Think of me instead as a watchman
Rereading Earth X by Alex Ross, Jim Krueger, John Paul Leon and Bill Reinhold. In the quarter-century since the Dark Age of comics and the graphic novel revolution, my tastes have changed. Realism is no longer something I look for. Superheroes are pretty much played out. The whole seriousness that I demanded from comics, that … Read more
The Alan Moore plagiarism scandal
The Alan Moore trolls – every comments section has one – have got their schtick pretty much down by now. He never created a character in his life. He doesn’t want other people doing Watchmen but he made Peter Pan’s Wendy do Alice in Wonderland. He supports Occupy wearing V masks which is hypocritical because … Read more
“Welcome to Death”
It probably happened in 2003 or 2004, though I can’t be any more accurate than that. A man, a professional driver of some kind, was driving along in a van with a friend in the Torfaen area of Gwent, South Wales. He turned to that friend and said, for no reason the friend was ever … Read more
Hiatus
Writing about Crisis was an unplanned excursion but a fun one, giving me the chance to cover something new every week that was often wildly different than the week before. There’s a lot of ground between Bible John and Third World War and Skin, after all. Next I plan, as promised about six months or … Read more
Crisis over
It’s appropriate that I concluded writing about Crisis in the week Thatcher died. Her presence was all over Crisis; she appeared as Gloria Monday in Dan Dare, she appeared as herself with her emasculated late Cabinet in True Faith, she appeared symbolically in a panel of The New Adventures of Hitler when John Bull was … Read more
Rather break things
Rereading Skin by Brendan McCarthy and Peter Milligan. Censorship in a free society isn’t monolithic. It isn’t the state, a grey bureaucrat in Central Office, who stamps transgressive art as unworthy of mass consumption. The process is instead gradual, the work of many hands each with an individual standard of what society can endure. Free … Read more
Preach to the yout’ dem
Rereading Third World War by Pat Mills, Malachy Coney, Alan Mitchell and various artists. Like a Detective Comics reader ignoring Batman, like a 2000AD reader never mentioning Judge Dredd, I’ve written about all kinds of stuff that appeared in Crisis but never mentioned its tentpole franchise. Third World War, written by Pat Mills and others … Read more
Crisis of identity
I haven’t written about everything that appeared in Crisis. When I write about Third World War I’ll probably have covered more than half the stuff that appeared in its pages, because Third World War was close to half of what appeared in its pages. I wrote about New Statesmen in an early series of blogs … Read more
Going nowhere, connecting with nothing
Rereading Bible John: A Forensic Meditation by Grant Morrison and Daniel Vallely. Being honest: I never believed there was an actual living rivalry between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison before the latter’s freakout at the end of last year. I mean people have always talked about it, or they have since comics fans found each … Read more
A lovespoke in the grim wheel
Rereading Rogan Gosh by Brendan McCarthy and Peter Milligan. If all art aspires to the condition of music then comics get closer than most. The cognitive and aesthetic senses are engaged simultaneously, the mind swept along with story and empathy while the eye delights in beauty. In theory. I mean, presumably nobody’s thinking that when … Read more
