Tales Of The Gurrier

I have been entranced by this art form since before I could read and returned to it again and again over the years most recently through the internet and one writer in particular.

Comics speak to me in a unique way. They are immediate, visceral, they reward the participant instantly. I’ve always thought they were like a visual form of crack cocaine. Instantly addictive yet when you are done you only want more, more, shut up and give me more! A good comicbook title gives you that little fix every month. Graphic novels which are my preferred medium of ingestion are like big crack orgies. You can sit down and gorge yourself on them for hours. When I discovered the internet could supply an inexhaustible glut of scanned comics, Jesus it was like a Roman orgy. I think I read comics for about four days straight. Me eyes nearly fell out of my head. A guilty pleasure. Filesharing arguments aside I read far more comics in those four days than I have in many years and rakes of stuff I would never consider picking up. Yet on the back of that marathon session I went out the following weekend and bought more of the damn things in my local comics shop. See like crack I tell you.

I’m no expert not even a dilletante, pedant or fanboy nor do I any claim to be. Huge swathes of the comic landscape I know nothing about. I read ‘em I like ‘em and here’s why.

“Alan Moore knows the score” Can U Dig it -Pop Will Eat Itself, 1989.
Discovering Alan Moore as a teenager was a revelation. My memories and experiences must be akin to many others for whom Moore is a giant of the form. For me V for Vendetta captured the mood of Thatcher’s Britain and the horrific possibilities of the future locked in that mad whoor’s head. That novel is Britain in the Eighties. The dark soul of Maggies dreams covered in tarpaulin and hidden at the bottom of the garden behind the shed waiting for some Alan Titchmarsh or Dermot Paddyfella to accidently dig it up one day. Groundforce eaten alive by rabid, zombie Thatcherite yuppies in rotting pinstripe suits with braces and radioactive mobile phones like breeze blocks.

The Watchmen was superlative and has been praised by far more seasoned and skilled observers than myself. If you have not read it you should. For me it lifted the cover off the costumed hero genre and said no it could be like this. Afterwards I realised Superman could not be the same again. My most enjoyable experience of Moore was discovering a cache of Swamp Thing graphic novels in a decrepit second hand bookshop in Dublin in the early nineties. I couldn’t believe my luck, they were selling them for three or four quid each. A penniless student I telephoned my best friend from a payphone and we clubbed together and bought the lot. Wow they were fucking brilliant. This was just after Swamp Thing had been revamped and relaunched. They were just excellent.

Then there was Morrison. Grant Morrison as a writer had a greater effect on me at an impressionable age than any other writer bar HST. My best friend growing up had an incredible comics collection. His father collected comics as a boy and had bequeathed the entire collection to his son when he was twelve years old. What a man. My God what a collection. From a fanboy collectors point of view he had some truly drool inducing items. I have held in my hands The Amazing Spiderman #2. Number two! In mint condition that collection of spot coloured paper is worth $11,000. He had Incredible Hulk #3. He had early issues of The Fantastic Four, Shield #1 and a rake of other amazing stuff. But my favourite was The Doom Patrol. He had an incomplete collection of the early Doom Patrol series which launched in the mid sixties and ran for nearly ten years. They were great comic books. Far different to the mainstream and darker than the X-Men who were their closest cousins on the Marvel side. It was this quirky title that Vertigo/DC relaunched in the late eighties with Grant Morrison at the helm. Being on this side of the Atlantic I had grown up reading 2000AD like every other teenage comic fan. Though it had its flaws and went through patches of brillance and then periods in the doldrums 2000AD was a great introduction to comics. In addition to the weekly comic they produced monthly reprints of their classic storylines like Nemesis the Warlock, ABC Warriors and the really cool Dredd storylines. It also meant early exposure to writers like Morrison.

My very first exposure to Morrison was at the tender age of ten years old in the pages of Superman Annual 1986. I had raced through it on Christmas morning and finished it all even the mandatory ‘help Krypto the superdog through the maze to the superbiscuits’ bit. But the UK versions of superhero annuals all seemed to have additional text stories. Either to pad them out or to meet some sort of educational quotient required for the improvement of young minds. They weren’t comics per se yet they were stories about superheroes. Perhaps the US versions used the space for all those adverts of cool gadgets, sea monkey kingdoms and X-Ray specs.

I approached the story I had skipped over on my first read through with some trepidation. It had pictures yeah but they were just illustrations, they were not comics. It was in my opinion a swizz. But the title was intriguing. “Osgood Peabody’s Big Green Dream Machine” written by Grant Morrison. The exact details of the story and the annual itself are lost to posterity but I remember it was deeply strange, something about a demented inventor who as the title suggests creates a machine that makes his dreams come to life which he then uses to try and kill Superman. Or perhaps on reflection Peabody is having a great time until Superman comes and ruins his fun which is much more likely. The big blue killjoy.

Doom Patrol relaunched with Morrison at the helm with ‘Crawling From The Wreckage’. It was great, like nothing I had read before in any genre. But then the book started to get deeper and weirder and stranger but better weirder and better stranger. Morrison was taking the book in directions and places I never knew you could go with comics into the land of metamentalism, into the post-modern, into the deeply weird and strange. What do all these statements mean? Well it means the comic was bloody amazing. We devoured the stuff. Morrison was getting weirder and weirder with every issue. He was bringing all sorts of strange influences to bear on the storylines but they bore up under the strain. We were making notes of all these references like Dadaism, Tiresias and Polari and going out and reading up on them. We were sitting around reading Doom Patrol, smoking dope and having a our brains blown away by the concepts he was coming up with. We were 17 years old and knew nothing. I’m 28 now and I still know nothing but those were good times. By the time the LSD issue arrived he was like our Castenada, our Timothy Leary. Morrison punched a hole through my consciousness that never quite filled itself in and I am most grateful for it. I bought a copy of ‘The Filth’ by Morrison last month and he is still at it but now with more riding.

Talbot. If you have never read The Adventures of Luther Awkright go out right now and buy it. Bryan Talbot is the best kept secret of British comics. He’s the one all the rest of them emulate. Arkwright is the book all the really good English writers wish they had written and he’s the one they all cry themselves to sleep at night wishing they were like. Every time they sit down and create a new character they must secretly curse Talbot for having all the good ideas first. The Tale of One Bad Rat. Child abuse and Beatrix Potter. Sod the ‘Stay Safe’ program this should be on the national curriculum.

Neil Gaiman. Now I like Neil Gaiman, I think he is a genius. I really like the way he tells stories. His imagination is fecund and vasty deep. The inside of his brain must be amazing. But well, he attracts the goths. They have to go somewhere I know and its better they gather to Gaiman like gormless black shod moths. Feeding on the angst nectar that surrounds The Sandman et al. This way it keeps them away from ruining all the other good writers for us. Overexposing them, making them pander to their petty needs. He is a self concious writer. There is amazing craft in the weft and weave of his stories but his need to engender a particular emotional response from the participant sometimes overrides the writing, suffuses it. I feel comfortable reading Gaiman, I know that if he tests me or pushes out the boundaries of his fiction I will be at the centre not the edge. Not clinging to the edge staring into the abyss. He uses mythic forms to whisper truths to us and those mythic forms are the familiar way we humans explain away the unknown. Like a Ted Hughes to Ellis’ Dylan Thomas. Ellis will write those terrible things that slip unbidden into the writers minds eye. He will write them and he may warn you ‘Don’t Look’ but that’s all you get with Ellis. One warning, you’re a grown up, you’re reading this you have made the concious decision to come along for the ride. Gaiman will couch the unpleasant in language and imagery designed to mitigate its impact. It makes for beautiful stories that really dig under your skin and stay there but sometimes it feels self conscious. Bloody navel gazing Goths.

Warren Ellis. What can I say about Ellis, I find him fascinating. I discovered him as a web entity first rather than a writer. I really like his work. The Transmetropolitan series is fantastic. It swamps the reader with so many brilliant ideas you are overwhelmed. He is a futurist in that gloriously english tradition of H.G.Wells. Reading Ellis is like having a techno savvy Begby in your head. Screaming and shouting and kicking people, sending you horrible emails in the night. Drinking whisky and shitting in your window boxes. Ramraiding the local chemist in stolen tractors and broadcasting the ensuing ketamine riots via futurephones to orbiting satellites.

Ellis is where it all kicked off for me again with comics. I had almost given up reading them for a couple of years and certainly had given up buying them. Then someone sent me the link to Ellis’ now defunct website diepunyhumans.com and I was hooked. I firmly believe Ellis and his ragtag band of crazies, freaks, hangers on, weirdos and Holy Slut army are the future and I like it. Reading Ellis is total exposure to the writer. Through his multiple web presences he invites the reader into every aspect of the creative process. As a reader of his site when I buy a Warren Ellis book I am exposed to; when he had the original idea, its genesis, the creative process involved in whittling it down from a concept to a workable form. When he started writing the script, where he wrote the script, what music he listened to while he wrote it, what he wrote it on, how he felt that day, how he felt after he finished writing it, rough drafts of the script, the general background and numbers involved in publishing it, how it did in sales and on and on until finally it arrives at my door and I sit down and read it. As a reader and a participant how much I have invested in this book by the time I actually read it?

There is a danger of information overload and all this is unnecessary to enjoy the work but Ellis does not simply produce the book for his readers he produces the experience of writing the book and delivers it to them via the web in text, images and sound. The added value and content the internet can bring to the table. That is the future ladies and gentlemen. Not the future full stop but a future for publishing. As a participant in all of this I am biased and thanks to Ellis far too close to the whole process to make a valid judgement. But he has numbers to back it up. It’s not for everyone but participation is optional. Watch this writer he has done great things and he will do more great things.

What should you read? If you have never read comics before or you are starting out you could do worse than read any of the above mentioned authors. If you really want to do some research go here www.artbomb.net. Unlike me these people actually know what they are talking about.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 2nd, 2005 at 1:18 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.