Previously, in Wuxtry...
The world's youngest old man tries to down wayyy too many bad Warren Ellis comix and crossfades 'em, like the weakest sort of weekend warrior, with a fuckovalot of John Smith joints.
The result? Sobbing!
[ IN, LIKE A LION: ]
Revere, Witch-Boy of London (1990-1994) - written on acid by John Smith & fully painted by Simon Harrison
This was really something.
I can't speak to the Truth of the supposition overriding my reading, but this three-year project between Smith & Harrison strongly suggests a love letter. As in, John Smith was in love with Simon Harrison-- or at least the aesthetic / spiritual forces Harrison channeled, during this time period. This is the span of time when Smith was straining to make it work with DC's freshly-minted Vertigo line, wrestling 'Scarab' into a shape Berger would find acceptable for publication.
* 'Scarab', in case you missed it, was an expy rendition of Dr. Fate... where the question was, what if Kent & Inza Nelson needed to bang so badly it rewrote reality? The expy of Inza, imprisoned for a tiny eternity outside of time, becomes some kind of Lovecraftian jellyfish angel, and eventually Scarab "rescues" her with a good old-fashioned flying fuck in the clouds. Then some Indigo Prime agents show up & do a blood sacrifice with a rabbit-- don't worry! one of the agents is sacrificed to the rabbit, not the other way around --ending Smith's weird little bad little comic in perpetuity. Never to be revisited, never to be resurrected! Call it a dream sequence, call it an alternate reality, call it a limited series: just don't call it cancelled. You can't cancel something that never happened.
There were plenty of other projects flying 1990-1994, too-- this was a period of peak productivity for the slow-rolling Smith, who was polishing up Devlin Waugh and revamping Tyranny Rex, in addition to the pre-requisite Judge Dredd & Rogue Trooper guest scripts. Even as he's shaking it up with Grant Morrison & Mark Millar at 2000ad, dropping tabs at company outings, generally being 20something & fab, he's also producing 'Revere: The Witch-Boy of London'. Basically he's living any comix scribe's best life.
And this book, this is evidence that if you love comix, comix will love you back. Even if your collaborator is a straight man, you can still do something weirdly autobiographical & genre-busting that spooks the horses & antagonizes normie plebes who wanna jerk to Judge Anderson. Smith, according to Harrison, actually dropped to his knees & kissed the painted art for this book. Smith went to bat with the editorial staff, who were as irritable about the full-frontal nudity as they were about the lack of a cogent plot: "Nobody's going to nip off to the toilet with Revere for a wank," said Smith in defense of Harrison, who was being scolded for being too brazen for Mrs. Grundy. The love would not be denied; the love was Real.
The pair got to finish their vanity project with minimal interference. The barely-hetero tale of young Revere (modeled on Harrison) is guided by the Astrologer (Smith's fictionsuit) and the floating disembodied head of his mother through a parched & fascist hellscape alleged to be London, in a meandering metaphysical struggle with archetypes of violence & sexuality. There's especial attention paid to Revere's barely-formed libido and his notions of femininity, so after a side-quest or two through the mirrors of London, Revere roars back to slaughter his hangups, his oppressors, and brutally sacrifice his preconceived notions of fixed gender. London is drowned & restored to its fecund glory as Revere sloughs his mortality to hook up with his soulmate (who's not the Astrologer! but also, no longer "male") in an eternal astral 69 of LUV, brah.
It may sound groovy, but it's not that: 'Revere' is harrowingly strange & strained. Readership & editors alike maligned it as too mumblecore to be Art, so it's kind of become a legend unto itself, this. Rarely reprinted, it's a comic exclusively for fans of the medium: not for fans of 2000ad, not even necessarily for fans of Smith-- Smith himself says he rarely revisits or re-reads 'Revere', because he had a head full of acid for the third & final act. 'Revere', as a whole, was a painful time for the author, who'd been officially rejected by Vertigo & Berger, and all he wanted was to do was Make Comics, Dance and Drug his cares away.
Three outta three ain't bad, John. Three out of three ain't bad.
Six Treasures of the Spiral: Comics Formed Under Pressure (1996-2020) - by Matt Madden
A clearing house of short strips that exceed the promise of Mazzacchelli's shorts. Like it's hard to not see Madden as a student of Mazzacchelli-- but where Mazz stops, Madden keeps having a laugh. Mazz feels like a teacher, making comix: it's how you wind up with the visually compelling (but generally uninteresting) Asterios Polyp. 'City Of Glass' is great comix but it's as dead inside as the novel it adapts. Whereas these Madden comix are whimsical: an instructor taking prompts for projects and making FUN. He does a whole section of short riffs based off a real estate office next to a post office, and it's all sharp.
Po-mo comix with a purpose beyond postmodernism. The point: to teach oneself to laugh at the sterile impetus of design.
Grip: The Strange World Of Men (2004 / 2014) - written & drawn by Beto Hernandez
My husband hates on the anatomical eccentricity of Beto's art. But I don't. Bodies are weird, and come in all sizes & shapes. My sole disappointment with the 2014 reissue of Grip stems from the (economical) decision to not pay the original colourist from the Vertigo run. I don't know that the new pages do much to improve the story-- this is to me a rare case of Beto fluffing, instead of doing something additive. But still, it's a book that was out of print for a decade, and that's not right when you're talking Hernandez comix.
Nah, I'm not gonna talk about the story. It's Beto doing his favorite bizarrerie bits: body-hopping identity-swapping ballin' swingin' bebop. Beto may age but his desire to include a little something for everybody is forever young. This book is easily as much fun as 'Twilight Children', as sprawling & strange & looped-in-itself-- but, surprisingly (to me, and probably to anybody who reads it) it's less horny than that book, or (honestly) most of Beto, despite the constant nudity & visceral gender switcheroos. It has a ton in common with 'Birdland' in gender-bendy terms, but with zero dino-sodomy & not one money shot. Impressive restraint!
Nobody tops Beto but Beto. Top Beto is tops.
I Love This Part (2015) - written & drawn by Tillie Walden
I love the games with scale Tillie plays. I love how BIG the emotions are in this book, how the characters' hearts are larger than the rooms of the houses they loom over. It's rilly literally acting-out the feelings of falling into, and away from, and learning how to: love. Tillie hears the music of our innermost irrational impulses. The desire for self-discovery, in tandem & in isolation, in ringing harmony with a world which seems too constrained for us, these days.
I love this book. It sings to me. It wants to sing to everyone with ears to hear.
A City Inside (2016) - written & drawn by Tillie Walden
Book as therapy. Book as memory. Memory as therapy. Memory as book.
This one's got it all. Tillie's work is just magic, man. And she makes it seem effortless.
A Man's Skin (2021) - written by Hubert, drawn by Zamzim
Boy Island (2024) - written & illustrated by Leo Fox
The story is not for me because it was not written for me, but I know that I can empathize with it. Leo's done some brave-ass art here. I love the gently addled expressive tilt of their lines. The colouring is exquisite and the book as a whole is a beautiful, melty slab of self. Gonna search out more of Leo's stuff. If there's one drawback to this book it's that there's little incentive to actually re-read it: Boy Island is all very up-front that there's nothing beneath the surface to search for, really. Not that I have a valid criticism there, though, because this is a Message Book, and it is about This Specific Historical Moment in american nazi-ass stupidity, and I'm definitely going to re-browse Boy Island after seeking out Fox's other comix. Astute social commentary.
Transmetropolitan vol. 1: Back On The Street (1997) - written by a young Warren Edgelord & drawn by the rickety genius behind Space Beavers, perhaps best remembered for his mainstream comix debut as penciler of Wolverine #54, Darick Robertson, co-creator of The Boys, a startlingly successful multimedia franchise
I don't know. It's Warren Ellis doing comedy. If your thing is loud and obvious, then go to it. Ellis has made me laugh. But not with this book. Honestly, I remember this thing being on the shelves. It interested me less than any other Helix title, if that's possible.*
* The moral being if Garth Ennis, in the midst of doing Preacher, spinning a yarn of future nuns with future guns cannot interest people, then your publishing imprint is rotten on the vine.
That's it. That's the review.
I padded out a month of my life re-reading Transmet and I kind of regard the entire venture as preparation for death. You know you have to go through it. You really would rather you didn't. But you're going to. And then some poor peon you'll never be able to repay has to remove the shit you left in your pants at the end of a protracted and irritatingly drawn-out death rattle.
Seriously. Get in your hole. Life's over.
John Constantine, Hellblazer #141: 'Shoot' (1999) - written by Warren Ellis & illustrated by Phil Jimenez
Is this victim blaming?
I'm going to break from my previous run of just bitching about Warren Ellis and say, there might be something here. It feels like a something that should have developed for more than a single issue. It feels as though it should be the launching point for a three-to-four parter. But it's not.
Spoilerz: What it is, is Ellis saying something awk about Awkmerica: that kids everyfuckingwhere have given up and are self-annihilating, more-or-less, by choosing to accept their place & fate in this horrible gun-dominated culture we've created for ourselves.
For reasons I can't quite make line up, Ellis chose to use transcript dialogue directly from the Jonestown tapes. There's a specialist in this issue who keeps the Jonestown tape running as she studies footage of the enigmatic school shootings. As the choice of soundtrack for a misguided researcher, I guess it scans-- but I find it hard to believe that an accredited professional would be doing what she does: falling asleep to the sounds of mothers screaming as their children are poisoned. It's weird & unhealthy behavior & grounds for immediate re-assignment. But... whatever!
And then John shows up, because someone asked him to. And then he realizes he's been too obvious, and the lady studying the footage has caught him in the midst of HIS investigation. So he does what Ellis likes to do, and has Constantine insult her & lecture her-- and since she's meant to be kind of an avatar for the readership, Constantine is insulting & lecturing a predominantly American readership --and then insists she read the lips of the kids in the videos...
Culminating in the Shocking! Reveal! that the victims are all telling their individual murderers to "Shoot."
It's classic Ellis. He takes shots at the usual idiots: "experts" who insist media violence desensitizes, irresponsible parents, etc. But... It's Ellis saying all this. And Ellis likes writing about guns. As a citizen of a society with very different gun legislation, he's always been very ambivalent-verging-on-pro-gun. He'll word salad all day about the problems, even as he has Spider Jerusalem proactively murdering shitbags with questionably-acquired firearms.
So I don't know. I sincerely don't know about this one. I feel like this issue wasn't on very solid turf even before Columbine, and then he was told to re-write it or the issue would be spiked. Ellis being Ellis, he didn't want a rewrite, and he hates editors (in general) so he just walked. The issue eventually was released, ten-plus years later. By which point the issue is pretty toothless, because you & I both know school shootings aren't gonna dry up any decade soon.
At any rate. It's the last issue of Hellblazer Ellis did, and the only one of that run of Constantine I'd never read. Another one down. Jimenez does some fuckin' great work, overall, his tightest penciling since 'Entropy In The U.K.'. My opinion, at any rate. It's a curio. And what a curio.
Because IS this victim blaming? I kind of feel like it is. Ellis makes a point of how arcanely insoluable the Gun Issue is, for americans. But he doesn't blame the gun manufacturers, or the NRA, or the culture of fearmongering which has completely usurped one third of the north american continent. It could be argued that those things weren't the force they became, in the wake of September Eleventh, but fuck that. These issues existed before any major flights were hijacked & weaponized. The NRA & the profit motives of the gun lobby pre-dated any accelerants Sept. Lebbin dumped on the fire.
And that shit doesn't get name-checked, here. Instead we get the argument(?) that 'There's nothing magickal about the gun problem, it's just kids giving up & the victims giving up, and there's nothing that can be done. Sucks, dunnit?' It's nihilistic and angry, but it's performative nihilistic anger, the kind Ellis likes best.
Honestly, I wish I hadn't read this. Because it's a weirdly weak ending to a strong run-- 'Haunted' is one of my favourite Constantine story arcs, and one to which I retreated immediately in the wake of 'Shoot' --and it's making me ask questions I shouldn't be asking about a Constantine story.
Like, whether the writer knows what the fuck he is talking about.
John Constantine, Hellblazer #134-145: 'Haunted' (1999) - written by Warren Ellis & illustrated by John Higgins
This, Ellis knows. Abuse of power & hollow macho degeneracy & creepy-ass grooming & women being victimized & demolished & erased.
When John Constantine is glaring at Watford sweating & bugeyed as he reads the coroner's grim report, Constantine is my audience identification figure, and Watford is nasty bastard Ellis.
But enough counting the sins of an annoying figure I once held in over-elevated regard. Let's talk about the guy drawing every salty bead on Watford's chapped upper lip: John "Absolute Legend" Higgins.
Higgins draws the tightest Constantine buttocks. No smoker in human history has ever had an ass as toned as Higgins renders unto John in issue #134. The magic of comix, folks.
Higgins' primary strength is a knack for cartoony abstraction which, perversely, grounds every bit of ugly blood-crusted violence in this thing. And his sense of pacing is second to none. This is a perfect comic book. Because of John Higgins. The page layouts alone inspire.
Hellblazer never looked better. It shoulda stopped here. It really shoulda.
WildC.A.T.s: Gang War (1999, i think) - by the author of Lost Girls, Alan Moore (in his sleep) & illustrated by Travis Charest and a gang of terrified chimpanzees with blunt sticks & deadline diarrhea
It's no Lost Girls. Remind me to regale you with my opinions about that some other time.
No, this book was shit because WildC.A.T.s has always been shit, in every incarnation. It is a dead I.P. walking. It is zombi IP in the DC vaults, now, and no better fate awaited it, because every iteration of WildStorm studios has been a shitshow. These were studios founded by pros who know what it took to produce a book on time and they did nothing but fuck it up straight from the jump. And it's not like we wouldn't have bought WildC.A.T.s no matter how long an issue took to put out-- Jim Lee, j'accuse! --so they coulda made it quarterly, or whatever. But they had their sights set on monthly, and they never made that profit the way they wanted because their artists always tapped out leaving a book stuck with lamers who can't bring it, then sales further sag like somebody replaced the office creamer with saltpeter.
Anyway, WildStorm couldn't make this book really take off, even with heat rented from Alan Moore. Because these fill-in artist jamborees might've been fun to hammer out at the 11th hour but they don't FLOW worth a damn.
Fuck it. I bought this cheap, like five bucks. Now I'm giving it away in a Little Free Library alongside 'The Upturned Stone' and some paperbacks. Bruce Sterling and Flann O'Brien. I'm leaving this malformed little dude in good company. Hopefully he gets a good home, this misshappen gimpylegged donkey dicked little fella with his adorable crossed eyes.
He really tried.
Saraphim 266613336 Wings (1993) - written by Mamorou Oshii & Satoshi Kon, illustrated by Satoshi Kon
THIS is how you make a fucked-up broken comic w/ a rep. You don't waste the reader's time.
Rork, vol. 5: Capricorne (1990) - written & illustrated by Andreas Martens
since i'm not great with french, this untranslated vol of rork is a little opaque in terms of narrative, but the visuals are delicious, as ever. the pages are PACKED-- the panel count varies, but overall there's anywhere from 9-18 panels a page, which seems absolutely insane to me. the original boards he works on must be huge. somewhere in the early 80s andreas developed a preferred grid for building things with: a base of 20, four panels a row, five rows. he uses this for pretty much everything, just shifting bits around. a really nice example of this is...
Coutoo (1993) - written & illustrated by Andreas Martens
it's not a great story, but the way it's all built is fuckin' fab. it's
one of my favorite murders-in-80s-new-york comix
i've never seen it
in full colour, although apparently that exists. the b&w is sharp
as obsidian chips in milk, and there are some real slow zooms & pans
that are all very cinematic, like Frank Miller cinematic, only possible
because of the base 20 pattern. you've never heard him say it, but frank miller loved andreas, although
he never mentions the man's comix anywhere. mmmaybe because he straight-up swiped one of Marv's most famous profile shots from Rork? the debts go wider than a single swipe: the page layouts in 'elektra lives again'
owe so very. much. to andreas, as do the manic architectural dalliances miller indulges in. 'ronin's famous grid, and
'tdkr' / 'tdksa' definitely owes andreas for the applications of grid timing. miller
diverges from andreas in that miller always works AWAY from complexity,
both in page layout & story terms, whereas andreas goes the opposite direction.
he likes it to get denser & denser: he wants the pages to fold in on
the reader & trap the eye
miller used to work like that,
but he lost the patience & discipline. he likes winging it too
much to drive with a seatbelt on, he wants to feel himself leaning into
the Tilt! as the feels the whole vehicle careen & judder around him: he likes getting lost in his story; miller doesn't enjoy planning
andreas's storytelling is cold & methodical, though, and
he likes the menace of a methodical, mathematical panel progression.
andreas can DO "lovecraftian"-- a word i absolutely abhor, but i mean it,
here: andreas can make the uncanny happen. 'cromwell stone' is maybe the best example of this: where the uncanny, todorov's fantastique, emerges from the careful examination of the world going Wrong, of abruptions of irreality. he gets that, on the page
now, 'coutoo' has none of that. it's just a visually bitchin' short
comic built out of brick stupid american pulp tropes. storywise the
kind of stuff frank miller would term a 'yarn', grist for a sin city
regular release. but 'coutoo' has none of the Showoff shit you see with
frank. it's ALL restraint, and honestly i think 'coutoo' feels kind of
tepid, as a story. there's magical negro schtick too (the kind miller would be totally in the tank for) along with bog-standard
italian mafioso caricatures. i dunno
'coutoo' is just so... weird... because
it's andreas applying his Real Comics shit to making a super stereotypically "American"
story, and if andreas is homaging any comix artists in here, it's maybe
keith giffen, with the designs of certain of his cop's faces. there's
one guy with basically a xeroxed expression in every panel he appears.
that's gotta be a giffen joke. i know andreas read american comix, and
he probably got a kick out of giffen
suppositions of influence aside,
'coutoo' is a puzzling-ass piece of work overall; there's a major pulp
detour to WW2 nazi science resulting in a viral serial killing "spirit",
the titular 'coutoo', and an intergenerational cycle of violence with a
policeman killing his cop father
like, this is a lot, too much, for
46 pages. i'm sure frank miller was licking his lips when he read it,
thinking, 'shit, i shoulda done some of that'. dark horse publishing
this, twice, right alongside frank when he was Moving Units for DH, and
miller never talking about andreas once... it's almost like miller
didn't want to recognize the competition, or the debt
but there i go
speculating again
