The Human Torch and the Thing

Stan Lee, Larry Leiber, Jack Kirby, Dick Ayers & others
The Human Torch and the Thing (1965)
As with the Daredevil collection I tackled back in 2022, I picked this up mainly in the name of research, and contrary to the impression given by Marvel Firsts last week, Stan and the lads hit the ground running with at least a few of the debut titles of their superhero revival. The Human Torch was apparently deemed so popular as to warrant a solo strip in the pages of Strange Tales. With half the page count of an issue of the Fantastic Four, much less juggling in terms of characters, and less pressure given that Doctor Strange was presumably held responsible for half of the sales, Johnny Storm's solo scrapes stuck to the fairly predictable formula of a succession of bank jobs and jewellery heists undertaken by traditional hoods with a few bells and whistles thrown in for the sake of the superhero theme. The heavy lifting is done by cheap gags, outrageous novelty, and the sort of peculiar twists of imagination which Bob Burden was apparently channelling in Flaming Carrot, an eighties book which I'm beginning to realise was a tribute at least as much as it was ever a parody. This was the era of Paste Pot Pete, a villain who carries a giant pot of glue around with him, a man with the power of all paste who, for example, at one point fashions a formidable pair of binoculars utilising lenses made from a special clear paste. In another issue we meet the Plantman, an individual resembling Harvey Pekar who has invented a dubious looking device with which he hopes to increase the IQ of certain plants; but the device is struck by lightning and grants him power over all plants, which he discovers when he exclaims well, fan my hide, obliging an adjacent bush to do so with its leaves. Also we have the real Sandman, a villain who turns into sand and is therefore significantly more interesting than Neil Gaiman's wispy personification of various Cure albums.

It's bollocks, but it's entertaining bollocks which gets away with it because it's for actual kids and it doesn't care, although being beautifully drawn by Jack Kirby, Dick Ayers, Bob Powell and others doesn't hurt either. Also, Strange Tales #105 brought us what I believe to be the single greatest panel of the entire sixties:

 

Just look at the fucking size of that piece of cake.

What's that you say? Johnny, who is technically still a child, has gone after the Wizard, a dangerous superpowered criminal, all on his own. Fuck him! I'm eating!

That said, being relatively short, the Torch's strips were at least as repetitive as old school Scooby Doo and are probably best appreciated at the rate of one a month between the years of 1961 and 1970 by persons under the age of ten. I'm unable to tick any of these boxes so I zoned out here and there, but not enough to present any sort of indictment on the ludicrous charm of these tales. Did I mention that the Beatles show up in one of the later issues?

 

No prizes for picking Ringo out of the line-up. The poor sod's hooter is so massive that it won't even fit in the second panel.

As with anything which Stan Lee claimed was bigger than the Bible, the Quran, the Torah and the complete works of Shakespeare blended into a single shining masterpiece, the solo adventures of the Human Torch don't quite live up to the hype, but this collection is still mostly great and goes some way to accounting for why Marvel took off as it did.

Kirby - King of Comics

Mark Evanier Kirby - King of Comics (2008)
I've read several versions of the story of how Stan Lee created Marvel Comics and is directly responsible for more or less everything, ever, and it seemed like high time I took a look at what was happening on the other side of the wall, Jack Kirby being the man who drew a humongous number of those comics which Stan may or may not have written. I found Kirby's art a bit weird when I was a kid and resident of the age group for which they were intended. There was something about his art, but I found the figures weird, forever reaching forward out of the page, smiling hard like John Wayne with that single dazzling white tooth spanning the entire width of the grin. All the same, he obviously made a huge impression judging by how much I loved some of those strips, even though his style had become the standard - from where I was stood - which is probably why 2000AD seemed like such a breath of fresh air.

However, my appreciation has grown in recent years, partially through a better understanding of what Kirby was doing, when he was doing it, and how starkly it contrasted with what everyone else had been doing up until that point. You may already know that Kirby created and even wrote a lot of the stuff for which Stan Lee has been given credit, and sometimes so much credit as to relegate his artist to some talented monkey who was able to hold a pen without dropping it on the floor; and if you're a regular working class person such as like what I am, you'll probably recognise the pattern because getting stiffed by the boss is the story of our lives. This isn't to suggest that Lee was without talent or failed to put in the work but, let's face it, it was mostly Jack. I'm not sure comics as we know them today wouldn't have happened without Jack in the right time and place, but at best it would probably be a completely different landscape.

Evanier's book, which may be one of the greatest things I've read on the subject of the comics biz, balances a sensitive, sympathetic biography with just the right quota of lovingly reproduced artwork to illustrate the tale without it becoming some luxurious portfolio, which most of the other Kirby books seem to be from what I can tell. As a friend and colleague of Kirby, Evanier is particularly well qualified to tell the man's story, and he does so with an incredible warmth which never slides over into sentiment or arse kissing. He paints Kirby as someone you would like to have known, with whom you would have wanted to hang out - or at least I would: imaginative, seriously talented, and above all just a regular working class guy trying to get by, who wanted to do a good job. Weirdly, Kirby puts me in mind of Ray, a former work colleague of mine - English, but the same generation, who bore a more than passing resemblance and who was likewise no stranger to getting stiffed by the boss. This biography accordingly left me with a few feelings I don't normally get from the accounts of the lives of people I've never met. It felt sort of personal, key to which might be Street Code, one of Kirby's very few - possibly only - autobiographical strips, eight pages shining a light on his having grown up under circumstances of grinding poverty during the depression. It's almost Harvey Pekar and has some of the same power.

I can't actually think of anything more useful, or even more coherent to say, but this is a frankly fucking incredible book about an incredible guy who, from my point of view, was one of us.

The Quitter

Harvey Pekar & Dean Haspiel The Quitter (2005)
This one is Harvey's life from birth up to his first forays into underground comics publishing with particular emphasis on occupational dead ends and failures. Some of the ground has already been covered, but not quite in this context, and there's a lot more of Harvey's childhood as a Polish Jew growing up in Cleveland than I've seen before.

I'm sure there will turn out to be many examples of why Harvey can't be considered the father of the autobiographical comic book should I make such a claim, but he remains father of the autobiographical comic book as we know it so far as I'm concerned, and I still don't believe that anyone has published better than American Splendor. The strange thing is that I still can't work out what Harvey did that made his work so distinctive and so powerful. It may be attention to detail, or the sort of detail he felt needed recording, or simply the way he tells 'em. It could just as well be the tenacity with which Harvey stuck to his own guns, ploughing his own furrow regardless of commercial concerns, because when a writer has this much courage in their own convictions, I guess it shines through, even when it's just some story about a guy buying a pair of shoes.

I must admit to having very little idea of what the autobiographical comic book is doing right now, but in the nineties it was mostly a confessional describing pornography habits, spiced up with how mad the girlfriend became when she'd read the previous issue. Between them, Joe Matt and Rob Liefeld drove me away from the medium for pretty much the next two decades; and yet Harvey's work endures because he kept on going, doing what he did best, being Harvey, and at times I identify with what he's been through so hard that it hurts. I don't know whether this is because I'm more like Harvey than other people - we're both blue collar, more or less self-educated and obsessive - or whether he genuinely tapped into some sort of universal experience of the human condition; but this one is a genuine masterpiece, even by Harvey's standards.

I realise he'd now be 83 were he still with us, which is probably pushing it a bit, but Godammit a world without Harvey Pekar still feels like a fucking stupid idea.

Mister Miracle

Tom King & Mitch Gerads Mister Miracle (2019)
Just over a month ago I wrote about an Avengers comic book, suggesting that to describe it as ludicrous would imply that there's such a thing as the ponderous superhero equivalent of Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge, which there really isn't. Whilst I haven't actually had cause to revise this opinion, it turns out that there actually is a ponderous superhero equivalent of Samuel Beckett, and it's Tom King's version of Mister Miracle.

Mister Miracle is some kind of super escape artist, a sort of cosmic Houdini with a cape born from the peculiarly vivid imagination of Jack Kirby as part of his Fourth World mythology. The aforementioned Fourth World never really featured in anything I read, so I don't fully understand what it's about beyond that it's something to do with Apokolips, New Genesis, the New Gods, and Darkseid's search for the anti-life equation which will eliminate free will across the universe; so the whole deal is about a million times weirder and more interesting than most of the rest of DC's jock-infested whitebread canon, and at the risk of seeming repetitive, there's something very van Vogt about it all.

Here we see our escape artist fail a suicide attempt and father a child with Big Barda, then war breaks out on New Genesis and Darkseid demands custody of the child as a price for ending the war. The more dramatic, far-fetched, cosmic elements of the story occur in the background almost to the point of being off the side of the page, and as such come across as belonging to something truly vast and unknowable, having been spared the diminishing effects of a sharper focus. Yet even when we can see the fighting, battles we wouldn't understand conducted with bizarre technology, these details are just background noise, of no more significance than a car journey or a trip to the drug store. The real story is that of Scott and Barda having a kid, sleepless nights, trips to the hospital, the sort of stuff you would more expect to find in something written by Harvey Pekar and told with the same muted tone: it's the small details which matter, which is the whole point of the story.

The art is gorgeous too, in case anyone was wondering, tender realism which emphasises the strangeness of certain events unfolding in the background, and doing so without anyone jumping up and down screaming look at me, I'm weird! This thing is simply beautiful, and possibly even the greatest comic book ever published, or at least I'm having trouble recalling anything which has impressed me more right now. As for Watchmen and other beacons of supposed graphic eloquence, Mister Miracle makes most of them look like Scrooge McDuck.

Old Records Never Die

Eric Spitznagel Old Records Never Die (2016)
I vaguely remember a point at which I made a vow to avoid the traditional mid-life crisis, mainly due to how terminally wanky it always looked on other people. That said, having recently passed the age of fifty, I'm aware of having spent a lot of time rummaging around in my youth. I've never been very good at throwing anything away, and I've always been fairly organised with a tendency to assemble the detritus of being alive according to something resembling a system, and so I've used up much of the last couple of years working on a forensic reconstruction of my own existence, something I will eventually self-publish purely for the sake of a point of focus towards which I can work. I've been transcribing material from old diaries, notebooks, correspondence, and even copies of spoken tape letters I've sent to people. I don't think of this exercise as nostalgia because frankly, most of my life has been disappointing up until recent times - not anything I'd wish to relive - and at the risk of sounding boastful, my life has been generally fucking amazing since about 2011; so it's more like a mapping project, something which answers the question, how did I get here? My past occurred so long ago in subjective terms that it may as well have happened to someone else, which is why I find it so fascinating now.

For reasons which clearly relate to the above, albeit by means I find difficult to define with any degree of clarity, I've tended to steer clear of books by Nick Hornby, notably High Fidelity, or things in that spirit: Stuart Maconie and Peter Kay chortling over Wacky Races and Curly Wurly. I may be wrong about Hornby, but it seems sappy and sentimental to me, even slightly unhealthy. The closest I came was reading Andrew Collins' excruciatingly twee Where Did It All Go Right?, one of the worst books I've ever read and yet another drearily self-deprecating account of growing up in the seventies and having an hilarious punk hairstyle for a bit and failing to shag some girl and listening to the Smiths, because it's always the fucking Smiths.

Writing about music, or specifically about one's love of music, is an inevitably subjective undertaking because it would be pointless were it otherwise; which can additionally leave the writing in question somewhat reliant on whether or not the reader shares the same musical taste as the author, at least in cases where the author isn't up to much and you probably wouldn't be reading but for the fact that he also digs St. Winifred's School Choir. I still have Smiths records, and I can appreciate them, and How Soon is Now? was wonderful; but the first music I really began to take seriously as a kid seemed a bit more wide-ranging in certain respects, beginning with Devo - working through Crass and Killing Joke, probably ending up in the general vicinity of Throbbing Gristle. For the most part it was music beginning from the point of view that all western society is fucked, that we're all living a lie, and that maybe you need to face up to it, shithead.  Doubtless it all took itself too seriously, but that was part of its job. Then the Smiths turned up, and I recall the interviews about how they only wanted handsome people at their little pop concerts, and This Charming Man sounded like the theme tune to a kid's show, and although the second single actually had a tune, everything since has been a heavy sigh of my life is shit and I feel a bit sad. I don't understand how that could really have changed anyone's world, or how anyone could be satisfied with just that, and no-one who ever wrote about it has been able to explain it to me.

Old Records Never Die is the account of one man's mission to track down all the records of his youth, not just the songs, but the actual same copies rescued from dusty boxes in basements and thrift stores. Needless to say, I approached the book with some trepidation, reading mainly on the grounds of it having been a birthday present from my brother-in-law, a man of generally sound judgement. I still don't quite understand why Eric Spitznagel really needed to reunite with the copy of Kiss' Alive II on which his brother Mark had scrawled HANDS OFF!!! across the cover in ballpoint; and I had a tough time getting through the first couple of chapters worth of references to the Travelling Wilburys, Billy Joel, and other artists I'd rather not have to think about; but as the book finds its stride, it becomes clear that this is not about the music or fat old fuckers going misty-eyed over the malts and shakes of a sunnier age, not exactly. Spitznagel's quest is a genuinely bizarre one, almost a ritual working, not really trying to bring something back so much as to understand its power; and I can identify because it seems reminiscent of what I've been doing with all my own old crap. It doesn't really matter whether or not the Smiths changed anyone's life, and in any case Spitznagel writes about the change and how we understand it rather than the source of musical revelation. If anything, the sources of musical revelation seem the least important detail of whatever the guy is going through in this book, so it's communicated as what may as well be a universal experience. More than anything it reminds me of Harvey Pekar's wistful tales of stealing jazz records from a radio station or finding a cheap pair of Stetson shoes in Goodwill. It has a certain passion, a certain affection, but there's nothing sappy or sentimental here.

I still haven't read High Fidelity, although if it's anything like the film, then Old Records Never Die really isn't a particularly close relative. It's about much more, the entire experience of memory, and while it's often very, very funny, the gags come naturally as part of the discourse - none of that gormless chuckling over old photos in which people look a little bit different to how they do now.

This one has really surprised me.

Jupiter's Circle

Mark Millar & others Jupiter's Circle (2015)
Here's another revisionist superhero book, a prequel to Jupiter's Legacy, about which I couldn't actually remember much aside from having liked it; and it's another revisionist superhero book building on the back story of contemporary characters by impersonating the forties and fifties. Just like Watchmen, one might well observe, and so it's probably no coincidence that the tale should open with our heroes battling a telepathic octopus from outer space. However, this one feels quite different to most variations on this theme which I've read, and I like it more. It's essentially hokey pipe-smoking caped escapades in a world of Leave It to Beaver and J. Edgar Hoover, more or less Justice Society of America with consequences. The twist is that the dark psychological underbelly of Jupiter's Circle is relatively mild in comic book terms, more Harvey Pekar than Rick Veitch's Bratpack wherein the masks conceal fetishism and personality disorders. The lightness of touch makes for a massively refreshing change and allows Millar to set an authentic tone with big, colourful stories powered by mad science and special kinds of ray, the contrast of which gives all the more weight to how these people relate to the real world and each other. We even get walk-on parts by Bill Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Ayn Rand without so much as the faintest trace of showing off; and Rand doesn't come out of it very well, which is gratifying. We've now clocked up nearly eighty years worth of superhero comics, a genre with certain very obvious limitations, and yet I don't think I've ever read one quite like this. I know Mark Millar's shot himself in the foot a couple of times, but Jesus - hats off to the man when he can still come up with stuff such as we have here.

American Splendor: Another Day

Harvey Pekar, Dean Haspiel & others

American Splendor: Another Day (2006)
Ten years later and I only just discover that Vertigo published Harvey Pekar, which is about the one thing to inspire regret at my having lost touch with what was going on in the comics biz back then, and additionally means I can forgive Vertigo for driving me away with Grant Morrison's Unreadables and Garth Ennis' award-winningly awful Preacher, a comic predicated on the daringly innovative high concept of rural working-class Texans being uneducated with a tendency to marry their own sisters. Nice work, Garth - very brave.

Backtracking further, by 1989 I had finished a three-year fine art degree course and was living alone and on the dole in a damp single room bedsit in Chatham, Kent, sharing a house with ageing alcoholics and persons who were more or less just living there whilst waiting to die. The degree course had left me no more employable than I'd been when I started it, and had taught me only that I had nothing in common with anyone describing themselves as an artist. In June I went for an interview with Royal Mail, and was taken on as a postman, a job in which I remained for the next two decades; but meanwhile back in 1989, Bill Lewis - who lived in the same road - sold me a stack of American underground comics, including a couple of issues of Harvey Pekar's self-published American Splendor, notably issue three which included a story called Awaking to the Terror of a New Day wherein our man forces himself to keep on moving forward through a seemingly futile existence more or less identical to my own without slashing his wrists. That was when I realised that Harvey had something unique, or at least something which is generally in short supply. Harvey understood.

Autobiographical comics briefly became a big thing around the early nineties, although not many of those I saw were that good - the worst possibly being Joe Matt describing his heavy pornography habit in one comic in wilfully lurid detail, then spending the next issue describing his girlfriend's reaction to reading the comic describing his heavy pornography habit with masochistic relish. On the other hand, American Splendor coming from a sixties blue collar sensibility was always heads above other representatives of the genre - a unique hybrid which somehow really needed to be a comic rather than just prose, and yet which never bothered with any of the comic as arts cinema pretensions associated with the comic book's supposedly having grown up - even though that's exactly what this is, and far more so than whatever the latest reinvention of fucking Batman may be. Harvey told it like it was, making wonderful use of the timing and emphasis afforded by sequential panels, then stopping when he'd said what he wanted to say - no real punchline, often not even a moral, sometimes leaving us wondering what had happened to the rest of the story and all because that's how life works, I suppose. It may seem mundane, and it may fixate on details like what thoughts run through your head when asking a neighbour to come and fix your toilet because your eyes don't work so good and you've lost your glasses and all he needs to do is fix the chain back onto the stopper, but never mind comics, this stuff is poetry.

To further infect the review with autobiographical detail, I'd had a shitty day, suffering in the heat of Texas in August, worried about a stray cat which has stopped eating and generally succumbing to good old existential nausea. I'd been reading one of the worst things I'd read in a long time - and the quality of my reading always affects my general mood - and had become fixated on all those people who just can't find it within themselves to add anything good to the world, instead just leaving a path strewn with worm-casts of recycled culture. Who are these people, these product-sponge cunts - as Louis CK calls them? Why are they alive? Why must I be aware of [name of person who doesn't matter excised for the sake of diplomacy]'s existence, and of the blog he has written explaining what he was trying to say in his five-thousand words of generic fanfic delineating a further adventure of [description excised because I'm not having that fucking argument again].

So I picked this and sure enough I feel restored, because Harvey always seemed to understand. There's something profound in his comics, and I've now been reading them for nearly three decades, but I still find it hard to pinpoint what it is, except that I know it's something between the lines, or the panels, I suppose. It may even be as much what it isn't as what it is, if that doesn't sound too preposterous a proposition. There's something calming about Harvey's voice, it being something far removed from all the bullshit and the shouting, or which is at least able to understand and make sense of the bullshit and the shouting - just read Delicacy in this collection, two wordless pages illustrated by Hilary Barta, the comic equivalent of a silent film, I suppose, and packing such a punch that I laughed out loud. That's real art, and if you don't see that, then I feel sorry for you and for the fact that we have nothing to say to each other.

As with David Bowie - of all people - I somehow still can't quite believe that Harvey is gone, because a world which doesn't have Harvey Pekar in it seems weird and unfamiliar, but thankfully we still have his voice.

1985

Mark Millar & Tommy Lee Edwards 1985 (2009)
Attending a comic book convention in North Carolina necessitated a couple of nights in an unusually uncomfortable hotel bed in a room shared with our kid - who apparently requires only two hours sleep - which made it difficult to concentrate on my current bedtime reading, Will Self's Walking to Hollywood, prompting an excursion into something less demanding, namely 1985 which I picked up at the aforementioned convention. This volume collects another title I missed at the time due to being somewhat out of the loop with monthly comics, and yet another story to blur the distinction between fiction and reality. What with Will Self and Michael Moorcock, I seem to have encountered a lot of this breaking of the fourth wall of late without it being something consciously sought out on my part, so it's tempting to wonder whether the universe might be trying to tell me something.

Admittedly 1985 is slightly different in that the fourth wall is broken for the characters of this book whilst their own fourth wall remains more or less intact, which as such prevents it from becoming a variation on Grant Morrison. 1985 is set in a world recognisable as our own but for the sudden and unexpected revelation of 1980s Marvel comics villains turning out to be real. As an exercise in nostalgia this seems initially strange to me given that I haven't had much experience of Marvel since most of the characters invoked here were still in service, so I wasn't really aware of the Shocker, MODOK, or the Stilt Man having passed into comics history, presumably having been replaced with the blood-drenched, katana-weilding assassins of Rob Liefeld vintage; and it was additionally weird reading 1985 in a hotel room above a convention centre packed with comic fans dressed as superheroes, and dressed as highly convincing superheroes. There was one guy who I'm pretty certain was actually the real Captain America, not just some impersonator.

Anyway, 1985 is set right here, and our protagonist is a young comic-obsessive kid who recognises the monsters emerging from the house in the woods because he's read about them in back issues of Spiderman, Iron Man, Avengers and so on. Unlike Grant Morrison's somewhat ponderous Joe the Barbarian, there's no real attempt to rationalise any of this, at least not by real world terms because that isn't really the point, and nor is it grittily realistic superheroes having to go to the bog and pay child support. The point, perhaps peculiarly, seems to be a reminder of the initial excitement at least some of us once had reading comics as kids, before anyone found it necessary to point out that Batman was almost certainly some sort of rubber fetishist. Accordingly the story is told with the determined earthy realism of a Harvey Pekar monologue, underscored by the beautiful, almost photorealist art of Tommy Lee Edwards, then contrasted with the absolutely deadpan intrusion of characters from old comics; and although by rights they should appear absurd, there is no doubt of their being monsters in every sense.

There he was, standing in front of me: A comic book character as real and as awesome as Mount Rushmore or Ronald Reagan. But it's the smell I remember most. Nothing can prepare you for just how bad the Hulk smells.

Thus does it continue, comic book violence replaced by real horror in this, our version of reality, but with a lightness of touch you probably might not expect of Mark Millar, with the appearance of the otherwise ludicrous MODOK presenting a particularly nightmarish interlude.

1985 is nothing profound, although it has no ambition to be anything beyond what it is; but it's a moving and highly satisfying testimony to the art form, and to that which we once took from the art form before some sneering Android's Dungeon employee called us Marvel Zombies and asked had we never heard of Love & Rockets; because apparently you should always feel ashamed for enjoying cheap, populist entertainment. This point has struck me as worth making in so much as the Captain America and X-Men comics I read back in 1985 had a more lasting impression on me than any of the independent cinematic classics I saw that year at art college. Similarly, returning to the point that I read this whilst attending a comic book convention, I couldn't help but notice how all those kids in capes or with purple wigs and fake pointy ears weren't anything like so saaaaad as I had anticipated. On the contrary, it made me feel good to see just how many of them there were, and how much effort had been expended in pursuit of their impersonations, and how happy it clearly made them. In fact, there was nothing saaaaad about them at all. In may ways I felt inspired by their example, and that's sort of what 1985 is all about.

Kick-Ass 2

Mark Millar & John Romita Jnr. Kick-Ass 2 (2013)
Kick-Ass is of course the superhero comic that could almost have crossed over with Harvey Pekar's American Splendour without requiring significant amendments to the laws of either physics or biology: real people putting on masks and patrolling the streets in the name of law and order, as has been happening in the real world at least since Mexico's Super Barrio first applied wrestling holds to village politics. As will hopefully be obvious to anyone reading this, there's no such thing as super-strength, invulnerability, or a mutant healing factor outside the pages of comics, so real life superheroes are somewhat more likely to have the living shit kicked out of them than the colourful characters from which they draw inspiration; which is a significant element of Kick-Ass, vividly expressed in page after blood-soaked page of stomach-churning violence, broken bones, bruises, black eyes, people braining each other with iron bars, and a vast chasm dividing the ideal of truth, justice, and the American way from what really happens, as Battle-Guy observes in the heat of a riot:
 

What the Hell, man? I thought you said we'd be heroes if we showed up and fought the bad guys. I thought it'd be like a comic book with people cheering and stuff.

Mark Millar has recently come under fire for this. Kick-Ass goes too far, seems to be the general consensus of opinion, and I can see there's a thin line between telling this kind of story, and the pornography of repulsion that informs the sort of thing upon which I don't feel inclined to elaborate and which is in any case probably quite easy to find on the internet. Two specific scenes in Kick-Ass 2 have been singled out as transcending the requirements of the narrative for the sake of gratuitous brutality - both scenes which have eluded faithful reproduction in the movie adaptation because, as Millar himself rightly points out, it's a different medium and not everything translates. I won't describe the scenes in question, but in the context of the story, I'm not convinced that either is significantly more repulsive than anything else here; and one of them I would argue is actually made worse for the visual gag with which it is cinematically prefixed.

Routine beatings, murder, someone pushed off the top of a building, child abduction, shootings, and a guy hung in his prison cell - these things are shown, whilst of the two transgressive scenes, both are described entirely by threat and aftermath because it simply isn't necessary to go into detail. The horror is already implicit. I would rather not be so crass as to ask whether routine beatings, murder, someone pushed off the top of a building, child abduction, shootings, and a guy hung in his prison cell are therefore to be considered acceptable as entertainment, but it seems significant that the two highlighted offending scenes push additionally emotive buttons of misogyny and animal cruelty. I'd suggest that it is specifically because these particular strains of evil are invoked that Kick-Ass 2 refrains from showing the horrible details, which is surely significant given that neither writer nor artist have held back in other respects. In other words, it's repulsive because it's supposed to be repulsive, but not more so than it needs to be.

This issue puts me in mind of controversy surrounding the power electronics group Whitehouse. For those who have better things to do than read The Wire, Whitehouse were formed in the early 1980s. I came across them in an issue of Flowmotion fanzine and was immediately intrigued by their being the one group of whom I knew nothing, and who had been routinely ignored by the music press. Shops refused to stock their albums, and even Throbbing Gristle's habitually awkward Genesis P. Orridge seemed to hate them.

The listeners of these recordings will always enjoy the most intense reactions of all because these are the most violently repulsive records ever conceived, claimed the publicity, and so of course I just had to know what this was about. Postal orders were sent and my copy of the Erector album somehow made it through the mail without anyone being arrested. The cover was a plain pressing plant cardboard sleeve with the photocopied image of a male johnson glued to the front. The music comprised four tracks of ear-splitting noise, just headache inducing feedback with a screamed litany of sexually sadistic threats; and one of the tracks was called Shitfun, apparently in honour of romantic acts involving faeces.

Yes, I concluded, this probably is one of the most violently, repulsive records ever conceived. Older and wiser, Whitehouse now sound to me like a noisy art gallery installation, but at the time I was seriously freaked out and half considered sending the thing back. I had gone in search of the transgressive, and unfortunately I had found it, which, allowing for the fact that any sort of attempt to rationalise such extremes of artistic expression will almost certainly be bullshit, seemed to be the entire point of Whitehouse. Whitehouse, I decided, were about reaction rather than art, giving all those sick puppy fans what they want, then forcing them to accept that maybe they didn't really want it quite so bad as they thought in the first place. I wrote to William Bennett of the group sharing these thoughts, and he told me it seemed that I had understood him very well.

Years later I was given a VHS copy of Faces of Death, a banned documentary purportedly containing actual footage of executions and the like. The documentary was at the time popular amongst a certain herd of counter-cultural sheep sharing the same dreary obsessions with Charles Manson, Aleister Crowley, and the number 23, and it was one such bleating industrial buffoon who sent me the film in the assumption that I would be interested. However, I found the very idea repulsive and ended up giving the unwatched tape to some guy at work who had also heard about it.

'It's supposed to be really sick,' he grinned, tongue working its way around the edge of his mouth for no obvious reason.

He brought it back a day later. He looked pale and upset.

'It was really sick,' he muttered unhappily.

To at last return to the point, these things come to mind when I read Kick-Ass 2, and particularly when it is criticised as glorifying brutality. Simply, I don't believe it does. I believe it rubs that shit in the reader's face, because if they really want an exciting adventure full of killing and stabbing, then they probably need it rubbed in their face.

Of course, there's also the point that whilst Mark Millar probably shouldn't be regarded as a campaigner for good, clean family entertainment working the system from the inside, he clearly loves annoying people; and all that I've written may actually be so much bullshit and rationalisation in service of defending the indefensible; but the bottom line for me is that surely no-one could miss that Kick-Ass 2 is informed by a strong moral code, even a sense of social responsibility, and certainly more so than a great many other books full of caped types blowing chunks out of each other whilst reciting the usual sub-Disney homilies about everyone being different and how that's a good thing.

Finally, because I've somehow yet to mention it, the art is characteristically powerful to the point of being perfect, and Kick-Ass 2 is, for my money, a wonderful if harrowing thing; and better than the film, in my opinion.

Hit-Girl

Mark Millar & John Romita Jnr. Hit-Girl (2013)
I suppose on an artistic level this is just the sort of corporate adventure product I should loathe given that Mark Millar now has his own planet, or at least that he churns out this stuff simultaneous to its own inevitable movie adaptation, but there's just something irresistible about his writing. I'm sure he's produced plenty of generic sub-standard shite during the course of his ascent from wee highland laddie to international entertainment complex, but if so, I've yet to read it; and with the beautiful evolution of John Romita Jnr.'s artwork towards something resembling a more colourful José Muñoz, there's really not much that can go wrong here.

Although Saviour had its moments, the first Mark Millar story to really make an impression on me was Insiders printed in Crisis back in 1991 - a supposedly cautionary tale of prison life concluding unexpectedly with the joyful nihilism of our man deciding he's glad he made all those wrong turns because his shitty life is still better than yours. Millar continues to deliver these yelping challenges to both good taste and reader expectation, as hilariously brash as anything ever flashed in your face by Grant Morrison, but without the deflative ten page suffixery of bollocks about Crowley or why the 1960s were like totally awesome - which has always been a bit of a danger with the aforementioned best-selling Unreadables author and heir to the budget supermarket chain of the same name.

Hit-Girl, like Kick-Ass from which it is spawned, tells tales of real life superheroes of the kind who, lacking science-fiction powers, tend to end up hospitalised with greater frequency than Arm-Fall-Off Boy and his ilk. It's a real life narrative - at least as much as anything you're likely to find in a comic book without it actually being one of Harvey Pekar's tales about buying a pair of shoes - quick, ingeniously plotted, funny, full of sparkling dialogue and apparently lacking in either cliché or padding; also occasionally stomach churning.

Being a full-grown man with a functioning moral conscience, it's difficult for me to read the story of a twelve-year old girl who routinely decapitates her foes without some degree of squirming, and whichever fine line may apply here, I have genuine doubts of a balance being struck, or even that a balance can be struck given the story. However, one aspect which seems significant is how Hit-Girl and the world she inhabits may constitute the first genuine inversion of the usual superhero dynamic, as interpreted here with typical clarity by Alan Moore:

I believe that the whole thing about superheroes is they don't like it up them. They would prefer not to get involved in a fight if they don't have superior firepower, or they're invulnerable because they came from the planet Krypton when they were a baby.

I could be talking utter pish here, but it occurs to me that this is exactly why Kick-Ass and Hit-Girl work so well: they restore vulnerability to the genre, not with any desperate attempt to convince us that Batman is just a regular guy who farts and likes peanuts, but by making us so painfully aware of our heroes being nothing more than scrawny little kids as to inspire identification more akin to that of long-suffering parents desperately trying to keep the little fuckers in at night and safe from harm. So Hit-Girl is uncomfortable reading, and hopefully for the right reasons; shocking, but possibly shocking with purpose and actual consequences, and very entertaining.

Top 10

Alan Moore, Gene Ha & Zander Cannon Top 10 book one (2000)
Here's another title I happened upon by chance when noticing that the local library had added a graphic novel section. I'd been driven away from comics a few years earlier by the contents of Grant Morrison's navel and Garth Ennis celebrating his five-hundredth successful retelling of that story in which a man, nursing a hangover following a night of Guinness and Irish show tunes, finds himself wrestling inner demons; Top 10 seemed oddly uninviting, and it took me a long time to get around to borrowing the collection, but it left a good enough impression for me to buy the thing more recently when I stumbled across a copy in Half-Price.

I'd lost track of Alan Moore roughly around the time of From Hell - issues of which I kept missing for some reason - but assumed he'd turned his back on superheroes - excepting I suppose 1963 which seemed so far into the realms of parody that it probably didn't count. It seems I had assumed correctly, as he explained here:

At the time I thought that a book like Watchmen would perhaps unlock a lot of potential creativity, that perhaps other writers and artists in the industry would see it and would think this is great, this shows what comics can do. We can now take our own ideas and thanks to the success of Watchmen we'll have a better chance of editors giving us a shot at them. I was hoping naively for a great rash of individual comic books that were exploring different storytelling ideas and trying to break new ground.

That isn't really what happened. Instead it seemed that the existence of Watchmen had pretty much doomed the mainstream comic industry to about twenty years of very grim and often pretentious stories that seemed to be unable to get around the massive psychological stumbling block that Watchmen had turned out to be, although that had never been my intention with the work.

More recently, he expanded upon the specific details of his disillusionment with the genre:

I've recently come to the point where I think that basically most American superhero comics, and this is probably a sweeping generalisation, they're a lot like America's foreign policy. America has an inordinate fondness for the unfair fight... I believe that the whole thing about superheroes is they don't like it up them. They would prefer not to get involved in a fight if they don't have superior firepower, or they're invulnerable because they came from the planet Krypton when they were a baby. I genuinely think it's this squeamishness that's behind the American superhero myth. It's the only country where it's really taken hold. As Brits, we'll go to see American superhero films, just like the rest of the world, but we never really created superheroes of our own.

Nevertheless, as is probably obvious, before too long he came crawling back with the America's Best Comics imprint, and so at the risk of reviewing by quotation:

When I was working upon the ABC books, I wanted to show different ways that mainstream comics could viably have gone, that they didn't have to follow Watchmen and the other 1980s books down this relentlessly dark route. It was never my intention to start a trend for darkness. I'm not a particularly dark individual. I have my moments, it's true, but I do have a sense of humor. With the ABC books I was trying to do comics that would have perhaps appealed to an intelligent thirteen-year-old, such as I'd been, and would still satisfy the contemporary readership of forty-year-old men who probably should know better. But I wanted to sort of do comics that would be accessible to a much wider range of people, and would still be intelligent even if they were primarily children's adventure stories.

So there you go.

Top 10, not entirely unlike Marshal Law, presents a variation on an old Simpsons Comics storyline in which the atomic power plant inadvertently irradiates the entire population of Springfield turning everyone into caped superheroes, or at least there's so many of them walking, flying, or swimming around as to negate the prodigal implication of the super suffix. Possibly this is why Moore dubs the inhabitants of his sprawling Neopolis science-heroes - they may have strange, unearthly powers, but so does everyone else, and they're so regular they could have been written by Harvey Pekar.

Whilst Marshal Law bends the genre over for a prune juice enema it will never forget, Top 10 is an altogether more gentle affair - sort of like Moore's Bojeffries Saga rewritten as Hill Street Blues with superheroes - packed with gritty blue collar detail, yet very funny without feeling the need to pull Lenny Henry comedy faces. Because it's always easier to dissect a flaw than a virtue, it's actually quite difficult to know what to say about Top 10 once we're past motivation, secret origins, and descriptions of what it isn't, not least because it's so unassuming. There's no big message; it just tells a story - or rather several stories simultaneously - and leaves the reader  reminded of how much fun superhero comics could be before Moore unwittingly ruined it for everyone with Watchmen - by his own testimony -  and had to re-reinvent them all over again.

Weirdly, I think this might be one of the best things Alan Moore has ever written, and before I forget, the art is absolutely sublime.