Al Kennedy's blog

Day One Hundred: Days Of Comics

Do you know something? I honestly didn't believe I would ever write this post. I do generally have quite strong self-discipline, but even I didn't think that I'd write anything between 800-1600 words about comics every day (excluding, of course, the days I took to thinking of as Show And Tell days - the artist spotlights, the copied covers posts and the YouTube entries). I really thought that I'd get about a dozen or so days in, then miss one, at which point of course the whole thing would be pointless because it's not one hundred days if you don't do it every day for one hundred days.

So, here we are, then. One hundred days on from that first post, what have we learned?

Comics are rubbish

Since I started this blog, Civil War finished. It was a diabolically poor final issue, only beaten in the terribleness stakes by the last issue of its companion title, Civil War: Frontline. In fact, it was so awful that I almost gave up reading comics entirely because of it - if I hadn't kept reminding myself that there were a lot of things about comics that rocked (or at least that interested me) then I think it could have been the end of 15 years of comics reading. As it is, I just culled about a dozen or so books from my regular purchases, all of which (surprise!) were Marvel and DC titles. Many people who are more erudite than I am have written at far greater length about their dissatisfaction with mainstream superhero comic books, and if you're a fan of comics at all, then you probably have exactly the same kinds of complaints. However...

Comics are great

...that's not to say that there aren't some splendid mainstream books out at the moment. The various series which made up Marvel's Annihilation event were absolutely first class (and I'm inordinately psyched about the upcoming Nova ongoing), Darwyn Cooke is doing Will Eisner's memory proud each month on The Spirit, Peter David's X-Factor is excellent every time, Vertigo look to have a truly essential new series in the form of the "Sopranos-on-a-reservation" book Scalped, and Paul Dini is knocking out some great Batman one-shots in his Detective Comics run. Outside of the Amazing Adventures of Pants-Man/Sweary Vertigo Stuff school of comics literature, there are plenty of smashing indies being published at the moment (some of which even have superheroes in them). Invincible, Elephantmen, the Goon, Casanova, Criminal (yes, I know, but it's published under the same business model that Image use, so it's not proper Marvel), Castle Waiting, and plenty of others. That's not forgetting the backlist of great books that aren't being published any more, but which live on in trade paperback - the spectacularly ambitious and intricate superhero puzzle of Seven Soldiers. The none-more-extreme road movie of Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon's Preacher. The "what if Hunter S. Thompson lived in the world of Blade Runner" stylings of Transmetropolitan. Then there are all the great graphic novels that are coming out all the time - American Born Chinese was one which I really wanted to write about, but I ran out of days.

Regrets, I've had a few

Mainly in the form of things I wanted to write about but didn't. Nova. Marvels. Steve Ditko. The Ringmaster and the Circus of Crime. Hopeless Savages. Awesome Andy. Lenore. The Constrictor. The Amazing Screw-On Head. Terry Austin's Cloak and Dagger run. Duncan Fegredo. Pants Ant. The Slingers. Thanos's chin. The list goes on and on. I briefly considered keeping going on a daily basis, but I really have to quit while I'm ahead, I think.

There are also a couple of posts that I wish I'd thought harder about before I titled them. The one about the Spider-Man album was called Sing When You're Slinging, instead of the obviously far better Songs For Swinging Lovers. I'm certain I could have come up with something a little more imaginative than Those Robot Toy Car Things for the entry on the UK Transformers comic. Carrie has just suggested the Suede-riffing Dog/Man Star for the entry on John Jameson, which would have been better than I'm The Urban Spaceman, Baby.

That's Carrie, my incredibly patient girlfriend, by the way, who thought up most of the best punny names. She gave us The Tragically Hippo, Bulletproof/Monk and Aiming High, amongst others. She's done very well to not ban me from either using a computer or reading a comic ever again, but it's going to be good to be able to get our evenings back (besides, we just got Final Fantasy XII for the PS2, and it won't play itself).

Recommendations, I've got a few of them an' all

If you're one of the at least two people whom I know who may be reading this who don't know anything about comics (hello mum, hello Rabia), here is a by no means exhaustive list of the names of some comics creators whose work is generally good and worth reading (I've put writer/artists under the writers category):

Writers - Alan Moore. Grant Morrison. Brian K Vaughan. Jeff Parker. Dan Slott. Garth Ennis. Christos Gage. Adam Beechen. Darwyn Cooke. Bryan Lee O'Malley. Michael Avon Oeming. Evan Dorkin. Linda Medley.

Artists - Pasqual Ferry. Skottie Young. Niko Henrichon. Frank Quitely. Josh Middleton. Rian Hughes. Jim Cheung. Steve McNiven. Jim Mahfood. Gabriel Ba.

(No recommendations of people whom I know, because that's a bit iffy. But you should check out comics made by Antony Johnston, Dan Evans III, Mario Boon, Kieron Gillen, Jamie McKelvie, Matt Fraction and Jim Massey anyway.)

I'd also like to mention that my esteemed friend and colleague, video games journo James Lyon, has decided to take up the Hundred Day Challenge and start a new blog, One Hundred Days of Games. He'll be kicking off on Friday, and you'll be able to find him here.

Also, don't go and see Ghost Rider, it's rubbish.

If anyone wants to get in touch and say hi, I'm at [email protected].

Thanks to everyone who's read the blog, and who's enjoyed it, and even those who haven't enjoyed it but have read it anyway. I leave you with the traditional Aloha of the greatest living American.

EXCELSIOR!

 

Day Ninety-Nine: Bulletproof/Monk

One last thing I need to talk about. Tomorrow's going to be a wrap-up, but there's one topic which I haven't raised yet, but which I mentioned back on Day One. I've talked a lot about my favourite comics, inasmuch as I've banged on a bit about Runaways and New Warriors and Sergeant Fury etc. I've not talked about my all-time number one comics fanboy fave, though, although if you know me at all you've probably got a good idea of what it is.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, Marvel loved to just grab onto passing fads and turn them into comic books. Disco hitting big? Why not create a disco superheroine, in the form of Dazzler? Evel Knievel and stunt-biking getting kids excited? Maybe you should make a biker superhero, Marvel! Then thirty years later, Nicolas Cage can star in a really dreadful film about him. Star Wars hit big? Maybe you'd better come up with Star Lord, guys! Two of the big cinema crazes of the '70s were by no means exempt from this magpie appropriation, and Marvel was quick to cotton on to them.

Pam Grier, Richard Roundtree, Melvin Van Peebles, Ron O'Neal and others were leading lights in the world of blaxploitation movies, which had a definite cool cachet. Marvel's answer to characters like Shaft was the tiara-wearing muscleman Luke Cage, who had been framed for a drug crime he didn't commit and sent to prison. There he volunteered for an experimental procedure which granted him super-strength and bulletproof skin, and he subsequently escaped from jail and set up shop above a cinema in New York's Times Square, offering his services as a 'Hero for Hire'. Cage was almost a parody of the heroes of the movies he was designed to cash in on, and his euphemistic battlecry of "Sweet Christmas!" and his open-to-the-navel yellow shirt placed him squarely between traditional superheroes and the truer tropes of blaxploitation. He was the first black hero to star in an eponymous solo series (first known as Hero for Hire and then Luke Cage, Power Man), and although his rogues' gallery may have been pimptastic and some issues may have struggled under the purple prose of Don McGregor, on the whole it's a distinctly funky book.

At around the same time, the other big cinematic cult following belonged to kung fu and martial arts movies, particularly those starring Bruce Lee. Marvel already had Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu as their approximation of Lee, but the TV show Kung Fu had given the world the pyjama-wearing Kwai Chang Caine, and Marvel were quite happy to double-dip. Thus Marvel Premiere #15 saw the first appearance of Daniel Rand, the Iron Fist. Danny was an orphan whose parents had been murdered before his eyes while on a trip to Tibet. Danny found his way into the legendary city of K'un-L'un (a sort of Brigadoon full of kung fu religious order sensei types). Honing his skills over the years, the adult Danny eventually fought and defeated a dragon by the name of Shou-Lau the Undying, and gained both a funky tattoo on his chest and the ability to channel his mental and spiritual energy into a thunderously powerful punch from which he took his superheroic moniker - the Iron Fist.

Alas, no fad lasts forever, and the Power Man series and the Iron Fist series were both scheduled to be cancelled. Marvel instead took the opportunity to merge the two titles (retitling Cage's book), and team the characters up. It shouldn't have worked, but it did.

It's Male Cleavage Night at the Marvel theme restaurant.

Power Man and Iron Fist have since become one of the B-list keystones of the Marvel Universe. It's the classic buddy movie scenario - Cage is a black guy who came from a disadvantaged background, and who has a criminal record. Rand is a blond, white fella with an inherited fortune who's appropriated aspects of an Asian culture. Their natural antagonism made for great stories - it should go without saying that the first time they met, they fought before they teamed up. They weren't always in synch agenda-wise after that, either, but their mismatched fighting styles and personalities meant that Marvel had, quite by accident, created a classic pairing.

Throughout the rest of the 1970s and 1980s, Power Man and Iron Fist remained a mainstay of Marvel's publishing schedule, with a dedicated fanbase for what was, to be honest, a very strange concept. The creative teams read like a who's who of great classic creators of the period - writers on the title included Chris Claremont, Denny O'Neil, Archie Goodwin, Christopher Priest and a very young Kurt Busiek, and the roster of artists is equally impressive, with such greats as Dave Cockrum, Frank Miller and Denys Cowan taking their turns to lay down some pencils. Alas, everything good has to end, and in 1986 the book was cancelled in order to free up space and talent to work on the incoming New Universe books. The final issue was #125, and in a shock ending, Iron Fist was apparently killed, with Cage being framed for the murder.

I hope Iron Fist has brought enough candyfloss for everyone.

You can't keep a good team down, though. The characters lay fallow for a few years, but in the early 1990s Cage was granted his own series again. Ditching both the Power Man name and the vest/tiara/chain belt combo, the book saw Cage relocating to Chicago to start over. It wasn't terribly good (and that's being charitable), and was cancelled after 20 issues. Crucially, though, at around this time John Byrne was the writer of the then-current Namor book, and as he had been one of the first people ever to work on Iron Fist, he felt some understandable attachment to him. He wrote a series of Namor stories which brought Rand back, and crafted a needlessly complicated story involving alien doppelgangers to explain why ol' Danny wasn't really dead. Even though it was a bit of a round the houses, left at the traffic lights kind of solution, it did mean that for the first time in six years both Iron Fist and Luke Cage were alive and active in the Marvel Universe.

It took until 1997 to get them back together in their own ongoing series, the self-explanatorily titled Heroes for Hire, by John Ostrander and Pascual Ferry. This was, quite honestly, a cracking little book, and the fact that it only lasted for 19 issues was criminal. Unfortunately, at the time of publication Marvel were in severe financial dire straits, and although Heroes for Hire was making a profit, it evidently wasn't making enough of a profit to justify its existence. Since then, Cage has starred in his own (pretty racist) miniseries, which turned him into a severely stereotypical gangsta thug, and Iron Fist had a couple of late-1990s miniseres himself, followed by an abortive six-issue (theoretically) ongoing in 2004. It was all looking a bit poor for our heroes, with nobody really fond enough of the pair to want to do anything significant with them.

Someone went clothes shopping without inviting the other along.

Enter Brian Michael Bendis. At this point, Bendis was the biggest writer at Marvel, and was able to throw his weight around in whatever direction he wished. Fortuitously, it seems that Bendis is a bit of a Cage/Rand fanboy, and inserted either or both characters wherever he could - Alias, Daredevil, Secret War, you name it, they were there. They've just hit the zenith of their personal success, both currently being members of Marvel's biggest-name superteam, the New Avengers, of which Cage is currently the leader. At the same time, Danny's been given his own ongoing book again, by hot-property writers Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction and artist David Aja (with guest pages by the legendary Russ Heath), and there have been rumblings about a new ongoing starring Luke.

So why is it that they're so great, then? Specifically, why do I love them so much? I think it's because they're so completely chalk and cheese that their bizarre pairing leads to great banter between them, and the fact that they've always been shown as being real friends, bickering just as often as bonding, falling out and falling in, getting each other's backs up and getting each other's backs. Add the fact that they've got a pair of pretty funky costumes (even though Cage hasn't worn the yellow in years) and their demented collection of villains, and you've got a rare thing: a cash-in that outlived the fad that birthed it.

Tomorrow: one hundred days. What have we learned?

Day Ninety-Eight: The Greatest Stories Never Told

When you look back at how much comics used to cost, it's frightening just how big the increases in price have been. In the late 1970s, you wouldn't expect to pay more than 25 cents for a regular-sized issue. Nowadays, the going rate is about $3. Sure, there's inflation to factor in, but even so, the vast majority of the steep increases in cost have happened over the last ten or so years. It used to be that a new comic would set me back about £1.25. In today's market, you're looking at something more like £2.15 for an ordinary issue, more if it's a special or one-shot.

Back in the mid-1990s, Marvel decided that they would be well-served by putting out a line of comics which would retail for 99 cents apiece. Some of these - like the desperately gritty Over the Edge and the laughably poor Professor Xavier and the X-Men - were a case of Marvel coming up with a good idea but not wanting to pay top talent to do comics which weren't going to bring in a huge return for them. One book, though, stands up today as one of the best comics of the 1990s to involve a certain wall-crawling friendly neighbourhood character - Kurt Busiek's Untold Tales of Spider-Man.

The basic concept was quite a smart one. Busiek was writing old-school Spider-Man stories which were told in their entirety, soup to nuts, over the course of one issue. At a time when the awful and seemingly endless Clone Saga storyline was running in the main Spider-Man titles, Untold Tales was a refuge for those readers who weren't prepared to put up with rubbish villains, stories that went nowhere, terrible artwork and diabolically bad writing. Untold Tales was set during the early days of Spidey's career, with each issue slotting in between existing issues of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko's original run on the character.

Blimey, yet more covers where characters rip a hole in the front of the book. It's some kind of fad.

Busiek's stories have a lot to offer. They're unashamedly modelled on the classic 1960s Spidey tales, where Peter has cash problems, school woes and worries about his aunt's health. At this point in the character's history, he was forever running into bad guys who would beat him soundly, before he figured out how to stop them and came back fighting. There were no clones, no symbiotic costumes, no spider-armour or supermodel wives or Avengers memberships. It was just all about the essence of the character, with wisecracks and acrobatics and ingenious methods of defeating villains.

Joining Busiek on the book was artist Pat Olliffe (now most well known for his long run on Spider-Girl), whose art style managed to get across the gawky, uncomfortable side of Peter Parker without slavishly aping Ditko. His rough-edged figurework was in direct contrast to the over-rendered, anatomically improbable, cross-hatch-a-go-go style that had become so prevalent in the years following the establishment of Image Comics. There was also a special one-off turn by Mike Allred in the 1996 Untold Tales annual, which was a smashingly fun story about one of Spidey's early encounters with Namor and the Fantastic Four.

All in all, the art side of the equation matched the intent of the writing side - these weren't flashy, go-faster comics with nothing but empty calories behind them; they were, first and foremost, great stories. They also linked explicitly into Marvel's then-current continuity, notably by introducing a villain by the name of Sundown in the 1997 Untold Tales annual who then turned up (subjectively) years later in the 1997 Amazing Spider-Man annual. It's a bit of smart use of continuity which helped negate one of the most often-heard complaints about books set in a character's past - that they can't possibly have any bearing on the character, because what are they going to change? We already know how the character's life turns out. Untold Tales got round that by showing us that there were other facets of Spidey's past that we just hadn't been exposed to before, and that a story didn't have to "change Spider-Man... forever!" to be worthwhile.

Other new villains created for the series included tragic freakazoid Batwing.

Unfortunately, Untold Tales was cancelled after only 25 issues and a couple of annuals. Luckily, the issues themselves aren't that hard to come by, and if you wanted to read them you could probably pick them up pretty cheaply. Even if you're not enamoured by the thought of raking through back issue bins trying to pick out Untold Tales issues from the mountains of Web of Scarlet Spider or Funeral for an Octopus, all is not lost - Marvel have begun releasing trade paperback collections of the series under the brand name of "Spider-Man Visionaries: Kurt Busiek". If you're fed up of terrible, stunt-driven stories which completely miss the point of the character of Spider-Man (and let's face it, that's just as likely today as it was in the mid-1990s), you'll find a lot to love here, and it won't break the bank either.

Day Ninety-Seven: Hello, Good-Bye

In 2000, I moved from Scotland to France, where I was to spend the next year. I got a copy of Good-Bye, Chunky Rice, a graphic novel by writer/artist Craig Thompson, and read it while I was there. I ended the book in a little puddle of un-manly tears. Comics aren't often thought of as being a medium which can bring out such strong reactions in a person - I don't imagine many people have ever been brought to boiling rage by Fantastic Four, or have had the urge to get up and dance brought on by an instalment of Sinister Dexter. Some rare comics manage to engage those mental media centres and start up an unexpected emotional engine (mainly, it has to be said, indie comics, although that's not always the case - Webspinners: Tales of Spider-Man #12 was another, but you don't want to hear more than one True Tale of Sequential Sobbing). Good-Bye, Chunky Rice is one of those.

The story's not exactly plot-driven. Chunky Rice is a little turtle who likes to get on down to his favourite motown records, and who lives a carefree endless summer of a life in a little town down by the seaside. His best friend is a big-eyed mouse by the name of Dandel, and together they build sandcastle towns and go camping. One day, though, for reasons unstated, Chunky Rice realises that he has to leave home. He never says why - it's just that his quiet hometown isn't the right place for him to be any more. He implores Dandel to come with him, but Dandel knows that she has to stay where she is; it's no more right for her to leave than it would be for Chunky Rice to stay. Equally, Dandel knows that there's no use fighting it, and encourages Chunky Rice to forge his own path out in the world.

Simplistic artistically, but there's a lot of expression in it. Brilliant, eh?

Once out in the wide world, Chunky Rice meets a strange group of people, including a ship's captain who misses his late wife and a couple of women who are conjoined at the head. Back at the town, Dandel spends her days writing letters to Chunky Rice and throwing them into the sea in bottles, and the reader gets to know a simple man who is trying to atone for a past misdeed which robbed him of his closest friend by proving his friendship's worth to a bird he's named Merle. Each of the cast is yearning for a close companion and a best friend, even the conjoined twins (who you would think wouldn't be able to be alone if they wanted to). Chunky Rice's ship sails on, through ever more dangerous storms and high seas, but the only thing that can hurt anyone in this book is the heartfelt ache of loneliness.

Thomson's art is reminiscent of classic underground cartoonists but with a twist of children's illustration mixed in, like a cross between Mike Kazaleh and Julie Doucet working on a Doctor Seuss story. Its use of strong black areas and heavy shading surrounding everything helps to subconsciously reinforce the feeling the characters have of being separated from the ones they love, and the strange designs of the characters makes the reader warm to their strange lives rather than being weirded out by them. Even the simplicity of Thompson's figures (particularly Chunky Rice) helps to open them up to the reader and makes us feel empathy towards them. Of course, that's helped by the beautifully sad script which Thompson uses to yank brutally at the heartstrings - nobody could fail to be touched by the sight of Dandel throwing another bottled message into the sea, saying "And yes! This one says 'I miss you' too! When will I think of something else to say?".

I should have mentioned how nice the lettering is too, but forgot. The lettering's nice. There!

Good-Bye, Chunky Rice was Thompson's first graphic novel, and although his follow-up (the cow-stunningly thick Blankets) is more well-known, it's an antsier and less sympathetic read than Good-Bye, Chunky Rice, and altogether more self-indulgent with it. Good-Bye, Chunky Rice is a work which will hit home with anyone who's ever lost a friend, who's ever had to leave home, who's missing a beloved pet, who's been bereaved... pretty much everyone. It's sad without schmaltz, and poignant without pretension. It's something very special. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got something in my eye...

Day Ninety-Six: The Free Amigos

One of the nice things about having this little bully pulpit is that I get to recommend comics which are made by people whom I'm friends with. I've already plugged Jim Massey's great comedy Maintenance on this blog (just before New Year, in case you were wondering), but here are two more books which I recommend you check out.

First off, for those of you who are young adults (of all ages), writers Antony Johnston and Dan Evans III have a nifty little creation which is just about to ship its debut issue to stores. It goes by the name of Texas Strangers, and is what I'm sure Hollywood types would call a High Concept - it's a cowboy series for kids and teens, with lots of extra added goodness in the form of magic, elves, ogres and mysterious interlopers.

This book features a Scottish ogre called Zog. I think I saw him in the street last Saturday night.

Texas Strangers is the story of a pair of teenage twins, Madara and Wyatt, who are on a mission to return an artefact - a knife - to its rightful location in Texas. En route, the kids are surprised to find that their quest will not only prove dangerous to their health, but may reveal to them secrets they never knew about themselves. In a nice bit of role reversal, it's Madara who's the pugnacious, scrappy one, while Wyatt is more content to swot up on his magic and rely on his sister to (literally) fight their corner on a more physical level. Their world is one where Christopher Columbus discovered America with the aid of an on-board wizard and Mexico has a large indigenous orc population, and it's a world that's being unveiled to kids this month.

Johnston is no stranger to comics, having worked on titles such as Queen & Country, his own ongoing Oni Press series Wasteland and the graphic novel adaptation of Antony Horowitz' Stormbreaker. Evans, on the other hand, may be new to comics scripting but has years of experience under his belt in the field of TV, where he has worked on shows such as Transformers: Beast Machines and Digimon. Together with artist Mario Boon, they've put together a story which fills a gap in the market - an ongoing children's book from a major publisher which doesn't feature superheroes or cartoon characters. Texas Strangers looks to be set to give comics-reading kids a continuing action-adventure series to call their own for the first time in donkeys' years. Each individual story is set to run over two issues for maximum reader-friendliness, and if you're interested in checking it out - and I hope you are - there's an 11-page preview of the first issue here, and it won't cost you one red cent.

If you don't reckon all-ages comics are your cup of tea, though, you might want to try out Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie's current Image comics series Phonogram. Following the story of one David Kohl, a distinctly unlikable indie chap, Phonogram posits the theory that music and magic are intrinsically linked, and phonomancers like Kohl can use the former to effect the latter. Kohl is a misanthropic fellow who's out to get what he can from whoever is willing to let him take it, but one day he finds out that Brittania, the symbol of Britpop and Kohl's patron goddess, is in trouble. At that point it all starts to go a bit wrong for him, and he's deputised on a mission to save both her and himself from rival phonomancers who are trying to tape over his memories and identity.

Each issue's cover is a tribute to a classic Britpop album design.

Gillen's been a writer for many a year, and is regarded as one of the top video games journalists around (he was responsible for creating a new style of review called New Games Journalism which focussed on subjective experience of games, which many saw as good sense and others were less enthused by. The debate continues to rage and no doubt amuses Gillen no end). He's also written for and co-edited the British small press anthology Commercial Suicide and writes a strip entitled Save Point for Official PlayStation 2 Magazine. Gillen's writing style is one which you have to work at (there's no easy way to articulate complexity without sacrificing at least some meaning) but is always rewarding once you wrap your head around the Big Concepts (which, ironically, often can be articulated easily - music is magic. See?). His David Kohl is a complicated guy, who seems at first glance to be the kind of guy you get in every scenester hangout and whom you would generally try to avoid, but he's got more in common with Hellblazer star John Constantine than the fact that they're both morally reprehensible magicians in comics - they're both also guys who will do the right thing as often as the wrong, even if you don't like their methods.

Art is provided by Jamie McKelvie, who comes from the flaming eight-balls, skulls and dice school of art. He excels at drawing attractive punk girls, but luckily his range also extends a lot wider than that too.  He has a super-cleanline style reminiscent of Steve Conley and Steve Rolston that could, in lesser hands, make for a pretty posed-looking comic, but McKelvie manages to give characters a subtlety of facial expression and body language that adds a sense that these characters have weight and presence. He's got an original graphic novel called Suburban Glamour out this year which, unsurprisingly, features some attractive punk girls, but it's hard to begrudge them that when he certainly draws them well.

Like Texas Strangers, Phonogram has a preview online (at this location) which covers the first ten pages of the first issue. Unlike Texas Strangers, Phonogram is definitely not all-ages, so don't click through to it whilst unprepared for swearywords.

There you go. Two comics by my mates, easily sampled online. Whether you choose to go into the West with Texas Strangers or turn on and tune in to Phonogram, it'll be worth your while. Plus, y'know, it'll help to make my friends richer, and they might buy me drinks. So everyone wins! Hooray!

Day Ninety-Five: The Fisher King

Okay, one last artist I want to cover in this blog before we hit the end (and, excitingly, I know what each day between now and the end is going to be now, which is more than I've done before). Previously, most of the artists I've highlighted have been guys who've got a bit of work behind them, but my great joy in telling the world about them is in the fact that their best days are doubtless still to come - they're all pretty young. Not so this fellow, unfortunately.

Seth Fisher was an American artist who settled in Japan, which he grew to call his home (his wife, Hisako, is Japanese). He was known for his delightfully crazy artwork, which merged influences of Frank Quitely and Brendan McCarthy to give an incredibly detailed and totally bonkers view of the world. His linework was painstakingly delicate, and managed to deliver George Perez levels of detail while never being over-busy. Instead, the reader's eye is drawn to individual aspects of each picture he produced, every square inch having as much to appreciate and savour as an entire page of many artists' output. He was nominated for an Eisner award for his superb work on Flash: Time Flies and Vertigo Pop!: Tokyo, and worked with writers like J.M. DeMatteis and Dan Curtis Johnson on DC titles. His Fantastic Four/Iron Man miniseries, Big In Japan, was possibly the most beautifully crazy thing he had done to date.

On the evening of January 30, 2006, Fisher fell from the roof of a seven-story hotel/nightclub in Osaka and was killed. The trade paperback of Big In Japan was released posthumously. Fisher was 34 years old when he died.

By now we're inured to comics legends passing away - most of them are pretty old. In creative terms, Fisher had only just begun to hit high gear, and he surely would have continued to hone his skills and produce ever better works. Below is a sample of some of his work - really, though, the monitor can't do it justice (you really, really have to click these and expand the images to get the full effect), and you should head out and get yourself some of his work in hardcopy as soon as you can. If you've enjoyed any of the artists I've tried to highlight while I've been writing this thing, you should pick up their stuff too, and write to the comics companies they work for and tell them you'd like to see more of it. Appreciate the good ones we've got while we've got them.

C-3PO gets enlightened

Flash: Time Flies

Vertigo Pop!: Tokyo

Batman: Snow

Green Lantern: Willworld

Day Ninety-Four: Not So Innocent

I promised a history lesson a few days back, so I hope you're sitting comfortably. Unlike a lot of history lessons that I had at school, though, this one's actually interesting, and it involves political drama and comic books. It also involves scaremongering, paranoia, lapses in logic and denial of the First Amendment. Mostly, though, it involves a German-born psychiatrist by the name of Doctor Fredric Wertham.

Wertham was originally from Munich, but after qualifying as a psychiatrist had moved to the US and settled in New York, where he had become a specialist in the treatment of juvenile delinquents and disturbed and troubled children. He had also written a book called Dark Legend, which dealt with a young man who had turned to murder at the age of 17. Wertham picked up on the kinds of things that this boy had done in his free time, such as enjoy movies and comic books. Comic books were clearly the thing which stuck in Wertham's mind, and he began to formulate a theory that young people could be led down a bad path by the media which they consumed, comic books being foremost among these from Wertham's persepctive, mainly due to the fact that comic books were created to be entertainment for children. We can get very high-faluting about comic books nowadays, but the fact remains that they originated as colourful and disposable distractions for young kids, and many would say that most of them have never quite risen above that (not that they necessarily should have to, but I digress).  He wrote several articles for noted psychiatric publications, one of which was entitled "Horror in the Nursery". This kind of sensationalism might not have been very appropriate for a supposedly professional doctor, but it was to be an indicator of the kind of rabble-rousing that Wertham would later embrace wholeheartedly.

Wertham became quite notorious on the juvenile delinquency criminal court circuit, frequently being called as an expert witness to testify to what he saw as the fact that comic books turned kids bad. For Wertham, there were no two ways about it - there was no greater threat to the morality of America's youth than American media, and no more pernicious corner of that same media than comic books. He believed that they weren't conducive to good "mental hygiene", and that they led children into criminal activity, mainly based on the fact that the majority of his young patients read them. This was what led him to publish the work for which he is most famous, and which causes his shadow still to be cast over the American comic book industry today - Seduction of the Innocent.

Exhibit A.

This book was inflammatory, from its title - which, consciously or not, echoed the very same lurid comic books that Wertham himself sought to do away with - to its content. In this book, Wertham put forward the position that there was no such thing as a comic which did not corrupt children. To give him the tiny bit of credit which he is due, his main targets were the horror and crime comics published by companies like EC, who are best known today for being the birthplace of the Tales from the Crypt brand and the original publishers of Mad Magazine. These were, in fairness, not suitable for younger kids, even though there was nothing spectacularly traumatising contained within their pages. To Wertham, though, every single comic was a crime comic. He believed that the Western genre was another branch of the crime genre, in that Western comic books "describe every kind of crime". War comics were "just another setting for comic book violence" and even the patently daft funny animal comics depicted crime in the form of ducks attempting to do in rabbits. It seemed that Wertham wasn't down on comics because they depicted violence and led children to crime, but that he believed that comics led children to crime and he saw violence in all of them because he was down on comic books. His lack of favour towards crime and horror comics had become a monomania.

In any other set of circumstances, Wertham could have been a Pat Pulling for the 1950s - a ranting kook whose views stayed on the fringes where they belonged. Unfortunately, they came at a time when McCarthyism was at its height. America had been at war for so long that its power blocs had forgotten that not everyone was their enemy, and had turned their attentions inward and begun to attack their own people. The Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, led by one-time Democratic Presidential hopeful Estes Kefauver (he was defeated for the nomination by Adlai Stevenson in 1952), had been established in an attempt to root out criminal elements of America's youth. Kefauver himself was a staunch anti-crime crusader, having held televised hearings investigating organised crime. Kefauver, together with chairman William Langer and executive director Richard Clendenen, decided that they had to have Wertham testify before them, and bring his experience to bear.

Don't look! It will turn you evil!

When Wertham took the stand, he found out that he had an ally in Clendenen, who was all too willing to let him push his half-baked theories as scientific fact (Wertham had evidently never considered that although many of his patients were comic book readers, it was likely that the majority of well-adjusted kids whom he never encountered in his work also read the same books without any noticeable ill-effects). Wertham gave a great deal of testimony to the Subcommittee, including such gems as his belief that romance comics led to child prostitution, that comedy characters such as Millie the Model would encourage young girls to stuff their blouses with tissue paper in order to emulate the "protruding breasts" of the actually none-more-wholesome lead characters, and that any expert whose opinion differed from his own was taking a bung from the comic book publishers.

Perhaps his most famous bit of barely-believable hokum concerned Batman and Robin, and he's famously quoted as identifying them as "corrupting" children into homosexuality. The most notorious passage from Seduction of the Innocent is almost amusing: "At home they lead an idyllic life. They are Bruce Wayne and 'Dick' Grayson. Bruce Wayne is described as a "socialite" and the official relationship is that Dick is Bruce's ward. They live in sumptuous quarters, with beautiful flowers in large vases, and have a butler, Alfred. Bruce is sometimes shown in a dressing gown. As they sit by the fireplace the young boy sometimes worries about his partner... it is like a wish dream of two homosexuals living together". While this has to be read in the context of the prevailing mores of a 1950s American society which was prone to suspicion of itself with little provocation, it's not beyond the bounds of sensibility to say that Wertham was reaching more than just a little here.

Fredric Wertham spies a comic book which, against all odds, remains unburned.

The findings of the Subcommittee were never finalised. The hearings were adjourned and never reconvened, with Kefauver and Langer evidently finding them more than a little preposterous, and a waste of time when faced with genuinely pressing criminal influences. The damage had been done, though. A large number of comics creators had been investigated by the Subcommittee (as fictionalised in Michael Chabon's Pulitzer-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay), and the industry was running scared, as the public were making their concerns known. Retailers boycotted comics, books were burned, and plenty of smaller companies went bankrupt. In order to try to combat this, the industry (or what was left of it) instituted a self-regulatory body - the Comics Code Authority. The Code put in place a draconian self-censorship programme which, for instance, disallowed the presentation of "policemen, judges, government officials, and respected institutions ... in such a way as to create disrespect for established authority." It also completely banned several words, such as "zombie", "crime" and "terror", from use in comics. Comics were not allowed to refer to homosexuality at all until 1989 if they wanted Code approval. Rather than establish a more morally sound comics industry, it drove it practically to extinction, and left what little remained a neutered shadow of what it previously was.

Even today, the Comics Code Authority stamp of approval on the front of a comic is looked on by some retail outlets as the only guide to whether a comic book is suitable for sale. Never mind the fact that most comics companies no longer submit to the Code (although this took until 2001 for Marvel Comics, and DC still submits most of its line for approval), of course - we appear to have grown out of it, thankfully. It might not be the case, looking around at so much of the pabulum pushed by the major publishers, that the comics industry is actually maturing and producing entertainment primarily for adults, but at the very least it appears to be accepting responsibility for itself and its own material. What Doctor Wertham would have made of all this, it's not for me to speculate, although I imagine he probably wouldn't have been a massive fan of Hellboy.

That's the end of the lesson. Hand in your homework as you leave, and everyone remember to bring in their field trip permission slips tomorrow.

Day Ninety-Three: Red Right Hand

There's a problem in comics, particularly superhero comics, with pretention and pomposity. While it's true that, say, Lee and Kirby's Thor comics were great yarns with smashing (literally) action scenes, nobody would dispute that they were often a little on the over-earnest side, and with aspirations to something which isn't readily apparent from the work itself. The worst time for this was the 1990s, when heroes with stubble, ponytails, grimaces and leather jackets (does anyone else remember the "A vest for every Avenger" period?) would strike terribly serious poses and pontificate about the ethics about shooting bad guys in, like, totally extreme ways. It's a breath of fresh air to find a character whose adventures take place within a genre which is most often as po-faced as they come, but who is a grounded, rounded, down-to-Earth guy who's got the fewest airs and graces of any major horror genre character. Enter Hellboy.

Hellboy's a character who was created by writer/artist Mike Mignola and first published in 1993. He's essentially a big red demon, but unlike his hellbound brethren he's not a bad guy. In fact, having been summoned to our world by Nazis in 1944, he ends up working for the US Army and its kooky offshoot the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense (or BPRD for short), in which capacity he investigates and takes care of (in both the Mary Poppins and the Charles Bronson senses of 'takes care of') monsters, ghosts, folklorish creatures and other oogly booglies. He despises his demonic heritage, and keeps his horns filed down to avoid looking like one of his own kind. He also happens to have a giant stone right hand, aptly named the Right Hand of Doom, with which he is prophesied to instigate the Apocalypse. Understandably, that's a role he's not too chuffed about.

The Getalong Gang, Getalong Gang! Each one's so special in his own way!

Hellboy himself fits in well with the other members of the BPRD, which includes such normal types as the amphibious Abe Sapien, pyrokinetic Liz Sherman, Johann Kraus (made of ectoplasm) and psychic guide/deceased pulp hero Lobster Johnson. They're a bit of an ol' gang of weirdos and no mistake, but they're a dysfunctional family and take care of each other, even if they're not always great at showing affection. Hellboy and the BPRD have undertaken a number of missions both together and separately, and it's to Mignola's credit that they don't stick to the traditional werewolf/vampire/Universal monsters axis of threat, but have encountered creatures from Irish, Russian, Japanese and Malaysian folklore, among others.

This is indicative of the kinds of stories Mignola is interested in telling (he said, in a bit of very banal observation). Hellboy is not about taking the beaten path. Instead, it's about subverting cliché and presenting the reader with something that's genuinely fascinating. Hellboy himself is the obvious example - being seven feet tall, bright read and sporting a tail and horns, you'd expect the big lug to at the very least be a bit on the angsty side. While he does have his moments of introspection, though, everyone's favourite demon tends not to let that side show too often. He's also not prone to big speeches and pontificating - perhaps the most archetypal Hellboy moment would be of him getting hit hard by a big monster, saying "ah, crap" as the floor gave way beneath him and plummeting into a cellar. He's a blue-collar, drinkin' and smokin' ordinary joe, and that makes his incongruity even more surreal and interesting.

Just another day at the nursing college.

Of course, it'd be churlish of me to talk about Hellboy without mentioning Mignola's amazing artwork. Equal parts Frank Miller and Alex Toth, Mignola makes use of heavy areas of thick blacks and a scratchy and expressionistic linework style to give each story a claustrophobic and spooky feel. It taps into something quite primal in the reader - if you know there are monsters out there, and so much you can see is in inky shadow, well, the things could be hiding anywhere. It's an atmosphere which suggests stillness and invokes feelings of being alone in the dark, and is an absolutely perfect match for the kinds of unsettling adventures which form Hellboy's bread and butter.

If you fancy checking Hellboy out (and why wouldn't you?), there are six volumes of the main title available, plus another eight of Weird Tales (non-Mignola stories), BPRD and Young Hellboy out there. He was also the subject of a really pretty good movie by Pan's Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro in 2004, with the dead-on casting of Ron Perlman as the eponymous big kahuna setting the tone for the whole endeavour - it wasn't quite 100% faithful to the original (a "normal" character was introduced, as was a love story for Hellboy), but it did have a scene where he was hit by a monster, said "ah, crap", and fell through a floor. When you've got that kind of essentially Hellboy moment in there, everything else is window dressing.

Day Ninety-Two: Comics' Constantly Copied Covers #2

Erm... yes. Well, this is a little embarrassing. Remember when I said, back on Day Six, that I'd be doing a couple of these comparisons of frequently-homaged covers during the course of the blog's run? Well, I might have, y'know, completely forgotten. Still, I'm going back through the whole blog now, closing off any tangents that are still hanging around, and I think that over the next week and a day I'll have covered everything I said I was going to. And speaking of covers, back to the point.

In 1976, one of Marvel's lowest-selling titles was on the brink of cancellation. It was running reprint stories and was being published bimonthly. Rather than cancel it, Marvel decided to overhaul the line-up of the team whose book it was, and give it to new creators to re-stock the group with new characters and do something, anything, with it that would mean it avoided cancellation. The creators were Len Wein and the late Dave Cockrum, and the book was X-Men. When Giant-Size X-Men #1, featuring the debut of the new team (which featured characters like Storm, Nightcrawler and Colossus making their first appearances, and also had some short hairy grumpy Canadian guy in it), nobody could have guessed that they'd just witnessed the birth of what would become comics' biggest publishing juggernaut. They also couldn't have guessed that Marvel had just published a comic that had one of the most enduring cover images in comics history.

The genuine article.

Now, in later years, X-Men-related comics have tended to return to this well quite a lot. It's a striking picture, and the thought of the old team reacting in shock to the new is a powerful image in that it implies violent upheaval of the status quo. Strangely, though, three of the most notable instances of it being homaged by other X-books feature non-violent things like babies and fat people.

Ah, the days before digital colouring. "RED! Make it RED!"

Too darned cute to live.

Okay, so maybe a woman with a machine gun is slightly threatening, I'll give them that.

The other reason for this particular cover being used a lot is for parody purposes - it's an instantly recognisable image if you're a comics reader, and it works as a sort of shorthand. It doesn't even need to be covering a story which has anything to do with a new team, or a parody of the X-Men - it's often just used because people will look at it and say "Hmm. That's a pastiche of the cover of Giant-Size X-Men #1. Its witty dissection of our comic book culture must be worth a look". See exhibits A, B and C below.

Bender as Wolverine = comics greatness

Nice use of the wee yellow stripe in the corner and everything.

Look! It's Invincible! Yay!

Strangely, although Marvel's popular gorefest series Marvel Zombies has had zombified versions of classic Marvel covers as its calling card, no issue, reprint or collection has yet had Giant-Size X-Men #1 as its cadaverous front-piece. Of course, that may be because Marvel felt that doing so would be too soon after X-Men: Deadly Genesis #1 did something similar.

He's got an arm off and everything.

Even the dinky toy line known as Minimates got in on the act when they produced a box set of the Giant-Size X-Men #1 team (or most of them).

Aww, da liddle cutie pies.

So there you have it, folks. A legendary cover, and one which has been ripp... er, homaged more times than Wolverine's had hot poutine. Now away you go and wonder why it is that a medium so happy to be incessantly self-referential to the point of creatively eating its own tail hasn't made more headway into the general popular cultural conversation. You probably won't have to wonder long. Maybe I'm being too hard on the comics biz, though. After all, it is a pretty cool picture.

Day Ninety-One: Heroes and Villains

With the advent of the Internet, not to mention the fact that solicitations have to be thorough enough to allow retailers to know whether they need to order two or two hundred copies of any given comic, it seems that the opportunities for comics readers to be taken by surprise are minimal these days. This wasn't a problem that Stan Lee ever had back in the 1960s, when folks would buy their comics as and when they happened to see them on the newsstand, and I'm sure it's not something that Julius Schwartz ever lost any sleep over either. Trying to actually surprise today's fans is nigh-on impossible to do without serious obfuscation (exhibit A: clones of Thor being posited as the real deal). In fact, there are very few occasions which come to my mind which can be said to legitimately be examples of twists in a comic story being genuine jaw-dropping shocks. One of these, and a very fine one it was too, was the story of Marvel's most wanted, the Thunderbolts.

In 1996, Marvel (as previously discussed here) launched an event called Heroes Reborn, which took Captain America, Iron Man, the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, plus other sundry characters such as the Inhumans and Namor out of circulation for a whole year. This left a bit of a void in the Marvel Universe, in that many of the major players suddenly weren't available for writers to use. Marvel launched a lot of new titles in this period, including Maverick (which gave Jim Cheung his start) and Deadpool (which did the same for Ed McGuinness) and Heroes for Hire (Pasqual Ferry's big break). Some of these, like the Waid/Kubert Ka-Zar series, had the benefit of a comics-y equivalent of a movie trailer in the form of the one-shot Tales from the Marvel Universe, a book which also had the second-ever appearance of the Thunderbolts, the stars of Marvel's big new team book. The team had previously turned up a couple of months beforehand in an issue of Incredible Hulk, attempting to apprehend the big green galoot, and with a number of other ongoing Marvel titles containing an advertising feature which showed pencil sketches and character designs for the T-Bolts' debut issue, it looked like Marvel were throwing quite a lot of weight behind them.

A typically understated entrance by the Thunderbolts.

The Thunderbolts were made up of Citizen V (an updating of a Golden Age character, wearing a full-faced mask and wielding a sword), MACH-1 (an armoured, flying hero), Techno (a mechanical genius with a weapon-generating backpack), Atlas (a size-changer), Songbird (able to make solid sound constructs using her voice) and Meteorite (a super-strong flyer). To be honest, they didn't look like much. Some, like Songbird and Citizen V, had pretty good costume designs, but the powers these guys had been given were fairly generic, and the team appeared to be a bit of a second-rate version of the Avengers. That, of course, was until the readers reached the final two pages of issue one of the Thunderbolts' own book.

Having fought the Wrecking Crew and saved the Statue of Liberty from destruction, the Thunderbolts did a meet-and-greet with the press. They were humble, personable and seemed to be generally all-round good guys, even if their leader, Citizen V, was a bit of a cold fish. When the team returned to their base in a disused warehouse, though, things took a sinister turn. As Citizen V removed his mask to reveal a familiar horribly scarred face, the readers realised that something was horribly wrong here, and suspicions were confirmed when he addressed the rest of the team by the names which Avengers fans had known them by for years. Beetle. Fixer. Goliath. Screaming Mimi. Moonstone. These were no heroes. These were the Masters of Evil, and their leader was the megalomaniac Nazi criminal Baron Zemo.

Surprenante indeed.

This was, not to put too fine a point on it, staggering. All through the build-up to the first issue's debut, none of the publicity material or either of the team's guest-starring turns in other books had given the slightest indication that they were anything other than a new and slightly humdrum hero team (although some eagle-eyed fans had speculated that at least some of the team's members were ex-Masters of Evil through carefully noting their powers). This kind of surprise was guaranteed to hook readers, and it certainly did the job on me. The Thunderbolts' story was an engaging one, and made all the more so by the fact that the rug had been pulled out from under the readers once already, and as a result, nobody knew how the plot was going to develop. As the tale went on and some of the Thunderbolts found that they liked being heroes more than villains, while other members of the team stuck to the wolves-in-sheep's-clothing plan to try to accomplish their plans by earning the trust of the public and the government, there was always the knowledge that this was a book where you could never take anything for granted.

Sadly, it seems that the point of the team has been rather swept away in a spectacular bit of point-missing by Marvel's current editorial regime, who seem to think that the whole concept boils down to "it's a bunch of bad guys on a team" rather than "can comic-book villains seek redemption, do they really want to even try, and can they cope with what they'll have to do to achieve it". Maybe that's doing them a disservice, though. Maybe they're going to pull a rabbit out of the hat and really surprise us. If any book can do it, this one can.