Further ramblings of a self-made pauper

Nostalgia

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 10:40:01 GMT

Last week I picked up a copy of Albion: Origins off the sale shelves at Forbidden Planet. A snip at £3.99 rather than the £14.99 “recommended” price. Frankly, it’s not worth the full price, but it contains enough nostalgia to warrant acquiring at the sale price.

A lot of the characters used by Alan Moore, Leah Moore and John Reppion in their limited series, Albion, are based more or less closely on classic British comic characters of 40-50 years ago and the origins book reprints some of the original characters’ stories.

When I was a kid, my Uncle Des used to buy Valiant every week and I’d get it a week later. I loved some of the strips in it, Captain Hurricane, The Steel Claw, Kelly’s Eye and so on. Albion: Origins includes a Kelly’s Eye story and reprints of such worthies as Janus Stark, Cursitor Doom and The House of Dolmann. I’m not familiar with most of them, but I remember Kelly’s Eye - Tim Kelly, who found a gem called the “Eye of Zoltec” in South America, which made him invulnerable to harm as long as he wore it.

I thought it was great when I was a kid, but even then I recall thinking that he ought to take more care of it. The chain/string that held it around his neck was always breaking and he would suddenly be normal again just at the moment it really mattered. What I hadn’t remembered or remarked upon when I was young, was just what a numpty Tim Kelly really was. Bad enough that he didn’t take steps to safeguard the Eye, but it turns out that he had some kind of bizarre compulsion to show it to every shady and/or disreputable character he ever met and say something that was essentially:

”Hi, my name is Kelly. I don’t know anyone around here at all and I just happen to have this gem, which I carelessly keep on this thin chain around my neck, or occasionally in my very shallow pocket. Not only is it priceless, but it protects me from any kind of harm at all!

You look line a decent bloke, Mr No-Nose McGruder, why don’t you and your equally decent looking chum, Knuckles Biggs hand around in this seedy out of the way café for a chat?”

Really, you can take show and tell rather too far. Tim Kelly was not quite the full ticket. I look forward to seeing just how dim the otherwise solid heroes of the age were, too.

I have to find reprints of Captain Hurricane; his ragin’ furies used to make me laugh out loud.

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Fantastic

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 10:13:24 GMT

I have finally completed the acquisition of the entire Lee-Kirby run on Fantastic Four in hardback. I actually accomplished this a week ago, but being on holiday I didn’t get around to mentioning it then.

I bought volumes 1 and 2 of the splendid Omnibuses a few years ago and had been hoping beyond hope that there would be a volume 3, reprinting at least up to issue 90 or so, but it has never happened. The page size of the omnibus editions is larger, they have been more carefully recoloured and best of all for nostalgic comic fans, include the letters pages.

Anyway, now I have the stories in the Masterworks series. I daresay Marvel will take the opportunity to issue a new Omnibus just to spite me; that’s the way these things work. Realistically, if they do, I suspect it will be timed to come out if and when they reboot the Fantastic Four film franchise to maximise sales.

I have the originals of most of the run between issue 10 and issue 120 safely bagged up and currently unreadable in the attic. Their condition varies: my earliest FF, #10 looks as though it spent 25 years under a hedge, but FF Annual #1 still has an almost pristine white cover. I am missing maybe 15 or 16 issues in the run, but my days of trying to fill the gaps are over, even for the less expensive omissions after issue 10. Issues #1 to #9 will remain forever outside my reach unless I happen to win the lottery jackpot (which is rather more unlikely than the official 14,000,000-1 odds since I rarely buy a ticket).

One of the things that I enjoy about these early Fantastic Four comics, other than simple nostalgia for my childhood, is watching Jack Kirby’s art develop as he stays with the same characters for 102 issues. By the time Joe Sinnott comes on board as regular inker, the result is incredible. It seems to me, having seen examples of Kirby’s work from the forties onwards, that the nine years on the Fantastic Four show the single greatest period of development in his technique from standard comic fare in the early days, through scratchy but imaginative layouts to – finally around 1968-1969 – superior pop art.

There are many artists around with more realistic styles than Jolly Jack ever managed with his stylised ‘full figures in action’ but no one has come close to maintaining or improving the standard of their work over a prolonged period and in such prolific quantities.

The man knew how to lay out a comic panel and page for maximum impact. The stories may be simplistic by current standards, but there is humour and insight and touches of the homely and mundane that adds to rather than distracts from them. It’s all wonderful stuff and nobody but nobody has (or ever could) drawn sophisticatedly complex and ludicrously fun machines like Kirby in his steadfastly pre-digital world.

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Comics

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 14:20:57 GMT

So last night I wandered up town with fencingsculptor and nipped into Forbidden Planet for a look-see.

I came out with a copy of volume 5 of Saga of the Swamp Thing, which is reprinting Alan Moore’s inaugural run on the title from the mid 1980s. I think there is enough material for an extra long volume 6 or, more likely as DC Comics will wish to squeeze every last penny out of the punters, two rather thin editions. We’ll see.

This was all groundbreaking stuff and together with the work he and Dave Gibbons did on Watchmen at the same time, in many ways it redefined the American comic industry (though it would be rude not to acknowledge Frank Miller’s contribution at the same time). To my mind, although Moore has a had a long, successful and influential career in comics since, he started with his best work; as far as I’m concerned, he’s never bettered that run on Swampy between 1984 and 1987.

The more I think about Alan Moore’s body of work, the more I tend to the view that his best efforts pretty much predate 1995 at the very latest¹. He’s done some excellent stuff since then, but by and large it is, in my eyes at least, rather more self indulgent, and the cleverness that was always there is more strained, whereas back in the early days it seemed more organic and spontaneous.

I also picked up a copy of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century 1969, which seems to be something of a return to form on that title at least. Century 1910 was poor and I really didn’t get on with The Black Dossier; too much turgid prose. Moore’s written style just isn’t as good as his ability to capture ideas in comic panel form (I didn’t much like the text pieces in Watchmen).

Given his continued popularity and his unassailable position as one of the “greats” of the genre, it probably says more about my taste in comics than his ability, but I really do prefer his older work.

¹In no particular order: The Ballad of Halo Jones, V for Vendetta, Captain Britain, Swamp Thing, Watchmen, Batman: The Killing Joke, DR and Quinch, the BoJeffries Saga, Marvelman/Miracleman and numerous Futureshocks for 200AD all predate 1990, I think.

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