There is only everything

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A Brief History of British Comics
27: Coda

We should, of course, always be leery of Golden Ages.

Too often it’s nostalgia for your own personal pop-cultural awakening, as opposed to a genuine epochal artistic moment.

But to experience a true Golden Age?

Blessed. That’s how it feels the further we get from that point. Blessed to have borne witness to a movement of unbridled kinetic creativity, an artform being pushed, kneaded and kicked into thrilling new shapes.

The experience of engaging with British comics in my childhood and adolescence changed me profoundly. A secret transformation, alchemical and atomic.  Portals into vibrant alternative worlds in the back of cars, in bedrooms, waiting rooms, grandparents’ houses.

The Golden Age of hip-hop is often argued, with substantial supporting evidence, to be 1988-94. Truthfully hip-hop is such a vital, restless artform that it’s always threatening another golden age.

British comics’ Golden Age, though, has a more finite period. From 1977-1992 there was a surge of incredible creativity through the medium, powered by an absurd array of mercurial talent, across myriad titles.

This wasn’t a specialised experience; high-street newsagent shelves pulsed with comics; kids comics, humour comics, romance comics, sci-fi comics, spooky comics, action comics, sports comics. Proper proletariat, commercial art that smuggled in experimentalism and subversion beneath grubby newsprint shells.

The comic art-form reached its cultural and creative zeitgeist moment in 1988, and British comics were right there in the engine room. Incubators for future titans of the medium, playgrounds for outrageously talented creators.

The art that came bursting out of these pages. The glorious, energising, endlessly exciting art. Causing acute positive brain damage to a vast and hungry audience. Batteries charged, lives gladly changed.

We thought it would last forever, like our youth. 

And just like youth of course, it passed. But it happened. And we were there.

Thank you.

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Try to remember

My favourite comic was cancelled after just four issues. No wonder. It was pretty obscure - a yarn about a pagan, occult resistance fighting a deep-state technocracy. Normal now perhaps, post Matrix, post-Brexit, post-Elon, Trump and Covid. But not then, in 1994. Here’s the twist: The publisher didn't pull the plug; the author did. I’m talking The Invisibles, issues 1-4, by Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell.

Readers point to Arcadia, the time-travel arc rescuing de Sade during the French Revolution, as the book's incongruous turn but Dead Beatles and Down and Out in Heaven and Hell are the outliers. They show Scouse teen Dane McGowan burn down his school, get dumped in a mind-control borstal, then broken out by King Mob only to face a street-shaman trial with a homeless mystic in London. These issues read as a Misty-coded thriller, starkly different from the metafictional sci-fi that followed.

As a fan who rated Zenith above anything by Moore, Miller, and the overhyped Gaiman, these issues felt like the ultimate progression by my writer-artist dream team. This follow-up to that 2000AD superhero masterpiece proved Morrison was a brilliant storyteller. Yet, desperate to escape Moore's shadow and the tropes of ‘realistic’ comics, Morrison adopted a hyperlinked, fourth-wall method - first in Animal Man, then across The Invisibles - that would become their defining hallmark. But what if they hadn't?

There is a rain-slicked, early-90s psychogeographic atmosphere on these first pages, distinct from the holographic artefact the series became. Let’s imagine Morrison, Yeowell, and Sean Phillips stayed in this Autumnal mode for a tight 24-issue run. Imagine these as comics version of a lost piece of late-night British television: a low-budget masterpiece airing on BBC2 in say, 1982, stuck somewhere between the nuclear dread of Edge of Darkness and the soil-deep madness of Penda’s Fen.

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The End and The Death (Dan Abnett, 2023-2024)

Questions bubble up through the warp. Answers too. Did The Horus Heresy need 65 books? (ask the Black Library accountants) Including 8 books for The Siege of Terra? (see above) And is the last part, The End and The Death, really 3 books long? (Warhammer is bigger for the UK economy than fishing) How come those Black Library boys were such stingy tippers then? (how would you act if your god emperor was Dan Abnett?)

Okay. Back in our day we had a diorama and we liked it very well.

Some truths sour into obligations, chants for the faithful. (‘in our day’) (‘40K was better when it was more grotesque and satirical’) Like a lot of Warhammer, these tensions manifest better through art by Paul Jon Milne, Erika Price, Craig Collins.

So what brought us here today? The words “It’s like Final Crisis for 40K” - neat trick, someone used it for Masters of the Universe: Revelation and it’s even more appropriate here. At the point of collapse, time and location lose all coherence so halfway through volume II you’re screaming “I FUCKING GET IT!” as various characters struggle to. You’ve got demonic entities wilting when reduced to story, duelling tarot, the works! Excess that extends past its commercial imperatives. A genuinely interesting way to spend that capital, you can tell by the Reddit threads that bloom like “Did anyone else struggle with The End and The Death?” (they did) 

These books, this armour, it’s overwhelming, personal. A tomb of dead thoughts we’ve charged ourselves with maintaining. It’s planetary too. (fin——al crisis) Patterns of force and consumption: “There will always be a reason to seize more.” 

No way out is offered, nothing new, anyway. Still, sometimes it’s worth tracing the shape of the disaster, and remembering where we sit in it.

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Calling You On To Victory - Transformers The Movie - 40th Anniversary Rerelease

Hot Rod throws the fish back. Of course he does. He’s an Autobot. Compassion is their creed. His actions speak louder than words.

Kup believes the past is the greatest teacher so you should learn to appreciate it. He sends his experience out into the world in the hope it helps the young grow.

For Blurr, the faster it is the better he likes it, and he is desperate to make a contribution.

Strength is more than physical, thinks Springer. Always ready with a quip to lift spirits, he’s here to help.

Arcee believes looks are always deceiving. More than meets the eye. How many times must she keep teaching that lesson?

Consistency is victory swears Ultra Magnus. Something to strive for, if not achieved.

The mantra of Wreck-Gar: collect and save, collect and save. It’s about finding connections and commonality. A search for a universal language.

Why do their enemies lose?

Galvatron thinks his power is everything: defeat is absurd. An island adrift.

Desolation follows in his trail, swears Scourge. Head of an army amy, head like a hammer.

While Cyclonus scorns compassion as the Autobots' downfall. 

All of them together, working only for themselves.

They serve the great beast, Unicron, and that which is not part of him shall become one with the great void.

Lost souls who see nothing past their own ambition.

I am in my mid forties now. I believe every silver lining has a gray cloud. Six year old me sat impatiently through the music video for Madonna’s Material Girl, awaiting the cinematic experience of his life. He reaches out to me across space and time as I watch the Anniversary rerelease, as I find myself thinking ‘here comes my favourite bit’ every five minutes. What did my childhood self believe?

Dare.

Need to get back to that.

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The Horned God (Pat Mills, Simon Bisley)
Part Five: Oh to be the right kind of monster 

 John Rowan, therapist, writer, educator, anti-sexist men’s activist, negligent husband, absent father, estranged son. His soon to be ex-wife’s deepening engagement with feminism leads him into crisis, he understands it intellectually, but he cannot let himself feel it. 

For Rowan accepting feminism wounds men, as they come to understand themselves as oppressors, the damage they feel at the damage they have done cuts deep. They either flee from the challenge of this insight or lash out in guilt and shame or oscillate between unable to move on.

He proposes a threefold programme. Practical. Join a men’s group, work with peers to understand their own masculinity and Therapy to understand the roots of the individual problem. 

But Rowan believes we need a spiritual dimension, Christianity with its plethora of bad dads is found wanting, so he turns to the older religions. Or rather the modern idea of the older religions, a patchwork of myth post-rationalised into a coherent rationale that conveniently meets the needs of now.

He encounters The Horned God in gateway witch Starhawk and finds in it a solution for post-feminist masculinity. 

“Wild but not savage, strong but not dominating, sexual but not coercive, aware of his full power and vulnerability, placing himself in the service of the Goddess”

Rowan describes encountering the goddess as remembering something he had always known. Mills, dismissive of most magic as pretentious bullshit, imports Rowan wholesale into this new Slaine. Putting his at least his character Rowan’s ritual therapeutic interventions. And Rowan's rituals are brutal. Terrifying. A mock trial where inquisition like the defendant cannot win. Circled by men in stonewashed jeans or dressed up in drag berating you with all your crimes against women on an individual and societal level, every accusation a confession. Brut 33 heavy in the air. Circe like stripping the disguise of man away till only the monster remains. From here he builds the subject up again.

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Ukko at the quiz machine

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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Planks Constant

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HATERS NO LIKE COS THE FLOW IS SO TIGHT

It's interesting to see, and I have had to do this like Alan ‘Friend Sacrificer’ Moore about a half dozen times in the last couple of years, but they always tell you in counselling you can become more boundaried and like give up giving up on yourself and some people will really not like it but I think this has to be the most blatant and as one (actual, not fake) friend put it “diabolical” scenarios played out for me yet: - well cheerio fuckface it's you who has lost out, I appear only to have lost a parasitic infection. 

Which is good I suppose but I am always surprised, and it farther pushes me to life as clangingly obvious metaphor/hologram universe/schizotypal thinking, and I suppose saddened and depressed a bit. If you thought I was emotional before the open heart surgery [metaphor which is also real] readers well boy howdy am I fluctuating between euphoria and grace at my continuance and ruing and searching for any solid sense of purpose as the matrix (Wachowski not Optimus ~ they literally opened my breastbone like his truck windows and it does freak my nut) ratifies and feeds all human endeavour and achievement to the beast Mammon and insists on farther efficiencies whilst siloing actual interpersonal community… life IS a roller coaster baby

HAPPY BATMAN DAY, I GUESS

I missed the store and have therefore not read Batman of Two Worlds, which I was very much looking forward to. I have in years past been quite critical of Fraction but his Batman is a coloured inside the lines and charming and clever rather than irksome as he was prone to be; his Jimmy Olsen book is a show-off but good enough to have & eat the cake.

I bought eReader copies of Absolute Batman vol.1 which I go on and on about but didn't actually own, and the Hayden Sherman illustrated ‘Dark Patterns’ (the first ish is really nasty classic Legends of the Dark Knight feeling; also hugely looking forward to that title relaunch from the Absolute Martian Manhunter team.) 

I really really wanted to watch The Dark Knight (which isn't exactly a comfort watch though it is familiar) when I got out of hospital, dunno what that's about -you wanna know where I got these scars that's right - but I suppose also the whole time I was in I was gantin’ on Lanterns which I was also missing.

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Santo y Blue Demon Contra Les Monstruos (Gilberto Martínez Solares, 1970)

The day I took my mask off my face was missing for two days.

Golden age culture heroes Santo and Blue Demon metabolise the classic horror menagerie. Grumpily dug up and stitched together by an underground necromancer, Cyclops, Frankenstein, Wolfman and the full line-up haunt Mexico City’s parks and mid rises, make-up like contaminants. Frugal indigo day-for-night filters turn everything the colour of twilight and a rival scientist’s family are under threat.

The masks opposite are pristine: enmascarados wear their disfigurements with a pride approaching sanctity.

In the last 20s, the masks came about to bamboozle the bookies handicappers, helping wrestlers and their management run their own game outside the mat. Take two bouts a night. Let Black Shadow play Blue Demon tonight, the crowd will never know.

Protection for eyes, ears and lips, one legend is the masks are inspired by a cockfighting practice called dubbing, where the soft tissue of wattle, earlobes and comb are cut off to prevent beakholds in the pit.

The mask anticipates the wounds to be sustained for the sake of the art, the attrition of sheared knee ligaments and nonconcussive head impacts. The mask shrouds elegantly the psychological friction of performance and authenticity that burns through anglo pros. The mask creates a scar. The mask shows us he knows he’s already hurt.

The mask lets the fighter transcend time without the necessity of death. As the audience recognise the lucha's sacrificial hurt, his generous commitment to the fight, they worship, become fanatical.

Wounded but immortal, the fighters disappear into the headgear, handed on to the new best kid in the family academy. The masks get heavier, carrying the dignity of many souls in their thread, building momentum over the top rope and deep into the cheap seats.