Category: Mature Reading

Posted on

Stormwatch: Lightning Strikes


By Warren Ellis, Tom Raney, Jim Lee & various (DC/WildStorm)
ISBN: 978-1-84023-617-0

StormWatch was a paramilitary Special Crisis Intervention unit tasked with managing global threats and superhuman menaces with international ramifications; operating under the oversight of a UN committee. From their “Skywatch” satellite in geosynchronous orbit above Earth they observed, waiting until a member nation called for help…

The multinational taskforce comprised surveillance and intelligence specialists, tech support units, historians, researchers, detention facilities, combat analysts, divisions of uniquely trained troops, a squadron of state-of-the-art out-atmosphere fighter planes and a band of dedicated superheroes for front-line situations beyond the scope of mere mortals. In the pilot’s seat was incorruptible overseer Henry Bendix – “The Weatherman”.

StormWatch was born during the comics revolution which saw celebrated young creators abandon major “work-for-hire” publishers to set up their own companies and titles – with all the benefits and drawbacks that entailed. As with most of those glossy, formulaic, style-over-content, almost actionably derivative titles, it started with an honest hectic enthusiasm but soon bogged down for lack of ideas.

Warren Ellis took over the ponderous feature with issue #37 (see the previous collection StormWatch: Force of Nature) and immediately began beating life into the title. Soon “just another high-priced team-book” became an edgy, unmissable treatise on practical heroism and the uses and abuses of power. Making the book unquestionably his plaything Ellis slowly evolved StormWatch out of existence, to be reborn as the no-rules-unbroken landmark The Authority.

StormWatch: Lightning Strikes collects issues #43-47 of the comicbook, taking short, hard looks at individual cast members and also features a spectacular gallery of covers and variant-covers by Tom Raney & Randy Elliot, Mark Irwin, Gil Kane and Jim Lee.

The incisive explorations begin with ‘Jack Hawksmoor’, a human subjected to decades of surgical manipulation by aliens to become the avatar of cities. Drawn to the scene of a serial killer’s grotesque excesses Jack uncovers a festering government cover-up which reaches deep into the soul of America’s most revered idols and threatens to rip the country apart if exposed.

But the apparently untouchable murderer will never cease his slaughter-campaign unless someone stops him…

‘Jenny Sparks’ follows the cynical Englishwoman whose electrical powers were an expression of her metaphysical status as incarnate “Spirit of the Twentieth Century”: a captivating pastiche of fantasy through the last hundred years as the jaded hero recounts her life story (see also Jenny Sparks: The Secret History of the Authority) in a dazzling series of pastiches referencing Siegel & Shuster, Frank Hampson’s Dan Dare, Kirby, Crumb and the horrors of Thatcherite Britain in a gripping tale of betrayal, whilst the terse thriller ‘Battalion’ sees StormWatch’s normally non-operational, behind-the-scenes trainer fall into a supremacist terror-plot whilst on leave in Alabama and forced to call on skills and abilities he never thought he’d need again…

‘Rose Tattoo’ was a mute and mysterious sexy super psycho-killer recruited by Bendix as a walking ultimate sanction. When her super-powered team-mates go on a hilarious alcoholic bonding exercise she finally shows her true nature in a tale which foreshadows an upcoming crisis for the entire team… and planet.

Following Raney & Randy Elliot’s sterling run of the previous four tales Jim Lee & Richard Bennett illustrate the concluding ‘Assembly’ as Bendix sends his core-team into the very pits of Hell in a bombastic action-packed shocker that acts as a “jumping-on point” for new readers and a reminder of what StormWatch is and does… preparatory to Ellis kicking the props out from under the readership in the next volume…

One again skilfully mixing the traditional with the outrageous these episodes offered a fresh take on the costumed catastrophe genre that energised once-jaded readers and paved the way for the graphic phenomenon of the Authority. Darkly anarchic, funny and frightening these tales celebrate the best of what has gone before whilst kicking in the doors to a bleaker more compelling tomorrow.

© 1996, 1997, 2000 WildStorm Productions, an imprint of DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

Posted on

The Original Adventures of Cholly and Flytrap – A Marvel Graphic Novel


By Arthur Suydam (Marvel)
ISBN: 0- 87135-734-8

Scantily clad hot chicks swinging swords have been a staple of fantasy comics from their very inception, but there are none of those on view in this beautifully realised collection from illustrator, designer, screenwriter and musician Arthur Suydam, whose anarchically humorous, offbeat confections and magical renderings have graced such disparate products as magazines Heavy Metal, National Lampoon, Penthouse Comix and Epic Illustrated (where these brutally madcap little graphic novellas first appeared – specifically issues #8, 10, 13, 14 and 34), comicbooks like Tarzan, Conan, Batman, House of Mystery and Marvel Zombies and movie spin-offs Aliens and Predator.

He has also well as produced covers for novels including Max Allan Collins and Mickey Spillane’s collaborative Dead Street and Game box-art for Touch the Dead. Periodically Suydam returns to his own uniquely creative projects such as Mudwogs and the military muck-ups of Cholly and Flytrap, teasingly releasing another snippet every so often…

This then is the other sort of fantasy: lavishly grotesque, manically arch and surreptitiously satirically subversive; a lavish blend of dryly witty pastiches combining elements of Moebius’ Arzach, the imaginative  sci-fi earthiness of Vaughn Bode and a surreal anti-war temperament that imbues the blackly comic ultra-violence with a hauntingly tragic undertone.

Long ago the space-barge Exodus II crashed on an uncharted world. After untold ages the survivors have bred but never prospered, locked as they are in the constant struggle for survival. It’s not that the planet is particularly inhospitable… it’s just that the denizens -indigenous and not – adore war-making and love killing…

Apparently Cholly began life as a bat-riding warrior: an image for the poster advertising the animated Heavy Metal movie, but he was mysteriously transformed into a hot chick on a pterodactyl after acceptance (this sort of inexplicable conceptual metamorphosis happens a lot in film-land) leaving Suydam with a cool-looking visual and a lot of ideas…

Time passed, Marvel started a creator-owned, rights-friendly fantasy periodical in response to the success of Heavy Metal and a reinvented bat-riding, goggles-wearing icon of conflict began appearing. Of course, he had evolved slightly and the chiropteran had become a colossal, naked, bald fat man. Cholly still rode him like a seasoned veteran though…

The collected insanity begins with ‘A Little Love, a Little Hate!’ from 1981, a frenetic chase/duel between a foul-mouthed, flying jacketed war-hawk and his slug-like arch-enemy, which showed Cholly’s streetwise cunning in spectacular, over-the-top fashion.

‘Flightus Interuptus’ followed, an airborne tussle (possibly started before the previous tale?) wherein the high-flying Cholly, sans Flytrap, battled a massive mammary zeppelin-bomber in nothing more that a primitive tri-plane pulled by a brace of the planet’s levitating anti-gravity breasts (no, really). Tragically shot down in the throes of victory, the adaptable aviator found a giant bat to ride (remember kids, recycling even of ideas and art is good for any planet). Sadly the noble beast didn’t last long…

Soldier and human(ish) steed were reunited for the longer saga ‘The Rites of Spring‘ as Suydam expanded his cast and extemporized on the concept of mortals as organic war machines in a Horatian tale of Thermopylan courage with Cholly and faithful, mute Flytrap holding back a veritable horde of slug-troopers and big-ass war-wagons – a smart and lusciously graphic feast of visual violence and sassy back-chat.

‘The End’ begins with the war-lover tooling around the sky on some more of those flying hooters until he encountered a monolithic monster having a furious argument with his own outrageously outspoken boy-bits. Passions aroused and tempers flaring, Cholly was witness to an ending you simply don’t see every day…

The short, sweet, one-trick gags grew into something more complex (a portent of the substantial tales that followed far too infrequently over the next twenty years) in the hilarious concluding Epic entry ‘The Adventures of Cholly and Flytrap’ (plotted by Peter Koch) as the peripatetic pair hauled up at their favourite restaurant for a feed. Impatience, hunger, foreign food and honking big guns never make for a sedate evening…

Topped off with a glorious portfolio of monochrome sketches and working drawings plus the magnificent cover of Epic Illustrated‘s last issue this sumptuous, gratuitous and entrancingly daft eye-candy, released in the extravagantly expansive European Album format (a square-ish, high-gloss page of 285 x 220mm rather than today’s elongated 258 x 168mm) is a mature readers delight and yet another classy piece of work to add to the “why is this out of print?” list.
© 1981, 1982, 1986, 1991 Arthur Suydam. All Rights Reserved.

Posted on

Arena – A Marvel Graphic Novel


By Bruce Jones (Marvel)
ISBN: 0- 87135-557-6

In  the early 1980s Marvel led the publishing pack in the development of high quality original graphic novels: mixing out-of-the-ordinary Marvel Universe tales, new in-continuity series launches, creator-owned properties, licensed assets, movie adaptations and even the occasional creator-owned property in extravagantly expansive packages (a square-ish standard page of 285 x 220mm rather than the now customary elongated 258 x 168mm) that felt and looked instantly superior to the average comicbook no matter how good, bad or incomprehensible (my way of saying outside your average Marvel Zombie’s comfort zone) the contents might be.

By 1990 Marvel’s ambitious line of outré all-area epics had begun to stall and some less-than-stellar tales were squeaking into the line-up. Moreover, the company was increasingly relying on hastily turned out cinema adaptations with built-in fan appeal and safe in-continuity stories offering established and company copyrighted characters rather than creator-owned properties and original concepts. The once-unmissable line began to have the appearance of an over-sized, over-priced clearing house for leftover stories.

So this stunning suspense saga counts as one of the last – and very best – indie/mainstream fiction experiments from before the rot set in; a creepy, clever, sexy thriller from EC fan and artistic everyman Bruce Jones which sets up shop in Stephen King and Ray Bradbury territory to deliver an overwhelmingly impressive rollercoaster of shocks and twists.

Sharon and her 12 year old daughter Lisa are driving through the majestic rural backwoods of America. It’s a pretty acrimonious journey and when the opportunity presents itself Mom takes a break and goes for a refreshing dip in a mountain pool whilst daughter stays in the car sulkily playing with her toy planes.

Sharon’s idyllic moment is shattered when she sees a jet crash scant yards away. However she can’t find any wreckage or even the slightest sign of it. Lisa saw and heard nothing and neither did the sinister voyeur who had been spying on them…

Rushing back to his shack simpleminded Lem tells his demented Granny about the strange woman. The old crone smells opportunity: if they can capture her and if she’s fertile they can sell her babies in the Big City… and even if she’s not big brother Rut will have a new plaything for awhile…

Lost in the deep woods Lt. Roberts, USAF crawls out of her crashed plane and hears voices. Sharon and the downed pilot start talking and realise that although they can’t see each other they are standing side by side. They’re invisible because they’re separated by two decades…

Somehow the mountain and forest are one huge time-warp… and increasingly, various eras are overlapping. Even though Sharon can only talk to Roberts, dinosaurs and cavemen are chaotically roaming over the hills, endangering both women in their own time-zones…

At that moment Lem and Rut strike, snatching Sharon. locking her up ready to make some money-spinning young ‘uns. From the car little Lisa sees her mother taken and twenty years in the future pilot Lisa Roberts suddenly remembers the horrifying moment her mother was killed by Hillbilly rapist psychopaths…

The time-shifts briefly stabilise and the two Lisas meet…

With beasts and worse roaming the woods the elder girl realises she has a chance to unmake the worst day of her life, but there are complications she could never have imagined in store for her and the girl she used to be…

Sultry, sinister and devilishly cunning this chronal conundrum is beautifully illustrated by Jones and his corkscrew plot is packed full of genuine surprises. Don’t think you’ve guessed the ending because you most likely haven’t…

A perfect sci fi movie-in-waiting, this terse and evocative yarn follows all the rules for a great screen shocker without ever having to “dumb-down” the temporal mechanics in deference to the Great Un-read in the popcorn seats.

Smart, seductive storytelling for sharp-witted punters, this is a time-lost gem you should track down however long it takes…
© 1989 Bruce Jones. All Rights Reserved.

Posted on

Stormwatch: Force of Nature


By Warren Ellis, Tom Raney& Randy Elliot (DC/WildStorm)
ISBN: 978-1-48023-611-8

StormWatch evolved out of the creative revolution which saw big name creators abandon the major “work-for-hire” publishers and set up their own companies and titles – with all the benefits and drawbacks that entailed. As with most of those glossy, formulaic, style-over-content, almost actionably derivative titles the series started with a certain verve and flair but soon bogged down for a lack of ideas and outside help was called in to save the sinking ships.

Dedicated Iconoclast Warren Ellis took over the cumbersome series with issue #37 and immediately began brutalizing the title into something not only worth reading but within an unfeasibly brief time produced a dark, edgy and genuinely thought-provoking examination of heroism, free will, the use and abuse of power and ultimate personal responsibility. Making the book uniquely his, StormWatch became unmissable reading as the series slowly evolved itself out of existence, to be reborn as the eye-popping, mind-boggling anti-hero phenomenon The Authority.

StormWatch was a vast United Nations-sponsored Special Crisis Intervention unit tasked with managing superhuman menaces with national or international ramifications and global threats, operating under the oversight of a UN committee. They were housed in “Skywatch” a futuristic space station in geosynchronous orbit above the planet and could only act upon specific request of a member nation.

The multinational taskforce comprised surveillance and intelligence specialists, technical support units, historians and researchers, detention technicians, combat analysts, divisions of uniquely trained troops, a squadron of state-of-the-art out-atmosphere fighter planes and a band of deputised superheroes for front-line situations beyond the scope of mere mortals. The whole affair was controlled by incorruptible overseer Henry Bendix – “The Weatherman”.

Referencing a host of fantasy classics ranging from T.HU.N.D.E.R. Agents and Justice League of America to Captain Scarlet and Star Trek: the Next Generation, StormWatch: Force of Nature collects issues #37-42 of the comicbook series and describes how the death of a team-member forces Bendix to re-evaluate his mission and find more effective ways to police the growing paranormal population and the national governments that seek to exterminate or exploit them…

The restructuring begins in ‘New World Order’ as, following the funeral of a fallen comrade, Bendix fires a large number of the superhuman contingent and recruits a trio of new “posthuman” heroes: electric warrior Jenny Sparks, extraterrestrially augmented detective Jack Hawksmoor and psycho-killer Rose Tattoo.

Weatherman’s own chain-of-command has altered too: his new superiors of the UN Special Security Council are all anonymous now and, with the world in constant peril, they have given Bendix carte blanche. He will succeed or fail all on his own…

The super-agents are further restructured: StormWatch Prime is the name of the regular, public-facing metahuman team, whilst Black is the code for a new covert insertion unit. StormWatch Red comprises the most powerful and deadly agents: they will handle “deterrent display and retaliation” – preventing crises by scaring the bejeezus out of potential hostiles…

Meanwhile, as all the admin gets signed off, in Germany a madman has unleashed a weaponized superhuman maniac to spreading death, destruction and disease. Whilst new Prime Unit deals with it Bendix shows the monster’s creator just how far he is prepared to go to preserve order on the planet below…

‘Reprisal’ is a murder investigation. No sooner had one of the redundant ex-StormWatch operatives arrived home than he was assassinated and Jack Hawksmoor, Irish ex-cop Hellstrike and pyrokine Fahrenheit’s subsequent investigation reveals the kill was officially instigated by a friendly government and StormWatch member-state…

Hawksmoor, Jenny Sparks and aerial avenger Swift are dispatched to an ordinary American town with a big secret in ‘Black’ as Amnesty International reports reveal that some US police forces are engaging in systematic human rights abuse. In Lincoln City they’re also building their own metahuman soldiers and testing them on ethnic minorities…

‘Mutagen’ sees the Prime team in action in Britain when terrorists release an airborne pathogen to waft its monstrous way across the Home Counties, turning humans into ghastly freaks for whom death is a quick and welcome mercy. As Skywatch’s Hammerstrike Squadron performs a sterilising bombing run over outraged Albion StormWatch Red arrives in the villains’ homeland to teach them the error of their ways…

In this continuum most superhumans are the result of exposure to a comet which narrowly missed the Earth, irradiating a significant proportion of humanity with power-potential. These “Seedlings’” abilities usually lie dormant until an event triggers them.

StormWatch believed they had a monopoly on posthumans who could trigger others in the form of special agent Christine Trelane, but when she investigates a new potential meta, she discovers proof of another ‘Activator.’

Coming closer to solving a long-running mystery regarding where the American Government is getting its new human weapons, Trelane first has to deal with the worst kind of seedling… a bad one…

This first collection of the Ellis Experiment concludes with the spectacular ‘KodÇ’.’ Japan shudders and reels under the telekinetic assault of cruelly conjoined artificial mutants bred by a backward-looking doomsday-cult messiah so the Prime team is dispatched to save lives and hunt down the instigators in a good old-fashioned, get-the-bad-guys romp which gives the team’s multi-faceted Japanese hero Fuji a chance to shine winningly…

Artfully blending the comfortably traditional with the radically daring these transitional tales offered a new view of the Fights ‘n’ Tights scene that tantalised jaded readers and led the way to the groundbreaking phenomenon of the Authority.

Tom Raney & Randy Elliott’s art is competent but mercifully underplayed – a real treat considering some of the excessive visual flourishes of the Image Era – but the real focus of attention is always the brusque “sod you” True Brit writing which trashes all the treasured ideoliths of superhero comics to such devastating effect.

This is superb action-based comics drama: cynical, darkly satirical, anarchic, alternately rip-roaringly funny and chilling in its examination of Real Politik but never forgetting that deep down we all really want to see the baddies get a good solid smack in the mouth…
© 1996, 1999 WildStorm Productions, an imprint of DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

Posted on

The Building


By Will Eisner (Kitchen Sink Press)
ISBN: 978-0-87816-025-9 Hardcover 0-87616-024-8

William Erwin Eisner was born in 1906, on March 6th in Brooklyn, and grew up in the ghettos of the city. They never left him. After time served inventing much of the visual semantics, semiotics and syllabary of the medium he dubbed “Sequential Art” in strips, comicbooks, newspaper premiums and instructional comics he then invented the mainstream graphic novel, bringing maturity, acceptability and public recognition to English language comics.

In 1978 Poorhouse Press released A Contract With God and Other Tenement Stories, a collection of four original short stories in comics form. All the tales centre around 55 Dropsie Avenue, a typical 1930’s Bronx tenement, housing poor Jewish and immigrant families. It changed America’s perception of strips and led to 20 further masterpieces from Eisner, consequently opening the door for creators to escape their own creative ghettos of superheroes, funny animals and other juvenilia. At one stroke comics grew up.

Eisner was a consummate creator, honing his skills not just on the legendary Spirit but with years of educational and promotional material. In A Contract With God he moved into unexplored territory with truly sophisticated, mature themes worthy of Steinbeck and F. Scott Fitzgerald, using pictorial fiction as documentary exploration of social experience.

Restlessly plundering his own childhood and love of human nature as well as his belief that environment was a major and active character in fiction, Eisner created The Building; a beguiling portmanteau saga of four lost souls and the pile of bricks and mortar that shaped their lives.

The 14-storey corner-edifice stood at a busy intersection for 80 years but New York is a hungry city and it was eventually torn down, replaced in short months by a prestigious new office complex. One day a quartet of ghosts appeared outside the gleaming new Hammond Building, invisibly waiting for something to happen…

Monroe Mensh had lived in the old building for years. One day a senseless tragedy changed his life forever and plagued with guilt, he spent his remaining days trying to atone. He never did, at least not to his own satisfaction…

Gilda Green could have had her pick of boys, but loved Benny, an unsuccessful poet. After years of waiting she settled for a dentist, security and lifelong dissatisfaction. Gilda never stopped seeing Benny; meeting for lunches and sometimes more outside the old pile as it gradually fell into disrepair. One day she didn’t keep her appointment…

Antonio Tonatti loved music but was never good enough for the big-paying gigs. He started working construction but had an accident. He couldn’t work but the settlement provided enough to live on, so he began playing again on the street corner, just to keep occupied and to make folks feel happier. For decades and more he played. Even whilst the new building was going up he played his corner, until one day he never turned up…

P. J. Hammond came from money and was forced into the family’s Real Estate business. He hated it but eventually became an even bigger bastard than his father. He spent most of his life acquiring properties on that street but the old building eluded him for decades, forcing him into ever greater excess and expense. By the time he finally acquired it he had no capital left to exploit his victory. When he was finally forced to sell, the new owners condescended to name the new skyscraper after him. He didn’t live long enough to gloat…

One morning four ghosts waited outside the Hammond Building, hoping that fate and circumstance would give them a final opportunity to fulfil the existences their sorry lives had not…

Eisner’s elegiac fascination with city life, deep empathy with all aspects of the human condition and instinctive grasp of storytelling produced here a gloriously comi-tragic melodrama, moving and uplifting in the classic manner of such films as It’s a Wonderful Life, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir or The Enchanted Cottage.

You’ll laugh, you’ll cry…

Sometimes the Medium is the Message, especially when the artefact is a substantially solid tome delivering magical artwork in seductive, nostalgic sepia line and tone – and if, like smug old me you’re rereading a signed, numbered hardcover with tipped in illustrative plate for the umpteenth time – then you’re as near to paradise as any jaded old realist can get, but to be frank any edition of Will Eisner’s The Building that you can get, you really, really should…

Art and story © 1987 Will Eisner. © 1987 Kitchen Sink Press. All Rights Reserved.

Posted on

Axa volumes 1: Axa: The Beginning and 2: Axa the Desired


By Donne Avenell & Enrique Badia Romero (Ken Pierce Books)
Vol. 1 ISBN: 0-912277-04-1 Vol. 2 no ISBN

During the 1970s the British newspaper underwent radical changes in style and particularly content as lip service to female liberation and the sexual revolution allowed editors to wedge in even more semi-clad women for men to ogle even while bragging that now the chicks were in control of their own lives.

One place where that policy actually manifested in truly strong female role models as opposed to vapid eye-candy and fluff-piece fashion flash-in-the-pans was the comics page where the likes of Modesty Blaise, Scarth, Amanda and a wave of other capable ladies walked all over the oppressor gender both humorously and in straight adventure scenarios.

They still got their kit off at every imaginable opportunity, but that was just tradition and the idiom of the medium…

By 1978 the fuss and furore had somewhat subsided and aggressive, take-charge naked chicks had become commonplace, but when Star Wars reinvigorated public interest in science fiction the old concept of a scantily-clad, curvaceous beautiful barbarienne toiling through post-apocalyptic wonderlands resurfaced. The concept must have appealed mightily to the features editor of The Sun when it first crossed his desk, especially with Modesty Blaise illustrator Enrique Badia Romero attached to the proposal as artist…

Veteran writer Donne Avenell (who had cut his teeth on hundreds of British comics icons and such major international features as The Phantom and assorted Disney strips) provided racy, pacy, imaginative and subversively clever scripts for glamour-strip star Romero, who had begun his career in Spain in 1953, producing everything from westerns, sports, war stories and trading cards, often in conjunction with his brother Jorge Badía Romero. He even formed his own publishing house.

“Enric” began working for the higher-paying UK market in the 1960s on strips such as ‘Cathy and Wendy’, ‘Isometrics’ and ‘Cassius Clay’ before assuming the art duties on the high-profile Modesty strip in 1970, only leaving when this enticing new prospect appeared. Political and editorial intrigue saw Axa cancelled in the middle of a story in 1986 and Enric soon returned to Blaise until creator Peter O’Donnell retired in 2001. Since then he has produced Modesty Blaise material for Scandinavia and a number of projects such as Durham Red for 2000AD.

Axa ran in The Sun Monday to Saturday from 1978 to her abrupt disappearance in 1986 and other than these slim volumes from strip preserver Ken Pierce has never been graced with a definitive collection. It should be noted also that at the time of these books the strip was still being published to great acclaim.

The first black and white volume opens with an informative essay ‘Introducing Axa’ by publisher and historian Maggie Thompson outlining the history of and indifference to nudity in British newspaper strips after which ‘The Beginning’ takes us to 2080AD and a domed city where restless, buxom, anti-social amazon Axa chafes under the stifling oppressive security of the State which controls the citizens’ lives down to the most minute detail.

Throwing off her shackles and her clothes she leaves her assigned mate Jon, breaks out and flees to the post-apocalyptic wastelands created by The Great Contamination, populated only by mutants and monsters. In a cave she is attacked by a giant spider and saved by Matt, a debased (but hunky) warrior of the Middle People tribe. Taken to their village she discovers that the free primitives are just as hide-bound and oppressive as the City Men. Fleeing the village with the captivated Matt she finds a gleaming long-sword and finally discovers the secret of total true freedom is the ability to defend oneself…

Matt convinces her to return to the Middle Men, but she is betrayed and condemned to be a breeding female, but finds unwelcome release when she and her fellow captives are taken by raiding mutants. Easily escaping, she follows the raiders, intent on freeing the other captive women, once more linking up with the double-crossing Matt.

Surviving the monsters of the wilderness they catch up with the raiders only to be captured. After a climactic battle where Axa’s arguments and beliefs are more effective than any weapons, the rescued women are freed…

This segues straight into ‘The Chosen’ as Axa discovers that her fierce nature and astounding exploits has led the Middle People to declare her a goddess. Bemused by the attention at first she soon finds at it’s all a ploy by the wily tribe’s leader. Goddesses are locked up in temples where they can’t interfere or change the way the people are governed…

Never defeated, Axa breaks out and battles her way to freedom, dragging the ambivalent and indecisive Matt with her. Trekking through a beast-infested desert she is soon lost, alone and near death when she is rescued by Jon. Thinking he has come to join her she awakes to find herself a prisoner, returned to the Dome for therapy.

Sanitized and “Depersonalised’ with mind-bending drugs she once more becomes a decent citizen, but the lure of freedom is too strong and once more she rebels. Throwing off the chemical cosh Axa once more makes a break for the outside, but this time with the sanction of the Dome’s ruler who wants the unconquerable woman to undertake an impossible mission…


The second volume, containing the next two adventures, opens with a text appreciation and recap by Catherine Yronwoode after which Axa the Desired begins with the unstoppable freedom-seeker heading towards the coast, closely followed by the reluctant Jon, torn between his desire for her and disgust with the tainted world beyond the Dome.

Soon they have found a colony of survivors eking out an existence from the slowly healing seas, but are betrayed only to be rescued by two sailors from a foreign land. Jon has had enough and bolts back for the safety of the Domed City and Axa takes ship with the mariners, but the constant storms which batter the poisoned seas destroy their boat and she is washed ashore on an island where the old civilisation seems to have survived.

Appearances are deceiving: the lifestyle of the islanders is about to end as their stockpiled resources of guns and food and gasoline are all but gone. All but handsome Jason Arkady are decrepit dotards and their enclave was doomed until the healthy, hopefully fertile Axa turned up…

Initially horrified, the suave Jason almost turns the wild-woman’s head, but as the mad cracks in the isolated island-culture begin to show, she bolts and discovers that her companion from the shipwreck has been hiding out on the beach, secretly aided by Jason…

When the three try to escape, the suppressed insanity of the Arkady clan boils over in a cascade of blood, bullets and conflagration…

The next saga – also called ‘the Desired’ – sees the trio reach what was once Europe where the biggest surprise was Axa’s discovery of another Dome, just like the one she fled from but located at the bottom of a shallow sea. However this bastion of technology is even worse than her old home as the rulers are women who have dominated their own men and use mutants adapted to aquatic conditions as slaves and beasts of burden.

Even after all her woes at male hands Axa cannot abide the loss of any creature’s liberty and rejects the overtures of the Sea Women to join their society. Moreover when the slaves’ long-planned revolt erupts she manages to avoid taking sides and broker a solution acceptable to all…

These tales are classically European if not British in style: lavishly drawn, cunningly written, expansive in scope and utterly enchanting in their basic simplicity. Eminently readable and re-readable, perhaps the distant promise of a major motion picture (although the project has been in a development wasteland much like the one seen here since 2005) might lure a bold publisher into producing some definitive collectors editions…

© 1981, 1982, Express Newspapers, Ltd. First American Collectors Edition Series © 1982 Ken Pierce, Inc.

Posted on

Jimbo in Paradise


By Gary Panter (Raw/Pantheon)
ISBN: 978-0-39475-639-4

Gary Panter has been an iconic force in comics and the visual arts since the late 1970s, and his unique distillation of American popular culture through the frenetic lens of his savage design style (alternatively termed “ratty line” or “punk”) has been seen in such varied fields as set design (winning 3 Emmy Awards for Pee-Wee’s Playhouse), interior design, TV and computer animation as well as record covers for Frank Zappa, Red Hot Chili Peppers and many others.

His expressionistic, beautifully ugly, primitivist, high energy anti-art has influenced a generation of cartoonists and illustrators including Matt Groening, whose Simpsons design style owes much to Panter’s innovations in the 1970’s hardcore punk-zine Slash and his contributions to Art Spiegelman’s legendary art comic Raw – from which these wildly eccentric strips are culled.

Long considered a dominant force in punk and alternative comics, Panter is the leading figure of a second generation of “Underground Cartoonists”, doing much to legitimise the movement and elevating this potentially misunderstood arena of graphic narrative to a position of High Art which most mainstream comics have never been able to achieve.

Born in Durant, Oklahoma in December 1st 1950, he became an integral part of the US New Wave movement (not to be confused with our British effete, big-haired, baggy-bloused, excessively made-up electro-pop scene of a decade later). He worked for Time, Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly and The New Yorker as well creating his own comics and graphic novels such as, Facetasm, Dal Tokyo and Cola Madnes (created especially for the Japanese market) as well as his signature creation Jimbo: a punk icon whose bizarre life was (mostly) explored in the seminal Raw magazine before being collected into the intimidatingly oversized tomes Adventures in Paradise, Jimbo’s Inferno and Jimbo in Purgatory.

Set – not that it’s particularly relevant – in a semi-futuristic, dystopian urban hodge-podge landscape, burly, kilt-clad Jimbo is just getting by and making do, but stuff always happens to him…

First, a new fast-food place opens up near the derelict building he lives in, but the telepathic robots who run it are really creepy and things start going bad when mutants chase him, trying to steal his burger. He takes refuge in the sewers but life doesn’t get any simpler. In ‘Jimbo’s House is Gigantic, but Condemned’ his skeevy pals Gruten, Zipper and Fluke come for a rather destructive visit, before they all go clubbing – giving the artist license to go hog-wild with stunningly complex full-page art-riots. Of course the authorities take a dim view of all the fun the kids are having…

‘Jim30’ begins a aeries of connected vignettes which abandon formal narrative structure as the punky pariah experiences the downside of waking up, making breakfast and bathing before ‘Jimbo meets Rat-Boy’ introduces our non-hero to a kindred spirit – and his disgusting pet…

After a devilish pastiche of the comic strip Nancy ‘Jimbo Erectus’ describes the evolution of the punk sub-species, after which we return to the future where Jimbo has scored with his buddy Smoggo’s harshly take-charge sister Judy. Now firmly entrenched in a “relationship” Jimbo is now confronted by a whole new world of give-and-take – so when giant cockroaches abduct his girlfriend he and Smoggo must rise to the occasion…

Many of these strips are accompanied by an ancillary strip running at the foot of the pages. Now, at the most inconvenient moment, ‘William & Percy’ take over the main page before the dramatic hunt continues…

Disillusioned, our man contemplates joining the army before opting for the natural life of a primitive shaman in ‘Jimbo is Running Sore’ (complete with graphic diversion ‘Klorex & Purox: the Mad Bombers’). After a brief conversation with God the hunt for Judy resumes; an extended odyssey leading to a fantastic barrage of visual extravaganzas that encompass the explosive death of the world and its aftermath: an eye-popping crescendo of apocalyptic imagery that perfectly captures the philosophy of 20th century punk.

If you’re looking for something a little strong, a little strange, perfectly outrageous and boldly experimental this is the ideal introduction to the works of an absolute maestro.
© 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988 Gary Panter. All Rights Reserved.

Posted on

Hellblazer: The Fear Machine


By Jamie Delano and various & (Vertigo)
ISBN: 978-1-84576-880-5

You’ve either heard of John Constantine by now or you haven’t, so I’ll be as brief as I can. Originally created by Alan Moore during his groundbreaking run on Swamp Thing, he is a mercurial modern wizard, a chancer who plays with magic on his own terms for his own ends. He is not a hero. He is not a nice person. Sometimes though, he’s all there is between us and the void.

Given his own series by popular demand, he premiered in the dying days of Reaganite Atrocity in the US but at the height of Thatcherite Barbarism in England, so as we’re singing the same song now (but with second-rate Britain’s Got Talent cover-artists as leaders) I thought I’d cover a few old gems that might be regaining their relevance in the days ahead…

In 1987 Creative Arts and Liberal attitudes were dirty words in many quarters and the readership of Vertigo was pretty easy to profile. Jamie Delano began the series with relatively safe horror plots, introducing us to Constantine’s unpleasant nature, chequered history and odd acquaintances but even then discriminating fans were aware of a joyously anti-establishment political line and wild metaphorical underpinnings.

Skinheads, racism, Darwinian politics, gruesome supernature and more abound in the dark dystopian present of John Constantine – a world of cutting edge of mysticism, Cyber-shamanism and political soul-stealing. In Delano’s world the edges between science and magic aren’t blurred – they simply don’t exist.

Some terrors are eternal and some seem inextricably tied to a specific time and place: The Fear Machine (collecting issues #14-22 of the mature readers monthly comicbook) is an engrossing extended epic which began when the wizard went on the run after the tabloid press pilloried him as a Satanist serial killer in ‘Touching the Earth’ (by Delano, Richard Piers Rayner & Mark Buckingham).

Forced to flee his inner London comfort-zone he is adopted by a band of neo-pagan Travellers (apparently as responsible for all the ills plaguing society in the 1980s and 1990s as fat people and immigrants are today…) and journeys through the heartland of Britain.

Going native amongst the drop-outs, druggies, bath-dodgers and social misfits Constantine buddies up with an immensely powerful psychic girl named Mercury and her extremely engaging mum, Marj, but even amidst these freewheeling folks he can feel something nasty building. The first inkling occurs in ‘Shepherd’s Warning’ when Mercury discovers an ancient stone circle has been fenced off by a quasi-governmental company named Geotroniks. Someone is trying to shackle Mother Earth’s circulatory system of Ley lines…

Meanwhile elsewhere, people are compelled to kill and mutilate themselves and Geotroniks is watching and taking notes…

When police raid the Travellers campsite in ‘Rough Justice’ Mercury is abducted and imprisoned in a secret complex where the mind’s limits and the Earth’s forces are being radically tested. Cutting edge stuff… if only the subjects and observing scientists can be persuaded to stop committing suicide…

Mike Hoffman illustrated the fourth chapter, ‘Fellow Travellers’ as Constantine headed back to London for help in finding Mercury and uncovering the secrets of Geotroniks. He gains a horrific insight when the train he’s on is devastated by a psychic assault which makes all the passengers destroy themselves…

‘Hate Mail & Love Letters’ (with art by Buckingham & Alfredo Alcala) begins two months later. Marj and the travellers are hiding in the Highlands with a fringe group called the Pagan Nation, led by the mysterious Zed – an old friend of the wily trickster. Constantine keeps digging, but across the country suicide and self harm are increasing. Society itself seems diseased, but at least the Satanist witch hunt has been forgotten as the Press rage on to their next sanctimonious cause celebré…

Touching base with his few police contacts and pet journalists the metropolitan mage soon stumbles into a fresh aspect of the mystery when a Masonic hitman begins removing anyone who could be of use to his enquiries in ‘The Broken Man’. Saving journalist Simon Hughes from assassination in a particularly exotic manner guaranteed to divert attention from his politically damaging investigations, Constantine finds new clues that a the psychic horror and social unrest are all being orchestrated by reactionary aspects of the government and a sinister “Old Boy network”…

And somewhere dark and hidden Mercury’s captors are opening doors to places mortals were never meant to…

As the Pagan Nation’s priestesses work their subtle magics to find the missing girl and save humanity’s soul, a disgusting, conglomerate beast-thing is maturing, made from fear and pain, greed and suffering and deep black despair: provoking a response from and guest-appearance by Morpheus, the Sandman, and prompting Constantine, Hughes and possibly the last decent copper in London to go hunting…

Picking up another recruit in the form of KGB scientist Sergei, events spiral ever faster as the Freemasons – or at least their “Magi Caecus” elite – are revealed to be organising the plot in ‘Betrayal’, combining Cold War paranormal research, economic imperialism, Thatcherite divisive self-gratification and the order’s own quasi-mystical arcana to create a situation in which their guiding principles will control society and the physical world. It nothing more than a greedy power-grab using blood and horror to fuel the engines of change…

All pretence of scientific research at Geotroniks is abandoned in ‘The God of All Gods’ as Masonic hitman Mr. Webster goes off the deep end, ignoring his own Lodge Grandmaster’s orders to abort the project amidst an increasing national atmosphere of mania, determined to free the fearful thing they’ve created and unmake the modern world at all costs. Constantine’s allies are all taken and the wizard is left to fight on alone.

Knee deep in intrigue, conspiracy and spilled guts, humanity seems doomed unless Constantine’s band of unhappy brothers and a bunch of Highland witch women can pull the biggest, bloodiest rabbit out of the mother of all hats in the spectacular conclusion ‘Balance’…

The heady blend of authoritarian intransigence, counterculture optimism, espionage action, murder-mystery conspiracy theories and ancient sex-magic mix perfectly to create an oppressive tract of inexorable terror and smashed hope before the astounding climax forestalls if not saves the day of doom, in this extremely impressive dark chronicle which still resonates with the bleak and cheerless zeitgeist of the time.

This is a superb example of modern horror fiction, inextricably linking politics, religion human nature and sheer bloody-mindedness as the root cause of all ills. That our best chance of survival is a truly reprehensible exploitative monomaniac seems a perfect metaphor for the world we’re locked into…

Clever, subversive and painfully prophetic, even at its most outlandish, this tale jabs at the subconscious with its scratchy edginess and jangles the nerves from beginning to end. An unmissable feast for fear fans, humanists and political mavericks everywhere…

© 1989, 2008 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

Posted on

100 Bullets: Samurai


By Brian Azzarello & Eduardo Risso (Vertigo)
ISBN: 978-1-84023-800-3

Not long after Columbus landed in America, thirteen ancient European crime-families migrated to the New World and clandestinely carved up the continent in perpetuity between them. As the country grew cultured and a new nation was born the Trust embedded itself in every aspect of it.

To prevent their own greed and ambition from destroying the sweetest deal in history the Families created an extraordinary police force to mediate and act when any Trust member or faction acted against the unity and best interests of the whole. They were called the Minutemen and were always led by the kind of peacekeeper needed to keep them honest and actively cooperating – a man uniquely honest, dedicated, smart and remorseless.

Not too long ago though, The Trust’s leaders decided they no longer needed overseers and acted with characteristic ruthlessness to remove them. Betrayed Minutemen leader Agent Graves didn’t take his dismissal well and has been slowly enacting a plan to rectify that casual injustice. For years he has been appearing to various betrayed and defeated people as a “Court of Last Resort” offering answers, secrets, an untraceable handgun and 100 Bullets…

Beginning as one of the best crime-comics in decades, 100 Bullets slowly, steadily transformed into a captivating conspiracy thriller of terrifying scope and immense, intimate detail. With this seventh volume (collecting issues #43-49 of the magnificently adult comicbook) creators Azzarello and Risso began arraying their huge cast of pawns and key pieces for the endgame and unguessable conclusion even though it was only the halfway point of the show…

With ‘Chill in the Oven’ the action switches to a maximum security prison where Loop Hughes is just getting out of solitary. Sadly that’s only the beginning of his problems since both the convict alpha dogs and the guards have been waiting for this moment…

Luckily, or probably not, the heat is temporarily off since the new intake includes the most dangerous sociopath nut-job in America… Lono, a brutal force of nature planning to take charge even from behind bars, fresh from an unexpected encounter in 100 Bullets: Six Feet Under the Gun. Sadly, the murderous ex-Minuteman also has a score to settle with Loop too…

When the Trust’s fixer Shepherd pays a surprise visit Lono realises who is behind all his problems if not why and decides to take matters into his own calloused, bloodstained hands…

Meanwhile out in the free world junkie Jack Daw (100 Bullets: A Foregone Tomorrow) still has one of those untraceable guns and is travelling south with his skeevy pal Mikey. ‘In Stinked’ finds the pair laying low at a seedy wild animal park that secretly caters to “businessmen” who want to kill a big cat without the hassle of licenses, laws or leaving the country…

Jack clearly thinks he has more in common with the caged beasts but when he discovers what else goes on at Jungle Land the lost boy finally makes a stand that leaves the walls red and nobody standing…

Wicked, clever, blackly funny and gloriously, gratuitously vicarious, this ultra-violent, sex-stuffed, profanity-packed, utterly addictive thrill ride goes from strength to strength but always pay close attention! Every beautiful panel on every thrilling page might hold clues to the grand saga unfolding before your eyes.

If there are still any of you rush-starved story fans – grown-up, paid-up, immured to harsh language and unshaken by rude, nude and very violent behaviour – who aren’t addicted to this compulsive classic yet, get out there and grab every one of these graphic novels at all costs! You need them all and the very best is yet to come…

© 2003, 2004 Brian Azzarello, Eduardo Risso & DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

Posted on

Nightwings (DC Science Fiction Graphic Novel #2)


By Robert Silverberg, adapted by Cary Bates, Gene Colan & Neal McPheeters (DC Comics)
ISBN: 0-930289-06-04

During the 1980s DC, on a creative roll like many publishers large and small, attempted to free comics narrative from its previous constraints of size and format as well as content. To this end, legendary editor Julie Schwartz called upon contacts from his early days as a Literary Agent to convince major names from the prose fantasy genre to allow their early classics to be adapted into a line of Science Fiction Graphic Novels.

In the far future Earth has aged into a somnolent, semi-feudalistic place of fantastic creatures and shabby glories. An old man from the Guild of Watchers is making his way to the fabled city of Roum, accompanied by an innocent gamin and a sardonic lizard-man outcast.

Watchers scan the heavens using portable technology and inherent psychic sensitivity, seeking the earliest inklings of a predicted alien invasion: this one has wandered the entire world and used up his life doing so. Impoverished and frail he makes his way to the greatest city on Earth with the beautiful Avluela, a creature who can fly like a butterfly – but only in darkness when the fierce solar winds have subsided. The old fool loves and yearns for the alluring nymph as does Gormon, their other companion. This reptilian goliath from the shunned guild of sub-humans carries with him a dark secret…

Each has their own reasons for going to the Eternal City, but as they make their way to the palace of the Prince, greatest ruler of this diminished globe they see evidence that all glory has faded and Roum is just as corrupted, decadent and increasingly bestial as everywhere else. Denied accommodation and food even from their own Guilds, appalled by the poverty and cruelty around them, the trio find tainted shelter within the Prince’s Palace but only because the arrogant, radiant ruler desires the fragile, gossamer Avluela and what he wants, he takes…

Disillusioned and at his lowest ebb the Watcher wonders if this world might actually benefit from the invasion he has wasted his life searching for. When heartbroken and vengeful Gormon reveals his own secret the Watcher’s equipment finally sounds the alarms he has waited all his life to hear…

Silverberg’s deeply moving, Hugo Award winning story of faded glories and mistimed love was first published in Galaxy Magazine in 1968 and was followed by two sequel novellas, Perris Way and To Jorslem which were promptly edited together to form the novel Nightwings.

Adaptors Cary Bates and Gene Colan, ably assisted by lettering legend Gaspar Saldino and painter/colourist Neal McPheeters, perfectly capture the debilitating aura of inescapable, inexorable loss and dissolution, but as always, any adaptation – no matter how well executed – is absolutely no substitute for experiencing a creator’s work the way it was originally intended, so Go Read The Story too.

However, as this is a place to review graphic novels, please be assured that this is one that works excessively well; moody, portentous and beautifully realised.

This refined, stoic interpretation is welcomingly traditional in its delivery, allowing the tale to creep into your hearts and is a perfect companion to DC’s other adaptations in this series. It’s an inexpressible pity they’re all currently out of print and this is an experiment the company should seriously consider resuming. Moreover as I’ve said before: these DC Science Fiction Graphic Novels would make an irresistible “Absolute” compilation…
© 1968, 1969 Robert Siverberg. Adapted with permission of the author and Agberg Ltd. All text and illustrations © 1985 DC Comics Inc. All rights reserved.