The Brown Wedge – FreakyTrigger https://freakytrigger.co.uk Lollards in the high church of low culture Wed, 27 Mar 2024 19:31:26 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 Aard Labour 12: Rick’s Story https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-12-ricks-story https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-12-ricks-story#respond Wed, 27 Mar 2024 14:39:43 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=35025 This is the 12th of my posts about Cerebus The Aardvark, a 16-book graphic novel by a guy with serious issues. As usual, contains full spoilers for what happens.

Previously: Cerebus spent several years in a pub, enjoying a bromance with his old friend Bear and a fling with local woman Joanne. Meanwhile, Dave Sim’s anti-feminist opinions were beginning to impact his professional reputation, and his wider worldview was changing in some startling ways…

Some people will tell you that nothing happens in the final third of Cerebus, or that the last 100 issues are “all epilogue”. They are wrong, I think. Thematically, the final third of the comic seems fairly clear to me. Cerebus takes up a number of roles: a friend, a lover, a son, a leader, a messiah, and a father. Ultimately he fails at all of them, often because he’s distracted by or blind to the faults of (you guessed it) women. 

There’s also a story – two in fact, both of them explicitly paying off plot threads from the first 200 issues. There’s the story of Cerebus and Jaka trying to make their relationship work on a journey back to Cerebus’ home town – that one’s straightforward enough and takes up the two books after Rick’s Story. It’s the other one that’s the problem – the story of how Rick becomes the prophet of a religion based around Cerebus, and the political and social consequences of that for Cirinism and for Cerebus’ world. It’s told in a mostly unsatisfying way, piecemeal across several books, sometimes very obliquely, and with multiple compressions and time jumps. It also, as detailed below, gets derailed before it’s even begun by Sim’s own religious conversion.

I know why people are keen to separate off the final third from the first two, salvaging a version of Cerebus that could be enjoyed with relatively little stress or guilt. Those later books are tainted, first implicitly and then very much explicitly, by Sim’s extremist viewpoints on gender. There’s also a big stylistic shift – most of the last six books are slowly paced and very low on any sort of conventional action. Sim by this point has a limited number of issues left, knows what he can or can’t do in a block of them, and is perfectly happy to move plotstuff to the background to make room for small domestic scenes, philosophical digressions or artistic experiments. It’s easy to see why people find the final third boring or frustrating or just plain bad. As I said in the Minds review, you definitely can stop at #200. But Cerebus is, in the end, a 300 issue story, like Dave Sim always said it was.

Within this big structure, Rick’s Story is a load-bearing wall. It’s the third act of Guys – the end of the tavern years, which finishes off the Joanne and Bear plots. At the end, it reintroduces Jaka via a deus ex machina (Dave-us ex machina in this case) twist to set up the upcoming “Can Cerebus and Jaka be happy?” storyline. But as the title suggests, the most important thread of this volume deals with Rick, his religious awakening and the “Booke Of Ricke” that he writes while staying in Cerebus’ pub, laying the groundwork for Latter Days, the concluding Cerebus arc.

So there’s a lot happening, and it doesn’t all make a lot of sense, but I’ll attempt a summary. Jaka’s ex-husband Rick arrives at the pub – since we last saw him he’s become a writer, obsessed with seeking Truth and working on a book about it. He’s also an alcoholic and somewhat insane, his perception of Cerebus flipping from demonic to divine. Cerebus’ recent ex Joanne reappears and flirts with Rick, agreeing to meet him at a bacchanalia, but stands him up and Rick returns with a head wound, which tips him further into madness: he begins writing the story of his experiences in the tavern as a Gospel. As he nears completion of his book Rick has a genuine religious encounter with a burning bush. That night he sleeps with Joanne, who tells him that Cerebus claimed to have been married to Jaka. Rick damns both Joanne and Cerebus before leaving, binding Cerebus magically to the tavern. Dave reappears, in person, and breaks the spell, leaving a package for Cerebus containing Missy, Jaka’s doll. Jaka shows up as soon as he opens it, reuniting Cerebus with the love of his life. The two decide to head north to Cerebus’ home town. Before they leave, a much older Bear and Cerebus’ other former bar friends finally return: Cerebus makes his choice, and leaves with Jaka.

Sim calling this chunk of the wider novel Rick’s Story invites obvious comparison to Jaka’s Story, but that actually was a story: the most successfully self-contained of any Cerebus book so far. As that summary suggests, Rick’s Story is deeply incoherent – an odd interregnum between two bigger arcs, with direct intervention from the author to jump from the Rick to Jaka parts. Stories that are mostly set-up are often unsatisfying, and even though Rick’s Story disguises this part of its nature well, that’s true here too. It’s the odd book out in later Cerebus – it doesn’t the high concept of Guys or the literary focus of the Jaka books, but it’s not a complete trainwreck like Latter Days.

That’s not the only reason Rick’s Story is tricky to parse. With Cerebus the constant temptation is to ask “how much of this stuff did Dave Sim know he was going to be doing?” – it’s inevitable when someone claims they’re going to tell a coherent 300 issue novel in monthly instalments. Sim has always been very cagey about giving definitive answers to this, and rightly so I think: while people disappointed in the work are always going to dream about what might have been, in the end the work is the work.

But Rick’s Story is one of the few parts of Cerebus where we know that Sim’s outlook changed while working on it. The story was intended as – and is – a satire of religious writing and revelation. Rick begins to interpret Cerebus’ every utterance as sacred and his writings become “the Booke Of Ricke”: monastic script, King James Bible language, stained glass windows and all. It’s Sim setting up a joke he’s always liked making – the ripple effects and unintended consequences of actions, and the way the mundane and the meaningful flip over and change places in time. We’ve seen in the Pigts characters living their lives according to their understanding of a prophecy; now we’re going to see an absurdist take on how that sausage is made.

Except that while researching Rick’s Story by reading the Bible, Sim realised what he was reading was, in his eyes, the Actual Truth, and was born again to a syncretic and highly individual monotheism which we’ll all learn more about in later books. But this, obviously, coloured Rick’s Story – it’s no longer a self-styled atheist parodying religious texts, but a devout new believer in those texts parodying them.

And this adds even more layers to what Sim is doing here. “The Booke Of Ricke” is a religious text written by a delusional, half-insane character which will, in future novels, be picked up on as literal Gospel by a cult of Cerebus. But now both Rick and Cerebus are being written by someone coming to the belief that not only is God real, but He has been using the actual story of Cerebus to lead its creator to certain cosmic truths (which we will get to at hideous length later on). Cerebus itself is going to become the vehicle for these truths at the same time as it’s sticking to its original absurdist-religion plot. It’s no wonder Rick’s Story feels overstuffed and confusing, and things are only going to get worse.

It’s difficult to unpick what, if anything, an unconverted Sim might have done differently in Rick’s Story, but it seems likely that at least the “burning bush” scene might be an addition to the plan (later on, Sim decides plants are the domain of the false female demiurge YooWhoo, and looks at this scene differently, but let’s leave that firmly to one side). Rick is already an onion of a character – he shows up as an old pal who seems to have his shit fairly well together, then you gradually realise how damaged he is, then he goes off the deep end and starts on his Gospel. But near the end of the book, after his burning bush encounter, he’s a suddenly more serious character, someone whose words have actual magical weight. Rick is both the comic vehicle for turning Cerebus into a Messiah (as opposed to a mere Pope!) and the first character in the story to have – it’s implied – some genuine contact with the divine. 

It’s all layered, dizzying, elaborate, stuff which – like most of the layered, dizzying, elaborate stuff in the back half of Cerebus – feels faintly hermetic, a magic trick which is plainly difficult but whose reveal is less scrutable than you’d hope. Appropriately for a book about mysticism and warped perceptions, the art is more dense and dazzling than ever – we see a lot of it through Rick’s eyes, with the world he sees of angels and demons constantly intruding on reality. Sim is producing some extraordinary, complex, unsettling pages here. Visually, Rick’s Story is the queasiest, most overripe of the Cerebus books, a picture of the world seen through the eyes of a profoundly unwell man, drawn by someone going through their own spiritual upheavals. Everything in Cerebus is always ferociously overthought, but by this point the level of technical ability is well out of ratio to the clarity of the ideas it’s communicating.

If Rick’s Story as a whole is odd and awkward, individual moments still work very well – it’s a curate’s egg (how appropriate). Sim does have archaic religious language down pat and there are some amusing context-switching gags as mooncalf Rick interprets Cerebus’ attempts to get rid of him as divine instruction. The stained-glass-window art is lovely and funny. There’s one very good meta-joke about poor Gerhard, stuck with a third year of tavern interiors. And the “binding spell” sequence is such a lurch in tone and so well paced that it has a genuine eerie power. 

But for what’s basically a one-joke idea there is a whole lot of “The Booke Of Ricke” and it feels like there’s even more than that: Sim really hammers at the concept. There’s a fundamental problem caused by the double duty it has to pull in the plot of the series – it has to both be an entertaining parody in this storyline and a semi-convincing holy text for upcoming ones. That’s an extremely tough circle to square and I don’t think Sim comes close to managing it – there’s both too much Booke Of Ricke here and too little to justify what it becomes later, even before you have to start untangling Ricke’s version of revealed truth from Dave Sim’s.

And speaking of Dave Sim’s revealed truth, Rick’s Story has the usual potential minefield of late Cerebus: at what point is this comic going to become a tract about the iniquities of women? The book is full of conversational scenes full of unspoken tension, and as Sim becomes better and better at drawing these, you trust his ideas of how characters behave less and less. Just to put us further on our guard, Rick’s been taking love lessons from Sim alter ego Viktor Davis himself, and passes on his advice to Cerebus about how the only way to make a relationship last is to never show a woman you’re unhappy.

This particular bad advice will be a central theme of the next books, Going Home and Form And Void, when Cerebus actually tries to do that. But with Joanne, the central female character in Rick’s Story and Guys, that’s not his issue. Deceitful, manipulative and self-centered, Joanne is the female character so far who most incarnates Sim’s feelings – sorry, observations – about how women behave in relationships. In particular, she’s the embodiment of one of Sim’s hobby-horses, ensnaring men with sex before trying to lock them into a longer commitment. (Not for the first time, a daringly unsayable Sim insight into women is a hackneyed chauvinist commonplace)

Joanne is a necessary creation because all of Sim’s previously established female characters are too nice, too smart, or too Cirinist to be properly leech-y and light-draining. So Joanne can be properly awful. Which is fine, some people are pretty awful – and Sim just about manages to keep her on the believable side of the ledger, unlike the stock Cirinist battleaxes Going Home is full of. But she’s also clearly being used as an archetype: Sim has tainted his own work, and whatever Joanne does you feel Viktor Davis is tapping you on the shoulder saying, “See? This is what they’re like!”

What’s irksome with Joanne’s characterisation will become more of an issue when it’s a character readers already care about. But Jaka’s personality – and how it has or hasn’t changed – is a question for the next two books. When she arrives here, embracing Cerebus, it’s like sunlight’s been let into the increasingly stuffy room of the Cerebus storyline. All of late Cerebus is a series of potential stopping points – this is the one you choose if you want the aardvark to have a happy ending.

Before Cerebus and Jaka skip hand in hand down the road, he has a choice to make, in the scenes which end the whole tavern leg of the book. Bear, Marty and Richard George show up, free of their wives, and picking up exactly where they left off with a game of Diamondback. But they’ve changed – they’re visibly older, fatter, sadder figures; their banter worn out and unattractive, particularly to Jaka. Cerebus spent a dozen issues desperate to really be part of their gang – now he finds it easy to leave them behind and take a shot at his heart’s desire. Sim the sexist may believe it’s a trap; Sim the artist makes Cerebus’ choice look obvious.

Guys and Rick’s Story haven’t always been an easy or enjoyable read, but with these scenes they end well, and their ending introduces another of the big themes of the final third: age. The final books of Cerebus are full of sad, vain old men trapped by their former glories: Bear and the guys, F Stop Kennedy and Ham Earnestway, and finally Cerebus himself. Bear and company here have visibly, dramatically aged in ways Jaka or Rick hadn’t. Sim in interviews has offered bullshit non-explanations for this along the lines of Cerebus’ aardvark magnifier effect creating time distortions, but that’s a lot less satisfying than what it looks like on the page. Cerebus once saw these men through beer-tinted glasses, at their swashbuckling bar-room best. Now, with his focus on romance, he sees them at the other extreme: pathetic old slobs. In a novel about how states of mind distort perceptions, it’s the final and most poignant example.

]]>
https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-12-ricks-story/feed 0
Aard Labour 11: Guys https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-11-guys https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-11-guys#comments Mon, 25 Mar 2024 11:13:33 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=35017 This is the 11th in a series of posts about Cerebus The Aardvark, a 300-issue comic by a troubled Canadian. As usual, contains intensive spoilers and no actual artwork.

Previously: Minds ended the “main storyline” of Cerebus with a conversation between the aardvark and his creator ‘Dave’. After almost abandoning his creation on Pluto, Dave offered Cerebus a free choice of where to go. Cerebus, in one of his more relatable acts, has picked the pub.

So Mick Jagger, Marty Feldman, Ringo Starr, and Norman Mailer walk into a bar…

Guys is one of the hardest books in the Cerebus series to get a grip on. It’s the apotheosis of three of Dave Sim’s greatest loves as a creator – innovative uses of lettering, phonetic speech, and caricatures of living people. But it’s also the first of several books which are more-or-less explicitly workings out of Dave Sim’s extreme ideas on gender relations, laid out in theory in Reads and here applied in practice to the lives of his characters. And all this is wrapped up in something very unusual in Western comics, though there’s no formal reason it should be – a situation comedy.

The plot of Guys is the simplest of all the Cerebus books. “Dave” has returned Cerebus to Earth where he requested, in a remote tavern he once hung out at. He spends the book there with a bunch of old and new friends and acquaintances, who come and go. Time passes – a long time; years in fact. And Cerebus grows as a character, in a way. When the book opens, Cerebus is a lonely drunk sitting in the corner. When it ends, he’s the bartender. 

So, Cerebus is shellshocked, and sitting around, and nothing much happens. We’ve been here before, right? In one way we certainly have: Guys takes inspiration from Dave Sim’s own “lost weekend”, his months spent between relationships as a barfly at a joint called Peter’s Place. This was the same period he drew on for Melmoth. But Guys has a very different tone from Melmoth, or from Jaka’s Story, the other “Cerebus does nothing” storyline we’ve had. In those books, Cerebus was doing nothing because he was no longer the active protagonist – Jaka and then Oscar were carrying the narrative weight of the comic. In Guys, there is no narrative weight to carry. The storyline is over.

Things happen all the time in this book – Sim blows bubbles of narrative tension around a minor incident, like a game of the invented hockey-shootout sport Five Bar Gate. But the bubbles pop, and little changes. You can read the book and trace gradual, subtle shifts in the world and the characters, but implicit in Guys is that as soon as things start happening, the story will begin to wind up.

But on this flimsiest of structures, Dave Sim builds some of his most elaborate, dense, visually striking storytelling yet. Cerebus has used lettering in innovative ways from very early on, and from Church And State it’s borne a greater and greater load of tone and meaning. Guys (and its direct sequel Rick’s Story) is the rococo peak of Sim’s lettering experiments. In this book, almost every main character has a different speaking voice, established through phonetic speech and emphasis. Then their state of mind – and of intoxication – is shown via letter style and speech bubble shape and word spacing, which can shift around wildly across a single page. Sim has also largely abandoned panel borders, so sequential action and speech happens in a more fluid, blurred way, especially when characters are drunk, or dreaming, or both. Oh, and mixed in with all this are characters based on other cartoonists’ creations, like Eddie Campbell’s Alec and Bacchus, whose lettering is taken from their ‘native’ strips and blends in with what Sim is doing.

It’s a tour de force – not for the first time in Cerebus it’s hard to think of anyone who’s done anything like it, certainly not with this much control and consistency. And it’s a feat of cartooning skill which actually serves the storytelling, it’s not just showing off. An awful lot of the story in Guys requires paying attention to things like lettering and background details, to track the level of inebriation of characters (variance in which drives the action of some scenes) and also the passing of the seasons outside the pub all this happens in: Cerebus spends years drinking here, something it’s easy not to notice if you’re reading inattentively.

The gentle passing of time is also a way of serving notice that things have changed structurally. Now the main story of Cerebus has finished, the timeline moves on years: Guys is a break point with some of the same characters but none of the momentum. We hear bits and pieces of wider-world developments; we see how the world has settled down following the Cirinist revolution, becoming a kind of agrarian barter economy, but for now those things aren’t the focus of the comic. There’s no background plot ready to leap into the foreground, like the Cirinist clampdown in Jaka’s Story. Guys is what it claims to be: 19 issues of Cerebus in a pub.

What’s he doing in the pub? Existing, which is what gives the story its sitcom texture. Men, in the Cirinists’ new world, are allowed to spend their time undisturbed in taverns and provided with free drink and food, but they aren’t allowed to leave unless they’re sober. If a married man fails to leave the pub for three days, he’s automatically divorced. By the time Cerebus arrives in his particular boozer, several years after this “Alcohol Sanction” was put in place, a lot of men have drunk or brawled themselves to death, and the pub population is a motley group of misfits. Some of them can’t fit in anywhere, some of them have chosen an itinerant life, and some of them are in between relationships. Not every character is honest with themselves about which category they fall into.

Guys as a sitcom is a series of comic episodes – Cerebus shows up and is ragged on by the tavern regulars; Prince Mick (the Mick Jagger caricature) gets laid to the disgruntlement of everyone else; Marty Feldman is duped into believing there’s a mongoose in a box; Cerebus and his friend Bear fall out over a game; and so on. At one point Norman Mailer arrives and brings the unwelcome attention of authority to the pub – Mrs Thatcher, from Jaka’s Story, shows up repeatedly in Guys to fill the stock sitcom role of the busybody outsider, a Cirinist version of Blakey from On The Buses. In what would be the season finale, Bear’s ex Zig appears, threatening to end the masculine idyll.

It’s all well-crafted, relaxed, low-stakes stuff and Sim doubtless had a lot of fun kicking back after the fireworks (on-and off-page) of Mothers & Daughters. That goofier vibe carries over to the reader, at least for a while – Guys seems quite fondly remembered even by people who generally have nothing good to say about the final stretch of Cerebus. But Sim also had a higher concept for the storyline. During his Peter’s Place days, he’d come to an appreciation of how men talked and acted when they were on their own, away from female influence, shootin’ the shit, followin’ the bro code, doing (as Bear puts it) “guy shit” instead of “chick shit”. Nobody, Sim hinted in interviews, had ever told the truth about what guys doing guy shit are like, and so Guys was meant in part as a celebration of masculinity and male friendship.

And I ended it thinking, maybe Dave Sim should have gone to a better boozer?

I must declare my interest here as a reader. I love pubs. I love conversations in pubs. I think a gently tipsy pub chat among mates – usually not all men, but sure, sometimes just ‘guys’ – is a beautiful thing. I would in fact agree with Sim that it’s genuinely hard to capture the rhythms and jokes and streams of associations, the inexplicable jokes and miniature tensions, you get in a good session down the pub. Maybe it’s different in North America, maybe I don’t know the right sort of manly men, but the action in Guys is unrecognisable to me. It’s hard to enjoy the book in the bros-forever sense Sim apparently wants because not one interesting conversation happens, not one good joke is told. Mostly what we get is issue after issue of guys being dickheads to one another and laughing about it afterwards. He should have called it BANTZ.

Behind its genuinely spectacular craft, Guys feels oddly craven. It comes over as Dave Sim writing for a desired audience of real bros who dig “guy shit” and will feel sad when a chick comes in to break up the band and bring the curtain down. For all that I enjoyed reading those issues, it’s safe to say I didn’t think that. Being stuck in Harrison Starkey’s tavern sounds like an absolute nightmare. Sim’s conception of guys and their shit is cramped and tedious: his reduction of women means he’s reduced men too.

On a second reading of Guys, though, I picked up more on the other thread buried in the novel. Dave Sim, after all – an obsessive artist whose day job involved drawing an aardvark comic – can’t have been an especially typical regular at Peter’s Place. Sim’s actual friends seem largely to have been, as you’d expect, fellow comics professionals. Perhaps the Peter’s Place sojourn was, for Sim, also a glimpse at an idealised, mysterious world where guys could be guys in some to-him platonic form, not overthinking shit all the time, albeit dragged hither and yon by the constant urge to get laid. A world Sim could observe and think about but not truly fit into.

This is all my projection, of course. Maybe Sim was a real bro, maybe he could slip into this demi-monde of dudes without a hint of awkwardness. But it certainly seems to tally with his protagonist’s experience in Guys, a novel where the one true narrative thread is Cerebus’ desperation to fit in, to be accepted as one of the guys.

The book starts, after all, with Cerebus being left out of the joke – drinking in the corner, talked about by Mick and Harrison, who crease up when he naively repeats Mrs Thatcher’s observation about “tavern tramps and whores”. That actually starts Cerebus on his path to acceptance, though when the same men collapse with mirth at Cerebus’ ‘graphic read’ (aka comic) later it prompts more angry humiliation. There’s a pecking order in Guys, with Cerebus and Marty on a lower rung, wanting to ascend but constantly coming off slightly worse to Harrison, Mick and Bear.

Ah, Bear. The emotional heart of Guys is Cerebus’ relationship with Bear, his mercenary buddy from way back, who showed up in Church And State as one of the few people Cerebus felt he could trust. Bear is the reason Cerebus is here – given the choice by Dave of where to go, and eventually persuaded that the answer shouldn’t be “with Jaka”, he opts instead to go to where Bear is. A few issues before, Cerebus has suppressed a memory of getting aroused by seeing Bear bathing. A few issues before that, Astoria has told him that he is, in fact, a hermaphrodite. 

In Guys, the crux of the novel comes when Cerebus and Bear are playing a game of Five Bar Gate, which Cerebus is losing badly. The pair are interrupted by a vendor of ‘graphic reads’, which Cerebus is fascinated by – in Bear’s eyes, as a blatant distraction from losing the game. It ends up with Bear blowing his top at Cerebus about the aardvark’s mood swings, sulks, unmanly habits – “It’s like yer part chick or something”. At the end of that issue, the two have made up and we get the most idyllic scene of the novel – Bear and Cerebus sunbathing while fishing by a nearby lake. “Hey” says Bear. A page later Cerebus says “What” – and the issue ends. (“Remember ‘jobs’?” is Bear’s answer, next issue, and the two fall about laughing, but Sim’s choice to end an issue mid-conversation, creating a point of tension in the scene, is an interesting one).

When Bear’s ex-girlfriend, Zig, shows up, Bear immediately falls back in lust and heads off with her. The rest of the gang, who can’t stand Zig, take this as a reason to pack up – even Harrison, the barman, shuts up shop and joins them heading south. Except Cerebus stays, unwilling to let go. He goes and sunbathes by the river himself. He debates to himself whether Bear will come back. He even creates a tally in chalk of the number of days he’ll allow himself to wait for Bear before leaving.

There is, obviously, a lot going on here. Cerebus is homophobic – in Minds, he’s in paroxysms of self-loathing over the idea that Astoria has revealed that he’s a “f….t” (Sim, obviously, leaves the slur intact). Dave Sim is also homophobic, though probably not as virulently as he is by the end of the series. Sim is a gender essentialist to an extreme degree, with increasingly strange and fixed ideas about what men and women are inherently like. If a homophobic gender essentialist were to write a story about unrequited queer desire, perhaps it would look like a homophobic protagonist discovering he’s a hermaphrodite and then wrestling with his unspoken attraction to a big, muscular, bearded guy called Bear.

I don’t remotely think this is what Sim intended as the primary reading of Guys. I suspect the story Dave Sim is writing is one of an idealised friendship – Cerebus overcomes his chick side by finishing the game of Five Bar Gate, and finally earns the respect of Bear, before Bear’s own weakness ends their beautiful friendship. But it’s a somewhat glaring possible reading nonetheless, and definitely helps explain why it’s so important to Sim that Cerebus is a hermaphrodite (a plot point he claims he was certain of very early).

Bear has his own moral code, expressed most clearly in the scene where an old friend, Greggo, appears at the tavern and the two get into a disagreement which requires “taking it outside”. Bear clocks Greggo one and the two combatants reappear in the bar, bloodied but friends once again. This is how manly men settle their disagreements, it’s implied. Sim’s attempt to put this code into some kind of practice in his own life led to the bizarre incident when he publically challenged Jeff Smith, creator of Bone, to a boxing match. 

Smith had given an interview in which he questioned Sim’s account in Reads of an evening at Smith’s house, during which Sim explained his views on women, Birth vs Death, and other favourite topics to Smith and his wife. In Sim’s version, this stunned Smith and he insisted they end the discussion. In Smith’s version, Sim ranted until Smith threatened to give him a fat lip. The upshot of this was the public challenge to a fight, issued in the editorial pages of Cerebus some years later: Sim went so far as to bring two pairs of boxing gloves to a convention. The fight, obviously, never happened: Sim established to his own satisfaction that Smith was a coward for not agreeing, and that the support from peers for Smith having to put up with this nonsense was a further sign that the comics industry was irredeemably Marxist-Feminist.

I mention this farce not just to show how difficult it was for Sim to put the ideals of Guys into practice, but also to illustrate the decomposition of Sim’s place in the world of independent comics. During Minds, Sim and Gerhard had organised a “Spirits Of Independence” tour of Cerebus’ North American markets, the veterans of self-publishing teaming up with local independent creators – he even gave their comics billing on Cerebus’ covers. In 1997, towards the end of Guys, Sim put out the Cerebus Guide To Self-Publishing, a lessons-learned manual for people who wanted to follow him down this road. Guys itself is full of Sim’s fellow cartoonists and their creations – and we see them crop up over the next couple of books, but by the late 90s Sim was backing heavily away from this creative brotherhood. Some of this was down to lifestyle changes – he was rethinking a lot of things in the wake of his 1996 religious conversion and moving towards the more ascetic lifestyle he still lives today.

But the separation was also mutual. Some time after Reads, The Comics Journal ran a piece focusing on industry reaction to Cerebus #186 and the “female voids” rant. Nobody interviewed precisely agreed with Sim, though (disappointingly but predictably) it was left mostly to women cartoonists to actually condemn Sim’s ideas. The men interviewed largely saw the issue as a deliberate provocation, or an exaggeration, or pointed out that Sim was free to write and draw what he liked. All of which were true to an extent, but were also ways for these guys to avoid facing up to the fact that yes, this is what Sim actually thought.

Outside the somewhat blokey indie comics establishment, Sim got a rougher reception, as women critics and creators ridiculed him and pointed out that most of the ‘hard facts’ he’d marshalled were urban myths at best. As Sim doubled down on his misogyny, the provisional agree-to-disagree support he’d enjoyed after #186 started to ebb away: the reaction to the absurd Jeff Smith fight showed how diminished his reputation was.

(Gerhard, of course, kept his head down and kept on drawing barstools and cornfields)

On the page as in life, the old gang drifted away. But the departure of Bear, Mick and the rest isn’t the end of Guys. The story picks up on a thread from Minds, and Cerebus faces the first of his own temptations vis-a-vis women, a relationship with Joanne, an older version of the young neighbour he had an affair with in Dave’s future vision. 

While the “guy shit” phase of Guys is a fluid, easy-going read, Sim intentionally makes this final “chick shit” act a lot more awkward: those tiresome thick dialogue descriptions are back, and Cerebus and Joanne have miserable times interspersed with good sex. Now Sim’s given us the cheat codes for his philosophy, it’s impossible to see this section as anything other than didactic. Cerebus as a character thinks with his crotch and is led into unhappy situations because of it – fair enough, that’s what people (not just men) do sometimes. People have been telling good stories about such characters for centuries and will do so as long as there are stories to tell. But Sim has made it impossible to read his handling of it as ‘just’ two characters, because he’s told you – at length! – that he thinks this is the universal male condition which only a tiny proportion of “male lights” can escape to reach true self-actualisation. Cerebus and Joanne can’t communicate not just because of things inherent in their characters, but because not communicating and having incompatible goals is the natural state of man and womankind.

The result is that we’re still in a sitcom, but it’s not Cheers, it’s the kind of corny, sexist, 70s-era comedy in which all men are horndogs and all women are trying to trap them into domesticity. Except that stuff was put together by professional comedy writers, and Sim’s idea of a joke is that Joanne wants to put new curtains on the tavern. The scene where Cerebus and Joanne visit the new tavern run by Marty and his domineering wife is a ten page distillation of every cliche about henpecked husbands Sim could think of. It’s painful, and not just in the way it’s meant to be.

Guys, and this is also true of the next few books, would be a lot more enjoyable to someone who hasn’t read the Viktor Davis parts of Reads and its objectivism-of-the-boudoir philosophy. When you’ve drawn a line in the sand between you and anyone who believes long-term relationships can be happy, and then make the next few books domestic dramas about relationships, a certain amount of dramatic tension is going to be lost. Cerebus for the rest of its run is going to be about the tension between Sim’s formal experiments and his curiosity about his craft, and his desire to make his books prove a point. Eventually, there’s a winner.

]]>
https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-11-guys/feed 2
Aard Labour 10: Minds https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-10-minds https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-10-minds#comments Thu, 21 Mar 2024 12:08:09 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34986 This is the 10th in a series of posts about Cerebus The Aardvark, a 300-issue comic series of some notoriety. As usual, lots of story spoilers, particularly in these later volumes where a lot of people quit reading.

Previously: The epic Mothers & Daughters storyline took a surprising turn as Dave Sim inserted himself into the comic, in the persona of ‘Viktor Davis’, to present a philosophy of men as rational lights and women as emotional voids, disgusting many readers. Meanwhile, Cerebus and Cirin fought before being blasted into space…

Minds is the first ending of Cerebus – if you were reading the comic for the fantasy elements, for the story of Cerebus’ rise, fall and comeback that began in earnest with High Society and climaxed with his brutal one-on-one fight with Cirin in Reads, that finishes here.

Except, honestly, it sort of doesn’t. Parts of those things – the disposition of power in Dave Sim’s fantasy world; how Cerebus deals with authority and success – do recur in future books. The broad arc of Cirin’s matriarchy and Cerebus’ part in its downfall is left for later. We’ll see many characters of note again at least once, even if Mothers & Daughters is the end for most of the fan favourites. I think what people mean when they say that Cerebus finishes with #200 – the end of Minds – is that Mothers & Daughters is the last time the book regularly feels like it did in its heyday, the commercial peak of Church And State. Cerebus has already proved it can break that template: this is the final time it returns to it.

From Cerebus Vol 1, to High Society, to Church And State, to Mothers & Daughters, the ever expanding fantasy sweep of Cerebus reaches its furthest limits in Minds. Cerebus will never go as far as he does in this book, will never encounter a higher power than the one he talks to here. Of the six books that remain, the next four are intimate and domestic: a transition just as total as the gear-shift from Church And State into Jaka’s Story.

Also there’s a practical issue. For a lot of readers, Cerebus ends at #200 because with Reads Dave Sim has taken the comic and his artistry into areas they aren’t willing to fund. Anecdotally you hear about a lot of people who quit during or after Reads, and another chunk who stuck it out until the end of Minds before dropping the comic. The remaining readers certainly don’t all agree with Dave Sim, but they’re invested enough in his and Gerhard’s artistry to want to see where he takes it. For the rest, Minds is the end of Cerebus whether Sim says it is or not.

Let’s take it on those terms, then. Is it a good ending, does it fulfil the promise of High Society and Church And State II? Yes. No. It depends. First the good news: Minds is a considerably friendlier book than Reads. Sim isn’t exactly working to regain readers’ trust (as will become even clearer, he doesn’t care, and I don’t think he could have made the good parts of Cerebus if he did.) But he’s not trying to actively alienate them either. The action of Minds is extremely strange, but it’s linear and legible: there’s no fractured storytelling or parallel text narratives.

Minds is also a beautifully told story, the Sim/Gerhard pairing on peak form. As Cerebus (and Cirin) voyage through the solar system, the sheer scale of the cosmic journey is spectacular thanks to Gerhard’s environmental storytelling. Comics’ gain was Krautrock LP sleeves’ loss. Thanks to him we feel the monstrous regard of Jupiter’s eye; the utter desolation of ravaged Pluto. Sim is drawing his heart out too, from the desperate aardvarks clinging to what’s left of their throne to the “what if” sequences exploring alternative futures for Cerebus if he married Jaka. There’s a page near the end which uses a silhouette in a way that’s devastating, unforgettable, and one of the artistic high points of the whole series.

There’s much less formal visual experimentation in Minds, but what there is works superbly. In the flashbacks to Cerebus’ boyhood and his mutilation with a kitchen knife, Sim really starts to work out how to use overlaid panels to suggest linked moments or passages of action, a trick he’ll use regularly from now on. The section in which the force of Cirin’s telepathic denial literally breaks all other thought and speech bubbles is wonderful. And the “injury to the eye” section is a highly disturbing, highly effective mix of point-of-view cartooning and expressive lettering, even if the payoff is a Pink Floyd lyric.

So it’s possible to enjoy reading Minds in a way it wasn’t possible to enjoy reading the deliberately gruelling, alienating Reads. There’s no text lumps, no whiplash shifts in pace, no brain-curdling gynophobia. And yet Reads happened. Viktor Davis may no longer be in the room with us right now, but his opinions linger, and he is, in some sense, writing this comic.

The promise of Cerebus has always been that when you turn a page you might see something you’ve never seen done in comics before. But after Reads, you also know that when you turn a page you might see Sim trying to persuade you that you or your partner or your friend is a brain leech. It creates, shall we say, a barrier. Sim is on his best behaviour in Minds – he has a job to finish, and it’s not until later books that the ideas presented in Reads bubble noxiously back up to the surface of Cerebus. But this isn’t a comic you can read innocent of what Sim thinks any more: there is no separation of art from artist after Reads, and that’s the way he wanted it.

So it looks very good, and it feels somewhat bad, but how is it as an ending to the story? Minds starts with Cerebus and Cirin, accelerating through space on the remains of their throne, arguing telepathically about whose ascension this actually is. The two aardvarks are still willing to kill one another, but a strange force prevents them touching, and splits their platform in two to continue their voyagings apart. Cerebus, terrified as he approaches Jupiter, begs and bargains for salvation with his god, Tarim. A very different creator answers – “Dave”, aka Dave Sim, who has dropped his Reads “Viktor Davis” persona now he’s addressing his creation directly. 

The second half of Minds is a lengthy conversation between Cerebus and “Dave”. He doesn’t wander up and shake Cerebus’ paw: it’s handled more elegantly, via thought bubbles intruding on Cerebus’ own consciousness (a meeting of Minds, if you like). Dave reveals a few cogent background details to Cerebus, tries to show him what’ll happen if he gets what he thinks he wants, and comes close to abandoning him before dropping him back into the final third of the comic.

Your feelings about Minds as a satisfying ending – to Mothers & Daughters, to Cerebus so far, or even just to itself – are going to depend on how you view this kind of metafictional self-insert. Sim claimed in interviews and in the comic itself that this meeting was always planned, and while I’m never sure how much he revises his own backstory I can absolutely imagine “Cerebus talks to his creator” as part of the initial “300 issues” revelation in 1979, especially as that revelation was linked to Sim’s prodigious consumption of acid.

More to the point, it’s the kind of thing smart writers of big postmodern novels liked doing. There was a minor fashion for characters meeting the author in successful literary fiction of the 70s and 80s – John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman; Martin Amis’ Money; Alasdair Gray’s Lanark; Paul Auster’s City Of Glass. This kind of thing certainly inspired Grant Morrison in the 1990 ending of their Animal Man run at DC Comics – Morrison’s meeting with Buddy Baker felt very like “Nastler”’s meeting with Lanark in Gray’s novel, a writer both aloof and apologetic to their character for the shit they’ve gone through.

So Dave Sim was slightly ahead of the curve in 1979 when he decided Cerebus and Dave would meet, but by the time they actually did the concept felt a little corny. Certainly I, a lapsed Cerebus fan but very keen at the time on Grant Morrison, heavily rolled my eyes when I heard about it. The Animal Man story had been only two years in the making and tied off all Morrison’s thematic work on the book, from our relationship to childhood experiences through the internal continuity of DC Comics to the way we relate to the creatures we make dependent on us. Dave Sim showing up in his own book after 190 issues seemed far more arbitrary. (This is why he does it twice, though – after Viktor, Dave at least comes less out of the blue)

Structurally, though, it works. Having just comprehensively undermined The Judge, his in-story omniscient figure, Sim can’t just introduce another, better Judge for a bigger Ascension. Cerebus has to actually either meet God, or meet someone who can credibly serve that function. But Tarim, Cerebus’ God, has become sort-of-ridiculous in the context of being a part of so many narrative jokes at this point anyway. Before meeting Dave, Cerebus switches between cowering from and defying Tarim, including a very uncomfortable sequence where he tries and fails to repress his worst possible thoughts. It underlines that Tarim’s function in Cerebus’ life is as a concept he’s terrified of, not a divinity he has any real relationship with. Meeting God, in other words, would be less impressive than meeting “Dave” (and not meeting him will turn out to be very useful for Sim later on, after the religious conversion that puts God right back on the narrative agenda).

Having Dave turn up also links back to both the text pieces in Reads, not just the metafictional one. Sim is a credible divine stand-in because – unlike Morrison or Steve Gerber or any other comics writer who’d played the metafictional card before – he truly does have sole control over Cerebus and his universe. Meaningfully meeting your creation is the prerogative of the true creator, the self-publisher.

So Sim wasn’t – as I unkindly assumed back in 1995 – ripping off Grant Morrison. In fact, while Sim’s friendships with Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman are well documented, there’s no evidence I can easily find of Sim ever even mentioning Morrison, or vice versa. And when asked about the story similarity, Sim apparently laughed it off and pointed out that Morrison had got it all from Chuck Jones anyway.

That’s probably referring more to a different Morrison Animal Man story, but it’s also a nod to where Sim did draw his inspiration. The final scene of Minds, Sim chomping a carrot at his drawing board, is a wink to Jones’ 1953’ Merrie Melodies classic, Duck Amuck, where Daffy Duck is tormented by a mischievous animator who turns out to be Bugs Bunny. Duck Amuck is a masterpiece of animation and of pacing, as the viewer at first laughs at the conceit before beginning to feel genuinely sorry for Daffy, helpless to act in a way that’s close to cosmic horror. Minds borrows a lot from this mix of comedy and hidden terror, with Dave gradually moving from slapstick (a pie in Cerebus’ face when he asks for a “sign”) to more calculated violence as he tries to find ways to make Cerebus face up to himself and change.

One of Chuck Jones’ creative lessons in Duck Amuck is that animators had the freedom to play with every element of reality in pursuit of story and entertainment; they had no reason to confine themselves to representing a narrative. It’s something Sim had fully absorbed from the beginning in Cerebus, constantly experimenting with storytelling, narrative shapes, and how the techniques of comics could push and twist those. Yes, from a plot and theme perspective Cerebus meeting Dave comes out of almost nowhere. But as I said about the first volume, the story of Cerebus is the story of Dave Sim’s evolution as an artist and, less happily, a thinker. From that angle, breaking the fourth wall like this was as inevitable as experimenting with zip-a-tone was in Volume 1.

Bugs and Daffy never converse in Duck Amuck; for that part of Minds’ DNA you have to look elsewhere, to the Cerebus story’s most direct ancestor, Steve Gerber’s Howard The Duck #16. While Cerebus meeting his maker was a long-term plan, Gerber’s was a panic response to a looming deadline – a one off way of avoiding the title having to run a reprint story. So the issue is a set of pinch-hit double page spreads by assorted artists, illustrating an all-text Gerber essay/story: it wasn’t just the authorial intrusion that made an obvious impression on the young Dave Sim.

Howard #16 is a lot of fun, but it’s not a high concept classic, more an example of the stuff a Marvel creator could get away with in the wild mid-70s before Jim Shooter’s creative and business clampdown. Howard takes his meeting with his creator in his stride – he’s the one dishing out no-nonsense advice to help the hapless Steve get his act together: at the end of the issue, he critiques a bizarre short story Gerber’s inserted. Sim flips these roles for the climax of Minds – Dave is making an intervention in a medical sense as well as a narrative one: a planned confrontation to help Cerebus help himself and, maybe, put his life back on track. Of all the metafictional inserts I’ve read, Dave and Cerebus feels most like a genuine conversation, an attempt by a creator to reckon with the character he’s made.

All that said, a very big part of Dave’s narrative function in the story is to deliver a huge amount of exposition, and big lumpy exposition in the closing chapters of your epic is an inelegant way of telling a story, whatever metafictional razzle-dazzle you surround it with. Dave gives readers the real skinny on Cerebus’ early years and the secret origin of Cirin, before digging in to the broader question of what Cerebus actually wants from life. 

For me, the best parts were the Cirin material, because they serve as a sort of epilogue to the parts of Mothers & Daughters that are about the women characters rather than about ‘women’. Cirin didn’t found her matriarchal movement, she stole it from the original Cirin – the old lady Cerebus had tea with back in Women, which partly explains why she’s so fearful about Astoria taking it away from her in turn. The Cirin sequence here is the last time Sim writes something which actually feels cogent and thoughtful about politics: in this case, the way revolutionary movements can be corrupted by their most brutal or paranoid elements. 

But there’s also a supposedly big revelation about Cerebus, and why he didn’t become a great conqueror, and it really feels unnecessary – answering questions that feel unimportant relative to the comic we’ve actually been reading all these years and change nothing much on a re-read. Like the parade of old faces in Flight, there’s something a bit finicky about it, a fussy tying up of loose ends, to persuade us all that old material really was important. Ultimately, as readers we already know why Cerebus didn’t conquer the known world: he’s a stubborn, greedy, drunken arsehole who’s incapable of understanding himself or changing his mind.

Or is he? One of the ways Minds genuinely is a payoff to the story of Cerebus so far is that it’s a sustained character study of Cerebus himself, something we’ve never actually seen before. Cerebus has not been an especially complex aardvark – he’s the motor of the book’s action, even when he’s being manipulated by another character. He’s single-minded enough that those manipulators get more than they bargained for. But when the action comes to a stop, in the quieter moments of Cerebus, so far it’s been others – Jaka, Rick, Oscar – that Sim’s focused on as characters. Now, in Minds, we get looks at the youth of Cerebus – his fear of his mother and his belief in his own destiny; we see his conflicted relationship with his God; we see his chronic inability to take in any information that isn’t directly related to his ambition. And we see that what he wants, more than gold or conquest, is for Jaka to love him.

This leads into the real conclusion of the novel – Dave’s attempt to show Cerebus why, no matter what happens, his relationship with Jaka won’t work out. The Jaka sequences offer an emotional ending for Mothers & Daughters as a whole, a novel that began with Cerebus spurred into murderous action by his obsession with Jaka, and ends with Cerebus given the chance to show growth as a person and choose not to pursue it. And pursuing it, according to Dave, is disastrous. He can’t just walk back into her life; she’s returned to her aristocratic roots and is seeing someone else. If Dave forces them together, it’ll be a miserable and loveless marriage. If Dave makes Jaka love Cerebus unconditionally, his own worst instincts will lead to him abusing her. And if Dave removes Cerebus’ violent nature, they’ll be happy until Cerebus gets bored and cheats on her, and then she’ll kill herself. 

These sequences are painful – the depiction of domestic violence is stomach-churning. What’s perhaps surprising after Reads is that the blame for the failure of the relationship, in every version, is squarely on Cerebus. After reading what actually does happen later with Cerebus and Jaka, it’s easy to see this as “Dave” stacking the narrative deck, trying to prove to his stubborn character that he needs to give up on Jaka or change on a deep level. Or Sim trying to prove to his readers that he doesn’t blame everything on women, for that matter. As we’ll see in Guys, Sim’s practical philosophy of how men relate to women really doesn’t get much beyond can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em – he’s not making any great claims for men’s virtue, or even their ability to resist the culture they’re living in. Beyond visionaries like him, of course.

There’s one craft element of the Jaka sections that’s new. Previously Sim has presented illustrated dialogue simply as dialogue – a consistent approach all the way from “Mind Game” in Issue #20 to Astoria’s conversations with her hairstylist in Women. Here he switches to a style which gives you not only the dialogue but stage directions and details of what characters are thinking and why. The scenes where he does this are all about seduction, or potential seduction – Jaka with her new beau; Cerebus with his young neighbour Joanne in Dave’s possible-future vision.

I want to single this technique out because for me it’s a (fairly rare even at this point) example of Sim trying something which doesn’t work well, but it’s also an ominous indication of where he’s going as a creator. He’s laying out dialogue so as to strip it of any ambiguity, giving us a forensic look at the steps and motivations which lead to or away from seduction. It’s exhausting to go through, and for me as a reader it feels smothering, particularly as Sim was genuinely good at writing dialogue with subtext and weight: what is really added by holding my hand in this way? 

As we’ll see in Guys and Rick’s Story, Sim is entering a particularly baroque phase as a creator, where the sheer amount of detail and variation he’s putting in makes each issue – each page – extremely dense. Artistically, it often works very well. But the risk is stuff like the Joanne scenes in Minds: not only does it remind me uncomfortably that I’m dealing with Dave Sim, Gender Knower, it over-elaborates on something Sim already knew how to do very well. The flipside of constantly pushing yourself artistically is knowing when to stop.

Maybe that’s the lesson for Cerebus as a whole – certainly the people who stop at #200 would agree. Mothers & Daughters ends with a conversation between a symbolic ‘father’ and ‘son’, and the reader who wants to walk no further with “Dave” or Viktor Davis or any of his ideas can lay the series down and forget the rest exists and think, wow, Cerebus, that was a weird comic, but when it was good it was REALLY good. Technically, that’s still true of the rest, but it will never be good in the same way again.

]]>
https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-10-minds/feed 7
Aard Labour 9: Reads https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-9-reads https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-9-reads#comments Mon, 18 Mar 2024 18:06:17 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34976 This is the 9th in a series of posts about Cerebus The Aardvark, a controversial independent comic. This episode has the controversial bit! And also spoilers, as usual, for the actual story both in this book and as a whole.

Previously: Mothers & Daughters, the climax of the main Cerebus narrative, reached its halfway point as four of the most important characters met physically for the first time. The comic’s extensive text material, meanwhile, had turned its attention more and more to its characters’ ideas about gender…


“”Fuck off, Viktor”, thought the reader” – Viktor Davis in Reads

OH GOD IT’S THIS ONE

With Melmoth, Dave Sim asked the question “what can Cerebus encompass?” and the answer was “anything I like”. But that turns out not to be the whole truth. The monthly experience of reading Cerebus wasn’t just about the comic, it was about the backmatter: the huge, rambling “Aardvark Comment” letter column, the samples and exclusives of whatever comics or creators Sim was keen his readers knew about, and the essays and commentaries Sim offered.

With the boundary between core story and side project thoroughly dissolved, Sim started testing new boundaries – between the story and the backmatter. Between the thoughts of Dave Sim and the action of Cerebus. Between the comic page and the creator. Even if the text sections were Elrod’s Gardening Tips, Reads would be Cerebus’ most radical book to date for how it shatters these barriers and for how it sets out a relationship between comics and prose which is unlike almost any previous comic – demanding we experience huge chunks of text as part of the comics story. And at the same time as Reads insists on the primacy of text for half its material, the other half is dispensing with it altogether, with a bloody, wordless fight scene occupying the comics pages for issue after remorseless issue.

Reads is one of the most formally challenging graphic novels I’ve ever read. But that’s not why it became probably the most famous, or notorious, section of Cerebus. This is also the point in the story where Dave Sim steps into his own creation at the climax of those text sections and spells out his incendiary views on men, women and creativity. How the world is a battle between creative Lights (almost all male) and devouring Voids (almost all women) and how the Voids’ main tactic for devouring the Lights is luring them with the impossible promise of Merged Permanence (a happy relationship of equals).

As I hinted last time, a re-read in 2024 blunts the impact of those views a bit. Not because time has proved Sim right, but because with hindsight it’s obvious how Sim built up to the bombshell issue #186, and it’s also clear that Sim’s misogynist views aren’t particularly novel. In fact they’re exhaustingly familiar. Even the most scrupulously fair summary of the ideas in Reads is likely to have you saying “Wow, sounds like that guy had some issues”

But Reads still does have an impact, not so much because of what Sim says but the way he says it: the visceral, vicious language of “Viktor Davis” rant in #186 is still brutal in ways that summaries can’t really capture. The stuff about women voting being a mistake comes early on, and it just gets further out from there. Meanwhile the cosmic terminology he drapes over his philosophy – all the lights and voids and merged permanence stuff – make the basic concepts seem stranger, and less tawdry, than they are. Plus, let’s face it, there are no comics parallels to what Sim is doing(1). The closest thing I can think of – almost a decade on from this – is Alan Moore’s tour of the Tree Of Life in Promethea, and that had gorgeous JH Williams pictures to soften the density of ideas. Even Gerhard doesn’t get a look-in here(2).

So Dave Sim’s arguments in #186 overshadow not just the story elements of Reads but the questions you might usefully ask about all the rest of it: do its many formal experiments work? How much text can a comic contain and still be one? What is the first text section of Reads doing? And even the rant poses questions beyond its content: Why is it in the comic and not the backmatter? Why does it have to be so hateful? And what did Sim imagine would happen when he published it?

I’m going to offer an answer to most of these questions, but there’s a caveat: this is the point in this series where all the material was new to me (if not by reputation). I originally quit reading Cerebus at the end of Flight, realising the story would read better in the ‘phonebook’ collections. I continued flicking through the comic in the shop each month, so absorbed enough about Reads to update my plans to “I’ll read it when it’s finished I guess”. Which, 20 years after it finished, I did. So any insights I have on these latter books are based on flimsier ground – I’ve read them more recently and thought about them less.

I’d guess most Cerebus readers haven’t rushed back to this one, though. So first, a quick summary of what else is in Reads.

HE READS READS SO YOU WON’T HAVE TO

So far, Mothers & Daughters has been structured around a single story – Cerebus, Cirin and Astoria’s power struggle – told in a complex, chaotic way by the constant interruption of dozens of simultaneous vignettes somehow related to those events. Reads continues that in a much more straightforward way, as the “ripple-effect” stories fall away and we get an uninterrupted story where the three leads and Suenteus Po finally meet in the cathedral of Iest.

The four characters talk – mostly a lecture from the ascetic Po, outlining his philosophy of inaction, as he hopes to persuade the others to basically give up and go home. He leaves, and so does Astoria, who has actually listened, and whose experiences in Women have left her disillusioned about political leadership anyway. Before she goes she drops a bombshell – Cerebus is a hermaphrodite. This leaves Cerebus and Cirin alone – neither have any intention of taking Po’s advice and they begin a fight to the death.

Giving the volume its title is a short story about Victor Reid, a writer of Reads, mass-market fiction a bit like the old penny dreadfuls or pulps. The Reads industry has been bubbling away for a while now in the background of the comic – Weisshaupt puts Cerebus’ name on some in Church And State, and both Oscars wrote them. It’s often meant to represent the comics industry or some aspect of it. That’s definitely the case here, as Reid’s story is a comics roman-a-clef about a talented young creator swept up by a big publishing house (“Vertigo Horse” DO YOU SEE), who break his creativity on their publishing wheel. He ends up a despairing hack, and the architects of his downfall are women: his demanding, baby-ridden wife; his ball-breaking agent; his fickle, bosomy muse(3).

The Victor Reid section is barely linked to Cerebus’ story – Victor’s great artistic leap forward, whose rejection by his publisher breaks him, is a ‘read’ about Cerebus’ ascension and the events of Church And State. It’s followed by a text section which does tie in directly, in a way we’ve never seen before. At the start of the Cerebus and Cirin fight, the point of view pulls back to show a drawing board with a man drawing the fight, the author of Cerebus. He turns around: this is “Viktor Davis”.

Viktor also demonstrates his control over the events of the comic. “BANG, BANG, BANG” he writes, and three huge bangs demolish the cathedral around the fighting aardvarks, leaving the throne ascending into space with Cirin and Cerebus clinging to it as it flies past the moon. Viktor, meanwhile, ends his role in the book with his lengthy thoughts on men and women and creativity, leaving us with a Pink Floyd quote(4) and a hope that he’s instilled some seed of enlightenment in the male reader. And that’s Reads.

The Viktor Davis sections are very oddly written, a third person description of Viktor talking to the reader about Cerebus. Viktor is, essentially, Dave Sim – he recounts real world anecdotes involving Alan Moore, Jeff Smith, and others. During the story ‘Viktor’ pulls ‘the Reader’ into the comic with him, an experience which reads like a kind of hypnotic ritual, and retells in prose the Judge’s story of the Big Bang from Church And State, except flipping the roles: now the male light is smothered and split by the female void. 

Reads kicks off the second half of Mothers & Daughters, but that isn’t its only function in the overall Cerebus construction. It’s also the start of what I think of as the third overlapping Cerebus novel. The first, which Mothers & Daughters ends, is a genre novel – a satirical, political fantasy saga full of dazzling digressions. The second, which Jaka’s Story opens, is a modernist novel, a comic and tragic story about a man and a woman who are unable to be happy with or without each other: it’ll resume as Mothers & Daughters ends. And the third is an experimental novel, a philosophical enquiry into men, women, God and their relationship to one another, in which the character of Dave Sim is as important as the character of Cerebus.

Depending on which of these novels you think you’re reading, the text elements of Reads play different roles. If you’re reading the first novel, they’re an unwelcome and skippable distraction, and even the metafictional elements which turn up here will be better used in Minds. If you’re reading the second novel, then the Victor Reid half of the text section is tangentially relevant but the “Viktor Davis” half is well worth avoiding: it acts as basically a spoiler (in several senses) for the next several books, in that it removes a lot of tension from future narratives by outlining exactly how Sim thinks men and women always behave.

And if you’re reading the third novel, then the Viktor Davis bits are the kickoff, the moment Dave Sim steps out of the shadow of his creation and reveals what the point of Cerebus was all along. Ouch.

YOU DO NOT IN FACT HAVE TO HAND IT TO DAVE SIM

There are several interesting questions about Viktor Davis’ anti-feminist screed, none of which are “is he right?” (He isn’t: for a start all his gender arguments rest on a hard division between ‘reason’ and ’emotion’ which he doesn’t define beyond linguistic pedantry. And that’s the bit even his sympathetic commentators tend to put before the “but…”(5)) One is “why is this in the comic not the backmatter?”. Another: “Is this what Dave Sim actually believes, and if so how long has he believed it?”

A lot of the initial response to Reads, especially from fellow creators and regular readers, leaned heavily on the fact that “Viktor Davis” is a pseudonym, and that his views might not fully reflect Sim’s. A lot of the later response takes for granted that Sim ‘went mad’ or was radicalised somehow and that the screeds of Reads bear no real relation to the humane, even liberal comic Cerebus used to be. 

Both of these responses are anticipated by Reads itself. Reads is painstaking in establishing that yes, Viktor Davis is the writer of Cerebus, Dave Sim. Sim’s own views – explained at infinite length ever since – tally with what he writes here. Viktor Davis writes about how he’s been self-censoring himself for years, and anticipates the horrified reaction to Reads in general and specifically ‘the reader’s’ appalled response to his reversal of the Judge’s monologue. In interviews at the start of Mothers & Daughters he put forward the idea – which he’s stuck to since I think – that the Judge and Viktor Davis represent two extreme points of view and readers can choose for themselves which is right. There’s a worthy liberal tendency to imagine that an author depicting two extreme points of view means they feel the truth must be somewhere in the middle: Dave Sim would not agree(6).

AARDVARK SHRUGGED

Viktor Davis is certainly Sim framing his beliefs in the starkest, harshest terms he can to get his point across, but it’s a point he’s been building to. In the Women post I went through the three strands to Dave Sim’s philosophy – the gender, creative freedom, and religious parts. Viktor Davis is where the first two of those end up: all the wider political elements feel like window dressing for Sim’s real issue, which is the way the “voids” absorb and drain the creative energy of the “lights”, i.e. the way women, in his view, sap and stymie men’s’ creative impulses.

This directly ties back to the Victor Reid parts of the book – Reid is an object lesson in how this happens. But the important part of the two stories isn’t just the women in them, it’s that Reid is also the victim of an industry which has the exact same goal – diverting and draining his creative light. Sim’s libertarian philosophy of self-publishing – that you simply cannot trust publishers not to force you into compromises, and compromise means artistic death – is the backbone of Reads as much as the gender material is.

In fact, you can see Sim’s philosophy of men and women as the next step of his belief in the importance of self-publishing to artistic greatness. Following your artistic path is hard. You will constantly be expected to compromise or weaken your work by the uncreative forces around you (publishers, distributors, other middlemen) so you have to own it for yourself. So far, so Randian. But Sim goes further, with his “Light does not breed” mantra – by expecting to be an equal partner, women (and later children) are automatically diluting and stealing this creative ownership and control. If publishers are parasites, how much worse are wives and families?(7)

Where Sim’s two big concerns – creative freedom and the iniquities of womankind – have ended up is a kind of Objectivism of the Boudoir, Cyril Connolly’s “pram in the hallway” bon mot on libertarian steroids. I don’t think you can disentangle those two elements of Dave Sim’s philosophy, which is one reason Jeff Smith becomes such a bete noire for Sim. Smith has a cameo here as a pal of Viktor, but is a living refutation of Sim’s ideas: his wife gave up her job to support his self-publishing ambitions, and his comic Bone is visibly Cerebus inspired but also considerably more palatable to a wider comics-agnostic public. Bone ends up in libraries and homes across the world(8) – it replaces Cerebus as the success case for self publishing at exactly the time Cerebus becomes a cautionary tale.

BUT IS IT AARDVARK?

So far I’ve looked at what Sim thinks in Reads and why he thinks it. For the reader of Cerebus, looking aghast as they turn the page to find yet another double page spread of small print, there’s a more urgent question: what is this stuff doing in the comic? It’s clear how they link philosophically, but how do the Victor Reid and Viktor Davis sections work as part of the actual story?

It’s initially very hard to see what the point of the Victor Reid parts in particular is. Artistically it’s the weakest element of the book, without the genuine brilliance of the comics sections or the “what the fuck is happening” rubbernecking of the Viktor Davis part. In its own right it’s just not a great story: Sim’s prose is as fussy as it ever was when pretending to be Oscar, and over time the gossipy elements have faded out to leave a set of stereotypes. It seems mainly addressed to Sim’s fellow creators: Reid is an example of artistry denied and defiled by compromise. 

It’s also a more general comment by Sim on the state of the industry. At the end of Women, the Roach has a crisis, and a horde of alternative identities threaten to burst out of him, all based on short-lived comics or publishers from the early 90s boom. Most are now unfamiliar even if you “were there” – yes, I could spot the Warriors Of Plasm reference, but I wish I couldn’t – but it’s the sheer number and relentlessness of them that’s the joke, a market glut given physical form. The material in Reads is more pointed – the boom was turning to bust, and Victor Reid’s story is a barbed commentary on the ‘mainstream alternative’ companies like Dark Horse and DC’s Vertigo imprint, which offered more varied and critically respectable – but still corporate-owned – output.

All the reads industry sections, though – not just this but the equivalent sections in Jaka’s Story and later books – are making a wider point within the story, which is that popular art is not any kind of bulwark against tyranny: the reads industry is subject to market pressures and tacit censorship under the Cirinists just as it was subject to political pressures before them, and creators are ultimately indentured labourers. Genuine artists can and must work only for themselves.

Artists like Viktor Davis, whose Read exists in our world and is a comic called Cerebus. And this is one answer to that question – why is Viktor Davis’ beef with women part of the actual comic? For Sim, only the genuine, self-publishing artist has the freedom to say the unsayable in modern society, but that freedom is meaningless unless it’s exercised. Sim has to push Cerebus to its most extreme point, in terms of form and content, at least partly because no publisher would let him do it.

Sim knows very well that the Viktor Davis stuff is going to shock and upset readers. Davis prefaces his big mask-off disquisition in #186 with a lot of “aint-I-a-stinker” hints about how controversial the last chunk is going to be. He’s already worked hard to rattle readers(9). And it’s written explicitly to be as offensive and horrible as possible. Nothing else would prove Sim’s point to his own satisfaction. There’s a moment in Victor Reid’s story where his evil aspect, the backmasked Rotsieve, comes out and says hateful things to everyone. Is Viktor Davis – David Victor Sim backwards – Sim’s Rotsieve? I think that probably was the point of that concept – but it was there to explain why Davis is so venomous, not what he was actually saying.

And the other reason it has to be in the comic is that each part of Mothers & Daughters is a reprise and revision of an earlier part of Cerebus, and here we’re redoing Church And State. As I mentioned above, Viktor Davis is the devilish reverse of the Judge: an omniscient being talking us through cosmology and inverting the Judge’s origin of the universe. Not an act of cosmic rape; an act of cosmic smothering and emasculation. If the Judge’s monologue has to be part of Cerebus, so does Viktor Davis’.

FORM AND AVOID

So now we’re just left with the question – does it work? This is Sim’s biggest, most notorious, most ambitious and most shocking risk? Does he pull it off?

Reads is obviously the book where a lot of readers noped out. Even if they made it through to the end of Mothers & Daughters in Minds, the decision to quit happens here. Whether or not you respect Sim’s artistic freedom – and despite Sim-as-Davis saying he could be prosecuted for hate speech, nobody has ever tried to ban Cerebus – from this point he’s a guy a lot of people don’t want to give money to.

Some people agreed with Sim, or partially agreed, or thought he had a point but ‘went too far’. Obviously they didn’t stop buying it, though Cerebus has never gained a reputation as a great work of conservative or libertarian art. Others argued for a “separate the art from the artist” principle which seems a little insulting in this case, given how diligently Dave Sim worked to make that impossible.

Many, probably most, readers decided that Dave Sim’s obvious artistic excellence meant putting up with his being an arsehole, and kept reading. The best critical work on Cerebus I’ve read, Andrew Rilstone’s When Did You Stop Reading Cerebus?, roughly takes the line that Cerebus is a big, deliberately complex and difficult book in a similar way to Moby Dick or Ulysses or Gravity’s Rainbow, and that reading it involves reckoning with the parts that are most difficult, Reads included.

I think, though, that you can see Reads as horrible but necessary to Sim’s overall conception, and still see it as an artistic failure.

Bits of it – the bits Sim actually draws – are certainly not a failure. Sim gives us both a philosophical and a physical resolution to the big conflicts of the series. The conversation between the three aardvarks and Po is the kind of thing people now call a “lore dump” but it gives a solid explanation to what an aardvark is and what’s been going on in Mothers & Daughters so far. Aardvarks magnify the traits, people and events around them: the only good course of action, according to Po, is inaction.

As she did in Women, Astoria shines. I’ve seen people say that she gets the best ending in the comic, and in a sense that’s true – her final contributions are a reminder of why we liked her and she leaves on her own terms, the only character with the brains to actually listen to Po. But even if her arc across Mothers & Daughters is complex and complete, her final turn to the domestic here also feels like a shabby ending for the comic’s great intriguer and manipulator(10). Is it growth, or is it just Sim wanting to take her down a peg, show her plans and schemes as futile? Or demonstrating to his women readers the virtuous way to overcome your devouring void-ness? One of the worst things about Reads is that he lets you – encourages you to – read those kind of motives into the action from now on.

The artistic high point of Reads, though, is the Cerebus and Cirin fight – page after page of weighty, savage, thoroughly choreographed and horribly physical combat, the first time in the entire series that Cerebus has fought someone clearly his match as a fighter. Their combat is quick to read, and continually interrupted by the – equally brutal in a different way – Viktor Davis pages, so it feels like it lasts even longer than it actually does.

Fight and action scenes are part of the grammar of American comics, but they are hardly ever this long – sometimes Jack Kirby would draw a big multi-page slugfest in Fantastic Four, which Stan Lee would usually over-dialogue, mistrusting the simple thrill of movement and the pleasure the reader gets from turning images into motion. Sim’s inner Stan Lee – occasionally a presence in the early issues of Cerebus – is silent here.

What the fight sequence feels most like is a manga episode, where higher page counts often allow for more wordless, decompressed storytelling. In Takehiko Inoue’s Vagabond, a stellar martial-arts manga, entire volumes are spent on fights in which only a handful of blows are exchanged, including pages of interiority as the combatants size each other up or move around one another looking for an opening. Manga is an influence Sim would have absorbed indirectly via Frank Miller, whose action choreography was the basis for his early stardom, but the level of weight and detail in Sim’s rendering – the blood-slicked fur of the combatants – takes this up a level. Sim disliked drawing fights and action – it was a reason the comic turned away from straightforward fantasy so early – so the Cirin fight in Reads, paired with the Viktor Davis text, is a creator deliberately pushing himself, as well as the reader, well out of his comfort zone.

But it’s those text parts that let Reads down, not just in content but in concept and execution. The Victor Reid sections are a mediocre morality play, a struggle to get through when I don’t know (or have forgotten) who all the characters are meant to be. Reid is a cypher – I don’t believe in his talent, so I don’t care when he abandons it.

The Viktor Davis parts are more readable, because they’re so strange, and because they promise some behind-the-scenes insight into the stuff a reader does actually care about (the Cerebus story). But Davis is insufferable even before he starts talking about women – he’s pompous, long-winded, self-satisfied, and presumptuous. He’s constantly assuming how the reader feels, and usually exaggerating it: as he described the reader’s (my?) horror and grief at his pronoun-switching of the Church And State big bang story, I was in fact flicking back pages to see what I’d apparently missed: in all the verbiage, I’d barely noticed him do it.

The Church And State reversal is – even more than the #186 lecture – the big payoff to Reads, the ultimate rugpull after two books of smaller ones, taking a hammer to one of the fan-favourite parts of Cerebus. It should be as shocking as Davis says it is. It really isn’t. All through the Davis part, Sim quotes Alan Moore talking about how stories work, from a conversation the two of them had. Moore tells Sim that “all stories are true” on some level, and they become true because the hearer gives a kind of permission for them to be true. If you want to defeat a story, you have to tell a better story. And if you told a beautiful illustrated story – like the end of Church And State – you aren’t going to beat it with prose. Especially not Dave Sim’s prose.

Absent Gerhard’s gorgeous lunar and cosmic vistas, absent Sim’s note-perfect Feiffer impersonation, the light/void retcon in Reads is torpid, hard to visualise, unengaging. And, yes, petty. Maybe in Sim’s mind, he was presenting two equally extreme versions to make a point, and when readers in their droves preferred the first one it just proved to him how the feminists had won and only he could see it. But they also preferred the first one because he told it better. 

The formal question Sim is asking in Reads – how much text does it take before a comic stops being a comic – is a genuinely interesting one. Maybe there are comics writers who could answer it well, and it obviously fascinates Sim, as every Cerebus phonebook has text-driven elements to a degree. But the more of the comic’s artistic load he asks them to bear, the worse it gets. Sim is just not a good enough prose writer to do the things he needs to do in Reads: I would call it an artistic failure whatever you think of its morality.

FOOTNOTES

(1) There are Reads parallels further back. In his excellent history of the penny dreadfuls and boys’ story magazines, Boys Will Be Boys, E S Turner gives an example of at least one penny dreadful writer who would regularly stop the ripping yarn for an entire episode to offer digressive essays on economics or prison reform, to the presumed frustration of his thrill-hungry readers.

(2) Which may be another reason for doing it this way. Viktor Davis’ thoughts are Sim’s, and the responsibility for them is Sim’s alone: why make Gerhard an accessory? I think it’s the only section of Cerebus with genuinely no illustration.

(3) These women characters are tiresome cliches or poison-pen caricatures, but for fairness’ sake let’s mention that Reid’s biggest believer, Milieu, is also a woman, who sees Reid’s descent into hackery as a betrayal. It’s not women per se Sim hates, you see, but the innate devouring female essence – he even allows that some rare women may qualify as creative Lights. How gracious of him!

(4) Sim is on record as disliking music, which fascinates me. He doesn’t work to it, he doesn’t make it, he doesn’t play it for pleasure, he thinks jazz is a marxist-feminist psyop, etc. Jaka’s dancing is essentially freeform, silent, non-interpretive. The only music references he makes in Cerebus are comically basic boomer ones – two Pink Floyd quotes, a Beatles quote, and members of the Beatles and the Stones turning up as visual icons.

(5) There are two parts of the Viktor Davis rant which people unsympathetic to the gender elements sometimes give credit to. One is the – I think very muddled – stuff about “Life” and “Death”. Sim thinks (roughly) that there’s too much respect given to individual life and preserving it, which is a factor in overpopulation. Leaving aside the question of whether the planet is overpopulated, one of the most generally agreed on ways to bring population growth down is educating women. The other part of the rant that people seem to like is the stuff on how wretched and uninformative the media environment is and how short-termist and manipulative politicians are. Here the issue isn’t that he’s wrong – people who trust the media or politicians are in a tiny minority. But his explanation for it, that feminism has won and reduced public conversation to arguments about feelings, is poor: politicians have always played on the emotions of the masses (and have always done the Sim trick of clothing unpopular positions in the robes of rationalism, for that matter)

(6) Much later on Sim does change his mind about the cosmology here, and we get a third version (now there’s something to look forward to). But that’s a refinement of his basic idea about the masculine and feminine principles of life, not a reversal. He’s not landing somewhere in the middle, more deciding his previous extreme perspective wasn’t quite extreme enough.

(7) Worth remembering at this point that the only person ever listed as publisher on Cerebus was, er, Dave Sim’s ex-wife.

(8) I’ll get back to Smith in the Guys post. I don’t actually enjoy Bone much, though Smith is a fine cartoonist. But that doesn’t shift his status as a counter-example to Sim’s ideas.

(9) I’ve not mentioned the one thing everyone who read Reads at the time speaks of with awe in the Viktor Davis part – the fake-out section where Davis says he’s going to end Cerebus at #200 not #300. It’s immediately reversed, but people coming to it fresh in issue #183 were genuinely floored. Obviously, that doesn’t work when you know going in it’s a lie, but fair enough – ya got ‘em, Vik.

(10) Of course Astoria has a parting gift – the “Cerebus is a hermaphrodite” thing. It’s hard to parse, and I’m going to park it for a later post – Sim thinks it’s a big deal, Cerebus obviously does too, but his subsequent crisis of masculinity plays out across a bunch of subsequent books. But yes, of course it’s significant that this happens in a comic so rooted in gender essentialism, I’m just not confident yet to say why.

]]>
https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-9-reads/feed 27
Aard Labour 8: Women https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-8-women https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-8-women#comments Sat, 16 Mar 2024 11:08:06 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34940 This is the 8th of my posts about Cerebus The Aardvark, a controversial and long-running comic. This post includes detailed spoilers for Women, for the series as a whole, and for its writer’s philosophy.

Previously: The 50-issue Mothers & Daughters storyline got underway with Cerebus taking the fight to the matriarchal Cirinists, a fight interrupted when he’s whisked away on a cosmic journey to talk to fellow aardvark Suenteus Po. Dave Sim’s storytelling grows more staccato and experimental as he tries to convey the nature of reality to his readers…

The second book of Mothers & Daughters starts with Cerebus crashing through a skylight and finding himself in a room with two ladies. One is an elderly woman who likes tea. The other is her Cirinist guard and stenographer, assigned to write down anything she says. This is clearly a significant encounter. The old woman seems to know important things. The first episode of Women ends, portentously, with her about to reveal them: “And now here you are. Here you are.”

And next issue she tells Cerebus this: “Women rape men’s minds, just as men rape women’s bodies”

If you know Cerebus by reputation, you know that at a certain point Dave Sim turns the story into a soapbox for his ideas about men and women. That moment is not quite here. But as you’d expect from a book called Women, some ideas turn up here first. For a start, it’s a book in which the story is continuously interrupted by pages from the philosophical writings of Cirin and Astoria, two established characters who are the leaders of opposing matriarchal movements. So already a sizeable bit of the novel is Dave Sim writing prose extracts from female supremacist philosophies he invented.

And then there’s this mysterious third character, a kindly old lady under house arrest, who tells Cerebus and the reader that women read minds, and more, that they absorb and consume men’s minds, and that the ultimate result of the Cirinist takeover will be disaster, as by consuming all the male rational minds they replace strong male leaders with weak, inconsistent women.

Now, Cerebus is a fantasy comic. These are fantasy concepts. We’ve already seen that the Cirinists operate as a telepathic group mind in combat situations. This is a new character speaking, who may be an unreliable one. “Women eat minds” could be a fantasy conceit like Robert Jordan’s “male magic is tainted”.

But if you know what’s coming up, you also know that in roughly 2 years’ publication time, Dave Sim is going to show up, thinly disguised, in his own comic, and say essentially that yes! women are in fact brain-draining leeches. This fantasy stuff is a very thin metaphor for the real world. Which means that before we talk about Women we have to talk about…women. And what Dave Sim thinks about them.

And now here we are.

Dave Sim is not a typical misogynist any more than Cerebus is a typical comic. But Cerebus is a comic, and the unusual things it does are rooted in the grammar and ideas of comics. Similarly, the way in which Sim expresses his ideas about women is certainly odd, but a lot of the ideas themselves seem to me straightforward, if hardline, conservatism in their conception of women as fundamentally unequal and – whatever weasel words he uses to get around the point – lesser. Women were happier as homemakers. Women are too emotional to make decisions. Feminism has wrecked Western society. Conservative speech about these obvious truths is being suppressed.

These are very basic reactionary ideas, the kind you might pick up on many a right-wing talk show or Men’s Rights YouTube channel, expressed by men with a hundredth of Dave Sim’s talent but very similar opinions. There’s a danger that in focusing on Sim’s weirder expressions of his misogyny – the stuff about women’s bums being evolved to spank, or the idea that music promotes the feminist illusion of collective decision-making – we lose sight of the fact that the core of Sim’s thinking on gender is bog-standard saloon bar conservative talking points, jacked up to emphasise the immense threat women pose to male creative or decisive energy.

And yet while Sim’s central philosophy isn’t as ground-breaking as he might think, parts of it are strange, and it gets stranger as he goes on. It’s a braid of three interlacing strands, of which his troubles with women are only part. Even if, like me, you’re trying to write only about the stuff he’s actually putting in the comic, it’s worth having a broad mental model of what Dave Sim believes and how it develops over time. So permit me an unwelcome break to describe the Three Pillars of Dave Sim Thought, as far as I can summarise them:

THE GENDER STUFF: There wasn’t a lot about men vs women in the first parts of Cerebus. The Cirinists appear quite early, but they’re basically nuns. Astoria in High Society is a woman who can’t openly operate as a politician, but is working towards broadly feminist ends. Sim didn’t seem to have many personal issues either: he happily portrayed himself in interviews and editorially as a horndog, and during the initial success of Cerebus Sim and wife Deni were an independent comics power couple. His marriage ended in the mid 80s, and around this time he started either drifting towards conservative positions on gender or feeling more free to express those positions – by the 90s he was happy to describe himself as anti-feminist in the letters pages. 

Sim’s big stated issue with feminism was that men and women are inherently, hugely different, wanting completely different things from life and love, and that feminism has restructured society since the 70s to deny this and to unfairly advantage women, with terrible effects. He explained this position at length through an alter ego in the notorious Cerebus #186, at the climax of Reads. The reaction to that, and his changing religious views entrenched and hardened his ideas, and from 1998 on he was celibate by choice. At some point he started making people who want to work with him sign a statement that he isn’t a misogynist, which raises a lot of questions already answered by the statement (and the 300-issue comic).

THE CREATIVE FREEDOM STUFF: Before his emergence as an anti-feminist, Sim was already a political activist – a firebrand by the timid standards of the comics industry. His position as one of the most consistent and successful self-publishers gave him a lot of authority in the independent comics scene in the 80s, and along with several other creators he thrashed out a “Creative Bill Of Rights” circa 1986 proposing complete artistic freedom for creators. 

This was a hot topic in mid-80s comics, as it became clear that some of the most legendary figures in the mainstream – Jack Kirby, for instance – had signed iniquitous contracts and were being shafted by the companies they made millions for. True creative freedom, for Sim, involved working independent of a publisher and having the maximum possible control over printing and distribution. These stances were more hardline than most independent artists, who might own their work but had contracted with hopefully sympathetic and honest publishers to get it on the market. But whatever the policy differences, Sim’s views won him a lot of industry respect (as did his work, and his personal generosity to other indie cartoonists). Working conditions in comics have changed at least somewhat since the 80s, and Sim is one of the people who deserves credit.

I’m not sure whether Sim ever embraced libertarianism explicitly, but the philosophy with its distrust of government and of rent-seeking middlemen certainly seemed to appeal, and I’m happy to use it as shorthand for this part of his thinking. Sim’s credo of total creative freedom at the individual level dovetails with his gender thinking in Reads. This is the part of Sim’s beliefs that has shifted least over the decades, though in the late 90s he publically backed away from the idea that he was a leader of any movement (he objected to the word “godfather” in particular).

THE GOD STUFF: Sim characterised himself before his conversion as an atheist. I think that doesn’t quite capture it – post-conversion he often calls his earlier self a “pagan”, which fits better. I might use that corny phrase “spiritual but not religious”. Sim certainly was no skeptic: he had a belief in hidden patterns and synchronicity and a dissatisfaction with pure materialism but, before 1998, no need to attribute those patterns to a higher being. While researching Rick’s Story, which involved reading the Bible in order to parody its language, Sim had a religious conversion. 

This wasn’t an overnight change – in a discussion about magic with Alan Moore printed in Cerebus around the beginning of Rick’s Story, Sim is a lot more open-minded about Moore’s beliefs than he would be later, when he described his sometime friend as possessed by demons (he still liked Moore enough to want them cast out). Sim’s religious researches led to some significant lifestyle changes, and ultimately to his developing a personal faith syncretising Judaism, Christianity and Islam. He has no time for the organised versions of any of these religions and his interpretations of their texts are, as we’ll see, unorthodox. Sim’s newly religious sensibilities sharpened both his gender politics and his sense of individual separation from society – his life now is essentially monastic – and figure heavily in the final two books of Cerebus.

All three parts of Dave Sim Thought are important – I don’t think you can get why he does what he does in Cerebus by just isolating one of them. He’s a misogynist. He’s a libertarian. He’s a convert. He’s also an artist, dedicated to improving his craft and telling his story in the best way he can. Sometimes for him that means putting that other stuff on the page. But sometimes that means leaving it out.

I would say the gender and creative freedom elements develop together from early on. The religious element comes more out of left-field. And it has a major impact on trying to actually understand what’s going on in the comic, because after the conversion Sim becomes even crankier, in the sense of derailing and ignoring questions about story points and wanting to talk a whole lot more about his beliefs and the marxist-feminist society that’s cancelled him. It explains some of the peculiar tone of the later books of Cerebus, but also makes any glosses he offers on the earlier books a lot less useful.

This is a problem for Women, as it’s a particularly hallucinatory, oblique part of the Cerebus story. After his chat with the mysterious old lady, Cerebus spends much of it back in the pub. But this time he’s asleep, though continuing to affect the world in the same chaotic way he did in Flight. A lot of other people are asleep, too – much of the action of Women happens in dreams, often shared dreams, but dreams which have a physical impact on reality. And somehow the catalyst for this is the Roach, who has taken on his final major incarnation as Swoon, king of dreams – a parody of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, comics’ critical sensation at the time. (Gaiman loved the parody, which is extremely broad but certainly nails Morpheus’ core identity as a sad horny goth)

Meanwhile the rapid-fire scene-switching of Flight continues, particularly towards the end of the book, with dream-states and waking states shuffling as the three aardvarks and Astoria start to converge for their confrontation in Reads. The tone is constantly, unpredictably shifting, and so is the cast – you turn the page from philosophy extracts to a daytime talk-show parody with Red Sophia and her Mother; Astoria fights for control of her besieged followers and a few pages later the Regency Elf is trying to seduce Cerebus. Like a dream, it feels chaotic and semi-random. On my first read of Women, it was probably the single most difficult Cerebus book to understand – on a “what is happening?” level, not a “why is Dave Sim doing this?” one. 

With hindsight, there’s a clear story throughline in Women – it’s where the extremely long-bubbling “Cirinists v Kevillists” subplot comes into the foreground, which is why it’s studded with those bits from philosophical tracts. And the chaos has more of a purpose, too. This is – though we don’t know it at the time – the last time we’ll see most of these characters. Remember that back in Church And State and High Society, the main way Dave Sim set up stories was by a shuffled series of encounters with comic relief characters – Elrod, The Roach, Sophia et al – which gradually built up to something wider, as those comedy characters subtly advanced the plot. With Jaka’s Story, Sim switched to his other main storytelling mode, a theatrical one following the drama of a small group of characters. After Women, that becomes the dominant way he tells the story: he returns to the “let’s see who shows up this issue” model with Guys, but he’s using it in a very different way, with a mostly new cast.

So a lot of Women is a farewell tour, and a rather bitter one at that – Sim is keen to overturn expectations and knock down characters he’s built up. The debunking of minor adversaries in Flight (like the demon Khem or Death) becomes a set of revelations about more significant figures. Elrod was never real. Nor was any version of the Regency Elf we’ve ever seen on-page. The Judge tearfully apologises for being wrong. At every turn in Women, Dave Sim is the guy in the astronauts meme, pulling a gun behind the shocked reader. “Elrod is a creation of the Chaos Gems?” “Always was.”

But this stuff is happening around the edges of the main story: Cirinism v Kevillism, and the return of Astoria to centre-stage after 70 or so issues in prison. Cirin is freaking out about Cerebus’ reappearance, and turns to the imprisoned Astoria, who she always assumed was running the Cerebus show anyway. Astoria realises the leverage she has and demands an in-person meeting, which will lead either to her death or an alliance. Before it can happen, disaster strikes as part of the mountain above Iest collapses onto the city – Sim handles the chaos of this brilliantly. In the disorder, Cirin is briefly believed dead and Astoria’s Kevillist followers are desperate for her to take action. The two women finally do meet, in a shared dream, but ultimately Cirin rejects any compromise with her former protege.

Like Flight paralleled Volume 1 of Cerebus, Women parallels High Society, in the sense that Astoria is very much its star turn. Astoria is one of those characters Dave Sim can’t quite bring himself to ruin, even when he obviously detests what she stands for. He’ll trash-talk her endlessly in interviews but keeps writing scenes where she absolutely steals the show, like her explanation of why, in the midst of catastrophe, she’s going back to sleep. Her character journey in Women – towards the realisation that the political movement she’s led sees her mostly as an alternative leader to Cirin, not an inspiration to set and achieve one’s own goals – is one of the most nuanced in the comics, perhaps because it parallels Sim’s own eventual disenchantment with his status as a self-publishing guru.

Astoria remains fascinating. The ideological battle she’s caught in is a lot less digestible. Cirinism vs Kevillism has been a background element of Cerebus for ages, the secret conflict behind much of the series’ intrigue, and both Astoria and Cirin tend to see the world in its terms. The Cirinists are absolutely vexed by their failure to understand why Cerebus is clutching the rag doll Missy, for instance – is he secretly making a pro-Mothers gesture?

(The observation here is shrewd – dogmatic thinkers tend to interpret all information in the light of their chosen beliefs, however little it actually fits. Dave Sim himself will become a case in point.) 

It’s true that as of Mothers & Daughters we haven’t had a full explanation of what Cirinism and Kevillism actually are, but it’s unlikely any readers would feel shortchanged. By their works shall ye know them, and we’ve seen enough to get a solid grounding in the two ideologies. Any reader will have picked up that Cirinism is an expansionist military matriarchy in which only mothers have full citizenship, men have almost no rights, and infertile women form an inferior caste. They should also have figured out that Kevillism is an offshoot started by Astoria that extends rights to “daughters”, i.e. all women, and believes in working within the system to achieve their ultimate goals, which include women’s suffrage, abortion on demand and “ownership of men”.

If readers have worked this stuff out already, why does Sim keep interrupting Women to give us more detail on the two philosophies? It’s not to entertain us: when the text blocks show up in Women it’s like a bad RPG sourcebook gatecrashing the comic. Strangely though, it’s not because the battle between Cirinism and Kevillism is vital to the plot either – in fact it’s something of a red herring. The whole of Women is setting up a conflict between Cirin and Astoria which barely happens – Cirin meets Astoria in a dream, has the chance to change things, and doesn’t. None of the philosophical disagreement ends up actually mattering very much.

So what’s going on? For me the answer comes back – not surprisingly – to the beliefs of Dave Sim, and his wholesale rejection of feminism.

One of the themes of Mothers & Daughters is how political movements go wrong. In Flight, the Cirinists are rife with internal rivalry and disobedience, and in Women, the Kevillists are revealed to have learned almost none of the lessons Astoria wanted to impart. The Cirinist mother cult is also hypocritical – their leadership barely see their own children – and the great schism between Cirin and Astoria turns out to be based on Cirin’s petty spite as much as any action Astoria took. For all the words we see spilt by the two women, it’s clear there aren’t many fundamental differences, and the main ones are rooted in age or personal enmity. (The Cirinist and Kevillist symbols are the same on those text pages – an ankh – it’s just the amount of ivy growing on it that differs).  

And when we see the Cirinists in future books, they’ve absorbed some minor elements of Kevillism (women are allowed in pubs!) but Astoria is gone and the disagreement is barely relevant any more. In other words, the great divide operating behind the scenes of Cerebus was largely an illusion – the differences between Cirinism and Kevillism, between Mothers and Daughters, were just not that important.

Dave Sim has made them seem important because he’s presented the Cirinists in a violently negative light and the only major Kevillist we’ve seen – Astoria – in a mostly positive one. And Astoria’s political wishlist is mostly a broad mix of real past and present feminist demands, whereas Cirin’s matriarchy feels alien and brutal, a totalitarian state in burlap habits. But this is another Mothers & Daughters expectation reversal: to Sim, the differences are cosmetic, which is presumably why he chucks the “ownership of men” grenade into Astoria’s list. 

To someone who’s issues away from telling us that the most basic of Astoria’s demands – women’s suffrage – was a bad idea, the vaguely-recognisable-as-feminism Kevillism and the full fascist matriarchy of Cirinism are two sides of a female supremacist coin. He’s ultimately no more interested in the differences between them than he is in the differences between first, second and third wave feminism. So the main plot of Women is a blind alley, which partly accounts for why, even by Cerebus standards, it’s an awkward, elusive book.

If Cirinism v Kevillism is a false trail, where is Sim really heading? The most telling text page in Women isn’t any of the extracts from The New Matriarchy. It’s the testimony, near the end, of an old woman facing a Cirinist tribunal, talking about how life was better before the revolution, when women stayed at home and men worked. It’s unadorned conservative anti-feminist talking points. The page concludes by noting her execution, as the Cirinists can’t handle the truth. This, not the shadow conflict between Cirin and Astoria, is the fight Dave Sim is about to pick.

Flight ended in a strange, rapid-fire muddle. Women ends with a sense of real momentum – Astoria, Cerberus and a robed figure who turns out to be Po, making their way to the cathedral where Cirin is waiting. The storytelling accelerates even more – cutting panel by panel between the four protagonists. Sim knows how to pace a climax. The first time fans read it, whatever they’d thought of the novel so far, whatever suspicions about Sim’s purposes they might have had, they must have felt excited. Reading it knowing what’s coming, what once was thrilling is now ominous. Here we are.

]]>
https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-8-women/feed 13
Aard Labour 7: Flight https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-7-flight https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-7-flight#comments Wed, 13 Mar 2024 11:51:01 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34935 This is the seventh in a series of posts about Cerebus The Aardvark, a comic I used to read. Spoilers, as ever, abound.

Previously: Dave Sim ended the first half of his 300-issue Cerebus comic with a meditation on death, specifically the death of Oscar Wilde. In the epilogue to that, Cerebus is galvanised into action and starts fighting the matriarchal theocrat Cirinists.

Flight is the first part of Mothers & Daughters, and Mothers & Daughters is a lot of things: the conclusion of the ‘main’ Cerebus storyline; a speedrun remix and retcon of the first 150 issues of that storyline; a gigantic rugpull for the faithful readers of those 150 issues; a 50-chapter postmodern metatextual graphic novel about feminism and its discontents; the point where Dave Sim irrevocably announces himself as one of said discontents; the point where a lot of readers (me included) quit; a smorgasbord of astonishing cartooning; a right fucking mess.

Mothers & Daughters is divided into four books, which Dave Sim issued as separate collections, partly for economic reasons I’m sure, but also partly so the Cerebus Fan’s bookshelf would forever bear Sim’s dread warning: WOMEN READS MINDS. I’ll be talking about the books separately, but first let’s have a quick overview of the structure of Mothers & Daughters and what each of the books do.

Mothers & Daughters is a shattered mirror of all previous Cerebus books, but in particular Church And State. Like that novel, it’s a story of political upheaval which culminates in an Ascension, which resets Cerebus’ understanding of his life for the next phase of the comic. In Flight, matriarchal tyrant Cirin is planning her own Ascension, while fellow aardvark Cerebus sparks a revolt in Iest against her rule and is then swept on a journey of cosmic self-discovery where he meets Suenteus Po, the third aardvark. In Women, Cerebus returns, disaster strikes Iest, and the conflict between Cirin and Astoria’s Kevillists comes to a head. In Reads, Po, Cerebus, Cirin and Astoria converge and converse, and ultimately Cirin and Cerebus fight. And in Minds, Cirin and Cerebus both ascend, talk separately to their maker, and Cerebus gets a tour of the solar system and of several possible futures before spending a couple of years abandoned on a moon of Pluto.

Put like that this is a somewhat baroque but legible fantasy story: it’s no more difficult to follow than, say, the average Avengers or X-Men event, and probably about as hermetic. But it doesn’t read that way at all. For a start I’ve left out the fact that in Reads the narrative bifurcates to include two long text stories, one of which is a memoir/manifesto by “Viktor Davis”, a Dave Sim analogue. This is where the controversy over Sim’s political views exploded. But even if you leave that to one side – and god knows many readers did – the storytelling in the first two books of Mothers & Daughters is deliberately fractured, a kaleidoscope of dimly connected events in which cause and effect is radically unclear. The moment at which Cerebus, after three years of slow, beautifully-crafted comics, finally starts moving its wider story forward is the moment Sim chooses to unleash his most chaotic, formally difficult storytelling mode.

And that’s the point. If there’s a theme to Mothers & Daughters – and in fact there are dozens – it’s escaping the tyranny of expectation. You expect certain things – from life, from a story, from a marriage, from the world, from a £1.25 a month comic – and your expectations, from a particular point of view, are themselves a compromise, a set of unexamined assumptions that are also traps. Mothers & Daughters is, among all the things mentioned above, an attempt to overturn those expectations and assumptions. So on the most basic level: you expected the story of Cerebus The Aardvark to continue along certain lines; you expected its creator to think and behave in certain ways; you expected that all the bits you liked already will continue to mean largely what you thought they meant. And this is the point in the Cerebus experience where Dave leans down and whispers “no”.

(OK, let’s be accurate, that’s two books after Flight.)

I don’t think thumbing your nose at expectations is a bad thing to do. I don’t think writing things that shift the meaning of what has happened before is a bad thing to do either. In fact if you’re undertaking a project as monumental and long-term as Dave Sim’s, you’re likely to end up doing that whether you want to or not. Cerebus itself has already worked like this: Church And State becomes more comprehensible when you know a) what an Ascension is and b) that almost every character in the story is interpreting Cerebus’ actions as trying to achieve one. In the third and fourth books of Mothers & Daughters, information on Cerebus’ nature is revealed which potentially shifts everything about the previous books – whether it does that well or not is a question for later. But this is all stuff Sim is consistently playing with – he wants you to always keep in mind the relativist, unreliable nature of almost every written or verbal account you get in Cerebus.

On the formal level and on the story level, the kaleidoscopic chaos of Flight’s storytelling is part of this rewriting of expectations. You thought you were going to get straightforward explanations: you aren’t. What you actually get, at first, is a linear set of action sequences – Cerebus killing Cirinists; the Cirinists trying desperately to get Cirin to take it seriously – surrounded by a whole handful of other mini-stories, switching in and out of the main narrative like subplots on speed, and most of them are wholly cryptic. Menaces from the earliest days of Cerebus are logicked out of existence by the Judge. The mountain of Iest grows a dick, horrifying Mrs Thatcher. A nude model posing for the artist from Church And State sees a tiny Cerebus hovering in front of her. The Pigts are on the march.

For the first few issues of Flight, this all feels terribly confusing but also terribly exciting. Stuff is happening! And at an astonishing pace! Also, you can intuit a basic idea of why – Cerebus’ actions are somehow having ripple effects all through the world of the comic, but the throughline of the story is in what he’s doing, not what’s happening around him. And then suddenly, Cerebus vanishes, and what he’s doing becomes another part of the chaos.

In one way, it’s a brilliant move: everything in the comic since the end of Jaka’s Story has been deferring gratification for the moment Cerebus springs into action and takes on the Cirinists. Flight is where it happens, and it’s very quickly apparent that Cerebus’ direct approach is absolutely no match for the situation he’s put himself into and is going to get a lot of people killed. The thing readers have been wanting for at least 12 months – and for over 3 years, in some cases – goes spinning off in a different direction. You thought Cerebus was going to get stuff done: he isn’t.

The rest of Flight isn’t trying to match the adrenaline rush of that opening, and it doesn’t. The helter-skelter scene-switching and staccato storytelling continues, though. So does the tour of moments from the first half of Cerebus, revisiting concepts and characters from as far back as the late 70s: Sim’s juvenilia. K’Cor and the Pigts get a lot of page time. The Roach and Elrod are a meaningful part of the action for the first time in 60 issues. And the main story becomes a cosmic chess game between Cerebus and Suenteus Po, in which the stakes are utterly obscure. 

Sim returns to older art and lettering styles, too – Cerebus’ journey to Po’s Eighth Sphere is told with the familar “omniscient narrator” font and with plenty of visual references to the original Mind Game story from Issue #20. The Pigts material reaches even further back to the Windsor-Smith Conan pastiche of the very first issues. It’s impressive – of course it is – that Sim can slip into those old styles like a vest. But…

On reading this stuff at the time a little voice spoke up – OK, what’s actually the point of all this? Those old stories weren’t exactly the greatest: they were a young cartoonist working through some heavy influences and discovering more of what he wanted to do and be. Returning to them smacked of an attempt to force-fit significance: Cerebus is a complete 300 issue work, ergo what happened in those first dozen comics must be made relevant to the wider conception. Cerebus had been self-indulgent before – as a reader, you knew to expect that. But it hadn’t ever seemed pedantic.

We know a lot about what Sim is aiming for in Flight, because he took more pains than usual to tell people in interviews, and (unusually for later Sim) his explanations are directly about the story, not about its underlying gender philosophies. A rough but hopefully honest paraphrase: Flight is an attempt to demonstrate the structure of Reality as Dave Sim understands it. However, there is no visible pattern, because it’s not possible to step back enough and discern the visible pattern in real events (the disorientation of Flight is akin to making sense of the ‘big picture’ of world affairs by reading a newspaper). In general, what’s happening is that Cerebus’ inaction has caused his peculiar ability to influence events to seep out into the world around him, so that now he’s doing something the environment is responding chaotically. Po’s chess game is meant to demonstrate to Cerebus that action in itself is a bad idea for someone with this unconscious ability.

This is all interesting stuff and some of it can even be deduced from reading the comic. Some parts you can work out after reading the rest of Mothers & Daughters – Po’s belief that staying out of events is the only moral thing for an aardvark to do, for instance, because he flat-out states it later. (Though it doesn’t make a re-read of the chess sequence feel any less arbitrary) But even if you did manage to entirely grok what Dave Sim is up to, “there’s a pattern to events but we can never get far enough away to see it” is such a shrug of an idea. It may well be how Sim honestly saw reality at the time he was creating Flight, but as a creative choice on the page, it’s hardly satisfying.

And that’s fine – satisfying his readers has never been Sim’s goal; most of what is good about Cerebus (and much of what is awful) wouldn’t exist if it was. In general, though, there’s been a balance of trust up to now – Sim has a reason for presenting the story how he does, and the payoff tends to be worth it. Flight – even when you know the thinking behind it – is for me the first real time that Sim’s ambitions and his abilities don’t match. There may simply be no way to represent ideas this abstract in an action comic. But it surely doesn’t help that he chooses to demonstrate the workings of Reality by returning to dead-and-buried story elements only the Cerebus hardcore will even remember.

Thinking about it in terms of the full conception of Mothers & Daughters – as the beginning of an acceleration to a conclusion, and a way to serve notice that much in those earlier issues is unreliable, and a last look at What Cerebus Used To Be Like before the inflection point we now know was coming – yes, all the nostalgic sequences make more sense. Individual pages and sequences are, as you might take for granted by now, brilliantly done. But they still add up to a comic which suddenly feels like it’s fussily going over old ground. Flight is the least essential part of Mothers & Daughters.

Which also makes it the least obnoxious. That says something about what’s coming up, given that Flight is also showing us something we’ve never really seen before – Cerebus as a genuinely violent comic. There’s a brutality in Flight that we’ve only seen in the Cirinist raid on the Tavern in Jaka’s Story, and that was a terrifying eruption of violence from nowhere. In Flight, the savagery is immediate and sustained. Cerebus’ fights with the Cirinists are horrifically bloody; later, a minor comic character from the earlier books gets whipped and burned to death. The Cirinists execute hundreds just because they saw Cerebus, and the Pigts slaughter each other: the violence isn’t always on-panel, but the book is soaked through with it. One of Sim’s most effective artistic touches here is pages of Beckettian mouths and eyes against blackness, as the citizens of Iest whisper together and try to imagine how they might survive the chaos of the storyline and the Cirinist’s fascist government.

Even the comic elements are pitch-black and raw-edged. The Roach turns into Punisherroach, gunning down Cirinists by the dozen. Shortly before, in one of the best sequences in the book, a mob of fired-up citizens attack the Cirinists and are slaughtered: Sim renders the “fight” as simply a full page of lavishly violent sound effects, including trailing intestines from the word “GUT!”. It’s inventive, repulsive, and horribly funny.

In the schema of Mothers & Daughters, each of the four parts is a response to one of the earlier novels. Flight is violent partly because Cerebus began as a pastiche of the sword-and-sorcery mainstream comics of the 70s, in which combat and implied brutality played a major part. That was 1977. By 1991, the mainstream had changed. Cerebus #151 – the opening chapter of Flight – came out in October, the same month as the best-selling comic of all time, Claremont & Lee’s X-Men #1, ending a run which predated Cerebus itself. While not an especially violent comic itself, it surfed to its 7 million sales on a new wave of slick, militarised, action-oriented, superhero stories. The sequence in which normalroach becomes the Punisherroach has a strange real-world echo: normalman’s creator, Jim Valentino, published at one point by Dave and Deni Sim, resurfaced at Image in 1992 with the antihero Shadowhawk, whose gimmick was breaking criminals’ spines. Such were the times, and the violence in Flight exists in that context.

From a story perspective, though, the most obviously important thing Flight does is give readers their first proper look at the patroness of Cirinist violence, Cirin herself. She’s been the explicit antagonist of the comic for 40 issues, and a source of reader fascination since her appearance in #100 as the second of the ‘three aardvarks’. It would be wrong to say she’s a particularly well-developed character, but in some ways nor is Cerebus. Cirin is ruthless, utterly focused, spiteful, impatient and overconfident – again, not unlike the protagonist. And visually, she dominates almost any page she’s on, a cross between a walking elephant and Frank Miller’s Kingpin. 

Cirin rarely comes up in conversations about Sim’s women characters, because the books she’s actually in get so notoriously derailed, and because she’s a fascist leader who’s turned herself into a symbol of her movement, and most characters react to her as such. But even though she’s not as strong or interesting a character as Astoria, Cirin is one of the great comics villains, in the one Cerebus novel that’s grand and operatic enough to require one.

One of the things that makes Cerebus fascinating to me as a comic is that the ways in which it’s bad, when it is bad, are so unusual. It has, obviously, several potential failure modes. A reader can find a book’s underlying philosophy repugnant. They can find its formal experimentation pointless or self-indulgent. They can judge that it hits all its intended artistic and philosophical goals and is simply a bust at the simple level of being entertaining and interesting. But then there’s one of the most common reactions I have to a comic – I can see what the idea was, but the execution falls short. (Comics are difficult to do well!) 

I’ve rarely had this response to Cerebus so far – even when I have, it’s confined to overwrought text sections or a failed attempt to catch an accent. Dave Sim is generally so technically good at what he does that he finds a way to pull off almost everything he attempts. So Flight is the first time I’ve thought “this doesn’t quite work” at the book scale. That doesn’t make it bad – as its name suggests, it’s a propulsive, exciting comic even when nothing much about it makes sense (another way in which it chimed with the early 90s times). But it’s the least satisfying to me of any of the Cerebus books so far.  

]]>
https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-7-flight/feed 4
Aard Labour 6: Melmoth https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-6-melmoth https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-6-melmoth#comments Mon, 11 Mar 2024 16:57:18 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34930 This is the sixth of my posts about Cerebus, the alternative comic that ran from 1978-2004. As usual, it’s full of spoilers for the book in question, the whole run of Cerebus and in this particular case, the life story of Oscar Wilde.

Previously: Dave Sim switched focus from his large-scale fantasy plot to tell a more intimate, theatrical story about Cerebus’ lost love Jaka, against the backdrop of rule by a fascist matriarchy, the Cirinists. One of the supporting cast was a fictionalised version of Oscar Wilde at the height of his literary powers.

Melmoth is the first of the really ‘difficult’ books of Cerebus, a dual narrative in which Cerebus sits outside a bar, almost catatonic (at one point a character literally dusts him) while Oscar Wilde dies. The Wilde scenes are drawn from – and narrated with – the real letters of Wilde’s friends, written as he lay dying in Paris. Dave Sim doesn’t alter the names but he changes geographical and religious details to fit Cerebus’ world. In some parts of the story, Cerebus is prominent – we even see a few old characters from Church And State, like Princes Mick and Keef or Bishop Posey. In others, the comic is entirely given over to the Wilde material, which is told mostly in the style Sim was coming to use more and more – text laid alongside beautifully composed illustrations.

I put ‘difficult’ in scare quotes because Melmoth’s reputation as a tough read mostly dates from when it was coming out monthly, across an entire year of the Cerebus comic. As a 240-page graphic novel (novella, purist Sim might protest) it’s a bizarre, unique work but an entirely digestible one. In fact, both the ‘comics’ and ‘illustrated text’ halves are less daunting than their Jaka’s Story equivalents. The Cerebus portions are a return to the way Sim was working during the first half of Church And State – a series of short comic or tragicomic vignettes which patchwork together into a story. The Oscar segments use considerably larger text and less flowery language than the extracts from “Daughter Of Palnu” we just sat through. Of all the sixteen Cerebus phonebooks, Melmoth might be the fastest to read.

Even so there’s rarely if ever been a ‘graphic novel’ more unsuited to monthly serialisation, and this was at a point where Cerebus’ overall reputation was glowing. Sim’s personal profile in the comics industry, as godfather of a creator’s rights movement and as hard-partying convention regular, was also sky-high. And he was putting out a comic in which, month to month, almost nothing happened.

The sheer inertia of reading Melmoth monthly is impossible to recapture, which is in some ways a shame for a book about the horror of helpless waiting for something to happen, even when it’s not something you want. There are definite thematic links between the Cerebus and the Oscar material but, as is often the case with Sim, the ties are also on the level of pacing and the reading experience. The characters in the Oscar half are in agony, a familiar one to anyone who’s been up close to a nasty death. They’re reliant on confused and contradictory diagnoses of a patient whose worsening condition includes moments of heartbreaking lucidity. Robbie and Reggie, Oscar’s companions, clutch at occasional straws but ultimately must resign themselves to the barely endurable wait for their friend to die.

Sim knows most monthly readers won’t be empathising with Wilde’s friends, but they can experience those feelings themselves as what they most want to happen (Cerebus to get up and do something) is similarly withheld. They get the catharsis they want in the Epilogue to Melmoth, but only after Oscar’s story has run its course.

For most of this post I’ll be exploring that story, and its place in Sim’s wider conception of Cerebus. But if the Oscar story is the heart of Melmoth, the Cerebus material has its own joys. Melmoth is, in essence, a filler arc – in an interview Sim candidly admitted he didn’t know exactly what it would be or even be about until the idea fell into place when reading about Wilde’s death. His original concept seems to have been an arc in which the dead-inside Cerebus acts as a kind of foil or sounding board for other passing characters – an idea which had the advantage that it would take as long or short as needed for Sim to get to #150 and the halfway point in the comic.

You can see traces of this in Melmoth as it exists – the scene with Prince Mick, for instance, probably the funniest in a book that’s not as short on laughs as you might imagine going in. There are visions and dreams which let Sim stretch out a bit from the straitjacket he’s put himself in with the rest of the story and nudge readers into recalling characters like Astoria, who will be important again soon enough. But most of the Cerebus part is the story of Cerebus’ stay at Dino’s Cafe, based on Sim’s own experiences as a regular at a Canadian bar in between relationships.

This phase of Sim’s life is also what he’ll draw on later for Guys, and the easy-going vibe of Dino himself feels like a dry run for some of the characters in that book. (In the chronology of the whole, Mothers & Daughters covers a few days in 48 issues, bookended by months and years Cerebus spends largely in the pub.) Dino is also the anti-Pud: no more intelligent, perhaps, but free of demons, more focused on his business, and bolder. Pud is terrified of Cerebus’ gold coin; Dino sees it as his chance to turn the Cafe into the absurdly fancy Dino’s Bistro Continentale. There’s very little movement or variation in the Oscar parts of Melmoth, so – even though Cerebus spends the book largely immobile – the Dino parts are a chance for Sim to enjoy himself with scenes that are often full of light and motion, like the sequence where workmen demolish the old front of Dino’s with rhythmic hammer blows.

Sim’s concept of alternating between the Oscar and Cerebus sections, and of letting some of the connecting tissue be Gerhard’s wonderful visualisation of a single Iestan street, is one of his best creative decisions. Without the Cerebus sections, the Oscar Wilde material would be a formal exercise in solemnity: sad and well-crafted, but unrelenting. But as it is, Sim generally knows exactly when to spin away from them and return to Dino’s. Equally, several issues of only Dino’s would have been too frothy to convey the depth of Cerebus’ collapse at this point, and might have made his recovery too swift. 

The counterpoint between the two is the storytelling answer to the very reasonable question: what on earth is a retelling of the death of Oscar Wilde doing in the middle – the exact middle – of a fantasy comic about a talking aardvark? But there are other answers too.

Oscar isn’t the first time we’ve seen a real world character lightly fictionalised in Cerebus. It’s not even the first time we’ve seen this real world character. In the next book, Flight, Dave Sim will make clear that there are two Oscars, but this is left tantalisingly ambiguous in Melmoth itself – Jaka-Oscar received the real world Wilde’s two years’ hard labour sentence, and Melmoth-Oscar’s stout defense of the literary merit of ‘Daughter Of Palnu’ could read as poignant self-justification. (It could also read as Dave Sim telling off those readers who disliked the prose elements of Jaka’s Story) At the very least, some of Sim’s beloved synchronicity is at work.

But Oscar in Melmoth – from now on I’ll just say “Oscar”, and specify if I mean the first one – is qualitatively unlike any previous real world borrowing in Cerebus. Most of the others – even the previous Oscar – are an opportunity for Sim to do a bit. They’re a comic foil (or a villainous foil in the case of Mrs Thatcher) for other characters to bounce off and a chance for Sim to show off his gift for pastiche. Oscar marks a significant advance in Sim’s technique, a further weakening of the boundaries between character and real-life model, in two major ways. 

First, Oscar is the first major borrowed character whose biographical details match his model’s: Lord Julius is not a comedian and film star; Prince Mick is not a singer. But Oscar – both of them – is a writer, and the circles he moves in are identifiable as the real ones he was part of. This is the model Sim will come to use for a series of writer and creator analogues later – F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Woody Allen, and others, overlaying literary and artistic biography directly onto the narrative of Cerebus.

The vehicle for doing this is the concept of “Reads” – the pamphlet-length serialised works of fiction which stand in for books in Cerebus’ world. Writers of fiction, in Cerebus, break the skin of the wider fiction they’re a part of. There is a whole metafictional sub-story beneath the surface of the longer work in which these writers are reading, commenting on, and reacting to one another’s work – Oscar in Jaka’s Story mentions meeting “the author of Church And State”, a droll in-joke which reads rather differently after Mothers & Daughters. The intrusion of real writers into the narrative of Cerebus anticipates what’s going to happen in that novel.

Which makes the conversation between Oscar and Robbie Ross in the first episode of Melmoth one of the most important in the whole of Cerebus. The two men are talking about “Daughter Of Palnu”, with Robbie expressing disbelief that its author (the Jaka’s Story Oscar) got away with so many implied criticisms of the Cirinists – mostly, we know as readers, via the character of Nurse, who turns out to be upsettingly different from the ogress Oscar writes her as. Au contraire, says Melmoth’s Oscar, the Cirinists have in fact allowed almost complete artistic freedom, because they understand that most dissent is simply fashionable contrarianism, admired for its daring but powerless to effect change. No licensed writer – nobody within the existing editorial system – will challenge the genuine power structures operating above and behind the factions of politics.

Oscar’s view of the Cirinists isn’t the gospel truth – the fact that Mothers & Daughters opens with Cirin selecting books to be burned implies that she, at least, cares what’s in them. But Oscar’s argument is important, because the things it suggests about what Dave Sim thinks about art and dissent are major flags as to what’s coming up in Cerebus itself.  

Oscar’s argument does not make a lot of sense as applied to the Cirinists, or indeed to any real-world authoritatians you could mention. Censorship of literature is, in general, pretty high on the agenda of tyrannical regimes, or of people who are hoping to lay the ground and rally the troops for future tyranny. But the argument is still a familiar one. It’s very much the line of reasoning used by people who think that Canada, or the USA, or Britain or France or any other Western ‘liberal democracy’, is in fact a tyranny, one so invisible and entrenched its citizens don’t realise they are doing its bidding. This is the position Dave Sim will indeed end up at, even if he isn’t there already at this point – in his view the “marxist-feminist-homosexualist” axis that governs Western culture is so powerful it won’t be shifted for tens, if not hundreds of years.

The idea that there is some genuine dissent which is culturally forbidden is a very attractive and very deep-rooted one, partly attractive because it’s obviously true. There are a lot of opinions in any society which sit outside, or uneasily on the borders of, an existing political consensus, and people aligned with that consensus will reject them if they can. Step outside it and you may well feel embattled, because very often you will be embattled.

The problem, though, is that stepping outside that consensus may or may not be right, but it’s very likely to feel right. That applies even if you haven’t actually transgressed anything. Casting yourself as the heroic figure who stands up and says “this is wrong”, the one who Just Asks Questions, is an incredibly strong temptation, and it’s no surprise a lot of people put on that rhetorical armour to defend positions which are actually deeply mainstream, or interest groups who are, in fact, doing just fine. (Very often they know exactly what they’re doing – casting yourself as the underdog is basic PR)

One consequence of feeling in the right – especially once you’ve convinced yourself you’re at war with an inescapable cultural tyranny – is that attacks on your position can become a kind of proof you are in the right. In the run-up to Reads and Dave Sim’s grand presentation of the “male Light / female Void” theory – and I think we’ve been in the run-up to Reads since the end of Jaka’s Story at least – he is continually dropping coy little hints that he’s about to be a Very Naughty Boy and get in a lot of trouble. This turns out to be true, and he’s laying the groundwork for his application of this circular logic when people do, not surprisingly, object to being told they or their loved ones are brain leeches. “Sounds like the kind of thing a marxist-feminist-homosexualist would say” becomes an infallible counter-argument. If dissent is tolerated, but people want to cancel Dave Sim, why, he must have stumbled upon the truth.

What does all this have to do with Melmoth? People might point to this book and say, look, why would a bigot like Dave Sim write this tender, haunting, deeply humane portrait of a gay man’s final days? I think the answer may be the same as the answer to “Why does Dave Sim write an “I Am Not A Feminist” editorial in Cerebus #140, running next to the excerpt from the trial judge’s verdict on Oscar Wilde?” Sim is preparing the ground for his own social ostracism, his self-fulfilling martyrdom and exile.

So that’s one, very cynical, answer to what the death of Oscar Wilde is doing here. But it’s an answer that also recognises something important: Melmoth really is a tender, haunting, deeply humane story, a graphic novel which mixes like no other comic a requiem – the pale, slow processional of the Oscar material – and a wake – Cerebus’ gradual emergence from his own mental collapse. This culminates in his active rejection of his own death, albeit standing over several fresh corpses. And this is where the second big difference between Oscar and previous real-world imports comes into play.

Most of the other import characters exist for Cerebus to react to. But not Oscar. In fact, neither Oscar ever actually meets Cerebus: the aardvark has not taken up residence at Dino’s when Oscar walks up the street on his final night out, and when the two stories do cross, Oscar has died. Oscar in Melmoth partly replaces Cerebus as the protagonist, like Jaka did in Jaka’s Story. But that was a story about Jaka in which Cerebus was a supporting character. In Melmoth, the Cerebus story and the Oscar one exist in parallel. They are, in a way, the same story.

We know that Cerebus will last until issue 300. We know the comic is about his life. We know how that life ends – “alone, unmourned and unloved”. So Sim is in the unusual position where he can tell a story at this point in Cerebus which foreshadows something later – in the way the end of Church And State foreshadows the end of Mothers & Daughters – but this time all the readers know what it’s foreshadowing and why. Oscar is a version of what Cerebus will become. The end of the first half of Cerebus is a pre-echo of the end of its second. 

So what Melmoth has to say about death is important in that wider storytelling scheme. In one way, you can see Oscar’s death – shabby and premature as it is – as a ‘good death’ compared to Cerebus’ prophesied passing. Oscar, surely, is not alone, unmourned and unloved.

I’m not sure this is what Dave Sim is driving at, though. Oscar is certainly loved and mourned – the main story of the book ends with his funeral, and it’s largely told via verbatim extracts from the letters of his lover, friend and literary executor Robbie Ross. But just as the Cerebus part of Melmoth is a slow return from spiritual death – at first he’s only able to say “aye” and “nay” – the Oscar part is a story of gradual but inexorable separation from friends, from consciousness, and finally from life. Oscar’s last recorded words are nonsense, his last sound a terrible, drawn out death-rattle. For the mourners, Ross and Turner, Oscar does not die alone. But for Oscar?

In a Bluesky comment on the Jaka’s Story post, the critic Andrew Hickey summed up a theme of the story beautifully. I hope he won’t mind me quoting him: “Jaka’s Story is, for me, a book about the lies we tell ourselves about who we really are, and about the lies we tell to and about other important people in our lives, and how it’s never truly possible to know anyone.” This is very much a wider idea of Sim’s – people and events are unknowable, there can be no ‘definitive’ account of anyone or anything.

And I think Sim carries this from Jaka’s Story into the still more pessimistic – though often very beautiful – Melmoth. What Melmoth is telling us about death is that subjectively we all die alone, unmourned, and unloved, cut off from the people around us physically, unable to see, hear or no them. There will be no ferryman on our voyage into the dark.

Read as a 240-page whole Melmoth is one of the more accessible parts of Cerebus, even if a new reader wouldn’t exactly know where everything fits. The pacing of the Cerebus sections is beautifully done, with almost nothing changing month by month but a slow arc towards awareness and awakening showing through the whole. The Oscar material works too as a formal experiment, a sombre high point in Sim’s realist mode, and it helps enormously that the language feels (and is) genuine, rather than clever Sim pastiches.

There’s one more reason to do a literary biography of the death of Oscar Wilde in the middle of your aardvark comic, though, and it’s the simplest of all. Because you can.

Sim was preaching self-publishing as the only way to ensure complete creative freedom for artists – that’s what Oscar’s digs about editors are getting at, and the whole idea that the established publishing system produces “good sheep”. (Another way in which this all prefigures Reads) All around him, meanwhile, cartoonists and writers were tackling their passion projects, helping cement the sense that Sim was part of a wave of outrageously talented alternative creators with no obvious limits to the ideas they might try and realise. 

Alan Moore, for instance, was starting up From Hell. Peter Bagge, a cartoonist Sim greatly admired, had chosen precisely the right moment to do a comic about dead-end kids in Seattle. And most relevant for Sim’s future directions, his friend Chester Brown had turned half his comic Yummy Fur over to a played-straight adaptation of the Gospel of Mark. Meanwhile, Dave Sim was committed to his 300 issue comic about a talking aardvark. 

Melmoth is the moment where Sim sets out to demonstrate – to his own liking, if not the market’s – that “a 300 issue comic about a talking aardvark” really can include absolutely anything he wants it to. He proved the point: Melmoth is one of the high watermarks of Cerebus. Even if nobody in 1992 understood what “Cerebus can include anything Dave Sim wants” might really entail.

If they’d read the Prologue and Epilogue, they might have had more of a clue. If you’re reading Cerebus for the “plot”, you can actually skip the whole Cerebus at Dino’s and Oscar Wilde sections – the main ten parts of Melmoth – and just read these. In the prologue, the Roach sits outside the cafe in a ghastly suit – he’s parodying Jim Valentino’s already-a-parody normalman – and mutters under his breath about “fucking cunts” while turning into a cringing heap every time a Cirinist looks at him. 

In the epilogue, Cerebus overhears a Cirinist patrol talking about torturing Jaka. He snaps out of his trance, slaughters the women, remembers his friend Bear telling him that Cirinists are a telepathic hivemind and begins to flee. Covered in flecks of blood, the panels shrinking to slivers, he starts his desperate run into metaphor, madness and Mothers & Daughters. It’s one of the most exciting cliffhangers in the series. If you wanted to stop there, and make it a Butch And Sundance style finish, nobody could blame you.

]]>
https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-6-melmoth/feed 3
Aard Labour 5: Jaka’s Story https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-5-jakas-story https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-5-jakas-story#comments Wed, 06 Mar 2024 11:01:39 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34875 This is the fifth in a series of posts on Cerebus The Aardvark, an often technically brilliant comic. As usual, it contains spoilers for both this novel and the series as a whole. In fact, this is a particularly spoiler-heavy post.

Front cover of Jaka's Story by Dave Sim and GerhardPreviously: Dave Sim ended the epic Church And State with the downbeat revelation that his aardvark protagonist had lost everything and would die “alone, unmourned and unloved”. The comic, meanwhile, had reached its circulation peak amid the 1980s black and white boom, making Sim a public champion of self-publishing and creative freedom in comics.

I.

There used to be a T-Shirt with the slogan, “I Survived Jaka’s Story“, a tongue in cheek reference to the idea that this Cerebus novel was particularly slow, or boring, or difficult to read. Knowing what’s still ahead of us, you might stifle a hollow laugh at the idea. But Jaka’s Story is boring. Intentionally, radically boring. It’s a 23 chapter novel in which almost nothing happens for 16 of them. Here’s the story: Cerebus arrives at Jaka’s house and becomes her guest. He meets her jobless husband Rick and their landlord, Pud Withers. Jaka and Rick quarrel sometimes and have sex sometimes. Cerebus does nothing. Withers fantasises about Jaka, who dances in his tavern to no customers, and these fantasies start to become violent. Rick idolises Withers’ other tenant, a writer named Oscar, who is painting the stone head outside the tavern. Cerebus goes to find some more paint. Pud finally gets another customer. Congratulations, you’re now two-thirds of the way through the book and almost a year and a half in. 

It’s quite a contrast from the last novel. As a feat of cartooning, Church And State was all about creating a sense of unstoppable momentum, Dave Sim taking advantage of his new partnership with Gerhard to produce some of his most fluid, gorgeously readable work yet, and integrating all his techniques – from caricature to wordless dream sequences to comic relief – in the service of a baroque fantasy epic that accelerates across 1100 pages before coming to a dead stop with an audacious five-issue monologue set on the moon.

Jaka’s Story flips the script. It, and its companion-stroke-epilogue Melmoth, swap acceleration for stasis, showcasing two more of Sim’s favoured techniques: the ‘decompressed’ telling of small actions (applying makeup, doing housework, playing games) across extended sequences, and the use of blocks of text alongside illustrations. Once these two storytelling modes are introduced in the first chapter, they barely vary. Jaka’s Story is the most consistent Cerebus has ever been; one of the most restless and unpredictable comics on the market has been tamed. One of the people who survives Jaka’s Story is Dave Sim himself, testing whether he can manage an extended period of suppressing monthly variety in favour of story discipline.

(He can, though you could argue he never really does it again – even the most extreme stretches of monthly invariance after this only last 6-12 issues, though some of them feel a lot longer.)

Whatever the longueurs endured by monthly readers, Jaka’s Story as a whole is seen as a peak of the series. For a lot of people it’s the peak, the one moment between the early fantasy stories and the later, more didactic ones that Sim achieved his potential. Few Cerebus novels can truly work as a standalone, satisfying experience. Jaka’s Story comes closer than anything else, partly because Cerebus’ own presence is so minimal in it. So it’s worth asking why Sim wanted to do it.

From a structural perspective that’s easy enough. Cerebus is the story of a life. Jaka is one of the most important people in that life, Cerebus’ great love interest. “Could Cerebus and Jaka be happy together?” is one of the questions the series keeps cycling back to. It’s important that readers get to know her better, and with Cerebus himself a wreck after Church And State and his lunar judgement, now is the right time.

But there’s another, rather interesting, external reason Sim wanted to try this kind of smaller-scale, human-stakes storytelling: it’s one of the few times Sim admitted to being influenced by a peer, in this case Love And Rockets’ Jaime Hernandez. The influence wasn’t entirely friendly – Los Bros Hernandez had made no secret of being uninterested in Cerebus, even though the two comics were constantly packaged together in the late 80s as brilliant independent alternatives. Sim in turn hinted that he didn’t much like the brothers’ comics, finding Jaime’s work artistically repetitive. But while Cerebus had been locked into a baroque fantasy epic, the acclaim for Love & Rockets grew and grew. In a later interview Sim copped to at least feeling some need to prove he could do the things Jaime did in his Locas strips – which he saw as realistic, domestic dramas.

Hence Jaka’s Story, which, to everyone’s credit, reads absolutely nothing like a Locas story, and isn’t obviously trying to. Jaime Hernandez’ comics take place in a version of the real world, and their realism springs from how we see the characters behaving in that world; Cerebus does not, and Sim’s built his world to be full of incongruity and absurdity, so ‘realism’ in Cerebus means stripping out a lot of the extraneous detail, zooming in on characters and their relationships, which is why Jaka’s Story is so tightly focused. 

This suits Sim’s developing storytelling style, too. Both Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez were developing dramatically as storytellers around this time, focusing not so much on panel-to-panel storytelling but on manipulating the transition between panels to shift scenes in place and time and communicate story by what’s not shown as much as what is. (Beto’s difficult, non-linear masterpiece Poison River is a contemporary of Jaka’s Story, for instance). Sim wasn’t at this point interested in that kind of experimentation, and pushed his storytelling in the other direction – close observation of movement and action, slow development of scenes, and teaching the reader to pay attention to small shifts in expression or detail. 

In a way it’s an evolution of his earlier technique – characters moving through panels across a static background – and like that it’s helped immeasurably by the solidity of the environments Gerhard builds (literally – he was making models for recurring locations like Jaka’s house). Except here often the characters are almost static too, and tiny shifts of posture or expression are where the storytelling happens.

This remorseless, slow attention to detail is also a feature of the text portions of Jaka’s Story, with long, descriptive passages about riding a wooden horse, or opening a door. But of the two overlapping modes of storytelling in Jaka’s Story, the text-and-illustration one is far less successful. 

II.

Jaka’s Story is a split narrative: the two modes tell two stories. Alongside the ‘present day’ story of a shellshocked Cerebus taking refuge with Jaka and her husband, we get excerpts from a book – which turns out to be written by Oscar based on his conversations with Rick – about Jaka’s girlhood as a child of privilege, the niece of regular character Lord Julius, ending with her leaving his city-state Palnu after her Uncle uses her to humiliate his wife, Astoria. Mixing text and illustration like this was a fascination of Sim’s as far back as the “Silverspoon” Prince Valiant pastiches in Vol.1, but it becomes an increasingly important part of his practice as a creator from this volume on. 

Compared to some of Sim’s later forays into illustrated (and increasingly non-illustrated) text, the “Daughter Of Palnu” sections of Jaka’s Story are uncontroversial. But they’re still by a distance the weakest parts of the book, even though Gerhard in particular does a tremendous job on detailing the palace interiors of Jaka’s girlhood (his work on the covers of Cerebus in this phase is exquisite, too). Like many comics writers who switch to prose, the writing is prolix and overdone, a chore to wade through especially when the comics pages are paced with such care and precision. If you’re feeling generous to Sim, you can of course blame the overwriting on Oscar, but Sim’s later prose is often just as meandering and pompous.

(Oscar, of course, is Oscar Wilde, in the same way Lord Julius is Groucho Marx, but I’ll hold wider discussion of that over till next time, when Sim tries his hand at literary biography)

After the first couple of chapters, where they synchronise well with the rhythm of the story, I came to resent the labour of working through the prose sections – especially as the comic scenes became more tautly horrifying in the final third of the book. They do add something to our understanding of Jaka – we know why she fled her life in Palnu; we see how she gets her greatest joy from physical motion; we get a sense of her taste for luxury, which will be a rather sour plot point much later. But we get far more sense of her, far more efficiently, from the comics sections. Jaka’s Story is an unintentional showcase of how much better good comics can be than mediocre prose at characterisation.

Jaka has up to this point been one of the weaker aspects of Cerebus – the lead character’s love interest, who shows up at important moments in the plot to engage in an issue or two of shameless melodrama, much beloved of the early Cerebus fandom. As the one serious recurring character, she played a useful role as a kind of yardstick for how low Cerebus had sunk (or how high he’d risen), but the lip-trembling mawkishness of the Jaka issues was an early alarm bell that writing relationships between men and women would not be a Dave Sim strong point. You might think an entire two-year sequence devoted to her wouldn’t work. But the comics section of Jaka’s story is a tour de force, where the novel earns its reputation as one of the indie comics greats. 

Sim is betting at this point that he’s a good enough cartoonist that he can use a page on almost any mundane action and make it sing. In Jaka’s Story he wins that bet. For instance, there’s a lot of dressing and undressing in this book, and it’s mostly presented as the entirely everyday thing it is, but Sim’s cartooning is so good that Jaka getting out of bed and stretching, and Rick pulling on his shirt over his lanky body, feel fluid and vivid, well worth spending pages at a time on. Later on, when Jaka is dressing to dance, Sim’s storytelling captures her more considered, careful movements. The detail in the cartooning, and the low-intensity, steady, six-panel-per-page pace of the comic is telling us something important: these are real people, not the caricature figures of Church And State, and we should get used to them, because we’ll be spending a lot of time together.

There’s always been a lot of talk about how comics are cinematic, but cinema is hardly the only way of combining words and images. Jaka’s Story is a rare example of a comic which is theatrical. It mostly limits itself to a small cast – Cerebus, Jaka, Rick, Pud Withers, and Oscar – and a handful of locations: Withers’ tavern, Jaka and Rick’s house, and the roadside between them. It even has an explicit three-act structure, though the third act introduces two new characters and locations.

Doing comics as theatre lets Sim concentrate on the cadences and rhythms of his dialogue – which he excels at – and the relationships between the characters, all of which are based to some extent on thwarted desire. Rick and Jaka are together, but Cerebus and Withers both want Jaka and Oscar wants Rick: Jaka’s Story is a farce which takes a sharp right turn into tragedy. For all the similarities to a stage production, though, Sim is able to use techniques unique to comics to create drama of a kind you can’t easily get in the theatre – Cerebus’ overhearing Rick and Jaka having sex, for instance, expressed as a duet of converging speech bubbles and licquescent lettering. Or the increasingly chilling scenes where Withers rehearses conversations he intends to have with Jaka.

(I say “unique to comics”, but the fact is they’re unique to this comic: nobody else is using alternating bold and italic dialogue in a text block alongside a single character image to show that character imagining a conversation. On the page, though, it feels entirely natural as a technique – you immediately get what Sim’s depicting and quickly learn what to pay attention to: the minor variations and additions in the dialogue as Withers’ obsession darkens.)

Jaka’s Story is built around a series of misdirections – the story you’re expecting is never quite the story you get. In the first act, the conflict you imagine is coming – between Cerebus and Rick for Jaka’s affections – largely doesn’t happen: Cerebus issues ultimatums to both and is quickly defused. In the second, all the tension in the comic is around Pud’s increasing obsession with Jaka and his premeditated plan to rape her, a storyline which comes to a head with a sudden switch back into farce as Pud (and the threat he poses) is rendered suddenly ridiculous. And in the third act, after another sudden and shocking reversal, we might be hoping Cerebus will return to the storyline to confront the Cirinists: he doesn’t. The novel’s title never lied: this was Jaka’s story all along.

In fact, after 113 issues with Cerebus at the centre, he’s barely involved in Jaka’s Story. He puts nothing in motion, he’s offstage well before the denouement, and reappears too late to make any difference. His only real role is as a distraction – readers, used to focusing on him, may be tempted to relegate or glaze over scenes without him, like Rick’s crucial conversations with Oscar about wanting a son, or Oscar’s stories about the Guffin. But these, more than anything Cerebus does or says, are what make the closing stages of the book make sense. 

Even though they turn out to be important to the plot, these scenes also feel like filler, because almost everything in the first sixteen episodes of Jaka’s Story feels like filler. It’s a comic which revels in its intimate, repetitive, domesticity, gradually cranking the tension underneath the daily events, but also letting it dissipate sometimes too. It all has one important effect – the reader is meant to forget the Cirinists exist until the moment they come crashing through the tavern door. And it works: the scenes in which everything falls apart are genuinely shocking and painful even when you know they’re coming: the remaining issues, of imprisonment and interrogation for members of the cast, are brutally powerful.

They also bring into focus a major element of the middle chunk of Cerebus – life under a fascist system. The Cirinist occupation of Iest is totalitarian and has impoverished much of the population, but Jaka’s Story keeps the occupiers offstage until the final act. Until that point it’s a story about everyday life in a time of shortages, state controls, and offstage gestapo justice. Jaka’s Story is uneventful not just because Cerebus himself is at the mother of all loose ends at this point, but because the Cromwellian social orders imposed by Cirin have leeched opportunity and joy from the comic’s world. Nothing is happening because nothing can happen. For the next books to work, we as readers have to hate the Cirinists at least somewhat, and Jaka’s Story certainly accomplishes that.

III.

For most of the book, the actual nature of the Cirinists isn’t as important as the recognisably oppressive ways their presence distorts the story. Dave Sim will have increasingly strong and strange ideas about what a fascist matriarchy would entail, but in Jaka’s Story they don’t really affect the comic until very near the end, where Jaka finds herself imprisoned by the Cirinists, then interrogated by one, Mrs Thatcher.

Yes, that Mrs Thatcher, though Sim’s version of her is more based on the Gerald Scarfe caricature than on real life, and as a British reader I’ve never found her speech patterns that recognisable – the character’s cadences read better to me if you drop any memory you might have of the actual politician. Still, she’s in there for a reason – she’s the first post-occupation Cirinist we see in a major role, and Sim looked around for a real life equivalent to trigger the responses he wanted in the reader. 

(Which is odd, as Thatcher’s actual politics don’t map onto Cirinism, as seen so far, very well: her legacy rests not on her social conservatism but her economic radicalism. It’s not that she wasn’t censorious, or closed-minded, and she was never afraid to pay lip service to the family as the fount of morality, but those are the shibboleths of most conservative politicians. It doesn’t matter for her role in the plot, but it’s an early example of how Cirinism is a slippery element in Cerebus – sometimes it’s an invented but fairly coherent politics of radical motherhood, sometimes it’s a catch-all for bossy women Sim doesn’t think are hot (the hot ones get to be Kevilists)) 

One thing the comics Thatcher does share with her real-world inspiration is a callous dogmatism. Thatcher’s role in the story is a dark mirror of The Judge in Church And State – the higher authority who gets to have the last word on what’s been happening in the novel. Both characters end up having their in-story authority brutally undermined later on, but in the moment their verdict is final. Of course, there’s a difference: the sheer strangeness of the Judge’s appearance on the moon gives him a kind of cosmic authority, whereas Mrs Thatcher is introduced as a villain, the tormentor of the woman whose story this is. The Judge’s verdict is a tragedy because we can look at the novel and see how he’s right. Thatcher’s is a tragedy because we can do the same and see how she isn’t.

Or can we? Sim in interviews has revisited the closing issues of Jaka’s Story in the light of his later religious and personal convictions and said, basically, he thinks Mrs Thatcher is in fact right. Dancing, he now agrees, is fundamentally wrong; it does unavoidably arouse men and lead them off the righteous path; and abortion is murder. I don’t think it’s controversial to say this really isn’t how the novel actually reads, even knowing what Sim thought later. For all I suspect Sim is more sympathetic to Rick at the end than Jaka, Thatcher is not just introduced as a villain, she’s played as a manipulative monster, using Jaka’s horror at the execution of Pud and her terror of prison to guilt her into accepting responsibility for his death. Her treatment of Jaka is another brutal removal of agency from a character defined by her lack of it and desperation to have it.

Or that’s how I see it. But some of the possible greatness of Jaka’s Story lies in how open the book is to letting the reader decide for themselves on the morality of the characters and their choices. Thatcher is a devil, but her reading of events is still the final word. In fact, I’d guess that’s the point of the novel – I’ve said throughout this post that Jaka’s Story reads as a theatrical work, a play, but the kind of play Sim is writing isn’t really apparent until this last act. Jaka’s Story is in the tradition of plays about social and ethical questions – ones designed to provoke precisely because their characters’ choices and actions are morally debatable.

(I very vaguely associate this tradition with Ibsen, but the near-contemporary theatrical artefact closest to Jaka’s Story might be 1992’s Oleanna, by David Mamet, a play about college sexual harassment which supposedly led to screaming arguments between men and women in theatre foyers. Jaka’s Story predates that, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Sim envied the impact it had)

Here’s a reading of Jaka’s Story which puts her choices in a wholly sympathetic light: Dancing is what she loves, it’s her means of self-expression and Rick wants her to do it. He is a lazy daydreamer who can’t find work, so having a baby would cut off their only source of income, and she ends her pregnancy. With dancing illegal after the Cirinist takeover, she’s forced to leave the Lower City and dance at Pud’s tavern, understanding that this is risky, but also realising that Pud is a black marketeer. She hates her upbringing, but when the Cirinists bust the Tavern she’s forced to claim diplomatic immunity to protect herself and Rick in the face of women who’ve just murdered two people in front of her.

And here’s the Thatcher interpretation: Jaka is fundamentally selfish, concerned only about her dancing, which is in any case pornography under the figleaf of art. She aborts their baby without telling Rick, lures Pud into letting her dance at the risk of his life and livelihood, and ultimately knows that if the shit does hit the fan she has a get out of jail free card in the form of her Uncle.

Cerebus meant a lot to a lot of people – me included – who now vehemently disagree with Dave Sim’s stated positions on almost everything, and there’s an understandable desire to stress the liberal, or feminist readings of his earlier work, to salvage the ‘good bits’ from the spectacular heel turn that’s now only a few years away. In some ways stressing those readings is easy, because they’re in the book. But other readings are in there too. 

Sim in 1990, writing the end of Jaka’s story, may not have agreed Thatcher was right at the time. But he’s writing a highly theatrical “issue” novel to be a litmus test for readers’ views: he definitely wants us to try and figure out whether and why she’s wrong, and whether Jaka or Rick are, and why. And honestly, the choice of abortion as the ultimate ethical pivot of an issue novel by a male creator is a telling one – there’s an air of “just asking questions” around it which makes it still harder to straightforwardly claim Jaka’s Story as a work written from a ‘liberal’ point of view.

And it doesn’t have to be. For a start, the craft in the comics sections is so remarkable that you can marvel at half the pages without the slightest thought to context. But beyond that, it’s a truism on the left that conservatives can’t make good art, but I’d say it’s a facile one. The reality is rather trickier. Political art made by someone whose politics you don’t share is often a hard sell, partly because you might disagree with its conclusions, but partly because the ways in which authors move their pieces around to reach those conclusions feel more visible, less natural. 

And yes, I do experience this as a flaw in Jaka’s Story – on re-reading it feels like 16-20 issues of beautifully observed, wonderfully crafted, slow paced human drama engineered to set up a cruel little thought experiment. But despite this the characters are rich enough, flawed and sympathetic and vivid enough, and the experiment open enough, that even I can’t wholly resent Dave Sim for pushing me into it.

Sim describes Jaka’s Story as his book about love. It feels more like a book about that most conservative of bugbears, responsibility. All the five lead characters in Jaka’s Story are in some way irresponsible, foolhardy, led by vanity, unable to resist doing things which threaten themselves or others. Sometimes – as with Pud – this leads them to the brink of doing something atrocious. More often the irresponsibility is imposed from without, by the arbitrary rules of tyranny, which considers any self-expression a danger, and whose monstrosity makes self-expression more virtuous by default. Thatcher dismisses Jaka’s claim that Pud letting her dance was an act of “civil disobedience”, but his swinish motives don’t actually change that her dancing is exactly that.

And how these characters are punished for it! One dies, the others are broken by the experience. Cerebus most immediately, as we see next volume, but Jaka most sadly. The next time we get an extended look at her, she’s a character much closer to the privileged, naive girl in Oscar’s book than the free-spirited, complex dancer we’ve been reading about. Whether that change feels real or cruel or both is a question for a much later post. But that T-Shirt told a lie. Nobody survives Jaka’s Story.

]]>
https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/03/aard-labour-5-jakas-story/feed 4
Aard Labour 4: Church And State II https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/02/aard-labour-4-church-and-state-ii https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/02/aard-labour-4-church-and-state-ii#comments Mon, 26 Feb 2024 13:21:31 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34868 This is the fourth in a series of posts on Cerebus The Aardvark, a comic I suggest you approach with caution if at all. As usual I’m including spoilers for the whole series, and not including much if any art. Church And State is one story published in two halves for size reasons, an arrangement my post mirrors.

Previously: In the first half of this 2-part post, Dave Sim started the longest Cerebus novel, Church And State. He recruited background artist Gerhard, who had an immediate effect on the look and quality of the comic. He also got divorced.

SIXTY THOUGHTS ABOUT CHURCH AND STATE, II

31 STONES

There are no great jumping on points for new readers in Cerebus (and a lot of great jumping off points for old ones), but every issue might be someone’s first and my first was the episode, a little over halfway through Church And State, where Cerebus meets Prince Mick and Prince Keef. It was not love at first read. I was 13, I only dimly understood who the Rolling Stones were, I had no idea why Cerebus was talking to them, and Dave Sim’s attempt at a British accent was indecipherable. Sheer bad luck – if my friend who bought it had been an issue earlier we’d have got the Secret Wars/Dark Knight parody, and that would have hooked us.

32 TARGETS

This read of Church And State might be the first time I’ve enjoyed the Mick n Keef stuff. It’s ultra-broad drug humour but the rhythms of Mick’s speech are a delight and the elegance of how Sim draws him, a languid swan of a creature like a Jules Feiffer dancer, is beautiful. It’s Sim having fun, and not really at anyone else’s expense, which is relaxing in a story in which mothers in law, fat women, skinny men, feminists, babies, peasants, artists and anyone else Sim likes are the butt of the broad, vengeful and (yes) often funny jokes, adding to the long established targets of politicians, bureaucrats, snobs, girlfriends, ex girlfriends, comics creators, characters and fans.

33 RIFFS

We aren’t yet at the stage at which Sim starts to grab the reader by the collar and yell that some of his basic jokes and barroom observations are actually a philosophy of life (and one of Sim’s recurring ideas, effectively used in Church And State, is that offhand comments turn into philosophies and accidents into traditions an awful lot). Church And State is a collection of comic or psychedelic or action riffs, like the Mick and Keef sequence, from a few pages to a few issues long, interspersed by moments of sudden seriousness. The seriousness of these moments in the rush of riffs makes them extremely effective – “Go to hell”; “Boom”; “It is”; Something fell”; “Alone unmourned and unloved” – as does the way the frequency of these beats increases until the final sequence (mostly a four issue monologue) gets an uncanny narrative weight from the rising momentum that’s led up to it.

34 PISS

Liberated from handling backgrounds, Sim’s art becomes more fluid, and his willingness to take up pages with wordless or decompressed action grows. He’s still calling the most formally adventurous issues “Mind Game” but the techniques he’s developing there start to bleed out into the rest of the story. Towards the end of Church And State I, there’s a sequence where the aardvark wakes from a particularly ominous dream and spends a few pages taking a piss, an early example of the deliberately mundane storytelling he’d return to again and again.

35 FASTER

For the most part, Sim’s interest in decompressed action works to speed the comic up, not slow it down. Church And State is a story in which events outpace everyone who thinks they have a handle on what’s happening – first Weisshaupt, then Bishop Powers, then Astoria, and ultimately Cerebus himself. The storytelling is constantly accelerating, too – there are longeurs and dialogue-heavy issues but you can binge-read Church And State in a way that wasn’t so easy for High Society. Back then issues would often end with a punchline, a satisfying way to say “here’s a month’s break”, and Sim’s storytelling often used that to its advantage, using the gap between issues to shift the story dramatically – the jump before the final episode being the ultimate example. But in Church And State Sim exploits cliffhangers as ruthlessly as a Netflix series. From roughly when Cerebus becomes Pope, the story seems to hurtle forward, faster and faster, daring you to try and put it down. 

36 CLIFFHANGER

Sim’s cliffhanger game is excellent through most of Church And State. It’s the last time he’s revelling in the episodic nature of what he’s doing. “What’s going to happen next?” is the oldest hook in comics, and this is the point where Sim is using it better than he ever would again. It means he can gladden an old school comic geek’s heart by making sure his 100th issue has a major turning point, a genuine game-changing revelation on the final page. But Sim’s skill with cliffhangers creates an illusion that Church And State is a coherent story in the conventional, three-act way High Society was. And it’s not, or at least it doesn’t work that way for me. The serious moments aren’t the spine of plot, they’re just a different kind of riff in the ever crescendoing tumble of events.

37 MILLER

A lot of the important bits and pieces around the Ascension storyline are given to minor characters and comic relief – the same technique Sim used in High Society: you get to be funny and advance the story at the same time by simply having the funny characters advance the story. Take the Roach: his ‘Secret Sacred Wars’ routines and the pursuit of Cerebus up the tower are solid parodies of mid-80s superhero melodrama in general and Frank Miller in particular. He’s probably never funnier. But Sim plays the pursuit simultaneously for laughs and not for laughs – it’s where he slips in the critical information that the Tower is growing, and we’re cued up by the desperate reaction of Astoria (one of the reliably serious characters) that what’s going on is properly important.

38 ROACH

The Roach is a more interesting character than he looks. He’s a series of parodies, some good, some less good, but more than that he’s a character that’s always in dialogue with the story and mood of the comic: from High Society on he’s usually an exaggerated answer to the question “how would a normal (read: mainstream) comics character react to this stuff?”. He’s a piece of another comic transported into this one and forced to adapt, and his adaptations reveal the story as well as reflect it. That gets even clearer later, but the Secret Wars Roach, it seems to me, is a response to the fact that the action of the wider Cerebus plot really is approaching a moment of crisis – even beyond the fact there’s a 50 foot golem stomping around.

39 LIMIT

So is Church And State any good? For all the exhilaration of Dave Sim finding his mature style once Gerhard is there to complete the ‘look’ of Cerebus, for all the sprawl and scale of the story, for all the moment-to-moment, issue-to-issue brilliance, I’m not actually sure there’s much to it. High Society is deeply cynical about politics, but politics is a topic which feeds on cynicism and Sim ends up finding something interesting and true to say about it. But religion? Sim goes straight for the limit case, the fire-and-brimstone fundamentalist preaching the end of the world while lining his own pockets. In the 80s, this was almost a stock character, and while the sheer gall of Pope Cerebus pushes the satire into a zone of black farce, there’s something lazy about it too: you never get the impression Sim has thought about religion in the way he obviously had about politics.

40 UNCANNY

Is it more interesting to read Church And State knowing where Dave Sim’s own religious journey ended up? Knowing about Sim’s politics doesn’t help a read of High Society – it probably clouds it. But Church And State is shallower on the surface about its intended topic, so reading it for clues that Sim was of God’s party without knowing it might help. Now, I’m writing this as an atheist myself, and I hope I stay one, but I think Church And State is rather good on the “moving in mysterious ways” side of the divine experience. The Ascension has rules (that nobody properly understands) but it doesn’t have an explanation for those rules, and scenes like the coins tearing out of the bags and Cerebus’ visions in the throne room retain a sense of the uncanny. Sim refuses to flatten the supernatural into a system, and leaves room for mystery – this is actually something he gets a lot worse at post-conversion.

41 WOLFE

It’s said of science fiction writer Gene Wolfe that his novels are built for the re-read: he tends to conceal or withhold information in ways that mean the second reading is where the book actually makes sense. This is overstating the case a little – the books are generally very rewarding on a first read too – but it’s certainly true that Wolfe is happy to leave a lot of work to the readers. Church And State is Dave Sim’s most Wolfeian novel: important pieces of plotwork and information are revealed in asides or comic scenes, and the motivation of almost everyone who isn’t Cerebus is only really clear quite late in the book, which changes your understanding of what’s been happening.

42 ASCENSION

Understanding what’s going on in Church And State becomes a lot easier when you know that the story is heading towards the Ascension, because this is what every character in the book already knows – except the one who actually gets to Ascend. When you first read the conversation between Cerebus and the soon-to-be-previous Pope, it’s obviously freighted with meaning, but it seems mostly metaphorical – Weisshaupt is aiming for power, he’s arranging forces to achieve this, he’s dangerous, etc, and the Pope is using the card game Diamondback as a way to make Cerebus understand this. On a reread what the Pope is probably thinking is “Weisshaupt is trying to ascend into heaven and the attempt will most likely destroy the city”, and we realise Diamondback itself may be a metaphor for what people think happens in an Ascension.

43 GOLD

The storyline of Church And State is based on a misunderstanding that comes true. Cerebus starts collecting all the gold and declares that the world is going to end. Every other main character – from Astoria to Thrunk – sees this as an attempt at an Ascension, this once-in-a-generation magical quest to go meet God, and reacts accordingly. But Cerebus doesn’t know that, and just wants the gold because he’s Cerebus and that’s what he does. In a story obeying the logic of politics, this would be a bit of ironic misdirection, like the Hsiffies turning out to be Conniptins in High Society. But Church And State obeys the logic of religion, so everyone who isn’t Cerebus is in fact right: doing the things which let you go up to heaven and meet God will, in fact, lead to you going up to heaven and meeting God.

44 WHAT?

“The Black Tower begins to rotate” – and after 40-plus issues of ratcheting momentum, the story reaches escape velocity and just… floats, into a climax that’s a four issue monologue by a character we’ve never seen before. What the hell, you might well ask, is going on? There are weirder things in Cerebus than the end of Church And State, but they’re almost all strange because they’re Dave Sim derailing his own comic. They aren’t what a whole novel has been leading up to. The only comparably audacious thing in Cerebus is the lurch into metafiction in Mothers & Daughters, and honestly, the finale of Church And State beats it. 

45 MOON

“Walking On The Moon” and the Judge’s monologue aren’t the last time Sim will collapse a story with something entirely unexpected, but it’s probably the last time he’ll carry a big part of his readers with him. Sim later on walked back most of what the Judge says, and took the negative reaction of readers as evidence they preferred the COMFORTING LIES of feminism to the HARD TRUTHS he was offering. But it’s hard to imagine many readers took the Judge’s cosmology seriously as a creation myth or even were wedded to it because it echoed their beliefs. It worked because it’s magnificently illustrated by Gerhard, beautifully paced by Sim, and puts a final, harsh capstone on Cerebus’ arc in the story. Making the big bang an act of cosmic violation makes the semi-divine judgement on Cerebus’ fate land harder, reminding us just who we’ve been reading about and what he’s recently done. People responded to it, I’d guess, as a literary success not a philosophical one.

46 JUDGE

Did Dave Sim intend the Judge to be wrong when he wrote the moon monologue? Like most “Did Dave Sim intend…?” questions it’s of limited use – the work is the work. But after Mothers & Daughters undoes a lot of the ending here, it’s a question many readers would ask. I’ve read a theory which claims Sim wrote Astoria’s rape, was shocked by the backlash he got, and came up with the Judge’s scenes a year later as a clumsy correction to persuade angry readers he (Sim) wasn’t the bad guy. I don’t believe this for a second – it seems so out of whack with the way Sim generally operated vis a vis reader feedback. But it’s also the case that Sim genuinely did persuade some readers into thinking Cerebus was a feminist comic. (My own guesses – and they are only guesses – on what Sim believed when can wait until Reads.)

47 TROPE

Cerebus is not the only rapist-protagonist in 80s fantasy fiction. Stephen Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant is a rapist: it’s almost the first action he takes. Gene Wolfe’s Severian, from The Book Of The New Sun, is one too. Sexual violence had become a nasty trope, a way to differentiate a new breed of lead characters from the noble heroes of post-Tolkien quest fantasy, to signal to readers that even as they followed these men through the story, they should not expect to like their actions. But like and dislike, approval and disapproval, identification and non-identification aren’t switches to be flicked on and off at the gift of the author. In Watchmen, Alan Moore ran into the problem that there was no degradation he could visit on Rorshach that would not make him seem a badass. (Rape is crucial to that story, too, though The Comedian is never a protagonist. But he is the guy whose badge you can buy.) To give Sim some credit, he had no intention of using sexual violence as part of a hero’s redemption arc, a la Donaldson. To withdraw that credit right away, where he ended up with Astoria’s rape was even worse.

48 CONSENT

Only Dave Sim knows whether response to the rape scene surprised him, but the event itself is obviously a pivotal one in Cerebus, and he returned to it three times. Once in the Judge’s monologue, and once in Astoria’s own recollections of it in Reads, where she claims she manipulated Cerebus into doing it. And then finally in Latter Days, where Cerebus does the “instant marriage” gambit again, this time consensually, and it works out dreadfully for him again. This final revisiting underlines textually what Sim had said in interviews all along – that for him the important element was the misuse of papal power, not the issue of sexual consent. (So maybe he was wrong-footed by the uproar)

49 BABY

Cerebus raping Astoria is the end – you would think (or perhaps hope) of Cerebus as hero – or, as I hedged in the High Society piece, of Cerebus as character-in-the-place-a-hero-goes. But this is the same character who, 25 or so issues earlier, threw a baby off a roof, an incident Astoria actually reminds us of in her conversation with Cerebus. How was he still a hero-shaped-character after that? This is an example of where the tonal shifts between comedy and drama in Church And State are treacherous – the terrible things Cerebus does that you laugh at are, to the other characters, still very terrible. But Sim can’t actually evade those shifts completely – tone does still matter, and Astoria’s rape is part of a sequence which plays out mostly as drama, which is why it’s not hypocritical for an imagined reader to read it as horrific and the baby scene as jet-black satire.

50 CRISIS

The most powerful sequence of covers in Church And State is the run from #94-#98, Astoria’s interrogation and the opening part of her trial, which includes the scene where Cerebus rapes her. This is the most claustrophobic, emotional, and dramatically intense part of the entire novel, and the covers reflect that, but in an unusual way: snapshots of moments of action (Cerebus pulling at Astoria’s chains; Cerebus unfurling a scroll), so zoomed-in you see every cross-hatched line, like beads of sweat in a movie close-up. This is a moment of crisis in these characters’ lives and in the wider plot: every action is appallingly consequential. While time seems to stop on the covers, inside Sim is slicing it up, using thin vertical panels to carve the page and the characters’ dialogue into staccato beats, showing slivers of scenes in a way that completely upends any usual panel-to-panel flow but keeps driving the action inexorably forward, however much we might prefer to look away from it.

51 JUDGEMENT

Wherever in the book you think it happens, by the closing act of Church And State Cerebus is a more monstrous figure than he’s ever been. He’s still the protagonist though, the narrative is still about his un-knotting his problems – and while those problems are the ridiculous Fred and Ethel monster, or the anonymous power of the Sepran Empire, the narrative pushes the reader onto his side. But in an important sense by the time he meets the Judge readers are ready for that Judgement not to go his way.

52 SPOILER

“You will die alone, unmourned and unloved” is a prophecy that hangs over the remaining 189 issues of Cerebus like a curse. If as readers we’ve been primed to feel that Cerebus has earned retribution, as comic readers we understand how powerful this particular retribution is. The character we’ve followed for over a hundred issues, and whose life we’re ready to follow for almost 200 more, has had the possibilities of that life brutally cut down. The Judge has issued the ultimate sanction, and for a fictional character the ultimate sanction is also the ultimate spoiler.

53 WOMEN

I said that Sim persuaded some readers Cerebus was a feminist comic; on reflection I’m not sure he actually did. What it had a reputation as, and not just among men, was a comic with good, rounded, interesting women characters. Astoria in High Society, Michelle in Church & State, Jaka throughout. Set against this there are the caricatures – Sophia and her Mother, the fat chambermaid in the Regency, and so on. But there are a host of male stereotypes and caricatures as well, though the situations Boobah or Posey find themselves in aren’t as stock as the mother-in-law joke. Sim was not – or not until much later – the kind of misogynist who was uninterested in women or ignorant of them. Like most great caricaturists he was a keen observer of speech and behaviour, even if his understanding of women grew increasingly bizarre, so later on there’s often a mask of observation over a core of misogynist ideology. But it’s only once the Cirinists make their presence fully felt that he can start writing them as creatures of undifferentiated malice.

54 HACKWORK

So I don’t think Cerebus’ rep for good women characters was unjust – Astoria and Michelle are interesting to read about and given depth by the script in ways none of the men in Church And State are bar Weisshaupt and Cerebus himself (inasmuch as he’s ever given depth). But there are caveats. One is that in 70s and early 80s comics we are very much grading on a curve. With most of Cerebus’ finer qualities you have to put Sim’s work in the context of a mainstream that was mostly hackwork and an nascent indie scene struggling to make headway after the decline of the undergrounds in the 70s. Put Sim’s writing of Astoria up against a random supporting character from a well-regarded mainstream writer from ‘82-’83 – an Englehart or Moench, say – and it’ll stand out. But it wouldn’t necessarily come off as anything special to a new reader now. And next to a contemporary like, say, Lynda Barry – an observer of people who actually likes them – his women characters seem jejune.

55 INTERIORS

The two sections of Church And State featuring the Countess, Michelle – found at the beginning of Volumes I and II of the story – are another opportunity to see how Sim’s synergy with Gerhard took the comic up a level. Both chunks of story are very similar: Cerebus is licking his wounds after a catastrophic defeat, and links up with the Countess, a mysterious but knowledgeable woman. The Countess comes with an entourage of dimwits – including the Roach – and both times the basic action of the story involves her trying to explain something important to Cerebus while a Roach-driven farce happens in the background. In her first appearance Michelle lives in a mansion, but what we see of it is suggestion – a staircase here, an entrance there, a few couches or chairs. In her second, she’s keeping house for her idiot sidekicks in a small urban cottage, and with Gerhard drawing interiors it feels like a real place, with the physical comedy using the layout of the house – stairs and cellars – to great effect.

56 MICHELLE

The Countess is a cryptic character, one of two women Cerebus lands (literally) in the house of who seem considerably more clued-up than almost anyone else in the comic. Like Serna later, I’m drawn to her as a reader, I want to know and see more. Both turn out to have a similar back story – formerly major political players who are now, by choice or by force, removed from the action, no longer intervening or manipulating things. (Or at least, until their chance encounter with Cerebus). Both busy themselves with things which are stereotypically the preserve of women – cooking, cleaning, knitting, making tea, reading romance novels, looking after dumbass men. These are good characters, but knowing what we later know about Dave Sim’s idea of women, it’s hard for me not to see them as his ideal of a woman – one who gives up her vampiric powers and retires to the quiet life.

57 INTOLERABLE

With most artists who fall from grace because of their views, you can see a number of critical lines develop, most defensible on some level but all, I think, ultimately springing from the same, highly sympathetic impulse: I would rather not be reading stuff by a person who thinks these things. The two extremes of opinion – “they were never any good in the first place” and “their towering genius leaves me no choice” – in fact share this basic urge. The cry of the moderate – “separate the art from the artist” – is impossible in Sim’s case; more honest to say, as many do, that Sim’s views make his art intolerable even if it’s brilliant and refuse to read it entirely. The question of Sim’s politics and life and their effect on how we see his work is really one for the final post in this series. But Church And State is where the gravity of that question first starts to drag on the reader, especially if they’re trying to ask a more pertinent one: is Church And State any good?

58 PYNCHON

Is Church And State any good? What I’ve been trying to obliquely argue in these posts is that to get the most out of this novel you have to come at it in a frame of mind that accepts the comic on its own terms – chaotic, fractured, storytelling; constant digressions; marrow-deep cynicism; and a quickening pace that ultimately asks you to simply have faith that what’s happening makes sense on some wider level. Literary comparisons to comics were in vogue in the 1980s, so here’s one – I get something of the same dizziness and acceleration from Church And State as I did when I read Gravity’s Rainbow; it’s the most Pynchonian part of comics’ most Pynchonian work. Which makes it the best part? I guess so.

59 CULMINATION

Was Church And State any good? When it finished it must have felt like a masterpiece – a strange, cultish one, to be sure, already drifting out from the centre of the comics conversation, following its own weird elliptical. But in its ambition, scope, variety, and Sim’s technical development, it was an extraordinary achievement. And it still is, but – even if you can sidestep the shadow of later Cerebus – time has done funny things to it. It’s not a question of feeling dated. The comics industry in-jokes have, god help us, aged well: events are still events, Wolverine is still Wolverine. But the whole style of cartooning Sim drew on has slipped further into the past. He was always an old soul – the Exile-era Stones about the most recent reference point he uses outside whatever the Roach is parodying – and his cartooning blends 30s, 40s and 50s newspaper strips and comics with the mainstream realism of the early 70s. A genuine pioneer in a business sense, artistically Sim feels more and more like a culmination, not a trailblazer.

60 ALONE, UNMOURNED AND UNLOVED

“Alone, unmourned and unloved” is also a promise and a warning to the reader. We have read Cerebus at his peak. The good times have rolled. Cerebus The Aardvark is not going to be anything like it used to be from now on. The issue after Church And State – not in the collections, which I think was a mistake – is called “Square One”. A devastated Cerebus returns to a devastated, conquered Iest and the ruins of his base. He has lost almost everything. There is a very good punchline which I won’t spoil. “Square One”, though, is a lie of a title. It implies Cerebus has gone back to his beginning, that he can start up again. This, you might think, is a breathing space before the next adventure begins. It isn’t. The tone of “Square One” – Cerebus as a passive wreck of a creature – sustains itself for the next three years.

]]>
https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/02/aard-labour-4-church-and-state-ii/feed 1
Aard Labour 3: Church And State I https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/02/aard-labour-3-church-and-state-i https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/02/aard-labour-3-church-and-state-i#comments Sun, 25 Feb 2024 20:51:07 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34864 (This is the third part of a series about Dave Sim’s Cerebus The Aardvark. As before, I’m not trying to get you to read this comic, just scratching a discursive itch, so it’s spoiler-heavy and artwork-light. Church And State, the third Cerebus “novel”, is one story published for size reasons in two parts. My write-up mirrors this arrangement.)

Previously: With a planned 300 issues to run, Dave Sim shifts the storytelling in Cerebus from one-offs to longer “novels”. The first of these, High Society, details the aardvark hero’s career as Prime Minister of the fantasy city-state of Iest. It is commercially and creatively a great success…

SIXTY THOUGHTS ABOUT CHURCH AND STATE, I

1 RELIGION

When I first read Church And State I thought it was “the one about religion” in the way High Society is “the one about politics”. And it kind of is, but not in the way I would have meant then. Cerebus’ antics as Pope are a satire of religion in the way Princes Mick and Keef are a satire of rock stars, a comic bit based on already existing stereotypes the readers have about “fundamentalists” and “rock stars” so Sim can turn that stuff up to 11. That’s already a difference from High Society, which for much of its story turns politics into other things – like Marx Brothers routines or comics conventions – in order to capture the vibe of the political without getting into the detail. So even though it bears little relation to ‘real’ politics it provides quite a subtle portrait of what it’s like to get caught up in it.

2 RULES

A better way of comparing High Society and Church And State is that beyond just being “about” politics and religion, the two novels obey the logic of politics and the logic of religion. So in High Society the drama and plot partly comes from the fact that politics has rules. We as readers can intuit at least some of those rules (and get some more explained to us), and we get to understand the extent to which Cerebus can and can’t break them. In Church And State, the supernatural or divine also has rules, but Cerebus doesn’t know what they are, and we don’t either, and the characters who think they do (like Weisshaupt or Fred/Ethel) tend to be proved fatally wrong. We have no way of telling which set of characters, caricatures, weird happenings, strange encounters, dreams, and so on is important, and nobody in the comic has a reliably better handle on that stuff.

3 PATTERNS

Cerebus may have been written by (at the time) an atheist, but it’s a comic and a world in which supernatural agency clearly exists but is not necessarily comprehensible. As readers we’re forced to read the story from a position of faith (that this stuff will make sense). We’re like a soothsayer with a set of entrails, looking for patterns among the chaos. The most obvious pattern we latch onto is tone – the serious stuff must matter more and be truer because it’s serious. Which turns out, as in High Society, to be somewhat treacherous.

4 REPRISE

Church And State doesn’t really begin in the conventional sense. It’s unusual in this. High Society opens with an episode called “High Society”. Jaka’s Story gets a title page. Mothers & Daughters even has an epigraph! There is no story called “Church And State”, no title page; people even disagree on its first issue. For our purposes it starts with Cerebus in a pub, writing his memoirs, and getting into a fight. Right after that, the comic seems to be spinning its wheels, doing a reprise of the original Astoria-and-the-Roach issue with a new character, Michelle. A few issues after that, Cerebus is Prime Minister again. A few issues after that, he’s the Pope, and all Heaven breaks loose.

5 MIRRORS

The first year or so of Church And State must have been odd to follow as a monthly reader. It’s good, it’s funny, but it’s also a conscious mirror to the story that’s just finished. Seven months after his dreams of power ended, Cerebus is back in office. This is our first look at one of Sim’s big structural techniques: he likes to repeat and reconsider situations and story set-ups. Mothers & Daughters starts by remixing the barbarian stories of Volume 1; the F Stop Kennedy section of Going Home is a refinement of the Jaka’s Story set-up; and so on. So before the main action of Church And State can start, we have to speedrun High Society again. Which recasts High Society – plotwise – as a sort of failed Church And State, which in turn mirrors how the action of Church And State is a failed version of what ends up happening successfully in Mothers & Daughters. Important events ripple and echo (“Something fell!”); nothing is coincidental. Before Dave Sim believed in anything else, he believed in that. 

6 EPIC

Is Church And State any good, though? It’s the heart of the Cerebus narrative. Ascensions, Cirinism v Kevillism, Tarim and Terim, Cerebus’ grab for power and its long fallout, Jaka’s marriage – this is what the rest of the comic is ‘about’ from a plot perspective, even if it’s rarely this direct again. As such it doesn’t really stand alone in the way the first two volumes did: it reads, ironically more so than Vol 1, as an episode in a wider fantasy series. It’s the first Cerebus volume where the details of the – forgive the jargon – world-building feel like they really matter. You can pinpoint the moment the comic enters the realm of the Fantasy Epic, too – Weisshaupt’s dying croak of “There are THREE aardvarks”, a development that is only interesting or significant if you buy into the tropes of high fantasy storytelling. But readers who enjoy Church And State as part of such an epic should also be aware that the rest of the story takes great pains not to be one.

7 READERS

Sim talked later in interviews about how a large chunk – even most – of his readership saw the barbarian stories as “the real Cerebus” and everything else as increasingly baroque deviations. Any reader coming to it now, knowing what Cerebus is as a whole, will have an almost opposite view. Inasmuch as Cerebus himself has a point of view on his own stories, you suspect he’d agree with the old school readers. And the comic continually flirts with giving those readers what they want, all the way up to the cliffhanger of issue #299. But the beginning of Church And State is the last time the comic actually could have gone in that direction – Cerebus on the road again, sword in hand. With hindsight I think Sim protested too much, and many Cerebus readers were staggeringly tolerant. Still, from now on every volume will find new ways to drive some away.

8 MEANING

Even though Church And State is the centre of the Cerebus story, if you had to sit down and describe what happens you’d rapidly have to admit that it doesn’t make a lot of linear sense – actions and outcomes are evident but causal mechanisms aren’t: that’s religion for ya! What you’re left with is an experience – a sense that something meaningful has occurred.

9 COVERS

One area the chaos of Church And State is reflected is its issue covers. Later Cerebus novels mostly take a far more controlled approach to cover design – they announce the title on the cover, for a start, but they also tend to impose a unified scheme on each novel’s individual issues, reflecting the reality that the monthly issues were simply becoming less important than the ‘phonebooks’. But during Church And State the issues were still king, which partly explains why the storyline is so freewheeling. Cerebus 100 is Cerebus 100, not also “Church And State: 49”, and its cover is a montage of previous Cerebus art. Elsewhere the cover styles flip around continually – three Miller Wolverine pastiches in a row (which Marvel rapped Sim’s knuckles for); a run of the panel-on-wallpaper effect he’d use more consistently in Reads; a trio of what are apparently Bill Sienkiewicz imitations; and finally the group of photorealistic images of the moon and lunar landscapes. 

10 TITLES

When I first read Church And State, I thought the issue titles were particularly badass – another accoutrement of mainstream comics Sim soon dropped. For much of Church And State they’re draped on the covers too, oblique little phrases which feel like Rush or Pink Floyd album tracks as often as they mark points in the story itself. For every “Talking To Tarim” there’s a “Hovering Above The Fray” or “Varying Reasons Of Assorted Depths”. (“Anything Done For The First Time Unleashes A Demon”: oh yeah, that’s on the Nick Wright side of Ummagumma right?) Fair dos – Church And State is the prog rock triple LP of 80s comics: heavy themes, technical virtuosity, and life-alteringly cool or irredeemably embarrassing according to where in the culture you find yourself. No wonder punk rockers like Los Bros Hernandez didn’t like Cerebus.

11 DIVORCE

Behind the scenes Church And State is marked by a departure and an arrival. The arrival is of Gerhard, who draws backgrounds from issue #65 and makes an instant impact on the comic. The departure, a little before, is of publisher Deni Loubert, formerly Deni Sim, whose divorce from Dave Sim is often cited as the reason Sim – and Cerebus – took the anti-feminist turns they did. Even now when Sim is mentioned casually it’s often in terms of his being “one of the most divorced men of all time”, up there with Elon Musk and Scott Adams. Loubert herself, though, in an interview given after Sim published his anti-feminist manifesto in Cerebus #186 at the end of Reads, said its views reflected what her ex had always been like, painting a picture – which Reads honestly does nothing to dispel – of a man terrified of his emotions and of the loss of control over them that women represent.

12 DAVE

Cerebus the character is not Dave Sim, but the story of Cerebus the comic is also the story of Dave Sim, and real people from Sim’s own personal and professional life show up in it, only sometimes disguised. If you’re to take Cerebus seriously, you have to take the hard biographical interpretation of Dave Sim seriously – the idea that his divorce and other failed relationships pushed him into the positions (some might say corners) he ended up in. You also have to take seriously the possibility that mental illness – the “borderline schizophrenia” he writes about, or something else – is behind some of his obsessions. But it seems to me that both are true but also limited. Every creator is shaped by their personal experiences – their upbringing, health, love, background, identity. To assume that some of those experiences are a kind of skeleton key to their work feels reductive, even when the ideas in the work are as extreme as Dave Sim’s became.

13 BUSINESS

One reason the biographical read of Cerebus is limiting is that it disguises a two way process. Very obviously, just as Dave Sim’s life changed Cerebus, the act of doing Cerebus changed Dave Sim’s life. Sim’s religious conversion while researching Rick’s Story is the most clear-cut example, but his divorce gives us another. Assuming Deni Loubert is right, and Sim’s bubbling gynophobia was the cause, not a symptom, of his divorce, the biggest change to come about because of it is that Sim suddenly becomes the sole publisher as well as sole creator of Cerebus, which raises his profile as a businessman as well as an artist. During the time publishing Church And State he’s also having public fights with distributors and refining his hardline view of the rights, duties and supremacy of the creative artist in comics.

14 READS

Sim’s main vehicle in Cerebus for commenting on the publishing business and commercial art is his concept of “reads”. Once we’re past the comic’s barbarian phase, where everything looks like a D&D module, the level of technology and culture in Estarcion (Cerebus’ home continent) draws on anything from the early modern to the Victorian eras, and reads are the Cerebus version of 18th century pamphlets or 19th century penny dreadfuls – cheap entertainment for the growing literate population. Later on, the reads industry more explicitly becomes the comics industry, but in Church And State it’s a propaganda tool ruthlessly exploited by Weisshaupt, the ally-manipulator-antagonist for the first half of the novel.

15 ENLIGHTENMENT

Weisshaupt is a great idea for a character. His basic deal is that he’s an Enlightenment man – his clothes are a dead giveaway – in a pre-Enlightenment world, and to get what he wants he uses the tools of the Enlightenment: statecraft, rationality, propaganda and gunpowder. A ruthless, rapacious Thomas Jefferson or George Washington let loose in a fantasy kingdom – naturally he’s terribly successful. Most of the characters in Church And State, and none more so than him, are on the “political logic” side of the story, assuming they’re in a narrative about deals and plots and self-interest. This is why they end up losing. Weisshaupt’s realisation of the kind of story he’s actually in, in the moments before his death, is one of the most terrifying and effective in the Cerebus run.

16 PARTNERS

Cerebus’ 300 issues is – or was at the time – the record stretch of comic book issues by a single creator. For 236 of those, from Gerhard’s arrival with #65, it was also one of the longest collaborations in comics history, a 15-year stretch which started magnificently and ended with Gerhard apparently counting the months until he could be free of the work. If Gerhard’s work on those later books isn’t up to the standards of his run from Church And State through Guys – and some of it is still extraordinary – it’s partly because Sim simply stopped caring about giving his artistic partner interesting things to draw. But in Church And State, that’s not an issue, and his arrival is a creative levelling-up that it’s hard to find comics parallels for. Looking at the issues just before Gerhard, Sim doing the rest of the run as a solo joint is almost inconceivable: for all the hard work before, #65 is the moment completing the 300-issue project became possible.

17 SPACE

Read those issues immediately before Gerhard joins the title and you see immediately why he was needed. In several sequences Sim has essentially given up on backgrounds – like his great influence Jules Feiffer, his characters are often interacting in blank space. We can imagine the Regency Hotel or the gardens of Iest – we’ve seen them recently enough – but Sim is barely drawing any of it. And while parts of the comic are as good as ever, it’s starting to affect the storytelling. When Lord Julius and Duke Leonardi show up to bamboozle Weisshaupt, Julius glides into the scene as he did in High Society, but without a background it’s not nearly as visually effective.

18 ARCHITECTURE

If you want to see what Gerhard brought to Cerebus, the cover of Church And State I shows the two artists at their best. A wraparound picture, it shows a two storey brick hotel with a long extension and a mansard roof on the main building. The hotel faces onto a square with more houses in the same style – which look less elaborate and elegantly built, with more wood against the brick. Behind them rears up a black mountain, oddly arranged in curtain-like folds – at the point nearest to us we see that the rock is made up of monstrous, gargoyle-like faces. All this is drawn by Gerhard, with his exquisite eye for providing detail and weight to architecture without having it overwhelm the composition or distract from the action.

19 GROTESQUES

Gerhard draws the scenery on the cover of Church And State I; Sim draws the characters. That’s the division of labour throughout their run together. And on that cover, Sim goes wild. The square is full of a crowd, hollering, cheering, begging as they raise their skinny arms and gawp at a tiny figure standing pontificating on the hotel chimney stack: Cerebus. The crowd are all different, rapturous grotesques – men, women, the young and the old, many infirm or injured, jammed into the picture to get a glimpse of their Pope. Sim’s face- and figure-work is way ahead of anything he was doing even during the High Society era – cartoon people as expressive and vivid as the Gerhard-drawn world they inhabit is tangible and detailed.

20 BACKGROUNDS

Gerhard is a background artist, a rarity in western comics where the comic-making process tends to separate artistic duties between penciller, inker, colourists and letterers. But it’s not a rarity in animation, as I understand it, and it’s certainly a technique used in manga production. In many Naoki Urasawa comics, for instance, there’s a similar division of labour – Urasawa, like Sim fascinated by the face and its expressions, is free to draw his motley cast while a number of assistants place them in the evocative surroundings of 90s East Germany or early 70s Japan. But these comparisons do no justice to Gerhard: he’s not an anonymous assistant learning his trade, but a master craftsman in his own right, a man who’s refined one particular aspect of comics-making to a near-perfect level. Sim’s luck in finding Gerhard can’t be overstated, and he knew it – he gave his new partner free rein, and a share in ownership of the comic. 

21 LETTERS

The pre-Gerhard issues are Sim visibly straining himself to carry the burden of creating and publishing a monthly comic. But they also have a couple of absolutely wonderful uses of lettering – the skill that really comes to define the middle stretch of Cerebus. There’s the scene where the recently enpontiffed Cerebus bullies the timorous Bishop Posey, his blocky, rectangular, thick-bordered word balloons coming in from off-panel and literally pinning Posey against the panel borders. There’s also the scene where Weisshaupt takes Cerebus up to the roof in a rainstorm, and the word balloons themselves, slanted and full of big grey letters, feel battered by the storm – they convey exactly what shouting to someone through a storm is like.

22 MOVEMENT

Recruiting Gerhard was a masterstroke because it liberated Sim to do the things he was already experimenting with better. He could work out his slight weakness in faces and figures, and continue to try out ways of making conversation – the basic unit of a Cerebus story – feel dynamic on the page. In High Society he’d developed the technique of moving figures across a static background and found it could work brilliantly – Gerhard let him concentrate on that animation-style feel to his paneling. But Gerhard’s painstaking creation of the houses and rooms Cerebus moved through opened up other options too – allowing Sim to start concentrating on the dynamics of groups of people in small, clearly-defined spaces.

23 SALES

The high point of Sim as a monthly storyteller was also – not by coincidence – his high point as a seller of monthly comics. At some point during Church And State Cerebus’ sales peaked at somewhere above 30,000 per month. In today’s market this would make a creator-owned book a major hit, able to run as long as its authors wanted. In an interview with The Comics Journal Sim waved aside allegations of success, pointing out how tiny his sales were compared to market leader X-Men, which shifted 400k a month for Marvel, and mentioning Eastman and Laird’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as an indie comic which far outsold his. Still, if he wasn’t quite as high selling as Elfquest or quite as acclaimed as Love And Rockets, 30,000 sales as a self-published title was remarkable. Sim found himself as de facto leader of a creator’s rights movement in indie comics, a position he took very seriously.

24 ’86

While Dave Sim was clearly ahead of most of his peers in acceleration and development, the gap was narrowing: Church And State coincides with 1986, the annus mirabilis of ‘mature comics’ as a mainstream force, the year of Maus and The Dark Knight Returns’ breakout successes in bookstores, of the first issues of Watchmen, of the emergence of the golden generation of early 90s alternative cartoonists (Peter Bagge, Dan Clowes, Chester Brown, et al). Oh, and the rise of Love And Rockets, whose creators had little time for Cerebus – and Sim made sure to mention he felt their work was lacking too, though it was strong enough to get Sim thinking about his next novel. Meanwhile, in comic shops, the black and white boom (and bust) in self-published or small-publisher indie comics turned Sim into a figurehead for a wave of self-publishers. Cerebus showed up as an honoured guest of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the book which launched this armada. 

25 HAMSTERS

The 1986 perfect storm of media attention and indie product glut should have been a triumphant moment for Cerebus – by almost any standards one of the best regular comics on the market. But for Sim it was a double-edged sword. He was lashed to the mast of a thick-continuity, monthly series sold only in comic shops, in the middle of a 60 part storyline about an Aardvark who becomes Pope. Sure, it was brilliant, but a very different sort of brilliant to the comics grabbing media attention. The cognoscenti knew that Cerebus The Aardvark was doing things closer in ambition to Maus than to Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters. This would not have been obvious to the press. Or, for that matter, to kids walking into comic shops looking for Turtles books.

26 CARROT

Dave Sim’s sense of allegiance to the indie comics scene is most obvious in Church And State near the end, when Bob Burden’s surreal post-superhero Flaming Carrot shows up for an issue, as a chance encounter inside the ascending Black Tower. It’s a jarring sequence, shattering the epic pretensions of the Ascension storyline and setting up a set of issues massively removed in tone from anything you might have expected. The sudden intrusion of an entirely different art style to Sim’s makes the issue doubly strange – a genuine irruption of the uncanny even in the anything-goes universe of Cerebus

27 FUNNY

Is, I say, is Church And State any good? It’s the end of the ‘early funny ones’. There’s a pretty definitive moment they end, too, in Astoria’s prison cell, after which the polarity of Cerebus switches. After Church And State we see a lot less of Sim’s old favourite trick, of the comic relief advancing the plot, and a lot more cosmology, philosophising, and slow-paced domestic drama. The jokes never quite leave Cerebus (there’s a whole book where Sim is at least trying to be funny) but Church And State is their peak. Nothing dulls funny moments more than repeating them, but when I think of the things that make me laugh most in Cerebus – Scorz, Most Holy getting robed, what Prince Keef would do with his gold – they’re generally from Church And State. It’s not the last time Cerebus is innovative or impressive or moving. But it’s the last time it’s fun.

28 GRANDMA

One of the funniest things in Church And State isn’t Dave Sim’s invention at all. A reviewer in The Comics Journal praised Mrs Henrot-Gutch, Cerebus’ mother-in-law, as a great comic creation. And she is! Just not Dave Sim’s. My own Gran used to love Giles’ cartoons for the Daily Express, and had piles of his collections around her house, so I immediately recognised his most famous character “Grandma”, who Sim had basically sampled. Grandma’s unlicensed cameo is a snapshot of the good and bad in Sim’s sense of humour. In Giles she’s a force of immobile but unstoppable malignancy, a creature no busybody or do-gooder could withstand. For Sim she’s a mother-in-law joke, but Sim gets his best laughs from cracking the mask of immobility, making her sudden motion into the punchline. The best jokes in Cerebus may be remembered by one-liners, but the laughter is always from the cartooning too.

29 STRUCTURE

Church And State is structurally looser than Cerebus ever would be again. Sim talked about how valuable High Society had been in letting him realise what he could actually do in 500 pages (less than he imagined, was the gist). Jumping to 1200 didn’t, it seems to me, greatly increase the thematic complexity or depth of the novel. Instead it offered a different way of resolving the “wider story vs chasing-an-urge” dilemma I outlined in the High Society piece – build a structure big enough to do both at liberty. Church And State is a patchwork of styles, shifting focuses, tonalities; a shaggy god story in which what an issue contributes in terms of vibe is as important as what it contributes in terms of plot.

30 OVERLOAD

So it’s fitting that this is the only Cerebus storyline to be split into two volumes of the same title. Church And State is too much – in the hippie-descriptive, not judgemental, sense. An overload, a story that refuses a shape, a whole that is not more than the sum of its parts because it breaks down into those parts as soon as you try and contemplate it.

NEXT: In the second half of this post, I look more at the actual story of Church And State – the Ascension, the Judge’s monologue, and the Astoria scenes, with thoughts on Sim’s pacing, Sim’s women characters, and how the whole story holds up today.

]]>
https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/02/aard-labour-3-church-and-state-i/feed 5
Aard Labour 2: High Society https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/02/aard-labour-2-high-society https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/02/aard-labour-2-high-society#comments Wed, 14 Feb 2024 23:01:25 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34857 (The second part of a series reconsidering Dave Sim’s Cerebus The Aardvark on the occasion of me actually finishing it. As before, I’m not worrying too much about spoilers or trying to draw attention to particular moments or bits of art: this is just me writing about it.)

Previously: Dave Sim’s Cerebus, a planned 300-issue comics series, launches with a series of Conan The Barbarian pastiches, which rapidly spin out into a comic fantasy series taking in parodies of comics characters and wider pop culture. The most successful of these, a take on Groucho Marx, points the way to Sim’s first lengthy “novel”…

Re-reading Cerebus as an adult makes me focus on the question – “what was Dave Sim good at?”. It feels like an important question because the answer puts the wider project – actually finishing Cerebus – in a different light. If I’m enjoying Cerebus for its ideas about society, or for the way Sim writes sympathetic relationships, that’s likely to make what’s coming considerably tougher than if I’m enjoying it because Sim draws a cool aardvark.

When I first read High Society, at age 14 or so, I probably did like it for the ideas and the relationships and all the awesome characters, but I mainly liked it because it blew open any ideas I might have had about the scope of what comics could do. It wasn’t my first encounter with Cerebus – more on that next entry – but High Society made me a Cerebus fan. 

I was at boarding school at the time, living in resentment and dread of the older boys who were, at a day to day level, in charge of me. My part of the school was subdivided into little common-room style fiefdoms of a dozen or so boys, run by individual prefects. One, an older boy called Nick, liked comics, and he let – or tolerated – me hang out in his common-room area reading them while he played his Blue Oyster Cult and Hawkwind records. Nick’s comics were almost the first indies I ever saw: he owned the Swords Of Cerebus collections, he owned a set of Sim-inspired British comic Redfox, and he owned High Society.

Nick was affable and kind, but within the narrow bounds of schoolboy taste there was something exotic and risky about the things he liked. Spiritually, if not materially, he was a stoner, and by 1988 his hippyish tendencies felt intuitively like a remnant of some vanished era, even if I couldn’t have articulated that. But the stuff he liked – the indie comics, the space rock, the Moorcock – blended with what I already knew, like D&D and Doctor Who and 70s Bowie, into a nerdish milieu that made up my cultural world.

Cerebus and High Society fitted right in. Like everything else I liked, they were little subcreations you could hide in, freighted with lore and oddity, full of doorways to other esoteric discoveries. Probably something which appealed to me about Cerebus was the sense of looking into someone else’s wunderkammer full of bits and bobs which had caught Dave Sim’s eye or ear: Conan, sure, but also Foghorn Leghorn, Moon Knight, Yosemite Sam, The Marx Brothers, Swamp Thing, Clint Eastwood. You didn’t have to share the exact reference points to catch in Cerebus’ use of them hints of a kindred spirit, or so it then seemed.

But even within my own range of teenage interests there was nothing like High Society, a comic that was constantly shifting its own terms of engagement, wriggling with discontent at the very idea of genre. The topline summary of High Society is “Cerebus does politics” or “Cerebus becomes Prime Minister”, but that doesn’t really capture the wild fractality of reading it. High Society is a comic about tavern fights and interest rates and old hotels and gambling and elections and romance and military strategy and comics conventions and economic terrorism. And on the meta level, it’s a comic about Dave Sim learning how to tell a 25-issue, 500-page story, and you watching him do it on the page. 

From this point there are occasional standalone stories between the larger Cerebus sagas, but Sim’s conception of a comics novel becomes the core structure the series is built on. High Society is the first of nine such, and at 25 issues it’s around the median in terms of length. Later on, the novels will feel a lot more tightly planned and individual issues much more diffuse – written for the trade to use a later phrase. Through most of High Society, though, the individual issue is still king, even as the overall narrative asserts itself more and more strongly.

So though High Society doesn’t overtly show any of Sim’s later obsessions it would be wrong to say there’s no connection in craft terms. Once he settles on the ‘novel’ as his way of writing, Cerebus is always a balance between Sim’s higher-level plan for this stretch of comic and what he wants to do with these specific twenty pages this specific month. How enjoyable (or bearable) it is comes down to both how much you’re down with his wider aim and how inspired he is to do great on-page work. 

There are stretches where the wider purpose crushes monthly spontaneity and bits where the opposite happens and everything stops for Dave to chase an urge. High Society is a rare sweet spot where the wider aim is one readers can get behind – tell a satirical story of Cerebus’ rise and fall as a political leader – but Sim’s given himself enough month by month room to chase those ideas and improvise the details, especially early on.

The result on the page is that this is Cerebus’ most playful volume, full of unexpected caricatures, one- or two-page joke sequences and storytelling riffs. Not all of these work – it’s where Sim’s love of text really starts ticking, and there are plenty of bits (like an army officer based on John Cleese) where Sim’s delight at capturing a vocal rhythm wasn’t shared by me. But nothing lasts for more than a few pages – there’s always a new idea on the way. Even at the end, as the overall plot plays itself out, whole issues are structured largely like a newspaper strip’s Sunday pages, a full-page mini-story with a punchline at the end.

The opening issues of High Society aren’t a huge shift from the stories in Cerebus Vol.1. The setting is new: the city-state of Iest, where most of the next 160-ish issues are going to happen, though the extensive city-building here barely matters later on. But the rhythm of the story is familiar – Cerebus finds himself in a situation, resolves it, only for a new twist in his fortunes to surface at issue’s end. Sim at this stage is working with full issues as his basic units of story rather than single pages, but the overall vibe isn’t dissimilar to early Tintin. Herge is another cartoonist who you can watch learning on the page how to structure a longer story, and in the early ones like Tintin In America, the plot is simply a sequence of dramatic cliffhangers whose purpose is to shunt the hero into the next episode’s situation. 

As High Society continues, though, this patchwork of encounters settles into a more clearly stable plot, and as with Tintin the marker of this stability is that Cerebus has acquired, for the first time, a supporting cast.

Most comics with a sole protagonist have regular supporting casts – Conan was an exception, which is probably why Cerebus didn’t acquire one until he started to leave the Conan model firmly behind. Supporting casts are useful because they generate stories outside whatever the standard M.O. for your character is – fight a villain, solve a mystery, etc – and because they complicate the character’s life in productive ways. (Aunt May getting ill makes Spider-Man feel bad about his lifestyle; Captain Haddock being a drunken idiot makes Tintin’s life harder, etc.) 

In most cases the character has a basic objective and the supporting cast either help or hinder them. But Sim does something unusual – in Cerebus, the supporting cast work to subvert the character’s basic objective. Cerebus’ basic motivation is greed and, when he’s in a position to get it, power (but power is usually a means to the end of greed). All through High Society, this fairly simple motive is being exploited by various parties, who ally themselves with Cerebus for their own ends (Astoria wants to advance her political cause; Bran Mak Muffin wants to encourage Cerebus to fulfil assorted prophecies). Cerebus himself has no particular desire for political office or reason to seek it, and Sim brings back Jaka, a love interest from one early issue, to act as a kind of conscience – pointing out that Cerebus isn’t happy and should just walk out of the story.

But the story has other ideas. Something Sim is very good at doing in High Society is getting the reader invested in a succession of tense situations – can Cerebus stay in his diplomatic position? Can he get enough votes to become Prime Minister? Can his military plans possibly succeed? – while disguising the fact that Cerebus might in each case be better off if the answer is “no”. He subtly encourages us to want Cerebus to ‘win’ even though the rules of engagement are being set by other characters and Cerebus’ own aims are, as usual, entirely selfish. And the upshot of this is that High Society is a comic where it feels like Cerebus has a goal and is surrounded by allies, even though that isn’t what’s happening in the book at all.

Building the supporting cast takes up High Society’s first act, Sim complicating Cerebus’ changed circumstances by bouncing old characters off him while introducing new ones. One of Sim’s great discoveries as a plotter is that there’s no difference between comic relief and moving the dramatic story forward – the same characters can do both jobs. This is something else Herge understood, and became very good at – his late masterpiece, The Castafiore Emerald, is a dazzling construction of a comic in which large numbers of his regular cast are smoothly rotated to create the illusion of a story. But even before that, characters like Professor Calculus regularly perform double duty as farcical stock character and serious plot motor.

In High Society and its sequel, Church And State, Sim uses this trick all the time. The Moon Roach, for instance, is a pisstake of Marvel’s multiple-personality character Moon Knight, and of mainstream comics’ then-growing love of melodramatic internal narration. But he’s also an assassin whose predations on the business class of Iest help Astoria move Cerebus into place for the second act, the aardvark’s rise to power in the city-state.

By this point the issue-by-issue pacing of the early parts of High Society has been subtly replaced by something often just as episodic (Sim enjoys, and is good at, cliffhangers) but more clearly plotted. The antagonist of the book comes into view, and appropriately it’s Sim’s most emblematic comic/dramatic character, Lord Julius, who runs Palnu, the country holding most of Iest’s debt. Lord Julius embodies the “comic relief is deadly serious” approach – it’s the modus operandi of his character, a ruler who uses obfuscation and confusion to achieve his aims. Or make people think whatever just happened were his aims in the first place, which works just as well. He does this by, obviously, being Groucho Marx, and his appearances are giddy tributes to classic gag comedy, especially when Chico Marx shows up as his fellow ruler Duke Leonardi.

When Lord Julius shows up on page, it’s a moment to take stock of how rapidly Dave Sim is developing as a cartoonist. While Sim gets a full page cliffhanger out of many returning characters, Julius glides discreetly into a scene in the lower background of multiple panels, an effect like the villain walking across the back of the set during a pantomime, and triggering similar delight in the audience. Sim’s panel transitions, his caricatures, and his sense of pacing are all getting better by the issue at this stage, and Lord Julius is a perfect showcase for all those skills.

Sim’s style, also, is fully shaking free of the early Windsor-Smith and Neal Adams influence – while those detail-rich artists are inspirations he’ll return to when he needs, across High Society he adopts what becomes his mature style. It’s a cleaner, simpler line which owes more to Will Eisner’s beautiful, flowing cartooning and Jules Feiffer’s looser, highly expressive caricatures. Both men were superb at capturing bodies in expressive motion, and Sim’s storytelling starts to centre more on movement across a fixed background.

At this stage not all the influences are fully integrated – some characters, like comedy hicks the McGrews, feel more purely Eisner to me; some, like Lord Stormsend and Filgate, could have walked out of a Feiffer strip. Others, like Astoria, have looks that don’t quite settle – Sim isn’t great yet at drawing womens’ faces, though the manipulative Astoria is one of the most compelling characters from almost her first appearance, so it didn’t put many readers off.

The second and especially the third act – Cerebus once he’s achieved power – create an impressive momentum: it’s the first part of Cerebus I wanted to binge-read, even if the internal politics of Iest are presented just earnestly enough to be boring and just frivolously enough to not feel important. (Sim, a deep cynic, is fascinated by politics, which appears to be full of people just as cynical). Those who are following along with the plotting and manoeuvring may still be wrong-footed, as Sim hides critical bits of plot (like what the Exodus Inward is) in chunks of text or side conversations, a way of hiding information in plain sight that he’ll use relentlessly in Church And State. It doesn’t work quite as well here as it will later, and Sim’s favourite technique of using comedy to move the actual drama along can help obscure important plot transitions.

But he pulls it all off in the end. The last 9-10 issues of High Society are dazzlingly paced, a chaotic mess of dread, triumph, hubris, disaster, plans and counter-plans, the desperation of seeing a situation slip away from you and a final bathos-soaked denouement (in an issue called “Denouement”). It genuinely feels like a payoff to the whole 600 page saga, one of the graphic novels that “sticks the landing” most gloriously.

So to go back to the original question – what was Dave Sim good at? Ultimately, pacing. Pacing at the level of a page, an issue, a storyline – all requiring very different skills. The individual moments that stick with me are little triumphs of one or two page storytelling, like the sequence with Lord Stormsend and the beacons. Those moments are all over High Society, threaded into a larger story which earns its payoff.

In some ways it’s a payoff to the whole of the comic so far. Cerebus gets the money and power he wants, he pursues his own agenda, and being Cerebus he fucks it up. One of the things I think late Sim and early Sim are quite consistent on is that Cerebus is not at all effective. He’s a success in the very short term arena of capers, fights and thinking on his feet. He’s smart enough to spot when someone’s trying to put one over on him (which is often) and good at thwarting them. But he is horrifically unsuited to any of the power he actually gets. The sections in the wider Cerebus story where he is acting decisively with a plan are often the sections where things end up going worst for him. They also tend to be the most compulsively readable parts. 

One tricky question this starts to raise is whether Cerebus the aardvark is the ‘hero’ of Cerebus the comic. I think one of the reasons High Society is so fondly thought of within the Cerebus corpus is that it’s one of the rare novels where, if you squint, he sort of is. For most of the series after High Society Cerebus is either active, or sympathetic, but not both at once – the big exception is the start of Mothers & Daughters, and Mothers & Daughters has its own issues far removed from anything the “little gray guy” is doing. 

Cerebus is – mostly – our protagonist, and Sim makes it clear early on he isn’t a conventionally heroic figure: he’s greedy, often ignorant and sometimes cruel. But while he’s not a hero, he is in the place a hero goes in the narrative – the sympathy character for the audience. (The main exception in High Society is the Jaka issue) He’s venal and selfish, but the forces he’s working with and against are all also venal and selfish. And besides, that’s his name on the comic.

This is where the bigger story of High Society, and Dave Sim’s broader insight about politics, come into play. The humour and drama of High Society both come from Sim playing on the trope of the outsider crashing the political system. But rather than our hero as a well meaning idealist manipulated by powerful forces, here our hero is a greedy and self-interested pragmatist who’s *still* manipulated by them. “Everybody’s on the make” is a cynical view of politics, and often a lazy one, but there’s also enough truth in it that it leaves me feeling High Society is genuinely ‘about’ politics rather than using it as a setting.

One of the things it’s been proven shrewd about is the role of outsiders in a political system. Cerebus is elected Prime Minister as, essentially, a populist. But he governs as a Napoleonic dictator – ignoring his promises, purging the system and using his power to launch a military war of conquest. The people and groups that elevated Cerebus prove utterly incapable of actually controlling him, despite his apparent uncouthness and ignorance. To unleash a populist outsider on politics is to risk politics itself. What it means to have such a figure in the hero’s place in a narrative would soon become more fully clear.

]]>
https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/02/aard-labour-2-high-society/feed 9
Aard Labour 1: Cerebus https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/02/aard-labour-1-cerebus https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/02/aard-labour-1-cerebus#comments Sat, 03 Feb 2024 22:26:06 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34834 As I said in the intro post, I’ll be posting expanded – in this case vastly expanded – versions of my Cerebus reviews on here. These aren’t really meant to advertise the comic, so I’m keeping actual images to a minimum, and they will readily spoil elements of it.

Back in those long-ago days when a liking for Cerebus didn’t come with a side order of clarifications about Dave Sim, there was one caveat most people still made: the comic doesn’t get good until Volume 2. Critical consensus had it that the first 25 issues of Cerebus – the early funny stuff, if you like – introduced a lot of recurring characters but were a chore to read, Sim working through his Barry Windsor Smith debt while writing a not very good fantasy parody. They had their moments but were, in the eyes of Cerebus fans wanting to make more Cerebus fans, a regrettable stumbling block to Cerebus being recognised as the Great Work it was.

It’s a testament to how well Sim set his own terms and how weird comics culture is that nobody back then and few since have said, wait, why is it all the same work? In most narrative fields – and frankly in comics too – the idea that someone’s mature work should be intimately part of the same story as their juvenilia would be really bizarre. The fact of Cerebus being a single 300-issue novel which is also its creator’s first work is held up as extremely impressive, and on some levels it is, but it’s also very weird.

In comics, I can think of two comparable creators, and the way they differ from Dave Sim illuminates why people read Cerebus, and why people stop. The first is his contemporary Jaime Hernandez, who’s spent a lot, probably most, of his career drawing the life of one character, Maggie Chascarillo, and her friends and family. Locas – the broad collective title for his Maggie stories – is like Cerebus in that its original opening story, almost his first published work, is very much the early work of a creator learning as he goes: “Mechanics” is a sci-fi piece with a lot of clumsy techniques Hernandez wouldn’t use again and characters he’d rapidly de-emphasise within his wider conception. It doesn’t fit, but he moved on from it, and the result is you can read Locas without ever reading the “Mechanics” stuff: Hernandez has neatly avoided the problem Sim created for himself by insisting on his early stuff being part of his bigger plan.

The other is Eiichiro Oda, creator of the most successful manga of all time, One Piece. Oda had published one manga before he started on the adventures of Monkey D Luffy in 1997, and he’s been writing and drawing them now for as long as Sim did Cerebus – a continuous narrative at least 3 times as long, thanks to the Stakhanovite practices of the manga industry (Oda’s health is the source of constant worry among his fans). One Piece has made him staggeringly rich. One Piece is also nothing like Cerebus. But if you had asked a Cerebus fan in 1979, when Dave Sim was still writing Conan-esque fantasy and first declared that his aardvark comic would run to 300 issues, what they expected that 300 issue novel would be like, their best reasonable prediction might have been something like One Piece. 300 issues of richer worldbuilding, more intricate plotting, and a steady stream of funny characters, but never straying too far outside the genre template those early issues laid down.

Sim didn’t do that, obviously. He didn’t opt to tell the story without changing its style and content, like Oda did later. He didn’t opt to change genre and content and characters and discreetly refit the story around it, like Hernandez has done. He wanted to have his 300-issue cake and change it into steak or salad or raw liver. 

Having announced he would write a 300 issue story, he started breaking down the genre and stylistic boxes he’d put himself in, working out on the fly how to bring politics, religion, literary pastiche, domestic drama, and more into his comic and how to plot longer stories. Much – most – of Cerebus is unrecognisable from these early issues, but still part of the same story.

The insistence that Cerebus is one complete novel of which this is the first chapter puts a burden on these early comics which they can’t sustain after the comic starts radically changing its form and content. And yet as late as the #190s, mere issues after Sim has declared the comic to be explicitly a frame for his ideas about gender politics, you’re still getting attempts to tie the story back to its original material, to make the stuff from Vol 1 about the Pigts and Cerebus’ Helmet matter. It’s just a really, really unusual way to approach creative work.

It’s as if Steve Ditko – another man with opinions as unyielding (if more comprehensible) than Sim’s – had made every comic he created about Spider-Man: 35 issues of fighting Doc Ock, then 100 more of preaching objectivism, Mr A style. It would radically change how we saw the character, just as Sim’s philosophical journey to his personal extremes changes how we see Cerebus.

But in that comparison is why, I think, Sim did it this way. Steve Ditko couldn’t have done that because Ditko didn’t own Spider-Man. Someone would have stopped him. Cerebus isn’t just a novel, it’s a proof of the idea that self-publishing means total creative freedom. Even back in these very early issues, buying into Cerebus means buying into the ideal of self-publishing and individual, unfettered creativity. Sim’s unwritten promise to the reader is that Cerebus will always be about exactly what Dave Sim wants it to be about. It’s a promise he keeps.

That implies something else, though. It implies that right from the beginning Cerebus is about Dave Sim. Not in the explicit way it’s eventually going to be. But to produce his 300 issues, Sim is going to push himself, and learn new styles and new ways of approaching comics. He starts on it right away, in this first book. Volume 1 of Cerebus matters not just in a plot sense – because it introduces Elrod and Jaka and the Moon Roach – but because it’s teaching you how to read Cerebus. You read Cerebus to see the development of Dave Sim. A plot development is interesting, but Sim learning a new way to pace a page, or to use blacks and greys, is also interesting.

(But doesn’t this involvement with Sim’s progress make it even more difficult when he, you know…? Yes, it does.)

Something that is helpful to reading Cerebus Vol 1 is that Sim starts off pretty good. He’s trying to do Barry Windsor-Smith Conan comics, and those are a good model for an artist in 1977, when the high tide of relative mainstream quality Smith represented had definitely gone out. He’s also inspired by the long tradition of “funny animal” comics, with Steve Gerber’s Howard The Duck the most obvious model. There’s a lot of rough edges in the art but Sim became a great visual storyteller remarkably quickly – there are strong examples on Issue 1, Page 1 and he keeps getting enjoyably better. It’s not true to say that each early issue of Cerebus is better than the last, but there’s no long dips, and a detectable upward curve which makes this volume less of a slog than it might be.

He didn’t become a great non-visual storyteller quite so fast, and even when he learned how to plot and pace a story beyond the page-by-page, issue-by-issue level it was knowledge he’d happily let go of to follow an urge. The comics collected here which hold up best now as narrative are exactly those early Windsor-Smith Conan pastiches, because Conan stories have a really solid structure that can withstand plenty of messing around and playing with tropes. The basic story here is repetitive but robust – Cerebus wants gold or loot, Cerebus gets involved with some scheme to get it, but loses it in such a way to seed the next instalment and move him to another location on his fantasy world map. Sim fills out the episodes with action, jokes, and increasingly parodies.

Longer-term readers will cheer when a soon-to-be-familiar face like Elrod shows up, but for me Cerebus Vol 1 gets significantly weaker once the focus of Sim’s satirical intent stops being structure and starts being character, especially as a lot of the characters referenced are pop or comics culture flotsam whose presence in the culture has waned over time, and the effect is a bit like a stoner trying to insist that a bunch of MAD Magazine parodies are really a coherent storyline. Sim’s drawing is improving fast – the positive effect of the parodies is that they push him away from Smith and towards Will Eisner and Jules Feiffer as influences, a cartooning style Sim turns out to be fantastic at. 

So Cerebus looks better and better but the jokes and observations are typical of the kind of cynical 20-something Sim surely was, and much of this book is a painful read now. The final storyline in the book is typical of its virtues and vices – a multi-part riff on Clint Eastwood’s The Beguiled with Cerebus stuck in a girls’ finishing school and gags based on Swamp Thing, Man-Thing and the X-Men. The references are confusing or era-bound, the jokes weak, but the atmosphere, Sim’s page-by-page pacing, and his ability to draw people are massively far ahead of where he started.

Cerebus Vol 1 is a turgid read for the most part, but there are three big exceptions in the second half. Two are formal – the side-story “Silverspoon” is a joyful step into Prince Valiant style storytelling, Sim having immense fun with Hal Foster’s rich but stiff strip about rich stiffs. He takes to prose-and-illustration with gusto, prefiguring his intense use of it later on, most of it far less charming. Also mixing prose – in this case dialogue – and illustration is the “Mind Games” experiment with ink, greyscale, and lettering styles, which still feels like a remarkable creative leap. 

Third and most important is the three part story introducing Lord Julius, Sim’s first and best recreation of a real historical or cultural figure. The story, about a secret society plotting the overthrow of a city’s ruler, is the usual nothing, but making the ruler into Groucho Marx, and then thinking through how the Groucho Marx persona might operate in a fantasy setting, is the first of Sim’s truly inspired ideas, and the one that unlocks the next hundred issues of the comic. Lord Julius – “Groucho as fantasy bureaucrat” – is a better idea than the rest of this hefty volume combined has, and it’s no wonder that his invention was the springboard for better things.

]]>
https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/02/aard-labour-1-cerebus/feed 4
Aard Labour 0: There Are Three Aardvarks https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/02/there-are-three-aardvarks https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/02/there-are-three-aardvarks#comments Wed, 31 Jan 2024 23:35:14 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34829 So. I’ve finished Cerebus The Aardvark. Twenty years after it ended, as promised, with its 300th issue, thirty years (roughly) after I gave up reading it, thirty-seven years (I think) since I saw my first issue of it.

At the time I stopped reading it I imagined I would pick it up again – my plan was to switch from monthly issues to the collected “phone books”. Whatever my personal beef with the comic and with Dave Sim, its writer and half of its art team, it seemed obvious that it was a major work which people would be reading for years to come.

About a year after I quit*, the comic became extremely controversial, and now, in 2024, it’s hardly read at all. The reason for this is Dave Sim (according to almost everybody who isn’t Dave Sim), and the marxist-feminist-homosexualist axis which controls modern culture (according to Dave Sim). That should also give you a flavour of why I never quite got round to finishing it.

The right has, to some extent, caught up with Dave Sim on this stuff. It’s no longer shocking to see phrases like that, in fact it’s exhaustingly familiar. Not that Sim is held up as a conservative prophet – he would probably have been a hero to the alt-right, but for the fact none of them want to wade through a 300 issue comic about a talking aardvark.

So why did I wade through it? Good question. Hopefully I’ll get around to answering it. Some of it’s nostalgia for a moment – brief as it feels now – when Cerebus was important to me. Some of it’s the fact that Dave Sim was a technically dazzling cartoonist and comics maker, restless in his pursuit of new things that could be done with the comics page. Until quite near the end he’s doing extraordinary things with layouts and lettering, and even at the end when the innovation has largely dried up he has bags of tricks that serve him extremely well. You can never entirely separate form and content (and Sim would be disgusted at the attempt, if resigned – he knows perfectly well the marxist-feminist-et-cetera has its claws in almost everyone) – but in comics maybe you can get closer than many things.

I’ve been reviewing the 16 individual volumes of Cerebus over on Goodreads. I’ll be posting those reviews here – tweaked in some cases now I’ve read the whole thing (EDIT: by “tweaked” I apparently mean “massively expanded”). This introductory post is a way of answering a very basic question: if you WERE going to read Cerebus The Aardvark, where should you start?

“In the beginning” is one answer, and probably the one if you are committed from the outset to tackling the entire 300-issue, 16-graphic-novel work. But Cerebus as a unitary work is problematic, even leaving out the later parts after Sim’s coming-out-party as an ‘anti-feminist’. For instance, the first volume is Sim learning on the job via a series of pastiches of Marvel’s Conan comic. These issues are pretty good Conan pastiches and get more interesting fairly quickly, but they aren’t Sim at his best. And in general, the stylistic and thematic variance in Cerebus is so great you’re probably better off being a bit more targeted.

So here’s a way of thinking about the comic aside from as a 300-issue story. It’s not really one overarching narrative, it’s three overlapping long narratives, which share some of the same material. Pick the one which holds most interest for you.

The first Cerebus is an epic satirical fantasy, which runs from Vol.1: Cerebus to Vol.10: Minds, though you can leave out the text material in Vol.9: Reads (and optionally in Vol.6: Melmoth). This version includes all the stuff people still say is good, like Church & State and Jaka’s Story. The best way of reading this is to start with Vol. 2: High Society, read a few issues, and if you like the way the story’s being told and are interested in the plot, put it down and then go back to Vol.1 to find out who everyone is. Read like this, Cerebus is a fairly coherent story with lots of excitement, great storytelling, good jokes, a couple of major digressions and a strange, probably unsatisfying but complete ending.

The second Cerebus is a domestic drama about a man and a woman who are unable to be happy apart or together (well, the man is an aardvark, but that’s less relevant in this version – you can think of it like Inio Asano’s Goodnight Punpun, with a non-human hero who is in any meaningful sense human). This one is the trickiest in terms of reading. The core parts are Vols 5-6 (Jaka’s Story and Melmoth) and Vols 11-14 (Guys to Form And Void), but it’s worth reading the handful of “Jaka” issues before that and the “what if?” sequence in Vol.10: Minds. Reading it this way gets you a complete if tragic story, Sim’s most mature writing and experimental designs, and also the best of his series-long love of characters based on real-world actors and authors. If you want to read this you should start with Vol 5: Jaka’s Story.

The third Cerebus is a highly experimental philosophical novel about the political, moral and theological journey of a writer, Dave Sim, and his creation, Cerebus, as they first explore relationships between men and women and later come to comprehend the divine implications of this initial understanding. It starts with the text sections of Vol.9: Reads and continues until Vol 16: The Last Day. The novel consists of a series of didactic dramas designed to illustrate the futility of marriage and romantic love, a set of utopian and dystopian outlines sketching possible societies arranged around this understanding, and climaxes with a close reading of the Torah and the revelation of a Grand Unified Theory of Everything, both centred on the natural incapacity of women to reason or create anything important. This is the stuff most people who read Cerebus got mad at, and they’re right, but if you do want to read this start with the “Viktor Davis” parts in Vol.9: Reads, and if you can stomach that good luck to you.

Or read the whole thing from Vol.1 (I warned you, though). Or ignore it entirely, like I didn’t.

*So incendiary was the issue where Sim published his ‘masculinist’ tract that I’d completely retconned my own quitting the book – I was off it well before.

If you simply want to jump to see what I have to say about a Cerebus book you particularly love or hate, here’s the list.

  1. Cerebus
  2. High Society
  3. Church And State I
  4. Church And State II
  5. Jaka’s Story
  6. Melmoth
  7. Flight
  8. Women
  9. Reads
  10. Minds
  11. Guys
  12. Rick’s Story
  13. Going Home
  14. Form And Void
  15. Latter Days
  16. The Last Day
]]>
https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2024/02/there-are-three-aardvarks/feed 1
Messing About On The River https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2023/08/messing-about-on-the-river https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2023/08/messing-about-on-the-river#respond Sun, 06 Aug 2023 15:10:08 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34445 Boat Life, Tsuge Tadao (tr. Ryan Holmberg), Floating World Press

Tsuda Kenta is a fiftysomething novelist who splits his time between thwarted attempts to write and equally ineffectual assistance with his family’s clothes shop. One day, on a whim, he buys a small boat and rigs it out with a canvas cabin, intending to use it as a writer’s retreat. Instead, he’s drawn into the extended quasi-community who use the river as a way to break out of their prescribed lives in post-boom Japan. Drifters, lecherous monks, off-grid wanderers, cagey amateur artists and stray cats cross Kenta’s path. He’s as effective at river living as he is at anything else – he catches few fish and spends a lot of time getting ill – but he’s at least occasionally content.

This is the first half of Tsuge’s Boat Life, in a beautifully presented English translation by Ryan Holmberg, who is doing a heroic job at the moment getting alternative manga out into the English-speaking world. Holmberg also provides some backmatter: an essay, alongside two of Tsuge’s own prose pieces, on the 80s and 90s “fishing boom” in Japan. This sudden uptick of interest in angling created an audience for not one but two manga anthology series entirely devoted to fishing, and it was in the shorter lived of these that Boat Life originally ran.

Fishing is as much a part of the Boat Life series as Kenta’s quasi-bohemian lifestyle – in one episode, Kenta’s editor at ‘Fisher Bum’ magazine commissions an urban fishing feature and he and two pals head off to Tokyo to catch some carp. (They fail to do so) Like most of Boat Life, it’s drawn from Tsuge’s own experiences – as well as his art, he had a fishing journalism side hustle.

While the setting of the urban fishing episode is unusual the tone isn’t – nothing much happens, Kenta gets little done, but it’s charming, philosophical and gently funny, and captures the rhythms and waning energies of middle-aged friendship beautifully. Tsuge’s art seems basic at first when really it does what it needs to – get across the earnest, likeable but slightly feckless nature of Kenta’s life and relationships. And his minimal approach is perfect for the landscapes of the series – the seas of reeds and wide river plains, flat and lonesome, welcoming only to the already partly-lost.

Tsuda Kenta has something in common with that other boat-addled patriarch, Tove Jansson’s Moominpappa, who drags his family off to islands and yearns to follow the Hattifatteners on their wicked, eternal voyagings. Both have extraordinarily tolerant partners, but the resemblance only goes so far – Moominpappa is a bourgeois Dad having a mid-life crisis; Kenta is a working class man who comes to recognise in the precarious world of the river an existence on the margins which he nudged up against and opted out of in his own youth. It’s a world Tsuge apparently explored – in its vivid and violent aspects – in his other manga (some collected as Trash Market, which I haven’t yet read): in Boat Life we see its older, more rural parallel, as Kenta meets people who have settled into their choices and embraced itinerant lives in a way he couldn’t. Even if he knows enough to visit.

Tsuge’s protagonist is certainly having a quiet kind of crisis, but by not focusing wholly on it and making the comic as much about the people he meets and the family who tolerate his whims, Tsuge makes Boat Life a richer and more sympathetic comic. The comic doesn’t flinch from the fact that its protagonist is a bit selfish and a bit foolish, but that’s also where the gentle comedy often comes in. Kenta thinks of himself as an experienced man of the world, but he’s still shocked by a pair of lovers wanting to rent his boat as an impromptu love shack, or by the bawdiness of the local monk. It helps Boat Life walk its particular tightrope – a relaxing slice-of-life comic about river living which is still clear-eyed about the lifestyle Kenta is flirting with and his ultimate lack of fit for it. One of the best things I’ve read all year.

]]>
https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2023/08/messing-about-on-the-river/feed 0
Why Won’t You HELP!? https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2023/06/why-wont-you-help https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2023/06/why-wont-you-help#respond Sun, 25 Jun 2023 15:56:07 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34417 Marvel Masterworks: The Uncanny X-Men Vol 2

Adapted from my Goodreads review. Collects X-Men 101-110 (July 1976-January 1978)

One of the weird things about the initial Claremont/Cockrum run on the X-Men comic is that the X-Men – still considered a tricky customer, sales-wise – was coming out bi-monthly. These ten issues take a couple of hours to read now, but span almost two years of publication time, which has a noticeable impact on how they’re written. Claremont has time to craft his issues and make every sequence count, but also needs that time to make sure a comic full of still-new characters sticks in readers’ minds every two months. 

It’s one reason – as well as his natural preference – that character interaction is so much at the forefront here compared to battles. The first issue in this collection – 101 – is radical not because it’s The First Appearance Of Phoenix but because it’s the first time Claremont’s risked writing a story with no antagonists. Jean Grey is assumed dead, reappears, collapses, and the bulk of the story is around the characters’ response to that.

So by the time the team throw down with Juggernaut in 102, it’s been 120 days without an on-panel fight. That’s a whole new set of assumptions about what readers want (and will tolerate) in a serial comic.

OK, that’s just one issue, and for most of this stretch there are plenty of fights, though the energy in the story always comes from the team interaction around them and generally the fights work or don’t as extensions of that. In the Juggernaut fight for instance the line of conflict isn’t between the team and the villains so much as between Storm (paralysed by claustrophobia), her own internal struggles, and the ability of the team to understand what’s going on with her.

It would be wrong to say this is entirely new – the great received wisdom on Silver Age Marvel is that it innovated by allowing its heroes to express their anxieties and problems. I do think there’s a shift in tone, though. In the Stan Lee era conflict is often cathartic – it’s how the heroes resolve a lot of their issues: via clobbering (and realising his usefulness), Ben Grimm deals with his self-loathing around being The Thing (until next month, anyhow). In the early 70s it’s more common for the fights and the character work to happen side by side, with the fights unlocking new plot developments or reveals or status quo shifts which the characters can react to afterwards.

What Claremont is doing is slightly different. Here the pressure of danger and conflict is a catalyst for characterisation – a necessary efficiency when you only have 20 pages every 60 days and a core cast pushing double-figures. It has the happy result of making the comic feel more serious, stakes-heavy and exciting – the X-Men aren’t characters who can stop and joke or philosophise in battle, because there’s literally no space for it, but it gives the fights a very different vibe from other mid-70s Marvels, even ones with more sophisticated ideas.

By the end of this volume, though, the conflict-shows-character approach – so exciting in Claremont’s first issues – is starting to show its limits. There are only so many times you can see Cyclops or Wolverine yelling “BACK OFF, Mister!” at each other before you start hoping for some actual developments. The switch of artist from Dave Cockrum to John Byrne will help with this – Byrne’s tastes in storytelling are a little more traditional – but this volume is still very much the Cockrum era, a wild ride of great characterisation and chaotic visual flair.

Cockrum’s final story is the heart of this volume, and the first real touchstone episode of the Claremont era. The team are whisked across space and engage in a battle around the cosmic M’Kraan Crystal, a battle that allows Cockrum to go hog wild with his costume design skills introducing dozens of characters at once, and allows Claremont to literalise the points he’s been making about friendship and teamwork (with a big dollop of Jewish mysticism in there too – as with the “Leprechauns Of Cassidy Keep”, this comic is weirder than I and maybe you remembered).

The handful of issues this space story and its build-up occupy are another reminder of that extended publication time. The first time we see the Shi’Ar, our space-faring antagonists, they’re a crew designed as a Star Trek riff, officers gathered earnestly around a bridge. After the team’s trip to space, Nightcrawler and friends relax by going to see Star Wars, which had come out – and changed geek culture forever – while the X-Men’s space saga was happening. A coincidence which surely didn’t hurt sales, since Claremont’s ideas of mad Emperors and space swashbucklers scratched the Lucas itch in ways most actual imitations didn’t.

Not everything in this volume is great. Even with 60 days between issues, we have two non-Cockrum art fill-ins, one of which is a story fill-in too. These are weak, and so are some of the Claremont stories – after the team’s visit to Ireland there’s a perfunctory Magneto fight which reads very much like someone at Marvel said “What’s this Leprechaun shit Chris? Do a Magneto story.” The man who’ll turn Magneto into his signature character has no real idea what to do with him at this stage, at least not on the page. But mostly this run remains hugely readable – and while it got tighter, it’s still obvious why everyone spent decades ripping it off.

]]>
https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2023/06/why-wont-you-help/feed 0
Game Of Groans https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2023/05/game-of-groans https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2023/05/game-of-groans#comments Fri, 26 May 2023 10:32:57 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34345 The Wrestling, Simon Garfield (2nd edition)

With hindsight this book had a massive impact on me when I read it back in 1996. Not that it rekindled any childhood desire to take up the grapple game – I may be a big lad but I wince at combing out a knot in my hair, so I’m happy to leave these stories of dislocated shoulders, crushed spines and huge buttock abscesses on the page. It didn’t awake a love of wrestling in me either – the sport existed in a vague twilight off to one side of my interests as a kid, and the more theatrical American version never even had the dubious appeal of Big Daddy or Giant Haystacks. Nothing Simon Garfield wrote changed that.

What the book did was open my eyes to oral history as a way of telling a story. Even this turned into a dead end of sorts – I was crap at interviews when I worked as a music writer, so the format was never for me. And of the dozens I’ve read, the only one near to The Wrestling in quality is Garfield’s own superb retelling of the Banister era at Radio 1, The Nation’s Favourite.

Even so, what Garfield does here is fantastic – it has the same combination of theatre and spontaneity, braggadocio and blood, as the great matches he describes. Voices weave in and out, sometimes given space to tell stories their way, sometimes left to undercut or contradict each other. Digressions, figures of speech, grudges, industry myths – all left in with minimal commentary, giving the impression of immense pride taken in grinding, dangerous, skilful work but also a sport in which almost everyone is working an angle, in-ring or out of it.

The amity of the opening chapter, at a wrestlers’ reunion, hides a web of tensions which Garfield teases out – at the time he wrote it, British wrestling was in steep decline after its TV-driven heyday of the 60s, 70s and early 80s. Everyone knows that the sudden loss of TV exposure killed the sport, but there are plenty of fingers to point around what caused ITV to pull the plug on a one-time cash cow. Is Jackie Pallo to blame, for writing a bestseller exposing some of the open secrets around the theatre of wrestling? Is Big Daddy’s outsize success the tipping point, shredding the final sporting elements? Is the problem a lack of charismatic performers to follow the generation of Mick McManus and Kendo Nagasaki? Is it a bit of everything?

Throughout the book there’s a sense of a business that bumped along never having a real plan: lots of svengalis but no visionaries. Near the end one promoter’s big plan for the revival of UK wrestling is a tag team inspired by the Power Rangers, and inspired by here means ‘flagrantly copying’: it never seems to occur to him what the inevitable legal end of this wheeze is going to be.

In some ways the book is just another chapter in British wrestling’s endless cycle of exploitation. Garfield’s interviewees are using him to settle scores; he’s using them to tell a garish story. A sad endnote reveals that the writer was blacklisted by the men he’d idolised, who didn’t like how the book portrayed them. And I feel like a lot of The Wrestling wouldn’t be written in the same way today. There’s little probing – as there surely would be now – of the prejudices in the business. There’s enough on the treatment of Black and women wrestlers, and on the industry’s queasy relationship with homosexuality, to make you realise there’s a whole lot more to tell, but Garfield mostly sidesteps those areas.

Similarly, the book’s seamy enough to cover the fact that Garfield isn’t digging deeply into the sleazier elements – bribery, corruption, exploitation, groupies. At the end there are interviews with a 15-year-old rising star who breezily tells us his Mum is a bit worried. No shit!

And there’s at least one genuine monster lurking in the line-up of pantomime villains. The first photo you see in The Wrestling is of Jimmy Savile, with the caption “I was very bad”. Too right. The double-take a reader does at this is hardly Garfield’s fault – even this revised edition came out a few years before Savile was exposed as Britain’s most ferocious celebrity child abuser. It’s a reminder that – as another interviewee says – all wrestlers are liars. Some lies are worse than others, but Garfield creates an overall impression of dishonesty and tall tales which means he never has to tug too hard at any single thread.

Even so, I loved the book – and still love it, even now I’m more aware of the works behind it and the places it doesn’t venture. There’s enough truth, enough charisma, enough enthusiasm among these people, given the chance to tell their stories in their own words, that it’s hard not to agree with Garfield that this stuff mattered: it’s a story worth the telling. And it’s wonderfully told.

]]>
https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2023/05/game-of-groans/feed 1
Guten Tag, Herr Frosch! https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2023/05/guten-tag-herr-frosch https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2023/05/guten-tag-herr-frosch#respond Tue, 16 May 2023 22:18:30 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34177 Uncanny X-Men Masterworks Vol 1

When I clicked on Giant Size X-Men 1 in Marvel Unlimited it definitely wasn’t with the intention of starting a large-scale re-read of the 70s and 80s X-Men. I had a vague urge to find out exactly how different and ludicrous the first appearance of Krakoa (THE ISLAND THAT WALKS LIKE A MAN) was. (It was very ludicrous). But I found myself reading on, and then reviewing the Marvel Masterworks volumes on Goodreads.

Marvel Masterworks aren’t the best or most intuitive way to read this stuff. You’re better off just slogging through on Unlimited. But for Goodreads purposes each of them were the right size for a chunky review.

For their Freaky Trigger serialisation I’ve edited them a bit and made explicit some of the references and spoilers. I have made a basic assumption that readers know a) who the X-Men are and b) that they’ve heard of Chris Claremont, the man who wrote them during their 70s and 80s rise to becoming Marvel’s most popular comic characters.

MARVEL MASTERWORKS: THE UNCANNY X-MEN Vol 1 contains Giant-Size X-Men 1 and Uncanny X-Men 94-100.

Reading a bunch of 70s Marvel makes the strengths of Chris Claremont’s opening stretch of X-Men stories clearer. With characters who’ve become such fixtures it’s easy to assume success was predestined – that there’s something inherently special about this cast rather than what the creators did with them. It’s also tempting to look out  for the things that would become Claremont’s best-known tricks – his long-term plotting, his particular narrative voice  – but in this stretch of issues those aren’t really in place.

Yes, Claremont’s writing is histrionic and caption-heavy, but so is everyone’s at Marvel in the mid-70s. The house style at the point Claremont took over the X-Men was just a flared, crushed-velvet version of the Roy Thomas style, where you paper over the lack of actual incident by pumping up the volume. Except of course there really IS plenty of incident in these issues too – a whole new cast, half of whom immediately quit or die. The captions freaking out feels legit for once, because there’s a lot to freak out about.

Still, while the overdriven style has more justification it’s not what makes the book distinctive (as you can see from Len Wein’s very similar narration in Giant-Size 1). Nor is the plotting – yes, there’s a big subplot involving Xavier’s bizarre space dreams, but it’s notorious for introducing nonsensical complexities into what’s already a fairly baffling story. The space dreams work because artist Dave Cockrum draws the shit out of them, not because of any long-term ideas Claremont has.

Who’s zooming who

As for the characters, if X-Men had any holdover identity in 1975 from its previous incarnation as the strangest teens of all the emphasis was firmly on the “strangest” part. In these issues a bunch of new, freaky-looking heroes collide with a set of weirdo characters and concepts from the earlier run plus a few new oddballs: Krakoa The Living Island, Count Nefaria And The Ani-Men, the N’Garai (one of a horde of Lovecraftian ripoffs plaguing the Marvel U at this point), and poster boy for subplot confusion Eric The Red. None of these are worth much on their own but it’s the patchwork of them that sets the tone for this very early phase of the book – none of these discontinuous pests needs any development or real motivation, which gives Claremont more time to get to work on the relationships between the characters.

Which is the actual work he’s doing better than almost anyone else in superhero comics here. For most of this volume, clashes with villains are the backdrop needed to build relationships (friendly and otherwise) between the heroes. Far more so than the FF and Avengers, these relationships are the story. Piotr’s naivety, Kurt’s determination to make a found family work, Cyclops’ perfectionism, Wolverine as an agent of chaos.. these are already what’s creating the stories’ momentum.

Claremont is quickly mastering character-clarifying moments and scenes (Nightcrawler taunting “Herr Frosch”; Wolverine slashing away Jean’s dress to help her fight) which stick in the mind more than any of the supposed stakes or resolutions. He’s also always carving out space in the story where he can quickly check in across the whole cast to contrast their responses to a situation. The two big crises in this run – Thunderbird’s death-wish stupidity and Jean Grey’s self-sacrifice – both happen after the corny central threat of their story has been dealt with, so they can work better as pure character moments.

Jean’s imminent death on a radiation-raddled shuttle is the final scene of the book, and even 45 years on it still works as tremendous pulp comics – the momentum of the scene pushing the decades of story that rest on it out of your mind. Instead it has the power it earned from the year of story leading up to it – the sense of ruthlessness created by Claremont’s initial deck-clearing and the work done quickly and deftly since then to convince you that these characters matter.

]]>
https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2023/05/guten-tag-herr-frosch/feed 0
Normal Men, Innocent Men https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2023/05/normal-men-innocent-men https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2023/05/normal-men-innocent-men#respond Wed, 03 May 2023 18:25:11 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=34008

The Sorcerer Of The Wildeeps, Kai Ahsante Wilson (2015)

A fantasy novella that gestures at vaster conceptions than its slim length can contain, Sorcerer Of The Wildeeps is at once a rich broth of engagingly florid prose, a pointed lesson in the uses of dialect in fantasy writing, a tight, violent slice of hard-scrabble life, and a queer science-fantasy love story. It’s not totally surprising that Kai Ahsante Wilson doesn’t hit every twist in this quadruple-somersault with equal aplomb, but it’s exhilarating (and a little exhausting) watching someone try.

The part of Sorcerer which didn’t quite work for me was the cryptic science-fantasy elements – it’s not magic, it’s genetic enhancements; those aren’t gods ascending, they’re superluminal spacecraft; etc. It adds a layer of riddle-making to the story which is certainly there to be puzzled out if you like that kind of thing (and usually I do!) but which doesn’t quite get beyond the feeling, common in modern fantasy, that there’s one hell of a campaign sourcebook lurking just out of sight.

That’s probably the only common thing about the book, though, and even then the worldbuilding does have a wider resonance – it’s a reminder of the traditions Sorcerer Of The Wildeeps is engaging in beyond high fantasy like Delany-esque afrofuturism or Wolfeian literary game-playing. And if the prose and the ideas are an awkward, self-conscious fit for a fantasy book, so too is the protagonist.

Demane, the protagonist, is trained (and to some extent genetically engineered) as a medic, but his superhuman physique and strength puts him in high demand for baser trades, and the book details his stint as a caravan guard, the second in command of a band of polyglot guards-for-hire he knows as “brothers”. They have a contemptuous employer, the caravan’s lead merchant, and a leader, another genetically unusual superhuman – Captain – who is also, secretly, Demane’s lover. The caravan has stopped at a waystation, in advance of its arduous trek across the area of shifting reality called the Wildeeps. But rumour reaches them of something much nastier than usual lurking on the road through…

Given this setup, Wilson makes the important choice to spend 2/3 of the novella’s 200 pages at the waystation, not in the titular Wildeeps. The focus isn’t on the area, or the threat, it’s on the relationship between Demane and Captain, and also the rabble of brothers Demane feels a responsibility to protect, from themselves as much as anything. Sorcerer Of The Wildeeps is a story about a romantic love between men, but it’s also a story about collective love between men – the frustrating, idiotic, bullshit-ridden, fierce bonds that exist between workers doing a dangerous job.

Why does it have to only be men? The bonds of work and danger cross gender. But Wilson has a good ear for men en masse: boastful, horny, sometimes deceptively tender, and the fact the caravan’s brothers are all men puts into sharper relief the way the book is about code-switching and passing – Demane, who is in reality transcendentally above both his middle-class employer and working-class fellow employees, struggles with both of their languages, at the same time as enjoying the other brothers’ regard and respect as their miracle-working ‘sorcerer’. The book’s dialogue is a thrill and a shock set against most fantasy writing – many of the brothers use AAVE, others speak in creoles, and there are fine distinctions of age and seniority in the characters’ dialects too. It’s one of the most successful parts of the book.

All this linguistic play holds up a mirror, of course, to the ways Demane finds communicating with his lover difficult too, and the assumptions and projections a lover makes about the person they love. Demane is not engineered for violence but can perform it with aplomb, and he believes – or presumes – that Captain has some similar ‘true’ role: a belief that drives the central incident of the ‘way station’ part of the novel, and carries forward into the book’s climax in the Wildeeps themselves.

This climax is unflinchingly brutal, Wilson and his cast wading in viscera as the caravan hits its moment of maximum peril (a character is gruesomely disemboweled, for instance: then a few pages later just to rub it in we get the action again from the disembowelee’s perspective). Violence has been a constant companion through the book, and Wilson’s prose is good enough to make it feel physical, repulsive and adrenalised rather than numbing. The ending will linger, but so will the heat, stink, ugliness and linguistic pyrotechnics of the book’s central chapters.

]]>
https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2023/05/normal-men-innocent-men/feed 0
Norman Fucking Rockwell: My Adventure In ‘AI Art’ https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2023/03/norman-fucking-rockwell-my-adventure-in-ai-art https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2023/03/norman-fucking-rockwell-my-adventure-in-ai-art#comments Thu, 16 Mar 2023 12:50:34 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=33116 The creations of AI art are truly dreamlike, which is to say, they’re only interesting if they’re yours. The endless scroll of a MidJourney Discord server is an index of desires, dreams, whims, and commercial needs, all compliantly rendered by the machine into artlike images . You can see the wishes the genie grants but you don’t know why these things matter to the wisher. A woman on a beach with green hair, ultra detailed. Men in suits, no beards (“BEARDS”, read the genie, and drew several). A stoat Roman Emperor.

I don’t know what my fellow users thought of my prompts. “A wise old owl telling stories to other woodland creatures, by Norman Rockwell”. “An illustration by Norman Rockwell of a delighted crowd leaving a cinema”. “A Norman Rockwell picture of a beautiful woman disembarking from a ship carrying an old suitcase”. Who was this person with an obsession with Norman, as Lana Del Rey put it, Fucking Rockwell?

It was me. I was writing a presentation about stories, for a marketing conference, and I decided to illustrate it with AI ‘art’. AI is a dangerous thing for a presenter like me to have, but I have it. And I thought the best way to understand it was to try and actually use it for something, rather than laughing at what it can’t do.

(“It can’t draw hands!” Mate, I read comics in the 1990s. Hands aren’t a dealbreaker.)

That doesn’t answer the question: “Why Norman Rockwell?” The answer to that was the first thing I learned. Working with AI image generation is a constant string of compromises. In theory your canvas is unlimited. In reality I hit an issue very quickly: consistency.

I wanted my 12-slide presentation to look consistent – the same artistic style on each slide. There are lots of ways you can constrain your AI generator to try and achieve this consistency – it’s why so many prompts are vast columns of technical or simply hopeful descriptors – “Unreal Engine, Highly Detailed, 8K, photorealistic” and on and on. Maybe a careful process of A/B testing revealed which to use in which order, but I doubt it – magpie accumulation of advice seems more likely.

That stuff is meant for things which look like photos or modern videogames. Not my bag – I wanted a vintage illustration style, something which would make my eventual audience think about stories. And there are not many illustrators whose style MidJourney gets right. Which isn’t a problem – the approximations it makes are often malformed but sometimes have their own charm. Except that trying to get them to stick to a style was a fool’s errand, particularly if the style is a botched imitation.

So there are even fewer illustrators whose style MidJourney can do twice in a row. I ran my first two prompts through a dozen styles – asking it to ape named artists, generic styles, eras, and more – and ended up with one pair of  pictures which looked, at a distance, like the same artist might have drawn them.

Norman Fucking Rockwell.

Still, Rockwell fitted my bill. Immediately recognisable, old-timey, immensely famous, vastly exploited commercially –  and long-dead so I didn’t feel the guilt about biting his style I’d have felt for a living illustrator. 

But even before I’d worked on a single slide I’d made compromises. Rockwell also has conservative overtones – not a fair reflection of his own views as I understand it, but he painted the society he lived in in particular ways, and those ways have resonances which I don’t necessarily want in my own work. Fortunately, the Fake-Rockwell style held when I asked it to diversify the people it was “painting”. Still, he wouldn’t have been my first choice.

This was my main lesson in trying to put AI image generation to use. You’re not a “creator”. You work with what the machine gives you.

MidJourney – the image generator I was using – offers a quartet of pictures for each prompt, each of which you can ask for variations on, or “upscale” to get a higher definition, more finished piece. So your input as a ‘patron’ happens at each end of the process. First working on the prompt you give it, second selecting from the output.

This process of selection involved choosing the best option, obviously. But it also involved a large element of self-deception, as you worked to persuade yourself that the interpretation the AI had made approximated what you thought you had in mind. AI image-making is a test, again and again, of how far you’re willing to take “the perfect is the enemy of the good”.

For instance, I wanted a picture of a reporter excitedly hammering at the keys of a vintage typewriter. I ran the prompt, with variations, again and again, and the same issue came up, again and again. MidJourney doesn’t ‘know’ what a reporter or a typewriter is. Most of its typewriters are photographed from the front. So are most of its reporters. Again and again it gave me a parade of nincompoops trying to write on typewriter whose keys faced away from them. At least the infinite monkeys were facing the right way.

Finally, after multiple attempts, I got a fellow facing the right way at a typewriter. The only problem – I instantly hated him. He looks like a right prick. I decided to use him, but I was mentally doing the calculus – do I mention it? Am I going to frame the slide more negatively because of him?

What I was doing didn’t feel anything like creativity, and it certainly didn’t feel like magic. It didn’t feel much like curation, either – the work of collage and juxtaposition to create an overall impression more powerful than the parts.

It felt a little like briefing – throwing something you can’t do out into the ether for those who can do it and waiting to see what they come up with. Sometimes it’s things you’d never have thought of. But there’s no real they on the other end, no set of choices you can ask about, worry about or enthuse over.

Partly to assuage my guilt about using AI images at all, on the day I decided to try it out I commissioned a human to do an illustration for a fundraiser I’m doing. I got the roughs back while I was wrestling with Norman Fucking AI Rockwell’s typewriter goons and the excitement of seeing them and thinking “oh that’s cool” or “hmm why that?” doesn’t compare.

What my AI project felt most like was something that’s become extremely familiar to me, and probably to you, over the last 25 years. It felt like searching on Google, or using hashtags on LinkedIn, or trying to discover something new on Spotify, or writing SEO copy. It felt like a cross between negotiation and problem solving. The act of trying to get something out of an algorithm that is enormously complex but fundamentally doesn’t understand you (or anyone). It just felt like the internet.

Negotiating with algorithms is inescapable, but it has its own satisfaction. It’s a skill. You see it when you talk to SEO specialists, who have rewired themselves to view language and writing in different ways from the rest of us, like surfers looking out at the sea. I myself am quietly proud of how good I got at using Spotify to discover new and weird stuff. The new generation of generative AI tools are already creating their own breed of wranglers, part horse whisperer part snake-oil salesman, ready to convince the wary or greedy that their promised land is just a prompt away.

For the rest of us, a future of tinkering awaits. Douglas Adams predicted it in the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, with the onboard drinks computer that can make a million million beverages but can’t quite synthesise tea. In the face of Generative AI, but also of the web in general, we are all Arthur Dent just wanting his nice cup of tea, constantly tweaking the request then settling for what the machine comes up with instead.

(Don’t look too closely at the dog’s legs, that’s my advice.)

APPENDIX AND EDIT: But is it any good? Well, see for yourself and don’t zoom in too much. But on some level I think the question’s meaningless. The lack of conscious creative choices removes many of the grounds on which criticism operates. Art is what an artist declares as art – but there’s no artist here (as I say, using MidJourney does not feel like making art, any more than using a search engine feels like making art).

It doesn’t remove all critical grounds, though. AI-generated images, like procedurally generated NFTs, can act as objects that operate in art-like ways, particularly in the marketplace, and be critiqued as such. But not just in the marketplace – this stuff can create some kind of emotional response. I’m using my Fake Rockwells to try and generate a low-level response myself, operating at the level of “vibe”, a kind of visual muzak. 

I won’t know if they work on that level until I actually give the presentation, near the end of this month. That’s when I can take these highfalutin’ stock photos and definitively say – yes, these were good.  After thinking about this over lunch I went back and removed most references to ‘art’ from the body of this piece.

]]>
https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2023/03/norman-fucking-rockwell-my-adventure-in-ai-art/feed 1
Read Harder Challenge (3 of 24): DATURA https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2018/02/read-harder-challenge-3-of-24-datura https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2018/02/read-harder-challenge-3-of-24-datura#respond Sun, 04 Feb 2018 21:53:19 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30888 Datura, or a Delusion We All SeeDatura, or a Delusion We All See by Leena Krohn

(Read as part of the Book Riot Readharder challenge 2018. Category: A single-sitting book.)

An anonymous woman in an anonymous (though clearly Nordic) city receives a flower for her birthday. She begins dosing herself with its seeds, to help her asthma. At the same time, she takes a job working for The New Anomalist, a magazine devoted to the uncanny and paranormal, whose publisher is always looking for a fresh (and profitable) angle. Datura is told as a series of vignettes – disordered notes, according to the narrator – of encounters with the uncanny. Some are under the aegis of the magazine – but others, increasingly, seem to be spontaneous, and the notes grow less and less reliable…

Datura is the first work I’ve read by Finnish writer Leena Krohn. Her prose – at least in this elegant, inobtrusive translation – has the brevity and clarity I’ve begun to associate with Scandinavian writers, which helps the more haunting and uncanny elements of the story linger all the better, as you gradually absorb the unpleasant implications of drily recorded incidents. What most reviewers seem not to have mentioned is that Datura is also a very funny story about work and journalism – the misery of the narrator as she chases down delusional non-stories on the whim of her editor will resonate with anyone who’s had pages to fill, or been involved in the filling of them.

The tonal mix – weirdness continually undercut by incidents which make the weird seem ridiculous – is the heart of Datura’s ambiguity. As is made clear from the first chapter, the narrator is being slowly poisoned by her self-medication regime. As is not made clear, it’s up to the reader to work out – or decide for themselves, or refuse to decide for that matter – which of the subsequent episodes she records is a dislocation from reality induced by the seeds; which are simply encounters with the credulous, desperate, and crankish; and which may sit somewhere in the middle. Of course it’s possible to take the entire novel as a realistic portrait of mental degeneration. It’s also entirely feasible not to. The people the narrator meets, in general, want there to be more to reality than it appears, whether their explorations are scientific, spiritual, or just somewhat unhappy. In her unknowing experiments, the narrator begins to confirm some of what her subjects believe. But as many a weird fiction protagonist before her has found, the truth of these discoveries is not worth the consequences of making them.

View all my reviews

]]>
https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2018/02/read-harder-challenge-3-of-24-datura/feed 0
Read Harder Challenge (2 of 24): HORTUS VITAE https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2018/01/read-harder-challenge-2-of-24-hortus-vitae https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2018/01/read-harder-challenge-2-of-24-hortus-vitae#respond Wed, 31 Jan 2018 02:05:34 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30876 Hortus Vitae: Essays On The Gardening Of LifeHortus Vitae: Essays On The Gardening Of Life by Vernon Lee

(Read as part of the 2018 Read Harder challenge. Category: A book of essays.)

Vernon Lee, pseudonym of Violet Paget, was an essayist, story writer, and aesthete active in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. She’s not quite forgotten now – there’s a Vernon Lee society with its own journal – but her essays come quite low down the list of things people remember about her. She’s better known for her supernatural fiction, her feminism and pacifism, and her theories of psychology and aesthetics – she was one of the first people in English to use the word “empathy”.

Said theories centered on the idea that appreciation of art was a matter of unconscious bodily response. They were considered eccentric. Her opus, Beauty And Ugliness, co-written with her work, travel and romantic partner Clementina (“Kit”) Anstruther-Thomson, was met with bafflement and mockery: the two women ended their relationship soon after. Undoubtedly an odd work – it consists mainly of Kit’s minute observations of her physiological and posture changes when she encounters beautiful objects (chairs feature heavily), and Lee’s philosophical glosses on same – it feels more relevant in the era of neuroscience and embodied cognition than it probably did in 1897.

Set beside these grand theories, or the epic anti-war denunciations of her allegorical play Satan, The Waster, the essays in Hortus Vitae (the Garden of Life) are knowingly and endearingly slight. But the subject – how to enjoy life with minimal regret – seem just as important to me, particularly as I drift into my mid-40s as greedy for culture as ever and as lazy as ever about actually getting out and experiencing it.

Lee’s point of view has two elements I particularly sympathised with. The first is a sense of optimism – looking for the best in experiences, taking opportunities, and so on. She’s honest enough about the general difficulty of this that her efforts seem sincere. The second is a keen appreciation of context as a shaper of experience – the way the smell of a theatre changes the play; the way a bicycle changes the landscape. One of the best and most specific essays, “A Stage Jewel”, describes Lee’s disappointment when she realises some jewellery she’d bought was made for the stage – not because it’s fake, which she knew, but because the understanding of the specific fakery collapses any mystique the object had. Or at least I think that was the issue. By that essay I’d grown accustomed to Lee’s unhurried, slightly arch style, occasionally direct, more often ornate – appropriate in a book devoted to pleasing oneself, however clear-eyed it is about the problems involved.

View all my reviews

]]>
https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2018/01/read-harder-challenge-2-of-24-hortus-vitae/feed 0
Read Harder Challenge (1 of 24): SIX TO SIXTEEN https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2018/01/read-harder-challenge-1-of-24-six-to-sixteen https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2018/01/read-harder-challenge-1-of-24-six-to-sixteen#respond Mon, 15 Jan 2018 21:08:24 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30790 Six to Sixteen: A Story for GirlsSix to Sixteen: A Story for Girls by Juliana Horatia Ewing

Read as part of the Book Riot Read Harder 2018 Challenge (Category: “A children’s classic published before 1980”)

She’s no relation, but I’ve always had a curiosity about the work of my mid-Victorian namesake Mrs Ewing, author of dozens of books and short stories for children. In her time a bestseller – enough that her early death sparked an 18-volume memorial edition of her collected works – hardly anyone reads her now, but there’s a chain of admiration linking her to the present day. There’s something of Mrs.Ewing’s unpatronising interest in childhood concerns in the work of E. Nesbit, for instance (who is not much read herself but whose flame is kept alive by Pullman and others).

Even so I was a bit scared to approach Six To Sixteen – I had the idea Mrs Ewing’s books might be rather dry and improving, since she was keen for them to lead her child-readers along virtuous paths. But I was wrong. If there’s a central message of Six To Sixteen, it’s one that’s orthodox today but I suspect was a good deal less widely agreed in the 1860s – the need for girls to have an education and lifestyle that strongly emphasises curiosity and “intellectual pursuits” (everything from art to naturalism to languages) over the traditional domestic and social spheres of the Victorian feminine.

Most of the novel – an autobiography started on a whim by Margery, the lead character, as exactly one of these pursuits – is a progress through a series of social milieux until our heroine winds up in one where she can effectively live this life. After an early childhood spent in India, Margery passes through life in a regimental town (too gossipy), an ancient family home (too traditional), and a private girls school (too limiting) before finally finding happiness in a vicarage on the Yorkshire moors where she can read, write, paint, learn, debate and play with the family dogs to her heart’s content.

This isn’t to say Mrs Ewing isn’t a moralist, or religious – but she’s not didactic. Religious morality is the air the characters breathe, but they explicitly remark on it about as rarely as they talk about that air. The improving character of the novel mostly shows itself through omission – there are no villains and very little bad behaviour, and when a character does display unfortunate traits (a flighty governess, for instance) the book is annoyingly careful not to go into too much detail. Mrs Ewing’s instructive method here is imitative – and it wouldn’t do to give people the wrong things to imitate.

The result is an episodic book with a very loose, barely discernible plot, whose characters are at worst well-meaning. Within thirty or so pages I’d adjusted to the Victorian style and within that style the book bubbled along very merrily even though not much ever seemed to happen. Where there is tension, it comes out of differences in philosophy, not from open conflict. It makes for a surprisingly subtle story, whose narrator is often quietly ironic, like a Jane Austen heroine for kids.

Though not entirely like – there’s no overt romance in Six To Sixteen, even if there’s plenty for Victorian shippers to work with. The book ends with Margery’s best friend Eleanor getting married, but the advantages of marriage as presented by Mrs. Ewing are firmly in keeping with the rest of the book. Eleanor has found a life-partner, someone who will share in and encourage her sketching, scientific pursuits, reading Dante and so on. I’m aware it’s my own stereotyping of Victorian mores that made this ending such a pleasant surprise, when I’d been expecting more of a “put away childish things” type resolution.

If parts of the novel felt disarmingly modern, other parts reflect a very different world. Eleanor, Margery, and other characters are independent-minded and practical, but there’s not even a hint that financial independence or work is on the cards. And if religion is taken as read, so too is class: Mrs Ewing’s good life of intelligence, culture and curiosity is not available to every Victorian girl (let alone girls in India, who are never mentioned in any case!). Nor is there any indication the possibility could exist. This isn’t a flaw in the novel, but it’s a possible clue as to why Mrs. Ewing’s work didn’t much survive her time, despite its approachability and sparkle.

Aside from religion and class, there’s one other constant presence in Six To Sixteen: death. Margery is an orphan; so are many other kids; and those that aren’t have often lost brothers and sisters, since every illness carries some risk of fatality and many – cholera, scarlet fever, smallpox – are reliable scourges. It wouldn’t be true to say that Margery takes death in her stride, but the fact of it is taken for granted in a way that would be impossible even in 20th century children’s literature. With mortality all around, the book’s central question – of how to live your best life – becomes still more urgent

View all my reviews

]]>
https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2018/01/read-harder-challenge-1-of-24-six-to-sixteen/feed 0
Good Comics I Read In 2017 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2018/01/good-comics-i-read-in-2017 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2018/01/good-comics-i-read-in-2017#comments Wed, 03 Jan 2018 12:38:19 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30711 seven sacksI’m not doing a comics poll this year – the slack is being admirably taken up with Pete’s new TV poll – but I still read a LOT of comics last year. Here, in no special order, were some of the best ones, new to me if not always to the world.

HOW TO BE HAPPY (by Eleanor Davis; Fantagraphics)

I loved this, a collection of beautifully composed stories and vignettes in a variety of styles, from gorgeous colour-saturated paintings to quick, fluid multi-page sketch stories that reminded me of Jules Feiffer (who’s also a reference point for Davis’ sharp observations of human neuroses). Some of the stories are glimpses into imagined worlds – like a near-future family reunion – others, like the eerie, funny, “Seven Sacks” – draw on folklore tropes. Davis’ skill at capturing the movement of bodies makes the simplest of ideas sing on the page.


PAPER GIRLS Vol 3 (by Brian K Vaughan and Cliff Chiang; Image)

paper girls 3

While the exact plot of Paper Girls remains inscrutable, three arcs is enough to get a handle on what the series does and how it feels. What it does, so far at least, is have its single volumes follow a simple structure within an overall architecture we’re only seeing in glimpses. How it feels is awesome.

So this third volume does the same things the first two did. The girls arrive in a new setting and figure out its rules: when it is, who they can trust, who they maybe can’t, and what the stakes are. As they uncover the story, it comes to a boil, and at the climax they (and we) go somewhen else. This is a tried-and-true formula for time-travel series – it’s hard to think of one that doesn’t employ it somehow. Where Paper Girls is clever is in disguising that repeating structure within a more complicated wider story, which Vaughan and Chiang present with a minimum of compromises: no reliable narrators, no glossaries of slang, no roadmap. Our narrative window is wider than the girls’, but not by much. The overall impression is chaotic, like a story which has been snipped up and rearranged, Burroughs-style.

So what we have is the rock-solid micro-structure of Doctor Who within the much riskier, looser macro-structure of (say) Lost, where we’re being asked to trust that the creators have a plan. Vaughan’s best storytelling trick – which infuriates some of the readers – is to be so imaginative, and so alive to the possibility that turning a comics page can make you gasp or laugh at the audacity of what you’re seeing, that Paper Girls feels arbitrary and confusing and thrilling even when we’ll probably all look back later and be able to figure out exactly what was going on.

This is not, as it happens, entirely dissimilar to being 12 years old, which is part of why Paper Girls works on an emotional and aesthetic level as well as being an enjoyable puzzle-box. Vaughan isn’t always the subtlest of character writers, but he’s superb at making you want to read more about the four leads and their dynamic, to the point where their constant separations are as painful for readers as for characters. And he and Cliff Chiang (whose command of the girls’ expressions, style and body language is exquisite) have channeled the aesthetic of how pop culture was when they were 12 – Stephen King books, Spielberg movies, early videogames – to create something which feels like 1988 as often as it comments on it. Somehow it all adds up to the most addictive, but also most satisfying, mainstream comic around right now.

WANDERING ISLAND Vol 1 (by Kenji Tsuruta; Dark Horse Manga)

wandering islandDid it help that I read this on holiday in a barely-inhabited Greek island? Oh yes. Would I have enjoyed it anyway? Certainly. Kenji Tsuruta’s delicate, detailed artwork is perfect at capturing the island life of Southern Japan and the romance of aviation. As the volume’s backmatter confirms, everything is thought-through and drawn-to-life. Even limber heroine Mikura’s reluctance to wear more than a swimsuit doesn’t feel entirely gratuitous.

The central mystery – a floating island circling the Pacific – is intriguing but Tsuruta’s real gift is capturing nuance on the face. Generally in stories with obsessed dream-chasing protagonists, it’s clear from the start that they have it right and their concerned doubters will be proven wrong. So it is in Wandering Island, but the degrees of exhaustion and obsession that Tsuruta delineates mean for once you can feel Mikura’s worry viscerally. It makes for a manga that’s deeply involving as well as gorgeous to look at.

I AM A HERO Vol 1 (by Kengo Hanazawa; Dark Horse Manga)

i am a heroHideo Suzuki is anxious to the point of hallucination, plagued by jealousy and low self-esteem, and trapped in a thankless, low paid job as a manga assistant. Just the type to discover his inner strength when the zombie apocalypse hits his dreary Tokyo suburb, then? Not really – Hideo wanders through his own story in a state of numbed shock and survives mostly by luck.

From the title down, I Am A Hero is a skilful, convention-twisting take on the overworked zombie genre, distinguished by its blend of disquieting imagery and ultra-dark comedy, its steady grasp of its protagonist’s psychology, and in particular by Kengo Hanazawa’s superb storytelling. This is a brilliantly paced comic, both on a macro level – the grim patience with which the first volume ratchets up the background horror behind its slice-of-no-life story – and on a technical one. The lines between reality and Hideo’s imagination are ambiguous but never confusing, the action scenes are brief and visceral, and Hanazawa has a gift for drawing the ordinary which makes its disruption all the more disturbing. His bizarrely flexible zombies, once they do appear, are impressively ghastly too – there’s a stunning sequence of double page spreads at the climax of v1, when we get our first close look at an infected victim: it’s an unforgettable bit of storytelling and a moment only the sequential nature of comics (and the generous page count of manga) could make possible.

GIRLS’ LAST TOUR Vols 1-2 (by Tsukumizu; Yen Press)

girls last tourAn odd one, this: two young girls and an armoured vehicle wander a barely inhabited post-collapse world. The tone is gentle, stories of friendship and survival; the setting is an endless industrial wasteland. It’s like a cross between the gargantuan post-human architecture of Blame! and the contented winding-down of mankind in Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou – all with sketchy chibi artwork (possibly best seen on Tsukumizu’s tumblr). Those are two of my favourite ever manga – so I like the idea of this a lot. The story content in the first two volumes walks the line between achieving a haiku-like simplicity of materials arranged for maximum effect, and being too quick to fully satisfy. Points for originality, for sure.

HOTARU’S WAY Vols 1-2 (by Satoru Hiura; Kodansha)

hotarus wayIt’s still pretty rare for josei manga (comics for Japanese women) to get translated at all, so even if Hotaru’s Way sticks fairly close to genre convention (and I suspect it does, in places) it’s a fun, refreshing change of pace. The heroine is a “himono” woman – a word which translates, somewhat horribly, to “dried fish”. She’s given up on romance and lives a relaxed life drinking beer, hanging out with friends and lazing around at home. Sounds fine, you might think, and it’s obvious Satoru Hiura thinks so too: Hotaru’s Way is a comedy, but it’s never critical of its heroine, even when her efforts to act against her nature go awry. Which, this being a rom-com, is every chapter.

The plot follows Hotaru’s romance with an affable, slightly bland younger man, but we know – even if she doesn’t – that the real chemistry is with her uptight older landlord/roommate, who’s moved in now his marriage is on the rocks. And he also happens to be her boss at a Tokyo events management firm. Are there hijinks? Of course there are hijinks, but Hiura keeps the focus on character rather than nudging things too far into farce. Hiura’s art works wonderfully, too – switching between ironically big-eyed/idealised shojo style for the romance scenes, a looser more cartoon-y look for a lot of the dialogue, and a clear, flowing line for the more naturalistic home and office scenes. There’s almost certainly a ton of nuance I’m missing, but I really enjoyed this one.

GOODNIGHT PUNPUN Vol 1 (by Inio Asano; VIZ Media)

goodnight punpunBleak, funny and excruciating in turns, Inio Asano’s coming-of-age manga follows protagonist Punpun through his penultimate year of elementary school. Punpun is anxious, somewhat passive but loyal and imaginative. But shyness, a chaotic home life and simple bad luck combine to make awkward situations invariably worse.

Obviously, the first thing you notice about Punpun is that he and his family are drawn as doodled cartoon birds, while everything else in the comic is rendered realistically. (There’s no sense that other characters perceive Punpun as anything other than human). Asano gets Punpun’s emotional state across by a using a marvellous bag of cartooning tricks (close ups, shaky lines, and copy-and-paste, to name only a few) juxtaposed with the rest of the world’s more standard storytelling. The result is a character whose alienation comes graphically across even as we sympathise strongly with him, and a style that captures a protagonist’s interior life with often hilarious clarity. Strongly recommended if you’re looking for something a little more acerbic in your manga.

APOSIMZ Vol 1 (by Tsutomu Nihei; Kodansha)

aposimz

Tsutomu Nihei’s career traces a gradual arc towards accessibility. His latest manga is his most conventional yet – like Knights Of Sidonia, which it may tangentially share a universe with, it’s taking a traditional manga structure and fusing it with Nihei’s monumentalist sci-fi architecture. In this case the structure is an episodic quest for revenge with a hero learning the full extent of his powers… pretty standard stuff, but as usual Nihei’s design and sense of space and scale immediately elevates the story. He’s changed up his art style for Aposimz – a story of duelling cyborgs set on the bleak, frozen surface of an artificial planet – adopting a feathery, lightly inked style which has drawn a lot of Miyazaki comparisons. But this is a much colder, less spiritual world, and like most Nihei manga violence is always a probability.

TRANSFORMERS VS GI JOE (by Tom Scioli and John Barber; IDW)

transformers gi joeThe standard one-liner about this extraordinary comic is the observation that it feels like a kid playing with action figures. This is absolutely true. But just leaving it at that occludes the particular choices that Tom Scioli makes to get that intense, lost-in-play vibe. Transformers v GI Joe breaks with comics convention by removing almost all traditional panel-to-panel storytelling, preferring epic splash-page tableaux of ultra-condensed action. This is compression taken to its limit, with almost every page feeling like the title page of a new issue, and every single bit of extraneous matter glossed over in the search for the next thrill.

The comic is so intense and formally bizarre that you wonder if it might all be a put-on. It’s easy to imagine someone recoiling from this as hipster affectation: the aesthetic it reminds me most of is pop formalists PC Music, with their compression of decades of hits into dwarf-star miniatures of popcraft, where ‘catchiness’ becomes a kind of abstract quality the way ‘plot’ does here. Just as PC Music’s tracks are not relatable to as actual pop, so you can’t imagine a real kid sitting down with Transformers vs GI Joe and a glass of lemonade and losing themselves in it: it’s a comic about the peculiar ego death of play, not one designed to induce it. Certainly, reading more than a couple of issues on the trot gives a sickly tartrazine rush: it’s just TOO MUCH.

But that’s not to downplay what Scioli and Barber have done here: there’s very little like this comic. The fact that it’s so odd in structure means that a reader can get the intensity even if – like me – they don’t give a shit about either toy franchise involved. For those still baffled – and everyone will be at some point – thorough and enjoyably immodest notes by the authors round out the volume.

PROVIDENCE ACT 1 (by Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows; Avatar)

providence moore

I re-read this in preparation for the final issue (see below). It’s still one of my favourite comics of the last few years, and my favourite thing Moore’s done for well over a decade. His encounter with Lovecraft creates a space where he can indulge his most Moore-ish habits and interests – magic, the nature of creativity, spotting patterns and connections, prolix stylistic pastiche, formal comics game-playing, and more – in ways that feel more productive and thematically appropriate than they sometimes have.

This first act (of three) sets the template for the series: in each issue, the protagonist finds his way into a Lovecraftian situation which he entirely misinterprets. Phrased like that, Providence is a comedy, not a horror comic. And that’s not wholly wrong. Of course, it doesn’t read or look like a comedy. The relentless beat of the storytelling, four horizontal panels to a page with few deviations, flattens the rhythms comedy (or indeed traditional horror storytelling) needs to survive. There’s little room for punchlines or jump scares in Providence – everything, the normal and the outlandish, gets a similar weight in Jacen Burrows’ detailed, clean-lined, sober artwork, which of course makes the line between the two blur even more. The smallest detail of a panel may be the pointer to something unnerving… or it may simply be a detail.

It’s exactly this steady accumulation of significance that makes Providence so effective. For a start, when you don’t exactly know what detail matters and what doesn’t, it brings on a state of paranoid watchfulness in the reader, creating an unsettling contrast with the blithe denial of the protagonist. You’re constantly looking back, checking details, comparing panels, noticing new things – whereas he strides onward through the story, oblivious. It’s the familiar effect of peeping between your fingers at a horror movie character making terrible decisions… except subtly and perfectly restaged for comics.

The dialogue magnifies this even more. Here’s where the comedy comes in: Moore has always had a compulsive attraction to irony, and developed several distinctive ways of using it in a comics script – running the dialogue and action of different scenes together so they act in counterpoint, for instance. In his 80s work he uses ironic techniques to the point where they are sometimes a real distraction. Providence represents this approach taken to its furthest possible extreme – almost every line of dialogue has multiple undertones and levels of nested meanings. When you pile up ironies to such an extent, the action starts to assume the slow, fraught pace of a bad dream.

This is the ultimate example of how Providence’s thematic concerns (and its plot) indulge what Moore loves doing anyway. For Moore, the Lovecraftian elements represent a reality that exists below, or intertwined with ours – two states of being in superposition, each dreaming the other. Moore writes a comic that makes this idea concrete through its plot, but also through its visual and verbal style.

PROVIDENCE #12 (by Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows; Avatar)

providence 12

Whether by luck, careful planning, or – who knows – magic, no comic lingered as unpleasantly this year, or captured the dark spirit of 2017 so well, as Providence’s finale. It’s Moore returning to tricks he was using as early as his Time Twisters and Future Shocks work in 2000AD, the world shifting around the protagonists without them really noticing. They want to resist – they know stopping this from happening is important – but reality is changing too rapidly for them to adjust to each disintegrating and reforming norm. And so disaster happens, quietly and with appropriate ceremony.

You can make the criticism that this final issue has very little to do with the first 10 issues of Providence. That’s true – Robert Black’s story ends in #11, and the last issue acts as a summing-up of all Moore’s Lovecraft work. But it’s also, surely, a statement of rage and disgust at what’s happened since the series began. Providence is revealed as the story of a cabal of evil old white men with a plan to transform not just the world, but how the world works: an epistemic attack that infects media and culture until the tipping point occurs and reality is simply overwritten. And their plan works. Drawing parallels between this story and 21st century politics barely qualifies as metaphor – as Karl Rove put it, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out.”

Or as one Proidence character puts it, “I’m trapped in a hell of melting facts.” He may be a sociopath with a swastika carved into his forehead, but I know just what he means.

]]>
https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2018/01/good-comics-i-read-in-2017/feed 7
Canoe: Dig It? https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2017/12/canoe-dig-it https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2017/12/canoe-dig-it#respond Sun, 03 Dec 2017 21:50:01 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30516 La Belle Sauvage (The Book of Dust, #1)La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman

Philip Pullman has an enviable knack of getting critics to dwell on the high-flown literary allusions in his books – Paradise Lost in the His Dark Materials trilogy; The Faerie Queene here. But he’s also very self-consciously in dialogue with the rich history of children’s literature, most obviously CS Lewis, of whom Pullman’s vociferous critique is matched only by his wholesale borrowings. Pullman’s anxiety-of-influence tango with Lewis helps give his books their imaginative charge as well as their moral and aesthetic mission.

It feels initially like there’s less Lewis in La Belle Sauvage, with Pullman instead sounding notes that echo Erich Kastner, Arthur Ransome, Joan Aiken and more. He’s also drawing more on a strain of children’s writing – with Ransome’s Swallows And Amazons series a great example – which takes resourcefulness, practicality and craft as its cardinal virtues, rather than the imagination and creativity which are the guiding lights of His Dark Materials. The pragmatic bluntness of the young barmaid Alice, for instance, would never have fit into that trilogy’s universe of schemers and dreamers: here she gets some of the most memorable (and ferociously sweary) scenes. The world of La Belle Sauvage is a world where experience and skill can carry the day – the Gyptians’ deep knowledge of water and weather; boy hero Malcolm’s boatmanship and engineering acumen; the tradecraft of spies and woodcraft of poachers, and scholar Hannah Relf’s dedication to reading the alethiometer. “You’re the slowest but you’re also the best”, someone tells her at one point, and that’s the sort of care and patience the book values.

The story’s two halves – an Oxford-set spy thriller and a phantasmagoric passage through a flooded England – aren’t always coherently linked, with elements and characters from the first half all but vanishing in the second. But a theme recurs and echoes – the way that below the visible structures of the world are the deeper and more mysterious forces that truly shape or govern it. The flood, and how it transforms the countryside; the networks of spies that innkeeper’s son Malcolm accidentally stumbles upon; the odious youth movement of sneaks that subverts his school. And one of Pullman’s favourite themes – the complex web of sexual motivations and drives that underpins adult life and that children can detect but not understand (until they start to experience it for themselves).

There’s one more iteration of this theme, which teases the second book in the new trilogy: the flood itself, say the Gyptians, is a doing of the “Secret Commonwealth”, and all through the story there are hints, then appearances, of the hidden and more pagan Albion under the harsh religious exterior of “Brytain”. River gods, faerie folk, and secret allegorical places emerge to have their day. This IS an echo of Lewis, whose Christian metaphors are constantly being upstaged by his obvious attraction to Narnian otherkin: naiads, dryads, Santa, Bacchus, fauns, et al. The effect Lewis perhaps hit on by Freudian accident, Pullman wants to harness. How well he handles that is a matter for the remaining books. This one is a very good start, distinct enough from HDM in structure and style to stand as its own beguiling thing.

View all my reviews

]]>
https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2017/12/canoe-dig-it/feed 0
Love And Rockets: Notes On A Re-Reading (I) https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2017/09/love-and-rockets-notes-on-a-re-reading-i https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2017/09/love-and-rockets-notes-on-a-re-reading-i#respond Fri, 08 Sep 2017 17:12:46 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=30394 Repurposed and edited Goodreads reviews of the Love And Rockets Library (by Los Bros Hernandez; published by Fantagraphics).

Heartbreak Soup (Gilbert Hernandez)

This is my third or fourth time reading these stories, but the first for a decade or so. No criticism here – these are foundational for me, some of my favourite ever comics. The first time I read the early stories here – 25 years ago now – I remember feeling a little sad at how quickly Gilbert Hernandez moved time forward. The world of the first Palomar story was so charming I wanted to stay there longer – but time and change, the steady accretion of consequences and histories, is the essence of both sides of Love And Rockets.

human d

So this reading the stuff which really stood out for me was at the end of this collection, the sequence of stories focusing on the individual boys from that first story, and the nearby strips, one a mad whirl of a cast-reunion party, one a surreal tale involving a bruja‘s visit to Palomar. What these have in common is Hernandez moving his storytelling style on from the whimsical but straightforward magic-realist narration of the first half of the book, trying out new structures (first-person and third-person narratives in the Heraclio and Vicente stories; the way Israel’s life is purely relational, defined entirely by who he’s with; the constant, panel-to-panel perspective shifts in the party story; and the feverish breakdown of storytelling in “Duck Feet”). This understandable thirst for variety and experiment would flower more in later stories – in this one it’s in delicious balance with the more consistent location and loveable cast.

Maggie The Mechanic (Jaime Hernandez)

When I was a nipper, received wisdom from the older comics heads seemed to be that Jaime Hernandez was the better artist and Gilbert Hernandez was the better writer. I kicked back against this for a long time, as when I got around to picking up Love And Rockets in collected editions I fell hard for Maggie, Hopey, Izzy and the rest. But on this re-read I get what they meant. The art in these early stories is, of course, absolutely glorious, there are pages that just take my breath away (the first appearance of the robot warehouse!) and there’s a confidence to the storytelling and structure that points to the peaks of later volumes. But while the world of Locas is enchanting, it still at this stage reads a little too much like a young guy’s punk girl fantasia – it’s telling that one of the stories that really works here as writing is the brief vignette of Speedy Ortiz and Joey chatting about Isabel and Maggie: the dynamic, a younger guy trying to impress an older one, feels dead-on in a way the interactions between the women don’t quite (yet).

And yes, I’d forgotten quite how much time is taken up by the Rand Race storyline. Los Bros Hernandez always wore their influences and interests on the sleeves of their drawing arms – but where Gilbert Hernandez kept the small-town magic realism and the B-Movie madness separate before finding ways to gradually integrate them, Jaime’s early stories are asking “Why CAN’T I do a comic that’s about punk life and robots and spaceships and revolution and lady wrestlers all at once?”

It’s a glorious question, it’s the right question, he approaches it with a swagger, and this book reads like him working out the answer, which is roughly, “I can, but not sustainedly”. Maggie at home is more interesting than Maggie in Rio Frio; Speedy is more interesting than Rand; Queen Rena is more interesting as a wrestler than as a pulp adventurer. “Las Mujeres Perdidas” does the everything-at-once approach as well as it can possibly be done, and has some amazing scenes, but it’s explicitly the end of the road for that strand of Locas stories. Race’s next appearance, where he’s the one in transit, dropping by Hoppers to check up on Maggie, is a reminder that the terms of the comic have shifted for good.

Human Diastrophism (Gilbert Hernandez)

So it takes only two volumes of the reissued Love And Rockets for the promised “perfect chronological order” to break down. The linked cycle of stories about the enforcer Gorgo that take up the second half of this volume play off the epic “Poison River”, and a big chunk of Maricela’s story happens in the LA-based “X” – both of which stories are held over until Vol.3 of the Gilbert Hernandez material. This makes Human Diastrophism, as an individual book, a good deal less user-friendly. But that was inevitable, as this volume also marks the point at which Hernandez’ sprawling universe of interlinked characters, chronologies and fictional layers fractures, abandoning its sometime focal point, the village of Palomar.

Except that’s a little too easy. From early on, characters cycled in and out of Palomar – some of the best early “Palomar stories” involved the cast’s fortunes outside the village. The publication order of the stories, with “Poison River” running alongside many of these shorter pieces, made it clear that by this point Hernandez’ vehicle was Luba and her wider family, and her 20-year sojourn in Palomar was just part of that far bigger canvas. And as early as “An American In Palomar”, Hernandez was exploring the tension between the convenient fiction of the self-contained village, its reception by American audiences (his readers included), and the messier, more complex stories he wanted to tell.

“Human Diastrophism” brings that tension to a head, stretching Palomar to breaking point, in fictional, metafictional and structural terms. The village is plagued by monkeys and murders, its dysfunctional families are breaking apart, and its magic realism and family saga genres are also breached by that most crassly American of tropes, the serial killer story. Meanwhile, readers used to wise and whimsical one- and two-parters were suddenly asked to cope with a 100+ page story with a far larger cast and far more demanding storytelling techniques.

The fact that many apparently balked (and “Poison River” got an even more boggled reception) is a reminder that the 80s golden era of independent comics didn’t necessarily take its readers with it at the time. “Human Diastrophism” is a masterpiece, a unique combination of a creator paying off years of emotional investment in his characters while simultaneously accelerating wildly in his storytelling ambition. It’s also brilliant at fucking with its audience, misdirecting them as to the type of story they’re reading and the directions plots are heading in, so that what happens at the end is more upsetting and shocking. It’s not the serial killing which breaks Palomar’s spell – the point of magic realism is to be omnivorous, to absorb even horrible stories into its patchwork – but the fatal incursion of the political (which turns out, tragically, to be just another story itself).

The second half of the book has a few Palomar follow-ups, tying off the Jesus Angel storyline among other elements. But it’s dominated by the Gorgo cycle of stories. “Human Diastrophism” has a tight focus in time and place but switches focus continually among a sprawling cast. The Gorgo stories follow a handful of characters – mainly Luba’s mother Maria, Maria’s children, and cadaverous gangster Gorgo himself – but leap wildly about in time and place, demanding careful attention from the reader and a willingness to think about the hidden connections between each shift of scene and era. It’s a more distancing way of telling a story, letting us form incomplete judgements on characters and their relationships before shifting the picture with new information. It’s not as successful as “Human Diastrophism”, but it feels even bolder.

]]>
https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2017/09/love-and-rockets-notes-on-a-re-reading-i/feed 0
The Freaky Trigger Comics Poll 2015: #12 – #1 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2016/01/the-freaky-trigger-comics-poll-2015-12-1 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2016/01/the-freaky-trigger-comics-poll-2015-12-1#comments Wed, 27 Jan 2016 16:01:31 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=29727 Bucks Fizz “Hi, we’re Jay, Mike, Cheryl and Bobby, better known as Bucks Fizz, stars of LOOK-IN magazine – oh the mischief we got up to! Nothing risque, you understand, it’s a children’s paper. Of course we’re also famous as the inspirations for Amaterasu, Inanna, Lucifer and Dionysus from last year’s comics poll winner, The Wicked + The Divine, which we thought we’d remind you of just in case it turns up again below. Our own comics career has been a little quiet lately but between you and us I think hosting this amazing Top 12 will be just the leg-up we need for a new beginning (mamba seyra), maybe a licensed series from IDW or perhaps Boom! Studios. Move over Jem and the so-called Holograms, Bucks Fizz are back and ready to twirl!”

Thanks, Bucks Fizz! Yes, bringing the curtain down on Poll Month, it’s the Comics Top 12. As usual, an asterisk means I haven’t read any of it but thankfully Kat has once again stepped in to lend her webcomics expertise to the countdown.

12 Loki

12. LOKI: AGENT OF ASGARD (Ewing/Garbett/Fabela; Marvel Comics)

Our first returnee from last year’s list, Loki: Agent Of Asgard ended its run last summer, bringing the six-year saga of Loki’s efforts to change to a satisfying close. Given the difficult job of coming in and writing a third act to one of the most critically and fannishly beloved of recent Marvel stories, Al Ewing (for it is he) produced his best Marvel work so far. He found a new and beautifully fitting angle on the erstwhile God of Lies and offered his own, redemptive take on the metafictional superhero – not to mention writing a great two-fisted homage to Marvel’s classic Asgardian epics. Terrific stuff.

11 Providence

11. PROVIDENCE (Moore/Burrows/Rodriguez; Avatar Press)

In which Alan Moore applies the painstaking world-knitting techniques of his League of Ordinary Gentlemen to the HP Lovecraft canon, creating an alternative “Cthulhu mythos” focused on the grim deeds, vanities, rivalries and self-delusions of mankind as much as the cosmic horror beyond. The usual caveats and content warnings apply: Providence contains horrific sexual violence (Issue 6, to be exact). But it’s also the most compelling Alan Moore comic for a long time – a slow-burn of claustrophobic, gradually advancing discomfort as his protagonist travels around New England hunting for a particular ancient book, and finding his grip on reality shaken in the process. Providence is steeped in Lovecraftiana, but Moore is an old and wise enough hand to make sure you don’t strictly need to recognise any of the source material. Meanwhile Jacen Burrows’ clear lines and patient, fixed-camera storytelling put him in the long list of Moore collaborators who fit a given project so well you can’t imagine anyone else doing it.

10 Paper Girls

10. PAPER GIRLS (Vaughan/Chiang/Wilson; Image Comics)

Brian K Vaughan is now enough of a draw that he can sell shedloads of comics while keeping his cards very close to his chest, hookwise. Nobody knew very much about Saga before it started, and the only teaser for Paper Girls was “4 girls delivering papers in 1986”. Of course there’s more to it than that – the first issue is a knockout, a perfect example of how to create smart, thrilling modern adventure comics, impeccably designed with oodles of atmosphere and pace. The comic spends fifteen or so pages proving that yes, actually, a comic just about 4 girls delivering papers in 1986 would be amazing, before sliding off somewhere else entirely. One of the best first issues I read all year, and, Vaughan being Vaughan, a wonderful cliffhanger. (Another two came out after it, but I’ve saved them up.)

09 Love And Rockets

9. LOVE AND ROCKETS NEW STORIES* (Los Bros Hernandez; Fantagraphics)

I’m horribly behind – like, years – on Love And Rockets, thanks partly to finding it difficult to figure out the myriad of graphic novels and what I have to buy to not duplicate things. But I know that while Beto has spun off into more self-contained work, Jaime Hernandez continues to focus on the life of Maggie Chascarillo, and that the 7th edition of New Stories, from 2015, features a reunion with former best friend and lover Hopey. There is absolutely no reason for me to doubt that this comic is magnificent.

8. BAD MACHINERY* (Allison; Webcomic/Self-Published)

Never read it, so let Kat fill you in:

“John Allison vaguely threatened that 2014’s The Case of the Modern Men would be the last Bad Machinery story, and attempted to fob everyone off with a (slightly unsatisfying) spin-off, Space Is The Place. Thankfully the Tackleford gang returned last summer for The Case of the Missing Piece, a story reflecting both the teenagers’ journey into a world of adult problems (money, snogging, realising your parents can make mistakes), and their dwindling interest in the supernatural phenomena of their past cases. The kids are slowly swapping their talking beasts for lipstick and nylons! But while there may not be any selkies or emo ghosts about, the dialogue is as sharp as ever: Charlotte Grote is the only comics character I’d like to regularly hang out with in a Wetherspoons.”

08 Bad Machinery

07 Giant Days

7. GIANT DAYS (Allison/Treiman/Cogar; Boom! Studios)

But wait, there’s more! Giant Days, a regular print comic (tho also available in digital, obviously), finds Bad Machinery’s John Allison writing about university, not secondary-school, life, and working with an artistic collaborator, Lissa Treiman. Treiman combines a breezy, cartoony style reminiscent of other Boom! comics with a gift for expressive faces that reminds me a bit of Posy Simmons. A feelgood comic, stuffed with funny moments and good lines, Giant Days captures the enthusiasm of going to University and a little of the awkwardness too.

06 Sex Criminals

6. SEX CRIMINALS (Fracton/Zdarsky; Image Comics)

The premise of Sex Criminals – in our top 10 for a second year running – is so weird that it was terribly hard to guess what stories the comic might tell. Two and a bit arcs in, with Susie and John tracking down a wild and wonderful supporting cast of sexual time-stoppers, and we know. Sex Criminals is many things, but one of them is a comic about self-fulfilment: accepting, communicating and being true to your desires. Sex is just the start. That’s struck a chord among a huge fan community, whose engagement Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky seem to thrive on as they have more and more fun creating a paratextual world alongside the comic. (Climaxing in a separate ‘sex tips’ book spin-off).

05 Saga

5. SAGA (Vaughan/Staples; Image Comics)

A top 5 fixture this year and last, Saga remains quite hard to summarise and very easy to enjoy. It’s managed the trick of folding in time jumps, location shifts and big cast changes without losing interest and affection. Its tone remains wholly its own – amazing to think it was solicited initially as being “Star Wars meets Game of Thrones”, when it feels nothing whatsoever like either of them. It’s as earthy, melodramatic and funny as ever. And while we’re starting to see distinctively post-Saga comics show up, none of them work nearly as well. Long may it ramble on.

04 Ms Marvel

4. MS MARVEL (Wilson/Alphona/Miyazawa; Image Comics)

Last year Ms Marvel (#2 in the 2014 poll) was an Important Comic. This year, with its legacy visible all over the Marvel line and with Kamala Khan a breakout character in the new Avengers line-up, it could relax into just being a good one, consolidating its virtues (Wilson’s gently humorous characterisation; Alphona’s deliciously fluid and goofy art) and building its loyal audience. Of course, it’s still an important comic – in a culture as fearful and prejudiced as ours right now, how could it not be? But it respects its audience and its characters too much to act like one.

03 The Wicked And The Divine

3. THE WICKED + THE DIVINE (Gillen/McKelvie/Various/Wilson; Image Comics)

There was a 34-point gap between #4 and #3, and then only 8 points across the top three – another very tight poll. Still, when things were added up, last year’s winner slips down to third. For me, 2015 was the year WicDiv really got going, both in terms of starting to play its bigger plot cards and in the inspired “Commercial Suicide” arc, with five guest-artists (and a screwed’n’chopped Jamie McKelvie) deepening the characters and the WicDiv world. From Kate Brown’s Inanna to Brandon Graham’s Sakhmet, the guests made the arc into a perfectly sequenced compilation LP, while Kieron Gillen’s story started to dig away at issues of complicity and responsibility. The series looks headed to uncomfortable places – I can’t wait. (Though I’ll have to, until April.)

02 Phonogram

2. PHONOGRAM: THE IMMATERIAL GIRL (Gillen/McKelvie/Wilson; Image Comics)

Who would have thought that a story about music fans hitting 30 in the 00s and re-evaluating their lives would be so popular on a website run by music fans who hit 30 in the 00s and etc etc. Luckily Phonogram III is not only brilliant because it is about us (in the general sense, though we know half the people in it too). It strikes the perfect Phonogram balance between music and magic, and more importantly between rampant elitism and broad-brush sentiment. It’s a bit like pop music. Or being into pop music. Or being into indie music then deciding pop music had it right all along. Or… well, anyway. Some of Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie’s best ever work is in here, too – McKelvie’s capture of the subtle ways people age in their 20s and early 30s is particularly fine. I remember finishing Volume 2 and thinking “Great comic, but these characters are a pack of arseholes.” They turned out OK in the end, bless them.

But ultimately the future must belong to the young. The bright-eyed. The bushy-tailed.

01 Squirrel Girl

1. THE UNBEATABLE SQUIRREL GIRL (North/Henderson/Renzi; Marvel Comics)

Squirrel Girl! Squirrel Girl! Squirrel Girl you are the Queen of our world! I wrote about the first volume of USG on Goodreads and I feel it sums things up (People even ‘liked’ the review. People I did not know!) Here it is:

Comedy superhero comics have usually rested on the assumption that there is something rather silly about superheroes, and you can get a good laugh by laying bare what it is. It works, because these assumptions are true. But superheroes are also awesome, so there is a lot of room for a superhero comedy which takes THAT as its starting point.

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl is that comic. As the title suggests, there is no confrontation Squirrel Girl cannot win, and the joy is in seeing her do it. Of course, these are the narrative conventions that underpin basically every Marvel or DC title: this one just lays them out upfront and gets on with having fun and treating the Marvel Universe like a playground full of hilarious toys. It’s a perfect vehicle for Ryan North’s joie de vivre and his typically stylised dialogue – Doreen Green’s voice in the comic is a perfect blend of fourth-wall breaking and the real self-consciousness of a clever 18-year-old.

Some readers hate this – Squirrel Girl is a lightning rod for disgruntled fans who feel Marvel is becoming stupid or childish and pandering to a new audience of hipsters or – gasp! – girls. In fact it’s one of the most grown-up comics Marvel has published for years. Doreen Green in this series is a superhero who mainly solves problems the way they are ideally solved in the real world – negotiation leading to a mutually acceptable compromise solution. Nothing juvenile about that, even if she does it with a squirrel sidekick and occasionally clad in living squirrel body armour. Erica Henderson’s effervescent art is a great fit too, full of joy, energy, and a complete lack of regard for the narrow range of faces and bodies you normally see in a superhero comic.

Most of all, though, it’s very funny, and as generous as it’s entertaining. Big-hearted superhero romps by a team who understand that punching is the least interesting part of superheroics, and the best comic Marvel’s publishing right now. PS: Galactus is so right about Thanos.

OK that’s the end until next year. Thanks to all our voters, to Kat for dropping webcomic science, and to the people who make the awesome comics we love. In the comments I’ll list the other stuff that got a vote – lots of it.

]]>
https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2016/01/the-freaky-trigger-comics-poll-2015-12-1/feed 6
The Freaky Trigger Comics Poll 2015: #24-#13 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2016/01/the-freaky-trigger-comics-poll-2015-24-13 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2016/01/the-freaky-trigger-comics-poll-2015-24-13#comments Tue, 19 Jan 2016 17:02:56 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=29672 Whacky “Hi Readers! It’s WHACKY here from COR!!, the weekly mag that thrashes the others. You’ve not seen much of me in comics lately, which is a bit of a sore point. I used to have to beat the offers away, but frankly, now Corporal Punishment in schools has been given the boot, there’s not been much call for my services. It’s a shame – a good whacking builds character. It certainly built mine. Still, I’m happy to help Freaky Trigger with their punishing poll schedule – they’re caning these results posts at the moment. Here’s the next instalment of the comics poll – I’m sure you’ll agree it features some real belters!”

Thanks, Whacky! I said in the last block of comics that it had the most titles I hadn’t read in. That, er, turns out not to be the case. Apologies for the perfunctory nature of some of the commentary below! As ever, an asterisk signals that I’ve not read any of it. We pick up with number 24…

24 Sandman Overture

24. SANDMAN OVERTURE (Gaiman/Williams III; DC Comics/Vertigo)*

Released over the course of the last two years, Neil Gaiman’s return to Sandman was of course a massive seller. Sandman felt complete to me in any case, so I haven’t read this, but I’m tempted to, since passing up on six new issues of JH Williams art would seem neglectful. Judging by reviews, long term fans seem to be divided between beautiful and satisfying, and beautiful but a little unnecessary.

23 Demon

23. DEMON (Shiga; Webcomic/Self-Published)*

Jason Shiga’s Demon has been running for a year and a half now. By reputation it’s an intricately plotted, fast-escalating, funny and nasty strip which starts with a man in a hotel room writing a suicide note, hanging himself, and waking up alive… and that’s almost all the various reviews I’ve read want to tell me: it seems this comic is eminently spoilable. Like most of the webcomics on the list, it lands here thanks to a couple of people who love it rather than a bunch of voters who liked it. Such enthusiasm is a good thing! Print edition coming later this year, apparently.

22 Crossed 100

22. CROSSED + 100 (Moore/Andrade/Digikore Studios; Avatar)*

Avatar has become a late-career home for Alan Moore’s commercial comics work, some of which can feel like bill-paying exercises, but even the most apparently throwaway series rest on a spine of careful research and world-building. Crossed+100 is his contribution to Avatar’s long running series about a virus that unleashes humans’ worst impulses (generally to gross-out effect) – the aspect of it which attracted most critical attention was probably the carefully detailed future language and culture Moore came up with, to bring to life a post-outbreak world. The series – which I haven’t read – was successful enough that it continues as an ongoing monthly written by Si Spurrier.

21 Supreme Blue Rose

21. SUPREME: BLUE ROSE (Ellis/Lotay; Image Comics)

A late entry in the lists of metafictional superhero comics, Supreme: Blue Rose has a haunted, elegiac tone to it. A young woman is hired by a mysterious futurist to find a man who readers may know – but she doesn’t – is the sometime superhero, Supreme. But after that premise, the world and narrative begin to decay around the characters and readers. An enjoyable story about continuity is elevated by Tula Lotay’s exceptional art and design – languid figures, gauzy layers of colours and stray lines, all helping build the sense that what we’re reading is provisional, a dream or visitation.

20 Injection

20. INJECTION (Ellis/Shalvey/Bellaire; Image Comics)

A second Warren Ellis comic in a row brings us into the Top 20. Injection is a story of five people, mostly on the edge of middle-age, dealing with actions they took years ago when they “poisoned the 21st century” by mucking around with AI. Behind the SF content, as I’ve said on Goodreads, this is the most British of his most recent comics – exhausted people dealing with the legacy of stupid shit they did in the past, and it’s steeped in UK folklore too. Evocative, fascinating, and exciting – with Declan Shalvey’s knack for subtle horror working firmly in Injection’s favour.

19 Bitch Planet

19. BITCH PLANET (DeConnick/De Landro/Peter; Image Comics)

Bitch Planet sneaked into last year’s poll with a single issue published after votes had opened – I predicted then we’d see more of it, and here it is, jumping up 19 places. The series has expanded – finding new exploitation tropes to mine and twist, adding violent future sport into its thrill-powered mix – but also darkened and deepened, as Kelly Sue DeConnick explores new aspects of its misogynist dystopia. The righteous victories of the heroines are echoed by the growing community forming around the comic, who share essays, thoughts and tattoos in the back end. A landmark series.

18 Multiversity

18. MULTIVERSITY* (Morrison/Various; DC Comics)

Depending on who you ask, Multiversity is either the ultimate Grant Morrison DC comic, or one Grant Morrison DC comic too many. A tour of sorts through DC’s ever-shifting multiverse, which includes tributes (or responses) to CC Beck’s Captain Marvel and to Watchmen, wrapped up in Morrison’s latest ideas about fiction, reality, the state of comics, and suchlike. I’m usually well up for this kind of thing, so I think it’s my jadedness with DC, rather than with Morrison, that’s caused me to pass on this so far.

17 Lazarus

17. LAZARUS* (Rucka/Lark/Arcas; Image Comics)

Lazarus, Greg Rucka’s dystopian near-future story about a world where staggeringly rich individuals have formally superseded nation-states, has been running for a couple of years. This year it apparently kicked up a gear, its plots (and violence) accelerating. (Lazarus is – yet again – one I haven’t read, though thanks to one of Image’s regular and generous sales, I have the first trade paperback floating around my hard drive.)

16 Battle Tendency

16. JOJO’S BIZARRE ADVENTURE: BATTLE TENDENCY (Araki; Viz)

Finally one I have read! In fact, I put this at my #1 and was overjoyed when someone else picked it – I can’t think of a comic which has given me more sheer, ridiculous pleasure this year as JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, Hirohiko Araki’s preposterously long-running manga (it started in 1986). Battle Tendency is the second of eight linked, but separate series chronicling the adventures of the Joestar family – it originally ran around the turn of the 90s, making it the oldest comic here, but it qualifies because it’s the first English edition. The plot of JoJo’s is generally too risible to summarise – some Nazis tampering with pyramids awake super-immortals, as you do – but it’s always a vehicle for Araki to do what he does best: eye-popping, perspective-warping action scenes that look like dance-offs, characters drawn and dressed for the catwalk or video shoot, and fight scenes designed like locked-room puzzles. As a faintly surreal kicker, most of the characters are named after bands or rock stars: Battle Tendency’s primary antagonists are immortal beings from Earth’s primal past who are, naturally, named Cars, Wham and AC/DC. I’m now deep into JoJo’s IV – each is better than the one before, so if Viz’ beautiful hardbacks tempt you in there is plenty more madness to come.

15 Batgirl

15. BATGIRL* (Fletcher/Stewart/Tarr/Lapointe; DC Comics)

This reinvention of Batgirl, along with Ms Marvel, was a spearhead for the current wave of upbeat, funny, youthful and diverse superhero comics – a trend which the FT poll is generally well in favour of, so it’s not surprising one of its set texts gets some love this year. DC’s other revamps and reinventions have had mixed fortunes this year – though they’ve done better in this list – but Batgirl remains pop and popular.

14 Octopus Pie

14. OCTOPUS PIE* (Gran; Webcomic/Self-Published)

Enough is enough – this is one too many “Tom hasn’t read it” entries so I have RAIDED the pop poll to get FT’s webcomic expert Kat Stevens to give her views!

“I’ve only seen New York on screen, so my mental image of what it’s actually like to live there mostly comprises of impossibly-big Manhattan apartments in Friends and cocktails with the Sex And The City girls. Meredith Gran’s relaxed, rounded drawing style not only captures a much more believable NY reality – slushy pavements, broken phone screens, bars where you can’t hear a word anyone is saying – but the raw emotions and flaws of the people living inside it. This year’s strips have stepped back from original protagonists Eve and Hanna’s scrappy stoner comedy, in favour of exploring some of the secondary characters. In particular, Jane and Marigold taking the plunge has been heartwarming to watch: two twenty-something adults finally realising that relationships no longer have to be filled with teenage drama.”

13 Black Widow

13. BLACK WIDOW (Edmondson/Noto; Marvel Comics)

The highest placed comic to only get 2 votes, Black Widow is another big climber, jumping 13 places on the list. Natasha Romanova’s character has strong appeal, but I suspect most of the love here is for Phil Noto’s lush painted art – his delicate colours are made for the soft backlight of digital reading. Romanova has a new series from Marvel, and Noto’s next destination is the Star Wars universe, where he will be illustrating the new Poe Dameron monthly.

NEXT: The Top 12! – “is it is it Wicked?”, to quote comics pundit DJ Pied Piper

]]>
https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2016/01/the-freaky-trigger-comics-poll-2015-24-13/feed 2
The Freaky Trigger Comics Poll 2015: #37-#25 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2016/01/the-freaky-trigger-comics-poll-2015-37-25 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2016/01/the-freaky-trigger-comics-poll-2015-37-25#comments Fri, 15 Jan 2016 12:13:59 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=29640 Doomlord “Greetings people of Earth. It is I, Servitor Vek of the Doomlords of Nox. My all too convincing alien visage has come among you to pass final judgement on your species. I expect to reach a guilty verdict. Perhaps the comics you have selected in the Freaky Trigger poll can persuade me that despite humanity’s many imperfections, you deserve to be spared cosmic annihilation… for another few weeks.”

Gosh, thanks Doomlord. This is the – slightly delayed – second section of this year’s comics poll, and also has the honour of being the section where I have read fewest of the titles voted for. Will that stop me making brief and ill-informed comments? No, it will not. (An asterisk means I haven’t read it AT ALL, though)

37 Casanova

37. CASANOVA: ACEDIA (Fraction/Moon; Image Comics)

I made the mistake of diving into this return of Matt Fraction’s dimension-hopping spy without having read any other Casanova, so I was completely lost. But obviously existing fans – and people with better reading comprehension than me – were digging it. The first Fraction title in this section of the poll and – cue foreshadowing noise – perhaps not the last…

36 Spider-Gwen

36. SPIDER-GWEN (Latour/Rodriguez/Renzi; Marvel Comics)

Spider-Gwen, Spider-Gwen / First appeared in a one-shot then / It sold out, in a flash / Marvel made, piles of cash / Look out, here comes the Spider-Gwen! Great costume aside I wasn’t especially taken with the alternate-world tales of Gwen Stacy as the spectacular Spider-Gwen, but it is symptomatic of Marvel’s new demographic priorities – Stacy’s death, a sacrificial victim to give Peter Parker more to moan about, was the most prominent “fridging” of the Silver/Bronze Age, and here it’s been symbolically reversed to give Marvel another breakout heroine.

35 Prez

35. PREZ (Russell/Caldwell; DC Comics)

The concept of Prez is the same as it was when Joe Simon introduced it back in the 70s – “the first teen president!”). But this series – published under the DC You banner – feels quite different from that famously hokey outing. This time the first teen president is Beth Ross, viral video sensation and winner on a write-in vote, but the comic is a fair bit sharper than previous iterations, an enjoyable, well-paced mix of optimism and satire. Not every punch lands, and the comic isn’t exactly subtle – but I liked it, and the fact it’s been made and won at least cult success is a good sign for DC.

34 Astro City

34. ASTRO CITY (Busiek/Anderson; DC Comics/Vertigo)*

I don’t think I’ve read Astro City since I stopped working at a comic shop in the mid-90s. Back then it struck me as the Crowded House of superhero comics, an exemplar of classicist superhero storytelling virtue in a fast, gaudy era, well-meaning and well-crafted but ultimately a bit lacking in thrill-power for my unrefined tastes. But it’s thrived, and now sits ensconced as one of Vertigo’s most popular series, it’s familiar but mature take on superheroics apparently as needed now as ever.

33 ODY-C

33. ODY-C (Fraction/Ward; Image Comics)

Last year, Matt Fraction and Christian Ward’s ODY-C snagged 32nd place on the list despite only having one issue out. This time, with half a dozen issues under its belt, it’s… 33rd. Highly consistent! The gender-swapped sci-fi retelling of the Odyssey remains a unique experience – Ward’s gorgeous, proggy art matched with Fraction at his most formalist, trapping his human characters in a metrical cage of epic verse-form while his Gods’ scansion roams free. And now the creative team are branching out from their primary source towards other strands of Greek myth, the comic looks set to recover the element of surprise you lose by retelling a very famous tale.

32 Hark A Vagrant

32. HARK! A VAGRANT (Beaton; Webcomic, Drawn & Quarterly)

It was nice this Christmas walking into Waterstones and seeing Step Aside, Pops – the second Hark! A Vagrant collection – getting proper buy-this-for-your-nan promotional shine. I hope some people did! Anyway, in a strong year for webcomics on the list, it’s no surprise to find Kate Beaton’s perennial here. As well as the historico-literary wit of it all, I don’t think there’s anyone drawing today better at capturing our base emotions – boredom, contempt, scorn, frustration – in a line or two, and making it so delightful to look at.

31 Hawkeye

31. HAWKEYE! (Fraction/Aja/Hollingsworth; Marvel Comics)*

Apologies to creators missed out if more than one issue came out in 2015, but I think Hawkeye is this year’s Young Avengers – eligible on the basis of its final issue. (All-New Hawkeye picked up one vote too, but I decided not to roll them up). Anyway I, er, haven’t read it yet. But for all the delays, it’s obvious that the Fraction-scripted Hawkeye is one of the era-defining Marvel runs – up there with the Claremont/Byrne X-Men and the Miller Daredevil in terms of setting a tone for the comics around it and making different things possible (within the strictures of a corporate entertainment entity, natch).

30 Crickets

30. CRICKETS (Harkham; Self-Published)

I’ve long lost touch with what used to be called ‘alternative comics’ – stupidly, on this evidence. The votes here are for Crickets #4, which is the only issue of Sammy Harkham’s self-published title to come out this year, and in fact, the only issue since 2010. (He is a busy man, editing acclaimed anthology Kramer’s Ergot). It’s the second part of “Blood Of The Virgin”, a story about exploitation films in the 70s, and it’s a marvellous piece of storytelling – the way Harkham captures character in a tiny handful of dialogue lines, and the way his dense, cross-cutting scenes evoke the chaos, ego-clash and idiocy of a movie shoot, are just wonderful. Strongly recommended – if I’d bought it before it showed up on the list, it would have been on my ballot too.

29 The Humans

29. THE HUMANS (Keller/Neeley; Image Comics)

From a story about 70s exploitation flicks to pretty much the ultimate example of same. Not actually a film, but who wouldn’t flock to cinemas to see the ultra-violent adventures of an all-ape biker gang? The aesthetic is complete, the action is visceral without being sleazy, and behind the great, nasty fun is a dark tale of PTSD and betrayal: issue #7 is as upsetting a comic as I read this year.

28 The Ultimates

28. THE ULTIMATES (Ewing/Rocafort/Brown; Marvel Comics)

Marvel Comics have had two clashing visions of the cosmic. One is Kirby’s from the 1960s – show us something bigger, vaster, newer every month. The other is Starlin’s from the 70s – outer space as inner space, cosmic entities and forces as personifications of psychological drives. Galactus on the one hand, Thanos on the other. For a long time, the Starlin side has been ascendant. In The Ultimates, Al Ewing (yes relation) is bringing Kirby back – as much as this follows on from the lovely ensemble storytelling of his Mighty Avengers, it’s also filling a gap left by Marvel’s decision to stop publishing Fantastic Four. Rocafort’s detailed, dramatic art is from yet another tradition – the “widescreen” comics of the 00s and the original Ultimates title. Of Al’s three post-Secret Wars titles, this one has picked up most critical heat, and I’m excited to see where it goes.

27 Captain Britain And The Mighty Defenders

27. CAPTAIN BRITAIN AND THE MIGHTY DEFENDERS (Ewing/Davis/Farmer/Quintana; Marvel Comics)

The second part of our Al Ewing double-bill, this Secret Wars tie-in has a simple premise. Faiza Hussain, the Muslim Captain Britain originally created by Paul Cornell in the 00s, versus a Judge Dredd analogue representing the forces of a paranoid security state. Sounds like it might be a tiny bit… topical? Perish the thought. Marks the first time a totalitarian robot villain has quoted David Cameron, and I dare say not the last.

26 Twilight Children

26. THE TWILIGHT CHILDREN (Hernandez/Cooke/Stewart; DC Comics/Vertigo)

Probably the book on this list I know least about – I’m sure Darwyn Cooke is as strong a storyteller as ever but I’ve not kept up with his work lately, even with the temptation of a Gilbert Hernandez story. With those talents, no surprise to see it this high, though from the couple of reviews I’ve read I can’t work out what it’s even about. Apologies for this half-arsed blurb, Twilight Children fans – I will drop by a library when the trade comes out.

25 Kaptara


25. KAPTARA (Zdarsky/Macleod; Image Comics)

There are a lot of funny comics coming out right now – but Chip Zdarsky and Kagan Macleod’s bizarro mix of Flash Gordon and 80s He-Man cartoons was the one that made me laugh most all year. The set-up – selfish, cynical protagonist in a gung-ho world – isn’t new. In fact it’s the same set-up, historically, as Zdarsky’s other series, Marvel’s Howard The Duck. But while that title is good, for me Kaptara gets more mileage and better jokes from the idea, and its gleeful satire is more in the Steve Gerber spirit, too. Macleod’s gloriously grotesque, hyperbolic art and colouring completes the package, giving Kaptara a tacky tartrazine glow perfectly suited to its inspirations.

NEXT! Superspies! Parallel worlds! The highest climber from last year and – the oldest comic on the list!

]]>
https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2016/01/the-freaky-trigger-comics-poll-2015-37-25/feed 3
The Freaky Trigger Comics Poll 2015: #50-#38 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2016/01/the-freaky-trigger-comics-poll-2015-50-38 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2016/01/the-freaky-trigger-comics-poll-2015-50-38#comments Wed, 06 Jan 2016 14:58:57 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=29498 Rasher “OINK! GNURF! SLURP!! SLOO!! GNAROOSH! GRUNT! SNAFFLE!! CHOMP! SNORRT!”

Translation: “Good morning, everyone. I’m Rasher, the porcine companion of that young shaver Dennis, and I’m delighted to introduce the 2015 Freaky Trigger Comics Poll. In a year when pigs have had rather a rough ride in the news, it’s wonderful to be able to show that we are cultured animals with a deep appreciation of the ‘Ninth Art’. Some of the comics here may not meet my high aesthetic standards, but I think you’ll agree that the diversity of the list is a credit to its voters and our shared hobby. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have an appointment with some week-old cabbage.”

Thanks Rasher! We had more voters, and more nominated comics, than last year, with the happy result that I’ve actually had to leave off some titles to produce this Top 50. I’m still greedy enough to go up to 50, mind you. The Comics poll is unique in that the same titles can, in theory, win it again and again if they’re being published year on year. So it’s worth reminding you all that last year Image Comics’ The Wicked And The Divine pipped Marvel’s Ms Marvel to first place by one solitary point, with Loki: Agent Of Asgard in third. Will any or all of those show up this year? Wait and see!

Titles marked with an asterisk are ones I haven’t read any of yet – thanks Pete’s film poll for this handy device

50 Omega Men

50. OMEGA MEN (King/Bagenda/Fajardo Jr; DC Comics)

Part of DC Comics’ “DC You” initiative, a slew of Summer launches designed to tap into the young, diverse new mainstream market so successfully identified by Marvel. Most of them flopped. As, to be fair, did this, at least in sales terms. But Omega Men was also DC You’s biggest surprise – a comic reminiscent not of Ms Marvel or Batgirl but of the ambitious and divisive 90s Legion Of Superheroes title, marrying a strict 9-panel grid to gritty, allusive political sci-fi. Omega Men is hardly subtle in its real-world references – its free preview featured Green Lantern Kyle Rayner as the unwilling star of an ISIS-style beheading video. But on-the-nose “relevance” is as much a DC tradition as reboots.

49 8House

49. 8HOUSE (Graham/Churchland/Penalta/Maier/Barlow; Image Comics)

One of the joys of Brandon Graham’s Prophet series was the imaginative worldbuilding – wonderfully exotic, sometimes disturbing alien cultures and creatures brought quickly to life in a few sentences and panels. Another was seeing multiple creators given stylistic rein in a single-comic shared universe. Fantasy series 8House repeats both tricks, but pushes its diversity of approach even harder.

48 One Punch Man

48. ONE PUNCH MAN
(ONE/Murata; Viz Comics)

I feel like John Peel introducing a rare hip-hop entry in the Festive Fifty, but I must say I was pleased to see more Manga on this year’s list. Even if I voted for most of it. Case in point, One Punch Man, satirical fight manga webcomic turned bestselling digital and print manga (qualifying here because 2015 saw its first print publication). For me, the story of a superhero whose main enemy is boredom is at its best when it’s playing things for deadpan laughs, but artist Yusuke Murata has the chops to handle the straightforward battle manga scenes too.

47 A Silent Voice

47. A SILENT VOICE (Oima; Kodansha Comics USA)

Yoshitoki Oima, the creator of A Silent Voice, apparently had to take her publishers to court to get it published, as it casts Japanese youth and their school system in a deeply unflattering light. She’s been rewarded with awards, a successful anime adaptation and now English language licensing. A Silent Voice starts off as a brutal depiction of bullying from the bully’s perspective – Oima putting his actions in context without ever justifying them. Psychologically acute, attractively drawn, and with some terrific use of page and graphic design to convey interior states, A Silent Voice is one of the best teen comics in a strong era for them.

46 Secret Wars

46. SECRET WARS (Hickman/Ribic/Svorcina; Marvel Comics)

Hyped as the blockbuster event that lives up to the hype, Secret Wars has been plagued by delays which have robbed the series of a lot of its in-continuity impact – we’re still waiting for its final issue. What we do have is a vast, bombastic homage to the best bits of the toy-shifting original: Marvel heroes and villains stranded on a patchwork world, and Doctor Doom in possession of ultimate power. Thanks to Jonathan Hickman’s ultra-portentious style, this is an event book that feels weighty, even if the universe it upended is capering happily on without it.

45 Material

45. MATERIAL (Kot/Tempest/Cowles; Image Comics)

The productive, always-interesting Ales Kot published new titles with Image at a ferocious pace in 2015, as well as rounding off two cultish Marvel series. Material was the most ambitious and (as it turned out) the most doomed – an exploration of contemporary issues and news via the cross-cut stories of four unlinked protagonists. Black Lives Matter, black site interrogation techniques, islamophobia, movie industry misogyny, hacktivism, generation gaps – face it, true believers, this one had it all. Never didactic, Material’s greatest strength was the way it felt like we were watching Kot learn about, think about, and try and come to terms with contemporary life at the same time the rest of us were.

44 Island

44. ISLAND (Anthology, edited by Rios and Graham; Image Comics)

Island has the distinction of being the only monthly comic I buy physically – its attractive oversize packaging being a definite part of the appeal. The downside of this is that I haven’t actually got round to reading much of it. European comics anthologies like Metal Hurlant are an avowed influence, and there’s a similar desire in Island to show the reader new imaginative worlds. But if the baroque fantasies of Heavy Metal are prog rock, Island is indie pop – a scratchy, friendly, cheeky and lived-in take on genre.

43 The Private Eye

43. THE PRIVATE EYE* (Vaughan/Martin/Vicente; Panel Syndicate)

Since his return to regular comics with Saga, Brian K Vaughan has enjoyed a remarkable critical (and commercial) strike-rate. The Private Eye, his digital comics collaboration with Marcos Martin, took on themes of privacy and identity and finished its online run in March, getting a lavish print edition from Image later in the year. I haven’t read it yet, but it’s still up on Panel Syndicate under a pay-what-you-like deal.

42 Daredevil

42. DAREDEVIL (Waid/Samnee/Wilson; Marvel Comics)

Mark Waid’s run on Daredevil came to an end this year – most of the votes were careful to specify that’s what they were rewarding. There are no shortage of good Daredevil runs but Waid’s very distinct, optimistic vision stands apart from most approaches to the character since the 80s. Once the initial shock of a stable, happy Daredevil subsided, Waid settled in to doing what he does best: solid, entertaining stories about people trying to live a good life.

41 Airboy

41. AIRBOY* (Robinson/Hinkle; Image Comics)

A metafictional superhero yarn which ended up as the most controversial comic on the list, when its second issue was sharply criticised for its transphobia. James Robinson and Greg Hinkle apologised – as Robinson admitted, they “fucked up”. The rest of the comic won widespread praise for its darkly humourous exploration of the insecurity and shame of the middle-aged comics pro, subject matter which had put me off in the first place, so I hadn’t read it anyway.

40 Transformers v GI Joe

40. TRANSFORMERS VS GI JOE (Scioli/Barber; IDW)

I don’t give half a damn about Transformers and even less about GI Joe, but I loved this series for how seriously it treats its material. That would normally be a recipe for something dreadful – but Scioli’s seriousness isn’t the seriousness of the adult holding onto childish things by updating them, but the life-or-death intensity of the child lost in the flow of imaginative play. This super-heavy approach, plus the brickish Kirby-esque figures, masks a bunch of formal experimentation in the art – several pages here are spectacular. The overall feel is so compressed and worked it’s almost queasy – “it’s the PC Music of comics”, I said the first time I read an issue.

39 The Spire

39. THE SPIRE* (Spurrier/Stokely/May; Boom! Studios)

This one is sitting in my Comixology account waiting to be read should my new iPad ever finally arrive – it’s a mystery set in one of those sprawling fantasy megacities writers love so much. Beyond that I don’t know very much about it (and have no desire to spoil myself) so I’ll just say that I’m glad a Si Spurrier comic is here on the list. The game of cross-generational comparisons between British writers is a reprehensible one, but his stuff reminds me of Pete Milligan – smart, stylish, occasionally a little cruel and happy to bamboozle the reader.

38 Silver Surfer

38. SILVER SURFER (Slott/Allred; Marvel Comics)

Dan Slott and Mike Allred’s reimagining of the Silver Sufer in the mode of modern Doctor Who – last of his kind, burdened with terrible guilt, travelling with a sparky young Earthwoman – hit #8 on last year’s list, and turns up again here. Like other Marvel titles, it got caught up in Secret Wars, though used the event to tie up all its own first year’s worth of plots and themes. There is lots of talk of TV-style “seasons” in comics right now, but Silver Surfer fulfilled that promise particularly well. And like its inspiration has so often, it ended that season with a triumph for the power of love.

NEXT! Teenagers! Animals! History! Violence! Al Ewing!

]]>
https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2016/01/the-freaky-trigger-comics-poll-2015-50-38/feed 1
The Freaky Trigger Comics Poll 2015 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2015/12/the-freaky-trigger-comics-poll-2015 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2015/12/the-freaky-trigger-comics-poll-2015#comments Fri, 18 Dec 2015 11:17:59 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=29350 fletcher hanks Back by popular demand! (Kat asked)

As last year, we are running a COMICS POLL. This was an intimate occasion in 2014 with a small but magnificent body of voters, so if you want to vote in a poll where your opinion really will count* then face front, true believer, this is the poll for you!

The rules are the same as last year. Vote for UP TO 20 titles IN ORDER and send your vote to freakytrigger AT gmail DOT com. These can be ongoing monthlies, original graphic novels, one-shots, web comics, individual strips within anthologies, anthologies themselves, or really anything except that I’ll fold single-issue votes up into the overall title, and it should have come out in 2015! (OR have seen its first English edition come out in 2015)

I think it has been a smashing year for comics and – if you read them – I hope you think that too. I have a shitload of stuff I haven’t even got to yet, but I do also plan to write some kind of personal best of list and by all means use the COMMENTS to remind people of worthy titles as by god there are a lot of comics out there.

*as long as at least one of your choices is voted for by somebody else somewhere, blah blah.

]]>
https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2015/12/the-freaky-trigger-comics-poll-2015/feed 2
You Think We Make Dreams In This Town https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2015/07/you-think-we-make-dreams-in-this-town https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2015/07/you-think-we-make-dreams-in-this-town#respond Tue, 28 Jul 2015 18:04:00 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=29113 More comics reviews from goodreads.com

fadeout THE FADE OUT Vol 1 (Image Comics. Ed Brubaker/Sean Phillips/Elizabeth Breitweiser)
SATELLITE SAM Vol 2: Satellite Sam And The Kinescope Snuff (Image Comics. Matt Fraction/Howard Chaykin)

One of the nice things about the current rise of Image is the leeway it gives creators to do passion projects, in this case a pair of historical crime thrillers which stand or fall on how indulgently evocative they are of places long-established in other fictions. So The Fade Out is story set in the dream factory of 40s Hollywood, where fine movies are made by people of integrity who spend their time being nice to each other. ONLY JOKING! There’s a dead starlet pretty much on page one and after that it’s four issues of noir bingo, lovingly executed by the purring collaborative engine of Brubaker and Phillips.

I don’t really care about Hollywood, or noir. But these guys do. It’s obvious the word “comfort zone” is too small for where these creators are on The Fade Out: this is an all out luxury zone, with writer and artist pillowing down and indulging themselves in every possible trope. Drunks, skunks, reds both under and in the bed (maybe they’ll end up dead?) and plenty of real life stars to spot. It’s glossy, beautifully overripe even when it’s dark, a romp if you like. I’m not feeling it exactly, but I’m certainly enjoying it.

If I had to pick, though, I’d pick Satellite Sam. Fraction and Chaykin’s period piece of sex, suits and swearing at the birth of live TV has a strong middle act, with protagonist Michael White swapping one addiction for another as he starts to follow in his dead Dad’s footsteps. The ostensible mystery – Who Killed Satellite Sam? – becomes ever more of a MacGuffin in this volume, but it hardly matters: as with part one, you read for the texture more than the plot.

Where the second volume improves is serving up more interesting characters – while the main plot takes a leisurely route, there are revelations and developments for the supporting cast that make Satellite Sam a far stronger ensemble piece and make its 1950s seem vivid, even if each individual twist (a brutal wartime past; a black man forced to ‘pass’ as white in 50s TV) feels like it’s there to introduce commentary on the era as much as to deepen a character. But that’s period drama for you. A breezy conjuration of place and tone, with Chaykin enjoying himself drawing craggy men and fleshy women – though close consultation of the character guide is still recommended to make most sense of it. (3.5 stars / 4 stars)

MANIFEST DESTINY Vol 2: Amphibia And Insecta (Image Comics. Chris Dingess/Matthew Roberts/Owen Gieni)

Chris Dingess’ and Matthew Roberts’s American frontier history meets Cthulhoid horror comic continues to be one of Image’s more straightforwardly entertaining series. Beyond the high concept pitch this is a satisfying adventure comic, no less and not much more: much of this second volume is spent with the Lewis and Clark expedition’s crew trapped by a suitably squamous amphibian beast, which allows Dingess to develop and complicate his cast a little more, though makes for a less exciting few issues than the multiple horrors of volume one. A meeting with some locals at the end of the volume has as much plot development as the entire rest of the book, providing useful backstory and an indication of quite how out of their depth our protagonists are.

Something I particularly enjoy about Manifest Destiny is the sense of stretched resources, particularly of the human kind – even the vilest human being might at some point come in useful, so a lot of time is spent trying to rescue and repair men apparently lost to the monstrosities of the wilderness. It makes for a horror comic with a low body count but a strong sense of stakes, and Roberts’ enjoyably earthy, detailed art makes every scratch, gash, and pustule count. (3 stars)

SECRET AVENGERS Vol 1: Let’s Have A Problem (Marvel Comics. Ales Kot/Michael Walsh/Matthew Wilson)

A third stab at making the Secret Avengers title work for Marvel – this one a S.H.I.E.L.D. book in all but name, picking up some of the cast but none of the tone of Nick Spencer’s suspenseful run. Ales Kot’s approach has been compared to Hawkeye – it has Hawkeye in it, and he acts a bit like he does in the Matt Fraction book – but Secret Avengers reminds me of a whole stew of titles. Michael Walsh’s quirky, diagrammatic art is in line with Chip Zdarsky’s approach on Sex Criminals or Steve Lieber’s on Superior Foes Of Spider-Man, and Kot’s flip tone isn’t far off Superior Foes either. But there’s a commitment to stylish, near-future weirdness (a sentient bomb built by an art terrorist, to pick an idea that catches the tone nicely) that recalls Grant Morrison, or the grandfather of Marvel spy cool, Steranko.

That’s a strong list of notes to hit, and Kot is one of the more exciting and ambitious writers Marvel have found lately. Secret Avengers isn’t as good as his independent work, but it offers hip, smart, fairly sophisticated fun. It’s not quite cohering yet, though – some characters still feel like they’re in it by decree rather than need, the references can be a touch too on the nose, the situations hotter in concept than execution. But Kot writes a zippy Phil Coulson, Maria Hill, and Clint Barton and he’s the first writer to make the new Nick Fury seem like a good idea. In a character- and idea-driven book, that’s a fine strikerate. (3 stars)

PROPHET, Vol 1: Remission (Image Comics. Brandon Graham/Simon Roy/Farel Dalrymple/Giannis Milonogiannis)

The first time I read these stories – as individual issues, closer to when they came out – I adored the imagination and sensory impact of each comic but the story seemed looser. Not so, on re-reading: as a graphic novel the action in the first long story sets off the three shorter ones that follow it, and each one introduces crucial information for the series as a whole. Prophet’s reputation for trippiness sells it short – this is also well-planned science fiction in a complex and visceral universe.

That said, it is a gorgeous, sensual comic, one of Image’s very best – fluid lines, fleshy colours and widescreen, information-rich compositions working together as a far-future derangement. The minimal scripting is a joy, too – I feel like I’ve seen the impact of its terse potency across a lot of other comics, Image and otherwise. (Though perhaps the style begins earlier – but this was the first time I noticed it.) The action is portentious, but there is a lot of sly humour lurking in the details of panels – and, in the first story, in the reaction shots of beefcake protagonist John Prophet. Brandon Graham’s great skill – also seen in this year’s 8House:Arclight – is a kind of worldbuilding via alien ecology. Get the details of a food chain or system of exchange right and everything else falls bewitchingly into place. (5 stars)

]]>
https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2015/07/you-think-we-make-dreams-in-this-town/feed 0
Left Me Standing Like A Guilty Schoolboy https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2015/07/left-me-standing-like-a-guilty-schoolboy https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2015/07/left-me-standing-like-a-guilty-schoolboy#comments Fri, 17 Jul 2015 08:57:59 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=29091 Jackpot Cover “It’s passionately interesting for me that the things that I learned in a small town, in very modest home, are just the things that I believe have won the Election.” – Margaret Thatcher, 4 May 1979

“The biggest horror is that the whole world’s becoming suburban. I find it very worrying.” – Norman Mansbridge

COVER

The last thing on anyone at IPC’s mind, when they launched a comic, is that somebody might actually want to keep the thing. Comics were born on the production line, and landfill was their grave, and in that brief span between their urge was not to survive but to reproduce, to impel the reader to buy next week’s issue. So in May 1979 the second issue of Jackpot – “IT’S A WINNER” invited mutilation at front and end. On the cover, a free SQUIRT RING to lure buyers in, mounted with sellotape, which still sticks to my Ebayed copy, covering a gash in the paper like a badly sutured wound. On the back, a coupon to fill in, cut out and hand solemnly over to the newsagent: “PLEASE RESERVE A COPY OF JACKPOT FOR ME EVERY WEEK”.

It’s a loyalty game. There are only so many kids who want to buy comics, and most of those already do. A new title offers a raft of new stories, which may or may not wear better than the ones in the comic you already buy, whose formulae have begun to thin and fray. But with a squirt ring, too – who wouldn’t risk ten pence? Then once you’re snagged, the magazine urges you to the newsagent for next week. You don’t want to miss out.

So it is that the first comic you see in Jackpot No.2 is a three panel, silent strip, admirably clear, instructing you on the use and delight of your squirt ring. Panel 1: a girl shows off her ring to a passing boy. Panel 2: the boy leans in close to admire this fine piece of jewellery. Panel 3: SPLOOSH! A deluge – in the poor sap’s face. HAW HAW!

Reality disappoints. The squirt ring is an ugly lump, it brings no boys to the yard, and the feeble spit of water its bulb holds wouldn’t trouble an ant. Like most cheap pranks, the squirt ring only works if all participants have silently agreed it will – an indulgent Dad, perhaps, leaning in to play the patsy.

This conspiratorial element, this lack of real surprise, is not unique to the squirt ring. To grow up in any culture is to become gradually aware of its web of social relationships, customs, and norms, and of your place in it. Only so much of this awareness can come from direct experience. The rest of the job is done by stories. Fairy tales, comics and cartoons – the first fictions you meet – carry in miniature an implicit social order, or, more rarely, a glimpse of alternatives. We romanticise comics for kids as an escape from reality – an opening of a door into wonder. But to do this they often play a double game, and reinforce reality at the same time. If you want to understand a society, look at its comics.

IPC/Fleetway, publishers in the 70s and 80s of Buster, Jackpot, Cor!, Whizzer And Chips, Knockout, Monster Fun, and dozens of other weekly comics, were not especially interested in alternative social orders. When such things disturbed them in real life – in the form of union action, for instance – the typical reaction was harsh. The existing social order, on the other hand, interested them a great deal. It was their bread and butter. The twenty or so strips making up a typical Fleetway title were social comedies for the under-10s, in which all the hierarchies and absurdities of society might be turned into a gag strip. The status quo might be mocked, but not seriously challenged. The jokes in these social comedy strips, like the squirt ring, work because everyone agrees that they will.

If the cover dates are right, Jackpot’s first issue came out on the day of the 1979 General Election – a genuine challenge to the status quo. I don’t remember the election. I do remember buying Jackpot. It became my comic – ten pence a week, every week, bought with especial loyalty because I’d been in it from the start.

A comic is a machine for understanding society. How does this one work?

RICHIE WRAGGS

The first strip is by Mike Lacey, son of another comics artist, Bill Lacey. British humour strips are identified by artist: scripts were provided by other, nameless freelancers, or often simply worked up in-house. In the case of a new comic with new stories, like Jackpot, the artists might have a hand in the look and feel of the strip – vital, since the plots are so rudimentary.

Most strips are one-pagers, turning on a simple premise. In this case, Richie Wraggs is a poor country bumpkin turned tramp, looking to make his fortune alongside his cat, Lucky. Each week he seems to have fallen on bad luck, but the situation reverses to produce a happy ending and – always temporary – riches.

This episode rests on a laboured pun about “crock” – the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow – and “crock” meaning worn out vintage car. This won’t be the last pun we see. You imagine scripters, close to deadlines or the end of their tethers, reaching grimly for a pun in lieu of a plot. That this is the best they can manage two episodes in doesn’t say much for Richie Wraggs’ potential.

Richie Wraggs

Given an idiotic story to work on, Lacey has a decent go. The meandering plot at least means Richie Wraggs shows off many iconic subjects of British comic art. We see cats (a fleabag, naturally), heaps of sausage and mash (the national cartoon food), and accidents involving a pot of paint.

And, of course, yokels. Richie Wraggs talks in West Country shorthand, and is inevitably a dimwit – the rather faithless Lucky provides commentary on his foolishness. His benefactor, an old man in a large fur coat, is upper class and genial. As we’ll see, it’s rare for posh characters in Jackpot to be shown in a good light: presumably the law that country folk are fools is stronger than the law that the upper classes are venal graspers. There is no letters page in Jackpot: if anyone from Richie Wraggs’ part of the country read it, they had no outlet for complaint.

ANGEL’S PROPER CHARLIES

The second strip is by Trevor Metcalfe, an art school graduate who got into comics after his National Service. In title only, it’s a TV spoof – one of the genres British comics ran on. Angel, a young girl, has three boy admirers, her Charlies – each week she beguiles them into helping her with some mischief. This week she wants to get into the Circus without paying.

016

Jackpot might have been bought by any children, but it’s obviously pitched as a boys’ comic – the majority of protagonists are boys, their friends are generally boys, and so Angels Proper Charlies is unusual. Not just because its lead is a girl, but the central theme of the strip is boys making fools of themselves over a girl. Angel is imaginative and resourceful, but not entirely independent: her job is to manipulate boys with her beauty. With the rather icky job of signifying pre-teen irresistibility, Metcalfe wisely goes for big 70s hair and a big smile: sophistication, not sex. The main audience, I’d guess, was kids with older brothers and sisters, viewing their emergent passions with a pitiless and scornful eye. Still, the message – girls will try to make a chump of you – comes through miserably clear.

For the second strip in a row, the plot involves slipping through a board in a rickety fence.

FULL O’BEANS

The third strip is by Tom Paterson, hired by IPC straight after leaving school. Paterson’s art is immediately more enticing, wilder and more exaggerated, than anything in the comic so far. He’s a follower of Leo Baxendale, creator of the Bash Street Kids for IPC’s great Scottish rival DC Thomson, and probably the single major figure in British humour comics. And you can tell. The physicality, the love of action, and the occasional grotesquerie in Paterson’s style are straight from the Baxendale playbook.

017

Full O’Beans is a strongman story – a stock “kids with amazing powers” idea. In this case Freddie hulks out when he drains a can of cold beans from his special stash. The plot is beyond basic – a drawer in Fred’s Mum’s dresser is stuck, he uses bean power to open it, wrecks the dresser, then rebuilds it. The focus is all on ludicrous feats and uses of the super strength – like chopping a tree into planks.

Any fences? Yes. Fred and his Mum are poor – their room is damp and peeling – but they live in a detached house with a fenced garden. It will turn out that almost every room in every strip, from office to home to hovel – is drawn this way, full of mildew and old wallpaper. (See story #20, Laser Eraser, for an illustration). A few years before we’d moved house, from a bungalow to a three-bedroom suburban home. Exploring the new home is an early memory. The vacated rooms were as Jackpot describes.

MARATHON MUTT

The fourth strip is by an unknown artist – the only one which I couldn’t find even claimed credit for. Some strips in Jackpot are signed, some aren’t. There’s no consistency, and it’s not as if the big name illustrators get signatures. It’s a shame I can’t find details for Marathon Mutt, as it was a particular favourite.

018

Partly that was down to the unusual format. Marathon Mutt is a gag strip done as a continuing serial – the adventures of Henry Bono, an anthropomorphised greyhound, who competes in a marathon against other breeds of dogs. Each breed has a gimmick – a sausage dog rolls, a springer spaniel bounces, and so on. The inspiration is obviously Hanna-Barbera’s Wacky Races cartoon, a showcase for this mix of slapstick comedy and minor dramatic tension. Back then it was the tension I liked. Now I like the textures of the landscape, which create a rudimentary but welcome sense of place. But Marathon Mutt is out of step with the social comedy of the rest of the comic, even with the cliffhanger it’s a little gentler.

THE TEENY SWEENEY

The fifth strip is by Jack Oliver, one of the younger IPC artists at this stage and another obvious Baxendale disciple – wilder than Paterson, indeed. The story is a TV spoof, more direct this time – its leads are roughly meant to be child versions of Regan and Carter, the heroes of British cop show The Sweeney, which had just finished its TV run, full of hardcase action and car chases. For The Teeny Sweeney, this means an appearance for a staple of British comics, the cartie, a rickety, gravity-defying soapbox cart.

Broadly speaking, the imagined suburbia of Jackpot strips – fences and all – is recognisable from my childhood. The strips are not quite placeless – in this one, our heroes cart their way to a farm, which suggests a more rural backdrop – but generally you can map Jackpot’s landscape onto most towns outside the very inner city. The home-made contraptions of kids’ comics, though – the soapbox carts and catapults – were alien to me. I was too middle-class to have friends who built them? Certainly a possibility – but it also seems likely that in their heyday these gadgets had proved themselves too useful to cartoonists to ever be discarded, visual shorthands for all kinds of outdoor fun.

019

The gag in this strip involves overhearing a farmer talking about a “kid napping” – the writer usefully including a space, to drain as much humour as possible from the payoff (perhaps you too can guess). Maybe it’s the quality of the material that nudges Oliver into indulging one of British comics’ greatest traditions – filling panels with puns, sight gags, and extras: a disembodied hand marked “FARM HAND”, or the words “CARTING IS SUCH SWEET SORROW” on the side of the speeding soapbox.

JACK POTT

The sixth strip is by Joe McCaffrey, who learned to draw while at sea with the Merchant Navy. He was in the middle of a long IPC career, creating Jack Pott for an earlier Fleetway title, Cor!! This makes Jack Pott the only strip carried over from any previous comic – IPC in their 60s and 70s prime much preferred to commission new titles and fresh (or re-sprayed) ideas than run reprints.

Jack Pott is a good example of a theme strip. Jack is a kid who wins things. That’s pretty much all there is to it. He’s lucky, or skilful, or a good gambler, depending on the story. It’s not a promising set-up, and prone to disapproval, which is probably why the character had been rested for a few years and wasn’t given top billing despite the comic’s name.

020

McCaffrey does a fine job here, though. He’s not a chaotic cartoonist in the post-Baxendale mode, instead he cleaves to the jovial, unflashy, direct comic storytelling I think of as the IPC house style. So the strip doesn’t have a lot of visual fizz, but the storytelling is impeccably clear. This is the first story where you don’t need the captions – Jack’s friend challenges him to win a ring-the-bell game at a fairground (another stock setting), and by a bit of luck and slapstick, he does. Two panels have zero dialogue – a sign of trust in a pro, you’d think.

LITTLE ADAM AND EVA

The seventh strip is by Paul Ailey, an artist who mostly ghosted and filled in on other strips, but gets a signature here, on Jackpot’s most bizarre story. Adam and Eva are kids, in a garden, which possesses a tree of knowledge, and a serpent – Serpy! – who is trying to tempt them to eat its fruit, because one particular apple will “spell their downfall”. Luckily, the other apples don’t do this, they just give useful tidbits of info.
Theologically this is an interesting take. Though of course the garden isn’t named – that wouldn’t get past the IPC editors. It’s testament, if nothing else, to IPC’s unshakeable belief that there is no situation you can’t get a strip out of if you make the characters kids.

021

Serpy is one of the most obscure Satan figures in British comics, and one of the more entertaining, but even more so than Marathon Mutt, Little Adam And Eva is way out of step with the rest of the comic. (I remember rather liking it.) Ailey has an attractive style, light on detail with a nice strong line and bold shading. Unfortunately, the strip gets an extra colour – red – which only emphasises the fact we’re reading a story whose leads spend the entire time naked.

CLASS WARS

The eighth strip is by Vic Neill, who’d mostly worked for Beano and Dandy publishers DC Thomson. He’d modelled his style initially on Dudley Watkins – another great UK comics figure, creator of the Broons and Oor Wullie. Watkins’ art was rooted in strong storytelling, an unusual degree of detail and a great repertoire of comic faces. On Class Wars, Neill offers a more streamlined version with touches of Baxendale grotesque. It works well – the story’s two pages hardly need their dialogue.

The strip title is pun intended. This is the first story where Jackpot’s social comedy turns into conflict. it’s a school strip (every mag had at least one) with the tension coming from a mixed class of working-class scruffs and stuck-up posh kids, thrown together when a private school is forced to merge with a comprehensive. A burly teacher acts as referee. In this story, the scruffs are doing their best to pelt their posh classmates with mud.

022

The resolution here is wildly unfair – eventually the teacher, treated with contempt by the scruffs and obsequious but patronising regard by the posh kids, gets hit by mud himself and gives everyone a cross-country run as punishment. But the strip knows better than to go against the social coding of decades of kids’ comics: tearaways have more fun, snobs don’t, so the snobs have to get their come-uppance in the end.

Except Class Wars is a much more conservative story than it might look. The outcome may be unfair, but the codes of behaviour are absolutely clear. Working class kids in this story are lazy, thuggish, and hate learning. Their moneyed counterparts are prigs, but hard-working and resourceful. Within the standard knockabout of the class-tension storyline, resolved as usual when authority intervenes, lurk some very nasty stereotypes.

GREMLINS

The ninth strip is by Steve Bell, a former art teacher, briefly stopping over at IPC en route to spending 30+ years drawing the If… newspaper strip for the Guardian. Bell’s style is still in development but it’s recognisably him – the fleshy roundness of his characters with their bulging noses; the toothy black blots that are the titular Gremlins, agents of mischief and malfunction in an ordered world.

023

Bell, a young cartoonist, is firmly in with the post-Baxendale wing of Jackpot, and while he’s not as extreme as some he’s inherited Baxendale’s love of disorder. The Gremlins exist to make things go wrong, Bell exists to depict the consequences as entertainingly as possible. The strip builds toward a single large, chaotic panel as a gremlin-infected shopping trolley goes wild in a supermarket. Nothing is resolved – the human leads can only flee as the shopkeeper shouts “GRRRRRRR!!”. There’s a gleeful chaos here quite unlike anything we’ve so far seen – order is not restored, and the gremlins represent the unpredictable and unaccounted for in Jackpot’s comic suburbia.

THE INCREDIBLE SULK

The tenth strip is by Jim Petrie, a DC Thomson lifer, who drew 2000 episodes of Minnie The Minx. The Incredible Sulk was rare IPC work for him, and he’s obviously enjoying drawing in a rather looser style: the strip plays with panel borders as a component of the story, a common trick now but unusual in this era. As Sulk’s rage builds, the edges of panels distort and their composition gets stranger – at the height of his anger, Sulk is barely on-panel, racing out the back and the front of panels, so angry he wants to break out of the strip.

024

These elemental tantrums made Sulk one of the comic’s biggest hits – never mind the very repetitive nature of the strip, this is pure wish fulfilment, a kid not only losing his cool (as they all do) but getting utterly away with it. As in Gremlins, the strip cuts out with chaos firmly in the ascendant. But here it’s a more relatable human chaos. I don’t know if Petrie was doing the stories as well as the art – there’s definitely a sense he’s being given a much longer leash than most of the artists, and he’s using it to the fullest.

GOOD NEWS/BAD NEWS

The eleventh strip is by Nigel Edwards, more prolific in the 80s for IPC – this may be his first gig, in fact. He’s yet another in the looser, Baxendale mode – his hero is a cheerful grotesque, and the liberal use of sound effects (“PONG! REEK! WAFT! GASP!”) shows the desire to cram as much comic detail into the strip as possible. Edwards would become a major contributor to OINK!, the last doomed triumph of the Baxendale style, a scatological “Junior Viz” of the mid-80s which goaded the censorious elements in British society and quite swiftly fell to them.

025

Back in 1979, this is one of the more unusual Jackpot strips, a formalist conceit, with a twist in every panel. Good news and bad news alternate – each situation is either complicated or resolved one panel on. The result, inevitably, is a strip that’s much denser than the average, with no panels wasted. A perfect fit for Edwards’ style, and it was a favourite of mine at the time. But it’s also slightly exhausting, a rigid fever pitch of action, laying bare the principles of rapid comic development that every one-page humour strip is discreetly obeying anyway.

KID KING

The twelfth strip is by Reg Parlett, son of an illustrator and postcard artist, and an IPC stalwart – he’d been at the company since 1923 and had over a decade’s work still in him at this point. As the excellent site Toonhound points out, it’s astonishing nobody had come up with this strip’s concept before – the ultimate fulfilment of the “kids do grown-up jobs” genre, a British comic staple. What job is more important than a King?

Kid King is a fantasia of absolute childishness rubbing shoulders with the absolute pomp of adulthood. All through this episode, kids invited to play in Kid King’s palace constantly think the guards are going to kick them out (or mow them down!). In fact they’re handing out toffee apples and lollipops – a carnival inversion straight out of the hippie imagination. But Play Power, or any kind of power, isn’t on display here: the strip is never about mocking the monarchy or its trappings, just about how fun it might be to have them as your toybox.

026

Parlett’s bold, fluid line is a great fit for the story – he’s a master of body language, revelling in the contrast between the loose-limbed Kid King and his stiff-backed retinue. Body motion in a lot of Jackpot strips feels rather overdone – a lot of windmilling arms, leaping, kicking to swiftly diminishing effect. Parlett, wisely, keeps it simple.

IT’S A NICE LIFE

The thirteenth strip is also by Reg Parlett, and it’s Jackpot’s colour centrefold. Jackpot’s palette is basic but very lurid – ultra bold yellows, reds, and greens with little mixing. This isn’t the best fit for Parlett’s art. His style is smooth, leading the eye easily from panel to panel – the colouring slows it down, even wrecks some gags. A three panel sequence of Stanley Nice trying to yoke pigs to a plough loses all detail: just not enough contrast between pigs, mud, and Stan’s jumper.

It’s A Nice Life is the most clanking of all Jackpot’s TV spoofs. It’s a comic remake of massively successful BBC sitcom, The Good Life, with the main tweak being that both the eco-friendly “self-sufficient” Nice family and their stuck up neighbours have kids. Not the only tweak, though. The Good Life was a gentle satire on both suburban aspiration and alternative lifestyles, with both families roughly on the same rung of the social ladder.

It’s A Nice Life is less ambitious. Satire isn’t the aim – the set-up is just an excuse for more on that favourite IPC theme, the class struggle. Stanley Nice and his family live in a caravan. Next door is a large private home with not just a car in the drive but a private motorboat. Whatever the origins of this pair’s rivalry, by its second episode the irresistible rhythms of the IPC class conflict strip have asserted themselves.

027

The stereotypes are more one-sided than Class Wars. Stan himself is just a twinkle-eyed cheeky chap. His rich neighbours – like the earlier strip’s posh kids – have a love of consumption and a horror of dirt. Naturally the strip ends with them ploughing their neighbour’s muddy fields with their precious new bicycles. (“HOW DEGRADING!”) Below the gag is a very 20th century bourgeois nightmare – to be stripped of your assets and put to work farming: a suburban Cultural Revolution, played for laughs.

Not that Mao was on the minds of the IPC scriptwriters – though with the pressure to crank out pages to fill a half dozen titles, you took your ideas as they came. But it’s emblematic of social relations as they play out across Jackpot’s strips. The world of Jackpot accepts that class struggle is axiomatic. But it also accepts that this is eternal – its class war is also a cold war, resetting, week upon week, to comic stalemate. No outcome to the class struggle is ever in prospect. The toffs would always despise the toughs, and vice versa – such were the facts of life. In which case best to have fun with them. This, if anywhere, is where the comic reflects the consensus politics of mid-century Britain, which ended the week Jackpot began.

LITTLE AND LARGE LENNY

The fourteenth strip is by Norman Mansbridge, a former political cartoonist, of no strong party opinion, who had turned to kids’ strips in his retirement. His speciality as illustrator and comic artist was suburbia, and he spoke of his growing realisation that the orderly jollity of suburban existence often masked cramped, neurotic lives. His great contribution to British humour comics was Whizzer & Chips’ Fuss Pot, one inspiration for The Incredible Sulk: a girl whose unstoppable tantrums drove her respectable suburban parents to despair. The repression and selfishness of suburban life made manifest.

028

Since almost all of Jackpot’s strips are set in an undefined semi-suburbia of fences, busy streets and neat lawns, Mansbridge is an obvious fit. Unfortunately, he’s saddled with an uninspired kids-with-powers strip. Lenny can grow big and small, and uses the power to discomfit a grouchy suburban hoarder of lost footballs – yet another stock strip character and crime. Size-changing is one of the great gifts to comic illustrators, a ready-made excuse to have fun with perspective, which Mansbridge does. But I’m not surprised this is one of the Jackpot strips I didn’t remember.

CRY BABY

The fifteenth strip is the second by Mike Lacey, artist on Richie Wraggs. In rare interviews with IPC script veterans, former writers explained the firm’s methods. Artists would stick with a strip for a long time, while the uncredited writers would often be rotated to keep them fresh. Run out of ideas for Jack Pott? Have a go on Kid King! Inspiration proved easier with some strips than others. Writers particularly cursed “Sid’s ****ing Snake”, a flagship Whizzer & Chips strip about a boy and a giant serpent. Notoriously stony ground for ideas, let alone laughs, yet too popular with the readers to ever ditch.

029

Cry Baby does not strike me as a strip with legs. It’s a cross between the Incredible Sulk subgenre of tantrum wish fulfilment and the amazing powers strip. Tina has the mutant power of producing literal floods of tears. In this strip her nervous suburban parents put her into a wetsuit and bathtub before obtaining – how? – a sea rescue raft, which she fills with tears and uses as a swimming pool. It’s a strange story. You can imagine kids fantasising about getting their own way, but incessant crying? Part of the point, though, is the pantomime of parental anxiety: “OH NO! YOU’LL SOAK OUR NEW CARPET!” And there’s something primal and powerful about how terrified the parents are of their daughter’s emotion and its potential to wreck their home and possessions.

This feels like a good place to point out that everyone credited or claimed as working on Jackpot is a man.

THE TERROR TOYS

The sixteenth strip is the first whose scripter we can identify. It’s Tom Tully, an old school IPC action writer who did a lot of sports story work. By 1979 Tully’s long career was winding down, but The Terror Toys is a re-edit of a 1960s strip, The Toys Of Doom. At four pages long it’s double the length of anything else in the comic, and is also dead serious – a sudden insertion of action into the humour format, varying the tone. It worked on me: I was hooked by the story of tiny, deadly toy soldiers and murderous bears – one scene, where a child was attacked by toy battleships in his bath, gave me nightmares.

If Tully’s identifiable, the artist is trickier. The drawing is pitched older than the other strips – more realism, more shadow, more detail in the background, and less of the kind of art an older, sillier me would learn to disdain as “cartoonish”. It’s a solid, old-fashioned action comic: two kids stumble upon the plans of a grotesque toymaker, but neither adults nor their peers will believe them. (Their tactics involve smashing up kids’ brand new toys, not a great dialogue starter.)

The internet suggests either Argentine great Solano Lopez – best known, at least by Google, for his porno comic Young Witches – or an artist from his studio. To complicate matters bits of the strip have been redrawn as well as edited. Still, the thick, Raggedy Ann style hair on the kids reminds me of the cheap, stylish South American artists IPC habitually used on their older boys’ comics, even if it looks nothing like Lopez.

030

The Terror Toys has little to do with the rest of Jackpot: even though I loved it, it was a few years before I read adventure stories for preference. I’m a little sad to learn it was a reprint – its thrills age six felt purely mine – but not surprised. Whoever drew it, their reference might have been stills from any 30s or 40s British film, even one set fifty years before that. This is an incursion from a foggier, creepier old England than the merry suburbs of Jackpot standard.

TERRY AND GAVIN’S FUNTASTIC JOURNEY

The seventeenth strip is by Ian Knox, who’d trained as an architect, but at this point was doubling a job drawing kids’ comics with a role as “Blotski”, the political cartoonist for Red Weekly and Socialist Challenge. Perhaps fearing his revolutionary potential, IPC have given him the comics’ least earthbound strip, a surrealist fantasy in which a pair of children and a crazy professor take to the skies in a “Welly-copter” and visit one absurdist land a week.

031

Of all the Jackpot strips, this feels one of the most old-fashioned – maybe it’s the Welly-copter itself, as the comic potential of the welly boot was an article of misplaced faith when I was small. Or maybe I’ve just never clicked with this brand of zany fantasy, whose unlikely events seem arbitrary in the way the handy life rafts and passing vintage cars of other strips never quite do. It doesn’t help that the kids rely on their adult friend to get things done – mostly because it turns the second half of the strip into exposition, but also because Knox can’t seem to nail perspective and get the height ratio of kids and grown-ups consistent. (In fairness, he’s dealing with a magic land where everything floats, which is a bugger to establish distance and direction in).
There’s an irony, too, that of all the strips to suffer from Jackpot’s elephant-gun approach to colouring, it’s Blotski’s that arrives absolutely doused in red.

MILLY O’NAIRE AND PENNY LESS

The eighteenth strip is by Sid Burgon, a former mechanic whose co-workers encouraged him into a career drawing. He drew for some of 70s IPC’s most popular strips – like Ivor Lott And Tony Broke in Buster, of which this is a sister strip. If it wasn’t obvious from the title, this is, yet again, a class conflict story. Unlike in It’s A Nice Life, there’s no TV spoof to provide a pretext. The set-up is very simple, though. Milly O’Naire – who lives in Moneybags Mansion – is rich but vain and mean. Penny Less is poor but ingenious. Penny wants something from Milly, and each week works out a way to get it.

This is a strip you could imagine Blotski getting his teeth into. It opens with Penny Less and her family, reduced to eating stale bread. She goes to Milly’s mansion only to find her serving banquets to her pet ostriches, who peck Penny off the grounds. There’s no camaraderie here, and none of the hidden stereotypes of Class Wars: Milly is nakedly hostile to her poor counterpart, and is unequivocally the villain. And the resolution finds workers occupying Milly O Naire’s grounds until she pays them to go away.

032

This is the most accomplished and satisfying of Jackpot’s class struggle strips, and Burgon is one of the definitive IPC house style artists, with his chunky backgrounds, fluid line and rock-solid storytelling. When I think of reading IPC titles as a kid, it’s Burgon’s art I see. But Milly O’Naire And Penny Less is thoroughly of its time. It gives zero ground in assuming the rich are venal and callous, and the poor are quick-witted and deserve a slice of the wealth. To use a modern term, the strip “punches up”, however cheerily. And even though it’s a kind of pantomime punch-up, one centuries old, with no suggestion that the social positions it depicts could ever change, it’s impossible to imagine a humour strip like this getting made now, partly because the country sneers at families living on stale bread, who are nobody’s heroines. Meanwhile a rich girl feeding cake to her pet ostriches might land a reality show or a record deal.

But this was one of Jackpot’s most popular stories, just like Ivor Lott And Tony Broke (identical save gender) was in Buster. The kids culture of the IPC comics rippled with social and class anxiety, and readers loved it.

SCOOPER

The nineteenth strip is our second by Tom Paterson, seen already on Full O’Beans. This is a much richer, more lovingly presented piece by him, crammed with details and full of a joyous grubbiness. Everything is dusty, run-down, grotty, but gloriously material. Paterson’s focus here is on expressive characters, particularly Scooper’s jowly, well-intentioned but incompetent Dad, whose nervous eagerness never lets up.

033

Scooper is a kids-doing-adult-jobs strip on journalistic lines, with Scooper the son of a local paper reporter. He goes out with his Dad to take pictures – which end up turning out to be of Dad screwing up. It’s a strong, flexible premise that means a huge range of things for Paterson to draw (this week it’s dogs). Notwithstanding a slightly flat script, Scooper is excellent.

And there’s something pleasing about one of the best stories in the comic being so low-concept: built on faith that a local paper beat is a place where funny things might happen. The one-line biographies of artists I’ve been giving suggest the range of backgrounds Jackpot drew its creative staff from – but one thing most of them, and surely their writers, shared was some immersion in journalism. Perhaps that accounts for the extra care Scooper seems to enjoy.

LASER ERASER

The twentieth strip is by Robert Nixon, an art school associate of Mike Lacey and similar in his clean and simple style – certainly on the ‘IPC house’ side of things. The strip knows the virtue of getting off to a brisk start: “EEK! HELP! ESCAPED GORILLA!” are the first words you see. “COR!” says our hero Ernie, and in panel two he’s zapped it into nothingness with the strip’s eponymous device.

034

The Laser Eraser can make things vanish from one place and return in another (the gorilla reappears and squashes a couple of crooks who steal the gadget). Nixon is a compact storyteller with a particularly good line in facial expressions, which works with the breakneck plot to make Laser Eraser feel a dense, good-value strip. The Eraser itself is a scripter’s gift – as long as you can think of a reason to have anything you like appear, you can use the Eraser to drop it into any other scene, creating the surreal combinations IPC strips thrive on with no plot strain.

ROBOT SMITH

The twenty-first and final strip is by Ken Reid, one of the great names of British comics, who created Roger The Dodger and died at his board still drawing an episode of signature strip Faceache. Reid’s faces made his reputation – clean-lined, detailed, but always entertainingly contorted – and his strip has a different feel from anything else in the comic. More old-fashioned, somehow – for all the 70s realism of the PE teacher’s trackie and combover.

035

Part of that old-school feel comes from the storytelling. Reid was famous enough to write his own strips, and Robot Smith is the work of a man steeped in their form and formulae. A situation is established in the first panel, resolved in the last, and in between is a series of simple sight gags. This episode – Robot tries out for the football team – could have been a Ken Reid strip from any time since the 40s. Even the premise – a robot goes to school – is like something out of a Charles Hamilton school story, and Robot Smith’s rivet-studded jumper and spring-driven legs are just as archaic. Next to the wild, Baxendale-style strips which represent the young generation of Jackpot, Reid uses startling amounts of white space, and lays out his panels with geometric fussiness. Robot Smith sticks out, but it’s a living reminder of the traditions the rest of Jackpot has built on.

TO THE NEWSAGENT

That’s the end of the stories. The inside back cover has the coupon for the newsagent (with a Marathon Mutt illustration) and the Jackpot Top 20 League Ladder, which you can fill in to create a top of the Jackpot pops.

Which means it’s time to think about what isn’t in Jackpot. Two things stick out as absent.

The first is pop culture references, scrupulously avoided by the IPC writers, in this mag at least. All through these write-ups I’ve commented on the texture of the strips – how familiar some of it feels, how distant in other ways. Jackpot is pitched at ‘everyone’, and as is often the way, everyone turns out to mean an imaginary middle: middle-class, suburban, aware of the poor and the rich and the rural, but at a distance, as exotic and comical elements. You can recognise 1979 in the comics, but only those broad outlines. With the large but specific exceptions of the TV spoof strips, the pop cultural texture of the time is missing: no punks, wookies, time lords, footie fans, disco dancers. A section of life, kept at arms’ length.

The second absence is more glaring now. Every face – every excited schoolboy, enraged official, idiot posho, hapless parent, everyone – is white. This was what parts of Britain looked like in 1979, of course. But only parts. Britain had welcomed – a mixed welcome, often – thirty years of Commonwealth immigrants; two hundred years of Empire before that had left the country more diverse than its xenophobes would have you think. My home was in a leafy, middle-class suburb, not too far off It’s A Nice Life territory, and I was at school with kids from families from India, Pakistan, Uganda, Ethiopia. The Britain that Jackpot presented was a plain lie. In May 1979 parts of the world it drew, and drew laughter from, were ending. But in important ways they had never really been.

BACK COVER

“Published every Thursday by I.P.C. Magazines Limited, King’s Reach Tower, Stamford Street, London SE1 9LS”. This was the start of a long, one-way association between my pocket money and Kings’ Reach Tower. First Jackpot, then Buster, then Eagle, then 2000AD, and finally the NME. IPC had me from cradle to rave. I can appreciate now what I didn’t then – that it was a somewhat sclerotic operation, prone to censorious fits, conservative in subtle ways despite all the outward fizz of its magazines. But their editors had a good nose for talent, however poorly they treated it.

It seems clear, looking back at this comic, that the IPC kids’ line was firmly artist-driven, and that the company was happy to pull in freelancers of any age and a range of styles. That’s the most admirable thing about Jackpot – the sense of a pack of different artists, of no one dominant style. The gonzo fleshiness of Steve Bell and Nigel Edwards; the loose line and tight storytelling of Reg Parlett or Robert Nixon; the grimy detail of Tom Paterson; the open spaces and weird faces of Ken Reid. It wasn’t something I noticed at the time – aged six, you bought for characters, not for art – but unconsciously maybe it filtered through, gave me a feel for variety. The flipside is that the scripts were often pitiful, insultingly lazy, a half-baked pun often built out into a whole page. The better artists kicked against that, by quality of storytelling or just a riot of detail. The others just drew it, and no doubt hoped for something better next week.

Next week, though! “DOUBLE TREAT”, the back cover says. A “magic numbers” card game and the covers of a cut out partwork – “WHY BE BORED?”. The last of the free gift cycle Fleetway would permit a new launch. Three weeks in and it would have to walk by itself. It did, until 1982 at least. Then the cull came.

IPC’s policy with its comics was notorious: hatch, match, dispatch. Launch a new title, if it failed, find an existing one to pair it with, and put the weaker to death. The readers would be given a weeks’ warning – “Great news for our readers inside!”. In Jackpot’s case, the host – and the eventual last survivor of the IPC line – was Buster, which inherited a range of strips.

Laser Eraser, the most leggy of the gimmick strips, made it over. So did Jackpot’s first black lead, when he eventually arrived: he was called Sporty, and was “good at sport”. A score-draw for progress. Terror Toys got yet another reprint. And all three of the class conflict strips – Class Wars; Milly O’Naire And Penny Less; and It’s A Nice Life – survived. Nice Life could pivot easily from a strip about hippies to a strip about yuppies. Ingenious Penny Less got a scholarship to a private school in 1986 – Milly O’Naire’s Dad went broke paying the fees. As for Class Wars, it hung on until May 1987, from Thatcher’s first election win to her last. But by then things had changed. The strip left Jackpot behind it with a more 80s title: “Top Of The Class”.

036

All illustrations copyright IPC Publications

NEXT: Under the shadow of the slipper – a closer look at DC Thomson and the Beano.

]]>
https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2015/07/left-me-standing-like-a-guilty-schoolboy/feed 22
Send A Limousine Anyway https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2015/05/i-know-how-to-curse https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2015/05/i-know-how-to-curse#comments Sun, 10 May 2015 11:51:51 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=28963 shootingstar2

1978: The Shooting Star

It’s the spider I remember. In The Shooting Star, boy reporter Tintin is investigating an apocalyptic threat, a star on a collision course with our world. He visits an observatory, hoping they can tell him what’s going on. They can: the world is doomed. He is led to the telescope and through it he sees a colossal spider, clinging to the star.

The beast is only on the telescope lens. And the world is not doomed. But I was entranced. By that, by the panic in the streets, by the race to reach a new island formed in the wake of the star’s passing, and by the grotesque exploding mushrooms our hero finds there. Tintin is the first comic I can remember reading, and The Shooting Star is my first memory of Tintin. In many ways, I wish it was almost any of his other adventures.

Tintin had a special status in our family. My Dad and his brothers and sisters grew up in the 50s and early 60s in Switzerland as well as Britain, as their father worked for the UN. Tintin was part of their childhood, followed in his own magazine, and with each new volume a bestseller. Those albums, in their original French, followed my Gran to England when she and Grandad divorced. I learned to read French by following my Dad’s translation of L’Ile Noire and Tintin En Amerique, at his knee. He bought me Tintin in English, the Methuen paperback editions. Some of those sit on our shelves now, creased, faded, and over-loved, supplemented with newer copies.

I am not the only person who holds Tintin in special affection. There are creators who establish the visual grammar and expectations of a whole style – a whole marketplace, in some cases. Kirby, Tezuka, Herge, and so on. To encounter them young is to be taught a language. Comics writer Kieron Gillen described Watchmen (which we’ll be meeting in 1986) as a comic that teaches you how to read it. Tintin, in its discreet, precise way, is a comic that teaches you how to read comics.

It does so almost invisibly. Herge never draws attention to his storytelling decisions: like his famously economical line, they are artefacts of impeccable design. A Tintin book is never flashy, never ambiguous or confusing – it is a gorgeously smooth reading experience, a user interface Apple would envy. It is not, however, cinematic – The Shooting Star is full of two-panel sight gags and payoffs that are utterly comic-y, relying on the sharp division of frames, not the fluidity of film or animation.

Take the first three panels of the book, a slapstick gag about Snowy walking into a lamp-post. In a cartoon, it would be very hard not to introduce the lamp-post before the collision, making the joke one of anticipation. On the page, lamp-post and collision can appear simultaneously, with Snowy’s forward motion suggested by the force of impact. Our eye has been tricked upward by Tintin pointing out the star, so it feels like Snowy paying the price for our misdirection.

shootingstar1

(Meanwhile, for new readers, the panels introduce a lot of information: Snowy can talk, he is the comic foil for the observant Tintin, it is unnaturally hot, and – for the sharp-eyed – there is a huge new star in the middle of the Great Bear. That last is the one thing you might miss, so Herge includes it as exposition next panel while leavening any dryness with another joke – verbal, this time. This guy is tight, basically.)

Two other things stand out about Herge. First, he plays very fair. The vocabulary of adventure comics is one of tight squeezes and narrow escapes. There are lots of ways to convey peril like this – having the characters talk about it, most crudely, but also using foreshortening or dramatic cutting to heighten the imminence and narrowness of the danger while also drawing out its resolution. Herge’s approach is a more honest one: he establishes the physicality of a location precisely and doesn’t amplify it to make peril seem greater, relying on that clarity to make the danger more vivid. For instance, there’s a great scene in The Shooting Star where Snowy is on the deck of a pitching and tilting ship, in danger of being swept away. In quick cuts across half a dozen panels, Herge establishes Snowy’s presence on the deck, then a hole in the deck wall through which water is hurtling, then a surge of water which moves Snowy nearer the wall, then – oh no! – he’s half out of the hole before being grabbed by Tintin. It’s so basic that pointing it out seems insulting. But I will remember reading it for the rest of my life – the solidity of the wall and hole, the force of the spray exploding through it.

Herge is a creator you trust, then. And the second reason you trust is his attention to detail. A famously scrupulous researcher, his settings and vehicles are created with the precision of an Airfix modeller and then rendered with the satisfying plastic simplicity of a Lego builder. So, reading The Shooting Star, I knew that were I to ever see a seaplane, it would look like a Herge seaplane. (Tintin is full of seaplanes.) I knew that if I ever saw a Norwegian dock in the 1940s, it would look like the dock Captain Haddock stops in to refuel. If I ever clung to a lamp-post to watch rats surge through the streets… well, the lamp-post would be Hergeian too. He was scrupulous about this: apparently he fretted for years afterwards that Tintin’s ship would not in fact be seaworthy. But if I was ever on a ship looking for a crashed meteorite, I would expect it to look like Tintin’s ship, the Aurora.

And if I summon to mind a corrupt financier, surely he would look like the corrupt financier, Bohlwinkel.

bohlwinkel Which is something of a problem. Because Bohlwinkel looks like – well, he is well-fed, balding, dark haired, with a long curved nose, fleshy, smirking lips, and beady, leering eyes. He looks like a caricature Jew, in a comic written and published in Nazi-occupied Belgium, in 1941. The very economy and exactitude, the trustworthiness, of Herge’s cartooning is suborned by a racist stereotype.

It gets worse. Herge uses his command of the techniques of comics to continually remind us that Bohlwinkel is an alien presence, a foreign body within his story of scientific adventure. The rest of The Shooting Star is – as ever with Tintin – a world of detail: streets, docks, and crashed meteorites rendered with beautiful parsimony, always just enough to be real, never a line more. But Bohlwinkel’s panels are empty of background: he sits, leaning eagerly in to hear the radio, in a yellow space whose sharp, sickly vibrancy contrasts with the less jarring palette Herge uses for his outdoor action. He is an interruption in the story, never physically active, listening and manipulating. The heroic characters never meet him. His plots wither on contact with the real world, foiled by the camaraderie of sailors, the derring-do of Tintin, and the decency of the unnamed man on the rival ship who prevents Tintin being shot.

Bohlwinkel is the symbolic spider at the story’s centre, mirroring the physically monstrous spiders on the telescope and later on the meteorite-island. Of course the association, then and now, of Jews with spiders is an anti-Semitic commonplace. But you needn’t buy that parallel to grasp the role Bohlwinkel is playing. He incarnates the ancient prejudice of the Jew as schemer, string-puller, the secret conspiracy behind misfortune. He is considerably more than just a caricature, let alone an accidental one as Herge later hinted – everything about his role in the story and the symbolism it’s associated with is nakedly and purposefully anti-Semitic.

Herge pointed out that there are plenty of comic stereotypes all through Tintin – spoiled Arab brats, drunken Englishmen, nutty professors, and so on. He was, you might say, an “equal opportunities” satirist. He had even spoofed the Nazis themselves, in an earlier book, and deserves credit for that. But only one of his satirical targets was the simultaneous victim of organised state oppression, then genocide. Did the good, worried folk of Charleroi and Liege, presenting their papers and going about their daily lives under the Nazis, understand what was happening to the Jewish-owned businesses in their towns? What speculation reached them? They could, at least, open up Le Soir and escape with Tintin into a world that reassured them that whatever prejudices Europe’s Jewry faced, they had to a degree brought it on themselves. The Mysterious Star ended its run in May 1942, with an expression of comic horror on Bohlwinkel’s flabby face as his schemes are found out and he learns the authorities are on his trail. That same month, the Jews of Belgium were given a star of their own to wear.

Why has the anti-Semitism in The Shooting Star not destroyed its reputation? Tintin In The Congo, the boy reporter’s notoriously racist first adventure, now comes in shrinkwrap, with a stern warning to librarians. The Shooting Star is simply part of the canon. Part of it, I think, is that Herge shields Tintin himself from Herge’s own casual anti-Semitism. Congo is repulsive not just because of Herge’s gross caricatures of black people, but because Tintin is so explicitly the voice and hand of colonial power. Without racism, and the racial horror of Belgium’s Empire, there is no story in Tintin In The Congo. (There’s not much of one in any case.) In The Shooting Star, though, the main plot is of a race between international science and private enterprise for control of knowledge – with Tintin, sympathetically, on the side of science. The story requires a cheating capitalist. It does not require that capitalist to be a Jew.

Bohlwinkel is, of course, never named as such: when Herge put together the colour volume of The Shooting Star – the one we have now – he cut another anti-Semitic scene and changed his financiers name to Bohlwinkel from the more telling Blumenstein. He felt this defused the issue. But he did not redraw the man – and Bohlwinkel’s Jewishness exists as code, instantly obvious to most readers in Occupied Europe in 1941, blessedly oblivious but potentially insidious to a 5-year old boy in 1978.

Within Tintin fandom you can find all the strands of opinion you might expect – the loyalists who take Herge’s line that the book’s anti-Semitism is accidental; the majority who consider it a regrettable lapse in an otherwise fine book, or simply feel it doesn’t matter and wasn’t it all a long time ago. And a few who think the book is a blot on Herge’s career. (Those who feel it damns the entire Tintin enterprise are presumably not in the fandom in the first place.) How do I feel?

I read the book when I was five. Re-reading it now, its setpieces are as striking and resonant as ever. The comic is an outlier in the Tintin canon, one of the few books where the uncanny – always lurking in Herge’s work at the edges of adventure, in dreams or as implications or as a mystery to be solved – bursts through the skin of the story. The book starts and ends with wonder – a world burning, then flooded; and an island of transformed science which exists only for a few hours. Herge, for all the buttoned-down repression his cool lines suggest, could be the most psychological of cartoonists. His affinity for the quiet comforts of the bourgeois world, struggling with his storyteller’s instinct to breach them, made him unusually good at capturing disquiet and upset. No wonder his wartime books are so strange and strong.

Perhaps my lifelong attraction to the mood of a comic begins here, in the panels set in the glow of the meteor’s approach, where the solidity of Herge’s universe begins to literally melt: faithful Snowy becomes stuck on a road of liquefying tarmac; the light and line becomes starker and sharper, and the characters’ shadows themselves become sticky and treacherous. Comics have so many ways of capturing feeling like this, of conveying interiority through how they show the world’s exterior. The crisis passes, of course: Tintin learns the world is safe in the most comically bourgeois way possible, via the Belgian speaking clock. In the midst of upheaval, order prevails.

But that’s the danger of it. A common twentieth-century British fantasy – perhaps it still is one – was to imagine what we might have done ourselves under Nazi occupation. Nobody chose collaborator. Mostly we imagined ourselves in a heroic role, more or less – if not as an actual resistance fighter, then at least hiding Jews, sneaking messages to the Free British, weighing out butter and boiled sweets to the occupying troops with a very English frost. This last agrees with the grim statistical likelihood of occupation: resenters would have been far more common than dissenters. But what good do resenters do, really?

Herge was not a collaborator. But The Shooting Star is a collaboration: an acceptance – inevitable, its defenders would say – of the realities of occupation, a newly disturbed world. Certain prejudices become more acceptable. Certain ones become less so. Certain dreams endure – both sides loved their scientists, after all. The Shooting Star takes all of this on board – how pragmatic it is – makes a quiet bet on the status quo, and reflects it in its choice of villain.

That is its lesson. It’s a beautiful, exciting, seductive comic, which is also a reminder – because, thank goodness, it lost that bet – of how casual and thoughtless acquiescence is. Because it’s so beautiful and exciting, it isn’t an easy reminder. It’s not a Tintin In The Congo, an evil comic which is also a bad one, hence simple to deplore. The Shooting Star is a splendid comic, its evil a subtle ripple, an answer to a single question, who is my villain, that’s as much lazy as bad. The Nazis are gone. The question – who is my villain? – has not. I gave The Shooting Star to my five year old son to read – he adored it. Why wouldn’t you? Because he adored it, I write this, for him to read later.

NEXT: May 1979. Greed is good, Fleetway hits the Jackpot.

]]>
https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2015/05/i-know-how-to-curse/feed 22
From Beyond https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2015/05/from-beyond https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2015/05/from-beyond#comments Fri, 01 May 2015 01:48:23 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=28919 secret wars cover NEW THRILL!

This is an origin story. Thirty years ago, give or take a day, I went to my local newsagent and I bought a new comic. The next day I asked the newsagent, Mr.Mann, he of the back room full of protein supplements and ‘marital advice’ partworks, to reserve it for me every fortnight. Two months later he was putting aside a second comic, 2000AD. Six months later I found a source for imported US Marvel comics, and I started ordering those. And so it grows.

The origin story is no different from any other comics fan’s. It begins when something radioactive bites you. Bought in a corner shop (but it could have been glimpsed in an attic, snipped up on Tumblr, passed on by an older sister, found in a doctor’s waiting room) – it sinks its teeth in. You’re changed. You borrow, and read, and buy. With great power comes financial irresponsibility. You walk away sometimes, you come back other times. And thirty years later, here you are.

There’s nothing special about the comic that does this to you. It could have been any comic. Like every origin story, mine comes with precedents, and acquires retcons. I can go back to 1978, age 5, and fill in the gaps of my comics prehistory. I will. But even if it wasn’t my first, that one comic is a turning point.

What was it? Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars #1. Not the American one. The British one. It had free transfers, and free foam stickers, which tore the covers up and lived on my bedroom door for months until they finally peeled away. It had a bonus feature – the Secret Artist, drawing distorted mockeries of Marvel characters, Basil Wolverton style. (The Secret Artist looks a bit like Cliff Robinson, who drew a few Dredds later in the 80s for 2000AD)

It also had the main story, a full reprint – flicking between colour and black and white – of the American Secret Wars first issue. That was what did it.

Secret Wars feels enormously contrived now. It felt enormously contrived then. Sean Howe, in his book on Marvel, uncovers market research by toy company Mattel which revealed that the most attractive words to small boys were “Secret” and “War”. Rather than go with a Contras playset, it teamed up with Marvel whose editor in chief, Jim Shooter, cooked up and wrote the series.

secret wars intro

Shooter establishes the tone of Secret Wars immediately. The comic opens with two space stations floating in the void. On one are twenty or so heroes. On the other are a dozen villains. Each station gets a long panel where all the heroes, and all the villains, stand in line, and say one line of dialogue each. That dialogue is as stilted as the staging, making sure a newbie kid could understand who everyone was. I get the impression anyone who had been reading comics for longer than a year rolled their eyes hard at it. I was that newbie kid, though. I loved it.

Secret Wars gave you heroes by the yard. For a long time my mental hierarchy of Marvel Comics was defined by who had been in Secret Wars. The Vision, mopey android and Avengers perennial, wasn’t in Secret Wars: so he was second tier. The Wrecking Crew, interminable Thor cannon fodder, were in Secret Wars: so they were major players. Recently I read a Thor issue where Titania (white trash, spiked shoulder pads, introduced in Secret Wars) rocked up. Somewhere in me, my kid self was delighted: I was there when WIMPY SKEETER DAVIS was transformed into TITANIA. And she’s still with the Absorbing Man! Aw. When you’re present for a character’s first appearance, they become yours – a trick of nostalgia that has served American companies very well over their long, recycled history.

The idea of Secret Wars is that the heroes fight the villains. Obviously. This is Marvel, though, and what I didn’t understand was the narrative pressure, which Marvel has often tried to corral and civilise but never quite controlled, to make things not just more complicated but stranger: to let the flaws and angst and breast-beating characterisation of 60s Marvel in, and the freewheeling stoner oddness of 70s Marvel. Secret Wars should have been the corporate fight comic par excellence. And yet… there was issue two, and already Magneto was wooing The Wasp in a building that looked like a tuning fork crossed with an airport viewing platform, set amidst a plain of colossal, writhing pink worms. Shooter, I learned later, had made bloody sacrifice of Weird Marvel at the start of his editorial reign, but he couldn’t shake its ghost.

secret wars doom

By the end of the comic, Doctor Doom – its secret lead – was weighing up the problems of omnipotence (a favourite Shooter theme) after galvanising a plot that swung wildly between invention and inanity. My Dad was very taken by Doom. So was I. His drive to dominate any story he’s in rescues the comic. The superhero event – here almost at its birth – is already being recreated in the image of Doom and his soliloquys. He’s won, the heroes are dead. (Shooter, inheritor of Marvel’s hallowed properties, wanted to destroy and replace them, making grand plans for a New Universe that would supplant the sixties icons). But as long as one scrap remains, might not Doom himself bring them back to life, by some freakish impulse? (And here he was, writing the story designed to make them more iconic – by which we mean, saleable – than ever before.)

Art and money and megalomania and trash – Secret Wars has the ingredients that made the American comics biz so terrible, so great, and so addictive. Thirty years on, Marvel are about to release a sequel, and my brother (who read my issues, and had his own favourites: he dug Hulk best, I liked Thor) is writing tie-ins. I’m delighted. But that is, genuinely, a coincidence. This series of pieces is not about that comic, or Marvel. It is about a life loving comics, and occasionally despising comics.

The rules. One comic for each year I’ve been reading them, except 1985, which gets another bite as well as this. Not always written or published that year – just my own firmest memory of being a reader. Where I was, who I was, but mostly what the comic did, the sensation of reading it. On one of the drifting space stations, lined up ready to fight, are thirty years of memories and fond recollections. On the other are my adult perspectives, doubts, issues. For now, they’re the villains, alright. But this is comics. Nobody stays a villain for ever.

NEXT: Adventure! Spiders! Racism! It’s 1978, and I’m reading Tintin.

]]>
https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2015/05/from-beyond/feed 15
Is Japan’s Bathhouse That Unusual? https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2015/04/is-japans-bathhouse-that-unusual https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2015/04/is-japans-bathhouse-that-unusual#comments Wed, 15 Apr 2015 11:14:15 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=28884 thermaeromae More comics reviews, this time focused on manga. Contains spoilers in places!

Thermae Romae I (Yen Press)

Surely the greatest time travel/bathhouse design manga ever written, Mari Yamakazi’s charming Thermae Romae has the pace and pleasures of a culture-clash sitcom: each episode, down-on-his-luck bath architect Lucius Modestus is confronted with a bathing-related problem in 2nd century AD Rome, finds himself whisked away to modern Japan, and returns home full of inspiration. Along the way he invents the Roman Empire’s first reptile house, water slide and loyalty marketing scheme.

With its repetitive structure and gentle mood, Thermae Romae is as relaxing as a good soak. It’s also laugh-out-loud funny, as the uptight Modestus tries to parse what he’s seeing on his visits to the future, and rather shrewd on the comparisons between two cultures that revere bathing. It’s even educational: unlike Thermae Romae’s original audience, I came to it knowing nothing about Japanese bathing habits, a gap which is being thoroughly filled. Yamakazi isn’t a spectacular artist, and it’s hard to say that Thermae Romae benefits from the extremely luxe packaging (and price point). But she’s a good storyteller, and Modestus’ quizzical, uptight expressions carry the book’s humour well. This first omnibus sticks to a formula closely – I loved it, others may tire. But as Modestus gets a little more involved in Roman politics, there are hints of a plot bubbling to the surface. (4.5 stars)

Dorohedoro Vols. 1-3 (Viz)

Lizard-headed Caiman and his friend Nikaido wander a vaguely steampunky world of capricious magic-users and the ordinary guys they experiment on, looking for the magician who turned Caiman into what he is. That’s the – not especially promising – initial set-up for Dorohedoro, but beyond the grime and gore this is a surprisingly gentle, whimsical manga. Caiman and Nikaido’s friendship is a warm one, but so are the relationships – however dysfunctional – between the group of magic-users who Q Hayashida sets up as their initial antagonists. Very quickly Dorohedoro – for all its grotesquerie and gothic inventiveness – becomes a comic you read to see what its characters are up to, rather than for the plot per se. (Just as well, as Hayashida’s story is set up so she can continue spooling it out for as long as the strip is popular). The art has a scratchy, spiky, distorted zest which – along with the dark humour – reminds me of the more cartoonish end of 90s 2000AD: Bisley, Hicklenton, ‘SMS’. A taste worth acquiring. (4 stars)

Phoenix Vol.1: Dawn (Viz)

Thrilled to finally get the chance to read this manga by the prolific and revered Osamu Tezuka. The only other Tezuka I’ve read are the early parts of his Buddha, and Dawn inevitably reminded me of that – not just the ancient setting, but the vivacious, flowing cartooning, mixing slapstick, action, mythology and tragedy while trusting the reader’s intelligence and ability to navigate the shifts in tone. (What hand-holding there is – stodgy text passages on early Japanese history – turns out to be the result of over-cautious English language editors.)

Dawn shares plot points with the first volume of Buddha, but it’s a looser, more meandering story. It’s also – as a standalone – a more powerful one, set on the misty border of myth and history. Kingdoms clash, with enslavement and slaughter the result for the losers – repeatedly, the story seems like it will resolve into a neat narrative of revenge, but Dawn is a more fatalist (and more humane) piece: tyrants age like anyone else, aggressors ultimately meet more powerful foes, life continues. Some characters’ hubris is met by nemesis, while others’ goes unpunished. Traitors and butchers live long enough to become protagonists. Behind the vivid motion and cartoon clarity of his figures – Disney’s impact on Tezuka is enormous and obvious – this is a real and unsparing story, unsentimental even though it’s also fantastic. Tezuka’s art is a delight throughout, but at its best when it pauses to linger on landscape and wider action – the forbidding walls of a volcanic crater, or a fleet of war-boats on a sea at night. (5 stars)

Gantz (Dark Horse)

Gantz is probably the most adolescent comic I have ever read. That’s meant in a good way as well as a bad. The energy – Hiroiya Oku is a wonderfully clear choreographer of fights – the hunger for sensation, the morbid imagination, and the sheer compulsive hookiness of the plot with its casual cruelty – these are all good things. On the other hand, the characterisation is risible throughout and Oku’s treatment of his women characters is truly dreadful – a parade of embarrassing stereotypes well beyond the demands of fanservice. The simpering love interest, the busty lust interest (who asks the hero to keep her as a pet!), the Lara Croft lookalike who jumps him and promptly dies, the famous pop star who naturally falls in love with him… none of them get even the rudimentary hero’s journey development of the lead, remaining half-dimensional mannequins until their near-inevitable death – though here, at least, Oku is an equal opportunity slice-and-dicer. It’s like an excruciating tour of a 14 year old boy’s dreamworld.

Luckily, the “characterisation”, while rough going, is at most 10-15% of an otherwise crisply drawn and inventively violent manga. The plot is simple, Riverworld meets Suicide Squad: the recently dead are harvested by a high-tech gamesmaster and given a second life as agents sent into gory battle against clandestine aliens (who often, quite reasonably, ask why they’re being targeted). Survivors get points, and points mean prizes – weapons, freedom, or the opportunity to resurrect former players. The gamesmaster will happily shove anyone into a battlesuit – punks, criminals, salarymen, grannies, small children, pandas, and, inevitably, quite a few angst-filled high-schoolers. Who survives? The answers are (occasionally) surprising. Over the course of extremely long, fast-paced, videogame-style battles against a variety of aliens, a team solidifies, in time for a wider alien invasion. At which point the manga lurches into apocalyptic bio-horror, and a lot of the energy bleeds away. Perhaps Oku, after over a decade of creating this nonsense, got bored of drawing cyberpunk fights – though he finds reasons to keep the nudity quotient extremely high.

Gantz is often reprehensible but generally compulsive – it’s a fast, bloodthirsty read, suspenseful and exciting even though most of the characters are cyphers, and much though I’d like to mark it lower I still ended up reading the whole thing given the opportunity to. Even the relatively feeble final act kept me turning the pages – though at least there’s the magnificent payoff of a giant nude alien woman with Hitler’s face in her stomach, informing the reader that God does not exist. Peak adolescence has been reached, the rest of comics can go home. (2.5 stars)

]]>
https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2015/04/is-japans-bathhouse-that-unusual/feed 2
What A Magical Young Lady You Are https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2015/04/what-a-magical-young-lady-you-must-be https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2015/04/what-a-magical-young-lady-you-must-be#respond Thu, 02 Apr 2015 13:40:38 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=28853 More comics reviews originally from goodreads.com

supreme blue rose SUPREME: BLUE ROSE (Image Comics)

The 1990s saw a rash of metafictional superhero comics by British writers – Grant Morrison’s Flex Mentallo and Animal Man, Alan Moore’s Promethea, and Moore’s original run on the Rob Liefeld character Supreme. Supreme: Blue Rose is Warren Ellis’ late contribution to the genre – the constant revisions and reboots of the modern superhero given a typically Ellis-ian science-fiction gloss. Themes from Ellis’ short-lived newuniversal project bubble up here too. For all the familiar – even mildly nostalgic – postmodernist and hard science trimmings, this is in places a very contemporary comic: protagonist Diana Dane is a former journalist turned freelancer, constantly having to ask herself what it means to live your best life in a disrupted, unstable world, even before those terms acquire more sinister meanings.

Even if the thought of another Warren Ellis comic about m-branes leaves you cold, Blue Rose is worth reading for his collaborator: Tula Lotay’s languid figurework makes for a beguiling, attractive comic. But it’s her expressionist approach to colouring and design that makes Blue Rose so spectacular – layered tendrils of colour and type overlaid onto the art to fully realise the dreamlike, provisional world the story exists in. The story in Blue Rose is one of sufficiently advanced science: Lotay’s art is what makes it indistinguishable from magic. (5 stars)

ALEX + ADA Vol.1 (Image Comics)

Jonathan Luna and Sarah Vaughn tell the story of Ada, an android granted sentience by her human owner, Alex. The world of Alex + Ada is a deliberately bland one – most problems are solved for our well-off protagonist, and if they aren’t, then advanced AI, seamlessly integrated into the skin of everyday life, can help. This creates a kind of comics-style flat affect, low on action, but very beguiling. I can’t think of a more patient Image comic, or one whose near future feels quite so near.

Alex’s disaffection with the world is mysterious even to himself, and he’s not a particularly articulate guy, so we’re mostly meant to infer his reasons for the choices he makes. Ada is inarticulate too, but not by choice: her full consciousness and sentience is subject to a block. This is a comic about tech and progress and how society deals with those things, but it’s not really a comic yet about the boundary between robot and human (a fairly tired subject). Instead the question it’s directly asking men like Alex – which make up a fair chunk of the readership, this being comics – is: what does it mean to treat others as human? What privileges might that mean surrendering? This first volume stops just where those questions begin to become acute, but the set-up is skilful and charming enough that I’m very keen to see where Vaughn and Luna go next. (4.5 stars)

C.O.W.L. Vol.1: Principles Of Power (Image Comics)

I was easily sold on the idea of this comic – a Superhero Union – without really thinking too much about what sort of stories I either expected, or wanted to read, about said organisation. As it turns out, C.O.W.L. is a comic about sixties Chicago politics with the odd bit of powered action mixed in. The vibe of it is very late-80s: not Watchmen, exactly, but certainly post-Watchmen – that point in superhero comics evolution where the colours were grey and the linework was scratchy and the problems were intractable and ‘realism’ was king.

None of those ingredients need be a problem, but this particular mix isn’t working too well for me. C.O.W.L. is a dour comic, but every individual piece making up its dourness feels like a character I’ve seen before – ruthless bosses, corrupt politicians, underestimated women, guys with points to prove. It’s not that there’s nobody to ‘root for’ – I’d be fine with that – it’s that nobody here feels like they’re going to do anything unexpected. The art, by Rob Reis, goes for a Sienkiewicz-esque expressionism – it’s effective at conveying mood and a sense of place, but action sequences are often awkward and unclear. A disappointment, ultimately. (2 stars)

BLACK SCIENCE Vol.2: Welcome, Nowhere (Image Comics)

I’m not sure that anything in Black Science has yet topped Matteo Scalera’s amazing double-page spread of a lightning-ravaged world of giant turtles in the first issue. It’s the kind of image that promises pulp wildness ahead, and Scalera does his best to keep up his end of the bargain on a near-monthly basis. The tighter focus of this second volume, though – largely confined to a single universe – keeps Scalera more grounded than I’d hoped, though chariot races and giant war hippos are an excellent use of his talents. He’s unusual, too, in that he can handle up-close action storytelling as well as the gorgeous painted widescreen stuff. The one problem in this volume is that the choice of antagonist – telepathic death millipedes – doesn’t lend itself to smooth storytelling: scenes between people work fine, but Scalera has hard work conveying emotion or action beats when the millipedes are on-panel.

Rick Remender’s storyline, meanwhile, moves dead-or-is-he protagonist Grant McKay to the side to focus on first the unscrupulous Kadir, and then McKay’s kids. Remender is an acquired taste – psychological self-flagellation on top of fast-paced action is his signature style, and if you’ve become tired of it in his other work then Black Science is not for you. But he has more to work with here than Volume 1’s bad dad angst – Kadir knows his attempts to assume the heroic role are barely credible and probably doomed, and the McKay kids’ conflicting personalities take them out of the standard peril magnet role. By the end, difficult second volume syndrome has been just about avoided, and a wider series premise at least partially unveiled. (3.5 stars)

SHUTTER, Vol.1 (Image Comics)

Shutter’s lightly twisted picture-book universe is never less than pretty: dinosaurs, ghouls, talking beasts, and grim’n’gritty Richard Scarry characters turned hitmen romp across its pages, the tone shifting unnervingly from playful to brutal. It’s not the kind of comic that risks boring its artist, and sure enough Leila Del Luca’s work has a fluidity and joy that brings to mind the looser, scrappier end of the European adventure comics that are apparently Shutter’s inspiration.

But that “apparently” is something of a problem. I had to go back to Joe Keatinge’s interviews to get any read on what Shutter wants to do, or be like. A 21st century take on fantastic adventure? Marvellous idea! But Keating immediately bogs his likeable lead down in a family saga and throws on a deadweight of soul-searching about whether she should even BE adventuring. So we have a gleefully chaotic, beautifully realised, tonally intriguing world and a plot which plays all that down in favour of route one angst. Frustrating. (3 stars)

]]>
https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2015/04/what-a-magical-young-lady-you-must-be/feed 0
I Hope You Can Kill Me Before Graduation https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2015/02/i-hope-you-can-kill-me-before-graduation https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2015/02/i-hope-you-can-kill-me-before-graduation#comments Thu, 12 Feb 2015 11:38:06 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=28660 Assclass Graphic novel reviews, originally posted on goodreads.com

ASSASSINATION CLASSROOM, Vol.1 (Viz Media)

This first volume unfussily sets up the hit manga’s premise – an octopus being has destroyed the moon, then become a teacher of a remedial High School class: his pupils have a year to kill him before he destroys the Earth too. He’s teaching them to do it. There’s high concept, and then there’s Assassination Classroom. Mangaka Yuusei Matsui, sensibly enough, introduces the idea quickly and with a straight face, before getting down to showing us how the manga will actually work. It turns out Assassination Classroom is an affable, low-key kind of a comic. Koro Sensei – our tentacular antagonist – is a pretty likeable fellow, but then so are the kids trying to kill him. The introduction of Karma, a particularly devious student, ups the stakes, and tilts the volume towards being a psychological duel a la Death Note… but then he turns out to be a nice chap too. The problem, bizarrely, is that this manga about murder, teen emotion and the destruction of the Earth feels oddly low-stakes so far. It’s crisply done, though, and Matsui is obviously growing into his ideas, so worth a look to see how things develop. (3.5 stars)

PRETTY DEADLY, Vol.1 (Image Comics)

A bold, haunting, slightly forbidding comic. Reading issue by issue required a right-angle lurch away from whatever mood I’d been in before. Reading as a whole I dodged that problem, but noticed more of a drop-away in intensity as the story (or fable) unfolded. There’s a balance struck in Pretty Deadly between the narrative logic of the Western – lone riders, saloon brawls, frontier justice – and the symbolic logic of the myth Kelly Sue DeConnick and Emma Rios are building. As the series goes on the balance tips more to the latter, and a lot of Pretty Deadly’s most thrilling and lasting sequences – the fight in issue #2, for instance – owe more to the former, or have a touch of both. But throughout it’s ambitious, gorgeous, and like nothing else Image is publishing. (4 stars)

RICKY ROUSE HAS A GUN (SelfMadeHero)

An action comedy that’s cleverer in concept (a knowing rip-off of Die Hard set in a Chinese theme park full of knowing rip-offs of other Western IPs) than in execution: the satirical aspects, and the commentary on US-China relations, drop away fairly quickly in favour of, well, doing Die Hard in a Theme Park and having a lot of fun with that. But Jörg Tittel and John Aggs DO have a lot of fun with it (even if some of the action storytelling is a bit unclear) and if you don’t go in expecting a quieter, sharper graphic novel you might have a lot of fun too. Endearingly reminiscent of the sort of things that used to run in the 80s/90s UK comic, CRISIS. (3 stars)

SATELLITE SAM, Vol.1 (Image Comics)

The first issue of Matt Fraction and Howard Chaykin’s Satellite Sam is a magnificent exercise in tone – throwing you in at the technical deep end of the lost world of 50s live TV, the action building to the moment of transmission (and the revelation of the book’s mystery plot). Nothing else in this first volume is quite as breathless or immersive – in fact it’s a comic that demands slow reading, as sorting out who’s who and what they’re after can take a while. But it’s a sharp, good-looking, entertainingly nasty book: Chaykin likes to draw hucksters, sleazebags and sex bombs, and Fraction gives him exactly what he wants. The plot bounces back and forth, getting more complex with every issue, but as with most Matt Fraction comics, I’m reading and enjoying this mostly for the atmosphere. Satellite Sam throbs with the sweaty insecurity and curdled dreams of middle age. (4 stars)

THE FUSE, Vol.1: THE RUSSIA SHIFT (Image Comics)

“Police procedural in space” is the hook, and a lot of the time The Fuse gets by on the obvious fun and love Antony Johnston is having simply doing a buddy cop book. I read very few procedurals, and quite a lot about space, so perhaps I should have been put off by the fact that the “space” element doesn’t exactly impose itself on the storyline. But the cop genre tropes were fresh enough for me, and Johnston’s glee in them clear enough, that I kept reading anyhow.

The Fuse is – despite a fairly high body count – a benign book by the standards of recent Image launches. Klem and Dietrich – our inevitably mismatched leads – never truly feel in danger, even when they notionally are. Despite Justin Greenwood’s pacy, gritty art, it gives The Fuse the feeling of a cosier comic than it’s perhaps meant as – an English detective story rather than a gritty cop yarn. But again, that was a positive for me: I enjoyed spending time with these people and watching trust develop between them. (3.5 stars)

THE WICKED AND THE DIVINE, Vol.1: THE FAUST ACT (Image Comics)

None more Goethe. (4.5 stars)

UNDERTOW, Vol.1: BOATMAN’S CALL (Image Comics)

Strong flashes of promise in this Image comic, bogged down by poor pacing and artistic problems. Artyom’s Trakhanov’s storytelling is fine, with plenty of gritty, messy action sequences, but he has real difficulties making characters distinctive. The loss of a limb, for instance, is traumatic for a character but a great blessing for the reader, who can consequently tell two of the Atlantean rebel heroes apart. The colouring is effective at selling location shifts, but not actually effective at highlighting action within said locations. And the interesting part of Steve Orlando’s story – a desperate mission to find a mutated Atlantean who can breathe air and is ruling over primitive humans – runs badly out of steam as the comic’s attention shifts to less charismatic adversaries. All told, an intriguing premise masks a bit of a mess. (2 stars)

WOLFSMUND, Vol.1 (Vertical Press)

Mitsuhisa Kuji’s Wolfsmund has a reputation for nihilism. It’s certainly bleak, and unsparingly brutal: if Kuji’s imagination is dark, though, her character designs are very clean and genre-standard, so the characters she torments across these linked takes of medieval injustice are all disconcertingly (and generically) hot. None more so than smoldering bad boy Wolfram, keeper of the fortress which gives the series its title, a keep that controls a key Alpine pass between Hapsburg-controlled Swiss cantons and the relative freedom of Italy. Wolfram, possessed of an uncanny ability to spot when someone’s trying to cheat him, smirks and sighs as he destroys rebellious Swiss hopes.

Decades of storytelling have conditioned readers to take the rebels’ side in an independence struggle. Their victories here, though, are tiny and won at horrendous cost. With her emphasis on the implacable pass and fortress itself, Kuji’s approach is to coldly detail the human cost of historical moments, while downplaying the ability of any one individual to make more than a piecemeal difference. Will any kind of heroism emerge from the story? Wait and see, I guess. For now, the most a human can do against Wolfsmund (and against the tide of the story) is a brief spell of action. So there are excellent scenes of clashing knights and men-at-arms, and a desperate mountaineering sequence, that let each protagonist make an impression on the reader, even if the narrative remains unscratched. (4 stars)

]]>
https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2015/02/i-hope-you-can-kill-me-before-graduation/feed 2
Marvel Comics: A Character Guide https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2015/02/marvel-comics-a-character-guide https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2015/02/marvel-comics-a-character-guide#comments Tue, 10 Feb 2015 19:01:47 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=28638 Marvel Comics’ famed innovation in the 1960s was introducing characters who were “human” with “relatable flaws” as opposed to the super-icons of rivals DC. These relatable flaws gave each Marvel character a core storytelling drive which has sustained them for decades. In the spirit of Mark’s in-depth analysis of the Marvel Cinematic Universe cast, here is a look at the central premises of Marvel’s silver age heroes, which together span the entire range of human experience.

spider dick


Spider-Man
: Everyone thinks I’m a dick.
The Hulk: I turn into a total dick.
Fantastic Four: My colleagues are such dicks.
X-Men: People say we were born dicks.
Iron Man: I am a dick, but I try not to be.
Thor: My old man is a dick (and as for my brother…)
Doctor Strange: I can’t do this dick job.
Captain America: Am I a dick?
The Avengers: Let’s be dicks together.
Daredevil: I can’t see dick.
Nick Fury: I can’t trust any of you dicks.
Silver Surfer: What is this thing called “dick”?

(Detailed character notes: The Fantastic Four is often conceptualised in terms of family – this is a later idea, in the early stories it’s more a family firm with office bickering. Also, “strong family” isn’t some terrible flaw. Captain America’s soul-searching phase runs from the 70s to the 00s but I cheated. The Avengers have a brief spell (Cap’s Kooky Quartet) of Why won’t anyone believe we’re not dicks? but are mostly premise-free in the 60s. Daredevil really doesn’t seem to have much of a ‘flaw’ beyond ‘he’s blind’, which is probably why he was the Marvel character to get such intricate development in the 70s and beyond. I left out Ant-Man because the shrinking joke was too obvious even for this post.)

Picture by Steve Ditko and Stan Lee, copyright Marvel Comics

]]>
https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2015/02/marvel-comics-a-character-guide/feed 1
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW! The Soulful And The Arcane https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2015/01/exclusive-interview-the-soulful-and-the-arcane https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2015/01/exclusive-interview-the-soulful-and-the-arcane#comments Sun, 25 Jan 2015 13:30:20 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=28531 We promised we wouldn’t write about the Freaky Trigger #1 comic of 2014 any more, but luckily a MUCH MORE AUTHENTIC AND REAL comic has come along for us to write about instead, thanks to this interview falling through a dimensional gateway from the evil alternate world of Earth-3. Caution – contains implied spoilers for The Wicked And The Divine #5-#7.

Few comics in recent years have attracted quite as much attention and praise as THE SOULFUL AND THE ARCANE, the groundbreaking Gods as classic rock fantasy by writer Kieran Giggin and artist Jimmy McLP. Only seven issues in, it’s already built up a strong following and – like its protagonists – looks set for an immovable place in the canon.

We caught up with Giggin and McLP after the Q Awards, to talk about THE SOULFUL AND THE ARCANE: the series so far, the gods, and how it’s been received.

Interviewer: Guys, congratulations, you must be thrilled by how things have gone.

Giggin: Rock’n’roll! [throws devil horns]

McLP:
Amazing, man.

Giggin: We’ve really resonated with the people we made the book for – guys in their forties, basically, who really care about rock, and art, and, you know, who maybe are beyond the stage where they’re interested in shallow fads and are looking for something solid that will really last.

McLP: We do what we do, and if anyone else likes it it’s a bonus, man.

Interviewer: Can you just quickly sum up the premise of The Soulful And The Arcane?

Giggin: It’s all in the tagline, “Just because you’re an asshole, doesn’t mean your work won’t live forever”. Every ninety years, the gods – the Canon – reincarnate into humans. And they choose humans who have the potential to do something really substantial and meaningful – and this time it’s rock musicians. And these twelve gods get two years to create an all-time classic, something up there with What’s Going On or Sergeant Peppers, and then their career is over. But like, they’re geniuses, so of course they’re really troubled – they have women troubles, drug troubles, troubles on the road, hassles from the man. They’re not all going to make it.

Interviewer: As we’ve seen with Lucifer.

McLP: Tragic, man.

Giggin: Exactly. Lucifer’s thing was that he was so honest – a really truthful, sensitive guy – he really looked at the world and saw the pain in it.

Interviewer: He was modelled on Gram Parsons, right?

Giggin: Well, there’s more in there, there’s like some Jeff Buckley in there, some Ryan Adams – but yeah, a rock star just too pure for this world, man. In the first book, you can see that his honesty is going to doom him. We put in a clue with his age – he’s 27. And then at the end, after he’s ODed, our protagonist Lawrence – the up-and-coming musician – picks up Lucifer’s plectrum.

McLP: Crazy, man.

Giggin: So in the second arc, which is called Up To Eleven, we see the consequences of that.

Interviewer: With Lucifer out of the way, The Soulful And The Arcane has been able to put some of the other Gods into the spotlight. In issue #6 we got a look at Inanna, who has a pretty interesting look for a rock star god.

Giggin: Yeah, Inanna is like – he’s just an everyday guy, he’s just a bloke, nothing special, he’s kind of short, nothing much to look at, but he’s really talented, he’s an amazing musician. And you see him before he became a God and he’s this happily married, really contented guy – there’s no tragedy, no motivation for him to write. So then when he becomes Inanna – wham, he gets divorced and he gets this massive tax bill, and there’s stuff he can make art about that ordinary blokes can appreciate.

Interviewer: I had a theory about him, when Lawrence is talking with him outside the venue, and offers Inanna his jacket, and Inanna says –

Giggin: “No jacket required!” Yeah, we can be on the nose sometimes. [laughs]

Interviewer: Jimmy, are there any Gods you’re particularly enjoying drawing?

McLP: Yeah, man, The Morrigan.

Giggin: Yeah, The Morrigan is a real challenge to write and draw but we’re loving it. That issue where Lawrence takes the endless limo to the Morrigan’s mansion – Jimmy did incredible work on that one. The sequence where Fat Comeback Morrigan first appears and there’s a blizzard of rhinestones – that blew me away.

Interviewer: And who’s the most entertaining to write, Kieran?

Giggin: Well, these are all troubled geniuses, and you have to think yourself into some pretty dark places writing that. It’s a relief writing someone like Baal – she’s so humble and thankful. I have a lot of fun with Baphomet, she’s like our token pop God, cos like, pop is a part of rock too, kind of, and some of it’s pretty good.

McLP: Guilty pleasures, man.

Giggin: Yeah, Baphomet is kind of our guilty pleasure. And Jimmy has fun drawing those spiky bras.

Interviewer: So the second arc is well underway now, Issue 7 just came out, and we get to see a bit more of Woden – she’s got a nasty side to her.

Giggin: Woden is kind of like a rock and roll take on the muse – she’s the inspiration to all these young rock stars but she’s actually breaking up their bands, cos she’s jealous of their creativity. You see that again and again in rock. And the fans are really responding to that – we’ve been seeing a lot of stories on the Soulful And The Arcane hashtag, a lot of guys have stories they want to share about these ladies, you know what I mean.

McLP: Women, man.

Interviewer: And in case the guys reading this want to join in, the hashtag where they’re sharing these stories about women is…?

Giggin: #ArSoul

Interviewer: Great. So what’s coming up

Giggin: Well, this arc is leading up to the big End Of Year list, where the Gods get to see what sort of critical acclaim they’re getting, how people think they’re going to stand the test of time. And there’s a lot of fallout from that. And then we’ve got spotlights on some of the individual gods.

Interviewer: Up To Eleven ends with issue –

Giggin: Ten.

Interviewer: Kieran and Jimmy, thank you. Any last words of inspiration for your readers?

Giggin: Well, like, this whole series, it came from me thinking about rock music, and how in two years in the sixties all these classic albums came out – like literally every great album apart from Dark Side Of The Moon! – you had Revolver, Blonde On Blonde, The Velvet Underground, that one with the goats on the cover, everything. And now it’s all just manufactured pop and people showing off. Who would want a comic about THAT?

McLP: Amen, man.

Volume 1 of The Soulful And The Arcane, STAIRWAY FROM HEAVEN, is available now from Substance Comics.

]]>
https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2015/01/exclusive-interview-the-soulful-and-the-arcane/feed 1
The Freaky Trigger Comics Poll #10-#1 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2015/01/the-freaky-trigger-comics-poll-10-1 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2015/01/the-freaky-trigger-comics-poll-10-1#comments Fri, 16 Jan 2015 15:52:15 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=28475 garp Breaker breaker, Trigger Digger buddies! You got the Big A, Ace Garp, the tucker trucker so tumshy they had to croak him twice, comin’ in atcha with the top ten of the Freaky Trigger comics poll, no bluberoni! You voked your votes and now you can eyeball the results, so crack your eggs and let’s bang in them goomballs and hammer down with the best comics of 2014! Ten-ten, good buddies!

Nice to have you with us, Ace, give our regards to Feek the Freak. And as you probably gathered, it’s the comics poll Top Ten.

10 Lumberjanes
10. LUMBERJANES (G.Ellis/Stevenson/Allen, Boom! Box)

A few years ago you heard the criticism a lot – with regard to the US market – that there just weren’t enough good all-ages titles, and there were very few attempts made to bring kids into the hobby. That has changed, for a bunch of reasons (tablets and digital comics, gradual improvement of comic shops, fans becoming parents, and fallout from a general trend towards a more diverse audience). Lumberjanes in particular has been a standard-bearer for the new all-ages comics – original material, female creators, female cast, and its surreal, joyful summer camp adventure is in the spirit of stuff like Gravity Falls and Adventure Time, from the current resurgence in kids TV.

09 Moon Knight
9. MOON KNIGHT (W.Ellis/Shalvey/Bellaire, Marvel Comics)

Warren Ellis and Declan Shalvey’s run on Moon Knight is a series of six hugely stylish done-in-one short stories, each one a compact argument – odd though it is coming from a writer with a public ambivalence towards the genre – that ‘cape comics’ can still feel fresh and unfamiliar. The six stories do follow a pattern, though: Moon Knight encounters a situation, and the story involves him working out the rules of that situation and then playing and winning its game (he may occasionally cheat). It’s ‘detective’ work of a sort, but allowing a great flexibility of tone. Plus it has one of the most awesome costume designs in a year of good ones. The series continued after Ellis and Shalvey left, but I’ve not read those issues.

08 Silver Surfer
8. SILVER SURFER (Slott/Allred/Allred, Marvel Comics)

The agonised philosophisin’ of the sixties Silver Surfer has been something of a straitjacket for the character since – nobody wants to write the character like that any more, but few have come up with something better. Dan Slott’s take – give him a companion – is as good a solution as Marvel’s found. It takes the focus off Norrin Radd – who turns out to work better as a straight man, as frankly Dawn Greenwood is already a lot more fun to read about. The setup is unashamedly a Doctor Who one, but that’s a good set-up! And the Allreds’ guarantee any comic a minimum level of charm.

07 Sex Criminals
7. SEX CRIMINALS (Fraction/Zdarsky, Image Comics)

One of the notable things about the current generation of mainstream comics writers is how much fun they have in public with each other and with their fans, thanks to Twitter, Tumblr, etc. This kind of open, comradely approach to comics-making has been part of the patter since Stan Lee, but it feels a lot more authentic now. Sex Criminals is the book that epitomises this approach on the page – not just because of stuff like the ‘Brimpception’ cover and the Wicked And Divine porno, but also because it’s about sex, which is serious and funny and collaborative and occasionally disastrous, a bit like making comics, but also quite a lot not, so perhaps I’ll stop this line of enquiry now. Anyway, Sex Criminals is also an example of a comic with a premise that seems initially very limited and turns out to be capable of telling a lot of different stories.

06 Hawkeye
6. HAWKEYE (Fraction/Aja/Wu/Various, Marvel Comics)

I have completely fallen out of touch with Hawkeye, I admit – once it became obvious that a) it would end up as a finished story and b) it wouldn’t get finished in any kind of regular monthly way, the argument for just waiting till the end and getting the omnibus or trades became too strong. So I can’t tell you if Hawkeye has been good this year, or even which of its issues came out – the sign language one? The Pizza Dog one? (No, surely not.) I assume it’s still great, you thought it was great, it’s basically transformed Marvel’s approach to solo titles, etc. I just can’t say anything about the actual 2014 comics!

05 Adventure Time
5. ADVENTURE TIME (North/Various, Boom! Studios)

Like all-ages comics, licensed property comics were at one point very much a poor relation – shoddy cash-grabs scratching around in the margins of their properties. The tide has been turning on that for a few years, and this week a licensed comic (Marvel’s Star Wars #1) became the industry’s first million-seller for two decades. Adventure Time captures the difference between then and now – Ryan North writes a comic that gets the voice and spirit of its parent property brilliantly right, while taking the opportunity to tell longer-form stories within the show’s world. Doesn’t hurt that Adventure Time is something of a jewel in current pop culture anyhow, of course.

04 Saga
4. SAGA (Vaughan/Staples, Image Comics)

Like Hawkeye, Saga is a comic I’ve fallen behind on owing to trade-waiting – I’ve not even read Vol.3 yet, let alone Vol.4. By all accounts it’s as good as ever. I think I’ve only ever read one “Saga is rubbish” piece and even that read more like someone building an argument to see if they could. On the other hand, I’ve not actually read any brilliant positive commentary on it either – it’s a curiously enigmatic comic, giving nothing away from the title down: it just rolls along being very good and hard to summarise. Gorgeous design and art, memorable characters, Vaughan is still the best cliffhanger writer in America… it’s at once obviously a flagship comic of the current era and one of the least analysed.

03 Loki
3. LOKI: AGENT OF ASGARD (Ewing/Garbett/Woodard, Marvel Comics)

When Loki was announced, with those languid and lovely Jenny Frison covers, there was a general sense that this comic was going to be purest Tumblr-bait. And it is! And a good thing too: a comic about lies, mischief and stories is particularly suited to Tumblr fandom’s focus on small character moments and joke beats. It means Ewing (that guy again) can structure the comic around feints and tells, its cast playing games with each other across pages, issues, and arcs. The introduction of King Loki continues the modern conception of the character – Loki is often an antagonist, but he only really has one himself: himself.

02 Ms Marvel
2. MS.MARVEL (Wilson/Alphona/Herring, Marvel Comics)

One teeny point behind the poll winner, G.Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona’s Kamala Khan is the Big Two character find of 2014, and Ms Marvel is an important comic: the first Marvel or DC book to reach half its audience digitally would always be a milestone, and the fact it’s this comic, about a Muslim teenage superhero fangirl, is particularly telling. It’s become the poster book for the idea that the mainstream comics audience is changing and growing. And it’s really good. It earns the right to use a very whiskery story template – the teen superhero origin – because the detail (growing up Muslim in America) is fresh to such comics, and also because the comic is so tonally distinctive. Wilson is a very benign writer, which is refreshing in itself: her chief villain is hardly menacing, she presents even Kamala’s enemies with sympathy, and Alphona’s whimsical style makes Ms.Marvel stand out as an optimistic, light-hearted book. You have to go back a long way – maybe to people like William Messner-Loebs in the early 90s – to find a Big Two comic this gentle and humane.

01 Wicked And The Divine
1. THE WICKED AND THE DIVINE (Gillen/McKelvie/Wilson, Image Comics)

Surprise!! Well, maybe not really. Always the favourite, this gods-as-pop-stars saga was also the comic that got most individual people voting for it. I’ve written about Gillen and McKelvie comics a lot, this one included, and it’s about pop stars (of a sort) – so it feels like a natural match for this site. It’s a comic, for all its incident, that is playing a very patient game, and I suspect the strength of it will be more obvious in a couple of years time, as themes and plot points start to roll out. By the same token, it could completely fuck up. But that seems less likely. It’s a book currently riding high on style, a very moreish premise (more Gods, more pantheons, can’t wait), and a few instant favourite characters – it’s not that that’s all there is to WicDiv, but those are the cards it’s played so far (and in monthly comics, they are very strong cards). Back when I was writing about the team’s Young Avengers series, I had plans for a “History Of Teenage Superhero Comics”, and one of the points I wanted to make was that Vertigo in its 90s heyday was a superhero publisher for actual teenagers, in all their sulky, fiery, uncomfortably intense, voraciously curious glory. The Wicked And The Divine is openly, and excellently, in that tradition.

]]>
https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2015/01/the-freaky-trigger-comics-poll-10-1/feed 6
The Freaky Trigger Comics Poll 2014: #25-#11 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2015/01/the-freaky-trigger-comics-poll-2014-25-11 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2015/01/the-freaky-trigger-comics-poll-2014-25-11#comments Sun, 11 Jan 2015 21:03:04 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=28441 RO JAWS “Wotcher, HUMES! Sewer robot RO-JAWS here, taking time out from cleaning THARG’S CLUDGEY to bring you the second part of the 2014 Freaky Trigger comics poll. And MANKEY MOSES, it’s taken some bringing! Those nurks at Freaky Trigger have tried to cram FIFTEEN of 2014’s best comics into ONE post. Like HAMMER-STEIN says when stepping out of the ROBO-LAV after a hard night on the oil — GIVE IT SPACE TO BREATHE! They’re round the bend – THE U-BEND! The last time I saw anything this full, I was -“

That’s, ah, all we have time for from Ro-Jaws, but he’s right – we’re into the list proper of the 2014 poll, your Top 25 comics of the year. And here they are –

25 Black Science
25. Black Science (Remender/Scalera/White, Image Comics)

A dysfunctional family saga set in a pulp-inspired science-fantasy multiverse, Black Science lets both creators indulge themselves to thrill-powered effect: Rick Remender with melodramatic two-fisted angst, Matteo Scalera with a succession of lush, bizarre universes.

24 Zero
24. Zero (Kot/Various, Image Comics)

Slices – one carefully-selected artist per issue – of the brutal history of hi-tech 21st century spy Edward Zero. The psychopathic, the cynical, the criminal and the brainwashed scrap it out in bloody detail and there’s no hope of anything turning out remotely well. It always looks fantastic, mind you.

23 Bad Machinery
23. Bad Machinery (Allison, scarygoround.com or Oni Press)

I don’t read this one so I’m reliant on Googled reviews that tell me to look out for the delightfully sympathetic portrayal of young mystery-solvin’ adults and the very funny dialogue. Serialised page-by-age on the web, and now also a series of collections from Oni Press.

22 The Fuse
22. The Fuse (Johston/Greenwood/Chankhamma/Brisson, Image Comics)

Back in the 80s there was a TV show called Star Cops, in which a grizzled vet runs a space station police department, solving crimes the Earth below wants nothing to do with. That is also roughly the premise of The Fuse, except Star Cops was famously boring and The Fuse really isn’t.

21 Young Avengers
21. Young Avengers (Killen/McKelvie/Wilson/Various, Marvel Comics)

Qualifies, as everyone voting for it was careful to point out, by having its final issue released last January. The most written-about comic on this site, so I won’t say more, except that there are already comics around which owe it an obvious debt.

20 Mighty Avengers
20. Mighty Avengers (Ewing/Land/Schiti/Leisten/D’Armata, Marvel Comics)

Amongst the grillions of Avengers comics, “Mighty” was expected to be the ‘street level’ team. Al Ewing (yes relation) had them fight cthulhoid terror, alien invaders, science gone mad and hordes of were-roosters… all of which probably are street-level in the Marvel U, come to think of it. Old school superhero fun.

19 Fade Out
19. The Fade Out (Brubaker/Phillips/Breitweiser, Image Comics)

The reliable Brubaker/Phillips team get stuck into historical noir with a 40s Hollywood mystery that promises to grow in scope. Straightforward in its pleasures, but no less pleasurable for that.

18 Hip Hop Family Tree
18. Hip Hop Family Tree (Piskor, Fantagraphics)

Piskor’s graphic history of hip-hop reached the 80s with its second collected volume, showcasing the zenith of Afrika Bambaataa’s work and beginning to explore the West Coast. Piskor’s books are beautiful objects, and his stories bounce with enthusiasm and the desire to teach, heavy on the atmosphere and personalities of one of music’s greatest (and most complicated) stories.

17 Uber
17. Uber (Gillen/White/Andrade, Avatar)

The challenge of Avatar is given the license and expectation to go all-out for gore, how do you find a story that justifies it? Kieron Gillen brings out his history nerd side for the most tonally serious work of his career: an alternate universe of Nazi super-soldiers and unrelenting, endless war.

16 Afterlife With Archie
16. Afterlife With Archie (Aguirre-Sacasa/Francavilla, Archie Comics)

Gimmick concept turned critical smash – having zero interest in zombies or Archie I didn’t read this, but by all accounts (including the account of our voters) it’s surprised everyone by being the best zombie title around.

15 New Avengers
15. New Avengers (Hickman/Various, Marvel Comics)

Hickman’s New Avengers and Avengers storylines remind me a bit of the notorious Mouse Trap game (not the Mousetrap play, even if it seems to have run as long). The bit where the mechanism all locks together and the mousetrap falls is glorious, even the hours of play spent getting there weren’t. But now we’re in that endgame, the dilemmas the series has teased can’t be avoided any more, and it’s all really quite exciting even if you do read the comics press and know what it’s leading up to.

14 She Hulk
14. She Hulk (Soule/Pulido/Vicente, Marvel Comics)

The most heartening thing about the Big Two in 2014 – at least if these results are any guide – was Marvel’s policy of putting out solo series for relatively minor characters whose creators were left alone to find a style and vision that fit the title. Charles Soule and Javier Pulido’s light lawyering comedy is the first, but not the last, in the main list.

13 Gotham Academy
13. Gotham Academy (Cloonan/Fletcher/Kerschl/Various, DC Comics)

The first DC comic on the list, and one of the first fruits of a reported loosening of the New 52’s editorial straitjacket – I’ve not read Gotham Academy yet but it looks like a very mid-10s superhero book: a diverse cast, an indie/webcomics sensibility, aimed at a younger and broader audience than the same-old same-old.

12 Eleventh Doctor
12. The Eleventh Doctor (Ewing/Williams/Fraser/Cook, Titan Comics)

I’m trade-waiting on this, so I’ve only read issue 1 – but that was one of my favourite single issues of the year (and obviously all the nicer that the best Doctor Who comic I’ve read since I was 8 was by Al) – a vignette that absolutely captured the Matt Smith Doctor and introduced a companion with bags of potential, while being a very satisfying stand-alone. Half the issues are by Rob Williams, and apparently they’ve been great too – can’t wait to get the collection and hand it to my own 8 year old.

11 Southern Bastards
11. Southern Bastards (Aaron/Latour, Image Comics)

I’ve seen talk of the Year Of The Colorist (and in 2013 too, for that matter) – a welcome raising of awareness (mine too!) of quite how much colour contributes to mainstream US comics storytelling, and quite how nuanced and skilful its practitioners are. We’ve come a long way since the brown-out “painted art” of the mid-90s and the garish palettes of early digital colour. Not that oppressive monotony doesn’t still have a role to play: Jason Latour’s suffocating red and brown tones on Southern Bastards are perfect for the comic’s cycles of violence and retribution and the sense of a series whose star is the land and its history rather than the men doomed to move through it.

Check back during the week for the Top 10!

]]>
https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2015/01/the-freaky-trigger-comics-poll-2014-25-11/feed 2
The Freaky Trigger Comics Poll 2014: #38-#26 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2015/01/the-freaky-trigger-comics-poll-2014-38-26 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2015/01/the-freaky-trigger-comics-poll-2014-38-26#comments Tue, 06 Jan 2015 16:16:38 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=28389 ShakoKiller Inside the Arctic Base, the men from the website peered nervously out as SHAKO paced the snow. The giant bear showed no signs of tiring. But what could it want? All they had were the Freaky Trigger Comics Poll Results. What use could a polar bear have for a rundown of the top comics of 2014? Outside, Shako waited. Like all polar bears, Shako could be… patient when it came to his prey. This was just like the fishing hole, where he waited for a seal. His instincts told him the humans would soon be exhausted… ready to… PLAY WITH SHAKO. Shako could smell the meat of analysis and vote totals. Very soon now, it would be his.

Ahem. Yes, thankyou Shako, and thankyou those readers who voted in the first annual FT Comics Poll for the best titles of 2014. We’ll get into your Top 25 comics of the year in other posts, but here, first of all, are the titles that ranked (i.e. got more than 1 vote) but placed outside the final 25.

38 BP

38. BITCH PLANET (DeConnick/De Landro/Peter/Cowles, Image Comics)

With only one issue, which came out after the poll was announced, it’s a sign of the brutal quality of Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine De Landro’s feminist space prison saga that it snuck on the end of a couple of ballots anyhow.

37 RG

37. ROCKET GIRL (Montclare/Reeder, Image Comics)

Zesty sci-fi about a time-jumping future cop in an alternate 80s New York. A lot of buzz around this comic at the start of last year, though it’s in between-arcs hiatus now.

36 umbral
36. UMBRAL (Johnston/Mitten, Image Comics)

Image had a bunch of epic or dark fantasy comics launch this year – it’s not a genre that does much for me, but Umbral was definitely the best I looked at, and probably the nastiest.

35 Seconds
35. SECONDS (Byron Lee O’Malley, Ballantine Books)

I suspect there is nothing that more precisely dates me as a comics fan than my not really ‘getting’ Scott Pilgrim. The fault is plainly in me not it – that comic was a touchstone for a bunch of fans a few years younger than me, and Seconds is a chance for them to see its creator tackle hitting your thirties.

34 Prophet
34. PROPHET (Brandon Graham and many more, Image Comics)

Brandon Graham’s sci-fi epic is finishing up next year – special bonus in 2014 for putting out the bizarre and fascinating Prophet:Strikefile, a mind-expanding guide to the series and the first comic called “Strikefile” since 1993.

33 C Marvel
33. CAPTAIN MARVEL (DeConnick/Lopez/Loughridge, Marvel Comics)

Another relaunch for Carol Danvers’ solo comic sent her up into space for a smart sci-fi adventure.

32 ODY C
32. ODY-C (Fraction/Ward, Image Comics)

Another one-issue wonder, though it was out for a bit longer when voting came round. A psychedelic gender-swapped Odyssey in space, and a showcase for the power of digital colours.

30 Trees
30=. TREES (Ellis/Howard, Image Comics)

Even more Image Comics sci-fi – this one is a series of character pieces by Warren Ellis, united by a setting in which Earth has been colonised by enormous, unresponsive, alien structures.

30 Cosplayers
30=. COSPLAYERS (Dash Shaw, Fantagraphics)

Contra the title, there’s not that much cosplay in the main storyline in Cosplayers #1, a charming story about online creativity and its intersection with real life.

29 Midas Flesh
29. THE MIDAS FLESH (North/Paroline/Lamb, Boom! Studios)

King Midas’ golden touch reimagined as a hard SF story which turns back into one about consequences – the breezy Ryan North style keeps things deceptively delightful.

28 Three
28. THREE (Gillen/Kelly/Bellaire, Image Comics)

A sword-and-sandal epic about slaves on the run that’s also Kieron Gillen’s barbed comment on historical mythmaking in general and Frank Millers 300 in particular.

27 Walking Dead

27. THE WALKING DEAD (Kirkman/Adlard/Gaudiano/Rathburn, Image Comics)

Image’s best-selling title which I have never…. actually… read…. but it’s about zombies, that much I know! And clearly had a strong year.

26 Black Widow
26. BLACK WIDOW (Edmondson/Noto, Marvel Comics)

Natasha Romanova gets a spotlight – Nathan Edmondson writes a clipped, atmospheric spy drama, turned thoughtful and melancholy by Phil Noto’s art (colouring in particular)

Check back in a couple of days for #25-11 – if we can escape the jaws of Shako, obviously…

]]>
https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2015/01/the-freaky-trigger-comics-poll-2014-38-26/feed 3
WHAM! POW! Polls Aren’t Just For Pop Anymore! https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2014/12/wham-pow-polls-arent-just-for-pop-anymore https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2014/12/wham-pow-polls-arent-just-for-pop-anymore#comments Thu, 11 Dec 2014 13:46:14 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=28152
B-but Shako... you weren't eligible... n-no... HELP MEEEEEEE

B-but Shako… you weren’t eligible… n-no… HELP MEEEEEEE

As well as the Freaky Trigger pop poll, masterminded by Kat, I thought I’d try something else – a Freaky Trigger COMICS POLL. This will work in exactly the same way – you list up to 20 comics you’ve enjoyed most in 2014 and send them to me before the end of this year. And by “me” I mean freakytrigger@gmail.com (so Kat doesn’t get a load of comics ballots and I don’t get any pop ones).

That’s basically ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW, so get those votes in. But if you CRAVE details like our chief sponsor SHAKO* craves MEAT then there are more below the cut.

What’s eligible? Anything that came out in 2014 and included stuff that had not previously been published in 2014.

Are we going to strictly check that it did? Probably not TBH.

Single issues or ongoing titles?
Obviously for original graphic novels, one shots etc. just give the name of it. For ongoing series, we’ll be listing the title as a whole. If you want to pick something from an ongoing title then you CAN specify a single issue if you want and we’ll try and mention that, but your votes will be rolled up into the title.

What about reprints and collections? Consider the amount of published-in-2014 material and vote as your conscience decides.

What about anthologies? We WILL consider anthologies separate from what’s in them – so a vote for a 2000AD series will not be rolled into a vote for 2000AD. But you could also vote for 2000AD as a whole.

Can the comics be from anywhere? They can.

Will you put my email address to nefarious use? We will not.


Do I have to pick 20 comics?
No! Pick as many as you like, but no more than 20 please.

When will the results be up?
January. I expect I will list anything that gets more than one vote, since I suspect this will be a highly limited electorate poll. And I’ll put all the one-vote suggestions in another post somewhere. No vote will be wasted!

*the only bear on the Pazz & Jop email list.

]]>
https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2014/12/wham-pow-polls-arent-just-for-pop-anymore/feed 1
Ragnarok And Roll https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2014/11/ragnarok-and-roll https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2014/11/ragnarok-and-roll#respond Thu, 06 Nov 2014 19:19:08 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=28012 The Mighty Thor, by Walt Simonson

thunder frog I got into comics in the 80s, a copy of Walt Simonson’s Thor was one of the first Marvel Comics I bought with my own pocket money. (#359, where Thor is ensnared by a LOVE POTION brewed by The Enchantress’ sister) Years later I went back and read foundational 60s greats like the Lee/Kirby Fantastic Four, and the Steve Ditko Spider-Man, but at that time they either weren’t available or just didn’t feel current. Simonson’s Thor was my Kirby.

The other comics that were exciting and praised at that time – Daredevil, Uncanny X-Men, later on things like Watchmen and the post-Watchmen DC stuff – they were all built on interrogating or complicating the last 20-30 years of comics, which was an awesome thing to come in on (yay! punk!) but also made me feel I’d arrived a little late – in time for the downfall of something I’d never really known to begin with.

Simonson’s Thor stood apart from that. It wasn’t trying to complicate or question anything, it was expansive and celebratory. Later, of course, there were a lot of self-consciously expansive, celebratory superhero comics, rowing back against that complication – but they all seem a little mealy-mouthed next to that Thor run. Simonson’s Thor run – from #337 to #382 – starts within a month or so of Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing, that hammer-blow that started comics’ revisionist age. And it ends within a month or so of it too. Perhaps you could see it as the last blast of Marvel’s initial heroic age, a Silver Age Ragnarok.

But of course, what Simonson was doing was actually very similar to the 80s revisionists – rebuild a concept from its roots up. His opening issue overturns the series with trick Marvel are still using now – it turns out someone else can pick up Thor’s hammer. And the run is even more similar to the kind of post-revisionist syncretic approach you eventually got on, say, Grant Morrison’s Batman. Take all the different kinds of stories an idea has proven able to support. Do them all at once, more integrated and more awesome. 60s Thor had myth, cosmic sci-fi, sudsy sleeves-up Midgard stories, guest stars, brawling aplenty – but before Simonson it had never been that well woven together: tonal shifts that used to demarcate storylines instead switched around from scene to scene. Meanwhile he made Asgard, not Midgard, the spine of the series – understanding myth as the thing you can do with Thor that you can’t do with anyone else.

kracalactaka But not myth with that air of slight mystery and reserve you get with the post-Moore crowd. There’s little of the austerity of high fantasy, and not quite the kind of post-modern mingling of myth and life you get with Neil Gaiman. This is Stan Lee myth, American myth, as much Barnum as Homer. The kind of myth the Marvel Universe, that expanding rubberband ball of snake oil, invention, swiped ideas and deadline panics, might earn. In the final Simonson storyline – largely pencilled by Sal Buscema – the world serpent Jormungandr goes undercover as a washed-up old 60s Marvel monster on a park bench, and two orphaned Midgard kids save the Nine Realms. It’s less heralded than Simonson’s opening storyline, and though Buscema turns in vivid, aggressive work it suffers from the art switch. But the mix of tone – the epic and the sentimental, the bombastic and the knowing – is perfectly done.

When Simonson was still the penciller, he took all that and drew the fuck out of it. Thor is LOUD – John Workman’s lettering makes the run sing – and is always in motion. A lot of Thor comics since – particularly in the painted art era – fall prey to the temptation to have the big moments feel like tableaus, or children’s book illustrations – beautiful, beautiful fantasy art, but static. Simonson’s Thor isn’t just an unashamed hero comic, it’s an unashamed ACTION comic, full of movement and force and a barely stilled vibrancy in the hearty, blocky figures – even when they’re talking or at rest. It’s a clever, well-thought-out comic which, like its hero, is happy to present an uncomplicated, good-natured surface.

It’s become fashionable, in these heady days of comic writers with speakable music tastes, to associate Thor with metal. Simonson’s run feels like rock music too, but of a slightly more populist kind. It’s Glam, basically. Not the Bowie-esque, androgynous kind of glam, but the platform-booted, big-riffing, big haired, Queen, Slade, KISS kind of glam and hard rock. Simonson’s Thor is inventive, melodramatic, ludicrous, occasionally baroque, unashamedly itself. I adore it: my favourite Marvel comics run, to this day.

]]>
https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2014/11/ragnarok-and-roll/feed 0
Squees! Hammer Goin’ Her (Temp) https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2014/07/squees-hammer-goin-her-temp https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2014/07/squees-hammer-goin-her-temp#comments Tue, 22 Jul 2014 11:59:29 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=27808 Avengers NOW! and Marvel in the 2010s

lady thor Marvel Comics’ announcement that its new Thor is going to be a woman has attracted plenty of froth and comment – especially since it turned out that this was part of a general refreshment of their core titles under the Avengers NOW! banner brand. Captain America is to be replaced by long-standing partner The Falcon (who happens to be a black guy), and Iron Man is going to become a dick (they may have trouble presenting this as a radical change).

There have been a range of responses. Superhero comics are built on the “illusion of change”, but apparently have the most reliably troll-able audience in media history, so some people are upset at the idea of a status quo change. That it’s a status quo change away from a white guy in two cases – and those two cases are the ones drawing all the heat, nobody is saying “I love Tony Stark! How dare they make him even more of a jerk” – is not coincidental to the level of rage.

But then you have people who are well aware of the illusion of change thing, and think Marvel are pulling a fast one – it’s a gimmick, it’ll just change back, haven’t we all grown out of this stuff? These people point to the 2015 release date of the next Avengers film – which won’t, most likely, star a lady Thor and a black Cap – as evidence of an expiry date on these plots. This sort of “wrestling – it’s fixed!” metacommentary (ongoing serials have subplots that begin and end – pass the smelling salts!) isn’t a great revelation but it stings more here because the spin on this has been that this is part of an important push towards greater diversity in comics – reaching to new audiences, launching more female-led titles, and so on. So if this is just the usual headline-chasing plot twister they’re playing with fire presenting it as something else.

And the third reaction is enthusiasm, broad or guarded – Falcon Cap and Lady Thor and maybe even Dickbag Tony will be good stories well told, and diversity really is important, so well done Marvel.

What do I think? I think the Avengers NOW! initiative is interesting as a clear progression in terms of Marvel’s current creative direction and recent history – and probably also needs to be understood through the lens of previous superhero replacements (there have – gasp – been a few) and what they mean.

STARS OF THE SILVER (AGE) SCREEN

avass1 Marvel Comics right now is in a position that’s both familiar and unusual. It’s the biggest fish in a fairly small comics industry pond – that’s the familiar part. It’s also the publisher of several enormously popular and vastly profitable sets of movie IP – one it owns (the Marvel Studios films) and some it doesn’t (the X-Men and Spider-Man films). This is unusual, historically.

So there’s a reasonable expectation that the movies will influence the comics, which is at the root of the “everything will reset by the time the next Avengers film comes out” response to Avengers NOW! And in the broad sense that Marvel’s publishing initiatives recently seem to have played up the properties Marvel Studios owns, and that more comics with THOR on the front show up when a Thor film is in cinemas, this is true: Marvel is Avengers-centric now to a degree that would have seemed absurd for most of its history.

But an actual lockstep between the films and the comics? No. Marvel put out a “movie Avengers” title, Avengers Assemble!, with the film characters and much Whedon-esque banter, which opened to high-ish sales numbers then quickly declined and was cancelled by issue #25 – not a disgraceful performance these days, but certainly not proof that “comics reflecting the films” is what the comics audience want, or that publishing such things brings new readers in. As we’ll see, there’s a difference between publishing comics designed to appeal to new fans from the films and comics designed to imitate the films. Marvel haven’t taken the latter path much since their film success started, so there’s no real reason to imagine they’ll suddenly begin that in 2015.

NUKE ME WITH THE NOW

So if they haven’t been tracking the films, what have Marvel been doing in the last couple of years? Avengers NOW! is the third annual refresh of the line – following 2012’s Marvel NOW! and last year’s All-New Marvel NOW! (and yes, the branding is getting a bit exhausting). And the comics now do genuinely feel somewhat different from the comics of a few years ago. What has the company been changing – for better and worse?

hawkguy MID-LIST BOOKS: The most influential Marvel comic of the 2010s is Matt Fraction and David Aja’s Hawkeye, which pushed the company to an unfamiliar level of critical acclaim and trade paperback success. Hawkeye’s ground-level, beautifully designed take on the everyday life of the Avengers’ everyman character showed that breaking away from a house style and giving creators license to find an individual angle on a book could pay off. Marvel have always had the occasional quirky book, but it feels like Marvel NOW! is actively chasing them as a publishing strategy. Since Hawkeye the company has established a thriving tier of low- to mid-selling comics with strong individual voices and visual identities – She-Hulk, Silver Surfer, Ms Marvel, Ghost Rider, Black Widow, and more. Not all of these work for me, but they feel less like each other than Marvel books have in a very long time, and the company’s critical stock has risen accordingly.

NEW AUDIENCES: Marvel has made it an increasingly public priority to attract new audiences to its comics – new meaning younger, more female, more diverse. It’s exactly the right time to be doing this – to take advantage of people switched on to characters by the films, of the wider availability of digital comics, and of the terrific fit of comics to social media platforms where new audiences live. It’s also the right thing to do, commercially – dragging comics to the same broader-based fandom that other kinds of ‘geek media’ have enjoyed for a while. It hasn’t paid instant and obvious dividends for Marvel, but it’s helped keep them the number one publisher at a time when rival DC has been particularly commercially aggressive.

kamala The extent to which Marvel has won the PR battle over diversity, in fact, is embarrassing for DC. By the metrics of creator diversity – bad at both companies – and series fronted by female characters, the two organisations are well matched. (Marvel’s public pride at having eight female-led ongoing comics may be down to it being the first time it’s topped DC’s ‘New 52’ launch total of seven.) But unlike DC, Marvel has largely avoided fuck-ups and firestorms around its handling of female characters, and – helped enormously by the very high quality of comics like Muslim superheroine Ms.Marvel – it’s made diversity part of its creative branding in a way it’s never managed before.

EVENTS: Marvel is now more than ten years into an era of line-wide events, and seems more invested in the format than ever. Marvel events of the 00s had two purposes. One was to sell exceptionally well. But they were more directionally important than ever, too – they built a sense of a universal meta-plot that was driving Marvel along, letting the company play the “illusion of change” game across the whole line at once. This impression of a single larger storyline, so prominent between hero-versus-hero slugfests Civil War (2005) and Avengers v X-Men (2012), has dissipated in the Marvel NOW! era. But not because the company has de-emphasised events – far from it. The pace has increased to two tentpole events a year, with a couple of breather months in between. Age Of Ultron (robots take over) last spring was followed by Infinity (space war) last summer, with a few months before Original Sin (cosmic detective romp) almost overlaps with the upcoming AXIS (villains get their shit together).

By shipping individual issues of these comics more often – so a six issue story takes three months not six – the overall footprint of event months doesn’t change, but twice as many books and tie-ins can come out. But this frenetic pace leads to a marketing situation where currently-running events are drowned out in the hype for the next one. And it means the thing Marvel did so effectively with its 00s events – use them to set up and shift status quos on a yearly basis – is off the table: the universe is too incoherent for that. While event comics are obviously still selling, in the 00s they also had a longer-term effect as a springboard for new titles: the damp squib of “Inhumanity”, Marvel’s one recent effort at a cross-line branding a la 00s efforts “The Initiative” or “Dark Reign”, suggests that might not be the case now.

avdiagram FRANCHISES: One of the more interesting and risky decisions of the Marvel NOW! era – and a revealing one vis-à-vis the company’s priorities for the Avengers books – was its choice in 2012 to tie the future of most of its major books to long-term storylines by its biggest-name writers. This included the Avengers. Hot off the most popular superhero film in history, Marvel locked their Avengers franchise into not one but two parallel, sometimes contradictory, multi-year uber-plots reliant on a single writer apiece (Jonathan Hickman on Avengers, Rick Remender on Uncanny Avengers). Each of these has leaned heavily on characters who weren’t in the films. Neither have finished yet.

This suggests that Marvel have decided that the comic audience and the film audience are basically irrelevant to one another: even when they’re the same people, they’re the same people wanting different things. So instead Marvel use the comics as an ideas lab – things the films can do 5 or 10 years later, not as an attempt to make a tiny smidgen more money off what they’re doing now. Of course, if you don’t like the idea of Jonathan Hickman doing a prog rock Avengers epic, you get to sit out three years of comics. And there’s another downside to this, which is that the uber-plots dominating Avengers actually cut off some commercial room for experiment – they immediately demarcate which titles “matter” and don’t for a plot-driven reader, making it hard to extend a franchise in the way DC have been doing with Batman. Not that this stops Marvel trying: there are still 8 or 9 Avengers titles a month.

A MIGHTY MARVEL NON-EVENT

anow2014 What does all this add up to? A pretty happy reader, in my case. I’m not especially invested in events, I am very interested in books with individual voices and creators doing their things, and I think a broader range of featured characters is good politics, good storytelling, and good for the medium’s future. But I also think it’s fair to say that going into Avengers NOW! Marvel feels a bit unbalanced. Looked at over the last couple of years, the House of Ideas is on a creative high, putting out fun, individual comics with an abandon it hasn’t shown since its chaotic, fertile 1970s. But this vibrant 2010s Marvel co-exists with and commercially relies on the declining 2000s Marvel, driven by events and macro-plots, an approach whose wheels seem close to falling off.

(The last time I paid attention to DC it seemed to have the opposite issues – no surprise, the two companies’ approaches often cycle – a sense of direction at the top end of its range and then a completely stagnant mid-list milling around waiting for the mercy of cancellation. I don’t know to what extent the weeklies DC recently launched have changed this. And the old rivalry isn’t strictly relevant to this post anyhow.)

This is all the context in which Avengers NOW! happens – a convenient rolling up of existing plans and plot developments into a marketing event, if not an in-universe one. Back in those wayward 1970s, Marvel put out The Defenders, which it liked to describe as a “non-team”, a bunch of characters who just happened to star in a comic together. In this sense, Avengers NOW! is a non-event, a similar bunch of things that just happens to be happening simultaneously.

But that non-event status might play to Marvel’s current strengths – it’s a potential way of squaring the circle between what it does well now and what it seems to struggle with, of absorbing the better parts of its 00s model and pushing its 10s one forward. It promises individualised approaches and new angles for its higher-selling books, and greater diversity to boot. But it also leaves the door open for a meta-plot along Civil War lines – how well will the new heroes respond to crises, work together, and so on. And it opens up their franchises in more interesting ways.

Which is necessary, because of the other big long-term trend in comics, one Marvel is on the wrong side of. Marvel’s viability is based on its intellectual property, and its intellectual property is largely very old. The House Of Ideas finds it harder than ever to create new ones. There have never been great incentives to create brilliant characters for Marvel or DC – you won’t own them, and you might get to look on as the people who do make lots of money off them. But there haven’t always been great alternatives to work-for-hire, either. Increasingly over the last twenty years there have been, and breakout characters and ideas – the kind people cosplay – are coming more from independent publishers. The story of Marvel since its bankruptcy and rebirth is the story of a company adjusting to this reality – a world where new IP is scarce, so you expand and burnish the old to its maximum potential. In the ‘metaplot’ years this was done mostly by re-arranging existing major characters in new configurations: Cap and Iron Man hate each other now! So do Cyclops and Wolverine! So do the Avengers and X-Men! It was a very effective way around the problem, but always a short-term one.

THE THIRD ACT TRAP

cap332 Which brings us to the other question people have been asking – what is Marvel’s endgame with replacing its heroes? How long will this last?

It could- of course – all end terribly as a set up for a big event in which your regular white dude heroes turn up and save the day. That’s your Hero’s Journey, third-act-plotting logic – where the “hero” in question is the one going through the trauma of getting replaced – and its gravity is very strong. But by publically raising the stakes about this – stressing the diversity angle rather than settle for a meeker “good story” approach – Marvel have made that option a bit less easy for themselves.

But it’s easy to see why people are worried about lady Thor and Falcon Cap being just plot devices against which the standard-issue characters can Prove Themselves for the umpteenth time. That’s how it’s tended to happen in the past. The first Marvel comic I read was Secret Wars, a 12-issue advert for a toy line which happened to reflect the status quo of the day, and the status quo was that Iron Man was a guy called Jim Rhodes, who was a) black and b) worried he couldn’t do the job. And indeed he couldn’t: by the time I caught up with the American Iron Man, Tony Stark was back. Meanwhile another replacement plot was underway – Captain America had quit because the Reagan administration wanted him to be its stooge, and said government promptly hired the kind of Captain America the 80s deserved: a punch-first right-winger. It went poorly; the original Cap was back after a year or so.

These were the planned executions of long-term story arcs, and I was an absolute sucker for them. The replacement hero storyline is one of comics’ corniest moves, but it’s a move I will always fall for. But despite my affection for this stuff, it’s something Marvel have only really ever pulled off in the context of extended storylines. Attempted permanent replacements are rarer: it’s worth noting that the Reaganite Cap storyline came only a few years after then-Editor-in-Chief Jim Shooter had tried to push through a permanent change for Cap, making him a high-flying Wall Street yuppie: nobody except Shooter thought this was a remotely good idea.

Of course, the line between permanent and temporary is a tricky one in serialised comics – rare is the editor who won’t keep a ball juggling a little longer if the readers are paying for it. But most of Marvel’s reboots, from Rhodey to Bucky’s stint as Cap a few years ago, feel like planned stories. And the Marvel reinventions that feel most like they were meant to be permanent are often also the biggest disasters. Spider-Man’s replacement by his clone, most famously, but also – from the same mid-90s swamp of foolish decisions – Tony Stark’s replacement by his teenage self. Even I couldn’t bear that one.

What’s the point, though? A short term sales boost, of course, but replacements are also a safe way of creating new characters – it’s no surprise they start surfacing at Marvel Comics after the company’s great 60s and 70s waves of original, profitable new properties begin to retreat. James Rhodes is still around – he just got a very short lived solo series. Reaganite Cap shows up now and then. Bucky’s reinvention as Cold War assassin/relic The Winter Soldier gave him a much more useful and resonant 21st century backstory than Cap himself could manage. We should expect a long afterlife for Lady Thor.

FAMILY MATTERS

stevebucky Historically, the company that’s played around with replacements and refreshments and legacies most successfully has been DC, not Marvel. In fact it’s been argued that “legacy”, as an organising principle of their storytelling, is DC’s major difference from Marvel. There exists a “Batman family” – a group of heroes (who can mostly sustain mid-selling books) ultimately drawing inspiration from Batman – in a way that isn’t the case for Captain America or Iron Man.

It was DC who seemed to have worked out, in the 80s and 90s, how to replace characters permanently – they switched out the Flash and Green Lantern for younger versions, and brought even older versions back into play around the same time. So perhaps Marvel’s long game is the establishment of Marvel equivalents of Wally West, John Stewart, Kyle Rayner or Dick Grayson – supporting characters who earned the spotlight long enough to build their own enduring fandoms.

The interesting thing about those characters is that – even though all but Stewart were straight white dude for white dude swaps – they helped DC get a broader audience. One of the reasons, I think, is that the establishment of legacy of ‘family’ characters inevitably throws the spotlight on inter-character relationships. For a primary hero, relationships with the supporting cast are often more nice-to-have than need-to-have – motors for a plot or character study piece, perhaps. The most important relationship within a Batman story is changeable – Bruce can find himself defined against Robin (pick a Robin), his parents, his secret identity, Commissioner Gordon, The Joker or Riddler or whoever… but in a Dick Grayson story, Dick is always already defined in relationship to Bruce: it haunts the comic, even if never mentioned. It forces a character to be defined in part by their feelings about someone.

Such unbreakable pairings seem to be fan gold – it’s hard to think of a character in the 1990s who had such vocal and creative fans, women fans in particular, as Dick Grayson, and Bucky and Steve have caught the imagination in a similar way. DC’s error was seeing this dependence as a weakness rather than a strength: they became obsessed by the idea of the ‘iconic’ versions of characters, and replacements with ten or twenty years of development were shunted aside. If DC were ever ‘about’ legacy, they aren’t any more.

But the idea is there as a strategy, waiting to be rediscovered – a mechanic that lays down a bedrock for stories based in character contrasts as well as conflict, a sense of family, and close relationships. The kind of stories the Hawkeye and Winter Soldier generation of fans want to see – doubly so if they’re increasing diversity and positive representation too. And I would see Avengers NOW! as Marvel making a grab for this strategy. So yes, it’s a gimmicky sales boost, and yes, it’s also part of a long-term and admirable push for diversity. But it’s more than those things: it’s an important way of moving Marvel from its 2000s approach to a 2010s one, and of fortifying itself in a twilight era where its new ideas of necessity have to build on the old.

]]>
https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2014/07/squees-hammer-goin-her-temp/feed 5
Game of Thrones S04E10: The Children https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2014/06/game-of-thrones-s04e10-the-children https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2014/06/game-of-thrones-s04e10-the-children#comments Mon, 23 Jun 2014 09:07:47 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=27612 Well, friends – here we are at the end of the series. Most of the loose ends have been tied  up, and  I take back last week’s grumble regarding frustrating cliff-hangers. For the most part, I’ve been vastly impressed by the showrunners’ interpretation of A Song of Ice and Fire, particularly their ability to condense hundreds of pages, axe dozens of characters, change fairly significant details and still remain totally loyal to the best parts of the plot. I still find this show highly problematic and wish some things had been done differently, but I don’t think it’s necessary or wise to flog a dead Dothraki horse. The Children provided resolution to the major story arcs, sent nearly everyone across their own personal Rubicons, and looked frigging impressive while doing so.

Jon Snow scurries past the outer gate to negotiate peace with Mance Rayder, passing a literal feast for crows (do you see?) as he leaves. Mance seems naively shocked at Jon’s sudden but inevitable betrayal. He asks after poor, dead Ygritte, and they both drink in her memory, as well as Mag the Giant King’s and Grenn the Farm Boy’s. Jon politely but firmly requests Mance and his army simply turn back, but Mance’s not having any of that. The White Walkers are not Killbots with a pre-set limit, and Mance isn’t Zapp Brannigan, willing to send wave after wave of his own men to die while he cowers in a bunker, clad in a handsome velour tunic. What he will do is send his people out of the true North into Westeros, whether the Night Watch likes it or not, because Winter Is Coming. Of course Jon’s really there to kill Mance, but they sort of let that slide. The offer of “Let us in, and we won’t slay the lot of you,” has hardly fallen out of Mance’s mouth when – da-daaah! The slaying begins anew as a proper army with banners and everything descends upon the camp.

It’s Stannis, hooray/whatever (delete as necessary), which was what I was afraid was going to be left unresolved till season five. Like the big ol’ bully he is, Stannis doesn’t just want surrender, he wants ritual humiliation as well. Mance’s cantaloupe-sized balls prevent him from kneeling, so his men are taken away in chains. Stannis questions what Jon’s doing there, and he gives him the usual sob story about being Ned Stark’s bastard, blah blah blah, but because Mance has been such a bro to him, he convinces Stannis to take him prisoner and farm him for intel rather than execute him, because that’s the Nedly way.

In King’s Landing, The Mountain That Rides is slowly dying from Oberyn’s poison. Maester Pycelle and not-Maester Qyburn quibble over whether or not they can save him, but Cersei needs him to live, so she tells Pycelle to get bent and hang the consequences. The process will change him, but as long as he isn’t weakened, she doesn’t care. She goes to try and weasel her way out of marrying Loras, but Tywin’s having none of it. Cersei is so panicked at the thought of leaving the Red Keep and Tommen that she tells Tywin she nearly poisoned him at the Battle of Blackwater when someone horrible may have been coming to take him away from her. Now it’s her own her father and Margaery who are the monsters. She then fairly pointlessly confesses the Gross Truth about Jaime and their children. Tywin refuses to believe it, but totally knows, and Cersei storms off elegantly.

Jaime’s moping over The White Book again when Cersei interrupts to tell him she spilled the beans about their special kind of loving. Before she can, they argue over Tyrion for a bit before deciding to bury the hatchet and get sexy, because she choo-choo-chooses her brother/lover. Guess she’s forgiven the sexual assault in the High Sept, then.

In Meereen, Daenerys receives supplicants. First, a freedman wants to sell himself back into slavery, because he’s old and confused and things are actually pretty sucky in the post-Master world. This burns hard, but she accepts it. It only gets worse when the next person in the queue shows her the charred bones of his daughter, torched by an apparently wayward Drogon the dragon. Out of control of her freed slave children and her dragon children, Mhysa then locks up Rhaegal and Viserion in the catacombs to everyone’s unhappiness. This is where we leave Dany for the time being, finding out that winning is not ruling and being the world’s mama is a vastly overrated job.

Back at the Wall, the dead Crows receive a traditional send-off while Stannis’s family looks on. Melisandre peers hungrily at Jon from across the flames, and you can see that she may have Made A Huge Mistake. Tormund rages against his chains, and he and Jon have a super awkward conversation, with Jon unable to answer questions about his former friend’s fate. He too lays on multiple layers of guilt re: Ygritte, peppered with some handy advice as to how to give her a proper funeral, so Jon sledges her body just outside the Wall and burns her.

Much further beyond the Wall, Bran and the bog children finally reach the tree from Bran’s weirwood vision – summing up nearly his entire story arc from A Dance with Dragons in less than ten minutes (HOORAY). Before they can reach their destination, they’re attacked by White Walkers, one of which kills Jojen. Bran wargs into Hodor, but the skeletons just keep coming. An eerie child-like girl throws some magic fireballs as Jojen’s eyes ice over. They just barely escape into the bowels of the tree, and here Bran meets the Greenseer that he’s been hoping will solve all his problems. Lols no. Bran won’t walk again, according to the man, but he will fly.

To the best and saddest part: Brienne and Pod awake to find their horses have scarpered. She spies Arya practising her water dancing. Sword introductions are made, and the two appear to regard each other with non-traditional womanly pride. The Hound turns up for some more formal introductions, and the penny drops for Brienne that an actual Stark girl stands before her. She’s determined to keep her promise to Catelyn, but The Hound’s not giving Arya up, as he recognises Lannister gold in Brienne’s armour. He also goes over all adoptive-fatherly, in a moment where surely everyone got something in their eye. The two fight brilliantly, in another scene invented by the showrunners just to rip our conflicted hearts asunder. Brienne wins via lots of punching to his nutsack and a conveniently placed cliff. Arya cleverly hides during their tussle, forcing Brienne and Pod to search for her. As the Hound lays dying, he attempts to goad Arya into giving him the gift. Arya’s cold, heartless, silent stare reminded me so much of Sansa ascending the staircase after lying to the Vale’s half-hearted murder inquiry, it gave me chills. She doesn’t need to cross The Hound off her death prayer anymore, and she probably can’t even remember what the butcher’s boy looked like anyway. She takes the pouch of silver stolen from the kindly peasant and leaves Sandor Clegane to die alone in agony. Valar morghulis, eventually.

Jaime arrives in the dungeons to save Tyrion, with the help of Varys. Their goodbye is short, sweet, and tearjerky. Sneaking his way through the Red Keep, Tyrion takes a detour through his old chambers as the King’s Hand, and is betrayed by both Shae and his father one last time. Tywin hypocritically appears to have shacked up with Tyrion’s former lover. He stumbles in shock and horror as Shae wakes, murmuring about her lion. She freaks upon seeing Tyrion and grabs for a knife, meaning he’s got to kill her in order to save his skin. Peter Dinklage is pure gold, weeping and apologising to her strangled corpse before swiping a crossbow from the wall.

It gets worse, of course, as he confronts the old man sitting on the bog. Tywin tries to get Tyrion to discuss things in more dignified way, but Tyrion refuses to give him what’s been stolen from him his whole life. Tywin tries to explain that he won’t let his son be executed, but fucking Shae was beyond betrayal. On top on that, treating her with disgust and flippancy was the final straw. Because Tyrion is his son. Remember when everything was coming up Lannister? Poor Tywin – all he ever wanted was to crush his enemies, to see them driven before him, and to hear the lamentations of their women. But he died on the shitter all the same. Varys walks in on the sad scene and tuts briefly before escorting Tyrion to the docks.

Arya too heads to the waterfront, seeking passage to the Wall, but upon hearing that the ship’s captain is going to Braavos, she presents him with Jaqen H’ghar’s coin. He returns her “valar morghulis” with “valar dohaeris” and she boards. The final scene, of the ship sailing while Arya leaves behind her old world possibly for good, music swelling, was tantalizing. Everything’s been as resolved as it can be, while still leaving us wanting MORE THINGS TO HAPPEN. 9/10

Sexy, Important Thoughts:

  • In the books I loved Davos like I love Fresca, but to be honest here he’s really beginning to chap my hide with his super-boring crush on Stannis – to the point where I actually told him to shut up. I find this a great pity.
  • “The power that moves them is powerless here” – well that clears it up, creepy not-Child lady person.
  •  Hearing Sandor Clegane nearly beg for mercy was awful. How dare this show make me feel feelings!
  • “You refused to die – I respect that!”
  • Thanks again to everyone sharing this vexing, amazing, bewildering televisual journey with me. And yes, I will be reading The Winds of Winter, by all seven hells.

 

 

]]>
https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2014/06/game-of-thrones-s04e10-the-children/feed 4
10 reasons it’s okay to not like The Wicked and The Divine #1 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2014/06/10-reasons-its-okay-to-not-like-the-wicked-and-the-divine https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2014/06/10-reasons-its-okay-to-not-like-the-wicked-and-the-divine#comments Wed, 18 Jun 2014 22:42:09 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=27573
  • Coronations are dull things
  • You read enough Vertigo comics in your youth (or, last week) and you have had sufficient for the next decade of ingénue audience identification figures having a world of wonder shown to them by an unreliable trickster.
  • You’re no longer in your late teens, and you’re a little irked at another piece of culture that insists that the secrets of life and the universe are locked in hearts that, looking back, you remember as a little underdone.
  • You are in your late teens, and have plenty of faith in your heart, thanks, but aren’t certain you want it explained to you by someone fading from view of 30.
  • You liked the first line best the first time you read it.
  • You’ve consumed enough media based on Artists and their troubling troubles, and have come to associate it with fundaments and the disappearing up thereof.
  • Related to the above, not looking forward to the issue on the tax system as it applies to the Gods’ earnings.
  • You don’t do social media, and dislike the implication that you’ve bought the DVD when you could’ve had the Bluray.
  • You can come up with your own objections, and don’t see a lot of value in a strident, and soon to be foolish, character raising them for you.
  • You’re only reading comics where a significant character has a BMI over 25.
  • ]]>
    https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2014/06/10-reasons-its-okay-to-not-like-the-wicked-and-the-divine/feed 12
    Is It Is It Wicked? https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2014/06/is-it-is-it-wicked https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2014/06/is-it-is-it-wicked#comments Wed, 18 Jun 2014 09:27:16 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=27561 wicdiv page

    The Wicked And The Divine #1, by Freaky Trigger friends and favourites Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie, is out this week. There’s going to be a bit of coverage of it here, partly because I interviewed Gillen and McKelvie about it last week for Pitchfork and the full transcript is long and interesting. But mostly because it’s a very good comic, which promises to use pop and pop stardom to tell a story about life and death.

    I wanted to have time to write a proper review, but I want to have time for a lot of things, and I don’t always get it. So instead here are twelve excellent things about the Wicked And The Divine #1, arranged to give an illusion of coherence.

    THE PREMISE: What first excited me about WicDiv (as the kids might be calling it) was the simple conceit. 12 gods are resurrected on earth every 90 years – this time it’s as pop stars. Fun, high concept. But look at what’s being claimed here: the Gods aren’t coming back to Earth as actors or, god help us, entrepreneurs. They’re pop stars – recognisable modern stars as well as archetypal ones. So the comic makes an argument that pop IS vital in 2014, that pop stars CAN be as vibrant and life-changing as they ever were. As a pop fan, that thrills me.

    All the other eleven things include SPOILERS – don’t read the rest of this piece before you’ve read the comic!

    THE MAKE-UP SCENE: A first issue is spent setting up what the book’s about, thematically as well as in plot terms. From its very first page, WicDiv is not subtle about this. Protagonist Laura’s self-transformation narrative as she prepares for Amataseru’s gig isn’t exactly subtle either. But let’s take a step back: this is a densely packed debut issue promising gods, stars, and exploding heads. Every page is ruthlessly planned, and it’s taking two very precious pages to show a girl putting on make-up. That’s a statement of emphasis as much as theme.

    THE GIG: This first issue is also about closing ideas off (whether permanently or temporarily is something we’ll see later). The first of these is in the Amataseru gig scene, which quickly and explicitly closes down the idea that the Gods’ (or THIS God’s) appeal is in their content: it’s all about her being and projection of that being. For Gods, this is hardly a controversial idea. For pop musicians, it’s a little more interesting: it’s allying the comic – for now – with a vision of pop centred on the star’s presence rather than their content or output. (Except we know content can be important – “will there be any more gospel?”, as the masked figure in the 1920s scene asks)

    CASSANDRA: Another thing that’s quickly closed off is the danger of seeing Cassandra – the disbelieving journalist character – as a patsy. Cassandra is wrong. She has to be wrong: we haven’t paid $3.50 for a comic about fake Gods. So the direction of the story is towards viewing her as a chump. Except she’s also a sympathetic character – set up as things stand to be another recurring one, like Laura – so the comic closes this down very quickly by making it clear that a) no, there’s no chance of her being right about the Gods not being Gods, and b) she’s a powerful character anyway, because while she can’t be right about the existence of the Gods, she can highlight problems with how they’re acting. Cassandra’s attack is on Gods who are behaving like tropes: “kids with a Wikipedia’s understanding of myth” – and it’s when that line of enquiry starts that Lucifer’s reaction gets really venomous…

    THE COLORING: The art in the interview scene is terrific – the interplay between dialogue, facial expressions, and staging – but Gillen and McKelvie have stressed a lot how much WicDiv is a team effort extending to their colorist (Matt Wilson) and letterer (Clayton Cowles) too. It shows. Look at how Cassandra is lit in serious brown when she’s interviewing Amataseru and Luci, and how that helps emphasise how the panels are arranged – a strip of disbelief cutting across the rest of a double-page spread. (There’s lots more to say about the design and colouring in this thing – this article from Comics Bulletin does a good job)

    THE WORSHIPPERS: While we’re on that scene, the creepiest thing in the entire comic is Sakhmet’s wordless, washed-out devotees – whose costuming and body language is subtly leeched of vitality and energy, giving them the impression of drained husks.

    THE CUTS: Great pop tends to involve a degree of ruthless editing. One of my favourite bits in the comic is the immediate cut between the climax of the interview scene and its follow-up in the courtroom. A lot of comics might not have resisted the temptation of a breather scene between those – building up tension, or showing more reaction. That isn’t what happens here. The focus at this point is ruthlessly on Luci, and the comic wants to keep that focus. Gillen judges – rightly – that the details of how she gets from the interview room to the courtroom – the processes of the world this is set in – simply do not matter.

    THE VIBE: The Wicked And The Divine is a very sharp, modern comic. Is it also a very retro one? The vibe of the first issue is extremely similar to the vibe of the old 1990s Vertigo comics – there’s a satisfying sense of weight and event to the first issue, you can feel the double-sizedness: it feels like reading Invisibles #1 or Preacher #1 did back then. And of course the concept itself is terribly Vertigo-ish – on borrow-a-cup-of-sugar terms with some of Neil Gaiman’s explorations of mythology. This is a Good Thing – strip out the gothickry and the early years of Vertigo were a time of effervescent playfulness, with an alt-and-proud veneer that was itself bang in line with early 90s pop culture.

    LAURA’S OPENING LINES: Except hold on there, Dad! “It’s not that I’m afraid my parents wouldn’t approve. I’m afraid they would.” Inasmuch as a 41 year old judging a 38 year old’s insight into the current state of the teenage mind can be useful, this Tumblr moment feels strong and valid – it’s the bit of WicDiv that’s gone round my head most in the days since reading it.

    THE LINE OF ATTACK: So take Laura’s lines as an insight – the problem they’re diagnosing isn’t “retro” exactly but a particular problem in current culture, something WicDiv exploits, indulges and attacks all at once. Popular culture has become a trope culture, one where readers, viewers and listeners quickly train themselves to see similarities more than differences. This kind of pattern recognition is an inevitable human trait, and it’s baked into the concept of The Wicked & The Divine, where particular archetypes do recur (which is one of the things that makes it so very 2014, darlings). But look at the two pages with the icons of the Gods – the archetypes recur, but they also change. Things don’t just map out. WicDiv is – no, too early to say at this stage. As a reader and a critic and a pop fan I want WicDiv to be a critique of trope culture as well as a creature of it. And I’m hopeful because…

    LUCI: Existing in a culture of similarity-spotting, setting a comic up as one about archetypes, offers absolutely tons of opportunities to wrong-foot the reader, and Issue #1 ends with a doozy. The ending doesn’t just set up a mystery, it offers a revelation too: Lucifer can be surprised. This isn’t a revelation because the comic has misled me. It’s a revelation because the comic has tempted me into misleading myself. The kind of Lucifer I think I know about in the kind of comics I think I’m reading – the Trope Lucifer, if you like – is a kind of master planner archetype, ultimately in control of the situation in a way Luci here really isn’t. (Strike one for Cassandra, as Luci herself has been playing along with that trope too.)

    (OK, you could say that Luci doesn’t SEEM to be in control, but at the moment the person the reader trusts in the comic – Laura – thinks she isn’t. And that has to be good enough to me.)

    THE CLIFFHANGER: There is one, for starters. OK, you could say there’s a cliffhanger at the end of Young Avengers #1 too, but that’s not a cliffhanger so much as “the last page of a Marvel comic” (trope culture again, dammit). The ending of The Wicked + The Divine one is properly thrill-powered. It wants me and you and the world to speculate about what’s happening and what’s going to happen next. With no particular evidence as yet! But what good is a debut single if it doesn’t leave you wanting more?

    How good is The Wicked + The Divine #1? On one level, it’s wonderful, it’s immediately the comic I’m looking forward to most every month. On another, it’s too soon to tell – so much depends on how Gillen, McKelvie & co. handle the material in future. Not so much structurally – these guys can be trusted with structure – but playing with pop archetypes is a fearfully tricky business, especially when the idea is to combine a bunch of star-types and find throughlines between them. If there’s an archetypal line that links Bo Diddley to Kanye West – to use an example Kieron Gillen mentions in interviews – that line wasn’t entirely created by the performers and how they behave: their performance was situated in and responding to a pop culture that’s already drawing lines between (and around) young black men.

    Ultimately Gods don’t create pop archetypes, people do, and we create them out of our prejudices and preconceptions – where’s the divide between archetype and stereotype? The Lucifer plot in this issue makes me suspect that question might be central to the comic – or at least, should be one these very smart, highly critical creators will navigate well. But in a clever, literate, high-concept comic about pop archetypes, a Bowie-esque one – albeit brilliantly done – is surely the easiest of the massive tasks Gillen and McKelvie have set themselves. But how good to read something so ambitious and accessible. This is the smash lead-off single: thornier pleasures await.

    ]]>
    https://freakytrigger.co.uk/wedge/2014/06/is-it-is-it-wicked/feed 3
    Game of Thrones S04E09: The Watchers of the Wall https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2014/06/game-of-thrones-s04e09-the-watchers-of-the-wall https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2014/06/game-of-thrones-s04e09-the-watchers-of-the-wall#comments Sat, 14 Jun 2014 08:35:55 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=27548 It’s wall-to-wall Wall action this week, with Jon Snow ‘n’ Pals finally facing Mance Rayder’s United Army of Free Folk. There’s not actually a lot of story to tell (or recap) to be honest. It is, however, visually a stunning episode, reminiscent of S02E09’s “Blackwater”. On the plus side, it’s fast-paced and packed with fierce battling and derring-do, but on the bigger minus side, the cliff-hanger ending was beyond vexing in a way I can’t elaborate on without massive spoilers for possibly the last episode or maybe even next year. This is the crux of my beef: the Wall’s storyline has been moving glacially all season and even with an entire show dedicated to this story arc, where things happen loudly and bloodily, the end is unsatisfyingly vague and it’s just not good enough, dammit!

    Jon and Sam are pulling night shift atop the Wall on a cold and miserable evening. Sam returns to his favourite topic of conversation (Doing It), treating Jon as sexpert since he’s done the nasty in the past-y. Unlike previous “What’s it like then?” exchanges, this time he’s more focused on the love side of the deed. Jon isn’t a bloody poet, so all he can offer are some vague comments about closeness and being wholly wrapped up in another person. Sam’s still pining over presumed-dead Gilly and Jon’s also pining over going-to-die-if-things-go-well Ygritte; neither is in the greatest state of mind for guard duty. Jon sends Sam away to get either get some sleep or go mope elsewhere.

    Outside Castle Black, the wildling talk is also sensual in nature, though Ygritte’s tired of hearing the same yarn about how Tormund didn’t fuck a bear for the bajilliontieth time. Her bloodlust is high for her traitorous lover, and no amount of taunting from Styr bothers her. She’s determined to kill Jon and as many Crows as possible, and take back the Free Folk’s rightful land. In the background, a shadow carrying a baby scurries past.

    Sam decided to sulk in the library and read more about wildlings, possibly to convince himself that Gilly’s of tough stock and survived the attack on Mole’s Town. Maester Aemon shuffles in to chastise him for wasting candles, and the two have a brief tête-à-tête. Sam protests (weakly) that he’s not in love with Gilly, and Aemon rightly calls bullshit. Sam’s like a broken record: he wants to know what love is, he wants you to show it, he wants to feel what love is, etc . The Targaryen king that never was nearly gets to reminisce on the girl who almost stole his heart but is shut off in general disgust, because old people are gross to the young. Nobody’s communicating very well, though with what’s to come the best way to communicate is via sharp objects to the vitals, so never mind.

    As Sam heads back to his bed, he hears Gilly shouting to be let in. From here on, this isn’t the Samwell Tarly we’ve come to know: there’s no way he is going to lose her again, and he bellows to open the fucking gate. For a short, sweet moment, Westeros’s most unlikely family is reunited. Then two blasts of a horn signal an attack, and everything falls apart.

    Jon looks out to see a lake of fire: thousands upon thousands of enemies bearing torches and fiery arrows. Ser Alliser admits he fucked up big time, and they should have sealed the gate when they had the chance, but Jon can’t bring himself to say “I told you so” because, well, 100,000 heavily armed wildlings.

    Despite her protestations, Sam locks Gilly away. She’s understandably terrified; the massacre she narrowly escaped and which is assuredly still searing her retinas naturally means she begs him to hide with her. The days of craven, simpering Sam are over; he’s clearly still bricking it but with a difference in that the lives of people he loves are on the line. He departs after a fairly chaste kiss and a promise not to die, because he’s unaware whose story he’s living in.

    He and Pyp try to gee themselves up for the attack. Poor Pyp – unlike many of the boys sent to the Wall as punishment, he was a singer who rebuffed a highborn’s sexual advances and has virtually no real experience fighting with dangerous weaponry. Sam tries to boost his confidence by saying that they’re all scared and that he was only able to kill the White Walker because he was protecting Gilly and the baby and that when you’re nothing, there’s nothing to be scared of. Now that he is something, he’s still scared but not so cowardly.

    It’s time for the attack. There’s a superbly stylish, almost majestic pan of the rag-tag army before they launch towards Castle Black, merrily shouting and banging metal while giants ride mammoths. Ser Alliser goes all Malcolm Tucker when Grenn drops a barrel of oil prematurely and archers nock and draw instead of holding. Ygritte’s getting loads of shots in, and soon the southern gate is under attack. Alliser leaves the Wall in the hands of Slynt to defend it. Almost immediately, Slynt bottles it – heading up the Gold Cloaks and protecting King’s Landing from itself has nothing on thousands of screaming wildlings. There’s no such thing as giants, buddy – not even that one you can see with your own beady eyes.

    Jon takes over leadership by default while the melee continues. A series of unfortunate deaths play out – flame-engulfed arrows to the chest; a giant’s arrow, the thrust of which knocks the man through the air to be impaled again on a spike; slit throats, beheadings; yadda yadda yadda. At one point the action barges into the kitchen for some more fun ways to be maimed. The Thenn-orphaned kid (whose name is apparently Olly) who was hanging around because Reasons is scarred anew at all the bloodshed. Instead of going to defend the southern gate, Slynt skulks away to hide and is confronted with a silently judging Gilly. Sam and Pyp continue their crossbow defence, but Ygritte gets Pyp in the neck.

    The giants and mammoths set at the outer gates, ducking exploding barrels of oil. Jon thinks of the inner gate, and sends Grenn and some other brothers to hold it. And by “hold it” he means “die holding it” – there’s no way he thought he was doing anything other than sending them to their deaths. I almost wanted Grenn to refuse, to challenge his authority since no one elected Jon leader. Then again, with no one to defend the inner gate, it would be curtains for Castle Black. So they go, and the look that is exchanged is brief but probably the most powerful moment in the entire show.

    Some nifty swordwork from Tormund and Ser Alliser at the southern gate. Alliser falls, which is hard to get worked up about seeing as how I’ve always been rooting for Team Giantsbane. Sam holds a dying Pyp and soothes him with sweet lies about how Maester Aemon will be able to save him as he gurgles to death on his own blood. By now everyone has pretty much realised Jon’s in charge and is happy to take commands from him. Olly is still hanging around PTSDly, so Sam instructs him to get the winch-lift started and wait for the signal, also to grab a weapon. Olly does this and finds Chekhov’s bow.

    The outer gate is getting a fair old bashing. Things are going just about as badly as they can for the Crows, and as Jon and Sam assess the damage from atop the Wall, Jon hands Sam a key, telling him “I need him more than I need you”, “him” meaning Ghost, who happily sets at the first wildling he sees. One of the giants is killed and the mammoth bolts, but the other giant needs revenge and has at the gate with his bare hands. Grenn and the others face him down, chanting their vows as they make their final, fatal stand. And now their watch is done.

    Ygritte spies Jon and makes to kill him…but of course she has to pause for some harsh words first. Jon’s all shaky from having plunged an axe in Styr’s head after a brief tussle. He actually smiles for a split second, seeing Ygritte in all her glorious, beautiful rage – and then of course the smile vanishes when Olly kills Ygritte, the wildling who spared a mother and her baby, with an arrow to the chest. She’s got just enough breath left to lay on an “I told you so” about the hot spring caves where they first bumped uglies. Jon also attempts some lying-to-the-dying “No, you’re fine, it’s all grand, we’ll go to Bognor, etc.,” as she expires, murmuring (of course) “You know nothing, Jon Snow.” Jon’s man-pain just keeps on coming.

    Climbers on the Wall are treated to a nifty, deadly effect – a big old scythe that smashes into them, then rakes them across the surface. That’s the final big fancy bit of CGI and the last straw on the only slightly reduced army, and they retreat, but there are still 1,000 of them for every Crow, so the fighting’s far from over.

    Sam returns to Gilly, and sees Slynt, still hiding. No words are exchanged. Day breaks and we’ve returned to Jon and Sam, miserable and tired, coming full circle to the start of the show. They pass Grenn and the other dead brothers, who did indeed hold the inner gate. Jon’s going to attempt a parlay with Mance, since there’s no way Castle Black can hold them off any longer. Sam tries to talk reason into Jon, knowing he’s in for nothing but torture and eventual death. Jon agrees but he’s tried nothing and now he’s all out of ideas. He leaves Longclaw with Sam because he promised Lord Mormont he wouldn’t lose it again, and then offskis and this SO did not end the way it did in the book. For the most part, this is fine but this time I need closure, dammit. DISAPPOINTED! 5/10

    Sexy, Important Thoughts:

    • “Yes, well I’m not nothing anymore” – got something in my eye, Sam.
    • “Castle Black will stand! The Nightswatch will stand! –> gate immediately crashes.
    • Please tell me I wasn’t alone in wanting to laugh and punch the air when Styr brained Jon Snow on an anvil.
    • Much like how I never realised how much I liked Oberyn until I saw his head crushed like a grape, I never realised how much I liked Grenn till he too died defending those he loved. Also those other dudes, but it’s hard to get worked up about them, mainly because I don’t recall who they were or their names.
    • I’m still so genuinely moved by the Grenn scene that I’m tempted to write a short AU fanfic where he survives and is struggling with PTSD. This is probably influenced by the fact that I’m reading Day by AL Kennedy which is about a WWII tail-gunner who can’t quite believe he’s alive and his comrades are not.
    • Finale next week, so there’s still time for the thing I thought would happen this week to happen, but probably not.
    ]]>
    https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2014/06/game-of-thrones-s04e09-the-watchers-of-the-wall/feed 2
    Game of Thrones S04E08: The Mountain and the Viper https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2014/06/game-of-thrones-s04e08-the-mountain-and-the-viper https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2014/06/game-of-thrones-s04e08-the-mountain-and-the-viper#comments Sat, 07 Jun 2014 09:16:32 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=27520 Aw jeeze, Lester! A beloved character dying is all part and parcel of GoT, and dying REALLY horribly is the doom cherry on the grimcake, I know this. I also know there’s only more awfulness to come, but this week’s show made even the most hardened fan flee to the internet for support groups. Whether you read the books or not – and even putting the Red Wedding aside – this episode smarted. It also felt frustratingly perfunctory at times.

    I think we’ve all learned to bristle whenever a scene begins with happy smallfolk. Dudes be drinking in a Mole’s Town brothel, where the sex workers serve you quaffable ale and entertain by belching one of the two known songs in Westeros (this time “The Bear and the Maiden Fair”). Said gassy lass has always hated Gilly, and we’re given a brief window of the bullying she’s had to endure since being shipped there ostensibly for her safety. The nasty woman is soon, like the rest of the clientele and staff, reduced to a puddle of blood pouring through the floorboards as Tormund Giantsbane and his pack of Wildling Allsorts arrive to send a message to Castle Black. And to source dinner, from the Thenns’ perspective. Gilly and baby Sam are spared by Ygritte, because although she’s happy to shoot arrows in adults’ faces, she draws the line at a baby because reasons?

    I’m not sure I buy it, but it gives the Crows reason to assure Sam Tarly needn’t worry about his unofficial kinda-girlfriend. Jon gets fairly snippy, insisting they need to stay at Castle Black to defend the Wall, but the odds aren’t looking good – roughly 100 Nightswatchmen to more than 100,000 various Free Folk, featuring actual giants. It’s a short scene, and it’s all we get from them this week. The slow burn regarding The Wall’s role this season has been mostly vexing, but the payoff should be good. And by “good”, I mean heartwrenchingly awful, obviously. I clearly never learn, because I was really looking forward to the trial by combat, and now I’m all empty inside.

    Bathtime for the Unsullied and royal maidens, in another short vignette bringing some much-needed humanity to this episode. Grey Worm can’t help but stare at Missandei’s beauty. His gaze is one of longing and romance, confusing her. She mentions the incident to Dany, who is plaiting her handmaiden’s hair, which seems out of character for a queen but whatever. They discuss the Unsullied’s pillars and stones (or lack thereof), pondering which bits have been cut. Incidentally, for your edification, ASOIAF readers have been told countless times that they have been cut “root and stem”. You’re welcome. Despite his lack of junk, Missandei feels that Grey Worm is feeling Ways About Stuff when he looks at her. He pretty much tells her so, when the scene cuts to his apology. When Missandei presses him for intel about his past, he continues to insist that he remembers nothing before being taken and trained. He can’t even regret losing his nuts (and possibly banana), because otherwise he’d not be where he was and who he’s become. I think the guy’s possibly cracked Ultimate Zen Mindfulness, and I almost envy him. This is the best “The Mountain and the Viper” can offer in terms of pleasant viewing – a forced asexual who is far from aromantic and a freedwoman being admired by a super-hot Non-Threatening Boys magazine cover star.

    Reek “dresses up as Theon Greyjoy” so he can betray his Ironborn for the sake of Big Daddy Bolton’s wardship of the north and for Ramsay’s legitimacy bid. Theon’s almost entirely broken and remade as Ramsay’s puppet. He hesitates before announcing his “false name” to the guard at Moat Cailin – and as if to reinforce the erasure of himself, we cut straight to him dictating the terms of surrender without actually hearing him say it. Life at MC doesn’t look too fun: Horses provide the food, and there’s a nasty-sounding bug doing the rounds. But because the Ironborn are nothing if not bloody-minded, the terms of surrender (“Leave the castle, and we totes promise not to flay you.”) are firmly rejected by Commander of the garrison. He nearly reduces Theon to tears by sneering at his apparent weakness, which is rich coming from a guy who can hardly stand up. Luckily for Theon, the Commander gets an axe to the head by a soldier presumably sick of eating horse on toast. He takes over leadership for a few mutinous moments, his fellow men dreaming of home and the sea. Naturally, there was no way Bolton was going to show mercy to the fishdudes as we handily cut to – of course – a Flayed Man. I’m not sorry we skipped the wholesale slaughter, because the real horror is for the closing scene, but everything regarding Theon this season feels choppy and unbalanced. I’m not saying the show should reflect the pages and pages (and pages) of text describing what everyone was wearing first, and what they ate, and a billion side characters to be carefully created and then killed, but his story isn’t holding my interest to the degree I think it should.

    To the Eyrie, where Littlefinger is forced to prove to the Vale’s Neighbourhood Watch Patrol that a) yes, Lysa totally jumped out of the Moon Door of her own volition, b) no, he ain’t no gold digger, and c) he’s got Robin Arryn’s best interests in mind. This is probably my favourite Sansa scene ever – she’s finally learning how to not just continue surviving, but actually play the game and win. And hooray, she also makes Littlefinger sweat by announcing she’s not going to lie for him anymore. Spinning a yarn mixing facts with fictions so plausible I could almost believe them, she confesses her true identity with Baelish smiling that oily, leery grin in the background. The Vale is not THE NORTH, but House Stark has more love than House Lannister, and the panel chows down Sansa’s story rather easily. From there it’s even easier for Baelish to send Robin away after they all take a moment to reflect on Lysa’s extreme attachment parenting and realise the kid’s definitely going to need some work.

    Ser Barristan oversees the removal of dead masters from Meereen’s crucifixes, when a messenger boy arrives with News. It’s a document laying out the terms of Ser Jorah’s pardon – spy for Robert Baratheon and his slaver past will be wiped clean. Barristan confronts Jorah, who has to then face a brilliantly fierce Daenerys. Before she can read him the riot act, he blurts out the truth, looking much like those photos of pathetic-looking dogs behind printed confessions (“I pooped on the kitchen floor”). His protestations that he totally stopped spying after the whole poisoned wine incident fall on hardened ears. Dany shows cruel mercy – she could have Jorah killed with a click of her fingers, but she knows that he WUVS her, so instead she pours a giant goblet of Haterade and banishes him from the land.

    Ramsay Snow and BD Bolton consider the landscape spread before them like I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, or a better simile. Roose prompts Ramsay into answering THE NORTH in response to the query “What is this thing we look at?” but the bastard can’t work it out. Regardless, the repulsive scrote has impressed the old man, who’s decided that he isn’t too bothered about Bran or Rickon Stark after all, which I had totally forgotten about to be honest. Ramsay Snow becomes Ramsay Bolton, and guess what? BD Bolton’s gonna want grandkids. Be afraid, my friends.

    Littlefinger drops by Sansa’s room for a quick session of perving and inquisition. Why on earth would Sansa think he was her last and only friend (that’s the bottle, dammit! Sorry, just channeling Tyrion via Uncle Tupelo). She knows what he really wants – or does she? Ooh, Sansa, you are fast becoming an equal of the Queen of Thorns herself. Littlefinger tries to throw her confidence – is she SURE she knows what he wants? Ugh, yes, dammit – now go away! The short scene left me worried in one of the few instances where I felt like it was actively unfair to leave us in the lurch. What happened then? Did he just leave? Apparently yes, but I had to pause, don my cutoffs, and take a shower in boiling water to cleanse myself before continuing.

    Checking in with Arya and The Hound: The Legendary Journeys. They’ve finally reached what The Hound is hoping is the end of their time together – the Eyrie. The guards at the Bloody Gate inform them that Lysa is dead. Hence, no ransom. You can actually pinpoint the exact moment Sandor’s heart finally breaks into a thousand pieces. It’s the moment that Arya collapses into proper hysterics. OF COURSE Auntie Lysa’s dead. She’s related to Arya! And imagine just how more uncontrolled that laughter would be had she known that her own sister was still there, and they’d left? Stark siblings so close, yet so far…at least unlike Bran, she couldn’t actually see Sansa. My fanfic brain went mentile at this point, because I have a pressing need to know what Arya thinks of Sansa – she can’t know the torment the Lannisters put her through, and the last she saw was her at the Great Sept for all intents and purposes siding with her family’s mortal enemy.

    And my, how Sansa’s changed. She descends the stairs, clad in Lysa’s fancy frock, eyes hardened, head held high. Dressed to kill, you could say. She’s not forced to hide as “Alayne Stone” anymore. Robin Arryn won’t be there to act as a buffer either – but I don’t think she needs him. I complained about the choppiness of the Moat Cailin scenes, but I have to admit, this was all I needed thanks to Sophie Turner’s UNHOLY ACTING TALENT.

    And finally, what I mistakenly thought I’d been waiting for all season – the trial by combat – The Red Viper vs. The Mountain That Rides. Oh, me. I’ve been a fool – a foolish fool. I must admit when I saw how little time was left, I was annoyed that everything would be over so quickly. [sobbing] I’m sorry! Jaime and Tyrion discuss their simple-minded cousin who was obsessed with killing beetles, and we’re given a glimpse into the kind of child Tyrion was – the kind who never stops asking “why?” Sadly the answer is “Because people is assholes, that’s why.” Humans are nasty, brutish types who kill for fun. The Hound once told Sansa that “killing is the sweetest thing there is”. As Tyrion faces his pretty-certain death, he’ll still never really understand why Orson killed all those beetles. Maddening.

    Finally, Tyrion enters a brilliant, blindingly bright world where death is a lovely day’s entertainment. Oberyn kisses Ellaria, and I nearly didn’t recognise her with her clothes on. The fight starts awesomely and is just what I expected and wanted – waterdancing moves and swashbuckling and big attitude from Oberyn. But as talented as he is, he doesn’t just want to kill Gregor – he needs a confession to truly avenge his sister. His mantra “You raped her, you murdered her, you killed her children” doesn’t lose its horror with repetition but seems to grow in power by sapping Oberyn’s control. And just when he should have let it go, plunged the blade into the heart of his enemy, he hesitates and then – oh Obz! – lets his guard down. And then that behemoth of a man uses his dying breath to overwhelm him, push his eyeballs deep into his sockets and crush his noggin, and now who’s going to fly the bisexual flag for House Martell at King’s Landing Pride? [more sobbing]. Yes, it was just as grim in the book, but it really was so much worse than I could have ever imagined, and now I’m all empty inside. Plus, y’know, Tyrion’s been sentenced to death. Woe is Bender! 7/10

    Sexy, Important Thoughts:

    • I’m not sure why Moat Cailin merits a mention in the opening credits; it feels like this story was almost forgotten and being crammed into the last few episodes and Ramsay seemed to imply they were heading to a new home [MILD SPOILER ALERT] i.e. Winterfell.
    • The internet – by which I mean Arrested Westeros – needs to redo the Jorah-leaving-Mereen scene by adding the sad Peanuts incidental music over his miserable shuffle out of town.
    • “Who gives a dusty fuck about a bunch of beetles?” – Jaime has been hanging out with Bronn.
    • ARockPaperCynic speaks for those of us who’ve read the books: it still hurts!
    • I can’t bring Oberyn back, but here’s a pic of him with Gregor Clegane all happy and smiling.
    • I know I’m going to fold and buy one of these skater dresses – this is fact. I just have to decide between House Lannister & House Targaryen.
    • Two episodes to go and I’ll be honest – there’s so much more death and sadness to come and I have no idea how it will all play out. Episode 9 will assuredly be THE WORST, and I might genuinely have to set up a support group via chat or sutin.
    ]]>
    https://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2014/06/game-of-thrones-s04e08-the-mountain-and-the-viper/feed 3