The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys: California

Gerard Way, Shaun Simon & Becky Cloonan
The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys: California (2013)
Okay, so this is the book I assumed National Anthem would be. National Anthem was a more recent rendering of the original story which became both this and an associated album by My Chemical Romance or, if you prefer, one of them is The Dark Knight Returns where the other is Adam West braining the Joker with a giant inflatable clown shoe. That being said, you can sort of read California as referring to National Anthem a decade or so down the line, with the populace of the latter having become something amounting to urban legends. At least that's how it seemed to me.

Here we have one of those futuristic dystopias of vaguely Orwellian thrust, albeit filtered through Andy Warhol with elements of Mad Max and Walter Hill's Warriors. Society has become a parody of the consumerist present - although as to how much of it is truly a parody is open to debate. The corporation runs everything and the sex robots of Battery City have their own religion predicting the apocalyptic return of the mighty mechanical Destroya. You get the picture.

Naturally we have rebellious outsiders opposed to the status quo, which is where the Killjoys come in, except this one flips the usual script by revealing that life with the idealistic freedom fighters really ain't that great either; unwittingly echoing the current state of internet discourse wherein shitbags occupy the full extent of the political spectrum leaving the rest of us more or less ideologically homeless.

It's massively pessimistic whilst also being a breath of fresh air, and is beautifully told with the narrative sophistication of Philip K. Dick but in a visual medium. Cloonan's art reminds me a little of those horrible Deadline folks of days gone by, except it's much, much better and actually cute where appropriate rather than just turning in twee Hernandez impersonations. I can't quite bring myself to acknowledge it being related to an album by My Chemical Romance, possibly because in terms of mood it seems closer to Bowie's Diamond Dogs to my eyes, or possibly ears. Yet, despite being tied in with the music of a band I honestly can't listen to, this version of the Killjoys is pretty much perfect in every way.

Milk Wars

Gerard Way, Steve Orlando & others Milk Wars (2018)
I bought the first one then waited patiently for further issues, and before I knew what had happened, the fucker had already been collected as a trade paperback. I'd assumed it was to be just some Doom Patrol crossover affair, so I suppose that's where I went wrong. It turns out to be a Young Animal crossover affair, specifically all the characters from Gerard Way's Young Animal imprint getting to play ball with Batman and the like.

It starts well with the Doom Patrol arriving in a humongously square version of the DC universe in which the ordinarily feral Lobo wears a cardigan, smokes a pipe, and takes pride in his lawn; and then the rest of the story is told though combinations of less interesting characters as written by persons other than Gerard Way. It doesn't quite go completely tits up, but there's a distinct sag. I don't really see the appeal in Mother Panic, and Batman as mild-mannered vicar is probably funnier if you care about Batman; and the subsequent chapter told through Wonder Woman and Shade just isn't very interesting, and has the added disadvantage of resembling a million other contemporary comic books.

I go into my comic shop, and everything is on fancy paper with lavish printing with all manner of CGI effects applied to the coloration, and the art is technically gorgeous but for that it all resembles a confluence of manga, bandes dessinées, and nineties independents, because - pow -the comic has now grown up to such an extent that it's slightly ashamed of being a superhero book, and Blue Beetle must therefore aspire to European cinema, or at least to something drawn by the Hernandez brothers. I think I liked the superheroes a little better when they were crap, and cheap, and when they knew who their audience were.

Anyway, that's what the Wonder Woman sequence looks like, with a bit of cutesy Hallmark card physiology thrown in.

The arrival of Cave Carson at least serves to bring us up to speed on what we've been reading, summarising the narrative glossolalia of previous pages, until we're back with Gerard Way and the Doom Patrol for the conclusion.

The story seems to be about the homogenisation of assorted DC characters, specifically the tension between wildly creative modes of storytelling as spun by wacky individuals, and the corporate and formulaic, specifically the corporate and formulaic which demands that continuity take precedence over creativity, and which reboots the DC universe every couple of years so that we don't have to think about Superman drawing his pension. It's a nice idea, and a story worth telling, but rings about as true as U2's political activism given that DC are owned by Warner, which rather leaves Milk Wars looking a little like the very thing it attempts to criticise. It's nice that they take the piss out of the fucking Funko Pop! thing - a worthless phenomenon if ever there was - but doing so doesn't make DC a samizdat guerilla outfit; and I'm only focusing on this aspect of the book because - well, they brought it up.

On the positive side, Gerard Way is as entertaining as ever and there's a lot to like about this book, but it sags in the middle and some of it is simply incomprehensible hipster noise.

Miracleman: The Golden Age

Neil Gaiman & Mark Buckingham Miracleman: The Golden Age (1999)
Is anyone else getting bored of the increasingly labyrinthine publishing history of Marvelman, or whatever he's called this year? I know I am. This reprints a reprint of an Eclipse comic which apparently no longer ever happened, may not actually have needed to happen in the first place, and may even have been redrawn according to some online article I can no longer find which was admittedly probably referring to Miracleman: The Silver Age, but never mind.

To briefly digress, some decades ago I went through a phase of wishing I could write superhero comics. I longed to be taken seriously as an author of frowning material involving capes, powers and important messages. The main obstacle to this career swivel was that I could barely string a sentence together. I wasn't particularly literate and what strips I had scrawled up to that point were improvised and heavily reliant on knob gags, so I sat down with a stack of my fave comics - mostly X-Men titles and things written by Alan Moore - and I tried really hard to work out what was going on so as to arrive at a method by which I too might tell a story. Eventually I accumulated a loose group of guidelines and techniques strip-mined mostly from the aforementioned Moore, methods I might employ so as to conceal my not actually having any story worth telling; roughly speaking, this sort of thing:

• Mess up the lives of your characters and the story will form around what happens as you try to get them back into shape.
• Don't be afraid of novelty. It looks like imagination and most people can't tell the difference.
• Quote freely, make frequent references to music, films, or literature generally regarded as cool. References to persons generally regarded as interesting are also to be encouraged - Crowley, Jung, Shakespeare and so on.
• Quote yourself freely, treating your story thus far as something of inherent weight and mystery. Maybe that person in the background back on page four could turn out to be some kind of mutant mastermind orchestrating everything from behind the scenes.
• Repeat yourself. People will mistake it for a motif and assume you know what you're doing.

Unfortunately, I learned just enough to immediately recognise my own efforts as complete bullshit once I got to work; and perhaps equally unfortunately, every time I pick up something written by Neil Gaiman - although admittedly it's been a while - it really looks to me as though he's using the very same checklist.

I discovered Neil Gaiman with an early issue of Sandman, went briefly nuts for the guy and bought up everything I could get my hands on; although within about a year I'd begun to detect the faint essence of something which I found difficult to like. I kept on buying Sandman, but Lordy those faux-Shakespearean issues bored me shitless; and I wasn't that wild about Harry fucking Potter even when he was Timothy Hunter; and eventually it all became too annoying so I flogged the lot on eBay. I recall the first twenty or so issues of Sandman as essentially decent, and I'd buy the collected editions but for the bloody awful art which somehow bothered me less at the time; and then there was Miracleman.

We didn't really need any more issues of Miracleman after Alan Moore was done with it, and I'm not convinced Neil Gaiman's run really adds anything. To be fair, The Golden Age seems to be the first of a longer three-part story, and is obviously mostly just scene setting, albeit for a story with a scene already set during Moore's run; and you can tell it's scene setting because it doesn't actually have a story. In fact it barely even has forward motion. I appreciate the device of describing something indescribable through the lives of those observing it from afar, but it reads like a series of novel images of the kind I would have tried to pass of as narrative back in my youth.

Lonely bloke looks after windmills, shags Miraclewoman.

Precocious Miraclebaby has superpowers, insults doting mother.

Geezer climbs mountain but doesn't find answer.

See, they're not really stories, just single images described at length by use of selected phrases deployed so as to suggest a particular mood, and at the end we're supposed to go wow whilst remaining nevertheless touched by the subtle poetry of human interaction; but nothing actually happens, and it really feels as though the author hopes we won't notice. It's the exact same thing which Steven Moffat does on Doctor Who, or did last time I could be arsed to sit through yet another time-wasting episode. A skeleton in a space suit does not in and of itself constitute narrative.

Where was I?

To be fair, the issue spent in the company of Andy Warhol, one of the many resurrected in Miracleman's brave new world of wonders, is terrific, and possibly the best thing I've read by Neil Gaiman; so I guess I can see what he's trying to do for most of this stuff, but none of the rest really comes close, at least not for me, because I can't read past what feels like writing by formula. We have the Kid Miracleman teen cultists drawn in apparent homage to the Hernandez brothers, because Love & Rockets is like rilly amaaazing, yeah? Then there's an incomprehensible Prisoner homage with edgily xeroxed images, and God help us yet another fucking story told as a twee children's book - novelty after novelty after novelty, and of course the poetry of the writing should be sufficient to save the thing from its own neatly modular eccentricity, except it can't because as usual it's so bleeding middle-class that it may as well be set in the same universe as Love Actually; and oh lookee - everyone meets up at the Notting Hill carnival in the final episode. Fancy that.

I realise I'm in the minority, but surely I can't be the only person to have had this reaction to Neil Gaiman's writing? Maybe American Gods is amazing. I don't know. I can only base my opinion on what I've managed to read by him, and it's all been twee; and instances of spontaneity and imagination feel calculated to invoke specific reactions; and it lacks danger or the flavour of any experience beyond the somewhat limited world of a conspicuously middle-class author who wishes only to entertain; and it feels like something for which there could never be greater praise than a glowing write up in Time Out; and when I read anything by Neil Gaiman it feels as though he's sat at my side, digging me in the ribs to see whether I'm suitably full of wonder, and it feels as though he's ever so pleased with himself.

That said, I'm sure he's a lovely bloke in person.

I expect Tim Burton's fucking smashing too.