Gad, Sir! Comics!

As usual, I was way too late to contribute anything to Tom Spurgeon’s call to "Name Five Near-Versions of a Character You Like, At Least a Little Bit" for his “Five for Friday” feature at The Comics Reporter. His original list (Wonder Tot, Bizarro, Calvin’s Clones, Gaard and Captain Marvel’s Squadron of Justice – Fat Marvel, Tall Marvel and Hill(billy) Marvel) is here, and responses of nimbler folk in the Blogosphere are here.

Some comics creators love this sort of stuff. Consider Grant Morrison, who gave us Acid Archie, the loved-up version of Lion comic’s stalwart Robot Archie, a mundane set of New Gods (subsequently ignored by DC Comics like the rest of his work on Seven Soldiers except, curiously, his new version of Klarion the witch-boy), and these guys, who featured in just a few panels of Animal Man, but who have always stuck in my mind.


Who needs a Justice League when you can have a Love Syndicate?

Then there’s Alan Moore, with his multiple versions of Tom Strong and Supreme, and a whole multi-verse full of analogues of Captain Britain. One of those even got his own spin-off strip in Mad Dog, a special issue of the 1980s ‘zine Dogma. Meet the hero of Oceania, Captain Airstrip One, in a story largely written in Newspeak.


Paul Grist is another serial offender. It seems that every other character in Jack Staff has an analogue in old British comics or TV. Or, in this case, a comics writer with a fondness for creating multiple near-versions of his characters.


Did it just get recursive in here?

(Yes, I know that’s only three. I missed the train, so why worry about the terms of the ticket?)

Panels
Animal Man “Crisis” by Grant Morrison (writer), Chas Truog and Doug Hazlewood (artists), John Constanza (letterer), Tatjana Wood (colourist) and Karen Berger (editor), Animal Man issue 23, DC Comics, May 1990

Captain Airstrip One by Alan Moore (writer), Chris Brasted (pencils), SMS (inks), SMS, Quill and Simon Meacock (letters), Dogma 10: Mad Dog, Oddmags, 1985

Jack Staff volume 2 issue 10 by Paul Grist (writer/artist) and Craig Conlan (colours), Image Comics, May 2006

Over at the Comics Reporter, Tom Spurgeon asked on Friday for nominations for five good superheroes created since 1950 and not published by DC, Marvel or Image. Unfortunately, he wanted replies the same day, so I’m going to treat this as a meme instead.

1. Marvelman
Created by Mick Anglo for L Miller and Sons, 1954
Created anew by Alan Moore and Garry Leach for Warrior, Quality Communications, 1982

I admit to having only an historical interest in Mick Anglo’s original (if we can call a knock-off of Captain Marvel “original”). It was crude and ugly stuff even by the standards of its day, and even when drawn by future great Don Lawrence. Moore’s version was something else again, taking Nietzchean claims of transcending morality seriously, examining the social and political consequences of the übermensch, and doing it with meticulous story construction and genuinely literate, if still mannered, words. It didn’t hurt that Garry Leach’s artwork, at once penumbral and crackling with energy, mimetically realistic and convincingly other, made my teenage eyes pop. His successors – even John Totleben – never quite lived up to the start Leach gave the series. If you’ve only ever seen Eclipse’s crayoned-in colour reprint under the name Miracleman, you owe it to yourself to track down the black and white originals in Warrior. Copies are still available cheaply, I think.

Marvelman and its pseudonymous continuation by Eclipse spawned swarms of inferior imitators, who borrowed only the darkness and brutality. It also helped convince the comic industry that “superhero comics for adults” was not an oxymoron, leading to the current climate of rape and dismemberment at DC and clumsily obvious political allegory at Marvel. But to blame Marvelman for Penance, Tony Stark and Superboy-Prime would be unfair. Taken by itself, it is still one of the most interesting works in the genre.

2. Zenith
Created by Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell for 2000AD, Fleetway Publications, 1987

In part, this was Morrison’s riposte to Marvelman. Here, the morally serious superhumans who want to reshape the world are the source of danger and disaster. It is Zenith, who just wants to be famous and get laid, and, above all, hippy-turned-Thatcherite Peter St John, who wants to accumulate conventional political power for himself, who emerge as the heroes, alongside brain-damaged robot Acid Archie.


Steve Yeowell has a following, but I'm not part of it, so the pleasure for me here is in Morrison’s writing. It is refreshing to find him treating sympathetically views about the benefits of self-interest more commonly associated with Samuel Johnson or Adam Smith, and indulging in nostalgia for old British comics rather than Silver Age americana, while already throwing out catherine-wheel sparks of mad science and narrative bravura.

3. Jack Staff
Created by Paul Grist for Dancing Elephant Press, 2000

And speaking of British comics nostalgia … In truth, I find Jack Staff the character one of the least interesting in Jack Staff the comic, but that is because it is overflowing with charming, compelling characters like Becky Burdock (Vampire Reporter), the staff of Q, Alfred Chinard and Bramble and Son. Grist draws his cast’s natures with the same deceptively simple elegance that he draws his pictures. Above all, his storytelling, integrating layout and narrative in complex, experimental ways that seem simple and natural when read, makes this not just one of the best superhero comics around, but one of the best comics, full stop. The frequent, smoothly integrated, appearance of characters drawn from 1960s and 1970s British comics and TV is just a particularly pleasing garnish for the ageing Brits among the readership.

Jack Staff is now published by Image, but wasn't created for them.

4. Fighting American
Created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby for Prize Group, 1954

Enough with these black-and-white Britons! It’s time for the superhero genre to return to the country of its origin and to its lifelong master and his principal accomplice. Again, Fighting American is a comic in which its lead character is the least interesting, overshadowed by the gallery of grotesques brought to life by Simon and Kirby, like Doubleheader, Hotski Trotsky, Poison Ivan and Rhode-Island Red. As political satire, this is little more than name-calling, but the stories burst with an energetic silliness. I have a very soft spot for the 1950s artwork of Kirby and his studio, which retains the smooth, heavy shading of the 1940s, but in service to more disciplined compositions. I gather that there were several Fighting American revivals by other hands in 1990s, but really, what’s the point of that? The value of the original is in the work of its creators and its response to the times.



5. The Incredibles
Created by Pixar Studios under the direction of Brad Bird for Disney, 2004

This entry is a cheat in two senses: it isn’t a comic, and it covers five superheroes, not one. But Pixar here demonstrated that animation could create cinematic superheroes who suffered from neither the ponderousness nor the camp foolishness that tend to afflict their live-action counterparts. The characters are charming, the story is funny, and you can amuse yourself with the paradox that an argument in favour of meritocratic elitism is being presented in the most lowbrow and populist of genres and media.


Pictures and panels
Marvelman “… A Dream of Flying” by Alan Moore (script) and Garry Leach (art), Warrior, Quality Communications, March 1982

Zenith “1. Dropping In” by Grant Morrison (script), Steve Yeowell (art) and Mark King (lettering), 2000AD prog 536, Fleetway Publications, 22 August 1987

Endpiece from Jack Staff: Yesterday’s Heroes by Paul Grist, Dancing Elephant Press, 2002

Fighting American issue 4 “Operation Wolf” by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, Prize Group, October-November 1954, reprinted in Fighting American, Marvel Comics, 1989

The Incredibles DVD sleeve by Pixar Studios, Disney, 2005

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8, issue 1: “The Long Way Home”, part 1 by Joss Whedon (script), Georges Jeanty (pencils), Andy Owens (inks), Dave Stewart (colours), Richard Starkings and Comicraft’s Jimmy (letters), Scott Allie (editor); cover by Jo Chen. Dark Horse Comics, March 2007, 24 pages of strip, US$2.99

Yes, it’s Buffy by Whedon, so you already know if you like this recipe or not. This is setting up a 4-issue story, and has the pacing, incident and patter you’d expect. The only drawbacks – Great Muppety Odin aside – are Whedon’s use of homebrew-phonetic spelling for some of the Slayerettes (after some pondering, I decided to read Leah as Irish and the other girl as Danish, but who knows?) and the return of the “US military versus Buffy” trope. Because the Initiative didn’t give us quite enough hours of dullness back in Season 4, I suppose.



What I really want to draw attention to is Georges Jeanty’s artwork. His compositions are spot on: there were no occasions anywhere in reading this issue when I felt myself having consciously to decide where my eye should go next, either within a panel or across a page. He has managed to incorporate likenesses of the TV actors without making them either unrecognisable or obvious tracings of photographs. A good test is that the one new character who gets significant face-time, General Voll, looks neither more nor less real and fully-rendered than Buffy, Xander and Dawn. Jeanty has a solid command of anatomy, facial expression and perspective; and with inker Andy Owens he provides craggy lines and shadows that give bite to the finish. Top stuff.



Dark Horse lets the package down a little by printing a Jo Chen cover which depicts Buffy as at least six feet tall, and by putting four successive pages of adverts in the middle of an action sequence.


Hunter & Painter by Tom Gauld. Buenaventura Press 2007, 18 pages of strip, US$4.95

The eccentricities of this little booklet start with its format – 24cm wide by 10cm high, bound on the short side – but don’t end there. Gauld gives us the story of a caveman who has hunted every animal he knows, and a caveman who has painted every hunting scene he can think of. The tone is mundane, mixing the cheerful and the melancholy. The art is as lumpy and stylised as cave art itself. Here is Painter, trying something new:



But don’t worry, there’s a happy ending. A very engaging oddity.


Jack Staff volume 2 issue 13 by Paul Grist (writer/artist) and numerous colourists. Image Comics, February 2007, 27 pages of strip, US$3.50

This is an all-cliché issue: a parallel world where the good guys are bad guys, characters stepping outside the panel borders, a chimp, undead versions of British sit-com characters (what? that isn’t a cliché? Well, it should be!); but Grist handles proceedings with his customary grace, charm and good humour, and the chimp has his own theme song, so I’m happy enough.



Viz issue 163, with contributions by Alex Collier, Simon Ecob, John Fardell, Robin Halstead, Jason Hazeley, Alex Morris & Joel Morris, Paul Palmer, Cat Sullivan, Barney Farmer & Lee Healey, Christina Martin & James MacDougall, Will Freeman, Tony Coffey and Robert Doyle. Dennis Publishing, March 2007. 21 pages of strip (out of 52), £2.60.

Viz has now been around long enough to be easily overlooked – and, indeed, sales have fallen from its million-plus heyday to a circulation of about 150,000 or 250,000 depending on who you talk to. But Viz’s contents have a consistent reliability about them: it’s the same mix of crude sexual and scatological humour and sharply topical social and cultural references, served up in the style of Beano-esque comic strips and pastiche tabloid articles.



The highlight of this issue is “Jack Black and the Crack Continuum”, in which Jack and his dog Silver spend their summer holiday in the countryside, helping Aunt Meg defend her class-A drug dealership from an unwelcome intruder. Pedallos, a submarine, a bullet to the head and almond and sultana cake all feature in this parody of cozy boy’s adventure stories.