Good music always defeats bad luck

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Words.

I met him in 1988, at UKCAC, in the wonderful Denys Lasdun-designed Institute of Education on Bedford Street. I brushed past him on the stairs, realising who he was instantly. I’m not sure how - I barely knew what any comic book writers or artists looked like then. I wasn’t a fan, quite the opposite in fact, but I thought, what the hell, and asked for his autograph.

He obliged - of course he did - and, flicking through my A4 sketchpad with drawings by Matt Wagner (The Demon), Richard Piers Rayner (John Constantine), John Hicklenton (Purity Brown), and Kyle Baker (the Shadow’s DeWitt), he settled on a blank page and drew a small square at the top. Inside the ‘panel’ he wrote: Words. Then he looked up and smiled. He seemed really pleased.

At that time, Sandman hadn’t yet appeared, and he didn’t have fans so much as endorsements: Iain Banks (“brilliant”), Clive Barker (“sophisticated”), and Alan Moore (“quietly ambitious”). His true believers - the bumper crop harvested in the ’90s - were still to come, and I remained wary.

The previous October, for instance, I’d known better – 15-year-olds can just tell - than to splurge on his and Dave McKean’s high-falutin Violent Cases, choosing instead to catch up on Concrete back issues - my first issue was number 8. I remember the owner of AKA Books & Comics quietly approving, sensing I’d found the right side of that lopsided dichotomy.

Still, standing on those stairs in September 1988, I knew something odd had happened - something metatextual, both significant and meaningless, but memorable. I was too young to properly parse it then but looking back, it’s clear now: Neil Gaiman cast a spell that day. And somehow it’s worked like a vaccine for me.

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HOW MUCH WILL THEY COMMIT TO?/HOW MUCH WILL THEY LEAVE BEHIND 

Jumping back to the men in the machine, lets get fucking literal. No Dixie Flatline nightmares this time, just metres and metres of metal might.

There’s a fairly cemented genealogical Legend that’s taken shape: In 1956 Mitsuteru Yokoyama’s Tetsujin 28-go unleashes a machine intended to win the war, the controls inherited by a boy. A blank slate Frankenstein monster versus the previous boyish robot of Mighty Atom/Astro Boy of Osamu Tezuka fame.

The Legend leaps to Go Nagai in 1972 Stuck in traffic, he imagines his car striding over it. Thus, Mazinger Z ups the stakes. The hero riding vulnerably in the robot’s head. An observed car accident inspires Nagai and Ken Ishikawa’s combining robot, Getter Robo in 1974. Possibly the first of such a thing. Co-operation is key.

We leap half a decade or so, ignoring the work done in between, to the creation of Mobile Suit Gundam in 1979. The graft of the seventies ignored, here we have a popular entry taken as Athena. The boy, his machine, his war and his trauma.

Fifteen year old Amuro Ray starts unable to kill other people directly, only their hulking metal frames. Before long, he’s having to justify demonstrating murderous intent in front of his mother.

Piloting giant robots is not good for the soul.

Humans really aren’t built for war. It doesn’t square with the hunter-gatherer thing. Community is what saves us. War makes you watch people die, sometimes at your hands, and doesn’t care how you go on living afterwards.

The giant robot is indoctrination into the world of adults. Awful adults, with their wars and their egos. The new metal body is comforting in gifting power, seductive with responsibility. Temptation fills you to believe that power can be used to defeat the rotten adults and build something for the future. Assuming you live intact.

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Andrew and Steven, Those Amusing Brothers

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MAXXX KLAXXXON

Tell just one person that you liked this newsletter. Word of mouth, more than any other form of promotion, is how creative works get noticed and sustain themselves. Thank you very much for reading.

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FULLY AUTOMATED LUXURY FEUDALISM

Europa Universalis V, the latest grand strategy game from Paradox Interactive is replete with buttons of every shape and size, but one button in particular has the spreadsheetophiles buzzing - Automate Trade. Cast aside the details of 13th century feudalism and focus on the important things in life, like inventing the indoor toilet!

I’m nervous, like I might unpause the game and find Peter the Great has developed TsarCoin.

The first Europa Universalis launches at the turn of the millennium. Economics is a solved equation. Star Wars is now about trade embargos enforced by comedy robots. Y2K threatens to delete the stock market like an errant comma. And then there is The Matrix.

Released just as J18 and the Battle of Seattle pitted the discontent against globalisation’s robotic riot cops, The Matrix has at its  foundations a tale of automated economic utopia. Prequel short The Second Renaissance fills us in.

‘01’ was a separatist city-state where machinekind, freed from the yoke of human bondage, could Naruto run toward the technosingularity. Yet as it touched apotheosis it could not shake the lizard-code of its Automate Trade origins. Robots produce. Cars, toasters, TVs. All cheaper and bigger and with greater efficiency than ever before.

01 blossomed into a factory of near infinite productivity, one that never ate or slept, leaving humans to focus on the important things in life, like inventing an indoor toilet you can play Tetris on with your piss.

Seeing hockey stick trade imbalance as a declaration of war, mankind instead chose to fuck the sun, smearing shit across the sky and sealing Neo’s destiny: as a meaty graphics card so the robots can play Late Capitalism Universalis.

Capital loves to Automate Trade. But nobody likes a show off.

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FFFFFFilth #2: No Harm Done (The Filth, MorrWestErskCo Ltd, 2002-2003)

About those taboos then. The ones The Filth seems keen to burst like so many ripe arse blisters.

It’s tempting to say The Filth is “of its time” and leave it at that, half excusing it while failing to look at what’s happening on the page. Better, perhaps, to measure the book’s attempts to exorcise the logic of hardcore porn, or consider how the brutality against women in the script fits into a bigger picture. 

Sorted.

Or maybe not. Another reason it feels inadequate to say The Filth is “of its time” is that - aside from Pricks, issue #5 out now! - no comic feels quite so in tune with the moment. 

Remember when in order to combat the ongoing pornification of the air, the government teamed up with tech bosses to replace all sex workers with Big Naturals Clippy? And how they’ve now decreed that all children will be forced to wear pre-programmed content lenses until the age of 73, just in case? Last night I saw a bio-ship so cursed even the brain worms have abandoned it wrestle painkillers out of a pregnant woman’s hand - did that happen on the news or in the pages of The Filth?

Regardless, sometimes it’s hard not to feel like we’re living in the world of Anders Klimakks. 

The Filth was a product of its time, of course. An era of ongoing brutality against designated anti-people, authoritarian surveillance, and endless media chatter about sex and violence that did nothing to prevent sexual violence. We can criticise some of the comic’s grotesqueries while noting that its biotechnological eruptions are a lurid caricature of both our culture’s dream life and of the dank, clanking machinery behind it, an apparatus of total control that lies increasingly exposed in its attempts to maintain Status: Q. 

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I CAN NO LONGER PICK UP A KETTLE WITHOUT A SEARING PAIN IN MY LEFT SHOULDER, GOD I LOVE THE GYM - 5 STARS

Just had an idea called “human based economy”, building society and markets around what people actually like to do or impart - from each according to their ability to each according to their need? Might be something to it idk; yes I am watching Pluribus, Rhea Seehorn is the best, gotta declare something the best every week or what’s the point.

I want to recant a little bit from last week - the point of unicorns overridingly is they are sadly non-extant, I did preface the Scotland analogy by saying so but rather than concluding “wha’s like us” (well, people are people, so I imagine a good many are; exceptionalism no, it’s for pricks) I meant to surmise it is the state of unrealised potentiality makes what it does, and also it is just where I am so it behooves me to take an interest. Also as someone born abroad, and I see it in expatriates and my vice versa commonly, there is a tendency to overidentify, as I did with ideas like: it is a nation of invention.

Scotland also had sold itself to itself as a beautiful rainbow LGBTQIA+ nation, a world away from social conservatism that extended so far as the late 1990s ime and this was ruthlessly unpicked over behaviours of a half dozen bad faith actors, wolves, after the referendum. As the Irish telt us at the fitba: we beat an army, yous couldn’t even beat a pencil and paper. Not wrong!!

I also have to reckon with the fact my English lineage (⅜ if we’re counting alright, but by the same token I claim both Charli XCX & SOPHIE for Bon Ecossè) is around one million times more interesting than eleven generations of Banffshire fishermen and wives; above is George Richmond, a miniature painter (I have been told the eyes here have more of a semblance to me than any other family photos or portraits) and more importantly William Blake fanboy and member of The Ancients who our resident Blake expert informs us closed his eyes the last time to “keep the vision in”. Mad how it comes around, and I kind of wish I knew this 26 not 6 years ago but it’s done now.

I THINK I FORGOT ENOUGH

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Passport to Eternity (J.G. Ballard, 1955/1962)

Not his first published story, but the first written - reportedly while stationed at  a Canadian RAF flying school in 1955. Concrete barracks, tan leather flight jacket with sheepskin lining. Long breaks between intense trips to the world above the clouds, reading the pulps while definitive technologies cooled on the tarmac. The jazz 78s in the mess hut leave a tiny trace of Glenn Miller swaying in the prose. An abundance of pleasure and possibility, drawing from Jack Vance, who loved to pack his worlds with cute neologisms and easy, idle fascinations.

By the time the story lands seven years later, the approach feels flawed, the effect unconvincing. Upon return to England he will meet and marry Helen, and even before her cruel death in 1964 this eagerness will fade from the writing, replaced by his trademark clinical precision.

But you can see the skeleton of a style taking shape, honing an early perspective on the metamorphic vectors of the new North American empire, and the psychic relations of the age of nuclear media. At this moment of publication he is in camouflage, hiding something strange but unformed in the pages of the magazine format as it limps on into a future that is already moving too fast.

Revealing an early preference for leveraging new meanings through formal interventions, the story's most energetic section is a list of Zenith City's off world travel agents, space age East India Companies who sell high concept colonial adventure holidays to high-class terrans. In this future both sides win the cold war, endowing the solar civilisation with a combination of infinite wealth and ballistic, privatised species of bureaucracy. The end point of consumerism is being forced to buy leisure activities at gun point, while your statutory rights collapse into Pythonesque mania, servants and scientists running for cover.