fire and forget

The other week I had the extreme good fortune to get 15 minutes chatting to Dave Gibbons, the thoroughly nice chap behind Watchmen, Martha Washington, Rogue Trooper and loads more. The interview appears at CNET UK: Crave meets Watchmen creator Dave Gibbons. This is the complete transcript:

You must be sick of talking about Watchmen…

No not at all. But I do feel that now the circus is leaving town.

Have you heard about the Judge Dredd movie?

Another one of these things that if it’s done right would be an absolute smash. The problem with the first one was that it was like Robocop had eaten Dredd’s lunch! And also the fact that there was a huge star who wanted to take the helmet off, and I really wish they could have done it without revealing that.

I think one of the successes of Watchmen is that the cast, although they’re wonderful actors, aren’t over-familiar. So you buy into the story, the scenario, without stopping to think “oh that’s that, y’know, the next Dustin Hoffman or Tom Cruise”. I wish the Judge Dredd movie well, I’d like to see it.

I think one of the keys to Dredd is that you never see his face, he’s like the Lone Ranger or something. He’s eternally masked and that’s the essence of his mystery

Are you pleased with how Watchmen turned out?

Very pleased. I feel so flattered that they stuck so closely to what Alan Moore and I did. I just think it’s wonderful. I’ve seen it a few times now. The first time I saw it I’m sure it would have been the experience of people much less close to it than me. It’s just “Oh my God — it’s really happening! It’s Rorschach! He’s gonna say that, this is the bit where this happens…” The second time I saw it I got over that. I saw it as a movie and for two-and-a-half hours I was lost in it. I thoroughly enjoyed it. If I’d paid ten quid to see it on a Saturday night I’d have been just thrilled.

Do you think it has brought in non-comics people?

Undoubtedly. The thing that’s the key to that is the sales of the graphic novels. Sales of the graphic novel have gone through the roof, and those are people who’ve been intrigued by the trailers, intrigued by the movie, and then saw the graphic novel so I’m sure it brought a lot of people in. And it’s interesting, people seem quite divided on the movie: there are some true fans who like it, some who don’t like it. Some people had never heard of it and really really like it. Some don’t get it. But it’s those ones who weren’t aware of it and had seen it not knowing and got absolutely hooked on it, they’re the real victories.

You were involved with recolouring Watchmen for the Absolute Edition. Is that something you’d have considered before the digital age?

The way that the colour separation was done on Watchmen originally is almost like something out of the Victorian age. You had to do watercolour colour guides with every single area annotated, and it would be something like R2B2 — which isn’t a Star Wars reference, it’s 25 per cent red, 25 per cent blue: it’s a light purple. Every single area had to be coloured like that. It would then go to these ladies who would sit at their kitchen tables with sheets of acetate and they’d paint out all the areas. It was so inefficient.

Every page?

Every page. Three tones of every colour, three tones of red, yellow, blue, so there’s 9 sheets of acetate for every page in a 30 page comic. That’s nearly 300 sheets of acetate. But now of course it’s done by computer, so what John Higgins the original colourist on Watchmen was able to do was go back and correct the mistakes that had inevitably crept in the process. Also of course in the old process you couldn’t do anything subtle; you had to paint up to a line and if there wasn’t a line there they’d just put an edge on the paper. So he was able to get digital files that were exact reproductions of the original colours and then tweak those so that they looked right.

We didn’t make huge changes because we didn’t want to do new work. We wanted to do the equivalent of a digital remastering of a favourite song, where you don’t correct the bum notes but you take the hiss and the scratch off it. You restore it to what it was always meant to be.

When did you start using digital technology in your work?

I first got a computer for my work… Well, I got one to do word processing, an Amstrad, in the mid-80s. But I invested in some serious stuff very early in the 90s. Originally I would do typographic sort of things. Mechanical elements. Then I started to do colouring myself, for which it was wonderful. And now I use it in all kind of ways: I write my scripts on the computer, I do a lot of my rough drawing on the computer because you can be so loose and free on it — you can re-size stuff and move stuff round. I’ve recently got onto a Wacom Cintiq graphics tablet, which is one of these wonderful things where you literally draw on the screen, and that’s just… that’s magic.

So I’ve used a computer increasingly since then. Things that probably wouldn’t occur, things like getting photo reference. You have to have lots of reference when you’re drawing comics. It used to be a trip to the library. Now Google it, and you haven’t got one shot of the car you want, you’ve got 100 shots of the car you want. So, on every level.

One of the main challenges of comics is you have to draw things repeatedly from different angles so 3D modelling programs are very useful there — not making finished models, but models that are good enough to draw from. So there isn’t an area of what I do that hasn’t been improved by technology.

So in theory you can do a comic without putting pen to paper at all?

You can. I’ve done bits of artwork where nothing has ever been drawn. On the computer I’ll do the roughs, then the pencils, then the inks, then the colour, and, y’know, it feels strange to begin with… And of course, the one downside is you’re not left a piece of original artwork that you can sell! But it certainly saves a hell of a lot of time, particularly if you ever have to do any correction or any redrawing. I’m moving increasingly towards ‘the paperless studio’.

Did publishers embrace that kind of technology?

There was resistance, because I think in a sense publishers liked to see what they’d paid for. They liked to have a page of original artwork, and actually a physical object. I think it’s a thing that had to reach a critical mass: a friend of mine called Richard Starkings, who runs a company called Comicraft who do digital lettering, he had terrible trouble with DC Comics, trying to get them to accept digital lettering. What he used to have to do was do it digitally, then print it out and cut and paste it physically onto the artwork.

But then Marvel Comics embraced it, because of course in production it’s a huge time-saver. Someone can do the pencil drawings, and they can be lettered while somebody is inking the pencil drawings, and they can be coloured while they’re still being inked. So it absolutely streamlines the whole production process. And it actually means that there is no longer the liability if original artwork that it might get lost or damaged, the problems of storing it. I think all the publishers prefer digital now.

Were British and American attitudes different? Because they’re such different systems for making comics.

I think everything’s becoming kind of global, so many Brits work for American comics, and so many British comics like 2000AD are virtually exclusively coloured digitally, the lettering’s now done on computer so the fields are interchangeable. The other thing is you can quite happily live in England and work for America — or live in California and work for England, because transfer is instantaneous. I’m of an age where, when I first started making comics, there was no such thing as Fedex. There certainly wasn’t such a thing as a fax machine. So if you wanted to send a page of script then you had to get it physically delivered to the guy. Now, as you know, it’s the work of a moment: you write it, you send it. You draw it, you send it.

That must have been difficult with Alan Moore’s scripts being so famously dense — must have been some big packages arriving…

That’s true, and also what used to happen when Alan was really under a lot of deadline pressure he wasn’t able to do an entire script. I have had two sheets of typing paper delivered from Northampton where Alan lived, delivered to Hertfordshire where I live, in a taxi because there weren’t any fax machines

That must have made for a white knuckle experience…

Yeah! He said that the money he spent on taxis was god’s punishment for making him rich.

He could have been richer if he’d been more involved in the films, but obviously… (I tail off, wishing I hadn’t said that)

Well, that’s true, it’s… he’s had a real bad time with Hollywood and he didn’t want to repeat it with Watchmen. He does get royalties on the sales of the graphic novel which is right, but yeah… I’ve had a very good experience on the movie, I perfectly respect his decision not to be involved with it, and we’re still friends which is the most important thing to me. But I do think of all the movies that have been made of Alan’s work this is the one that comes closest to the spirit of the original.

You’ve worked with Frank Miller as well. What do you think it is about their work that makes them so attractive to Hollywood?

Well I think they’re wonderful writers. For a start, their characters and their stories are of huge interest. Y’know, Frank I think has always been directed at Hollywood, that’s always been part of his plan to end up in Hollywood. He’s a visual storyteller and he can write and draw both, so… I just think they’re very talented people. But their approach is completely different. Alan is like Mozart, everything’s like a symphony. Frank is like jazz, he kind of jumps about, it’s improvised.

Frank Miller 2008

‘Comic book movie’ can mean two things: a movie based on a comic book, or a movie that follows the kind of broad entertainment value, gravity-free logic and near-slapstick violence most people associate with comics. Some movies, like Ghost World, A History of Violence or Road to Perdition, fall into the first category but not the second. Some fall into the second, like Con Air (or just about any action movie that involves people shooting oil drums to make them blow up, then walking away from the explosion in slow-motion) without any evidence that they’re working from a printed script, let alone a printed comic. Some movies, especially in the superhero genre, fall into both. The Spirit is both, and takes the concept of a comic book movie to the extreme.

We’re launched straight into the story of Central City’s masked crimefighter the Spirit (Gabriel Macht) as he takes on mad scientist and drug-peddling villain the Octopus (Samuel L Jackson). Our hero is Denny Colt, a rookie cop presumed dead but still capable of charming the ladies, including his boss’ daughter Ellen Dolan (Sarah Paulson) and old flame-turned master-thief Sand Seraf (Eva Mendes).

In the Spirit comic, Will Eisner pushed the boundaries of what was possible with the comic book form, and invented many sophisticated techniques still used today. Director Frank Miller shoots for this kind of invention, crafting the film from digital elements, his high-powered cast placed on a green-screen background and echoing many of the comic’s iconic shots.

It’s a bold approach, bringing the live-action film-making process of the comic book movie (the first kind) as close as possible to comic creation, where the only special effects budget is the creator’s imagination. Robert Rodriguez made it work in his shot-for-panel adaptation of Miller’s Sin City. Sadly, in this case it just doesn’t work.

The reason Sin City worked is because, per the title, the location was a character itself. The brick walls framed the chiselled granite toughness of the men, the stark chiaroscuro lighting echoed the beauty and darkness of the women, with everybody mixed up like cats in a sack in that crazy burg. It’s a trick honed from Eisner’s trailblazing use of the location as part of the framework of his comic, and vice versa. Where Sin City’s location and look defined the book and the film, The Spirit fails to repeat the trick. For all of the lead’s tortured voiceover about ‘his city’ we never get a sense of the place. Apart from generic (if exhilarating) rooftop-jumping, the backgrounds are often unclear and open. With greenscreen providing an option to place the characters anywhere that can be conceived, all too often the cast feel like they’re standing on a soundstage accompanied only by a smoke machine.

The film also takes the anti-logic of the comic book movie (the second kind) to extremes. Eisner’s Spirit was an ordinary joe, unlike Superman’s superpowered alien or Batman’s millionaire gadget-fetishist. Eisner’s Spirit’s only crime-fighting equipment were his fists, yet he seemed capable of taking regular beatings that should have seen him in a (second) early grave. Miller latches onto this, adding a superhuman element to the Spirit’s toughness, and making a plot point of the extended scraps between hero and similarly-endowed villain. Miller has thankfully toned down some of the excesses he apparently had in mind, and the conflict between Spirit and Octopus actually works well, with Sand Seraf’s subplot intertwining nicely.

But once again a lack of context hamstrings the story: we know the Octopus is a drug dealer from a throwaway line, rather than a visit to the seedy side of town that would have both established his villainy and given us a glimpse of the city’s character and texture. Miller seems more interested in giving the Octopus a series of non-sequitur costume changes, which are fun but overly long and talky, and ring hollow in the absence of context. Is the Octopus a Nazi? No, he just likes the uniform.

Macht does reasonably well with his square-jawed milk-and-cookies hero, his compulsive womanising staying the right side of innocence in his wide-eyed expression. Miller is willing to have fun with the character (”Somebody bring me a tie… and it better be red!“) but gives Jackson too much rope without any really killer lines to shout (instead barking tosh like “C’mon… Toilets are always funny!”). The highlight is another entrancing turn from Eva Mendes, whose ruthless yet smoulderingly fragile thief deserves her own movie.

Well blow me down: Popeye is out of copyright as of a few hours from now, reports the Telegraph. I’m tempted to make my own Popeye comic. I loves Popeye.

Elzie Segar, the Illinois artist who created Popeye, his love interest Olive Oyl and nemesis Bluto, died aged 43 in 1938 and an EU law that protects the rights of authors for 70 years after their death is about to end….

Mark Owen, an intellectual property specialist at the law firm Harbottle & Lewis, told the paper: “The Segar drawings are out of copyright, so anyone could put those on T-shirts, posters and cards and create a thriving business. If you sold a Popeye toy or Popeye spinach can, you could be infringing the trademark.”

“Popeye is one of the first of the famous 20th-century cartoon characters to fall out of copyright. Betty Boop and ultimately Mickey Mouse will follow.”

Eh? While Segar sadly died young, Betty’s creator Grim Natwick lived to the ripe old age of 100. That means, as I understand it, Betty Boop won’t be available for anyone to fool around with until 2060. I hope I get to have a crack at her.

Oh, and Uncle Walt died in 1966, so anyone who isn’t that keen on the mouse should sharpen their pencils and their wit in 2036.

Right, that’s all I can stands, I can’t stands no more…

Cover: very Greg Staples, 90’s-style painting, like it, although it is a bit static - maybe a BOK! sound effect is needed…

Judge Dredd: well-told by Robbie Morrison, not that keen on Paul Marshall’s artwork, I was never a Cam Kennedy fan the first time round. Why do all the gangsters have weird noses? Should surely make Dredd’s job easier - arrest everyone with a weird nose, job done. Good to see Shaggy in the Big Meg, where’s Scooby?

Future Shocks: wasn’t impressed. Westerns in space, come on… and with the artwork feeling a bit ’80s, reminded me of Colin Wilson, the whole thing feels a bit dated. Actually I’m probably just bitter, because I got rejected with an FS updating Stagecoach to the future (the story, not the imagery - I didn’t have any bloody stetsons and laser guns). Liked the gun coming out of the coffin on it’s own, though, nice twist on Django.

Lobster Random: love Simon Spurrier’s way with words. Still feel a bit like nothing’s actually happened for about three weeks. And Carl Critchlow’s scratchy art is still a real let-down after the lushness of Disraeli’s work on the Vort. Last panel is brilliantly menacing, though.

Stalag 666: as mentioned elsewhere: that’s more like it! (What does it take to get some frickin’ snakemen with rocket launchers on quad-bikes around here?!) Particularly like the last panels on page two and three. Although some Akira-style speed lines rather than some haphazardly applied background motion blur would really kick things into gear.

Red Seas: initially underwhelmed (not aware of the back story) but the dialogue has really drawn me in. I really like the sense of foreboding in the last couple of panels. But the art doesn’t do anything for me: I just don’t think Steve Yeowell’s linework is evocative enough to be that sparse. I never get a sense of backgrounds from his work (what was that mecha thing he drew a while back, with the pastel robots and the environmental theme? Detonator X. Awful). The third panel on page 2 is the first time I’ve seen him draw a proper face for ages, everyone else seems to be walking around looking pained with their eyes closed.

Finally, the classic T-shirts. Was never a Shakara fan, but that is a wicked shirt. No arguments with Bad Company and Dante, although I would be more likely to shell out for a Kev O’Neill Nemesis and Chopper shirt without all the crowd noise. What I wouldn’t give for a shirt with the Supersurf logos and kneepad stickers from the Song of the Surfer GN — to the interwebs!

**Batman music**

Originally posted at 2000ADonline forum.

First five pages of volume two of the magnificent Phonogram, The Singles Club at the Phonogram blog.

The first volume of Phonogram is one of the few things I had wondered if the creators had yanked all the stuff I wanted to write out of my brain and y’know, made it as good as it sounded in my head. The first thing I saw when I opened the trade paperback at random was a reference to Kenickie, and I just had to have it.

It’s about… well, when I finished it I opened Indiedisco, the story i’ve been writing, about a guy in the present day who looks back at his group of friends in the britpop era, full of smart cultural references to obscure yet glorious indie bands, and wrote this:

INT. THE RED DRAGON - DAY. NOW: JOHNNY, in white v-neck t-shirt and dark jeans, is sat by a small table on the bench around the edge of the pub, reading Phonogram. Mia, in black cap-sleeve t-shirt and black jeans, is slouched next to him reading a tattoo magazine with her plain black trainers on the seat. Her sunglasses, an untouched pint and a half-drunk vodka and tonic sit on the table.

JOHNNY:
FUCK.

Mia looks over.

MIA:
BIT RUBBISH, IS IT?

JOHNNY:
NO, IT’S GREAT. WELL, IT’S ALRIGHT. YOU KNOW THAT STORY I’VE BEEN TALKING ABOUT WRITING, ABOUT A GUY IN THE PRESENT DAY WHO LOOKS BACK AT HIS GROUP OF FRIENDS IN THE BRITPOP ERA, FULL OF SMART CULTURAL REFERENCES TO OBSCURE YET GLORIOUS INDIE BANDS?

MIA:
YEAH.

Johnny holds up the comic.

JOHNNY:
WELL, THIS IS A STORY ABOUT A GUY IN THE PRESENT DAY WHO LOOKS BACK AT HIS GROUP OF FRIENDS IN THE BRITPOP ERA, FULL OF SMART CULTURAL REFERENCES TO OBSCURE YET GLORIOUS INDIE BANDS.

WITH MAGIC AND GODDESSES.

Mia makes a face, which Johnny reciprocates while still looking at the comic.

MIA:
FUCK.

JOHNNY:
YEAH.

MIA:
I HATE MAGIC AND GODDESSES AND SHIT LIKE THAT.

Of course, they’re totally different beasts. Phonogram is way sexier than me, for a start. And reading it did push me to push the pop cultural references in Indiedisco a bit more. It also made me let go of Britpop. Not bad for a funny book.

And while we’re on the subject…

“I ain’t gonna bury you again, you son of a bitch”

Came a bit late to this series, but I just tanned an Amazon voucher getting the first six trades. The series, written by Robert Kirkman and drawn mostly by Blighty’s own Charlie Adlard, follows the travails of a group of survivors in the wake of a zombie apocalypse. What I love about The Walking Dead is the juxtaposition of logistical trivia — how they get by on an everyday level — with extreme violence — headlopping the undead — and frequent crowning moments of awesome. Our nominal hero, down-to-earth small-town cop Rick, gets most of them: upon learning that his former partner, who had an affair with his wife and then tried to kill him, may have turned into a zombie and is probably buried (kind of) alive, Rick digs him up just so he can kill him again. Later, beating a child-murderer so hard he breaks all his own fingers is pretty grim, but still pretty bad-ass.

As much as I like Rick, it has to be said that the baddest crowning moment of badassery belongs to hammer-wielding Tyrese. After his daughter is killed in a botched suicide pact, the inexplicably calm ex-pro footballer decides to clear out a gymnasium full of zombies as a sort of catharsis. His friends carefully and methodically shoot each zombie — crucially remembering to stay near the door — but Tyrese gets hammer-happy and wades into the ghouls. He’s soon overwhelmed, and his horrified friends are forced to leg it. When this is related to Rick he demands to know if anyone actually saw Tyrese’s body, and busts into the gym. Where Tyrese sits, surrounded by a gym full of definitely-not-coming-back zombies: “What kept you?” Nails hard.

“A little fight in you. I like that…”

***SPOILERS!***

At the risk of harping on about The Dark Knight, I was reading the excellent Girl-Wonder.org, and it got me thinking about the gender politics of Christopher Nolan’s Bat-opus. I’m a sucker for masculine bonding and professional, or men-on-a-mission, stories. But why did Rachel Dawes have to die?

Skipping the snarky jokes about killing the Katie Holmes version being OK, it’s obvious in narrative terms why Dawes dies. She’s the one thing that all the characters care about. Harvey Dent loves her; Bruce Wayne sees her as symbolic of his someday/maybe release from the mantle of the Bat; and Jim Gordon trusts her, a pretty exclusive honour in this troubled town. And someone we care about has to die, otherwise the Joker’s sense of menace isn’t validated — killing faceless extras doesn’t carry the same weight.

Everybody loves Dawes, so her death has far-reaching implications. And she’s the only character not entrenched in the Batman mythos. Dent, Gordon, or Alfred can’t die because they can’t be replaced. Lucius Fox maybe, but as the most benign presence in the film that would just be cruel. So we kill the girl.

Because that’s what she is. She’s the girl. She’s the moral centre for the men taking care of business, but she has no role in moving the story forward except to provide motivation for the men. Holmes’ limp incarnation didn’t convince for a second that she was a crusading lawyer, so credit to Gyllenhall’s more authoritative take. Yet the one point when the script calls for her to do some lawyering, when she interviews Lau in the MCU holding cell, could have been given to Dent and the story wouldn’t have skipped a beat. As such, she’s replaceable.

Just as Vicki Vale, Chase Meridien, Julie Madison, Vesper Fairchild, Silver St. Cloud and the rest are disposable and replacable, Dawes is the only who can go. Then there’s Judge Freel, who gets blown up, and Ramirez, who is a corrupt cop. But not even a cool, badass corrupt cop, just one who loves her dear old mum, gawd bless’er.

It’s galling that a female character — the female lead, no less, can’t be more than the voice of reason who provides motivation for the men, by looking pretty and then dying. It’s called Girlfriend in a Refridgerator Syndrome.

What makes it worse in this context, is Gordon’s death. When Gordon dies, I felt that the gloves were off. Holy shit, they’ve killed one of the main characters from the comic! Anything can happen! Except, of course, he isn’t dead. The guys don’t die.

Incidentally, see if you can guess if Dawes shows up in IMDb’s memorable quotes from The Dark Knight, which is stuffed full of great lines. When a character called Tattooed Prisoner gets better dialogue than the female lead, there’s something wrong.

How to right this? Talia al Ghul kicking the shit out of everybody.

I love Frank Miller. But come on:

Charlie’s War. In the hype surrounding Watchmen and the Dark Knight, and the consequent attention to Moore and Gibbons’ Watchmen, and Miller’s Dark Knight and Batman: Year One, and even Millar’s Wanted for Drokk’s sake, I just wanted to say that if you have even the slightest interest in comic books you have to read Charlie’s War. Written by the legend that is Pat Mills, and drawn by Joe Colquhoun. Frankly if anyone can think of a reason why Joe Colquhoun isn’t as legendary as Brian Bolland then they need to rethink their entire life. I cannot overstate the beauty and the tragedy of Charlie’s War. If you have a son, stop reading this shit and give them a copy right this second.

Just come back from an extremely interesting panel discussion involving comics legend Pat Mills, Nikolai Dante creator Robbie Morrison and 7-year 2000AD editor Matt Smith at the BFI. The focus was split between the history of 2000AD and the possibility of the galaxy’s greatest comic on film. Cyber-Matt was a bit cagey about details of upcoming projects, but apparently a new Judge Dredd film may be in the offing…

Smith made a great point about Judge Dredd being a straight man to the insanity of the world around him. That made me realise that suspension of disbelief works with Dredd in almost the opposite way to the usual: instead of placing a changeable character in a believable world, with its own internal logic, Dredd is a fixed point in a world where pretty much anything goes.

Morrison’s recollection of a Dredd story in which Brian Bolland conjures up Hammer horror with a story of waxwork robots escaping into a peasoup fog evokes Dredd’s ability to span genres and styles without sounding a wrong note. Something that has always mystified me about why Dredd endures as a character even though he has almost no character arc now becomes clear to me: he is near-incapable of change, and as such he will always be our fixed point of reference in a world of everyday criminals and aliens, psychos, psychics and super-fiends.

My friend and chief red biro-wielder Nick made an excellent point over a pint or two later, that Dredd is also about the British relationship — or perhaps more accurately, fascination — with American fiction. It occurred to me that Dredd is less about the gap in time between his world and ours, than the gap in space between us and the incipient violence of the States. Dredd was partly inspired by Dirty Harry — or his comic book counterpart, One-Eyed Jack — which suggests that Dredd’s creators weren’t commenting on the crypto-fascist ultraviolent urban hell that could happen way off in the future, but on the crypto-fascist ultraviolent urban hell that was already threatening way off across the Atlantic. And, most importantly, what that means to us.

A Crowning Moment of Awesome is defined by TVTropes as a “moment when a fictional character does something for which they will be remembered forever, winning for them the eternal loyalty of fans.” It’s a punch the air moment, and here are some of my favourite CMOAs:

“Popcorn!”
Grosse Point Blank

Out of ammo, existentially-torn hitman Martin Blank (John Cusack) is cornered in the kitchen of his girlfriend’s father’s house. On the other side of the kitchen unit, proselytizing rival hitman Grocer (Dan Ackroyd) offers to sell him a pistol. Blank, who earlier killed a man with a pen to the neck, agrees, but as Grocer beetles out to shoot him, Blank manhandles a television off the counter. Which he then deposits on Grocer’s head with his rival’s own catchphrase.

Dredd stabs his own hand
Judge Dredd: Raptaur

There’s a fair case for Dredd’s CMOA being the moment supernatural Dark Judge Fear, who kills by showing people their greatest fear, discovers that Dredd fears nothing and is invited to “Gaze into the fist of Dredd!” But I wasn’t around for that, and my earliest defining memory of how hard Dredd is comes from the lushly-painted Aliens rip-off Raptaur by Alan Grant and Dean Ormston. Dangling from a pole, half-dead, Dredd stops himself from falling by sticking his boot knife into his own hand before passing out. Nails hard, that is.

“I was out of bullets…”
Die Hard 4.0/Live Free or Die Hard

Cornered in a traffic tunnel, an injured and pissed-off John McClane (Bruce Willis) climbs back into his damaged car and heads at full speed towards the helicopter in which Euro-mercenaries are waiting for him. At the last second, he bails out, and the car is launched through the air… Hacker Matt Farrell (Justin Long) is gobsmacked: “You just killed a helicopter with a car!”

“It’s way past time you learned– what it means– to be a man”
The Dark Knight Returns

Man of steel-turned-government stooge Clark Kent is ordered by the US government to bring in Batman, whose return to vigilantism is attracting the wrong kind of attention. Batman softens up his former friend with hunter missiles, a shot from the Batmobile, kryptonite arrows, a sonic gun and a blast of electricity direct from the city grid. In an armoured suit, he delivers a stunning punch. For a glorious moment, Frank Miller shows us Superman beaten.

“Not even in the face of armageddon. Never compromise.”
Watchmen

Ozymandias, the smartest man in the world, has ended war by the simple expedient of murdering millions in New York. As other costumed adventurers stand by, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ implacable and psychopathic vigilante Rorschach shows his resolve, simply turning his back and walking out into the Antarctic snow, determined to expose the horrific crime. It’s his defining moment, and his last: when Doc Manhattan follows to kill him, Rorschach removes his mask, tears streaking down his face, showing emotion for the first time as he exhorts Manhattan to “do it!”

“Not enough gun.”
Preacher: War in the Sun

The Saint of Killers, a vengeful gunslinger now deputised as the angel of death, meets Jesse Custer in Death Valley. There he faces a US Army tank squadron, ordered to fire on the lone gunman by the evil Herr Starr. A grinning tanker admits “he’s always wanted to try this”, but as the smoke clears the Saint is not only still standing, he’s shooting it out with the tanks. Realising his miscalculation, Starr calls in a favour from the White House and the Saint is hit by a nuclear bloody missile. The mushroom cloud spreads over Death Valley, but in the white-hot epicentre the Saint shows why he’s clearly Garth Enis and Steve Dillon’s favourite character — and mine — as he simply spits and keeps a-walking. Now that’s awesome.

After a slightly nondescript Simon Davis cover, prog 1535 opens with the climax of the Judge Dredd: Origins mega-epic. This last installment is a fairly breathless sprint to the end, and having not read the preceding twenty-three episodes I can’t help feeling that this part zips by too fast. There’s some nice details though: I like the arc followed by Logan, who started the story with a bad hip and ends up by this point with just about everything else wrong with him, the payoff being that his hip is fixed along with the rest of his wounds when he returns to Mega-City One. I really like the evocative future-medical concept of a ‘paper lung’ (or do they already have those?).

There’s a lovely gnomic Dredd moment on page two. Joe asks the newly-arrived rescue party how they found him, and gets the reply: “Just followed the smoke.”

I have to admit at this point a certain blasphemy, a dirty little secret I have borne with secret shame for most of my life: I don’t really like CarlosEzquerra’s style. While I acknowledge his incredible body of work, his important place in comics lore, I just don’t like his lumpy shapes or scratchy hatching. And his women look awful (what is going on with Hershey’s fringe?). But his Judges in full gear do look wicked.

Heresy I know. Don’t mention Ron Smith or Mike McMahon either.

If the first few pages race by, the last three screech to a halt with the shattering meeting between Dredd and Fargo on the old man’s long-deferred deathbed. There’s a double revelation of Fargo’s regret, and Dredd’s concealing Fargo’s dying wish. It’s a Pyrrhic victory to say the least, and definitely the sort of moral and narrative ambiguity I want to see in action comics. The last three panels are a moment of stillness but possess a real punch that resonates forward and backwards through theDredd mythos: Was it all a lie? And what will Dredd do now?

More hard-hitting ambiguity in the climax to Savage: Double Yellow. Charlie Adlard’s wetter, high contrast black and white art has a real feel of solidity. It’s richly contemporary stuff from Pat Mills, with insurgent groups threatening to behead hostages, popular demos turning into armed revolution, and talk of ‘blood for oil’. Only the oil comes from the North Sea, not the Middle East. The oppressive armed forces are overthrown in the West End, not the West Bank. There’s a message of hope in the realisation by fanatical revolutionaries that popular uprising (”This really is ‘our finest hour’!”) is better than extremism (”For an eye - both eyes. For a tooth - the whole jaw.”) Then there’s the great little moment of unreconstructed ‘ard man Bill Savage delivering a message to the US president that “nobody like armed missionaries.”

After all that breathless social comment Detonator X seems a bit vanilla. Alright, there’s an environmental message in there, but aren’t warsuits vs intradimensional monster invaders a bit old hat? I haven’t read the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic regularly for years, and even I’ve seen it before. Yowell’s art is a bit insubstantial and the colours are too pastel. And the warsuits look lame. We’ll see if it gets better.

You can, of course, always rely on Sinister Dexter. Not sure about Finnigan’s new look (I liked it when he looked like Ginger Wildheart) but I do like Simon Coleby’s chunky, dynamic art that keeps things ticking even when not much is actually happening. I actually prefer this kind of flowing, subtle narrative development to the choppier, tie-things-up-quick bang-bang-bang-the-end of the Savage andDredd stories.

The Nikolai Dante strip is a bit like that. Another final part, it’s not much more than a scrap with a werewolf, and as such doesn’t really have a huge amount of storyline to draw together, so you can forgive the simplicity. There is a touch of depth in the Christian iconography and John Woo-esque church setting which could have been teased out more. Still, I love John Burns’ work, especially his mad-eyed loonie priest here, but I wish he’d put borders on his panels. The speech bubbles are too incongruous without similarly weighted frame borders.

I zipped through this prog faster than I wanted to. But I’ll be coming back to the last three frames of Origins again, I suspect.

“This would be a good death…”

A common theme of Frank Miller’s work is a man’s mission to ‘die right’. 300 is an extended last stand, full of talk of dying with honour and glory. Sin City is full of flawed heroes going unwaveringly to their seemingly inevitable doom. In The Dark Knight Returns, Batman chooses the time and place of his death – to the second (although he claims his timing is a bit off, but I like to think that’s a deliberate mistake – Bruce letting Clark know that he trusts him, always trusted him to come through in the end… but also getting one up on the Kryptonian yet again. A wink, and a reminder.)

Miller’s heroes represent absolute moral justice made flesh – yet more than flesh, their rock-hard moral convictions reflected in the hyperreal, granite-like physicality of Marv, the Dark Knight, or Leonidas. Maybe this explains Miller’s attraction to Robocop, the male body rendered literally impenetrable, metallic.

For Robocop, doing the right thing is programmed into him, even overriding the programming imposed upon him by society. It’s the same with Bruce Wayne scorning the committee that bans superheroes, Leonidas killing the messenger. They’re not interested in what lesser men might do.

Doing the right thing despite the cost means that death is near-inevitable. So while conviction means death, life means compromise. Society compromises; so the uncompromising hero is a loner. We see this in 300, when Leonidas questions the Arcadians’ professions. Be a part of society, but lack agency, or be in control of one’s own destiny and conviction but be apart from society.

This is why there’s such a clear separation between the warrior class of Sparta and the others, or the chattering classes of Gotham and the Dark Knight (“Batman? I’m plain tired of hearing about him. Him and how he doesn’t let things stop him or just let things go the way us humans do”). It’s the same as the distinction between the normal folk of the American West and the gunfighter who rides into town to commit righteous violence on behalf of society, yet can never be part of that society and must always ride on into the sunset.

To attempt to be part of society is irreconcilable with the way of the warrior. Love always means trouble in Sin City. This construction of hypermasculinity precludes relationships. Relationships lead to death. And it’s not always the man that’s punished.

“The world only makes sense when you force it to…”

Sixgun is mindbending and also awesome. I think we’ve all been on the night out in Chapter Four.

Paul Chadwick

Concrete is an intelligent, literate and human take on the comic book staple of the indestructible, made-out-of-rock dude. It’s ponderin’ time…

In this collection, crunchy-on-the-outside, soft-on-the-inside travel writer Concrete gets involved with a trashy fantasy film to earn some cash. Chadwick clearly has a lot of fun with the film-within-the-comic, a toy franchise not a million galaxies away from Castle Greyskull. But the real joy of the story is in the relations and interaction between the well-realized ensemble cast of characters.

There’s a stunning opening, a double-page spread of beautifully rendered perspective as our hero lumbers down a monochrome street, colour spilling into the second page like a pot of Technicolor washing across the page.

Unfortunately, from hereonin the composition is often a bit muddy and unclear when things are actually happening, as opposed to when we are just looking at panels of people sitting and standing round talking. It’s hard to tell what’s actually happened in the action beats, rare as they are.

A poor editorial decision in this collected edition also causes some confusion, as a separate short story, ‘Fire At Twilight’ which takes place in the Fragile Creature continuity, is placed at the end of the book rather than in the correct chronological place. This led to some head-scratchin’ and page-flippin’ as one of the major characters suddenly acquires a bandaged head.

‘Fire At Twilight’ apparently received criticism at the time for being racist. To be fair, as Chadwick points out, the antagonists are never seen, so perhaps the story serves to expose prejudices in those who assume the characters are ethnic minorities. We don’t see them, so for all we know they could be white or black or any combination of the racial rainbow.

But I doubt it’s that clever. The events of ‘Fire At Twilight’ just aren’t that interesting even taken as part of the main Fragile Creatures story; the decision to make a whole standalone story out of them is just mystifying.

But if the ‘action’ in Fragile Creature is a bit clunky, the human drama is spot-on. There are plenty of nice character details, with a wealth of characters that avoid stereotyping. We get a nice insight into low-budget (almost amateurish) film production and the slightly desperate camaraderie involved.

In one great scene, Concrete meets the filmmakers for the first time and we read their thoughts throughout the conversation. Both sides are internally nervous, awkward, intimidated by the other, and both mistake the other’s awkwardness for command of the situation.

The standout moment is when we think something is going to happen, and it just… doesn’t. A musing Concrete spots a car running someone over in the distance, and pounds to the scene, only to find no evidence that it ever occurred. It’s a lovely, contemplative moment that adds nothing to the narrative but everything to the character of the story.

Nicolas Cage / Eva Mendes / Sam Elliott
Mark Steven Johnson (dir)

This is the sort of film where someone in a Matrix-style long coat stands in a darkened church staring broodingly at the candles, and when challenged by the priest, replies “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. I’ve sinned a lot!” and turns into a demon. Says it all really.

Ghost Rider isn’t bad, like, just not great. The big draw is the visuals, and it would be pretty hard to cock up iconography as strong as a leather-clad avenger with a flaming skull for a head. Whether riding his fearsome hell cycle up the side of a skyscraper, lassoing a helicopter with a fiery chain (!) or just standing there doing that Elvis open-fisted pointing thing, the Ghost Rider himself never looks less than dead cool. And if that image doesn’t sound like your cup of jellybeans, then, hell, Music and Lyrics is just starting in the next screen, you big girl’s blouse.

Just kidding. It’s pushing it to hang a whole feature just on how cool the lead looks, so hey, at least this film is pretty short. The Ghost Rider is the devil’s bounty hunter by night, stunt cyclist Johnny Blaze by day. In between jumping over helicopters Blaze flirts with childhood sweetheart Roxy, gets advice on stopping the devil’s son from a mysterious gravedigger, and has a couple of slightly dull paggers. And that’s about it.

It’s all quite charming, if not compelling, suffering from such a workmanlike, origin-of-a-superhero tick-box plot: guy gets superpowers, guy tests superpowers, guy reveals superpowers to sceptical girlfriend, guy has showdown with police that has everyone convinced he’s bad (except girlfriend), guy has it all explained by mentor figure, guy’s girlfriend gets kidnapped, guy has big showdown with assorted baddies over some kind of ultimate weapon, guy sets up sequel.

The Ghost Rider even takes on a purse-snatcher, for god’s sake.

That’s not to say this film is wholly without imagination: there’s plenty of nice little touches around the edges, mostly in the performances. Mendes, Cage and Elliott are all down with the silliness, and seem happy to just relax and have fun, and they’re all fun to spend time with.

An unexpectedly lean Cage is astonishingly restrained – I expected him to be bouncing off the scenery with his head on fire, trying to do the role without special effects. Instead there’s lots of little character beats like listening to The Carpenters and casually mentioning that he’s thinking of becoming a motorcycle cop.

Elliott is perfectly cast to lend proceedings a bit of gravitas, and nicely anchors the urban/Western/Texan gothic setting. Mendes is luminous but has nothing to do, except for a nice bit of comedy in a restaurant.

The villains are less successful: Peter Fonda is a casting coup but would probably be more menacing without the distracting CGI inserts (see DeNiro’s Louis Cyphre in Angel Heart), while his devilish son Blackheart, played by Wes Bentley, is just laughably lame. Blackheart’s goons, a demon for each element, each have an OK signature CGI trick and might get by in a Marilyn Manson video, but they’re absolutely rubbish in a scrap.

The fights should have involved more running each other over with lorries and less interminable scenes of two CGI demons screaming at each other. Let’s face it, the smoky, wraith-like CGI demons peddled these days lack the physicality, the menace, the downright implacable sinisterness of Harryhausen’s stop-motion skeletons, no matter how many times they come snarling and roaring right up close to the screen, woooohhh, scary!

So a bit more depth in the Ghost Rider/Johny Blaze character would have been good, more of a Jekyll-and-Hyde thing, but hidden depths are probably a bit too much to ask for in a film so shallow. ‘Nice flaming skull’ really says it all.

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“Why is Spiderman in a black suit? Does he turn bad or something?”

No, his suit turns bad. It’s called Venom.

“What? His suit turns bad?”

Yeah, in the comic he goes off into space or something and gets a new black suit, but it comes alive and goes bad. It’s called Venom.

“Oh right. His outfit comes to life. Cause that’s plausible.”

Any more plausible than a man getting bitten by a radiocactive spider and gaining superpowers?

“Oh that’s perfectly plausible. Isn’t it a documentary?”

Yeah. Fly on the wall… arf!