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
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
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
Opal Fruits, Milky Bars, toy soldiers
Rereading Still Life by John Smith and Sean Phillips. I got a couple of new graphic novels for Christmas, which might be a surprise to readers of this blog to whom I’m a fanboy Amish who refuses to admit the existence of anything published after 1995. I’ve spent half the last month reading Brandon Graham’s … Continue reading
Looking through James Herbert books just for the bits with sex in
Rereading Straitgate by John Smith and Sean Phillips. We say a piece of art hits home, or when that’s worn out from overuse we say that it hits us where we live. By which we mean that it feels personal, as if the artist has created it just for us, that they’ve identified a singular … Continue reading
Fly the flag proudly, son!
Rereading Big Dave by Grant Morrison, Mark Millar, Steve Parkhouse, Anthony Williams and Gina Hart. Superheroes came too late for Britain. In the Golden Age, the 1930s, we were going through an undeclared civil war between the haves and the have-nots, no longer certain of our identity. In the Silver Age, the 1960s, we were … Continue reading
What it’s like for real people
Rereading New Statesmen Epilogue and Prologue by John Smith, Sean Phillips and Jim Baikie. There was a time, about 10 or 12 years ago, when the DC universe was dominated by a new generation of its marquee heroes. Grant Morrison’s JLA had Wally West, Kyle Rayner, Connor Hawke, Steel, Zauriel who was intended to be … Continue reading
A headful of loose change
Rereading New Statesmen chapters 7-12 by John Smith, Jim Baikie and Duncan Fegredo. Comics have never made it far enough into the cultural mainstream to become studied objects, to be tested against the -isms. They’ve been working too hard to catch up with literature and movies to worry about where they stand with modernism, with … Continue reading
A big gaudy picturebook
Rereading New Statesmen chapters 1-6 by John Smith, Jim Baikie and Sean Phillips. Things that were hot, post-graphic novel revolution: limited series. Painted comics. British writers. Bloody violence. Character deaths. Morally ambivalent protagonists. Straight up nasty protagonists. First-person captions. Sex and sexual deviance. Real-world political angles. Corruption in high places. Pseudoscience. Literary techniques. Literary allusions. … Continue reading
Suggested For Mature Readers 