Mark Millar’s previous run on Wolverine, collected as ‘Enemy of the State’, was fantastic, but this current run may be even better, and the latest issue was one of the best I’ve read in years. The setup: it’s set in a future 50 years after just about every Marvel villain somehow got it together to team up and massacre all the superheroes and take over the world. Wolverine hasn’t fought anyone or popped his claws since then. He’s lived instead as a farmer in Sacramento. The West Coast is now run by the Hulk Gang, descendants of Bruce Banner, and they are leaning on him and his family for overdue rent. Cue the aged Hawkeye, now blind, with some important mission, asking Wolverine to drive across country with him as his minder. This means crossing the territories as divided up by the top villains - segments owned by the Kingpin, Dr Doom and others. It’s a wonderful setup rife with possibilities, and Millar exploits them well. This is the fifth issue, and Logan finally explains why he won’t fight (they have stumbled as far as the Midwest, entering Dr Doom territory, by luck and Hawkeye’s skills), what happened on that day 50 years ago. Plenty of action, as Wolverine recounts the desperate battle with a host of major supervillains (including Dr Octopus, the Green Goblin, the Absorbing Man, Sabretooth, Bullseye) - and this ends with a really devastating twist, featuring a very surprising villain and the fate of the rest of the X-Men, and a full explanation of his withdrawal since that day. This is one of the best and strongest twists I’ve ever read in a superhero comic, and I’ve read tens of thousands of the things. If that emotional charge wasn’t enough, he ends the issue in the future narrative, with a panel providing a scary upgrade for an already major villain - I won’t give it away, but it’s a terrific moment, packed with real thrill power, and once more it leave me looking forward to the next one.

I’m neglecting the artist here because I want to extol the surviving art of the single comic, and the artist has the same job however the story is broken down. Having said that, Steve McNiven does a good job, drawing action and conversation with skill and mostly sound decision-making. The inking is good too - I particularly like Logan’s stubble and wrinkles.

There is no doubt that all of the above contribute to the Spirits’ awfulness, but at the same time the film has a gusto and energy missing from many movies, something which could be down to the writer directors singular vision of the titular character. Which unfortunately boils down to “What if Miller’s Batman moved into Sin City?”. So we get endless voice-overs of how “The city” is The Spirit’s wife and life - which is somewhat ironic as the choice of filming technique leaves us with little image of the city itself except as a black silhouette and a few bricks.

So to take those criticisms above:
a) Frank Miller is not a film director. That co-directing credit on Sin City was a vanity to Robert Rodriguez, which luckily - via Miller’s choice of almost identical shooting style shows who the real director was there. The other criticism of Miller is that he had taken Eisner’s distinctive character and turned him into a stock Miller caricature also holds, but then its not as if anyone outside a small circle knows the backstory of The Spirit.
b) Superhero fatigue has set in already, that was clear well before this summer. What this summer did differently was give us superior films in their genres. And good actors. Which Gabriel Macht is not, even without stupid flapping tie, no motivation and a rubbish mask.
c) The Spirit is stupendously, cartoonily violent. Some of this violence if plenty fun (my views on the use of toilets in fights has been documented elsewhere) but when it is all the film has to offer in the way of conflict resolution it really gets dull quickly. My views on fights between indestructible protagonists are also well documented.
d) Why is it that blue screen digital set building has led, on the whole, to an aesthetic which can only really be called grimy. Every hue of desaturated blacks, greys and browns are enlivened only by the flappy red tie and Tennantesque waffle pattern of the Spirit’s Converse.

What (questionably these days) works for Miller on the comic page, fails him on the big screen. Cinema, even blockbuster cinema, has no room for his unnaturalistic dialogue, and the characters find it hard to move from one set piece to another with motivation and demeanour intact. So in the end what is left is a flapping red tie and the images which luckily do burn themselves into your memory. So not terrible if just for the memory of:
a) Samuel L.Jackson dissolving a kitten whilst dressed as a Nazi
b) The Spirit escaping from a precarious situation with his trousers down
c) The hosts of sixties Batman henchmen with their punning names on their tops.

In all other ways, terrible!

So I was in borders with a gift voucher, unsure of what to spend it on, when I remembered and picked it up, not quite out of duty, but frankly without any great expectation (not unlike when i got the new girls aloud alBUM).

It is ASTONISHING. I can’t remember the last time a book, a BOOK, has hit me like this, it might have been shampoo planet (yes, i read it before generation x, because waterstones in cheltenham didn’t have gen x) or My Idea of Fun, fifteen years ago. You might think “ah fanboy, bound to like it” but it’s so far away from his theatrical writing, and yet contains hints of all his beautiful little linguistic ticks that made me cheer inside when I spotted one.

Anyway, it may be the best novel yet written about blogging, the argot is so spot-on, the way the unnamed narrator, like all bloggers, moves away from the Proper Subject At Hand (a walkthrough of mindbogglingly complex computer game) to talk about himself, his friends (who are all referred to by their internet names throughout), his crappy job making Cooked Circular Food (a beautiful neologism that i intend to use at Every Appropriate Point) and everything else in his real life. There’s clearly a deep love for the subject matter, alienation and distance has always a key driver in forced ents work, but an embrace of distance, that it’s a good thing, and this links so strongly with how people immerse themselves in MMORPGs that it was kind of inevitable that Tim would see the potential in them.

Really, I can’t recommend it highly enough, and am worried that i’m doing a shocking job of describing how great this book is, but I HAD to tell you about it.

Anyway, this article reminded me that recently I picked up my first SHOUJO MANGA (manga for gurlies, typically published by Shoujo Beat over here)! My decision to Try It (given that I hates all comics) was provoked by intense lolz from recent jdrama Yasuko to Kenji, which featured boyband drummer Masahiro Matsuoka as an ex-biker gang leader turned awesome shoujo manga artiste (each episode would feature him dressing up his two goons as eg swooning schoolgirls, cheerleaders, puppy-walkers etc).

I picked up “Absolute Boyfriend”, as I have familiarity with the jdrama (‘Zettai Kareshi’) based on the manga, which turns out to come with two further ‘stand-alone’ comics, “I Won’t Let You Become A Star” and “Aromatics”. I’m not sure if each ‘book’ has one ‘serial’ in each instalment, followed by two standalones or whether this is a one off as it was the last episode of ‘Absolute Boyfriend’, mind. As AB is the finale of a long-running story, it’s actually quite hard to say anything about it without talking about the drama which is a different kettle of cream-puffs. So I shan’t bother!

I Won’t Let You Become A Star! is not in fact about someone jealous of their lover’s X-Factor rising success, but the following: A girl with psychic powers meets a cute boy on a train! Girl with psychic powers called to exorcise ghosts from local boy’s only high school! Haunting boys are former student council members! Student council president is the cute boy from the train! OH NOES BUT HE IS DEAD!! OR IS HE?? Psychic girl ends up on rubbish dates with the ghosts at the flicks! The least subtle subtext ever as 3 boys take turns ‘possessing’ physic girl’s body and they stay up all night ‘painting the gym’!

Aromatics features the story of a high-schooler who can ‘smell pheromones’! It’s easier to have this as ‘identify’ pheromones, as he uses this ‘talent’ of his to match up couples with compatible smells. Well, I guess it’s as good as Blood Type matching agencies. In this story, there’s a saucy librarian and a sweet’n’shy glasses-wearing girl who’s the librarian’s helper… which do we guess will eventually end up winning the incense heir’s heart? Murder attempts! The ‘smeller’ catches a cold!!

Did I like any of them though? The answer is… yes!! Whilst both are big-hearted “and they call it, puppy looooo-ooo-ve” stories, what do they have? Absolute Boyfriend has a ROBOT LOVER! IWLBAS (phew) has a PSYCHIC GIRL and an ambiguously-living love interest! Aromatics has super-intuition based on traditional family institutions and wearing a smelly kimono! Whilst the end of the line is always boy-meets-girl (or ‘boy meets boy’ if you L your BL), the only way this could be Sweet Valley High (say) is if Jessica Wakefield found forbidden love with a boy from the future who could only appear in her dreams and would leave a single red rose by her door every night to prove that he really WAS THERE! Ie awesome of course. Unashamedly romantic in every ridiculous sense!

SO WHERE ARE MY PRETTY-BOY ANGST-RIDDEN VAMPS?? Not in this one – I am not denying for one second that this genre doesn’t exist, but if we’re looking at that, don’t we look at Buffy, Stephenie Myer’s Twilight series and Anne Rice? Oh, so western-centric, but yeah – if the ‘manga’ traditionally conceived of by your western peeps is the shonen stuff (Naruto, Jump, Bleach <– I have read none because they are comics for BOYS and probably rub, although Shokotan is just so goshdarned cute she almost makes me want to give some a go?!), saying that the shoujo stuff is ‘pretty boy vampires’ is as inward looking as all get-go, looking specifically towards your gothic subbacultchas, your gosurori and you know – who cares huh??

But yet! The front page of the Shojo Beat magazine features a story called ‘Vampire Knights’ – the tagline? Cross Academy is attended by two groups of students: the Day Class and the Night Class. At twilight, when the students of the Day Class return to their dorm, they cross paths with the Night Class on their way to school. Yuki Cross and Zero Kiryu are the Guardians of the school, there to protect the Day Class from the Academy’s dark secret: the Night Class is full of vampires.

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK! OK, busted. We has vamp, and it’s shoujo manga, of course they will be pretty. Anyway, shut up!! Pretty-boy vampires are awesome!! Tssk. Yet, making this and yaoi the only girls interest stuff is missing - well - EVERYTHING else! There can be plenty of thrill-power in a story which concludes with wistful sighing and holding hands too! Stupid nerds. I wonder what shoujo manga I should read next!! YAOI YAOI YAOI. Seeing as the books are £6ish each it had BETTER BE GOOD. Bear in mind, a book doesn’t even contain a whole story! Is it too western-centric yet again to say that if it looks like a book it should quack like a book and eg GIMME THE WHOLE STORY? Oh, I’m so greedy! Anyway it’s definitely better than “Hulk Vs Predator” or whatever silly musclefest boy comics you all like. Yeah!

Vintage Cookbook Trials is by Alix, Sarah and Elly and involves trials of recipes scavenged from old cookbooks (and cookery cards).

How To Nom is a collection of NEW recipes submitted by Eli and others. Future branes will consider THESE their vintage texts.

Neojyanisme is Sarah and Cis posting about mad Japanese boybands as far as I can tell.

Bookmark them all!

It’s still a very readable and interesting book – a thorough exploration of a relatively obscure period in European history, covering the time from the coronation of Charlemagne in 800 to the culmination of the First Crusade in 1099. Holland doesn’t dwell on either event, looking instead to less well-known – but more crucial – turning points: the victory of Otto over the Hungarians at the Battle of Lech; the rise to power of the Abbey of Cluny; the humbling of Emperor by Pope at the fortress of Canossa, which Holland contends represents the crucial division of Church and State on which Christendom was founded.

All this was new to me, all of it intriguing and well-told. Holland’s style is evocative, picaresque even: he likes to present his sources with their mentality intact, which means taking at face value stories of visions, dragons, portents and miraculous occasions. He’s sure-footed enough never to labour the doubtfulness of these tales, trusting the reader to pick out when the tellers believed their yarns and acted accordingly and when the convenience of the claims is a little too neat, as with the remarkable discovery by one abbey of the head of John The Baptist, helpfully encased completely within a stone pyramid.

On a broader level, though, Millennium doesn’t quite come together. The hook Holland has picked to hang his tales on is the millennial expectations of the era – the general conviction that “the world has grown old” and the last days of mankind were upon its inhabitants. The problem is that it’s quite hard to pinpoint this millenarianism as a motivating factor for most of the book’s action – certainly some individuals were driven by it, like the young Emperor Otto III, groomed by his religious mentor (and later Pope) to rekindle the Roman flame and bring on the End Times. But for most of Millennium’s cast of conniving nobles, Viking and Norman looters, monks and Patriarchs, the looming end of days is simply part of the mental scenery, and there’s scant evidence it affected the usual human pursuits of jockeying for status and money and worrying about one’s immediate future. Impending doom – as recent nuclear and current environmental crises testify – tends simply to be too big to affect individual behaviour much: saying a few more prayers was the 10th Century equivalent of recycling a few more papers, and probably not much less tangential to the daily grind. Especially as it was often outsourced to monks.

What’s frustrating about Millennium is that there are other, more gripping themes in the book. As the year 1000 passes without the world’s end, and the year 1033 likewise (dedicated Apocalypse watchers simply shifted expectation from the anniversary of birth to that of death), the tempo of the story hardly slackens. The real plot of Millennium is one of history driven by innovation – partly liturgical innovation, the monks at Cluny devising elaborate rituals*(and engineering political change) to turn their Abbey into a kind of continental salvation machine, protecting Europe with a forcefield of prayer and helping create an ideological unity across the region. But mostly technological innovation, particularly the rise of castle-building.

Castle-building in Millennium, and the development of mounted knights that accompanied it, was the innovation that turned medieval society even more radically asymmetric. Flung up with shock-and-awe speed across a conquered landscape, the castle – routinely described now as a defensive innovation – in fact worked as an offensive base, an HQ from which to mount oppressive raids across a territory and wipe out further resistance. The rise of castle walls was a source of extreme dread to local peasantry and the parasitic knight class a scourge which required monastic intercession to deal with. The newly authoritative monks saw the Knights as potential shock troops for Christendom, recognition of which would give said troops the moral authority to turn pillage into permanent settlement. This set in motion what must be one of the biggest bits of spin doctoring in history – the imaginative transformation of mounted thugs on the make into the noble and chivalrous orders of later renown.

This is a great story, and makes Millennium a better book than the slightly tenuous apocalyptic material would allow by itself. It also somewhat justifies the enormous digression on the Norman Conquest, a whole chapter spent on English domestic politics in a book whose more general thrust they have little to do with. Generally, though, I was left with a feeling that the sheer scope of the book – from the settlement of Iceland to the origins of Russia, from the imperial policy of Constantinople to the internal strife of the Caliphate in Spain – left it groping for unity. For instance, the evocative opening at Canossa, presented as a seismic development, later falls into place more as a skirmish – not the first, hardly the last – between Emperor and Pope, and the upper hand gained by the Papacy being far from decisive. This all results in Millennium ending up a fascinating but frustrating read – one that in some ways demands a slightly less neatly packaged sequel.

*someone wanting to write a Holland-esque history book that works as a nudge-wink towards our own times could do worse than look at the development of liturgical instruments, which took a simple principle – intercession against sin, or theological insurance – and gradually made it vastly more complex, until the guaranteeing of pardons against future sins had become a vast industry and a bedrock of the Church’s finances. The Reformation as a derivatives bubble? Could be a goer!

The comic always featured our Earth too, thanks to dimensional travel and Zot getting friendly with an Earth girl named Jenny. Her and her friends and family grew in importance, and while there were some awkward and leaden moments of ‘wow, on THIS Earth…’, it wasn’t long before his depiction of this world became more and more thoughtful and artistically honest. Eventually, after 27 issues where the centre of attention was Zot’s glittering Earth, he was stranded on this one. No supervillains, almost no ‘action’ as superhero comics understand it, just the people, focussing on sometimes apparently negligible members of the supporting cast. The surprising thing was how much better the comic became. A good friend of mine, Nigel Fletcher, cites #33 as a contender for his favourite comic ever, and he is totally right, a very beautiful and moving tale about being different in school - and with an inspired and wholly original formal trick at its end, intelligently preserved in this collection. My friend is right in describing it as a masterpiece (see The Slings and Arrows Comic Guide for his full review). A few of the other issues in this nine-issue run on Earth are nearly as good.

I’ve always been a huge admirer of people who can do different styles so well (Hawks or Wilder in movies, Tezuka or Kirby or Kurtzman in comics, for instance), but it’s rare for someone to change tone so completely in a comic book, from superhero SF adventure and fun to human drama - and not just for one issue between fight scenes, but for a lengthy run. To do this with a wonderful and delightful title is even more extraordinary, and to do it and produce far better comics from it is amazing. This is a great series, and I highly recommend it.

Footnote: McCloud is returning to fictional comics, after all those big comics about comics, plus the recent online comic accompanying Google’s new browser. I’m very much looking forward to this, but it is hard to imagine him topping Zot!

* By the way, Tezuka provided a key moment when I interviewed McCloud many years ago (1990 or ‘91, I think). He was very guarded at first, and clearly trying to work out how much of his attention I was worth. When I realised his mention of Jack Kirby was testing my knowledge, it gave some idea of the kind of comic fans he must have talked to; he tried Spiegelman next, and I knew who he was too; then he tried Osamu Tezuka, and when I said I was an admirer and had written an obituary for him not so long before, I was in, and he was an enthusiastic participant in the interview from then on.

While you’re waiting, ponder Lewis Carroll’s prescient illustration of the peculiar submissive dumbness of artificial intelligence:

“Would you tell me,” said Alice, a little timidly, “why you are painting those roses?”

Five and Seven said nothing, but looked at Two. Two began in a low voice, “Why the fact is, you see, Miss, this here ought to have been a red rose-tree, and we put a white one in by mistake; and if the Queen was to find it out, we should all have our heads cut off, you know. So you see, Miss, we’re doing our best, afore she comes, to–” At this moment Five, who had been anxiously looking across the garden, called out “The Queen! The Queen!” and the three gardeners instantly threw themselves flat upon their faces.

Really, this heading is just for me to talk about one eight-page story, which only loosely belongs here. It’s widely considered the best short-story ever in comics - this may be a fair assessment, though I mention a couple of other contenders in the War and Koike & Kojima entries in this series. Whatever, ‘Master Race’ is a genuine masterpiece. You will often find no mention of the writer - it’s just discussed as Bernie Krigstein’s comic. The script in itself is daring: in 1955, the Holocaust was not much referenced in popular culture. I imagine it was still too raw, too hard to assimilate into anything but the most serious coverage, so writer (and editor of Impact, which ran this story in its first issue) Al Feldstein was taking a risk in including details of its horrors. Krigstein for once got permission to do things more or less his way - he had had regular battles with EC about changing the panel layouts he was given (EC habitually had the borders and copious caption text all set before the artists got at it). This time, he even got to stretch a 6-page script to eight pages, though I have seen it said that he had wanted 12.

It’s that art job that makes this so exceptional. I thoroughly recommend reading the whole thing here. He uses some terrific and original tricks, such as the repetition to suggest fast, flickering movement, for instance at the end of the first page - and contrast the execution of this with the same device used at the end, to understand how much control he demonstrated over his fresh artistic inventions. He was also a great draughtsman, clean and sharp - sadly, he got so frustrated by comics that he left the form a few years later to draw for book covers, magazines and so on, and to teach art. His uses of perspective in the later parts of this are among the most effectively dramatic that I ‘ve ever seen, and his willingness to use a sequence of narrow panels for a moment that anyone else would show in a single panel provides wonderful control of pacing and tension. The sequence I shows here may be the most reproduced in comic history.

It’s rightly seen as evidence of how much comics can do, as an artform. The story is a little lurid, though smart in toying with its readers’ expectations, but the art shows that, like a movie director with a less than great script (best ever cinema example: Kon Ichikawa’s An Actor’s Revenge (me on that film)), nearly anything can be transformed into something very special. It’s sad how few comics in over half a century since this story have made any attempt to achieve so much.

It’s been reprinted a bunch of times, in comic reprints of Impact 1, and in the lovely big hardback collections. I’m sure most comic shops could provide a copy, but since you can read it online you may not want to bother. I do recommend a couple of big, classy books on Krigstein, especially B. Krigstein Comics, which has lots of other great stories, including another wonderful EC story featuring lots of keys.

Lou Fine is the artist Will Eisner always talked about most - Fine had worked on Eisner’s The Spirit, which is perhaps the best comic work of that era. It ran in a newspaper supplement, 7-page strips from 1940-1952. Eisner was an immensely accomplished and expressive cartoonist, who also had a talent for memorable characters, including some femmes fatale to match Caniff, and tightly wound short stories, but I think his biggest contribution to the comics of the time was his sense of design, which was like nothing else seen in comics then, and rarely matched since. His splash pages in particular are often highly original and memorable. One warning: there is a comedy black kid in it, and Ebony obviously looks rather distasteful all these decades later.

It’s worth noting that after a quarter of a century away from comic books, Eisner returned in the late ’70s and became a prime mover in the creation of graphic novels, with a series of volumes based around Jewish characters in New York - these are rather sentimental, but superbly crafted.

Lots of greats worked on The Spirit: Eisner, Fine, Wally Wood, Jules Feiffer, Joe Kubert, Jerry Grandenetti and others, but the one who rivalled Eisner’s work at the time was Jack Cole, creator of Plastic Man. He was the first successful stretchy superhero, and that power gave Cole enormous opportunities to play with the design of the panels. He was one of the great cartoonists, energetic and endlessly fun, and while the stories are far less intense than Eisner’s best, they are very entertaining.

The Spirit has been extensively reprinted. Since the rights are with DC these days, I hope that we will eventually get cheap Showcase reprints, but I’ve no idea if that will happen. Plastic Man and the other Quality titles are owned by DC now, and there are expensive reprints, but no indication of Showcase reprints so far - again, I live in hope. (Actually, the same is true of Fawcett, who published the Captain Marvel titles, but DC have shown no sign of reprinting any pre-Silver Age comics yet in their bargain editions.)

For those unfamiliar with A Bite of Stars, a Slug of Time, and Thou, it’s an exhumation and revivification of old avant-garde and speculative science fiction short stories, hosted by MARK SINKER and ELISHA SESSIONS and a studio guest. Elisha reads the story for you at the front of the programme and then it gets talked about. Our M.O. is respectful frivolity and enthusiasm — we’re not sci-fi experts and we don’t need you to be either.

Our story this week is the frankly nutso “Zirn Left Unguarded, The Jenghik Palace in Flames, Jon Westerley Dead”, by Robert Sheckley, written in 1972. Our guest is PETER BARAN (we warned you).

http://freakytrigger.co.uk/slugoftime

This point hasn’t been picked up an awful lot, but now we have as high a profile use of that idea as I’ve ever seen. Google has just launched a new browser, which looks pretty impressive. To explain it, they brought in the perfect choice for the job: Scott McCloud (who I happened to cover in the context of his great comic Zot! a few weeks back)(and he even responded!). I assume his Understanding Comics, a comic explanation of the medium, showed them how useful this approach was. He’s produced a lovely, clear and highly readable comic explaining and promoting it, explaining new features and elements of its internal architecture superbly. I have no idea if Chrome is as good as this makes it sound - new computer software is never bug free, and the potential problems from browser bugs can be huge, though it sounds as if they have taken sensible decisions to minimise the hazards - and this isn’t any kind of endorsement of the browser, which I haven’t tried, just an expression of delight that they chose this method, and the perfect person to execute it. I can’t imagine how many people will see this, but I hope it inspires others.

Kurtzman’s humour material is almost all well worth finding: Hey Look! and Help! are erratic but never less than magnificently executed, but his best comedy is in Goodman Beaver (beautifully inked by Elder) and especially The Jungle Book, one of the all-time great comics, it comprises four parody tales - a private eye story, a business satire, a cowboy tale and a Southern sheriff strip. It’s genuinely funny, and, for me, a genuine masterpiece of cartooning. (I would recommend skipping Kurtzman and Elder’s long-running Playboy strip, Little Annie Fanny, lovely as it looks.)

Mad has also featured two of my other all-time favourite funny cartoonists. Don Martin was a Mad regular for over 30 years, producing a vast number of hilarious strips starring ugly characters and a wildly energetic style, plus the best sound effects anyone has ever given us. There have been few comic artists with as instantly and widely recogniseable a style - I’m sure just about everyone knew who drew the Mona Lisa illustration here.

Sergio Aragones is one of the most charming people I have ever met, and a lightning-fast, consistently funny cartoonist. His ‘Mad Marginals’, tiny silent cartoons, have been in all but one issue of Mad since 1963 (that issue’s were lost in the post). He has also worked extensively for DC, and created the barbarian comic Groo the Wanderer for Marvel. This comic, co-written with Mark Evanier (Aragones is Spanish, and his English needed help), starred the dumbest and most accident-prone warrior available - but Groo is also an unbeatable fighter. Most issues end with him fleeing from a huge angry mob. Because Aragones is so incredibly fast (I’ve watched him work), he can’t resist putting in loads of detail, packing in background gags.

Obviously other funny comic strips have been covered here - newspaper strips, undergrounds, indies, children’s - but there’s one other odd one I want to mention here. Gregory is an institutionalized small child, who has a couple of words and lots of expressively meaningless sounds. He’s mostly in a straitjacket, his only friend is a rat and he is sometimes mistreated by the asylum staff. This may not sound a recipe for comedy, but it’s genuinely delightful and very funny, largely thanks to Marc Hempel’s bold, strange and confident cartooning.

Early Mad issues have been collected in reprints, and there are collections of Don Martin’s work, in the small paperback reprints and in large, luxurious volumes. Aragones has had his own paperback Mad collections, and there are lots of Groo collections. Kurtzman’s Jungle Book and Goodman Beaver may be found, if you’re lucky. I found some Gregory on Amazon easily enough - his Tug & Buster is well worth reading, too. You may even find some of the above in libraries - Groo may be the best bet there.

Adventure isn’t a terribly fashionable genre (it’s generally been better represented in newspaper strips - see link at right), but it contains another genuine giant of comics. Some friends of mine, whose judgement should be trusted at least as much as mine, would answer that opening question with Hugo Pratt. The bulk of his work is a long series of graphic novels chronicling the semi-historical adventures of Corto Maltese, a sailor. I remember having a fairly long conversation with Dave Gibbons about his compositional abilities, many years aho - Pratt’s drawing is a touch rougher, even scratchier, than Toth’s, but he’s his one rival for composing an image. Corto’s rangy frame is particularly well used. I don’t love his art quite as much as Toth’s, but he’s a much stronger writer, and the Corto tales are complex and interesting as well as being exciting adventures, with some very memorable characters. Anything by Pratt is worth seeking out, and the Corto books are available, but pricey on Amazon - overdue for a new series of reprint translations, I think. The Corto Maltese magazine is great too, featuring many of the other greatest European comic artists - Crepax, Manara, Bilal, Toppi, Battaglia, plus South American greats like Munoz and Pellejero - mostly giving us adventure stories of one kind or another. I have a bunch of Italian editions, despite not being able to read the language, because I love the art so much.

I’m not a big fan of Moebius’s SF, but I do like his art on the Lieutenant Blueberry series (pictured). It’s written by Jean-Michel Charlier, and drawn under Moebius’s real name, Jean Giraud, and the feel is more like a classy late Clint Eastwood than any earlier US or European westerns. The angle is interesting: our protagonist is a Southerner who fought for the North in the Civil War due to his conversion to anti-racist beliefs, and the stories focus on this. They are compelling and muscular, and Giraud’s art matches this - none of the flash of his SF, just superb comics art. There are lots of volumes in English - the series names are varied (Lieutenant, Marshall, Young…), but the word Blueberry is your clue.

When DC started its Showcase reprint series, I was kind of surprised that Jonah Hex was one of the first they announced, and I almost didn’t buy it. That would have been a mistake, as it’s among the most consistently excellent collections. The character is a deformed and angry wanderer, not that long on morality, but still ending up on the heroic side. The art, mostly by Tony DeZuniga, is suitably grainy, particularly well drawn in a realistic style.

I’m also quite fond of occasional Hex artist and co-creator of Jonny Quest Doug Wildey’s western work. He was in his ’60s when he did a few volumes of a western character called Rio in the 1980s. The drawing is lovely, the storytelling fluent, and it has some of the best use of zipatone I’ve ever seen. The style is a little more dated than the other two series I’ve mentioned, but it’s classy work by a veteran craftsman.

Showcase Presents Jonah Hex should be pretty easy to find, but I’m less sure about the Blueberry and Rio books. Having checked Amazon, Blueberry books are pricey, Rio volumes are cheap. You’ll be lucky to find any of these in libraries, but you never know.

preamble: the chinese capitalised (er haha) on A: a known gift for fireworks, B: a known gift for people prettily running with flags, C: spectacular oriental spectacle, D: a population as numberless as the pixels in the ocean — and the Brits limp far behind on all counts; my suggestion is that we should make a virtue of necessity and scrobble our counter-spectacle up round the sense of grumpy, lumpy, stubborn, dry-witted, weird-crop SMALLNESS, the aesthetic legacy of a small crowded windy greenfield crag dropped into the north sea

hence my answer: