Nothing will ever be real again
Context: the below is an essay written for the gallery catalogue of abstract comics creator Gareth Hopkins’s exhibition The Intercorstal: After Smith in Bremen last year. It was intended for those attendees who had never heard of John Smith’s work. I’m presenting it here first because I’ve been meaning to for a while, and second because … Continue reading
Go toxic, Joe!
Rereading Marshal Law: The Hateful Dead and Marshal Law: Super Babylon by Pat Mills and Kevin O’Neill. The third part of a dialogue about Marshal Law with Joe McCulloch, blogger, contributor to the Comic Books Are Burning In Hell podcast and writer for The Comics Journal, no less. ME: Among the many underlying similarities between … Continue reading
A leather-clad Tinkerbell
Rereading Marshal Law: Fear & Loathing by Pat Mills and Kevin O’Neill. I’m joined for a dialogue about Marshal Law with Joe McCulloch, blogger, contributor to the Comic Books Are Burning In Hell podcast and writer for The Comics Journal no less. ME: I came into the recently published Marshal Law Deluxe hardcover with a … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
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 … Continue reading
Makes everything seem so miserable
Rereading Dare: The Future by Grant Morrison and Rian Hughes. How many years will it take for historians to produce an objective, sober assessment of what Margaret Thatcher did to Britain? How many decades? 22 years haven’t been enough. Her legacy, using that word neutrally, is as passionately disputed now as it was when she … Continue reading
Suggested For Mature Readers 