A Man & His Cat

Umi Sakurai A Man & His Cat (2018)
Some facebook thread on a friend's page recently threw up the assertion that western comics are crap because it's all superheroes while manga is amazing because it can be about anything. This one is about a man and his cat, as the title implies. Unfortunately though, despite the sheer force with which the subject alone socks it to anyone who ever dared take pleasure in an issue of Superman Family, it's still manga.

I'm well aware that manga has its admirers.

I'm not one of them, because to admire something simply because of its format would be fucking stupid, like enjoying vinyl records regardless of what's recorded on them. I liked a few of the Godzilla comics which Dark Horse reprinted back in the late eighteenth century, and Akira and Grave of the Fireflies were great - although they're movies - but I remain otherwise unconvinced.

On the other hand, I'm a big fan of cats, which is why my wife and I have a number of them - not less than thirteen, usually more depending on who turns up for breakfast - and we also volunteer for a local cat rescue organisation; so you can sort of see how I ended up with this book, which is a manga.

The story is about an old man - or one who is referred to as an old man despite his depiction - who buys a cat, followed by the usual realisations which occur to anyone who takes on a cat regarding their feeding, use of litter tray, and so on and so forth. Of course, it's mainly about how much the man and his cat love each other.

It's a nice idea except the cat resembles a Pokémon character and seems to have been written by someone who doesn't understand cats - so Fukumaru, as the cat is named, is written with the needy qualities of a dog and eyes abrim with tears for almost half the page count. The purpose of the story seems to be delivery of the narrative equivalent of a series of emoticons, emotional currents reduced to a series of hearts and frowny faces. Consequently A Man & His Cat feels like one-hundred pages of button pushing.

Even with more of a story, I'm not convinced it would work. As you might expect, it's all giant eyes, tiny mouths and infantilised women, the same style as drawn by a billion others churning out this same corporate variant on cereal box design, all distinctive qualities flattened out to the artificial texture of mass production and candy. This saddens me because I respond to anything involving a cat, but this one doesn't feel entirely sincere. Fukumaru's dialogue substituting you for mew and my for meow just isn't that funny, and the whole thing has the unpleasant angular look of a style copied without much underlying ability to draw or to arrange shapes on a piece of paper; and the supposedly old man looks about thirty, or would if he didn't resemble Christian Bale in American Psycho, or would if he looked remotely human with that weird angular chin. Seriously, it all makes Rob Liefeld look like Leonardo da Vinci and I don't know how people can be satisfied with anything so thin, so lacking in character.

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.

Mutant Genesis

 

Chris Claremont & Jim Lee Mutant Genesis (1991)
Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in…

Having finished a somewhat exhausting and extended bout of proofreading, I finally claw back some time in which to take a look at what books Santa brought. I begin with Will Self's memoir - which is absorbing and a joy to read - and then this turns up in the mail just as I come to the end of the first part, and suddenly I'm Principal Skinner admiring Ralph Wiggum's display of Star Wars action figures in that Simpsons episode. Look, I hear myself thinking as I gaze at the cover, it's the Beast, and there's Nightcrawler, and why - Psylocke is there too, because apparently I'm still twelve.

After seventeen years, Chris Claremont ceased writing the X-Men in 1991, having become massively disillusioned with what Marvel wanted to do to his characters. I recently discovered the existence of 2009's X-Men Forever, a title wherein Claremont continues the story he would have told had he stayed with the book, thus overwriting whatever the hired hands came up with in his absence; and specifically continuing the story from his final three issues, collected here and retroactively labelled Mutant Genesis for the sake of the sales pitch. These issues were actually the first three of 1991's X-Men, then the brand new collectible companion title to the long running Uncanny X-Men. I used to have them but it really felt like the whole thing had gone tits up, so I sold them and didn't bother restocking during my recent campaign of buying back all the stuff I've flogged on eBay. Anyway, I sort of can't not at least take a look at X-Men Forever, and I therefore bought this as a refresher.

I remember this thing as a complete dog's dinner, and so much so as to have bequeathed me no memory of what happens besides various angry looking mutants flying through the air, page after page after page. What happens is the death of Magneto. Claremont began the rehabilitation of Magneto, the previously somewhat generic supervillain, back in Uncanny X-Men #150, eventually transforming him into a sympathetic character on the grounds of it making for a more interesting, even more plausible story than the usual cycle of superpowered battles and evil cackling. Marvel sort of lost its mind around the beginning of the nineties, noticed how well all those X-books were selling and decided to cash in by upping the marketing campaign and turning the books into something which missed the whole point of why we'd bothered reading them in the first place. Thus was Claremont, the architect of the book's success, reduced to providing snappy dialogue for the story Jim Lee - a proven seller if ever there was - wanted to tell, and the story Jim Lee wanted to tell was mostly a resumption of superpowered battles and evil cackling with Magneto reverting to his nefarious ways so as to keep Rob Liefeld from feeling a bit gay when leafing through a copy in the store.

Amazingly, reading this thing three decades later, I realise it's not bad. It doubtless helps that I'm reading while curious to find out what happened, as distinct from praying it makes some fucking sense without my having to read ten other titles as part of the publisher's increasingly transparent attempts to empty out my wallet. I say not bad, although the story is standard caped stuff demonstrating little of the imagination or flair which had brought the X-books through the previous decade; but Claremont's dialogue carries the whole thing, lending even the most stupid plot twists a sense of gravity - maybe not quite turning a small boy smashing his action figures together into Shakespeare, but certainly something in that direction; and even the restoration of evil Magneto is somehow convincing.

Jim Lee's art is, just as I remember - more or less Rob Liefeld with more than just three facial expressions and without the wonky anatomy - but it doesn't really matter because Claremont's dialogue does all of the heavy lifting; and does it with astonishing grace given that he was effectively filling out his own P45 here. It's a tragedy of sorts in so much as that 1991's X-Men #1, reprinted here, remains the single biggest selling issue of a comic book of all time, and was written pretty much under protest by a man who had to wait another two decades before he was able to finish the story as he wanted it, but it's a testament to his ability that he was able to deliver this swan song in such fine voice.

Marvel Comics - the Untold Story

Sean Howe Marvel Comics - the Untold Story (2012)
After several versions of the life of Stan Lee, only one of which was written by the man himself, I get the impression I probably should have started with this thing. Sean Howe answers just about every question I had, including those I'd assumed probably weren't worth asking. His attention to detail is exhaustive and impartial - so far as I'm able to tell. I've seen online mutterings about the Untold Story having given Jim Shooter, Marvel's editor-in-chief from 1978 to 1987, something of a battering, but nothing written here seems massively unfair or uneven, and credit is freely given where it's due.

Howe's account begins with Martin Goodman's Timely Comics, sinks its teeth in with the tenacity of a bull terrier, and doesn't let go until we're caught up to the present day. The picture revealed is broad yet coherent, with the grinding inevitability of the corporate appetite countered by reminders of why Marvel worked, when it did work, and often in spite of itself. This matters - at least in so much as any of this matters - because our collective memory of the comics biz and its role in popular culture is revealed as comprising at least as high a quotient of received wisdom and strategic mythology as Stan Lee's somewhat unreliable version of events. The idea that the comic book ever needed to grow up, for one example, seems to be an answer to a question that didn't need asking; and while it's clear that the average age of the target reader has varied from one decade to the next, the notion of the figure steadily increasing up until the revelation of Alan Moore's Watchmen is obviously bollocks in light of Marvel having been such a huge hit with the beatnik community in the sixties, and then the brain stretching likes of Starlin's Warlock - amongst many others in the seventies. Indeed, our idea of the juvenile comic book - to which superheroes with drink problems was apparently the antidote - seems to have formed in the late seventies as a reaction to Starlin, Gerber and the rest in the form of Godzilla, Star Wars and Shogun Warriors tie-in material. I'm generalising here, but it's nothing like so clear cut as all those Time Out articles told us.

Much needed testimony regarding what was once so great about Marvel is offset by unflinching reportage of the artists and writers getting screwed over and over and over from one decade to the next, even with the understanding that work-for-hire was never anything more than an assembly line. We presumably all know about Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, and inevitably they're just the tip of a heartless corporate iceberg specialising in using them up, wearing them out, and asset stripping their legacy. Some of it is heartbreaking, not least realising that Chris Claremont's departure from the X-books back in '91 actually was the betrayal it resembled from the outside; and that Rob Liefeld got to revamp Captain America at some point in the mid-nineties after his previous anatomical bowdlerisations had driven me away from the medium; and while we're here…

Before Grunewald left for his weekend home on August 9, he grabbed a preview copy of Rob Liefeld's Captain America #1. It was Grunewald's favourite Marvel character; until a few months earlier, he'd either written or edited every issue since 1982. On Monday morning, rumours started flying around the offices, confirmed by an 11AM email from Terry Stewart. 'It's with my deepest and most profound regret that I inform you that Mark Grunewald passed away unexpectedly early today at home,' the note began. The cause of death was a heart attack.

Grunewald was forty-three, a non-smoker who exercised regularly, and I didn't even realise he was dead. I always liked his work. I'm not saying that the art of Rob Liefeld finished him off, but you really have to wonder.

This is a thick book, and quite a tough read for anyone with any interest in comic art - emotionally speaking, but thank fuck someone wrote it.

Wolverine

 

Chris Claremont, John Byrne, Larry Hama etc. etc. Wolverine (1991)
Not a graphic novel, not a collected edition, just a big stack of comic books like you would read when in bed with the measles, or a hangover if you're a little bit older. The story, as I've definitely already mentioned on more than one occasion, is that I was once a massive sucker for caped comic books, then sold my entire collection during a sudden fit of what I imagined to be maturity. It's a decision I've always regretted and have finally set right, having spent the last couple of years buying them all back - mainly thanks to the fact that none of them ever ended up quite so collectible - and by association, expensive - as we were told would be the case.

When it finally happened, Wolverine as a regularly monthly title didn't make much of an impression on me, as is possibly indicated by my having re-bought entire runs of X-Men, X-Factor, and New Mutants* before I even remembered that there had ever been a regular Wolverine title, and one to which I subscribed and presumably read. Anyway, I picked up a few and realised that yes, I actually had enjoyed the thing well enough, thereby justifying another couple of hundred dollars spunked away at Lone Star Comics in the name of nostalgia, albeit an admittedly vague form of nostalgia.

Anyway, Wolverine was essentially everything Charles Schulz had warned us about in his Peanuts strip back in 1952.

Unfortunately, a homicidal nutcase whose superpower is stabbing people proved somewhat limited in terms of what kind of stories might be told, and so Wolverine was written as a man wrestling with inner demons, which at least allowed for bit more wiggle room. Frank Miller and Chris Claremont had already done a lot to flesh out the character both in the main X-Men comics and in related spin-offs, and Claremont got the regular book off to a fairly decent start, essentially turning Wolverine into a hard-boiled detective and letting him run loose in an old Terry and the Pirates strip. It worked well, and was at least more engaging than the endless cycle of growling and stabbing which it could have been, and which a few of the readers had seemingly expected.

That said, a few of Claremont's plot points were somewhat bewildering - possibly due to this being just one of fifty other books he was writing to a monthly schedule, and the whole thing came across as kind of dry at times what with the rigorous adherence to Wolverine as film noir. Peter David and then Archie Goodwin took over from Claremont after ten issues, roughly maintaining the same mood and general standard, even allowing for bursts of humour. Considering the vigour with which Marvel had been milking the X-cow at least since the second half of the eighties, the actual quality of Wolverine is surprising and impressive, although I suppose if they were throwing money at any title, it was going to be this one; and so the art is likewise mostly exceptional as one would expect of John Buscema, John Byrne, Klaus Janson, Marc Silvestri and others. However, I couldn't help but notice that this stuff reads a lot better when you sit down with a big stack of comics and binge the lot in just a couple of sittings. It played its cards just a little too close to its chest for a monthly schedule - as I vaguely seem to recall - which is probably why I'd forgotten so much of it, including even the point at which I gave up and stopped buying the thing.

Having no idea of where I'd originally jumped ship, and being reluctant to buy a run of back issues where the cut-off point might leave me hanging in the middle of an unfinished story, I re-bought the book up to and including issue fifty on the grounds of it being a round number and not too deep into the period beyond which these comics had mostly turned to shite in a grimacing cross-hatched effort to tap into some of that old Rob Liefeld magic. Now, having actually read the things, it seems I've made the right decision, both in drawing the line at issue fifty and in dumping the book when I did first time round. Larry Hama's run on the last twenty or so of these restores a lot of the humour and peculiar novelty which had either been missing or else was stood in the corner pretending to be Mickey Spillane during previous episodes. On one level, Hama turned Wolverine into sixties telly Batman, having Logan fight his own android double while trying to save the life of a bomb disguised as a cute little girl with pigtails and a lisp programmed to blow him into pieces; but for all Hama's wit and invention, it becomes obvious that all those letter-writing twerps complaining about the lack of stabbings have had their way. Various X-Men begin to turn up as crowd pleasing guests with increasing frequency, and by now it's the grimacing nineties X-Men in those bondage costumes covered in pockets, utility belts and holsters and all the women with massive tits and no waist; and inker Dan Green seemed to be doing his best to make Silvestri's pencils resemble something from the Image stable.

Wolvey's secret origin, you won't fucking believe it, deffo the real thing this time, not a dream, grimace grimace, black ops, even more fucking cross-hatching and random pockets, more black ops, clandestine government organisation, foil stamped edition also available blah blah blah…

Wolverine was never really in competition with The Taming of the Shrew, in case anyone missed that particular memo, but this was a decent, even classy book for a while, regardless of having sprung from Marvel's increasingly rabid attempts to take its readership for every last penny - although I gather much worse was to come, and a mere fifty new X-titles hitting the racks each week now seemingly represents a model of restraint by comparison. Inevitably there were lapses, notably the bewilderingly shit Lazarus Project issues featuring art by Barry Kitson whom I seem to recall as having contributed to my giving up on 2000AD back in the eighties; but these were exceptions rather than the rule. Otherwise, for my money, these issues belonged to the final flowering of the American superhero comic before it grew up and became an absolute fucking bore, having mistakenly assumed a massive body count and increasingly baroque forms of slaughter to be pretty much tantamount to adulthood. Those vicious little letter page gorehounds got their way, effectively killing off the thing they purportedly loved, then themselves most likely grew up to be cops, security guards and right-wing politicians, so I'd guess.

Still, it was nice while it lasted.

*: Well, entire runs of the readable stuff, my cut-off point being around 1991, beyond which most of them had turned to shite.
 

Wolverine / Kitty Pryde & Wolverine

Chris Claremont, Frank Miller & Al Milgrom
Wolverine (1982)
Kitty Pryde & Wolverine (1984)
As I may have mentioned, I was once something of a Marvel zombie, particularly where all those X-books were concerned. I bought and collected them religiously up until the point at which Rob Liefeld came on the scene and it all went down the toilet. Then, feeling a little uncomfortable about how much of the stuff I'd accumulated, I flogged the lot for not nearly enough back in the nineties, an act of Cromwellian reform which I've regretted ever since; at least up until about two years ago when I noticed how this shit is still pretty cheap and easy to find now that we've invented the internet. So I've re-bought more or less everything I once owned then sold, and filled in a few gaps along the way.

Accordingly I have a big stack of Wolverine back issues which I intend to tackle fairly soon, but I thought I'd start here for the sake of keeping things tidy - two limited series dating from before the lad graduated to his own regular comic book, four and six issues respectively, the earlier one having been collected during the initial excitement of the graphic novel, the comic growing up, and all of that good stuff.

At the heart of most superhero comics you'll find the world's biggest square wearing a fucking leotard and foiling a bank robbery, so those comics I'd consider the most successful have tended to work in spite of the genre, usually by doing things in such a way as to distract from the world's biggest square wearing a fucking leotard and foiling a bank robbery, or else by doing something slightly different. The X-Men comics, for example, border on science-fiction by focussing on the sheer weirdness of superheroes, emphasising their outsider credentials - potentially at odds with the status quo rather than necessarily supporting it through the foiling of bank robberies. Wolverine, as a character, took this one further through being a dangerous, homicidal nutcase, an outsider even amongst outsiders. I'm sure you all know who he's supposed to be and what he's supposed to do, but it's possibly worth remembering that initially, this was all he did - the unstoppable mutant dude who gets the red mist and stabs everyone in the room. It was one dimensional and somewhat limiting in terms of story because his response to any situation could only ever be to slice everyone into pieces, so Chris Claremont and Frank Miller decided to open things up a little.

1982's Wolverine sends our man to Japan and redefines him as a failed samurai, as a man striving to become something better than just the guy who loses his shit and slices everyone into pieces. Superheroes had come fitted with their own inner demons at least since the sixties when the Mighty Thor lost all faith in his own ability to select an insurance policy combining peace of mind with genuinely competitive rates; so Wolverine's hero journey was nothing particularly new but for the way in which it was told, borrowing from film noir and martial arts cinema which - again - if not exactly new, represented a refreshing further abstraction from the superhero genre. I'm possibly unique in having no particular interest in Japanese culture besides Godzilla movies. I therefore can't vouch for how well Claremont and Miller do Tokyo, and it may well be hokey as fuck given Claremont's version of London as seen elsewhere, but it works for me. It remains a kid's comic, or at least a precocious teenager's comic, but it does the job through never talking down and by maintaining a certain level of emotional intelligence, and Frank Miller's art is nothing if not cinematic.

 

Kitty Pryde is a character who had been hanging around the pages of the X-Men books for a while, seemingly another abstraction from the conventions of the genre in her failure to have settled upon either an action figure super-identity or costume. Kitty Pryde & Wolverine approximately repeats the previous hero journey in the service of granting Kitty a little more substance than just reader identification. Al Milgrom has drawn some truly ropey stuff in his time, but sort of gets away with this, rendering a slightly sketchier version of what Miller drew in the previous book, albeit without quite the same fine-tuned sense of design, picture space, and so on. Kitty Pryde & Wolverine fumbles the ball a little compared with its predecessor, taking a little too long to do its thing then closing with a ludicrously generic slap-up feed, suggesting Miller's input was fairly crucial.

Neither of these titles were life changing, but they did what they set out to do extremely well for the most part, expanding the form into something a bit more engaging than foiled bank robberies. They were something with a sense of art beyond what one might expect from unit shifting entertainment factories.

I continue to find Chris Claremont's writing fascinating because what he does seems fairly straightforward and mainstream - nothing too avant-garde, nothing particularly weird, certainly no obscure references to Marcel Duchamp - and yet his style is distinctive, immediately recognisable, and it hooks the reader into whatever is going on like few other comic book authors have managed, hence, I would argue, the phenomenal success of all those X-books back in the eighties. Some of what he writes should logically be as corny as shit given the stories to which the words are applied, and yet he always finds a way around stating the obvious without even drawing attention to such dodges.

Neither of these two series were ever really examples of the comic book having grown up, but they didn't need to be, and they work just fine on their own merits.

Longshot

Ann Nocenti & Arthur Adams Longshot (1986)
Here I am again with the reading equivalent of comfort food, or even the reading and looking at pictures equivalent of comfort food. Shitty occurrences temporarily brought me down and I just couldn't cope with Borges. This was originally purchased during my time as a Marvel zombie, then sold, then bought again once a mid-life crisis expressed itself as nostalgia for the Marvel zombie days, the innocence, the excitement of some new character showing up, all that good shit…

Longshot isn't the worst, but it hasn't aged quite so well as others of its vintage. Actually, it's far from the worst and is mostly readable, a decent story ever so slightly handicapped by its own telling. Longshot is a relentlessy chipper superguy, a character whose creation alludes to more innocent, wholesome times. He's a former slave escaped from a cruel media-fixated dimension, blessed with good luck powers, and the six issues collected here are about his escape and subsequent attempts to get along in our world, or at least the Marvel version of our world. Buckles are swashed with some frequency, and it feels as though Ann Nocenti was probably a fan of The Never Ending Story and its like. We have mullets aplenty, and we live in a world of leg warmers and pizza as a guilty pleasure, so yeah - this one was never aimed at fifty-four-year old men with Sleaford Mods albums such as myself. However, the most unexpected element is that it feels like a fanzine, or at least an eighties indie comic, the work of people who were still very much learning as they went along. There's way too much dialogue cluttering up each page, suggesting overcompensation, and Arthur Adams artwork was still surprisingly clunky and uneven at this point, some hints of what was to come, but quite a few figures suggestive of Ian Gibson characters as drawn by Rob Liefeld. Of course, given those responsible, it's not without redeeming features. You just have to keep your eye open for them.

Weapon X

Barry Windsor-Smith Weapon X (1991)
I missed this one first time around, having given up on Marvel a few months earlier from what I can recall - probably a good thing as Weapon X, had I seen it, might have sucked me right back in, it being the absolute opposite of all that Liefeld inspired crap which was dragging the medium down into a grimacing slurry of katana swords and improbably massive tits. Weapon X is exactly the sort of thing which first got me hooked on all those caped books.

For those who've been living in a monastery since 1974, Wolverine is a character rather than a superhero, a violent feral mutant with the ability to recover from almost any injury no matter how disgusting. It's surprisingly difficult to trace his lineage back to Superman or any of his sunny pals, and Wikipedia points out that Wolverine is one of a certain superhero archetype which seems to have emerged in the wake of the Vietnam war. Since he first appeared in an issue of the Incredible Hulk, Marvel had kept the origin of the character vague and mysterious, occasionally hinting at his being the reluctant fruit of some dubious military experiment, and for a while there was a lot of mileage in all of this muttering and whispering. Of course, what with Marvel being Marvel and the whole deal with how you won't believe your fucking eyes as we finally reveal the pulse pounding secret origin of whoever inherited amazing powers from an ancient sorcerer this week, the mystery wasn't to last; and by now, had I been paying attention, I probably would have known what brand of underpants Wolverine was wearing when they squirrelled him off to that secret laboratory. Anyway, back to 1991 when we still didn't really know…

Barry Windsor-Smith, writes, draws, and doesn't give a whole lot away, telling this story in generally impressionistic style with hints requiring the reader to join the dots - snatches of dialogue combined with images from other parts of the story as a sort of narrative collage, no thinky bubbles, no one explaining what they're doing for the sake of an easy ride. Weapon X is disorientating, brutal, and beautiful, one of the most elegant looking comic books I've seen and at least of a standard equivalent to the work of Jean Giraud. The disorientation serves the atmosphere of the tale rather than obscuring the sequence of its events, which are in any case loosely familiar from Frankenstein, The Island of Doctor Moreau, and even Jurassic Park, I suppose. The end result makes even the more commonly praised examples of the medium seem clunky and childish, and yes, even Watchmen and its like.

Weapon X was originally serialised in Marvel Comics Presents, a biweekly anthology which I vaguely recall as having been otherwise somewhat ropey; which is indicative of what I loved about Marvel at the end of the eighties, specifically the sheer variety of ideas and quality without anyone feeling the need to slap a warning on the cover reading grown-ups only, no kids allowed! As the comic book became a teenager, wearing long trousers, listening to Gentle Giant albums and trying really hard to enjoy them, Marvel - at least for a while - was just getting on with doing what it had always done to the best of its abilities. Too bad it all went tits up.

Fantastic Four versus the X-Men

Chris Claremont, Jon Bogdanove & Terry Austin

Fantastic Four versus the X-Men (1987)
I chose this as light bedtime reading on evenings when it seemed like Philip K. Dick's Exegesis might be a bit too much, which could justifiably be characterised as a retreat into childhood - although I was twenty-two when I first read this and not technically a child, just emotionally behind and lacking in worldly experience.

I brought the occasional Marvel comic back from school when I was a kid, usually borrowed from a friend. I quite specifically recall my mother sneering with unusual severity at the cover of Spiderman Comics Weekly #111, which would have been January 1975*, and which imprinted on me the idea that these things were trashy, shameful, and therefore forbidden. Normally she wouldn't have seen the comic but I had to get a parental signature so that I could join FOOM, or Friends of Old Marvel.

I didn't really go anywhere near superheroes after that, excepting a few issues of the Defenders and something or other reprinting the Inhumans. 2000AD and Doctor Who met most of my science-fiction needs and didn't seem to draw quite such opprobrium, possibly because there was no-one wearing a cape on the cover, meaning they could therefore be smuggled past the border patrol as something faintly cultural by virtue of not being American.

Then within about a year of leaving home at the age of eighteen, it suddenly dawned on me that I could now read that caped shit until my eyes hurt, and there was no-one to stop me. Furthermore, I now had the means to buy many different titles thus enabling me to keep track of what the fuck was going on in the wider Marvel universe. Part of the appeal of the Defenders had been the glimpse it afforded of a more expansive but otherwise mysterious narrative. I slipped into monthly expeditions to Forbidden Planet up in that London, usually spending about fifty quid at a time. I accrued a massive collection of American comics. Then around '92 it became obvious that I had to shed some of what I had accumulated for practical reasons, and it was mostly the Marvel stuff. Rob Liefeld had become involved and the current titles had all turned to shite, plus it seemed like a clean break might not hurt - kicking the habit as though it were an actual chemical addiction, all or nothing, and most of the caped stuff went.

Thirty years later, my curiosity has built such a head of steam that I've started buying back all those issues I once owned, which as mid-life crises go is probably healthier than sports cars or banging teenagers. The element of curiosity is my specifically wondering how bad those comics really could have been given that they clearly meant a lot to me at the time; and would the magic, whatever it was, have endured? Strangely, it has in most cases, despite my now reading these things with more brain cells at my disposal, being arguably more educated and more emotionally developed. I cleared out the caped stuff because it struck me as childish and therefore symptomatic of my own immaturity, and of course I held onto all that sophisticated stuff by Alan Moore and the rest; but only now have I noticed that this was itself an immature perspective.

I'm reading Watchmen instead of X-Factor. I'm a big boy now!
 

Anyway, I read the Mephisto limited series a few nights back. It was a lot of fun, but definitely a children's comic, and there's not much more to be said about it. Fantastic Four versus the X-Men is likewise a children's comic, but one written by Chris Claremont which might therefore be seen to epitomise everything which drew me to the genre and then kept me reading.

The story is fairly simple. Shadowcat of the X-Men is unwell and only Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four has the scientific knowhow to save her, but he experiences a crisis of confidence and refuses, fearing he will only make the situation worse. Dr. Doom, mortal enemy of just about everyone but also a brilliant scientist steps in, offering to cure Shadowcat; and they all have a fight.

Where Claremont succeeded was emphasising the soap opera aspect of these stories, and either sufficiently downplaying the more ludicrous elements of the genre so as to keep them from getting in the way, or else disguising them as something more like science-fiction. So maybe the superpowers, mutant or otherwise, are preposterous, but by passing our guys off as sympathetic monsters, we never have to think about the truly stupid stuff such as why anyone would dress up as a bat in response to the death of their parents, or even the absurd frequency with which strangers need rescuing from burning buildings. Instead of something which pulls towards the status quo of upholding justice and jailing bad guys, the world of our mutant superheroes is actually pretty fucking weird with plenty of wiggle room for shifting moral foundations, playing on the sort of subjects which will tend to preoccupy all but the most stupid teenagers. This dovetails nicely with that thing about comic book narrative being a case of messing up everyone's lives and then trying to get them straightened out - reforming the villainous Magneto as a sympathetic character for one. Claremont did this a lot, but framed his dilemmas in such a way as to present the illusion of there being something real at stake. Here we have Shadowcat, whose molecules are drifting apart, faced with her own extinction, and the writing, pacing, timing and art are so perfectly judged as to evoke genuine tragedy.

Claremont writes in the tradition of Stan Lee, moving his story along with a third person subjective narrator prone to rhetorical questions in Marvel Shakespearian.

Did you really think to do that much, Reed Richards?

As narrative, it's the opposite of Warren Ellis trying to fool us into thinking we're watching a film. It's chatty and probably a bit camp, but as with anything, you have to make some effort to work with the genre rather than expecting Sartre with capes and superpowers - an approach which will lead only to disappointment.

Here Claremont tells a story spelled out in huge, brash brush strokes with everything sign posted and plenty of sentiment, and somehow he gets the balance absolutely right, resulting in a story which is never too much or too little of anything, meaning that while it remains a book which seems obviously aimed at ten-year old boys, I can still read it at the age of fifty-three without feeling like I'm watching Dora the Explorer; because the elements which keep it interesting - the shock of the weird and the soap opera - don't speak to any one specific reading age.

I'm really glad that I grew up so much as to be able to read this sort of thing again.

*: I had to look this up, scanning through page after page of internet to find a cover I recognised. This search has additionally brought to my attention the fact of this particular issue having been drawn by Gil Kane, so I probably shouldn't have placed so much stock in my mother's verdict on this occasion.

Deadpool Classic volume one

Fabian Nicieza, Rob Liefeld, Mark Waid & others

Deadpool Classic volume one (1997)
Having decided Deadpool wasn't for me, I quickly expunged this first volume from my Amazon wish list, but apparently not quick enough given the temporal proximity of my birthday. Oh well, I thought, I'll give it to the kid - no doubt he'll think it's amazing, although I dutifully had a quick look, seeing as how it was a birthday present and all.

This one reprints Deadpool's first appearance in an impressively fucking awful issue of New Mutants, then a couple of four-issue limited series, and then the debut issue of the animé balloon animal version with which I am already unfortunately familiar.

I quite enjoyed Fabian Nicieza's Psi-Force at the time, and would say he scored above average as a writer of caped stuff providing you don't object to a certain reliance upon generically embittered mercenaries as narrative pivot; and most of this collection is rooted firmly in the nineties, so it's mostly wisecracking assassination and grimacing men with too many scratchy lines on their faces. Yet somehow I found I enjoyed it more than I thought I would, and certainly more than the more recent, arguably more imaginative version. I suspect this is because Deadpool simply works better as an unreconstructed Judas Priest album with jokes. Tarting up as violent, ironic Archie only serves to accentuate the flaws of both the character and the genre Deadpool inhabits. It feels thoroughly self-conscious, and at least as grave a mistake as going the other way and doing a Watchmen.

You were better when you were crap, to borrow the chorus of an old song by the Dovers.

Deadpool Classic volume two

Joe Kelly, Ed McGuinness & others Deadpool Classic volume two (1997)
Deadpool was part of what drove me away from the caped stuff back in the very early nineties, one of a number of generic vigilante types surfing in on a wave of witless wisecracks and terrible art courtesy of Todd McFarlane, Rob Liefeld and others. Years later I found myself bewildered from afar to note the popularity of a character I remembered only as one of many reasons why it didn't matter that Marvel had cancelled New Mutants. Still, my stepson seemed to be very much a fan, and against expectation I thought the film was fucking great, and my friend Steve suggested that the early issues were worth a look.

I had this collection on hand for the sake of light relief whilst wading through Alan Moore's turgid Jerusalem - not a great choice as it happens. The jokes aren't anything like so funny as I hoped, and the art is horrible. Everyone looks as though they're made of brightly coloured beach balls. It's drawn in that cutesy manga style which infects fucking everything these days. Half of the characters resemble a WeeMee or something from Deadline. It all feels like the comic book equivalent of autotune.

Maybe I'm just too old.

Maybe Deadpool just isn't very good after all.

You live and learn.

Sex Warrior

Pat Mills, Tony Skinner & Mike McKone Sex Warrior (1993)
Before we get bogged down in dreary consideration of Sex Warrior, let us briefly turn to Whoopee, and specifically the issue of the children's comic dated to the 12th of January, 1985. The cover was a parody of 2000AD with Leo Baxendale's Sweeny Toddler masquerading as Judge Dredd. Chris Browning posted a reproduction of this cover on facebook, inspiring the following exchange.

Lawrence: I had no idea Whoopee endured beyond the seventies.

Chris: Mid-eighties is when great news for our readers! meant it was eaten by Whizzer and Chips, itself eaten in due time by Buster which was the final one of the stable...

Lawrence: I remember those great news issues. They never were. I'm still slightly pissed off at losing Star Lord after all these years, and even Tornado come to think of it.

Chris: My friend with whom I cooked up the Cheeky-ITMA theory was the one who pointed out that after the first time you saw great news!, you were pretty much cynical about the words from that point on. Kind of prepares you for the adult world, I guess

Lawrence: I jumped ship at prog 181 with 2000AD. It just seemed to be repeating itself, plus I'd left home and gone to college so it was an all around upheaval, and the quality of paper on which it was printed seemed worse than ever, and then came Meltdown Man and The Mean Arena...

Chris: 2000AD tends to work well when half of it repeats itself allowing for slightly madder flights of fancy. This is why Dan Abnett is the Terrance Dicks of 2000AD. Old safe hands occasionally manage something miraculous, mostly are just very good at writing variations of the same stuff whilst not becoming stale - see Pat Mills who, with a few exceptions, feels like a lunatic who got obsessed with paganism and anarchy and is just bellowing at you. The current Tharg, Matt Smith, is good at this ratio. It's why we've had Brass Sun and Scarlet Traces and some variety snuck in behind the back of the luddites

Lawrence: That's a great description of Pat Mills, even though that's sort of why I enjoy his best stuff. There was a Grant Morrison interview in which he was weighing in with his thoughts on the comic book profession, overcoming his characteristic reticence, and in which he said something like, that was when Pat Mills took a bit of a funny turn, which always amused me. I mention this mainly because I've just picked up the two issues of Sex Warrior which Pat Mills wrote for Dark Horse, and in which he tries far too hard, as usual.

Chris: Occasionally you read a bit of Pat Mills where you go, That’s it! That’s the one I liked as a kid! - the most recent ABC Warriors and Savage stuff has been a bit more focused because he's enjoying Howard Quartz as the big bad and channelling his usual bugbears into all that. Even the last Slaine was readable; but then you get Blackblood talking about fake news and it's like being bludgeoned all over again.

Lawrence: He's like the nutty friend of a friend who sets bus shelters on fire and is massively funny despite how hard you might try to dislike him, and yet you kind of don't want him as your own actual buddy.

Chris: Yeah, pretty much. I mean Finn, Black Siddha and American Reaper are among the worst things I have ever, ever read; but then there's this:

Lawrence: I vaguely remember disliking Finn because he reminded me of half of the people I knew at art college. I'll remain blissfully ignorant about the other two.

Chris: American Reaper is photo realist nonsense which, bizarrely, featured comedy metal band the Darkness in it, briefly. Black Siddha is basically Finn, but Asian and with jokes about corner shops and curries among the wanging on about the Goddess

Lawrence: That whole deal of identifying with Asian culture by explaining how much you love curry always irritated the hell out of me.

Chris: Black Siddha turned up in the free floppies with the Megazine, surely as some sort of keep Pat happy contractual obligation. Someone recently wrote in asking why the prog was publishing two Pat stories at once, saying surely one is enough at the best of times? A brave, brave man, that.

Sex Warrior began life in the pages of Toxic! with somewhat muddy-looking art by Will Simpson, and I have an anomalous memory of having sold a Dark Horse reprint of the same on eBay - anomalous because this version is drawn by someone else, is the only limited series to feature the character outside of Toxic!, and I have no memory of ever having read it. Anyway, assuming that this was the thing I once flogged on eBay - allowing for someone having mucked about with the time stream or summink - I now understand why I didn't feel the need to hang onto this one first time around. The art significantly improves on what I recall of the Simpson version which, if not without merit, always seemed to have the chromatic palate of playgroup Plasticine after a few months heavy usage; but otherwise everything you need to know is more or less covered in the above conversation. The premise of a war waged between the young and the old had potential, but for all intents and purposes, Chris Donald did it better back in the October 1985 issue of Viz.

Also, the cover of issue two is awful in ways even Rob Liefeld could barely manage.

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl

Ryan North & Erica Henderson The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl (2015)
I sometimes forget that my comic habit, such as it is, is largely restricted to that which I recall having read as a kid, or which I missed first time around, or which I once had but got rid of during one of my infrequent purges; so in all honesty, my impression of the current state of the art is vague at best, garnered either from news items posted on facebook, or the occasional bewildering stumble around Android's Dungeon in search of something old and familiar. My local comic shop isn't really called Android's Dungeon, but I feel strongly that it should be because it would be preferable to Heroes & Fantasies, which is the actual name.

Modern comics, at least the mainstream stuff, seem to be mostly self-referential superheroes drawn by people who grew up reading either manga or things drawn by Rob Liefeld; and they appear to be aimed squarely at comic book obsessives far more than they were when I was buying the things, back in the old days when everything was better than it is now. I've read a few that were okay, if nothing amazing, and a few that were fucking horrible; and I browsed Before Watchmen in the store and just couldn't see the point at all, but then what do I know?

On the other hand, there's Squirrel Girl, formerly best known as star of all those twenty shit superheroes lists which could once be found simply by randomly lobbing a brick at the internet - you probably know the deal: Arm Fall Off Boy, Matter Eater Lad, all those other guys. As it happens, Squirrel Girl's debut - written and drawn by the talented but undeniably cranky Steve Ditko and handily included in this collection - is indeed a bit on the crap side, truth be told; or if not crap than there's something very difficult to love about it, a faintly unpleasant tone stemming from the ambiguity as to whether we're laughing at or with our patently ludicrous not-quite-a-heroine.

Girls and squirrels - dude, that's so gay etc. etc.

In context, the revived Squirrel Girl feels like both a revelation and a stroke of genius, territory clawed back from the grimacing ninjas with the Japanese swords, throwing stars and the one-liners which actually aren't that funny. It's a reminder that comics can still be for kids, seeing as we've apparently lost sight of that detail. She's still ridiculous of course - with her squirrel powers and a theme song patently nicked from Spiderman; but she's ridiculous by the same terms as the rest of us, because we're all ridiculous to one extent or another and it isn't necessarily a bad thing. Naturally, it's a funny book because it wouldn't work otherwise, but at least it's on our side in a way I'm not convinced that the Ditko version ever really was. The humour will be familiar from all of those Buffy episodes and more or less everything that presently comes out of my thirteen-year old stepson's mouth, but it's warm and well-intentioned; and of course, being Marvel, it's also kind of square - lame observations qualified as humour with a suffix of right, guys? and that sort of thing - but not in a bad way, and not everything has to be Johnny Ryan's Retard Hitler. Personally I take it as a very encouraging sign regarding the collective soul of the human race that a comic such as this can still get published.

Please, Marvel, don't let Grant Morrison anywhere near it.

Ultimate X-Men volume one

Mark Millar, various Kuberts, some other guys...
Ultimate X-Men volume one (2001)
Marvel's Ultimate line began in 2000 as a series of comics reinventing existing characters and titles within a vaguely more realistic setting and generally involving an increased grit ratio. In other words, hitting the reset button on Spiderman and pals but having them kidnapped by secretive government agencies rather than planet-sized dudes in purple armour issuing edicts in fake Shakespeare talk, or thereabouts. It's not a bad idea in itself, at least as a way around people who were at high school in the early sixties still being teenagers forty years later, the main problem of which is that such things remind us that we're reading a comic rather than an account of something which actually happened, because apparently that's bad; although I'm not convinced.

Personally I'm quite happy with the X-Men being those five goofy kids who signed up at Xavier's way back when the X still stood for xtra powers; and I'm quite happy with none of them having met Wolverine or Storm until Chris Claremont took over the book in the seventies; and I'm quite happy with Jean Grey turning out to be Phoenix, and the trial of Magneto, and the complete change of line-up which introduced Psylocke and Gambit, and everything up until about 1992 - the point at which it all turned to shit and landfill. As a writer, Claremont wasn't without problems, and I could have lived without all those horrible thinky bubbles he used to cram with streams of emo consciousness written in what I guess he regarded as street talk; but his worth became painfully obvious once he jumped ship. Claremont's characters had some sort of depth, and whilst his story lines might have seemed ridiculous in the cold light of day, they did their job regardless and you kept on reading. The villain would turn out to have been someone we'd already forgotten from fifty issues back, and his labyrinthine schemes would be revealed as the framework upon which the last few years had been built. Then the next guy would be even worse, and it would turn out that the previous villain had been merely a pawn in this guy's cosmic chess game, and eventually it would turn out that even this guy was but part of some larger, darker puzzle. It was horseshit, but no-one noticed because it worked, and Claremont's X-Men will remain the definitive version for me, not least because that's where we encountered New Mutants which remains the greatest title Marvel ever published, in my view. Then Rob Liefeld gave everyone a Japanese sword and drew them like they were trying hard not to quack their pants, and a series of writers I don't even like to think about tried hard to duplicate that Claremont magic, and failed miserably, and I stopped reading.

Grant Morrison did a reasonable job of bringing the X-Men back in New X-Men, because whilst it was something different stuffed with all sorts of weird Morrisonalia, it felt like a continuation of what Claremont had done; it retained the soap aspect, the characterisation, and the novelty of new, ever weirder mutants popping up each month like collector's cards, appealing to people such as myself who like to think about sets of things.

Anyway, Ultimate X-Men doesn't really seem to improve on anything, or do anything better than it had already been done, or even different to how it had already been done, so I'm not really sure what the point was aside from selling more comics with what may as well be recycled material. In terms of X-Men mythology, it does more or less what the films did because they were in another medium, but for no real purpose other than jamming together a group of vaguely familiar characters in a particular combination without having to worry over how many decades any of them have spent as a teenager. In fact, it's almost the Saturday morning cartoon with much more frowning and just a touch of Guantanamo Bay. To be fair, Ultimate X-Men isn't bad, or at least it isn't bad in the same way as was Millar's take on the Avengers with a rapey version of the Hulk, but there's something unpleasant about the contrast of a story told in terms suggesting it has been written for a much younger audience than the material would imply. I suppose there are some nice twists in there, but nothing as weird or interesting as what you get in the Morrison or even Claremont versions; and the art is of that generic post-millennial what if Rob Liefeld took an anatomy lesson? kind with the manga eyes and most facial expressions being either angry determination or glee.

Just last week I saw the new X-Men film at the cinema, regarding which, my thoughts as shared on facebook were as follows:

 

Not bad, bit po-faced and not as good as those Avengers films but generally watchable. Kind of wish James McAvoy wasn't in it because he's James McAvoy in everything he's in, plus he sort of resembles Mark Swannel from work, which isn't a bad thing but you don't go to the cinema to watch your mate from work as Professor X - it's just too weird. Quicksilver was funny. Apocalypse was a bit Stargate, but never mind. Still can't get over it not being a late eighties comic drawn by Walt Simonson, but yeah - it was definitely all right.

Sadly, even that was better than this thing. Ultimate X-Men just makes me want to go back and read the good stuff.

Jupiter's Legacy

Mark Millar & Frank Quitely Jupiter's Legacy (2015)
All I can say is Blimey! I've always liked Mark Millar's writing, or at least some of his writing, and I've always felt he had great potential; except every so often there would be something slightly shit or just plain fucking horrible and it would suddenly feel like the good stuff probably came about by accident. Throw sufficient numbers of starving transsexual Cambodians forced to consume their own dead fathers' AIDS infected penises on live television at the wall, and eventually one of them will stick and form a pattern which reminds you of Watchmen.

Jupiter's Legacy is yet more revisionist superheroics - caped types with superpowers in a world which behaves more or less like our own, at least in comparison to wherever Spiderman is supposed to live. It's been done a million times before, and yet here it is again but with such snappy vigour as to make it read like a new thing. I can't even tell how he does it, beyond that Millar seems to have an ear for natural dialogue, a great sense of timing, and a good understanding of how people work. Of course there are a couple of horrible moments as you might expect, but still nothing as bad as the slashfest of all that stuff drawn by those who look up to Rob Liefeld as an artistic role model. Millar's gore is repulsive because that sort of thing should be repulsive more than it should ever resemble something cool from a console game.

Jupiter's Legacy riffs on the whole great power equating to great responsibility equation and tries to answer the question of why Superman doesn't ever seem to get around to ending world hunger, our reliance on fossil fuels, or anything else which actually matters. This isn't a new idea, but it feels as though it is, or at least fails to resemble anything else of its kind which I can remember reading. It's a story of human - or rather superhuman frailty told on an epic scale without any of the usual pomposity or attempts to fool the reader with generic grandeur; and Frank Quitely's art is the best I've seen it, invoking the stately dynamism of Moebius and the like, and even the chins seem to be mostly under control.

As I read this I thought to myself Mark Millar is beginning to make Alan Moore and the rest look like hacks, which I know can't possibly be true even if it felt like it was. I wouldn't say Jupiter's Legacy is the greatest superhero comic ever written, but it's possibly the greatest superhero comic written since the previous greatest superhero comic ever written.

X-Men: E is for Extinction

Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely & others
X-Men: E is for Extinction (2002)
I've a feeling this may have been the one which got me back into reading comic books, and more significantly into actually buying comic books. As the nineties broke for half-time, the number of monthly titles I could be bothered to pick up had dwindled to just a few Vertigo efforts which I'd been following with ever-decreasing levels of enthusiasm. Then came Preacher in which Garth Ennis bravely experimented with references to that time we drank a million pints of Guiness and ended up in this really amazing Irish pub with this bloke playing one of those Irish tambourine things and we were all singing Pogues songs and we were sooo pissed and it was like really wild so it was and we were sooo hungover it was untrue as a substitute for narrative, and Morrison's Unreadables which was shit; and my comics habit began to feel like I'd found myself cornered by the world's most boring wanker at some party I hadn't really wanted to go to in the first place. Thusly did I pack it in.

Almost a decade later, probably not too many months before I committed to obsessively penning reviews of everything I read, I found this collection misplaced in some corner of the book store which patently wasn't comics and picked it up out of simple curiosity.

'So this is still going,' I scoffed to myself, feeling older and wiser before noticing that it was written by Grant Morrison. I'd had no idea he'd become quite so mainstream whilst I'd been looking in the other direction. X-Men was a superhero title which had once pissed over most of the competition, historically speaking, and the thought of it having been written by the author of the wonderful Zenith and Doom Patrol intrigued the shit out of me. I skimmed through the collection there in the shop, making sure it wasn't just an incoherent sequence of references to Aleister Crowley. It wasn't, and there seemed to be much to suggest that I'd be able to follow the story despite not having bothered with an X-Men comic since about 1992.

I loved the X-Men at least since junior school when the classic Lee and Kirby material had been reprinted in black and white in the back pages of something or other; and then again in about 1985 when shopping at the Maidstone branch of Safeway with Charlie Adlard, I noticed a comic bearing the same title with an individual I didn't recognise on the cover.

'Who the hell is that?' I wondered out loud.

'That's Wolverine,' Charlie told me, revealing a previously unsuspected interest in comic books.

'What does he do?'

'He has these metal claws,' Charlie explained, and so I bought the thing and became immediately addicted. This was the Chris Claremont run on X-Men. As a writer, Claremont had certain weaknesses - not least a propensity for way too many thought bubbles crammed with proto-emo corn - but he was always a fucking great storyteller. Over the next couple of years I became obsessed, faithfully following the ever-expanding catalogue of mutant titles until the whole edifice eventually began to collapse under the weight of its own overextended marketing. Suddenly Claremont was no longer involved, and Rob Liefeld was, and the formerly wonderful New Mutants had been cancelled, and it all seemed like a massive waste of everyone's time. It really felt as though Marvel were taking the piss, and so I took my wallet elsewhere.

Amazingly, Morrison's X-Men turned out to be every bit as good as I had hoped. He'd reigned in his own more self-indulgent tendencies and really tapped into the essence of what made the book so great back in its heyday, back when Chris Claremont had been pulling the sort of wacky twists which just shouldn't have worked and making it seem effortless - turning the bad guy into a hero, resurrecting the dead and so on: all the stuff which has become commonplace and prosaic in the tiresomely mannered storytelling of modern film and television and other media aspiring to be film and television. Morrison seemed like a natural for this book, pulling off all sorts of convoluted continuity derived intrigues without the off-putting fan-wankery so often associated with the form. It's soap opera with explosions, and is at least as much science-fiction as it was ever about leaping tall buildings in a single bound. Superheroes tend to entail a certain degree of wish fulfilment of the kind which appeals to outsider types, and the success of X-Men was always rooted in this idea, perhaps more so than has generally been true of the genre as a whole. You might wish for Superman or one of those others to sweep down, fix your broken glasses and retrieve your dinner money from Gripper Stebson, but you knew full well that you could never be like him, you weirdo. The X-Men, on the other hand, were similarly outcast and - once over the initial hump of expectations associated with a 1960s mainstream comic book - it wasn't even about fighting crime. X-Men was always about survival, about getting from A to B without having your head kicked in. Even if the readers weren't actually strange mutants with peculiar powers, they may as well have been so far as our Gripper Stebsons were concerned. Accordingly Morrison's X-Men is an appeal for tolerance and an indictment of the censorious and religious right as representative of everything which is wrong with society; and the message is somehow written in block capitals without so much as a whiff of preachy, which is some feat.

Even with the massive chins of Frank Quitely, this is a raw and unalloyed joy to read. It's at least as solid as anything Chris Claremont ever wrote and is amongst Morrison's very best - right up there with Zenith and Doom Patrol if you ask me.

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.