The Ubu Plays

Alfred Jarry The Ubu Plays (1900)
1968 translation by Cyril Connolly & Simon Watson Taylor
It's hard to know where to start with Ubu. I started while taking drama 'O' level when I was seventeen or possibly eighteen, and it made a huge impression on me. It seems fair to say that Ubu made a huge impression on twentieth century culture in general, and if anything can be credited as the singularity from which modernism was born, it's probably Ubu. It's difficult to imagine there having been Dada or Surrealism without that formative kick up the arse provided when Firmin Gémier greeted his theatrical first night audience with a hearty cry of Merdre! back in 1896. Ubu Roi was hardly the first instance of artists thumbing noses at punters, but not even Rabelais did it with quite such riotous enthusiasm, using outrage almost as an end in itself.

Ubu Roi began life as a puppet theatre by which Jarry and his juvenile pals took the Victorian piss out of a hated school teacher, so any parallels one may happen to notice with Viz comic and the like are entirely pertinent. Jarry himself matured whilst ensuring that the scatological purity of his characters remained inviolate even as they moved from puppet theatre to the actual stage, by which point Ubu's focus had expanded to take the piss out of the entire Belle Époque and everything it held dear, not least its ruthless optimism. Pere Ubu achieves this by conquering Poland in the first play, then debasing himself in a peculiarly enthusiastic quest to become the lowliest of slaves in Ubu Enchaîné, the final tale. None of it really makes any fucking sense whatsoever, and that's sort of the point. I may have got more out of these plays had I been armed with a more thorough understanding of European history of the time - and I assume the treatment dished out to the Polish is supposed to be insulting for a reason - but the jokes still work so maybe it doesn't matter.

That being said, this book assembles the three Ubu plays, and although they're mostly entertaining, they work better on stage, as the author intended.

Planet Comics volume one

Planet Comics volume one (2012)
A massive stack of these turned up in my local Half Price, numerous titles from the thirties and forties and entire runs of things I've never heard of reprinted over a number of volumes. I kept a distance, knowing my own tendency to collect complete sets, but curiosity overcame me. Just one won't hurt, I thought, and Planet Comics seemed closest to my interests. Apparently this thing ran to seventy-three issues, of which the first four are reproduced here, and aside from Will Eisner having drawn a couple of covers, I'd never heard of either it or anyone involved.

I guess from this that mainstream comic strips of the forties were in certain respects closer to silent film than the narratives with which we are familiar. The tales here comprise mostly a series of bold images, more summaries than stories, with text usually serving to emphasise or clarify what we're looking at and only occasionally to explain. The art is generally amateurish, but simple enough to survive crude printing on what probably may as well have been Izel toilet paper, and so strongly stylised as to rise above most of its technical failings. Of course, I'm looking at this stuff seventy-five years later, and that which I see as having novel or otherwise exotic qualities may simply be hack work and crap by ordinary criteria; and there's also the possibility that what I'm enjoying pertains to how closely it resembles strips which have parodied or emulated this sort of material - early issues of Viz, Reid Fleming, and particularly Flaming Carrot; but fuck it - it works for me.

The strips are mostly variations on the theme of the loosely Gernsbackian science hero in thrills and scrapes reminiscent of the fiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs or E.E. 'Doc' Smith - variations on Flash Gordon in other words, right down to the one-then-two syllable names - Flint Baker, Buzz Crandall, and Spurt Hammond, to name but three. The adventures tend to involve alien despots and female companions kidnapped or else terrorised by the same, and other planets of our solar system tend to bear a suspicious resemblance to Earth. Auro, Lord of Jupiter, for example, tells the story of Auro, a human child orphaned and abandoned on Jupiter and raised by a sabre tooth tiger to rule the planet - which seems to be mostly jungle - by virtue of his superior strength and intelligence. It has to be said that aside from the occasional space rocket, Auro is a lot like Tarzan.

As with Flash Gordon, most of our guys seem to inhabit a swashbuckling narrative of kings, queens, castles, and beautiful princesses, with a cursory mention of the tale being set on Neptune or Pluto to qualify it as science-fiction. A particularly bewildering episode of Captain Nelson Cole of the Solar Force takes our man to the planet Zog whereupon the local and inevitably troubled ruler informs him that he must fight a two-headed giant which has been inducing terror amongst the natives, and he must fight the beast whilst disguised as a character called Torro. Unlike Cole, Torro has a moustache and a mullet, and given that the reasoning behind this transformation is never explained, I've a feeling it may have been effected so as allow the artist to recycle an existing strip for the second half of this one. Equally bewildering is Kenny Carr of the Martian Lancers which reads a lot like an episode from the Boer War but for the spaceships which our narrator insists are seen making the trip through that cloudy stretch of space between Neptune and Pluto. These spaceships are of the kind with two wings extending out from the centre of the fuselage, wheels beneath, and a propeller on the nose, so I suspect the enterprise is informed by either a certain degree of recycling or a spectacular lack of imagination.

Yet despite all of this, there is genuine charm in much of this material, and the better strips are almost hypnotically weird. Plots twist beyond reason and virtually without explanation in the majority of the stories, conclusions occur abruptly or not at all in a couple of cases, and we're left with the feeling that someone was either drunk or making it up as they went along. In other words, if you enjoy A.E. van Vogt, you shouldn't have too much trouble with Planet Comics.

Above all, regardless of narrative peculiarities, whilst the art remains awkward and angular thoughout, these tales are packed with arresting, even nightmarishly surreal images and an often powerful sense of design consistent with the era. Just about every panel of the amusingly named Spurt Hammond, Planet Flyer will pop your eyes from your head, and Henry Kiefer's artwork is genuinely beautiful even if he could have used a few more lessons in figure work. It's a shame Spurt didn't get a longer run in the title, lasting only up to issue thirteen according to Wikipedia, although I suppose at least it means I won't feel obliged to hunt down all eighteen or however many volumes, should I end up going down that road.

On a purely technical level Planet Comics is probably one of the shabbiest things I've ever read, and yet I find myself absolutely transfixed.

2000AD Summer Offensive

Grant Morrison, Mark Millar and others 2000AD Summer Offensive (1993)
Not a collection, in case anyone was wondering - but eight back issues of the comic nabbed from eBay and dating from a year or so before I gave up on the galaxy's greatest and flogged my entire collection to Skinny Melink in Lewisham. I remember Big Dave being great, and as something which is obviously never going to get a reprint, and the Summer Offensive sounded fun as I applied myself to Wikipedia in an effort to jog my memory of having read the thing.

The idea was to hand the editorial reins over to Grant Morrison, Mark Millar and John Smith for a couple of months just to see what would happen - these being three writers who had distinguished themselves with sparky, volatile strips characterised by a reluctance to play it safe, or summink. Maybe someone was hoping to revive that wave of lucrative outrage which had greeted 2000AD when it first appeared in the seventies.

Big Dave is as horrible as I recall it being, and therefore justifies this return visit. It's essentially real world Biffa Bacon from Viz turned up to eleven, working mainly because it really doesn't have any redeeming features whatsoever and constitutes a psychological portrait of the worst aspects of nineties Britain, and because Steve Parkhouse's artwork is gorgeous, possibly the best he's ever drawn. Big Dave arguably defies criticism by already being everything bad you could possibly say about it.

Then there's the rest, none of which I was able to remember from the first time I read this stuff back in the nineties, and now I know why. Morrison and Millar's version of Judge Dredd isn't bad but it's no Cursed Earth, and only really feels like Dredd because of Carlos Ezquerra's characteristically exceptional artwork, which I guess at least distracts from a story which might otherwise seem fairly average; and the Indian Judge is named Bhaji and comes fitted with speech patterns very much in the vein of Apu from the Simpsons, so that's a bit of a bore.

Back in April, I wrote a satirical thing called 2000AD After I Stopped Reading which proposed a number of strips which may or may not have featured in the comic since I lost interest, informed mainly by sarcasm and vague memories of the formulaic composition of some of 2000AD's lesser series. Anyway, Mark Millar's Maniac 5 and John Smith's Slaughterbowl read unfortunately as though they were expanded from vague ideas I came up with when taking the piss. Maniac 5 looks amazing, having been drawn by Steve Yeowell, but that's all; and while Slaughterbowl isn't entirely without worth, John Smith has written much better, and it reads as though the other two were egging him on, insisting he make it even more offensive; which I suppose at least conceals its parentage in those earlier future sport strips which were mostly just Roy of the Rovers with jetpacks.

I'd say Really & Truly is as bad or worse than I remember it having been, except I had no memory of ever having read it; so it's as bad or worse than I would have remembered it being had I been able to remember having read it, which wasn't the case. It's like a conversation with a pothead, the word wow in faux psychedelic lettering dragged out over eight agonising instalments, or hits if you prefer, man. Groovy. The plot - and it should be noted that were I to frame the word plot as it applies here between accordingly ironic quotation marks, the necessary degree of irony would demand that said quotation marks be of such scale as to force the rest of my text right off the edge of the screen - is almost identical to that of Everyman and shares similar affectations of nadsat, drugs, and self-consciously quirky characters on a really amaaaaaaazing trip, meaning it's unreadable and a criminal waste of Rian Hughes.

So that was the Summer Offensive - Big Dave, a cover version of Judge Dredd, a couple of participation award winners, and a strip which really, really wanted to be Philip Bond's Wired World from Deadline, which was itself a massive pile of wank: not very zarjaz at all, it has to be said.

Kingsman: The Secret Service

Mark Millar, Matthew Vaughn & Dave Gibbons

Kingsman: The Secret Service (2012)
Here's another one which began life as a comic book and a film adaptation, both at the same time, born from a conversation between Mark Millar and some bloke who was something to do with a couple of X-Men films. I'm not really interested in the film and hadn't even heard of it, but I've got a lot of time for Mark Millar. I know he's perpetrated some utter shite, but when he's good he makes the rest look like wankers.

Of course, if you're not already a fan of Mark Millar, this probably isn't going to be the one to effect your conversion. The violence is gratuitously elabourate, and Miller's delight in broad, pointedly crass brushstrokes executed in the name of uncomfortable chuckles is as much in evidence as it ever was. Beyond that, there's actually a point to this one, if you're interested. It's a spy thriller bordering on farce which transposes a ruffneck Peckam yoot to the champagne and casinos environment of James Bond and the rest; which could have turned out like something from Viz but actually makes some fairly profound observations about class and our expectations. Broadly speaking, The Secret Service is a critique of misanthropy, both the kind demonstrated by the bad guy striving to depopulate the planet for the greater good, and that of a society in which it has somehow become acceptable to demonise working class kids from Peckham as hopeless chavs, amongst other pejoratives. Here we see the working classes as essentially decent - give or take some small change - quick witted and resourceful, which makes a nice change from the usual sneering over Burberry caps and twocked car stereos. I find this particularly refreshing, having actually lived in Peckham - which is where our story begins - and worked with people who may as well be walk on parts herein, aside from the obvious distinction of their having had jobs; so I feel a little protective about the residents of certain bits of south-east London and, against all odds, Mark Millar has somehow managed to avoid getting me all wound up. I'm not convinced that Dave Gibbons was a great choice of artist as his style seems a little clean given the general rhythm of the story, but on the other hand he appears to have done his research to the point that even if certain scenes aren't actually Peckham in the strictest sense, I can immediately recognise where the photographs he obviously used as reference material were taken; which gave me a bit of a warm feeling, and even a craving for a can of Dunn's River Nurishment.

Zenith: Phase One & Two

Grant Morrison & Steve Yeowell
Zenith: Phase One (1987) Zenith: Phase Two (1988)
I was going to do just the first of these two, but you know how it is once you've started and you can't have just one. Plus I've been fiending for this shit since 1994 when I found myself obliged to make a choice between my large collection of 2000AD comics and regular access to a lady's vagina.

Zenith was Grant Morrison breaking into mainstream comics, or at least breaking into mainstream comics which people read. If you look closely you will notice that it's essentially his take on Brendan McCarthy's Paradax mashed up with Alan Moore's version of Marvelman with a load of Moorcock chucked in for good measure. This isn't a criticism, only an acknowledgement of Zenith wearing its influences on its sleeve, at least for most of Phase One. This is because the methodology of Morrison's writing is, at its most basic, tantamount to that thing you do when expecting a visitor, so you have a quick think about which book will create the strongest impression as your guest arrives, and you turn in your swivel chair to face them with the world's least convincing chuckle.

'Oh hello! You'll have to excuse me - I was just brushing up on my Kierkegaard.'

This is why so much of Morrison's dialogue, particularly early on in his career, is often so arch and affected and so damn teenage. It's portentous horror movie straplines as conversation.

'Are you Gideon Stargrave?

'As often as possible, but you know how it is these days.'

Possibly the funniest example of this that I've yet seen was an issue of the Thundercats comic in which Morrison was busily getting the Moore-by-numbers thing out of his system with first person narrative captions and traumatic back story as substitute for character.

My name is Liono. I am ten years old, followed by junior Liono being bummed flat by one of the older kittens at Thundercat school or something of that sort, closing with the aspirationally chilling Yeowell zoom-in on tear-stained whiskers, and again My name is Liono. I am ten years old...

This isn't a bad thing, but it's a bit comical if you don't get it right and then go on record stating that you taught Alan Moore everything he knew in an autobiography reading much like that of Spawny Get from Viz comic.

As I shagged my massively titted supermodel girlfriend on that pile of sweets, I suddenly had a great idea for a bold new direction for Batman. So I turned to my famous friend John Andrew, the drummer from Kingmaker, and I said...

Anyway, I was more easily pleased in 1987 when Zenith first turned up in the pages of 2000AD, but it still seemed like a huge, bold statement in comparison with the rest of the comic. Phase One still works for me, but mainly because I remember how great it looked first time around. Here in 2012, I can't help but notice how thin it actually is, but the disparity is not so pronounced as to diminish the pleasure of reading it once again. Phase One barely has a story at all, but gets away with it through having just the right book in its hand as it turns to greet you with studied nonchalance, and a genuinely wonderful sense of timing; plus all the jokes still work, which is sort of the same thing. Surprisingly Yeowell's artwork now looks quite ropey, all those big wide faces with their tiny, piggy eyes, but he makes up for it with deft use of shadow; and by the time we come to Phase Two he's absolutely nailed it. The same goes for the writing, which by Phase Two has built up just enough mythology to make things interesting when it all falls apart; and by Phase Two I'd remembered just what made Zenith so great.

As with a lot of Morrison's work, it's all about surface - much like Zenith himself - and here with surface presenting a thoroughly convincing illusion of depth. It seems telling that our boy now regards Zenith as having been a mere job, just one path trodden on his road to stardom. Zenith, having originated in 2000AD, was Morrison doing the sort of nutty shit he does best with some IPC gorilla stood at his side forcing him to behave, perhaps giving him licks every time a Crowley quote looked like it was turning into one of those dreary, meaningless essays. The Invisibles was, by some definition, Zenith without the restraints which saved it from its own author and thus made it readable.

In just two collected volumes this story goes from something that could almost have been published in one of those horrible eighties fanzines with two seventeen year-old nobodies from Chichester presenting their own extraordinarily po-faced take on the X-Men, to something which is at least as loud and exciting as the first Sex Pistols album. We meet a superhero who is essentially a twat, and another who is probably Michael Heseltine with a heart, and Lovecraft gets raked over with a little more vigour than usual, and Morrison reveals his true genius in explaining exactly why a real Superman couldn't end world hunger, war, or any of that stuff - part fourteen of Phase Two, in case you're interested; and all of this whilst casually waving its arse at Margaret Thatcher. Warts and all, Zenith is still fucking brilliant.

The Bojeffries Saga

Alan Moore & Steve Parkhouse The Bojeffries Saga (2014)
Still wrestling with M.R. James and needing to come up for air every once in a while, so...

I have a friend of thirty years standing who doesn't really seem to do books, or indeed to do anything occurring outside and therefore not directly relating to himself; and he isn't likely to read this so I may as well be honest.

He's a decent guy, but Jesus fucking Christ; when we were both young and still at college, every single mutual acquaintance urged him to move away from home as soon as possible, to go out into the world and experience things; but he knew better. Today he still lives in the same house, for all I know the one in which he may well have been born. He has never lived away from home. His job when he had one - and he insists that it really was a job - was in the antiques trade, specifically selling whatever tat his mother could find in the attic from a stall at an indoor market; here using the term antiques in the broadest possible sense of anything which isn't actually brand new. He had one other job, something to do with selling iron gates, and that lasted for a couple of months so far as I am able to recall. His first girlfriend turned up during his late thirties, and his wife - with whom he lives in the house inherited from his mother - is at least a decade his senior, as was the girlfriend.

When the subject of his continued residence at the house in which he grew up arises, he offers terse, resentful statements about the controlling influence of his late mother and how she held him back; although all I can recall from the few times I met her is how exasperated she seemed in regard to her son still living at home.

He would phone me up and ramble on for ages regardless of whether or not I cared, apparently having assumed that his favourite subjects were logically of interest to more or less everyone. On one occasion I set the receiver down on a chair and went to make myself a cup of tea as he was telling me something or other about the aviation industry - for reasons I couldn't follow. When I returned five minutes later he was still talking, having failed to register my absence. On another occasion I was having such trouble at work adapting to impractical and back-breaking new employment conditions that I felt like topping myself, and his response to this was a twenty minute monologue comprising his thoughts on British industry and how it needed to change to meet the demands of the market, the same bollocks with which upper management had justified the hell to which I had become recently subject. When finally I got a word in edgeways to point out that I was speaking from actual experience, he cut me short.

'Mum's nagging me to get off the phone,' he chortled. 'She's just put out the sticky toffee pudding,' which was followed by ten minutes on the subject of sticky toffee pudding - yum yum yum. I had never heard of sticky toffee pudding, whatever the fuck it is. I looked around to see if Mike Leigh was crouched down behind the sofa directing a cameraman.

I went to visit my friend for one last time a few days before I moved to the United States. I hadn't seen him in a while and anticipated a few questions about the details of my move, some level of curiosity, but no; I sat and listened for at least thirty minutes as he explained his big idea, a new kind of science-fiction show. It would be, he said, like a cross between Doctor Who and Star Trek.

Perhaps not surprisingly he is now an enthusiastic supporter of UKIP, the English political party which by definition epitomises fear of the unfamiliar. He turns up on my facebook page to argue with gibberish restated from some source aimed at people of low intelligence who prefer an argument they can understand over one which addresses an actual problem - I live in a shit house because of Polish immigrants, for example. My friend has, I realise, probably not had a great life by any criteria I would recognise, and it pains me to state this but he really can't see that each time he sits at a keyboard to share some thought, the result is basically dog shit because his experiences are so extraordinarily limited as to negate any attempt at self-assessment, any effort to address the question am I talking out of my arse or is this the good stuff?

Anyway, I'll return to him in a moment.

The Bojeffries Saga, roughly speaking The Grove Family as written by a much funnier H.P. Lovecraft, was arguably the greatest of Warrior's many fine strips, and a more explicit insight into Moore's roots and influences than most of the other stuff for which he was known at the time. If closer in spirit to D.C. Thompson and Carry On than underground comix, it was still at a fair old tangent from his work for 2000AD and elsewhere in the pages of Warrior. It might even be argued that Bojeffries was essentially post-watershed Grimly Fiendish - an idea so simple as to make it seem crazy that no-one had done it before, at least not in quite the same way; and because The Bojeffries Saga was such a simple idea, it was generally magnificent.

That said, coming back to Bojeffries older and wiser is an odd experience. The jokes are no less funny, but some additional knowledge of the author has cast an ambiguous tint over certain details, at least for me. Elements such as Raoul's working environment at Slesidge & Harbuck Staunchion Grinding and Light Filliping read as though researched through 1970s sitcoms rather than any actual shop floor. I probably wouldn't have noticed but for anthropological critical mass having been reached with the addition of a new strip, a cartoon mockumentary concerned with what members of the Bojeffries family are up to these days presented by a person resembling Jonathan Meades and which ends up taking the piss out of Channel 4's Big Brother. It's all highly comical but seems somehow poorly observed in places, unfortunately reminding me of instances of my aforementioned friend passing comment on almost any subject, his shabbily drawn maps mistaken for territory at every single turn. I'm sure I read somewhere that Alan Moore no longer even owns a television, although I may be wrong, but if true then I guess that's one explanation for the more cock-obvious aspects of the satire. It's not that it isn't funny so much as that it simply isn't so sharp as, for example, what you might find in Viz which I gather parodies from some degree of experience rather than general impressions, or more so than whatever informs Bojeffries. It doesn't quite sneer at Sun reading working class thickies, but something doesn't quite add up, at least not for me, not any more.

Then again, there's the strong possibility that I may be overthinking this, and that most of what I've written here is bollocks, particularly as the Warrior material remains mostly as potent as when it first saw print. It's just the update which feels somehow surplus to requirements, the equivalent of any David Bowie album you care to name since Scary Monsters - it has the right moves and you can tell it's the same guy, but otherwise there's no point.

Jenny Sparks

Mark Millar, John McCrea & others Jenny Sparks (2001)
Ordinarily I would cross the road to avoid an American comic so self-consciously saturated in Union Jacks and the Houses of Parliament in silhouette because such efforts so often feel either like someone is trying too hard or else may be hoping to pull an Alan Moore, who at least usually managed to get away with this sort of thing without looking too much of a berk; but this is written by Mark Millar who may well be the Jim Davidson of superhero comics, but is nevertheless often very entertaining, or at least he is to me.

I think the key to Millar's success - at least on the evidence of this and Red Razors - is that he doesn't seem to give a shit about what is likely to work in terms of story and is more concerned with cheap laughs. He jams together whatever raises either an initial chuckle or shiver of disgust or some related emotional response, and then finds a way to make it all work in spite of itself, and so here we have a superhero comic based around a chain smoking woman who is essentially a character from Viz and who once shagged Hitler. The details go out of their way to serve up peurile laffs and Vic Reevesisms whilst the whole is somehow smoothed over into something which, if possibly lacking anything you could describe as greater purpose, at least tells a decent story with unexpected apparent sincerity.

John McCrea's art still makes me think of all those early nineties fanzines done by overly earnest teenagers trying to remake the X-Men, but somehow it sits just the right side of caricature to work, or to at least to keep things moving with a straight face.

Jenny Sparks is hardly the most cerebral comic I've read, and it's ambitious almost to the point of absurdity, and yet it just about pulls off everything it attempts. With hindsight, it reminds me somewhat of Steven Moffet's version of Doctor Who Man Telly Time, except without insulting the audience or being hopelessly shite, the difference being that Millar bothers to go further than just serving up a list of ingredients and expecting you to be impressed. Surprisingly, this is very good of its kind.

Red Razors

Mark Millar, Steve Yeowell & Nigel Dobbyn Red Razors (1995)
It's hard to know where to start with this one, the comic book equivalent of a family-size bag of Morrisons' own brand cheese footballs. It's set in that version of twenty-second century Russia in which the Soviet Union endured, as did its furtive fixation with all things western, specifically all things 1970s western to the point where the only clue as to culture and geography is the occasionally gratuitous afterthought of a hammer and sickle slapped on either a building or someone's hat. There's a Church of Elvis, a talking horse called Ed, a Starsky and Hutch themed nightclub complete with Huggy Bear, references to Top Cat, Laverne & Shirley, Scooby Doo, on and on and on. It borders on exhausting for the same reason that comedian Peter Kay became unbearable when he gave up telling jokes in preference for gurgling who remembers fondant fancies? over and over like some peculiarly senile man-toddler. The thing that hurts most is that I know I've done this exact same thing: if you have no story to tell, just keep coming with those hilariously knowing references to the amusingly crap and dated, and maybe no-one will notice. It's probably what kept Deadline magazine going, or at least the careers of Jamie Hewlett and Philip Bond, respectively artists of Tank Girl and the truly excruciating Wired World, the strips which dared to name the fave bands of those involved every three fucking panels. Hey kids, who wants to check out The Wonder Stuff?

I'll pass, thanks.

Yet I still find it impossible to dislike Red Razors - the story of a Soviet psychopath turned instrument of rough justice, in case it wasn't obvious. It's fucking stupid, but it's almost so stupid that it comes out the other side, which is probably helped by the wonderful art of Steve Yeowell who just about manages to do the job of telling the joke with a straight face. There's still a gap in there, a place where certain elements don't quite connect because the story can't work out whether or not it should have been drawn by Paul Sample or Gilbert Shelton; but by the time Millar wheels out Vic Reeves' and Bob Mortimer's Judge Nutmeg as a radioactive mutant dispensing harsh sentences for crimes such as stepping on the cracks in the pavement, it's easier to just give in and go with it.

The Hunt for Red Razors drawn by Nigel Dobbyn doesn't really fare so well. The references to Multi-Coloured Swap Shop have been toned down, but the art doesn't quite fit. It's not that it's bad, but the guy was clearly just starting out and still had some way to go; and I suppose the same was true of Millar himself - Red Razors feels rushed, unlike either Saviour or Insiders so far as I recall, and rushed  to the point of having one of those panels so beautifully parodied in Viz wherein a crowd is stood to one side offering commentary on the action:

Razors is pretty tough! Spike broke his ribs and he's still fighting!

Yes, Barry. Thanks for that.

People tend to get a bit misty-eyed with the Judge Dredd mythos from which Red Razors is derived, possibly because it's enduring and English, and whilst much of it is undeniably great, readers tend to forget all the deadline-driven landfill like The Secret Diary of Adrian Cockroach Aged 13½ Months. I'm not really sure where Red Razors sits on the scale, because the whole thing really is frankly fucking stupid, but as I say, it's so stupid it kind of works, and as such it's very difficult to dislike.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century

Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neill
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century (2012)
As everyone in the universe is fully aware, this came out as three separate volumes respectively identified as 1910, 1969, and 2009, each being set in the year for which it is named and featuring the same effectively immortal cast. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen recycles characters from existing fiction - classic or otherwise - mashing them all together into the same universe because it's funny, and because it's a neat way to say something about the art of storytelling, and because the state of the art of storytelling speaks volumes about the society telling the stories. Amongst the characters I managed to spot are Aleister Crowley's Simon Iff, Patrick Troughton's Doctor Who, most of the regulars from the Carry On films, at least three versions of James Bond, Wellington and Boot from The Perishers, Parker from Thunderbirds, Sid the Sexist from Viz comic, Michael Moorcocks' Jerry Cornelius, Turner from Nic Roeg's Performance, The Rutles, Andrew Norton from Iain Sinclair's Slow Chocolate Autopsy, and of course Harry Potter.

The point, as with the previous volume, is that culture is built upon mythology, and can thus be judged by the quality of its art and by extension its storytelling. If our magical landscape, our art and fairytales and fictions, if that goes bad, Virginia Woolf's Orlando suggests, maybe the material world follows suit. Moore seems to believe that the quality of our storytelling, and by extension our culture, has been in decline for some years, as perhaps signified by the popularity of Harry Potter who turns out to be the Antichrist of Century, the terrible moonchild and herald of a cultural apocalypse brought into being by Oliver Haddo - W. Somerset Maugham's Aleister Crowley parody.

I've never really warmed to Harry Potter. I haven't read any of the books on the grounds that they don't really appeal to me, and it all seems to resemble similarly bespectacled schoolboy Tim Hunter from Neil Gaiman's The Books of Magic from back in 1990, which itself seemed rather like a quaint mash-up of earlier material tapping into the growing market for cutesy English shite. Visiting a ruined school that was once obviously Hogwarts, Bram Stoker's Mina Harker observes this whole environment seems artificial, as if it's been constructed out of reassuring imagery from the 1940s... a storybook place gone horribly wrong, so I guess Alan Moore and I are on roughly the same page with regards to Harry Potter.

As a criticism, with the plucky wand-waving schoolboy ultimately manifested as a nightmarish many-eyed giant, Century hits its target with the same sort of impact as those records Tupac made about Biggie; and it's very, very funny, but at the same time, much as I dislike Rowling's chirpy juvenile tosspot of magic, I can't help feeling this is all a bit like shooting a fish in a barrel. Furthermore, I really have to wonder whether Harry is significantly worse than any of the 1900s pulp heroes in whom Moore seems to perceive at least some worth.

As a recovering former fan of that mysterious investment portfolio in time and space known only as the Doctor at least until Moffat daringly reveals that he's also known as Edgy McSex-Cock because that's like really gamechanging and brilliantly brilliant and shit I can certainly appreciate the idea that culture and by extension society were generally of a higher standard back in the old days when everything was better; but equally there's a danger of generalisations made by virtue of an extremely selective memory. Moore's brief rendering of the punk years in the final pages of 1969 seems in this respect particularly ambiguous, and I couldn't tell if it was a purposefully cock-eyed Two Ronnies safety-pin-through-the-head interpretation offered as a comment on historical revisionism, or if it really was just some beardy old fucker whining about it being too loud and not being able to understand the words but - hey - weren't the 1960s amaaaaaaazing...

Century is great, and I agree with what it does on principle, not least because it does it in a massively entertaining way, but I do wonder if there isn't an element of the new equated with the bad simply because it's new. Whatever you think of Harry Potter, or if like me you try not to, I'd say there are many more deserving targets out there.

The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel

François Rabelais The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel (1553)
A pedant might point out that the satirical writings of sixteenth century Franciscan monk François Rabelais might not really qualify as science-fiction in quite the same way as, for example, an episode of Blake's 7; but persons bringing Blake's 7 to the table have already betrayed themselves as simpletons and forfeited their stake in the argument so far as I'm concerned. Blake's 7 was bollocks even at the time, and Gargantua and Pantagruel features both giants and toilet humour, which is good enough for me. Some might say that's an unfair or even ludicrous comparison, but they're wrong.

No-one seems quite able to agree on the identity of the first modern novel, and the works of both Cervantes and Swift have been suggested as candidates presumably on the grounds of their having some sort of narrative progression. Whatever the case may be, it probably wasn't Gargantua and Pantagruel, the collected tales of a giant and his son belonging firmly in the tradition of early novels wherein people have long conversations about stuff. True, our heroes - mainly the giant Pantagruel and his human sidekick, Panurge - embark upon a series of adventures, visiting islands populated by the sort of beings which kept sixteenth century monks awake at night, notably a giant who eats windmills - but the ensuing japes and scrapes remain secondary to the discourse they inspire, representing a subtle difference of emphasis to the somewhat more dynamic Gulliver's Travels. This isn't a criticism. Simply an acknowledgement of this being an earlier work reflecting the efforts of an entirely different author.

Like Swift, Rabelais found endless entertainment in jokes about things plopping out of arses and landing upon human heads. Thus do we have the term Rabelaisian which may be applied equally well to both Gulliver's Travels and Viz comic, or at least Viz comic when it was funny. This was all something of a revelation for me, my previous experience of sixteenth century monks (which is more extensive than you might suspect) very much typecasting them as pious sorts with an abiding love for both Jesus and the Pope. Rabelais spends a lot of time chuckling over turds thrown as missiles, people drowning in lakes of piss, couples rubbing their bacon together, as he calls it, and taking the St. Michael out of God's alleged Earthly representative. He also spends a great deal of time discussing human concerns, society, morality and so on, and with an insight that seems refreshingly honest and open considering the writing of at least some of his contemporaries. I'm looking at you here, Fr. Sahagún.

Gargantua and Pantagruel is alternately both gripping and hilarious whilst at other times being somewhat repetitive and lacking in the energy which made Swift so engrossing, although in all fairness I  suspect this may be down to my being something of a thickie where the classics are concerned, so jokes about Pythagoras or Roman emperors tend to be wasted on me. As a satirical novel, it's pleasantly devoid of the misanthropy which infects the later books of Gulliver's Travels and is probably funnier in places, but despite all there may be in its favour, sadly it just hasn't aged as well.