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:

1. The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers Omnibus comes out on September 20th, a real bargain at 624 pages (over a third in colour), featuring all the stories ever. I recommend it very highly.

2. Gilbert Shelton will be at Gosh Comics (39 Great Russell St, London, almost opposite the British Museum) on Saturday, September 13th, 2-4pm, to sign copies (so you can also get yours early). It’s very rare for there to be a signing by a veteran artist of his calibre , especially one not UK-based - well, except he will also be in OK Comics, Leeds, the day before (3-5pm),  and Dave’s Comics, Brighton, the day after (don’t know the time).

The other writer I follow most faithfully is Mark Millar. Again, I should declare a bias, as many years ago I gave him his start in comics, with Saviour (i.e. I had enough sense to recognise an obvious genuine talent when it showed up in my mailbox). In recent years he’s been one of mainstream US comics’ biggest stars, and deservedly so. His Ultimates series, with Bryan Hitch art, was particularly superb. Marvel’s Ultimate line is a fresh universe, starting from scratch with new versions of their biggest characters; The Ultimates is that world’s equivalent of the Avengers, and they are wonderfully reimagined. His Ultimate X-Men was also excellent. He does a lot, mainly for Marvel, and it’s all at least worth a look. I particularly recommend, from their regular universe, his Wolverine story ‘Enemy of the State’, in which the character, who I’ve always been much less keen on than most, is brainwashed into a deadly assassin; and the current ‘Old Man Logan’ story, set in a future after the supervillains have won, which is exciting me as much as any superhero book in years. There is plenty more - he’s currently writing an astonishing number of comics, and I’m enjoying them all.

I’d also recommend The Authority, a title that started under Warren Ellis, another writer well worth trying, and he was followed by Millar. This is another superteam book, featuring characters who are new takes on a lot of the archetypical superheroes in something like a Justice League. I love the stories in this, Ellis’s and Millar’s, perhaps especially Millar’s inspired casting of a Jack Kirby analogue as a supervillain.

I have some friends, good judges of comics, who hate Brian Michael Bendis, but I’m a big fan. His long Daredevil run was exceptional: revealing his secret identity was a motor for countless gritty stories. His strengths had always been dialogue (he’s one of the best ever at that) and the fringes of the superhero world - cops in that world in Powers, a retired superhero and would-be private eye in Alias, a magazine about superheroes in The Pulse - and characters with low-level powers, like DD, so even his fans had doubts about his abilities on the Avengers titles, but they have been tremendous, and the big Secret Invasion crossover event now happening cements that, though he still sometimes loses momentum with his digressions.

Darwyn Cooke has made his way into comics from the animated Batman and Superman shows. His New Frontier was a wonderful work, reimagining the start of the Silver Age (late ’50s into ’60s) DC superhero revival. It’s beautiful to look at, but also very smartly constructed, introducing the characters in the same order that DC first published them in this period (some were revivals). His Catwoman stories, written by the very fine Ed Brubaker, are also terrific, and he is to produce a series of adaptations of Richard Stark’s great ultrahardboiled Parker crime novels, which could easily be great.

Daniel Clowes gained fame when Ghost World was made into the best comic book movie ever. His work generally focusses on odd outsider characters, alienated and often kind of grotesque, written and drawn with a cool clarity, with a huge enthusiasm for pop culture. I find his work compelling and often shocking (he edges towards horror at times), with genuinely memorable characters. As well as Ghost World, any of his collections (mostly previously serialised in his Eightball comic) are worth reading - I’d particularly recommend David Boring and Like A Velvet Glove Cast In Iron.

Peter Bagge is an exceptionally funny cartoonist, drawing exaggerated figures and expressions in a bouncy, vicious style. His characters tend to centre on middle-class slacker youth into punk and grunge and the like. The Buddy Bradley stories seems to be almost autobiographical: a young man with no great purpose in life, no hopes, and with rubbish friends. His territory isn’t so far from that of Clowes, but his style is very different. Any of the Buddy Bradley collections are worth having, as is just about anything else, though I’ve not liked his more recent work so much.

Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library comic book is expensive, though beautifully made. The main storyline was collected as Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid On Earth, one of the most praised comics ever, and understandably so. Its formal qualities are particularly thrilling, exploiting countless possibilities of the medium that have hardly been seen before, and never handled and combined as well. The story, of a timid middle-aged man, is also rather moving, though working out what is real and what isn’t is not easy.

I suppose I should declare bias when mentioning Eddie Campbell, in that he did a series of stories for my comics years ago. He made a name, in a small way, with his autobiographical Alec stories. His art is rather scratchy, realistic and deceptively sophisticated, largely from a grasp of some very old illustrators and cartoonists. His writing is exceptional, full of insight and gentle humour, and moved on from Alec to stories of the Greek god of wine, Bacchus, in the modern world. He also illustrated From Hell, a Jack The Ripper tale written by Alan Moore, made into a pretty dull movie.

Everything I have mentioned here should be available in comic shops, and you are very likely to find Jimmy Corrigan and Ghost World, maybe more if you’re lucky, in libraries.

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.

Lone Wolf & Cub is their greatest work: around 8,500 pages about the shogun’s executioner. His family is assassinated, missing only his infant son. He places a colourful ball and a sword on the floor, and waits to see which his child approaches. He is going away, on a path of obsessive, long-term revenge, and if his son chooses the plaything, he is not suited to this life, and he will kill him. He chooses the sword, and accompanies his father on the road to hell. There’s a large range of stories, often episodic but looping back to the main point. My favourite focus on the son, who grows into a unique child. In one story where he is separated from his father, after almost being burnt to death he finds himself face to face with a ronin. This small child picks up a stick and readies himself for combat, and the look in his eyes makes the ronin back off. This is one of the greatest comic series I’ve ever read, magnificent on every level.

There are two more translated series. Samurai Executioner features as disciplined a character as in LW&C, the shogun’s sword tester - he tests them by executing criminals. The stories are episodes, but some of them are among the best shorts I’ve ever read, close to perfect. Some notes on one story.

Reaching its final volumes as I write is Path Of The Assassin. This centres on Ieyasu, who became the shogun who created Japan’s longest period of peace after over a century of wars, and his bodyguard, a ninja who grows up with him. It’s a great setup for the political and military manoeuvring into and during the climactic civil wars that united the nation, and for individual ninja action. The relationship between the two central characters and their different worlds is particularly superbly handled, though this may lose something if you have a less deep interest in that period of Japanese history, and Ieyasu’s totally original governmental methods (which this series may not reach) than I do - it’s kind of hard for me to keep track of it all, and I am fairly familiar with the major players, at least.

I also write about these two on my own site, including a page on one very strange LW&C story.

All of the above should be pretty easy to find, in small-format paperback translations from Dark Horse. They’re good value too, something like £7.50 for 300 pages a book. Samurai Executioner is the only one where you can sample a random individual volume with no risk of losing anything by not having read predecessors. If you want to try one, go for #6, as discussed in that linked review.

Bizarrely, these books are authored by a rather “keen” Mormon author, and don’t feature drinking, drugging or… s3xxxing? Hold on a second, but you know the whole vampire thing is massively… like… about…? SINKING FANGS INTO NECKS and so on? Apparently these series are big business in the US (apparently whilst magic is evil, vampires - providing they don’t booze or s3×0r - are fine!) and set to be huge in other territories. Now I love me some teen vampire trash but when written by a woman who allegedly hasn’t seen an R-rated film “on principle” - whut?

I admit I haven’t seen an R rated film myself - I still don’t QUITE know what it means! I thought it was the stage above 18, but apparently not! From FAN FIC, I have the following assumptions about RATINGS:

G: this is ‘U’. People occasionally look at each other and hold hands. Either dull or insanely fluffy. Can often contain lots of talk about FEELINGS, but then there is a crossover with R - see entry for “R”.
PG-13: boys KISS, if this is a PG rating then I am 1xmonkeys uncle d00ds - surely that would make it a 15 yes? Generally written in inappropriate fonts and purple text.
NC-17: = 18, although frankly given some of the FILTH out there it is probably XXXXX r4ted (but you don’t get that rating at the cinemas that I go to so it doesn’t count). Smut basically.
R: warning - here be EMO! Basically R means “your characters will be unhappy, angst a lot and there will be domestic abuse perhaps BUT ONLY BECAUSE HE LOVES HIM AND HE COULD NEVER BE WITH HIM”. The end scene is generally someone sobbing alone in the Cold Night Air. Either no w1nkies feature at all, or LOTS of w1nkies do. WTF. This rating does not exist in this country and frankly it baffles me, my dere. Can sometimes be smut, can sometimes be nuzzink. K-bizarre.

I’d rather read some of this vampire chicklit! Undead (And Unwed)! Now THERE’s vampire “fic” for you! *adds to wishlist* - seriously this is genius. GENIUS.

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.

My favourite comic of his is probably his run on the Justice League of America, and it showcased one of the qualities he has shown on major titles, an ability to identify what makes a comic special or distinctive, and run with it. He centred it on DC’s biggest stars, and gave them the most gigantic challenges available. The climactic story, where the thing that destroyed the last universe attacks at the same time as World War III breaks out and all the participants are activating their nukes, and the alien Queen Bee takes over New York City and turns everyone into slaves, and Luthor attacks the JLA, blowing up their base and killing one of the members, to mention a few highlights, is magnificent. There are no superhero comics since Kirby’s Marvel prime that I have reread so often.

Many people prefer his X-Men, and this is not unreasonable - again, there are wonderfully built-up megathreats, and great use of the school. This also has better artwork than the DC series I mentioned, which helps, though I found the run a bit patchy. His Seven Soldiers project for DC was patchy too, with variable art quality and some of the seven mini-series much better than others, plus an overcrowded final issue - but some of it was glorious, including one of my favourite moments in comics ever. The page in the final issue of the final mini-series, Frankenstein #4, that reveals the nature of the enemy, and the following spread gave me a kind of thrill and glee that I’ve experienced only a couple of times in the medium.

Since then he has been writing DC’s two biggest stars. I’m particularly loving his Superman run, which plays with much of Superman’s rather ludicrous history, recreating some of the pleasures of the character’s silly stories of the late ’50s and ’60s. This also has lovely art, from Frank Quietly - Grant has not been blessed with this too often. He’s now writing Final Crisis, another mega-event title, which is immensely dense and rich so far.

Most of this stuff is pretty easy to find, bar St Swithin’s Day, probably. There are many, many collections of his best and most high-profile work, and I could have mentioned lots of other things well worth reading - some people like his big Invisibles series better than anything I’ve mentioned, for example, and the Seaguy mini-series was a total joy.

In actually two hours time I set off for EDINBURGH where myself and Mr Hibbett will be showing, for your delectation and delight, My Exciting Life In ROCK!

think that just about covers everything, Medina is here, right off Bristo Square (it’s the downstairs bit). If you’re in Edinburgh please come along, mention the “Freaky Trigger Special Offer” to get two for one all week, cos I’m generous like that.

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.

Even better, for me, is a strip with some similarities, Calvin & Hobbes: again, a small boy and an animal, and again lots of regular riffs. The two leads are great characters, as is Calvin’s dad (was it Schulz who thought he’d take over the strip?), and Bill Watterson was a far better artist, genuinely brilliant a lot of the time, both in spectacular colour Sunday fantasy sequences and in precise expressions, especially for Hobbes’ appalled and ironic moments. He was also tremendous with words - a real feel for language’s possibilities. Contrary to Schulz, he would never license merchandising. I suspect an unwillingness to fix Hobbes in one form, to make a decision between his being alive and it all being Calvin’s fantasy world, was behind this: there are strips supporting and denying both interpretations. It doesn’t really matter - it was a glorious strip, and he stopped before any significant decline in quality, so its run is perhaps the most perfect ever.

Cheating a bit, but I also want to mention Gary Larson. He rarely ventured into the strip form, generally offering a panel gag, but the Far Side cartoons are among the funniest ever produced. He made dazzling use of animals of every kind, but seemed to be able to create hilarity from nearly any territory.

And if I am mentioning single-panel series cartoonists, let’s fit Giles in here too. His political points were sometimes rather tedious, but the raw chaos of some of his best panels, most often those centring on the large family he depicted so beautifully, is irresistible, and the mighty grandmother is an unforgettable creation.

Collections: you still see those lovely old Peanuts paperbacks around some, and now there are prestige collections appearing of all of it, in order. The Calvin & Hobbes collections should be easy enough to find too. Far Side collections are easily available. Those lovely Giles books are sometimes found in charity and secondhand shops, but they have become more collectible and therefore expensive, and the late editions are much less appealing.

“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!”"  .

SF’s always had a big part in comics all over the world - the argument used to be that comics had an unlimited special effects budget. Whatever, there have been some good ones. EC did plenty of SF, with some wonderful art - see the horror and war entries for some of the names. The stories are often a little unexciting, but they are very nice to look at. Before Marvel started doing superheroes, the great Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko did lots of SF and horror for them. Kirby specialised in big monsters, Ditko in little twisty tales. These are sillier and more fun than the EC stories, and the art is even better - Ditko in particular provided a lot of the best splash pages I’ve ever seen on these stories.

It’s also been a huge part of manga. My taste for big robots and post-apocalyptic settings is pretty small, so most of it is of no great interest to me, but I do want to mention Hiyao Miyazaki’s Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind - he wrote and drew the comic, as well as directing the movie. It’s a dense work, much more complex and substantial than the film, and as strong an SF story as I’ve ever read in comics.

Collections: all of Nemesis is collected in fat, reasonably priced volumes, and the same publisher is gradually putting out Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files (10 books so far - these are nearly as good value, pages per pound, as Marvel’s Essential and DC’s Showcase reprints). Moore’s Halo Jones and the McMahon Slaines can be found reasonably easily in book collections too. The EC SF has been reprinted more than once, and there are big hardback volumes too. There’s a lovely big omnibus collection of Amazing Fantasy, including some terrific Kirby monsters and a huge amount of Ditko SF and horror shorts. Nausicaa is available in four books.

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!”.

And I honestly can’t remember anyone who saw the film being disappointed. I went with my Dad, who’d been impressed by my Miller Year One comics, and we both thoroughly enjoyed it. In Burton’s hands the film lived up to the hype, Nicholson was generally considered a triumph, the caped crusader monstered the box office and dancing with the devil in the pale moonlight seemed to sum up pop culture in 1989 quite admirably.

The film’s tone and mood was, to be honest, nothing much to do with the Frank Miller Batman, which was becoming the grim template for the character in the comics. Burton’s Gotham was colourful, queasy, and dangerous, and the film enjoyed its aura of curdled, menacing camp. It was a necessary step away from the version of Batman laid down in the 60s - the full-on kitsch crusader, fighting the Riddler and rubber sharks - but it wasn’t a complete break from it, and nor was its sequel, with the Catwoman and Penguin, which I enjoyed even more. Later films slipped back into the family-fun mode, only without the “fun”. But the sensibilities of the two Burton Batman films, despite a few concessions to modern viciousness, are closer to the twisted comedy of Batman in the 1970s comics - stories like “The Laughing Fish”, where the Joker gives every fish in Gotham his rictus grin, and then murders people who won’t pay him a royalty for it.

What’s intrigued me most about the build-up to the enormously successful The Dark Knight is how similar it is to the hype for Burton’s Batman - visionary director, true to the comics, dude you gotta see this Joker - and how much fan reputation of the Burton movies is now tinged with retconned disappointment, as if Arnie and his Freeze Gun were always implicit, hidden in the frames of the 1989 film just waiting for Joel Schumacher to free them. But it goes deeper than a tarnished franchise - Burton’s efforts are judged wanting compared to the new Nolan films because they present an inferior version of the Proper Batman.

The Proper Batman is, in essence, what happened when Frank Miller’s Batman vison took over the character. The Proper Batman is hard, dedicated, driven and ruthlessly efficient, but still heroic. His war on crime is unending, his character is defined by his parents’ murder rather than by his friendships or status as a superhero. He is not, absolutely not, in NO WAY “camp”. His stories are dark. His enemies are psychopaths. He isn’t an asshole, though it’s easy to write him like one. His adventures are - “realistic” isn’t quite the right word, dude’s still a multimillionnaire who dresses like a bat, but they have a patina of “realism”: people get hurt and killed in them, if not killed by him.

The Proper Batman doesn’t really exist in the comics - in some senses he hasn’t since 1940’s BATMAN#1, which introduced Robin (who Nolan refuses to use in the films, probably rightly). Attempts to write him have foundered, partly beause you need to be a very good writer indeed to catalogue the adventures of such a monomaniac on a monthly basis, and partly because Batman in the comics lives in a shared universe where not only Robin exists, but where Superman is his mate.* Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns and Year One reinvention of Batman, in fact, is simultaneously the most effective superhero reimagination of modern times and the most unworkable. It only really works in one-off stories in which Batman’s war on crime is a genuinely lonely one. Enter Nolan and his movies, which can realise the Proper Batman in spectacularly intense fashion.

So The Dark Knight is a “comic book” film at one remove - a film based on idealised, not real, comics. The current comic adventures of Batman, ironically, are closer in feel to the surreal, blackly funny dreamscape of the Burton Gotham than anything DC Comics has published since the late 80s, and are also the first time in years and years I’ve regularly enjoyed reading the character. As one outraged blog comment asked, what are DC thinking if a new fan, enthused by the stark realism of The Dark Knight, walks into a shop looking for Batman comics and finds the current issue? Which features Bruce Wayne high on meth, convinced he’s a Batman from an alien world and sewing himself a gaudy new yellow-and-purple costume, with his pal from the fifth dimension, Bat-Mite, looking mockingly on.

The concept behind the current Batman storyline, by Freaky Trigger favourite Grant Morrison, is in its way as radical as Miller’s tight focus on Batman the obsessive noir vigilante. Faced with stories dating from the 30s to now, with Batman and Robin fighting freakish gangsters in the 40s, meeting aliens and mermen in the 50s, palling about with Superman in the 70s and 80s, and undergoing trial after sales-chasing trial in the 90s, he’s simply asked the question: “What if all this stuff happened to the same guy?” He hasn’t picked and chosen to make a Proper Batman, he’s just assumed that every Batman story is in some way ‘valid’, and then tried to work out what all that would do to Bruce Wayne. The answer being, obviously, that it would drive him completely mental. The storyline is called “Batman RIP”.

Morrison’s Batman, haunted by crazy adventures and higher-dimensional imps that may or may not be in his head, is as unfilmable now as a Miller version would have seemed in the 60s, Adam West era. In spirit, though, as a patchwork of compromised visions, he’s close to the Tim Burton vision of the Dark Knight, whose balancing of camp memory and strident new realism was so loved at the time and has ended up so curiously unthanked.

*This puts a serious spoke in the wheels of Proper Batman, as outlined by Al in an ILC post of yesteryear: “Hey wow, Bruce, how’s that neverending quest to clean up Gotham working out? You know the one, the one I COMPLETED IN 8 SECONDS with SUPER SPEED. Yeah the Joker put up a hell of a fight for an ORDINARY MAN WITH A DEFORMED FACE. Also I don’t know how you slept at night when there was a man dressed as a penguin roaming your town…”

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.

Gilbert Shelton

Shelton was, for me, underground comix’s finest entertainer. Fat Freddy’s Cat and The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers are always funny, as is the less well known superhero parody, Wonder Wart-Hog. The Furry Freak Brothers were a trio of hapless stoners, always in search of a score and a way to pay for it. I can’t find any figures online, but these have been gigantic sellers for decades, and deservedly so, so shouldn’t be at all hard to find.

Harvey Pekar

It’s questionable whether he should belong here, but Pekar’s autobiographical comics are so clearly post-Crumb (and Crumb draws some of them) that this is as good a place to put him as any. They aren’t often pleasant reading, though he has a very good ear for small anecdotes, because of Pekar’s self-loathing, but they are compelling and potent. The movie of American Splendor made him famous, so you should be able to find his work easily.

Undergrounds produced lots of terrific talents. I can’t cover many here, but it’s also worth trying Justin Green, Kim Deitch, Ted Richards, Bill Griffith, Roberta Gregory, Foolbert Sturgeon, Jaxon, Spain, S. Clay Wilson, Rory Hayes and Vaughan and Mark Bode (father and son) among others. Art Spiegelman (see the Raw entry in this series) started in undergrounds, and many of the artists appeared in Raw in later years. Some subgenres split off and produced interesting work too - anthologies Gay Comix and especially Wimmen’s Comix had some terrific cartoonists, for example.

No, the problem with Watchmen’s filmability, which judging by the trailer is likely to remain a problem, is the question of who the hero is? This is, basically, a superhero story whose protagonists are either ineffectual, inscrutable, or insane. Again, this needn’t be much of an issue - it’s not as if morally murky films with no clear heroes are any great novelty. But the buffer Alan Moore ran into (and admitted as much in interview) is that, despite every attempt to make Rorschach repulsive and pathetic, he ended up as a total bad-ass. OK, he was pathetic in his ’secret identity’, but so’s Superman. And it’s not like he’ll be less of a bad-ass on film. “He’s mentally ill but arguably the most heroic of them all.” as an MTV interviewer puts it to the film’s director. (The trailer suggests balance will be provided by making Nite Owl and Silk Spectre bad-asses too, but it might just be that we’re being shown their more bad-assy moments).

This is the context of Moore’s current round of interviews, in which he’s been expressing concern that - not that he gives a monkeys about the film, you understand - Watchmen’s director also did 300, which glorified militarism and war, and maybe this new film will also glorify bad things. He knows perfectly well, of course, that if he was worried about glorifying bad things he probably shouldn’t have written a scene in which his supercool masked vigilante murders three enemies from behind his cell bars. The message Alan Moore perhaps intended to convey with Watchmen was, superheroes are completely fucked up, let’s not write so much about them pls. The message he ACTUALLY transmitted was, superheroes are completely fucked up, that makes them EVEN COOLER, and so instead of killing the genre he reinvented it and here we are in our brave new world in which the Watchmen film is almost certainly NOT attempting to kill anything at all, it’s meant to fit right in with a superhero movie boom. It’ll be a “dark take” on superheroes, of course, but there’s a world of difference between ‘anti-hero’ and just plain ‘anti’.

So what I’m getting from the trailer - and it’s only one trailer, and I went “wow!” in all the same places most other people did - is sense of a film which is playing off immense faithfulness to the source material from the perspective of visual, panel-by-panel recreation, against a certain (inevitable) faithlessness to the intent of the comic. But without Moore’s doomed botched utopian rage to animate Watchmen, what is it? A fun bit of superhero sci-fi with a dodgy ending? I’ll be very interested to find out.

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.

Gerber also wrote The Defenders, and this was the weirdest superhero title of its time, with strange villains and plots, including a bewildering sequence of issues where character’s minds and physical brains were getting switched around - watching the Hulk try to grasp that they had his friend Nighthawk’s brain in a dish, and the cute fawn was an evil wizard, was tremendous fun. Check out Essential Defenders 2 and 3 (3 also includes a great story by David Anthony Kraft).

Frank Miller
Frank Miller was the other shining new light of Alan Moore’s generation, and we’ll come back to his later work in another instalment. He came to prominence with some tremendous work on Daredevil, combining classic comic art (a lot of it learned from studying the likes of Will Eisner) with some imaginative, gritty stories and some good new characters, most notably Elektra. His most famed work of that time was The Dark Knight Returns, a future tale of Batman that had a huge impact. His work was questionable politically, but brilliantly executed, and Dark Knight totally reinvigorated a rather stagnant Batman, and has been the key model for the character ever since. (This is reprinted in countless forms, and you will have no difficulty in finding it.)

Scott McCloud
I’ll also slip Scott McCloud’s Zot! in here, as an example of the different approaches opened up in the ’80s indie boom. McCloud is best known for his superb later Understanding Comics, a very sound formal guide to the medium in graphic novel format. His formal understanding is very much on show in Zot!, with all kinds of great cartooning, plus clever characters and fresh stories, but maybe the most impressive aspect of what was a tremendous series was its dealings with its teenage stars as people - one issue that is an intimate conversation seems to me to be something of a masterpiece. (There are collections of this great comic, but they may be a little harder to find than those above.)

This is just a sampling - the ’80s really opened superhero comics up, in terms of extending the boundaries of the genre and offering new possibilities. Too many people simply regarded the biggest successes, Moore and Miller in particular, as defining new paradigms, but some others have more smartly seen them as invitations towards rethinking how to do this rather absurd genre.

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.

Noel Sickles

In 1933, Sickles took over a strip called Scorchy Smith, drawing it for three years before largely abandoning comics for better paid illustration work. He was a superb artist, especially his brushwork and use of duotone, and he brought in effects that you then see in the work of the more famous Milton Caniff, particularly his use of chirascuro. They worked together for a while, and that included trading strips at times, so there are Caniff Scorchy Smiths and Sickles Terrys, but I don’t think anyone is sure which. Some great samples of his art.

Milton Caniff

The giant of adventure comic strips. He started Terry and the Pirates in 1934, and these stories set in a rather implausible Orient were a huge success. When he left it in 1946 to launch a new strip that he would own (as Crane had done with Buz Sawyer), it was huge news: front-page strapline teasers for the coming strip for over a month on newspapers, and the first Steve Canyon strip was printed on the front page by some. Its unabashed militarism is at times exasperating, and it cost it a lot of readers and papers during the Vietnam war, but both strips are absolutely masterful storytelling, with daring adventures and femmes fatale all over the world.

Frankly you’ll be very lucky to find anything of Crane or Sickles available cheaply, if at all. (Actually there is a collection of all of Sickles’ Scorchy Smith out soon, but it isn’t cheap.) Caniff is better served, with lots of collections of Terry and Canyon available. You might even find Checker’s Steve Canyon collections quite cheaply, but bear in mind that they are significantly reduced from the original size, so you need decent eyesight to read them.

Oh, and I’d like to add an honorary mention to Frank Robbins’ excellent work on Johnny Hazard from 1944-77.

It was, more than anything else, EC’s powerful horror comics that led to uproar and US Senate hearings in the ’50s - and for years afterwards, comics were aimed more squarely at children than any time before or since.

They don’t seem so scary today, over 50 years on. The twists are often predictable and kind of repetitive when you read a lot of them, and the insistence on describing everything in captions (the panel outlines and caption lettering were produced before the artists got to start work) is wearing. Nonetheless, they had lots of terrific artists: Johnny Craig, Harvey Kurtzman, Wally Wood, Jack Davis, George Evans, Jack Kamen, Reed Crandall, Graham Ingels. Ingels was particularly strong on creepy characters and atmosphere, but the general standard was exceptional.

There have been lots of comic reprints, so you should be able to sample these easily; and if you love them there are terrific big hardback collections.

Warren

In the mid-’60s Warren started producing post-EC comics in B&W magazine format. It wasn’t long before they relied heavily on cheap foreign artists, but early on the standards were exceptional, with art by Alex Toth, Steve Ditko, Gene Colan, Gray Morrow, Jerry Grandenetti and Neal Adams plus EC alumni like Al Williamson, Angelo Torres and Reed Crandall. The stories, mostly by Archie Goodwin in the early days, were much stronger than at EC, and some of the Toth and Ditko stories are genuine masterpieces.

Old issues of Eerie and Creepy aren’t so easy to find, though they did publish later issues reprinting the best of Ditko, Toth and Adams, for instance.

Manga

Hideshi Hino has produced 150 volumes of, mostly, horror. Some of his work is wild and hilarious, though I am getting a little bored with some tropes and repeated images. My favourite, by a long way, is Junji Ito: his best works are, for me, the best horror tales ever in any medium. I like horror well enough, but it’s rare for me to be genuinely scared, to be thinking “oh fuck, no…”, to be bracing myself before turning a page. Uzumaki is a three-volume set of stories set in a town cursed or haunted by a spiral; Tomie is two volumes of tales of a beautiful but monstrous woman (some of volume 1 is weaker early work); Gyo (review by Tom Ewing) starts with a fish with legs, and escalates in extraordinary fashion. I think he’s a brilliant creator of original and horrific ideas, and I’m sure his best work will haunt me forever.

You might find some of these in libraries - I came across him when I found Uzumaki in the children’s section of one, which is a very bad idea.

Charles Burns

I must mention one wonderful American cartoonist whose work often focusses on body horror, disease and the like. His work is genuinely unsettling, and the artwork goes from beautifully precise black and white linework to absolutely hideous. Again, you might be lucky enough to find Black Hole or Skin Deep in a library.

The problem of the Telmarines: book-Telmarines are Puritan colonisers, Early Americans if you will, pirates-turned-moralisers out of sync with the nature they’ve invaded. They had excellent pointy helmets and nifty mini-skirts. Film-Telmarines are Spanish Conquistadors extpriating the Aztecs, proud and treachorous all, except for tyrant-usurper Miraz, who is Hitler obv, and therefore Iranian. Their military knowhow is negligeable — they don’t even know that footsoldiers should break stride on a nearly built bridge — but luckily they are up against the cluelessl of Old Narnia.

The problem of Narnians: Centaurs and Satyrs and Furries oh my! Mr Tumnus (as channelled by Mallarmé, one afternoon): “I adore you, wrath of virgins–fierce delight/Of the sacred burden’s writhing naked flight/From the fiery lightning of my lips that flash/With the secret terror of the thirsting flesh:/From the cruel one’s feet to the heart of the shy,/Whom innocence abandons suddenly,/Watered in frenzied or less woeful tears.” <— This is what kosher fauns get up to when it isn’t winter. In the film, the massed ranks of centaurs are all nips up top, all pubes everywhere else. Old Narnians are REALLY REALLY none too bright, at least outside the ranks of Dwarf Nikabrik’s sadly thwarted Campaign for REAL Old Narnians (CAMRON) (Carmody to thread!)

The problem of war: is the problem of the story. War is, like, horrible: and to be remotely exciting on film today it has to be amped UP not tamped down. In the book it’s a romp where nearly no one gets killed; the film has to stand against LotR and Troy and 300 and whatevs. It’s a tough call guess which side adopts the more incompetently insane strategy: the Narnians who stand in FRONT and then undermine their own fortifications, or the Telamarines, who set their cavalry off at charge then fire massive trebuchet boulders at them from behind. “We detest and fear the trees! Let’s do battle right in the middle of them!” Etc. Perversely, I rather liked the added-in castle-attack: the book sees General Caspian, on his own and untrained, lead a failed foray — Giant Wimbleweather broke out “at the wrong time and from the wrong place”, and a centaur is “terribly wounded” — and its glum aftermath (poor dim Wimbleweather crying all over everyone). The film turns this into a Robin Hood-type escapade, which goes wrong bcz Caspian and Peter are squabbling inexperienced rivals, bcz plans are not stuck to, and bcz castles are kinda built to withstand Robin Hood-type escapades, 90 years of cinema cliche notwithstanding. So hurrah for PC’s plot-departing genre-busting daring here, even if it does mean a bunch of lovely Furries dying in horrible agony, a downer even Lucy’s winsome freckles and snub nose can’t entirely dilute. Lots of Narnians die because Peter and Caspian are idiots — not to mention KIDS d00d! — and the grown-ups, viz Aslan, are prancing about in the woods playing test-yr-faith hide-and-seek. Did I mention Aslan is a kn0b?

The problem of the children: why does Narnia need Kings and Queens who are Sons of Adam? It is of course because you are NOT ALLOWED TEH SECHS IN unless you already fell off the wagon, eden-apple wise. CSL gets himself in SUCH a silly mess about this — Aslan has set up an RPG with ad hoc rules that make a happening FantasyWorld totally impossible. (Old Father Time, last to leave, will put out the light before three of these Earthlets even lose their virginity; and the lion will be carpeted by the Emperor-Overseas: “With all due respect, Aslan, youre fired”))

The problem of Susan: beestung lippie-tastic stunna from the off, fending off mere mortal mingers, I will happily defend that Susan can’t keep her eyes or hands off Suave Latino Caspian, and vice versa — horn’n'faun jokes are the Rampaging Oliphaunt in the Narnian Spare Oom already, and TORCHWOOD AGENDA GET OVER IT ppl. Susan is a super-boring character without this dimension; I prefer the Pevensies flailing around getting stuff wrong and bickering convincingly.

The problem of High King Peter (the Magnificent): worst general evah (but then he is 13 AT MOST and quite properly expecting Aslan to arrive soon and sort stuff out). I liked the way Peter lurched from decency to flustered petulance — the oldest brother character is a classic dud in KidLit anyway (tone set by Swallows and Amazons, John Walker the utterly wooden-be-good stand-in for real-life tomboy Taqui Altounyan, who sounds like the Pirate Queen of the Calormenes). So yeah. “We would have got away with it if it wasn’t for those meddling kids FANNYDANGLING DEITIES WHO MADE THIS WORLD AND EVERYTHING IN IT” <— fixed

The problem of Aslan: is that like all monotheistic supreme being he was a preening self-absorbed tw@t, and being voiced by Liam Neeson makes it worse. I enjoyed this film immensely: TASH-SLASH NOW!

“loneliness + alienation + fear + despair + self-worth ÷ mockery ÷ condemnation ÷ misunderstanding x guilt x shame x failure x judgment n=y where y=hope and n=folly, love=lies, life=death, self=dark side”

Now, I may not know much about maths, let alone the higher-dimensional equations of the Fifth World - but I have to ask myself - is this actually an equation? Even if you put “Anti-Life =” at the start? Well, surely not. It’s an equation followed by a proposition and then some statements which I guess the equation will help prove…? Mathematicians? Help me out?

What I DO know is that the main equation bit also needs some BRACKETS! Every good equation should have brackets. This would seem to make more sense:

“Anti-Life = (loneliness + alienation + fear + despair + (((self-worth ÷ mockery) ÷ condemnation) ÷ misunderstanding)) x guilt x shame x failure x judgment”

Poor old self-worth! Long-term students of music and FT will also notice that this is the definition of emo we’ve been struggling for.