and his little band of criminals and patriots, but there's no denying that this chapter is the most effectively staged of "Crims" so far.

I don't care what happens, but at least what's happening has some purpose and drive now.

III. Plot Reversal

But there are of course no unexpected reversals here, for if ever a story had been written to a formula and then spiced up just a little by a few of the author's quirks and ticks, this is it. In fact, the only surprise, and a dodgy one at that, was the whole "kill-a-bloke-'cause-you-think-he's-gay" sequence, and that's not because it was homophobic, but because it's such a clumsy way to put to use such a potentially contentious piece of material.

To be continued when the various strips we've discussed in this series are concluded;

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Hoping To Be Falling In Love Again? Absent Emotions, "The Red Seas" & 2000 AD 1696:- Part 3 of Who Knows?

2010-08-07T03:38:00.000-07:00

Continued from the previous entry;

1. "Dear God, Jack! The Size Of That Thing! It's A Veritable Behemoth!"

Writing about "The Life And Death Of Johnny Alpha: Part 8" a few days ago helped focus my attention on Mr Wagner's spectacularly able use of character, spectacle, and plot-reversal to snare the reader and engage their emotions. And as a consequence of that, I thought that it'd only be fair to attempt to take a look at "The Red Seas" in the light of those factors too, so that I'm having a stab of comparing like-with-like rather than just fan-whining and declaring that I don't like it because I don't like it.

Although, in the end, that's what it all comes down to anyway.

2. "The Red Seas" by Ian Edginton & Steve Yeowell

I. The odd thing about the flat affect of "The Red Seas" is that it must reflect a deliberate effort on the part of its writer and artist to produce a strip which is as straight-forward and unchallenging as possible. After all, neither Mr Edginton or Mr Yeowell are anything other than highly skilled and successful creators, and so it has to be presumed that what we're seeing is exactly what they want us to. Yet, where the matter of character and character development is concerned, there isn't a single panel in part 9 of "Hell And High Water" where the reader learns a slither of a meaningful thing about any of the many actors wandering around the various ships on display. There's simply not a single character moment in the whole strip, with the exception of Jack displaying a panel's worth of predictable and so-familiar-its-uninspiring bravado at 1:3 when faced with the "veritable behemoth" that's the devil's ship, and some broad "I'm evil, me!" gloating from that devil on page 4. Now, even given that 40% of this week's strip is a double-page establishing-shot of a crowded battle at sea, the fact remains that this episode is bare of human interest and concerned more with the mechanics of a dust-up on the waves which in plot-terms takes us no nearer to the stories' end than before. (If this episode was removed from the collected edition of this that's presumably to come, how much vital information would be lost?) It could be asked, therefore, whether a writer's task might not be to at least sprinkle the action scenes with human incident that reveals something of emotional consequence about the fighting on a strip's cast. (Mr Yeowell's two-page shot of Jack's fleet engaging the Devil's flagship is an impressive piece of work, clearly laying out the battle-field and accentuating the fearsome size of the protagonist's ordinance with a bold use of blocks of black ink on what's effectively a white panel. Yet on the whole, the scenes in this week's chapter are so by-the-book and emotionally-bare that's there's little he can do to add some spice and shiver to what's a fundamentally one-dimensional and uninvolving affair.)

In truth, the reader learns nothing at all in this chapter that wasn't known before. Yes, Jack's brave and, yes, the Devil's a mean, mean chap. But then, we knew that, and if we were going to be told it again, we needed something more remarkable than, for example, a pantomime villain scheming in exactly that way that pantomime villains always have.

At the very least, we might have had the devil all dressed up like Widow Twanky. A little cross-dressing can always add a spark of role-transgression to an everyday tale of nice pirates and horrid ones too.

No extra information. No character development or indeed revealing character moments. This was a chapter of show and not tell, and that's rarely going to lay hands on a reader's emotions.

II. Strangely enough, the recent gentle character development that we've been given in "The Red Seas" actually uncut the sense of jeopardy which the cries of "Run out the damnations!" and the great sea explosions in places threatened to create. For with so much of the limited emotional conflict in the strip already closed last week, with Jack showing a brave conscience and various love affairs and family quarrels being brought to an end, there's a sense that even if various cast members die, they've died well, their story-arc completed. And though it's often a tedious trope of adventure stories, the fact is that character-strife which closes during a climatic conflict adds to the weight of the last scenes of a tale. But here the emotional business seems to have been largely wrapped up, and so to a degree it feels as if the battle's happening because that's what's supposed to happen in this type of story. Big showdowns shouldn't feel unimportant and unthreatening, but here they do, because there's nothing at stake except for the beating of that nasty, nasty devil.

And so, though anybody flicking through these five pages would rightly note a great deal of spectacle indeed, nothing that happened mattered in terms of plot or character, and so nothing seems so spectacular at all.

III. Of course, by their very nature, daring and successful plot-reversals, such as the revelation in "Strontium Dog" that Feral had never left his prison, are thin on the ground. Hollywood movies that are constructed from nothing but "dramatic" reversals quickly end up wearisome and pointless, and Mr Wagner didn't produce his turn-around in SD until the eighth episode. So it wouldn't fair to critcise "The Red Seas" for not taking the standard-model good folks/bad folks story and throwing a spin on events this week. It would've helped, however, if an interesting reversal had appeared, given the disappointments elesewhere in the strip. But then, readers of part 8 will know that the crew's two-headed dog is just about to produce a supposition which might turn the fight in Captain Jack's direction, so there's something other than a linear sea-battle on the way.

IV: There is absolutely nothing wrong in producing a simple romp, a light-hearted and straight-forward adventure tale to bring a nostalgic smile to the reader's lips. For "The Red Seas" surely has to have been created with a nostalgic glance backwards in mind. What else might be concluded when there's so very little, beyond the brief scene of decapitated heads on sticks and the presence of the Devil, that couldn't have adorned, with a little polite reworking, the middle pages of "The Eagle" in the Fifties?

And yet, if this is a nostalgic piece, what is it nostalgic for? It can't be for the pirate strips of the past, which haven't been able to muster an audience for decades, for it'd be daft to try to homage the stiff and up-tight tales of so long ago in today's 2000 AD. It can't be the grand era of children's pirate stories, for the likes of "Treasure Island" and even "Peter Pan" are far scarier than this, far more charged with confusion and violence and, just below the surface, a fair measure of sexual anxiety too. Similarly, "The Red Seas" can't be a homage to the swashbuckling technicolour epics starring Fairbanks and Flynn. Those movies were, in the context of their time, fast-moving, colourful, audacious in their set-pieces and charmingly broad in their characterisation.

What is it that the "The Red Seas" is intended to be, and how is it expected to move its readers?

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Falling In Love Again? Absent Emotions & 2000 AD 1696, Part 2 of Perhaps 2, or Maybe 3

2010-08-05T01:32:00.000-07:00

Continued from Monday;

1.

It's not as if "Judge Dredd: The Connoisseur" is the least moving story in this week's Prog. In fact, in terms of the emotions that it inspired in this reader, it's probably the second-best story of the week. And "second-best" is a pretty good position to occupy in any issue which features the likes of the eighth chapter of "The Life And Death Of Johnny Alpha", which for a host of reasons is certainly one of the very finest single episodes ever featured in the 2000 ADs that I've read.

In fact, I suspect that there's very few comparable chapters in any issue of 2000AD that are its equal. And since we're currently set on discussing why particular stories do, and do not, engage the readers' emotions, this week's Strontium Dog is a good place to stop and think about why a tale concerning the death of an unpopular, forcibly-overweight and redundant secondary character should prove so moving.

2.

I. The oddest couple in the past few months of 2000AD are of course also a menage a trois. For Archibald "Middenface" McNulty and Precious Matson have just one thing in common, and that's the absent-presumed-dead Johnny Alpha, and the longer the two of them search to discover the truth of whatever's happened to him, the more his character dominates their narrative. So protracted, exhausting and quietly desperate has McNulty and Matson's search been that it's as if Alpha is being forced back into life as we watch simply through the force of their efforts. (Noble striving is rarely utterly unrewarded in heroic adventure, so there's a strong expectation that their journey will earn what it seeks.) And that very fact that the lead character's efforts will very likely be rewarded combined with the expectation that Alpha will inevitably return could have neutered any great pleasure in this story. After all, if everything seems sure to end up for the best, why care?

II. Yet the fact that every most every significant action in "TLADOJA" has a discernible emotional effect on the characters involved means that nothing we read appears to lack importance. And just about everything we read here does have a purpose beyond simply taking us through the main beats of the plot, and so we're constantly being made to feel about what we're watching rather than being allowed to just passively consume it. Consider, for example, Feral's execution; in its own terms, it's quite horrific, but then, we've all watched a great many horrific scenes. But this one is given its extra emotional resonance in part by having McNulty declare after it that "When I see such things as that, d'ye wunner I turn tae drink?", which helps us to understand just how awful Feral's death has been on an emotional level for those who knew him. (We care more because they care in such a profound, if not overly melodramatic, fashion.) There's always the risk that violent water-cooler moments quickly pass us by after we've consumed them. But we're all fond of McNulty, and we'd all prefer that he could put his alcoholism behind him. And so this one statement helps us grasp how strong the demons are that he tries to drown in drink, for they're as bad as feeling responsible for a man's immolation, and so it all emotionally grounds the fact of Feral's death, convincing us that it's the kind of experience which can traumatise a witness to it.

For the truth is that we have all become a touch desensitised by comic-book death and the attendant horrors of it in the pages of 2000AD. But anchor an already-shocking death in the context of Middenface's haunted psyche and we can't skip over what's happened nearly so easily.

3.

To make the death of a comic-book character feel as if it's worth our caring about, it also has to be carefully foreshadowed and built towards so that the reader is made a collaborator in the whole process. For there's nothing more truly moving in a story than the sight of a character faced with an appalling death that the reader's been compelled to accept as inevitable and even, to a greater or lesser degree, just. If Feral had been immolated without, for example, the reader being convinced of both his guilt and of the justice of his death, the execution would've carried far less force of feeling with it. But Mr Wagner's been exceptionally careful to make sure that, by 3.5 of this Prog, we're resigned and yet still regretful about Feral's fate. We've been made to accept, in a whole variety of ways, that he ought not to be permitted to survive in a world where Johnny Alpha hasn't, and so we don't really want him to. Which means that, after a fashion, our hands are as dirty, or not, as McNultys, and we watch Feral's death knowing that he's not going to get away, and that he shouldn't either.

But the set-up for that was hardly just a simple manner of being told that Feral was a mass murderer who deserved his punishment, if not the way it was administered. It's also that Feral has proven himself unworthy to live while Alpha has died. (Or to paraphrase Morrisey: He's fat on the outside because fat is what he is on the inside.) Where Johnny Alpha was caring and community minded, Feral hides the truth and serves his own ends, and is willing to go to his death with the knowledge Matson and McNulty seek if he can't escape his fate. Where Alpha sacrificed himself for his friends and his principles, Feral failed to persevere even with his attempt to save Alpha for fear he'd be killed in doing so, and then covered up his own lack of courage and persistence with a lie. That's not the kind of behaviour that heroes are supposed to indulge in. ("What good would it have done? Just make me look a fool.") And, of course, there's a sneakily brilliant use of intertexuality involved in damning Feral, since many readers know that he was introduced as a character when Alpha was killed off; it can't help but feel appropriate that one of Alpha's apparent replacements should be done away with to balance the scales before JA's supposed return.

Oddly enough, it's easier to care about Feral's death, and to be moved by it, when we know that his place in the narrative is that of the flawed anti-hero who has to die, and die horribly.

4.

For what's so far been an eight-part series, "The Life And Death Of Johnny Alpha" has been astonishingly short of lead speaking parts. There's McNulty, Matson, Feral and, if you will, the absence of Johnny Alpha, but little of consequence beyond them. It's a story-telling device which pays off massively when it comes to inspiring emotion in the reader. Where "The Red Seas", "Sinister Dexter" and "Savage: Crims" are rammed full up to the gills with so many supporting characters that it's hard to care for any of them, John Wagner's script focuses on the business of story-telling; he emotionally engages us by concentrating our attention on a few key figures. And Mr Wagner has long ago learnt what so many other comic book writers have failed to, namely that the capacity of the human heart to find meaning in the lives of a great number of characters is far less than the human mind's ability to recognise a host of them. Flick through the "Why-Shaped Cut" or "Hell And High Water" this week and it's actually really hard to work out who the reader is supposed to be caring for. Focus on "The Life And Death Of Johnny Alpha" and the answer is clear. We're supposed to be impressed by Matson's stoic good-sense, sympathetic to McNulty's deep sense of dishonour, and shamefully complicit in Feral's fate.

And so we are. The focus is narrowed, and the effect is concentrated and increased.

5.

It's noticeable that "The Life And Death Of Johnny Alpha" functions so well as a drama while the traditional focus of the comic book adventure tale, the villain, is quite absent. Unless we take the protagonist of the tale to be the existential one of death itself, or even writer Alan Grant for his ill-judged decision to kill off Johnny Alpha in the first place, then this is a tale without any moustache-twirling or carpet-chewing at all. (The Red Seas has the Devil as its enemy, for heaven's sake, and yet he's so broadly drawn there, with no human emotional characteristics on show at all that I couldn't care less what he does and to whom.) Yet the "enemy" in "TLADOJA" is, of course, nothing else but the lack of just closure in a comic-book heroes life. None of those of us who were familiar with Johnny Alpha want him to have died in such a brutal and wasteful fashion. (It's certainly hard not to rebel against the knowledge that, as revealed in the Megazine this month, Mr Grant wanted the character taken off the board so that no other writer could write him badly.) In combination, real-world hubris and narrative injustice leave a sense of unfairness that "The Life And Death Of Johnny Alpha" gains meaning from dealing with. We care, therefore, not just because of the characters which have driven this tale so far, but because they're engaged in a mission to right a wrong in the reader's lives as well as in Johnny Alpha's. In short; Alpha shouldn't have died that way and Mr Wagner seems to know that we very much want the injustice to all be put right.

Writers often seem obsessed with providing their stories with great dark, universe-threatening villains, and sometimes they forget that the enemy doesn't have to be a person, or even a thing at all. Sometimes the very fact of an injustice can be immensely moving in itself, as Precious Matson and her desire to discover the truth reminds us.

6.

Many Hollywood would-be blockbusters try to ground their movies' appeal in surprise and spectacle, ignoring the business of representing believable and moving characters because they seem superfluous to the accountants-centred mind. And it's a mistake that a great many comic book creators make too. For as we know, there's no spectacle so complex and impressive that it can't become immediately tedious when populated by paper-thin characters, and no amount of reversals, of unexpected surprises, can bring to life a story populated by stereotypes rather than people.

Yet when added to a tale which has at the very least competently-deliniated two-dimensional characters on show, spectacle and surprise can function as they ought to, to catch the eye, promote a sense of shock and even awe, and to reinforce what we're learning elsewhere about the story and its lead "actors". So, for example, the revelation that Feral has been deceived, and that he was never rescued at all, does far more than simply thrill us with its unexpectedness. (*1) It reinforces how utterly important the quest for Johnny Alpha is, and it accentuates our knowledge of what McNulty and Matson have sacrificed to find him. (After all, Matson may be trying to do everything she can to blot Feral's fate from her mind, but she can't help weeping, and McNulty is reduced to declaring that the executions shown how he's " ... no' half the man he wuz. No'half the man...".) Again, action is grounded in character, and, yes, character grounded in action.

*1 - It certainly put me in my place! I was moaning last week about how the escape was far too easily achieved. Huzzah! for the imperious bluff!

7.

If there's a more cathartic moment in the last three episodes of TLADOJA than Feral's execution, I'll be surprised. For there's a sense that the worst that can happen already has, that the lowest point has been reached and just passed, and that the mettle of the leads has already been tested and found to be of the truest stuff, though they themselves don't know that yet. And if Johnny Alpha is found to be dead after all under that great world tree, it won't be the disappointment that it might otherwise have been. Because this story isn't solely about ol'dead red eyes anymore, and, more surprises not withstanding from Mr Wagner's word-processor, Matson and McNulty have already proved themselves as the heroes of this story, and in a sense they've redemned Alpha's end by showing how very important he was to the world that he had to leave behind.

Or: there's not many creative teams who could have summoned up the shockingly gruesome details of Feral's dispatching, but that on its own would be nothing more than a competently achieved and perhaps-even gratuitous example of comic strip spectacle. But match that scene with Feral's "betrayal" and guilt, and our lead's regrets, and the meaning of the knowledge gained for the business of finding Johnny Alpha, and the whole appalling sequence is quite impossible to shake from the mind.

To be continued. Or, perhaps, not. But I think so.

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