Comics

Comics: A Beginner’s Guide: Koike & Kojima

If you like Kurosawa’s samurai movies, it’s a very good bet that you’ll like Kazuo Koike and Goseki Kojima’s comics - it’s the closest movie/comics match this side of Sin City, which is kind of cheating given Frank Miller’s involvement in the movie too.

Koike is as superb a craftsman as you’ll find writing comics anywhere. You get very substantial characters, thematic content, motif and strong stories. His knowledge of Japan’s history has immense breadth and depth - he gets at the motivations and circumstances of the times with genuine insight, as well as doing his research thoroughly. Best of all, he creates some extraordinary characters, and drives the story from them.

Kojima was a world class comic artist, immensely powerful and exciting - think of the battle climax of Seven Samurai. His work is gritty and flowing, fast and as muscular as it gets, with exceptional control of the very different pacing Japanese comics offer. He also provides great moments - there’s a shot of a pair of eyes in one Lone Wolf & Cub story that I’ll never forget. … read on …

Comics: A Beginner’s Guide: Grant Morrison

Grant Morrison may well be my favourite comic writer ever, by now. I find him and endlessly imaginative, exciting and delightful writer, one who maintains my faith in buying individual comics rather than, as many have, buying the collections - he writes such great single issues, and I love the feeling of waiting impatiently for the next instalment. I’d maintain that his first great work was a comic called St Swithin’s Day, with Paul Grist, in which a young man dreamt about shooting Margaret Thatcher. Of course, since I edited that, I may be biased.

He started at DC around that time. On his own recommendation, I have never read the first four issues of Animal Man, but the fifth, centred around a version of Wile E. Coyote, is dazzling, and the meta elements of the rest of the highly imaginative series are extraordinary. His Doom Patrol run may be even better, bursting with strange ideas and breathtaking stories, and some great characters, not least Danny the Street, a superpowered street. … read on …

Comics: A Beginner’s Guide: Modern Humour Strips

The second half of the 20th Century was far less rich in great humour strips than the first half. Having said that, there were a couple that rank with the best ever.

The only place to start is with what was by far the dominant humour strip of that era, Peanuts. Charles Schulz throughly earned his place in the hearts of millions around the world, with one of the great casts of characters and some wonderfully subtle comedy writing. Some great humour writers would take pride in a strip being taken as against both sides of an argument; Schulz felt that way about one strip that was taken as in favour by both sides, the issue being prayer in school - I guess this is the difference between a satirist and someone with as much human warmth in his work as Schulz. Perhaps his artistic limitations would have been more exposed in earlier decades, when comic strips were a lot bigger, but he found a style that worked very well for him. Peanuts was a magnificent strip, particularly so soon after he’d found his stride, in the ’60s especially. In Charlie, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy and Peppermint Patty in particular he created some of the best known and most loved comic characters ever. … read on …

Life Imitates Tharg part 374

Can Electronic Cigarettes Beat The Smoking Ban?

“I think people need to be cautious,” warns Dr Roberta Ferrence, director of the Ontario Tobacco Research Unit. “It’s an unknown.”

“The concern is that the product will probably be promoted as something that’s safer than smoking,” she adds. “What needs to happen to make the dangers of smoking clear is for the product to be fitted with an electronic voice, perhaps one possessed of a piercing Mexican accent and a series of warning phrases such as “No no Senor Slade! Thees ees madness!”"  .

Comics: A Beginner’s Guide: SF

I guess the place to start for SF comics, particularly on a British site, is 2000AD. Its title now makes it sound very unlike SF, but it’s been running future adventure stories for decades. It’s never been consistently great, but it’s had lots of great strips over the years: Alan Moore and Ian Gibson’s future-Locas series Halo Jones, Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell’s superhero strip Zenith, Pat Mills’ future-inquisition story Nemesis, with lots of artists, but most famously, Judge Dredd. I don’t know how many Dredd stories there have been by now, but nearly all of them are at least pretty good - Mills and John Wagner managed a strong standard for a very long time. It’s hard to know where to start with highlights, but the early Judge Death stories, with art by Brian Bolland, are wonderful (a sample is shown, a favourite comic moment of mine), and Mike McMahon’s art in the same era is as good as British action art has ever been - well, except he may have beaten it on Pat Mills’ Celtic fantasy series Slaine, also in 2000AD. … read on …

Bruce Wayne, Auf Wiedersehen

I was 16 when the Tim Burton Batman film came out. At the time it was the most-hyped movie I could remember for several years. It was the first major comic-book film to come out for a while, and the first since the new wave of comics - and specifically, superhero - respectability had hit in the mid-80s. That respectability had been kickstarted by a Batman yarn, Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, and word was that this new, big-budget Batflick would cement the new, slick, media-literate, violent and intelligent take on superheroics that Miller had helped pioneer. The NME, which had a fair few comics nerds hidden on-staff, used the (sizeable) figleaf of Prince’s soundtrack to run a bundle of coverage. The serious papers nodded in approval at Jack Nicholson’s vicious, charismatic, Joker. In retrospect, it was probably the high watermark of “WHAM! POW! Comics Aren’t Just For Kids Anymore!”. … read on …

Comics: A Beginner’s Guide: Underground Comix

American comics were almost entirely childish and pretty insipid after the Senate hearings in the mid-’50s. Unsurprisingly there was a reaction to this, and some cartoonists started putting out alternatives, full of drugs and sex and anti-establishment politics. It got very tied in to the burgeoning hippy movement.

Robert Crumb

One all-time comics great came out of this movement. Crumb is a pretty twisted person with various misogynist attitudes - the saving grace is that the comics don’t read as if it’s someone telling you how women are, but as confessions of the creator’s wrongheadedness. This was new. He’s produced tons of great comics himself, and he married another extremely talented cartoonist, Aline Kominsky. He got his start working for Harvey Kurtzman on Help! (his successor to Mad), where Fritz the Cat debuted, and then started putting out his own comics. His drawing is superb, harking back to illustration styles before comics, as well as earlier comics like Popeye, and his writing is scabrous and impossible to ignore. As well as being a great creator, he was also the inspiration for the movement, and an influence on pretty much all of it. Crumb’s work has been extensively collected, and most libraries will have something. … read on …

Billy Cor Knows The Score: The Watchmen Trailer

I’ve often been told that what makes Watchmen “unfilmable” is its complexity: this is surely not true. Generally this argument confuses complexity for detail, which nowadays is bread and butter to a sufficiently obsessive director and an audience with frame-by-frame access. And looking at the trailer that’s what the Watchmen film’s got. Yes, the story as a comic contains a lot of flashbacks, but it’s not as if this is a technique unknown to cinema audiences! If you lose the Black Freighter sequence you’ve got a relatively straightforward story, albeit one with a somewhat eyebrow-raising tonal shift at the end. … read on …

Comics: A Beginner’s Guide: Stretching the Superhero

Having mentioned ’60s superheroes, at Marvel and DC, and Alan Moore, I thought I’d talk about those who tried to take the genre somewhere else in past years.

Steve Gerber
It was Steve Gerber who got me back into comics in the ’70s, after dropping them when younger, and he’s still one of my two or three favourite comic writers ever. He wrote a swamp-monster comic called Man-Thing, making the stories about characters and issues rather than horror or superheroics. In an issue of the gloriously named Giant Size Man-Thing, an odd guest character appeared: Howard the Duck, a cynical and sardonic talking duck from another dimension. He proved popular enough to get his own title, in which he sneered about this world of talking apes and got involved in parodic superhero adventures. It was sometimes terrific satire, but also substantial human drama, with the quiet moments among the best. A great series, and there is a fine Essential collection.
… read on …

Comics: A Beginner’s Guide: Adventure Strips

All of my favourite newspaper strips were at the comedy end of the market - and it is worth noting here how big an influence Segar’s Popeye was on adventure strips. Nonetheless, there were some great adventure strips, back in the days when there was room for more than talking heads in comic strips. All of them feel old-fashioned these days, it should be admitted.

Roy Crane

As Popeye took over Thimble Theatre, so Captain Easy took over Roy Crane’s Wash Tubbs strip - indeed, the Captain appeared just a few months after Popeye in 1929. He was a much more straightforward hero, shifting what had been a comedy adventure strip into more serious territory. Captain Easy was a definitive influence on adventure strips - and comic books too: he was an archetype who is seen in Superman and Batman and many others. He followed this with Buz Sawyer in 1943, a straight adventure strip. Roy Crane, more than anyone else, evolved the style of the adventure strip, in terms of art, story and character. … read on …