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A Brief History of British Comics
13: BLAST!

• Publisher - John Brown
• June - November 1991
• 7 issues

You name it BLAST! you best come ready to stir up some shit.

Wyndham Lewis and company’s Vorticist movement arrived brattishly at the tip of the 20^th Century, biting the hand of Futurism and looking to launch a conceptual Molotov into British modernism. BLAST was the flagship physical object for this vibrant, quixotic ideology, graphically stunning, packed with impish manifestos, and lasting 2 issues. 

WW1 literally exploded Vorticism, rendering literary and design fireworks irrelevant in a maelstrom of bullets, explosions, mud and blood. Destructive technological advancement colliding catastrophically with flesh. Artistic pretension suddenly impotent and jejune beneath the churning wheels of the 20^th century industrial machine.

BLAST! vol 2 conversely emerged after the explosion had occurred. The tail, not the tip. 

The 1980s was a fulcrum of impossibly exciting change and innovation in comics. A unique moment in the life of an artform. Possibility was teased and tested, creative energy pulsing through panel gutters. Things happened fast, artistic barriers were broken down at an exhilarating rate. 

By 1991, things slowed. Post-modernism, the dominant mode of the 90s, facilitated parlour games, refried nostalgia. Splashy, hormonally-charged artists made the surface wildly appealing attracting money-heads, hungry sharks to a blithe swimmer.

From the ashes of Brit-crit institution Speakeasy, came BLAST!, bolstered by Viz-cash from publisher John Brown. A nobly intentioned mish-mash of new UK work and reprints from the US and Europe, it lacked the strong identity a title like that demands. Ellis and D’isreali’s bracingly confident ‘Lazarus Churchyard’ set a tone that sparked awkwardly against undeniably classy, but gentler fare like ‘Concrete’. ‘Mr Monster’ was from a fustier, fuzzier era. ‘Torpedo’, Charles Burns’ ephemera – all great, but it felt like a poorly planned and badly timed lucky dip.

It lasted seven issues, five more than its namesake. Nothing changed. Does it ever?

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Adventures in Pyramid Building: Hush now babe it will be alright.

Under the black sky, over the black water we cross the Mersey together in silence. The Krossing is always in silence. I can feel the cold seeping into my bones, the first indication that I am inadequately dressed. Do you remember Sean Bonney writing his will? ‘…my collection of empty beer bottles I leave to my landlord…my sexual uncertainty I keep to myself. My love I leave to the suicided…’ 

That lovely man from the Skool of Performance stands on the lower deck, cradling his brick, looking to the far shore. He strokes the corner with his thumb, quick, soft, reassuring. A woman hangs over the side emptying ashes into the night sky. The wind makes momentary clouds. The Tannoy speaks ‘Don’t be afraid of anything ever because you are already dead.’ Vertiginous time. I sense a future I’m no longer in looking back dissecting us. 

And then it is time to break our silence and shout the names of our dead into the sky, to speak the names of our dead over the water. I have two new names this year. Both so fresh that they trip me up when people ask dangerous questions like ‘How are you?’ I repeat them again and again in the hope that, wherever they are, this may help them.  Voices break and try again. Names as invocation, names as football chants, names as anchors, names as what we never said. 

It is so cold mate. 

I cannot adequately convey to you how beautiful the Krossing is. 

We reach Birkenhead and the Ferryman starts demanding his coins. He is loud and crass and it makes me angry. But then I see how right it is. We need to be shocked out of our contemplation. It’s time for the Spectacle. I have to find J, I have to find my band. We have noise to make and witness to bear. 

https://www.thepeoplespyramid.org/

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SUPERMAN MADE ME CRY IN BED AT 1.00AM

The language of the modern cutting edge superhero book is exceedingly Morrisonian but this is a, forgive me, super example and did [as above, I buy my comics digitally after Tuesday midnight as early as possible like a real fan] - plaintive and moving, there is a context with deprogramming a monstrous and despotic Ra’s al-Ghul plays it off beautifully too… Superman has probably been a weaker element of the Absolute Universe - I have just seen the sales on Scott Snyder’s Instagram and they do seem to bear out crowd wisdom here, Batman first, Martian Manhunter second with this lagging back - but! It is extremely rare for a comic to induce a healthy adult tearfest, for some reason I do remember Batwoman being thrown out the military disproportionately affecting me (I don’t give a fuck about the US Army, man) but I was also listening to Nobody Gets Me But You off the then new Spoon album and probably having some very bad life circumstances in which I was being very much constructively/destructively not “got”. 

Grant has done it of course, I don’t know if the suicide saviour bit in the now GOATed All-Star Superman #10, but 100% the last Doom Patrol, ‘Empire of Chairs’, that shit is the Six Feet Under finale with Sia of comics. Anyway respect to Jason Aaron for delivering here, he was very promising initially but I think in the typical Marvel way glutted out — they finna do it to cinema!! Hexus the Living Corporation in Marvel Boy #3 a synecdoche!

[Just watched that 6FU bit again, I am going to need a minute, I have my aunt’s funeral to go to on Tuesday… right let’s calm down and reflect pensively on Larkin ‘Church Going’.]

IS THAT THOR?! IS HE CRYING?!!?

Aye son, even the god of thunder may cry.

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Deancore

I find myself at the Time Piece club in Exeter for a night of Deancore. I'm here before it opens to talk to promoter Trevor Spoor. Spoor has been busy blutacking A4 printouts of Leticia Dean on walls, hanging camouflage netting for his "Forest of Dean" and sorting the drinks menu to include Leticia Dean themed cocktails, Dean-a Colada, Espresso Deantini and Leticia On The Beach.

"I'm just a fan of the pop star Leticia Dean. I get very angry when people say she's an actress."

Leticia Dean has acted in over 2,700 episodes of Eastenders as Sharon Watts but tonight is devoted to her pop career. This consists of two singles. I confess to only vaguely remembering Something Outa Nothing (with Eastenders co-star Paul Medford).

"That’s all you need. The other single was with her brother and didn't chart. Something Outa Nothing charted at fifteen! Shoulda been higher. Incredible song with Leticia's stunning vocal talents up front and Paul Medford only singing a few harmonies and the middle eight."

Something Outa Nothing will be the only music played tonight. It's a cut and shut mess with lyrics leaping from descriptions of synaesthesia to winning “the game” to the importance of friends and contradictorily the burning of bridges. An imitation of a pop song.

After opening, Something Outa Nothing is the only thing filling the room except for the bar staff, bouncers and Tony's supportive sister. She doesn't like the song.

The song is horseshit.  But maybe if we delve into that shit we can see what the horse has eaten. Clichés mostly. After two hours I drain my Leticia On The Beach and say goodbye to Trevor and Sharon. Will Trevor do this again?

"Definitely! It's been amazing!"

Will Deancore catch on? You never know, Trevor may yet make something outa nothing.

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State Security 

There felt like there was something transgressive about the snippets I would encounter of the Larry Hama GI Joe comics as back up material in the Marvel UK Transformers. As a kid who only read things like the Beano, the odd glimpses of other Marvel books appended in left strange images I wasn’t sure I was supposed to see. Iron Man 2020’s cogwheel teeth fangs. Muddled memories of a character in Rocket Racoon pulling their face off. Adverts for Zoids with the scary looking cyborg Silverman. And Cobra’s Baroness stripped to her underwear, tied up in a cupboard with bound Cobra Troopers.

It was a period around the time I was roughly nine that Hama really made an impression. The Borovia storyline has Stalker, Quick-Kick, Snow Job and Outback sneak into Not East Germany to rescue a captive American journalist. They’re fucked by him already having been traded in an even more secret deal. Outback gets away, the others go to the gulag. I remember asking my much older brother what the gulag was.

Why would this stay with me so? Perhaps it was a change in atmosphere. By this point I had seen Transformers die, but their deaths were fleeting. Perhaps these action men could suffer and die. 

Aged eleven I would obsess over the movie FireFox. A Clint Eastwood adaptation of a Craig Thomas spy thriller. Eastwood’s pilot must steal a Soviet aircraft of immense capability. I used a tape recorder to record highlights of Maurice Jarre’s score to listen to on a hand me down Walkman. Mostly I was about the back half, the aircraft successfully stolen, its muscles flexed. Duelling prototypes tear through the sky.

The front half lingered though. Stomach knotting fear of KGB agents questioning my papers. Perhaps knowing the gulag could await. Traveling solo in airports, I could hear Jarre’s music.

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Sufficiently Advanced Technology

Dr Damien Williams, an assistant professor of Philosophy and Data Science and one of the most cogent critics of "AI" at the moment, has been saying for a long time that one of the central facts of the current moment is that "all the worst people have realised that magic is real". 

We live in an age that is defined by propaganda. Not propaganda as an individual message, but propaganda as a total information environment so pervasive that even the critics of fascism end up all too often using its frame and premises, even as they (as we) dispute the details, arguing about chromosomes as if anyone gives a shit while they're genociding our trans siblings. It happens in big ways ("nobody wants uncontrolled immigration, but...", the BBC referring to trans women as "biological males") but also, and more perniciously, in small ways. We *all* now refer to the UK leaving the EU by the cutesy nickname "Brexit", made up by its advocates.

And when we accept their framings, we are very much living in their world. 

There's plenty of nonsense in the writings of people like Robert Anton Wilson, and in the magicians, chaos and otherwise, inspired by them, but one thing Wilson always said has stayed with me. As far as he was concerned, he and his friends were the conspiracy running the world, because they had decided to be and because they were refusing to accept the reality tunnels that authoritarians were trying to impose.

Unfortunately we now live in a world where the authoritarians have read Wilson and his ilk, and much as with Tolkien they've learned just enough to do real damage. The fight in the real world is, rightly, a priority, but we need to take the fight to the noosphere too.

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Beyond the Absolute!

Been thinking about ‘Dogeared’ by Armand Hammer x Alchemist a lot in the first thirteen months of this year. The billy woods verse, mostly, but that needs ELUCID’s bars to set it up properly eh?

ELUCID stacks thoughts up so you hear the way they connect, slowing down into “impossible matter” then lingering on “patterns” and “apparent”, building an elaborate origami structure that’s razor sharp to the touch. 

In comparison, woods announces his rhymes like something he’s just come across on the street, his delivery matching the way the synths threaten to spiral into incoherence before meeting themselves where they began. "What's the role of a poet in times like these?" is the question as woods wanders through parts of the world that only seem connected by his being there. This is a response of sorts, though not one you can feel truly satisfied with: "You got an answer for me yet?"/ "I'm still grappling."

There’s another billy woods track from 2025 that’s been on the brain this year though.

The opening from woods is more dystopic here, the poet as a scarecrow staring through a dark glass while a demonic pulse builds around him. Despot’s arrival brings drums to the party, with our man hammering away at the anger behind woods’ words, taking it all the way to the top: “When I finally meet my maker, I'll have somethin' up my sleeve/And I'll find out if the god above me bleed the same as me.”

A ludicrous thought, of course. Like something from a comic - 

- but if you can look past the apparent patterns on the way back down to the page you might find clear outlets for that anger, and fresh endings to stories we’ve been stuck with for far too fucking long.

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Why I want to fuck Tomás De Torquemada

The alien being known to humanity for at least eight thousand years as  𓅝𓏏𓏭 𓁟𓏏𓏭 𓅝𓏏𓏭𓀭/Thoth, to avenge the death of his mother, chased the lord of the Terran empire backwards through time. Persecuting the persecutor, slaughtering the Terminator-in-Chief’s successive incarnations as he went. One murder or ten thousand, it’s all the same. They can only hang you once.

Antlered, baboon, bird and warlock, Thoth is also a child-god, defined by his parental relationships. This act of temporal animacide is fatally oedipal - a putative usurpation of his father’s obsessions covering a (successful) plea for attention. 

It is unknown whether Thoth’s strategy is a unique event in the universe, or an unremarkable habit of divinity. But the action inscribes a cut into the fabric of spacetime, a death mark which, following the cosmic foundation of enantiodromia - the tendency of things to emerge as their own opposites - is inescapably erotic, yet without the possibility of release or grounding. All the Torquemadas are dead, but pulse with sexual longing. Human societies remain compelled to create our own vessels for the ghosts of evil.

Traces of Thoth’s red signature appear in dream reports, psychiatric admission records and search engine trends, particularly on pornographic websites and right-wing social media. Paraphilic interest in the Torquemada-complex’s historic bodies remains constant, and reflects into their own physical biographies, which are always adopted by their contemporary admirers:

Adolf Hitler - incestuous pedophile, drug addict, testicular deformation.

John Milton Chivington - Masonic ritualist (compulsive masturbator), collector of severed genitalia (Native American males and females).

Maximilien Robespierre - pathological asceticism, scatolia.

Matthew Hopkins - sexual extortion, pioneer of invasive body searches and genital inspection as humiliation technique.

Peter the Hermit - bestiality, ablutophobia, nidering.

Tomás De Torquemada - self-mortification, cilice, torture.

Nemesis Book Seven, by Pat Mills, John Hicklenton and Steve Potter (Fleetway Publications, 1987-8)