"...Gimme A Circus Like This Anyday." COMICS! Sometimes We're In Like Flint!

There's a little bit of Dredd in this one, a smidgeon mayhap. However there is a whole lot of Carlos Ezquerra and he's really making his computer colouring work in this one. Some real freaky skyscapes going on in the background of these panels. If you're a Carlos Ezquerra fan you'll probably want to pick this one up. Oh, looks like I started the review early, better put the rest under the jump. See ya, wouldn't want to be ya! CURSED EARTH KOBURN by Carlos Ezquerra

Anyway, this…

THE JUDGE DREDD MEGA COLLECTION REVIEW INDEX

JUDGE DREDD: THE MEGA COLLECTION Vol. 67: CURSED EARTH KOBURN Art by Carlos Ezquerra Written by Gordon Rennie Lettered by Ellie DeVille and Annie Parkhouse Originally serialised in JUDGE DREDD MEGAZINE 211-212, 221-223, 228, 239, 241-244, 314-318 & 361-364 © 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2011, 2015 & 2016 Rebellion A/S Hatchette Partworks/Rebellion, £9.99 (2016) JUDGE DREDD created by Carlos Ezquerra & John Wagner

‘Cursed Earth Koburn’ mostly features the exploits of circuit-Judge Koburn, rounded out by a Dredd adventure featuring the vengeful El Maldito. Both Koburn and Maldito hark back down the ages to Battle Picture Weekly and the strips 'Major Eazy' and 'El Mestizo', both of which were created by Carlos Ezquerra and Alan Hebden. I’ve written some slapdash slop about 'Major Eazy' before HERE, but just to recap for those too busy to click on a link: Major Eazy was a laid-back one man attack, as anti-authoritarian as he was effective in taking the fight to the Nazis. And since he was very effective indeed he was very anti-authoritarian indeed, as many a weak chinned officer type found out to his stuttering chagrin. Like most of Battle’s characters he was a direct reaction against the bright eyed and bushy tailed Tommy pushing back the baddies for God, Queen and Country, always with that distinct sense of good sportsmanship which defines the British in their own minds but in no one else’s. In comparison Major Eazy would fuck you up, and fuck you up good and he’d do it quick and nasty too. Because in war you get the job done, you don’t stop and have tea and scones while you do it. Visually Eazy was modelled on David Niven, as any fool knows. No, it was the American actor James Coburn (1928-2002), an actor with an easy-going and thoroughly amiable but subtly malevolent, screen presence., Despite apparently being born with the teeth of  a much larger man the ‘70s were good to James Coburn, indeed as they were to British comics, and so the latter plucked the former’s iconic image from Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron and plunked it in a strip for kids, probably about 50 seconds after Hebden and Ezquerra left the movie theatre, since both film and character appeared in 1976. Which is why Eazy wears a German cap, usually pulled down over his narrow, calculating slits for eyes. He also usually has a cheroot drooping from his slim lip because Coburn was a keen smoker both on screen and off.

CURSED EARTH KOBURN: KUSS HARD by Ezquerra, Rennie and Parkhouse

If you buy the Arrow blu-ray of 'Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia' not only will you have bought the greatest movie about Warren Oates and a head in a bag ever made, but you also get the documentary about Peckinpah, 'Man of Iron', in which Coburn probably appears, smoking. It’s highly likely because if you do buy that blu-ray (which I think you should. NOW!) you also get a disk with 10 hours (1!0! H!O!U!R!S!) of interviews, from which the contents of the doc are culled. I’m far too busy being a supercilious prick to have watched this yet, but I did treat myself to the first 30 mins or so, in which James Coburn appears, smoking. He is also, obviously, awesome.  He is so awesome in fact that after a few seconds it’s like you’re sat opposite him while he suavely drawls about the past, smoking. So convivial is his company that at one point I almost tapped him for a smoke, then I remembered it was a recording, he’d been dead for 15 years and I no longer smoke. He’s a funny one because you always think he just showed up and did his stuff, but the interview reveals him as a proper artist with thoughts about his art and a real interest in the art of moviemaking. I mean, I never realised this, but James Coburn was second unit director on 'Convoy'. The last thing I ever envisaged James Coburn doing was sitting on a water tower waiting for instructions via walkie-talkie (like a mobile phone, kids) so he could film footage for one of Sam Peckinpah’s shittiest films. Man, the dude really dug Peckinpah. Oh, he also reveals what the ending to 'Cross of Iron' means, which is something I’ve been puzzling over for about four decades. (SPOILER: It’s hilarious, after all these years it turns out that the ending to 'Cross of Iron' means that Peckinpah set Coburn and Maximilian Schell loose on a set of exploding scrap until something happened. What happened was that Schell’s prop gun fell to bits in his hand and Coburn laughed his ass off in response. That’s it. Brilliant.) Basically James Coburn was awesome, and this was duly recognised by the Academy in 1998 with an Oscar® for his role in 'Affliction'. (Which is a great movie; one that should be on Blu-Ray, people!)

CURSED EARTH KOBURN: KUSS HARD by Ezquerra, Rennie and Parkhouse

I don’t really know where I am now, uh, Major Eazy was based visually on James Coburn? Which is why Koburn is called Koburn. According to the interview with Rennie in the back of the book they tried lots of variations along the lines of “Eazy” but went with Koburn, which works. Turns out a fan suggested Ezquerra bring Eazy back, and that was Rennie’s impetus for introducing the basic character to the world of Dredd. The first strip “Sturm Und Dang” sets out the characters’ stall. Dredd is on a hotdog run with some cadets and picks up Koburn along the way. Koburn knows the territory because he’s a cursed Earth circuit-judge, a kind of itinerant sheriff with a given area to patrol. This set-up  allows Rennie to play Koburn’s slackness off against Dredd’s rigidity, to effectively define how the character works. It’s a smart move. Key is the fact that both Dredd and Koburn get the job done. It’s no good being a laidback dude if you can’t snipe a guy’s eye out from two klicks at the drop of a hat. Koburn’s all pose but underneath his cool poise you just know he’s like a cat in a room full of rocking chairs (© Traditional). All Dredd can see is infractions of Dress code and lack of respect.  But who ends up in a bath chair with a broken leg fighting a Panzer and who sashays his way through storms of bullets while barely breaking a sweat? That’s right. Oh, the panzer? Oh, yeah they are up against Comedy Nazis which isn’t ideal for me, because I’m not that into Comedy Nazis since that logically leads to Comical Concentration Camps and I have a hard time squaring that particular circle. And yet, I guess, yeah, it does acknowledge the roots of the character in a cheeky winkeyty-wink kind of a way, and no one gets hurt. Except the comical Nazis who get comically dead. Ezquerra is obviously having a whale of a time and gives The Cursed Earth his unique sheen of grubbiness while revisiting his war comic past, but with a quirky twist of Dredd. GOOD!

CURSED EARTH KOBURN: STURM UND DANG by Ezquerra, Rennie and Parkhouse

Next up is “Kuss Hard” in which Koburn gets a partner. Typically this is a female Judge, Judge Bonaventura, who is a bit more rules orientated than her shabby new partner, and so she’ll be getting a lesson in how things work in The Cursed Earth, dang straight! We get a bit of low-comedy where she walks in on Koburn being ridden by a Rubenesque whore and she’s all “Oh, my!”  She’s a straight arrow, see. Did you get that? The mis-matched (sigh) pair set off on the trail of The Kuss Brothers who are suspected of Organ-Legging and are regulars on Koburn’s patch. To be honest Rennie seems to get distracted early on in this one and it all just sort of happens without any weight to anything.  There’s a weird bit where Koburn visits the Brothers’ mom at the unsavoury jail she runs. When she’s less than forthcoming Koburn releases all the inmates and it’s like Rennie forgot Koburn was a Judge or something. He’s not some wandering vagabond laying down the law in his own special way; he’s a Judge! Even better (i.e. worse) their mom’s totally superfluous to proceedings, and it all ends, as it should have done a lot earlier, in a fight in a meat packing factory. It’s all a bit uninspired and flabby, which is unfortunate so early in the character’s run. But it does introduce Bonaventura for Koburn to play off, and old fogies will realise belatedly that she’s just a sex-swapped update of Sgt Daly, Major Eazy’s long-suffering subordinate.  (Later I think Eazy acquired an Arab chap who liked cutting Nazi throats, but there are probably some things we should leave to the ‘70s. Despite what UKIP think.) OKAY!

CURSED EARTH KOBURN: BURIAL PARTY by Ezquerra, Rennie and Parkhouse

“Burial Party” is up next, where Rennie widens the cast of the series to include Koburn’s fellow circuit-Judges, all of whom are either scarred or a bit nuts as befits the harshness of their lives. It’s a nice piece with drunken silliness giving way to sober reflection on occasion, as everyone drinks around the corpse of a fallen Judge, a blatant reminder of how they’ll all end up.  Despite being mostly set in one room with a fixed cast all wearing very similar clothes, Ezquerra’s art is so good at making even the mundane visually interesting with his bold feathering and attention to grimy detail, it never feels visually constrained in the least. GOOD! Having established, koburn, Bonaventura, and their fellow circuit-Judges Rennie goes on to show us one of their regular duties in  “The Assizes”. Titled after a now defunct British legal term describing courts held periodically around the country, The Assizes shows us Koburn doing precisely that small-scale  King Solomon shtick in some Cursed Earth armpit of a town. The complaints of the scabby citizenry are of the "humorous" kind and are probably really funny if you think people fucking animals is hilarious. It’s the kind of stuff that would make Garth Ennis shoot Guinness out of his (broken) nose. Still, Ezquerra has fun, and it’s always nice to see his never entirely-absent skills as a caricaturist slide to the fore. Hit and miss stuff, basically. So little is there to “The Assizes” that a substantial part of it is the prologue to the next story.  OKAY! “Malachi” is that next story and it’s where Rennie starts trying to inject some seriousness into his so far largely light-hearted strip.

CURSED EARTH KOBURN: MALACHI by Ezquerra, Rennie and Parkhouse

Malachi is some dude who encountered Judge Death and, well, unlived to tell the tale. Now he roams about killing everything he meets while saying spooky things in those spooky word balloons that make spooky words everso much more spooky!  I think he’s the physical manifestation of the hate The Cursed Earth dead hold for the living.  Or something. It’s not entirely clear, but what is clear is nothing can kill him and he’s headed straight for Koburn and Bonaventura. Which is unfortunate as Koburn and Bonaventura are currently looking in on Spring Seeds, a Juve Offenders facility. This means there’s a lot of kids for Malachi to mangle unless someone can stop him, which is going to be tough as Malachi, as is demonstrated by his run-ins with the circuit-Judges introduced in “Burial Party”, is unstoppable. Just so we care, Rennie gives us a tough Juve who may be salvageable and his pregnant girlfriend to root for. Pregnant? Yes, even in a Juve Offenders facility nature finds a way. Which is not too big a surprise as later when Malachi bursts into the girls dorm they are squealing in negligees like someone got 'Porky’s' and 'Friday The 13th' mixed up. Negligees in a Cursed Earth Juve Offenders facility! Oh, Carlos Ezquerra, you cheeky Spanish rogue! There’s a real feel of impending doom, some characters to care for, a sense of jeopardy and a genuine question about how Koburn can stop such an unstoppable force. In the interview Rennie says the more serious strips don’t work as well, but I’d have to disagree here. GOOD! Blimey, this is a proper slog isn’t it? Last push, everyone!

CURSED EARTH KOBURN: GOING AFTER BILLY ZANE by Ezquerra, Rennie and DeVille

In the final Koburn tale, “Going After Billy Zane” Rennie cranks up the seriousness and sets up a creepy tale in which the past which haunts the present bares its teeth. Koburn teams up with Judge Rico (who is basically another clone of Fargo; a younger Dredd) to track a Citi-Def squad lost on manoeuvres in The Cursed Earth. Unfortunately the Billy Zane Block Citi-Def squad are not lost but are tracking a distress signal, a distress signal sent by a man who died twelve years ago. Obviously they don’t know that, but we do. The squad are led by a female leader who lost her kids twelve years ago, the man who died twelve years ago was the Judge who broke Koburn in and, uh, about twelve years ago Rico had doubts about his lineage. (The original Rico being Dredd’s bent Judge brother. Judge Dredd's favourite joke: "My bent Judge brother has no nose! How does he smell?...") Which kind of reflects the strip in essence. That is, it struggles to link everything so that there’s a true sense of things coming full circle, a sense of inevitability but it..just…can’t…quite…make it happen. Which is a shame, because there’s some strong stuff on these pages. Strong enough certainly to entertain but not any stronger than that, alas. Ezquerra’s pours the creepiness on this one with a great inky ladle, making rocks and crevasses look far more menacing than you want them to . There’s a surface sense of unease and an undercurrent of violence running through all Ezquerra’s art here. The big noses and whiskery  comedy chins stay at home and he breaks out the shadows and silhouettes to unsettling effect. The strip peters out on a cliff hanger which is as yet unresolved, but even that seems appropriate to the sense of amorphous menace it seeks to convey. Koburn’s last outing is GOOD!

JUDGE DREDD: EL MALDITO by Ezquerra, Rennie and Parkhouse

Yes, that was Koburn’s last hurrah but there’s still one story to go: “El Maldito”. This strip is interesting for a couple of reasons, the most obvious of which I’ll save ‘til last. In this one a spooky figure is wading in on the side of the workers at a food processing facility in The Cursed Earth. What’s interesting here is that it’s not often that you see something so “up the workers!” in comics these days, which I find both odd and troubling. Mostly because this silence seems to reflect the increasing belief that somehow unions are bad things. Over here the papers (who are all to a greater or lesser extent in hock to tax dodging billionaires with their own freedom stifling agendas) endlessly roar at any and every episode of industrial action. And the vox pop is less than ideal, “how dare they inconvenience me!”, “I wish I could have the day off work!” and all that cretinous rot. Hey, poncho, I’ve been on strike. I’ve been on strike more than once, and I’ll let all you vox pop nincompoops out there into a little secret: you don’t get paid for strike days. And if I could afford not to get paid, pal, I wouldn't go to work. Those people striking? They are making a personal sacrifice to protest some form of injustice or proposed measure which will erode the safety of all involved. So, think on next time. Anyway, here we have a bunch of “peons” striking and acting up and generally getting in the way of business. Obviously that can’t stand, so the company send in the men with the batons. Apparently these workers want conditions improving or fair pay or somesuch socialist snowflake nonsense. Probably want treating like human beings or some other pie in the sky shit. So the plan is as ever, a few heads get cracked, names are named and the ringleaders get rounded up and hey ho we can all get back to work. Or you can. I’ll just spend all this lovely money while you put your back into it.

JUDGE DREDD: EL MALDITO by Ezquerra, Rennie and Parkhouse

Unfortunately a lot of companies mistake salaried employment for indentured servitude, and even more unfortunately a lot of governments are happy to let them. Oh, don’t worry, my right wing chums, I’m fighting a losing battle. It’s okay, don’t ruffle your share portfolios over it; you’re winning while I’m whining. Today Theresa May sent her letter triggering Article 50 which will see us begin to leave the EU. Yes, we’ll be leaving all that “red tape”, all those pesky regulations that gave us holidays, safe working conditions and kept our food safe are all up for grabs now. And the Tories have the whip hand. So, yeah, good times ahead for people who want more human faeces in their drinking water and horse meat in their Bolognese. Regulation! Pah! Who needs it! Personally I think we should just go the whole hog and bring back hanging, National Service and 'The Black and White Minstrel Show'. Say, did you see that shit about “Empire 2.0”? And that’s the grown-ups in charge that is. I despair, I honestly and utterly despair. I also lose my track but always find my way back. The strikers are helped by this spooky figure who comes in times of need, this El Maldito. The company has Judge Dredd. Sparks fly and symapthies may not lie entirely where you expect. It’s a decent strip with good points to make about industrial relations, but Judge Dredd survives a massive explosion, uh, because, and the subplot about the guy and his kid doesn’t gel but, y’know, fun is had and salient points are made, so GOOD! Oh, the other interesting thing (besides how irritated you got when I went on about strike action) is that El Maldito is a tip of the hat to 'El Mestizo', which like 'Major Eazy' ran in Battle Picture Weekly. Unlike Eazy this was set in the American Civil War and involved a black slave turned mercenary having weekly and very violent adventures. Yeah, a black slave , and if you started any of that moaning about pandering to Social Justice Warrior Snowflakes shit he'd have stuck a stick of dynamite up your arse and kicked you off a cliff. And quite right too. Unfortunately while I do remember the strip, all I can remember is he looked like Jimi Hendrix as dressed by Sergio Leone and was balls cool. Although it was the ‘70s so we probably would have said he was “jolly spiffing” and then laughed at some homosexuals on TV. Since there were only 16 episodes someone should collect the 'El Mestizo' strips so I can buy them, you know, with money I earned while not striking. HAH!

CURSED EARTH KOBURN: GOING AFTER BILLY ZANE by Ezquerra, Rennie and DeVille

NEXT TIME: If I don’t end up in jail for sedition, it’ll be more Judge Dredd and thus more COMICS!!!

"Death Among The Hors D'oeuvres." COMICS! Sometimes It's Tough, Tough Toys For Tough, Tough Boys!

What would Thunderbirds be like in the world of Judge Dredd? My dog has no nose; why isn’t Robbie Morrison funny? What if the messiah was susceptible to weed killer?  What would be the absolute best name for a character in a very cold place? Can a gun be too big? And if war is so terrible why is it so good for John Wagner? All questions I’ll probably forget to answer in the latest jolly riverdance through the JUDGE DREDD MEGA COLLECTION. JUDGE DREDD: THE HEAVY MOB by P J Holden

Anyway, this…

THE JUDGE DREDD MEGA COLLECTION REVIEW INDEX

JUDGE DREDD: THE MEGA COLLECTION Vol. 55: THE HEAVY MOB Art by Jim Murray, Clint Langley, Malcolm Davis, Nick Percival, Xuasus, David Millgate, Kevin Walker, Brian Bolland, Ron Smith and P J Holden Written by John Smith, Chris Standley, Robbie Morrison, John Wagner and Michael Carroll Coloured by Chris Blythe and Len O'Grady Lettered by Gordon Robson, Ellie DeVille, Steve Potter, Tom Frame and Annie Parkhouse Originally serialised in 2000AD Progs 122-125 & 1792-1796 & JUDGE DREDD MEGAZINE 2.31-2.33, 2.60-2.62, 2.70, 3.20-3.23, 3.29-3.33 & 240-243 © 1979, 1993, 1994, 1995, 2006, 2012 & 2015 Rebellion A/S Hatchette Partworks/Rebellion, £9.99 (2015) JUDGE DREDD created by Carlos Ezquerra & John Wagner

HOLOCAUST 12: SKYFALL Art by Jim Murray Written by John Smith & Chris Standley Lettered by Gordon Robson Originally published in JUDGE DREDD MEGAZINE 3.20-3.23 HOLOCAUST 12: STORM WARNING Art by Clint Langley & Malcolm Davis Written by John Smith & Chris Standley Lettered by Gordon Robson & Ellie DeVille Originally published in JUDGE DREDD MEGAZINE 3.29-3.33

HOLOCAUST 12: SKYFALL by Murray, Smith & Standley and Robson

In the 1990s the JUDGE DREDD MEGAZINE was so starved of content there was actually a strip based on a concept (The Holocaust Squad) which had appeared for less than a page in Judge Dredd a couple of decades earlier (see Father Earth below). Spotting that idea had legs was a pretty good spot, particularly as the 1990s were characterised by a bizarre fetish for trying to replicate the high-octane and content-light high-concept action movie style into comics. It didn’t work. Movies aren’t comics and comics aren’t movies. What zips past on the screen trundles across the page, and so this first outing for what is basically a fire brigade on steroids staffed by psychopaths  seems to involve the world’s slowest space ship crash. It would have been even slower on its first appearance with the weeks separating each instalment. On screen there are also actors, so even the slimmest of characters can be fattened with unspoken character. On the page Cyrus “The Virus” is probably a bit flat but stick his words in the mouth of John Malkovich and we’re off to the races. Smith’s strip has no such advantage so his characters are just violent ciphers. Visually they are distinct because comics have art and Murray and Langley are certainly distinctive artists, but that’s about it. One of the Squad carks it in this first instalment and I couldn’t remember which one , and our POV character gets side-lined shortly after he’s walked through a room and had everyone described to him. There’s a lot of “This is Cockthrottler Magoo. He can fart through cement and is just such a badass, well, it’s just plain scary is what it is!” A lot of telling not showing basically, and we all know how much we enjoy that.  Smith is a good writer but some writers are good only in certain areas. The vagaries of comic writing mean the humble dreamweavers are often called upon to write something they aren’t really suited to. Disaster-action movie seems a particularly poor fit for John Smith’s body horror obsession and trademark bursts of stream of consciousness narration. It’s too constricting; Smith works best on horror because horror is a tad more elastic than the action movie. The action movie is all about the cliché, moving within that cliché, and stretching it maybe, but always solidly retaining that core cliché. Smith’s not one to work well within restrictions. He’s too cerebral for this shit basically; you practically can feel him switching of areas of his brain, limiting himself.

HOLOCAUST 12: STORM WARNING by Langley & Davis, Smith & Standley and Robson & DeVille

It’s not a complete loss, he certainly has some fun sneaking his gore in there. Lots of people die horrible deaths in both instalments and it sometimes seems like concocting vile ends for his bodies is all that’s keeping Smith awake. It’s pretty much all that kept me awake too, well,  besides his always fun narrative captions, evidence that at least one comic creator enjoys modernist linguistic trickery. There’s a disaster, people die, the Holocaust Squad stop being naughty and set off, the clock is ticking, more people die, rescue is achieved. It’s all pretty much like that. In the first a spaceship fizzing with chemical death is crashing into the city, in the second the tallest building in the world (Chump Tower; ho ho!) is hit by a freak weather storm and a space ship, oh, and the zoo gets loose, because there's no such thing as overkill! In this second one Smith doesn’t make it easy to root for the victims as they are all rich arseholes (rissoles?) except for a manservant (maybe a nod to The Admirable Crichton (1957) there?) Ultimately Holocaust 13 just feels too restrictive a concept to have much room for Smith to manoeuvre within. Artistically the strip provides plenty of freedom for Murray and Langley (hmm, that sounds like a posh brand of paint) particularly in the realm of the grotesque.  Although given a largely tech-based scenario Murray gets some nice gore in there, and has fun with his POVs. He takes the time to paint the reflected lights in a pool of blood and his SFX have a Vaughn Bode/Comix wobble to them. The reproduction dulls his fully painted but cartoony art, but Murray goes the extra mile indicative of someone enjoying themselves. Clint Langley goes several miles too far and may be enjoying himself far too much. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what you’re looking at on Langley’s metallically garish yet brutally dark pages. It’s like squinting at a metal zoo losing its collective mind  in a catacomb. Langley’s obviously pushing the then available technology of photo manipulation to its extreme, and while it may be a struggle to read, it is just a step on the way to his current bizarre peak. For a couple of strips struggling so hard to be unpleasant, surprisingly there are pleasures in these Holocaust 13 strips but you have to hunt and peck for them. GOOD!

BRIT-CIT BRUTE Art by Nick Percival Written by Robbie Morrison Lettered by Ellie DeVille Originally published in JUDGE DREDD MEGAZINE 2.31-2.33 BRIT-CIT BRUTE: TRILOGY Art by Nick Percival, Xuasus and David Millgate Written by Robbie Morrison Lettered by Steve Potter Originally published in JUDGE DREDD MEGAZINE 2.60-2.62

BRIT-CIT BRUTE by Percival, Morrison and DeVille

I’m not spending long on this one as it’s clearly for people who found DC’s Lobo a bit highbrow. It’s supposed to be funny so you get our strapping lad of a lead being named Newt (because they are small!) and his boss who looks like John Major (British Tory Prime Minister 1990-97) is called Judge Major (because satire!) and some Elvis references (because he’s a lazy comedy staple!) and some underwear stealing (because the British!) and if you find your ribs being tickled by any of that you’ll soil yourself if you ever read any Mark Millar (ugh!). Brit-Cit Brute is bad is what I’m saying. And don’t be expecting any insight into Brit-Cit unless you are a massive fan of being disappointed. It’s hard to even tell what Brit-Cit looks like because Percival’s art is so unfocused. It’s the work of someone who likes drawing but hasn’t realised there’s more to comics than just drawing; there’s as much panel to panel continuity here as there is on Celebrity Squares. It’s a good job Robbie Morrison’s script is so tedious that it informs us of things we should be able to see , because thanks to Percival’s murky and stilted art we can’t actually see them anyway.  There’s a two page interview with Percival at the back where he sounds very enthusiastic and likeable, which is nice, but doesn’t alter any of the artistic deficiencies here. However we do also learn he was very young and Brit-Cit Brute was very early in his career, so maybe enshrining it between hardcovers wasn’t such a hot idea, Rebellion?  Xuasis and David Millgate fare better artistically, but none of it’s in any danger of hanging in the Louvre any time soon. Hopefully everyone involved had a great time because I didn’t.  Brit-Cit Brute has only a handful of episodes but manages to outstay it’s welcome before even the first of them is over. CRAP!

WYNTER Art by Kevin Walker Written by Robbie Morrison Lettered by Ellie DeVille Originally published in JUDGE DREDD MEGAZINE 2.70

WYNTER by Walker, Morrison and DeVille

He’s called Wynter ‘cause he’s up in the snow, and it’s proper snowy in winter, see. Clever wordplay, Robbie Morrison. Well, in the old days it snowed in winter, nowadays not so much. Definitely nothing to that global warming malarkey, mind. All made up by them Koreans to make America look bad, bribed all the scientists haven’t they? My lad’s all glum because every year they promise it’s going to be a “Bad Winter”, and it isn’t; so no sledging for the yowwun. We had a bit of a flurry but nothing special. I remember when it’d be knee high, and all the buses would stop and you’d have to walk to school.  Mind you I also remember the Yorkshire Ripper, Margaret Thatcher and the IRA pub bombings so, you know, it wasn’t all roses. You can oversell nostalgia, kids. But it wasn’t that far back either; in the ‘90s I once got stuck halfway between home and Leeds because the snow was too much for the buses. Had to spend the night in a Fox’s biscuit factory. No lie. Got waved over to it by a plod who spotted me walking aimlessly about looking worried and trying to keep warm. Curled up on a leatherette sofa eating free biscuits and reading Helen Zahavi’s Dirty Weekend while the night shift kept those biscuits flowing, snow or no snow. I’ve had worse nights. Rang in and told work to **** off the morning after. Barely had any sleep had I? Got to get my beauty sleep or I’m no use to man nor beast. So, yeah, Wynter, clever word play. Except it drives me nuts that “cool misspellings” thing. I have to keep checking “Gil” knows you don’t spell “attacks” “attax” as in “Match Attax” and all the other everyday spelling atrocities which slip my mind right now. So, back at the comic, Wynter is a Judge in the snow, the Antartic Territories to be precise. All Robbie Morrison has to tell us about this exciting addition to the world of Judge Dredd is it’s cold, snowy, sparsely populated and it’s snowy, did I mention the snow? Luckily he remembers Michael Moorcock’s The Ice Schooner and has a boat zipping over the ice proper sharpish like. It’s crewed by ice pirates who have made off with some medical supplies and some chemical weapons. Wynter (recap: because it’s cold) has to get the chemical weapons and never mind the mega-Lemsips. But kids are dying so he’s not happy about that. There’s a bit of a ruckus and he makes the right choice. There’s not much too it but then I imagine no one imagined it’d ever be enshrined between hard covers, probably a last minute bit of filler unfairly maligned here by my rancorous self. The art’s okay though. Probably more of interest as a look at Kev Walker before he dropped all the extraneous detail and went a bit Mignola; a style which suits him greatly and is adequately represented elsewhere in this series. Here though he’s still drawing like someone who really liked Citadel miniature’s Warhammer 40K and thinks John Blanche is an artistic demigod (which he is). His action’s all over the shop as well, but he’d get (a lot) better and so he shouldn’t be too upset. I did like the way Robbie Morrison tried to give it some weight by starting off with Wynter (recap: brrr!) portentously informing us that he’d “buried a child today”. In the same way that chucking Johnny Cash’s version of Hurt over anything, even a video of a your cat cleaning its bum, makes it seem as important and moving as The Crucifixion, dead kids give stuff a bit of heft.  Wynter (recap: because it’s a bit nippy!) is a bit of a waste of a dead kid really because it’ still EH!

JUDGE DREDD: FATHER EARTH Art by Brian Bolland and Ron Smith Written by John Wagner Lettered by Tom Frame Originally published in 2000AD Progs 122-125

JUDGE DREDD: FATHER EARTH by Bolland,Wagner and Frame

This is the best tale in the book by a hefty margin and it’s nobody’s fault except everyone surrounding it that it’s also the most elderly. This does mean a few of you will be suspecting that I have difficulty accommodating the present and like many withered old fusspots prefer to live in the past.  Which is obviously  true; after all I sit here in the sallow light of flickering candles inscribing these words upon parchment via quill and ink. There is a certain bit of the power of early imprinting at work because I can quite clearly remember several moments in this one and the attendant original thrill they induced quite clearly. But would it have imprinted so hard had it not been so good? I don’t know, and I don’t think it’s worth applying for a grant to find out. It is good; really, really good. It starts off small with a (rare for 2000AD) black couple encountering a Cursed Earth messiah, who looks like Alan Moore if he’d been designed to sell corn on tins for a living, at their trading outpost. Before the story ends Mega City 1 will have become besieged by mutants wearing dog heads like hats, a power tower will have gone a bit Pompeii, thousands will have lost their lives and a singing, killing plant will have meted out blackly ironic justice. It is a master class in serialised entertainment. Because not only is there all that stuff but there is also a tense bomb disposal scene (a la David Hemmings in JUGGERNAUT (1974)), comedy robots, Dredd failing to save a lady, and a major plot point hinges on the power surges in the 1970s whenever the whole country watched something on TV (e.g. there used to be power surges immediately after CORONATION STREET as everyone leapt up to put the kettle on) and of course…the Holocaust Squad!

JUDGE DREDD: FATHER EARTH by Smith,Wagner and Frame

These dudes appear for a half page, dropping out of the sky in sci-fi diving suits and into the maw of the power station turned volcano. After that we only hear their voices for a handful of panels as they go out one by one like candles in a draught. Which reminds me…hang on (lights candle and bends back over the parchment). The brevity of their appearance belies its power to shock the mind of a child. For the last few decades I thought they were the focus of a whole episode, but they barely get a page in reality. It really shook little me up reading their voices bravely passing the baton as they burnt up like tissues in a furnace. Wagner has many strengths as a writer and here we see two of them smashing boredom like twin hammers going at a pile of crackers. First is how much he can get out of so little; the robots get enough personality to make them humorous, but also enough for you to go “Oh!” when the bomb disposal goes to cock, and the Holocaust Squad have more impact over their petite sprinkle of panels than they do over two full stories by John Smith (see above). Secondly he is fearless in his use of imagination. A lot of comic writers write like they are scared they will never have another idea, Wagner writes like he’s convinced their flow will never cease. It takes some nuts to write like that, but it’s definitely the best approach. The art here is by Bolland and Ron Smith and it’s great too, although the reproduction is so awful you may have to take that on trust. Bolland fares worst with big areas of solid black swamping his detail but Smith uses a lighter touch and his art comes off better, if a little ghostly. Shame, but it doesn’t stop Father Earth being VERY GOOD!

JUDGE DREDD: DEBRIS Art by P J Holden Written by Michael Carroll Coloured by Chris Blythe Lettered by Annie Parkhouse Originally published in 2000AD Progs 1792-1796

JUDGE DREDD: DEBRIS by Holden, Carroll, Blythe and Parkhouse

Michael Carroll is one of the new breed of Dredd writers currently tasked with chronicling Old Stoney Face regularly whenever John Wagner isn’t. Because I don’t follow The Tooth regular like anymore I’ve not read a lot of his stuff yet, but it seems competent enough, just lacking that essential Umpty factor.  This Debris one is fine, I guess, but not exactly a stunner. It’s about a block seceding from the Meg and how it has a big gun on top to defend itself. There’s an interesting kernel there about how the block feels it’s better at protecting its inhabitants than the Judges, and it’s hard not to see their point as the story is set after another of the seemingly endless city filleting events.  The gun on the top is the least interesting aspect but this proves to be the focus of the strip, which is unfortunate. Carroll seems unduly impressed by the fact that the gun hoovers® up debris (that’s right!) to fire. Sure, it’s an idea but it’s not a big enough or good enough idea to hang the story on. I mean, it’s a big gun so all you have to do is get under it so it can’t fix a bead on you and Bob’s your uncle and Fanny’s your Judge. This doesn’t seem to occur to any of the characters, who are bulked up by some Space Marines who themselves are bulked up by their armour (hence their inclusion in this volume). The Marines are there because the Judges are so depleted by the regular occurrence of extinction  level events their numbers are running low, they might also be there to highlight the different approaches to situations between the military and judicial mind-set, they might not; it’s hard to tell because developing that would distract from the big gun, which Carroll is convinced we are more interested in. Unfortunately we’re not; or I wasn’t, you might be all over that big gun like a rash. Since it devolves quickly into action and shouting Debris takes up too much page space. After The Pit it’s pretty much established that the Dredd audience can manage the more talky stories, so Carroll’s swerve into the least interesting  and more action packed approach is even more puzzling. Holden’s art is okay though; a little rushed and he fluffs some of the staging, but it’s chunky and funky in a Brett Ewins/Rufus Dayglo markers and rulers way. It’s no great shakes but Dredd seems like Dredd and entertainment is had. OKAY!

JUDGE DREDD: WARZONE Art by P J Holden Written by John Wagner Coloured by Len O'Grady Lettered by Tom Frame Originally published in JUDGE DREDD MEGAZINE 240-243

JUDGE DREDD: WARZONE by Holden, Wagner, O'Grady and Frame

Not only is this one also illustrated by P J Holden but its events are also spurred into being by a recent Mega-City trashing event. One of the many (many) cool beans things about The World of Dredd is how Events happen and then there is a period of fallout from that Event which has to be navigated before the next corpse-piling Event occurs. Because, yes, astonishingly, it turns out that it is possible to segue from one Event into another while also providing satisfactory stories with beginnings, middles and (crucial this:) endings, characterisation and even internal logic; despite what writers of North American genre comics demonstrate on a monthly basis. (I mean seriously now, are you people even trying?) Anyway, Dredd’s after some bloke who was instrumental in terror attacks on the Big Meg. Wisely hiding out in a warzone the guy probably thinks he’s safe, unfortunately he doesn’t realise he’s the bad guy in a Judge Dredd strip so his days are numbered, like on a really morbid calendar. You can take the war comics off the child but he’ll only buy them again later in more expensive hardback formats. No wait, I mean you can take the writer out of the war comics but you can’t take the war comics out of the writer. Wagner might have started out writing girls’ (eeew!) comics but he got great during his stint on war comics, and Warzone is like a quick reminder to the world that where war comics are concerned John Wagner’s still got it going on. He hasn’t lost a step; he might even have gained a couple of new ones.

JUDGE DREDD: WARZONE by Holden, Wagner, O'Grady and Frame

In less time than it takes a North American genre comic writer to have his characters discuss their favourite cereals Wagner has sketched in the personalities of each member of the group assigned to Dredd. Not only that but he’s also established the needlessness and futility of the conflict they are waging (it’s space-Vietnam). Sure the soldiers are types, but they are also alive; the noble sergeant who is more metal than man, the shell-shock case who can only utter profanities, the hov-grafted guy who lost his girl along with his legs, the ear-collecting Rogue Trooper-a-like, etc etc. Not an original one among them, but you’ll still give a shit when they get shot to bits. How does that happen? SPOILER: Good writing. There’s a tellingly protracted sequence after the big battle when time is spent just showing the bodies, all torn and mangled and host to a variety of carrion eaters, in which the reader is silently invited to ruminate upon exactly what their deaths have achieved. They died bravely and they died well but they are dead. Wagner being Wagner there’s also some humour because where there’s life there’s laughter. I particularly enjoyed Dredd’s abrupt curtailment of the campfire bonding. In the end as implacable as ever Dredd, bloody but never beaten, pushes his way past the war and manages to extract some small measure of Justice for the fallen. Warzone is John Wagner doing war comics and that’s still VERY GOOD!

NEXT TIME: Old British war comics make another unlikely appearance in the world of Dredd as a couple of familiar faces get a new coat of future-paint! Hoo ha -COMICS!!!

"...Do Not Adjust Your Brains!" COMICS! Sometimes "M-O-O-N" Spells “Moon”, Despite What Tom Cullen Thinks.

Judge Dredd on the moon. That's it. JUDGE DREDD: DARKSIDE by Marshall

Anyway, this…

THE JUDGE DREDD MEGA COLLECTION REVIEW INDEX

JUDGE DREDD: THE MEGA COLLECTION Vol. 80: DARK SIDE OF THE MOON Art by Paul Marshall, Peter Doherty, Laurence Campbell, Lee Townsend, Brian Bolland, Mick McMahon and Ian Gibson Written by John Smith, Rob Williams, John Wagner and Gordon Rennie Lettered by Tom Frame, Ellie De Ville, Tony Jacob and Simon Bowland Colours by Alan Craddock, Peter Doherty and John-Paul Bove Originally serialised in 2000AD Progs 47, 50-52, 57, 1017-1028 & 1468, JUDGE DREDD MEGAZINE 328-331 © 1978, 1996,2005, 2012 & 2016 Rebellion A/S Hatchette Partworks/Rebellion, £9.99 (2016) JUDGE DREDD created by Carlos Ezquerra & John Wagner

JUDGE DREDD: DARKSIDE Art by Paul Marshall Written by John Smith Coloured by Alan Craddock Lettered by Tom Frame Originally published in 2000AD Progs 1017-1028

JUDGE DREDD: DARKSIDE by Marshall, Smith, Craddock and Frame

The order of these stories are all to cock chronology wise. The earliest Luna-1 stories are later in the book. I'm not sure why that is but we start with another disappointing John Smith Dredd outing. All the more disappointing because there are some pretty nifty elements here, but it all fails to gel. Someone is murdering people on the Luna-1 colony, someone with Judge Dredd's DNA! Worse, old Stony Face is actually on the moon pursuing a perp while also accompanying Psi Judge Hassad who has had “premonitions of a premonition”, so it could actually be Dredd. In fact who else could it be? It's a really promising set-up, but Smith fails to capitalise on it and plays his hand far too soon. What you end up with instead of a murder-mystery is a lot of running about bumping into call-backs to older, better stories.

JUDGE DREDD: DARK SIDE by Marshall, Smith, Craddock and Frame

He's aided and abetted by Marshall's clean line and chunky directness, which in turn is lent pizzazz by Craddock's vivid colours, which include photographic elements. The colours give it an otherworldly touch and the art successfully casts everything in a serio-comic mode. But it's all for naught as the tale is torpedoed by Smith's failure to balance his disparate elements. Usually his blend of comedy and horror is jarring, but intentionally so. Here his hands are too heavy on the horror and the humour both; resulting in a tonal roller-coaster of brutal murders which keeps ploughing into the candyfloss stand of the overly broad comedy, because for some reason it's on the track instead of down below next to the boating pond. Some of this sense of humour failure stems from Smith's distaste for the Judicial System; having Dredd interrogated by a Teutonic sadist complete with monocle and duelling scars is slapstick rather than satire. Some of the sense of humour failure is...well, inexplicable really; Psi Judge Hassad's a step too close to the old “Dearie Dearie me!” stereotype for comfort, never mind comedy. (Later we'll see some more unfortunate stereotypes; being white, male and totes privileged I'm willing to give stuff from the '70s a grudging pass, but not from the '90s.) I get the impression John Smith doesn't enjoy writing Dredd much, which is fine, each to their own but unfortunately more often than not it ends up with the reader not enjoying reading Judge Dredd. That’s less than ideal. EH!

BREATHING SPACE Art by Peter Doherty,Laurence Campbell and Lee Townsend Written by Rob Williams Coloured by Peter Doherty Lettered by Ellie De Ville Originally published in 2000AD Progs 1451-1459

BREATHING SPACE by Doherty, Campbell, Townsend, Williams and De Ville

Regular Squaxx dex Kano will know that in the comments we've been having a bit of a think about who “gets” Judge Dredd; it being a bit of a notable failure on the part of some Dredd scribes. Turns out it's a matter of opinion! Anyway, here we have a good way of avoiding that problem; Judge Dredd isn't in Breathing Space. It's a space-noir which uses the enclosed environment of Luna 1 to excellent advantage. The newly appointed Chief Marshal of Luna 1, Judge King, steps onto the lunar surface and straight into a mess of corrupt Judges, corporate backstabbing and...MURDER! In a nice tip of the space-fedora to SUNSET BOULEVARD the story starts with a dead man, and then we go back and see how he ended up there. It's not so much whodunnit as a whydidhedowhathedunnit. Any greater detail risks an eruption of the Thrill Suckers' ambrosia – SPOILERS!

BREATHING SPACE by Doherty, Campbell, Townsend, Williams and De Ville

For such a sweet read it's odd to find in the text at the back that Breathing Space had a troubled gestation. Due to illness Doherty (he got better; don't send cards) draws only the initial episodes but Campbell & Townsend pick up from him so delicately that you barely sense a switch in style. Although episodes appeared regularly, apparently it was written over three years (by which I mean there was a ruddy great hiatus in there, not that Williams' was honing it over a three year period like some kind of Joycean perfectionist; as good as it is it's still space-noir not ULYSSES, people), but you'd not guess as the pared down style reads smooth as a successful getaway. The consistency is helped no end by Doherty's continued presence as colourist; his use of a strictly limited and thoroughly muted palette sets a suitably sombre tone for the dour proceedings. The whole thing zips glumly along and Williams' intelligent plot is peppered with characters just the right side of caricature, there's some nifty misdirection and the vital plot point is rooted firmly in the “Dredd” universe. Placed as it is after Smith & Marshall's misfire of dayglo clowning the success of Breathing Space's restrained doom-mongering seems all the greater. There's no Dredd in it but it's still VERY GOOD!

Thus starts a brief run of the original Luna 1 stories. It's not all of them; just those with art by Brian Bolland, because everyone likes to remember when you would get weekly doses of Bolland Thrill-Power. Fat chance of that now. I'll burn through these, because they are from that period when Dredd was finding its feet as a strip. Any elements that have survived into the Dredd canon (NOT cannon; that's a thing that fires projectiles. Make a note of that.) are sparse, since even for a strip which delights in exaggeration as Dredd does, Wagner is so far over the top here he risks clipping the moon itself.

JUDGE DREDD: LAND RACE Art by Brian Bolland Written by John Wagner Lettered by Tony Jacob Originally published in 2000AD Prog 47

JUDGE DREDD: LAND RACE by Bolland, Wagner and Jacob

The Land Race is a riff on the American West tradition of the first person to stake a claim on a piece of land getting to own it. (And by “people” I mean European immigrants; the native Americans were not consulted. I always like it when the Americans descended from European immigrants get all pinch-arsed about immigrants. Dunces.) Bolland has fun designing the vehicles driven by the prospectors, but the mayhem soon gives way to a protracted scene involving an old woman being mind controlled into signing her land away. Amusingly the bad guys are from Interstellar Psionics Corporation, i.e. IPC (the then publishers of 2000AD). There's also a panel of Judge Dredd's head in the corner of which is an X-Wing from the children's entertainment STAR WARS. I think this was to do with a Competition at the time; where you had to find these scattered through the comic to win...er...something to do with STAR WARS. George Lucas' bum fluff? I don't remember that bit; the prize. Unfortunately, we also see here the two Mexican Judges who are, uh, a bit stereotypical what with the sombrero, 'taches and the “Thees” and the “heem”s. Weird in that way only kids '70s could be Walter The Robot gets a girlfriend in the form of Rowena The Robot. Best of all though we discover that Judge Dredd's palate is so disciplined that he can tell the difference between man-made cookies and those made by a robot. Personally I think more should have been made of this and Judge Dredd hereafter is a lesser character without his cookie tasting skills. Trains not taken, eh? All these things are more interesting than the story which is just a lively entertainment, wonderfully drawn by Bolland. But there are worse things to be than entertaining and drawn by Brian Bolland so OKAY!

JUDGE DREDD: THE FIRST LUNA OLYMPICS Art by Brian Bolland Written by John Wagner Lettered by Tony Jacob Originally published in 2000AD Prog 50

JUDGE DREDD: THE FIRST LUNA OLYMPICS by Bolland, Wagner and Jacob

Not much to this one beyond Bolland's reliably exemplary art and a horrifically un-Dredd moment. Most of it is a lot of simple jokes about The Olympics. The Sov competitors are full of drugs, and the bits that aren’t full of drugs are mechanical; the high jump is very high because of the low gravity; etc etc. Wagner nails the commentators' voices, and the jokes are mildly amusing jokes, but to his credit it's all a feint because at strip's end Dredd starts a war with the Sovs by accidentally shooting a Sov Judge. It's clearly an accident and the Sovs are over reacting, but Judge Dredd? An accident? Get outta town. I think this is the first appearance of the Sov Judges and Bolland totally nails their appearance; so much so that they have barely changed over the ensuing decades. I particularly like the way their helmets echo those odd toppings on the Kremlin. I thought I might have to do a quick run down of The Cold War and how America and Russia's nuclear cockfencing endangered the whole world. Luckily I don't have to because Putin and Trump have brought it all back. Personally I'd have preferred the return of the Rubik's Cube but there you go, they didn't ask me. Some okay jokes and a super unexpected cliff-hanger, with Bolland's comical realism on top like a tasty Kremlin Onion, is OKAY!

JUDGE DREDD: LUNA-1 WAR Art by Brian Bolland Written by John Wagner Lettered by Tony Jacob Originally published in 2000AD Prog 51

JUDGE DREDD: LUNA-1 WAR by Bolland, Wagner and Jacob

WAR! HUH! Oh, you know that song! In the future Luna 1 War tells us, “Wars today are NO LONGER FOUGHT BETWEEN VAST ARMIES, But by Combat units consisting of FOUR SOLDIERS and one reserve!” This idea doesn't last any longer as the duration of this strip (The Apocalypse War certainly seemed more substantial than a ruck in a pub car park.) but it is a good idea nevertheless. Dredd watches from the side-lines saying awesome things like “We're no better than The Sovs. They use war as an excuse to grab land – we treat it as a GAME!” I'm a-okay with eight year olds reading that despite how it may sound to sophisticated twenty year olds and up. So you can stop rolling your eyes, pal. Anyway, the Sovs are a bad lot so they spike the M-C1 reserve with a “Hypo-Dart”. Big Mistake. Judge Dredd dons a suspiciously Dan Dare-esque helmet and gives those unsporting Sovs' hides a good tanning. For two issues now we've had to “listen” to Wagner's excellently aggravating sports caster (Bolland makes him look like a certain Daily Planet stringer. Heh.) so on our behalf Dredd chokes him with his own mike, turns to the audience and spits, “War is POINTLESS. War is EVIL. WAR IS HELL!”. Hey, sometimes the truth doesn't need nuance. GOOD!

JUDGE DREDD: THE FACE-CHANGE CRIMES Art by Brian Bolland Written by John Wagner Lettered by Tom Frame Originally published in 2000AD Prog 52

JUDGE DREDD: THE FACE-CHANGE CRIMES by Bolland, Wagner and Frame

Unlike the concept of war as a 10 man sporting event, the idea introduced here would persist for the duration of the Dredd strip, causing no end of bedevilment for our future Lawman. It does what it says on the tin, this face-change technology. So here we start with a bank robbery by Laurel and Hardy with Charlie Chaplin, where the robbers evade capture after a bit of !presto-changeo! by being evacuated with the faces of the (3) Marx Brothers. Needless to say Bolland's art is every bit the perfect fit for the bizarre sight of dead 20th century comedians robbing a future bank on the moon. Luckily Judge Dredd has a somewhat unlikely knowledge of deceased 20th Century Comedians and quickly zeroes in on his suspects. Freed by their lawyer, who is a dead ringer for the famous actor and acromegaly sufferer Rondo Hatton, Dredd is left kicking his heels but..."TWO CAN PLAY A DIRTY GAME…!", and he doesn't mean nude Twister. This is a fast and fun one, with Bolland's realism coming to the fore to underscore the visual lunacy of what's going on. You know, VERY GOOD! Personally I feel more could have been made of Dredd's credulity stretching knowledge of 20th Century trivia; it could perhaps have been combined with his amazing ability to tell who cooked what he's eating in order to solve future crimes. On second thoughts we're just a touch of smug irony away from a Matt Fraction Image comic, so forget I said anything. The world doesn't need any more of those.

JUDGE DREDD: THE OXYGEN BOARD Art by Brian Bolland Written by John Wagner Lettered by Tom Frame Originally published in 2000AD Prog 57

JUDGE DREDD: THE OXYGEN BOARD by Bolland, Wagner and Frame

This strip is where the young John K(UK) was infused with a life-long detestation of the Free Market philosophy so beloved of soulless cankers who walk like humans. Regulation isn't the enemy, greedy psychopaths are. Sure, I know, I know, if we just leave the provision of services to find its own level no end of good will result. After all, human behaviour is improved no end by the possibility of earning ridiculous amounts of money without obstruction. And if you believe that fairy story/self justificatory pile of horse apples you probably think you can eat the moon on crackers. Anyone who has ever ridden a train in England or received a utility bill know that The Oxygen Board isn't just a possibility; it's inevitable. You also know that Free Market philosophy makes about as much sense as wearing hats made of shit. And if they could charge you for it they'd tell you that was a good idea too. And some of you would do it too. So, uh, yeah, on the moon, oxygen is piped in and billed and if you don't pay your bill...well, that's on you! It's a wicked and powerful punchline most writers would make much hay out of, but Wagner slaps it at the end of a tale of thieves who have robbed the very Oxygen Board itself. Their ironic comeuppance turns the whole thing into a darkly prescient parable. It's drawn by Brian Bolland too, and if that's the only thing that gets people looking at what is a tiny masterpiece then all the better. VERY GOOD!

JUDGE DREDD: FULL EARTH CRIMES Art by Mike McMahon and Brian Bolland Written by John Wagner Lettered by Tom Frame Originally published in 2000AD Prog 58

JUDGE DREDD: FULL EARTH CRIMES by McMahon, Wagner and Frame

This one is better than its simple premise might indicate. On the moon people go loco at Full Earth like people are purported to do on Earth when the moon is full. We then get a conveyor belt of crimes punchily slapped down by the living genius Mike McMahon. It's a succession of funny future crime set-ups each followed by a Dredd-is-a-hard-bastard punchline. E.g Dredd saves a leaper but then gives him 90 days Penal Servitude for public nuisance. Wagner doubles down by having a lady bystander tell Dredd off, because the guy is clearly not the full shilling, only for Dredd to fine her 2,000 Creds for obstructing Justice. Then, with a poker face like iron, Wagner TRIPLES down and when she complains Dredd ups the fine to 4,000 credits. Actually, it is quite funny now I think about it. There’s a bunch of that kind of thing before Dredd goes home exhausted. It's just a string of jokes really, with the double page opening by Bolland and the actual meat of the story by Mike McMahon. Call me unstable but I will always have room in my mind for the final panel where Walter faithfully tucks a blanket around “Dear Judge Dwedd...” OKAY!

JUDGE DREDD: GLOBAL PSYCHO Art by Ian Gibson Written by Gordon Rennie Lettered by Tom Frame Originally published in JUDGE DREDD MEGAZINE #328-331

JUDGE DREDD: GLOBAL PSYCHO by Gibson, Rennie and Frame

Oh, thank Grud. We’re nearly at the end! Oh, you're all feeling the fatigue, what about me? I went to C**********d and back halfway through writing this (round about the Luna-1 War bit) because people think I have to contribute to the social life of the family or something! It was cold and windy enough to require my big coat too! Straight back with “school shoes” and here I have to go on about Gordon Rennie, while fielding black looks from the person cooking the tea. Anyhoo, Judge Dredd is outfoxed by a serial killer in a oner which sets up the somewhat chunkier one which follows on below. Ian Gibson draws in his kind of diseased kid's illustrator style and once again his colours are a delight of polished inkwashes. The most interesting thing for me with Global Psycho is the fact it shows a bum and a bit of tit on a killer's strung up victim. We didn't need a bit of bum and tit in my day! Not in Judge Dredd anyway. What we did our own homes was another matter. It's just a setting up strip so it's OKAY!

JUDGE DREDD: KILLER ELITE Art by Paul Marshall Written by Gordon Rennie Greytones by Jean-Paul Bove Lettered by Tom Frame Originally published in JUDGE DREDD MEGAZINE #328-331

JUDGE DREDD: KILLER ELITE by Marshall, Rennie, Bove and Frame

Gordon Rennie acquits himself quite well here; it helps he's given himself a strong premise. The psycho from Global Psycho is dying, but before she pops off she collects the galaxy's greatest murderers and has them all face off on the moon. The prize is the seat aboard an escape pod. It doesn't sound like much of a prize, but the complex will explode in sixty minutes and there is only one seat on the escape pod. Dredd's in there because he is after all “the greatest mass murderer in human history”; which by this point in his history is probably understating the matter. It's nice to be reminded how much blood is on Joe's hands every now and again. Particularly if you've recently watched him get tucked up snug by a fawning robot. A whole lot of mayhem ensues but to avoid it all getting a bit one-note Rennie builds the trap around Dredd so tightly that by the time he reaches the pod with another survivor you really don't know how he's going to get out of it. It's fast and fun, and if not quite as fast or fun as Rennie might think, it's fast and fun enough. The only let down is the art. While there's nothing wrong with Marshall's typically sturdy work, someone has made the (cost cutting?) decision to go for gray tones instead of colour. This makes it all a bit visually drab, so much so it starts to undermine the art. The swathes of gray don't allow anything to pop, even when you know what you are looking at should be popping like Space Dust on a pre-teen's tongue. But Dredd's convincingly Dredd, and Rennies' Most Dangerous Game is dangerous enough so GOOD!

DARK SIDE OF THE MOON shows that Luna-1 is whatever any particular writer requires of it; empty and forbidding in Breathing Space, noisy and garish in Darkside, bustling and crazed in the original strips and the moon is just, well, there as a deadly backdrop in Killer Elite. It doesn't really matter as the freedom allows all these different approaches; and while some work (Breathing Space) and some don't (Darkside) none of that's down to the setting. As a volume it's GOOD!

NEXT TIME:  Manners maketh the Judge, so says Judge Mum and - COMICS!!!

“EASY THE FERG!” COMICS! Sometimes It's Not The Fall That Kills You!

It's Valentine's Day! This Valentine's Day Judge Dredd's first and only love, The Law, sends a Valentine...straight...to...his...HEART! JUDGE DREDD: THE DAY THE LAW DIED by Bolland, Wagner & Frame

Anyway, this… JUDGE DREDD: THE MEGA COLLECTION Vol. 33: THE DAY THE LAW DIED Art by Mick McMahon, Brian Bolland (Dave Gibbons inks one episode), Brett Ewins, Brendan McCarthy, Garry Leach, Ron Smith, Carlos Ezquerra and Henry Flint Written by John Wagner and Garth Ennis Lettered by Tom Frame, Dave Gibbons, Tom Knight and Jack Potter Colours by Chris Blythe Originally serialised in 2000AD Progs86-108 & 1250-1261 © 1978, 1979, 2001 & 2016 Rebellion A/S Hatchette Partworks/Rebellion, £9.99 (2016) JUDGE DREDD created by Carlos Ezquerra & John Wagner

It’s now established tradition that Dredd mega-epics are usually separated by the best part of a year so as to allow everyone to get their breath back, including the readers; but back in 1978 John Wagner must have been full of beans and youthful pep because Old Stoney Face would barely have time to wash his smalls after “The Cursed Earth” before being unwittingly embroiled in “The Day The Law Died”. This one would be purely John Wagner’s creature and as such it trades heavily in his trademark satire via absurdism, rather than the more in-yer-FACE!!! style favoured by Pat Mills. While “The Cursed Earth” had been an energetic and eye popping exercise in world building “The Day The Law Died” turned its gaze inward and set about consolidating the world of Mega-City One, with particular emphasis on The Judge system. Back in Mega City One Dredd is immediately framed for murder, dispatched to Titan, shot in the head and left in no doubt that the new Chief Judge, the flagrantly insane Cal, is up to no good. Heading a rag-tag resistance Dredd has to free his city from the autocratic maniac, his own Judges and Cal’s Praetorian guard of Klegg alien mercenaries. Slicey-dicey! Oncey-twicey! Personally, my money’s on Dredd.

JUDGE DREDD: THE DAY THE LAW DIED by Bolland, Wagner & Frame

Previously Judges had been shown as an elite police force with traffic cops and more routine police being glimpsed around and about the strips. The very name, “Judge” suggested they were high up some nebulous law enforcement hierarchy. It was now made explicit that the Judges were the police, the whole police and nothing but the police. They were The Law. Hmmm. That’s catchy. However, there was still an elite police force, the Special Judicial Squad (SJS). These being an armed version of Internal Affairs, or the gimlet eyed automata known within most organisations as “Audit”. Tellingly these salty looking SJS dudes sport a uniform even more fascistic than that of Dredd, and since Dredd’s helmet has the twin lightning bolt emblem of the Schutzstaffel instead of eyes, that’s pretty darn fascistic. Keeping these little charmers under control comes under the purview of the Deputy Chief Judge, second in command to The Chief Judge, the prime panjandrum of the Justice System. Both these sit on the Council of Five, with three other seasoned vets.

JUDGE DREDD: THE DAY THE LAW DIED by Ewins/McCarthy, Wagner & Frame

More seasoned vets are on show when the Judge Tutors appear to help Dredd. Back in the ‘70s the old saying was “Those that can’t, teach. (And those that can’t teach, teach P.E.)” Accordingly Judges who are no longer street fit end up teaching in The Academy of Law. Dredd has a bunch of these dudes with missing bits on his side. They are pretty funny; one guy calculates their chances of survival while they are falling to their probable doom, another is called Judge Schmaltz so…you can fill in the blanks there, I guess. Oh, Judge Giant turns up again reminding me that his presence links Judge Dredd to HARLEM HEROES. Alas, JUDGE DREDD was slow to incorporate black characters and Giant only appears intermittently hereafter. Since he uses the word “baby” and refers to his “pappy” this might have been for the best. He is, however, resourceful and instrumental in saving Dredd’s bacon, so there’s that. Apparently Mike McMahon started drawing Judge Dredd under the impression the character was black (mostly because his name was a garbled leftover from Pat Mills’ pitch for JUDGE DREAD, a voodoo horror strip which didn’t happen.) Imagine if they’d stuck with that!  You’ll have to imagine it, because they didn’t; Judge Dredd is white, baby. White like Pappy’s bedclothes! Baby! Things look bleak for Dredd and Mega City One until he and his team of maimed trainers smash through to the undercity and land in the Big Smelly. Oh, yeah, turns out the undercity is the polluted husk of the American Eastern seaboard. Seems it was easier just to concrete over it and build Mega-City One (some landmarks were relocated above ground for the tourists e.g. Empire State building), the Big Smelly is the Ohio River. On impact, most of them die as a result, but they do meet Fergee who is a big lovable doofus with a penchant for ultra-violence.  Fergee’s lack of smarts, specifically his failure to realise he is dead, will be instrumental in foiling Cal’s plan to nerve gas the whole city.

JUDGE DREDD: THE DAY THE LAW DIED by McMahon and Wagner

Don’t be deceived by those leaden paragraphs from my stilted hamd because Wagner is a talented writer, so he knows how to leaven the strip with exposition without sapping any of the demented drive of his tale. A tale which is an answer to an interesting question. What if someone with only the most tenuous grasp on sanity achieved the most powerful office in the land? Apparently he would build a big wall, institute a whole slew of authoritarian and often preposterous laws, throw a hissy fit when the public failed to display the requisite adoration, surround himself with pusillanimous yes-men and, basically, just abuse the office he holds and stain the system he represents like a crack addled Little Lord Fauntleroy. But enough about the 45th President of the United States! (Cue: sad trombone.) Weirdly enough that’s also what Judge Cal does after he has connived his way into The Chief Judge’s chair. “It is the doom of Man that he forgets!” squawks Nicol Williamson’s skull capped Merlin in EXCALIBUR (1981) and he’s not wrong. See, Wagner doesn’t base Cal on the Roman Emperor Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (AKA Caligula) merely because he’d recently watched  the 1976 BBC production of “I, Claudius”. I don’t doubt that it helped, particularly as the late John Hurt’s performance of “the little boot” was probably reliably arresting. (Wagner almost certainly hadn’t seen Tinto Brass’s porno-chic “cult” movie CALIGULA (1979), for which we can only be thankful.) No, he probably picked Caligula mostly because, well, “It happened before, it will happen again, it's just a question of when.” as Charlton Heston narrates in ARMAGEDDON (1998). It’s called learning from history, and when we don’t this is where we end up. Also with Wagner picking the much maligned Roman Emperor the opportunities for absurdism knocked harder than a drunk whose forgotten his keys. Suetonius says Caligula made his horse (Incitatus) a Senator? Wagner can have his Cal appoint a fish Deputy Chief Judge. Yes, Judge Fish is the spectacular character find of 1978! Who can ever forget his sage advice, “Bloop!” or his heartbreaking “Bloop! Bloop!” Gets me every time. Wagner has a ton of fun with Cal’s credulity straining antics so we’ll not spoil it for anyone. But, y’know, Judge Fish!

JUDGE DREDD: THE DAY THE LAW DIED by Bolland, Wagner & Frame

Artistically “The Cursed Earth” was a two-hander between McMahon and Bolland, with McMahon’s hand being comically large like that of a cartoon mouse and Bolland’s being more refined and smaller like that of a lady of means. “The Day The Law Died” is more of a scrum; there’s a real pout pourri of art styles on display for the length of the epic. In a North American mainstream genre comic this would lead to a right buggers’ muddle and generally not work terribly well. Here it works out surprisingly well. Regular 2000AD readers (and Brit comic readers in general) were conditioned to understand that a strip’s artist could change at the drop of a hat. Being too young to be anything other than positive it was viewed as more of an opportunity to see a different style, rather than an indication that Terry Blesdoe had had to step in because Barry Teagarden had started shouting at buses due to the punishing demands of drawing 8 pages of Space Urchins every week for wages that would shame Sports Direct. It helps also that there’s a definite visual through line. Say Mike McMahon ends his strip with Dredd’s gun arm stuck deep in a Klegghound’s gullet, next Prog Brian Bolland will start his strip with…Judge Dredd’s gun arm stuck deep in a Klegghound’s gullet. And although every artist tends to draw MC-1 and the Judges with their own slightly quirky way, you are still clearly reading a strip about a future cop in a future city.

JUDGE DREDD: THE DAY THE LAW DIED by McMahon, Wagner & Frame

Big Brian Bolland leads us in with his reliable clarity of line and subtle undermining of his hyper realism via restrained caricature. As ever his episodes are few and far between but always a tight delight. Mike McMahon gets stuck in, his work here being a bit airier than on “The Cursed Earth” but no less manic or delightfully inventive. By now Mike McMahon is able to bend reality to his scrappy whim and can populate his strip with what look like maltreated Muppets lolloping about a claustrophobic jumble of a city without once endangering the reader’s suspension of disbelief. There are also strong hints of McMahon’s next evolution in style peeking through, but right here  right now Mike McMahon’s work is sweet indeed! Gary/Garry Leach looks like he’s got too much ink on his brush and that spoils his usual majestic delicacy of line this time out. Brett Ewins and Brendan McCarthy team up and their combination of rigidity and fluidity creates an interesting effect each couldn’t achieve alone. Picking up the baton for the last stretch is Ron Smith. I understand Ron Smith is a divisive artist for a lot of Dredd fans, due primarily to his cavalier attitude to continuity of the series’ designs. Despite being in the top ten in terms of Dredd output (probably, I can’t be arsed to check) there’s not likely to be a “Dredd by Ron Smith” volume any time soon. Which is a shame, because I think Ron rocks. Like McMahon he can lard a page with a so much detail and information it’s staggering. His page layouts are always striking, with at least one dominant image to grab the eye, and sometimes more, so the eye bounces about the page, but always in the right direction. He shows a remarkable agility with regards to shifting scale between panels without jarring the eye, and the amount of detail he crams in is ridiculous. I’m a particular fan of his hyperbolic body language, shown off here to best effect by Cal’s contortions as his mania grips him. Look, Ron Smith is the man who drew “Sob Story”, “The Man Who Drank The Blood of Satanus”, “The Black Plague”, “The Hot Dog Run”, “Shanty Town”, “Tight Boots” and co-created not only Chopper but also Dave, the orang-utan mayor. John says Ron’s The One!

JUDGE DREDD: THE DAY THE LAW DIED by Smith, Wagner & Frame

“The Day The Law Died is an artistic mish mash held together by the strength of the various styles on show and John Wagner’s elegant and understated blend of absurdity, drama and action. It’s VERY GOOD!

JUDGE DREDD: HELTER SKELTER by Ezquerra, Ennis, Blythe & Frame

This volume of JUDGE DREDD: THE MEGA COLLECTION also includes “Helter Skelter” a 12-parter from the year 2001 which marked Garth Ennis’ return to the character of Dredd. In comparison to the “Day The Law Died” it’s a slight effort indeed, but not without its charms. An experiment in dimension mapping comes unstuck when a probe returns with what looks remarkably like the Geeks from the old 2000AD strip THE V.C.S. Further incursions of the familiar occur, and it all turns out to be a plot by Judge Cal from another dimension to kill Dredd, since he can’t stand the idea that there’s a dimension where Dredd won. Cal is accompanied by an army of Judges, a bunch of Dredd’s old enemies (dead in this dimension: Fink, Rico, Murd The Oppressor, Cap’n Skank, etc) equally upset at the thought of a live Dredd and a bunch of dimensional flotsam and jetsam  familiar to elderly Squaxx Dec Thargo, or keen readers of reprints.

JUDGE DREDD: HELTER SKELTER by Flint, Ennis, Blythe & Frame

It’s all done with a sense of fun (there are roughly “two thousand” dimensions already mapped. Ho ho!)  and while it trades unashamedly in nostalgia there’s enough of a plot and some decent jokes to leave you with a smile (and maybe a little tear as you recall Ace Garp’s sign off floating through the air). Carlos Ezquerra draws the bulk of it and is as reliably Carlos Ezquerra as ever. Most notable are his computer manipulated backgrounds which are interesting reminders that he was a swift adopter of new tech. Henry Flint does a bit of it and he’s as inkily delightful as ever, managing to evoke early McMahon while also being clearly his own man. “Helter Skelter” has some good scenes and makes a valid point about the Judges (they don’t do it for their benefit but for the citizens’ benefit) but is never really more than a bit of a nicely illustrated lark. GOOD!

NEXT TIME: Uh, maybe look at some other bits of Dredd’s world? People seem interested in that judging from the, uh, two comments. So pack your swimsuit and your sun oil! Factor 2000!

INDEX TO JUDGE DREDD: THE MEGA COLLECTION REVIEWS

"I Have No Interest In Pleasure." COMICS! Sometimes They Make Jurassic Park Look Like Flamingo Land!

So while I was musing, as is my wont, upon THE LAST AMERICAN it occurred to me that it could also be read as a riposte to another strip involving a trek across a post-nuke landscape. One Wagner was also involved in, but which was driven mainly by Pat Mills. The difference between the two approaches is telling. But I don't tell you about that, instead I just ramble aimlessly in my irritatingly hyperbolic style. It's “An Impossible Journey Through a Radioactive Hell...” It's “The Cursed Earth”! JUDGE DREDD: THE CURSED EARTH by McMahon & Mills

Anyway, this...

JUDGE DREDD: THE MEGA COLLECTION Vol. 32: THE CURSED EARTH Art by Mick McMahon, Brian Bolland (Dave Gibbons inks one episode) and John Higgins Written by Pat Mills, John Wagner, Chris Lowder and Alan Grant Lettered by Tom Frame, Peter Knight and John Aldrich Originally serialised in 2000AD Progs61-85 & JUDGE DREDD ANNUAL 1988. © 1978, 1987 & 2015 Rebellion A/S Hatchette Partworks/Rebellion, £9.99 (2015) JUDGE DREDD created by Carlos Ezquerra & John Wagner

“The Cursed Earth” started in Prog 61 of 2000AD and is when Judge Dredd, for me (yes, it’s all about me!), became not just one more very good thing about 2000AD, but the very best thing about 2000AD. Pat Mills seizes the reins, with an assist from John Wagner & Chris Lowder, and starts hacking all the ballast from Dredd’s first appearance (in Prog 2) back to the raw necessities, and there’s a marked emphasis on cohesion of backstory. The first shaky steps on this road had been made in the “Robot Wars” and “Luna-1” extended story lines, but it’s “The Cursed Earth” where things really start to click into place and the mythological underpinnings really lend the strip its own unique flavour. Basically Judge Dredd starts to feel a lot less like Dirty Harry in the future and a lot more like its own crazysexy thing.  In these 21(*) episodes (each roughly 7 pages in length) the strip savagely shears off the generic elements and imprints the series with the signature super-satirical lunacy, mega violent mayhem and boundless imagination which will propel it through to 2017.  Also, it’s also a fuck ton of fun.

JUDGE DREDD: THE CURSED EARTH by McMahon, Mills & Frame

Oh, it’s still a work in progress and there’s still some pruning to be done; witness the first episode, set in 2100AD, when Dredd’s old friend, Red, a space pilot returns from a plague ridden Mega City Two with a desperate plea for help. In hindsight not only is it unlikely Dredd would have a friend who was not a Judge, the idea of Dredd having friends of any description seems to soften the character to almost Mr Tumble proportions. Dredd comes off as strangely naïve throughout; quick to recognise the decency in radlanders (“I guess all mutants AREN'T crazy and evil...”) and often appalled by the depths people sink to (At one point he even writes “SOMETIMES THE HUMAN RACE MAKES ME SICK!” in his notebook in block CAPS with underlining, like a disillusioned adolescent. Not quite the stony faced arbiter of authoritarianism we will all come to both fear and pity. But then this is mostly Pat Mills' baby and so it is a heady blend of shrieking polemic and apocalyptic violence, events are so awesomely unhinged the characters have to shout their way through them as though they can't believe what's happening either (“THE BRUTE'S TRYING TO EAT THE KILL-DOZER!”) Chris Lowdner would be lost to the mists of time and John Wagner would cover himself in glory hereafter but “The Cursed Earth” is very much a Pat Mills strip. On the upside, for those who find Mills too antagonistically blunt, there’s a dizzying explosion of world building on show.  Mega City Two is first mentioned here, and expands Dredd’s world considerably, being a West coast equivalent of Mega City One. Well, at least it is until 2114AD when it is nuked to ash during the “Day of Judgement” epic. Fourteen years earlier though, in order to prevent the whole of Mega City 2 devolving into feral cannibals Dredd will have to deliver an antidote to the 2T(FRU)T (that’s right, “oh Rudy!”) virus by crossing “over a thousand miles of hostile radioactive desert!” The Cursed Earth! which is named here for the first time.

JUDGE DREDD: THE CURSED EARTH by McMahon, Mills & Frame

The mind thrashingly bizarre encounters include The Last President of America, Robert “Smooth” Booth, (affording us our first glimpse of how the Judges came to power), escaped genetically engineered dinosaurs (linking Judge Dredd to “FLESH!” (AKA  “The Best Comic Strip Ever!”; thus spaketh the sage  John Kane (age 7)), masses of mutants both good and bad (which will provide much grist to the strip’s mill in the decades ahead) and the war droid survivors of The Battle of Armageddon (2071AD). (These last and the dinosaurs will also be linked by Pat Mills later to his ABC Warriors strip, which will itself become linked to “Invasion: 1999” etc etc etc) And that’s just the continuity stuff I can remember. Then there’s  the crazytown who make sacrifices to flying rats, Mount Rushmore with a special addition, the mutant slavers, the Las Vegas mafia Judges, sad faced telekinetic Novar and his spindly metal tree, Tweek the rock eating alien who is more human than the humans who degrade him, and I know I already mentioned the dinosaurs, but I did not specifically mention SATANUS, THE SON OF OLD ONE-EYE! And I don’t think it’s possible to mention rampaging genetically engineered dinosaurs too much. SATANUS! SATANUS! Rah! Rah! Rah! Cough, uh, anyway Dredd’s band is hassled by that eyeboggling lot as they cross The Cursed Earth. Oh, they have to go by land, see, because the cannibals have taken over the spaceports, or there are “death belts” of rocks in the air which are never ever mentioned again, or both; I can’t recall. It doesn’t matter. No one said it was drum tight stuff. It’s 1978! Just go with it. Dredd soon crews up, gears up and sets off into one of the most entertaining uses humanity has ever put paper and ink to - “The Cursed Earth”. You think I’m exaggerating? It’s drawn by Mike McMahon and Brian Bolland.

JUDGE DREDD: THE CURSED EARTH by Bolland, Mills & Frame

Dredd and his team of elite Judges (Gradgrind, Patton and, uh, Jack) are accompanied by Spikes Harvey Rotten and some war droids aboard the Modular Fighting Unit. Continuity is bolstered by the return of Judge Jack from “Robot Wars”, and Spikes Harvey Rotten, who is drawn here by McMahon completely differently from Bolland’s original in “Death Race 5000” (but Bolland here gamely follows McMahon’s lead). The names of Dredd’s compadres are a nice touch too, adding another level of fun to the proceedings. Judge Gradgrind recalls Charles Dickens’ character Thomas Gradgrind (from HARD TIMES (1854) and whose surname has become a byword for hard hearted philistinism); Judge Patton is named after the flinty WW2 U.S. General, as famous for slapping a wounded soldier as for his nickname of “Old Blood and Guts” (which also foreshadows “Old Blood and Nuts” who crops up later); and Judge Jack is called that because that’s what he was called last time. Mills often has fun with names, witness also Judge Fodder who lives up to his jokily obvious name in short order (“AAAGH!!”).

JUDGE DREDD: THE CURSED EARTH by Bolland, Mills & Frame

You might think that that stuff might be above most 8 year olds and you wouldn’t be wrong, but since it’s 2017 and we’re still here talking about a comic from 1978, I will stand by my belief that it’s always better to write up to than to write down to your audience. Essentially though, the primary audience in 1978 was most definitely kids, so it was a smart move to base the Modular Fighting Unit on the MATCHBOX ADVENTURE 2000, K-2001, "COMMAND RAIDER" toy. Also, having a physical reference would have helped keep McMahon and Bolland on-model, because stylistically those two were/are apples and oranges, Ditko and Kirby, ham and eggs, Hammerstein and Ro-Jaws, Bogie and Bacall, uh, pretty different but both great, yeah? And a bit of visual consistency never hurts. Lest we forget each of these episodes originally  appeared weekly, so it’s no surprise that McMahon shoulders most of the burden since Bolland’s never really been built for speed. His art may be a crisper, cleaner and altogether more elegant affair, but it’s little Micky whose scruffy bursts of inky mania prove a far better fit.

JUDGE DREDD: THE CURSED EARTH by McMahon, Mills & Aldrich

Back in 1978 Bolland’s the better draughtsman, but his Cursed Earth is a tad too antiseptic. That alien slaver might have a nose festooned with boils but it still looks like you could eat your dinner off 'em. It’s attractive stuff artistically speaking and Bolland’s astonishingly accomplished even at this early stage but Mike McMahon? Look, Bolland is beautiful, but Micky’s the Man. You wouldn’t even want to eat your dinner off a dinner plate if Mick McMahon (circa ’78) drew it. His art here is just such raw bloody fun and the sheer talent on show is immense. Each of McMahon’s pages is so hectic with incident and so deceptively detailed that in lesser hands they would collapse into eye boggling unintelligibility. The control of flow and density of information is that of a master, but the energy and chutzpah is that of a sugar rushed kid. It’s a killer combo for a strip paced as crazily as Judge Dredd circa ’78. Most comic artists could work a lifetime and never reach this peak, but for little Mick McMahon it was just the start. And the stuff both Bolland and McMahon are called upon to draw is punishing and unrelenting in its demands.

JUDGE DREDD: THE CURSED EARTH by Bolland, Mills & Frame

In 2017 most comics hunger to be TV shows or movies and so the imagination on show is (unconsciously?) limited by implicit budgetary restrictions. Back in 1978 it was understood that comics were movies without budget, and thus there were no limits to the imagination. Back then, basically, Brit comics blew the bloody doors off. Jim Lee would sue for mental cruelty if he had to draw an episode of “The Cursed Earth” in a week. Or even a panel. In one panel McMahon has to draw a T-Rex smashing through a prison wall while all the prisoners react in a fairly understandable fashion. Another finds our T Rex drooling mutilated bodies from its flesh glutted mouth as it rampages about. What? No, not splash pages, panels. About six of those things to a page, each imbued with so much atmosphere you can practically smell the fetid stench of theT-Rex's breath.  It’s a strong style, sure, and it’s not for everyone, which is why in the halls of my mind he will evermore be known as Mike “Mango Chutney” McMahon.

JUDGE DREDD: THE CURSED EARTH by McMahon, Mills & Frame

“The Cursed Earth” is kind of wonky, and lopsided but it is drawn by two All-Time Great artists, and has a narrative festooned with visions of the impossible which sear themselves indelibly into your soul. It would be a stony heart indeed which could be left unmoved. And the bit where Dredd finally staggers into Mega City Two battered, rad-burned, stubborn beyond sanity and still defiant is a comic book moment up there with Spidey and his machinery lifting.“The Cursed Earth” is VERY GOOD!

JUDGE DREDD: LAST OF THE BAD GUYS by Higgins, Wagner, Grant & Frame

The book also contains a later strip from the JUDGE DREDD ANNUAL 1982 by Wagner, Grant & Higgins. “Last of the Bad Guys” is inessential stuff, notable mainly for Higgins' queasy colour scheme and the ability of Wagner and Grant to pad out an idea more suited to 7 pages to 30 pages without leaving you feeling too short-changed. It's OKAY!

(*) Originally “The Cursed Earth” was 25 episodes long but this reprint omits the “Burger Wars” and “Soul Food” chapters, 4 episodes in total. Since the strips mocked the copyrighted characters of McDonalds, Burger King, and Green Giant (amongst others) and this led to legal action, these were not reprinted until 2016 in ““The Cursed Earth” Uncensored”. This was due to a 2014 change in the law implementing a European directive on copyright law allowing the use of copyright-protected characters for parody. Bloody Brussels! Bloody unelected bureaucrats! Coming over here and staffing our Health services! Grrr! Oh, wait…Anyway, I can’t remember the missing episodes having only read them once, and so “The Cursed Earth” no longer includes them in my head. Basically I’m not fussed that this book is “incomplete”, but you might be. You know how funny you can be about these things.

JUDGE DREDD: THE CURSED EARTH by McMahon, Mills & Frame

NEXT TIME: A flamboyantly insane man-child achieves the highest office in the land endangering the lives of millions! Is it reality or – COMICS!!!

THE JUDGE DREDD MEGA COLLECTION REVIEW INDEX

“What’s The Knife Got To Do With Anything?” MOVIES! Sometimes My Questionable Taste In Movies Spans Several Decades!

I’ve not had time to write up any comics, but I have written up some movies. I didn’t do a proper intro either. See?All complaints to the management, pal.

Combs & Crampton in FROM BEYOND

Anyway, this…

THE YAKUZA (1974) Directed by Sydney Pollack Starring Robert Mitchum, Ken Takakura, Brian Keith, Herb Edelman, Keiko Kishi, Eiji Okada with Richard Jordan as “Dusty” Screenplay by Paul Schrader and Robert Towne, Story by Leonard Schrader Music by Dave Grusin

She said: “Robert Mitchum is always a good time.”

Richard Jordan! I know! Fellow elderly readers have just threatened the purity of their incontinence pants! Whatever happened to Richard Jordan? He seemed to be in every movie made for about five minutes back in the ‘70s. And then: nada. (See also: Michael Sarrazin) Anyway, like you care, with your youth and your lattes and your wild ecstatic dancing. So, yeah, Richard Jordan is in this as the young scamp supporting Robert “Bob” Mitchum as he glides through Japan on a vengeance tip like a ferocious rock on a Segway®. A super cool rock, mind. One that returns to Japan to re-spark a WW2 romance while extracting a pal out of a jam with the Yakuza. Violence and stifled erotic yearning ensue. Based on a Paul & Leonard Schrader (with some Robert Towne tinkering) script it’s directed by Sydney Pollack. Unfortunately Pollack seems a poor fit for something that would benefit from being punched up with some of the shabby insanity of, say, Paul Schrader’s ROLLING THUNDER (1977). But then that’s a perpetual problem with Pollack’s stuff, a glaring lack of last act whorehouse shootouts. Particularly so in TOOTSIE (1982). THE YAKUZA keeps trying to be classy, basically. Too classy for the neo-noir material really. If you can get past that (and a truly jarringly inept flashback sequence) this is a pretty fun time. Not only do you get to see Mitchum placidly fuck the Yakuza up, but as an added bonus the perpetually underappreciated Brian Keith is gallantly sporting a quite remarkable hairpiece. This was on TCM so the print was hardly spectacular but still worth a  watch, if only for the sight of Robert Mitchum bursting through paper walls and emptying his gun into Japanese gangsters with all the emotion of a fridge. If nothing else THE YAKUZA proves that paper walls are no defence against elderly enraged Gaijin on the vengeance trail. GOOD! 

CHILD’S PLAY (1988) Directed by Tom Holland Starring Catherine Hicks, Chris Sranadon, Alex Vincent, Brad Dourif, Dinah Manoff with Jack Colvin as “Dr. Ardmore” Screenplay by Don Mancini, John Lafia and Tom Holland Music by Joe Renzetti

She said: “It’s silly.”

She’s not wrong, but it’s meant to be silly; so that’s okay. I got this on Blu-Ray just t’other day, because My Lady of Perpetual Suffering got herself gussied up as Chucky for Hallowe’en, but had never seen the movie. I know! Talk about an impoverished upbringing! One of the great unacknowledged burdens of Modern Life is the seeming inability to directly address any of life’s glaring injustices. Seven pounds sterling and twenty four hours later and I had kicked the lack of Chucky movies in my loved one’s life to the curb.  Next week: John ends world poverty. In the meantime I’ll tell you about CHILD’S PLAY, mainly so that I can claim the seven pounds back as “Business Expenses”. Thankfully, Tom “FRIGHT NIGHT” Holland is clearly not pulling a Pollack here and smartly plays down to the premise’s nutty strengths. Which is a good idea, as here he’s dealing with Brad “WISEBLOOD” Dourif’s serial killer escaping death by possessing an overpriced kid’s toy and then offing a bunch of people, before trying the same soul swap trick on Catherine Hick’s resourceful single mom’s kid. Given the not entirely straightforward premise the script does a remarkable job of cramming exposition, character work, set pieces, horror and humour into its wiry 87 minutes. No one’s going to give CHILD’S PLAY an Oscar® (unlike TOOTSIE) but as low budget ‘80s horror movies about foul mouthed killer dolls go it’s a pretty fun time. The fact it’s Brad (EXORCIST III) Dourif hissing expletives out of the chubby plastic face doesn’t hurt, obviously. For the time and the money they do a remarkably good job on the Chucky stuff. Which is clearly important as he’s (it’s?) the star, no matter how much fun Chris (FRIGHT NIGHT) Sarandon has with his Bwanx! accent. But Sarandon gets the best scene where, in a spirited blend of horror and physical comedy, he has to fend off Chucky’s attacks while driving a speeding car. But all the kills are well staged being either silly (Mr McGee from the Hulk gets electro shock) or flinch-making (the voodoo bone breaking. OH!) or creepy (Chucky skittering around the apartment like a barely glimpsed homicidal, ginger wigged cockroach). It’s an ‘80s movie so there are scenes of hobos with shopping carts, hairspray, a “spunky” best mate ripe for a spectacular fall, an explosion caused by someone putting the gas oven on, smoking, and a niggling sense that there was a lot of ruby and violet lighting (even though there probably wasn’t). It’s not as good as FRIGHT NIGHT (1985) but CHILD’S PLAY is still GOOD!

STAGE FRIGHT (1987) Directed by Michele Soavi Starring David Brandon, Barbara Cupisti, Robert Glogorov, Giovanni Lombardo Radice, Clain Parker, Loredana Parrella, Martin Philips with James Sampson as “Willy” Screenplay by George Eastman and Sheila Goldberg Music by Guido Anelli, Simon Boswell and Stefano Mainetti

She said: “This is just fucking awful; I’m going to bed.”

My paramour having been pummelled into early retirement by a distressingly ‘80s dance sequence, I was left alone to savour this, a poorly dubbed Italian slasher flick in which a bunch of thesps rehearsing an awful musical are stalked by an escaped nutter wearing a massive owl mask. The dialogue and the acting are kind of terrible, but that’s not why we’re here. No, we are here to see an escaped nutter wearing a massive owl mask off some thesps in inventive, suspenseful and, hopefully, excessively gory ways.  Which is what happens, oddly enough. Since Aristotle first posited the notion of catharis, the belief has persisted that watching stuff like this is, uh, cathartic, stopping us from doing bad stuff by soaking up nasty urges. Since I have never heard of anyone donning a massive owl mask and offing a bunch of thesps, the evidence, anecdotal as it may be, is on Aristotle’s side. Who knows how many poorly dubbed thesps’ lives this movie has saved simply by existing? No one knows. Because it’s a stupid question. Putting aside the pretentious crowbarring in of ancient mega brains in an attempt to class this up Sydney Pollack-like, STAGE FRIGHT is a slasher flick and slasher flicks are all about the kills. Oh, there are some sweet “kills” in this one. Hurr. Kills. Hurr. I like the kills. Hoo! Hoo! See how they die! Hey, Aristotle said it’s good for me, so don’t you be judging me! For the more erudite cineaste there’s a brilliantly staged piece of suspense where the heroine has to retrieve a key from right by the killer’s feet by shimmying under the stage, all the while unaware of whether the killer’s caught on, because of the giant face occluding owl mask he’s wearing. The choppy and unpromising start can drive the more sensible viewer away, but if you can tolerate the initial stretch of almost hallucinatory poor, well, everything STAGE FRIGHT rewards you with some hectic homicidal mayhem. It gets a bit odd at the end, with a character repeating things like he’s suffered a brain injury and a “shocking reveal” that centres on the inability of the police to count. But, y’know, I came to see an escaped nutter wearing a massive owl mask slaughter a bunch of thesps and I got exactly that. So STAGE FRIGHT was OKAY!

TARNISHED ANGELS (1957) Directed by Douglas Sirk Starring Rock Hudson, Robert Stack, Dorothy Malone, Robert Middleton with Jack Carson as “Jiggs” Screenplay by George Zuckerman Based on the novel 'Pylon' by William Faulkner Music by Frank Skinner

She said: “Everyone is having emotions!”

Here Douglas Sirk adapts William Faulkner’s 1935 novel ‘Pylon’, reportedly much to William Faulkner’s apparent 1957 displeasure. Lighten up, Billy Faulkner! I know, I know, TARNISHED ANGELS looks like one of those movies you watch with your elderly parents on a Sunday afternoon. That’s what it looks like, what with Rock (SECONDS) Hudson as a tipsy reporter in a hat, Robert (AIRPLANE!) Stack as a moody stunt flyer, Jack (MILDRED PIERCE) Carson as the cheeky mechanic, Dorothy (WINTER KILLS) Malone as the woman caught between them, and Chris Olsen as the tow headed child alternating between weepy and cheeky in the background. To top it all off Rock Hudson’s character is called Burke Devlin, a name so butch it’s got hair on its knuckles. And most names don’t even have knuckles. Unthreatening Sunday matinee material a-go-go then. Ah-ah-ah, not so fast! This is a Douglas Sirk movie, so for a start the emotions on display are so intense they almost exist independently of the actors expressing them. Being English and thus an emotional invert I find Douglas Sirk movies quite traumatic viewing. Where war movies have bullets and horror movies have monsters, Douglas Sirk movies have emotions. And in Douglas Sirk movies emotions wound like bullets and maul like monsters.  Some mock Sirk for being a kind of bland romantic, but TARNISHED ANGELS for one is one sleazy movie about really unhealthy relationships and horribly damaged people. It’s a movie which is only saved from being vilely unsavoury by the slight dilution afforded by the restraints of the time. Unfettered, I feel Douglas Sirk would have made movies that made REQUIEM FOR A DREAM (2000) look like TOOTSIE (1982). I mean, Christ, in one scene here we are cruelly forced to view a child trapped on a fairground plane ride hysterically freak out as he watches his dad’s fatal plane crash mere yards away. And if that pitilessly harrowing scene isn’t a perfect summation of the Sirk approach, it’s only because it isn’t soaked in sumptuous swathes of lush Techni-color. Alas, TARNISHED ANGELS is in B&W but otherwise it’s as SIrk as Sirk can be. EXCELLENT!

FROM BEYOND (1986) Directed by Stuart Gordon Starring Jeffrey Combs, Barbara Crampton, Ken Foree with Ted Sorel as “Dr. Edward Pretorious” Screenplay by Dennis Paoli, Brian Yuzna and Stuart Gordon Based on the short story by H. P. Lovecraft Music by Richard Band

She said: “There’s just too many tits in ‘80s horror movies!”

And she wasn’t talking about Malcolm McDowell. BOOM! BOOM! Prudes beware; this is based on the H. P. Lovecraft short story ’From Beyond’ in the same delightfully vulgar way as the same team’s REANIMATOR is based on ol’ shovel chin’s ‘Herbert West: Reanimator’. Which is to say that if H. P. Lovecraft ever saw either one he’d probably expire forthwith, face empurpled and eyes agog. Because FROM BEYOND is Trashy McTrash, no doubt. But it’s unapologetically trashy; trash which winks because it’s smarter than you think.  No, for 21st Century citizens with their elevated tastes there’s just no getting around the fact that Barbara (YOU’RE NEXT) Crampton’s arse gets a good airing and her chest gets a good mauling by gooey claws, while Jeffrey (THE FRIGHTENERS) Combs slowly transforms into a giant phallus, and poor old Ken (DAWN OF THE DEAD) Foree’s good-natured cop can only try to keep spirits up with his dumplings and gravy. But why would you want to get around any of that? You should wallow in it, wallow, I say! Otherwise you’re watching the wrong movie. Try ****ing TOOTSIE (1982) if you want inoffensive claptrap. So, having built a “Resonator” (as one does) to stimulate pineal glands (!) Dr. Pretorius’ head brutally disappears leaving a babbling Crawford Tillinghast (Combs) and an upset neighbour in curlers in its wake. Eager to make a name for herself Crampton’s shrink (Dr Kate McMichaels; who must have started studying medicine at the stately age of 4) takes Tillinghast back to the scene of the weird science crime to find out what happened. Slightly concerned about the headless corpse and the fact that Tillinghast was the only suspect, the police insist Detective Bubba Brownlee (Foree) accompany them. (To be honest this might not be an entirely accurate reflection of police procedure.) McMichaels has the bright idea of repeating the experiment, and then things get a bit rudey-roo and gooey-goo as reality is invaded by creatures and impulses …from beyond! FROM BEYOND is unusually bawdy for a horror movie, but it’s got plenty of the old claret splashing and brain munching as well as some freaky creatures. Everyone acts like they are having a blast, and since most of the FX are physical it stands up to blu-ray pretty well; the blue screen stuff suffers, but since that’s minimal it’s hardly a deal breaker. Taken optically, FROM BEYOND provides your RDA of saucy horror tomfoolery. VERY GOOD!

WE ARE STILL HERE (2015) Directed by Ted Geoghan Starring Barbara Crampton, Andrew Sensenig, Lisa Marie, Larry Fessenden with Monte Markham as “Dave McCabe” Screenplay by Ted Geoghan Music by Wojciech Golczewski

She said: “That’s really shit me up, that has!”

This was an impulse view and, boy, this was a good one. You could almost smell my relief as I found that my aging impulses remain sound. Unhealthy, sure, but still sound. I didn’t know anything going in to WE ARE STILL HERE and it was all the better for it. Hence the brevity of this review, as I seek to replicate that experience for your good self. In essence though, Barbara (FROM BEYOND) Crampton and Andrew Sensenig play a couple still shell-shocked by grief for their recently deceased son, who move into a remote house in a snowy and bleak bit of ‘70s America. Creepiness ensues. It really would be a shame to spoil it, but the best thing was how it ended up crushing expectations like a still beating heart in a vengeful corpse’s fist. WE ARE STILL HERE starts off all elegantly measured and mournful, with brief glimpses of disquiet and then it lunges suddenly into, well, something else. Clearly the people involved all love horror movies and know how to make ‘em, but most impressive was the acting. Everyone’s acting is top notch, really , really top notch; everyone nails the characters just right. But even so, unsung screen vet Monte Markham stands out with his enormously entertaining affable bastardry. Damn, this was just such fun. You’ll probably never look at a sock the same way again. WE ARE STILL HERE is still VERY GOOD!

THE NAKED ISLAND (1960) Directed by Kaneto Shindô Screenplay by Kaneto Shindô Starring Nobuko Otowa, Taiji Tonoyama, Shinji Tanaka, Masanori Horimoto Music by Hikaru Hayashi

She said: “That was sad. Good, but sad.”

This is a Japanese movie about a family of four whose hard scrabble life is dominated by the farming of a harsh lump of an island in the Setonaikai archipelago . Most of each day is taken up with rowing to the neighbouring island to draw the water essential for life and agriculture. For part of the day the two children attend school. The school together with the water bearing and trips to sell crops are their only links with the wider society. The movie is minimal and realistic; Shindô and his cast and crew lived on the island throughout the filming. No words are spoken for the first half hour, and for the most part the movie just follows the family’s bleak, repetitive existence, creating a soothing rhythm until the inevitable occurs, and the lack of things we take for granted takes a terrible toll. Then life resumes and then life goes on. With THE NAKED ISLAND Shindô is as quiet as Sirk is loud but to no lesser emotional effect. THE NAKED ISLAND is the kind of deceptively artless movie which seems to be doing nothing but is quietly doing everything. Unlike ***ing TOOTSIE. Whatever, THE NAKED ISLAND is EXCELLENT!

NEXT TIME: Oh, go on then – COMICS!!!

"Bedlam In Bug's Back Yard!" Sometimes The Visual Tribute To Battlin' Bill Mantlo Has A Second Part!

Yes! The post no one demanded! All the visual ephemera I could find within my battered back-issues of Battlin' Bill Mantlo and Michael "is" Golden's fizzy kid's comic confection THE MICRONAUTS. I may have missed one or two, but even so here is art from Michael Golden, Steve Ditko, Gil Kane, Butch Guice etc.. which may very well be shortly lost to time. Not on this old fool's watch! Feast your eyes! BONUS: Is MICRONAUTS #39 the "Rosebud" to Citizen Hibbs? Wilder things have happened, pilgrim! Have a happy Bank Holiday, from your pugnacious pal Jabberin' John K of the UK! EXCELSIOR! MICRONAUTS#39 by Steve Ditko, Danny Bulandi, Bill Mantlo, Jim Novak & Bob Sharen

Anyway, this...

Thanks, Battlin' Bill and all your artistic partners! This kid appreciated it!

NEXT TIME: Words about COMICS!!!

"Take Him To The BODY BANKS!" COMICS! Sometimes It's The Little Things...

Um, here's a gallery of comic book covers from a series that Marvel published from 1979 - 1984 as a tie-in to a terrible line of toys. It was also, as of issue 38, part of Marvel's first tender dalliances with Direct Market only comics (see also MOON KNIGHT and KA-ZAR). The unfortunate Bill Mantlo scripted the series solidly (as was his wont) for its duration, but the real attraction was the cavalcade of artistic talent who put food on their table drawing this stuff. Michael Golden! Gil Kane! Steve Ditko! (Howard Victor Chaykin even did some innards but, alas, no covers). Because of legal what have you, and the fact it was so heavily intertwined with the Marvel Universe it's unlikely the series will ever be reprinted, so here for your baffled perusment I present without words and purely in pictures, the mighty MICRONAUTS... MICRONAUTS by Michael Golden, Josef Rubinstein, Bill Mantlo, Tom Orzexhowski & Glynis Wein.

They are old and they are yellowed but, by Dallan, they are - COMICS!!!

“Somebody Who Should Be Dead Is Alive, Or Somebody Who Should Be Alive Is Already Dead!” MOVIES! Sometimes I Am Reminded That No Matter Whatever Our Country Of Origin May Be We Are All Human And So United By A Fear of Being Stabbed In The Face By A Gloved Nutter.

Yes! It’s that thing where I watch some movies you aren’t interested in and then tell you what I think about them, while prefacing my words with a comment My Lady of Infinite Patience made about them. Look, I just haven’t had chance to read anything lately. Sorry but, uh, them's the breaks. Anita Strindberg in Your Vice Is A Locked Room And Only I Have The Key (1972)

Anyway, this… PHENOMENA (1985) Directed by Dario Argento Written by Dario Argento & Franco Ferrini Starring Jennifer Connelly, Daria Nicolodi, Fiore Argento, Frederica Mastroianni, Fiorenza Tessari, Dalila Di Lazzaro, Patrick Bauchau and Donald Pleasence as Professor John McGregor. Special Guest Chimp “Tanga” as Inga Music by Simon Boswell and Goblin

….and she said, “I think I’m going to be sick…”

That wasn’t a comment on the movie; we were barely forty minutes in when She of The Streaming Content was taken badly. This left me with a dilemma: I could either watch a ridiculous movie in which a baby-faced Jennifer Connelly hunts a serial killer in a Swiss girls school aided only by her ability to communicate with insects together with wheelchair bound pathologist Donald Pleasence and his trained chimp, Inga, or…or…or I could  provide succour and comfort to my ailing heart partner. Obviously, I watched the movie. Now, before you trip over yourself in your rush to judgement may I just remind you that this was a ridiculous movie in which a baby-faced Jennifer Connelly hunts a serial killer in a Swiss girls school aided only by her ability to communicate with insects together with wheelchair bound pathologist Donald Pleasence and his trained chimp, Inga. Sometimes Life’s all about priorities, kids.

Even though we (well, I. Sorry, dollcakes) watched it via a streaming service and so it wasn’t HD, and thus it was like watching it through a piece of soiled muslin, Argento’s much lauded stylishness was still more than apparent. Having avoided his work thus far in my life I am really warming to Dario Argento; there is just something supremely endearing about the seriousness and sheer graft with which he approaches the most preposterous baloney. As preposterous baloney goes PHENOMENA is amazingly so right until the end. At which point the preposterousness and the baloniness reach such a hysterical pitch that they pummel you into submission.  Truly, the ending to PHENOMENA is just a thing of wonder and a joy forever, because this ending goes on for a good half hour and just keeps piling insane nonsense atop insane nonsense, in a kind of splendidly insane nonsense Jenga of an ending. And somewhere in there Donald Pleasance is “doing” a Scots accent to boot. HELP MABOAB! Look, if you are okay with a barely pubescent Jennifer Connelly attempting to locate the killer’s house by taking a fly on a bus ride then you, sir or madam, are in for an intoxicating treat. PHENOMENA was PHENOMENAL! (HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Shame is for lesser men!)

TENEBRAE (1982) Directed by Dario Argento Written by Dario Argento Starring Anthony Franciosa, Giulana Gemma, Christian Borromeo, Mirella D’Angelo, Veronica Lario, Ania Pieroni, Eva Robins, Carola Stagnaro, John Steiner, Lara Wendel, Daria Nicoldi, Giuliano Gemma and John Saxon as “Bullmer” Music by Massimo, Fabio Pignatelli and Claudio Simonetti

…and she said, “Do they not have bras in Italy then?”

Oh, we both liked this one. Belay that, we both loved it! Sure, enjoyment was expected but amore was a pleasant surprise. That Dario Argento, the tricksy scamp,  outflanked me by making a wicked-smart movie; one not just with a plot that made sense but one with real cinematic smarts too. The stuff cineastes adore is here with “doubling” abounding, a meta-textual message to his critics embedded in the meat of the movie (one that needs to be reconsidered once the movie ends) and playful jumps between diegetic and non-diegetic sound. Or, cough, so I hear. For us layfolk who are here for the entertainment that’s all well and good, but it’s probably nicer that with TENEBRAE Argento’s got several people who can act in the cast, rather than the usual just one or two (or none).  Also, style? This thing is lacquered in style. It’s so ‘80s I was tempted to try and snort it through a rolled up tenner. TENEBRAE may mean shadows (or darkness) in English but the movie is shot in such a way as to eradicate as much shadow as possible. This is Hell in the glare of a neon flare. Murder in a world lit like a Supermarket. (Some of my trademark overstuffed writing there in case you were missing it.) Even a chase through a park at night denies the quarry the safety of shadows. A park at night, even! That’s visually tricky stuff to pull off that is. But Argento et al pull it off, alright. There’s just something fantastically right about TENEBRAE; as though it’s the movie Argento was working towards and everything after it could only ever be a decline. (Calm down, Argentophiles: That’s relatively speaking; his “decline” still includes PHENOMENA see above). Argento is just ON with this one. He even has one of the most flamboyantly pointless camera moves in history and it’s just a delightful indulgence soundtracked by the best blare of Death Disco soundtrack yet.

Anthony Franciosa winningly essays  a charmingly jovial author whose new schlocky horror novel (‘Tenebrae’, natch) is found at the scene of a brutal murder which leads to the police taking an interest in him, and his taking an interest in the crimes. After all, imagine if “Peter Neal” (for 'tis he), could catch a killer - imagine the book sales!  Unfortunately he fails to consider what might happen should the murderer have other ideas –imagine the bodycount! Don’t worry you won’t have to. You’ll see it. There’s some mighty fine murders in this one. Although Franciosa’s persistently upbeat performance owns the movie he gets good support from the ever sturdy John Saxon (who has fun playing with his hat and wiggling his eyebrows),  the cops (Carola Stagnaro and Giulano Gemma) are sympathetically puzzled and Daria Nicoldi gets the best of the female civilian roles (most of the other female roles involving screaming and bleeding) and, really, the only weak spot in the main players is what seems to be a young Martin Amis in a bad jumper. But, you know, for an Argento movie the cast is like MAGNOLIA solid. Not only that but  the plot makes sense. I know! I wasn’t expecting that at all. Usually you’d have more chance identifying the killer by opening a book of Baby Names at random, but this time if you’ve got your wits about you the smug luxury of being right is within your reach.  TENEBRAE’s not perfect, there are still some of Argento’s bad habits like some truly ridiculous plot contortions to get a character to accidently enter the killer’s den and some stilted lesbian arguing but when it ends you won't remember any of that. When TENEBRAE ends you'll just remember that sometimes the darkness is within. TENEBRAE is TENEBRAE!

YOUR VICE IS A LOCKED ROOM AND ONLY I HAVE THE KEY (1972) Directed by Sergio Martino Screenplay by Adriano Bolzini, Ernesto Gastaldi and Sauro Scavolini Story by Luciano Martino and Sauro Scavolini Based on the story The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe Starring Edwige Fenech, Anita Strindberg, Luigi Pistilli, Ivan Rassimov, Franco Nebbia, Riccardo Salvino, Angela La Vorgna and Enrica Bonaccorti as “Hooker” Music by Bruno Nicolai

…and she said, “Phew! For a minute there I thought we weren’t going to see her breasts.”

Seriously, who could resist a movie with a title like that? Not I, honeythighs. YOUR VICE IS A LOCKED ROOM AND ONLY I HAVE THE KEY ! It’s like something a bell-bottomed Howard Victor Chaykin would use to chat up “foxy chicks” in the ‘70s at a roller disco: “YOUR VICE IS A LOCKED ROOM AND ONLY I HAVE THE KEY!” (Subtext: THE KEY BEING MY PENIS!) Fan-tastic. Obviously the movie doesn’t live up to that promise of staggering ridiculosity, but it certainly has an admirable crack at it. YOUR VICE IS A LOCKED ROOM AND ONLY I HAVE THE KEY is a 1970s Italian movie adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Black Cat, but in a really sleazy giallo stylee. So, there’s  pair of gloved hands, some heavy breathing POV, blaringly cool murder tunes, scads of stabbing and a pint pot of plot twists. That’s the giallo bit taken care of. The 1970s bit is covered by the unpleasantly leering air, the use of unfortunate racial terminology, a supercrazysexygroovy party scene, excessive motocross footage, asphyxia mocking levels of smoking,  and wardrobe choices which turn everyone into a sartorial criminal.

(Words fail me.)

Well, everyone except Luigi Pistilli who has that distinctly craggy machismo which enables him to carry off looking like a disco shepherd. Anyway, he sulkily plays a debauched writer who can’t write, and so like any writer fills his time by drinking, smoking, throwing supercrazysexygroovy parties, drinking, abusing his wife (Anita Strindberg doing a nice line in “Crazy Lady Eyes”©®), smoking, drinking, feeding his black cat (“Satan”, natch), smoking, drinking and knocking off (in a sexy sense) his ex-student. Then someone knocks off (in a dead sense) his ex-student and things escalate into a crazy slasher flick for a bit before calming down into a movie normal human beings might endure at a push, but then his sexually, uh, accommodating niece (a very, uh, vigorous Edwige Fenech) turns up and  things hurtle off into the a realm of mental delirium so unapologetic Poe would probably approve. (Although he’d probably have had conniptions over the surfeit of tits.) YOUR VICE IS A LOCKED ROOM AND ONLY I HAVE THE KEY  was DELIRIOUS!

So, um, next time – COMICS!!!

"Justice Has A Price. The Price Is Freedom." COMICS! Sometimes I Hesitate To Correct An Officer Of The Law But I Think You'll Find That In This Case The Price is £9.99 Fortnightly. OW!

Borag Thungg, Earthlets! Clearly I have nothing useful to do with my time because I have bodged up a master list of the JUDGE DREDD MEGA COLLECTION. As each volume is released I will update the list and the accompanying image gallery. Should I “review” a volume I will link to that volume in the list. So, interested in the JUDGE DREDD MEGA COLLECTION as “reviewed” by yours truly, then this is the list for that. Pretty clear stuff. No questions? Anyone? Good. If anyone wants me to look at a particular volume, just drop me a comment. The volumes aren't released in order so it's not like I have a sensible plan of attack. If anyone wants me to stick them where the sun don't shine I suggest you keep that sentiment to yourself, cheers. Right, that laundry won't wash itself. Pip! Pip!

JUDGE DREDD by Mick McMahon & Pat Mills

Anyway, this... JUDGE DREDD THE MEGA COLLECTION Published by Hatchette/Rebellion UK, 2014 onwards.

Judge Dredd Created by Carlos Ezquerra, John Wagner & Pat Mills

Volumes:

01 – JUDGE DREDD: AMERICA Cover by Colin MacNeil

02 – JUDGE DREDD: DEMOCRACY NOW Cover by John Higgins

03 – JUDGE DREDD: TOTAL WAR Cover by Simon Coleby

04 - JUDGE DREDD: THE DEAD MAN Cover by John Ridgway

05 - JUDGE DREDD: NECROPOLIS Cover by Carlos Ezquerra

06 - JUDGE DREDD: JUDGE DEATH LIVES Cover By Brian Bolland 07 - JUDGE DREDD: YOUNG DEATH Cover by Frazer Irving

08 – JUDGE ANDERSON: THE POSSESSED Cover by Brett Ewins

09 - JUDGE ANDERSON: ENGRAM Cover by David Roach

10 – JUDGE ANDERSON: SHAMBALLA Cover by Arthur Ranson

11 - JUDGE ANDERSON: CHILDHOOD'S END Cover by Kev Walker

12 - JUDGE ANDERSON: HALF-LIFE Cover by Arthur Ranson

13 -

14 – DEVLIN WAUGH: SWIMMING IN BLOOD Cover by Cliff Robinson

15 - DEVLIN WAUGH: CHASING HEROD Cover by Colin Wilson

16 - DEVLIN WAUGH: FETISH Cover by Cliff Robinson 17 -

18 -

19 - LOW LIFE:PARANOIA Cover by Henry Flint

20 - LOW LIFE: HOSTILE TAKEOVER Cover by D'Israeli

21 - THE SIMPING DETECTIVE Cover by Cliff Robinson

22 -

23 - JUDGE DREDD: BANZAI BATALLION Cover by Jock

24 - JUDGE DREDD: MECHANISMO Cover by Colin MacNeil

25 - JUDGE DREDD: MANDROID Cover by Kev Walker

26 - 27 -

28 - JUDGE DREDD: THE LIFE AND CRIMES OF P. J. MAYBE Cover by Cliff Robinson

29 -

30 - TARGET: JUDGE DREDD Cover by Jim Baikie

31 – JUDGE DREDD: OZ Cover by Steve Dillon

32 – JUDGE DREDD: THE CURSED EARTH Cover by Mick McMahon

33 - JUDGE DREDD: THE DAY THE LAW DIED Cover by Mick McMahon

34 - 35 -

36 – JUDGE DREDD: THE APOCALYPSE WAR Cover by Carlos Ezquerra

37 - JUDGE DREDD: JUDGEMENT DAY Cover by Carlos Ezquerra

38 - JUDGE DREDD: INFERNO Cover by Carlos Ezquerra

39 - JUDGE DREDD: WILDERLANDS Cover by Trevor Hairsine

40 - JUDGE DREDD: THE PIT Cover by Cliff Robinson

41 -

42 – JUDGE DREDD: DOOMSDAY FOR DREDD Cover by Dylan Teague

43 - JUDGE DREDD: DOOMSDAY FOR MEGA-CITY ONE Cover by Colin Wilson

44 -

45 - JUDGE DREDD: ORIGINS Cover by Brian Bolland

46 -

47 - JUDGE DREDD: TOUR OF DUTY: BACKLASH Cover by Carlos Ezquerra

48 -

49 - JUDGE DREDD: DAY OF CHAOS: THE FOURTH FACTION Cover by Henry Flint

50 – JUDGE DREDD: DAY OF CHAOS: ENDGAME Cover by Henry Flint

51 - TRIFECTA Cover by Carl Critchlow

52 - 53 - 54 -

55 – JUDGE DREDD: THE HEAVY MOB Cover by Dylan Teague

56 -JUDGE DREDD: BEYOND MEGA-CITY ONE Cover by Brendan McCarthy

57 - CALHAB JUSTICE Cover by John Ridgway

58 - 59 -

60 – HONDO-CITY JUSTICE Cover by Cliff Robinson

61 - SHIMURA Cover by Colin MacNeil 62 - 63 - 64 - 65 - 66 - 67 - CURSED EARTH KOBURN

68 - CURSED EARTH CARNAGE Cover by Anthony Williams

69 - 70 - 71 -

72 - JUDGE DREDD: THE ART OF TAXIDERMY Cover by Steve Dillon

73 - JUDGE DREDD: HEAVY METAL DREDD Cover by John Hicklenton

74

75 – JUDGE DREDD: ALIEN NATIONS Cover by Cliff Robinson

76 - JUDGE DREDD: KLEGG HAI Cover by Chris Weston

77 - JUDGE DREDD: HORROR STORIES Cover by Brett Ewins

78 -

79 - JUDGE DREDD: INTO THE UNDERCITY Cover by Tiernen Trevallion

80 - JUDGE DREDD: DARK SIDE OF THE MOON Cover by Brian Bolland

Judge Dredd! He is the – COMICS!!!

"If Only I Could Convince BEVERLY That He's As IMPORTANT As I Know He Is." COMICS FOLK! Sometimes It's 65 Pictures For 65 Years!

It's the 7th October 2015 and that means it's been 65 years of the chunky wee thermodynamic miracle Howard Victor Chaykin! Today is his day, so I'm going to shut my yapper and below the break you can feast your eyes on 65 images culled from The Chaykin Section in The Kane Garage Archives. Raise your root beers high and let's all drink to another 65 years of the amazing Mr. Chaykin!

THE SHADOW by Chaykin, Bruzenak & Wald

Anyway, this...

  Happy Birthday, Mr. Chaykin and thanks for all the - COMICS!!!

"Pop...EVERYTHIN' I Want Costs MONEY!" COMICS! Sometimes I Slap Leather!

Sorry, that garage clearing was a beast. Still, look what I found:

Hawk, Son of Tomahawk by Thorne & Kanigher Anyway, this... TOMAHAWK# 135 Art by Frank Thorne, John Severin Written by Robert Kanigher, Jerry DeFuccio DC Comics, $0.15 (1971) Tomahawk created by Fred Ray & Ed Frances Herron Hawk, Son of Tomahawk created by Mr & Mrs Tomahawk

Here's a DC Western book I'd never heard of and didn't realise I owned. It's got a Joe Kubert cover that looks like an “Egg-timer Special” but still has time for a sweet charcoal effect background, and slips its lack of detail past by walloping you with a fistful of impact. Yeah, Joe Kubert could do you a cover like no other. Joe Kubert was also the Editor here, which explains the presence of Robert Kanigher on typewriter hammerin'. Back then Editors had a favoured stable (Western wordplay, cheers.) of talent whose most valued attributes were timeliness and dependability rather than flash, pizzaz or having performing hair. Kanigher was a sturdy workhouse who Kubert was always happy to employ because he knew that he could ask Kanigher for a 12 page oater by lunchtime tomorrow and Kanigher would deliver - like it was his job or something. Basically, books edited by Joe Kubert tend to have a lot of Robert Kanigher in them because Robert Kanigher got it done. And I tend to have a lot of Joe Kubert edited books because I like the weird genres they put him in charge of (War, Westerns, Apemen and Tor (always Tor)). Just in case you were thinking I was engaged on some stealth rehabilitation of Robert Kanigher or something.

Hawk, Son of Tomahawk by Thorne & Kanigher

The book is called SON OF TOMAHAWK but the indicia reveals it is actually TOMAHAWK, this discrepancy is due to the recent replacement of Tomahawk in the main strip by his son Hawk, Son of Tomahawk. The repercussions of this are documented in the letters page where the level of bewilderment, guarded optimism and plain dislike show comic fans' embrace of change is timeless in its consistency. Unfortunately, I lack any kind of context for this comic so I had to look up Tomahawk and it turns out his adventures were originally set during in the Revolutionary War where he fought on the wrong side (I'm British, natch). In this book he wanders about in his vest puffing on a corncob pipe while his son has all the fun. His son, Hawk, Son of Tomahawk, is a design classic in the same way as a Plymouth Fury. A Plymouth Fury that some crackjob's driven into a wall. Because Frank “Every Rose Has Its” Thorne's art here is characteristically light on detail it's hard to pin down Hawk, son of Tomahawk's look too specifically, as Thorne's work becomes more nebulous the harder you look at it. Basically though Hawk, son of Tomahawk, with his skunk streaked DA, tasselled jacket with tribal decals, and drainpipe jeans would make even Vegas Elvis do a double take. But then this is a new kind of Western hero.

Hawk, Son of Tomahawk by Thorne & Kanigher

Or at least I think it is; this is the only issue I own so it might just be an outlier in what is otherwise a run as salty and plain ornery as SCALPHUNTER or JONAH HEX. Here though it looks like every effort is being made to avoid offence, even to the extent of having a pacifist hero. Hawk, Son of Tomahawk's mum is a Native American and he has a toddler brother decked out in tribal duds. Which is nice, but they are pretty generic and later when some other Native Americans show up they are all stoic and dignified. Which is fine, very respectful and that but it's hardly the stuff of high drama. Luckily, there's always the White Man. I don't know why the White Man gets such a raw deal (reads a history book; cries. Okay, **** the White Man.) The story starts by some bad white guys harassing a peddlar who gives Hawk, Son of Tomahawk a catalogue as a reward. Now, remember the Old West was like a giant open air lunatic asylum where the only recreational activities were murder, rutting, trains and drinking until blindness set in. So a catalogue in the Old West would have been like the Internet but with less naked people involved in wallpaper paste accidents and less pictures of cats hating us. Seriously, Hawk is enraptured and decides immediately to set out to gain enough riches to buy some scented candles, Sea-Bison or a life-size cardboard glow-in-the-dark Abe Lincoln. Whatever; I don't know what they had in those things; vittals and gingham or something. Anyway, he bumps into his big pal who is just setting out with a treasure map. That's quite a coincidence to you, but if you had 12 pages you'd tend to think of it as expedient. There's a nice bit where they find the Ghost Mountain inside another mountain, but the gold turns out to be in a Native American burial ground. (Joke about America being one big Native American burial ground removed on grounds of taste.)

Hawk, Son of Tomahawk by Thorne & Kanigher Up until exhaustion and gold fever set in Hawk, son of Hawk's pal is pretty okay but then he gets all racist and violent like a Farcry game on legs. That's not because he's white though, let's be clear here; gold turns the guy's head, at which point he becomes a big murderous racist. This is good because if someone had more time they could “read” this story about the corrupting effect of the capitalist system and how its emphasis on reward sets people against one another. Or something. Mind you, I don't know if Kanigher accidentally stumbles on this, I've just had a brain fart, or it's actually built-in. It's not every comic that has the brass balls to declare that even The White Man isn't the villain, it's the system of exploitation in which he exists which is the true villain! Socialist Pacifist Western Comics for The Win! Anyway, the whole trapped underground with a violent racist thing is pretty unfortunate for Hawk, Son of Tomahawk, what with his Mum being a Native American. Even worse, he's in a 1970s comic where it seems they are actively trying to get away from the usual Western thing of plugging varmints and owlhoots at the drop of a stetson. Luckily, he's in a 1970s comic where it's still entirely okay for the greed addled white dude to get speared by a toppling corpse because this makes it both no one's fault and karmically just.

Hawk, Son of Tomahawk by Thorne & Kanigher

Basically, and admirably, Kanigher attempts to deliver a message via a tale without villains, heroes or excessive violence. Since all those things are the reasons comics are entertaining its no surprise their lack makes the result a little dull. But I do have to admire how Kanigher leaps out of his own trap built of good intentions. I was entertained after all, just in a different way than usual. It's efficiently and pleasantly drawn by Frank Thorne, whose art has a fluid grace not entirely unlike that of Joe Kubert. Thorne would later become famous for drawing Red Sonja and spend many happy years producing his own comics featuring ladies in a state of undress, and judging Red Sonja-a-like contests while dressed as a wizard. In many ways, I think we can all agree, Frank Thorne won.

AMERICA: "A Glance at Yesterday" by Sam Glanzman

After the lead feature Sam Glanzman gets roped in to do one of his typically informative double page spreads. I’m used to seeing these pop up in war comics so it’s interesting to note he was versatile enough to do The Old West too. Here kids get to thrill to a picture of a wagon train being burned, which is surrounded by informative illustrations of weapons the native Americans would have used to slaughter the same kids' ancestors and some of the headdresses they might have sported to do so. It's nice, dusty looking stuff and it's even nicer to be reminded that space fillers could be quality gear.

"SPOILERS" by Severin & DeFuccio The final 8 pages are a (probably reprinted) story called “Spoilers” by Jerry DeFuccio and illustrated by John Severin. This is a really dense tale with an attention to detail in the text which suggests it is an attempt to adapt a true story into comics. Maybe not though, because during a quick spin around the Internet I found no mention of “Kirby's Raiders” circa 1865. I did, however, find some really interesting pictures of naked people who had been involved in wallpaper paste accidents, and also of cats hating us. It's a nice yarn about a Confederate who goes back home to one of those mansions apparently everybody in the South seems to have lived in (well, everybody white). You know the ones with the big pillars and a big pile of fixings for them thar mint juleps out back. Unfortunately those Northern bastards have been at it and left it not unlike when a burglar breaks in and dumps one out on your bed (apparently it’s from the adrenalin; it makes you loose). As revenge Kirby forms his Rangers and they go around stealing gold from that darned gubbermint. Kirby takes a break, disperse his gang, hides the cash and takes up on a farm where he helps out with his honest toil until a bunch of locusts turn up. Basically, Kirby sees he has become a spoiler like the darn Yankees and the locusts. It ends with a hilariously underplayed final panel where he muses on the lesson he has learned and we are informed that the money he hid earlier had also fallen victim to the locusts. It’s left unsaid, but if I know my westerns then that guy’s life was short and punctuated by violent inquiries as to the location of the loot from his former colleagues. John Severin draws the holy Hell out of it all in his characteristic style - sharp as a craft knife and loaded with detail. Two decent strips and an informative space filler makes TOMAHAWK #135 a comic which is GOOD!

In 1971 for fifteen slim cents you could get Joe Kubert, Frank Thorne, Sam Glanzman and John Severin. Now that's – COMICS!!!

"WHO'S Stubborn?" COMICS! Sometimes Only The Sea Sees!

No, no, no! Oh, Sgt Rock, the optimum method of seagull attracting is to be a small child stood in St Ives holding a rapidly collapsing ’99, as my still somewhat traumatised son will attest. Naturally I realise it isn’t the fault of the seagull but rather that of the idiots who persist in feeding them in flagrant contravention of the many signs prohibiting this precise behaviour. (I am particularly proud of how middle-aged that sentence sounds; it’s the written equivalent of rolling up my jacket sleeves and nodding fiercely along to a shitty Phil Collins “number”. At a wedding.) SGT ROCK by Heath & Kanigher

Anyway, this... OUR ARMY AT WAR #258 Art by Russ Heath, Sam Glanzman Written by Robert Kanigher, Sam Glanzman DC Comics, $0.20 (1973) Sgt Rock created by Joe Kubert, Robert Kanigher & Bob Haney

This comic came out in 1973 and is set during a war which ended in 1945. As I peck these words out it’s 2015 and while you’ve probably heard of that war (The Second World War) you’ve probably never heard of this comic. There’s no real reason for you to have done so. I only found it because I’ve had to start clearing out the garage because someone had the crazy notion that we should put a car in there. Sheer madness, I trust you’ll agree. Obviously then, I’ve been sorting through my comics, and I read this one and thought I’d write about it precisely because it is a good example of the kind of comic that’s rarely mentioned; a 1970s DC war comic. 1970s DC war comics get the high hat because they aren’t as good as 1950s EC war comics and also, everybody probably (and rightly) feels a bit hinky about war as entertainment. This sensitivity to tastelessness can be seen right there in this issue's letter column:

Allan Asherman there, making sure everyone's on the same pag viz a viz reality and war. Besides Sgt Rock the book is also bulked out by other strips, most notably one of Sam Glanzman's unaffected and clear eyed depictions of serving aboard the USS Stevens. It's a particularly bleak tale drawn in Glanzman's Kuberty and roughly blunt signature style. Basically, Sam Glanzman is pretty great, you know?

USS STEVENS by Sam Glanzman

Anyway, this isn’t the old Comics Were Better Back Then! or the rarer Hey, Look a Lost Masterpiece! it’s just a look at one of hundreds of thousands of comics produced in the past before it slips into the obscurity it was intended for. Well, slips back into my garage, because this one’s a keeper.

SGT ROCK by Heath & Kanigher

Keeping it as basic as basic training then, the cover is by Joe Kubert but that’s not all of Joe Kubert’s contribution. If you squint at the print below the opening splash page it’s possible to see that the Editor was also Joe Kubert. Joe Kubert (1926-2012) was a titanic comics talent whose staggeringly voluminous output consisted largely (but not solely) of war comics. And Tor comics. In his later years he would attempt to connect more directly with the world by addressing the Bosnian conflict (Fax From Sarajevo ( 1990)) and by dealing with a chunk of personal issues in a series of OGNs addressing the Holocaust (Yossel, April 19, 1943 (2003)), parental expectations (Jew Gangster (2005)) and the reality of war (Dong Xoai, Vietnam, 1965 (2010)). All of them were visually striking if slightly over earnest comics which, disarmingly, sought to impart the importance of decency, respect and empathy. An admirable aim he pursued right up to the end of his life, and which saturates his final comics series (Joe Kubert Presents (2013)) And, yes, even his Tor comics. Here though, with OAaW#258, the mighty Joe Kubert’s visual contribution is a typically arresting cover featuring Sgt Rock wrestling a very yellow fellow indeed. Sgt Rock’s foe is a Japanese soldier and his icteric aspect may be down to a touch of malaria and an attendant pinch of jaundice, but let’s face it it’s probably down to the heavy handed colouring of the day. But wait, weren’t Sgt Rock and Easy Company active in the European Theatre which was kind of light on Japanese soldiers and, it should be noted, a really poor choice for a night out as theatres go? Every so often Robert Kanigher would find a reason to shift Sgt. Rock to the Pacific. This was largely for reasons of variety, I expect. While Bob Haney actually wrote the prototype Rock’s first appearance in OAaW#81 (1959), Kanigher created him (Rock, not Haney) in an editorial capacity and he and Joe Kubert further refined the character into his iconic state. Kanigher wrote the vast majority of Rock’s antics so it was probably primarily for the sake of his own sanity that he changed things up intermittently.

SGT ROCK by Heath & Kanigher

Of course the audience of the time (children, soldiers, degenerates, reprobates) couldn’t be counted on to have seen the previous issue so a quick catch up was always appreciated. The first page of this issue is one such catch-up. Today you might get a page of poorly proof read text, the tone of which can vary from the functional to the humorous. Here we get a Russ Heath splash page, which may very well just be an exercise in visual exposition, but it’s one done with such design flair and general artistic excellence I’d certainly hang that bad boy on my wall. Check it out. Check it out again. Still rocking, right? All the information a reader needs is represented visually right there. Rock’s haunted face has pride of place in a position suggesting the elements surrounding him are thoughts/memories, and the smoke trail of the falling plane carries the eye down while it gluts itself on the surrounding detail. You’d have to be trying very hard indeed not to interpret the visuals here correctly. Admittedly, yes, all the information a reader needs is repeated in the text box. But while this image-text repetition results in a certain level of redundancy intrinsic to the form at this time (i.e. 1973, not 2015) this occurs less frequently than you might expect in the following pages, but it does occur. I hold that this repetitiveness is entirely intentional and a natural result of the bifurcation of the workload, rather than bad writing per se. Say an editor asks a writer to write a script and assigns it to an artist, where’s the guarantee that they’ll get back a seamless piece of entertainment? It’s over there having tea with Lord Lucan is where that is. So, you make sure the writer writes it all down and you make sure the artist draws it all too; belt and braces, basically. Comics was different back then; it was better. No, of course it wasn’t. The rewards back then were pitiful. I’ve read this comic a couple of times and I can’t actually find the names “Robert Kanigher” or “Russ Heath” credited as writer or artist respectively. These dudes expected nothing. These dudes weren’t going on chat shows anytime soon, or getting their snout in the TV cash-trough, or snorting uncut Hollywood; they were making a comic and doing it as well as they could. Which in Russ Heath’s instance was phenomenally, in case I don’t make that clear later. Heath’s the star of this strip but Kanigher’s no slouch.

SGT ROCK by Heath & Kanigher Robert Kanigher (1915-2002) was, reportedly, not well loved by his peers but as far as posterity is concerned that carries as much weight as a politician’s promise. You pick up this book and you'll just find Robert Kanigher’s a decent writer. This sucker just chugs along. It’s 14 pages long but it feels like three times that, and in a good way. In another way he’s a very bad writer because the strip is just a succession of events that aren’t actually thematically connected or any of that fancy stuff; but it entertains. Since that was his job - he’s a good writer here. For the bulk of the issue Rock is alone and adrift yet Kanigher singularly fails to let us into Rock’s head except via his terse and basic narration of events.

SGT ROCK by Heath & Kanigher

Most writers wouldn’t exercise such restraint. There are no revelations about Rock’s past; it’s all about his present. This is good because Rock is a pretty basic character. Whatever you throw at him, he doesn’t fall. He endures. He’s a rock. That’s it. (It works, don’t knock it.) Having flashbacks to Rock’s first sweetheart, harvesting waving fields of corn, labouring in the steel mill and being dandled on Pappy’s knee etc. would dilute him. Sure, such after the fact encumbrances would appear in other Rock comics and be so poorly policed that at one point if you totted them up he’d got three Dads, like some shitty sit-com or something. In this comic there’s none of that; just a man existing moment to moment. Because that's how you survive a situation this horrific. Well, in this comic anyway. However, Kanigher’s nerve buckles when it comes to having faith that this stoic castaway stuff will keep the audience attentive. So we have a flashback with Easy Co. storming a pill box so that the kids get their customary action scene, complete with Kanigher’s signature move – the "TNT-whatsit" phrase ("Looks like that flyin' swastika is goin' to put us in the ice-box --with a TNT ICE-BERG!"). In his defence Kanigher does use the scene to establish the particular quality of Rock the issue will pivot around; his stubbornness. And, let's face it, editorial may have required certain “Sgt Rock” elements to appear in every issue; I think that’s pretty likely. A more organic outburst of action occurs when Rock lands on one of those tiny islands the Pacific hosts which are as numerous as my grudges, and he encounters some Japanese soldiers. A sequence of violence is then depicted by Russ Heath who, with ink, brush and genius, manages to communicate all the desperate tension and explosive movement of such an encounter. Being the shy type I’ve never been attacked by Japanese soldiers on a beach but for a few seconds Russ Heath sure made me feel like I had. Just Rock and the Japanese officer are left and, sensibly enough, they decide to pool their resources until they get back to the war.

SGT ROCK by Heath & Kanigher

I know, I know, you’re ahead of me here and are already thinking of John Boorman’s 1968 movie HELL IN THE PACIFIC. This movie starred Lee Marvin and Tosihro Mifune as WW2 enemies stranded on a Pacific island who first fight then unite, before the War inevitably returns and with it, duty. And this bit in the comic is, indeed, like that fine movie, but it isn’t 103 minutes long it’s 14 pages long. Kanigher & Heath don’t have the room to do more than nod in the movie’s direction but it’s a firm nod. So, I guess there’s a bit of pop culture referencing going on there; some homaging, yeah? You didn’t realise they did that before Community did you! This basic premise was also, uh, homaged somewhat more extensively in an episode of Battlestar Galactica, but that hadn’t happened in 1973 and I doubt Robert Kanigher had seen it unless he was prone to prophetic visons of crap culture. Depends how hard he was hitting the sauce, I guess. I know I’ve seen a few sights that way (badgers on mopeds!) One of the interesting things about the movie is that Marvin and Mifune never stray from their native languages so the audience shares their frustrations and breakthroughs, this is a great idea but probably not one the public warmed to as the movie was a huge financial loss. Kanigher & Heath don’t have time for all that smart malarkey so it turns out the Japanese officer can speak English.

SGT ROCK by Heath & Kanigher

In a pithy masterclass on exposition, Kanigher establishes how that is ("My mother taught it in school." BANG! Job done.) Kanigher cannily uses the officer to have Rock fill us in on the story so far, which is one time too many really. As though sensing this Russ Heath wades in and draws the balls off of what is basically several panels of two men sitting and talking. The standout here is the bit where Russ Heath takes us under the surface of the sea to show a shark shadowing the raft and its oblivious passengers. A certain kind of easily excited blogger might start telling you that this shark represents the war which exists independently of the two men’s attention and could explode into their lives without warning. Me, I think Russ heath is keeping both himself and his readers awake and just really drawing that shark the way sharks should be drawn - really well. Look at that panel. Damn, the song Russ Heath’s art sang in 1973 is so strong in this comic I can hear it all the way in th efuture year of 2015.

As I’ve said the strip is only 14 pages long (did you catch that?) and yet Rock’s journey takes days, weeks even. Kanigher acquits himself well, but it’s Russ Heath’s art which leaves you feeling you’ve shared Rock’s journey and appreciating its span while he generously spares you the actual tedium of it. Heath’s opening splash is a majestic thing but the double pager that follows it up is equally strong. Having established Rock is adrift on the previous page Heath uses the top panels on the next page to punch home how long Rock’s been floating and the cost it’s had on him. Alternating (and enlarging) Day-Night-Day panels punctuated by repetitious babble take the eye across to the seagulls which become in Rock’s sun-fried mind, and before our eyes, planes swooping down from the top right with their bullet trails diagonally strafing the combat happy joes of Easy Co., who push across to the right against the bullets and take us to the page turn. That’s some pretty sweet visual storytelling right there.

SGT ROCK by Heath & Kanigher

In a later sequence similar to the one at the top of page two Heath manages to make it send a different message; this time the panels again indicate an indeterminate but large amount of time has passed but Rock seems barely to have moved. The maddeningly slow pace of drifting depicted there, because unless some weather is happening the sea isn’t really rushing anywhere.

SGT ROCK by Heath & Kanigher

Again and again, on every page it’s Heath’s eye for detail which convinces. Heath pays everything the same level of interest and doesn’t play favourites. As a result his people are convincing in posture and expression within a world that seems concrete. He actually draws the sea for a start, then there’s the stances in the tussle on the raft, the body blown back by bullets, the predatory grace of a shark, everything, all the way down to the scabs on Rock’s head.

Just another comic; just another day at work for Russ Heath & Robert Kanigher. Our Army at War #258 is just VERY GOOD!

SGT ROCK by Heath & Kanigher

In the end all rocks must crumble but some things endure. Yeah, I'm talking about COMICS!!!

"In This Issue: EVERYONE DIES!" Sometimes It's Not Just The G.I. Who is Immortal!

Being a gallery of comics covers featuring The Unknown Soldier, drawn mostly by Joe Kubert (1926-2012). Yes, okay, a cursory bit of staid analysis and a little tearful nostalgia too, but mostly some timelessly exciting imagery. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did (and continue to). Art by Gerry Talaoc

Anyway, this... It will be readily apparent to even the most bleary of eyes that the majority of the covers below are by Joe Kubert. The rare exceptions are by Ernie Chua (Ernie Chan) and Al Milgrom. The difference is striking. Noting that difference is certainly no slur on either man as Joe Kubert had few equals when it came to cover art and design, and even fewer equals when it came to war comic cover design.

Because Kubert provide covers for the majority of the Faceless G.I.'s escapades this gallery, incomplete as it may be, highlights several aspects of Kubert's cover art. There's no escaping Kubert's fondness for the cover delivering the chilly thrill equvalent to the "He's Behind You!" of children's pantomimes. (e.g. #166,#174, #181 etc) Joe Kubert would never get tired of this device and because Joe Kubert was an amazing talent it never got old. So amazingly talented was Joe Kubert that he could produce covers which could still capture the eye despite teetering dangerously close to the generic. (e.g. #185, #192,#193 etc) Back then it was not uncommon for covers to be held on file for use in the event of a deadline chrunch, so this explains the lack of specificity here rather than any disinterest on Kubert's part. Those are the least of these covers, and they are also the fewest. (They are still good though.) Outnumbering them by far are images so pulpily explosive I want to go and find out what's going on inside that comic right now. And I already know!

And just as I can recall the exact page of Gullivar Jones: Warrior of Mars where I fell in love with Gil Kane's work, so I can remember exactly which comic cover sold me on Joe Kubert for life. It's #195. An American relative visited us when I was under 10 and brought with them a pile of comics. Yes, even then everyone knew no good would come of me. I can't remember any of the other comics but I remember that one. I remember that one because the charge of violent menace coming off it was almost palpable. I recall that for several months I kept it beneath my bed and, when feeling brave, would lean over and inch it out with my finger until I could take its horrid promise no more and scoot it hurriedly back into the darkness. Brrrr!

Sometimes I think The Unknown Soldier is in danger of being forgotten by Comics, but I shouldn't worry because Comics will never forget Joe Kubert and their legends are entwined. He co-created him after all.

Enjoy!

The Unknown Soldier was created by Joe Kubert & Robert Kanigher

So, no, I don't have the final issue. Humph!

You know what those were right? COMICS!!!

"..When You're Digging For Artifacts...Don't Bury Your Reputation!" COMICS! Sometimes I Guess You Can't Trust An Orangutan!

In which I continue to drag you along on my cheerless trudge through all the 1970s Marvel UK issues of Planet of the Apes Weekly a man at work lent me that time. Doesn’t it just make everything in your life seem radiant with an inner light by comparison? Suit yourself.

Planet of the Apes by George Tuska, Mike Esposito & Doug Moench

Anyway, this... PLANET OF THE APES WEEKLY #3 (Week Ending November 9th 1974) Edited by Matt Softley Planet of The Apes Chapter Three: In The Compound! Art by George Tuska & Mike Esposito Written by Doug Moench Based on the 20th Century Fox Motion Picture Planet of The Apes (1968) Based on the novel by Pierre Boulle Gullivar Jones, Warrior of Mars: River of the Dead! Art by Gil Kane & Bill Everett Written by Roy Thomas Lettered by John Costa Freely adapted from the novel Lt. Gullivar Jones  by Edwin L. Arnold Ka-Zar: Frenzy on the Fortieth Floor! Art by Jack Kirby & Stan Grainger Written by Roy Thomas Lettered by Sam Rosen Ka-Zar created by Jack Kirby & Stan Lee Marvel UK, £0.08 (1974)

A quick note about the covers: Since Planet of the Apes Weekly appeared more frequently than its monthly US parent mag it required more covers. In this issue there's a note about who did what. So fair play to Marvel in this instance. And so let the record show:

Planet of The Apes Chapter Three: In The Compound! Art by George Tuska & Mike Esposito Written by Doug Moench Based on the 20th Century Fox Motion Picture Planet of The Apes (1968) Based on the novel by Pierre Boulle

Being the third chunk of Doug Moench & George Tuska’s faithful replication of the 20th Century Fox motion picture presentation Planet of the Apes. Just to recap for those joining us late (yeah, right) or anyone who enjoyed their twenties a tad too much – it’s a very respectful adaptation which, in a sense, is nice. But then again it’s a bit too respectful. You’d think Planet of The Apes stormed the beaches of Normandy, invented the iPad or died for our sins. Heck (not Don; just the expletive), I like Planet of the Apes but, c’mon. Mind you, as we’ve also covered (and it will be on the Mid-Terms) there were probably reasons for that (you couldn’t watch the movie in the comfort of your own home, never mind on a tiny phone screen propped up on your dashboard while you drove, like some dangerous jackass.) But, forty years on I get a bit restless reading even these small chunks and my mind wanders and I find myself wasting time and energy making very poor jokes like this:

Planet of the Apes by George Tuska, Mike Esposito & Doug Moench

I think Zira’s Little Rascals’ face seals that particular deal. But, no, it’s weak comedic tea indeed and I’m not proud of having done that, but it’s pretty clearly Doug Moench and George Tuska’s fault. So, um, Moench is mostly just aping the script and it’s up to Tuska to impress. And he does, really, in bits. In one smashing panel Tuska catches the body language of Doctor Zaius ("Doctor Zaius! Doctor Zaius!") just so. That’s no mean feat as the apes in the old movies walk in a kind of ambling shuffle which encompasses a kind of see-saw effect in the shoulders. Obviously Tuska is denied movement but the figure he draws is clearly frozen at a point in that process.

Planet of the Apes by George Tuska, Mike Esposito & Doug Moench

Also, and crucially, Moench senses when to shut up and Tuska knows how to sell the pivotal moment when Dr Zaius’ stitched slippers sweeps Taylors words away. It’s not exactly a visual gift that scene, but it works on the page and it’s important that it works. As an entertainment Planet of the Apes keeps its momentum up by serving up a succession of uppercuts to expectations and this one is one of my favourites; when Dr Zaius reveals himself as a big furry shit.

Planet of the Apes by George Tuska, Mike Esposito & Doug Moench

But it also, also, it puts a little bit of spin on the events. It’s a bit of a shocker isn’t it, really? So Zaius knows? What exactly does he know? How does he know it? Eh? And why doesn’t he have those funny big cheeks like the orangutan in that modern Apes movie? Not the new new one with Commissioner Gordon, no, the old new one. The old new one where Jess Franco, the world’s stupidest genius, ignores every single health and safety protocol (put there for your own safety, people) to save his Dad, who can’t remember how to play the piano anymore (not everyone else; just his Dad because his Dad’s special; fuck everyone else whose Dad can’t remember how to play the piano, or the tuba or whatever. And if your Dad wasn’t musically inclined in the first place, well, he’s just wasted everybody’s time and should lie down in a ditch and scrape the earth over his (rightly) weeping face.)  but instead ruins National Parks for ever. Or something. I don’t know, I had to stop watching when the ape went to stay at Brian (the stocky actor not the baby-faced physicist) Cox’s and it was all David Pelzer Time but, y'know, for motion capture fake animals. I can’t watch animals being sad anymore. Not even pretend ones. I don’t know what happened. I just can’t do that anymore. This is what age does to you; you can't even take pleasure in the suffering of fake animals. Enjoy your youth. But, yeah, the bit on the bridge was good (I came sashaying back in for that bit) and old floppy cheeks was in that bit. So, yeah, Dr Zaius  - did he evolve out of his floppy cheeks? Maybe there’s more than one kind of orangutan? There was “Right turn, Clyde!” Y'know, Clint and that. American Orangutan. Like An Orangutan Lining Up Its Shot. Oscars, yeah. America, I feel you. Sweet. So , yeah, January - not the month to ask a lot of me, I'm guessing.

Planet of the Apes by George Tuska, Mike Esposito & Doug Moench

It’s kind of freaky that Tuska handles such a quiet (but momentous) moment so well because when action erupts Tuska’s super-heroic Marvel House Style reflexes kick in to ill effect. Muscles become swollen like boulders and a generic air descends on the combat. Super-hero comics (back then anyway) dealt in action rather than violence. (Yes, I’m archaic enough to think there’s a difference between a bit o’ colourful wrasslin’ and some guy in a domino mask dismembering some other dude and feeding him, piece by piece, into his own arse. Call me old fashioned. Call me Pappy!) But PotA isn’t about super heroes; it’s about animals and man and how the two are (SPOILER!) quite similar if you think about it (I hate that presumptuous phrase so much). Yeah, so, action is how humanity domesticates its violence and Tuska undercuts this point by portraying action when he should, I think, be upping the ante to violence. He does good monkey faces though. Sorry, ape faces. See fig. 1 above; that there’s as close to a jowl wobblin’ Elvis Double-Take (see Gigolo Rigmarole! or Clamgasm! for more face shakin’ Presley action!) as comics can come, I believe. In fact the expressions on Tuska’s apes are much better than those on his people. Yeah, Tuska’s Taylor (some might spy) is well served at the emotional extremes but in-between he looks like someone’s switched him off. Don’t get me wrong, with all this talk of lack of effect and lifelessness George Tuska’s art is still a far more amenable sight than , say, that of Greg Land. Tuska’s Nature may well be beige in tooth and claw but at least it isn’t shit. OKAY!

Gullivar Jones, Warrior of Mars: River of the Dead! Art by Gil Kane & Bill Everett Written by Roy Thomas Lettered by John Costa Freely adapted from the novel Lt. Gullivar Jones by Edwin L. Arnold

In this second episode of the adaptation of the original (cough) inspiration for John Carter our old mucker Gullivar Jones gets a bad case of worms. More pertinently the writing bloats with all the bad habits of Bronze Age writing. Which is a massive shame because it makes me look bad. After all, last time out, I made great play about how Roy Thomas’ writing was as verbose and purple as a Peter Ustinov made of plums. And yet, and yet, I maintained mulishly,  that approach suited the material perfectly. Obviously, I’m not saying I was wrong (what a terrible thing to say; wash your mouth out) I’m just saying I can’t say that this time out. What I was saying a lot while reading it was sub-vocal and largely consisted of instructions for Roy Thomas to get out of Gil Kane’s way. Quite forceful instructions, if you know what I mean.

Gullivar Jones, Warrior of Mars by Gil Kane, Sam Grainger & Roy Thomas

Because, be still my beatin’ heart, Gil’s away again. He’s off at a proper canter all right with Gullivar hacking at big worms, then slicing up ape headed spiders (or spider bodied apes) before being crucified and fed to a giant Gil(a) monster. It’s all cavorting and chopping, nasal flare and sweeping hair. It’s Gil Kane with his ridiculously anatomical  antics on great form. The mere brow muscles of Gil Kane’s Gullivar Jones could crack walnuts. The stuff here’s a hair closer to violence than action with the odd gout of blood (ichor?) splashing up from a wounded worm. I remember that being a bit of a shock when I was little; the rarity of such signifiers of the effects of violence lending them weight and, yes, horror. But startling spurts aside, throughout the strip Gil Kane’s spectacular gymnastics have their energy stifled by the physical presence of Thomas’ clotted prose. Because that’s the thing about comics, the writing is there; like a fedora, it’s part of the image.

Gullivar Jones, Warrior of Mars by Gil Kane, Sam Grainger & Roy Thomas

Now, I like writing. A good turn of phrase or a mot which is bon turns me on; I like words. But this is Comics so when they bog down the art I’m all rearing back like a horse at a cliff face and Unh-UH! Words that do that better be some special words indeed. Unfortunately the words here aren’t terribly special. I’ve not read the original Arnold novel so maybe Thomas is just adhering  to the source, and the source isn’t very good. Or it’s just not working this time out; it can happen to the best of us. In 1970’s Roy Thomas’ defence there are still, in 2015, plenty of writers who can’t find that golden balance twixt art’n’words. And there’s always the art, which is Gil Kane. Word. GOOD!

Ka-Zar: Frenzy on the Fortieth Floor! Art by Jack Kirby & Stan Grainger Written by Roy Thomas Lettered by Sam Rosen Ka-Zar created by Jack Kirby & Stan Lee

Ka-Zar tracks Kraven The Hunter to his swanky NYC hotel lair and battle commences  for the freedom of Zabu. I know what you’re thinking (ugh!) but, no, Ka-Zar doesn’t just barge in like some savage. Instead, like a latter day loin cloth clad Sun Tzu Ka-Zar stands in the lobby of the hotel and bellows…and then barges in like some savage. Kirby’s prime concern here is A!C!T!I!O!N! and he’s set his slobberknocker in the environs of the urban “jungle” to see how that shakes out visually. And visually it works a treat with swinging from balconies instead of branches and commuters hurriedly dispersing like startled rodents. Like an old timey wrasslin' match in the first episode Ka-Zar and Kraven wrassled on Ka-Zar’s home turf and Ka-Zar lost (because Kraven cheated, natch. Boo!) Here we get the rematch where, despite Kraven’s habitual cheating (boo!) and the unfamiliar environs, Ka-Zar is victorious.

Ka-Zar by Jack Kirby, Sam Grainger, Roy Thomas & Sam Rosen

All Rascally Roy's Stan-tastic dialogue can do is cling on and hope to  convince via its relentless presence that it’s an integral part of the whole thing. Which it isn’t, so you get some dandy Faux-Stan Lee moments of Stan Lee’s patented (not really, legal eagles) “I knew you were going to do that, so I let you, so I can do THIS!” Manoeuvre. Which is a smarter move on his (Stan or Roy's) part than he’s generally given credit for. Such impromptu one-upmanship is, after all, a staple of the schoolyard play of the 1970s target audience.  Children, I’m talking about children there. Remember, children? They used to read comics. Or maybe they still do. Someone bought those 250 giga-billion copies of the first issue of that comic based on the children’s entertainment Star Wars. Children, obviously. Oh, or Retailers.

Ka-Zar by Jack Kirby, Sam Grainger, Roy Thomas & Sam Rosen

This Ka-Zar strip here is a mess, but it’s fun, it’s daft too; it’s basically men in tights, but these are the kind of tights stretched out of shape by the girth of such 70s giants of the ring as Big Daddy, Kendo Nagasaki and Giant Haystacks rather than those that snugly cosset the somewhat more svelte Superman. Next time they want to make a Wallace Beery "B" they should nix that Barton Fink fella and go for that “Jack Kirby feeling”. It is preposterous stuff  that retains the attention thanks to its rowdy visual energy. Mind you, these visuals are strangely marred by touch-ups. It’s not even subtly done so I know it’s a fact that there’s definitely the hand of a Severin (Marie?)  in the mix here, which makes you wonder what strange set of circumstances must have arisen to occasion Jack Kirby’s art being footled with. I’m not saying Jack Kirby’s mind was on other things but I will say that this strip originally appeared in Astonishing Tales #2 circa 1970, which is when Kirby disappeared from Marvel and took a chance on DC. I’m just sayin’ is all! OKAY!

This issue of PotA-W is rounded out by a pulse-pounding pin-up. So, I leave you, gentle reader, with this thought: some under-tens didn't put aspirational pictures of sportsmen and women on their wood-chipped walls, but plumped instead for “MARCUS, Gorilla Head of Security Police specialising in violence and torture. Look out for him!” Look for that kid, I say!

NEXT TIME: Hopefully the snow will have melted enough to let the Royal Mail drop off my first comics parcel of the new Year. Then I can stop entertaining myself at your expense and get stuck into some modern – COMICS!!!

"You Can't...Put A BULLET...In A NIGHTMARE!" COMICS! Sometimes Pleasures Can Be Dark Indeed!

Thanks to the snow and the UK's inability to ever cope with it I got a bit of extra time (but not your...kisss!). I'll have to make that time up mind you, but don't you worry about that, because here's a pitiful splatter of words about a collection of Tom Sutton's work on Charlton's "ghost" line of comics. I should probably tell you upfront that I liked 'em, because I know I can be a bit equivocal about this stuff.

Anyway, this... TOM SUTTON'S CREEPY THINGS (The Chilling Archives of Horror Comics #9) Art by Tom Sutton Written by Tom Sutton, Nicola Cuti & Joe Gill Edited & Produced by Michael Ambrose & Donnie Pitchford Yoe Books/IDW, $24.99 (2014)

Oh, I loved this book. I loved this book so very, very much. This book is chock-a-block full of stuff I thought I’d never see, but stuff I always wanted to. And here it is and I’m seeing it! Oops, sorry. (Dignity in all things, John!) So, ahem, this splendid tome, from the hands of Michael Ambrose & Donnie Pitchford, contains reprints of a selection of strips and covers Tom Sutton drew (and many of the stories he also wrote) for the comics publisher Charlton's "ghost" line during the 1970s. I don’t think they’ve been reprinted since they first appeared, certainly not in bulk; I know they were all fresh sights to my eyes.  Which isn’t surprising as even though, like all good 1970s children, I was gluttonous in my hunger for four colour papery entertainment, Charlton rarely formed part of that eye diet.

Mostly this was down to Charlton comics being a sporadic sight in obscure North of England market towns like the one in which I festered. The other thing about Charlton comics was that when they did turn up they were so aesthetically displeasing even the least picky child was deterred. Charlton’s poor reproduction and unpleasantly tactile paper are the stuff of legend, but it’s a legend based in fact; they were poorly printed on weird material. When it comes to the company itself fact and legend get all mushed up so, although it sounds like a myth, it is a fact that the company was formed over a handshake in jail. Yet the stuff which sounds plausible, the stuff about how their comics were the result of penny pinching efficiency because the presses had to keep rolling 24/7, might be a legend (it depends whose “facts” you read). Mind you, on reflection “The presses must never stop! They hunger.” is all a tad Oliver Onions, non? Delightfully so. Then there was the flood which submerged the company under 18 feet of water in 1958 and I’ve even heard that the nightwatchman had a hook for a hand and strange lights came from the gents on Wednesdays. From this physical and temporal distance relying on other people’s accounts Charlton sounds not so much like a comics publisher than a haunted house. Or a cursed one at least. Where better for the work of an artist whose art is as sinister as that of Tom Sutton to infest?

Obviously that creaky and laborious conceit all rather crumbles to dust in light of all the other comics Charlton produced but I’m trying to keep a creepy theme going and you’re making that hard with your insistence on facts. So, yes, okay, Charlton didn’t just produce horror comics they produced western comics, war comics, romance comics, super-hero comics (Blue Beetle, Captain Atom, E-Man), licenced comics; remember, the spice must flow; the presses must never stop. And Tom Sutton probably drew some of those, but they aren’t in this book. This book is all about his Charlton horror comics (For pedants: yes, there's one S-F and one "barbarian" but they all appeared in the "ghost" line of books). Sutton worked at Charlton for the same reason as Steve Ditko - they paid pennies but they left you alone. As long as pages were coming in they were happy, which meant what was on those pages was at the mercy of the artist. Artistic freedom, I believe they call it. The results can vary depending on the artist (O God, can it vary; truly, it varies) but in Tom Sutton's (and Steve Ditko's) case the results were wonderful.

Not so much because of the plots, which sound daft when torn from their visual context. These artfully mottled pages contain a vengeful stuffed toy, a drunk and lonely ghost, an unfortunate marriage or two, a sea monster; basically a bubbling broth of all the rote , but fun, genre markers of horror of the 1970s. Yet Sutton’s art brutally lashes these mostly slender, and derivative (but sometimes original, to wit - a love story told from the POV of a grave) concepts to the end of their allotted pages and the results may leave your higher brain unruffled but your lizard brain will be skittering about like it sat on a hot rock. These strips leave hazy emotions lightly roiling in their wake as though something disturbed is moving around down there in the mud of your mind. Something angry;something hungry.

I guess it is style over content, but in that good way Comics can carry off; the style is sometimes also the content. Mostly, the content fills while the style kills. So, no, it isn’t the killer teddy bear which unnerves; it’s the world of razor sharp lines and blooms of stygian black you inhabit while reading which goes quietly about its terrible work of suspending your disbelief by its ankles. Sutton’s work can sell the silliest or most pointless stories because the seriousness is in the art. So, yeah, it's a story about a blob in love with a robot but when Sutton draws it, you can tell he's all in. They are stories but sometimes only just; sometimes it's better to see them as wells of mood into which Sutton’s art pitches you. The unfathomable depths of Sutton’s blacks in which he couches his sudden lurches into intricately filigreed detail are not only how the tale is told, sometimes they are the tale itself. "Unscheduled Stop" doesn’t even make any narrative sense but for the duration I was rapt as Sutton starts with one of the most depressing grid pages I’ve ever seen, and by the second page he’s messily riffing on Krigstein’s "Master Race", and then it’s page layout blow-out time as the ghost of Poe directs the Universal creatures in a fantasmagoric dream melt. I had no idea what I'd just read but I knew it was great COMICS!!!

On an aesthetic note, the reproduction of these Comics (and covers) throughout is pretty good. They are presented as was though, so be warned that they do look like old comics. There's no re-colouring or re-mastering or re-anything except re-sizing and reprinting going on here (as far as I can see). Where there is the occasional descent into addled muddiness it’s still within acceptable parameters, I think,  for the privilege of seeing this work. For the most part, sized-up to magazine size as they are here, these pages have (probably) never looked so good. (They still essentially look like old Charlton comics though; I'm just making that crystal clear.) Better yet, there is a smattering of pages that also have never been seen (by the wider reading audience; obviously, someone saw them.) These pages take the form of the original art (from the collection of Michael Ambrose; cheers, Michael Ambrose!) and where possible these B&W reproductions have been used in place of the printed pages. Sutton’s often overlooked precision hits you immediately on these pages.

The shittines of the above image is due entirely to my scanning ineptitude. In the book this is (as are all other such B&W pages) crisp and clear. So, anyway, often Sutton's precision is lost in the blurry printing and the sheer reckless momentum of his art, but not here. Consider the half page panel of a sailorman stumping forth from a fog. It could have been drawn any one of the current carriers of Sutton's strain of dark genius; it could have slid from the brush of Michael T Gilbert, Steve Bissette or Kevin O'Neil only yesterday. But it didn't, it was drawn by Tom Sutton in 1974. In 2015 I am still impressed with the apparent ease with which Sutton makes the background elements creepily cohere into a shape of Cthulloid menace. It's just one of Tom Sutton's Creepy Things and this book's bloated with 'em. VERY GOOD!

“Run Scared And You End Up Running From Yourself." COMICS! Sometimes A Sunday Morning Is The Last Thing You’d Think To Compare Him to!

Carlos Ezquerra. Alan Hebden. Major Eazy. Major Eazy by Carlos Ezquerra

Anyway, this… MAJOR EAZY: HEART OF IRON Art by Carlos Ezquerra Written by Alan Hebden Major Eazy created by Carlos Ezquerra & Alan Hebden Titan, 128 pages, B&W, £14.99 (2012)

This is a collection of comic strips from Battle Picture Weekly featuring the fondly recalled (by me and probably many other emotionally stunted middle-aged men) fictional character Major Eazy. The strips within detail his adventures in North Africa during the very real 2nd World War. Launched in 1976 Major Eazy, the creation of Alan Hebden & Carlos Ezquerra, quickly became a popular strip in an already popular comic. It featured a character who was visually James Coburn in Cross of Iron from the neck up and behaviourally beholden to Clint Eastwood’s character in Sergio Leone’s Man With No Name oaters. Eazy was a maverick (hence his suicidally inappropriate headgear and his Bentley) whose apparent lackadaisical style belied his killing efficiency. As a foil for expressions of awe at his antics Eazy was provided with Sergeant Daly; clearly, and amusingly, modelled on the 1970s sit-com mainstay Arthur Mullard. Since starting to sully this site I have thought about British comics harder and longer than ever before, and I am coming to the conclusion that Carlos Ezquerra, a Spaniard no less, was the single most important artist in 1970s British comics. He isn’t important because of Major Eazy, but Major Eazy is a part of that importance. Ezquerra’s fast and nasty style was a perfect fit with the fast and nasty Brit comics of the 1970s and he was in the best of all of them (Action, Battle, 2000AD) and, ultimately, he co-created the most enduring strip of all of them (Judge Dredd). And because the Comics crowd is now so huge so many get lost in the crush no one will be a rush to pin any Comics medals on Alan Hebden, his work here is certainly sturdy enough to remain entertaining decades later. No mean feat, that.

Major Eazy by Carlos Ezquerra & Alan Hebden

It’s mostly Hebden’s show as, despite his undoubted genius, Ezquerra’s visuals aren’t able to carry this book unaided due to, entirely reasonable given the material’s age, I guess, deficiencies in reproduction. While the book does present the strips at the right size (i.e. magazine size), unfortunately it necessarily reprints them at a remove of some decades. And, much like the UK public transport infrastructure since the 1970s, there’s been some degeneration. The worst affected are the once-colour pages which are now mushy looking and blurred, but even the regular originally B&W pages vary in quality. Some pages display Ezquerra’s evolving method of contrast (panels which almost glare via delicate hatching then hemmed in by grubbily dense panels) to fine effect, while other pages present an exciting challenge to the reader’s perceptual abilities. It's a mixed bag with the earlier pages faring worst, the majority of it reads just fine. But if you are used to the almost hallucinatory precision of modern comics reproduction this might not be the book for you.

Major Eazy by Carlos Ezquerra & Alan Hebden

But then these were comics intended for the moment, not comics intended for the ages; it’s testament to the strength of Hebden’s writing that these strips still entertain despite the frequently difficult to decipher visuals. These were also comics aimed straight at the brains of children and it’s totally to Hebden’s credit again that he not only introduces adult themes but that he handles them so nimbly. Kids’ comics they may well be, but they don’t shy too far away from war’s inhumanity. This is a children’s comic where the light and larky Kelly’s Heroes vibe (Eazy happily plays cards with the Germans between bombardments – until they cheat!) is regularly pierced by dark moments that flirt strongly with honest depictions of the depths war contains - a priest previously seen rescuing smiling children is found strung up from a tree, British troops are mistakenly shot down by an American plane, Eazy shoots a young woman in the back, a steam scalded German is allowed to suicide under Eazy’s eye, wounded troops die due to black market profiteering of essential medical supplies, and on, and on, and more besides.

Major Eazy by Carlos Ezquerra & Alan Hebden

Hebden doesn’t get away with everything though and there’s some fun to be had spotting the occasional comical editorial intervention. In the friendly fire episode the yank flier is clearly machine gunned to death by Eazy, yet the next panel finds Sgt Daly pointing with a hastily drawn arm to a yet more hastily drawn figure parachuting to safety in the distance. And then you get a story so harsh it’s staggering that editorial waved it past. There’s one particular cavalcade of chuckles featuring a Polish officer who, unhinged by the treatment of himself and his country at the hands of the German Army, embarks on a series of retaliatory atrocities. In one unpleasantly memorable scene Eazy surprises him in a barn going at a trussed up German with a straight razor and shortly thereafter everything ends admirably badly for everyone. Sure, these strips may be a bit rickety but there’s still power in their pages. And that power is all the more impressive for the brevity of each episode (3-pagers, done in ones; mostly). Intermittent visual shortcomings aside I enjoyed revisiting these strips; they are a lot darker and harder than I thought they were. (That probably goes for the 1970s too.) GOOD!

Major Eazy by Carlos Ezquerra & Alan Hebden

Of course the real horror is that during wartime they ration paper and that means no - COMICS!!!

"Man HAS No Understanding, Dr. Zira! He Can Be Taught A Few Simple TRICKS Nothing More!" COMICS! Sometimes I'm Just Glad I Don't Have Ka-Zar's Vet Bills!

In which I continue to fly in the face of popular opinion, medical advice, and common sense to continue my languorous amble through Marvel UK’s Planet of the Apes Weekly. Planet of the Apes by Tuska, Esposito & Moench

Anyway, this… PLANET OF THE APES WEEKLY #2 (Week Ending November 2nd 1974) Edited by Matt Softley Planet of The Apes Chapter Two: World of Captive Humans Art by George Tuska & Mike Esposito Written by Doug Moench Based on the 20th Century Fox Motion Picture Planet of The Apes (1968) Based on the novel by Pierre Boulle Gullivar Jones: Warrior of Mars Art by Gil Kane & Bill Everett Written by Roy Thomas Lettered by John Costa Freely adapted from the novel Lt. Gullivar Jones  by Edwin L. Arnold Ka-Zar: The Power of Ka-Zar! Art by Jack Kirby & Stan Grainger Written by Stan Lee Lettered by Sam Rosen Ka-Zar created by Jack Kirby & Stan Lee Marvel UK, £0.08 (1974)

Planet of The Apes Chapter Two: World of Captive Humans Art by George Tuska & Mike Esposito Written by Doug Moench Based on the 20th Century Fox Motion Picture Planet of The Apes (1968) Based on the novel by Pierre Boulle

In which Doug Moench and George Tuska continue to place scenes from the 20th Century Fox motion picture Planet of the Apes in front of you with all the vigour and drama of a tired vice cop at the end of his shift showing you mugshots while preoccupied with remembering where he stashed that fifth of Old Grandad. (No one's judging you; we’ve all been there.) Once again then, it’s Yeoman’s work all the way, with such little spark on the part of the art that at times Tuska’s people are so drained of emotion and animation they resemble big, stiff dolls. Still, George Tuska does wrench himself out of his torpor for a couple of panels where Taylor reacts badly to talk of brain surgery and experimentation but that’s the last page. To be fair, George Tuska had his moments. But few of them are on these pages. I know I said that’d be in the last one; I’m just keeping you on your toes. While faithful replication remains the paramount concern of the adaptation overall, there's still quite a bit of chicken fat about this thing.

Planet of the Apes by Tuska, Esposito & Moench

Everything feels dragged out as though the problem isn’t the allotted space but the filling of it. I guess this is why Moench expands on the movie dialogue to ensure every point is made at such ambiguity trepanning length that the movie seems subtle in comparison. (And it’s very much not a subtle movie; it isn’t supposed to be.) Turn that CAPS LOCK off, Moench fans, because I might seem to be giving Moench a hard time but, luckily, he does most of the Marvel Apes material and I’ll be saying far nicer things further down the line. Sure, this is just a weird isolated chunk of a story transformed into an episode by the weekly nature of UK comics production but there’s still a good bit or two. Certainly the bits where the chimpanzees are arguing about tenure, office supplies and quota systems was funnier after several decades sitting at a desk praying for my pension to kick in than it was at age four. While there are bits to like here, they were already in the movie. There’s nothing yet about the adaptation as a comic to cause anyone to start bouncing up and down, teeth bared, while slapping the top of their head. So far even the action scenes have been consistently spuffed down the comic’s leg. This issue's section is mostly talk, and it's all so enervating you pine for the inactive action of last issue. Tuska’s art is just too tentative here to engage for long when limited to talking heads. Heck, they are talking ape heads and still my mind wandered off and…well, I hope it gets back soon, I kind of need it. Meat‘n’taters this strip remains then. OKAY!

Gullivar Jones: Warrior of Mars Art by Gil Kane & Bill Everett Written by Roy Thomas Lettered by John Costa Freely adapted from the novel Lt. Gullivar Jones  by Edwin L. Arnold

The personal highlight of issue 2 is Gullivar Jones, Warrior of Mars by Gentleman Gil Kane and Rascally Roy Thomas. Now y’all know by now I’m a bit of a one for a GilRoy© Joint, but what y’all don’t know is this particular GilRoy© Joint is the exact and precise one to blame. But before we get to that we have the bit where I prove I can look stuff up on the Internet - this strip originally appeared in issues 16 to 21 of Creatures on The Loose in a series of 10 page instalments with the rest of the comic bulked out by reprints. The perfect size for its slot in PotA-W. This is the one about a Confederate yanked off to Mars where he meets a steel bikini clad princess and kills the stuffing out of a load of bad dudes. It is not to be confused with John Carter of Mars which is the one about a Confederate yanked off to Mars where he meets a naked princess and kills the stuffing out of a load of bad dudes. The two are not to be confused largely because Edwin Lester Arnold’s Gullivar Jones: His Vacation was published in 1905 and Burrough’s (Edgar Rice not William) first John Carter book arrived in 1912. I think, I was kind of losing the will to live reading about all that so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. Anyway, I'm sure they are totally different because the last thing we want is lawyers developing time travel so they can go back and get dead people suing each other as well. Because they will. They will. Hasslein knew. The similarities between the two properties are certainly, um, arresting but then I don’t know how faithful GilRoy©’s adaptation is; there’s always the possibility they blended the two.

Gullivar Jones by Kane, Everett, Thomas & Costa

It can’t be all that faithful to the source because here Gullivar is a ‘Nam Vet (no, not an Indo-Chinese animal doctor; the other kind.) and instead of a magic carpet he is Mars borne on a sort of cloud composed of Gil Kane’s ™ and © cosmic amoebas. Gullivar also has a sweep of ice creamy hair atop his chiselled head not unlike Gentleman Gil’s artic topping. Gully’s hair turns white during his transportation from Earth to Mars; when Gil Kane’s hair turned white is anyone’s guess. (Probably thirty seconds after he started working in comics. Only kidding! It’s just one big fun club-house of magic!) Keen Kane Watcher’s will note quite a lot of Gil Kane’s heroes spurn Just For Men. I don’t know if GilRoy© threw that bit in nor if they gave Gullivar enhanced muscle powers like ERB’s Jon Carter because…I haven’t done my due diligence. Anyway, Gullivar lands on Mars and without checking much out immediately wades in and starts killing things while immediately pairing up with the swellest gal round, Heru by name. It’s a ridiculously propulsive chunk of bounding, swashbuckling, romance, leaping, jumping, violence, buckswashling, torn shirts, and heterosexual male wish fulfilment. It is fantastic stuff if you are partial to GilRoy© Joints, barbaric tomfoolery or, um, John Carter (Shhh!)

Gullivar Jones by Kane, Everett, Thomas & Costa

Gil Kane’s on top form here despite the muting effect of the B& W art’s none too precise reproduction. I think some of it’s been redrawn to make it pop out of the monochrome slurry the colour has become, and I’d suggest there looks to be some redrawing around the cups area of Heru's bikini as well if that didn’t make me seem like a creepy weirdo. ( I am a creepy weirdo, of course, but apparently lot of adult life is spent hiding what really you are so no one burns you in public.) Mostly though, I’d say Gil Kane was into this one, which I certainly was. So much so that I know this strip here is where Gil and I struck up an immediate bond; one whereby I would forever after be willing to pay him for his services. Hmm, that sounded a lot less seedy in my head. Because I remember (and I do remember this) reading this exact strip in this issue and feeling Kane’s hit me like Larkin's “enormous yes". Seriously, somewhere in pages 4 and 5 I was lost; Gil and I were in bonded by the chains of art/commerce for life after that. So, you know, if I can just address every comics publisher everywhere, I find the lack of Gil Kane reprints pretty ridiculous. Sort it out, please. Pronto, if you would.

Gullivar Jones by Kane, Everett, Thomas & Costa

We’ll take about Gil Kane more later no doubt, no doubt. But what about Roy? Roy Thomas plays a big part in making this strip work as well as it does, and I think it works pretty well. I like Roy Thomas; Roy’s okay by me. He likes order to excess and can probably find his apple peeler in the dark but he can write. He can write pulp, anyway. There are plenty of words on these pages; perhaps too many for today’s prose averse readers, but I like ‘em and I think they’re needed. It’s written in a really butch pulp style - this prose stops off in a bar after a hard day riveting to catch the game and sink some brews; this prose buys its shoes by mail because no way is another man touching its feet; this prose wonders why Walter Hill never won an Oscar; this prose totally tucks hard packs of cigarettes under its rolled up sleeve; this prose is macho stuff all told. Which is great, it keys you in, it cues you up - this is beefy pulp action soaked in bourbon, and apologies and poetry aren’t happening tonight, baby! And that’s intentional, “With a cording of throat muscles” is no one’s first choice of wording. We all know what he means but how he says it means something too. Writing there; it’s not just putting one word after another. Gullivar isn't like Roy, Gullivar doesn’t work with words, he works with his hands and his hands are killing hands. Thomas' lurid insight into the mind of the protagonist makes it a much richer and more immersive experience. It's still pulp nonsense but you're paying attention. Here the clumsy carnality of Thomas’ prose couples with the sensual elegance of Kane’s practically throbbing visuals to make a heated experience indeed. Captions aren’t always necessary but also captions aren’t always redundant; captions are a tool - one of many. You choose the right tool for the job. And Gullivar Jones is a right tool. Or something. Someone should reprint this stuff, it's VERY GOOD!

Ka-Zar: The Power of Ka-Zar! Art by Jack Kirby & Stan Grainger Written by Stan Lee Lettered by Sam Rosen Ka-Zar created by Jack Kirby & Stan Lee

This starts off with one of those great full page panels which make no sense whatsoever if you think about it for a second - Kraven is thrusting a newspaper at the reader and bellowing about something that’s really getting his balls in an uproar. But, and trust me on this, we aren’t actually there so I don’t know what that all’s about. It’s like we aren’t meant to take it literally or something! Turns out Kraven is on his own in his Kirby-esque study built of, as so many Kirby studies are, antique Lego. Kraven’s plan is to talk out loud about everything he knows concerning Ka-Zar into a “recording device” and when he’s done that, having kick started his little grey cells into unconscious ratiocination, I guess, he will know where Ka-Zar and Zabu are. As plans go this seems pretty flimsy, but it works so, hey, what do I know. Surprisingly, despite being dressed like an Earth-2 Liberace Kraven doesn't want to adopt Lord Peter Whimsy (aka Ka-Zar); Zabu is his real target because, well, Kraven has issues - check out his name! He’s gonna find that sabre-toothed tiger and give it a good wrasslin’!

Ka-Zar by Kirby, Grainger, Lee & Rosen Preventing you from registering how none of what you read so far makes a lick of sense the story suddenly hurls images of Ka-Zar and Zabu saving some dinosaurs from their own stupidity at you. At this stage (quite early; "Ka-Zar first showed up in the now legendary X-Men#10 (1965). Joltin'John.") in his career Ka-Zar is still talking like he’s got something lodged in his brain. Ka-Zar is basically a blonde Tarzan who lives in the pocket of prehistoric throwbackery known as The Savage Land, and is accompanied by a sabre-toothed tiger rather than a cheeky chimp. I don’t know about you, but by the time I finished that sentence we seemed to be a long way from Tarzan, and yet the jungly musk of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ creation still permeates everything about Ka-Zar. Go figure. Kraven’s a wrasslin’ man with wrasslin’ on his mind so there’s a whole lot o’ wrassling in this one with some characteristically dynamic Kirby panels. I am always particularly taken by the one where bodies explode away from a figure at the epicentre of a panel and the one where someone cranes their neck to look back out of the panel with a big old “Oh Shit!” expression on their strangely blocky face. Both of which are here but my favourite was a trio of tusslin’ panels which brought to mind a famous Harvey Kurtzman sequence:

Ka-Zar by Kirby, Grainger, Lee & Rosen

Cover Detail from "Corpse On The Imjin" And Other Stories by Harvey Kurtzman (Fantagraphics, 2012)

Just a fun collision of images in my head with no deeper meaning or import, I’m sure. But I think we can all agree that Kirby’s use of the foot there is pretty funny. There’s no way this strip wasn’t driven by Kirby’s art and the proof is in the patter Lee provides. Patter which is almost puce in the face as it struggles to both keep up and pretend something sensible is happening. Nothing sensible is happening here but who gives a cheesy toupee when there’s a whole lotta Kirby goin’ on ! GOOD!

BONUS: Rejected visual pitch for Just Imagine...Stan Lee Creating V For Vendetta!

NEXT TIME: George Tuska starts livening up! Jack Kirby clearly has other things on his mind! And Gil Kane's work forces me to don flame retardent pants! All this and a whole lot less in Part 3 of Planet of the COMICS!!!

“You Who Are Reading Me Now Are A Different Breed - I Hope A Better One.” COMICS! Sometimes You Stop And Find Forty Years Have Slipped Down The Back of The Sofa!

Yes! This is a thing which is happening! It’s the second patience sapping instalment of the world’s slowest and most digressive crawl through Marvel UK’s Planet of the Apes Weekly (1974 - 1977). O ye of little faith! Run, you fools! Planet of the Apes by George Tuska, Mike Esposito & Doug Moench

Anyway, this… PLANET OF THE APES WEEKLY #1 (Week Ending October 26th 1974) Planet of The Apes Part 1 Art by George Tuska & Mike Esposito Written by Doug Moench Based on the 20th Century Fox Motion Picture Planet of The Apes (1968) Based on the novel by Pierre Boulle Marvel UK, £0.08 (1974)

Blame it on The Roy. For Rascally Roy Thomas was the one. The one who personally bagged Marvel the rights to produce original material based on the 20th Century Fox motion picture presentation Planet of The Apes. That movie was released in 1968 so why a push for a comic in 1974? Why, Roy? Why? Good question; Roy’s glad you asked. Because Television. You know how important Television is to comic creators today? Well, Television was that central to everyblummingbody back in 1974. Albeit less for monetary reasons, and more for distractions-from-the-hideous-reality-of-the-1970s reasons. There was comparatively very little Television programming at this point in time (the 1970s, keep up!) which tended to lend it all an importance out of all proportion to its quality. It was still early days so there was only a limited array of TV programmes – ones where a pair of caucasian, heterosexual males (one blond, one brunette) had adventures in a variety of settings, ones where a mishap prone heterosexual couple inhabited a house filled with invisible laughing maniacs, ones where someone, usually a caucasian heterosexual male (blond or brunette), was pursued from town to town for eternally unresolved reasons, ones with news on them and then documentaries about corned beef manufacture in Argentina. When the Planet of the Apes TV (PotA-TV) series was broadcast in 1974 it was a daring evolutionary step forward for Televisual entertainment - it was about a pair of caucasian, heterosexual males (one blond, one brunette) having adventures on the Planet of the Apes WHILE ALSO being pursued from town to town for eternally unresolved reasons. As artistically modest as it may appear to audiences raised on The Wire and Mr. Bean it remains a fact that PotA-TV was a smash-hit with the simple, clueless, happy-go-lucky folk of 1970s Britain.

Planet of the Apes by George Tuska, Mike Esposito & Doug Moench

Luckily for all their lovely share-holders Marvel UK were Johnny-on-the–Spot with Planet of the Apes Weekly (PotA-W) which basically acted like a papery pocket money attractor. So successful was the comic that it ended in 1977 not, as is traditional, for want of sales, but rather because APJAC international Productions raised their licensing fees and Marvel balked. Marvel UK was a bit different from Marvel proper in that it was formed in 1972 (said Wikipedia, yesterday) to publish comics in the UK but with editorial direction via Noo Yawk. While it’s true that Neil Tennant, long before becoming a pop colossus, did work for Marvel UK in an editorial capacity, he denies anything to do with PotA-W. This is a shame because I’d have liked to have mentioned Neil Tennant, being a big fan of The Pet Shop Boys as I am. As it is any mention of Neil Tennant would just unnecessarily cloud the issue. And I think we all know I just cannot be doing with unnecessary digressions. In 1976 Marvel UK would produce its first original material in the form of Captain Britain Weekly, which I liked (Herb Trimpe, oh yeah!) Since PotA-W was produced prior to 1976 all its content (bar the letters page) was produced in the Land of The Free and the Home of The Brave. America, I’m talking about America there. And the face of American comics in 1974 was a Smilin’ one. So, opening the painted cover, the first thing you saw in 1974 was Smilin’ Stan Lee. Caught there for posterity in a comic book store somewhere, in a picture bearing mute but unarguable testament to the sublimity of craft imbuing his hairpiece, Stan Lee welcomes us to this, the first issue of PotA-W. Thanks, Stan! Don’t mind if I do.

The comic strip bits of the first issue of PotA-W consist entirely of the first part of Marvel’s “6 part adaptation” of the movie (PotA-M). Before the children’s entertainment Star Wars (1977) happened science fiction in movies was, mostly, telling us that the future was going to be even worse if we didn’t get our act together. PotA-M is very much in that grand, finger wagging tradition and it stars Charlton Heston, who I will always adore for a number of reasons. I shall now bore you with them. Obviously, and most pertinently, he would eventually star in three of my favourite Pull Your Socks Up, Humanity! movies – Soylent Green (1973), The Omega Man (1971) and Planet of the Apes (1968). Those were all movies I saw slightly later in life because they were on later in the evening, but I was still primed for Charlton Heston. For, when younger, I had spent many a happy Sunday afternoon drinking Cresta in front of the Television watching The Hest’s parched delivery save such historical and long movies as El Cid (1961), The Warlord (1965) and Khartoum (1966) from my childish disinterest. Best of all the many Sunday Afternoon Hest Fests was The Naked Jungle (1954) which was about Charlton Heston and Eleanor Parker learning to love among the marabunta ants. Unstoppable killer ants aside, the scene where the widowed Eleanor Parker character tells Hest that the best piano is one that's been played remains kind of awesome to me even now. Then, later, I found out about Charlton Heston insisting Orson Welles be allowed to direct Touch of Evil (1958), Charlton Heston marching for Civil Rights and, naturally, Wayne’s World 2 (1993). Probably other things in there as well. Yes, for a very long time there was no question about Charlton Heston. But then I made the mistake of watching some Michael Moore thing which had Charlton Heston brandishing a firearm and yelling about his cold dead hands. Unbeknownst to me, apparently in the 1980s (that heinous decade), Charlton Heston threw liberalism over for conservatism. If he’d just called I might have been able to talk him out of it, but he was a proud man and, perhaps unconsciously sensing his error, never sought my advice. Yes, there were sure some mixed feelings in my head that day. But those feelings, that head and that day itself were in 2002; which, in line with Haslein’s theory, hadn’t happened in 1974 when PotA-W started.

Mind you, reading George Tuska and Doug Moench’s comic book adaptation of PotA-M you’d be hard pressed to guess Heston was the star. In the old days, with their old ways, licenced comics had to get some kind of likeness agreement from the people in the movie concerned; otherwise there’d be some legal unpleasantness. Apparently Marvel didn’t bother with that, because Tuska was, so it’s still claimed in smoky back rooms and seedy dance halls, explicitly told not to make anyone “look like Charlton Heston”. A bit of a drawback really when adapting a movie starring Charlton Heston. And so Tuska’s art compliantly contains no one who could even charitably be said to “look like Charlton Heston”. I’ve had food that looked more like Charlton Heston. If anything Tuska overplays his underplaying as all the human faces resemble cereal boxes bearing variations on the same generic visage. This pretty much sums up Tuska’s performance here – he does as he’s asked, but little more. There’s a lot of chops involved in just doing that well, I’m not unaware of that, but Time lacks mercy and while in 1974 this was probably pretty good stuff, by 2015 I (and this is just me, never mind someone actively involved with comic art) have seen Sienkiewicz & Macchio’s Dune, Bissette & Veitch’s 1941 and Simonson & Goodwin’s Alien: The Illustrated Story. Tuska’s stuff here is never not going to look rough in that company. Audrey Hepburn would struggle in that company, and George Tuska is no Audrey Hepburn. Gamine or no, what George Tuska is though, is competent.

Planet of the Apes by George Tuska, Mike Esposito & Doug Moench

He’s certainly as competent as Franklin J. Schaffner’s unspectacular direction of the source movie. But Schaffner had advantages denied to Tuska. Schaffner had Jerry Goldmith’s appropriate pandemonium of parping brass and screeching strings to load even the stillest moments with foreboding, and he had a cast comprising Roddy McDowell, Kim Hunter and Charlton Heston. Poor old George Tuska has none of these things; Hell, he’s even denied anyone who even “looks like Charlton Heston”. He does a decent job; even though I kind of tense at the meagreness of his line and the inertia soaking everything so that even the rough and tumble in the reeds which ends the issue struggles to excite. But it’s doubtful if excitement was even on their agenda. What Tuska and Moench have done here isn’t so much an adaptation as a documentation of PotA-M. Moench & Tuska are obviously attempting to replicate the movie as rigorously as possible on the printed page. Of all the comic options this is the most literal and least interesting approach. But, again, I wrote that in 2015 and this comic was made circa 1974 when the idea that the mass of the UK population might own and view movies in their own home was the stuff of unhinged fantasy. (The exception was a minority of film buffs and onanistically inclined gentlemen for whom select movies were available for home projection; but it was hardly a widespread practice. The projection of movies in private domiciles that is; onanism is ever at hand.) The ephemerality of the movie viewing experience at the time meant that a comic such as this would act as a substitute to a repeat viewing. Once a movie’s theatrical run ended usually the next time you’d see it would be five years later on Television. So there are certainly reasons for Tuska and Moench’s, to modern eyes at least, tiresomely literal script. Yet, what was once a boon has become a burden thanks to that unstoppable bastard, Time.

Planet of the Apes by George Tuska, Mike Esposito & Doug Moench

Basically, in 2015, I’d rather watch the movie but in 1974 I didn’t have that option, and neither did anyone else. Because I do like the movie, don’t get me wrong. While I may have found Pierre Boulle’s original 1964 novel torpidly unengaging someone liked it enough to get Rod “Twilight Zone” Serling (and Michael Wilson) to punch it up with sensationalised action and on-the-nose allegory to the point where someone as uncouth as I is still quite happy to watch it. Sure, there’s more than the one odd thing about PotA-M, not least Taylor himself. When we first meet Taylor, and Taylor is the first person we meet, he is not only hubristically huffing a cigar in a high pressure oxygen environment but also helpfully setting up the themes and basic gist of the movie about to unfold. He does this via a Hestonically delivered misanthropic soliloquy. Taylor’s basic distaste with the Human Race persists throughout the movie until it is knocked off its perch by his distaste for the simian usurpers. He’s just not a people person, Colonel Taylor, and I don’t think putting him in charge of a space mission speaks highly of NASA’s (or is it ANSA's?) screening processes. And that NASA mission’s a bit odd as well. It looks like someone’s had the bright idea of throwing three men and a woman into space with the intention of setting up a new franchise of Humanity. “She was to be the new Eve”, yeah? Now, when it comes to biology my interest is purely amateurish and recreational, but it strikes me that three men and a lady is a breeding fast-track to kids with more thumbs than fingers. I could be wrong; I’m no science-tist. Or maybe two of the blokes were a couple or something. As it happens the, biologically speaking, weird science doesn’t matter much because quicker than you’d Adam and Eve it Stewart (the female crew member) is both old and dead which, even in the swinging ‘60s, is enough to dampen the crew’s ardour. Gerontophilia, perhaps. Necrophilia maybe. But both together’s a bit rich, or am I just being old-fashioned? Then there’s a long mostly quiet bit full of rocks, wandering about and Taylor winding up his crew before we get to the big shock reveal, which is that they are on a (SPOILER!) planet of apes! Boy, it’s a good job it isn’t called Planet of the Apes or something, he said sarcastically. Mind you, at least they left The Big Twist (they’re all dead!) until the end back then, nowadays even that one’s spoilt by the box cover. All of which spoilery matters a lot less than you’d think because back in 1968 they made movies that were so well made that they could survive as satisfactory viewing experiences even with all the surprises sucked out. Alas I can’t say the same for the comic adaptation which is just OKAY!

Planet of the Apes by George Tuska, Mike Esposito & Doug Moench

NEXT TIME: The back-ups are coming! The back-ups are coming! Gil Kane! Jack Kirby! Can poor printing mute talents so large? Sabre-toothed tigers and horse riding lobster men! It’s even better than an offer to groom you for nits - it’s Part 3 of Planet of the COMICS!!!

“...His Wisdom Must Walk Hand In Hand With His Idiocy." INSANE RAMBLING! COMICS! Sometimes It’s Context Of The Planet Of The Apes!

Laydeez enn gennelmen! Please be seated for tonight’s presentation. Refreshments are available from the kiosk. Smoking is permitted in the auditorium because this is the 1970s and we are all going to live forever. Yes, your eyes do not deceive you, this is the 1970s. This is the Bronze Age. And this? This is the Preamble to The Planet of the Apes. (Again.) Cher on The Planet of the Apes. Yes, Really.

Anyway, this… 1. Being A Very Special And Very Personal Note From I, The Author, To You, the Reader (or Sorry, But There’s Nothing for You Here.)

Hello. The bulk of what follows was written in an attempt to write something. 2014 was a difficult year writing-wise, personally speaking, hence the large gaps between posts, the often stilted content, the unconvincing feints at seriousness and the occasional veer into fully fledged nonsense. No change there then! Oh, my! Looking back I don’t remember much of it but I remember having trouble doing it. Very much how I imagine I will feel about life when on my death-bed. Anyway, at one point things got so bad I wrote the following. I just started writing it to see what fell out. At worst, I figured, I’d use it as an entry in The Savage Critics annual Christmas tradition of my putting up a post about Planet of the Apes Weekly and then failing to follow through. (This failure to follow through would have been a lot handier in my drinking days, but there you go. That’s right, a joke about self-soiling – Happy New Year!) When I read it back I was not only surprised at its awfulness (I’ve edited it extensively since then; still awful, but hopefully less so) but also by the weird attempt I was apparently making to contextualise a certain time. I realise now why I was doing that but that reason was hidden from me back then. But, um, I don’t know, as I say, I’ve messed about with it and thrown it up. Largely because I think I need to lighten up about this whole writing about comics thing and I think putting up something this inane will help. I don’t know. I do know that “thrown it up” is pretty apt. So this one’s for me and, no, it doesn’t work; I’m particularly fond of the bit where I excoriate comedians for lazy stereotyping of the 1970s and then do the exact same thing in very short order. But in return for this I will write about Planet of the Apes Weekly. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow but soon and for what will feel like the rest of my life.

2.What Went Before (or Previously on Middle Aged Public Nervous Breakdown Theatre):

In 2012 a bloke at work lent me his collection of Planet of the Apes Weeklies. I promised to get right on that and write about them for The Savage Critics. I patently failed to do so. The year is now 2015…

Now read on...

3. The 1970s (or “And I Only Am Escaped Alone To Tell Thee…”)

The 1970s! Space hoppers, Spangles and white dog shit! As only the most hatefully predictable stand-up comedian will tell you. Also, perhaps, other things. I don’t know about this bit, I don’t know if I need to tell you about the 1970s, or more specifically 1974, the year in which Planet of the Apes Weekly was launched. I did think maybe a few words of explication might be necessary because of a conversation I recently had with “Gil”, my under-10 spawn. Now, I realise most of you might have more of a grasp on the 1970s than a small child, so if you are au fait with the 1970s or could, frankly, not give a shit please do feel free to entertain yourselves in some other fashion. After all there is a rumour going around that this is a comics blog rather than my personal forum for tearful elderly reminiscences. On reflection then I’m not going to go on about the 1970s, nor 1974 in particular. You have The Internet as well, so you don’t need me to tell you that in 1974 the crew of Skylab returned to mother Earth, a WW2 Japanese soldier surrendered having missed the news about the war ending in 1945, Stephen King published Carrie and the Irish began their UK mainland bombing campaign. In 2015 space is full of junk, nobody surrenders anymore because the wars don’t end, Stephen King is a much wealthier writer and the Irish and the English are both mostly behaving in an adult fashion (at the time this went to press at least). So, a bit of a mixed bag progress wise. On balance Stephen King seems to have come out best from the last 40 or so years. So, well done there, Stephen King.

4. Intermittent Television (or The Beast That Shouted “Crackerjack!” At The Heart of the Living Room!)

Anyway, back at the bit where I try and strike up some cheap emotional connection with you like it’s the back matter of an Image book: me and the kid are talking and I’m trying to explain to him how in the past not only would I not have been able to ‘freeze’ the ‘streaming’ SpongeBob episode while I went and did my ‘business’ , but if it had ended before I had returned (having flushed and then washed my hands; I place particular stress on that part to him) I would have been unable to watch the episode by selecting it from a ‘cache’ of ‘stored’ programmes via the use of a ‘handset’. I would have had to wait for the programme to be repeated at some uncertain point in the future, probably at teatime because children’s programming was on only at specific points in the schedule, rather than running 24/7 on an array of dedicated channels. As for that handset, well, since there were only three channels most of the buttons wouldn’t have been there, and, anyway, the handset itself in all likelihood wasn’t there; thus sadistically requiring people to actually get out of the chair, travel across the length of the room to the television itself and thereupon physically turn a dial or press a button set into the fascia of the crate sized behemoth; the bulk of which was not screen and the screen of which displayed only fuzzy pictures, allegedly in colour but certainly fond of lurching up and off the side of the screen like an aunt startled by a flasher. In the 1970s, I stress, all this was state of the art. However, I note that such picture quality is now used in movies as shorthand for the presence of a malefic supernatural force. Which is how I also like to think of the ‘70s. This Television then, the notional one I’m using as an example, would squat in a front room, a room heated by a real gas fire with real flames; the danger of which would also be real, and so it would likely have a kind of portable metal mesh screen set in front of it to avoid real children getting too close and receiving real burns. The room’s walls would be adorned with wallpaper the thickness of today’s carpets while the carpet would be thicker than a bear’s pelt . It would have been on just such an apparatus as that Television in just such a room as that just described that the Planet of the Apes TV show would have been aired by the commercial UK TV channel ITV on Sunday 13th October 1974. (I looked it up.)

5. Second-Hand Treasures (or The Unfeasibly Long Half-Life of Comic Books)

It would be this very show it has taken me so very, very long to mention and its audience of thrilled children that the comic (can you remember back that far?) was aimed at. One such thrilled child would have been me, age 4. Now, as important as it is to me that you think I’m bloody super I am not going to pretend to have read Planet of the Apes Weekly when it came out. I doubt my reading skills at age 4 were all that, brah. I would have read it later and I would have read it from the second hand book shop in the market in the centre of town. This is where your Mum would get most of your comics because even back then your Mum was just doing the best with what she had, just trying to give her magical little boy the best she could despite paltry wages earned at exhaustive cost. And this magical little boy would grow up and repay her in the coin of resentment and ingratitude because, kids! (Did you enjoy the distancing language I unconsciously employed there?) Certainly when I was a child I thought like a child but when I became a man I kept all my childish things inside my head for later, because being a grown-up isn’t, surprisingly, all it is cracked up to be. And one of those things retained in my head is an abiding enjoyment of Planet of the Apes…and at that point I noticed…I was alone. At some point “Gil” had wandered off and was playing virtual murder on his X-Box360. Thinking back, the point of his prudent departure was probably where I seemed to start addressing an invisible audience of two bored people on The Internet. It may well be a bad thing to lose your audience but it is a worse thing not to know at which point it happened. Hello? Oh, I’ll go on.

6. Thunder Underground (or “It was The Boogeyman.”)

What I’m saying is there wasn’t much television back then and what there was you made a date to catch because it wouldn’t wait for you and you’d never know if it it’d be back again. Also, brace yourselves, there was no Internet. In truth I think the lack of the latter was hardly felt as people were quite openly racist, misogynistic and homophobic right to each other’s faces; arguing about meaningless shit until violence erupted was no problem either since everyone drank booze like someone was going to snatch it away; pornography was everywhere anyway in the form of savaged jazz mags badly hidden in bushes and your uncle’s airing cupboard, so men of all ages were still able to achieve physical satisfaction while avoiding interacting with real women; in the 1970s life itself was the Internet. On the upside kids spent a lot more time outdoors but life loves balance so they also spent a lot more time never being seen again and dying in quarries. So much so that Donald “Death has come to your little town, Sheriff.” Pleasance was hired to scare them out of such activities. Of course there were worse things than those happening to kids out there in the 1970s but people didn’t like to talk about it much. Surprisingly, ignoring it and hoping it went away turned out to be a terrible idea of truly titanic proportions. Witness the last couple of years of our news sheepishly revealing the fact that both the light entertainment industry and the ruling elite have been treating the children of Britain as a big old Paedo pick’n’mix for the last four decades at least. Imagine a world where the very people entrusted with the entertainment and, yes, the very care of the most vulnerable in society just get stuck in like pigs; it’s easy if you try. Imagine a world in which David Peace’s Nineteen Seventy Four undersold the situation; don’t bother, you’re sat in it. Shit, that got dark quick. Look, I'm not angry; just disappointed (I am angry; I'm fucking livid).In 1974 had I written myself into a hole like that I'd have then had to exercise some serious literary muscles to get you all back on-side but it's 2015, and so with a wave of The Internet I instantly salve all wounds:

7. News From The Future (or Invasion of the Format Snatchers)

In summation then: there weren’t many distractions for kids in the ‘70s but amongst their limited number we can count comics (!!!) and Television. One thing which combined both was Planet of the Apes Weekly. It’s unfortunate that while in the past there was no shortage of children there was a very definite shortage of distractions, and so the need for cheap entertainment for the sedation of offspring was at a premium. This is where comics came in. Cheap and plentiful they were back there, back then, in the 1970s. There were two kinds of comics: home-grown and imported. I lie; there were three kinds of comics: home-grown, imported and mongrels. Home-grown adventure comics were effectively black and white, gender segregated and sedately content to pimp the increasingly archaic values of the previous generation. (i.e. before Pat Mills et al. happened) Imported genre comics came from The Americas and were suffused with the glamour of bubble gum, nylons, gun crime, Howdy Doody and Television. Yes, that list is supposed to be a bit anachronistic. Like their star spangled land of origin the yank mags were more colourful and vibrant because America was where The Future was happening, and the comics which landed on our shores felt very much like vulgar intrusions from The Future. Yes, in the 1970s everyone in Britain knew America was where The Future was happening. Here in the science fictional year of 2015 of course those very comics look as fresh and progressive as a white man in a suit drunkenly pinching his secretary’s bum. And then there were the mongrels, of which Planet of the Apes Weekly was one. These curs of the comic book world took their content from American sources, reprinted it in black & white to avoid over stimulating the easily excited British audience and chopped it up so several “episodes” of different series could be bodged into one comic . This made a lot more sense than you might think. In Britain, see, comics were weekly, (mostly) B&W anthologies and someone in Marvel’s Mighty Marketing Department had obviously read their Jack Finney, so when they set out to infiltrate the British market they did it via imitation. (Also, it was flattering, I guess.)

8. Nearly There (or The Secret Origin (Not Really) of the Direct Market.)

The American source in this case was the magazine format Planet of the Apes which was already B&W, so that worked out okay, but in America books were monthly which meant an inescapable content deficiency loomed over the project. Never more innovative than when cutting corners, Marvel hacked the yank stuff up into chunks, with only that chunk rather than the whole strip appearing in a single weekly issue. British kids then had their comics beefed up with behind the scenes articles (also from the American magazine) and backup strips. Once we get past the novelty of reading about the adaptations and the Mike Ploog brains-in-jars stuff these back-ups will be the most interesting thing about Planet of the Apes Weekly. Should you ever chance upon a physical copy of Planet of the Apes weekly, or indeed any 1970s British weekly comic, the chances are high that on the cover (front or back) in a top corner will be a surname in biro. This is where the newsagent would put your name were you to answer the call printed in every issue of your top weekly funny paper to place an order with your newsagent (“Never Miss An Issue!”). This was a kind of Palaeolithic version of having a pull list with a comics shop. True or not, I like to think that the 21st Century’s sexy rebels of Comics Retailing, like Brian “Two Shops” Hibbs, evolved directly from small men with brilliantined comb-overs and braised faces who could spin on a penny when the bell above their door tinkled announcing the entry of an all too likely larcenous child. And so, there in 1974 in a cramped den of cigarette packets and serried sweet jars somewhere in there, usually at ground level and braced between puzzle magazines and the sexy lure of Look-In, lurked Planet of the Apes Weekly. Let’s reach down now and take a look at issue 1…

NEXT TIME: Cold dead hands, marabunta ants, and somewhere in there I'll probably say, “To be fair, George Tuska had his moments. But few of them are on these pages.” It’s all in the first real instalment of Planet of the COMICS!!! Yes, it is coming and I shit you not, kids!