Alan Moore: Grendel by Matt Wagner

GRENDEL: DEVIL BY THE DEED

by Matt Wagner

Introduction by Alan Moore (1986)

For any comic creator who takes his work seriously, a large portion of his everyday consciousness must necessarily be devoted to the nuts and bolts of his craft, such considerations occupying that lobe of the brain that ordinary people use for thinking about sex, money, food and life assurance. At almost any given moment of the day, the dedicated artisan will be turning new storytelling ideas over within his or her mind, pondering the perception of lapsed time in multi-panel continuous background shots, mentally fiddling around with an imaginary Rubik cube of established precedents, half-formed theories, and half-baked impulses in the never-ending search for a new combination, a new pattern, a new way of telling a story.

To anyone who has been following the adventures of Kevin Matchstick and company through the pages of MAGE with even half an eye, it must be evident that Matt Wagner does some long, hard thinking before committing a line or word to paper, evolving as a result a storytelling style that is at once fresh, clean and wildly innovative. So dazzling and stylish, in fact, has Wagner's performance on MAGE been that I think he may have accidentally overshadowed a feature equally dear to his heart, equally daring and carefully conceived.

GRENDEL, sheltering unobtrusively in the rearmost pages of this splendid comic book, provides a perfect counterpoint to the lead strip in terms of style. While MAGE tells its story entirely in pictures and word balloons, avoiding captions and consequently creating a sense of narrative naturalism, GRENDEL takes the opposite approach and presents its verbal narrative entirely in caption form, adopting a more novelistic approach to its material.

As a result of this, GRENDEL finds itself exploring territories almost untouched within the field of mainstream, comic art: those vague borderlands that lie between what most people  would recognise as a comic strip and the traditional illustrated story. This creative terrain is vague because of the lack of a distinct demarcation line between the two areas. What separates an illustrated story from a comic strip told entirely in captions? Is it just the number of pictures? If so, how many constitute a comic strip, how many an illuminated text piece?

The rare excursions that I have seen into material of this nature before have fascinated me with the range of effects that they were able to achieve, quite unlike those found in a regular comic strip or in a traditional narrative-with-spot-illos. I recall particularly a piece that appeared in the science fiction monthly, GALAXY [March 1970, Vol 29 #6], written by Harlan Ellison and illustrated by the late and sadly neglected Jack Gaughan. I believe it was called "The Region Between", and by setting small passages of text against large and dominating images, it achieved storytelling effects that I had never seen before, nor seen attempted since.

Until GRENDEL.

In GRENDEL, Matt Wagner does things with comic strip design that are pretty much state of the art. The pages become whole visual units, panels broken down like the various images contained in a stained glass window or like the motifs on a beautiful snazzed-up Art Deco pinball table. Somehow, this iconic approach to the illustration, combined with the sense of distance that the narrative prose carries, creates a mythical quality, as if one were reading some Egyptian fable told in dazzling sets of hieroglyphics. As a setting for the tale of the mythic and titanic conflict between Grendel and Argent, the wolf, it is perfect. If we could hear these characters speaking their dialogue as we do in regular comic books, they would be diminished somehow, reduced to ordinary funny book characters, however interesting, instead of characters with all the potency and glamour and timelessness of those in the very best fables and fairy tales.

That GRENDEL is a fairy tale shouldn't be belied by its backdrop of cooly modern city skylines and meticulously elegant apartments. With its subtle and clever account of a war between two wonderful creatures of gigantic stature, it evokes powerful resonances of the ancient sagas that spawned its namesake, BEOWULF's Grendel. The excellent jewelled colouring does nothing to detract from this effect, transforming even the skylines and apartments mentioned above into scintillating and enchanting backdrops as rich as any provided in folklore.

In a comic book world where text pieces are generally regarded as filler and where comic strips have balloons, GRENDEL is a brave and possibly even reckless experiment that has succeeded admirably in its own terms and which deserves our support and admiration. Perhaps here, in a collected volume away from the all-too-welcome distractions of ogres and grackleflints, it will finally receive the respect it deserves and be seen as the trailblazer that it truly is.

Alan Moore,

Northampton, 1986

Matt Wagner is best known for one of comicdom's most respected creator-owned titles - the centuries-spanning epic GRENDEL and his more personal fantasy allegory MAGE. Lauded for his character-driven stories and his obvious love of world history and mythologies, Matt’s efforts have won multiple Eisner Awards. 

Alan Moore: Alec by Eddie Campbell

ALEC

by Eddie Campbell

Introduction by Alan Moore (1984)

Really, introductions are a bit of a wasteland, aren't they? 

I'm sitting here at the top of a fresh sheet of Croxley Script and all of the clever and incisive Clive James stuff that I wanted to say about Eddie and his work has been chewed over for so long, that it's lost all its spearmint and I wish I'd gobbed it into the waste paper basket half an hour ago. I'm surrounded by abandoned first drafts torn out of the typewriter two lines into the first paragraph and strangled at birth. There's one that starts off by talking about pacing, graphic storytelling and the parameters of visual continuity in a very deep and level masculine voice. There's another one that affects a kooky, zany approach, and a third in which I spell Eddie's name with a "y" halfway through and then abandon the whole thing in a sudden fit of depression. Life is useless and there is no God.

The thing is that I really want to explain how brilliantly the artefact at hand shines with the light of truth and beauty, but I'm painfully aware that all you have to do is turn over the page and start reading 'Danny Grey Never Forgave Himself...' to render by best efforts redundant, obsolete and sickly. Also, when you're fully immersed in something as powerful as 'Mammoth In Ice', the last thing you are short of is a weedy intellectual voice telling you to watch out for all those clever panel progressions. It'd be like watching the shower scene from 'Psycho' while the jackanapes in the row behind is saying, "...and do you know, it's amazing, but you don't actually see the knife go into her, well, it's all in the editing..." in a load voice to his girlfriend. Alec is magic, and even if I knew how it was all done I'd be doing you a disservice if I pointed out the wires and mirrors.

So what am I doing here? I suppose the only thing that makes even a moiety of sense is for me to tell you why I like Eddie's stuff, rather than why you ought to like it.

I like Eddie's stuff because it's Masculist fiction and it demonstrates that you don't have to be published by Virago books in order to have any heart, understanding or human sensitivity. Men feel things too. It just takes them longer.

I like it because it doesn't confuse being realistic with being depressing and because its written by someone who obviously finds being alive an endless source of novelty and conundrum. I like it because it fills me in on what would have happened to Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassidy if they'd traded in the Lincoln for a Ford Transit and moved to Southend-On-Sea. 'On The Pier' as opposed to 'On The Road'.

I like it because I like Eddie, I like his accent, I like the shade of blue Magic Marker that he uses to hand-colour the covers of his hand-published collections and I adore the fact that he's never going to be commercial enough to start crowding me on my own turf.

Oh, and one other thing... Eddie came up to visit earlier the year, bumming a lift with a lorry driver of his acquaintance. I was out when they arrived and returned to find the lorry parked street-centre and Eddie quizzing neighbours as to the whereabouts of my domicile. Announcing my arrival I was introduced to Eddie's chum behind the wheel of the truck. It was Danny Grey. We shook hands awkwardly through the wound-down window and just for an instant I had a sense of panel borders looming on the periphery of my vision, framing the lorry, the handshake, the Sainbury's career bag in my hand and the infants school over the road.

Eddie Campbell thinks he can see across the world and hear babies sleeping, and I think he can too.

Alan Moore,

Northampton, 1984

Eddie Campbell is best known for his collaboration with Alan Moore on the epic graphic novel From Hell, but as writer/artist he created the irreverent and wine-soaked series Bacchus, which revives the Greek gods in a sprawling, unpredictable, and enormously entertaining thousand-page epic; and the award-winning autobiographical series Alec. These works are all available from Top Shelf Publishing. 

Alan Moore: The Suttons by Phil Elliott

The Suttons by Phil Elliott

Introduction by Alan Moore (1988)

My first exposure to the work of Phil Elliott came in the early 1980s, back during the first heady rush of what might be termed Britain's New Wave of comics. Like many others, I gradually became aware of something new and unfamiliar haunting the trestle tables of the comic-marts that I would occasionally attend: small, xeroxed booklets with print runs small enough and artists dedicated enough to allow such novelties as hand-coloured covers and other engaging quirks of production deemed cost-ineffective by larger publishers. Back then, before the movement attained its highest profile with the advent of ESCAPE, the most prominent of these personalised masterpieces were the regular FAST FICTION anthology, along with individually published pieces by two of its most notable contributors, Eddie Campbell and Phil Elliott.

Though lumped together by circumstance, Eddie and Phil have always been almost diametrically opposed in terms of style, making their occasional team-ups all the more remarkable. Those loose naturalisms of Eddie's drawing is as far removed from Phil's clean and stylised lines as the former's unembellished autobiography is from the latter's delicate and dreamlike vignettes. I've gone on record elsewhere concerning my admiration for Eddie Campbell's work, in other introductions, but have never been so forthcoming when it came to Phil's. I'd like to take this opportunity to put that right.

Phil Elliott is superbly accomplished, both as an artist and as a writer, and never moreso than when he's handling both these tasks himself. This is not to diminish his many collaborations with other writers, but simply to state that in my opinion, Phil's work finds its purest expression when he's in control of both words and pictures. The charm of his insight and observation as a writer so perfectly complement the sensibilities of his drawing that I miss it when it isn't there, however talented his collaborator might be.

I suspect that this factor, more than anything, is what has prevented me from working with Phil myself. Though we've both expressed a keen interest in striking up a creative partnership, the only stories that I have ever come up with that seem compatible with the Elliot visual touch are pale pastiches and imitations of Phil's own work. Nothing else feels right, but there's obviously no point in my writing stories for Phil if they're simply watered-down copies of his own. To be brutally frank, he doesn't need me. I had exactly the same problem with Eddie Campbell, come to think of it.

Phil's own work, from the poignant and nostalgic musings of GIMBLEY to the post-modernist slapstick of DANIEL AND MEYSSAC, is always a breath of fresh air, laden with the scent of unfamiliar and elusive ideas. Strangely enough, however, though I doubt anything could supplant GIMBLEY in my affections, if anything WERE to do so it would be the strip that on the surface seems to represent the most conventional work that Phil has ever done. I'm talking about Phil's regular weekly strip for his local MAIDSTONE STAR, THE SUTTONS.

Original non-syndicated strips in local newspapers are a strange phenomenon, and I like to think of myself as one who knows whereof he speaks in that department. Many of them, commissioned by editors who know nothing about comics from amongst the ranks of unsolicited young hopefuls or old drinking buddies who fancy themselves as cartoonists are, it must be said, terrible.

On the other hand, sometimes it is the selfsame lack of clear editorial ideas as to what a comic strip SHOULD be that allows something special to take root and flourish far from the confines of mainstream comics with their preconceived, strait-jacketed notions of form and content. Such is the case with THE SUTTONS.

On the surface, it seems like nothing new. There have been, and continue to be, many English newspaper strips that deal with episodes from domestic life a semi soap-operatic fashion, from THE LARKS and THE GAMBOLS right up to GEORGE AND LYNNE. One only has to look closely, however, for the differences between the above strips and those comprising this current volume to be strikingly evident. The British newspaper strip has travelled a long way since J. Millar Watt's lyrical POP strip in the 1920s, and many would argue that not all of its travels have been in the right direction. Today, the domestic strip, where it exists at all, exists in one of two narrow categories. Firstly, there are those supposedly humorous domestic strips whose humour seldom reaches beyond that of THE CLITHEROE KID, much less TERRY AND JUNE. Secondly, there are those domestic strips largely entertained by the more lamentable tabloids, where the sole purpose of each day's 'gag' is to reveal the D-cup punchlines of the female protagonists.

Clearly, THE SUTTONS falls into neither of these two camps. To look for antecedents, we must go back much further to the classic newspaper strips of the 1920s and 1930s, when the interest of a readership would seemingly be held by simple, honest, human observation, without recourse to perfunctory puns or gratuitous mammaries. It is in the BRINGING UP FATHER of George McManus, or Frank King's breathtaking GASOLINE ALLEY that we find the real forebears of THE SUTTONS; strips that would rather evoke a quiet, whimsical smile than surrender themselves to the somewhat desperate pursuit of a daily belly-laugh.

In this work, Phil Elliott has created, by instalments, a simply-drawn yet touchingly personal portrait of a young family and the community surrounding them. Some sequences are funny, some are more like beautifully-observed snapshots of suburban life and behaviour, but all of them are suffused with a real human warmth that no amount of slickly delivered gags could ever compensate for.

If you're looking for something that provides a relentless onslaught of melodrama or keeps you convulsed with mirth from beginning to end, them I suggest you put this book aside and watch NEIGHBOURS instead.

If, on the other hand, you're looking for one of the country's finest young cartoonists at the very peak of his form, them you need search no further. In the collected SUTTONS, Phil Elliott has given us what might yet prove to be his most enduring and endearing work.

He has also relived us of the need to move to Maidstone, for which we should remain properly grateful.

Alan Moore

Northampton, 1988

Phil Elliott has been active in the comic book industry since the mid-1970s. He launched and co-edited the FAST FICTION fanzine in the 1980s where he introduced his bequiffed character GIMBLEY. He was a regular contributor to the influential ESCAPE magazine and his other work includes ILLEGAL ALIEN, BLUEBERAD, LUCIFER, ABSCENT FRIENDS, THE REAL GHOSTBUSTERS, GREENHOUSE WARRIORS, MR NIGHT and THE ROCKPOOL FILES. Phil has recently reprinted many of his early strips funded by successful Kickstater campaigns.

Alan Moore: Love & Rockets by Jaime Hernandez

Love & Rockets #24 (1987)

Original cover art by Jaime Hernandez

ALAN MOORE:

(from the introduction to Love & Rockets: Mechanics #1 by Jaime Hernandez, 1985)

The worst thing about being a mature and discerning comic enthusiast who's fiercely committed to the elevation of aesthetic standards within the medium is that you have to hide all your copies of Herbie and Atomic Mouse when your friends call round. Much as you might be dedicated to sweeping radical change in the field of graphic narrative, there still remains a sloppy and nostalgic longing for the way Lee Elais drew the Black Cat or the precise feel and smell of a Giant-Sized Li'l Archie Special, and the difficulty of reconciling a thirst for the magnificent with an appetite for the inane is something that makes hypocrites out of the best of us. We all want progress, but we don't want to watch while the bulldozers of cultural advancement roll forwards over the crushed remains of Betty, Veronica and the Fighting American.

That's why Mechanics, along with the rest of the work that the Brothers Hernandez have been perpetrating within the pages of Love & Rockets, comes as such a bloody relief. There's enough style, content, and persistent narrative ingenuity to satisfy the most wild-eyed and slavering progressive, but somehow it's been accomplished without sacrificing and of the sheer silly-arsed vitality that gives the medium so much of its appeal. In Mechanics, Jaime Hernandez seems to have somehow synthesised a complete and satisfying comic-book world out of all the things that, for whatever reason, he loves about comics.

There's a sense that the world inhabited by Maggie and her friends exists in the backstreets of the regular funny book universe. You know that if you took the crosstown bus from Barrio Hoppers 13 you'd find Riverdale High School, sheltering out in the more sedate residential districts uptown. You know that somewhere far away there's a Metropolis where the super-people are punching each other through buildings, even though the sound of conflict seldom filters down to street level. All the familiar icons dotting the comics landscape are filtered through a unique and lucid personal vision, providing a rich, evocative backdrop for the meticulously observed and vividly human characters to perform against, and the mix is as perfect as it is consistent.

Relentlessly charming despite its hard cutting edge, Mechanics is a comic strip for the future with a keen grasp of what was valuable about the strips of the past. If there's a more exhilarating or compelling book on the market at the moment, I haven't heard about it.

FURTHER READING:
Fantagraphics: How to Read Love & Rockets

Alan Moore: Tales of Telguuth by Steve Moore

Tales of Telguuth

by Steve Moore

with Greg Staples, Paul Johnson, Siku, Simon Davis, Clint Langley Jon Howard & More!

PURLIEUS OF LICH & PERIDOT

by Alan Moore

(from the introduction to Tales of Telguuth by Steve Moore, 2015)

Steve Moore (June 11th, 1949 - March 14th, 2014) remains a massively influential figure in a diverse array of fields ranging from Oriental studies and I-Ching scholarship, through his extensive Fortean work, to his standing as an occultist or as an authority on Decadent and Gothic literature. His patiently accrued collections of Chinese and Japanese swords; his unique archive of Asian cinema; his thirty-year dream record; his accomplishments as classical scholar and contemporary moon-goddess worshipper: all of these clearly require an introductory essay of their own in order to unpack the intellectual breadth and the importance of this extraordinary individual. Just as clearly, given that you're reading this as preface to a trade collection of his Telguuth comic strips, none of the things above are what we're here to talk about. They are included only to provide a little necessary context to the work as writer of comics, science fiction and fantasy for which my late mate was best known. 

Starting work at Odhams Press in 1967, aged sixteen, Steve Moore was an enthusiastic science fiction fan and, more unusually, one of the country's earliest devotees of comic books. As a perfect example of the audience that the publishers of Wham, Pow, Fantastic and Terrific were hoping to reach, his ideas were listened to and and a result the above weekly comics became far more fan-friendly endeavours... this long before there was even such a phenomenon as a recognised English comic fan. Using the benefits that his new stays as sud-editor allowed him, he published the UK's first comics-fanzine, Ka-Pow, and co-founded the first Bristish comic conventions. These would lead to the creation of a healthy, progressive indigenous comic scene and, directly or indirectly, to most of the early British comic book talents of whom you've ever heard becoming involved with the medium and the industry. Without Steve Moore the modern comic landscape would look very different, if it was even noticeably there at all. This is, of course, without considering his contributions as a writer.

Much like Woody Allen's Zelig, Steve Moore would appear to have been involved intimately with the greater number of the British comic scene's most influential landmarks such as Doctor Who weekly and monthly, Warrior, and, in 1976, a fledgling weekly title which would become the venerable institution known as 2000AD. Here he created that long-standing format and excellent proving ground for new talent, Tharg's Future Shocks, along with is work on the reanimated versions of boyhood favourites Dan Dare and Rick Random, which in later years there were a slew of inventive serials such as Valkyries or his space-Yakuza narrative Red Fang. And yet, of all the many feathers in his 2000AD cap, the writing of which he remained the proudest was his work on the delirious and exquisite horror-fantasy, Tales of Telguuth.

His writing style, commenced in the restrictive and pragmatic confines of the early boys' adventure comic was brisk, spare and functional in keeping with the editorial directives of the 1960s, but throughout his long career you can see finer, more exotic sensibilities attempting to break through without disrupting the professional requirements of a fast-paced action story. By the time that he was in his twenties, he was reading less and less adventure fiction (prose or comic book) for personal enjoyment and was gravitating more towards the Classical or Oriental; to the Gothic and the Decadent. The jewelled concerns of language and originality of concept became his priorities, more so than the old-school story requirements of perpetual physical activity and constant danger. He wanted to write a fantasy narrative which reflected his genuine personal tastes and interests in that genre. These had shifted from a general affection for the field of sword and sorcery to a more rarefied appreciation for the Dying Earth tales of Jack Valance and, especially, the glittering fantasies and decadent prose-poetry penned by Clark Ashton Smith.

Smith (1893-1961) started out as a young poet of considerable promise before being led, in the 1920s, into fantasy fiction through the influence and example of his friend and correspondent H.P. Lovecraft. Smith's origins as a poet and his fastidious use of language were evident throughout his career as a fantasy and science fiction writer, even when working under the most narrow and draconian of restraints. Among his prolific creation of fantastic environments, there existed a few that Smith returned to again and again, such as the imaginary medieval realm of Averoigne or, more significantly, his breathtakingly weird 'Last Continent', Zothique. With many of his stories appearing the legendary pulp magazine Weird Tales they were understandably horror-inflected, their strikingly strange ideas and crystalline language lifting them head and shoulders above all of the magazines other contributors with the arguable exception of Lovecraft himself. Discovering Smith was as much of an inspiration for Steve Moore as had been Smith's own discovery of Lovecraft, or Lovecraft's of his early idol Lord Dunsany. There was that same recognition of a kindred literary spirit, the gratifying sense of someone else attempting to articulate that same creative urges and in doing so establishing a blueprint for the way in which such work might be attempted.

There are some early examples of Steve trying to apply the sensibilities of Smith to comic strip adventure, such as in the Claustrophobia and Twilight continuities that he essayed for Warrior, but its not until Telguuth emerges as a perfect vehicle for such ideas that we see him employing the full range of unrestrained and decadent imagination that his readings had awoken in him. In Telguuth, where there is no continuing character save for the vicious and phantasmagoric world itself, he was set free from the requirement to ensure his leading men and leading women lived to see another episode and could enjoy the 'anything-might-happen' frisson that arises from a self-contained short story. Given their potential disposability, Telguuth's array of monsters and protagonists are thereby liberated from the need to be conventional heroes or villains. In Telguuth's nightmarish milieu, with death or worse prone to descend at any instant, most of the inhabitants appear to be unburdened by morality and there is no sense of an ethical imperative in play across this frightful and hallucinatory terrain. Amongst the numerous and largely diabolic deities of Telguuth, none are just and loving shepherds eager to assist the fair or happy ending, and in these upsetting tales of desperate and ill-motivated individuals blundering into horrific situations which they do not fully comprehend, we are shown a reality which, despite its extravagant fantasy trappings, is actually far closer to the reality in which most of us are unlucky enough to be living. The questing hero is a self-serving oaf, frequently undone by his own disastrous lack of imagination. The sultry heroine and the villainous magician, equally flawed and desperate, are liable to fall prey to their own magical subterfuges and the truly ghastly entities they have attempted to control. On Telguuth, as on our only slightly less exotic and demented planet, few thing can be said to work out for the best.

In these often sadistically amusing stories of the dreadful, the perverse and the grotesque we can see one of the most important British comic writers of the last fifty years having the time of his life. The musical names of his characters and cities roll off the tongue like poisonous beads of mercury, the curses and the demons are of the most fiendish and implacable variety and every tales extends the map of a new, gem-encrusted alien hall. This is an author ecstatically at play within his feverish, overgrown and not-infrequently alarming deviant imagination, a deranged and capricious sorcery to equal anything that ancient and ghoul-haunted Teekar-Tannlan has to offer.

Of the many dreamlands that Steve Moore engendered, it can be assumed, I think, that Telguuth was the closest to his heart outside the moonlit territory of his fabulous prose novel Somnium, as evidenced by the plain fact that Telguuth was the only world of fiction that he never could relinquish, even after his retirement from the comic industry. His self-published not-for-profit Tales of Telguuth prose short stories were a continual delight to the small circle of friends and acquaintances fortunate enough to be on his mailing list. He was halfway through sending out his latest tale, The Marmoreal Frown of Ahuralura Manz, when he suffered the heart attack that finally removed him from our midst, and his admirers will be relieved to hear that Strange Attractor Press are issuing a limited edition of these rare and gorgeously bedizened little masterpieces to coincide with this splendid collection of his bitter fables from 2000AD, illustrated by a fine assortment of young and contemporary artists who've arisen from a British comic field that Steve Moore ploughed, sowed and stamped out nearly fifty years ago.

To those of you who care about comics, about fantasy, or about the art of writing itself, welcome to a marvellous and heartless wonderland. Welcome to Telguuth.

Alan Moore

Northampton

October 26th, 2014

Iain Sinclair & The South London Psychic Circuit

FURTHER READING:

Strange Attractor Press: Steve Moore Obituary

Strange Attractor Press: Tales of Telguuth

2000AD: Tales of Telguuth

The Quietus: Interview with Steve Moore (2011)
Steve Moore: The Hermit of Shooters Hill by Padraig O'Mealoid

Unearthing by Alan Moore

Alan Moore: Memories of Harvey Kurtzman (1924-1993)

The Bedside Mad (1959)

by Harvey Kurtzman & Others

ALAN MOORE:

(from The Comics Journal #157, March 1993)

The first time I encountered Harvey Kurtzman, I was around 10 years old. The encounter took place between the covers of The Bedside MAD, a paperback collection; strange, American, the cover painting possibly by Kelly Freas, the edges of the pages dyed a bright, almost fluorescent yellow. To this day, it burns inside my head. 

The stories in that volume and the Kurtzman stories I discovered later brandished satire like a monkey-wrench: a wrench to throw amongst pop culture's gears or else employed to wrench all our perceptions just a quarter-twist towards the left, no icon left unturned. King Kong and Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes and Superman were rendered naked and absurd by the device of draping them with realistic failings and then setting them against a gross yet realistic world where Wonder Woman marries her romantic interest and ends up shackled to a stove, hemmed in by hyperactive kids. Where all the slapstick violence Maggie dishes out to Jiggs results in ugly bruises, blood-stained collars and the bleak depressions of a battered spouse.

The first time I met Harvey Kurtzman, it was in peculiar and somewhat inauspicious circumstances, over a hotel breakfast in San Diego. Julie Schwartz, aware of my admiration for Harvey's work, had decided to drag me over to the table that Kurtzman was sharing with Jack Davis and make introductions, which effectively made me feel like an awkward, party-crashing nerd from the very outset. Added to this, Harvey was still apparently nursing some obscure minor grievance of possibly pre-war origins against Schwartz, which he vented by pretending to mistake Julie for Robert Kanigher. Brief and largely bewildered introductions were made, and I returned to my orange juice and eggs.

The next time I met Harvey, it was halfway through what was, for personal reasons, probably the lousiest week of my life to date. As a confirmed stick-at-home, I was in France. As a certified convention-hater, I found myself attending the Grenoble comic convention. Beyond this, I was in the middle of a complex and painful relationship-breakdown and I felt wretched, a bone-marrow misery that went on for months.

It's strange, then that this singularly lousy week should also contain a few of the most golden and idyllic hours that I can ever remember spending. Halfway up a mountain, in blazing sunlight above the snowlike, I sat at a cafe table with Harvey Kurtzman, drinking beer while Harvey, suffering from the debilitating effects of Parkinson's disease and bundled up warm on an already warm day, drank cocoa. We both had our families with us, and Harvey's daughter took my daughter's up for a trip in a light aeroplane while we talked with Harvey and his wife Adele.

I don't remember every word we said. I wish I did. I remember that he said Watchmen was "a damn fine piece o' work," and I know that it's one of those memories that I'll still be clutching at pathetically when I'm old and spent. I remember that he seemed surprised when I told him that Watchmen wouldn't exist if he hadn't skewed my perception of the super-hero genre with works like Superduperman. He looked amazed, almost bashful, unbelievably enough, and he said, "Well, how about that?" We talked, unsurprisingly, about comics. I told him about working for DC, how you know they're going to end up owning your creations going in the door, but how at the time you assume, with the total folly of youth, that it isn't important; that you will always have an inexhaustible supply of good ideas. He nodded. "That's true. What you said about assuming that you'll always have ideas, that's very true." Adele asked if he'd like another cocoa. He said, "No, I'd better not. I might start something." I remember all these things, small and useless as they are.

The last time I saw Harvey Kurtzman was the next morning. He and his family were leaving the hotel, taking an early flight back to the States. I hadn't slept, and had come down to the lobby in search of fresh cigarettes only to find Adele, anxious because their taxi had arrived and Harvey was missing.

I found him on the first floor, unable to get his baggage into the elevator due to the ravages of Parkinson's. I helped him get everything downstairs to the taxi, and he was painfully grateful. Bearing in mind that every good idea I ever had was probably ripped off of Harvey Kurtzman, I told him to forget it. That it was a small thing. A brilliant, vital mind trapped in a body that no longer responded properly, he replied that I was wrong. That it was a goddamn big thing. He got in the cab. They drove away towards the airport.

Harvey Kurtzman, the one I last saw that morning is gone. The Harvey Kurtzman who exists in my mind, in my work, in every line I write, he's not gone at all. He's there forever.

 

Harvey Kurtzman (1924-1993) was an American cartoonist, writer, editor and pioneer of comics. He is probably best known for creating the trailblazing and revolutionary humor magazine MAD in 1952 before eventually leaving the publication in 1956. However, his influence extends far beyond that legendary 28 issue run, with his work continuing to inspire generations of cartoonists worldwide. Following his work on MAD, Kurtzman would go on to create a variety of seminal works of the medium including Trump, Humbug, Little Annie Fannie, The Jungle Book and Help! During this time, he helped to discover and mentor a number of diverse talents including Terry Gilliam, Gloria Steinem, Gilbert Shelton and Robert Crumb. Known for his social satire and pop culture parodies, Kurtzman is looked upon as one of the most influential pioneers of comics whose towering and iconic shadow still looms large today.

Alan Moore: The Mark of Batman

 

ALAN MOORE:

(from the introduction to Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, 1986)

As anyone involved in fiction and its crafting over the past fifteen or so years would be delighted to tell you, heroes are starting to become rather a problem. They aren't what they used to be... or rather they are, and therein lies the heart of the difficulty.

The world about us has changed and is continually changing at an ever-accelerating pace. So have we. With the increase in media coverage and information technology, we see more of the world, comprehend its workings a little more clearly, and as a result our perception of ourselves and the society surrounding us has been modified. Consequently, we begin to make different demands upon the art and culture that is meant to reflect the constantly shifting landscape we find ourselves in. We demand new themes, new insights, new dramatic situations.

We demand new heroes.

The fictional heroes of the past, while still retaining all of their charm and power and magic, have had some of their credibility stripped away forever as a result of the new sophistication in their audience. With the benefit of hindsight and a greater understanding of anthropoid behavior patterns, science fiction author Philip Jose Farmer was able to demonstrate quite credibly that the young Tarzan would almost certainly have indulged in sexual experimentation with chimpanzees and that he would just surely have had none of the aversion to eating human flesh that Edgar Rice Burroughs attributed to him. As our political and social consciousness continues to evolve, Alan Quartermain stands revealed as just another white imperialist out to exploit the natives and we begin to see that the overriding factor in James Bond's psychological makeup is his utter hatred and contempt for women. Whether most of us would prefer to enjoy the above-mentioned gentlemen's adventures without spoiling things by considering the social implications is beside the point. The fact remains that we have changed, along with our society, and that were such characters created today they would be subject to the most extreme suspicion and criticism.

So, unless we are to somehow do without heroes altogether, how are the creators of fiction to go about redefining their legends to suit the contemporary climate?

The fields of cinema and literature have to some extent been able to tackle the problem in a mature and intelligent fashion, perhaps by virtue of having a mature and intelligent audience capable of appreciating and supporting such a response. The field of comic books, seen since its inception as a juvenile medium in which any interjection of adult themes and subject matter are likely to be met with howls of outrage and the threat or actuality of censorship, has not been so fortunate. Whereas in novels and movies we have been presented with such concepts as the anti-hero or the classical hero reinterpreted in a contemporary manner, comic books have largely had to plod along with the same old muscle-bound oafs spouting the same old muscle-bound platitudes while attempting to dismember each other. As the naiveté of the characters and the absurdity of their situations become increasingly embarrassing and anachronistic to modern eyes, so does the problem become more compounded and intractable. Left floundering in the wake of other media, how are comic books to reinterpret their traditional icons so as to interest an audience growing progressively further away from them? Obviously, the problem becomes one that can only be solved by people who understand the dilemma and, further to that, have an equal understanding of heroes and what makes them tick.

Which brings me to Frank Miller, and to Dark Knight.

In deciding to apply his style and sensibilities to The Batman, Frank Miller has come up with a solution to the difficulties outlined above that is as impressive and elegant as any that I've seen. More strikingly still, he has managed to do it while handling a character who, in the view of the wider public that exists beyond the relatively tiny confines of the comic audience, sums up more than any other the essential silliness of the comic book hero. Whatever changes may have been wrought in the comics themselves, the image of Batman most permanently fixed in the mind of the general populace is that of Adam West delivering outrageously straight-faced camp dialogue while walking up a wall thanks to the benefit of stupendous special effects and a camera turned on its side. To lend such a subject credibility in the eyes of an audience not necessarily enamored of super-heroes and their trappings is no inconsiderable feat, and it would perhaps be appropriate to look a little more closely here at what exactly it is that Miller has done. (I hope Frank will forgive me for calling him 'Miller'. It seems a little brusque and rude and I would certainly never do it to his face, but somehow it's just the sort of thing you call people you know quite well when writing introductions for their books.)

He has taken a character whose every trivial and incidental detail is graven in stone on the hearts and minds of the comic fans that make up his audience and managed to dramatically redefine that character without contradicting one jot of the character's mythology. Yes, Bat-man is still Bruce Wayne, Alfred is still his butler and Commissioner Gordon is still chief of police, albeit just barely. There is still a young sidekick named Robin, along with a batmobile, a batcave and a utility belt. The Joker, Two-Face, and the Catwoman are still in evidence amongst the roster of villains. Everything is exactly the same, except for the fact that it's all totally different.

Gotham City, a place which during the comic stories of the forties and fifties seemed to be an extended urban playground stuffed with giant typewriters and other gargantuan props, becomes something much grimmer in Miller's hands. A dark and unfriendly city in decay, populated by rabid and sociopathic streetgangs, it comes to resemble more closely the urban masses which may very well exist in our own uncomfortably near future. The Bat-man himself, taking account of our current perception of vigilantes as a social force in the wake of Bernie Goetz, is seen as a near-fascist and a dangerous fanatic by the media while concerned psychiatrists plead for the release of a homicidal Joker upon strictly humanitarian grounds. The values of the world we see are no longer defined in the clear, bright, primary colors of the conventional comic book but in the more subtle and ambiguous tones supplied by Lynn Varley's gorgeous palette and sublime sensibilities.

The most immediate and overpowering difference is obviously in the portrayal both of The Batman and of Bruce Wayne, the man beneath the mask. Depicted over the years as, alternately, a concerned do-gooder and a revenge-driven psychopath, the character as presented here manages to bridge both of those interpretations quite easily while integrating them in a much larger and more persuasively realized personality. Every subtlety of expression, every nuance of body language, serves to demonstrate that this Batman has finally become what he should always have been: He is a legend.

The importance of myth and legend as a subtext to Dark Knight can't really be over-stated, shining as it does from every page. The familiar Batman origin sequence with the tiny bat fluttering in through an open window to inspire a musing Bruce Wayne becomes something far more religious and apocalyptic under Miller's handling; the bat itself transformed into a gigantic and ominous chimera straight out of the darkest European fables. The later scenes of The Batman on horseback, evoking everything from the chivalry of the Round Table to the arrival in town of Clint Eastwood, serve to further demonstrate this mythical quality, as does Miller's startling portrayal of Barman's old acquaintance Superman: The Superman we see here is an earthbound god whose presence is announced only by the wind of his passing or the destruction left in his wake. At the same time, his doubtful position as an agent of the United States Government manages to treat an incredible situation realistically and to seamlessly wed the stuff of legend to the stuff of twentieth century reality.

Beyond the imagery, themes, and essential romance of Dark Knight, Miller has also managed to shape The Batman into a true legend by introducing that element without which all true legends are incomplete and yet which for some reason hardly seems to exist in the world depicted in the average comic book, and that element is time.

All of our best and oldest legends recognize that time passes and that people grow old and die. The legend of Robin Hood would not be complete without the final blind arrow shot to determine the site of his grave. The Norse Legends would lose much of their power were it not for the knowledge of an eventual Ragnarek, as would the story of Davy Crockett without the existence of an Alamo. In comic books, however, given the commercial fact that a given character will still have to sell to a given audience in ten years' time, these elements are missing. The characters remain in the perpetual limbo of their mid-to-late twenties, and the presence of death in their world is at best a temporary and reversible phenomenon.

With Dark Knight, time has come to the Batman and the capstone that makes legends what they are has finally been fitted. In his engrossing story of a great man's final and greatest battle, Miller has managed to create something radiant which should hopefully illuminate things for the rest of the comic book field, casting a new light upon the problems which face all of us working within the industry and perhaps even guiding us towards some fresh solutions. For those of you who've already eagerly consumed Dark Knight in its softcover version, rest assured that in your hands you hold one of the few genuine comic book landmarks worthy of a lavish and more durable presentation. For the rest of you, who are about to enter entirely new territory, I can only express my extreme envy. You are about to encounter a new level of comic book storytelling. A new world with new pleasures and new pains.

A new hero.

Alan Moore

Northampton, 1986

Alan Moore: Luther Arkwright by Bryan Talbot

The Adventures of Luther Arkwright

by Bryan Talbot

ALAN MOORE:

(from the introduction to Luther Arkwright Book II: Transfiguration, 1987)

We live in interesting times. Comics, suddenly caught in the shockwave of a media explosion, seem to be brimming with new possibilities, new format, new storytelling ideas to suit a new and more sophisticated audience. Finding oneself in the middle of such a pyrotechnic display of serious critical attention and flying superlatives, it's tempting to slide into the belief that this has all somehow happened overnight; that an entire funnybook renaissance has come into being full blown, like Athena springing from the head of Zeus.

This, of course, is rubbish. As anyone with even a passing interest in the comic medium over the past twenty years could tell you, today's innovations are built squarely upon the foundations layed by a string of underpaid and largely unsung craftsmen and women stretching back to woodcut artist Lynd Ward, ranging through Will Eisner to the underground artists of the sixties and beyond. These were and are people who always insisted upon owning their own work; upon following their own creative control. Some of us get to own our own creations. We have a way to go yet, but we wouldn't have made it this far without the inspiration provided by the pioneers mentioned above.

Which brings me to Bryan Talbot and to Luther Arkwright.

Back in the seventies, there was no British comic scene worth mentioning. The glory days of the Reid / Law / Watkins & Baxendale Beano were long gone, and although 2000AD had appeared, it's revitalization of the boy's adventure comic was still some years in the future. The Alternative comics were in similarly bleak condition: the H. Bunch reprints of American underground material had vanished, and apart from Hunt Emerson and the Arzak crowd, there was little in the way of home grown material to be had.

Luther Arkwright was the exception. Starting out as just one strip in the anthology title, Near Myths, Luther Arkwright went way beyond anything that creator Bryan Talbot had attempted in his previous tribute laden doper fantasies, the Chester P Hackenbush series. Synthesizing influences from as far abroad as the New Wave science fiction of the period and the films of Roeg and Peckinpah, he created a seamless whole, a work ambitious in both scope and complexity that still stands unique upon the comics landscape. As the only avant garde graphic adventure strip of its day, there was nothing like it back in the seventies. There is nothing quite like it now.

For me, the heart of the strips appeal lies in its relentless experimentation. While remaining lucid, it explores as wide a range if graphic storytelling as you're likely to find between soft covers these days. That it accomplishes this with such visual power and charm is an added bonus. A superb illustrator, Bryan Talbot firmly anchors his complex and shifting metaphysical fantasy in a solid bedrock of beautifully rendered Victorian architecture and meticulously researched period backdrops. The combined effect is stunning.

As a crucial stepping stone between where comics were and where they are now, Bryan deserves our gratitude, and Luther Arkwright deserves to be read. More than this, it demands our attention as an intricate and fascinating graphic accomplishment in its own right.

Step this way for the multiverse...

Alan Moore

Northampton

November 1987

Bryan Talbot's Luther Arkwright epic is currently published by Dark Horse Comics. As new sequel to the Luther Arkwright series is planned for 2022.

FURTHER READING:
Bryan Talbot's Official Website
TCJ Interview: From Arkwright to Integral & Back Again (2021)

Alan Moore: Hellboy by Mike Mignola

Hellboy: Wake The Devil (1997)

by Mike Mignola

ALAN MOORE:

(from the introduction to Hellboy: Wake The Devil, Dark Horse Comics, 1997)

The history of comic-book culture, much like the history of any culture, is something between a treadmill and a conveyer belt: we dutifully trudge along, and the belt carries us with it into one new territory after another. There are dazzlingly bright periods, pelting black squalls, and long stretches of grey, dreary fog, interspersed seemingly at random. The sole condition of our transport is that we cannot halt the belt, and we cannot get off. We move from Golden Age to Silver Age to Silicone Age, and nowhere do we have the opportunity to say, "We like it here. Let's stop." History isn't like that. History is movement, and if you're not riding with it then in all probability you're beneath its wheels. 

Lately, however, there seems to be some new scent in the air: a sense of new and different possibilities; new ways for us to interact with History. At this remote end of the twentieth century, while we're further from our past than we have ever been before, there is another way of viewing things in which the past has never been so close. We know much more now of the path that lies behind us, and in greater detail, than we've ever previously known. Our new technology of information makes this knowledge instantly accessible to anybody who can figure-skate across a mouse pad. In a way, we understand more of the past and have a greater access to it than the folk who actually lived there. 

In this new perspective, there would seem to be new opportunities for liberating both our culture and ourselves from Time's relentless treadmill. We may not be able to jump off, but we're no longer trapped so thoroughly in our own present movement, with the past a dead, unreachable expanse behind us. From our new and elevated point of view our History becomes a living landscape which our minds are still at liberty to visit, to draw sustenance and inspiration from. In a sense, we can now farm the vast accumulated harvest of the years or centuries behind. Across the cultural spectrum, we see individuals waking up to the potentials and advantages that this affords. 

It's happened in popular music, where we no longer see the linear progression of distinct trends that we saw in the fifties, the sixties, the seventies, and so on. Instead, the current music field is a mosiac of styles drawn from points in the past or even points in the imagined future, with no single nineties style predominating. It's happened in the sciences, where mathematicians, for example, find valuable insights into modern theoretical conundrums by examining the long-outmoded Late Victorian passion for the geometric study of rope knots. It's happened in our arts and one could probably make a convincing argument that it has happened in our politics. Without doubt, it has happened in the comics field: the most cursory glance 'round at the most interesting books, whether we're talking about Seth's Palookaville or Chris Ware's Acme Novelty Library or Michael Allred's Madman, will reveal that in even the most contemporary of modern comic books, our previous heritage looms large, and is in many ways the most important signifier. Which brings me to Mike Mignola's Hellboy. 

Hellboy is a gem, one of considerable size and a surprising lustre. While it is obviously a gem that has been mined from that immeasurably rich seam first excavated by the late Jack Kirby, it is in the skillful cutting and the setting of the stone that we can see Mignola's sharp contemporary sensibilities at work. To label Hellboy as a "retro" work would be to drastically misunderstand it: This is a clear and modern voice, not merely some ventriloquial seance-echo from beyond the grave. Mignola, from the evidence contained herein, has accurately understood Jack Kirby as a living force that did not perish with the mortal body. As with any notable creator, the sheer electricity inside the work lives on, is a resource that later artists would be foolish to ignore just because times have changed and trends have fluctuated. Did we stop working in iron and stone the moment that formica was discovered? No. We understood those substances to be still-vital forms of mineral wealth that we could build our future from, if only wed the wit and the imagination.

Mike Mignola has these qualities in great abundance. Hellboy's slab-black shadows crackle with the glee and enthusiasm of an artist almost drunk with the sheer pleasure of just putting down these lines on paper, of bringing to life these wonderfully flame-lit and titanic situations. Images, ideas, and thinly disguised icons from the rich four-color treasure house of comics history are given a fresh lick of paint and are suddenly revealed as every bit as powerful and evocative upon some primal ten-year-old-child level as when we last saw them. This, perhaps, is Hellboy's greatest and least-obvious accomplishment the trick, the skill entailed in this delightful necromantic conjuring of things gone by is not, as might be thought, in crafting work as good as the work that inspired it really was, but in the more demanding task of crafting work as good as everyone remembers the original as being. This means that the work must be as fresh and as innovative as the work that preceded it seemed at the time. It's not enough to merely reproduce the past. Instead we have to blend it artfully with how we see things now and with our visions for the future if we are to mix a brew as rich, transporting, and bewitching as the potions we remember from the vanished years. 

Hellboy is such a potion, strong and effervescent, served up in a foaming beaker from an archetypal Mad Scientist's dungeon or laboratory. The collection in your hands distills all that is best about the comic book into a dark, intoxicating ruby wine. Sit down and knock it back in one, then wait for your reading experience to undergo a mystifying and alarming transformation. Hellboy is a passport to a corner of funnybook heaven you may never want to leave. Enter and enjoy.

FURTHER READING:

Hellboy at Dark Horse Comics
Cartoonist Kayfabe Interview: Mike Mignola (2021)

"Arcade: Too Avant-Garde For The Mafia?" by Alan Moore

Arcade #1-7 (1975-1976)

edited by Art Spiegelman & Bill Griffith

Arcade #1 cover art by Robert Crumb 

INTRODUCTION:

Alan, 

Thanks for the entertaining letter. Seeing as it was of such a high intellectual calibre, we'll most likely print it in our next issue... You almost found us too late. No 7 is just out and No 8 (out in 6-10 months) will be our last as a magazine. After that we go annual, in paperback form. I'm afraid we're a bit too avant-garde for the Mafia. 

Tally ho, 

Griffy

I received the above letter in the late September of 1976 after coming across a handful of issues of Arcade at the comic shop Dark They Were & Golden Eyed. I'd originally picked the magazine up on impulse after being attracted by a cover line that promised the unlikely combination of William S Burroughs and S Clay Wilson, apparently to be found within. What I discovered was a collection of comic material that swiftly elevated Arcade: The Comics Revue to the Olympian reaches of my Three Favourite Comics Ever In The History Of The Universe. As is usually the way when I encounter something I'm really fond of, my condition escalated rapidly from good natured boyish enthusiasm to an embarrassing display of slobbering hysteria. I wrote a long and love-struck letter to the magazine swearing that in order to ensure the continued publication of this Pulp Paragon I would be prepared to have sexual intercourse with a Komodo dragon or kill my family with a blunt butter-knife (or words to that effect). A few weeks latter I received the above rely from Bill Griffiths. I reprint it here partly because I really like the bit about my high intellectual calibre, and partly because of its historical interest: The last issue of Arcade was issue 7. There was no annual paperback. The Mafia obviously got them after all.

During its brief lifespan Arcade published some of the only truly worthwhile material produced during the 1970s, and for a short time seemed almost capable of revitalising the near extinct genus of the Underground Comic. This dream was truncated suddenly when Bill Griffiths woke up one morning to find Zippy The Pinhead's pointed, severed head in bed with him, or whatever way it was that those ruthless pinstripes Sicilians put the frighteners on him. The fact that Arcade folded is a shame; the fact that it has been pointedly ignored ever since is a tragedy... at least on the effete scale with which we aesthetes evaluate tragedies.

In an effort to address the balance a little I'd like to attempt a brief and necessarily inconclusive rundown on the magazine. To understand Arcade you first have to understand a little of its historical context, so I hope you'll bear with me as I do my best to lubricate the dry facts.

Arcade #2

Cover art by Robert Crumb

LUBRICATION:

Arcade #1 was published in the spring of 1975 as a quarterly black and white magazine of around fifty pages, sporting beautiful full colour covers, many by Robert Crumb, printed on card. It appeared at a time when the Underground comic had started to cough up blood after several years of looking pale and ill. The initial wave of energy provided by ZAP Comix had reached its high water mark, broken, and fallen back. The busts and court cases had taken their toll, and the only undergrounds that seemed to be breaking even were those that tended towards sex and horror: Skull, Slow Death and lesser titles seemed to appear with some regularity while the more adventurous and experimental books fell by the wayside. One gets the impression in retrospect that the underground market was slimming itself down and getting rid of its social conscience in preparation for its metamorphosis into the Heavy Metal audience of some years later. Whatever the situation, things looked bleak for the underground.

In 1975 then, Arcade served as a rallying point for those cartoonists who were more concerned with their art than their bank balances. In the process it brought more concentrated intelligence to bear upon the comix strip medium than has been experienced since the balmy heyday of the Great American Newspaper Strip. So what was it all about?

As a package it was delightful: Nice printing on white paper and card covers aside, it had a sort of garish pulp charm that latterday descendants such as RAW can't really hope to capture. Arcade wasn't hard edged and intimidatingly intellectual. It was approachable, and everything from the style of the mast head lettering to the gallery of self-portraits on the contents page reflected this somehow. Entertaining as the package might have been however, it didn't hold a candle to the contents.

The contents of Arcade had a pleasing regularity, considering how diverse the actual material was. Most of the early issues opened with a full page illustrated text feature by Jim Osborne on the inside front cover, similar to the Loathsome Lore features that the late Roy Krenkel did for Warren's early run of Creepy. These were historical items centring upon some famous real-life monster from history, such as baby-butchering Caterina Sforza or Peter Kurten the Düsseldorf vampire. Lovingly illustrated in Osborne's delicate stippling, these catalogues of genuine atrocities became so numbingly terrible as to be almost funny, leading the reader in to the uneasy no-mans land between the disturbing and the amusing that was to almost a trade mark for a number of the most prominent Arcade artists, and the nearest that the magazine ever got to a distinctive House Style.

Arcade #3

Cover art by Robert Crumb

After an imaginatively designed contents and editorial page, the main contents unrolled. As the issues passed, some of these emerged as Arcade's equivalent to continuing features.

SPAIN RODRIGUEZ:

As an example, there seemed to be a sort of unofficial biography spot, in which one of Arcade's regulars would produce a comic strip biography of the character of his choice. These included George Kuchar's darkly comic piece on H.P. Lovecraft and a brilliant study of the life of Henri Rousseau by Bill Griffiths but the very best was a portrait of Stalin by Spain Rodriguez (Arcade #4). Within a limited number of pages, Spain created a convincing picture of the brooding and psychopathic 'Red Monarch' and the strange abstracted landscape in which he lived. The use of heavy block shadows and Rodriguez' powerful sense of composition give a real atmosphere and weight to the story, with an abrupt and brutal pace to the storytelling that matches the chilling nature of the subject matter quite adequately. A scene in which Stalin's wife is reported a 'Suicide' (whatever that meant in Stalinist Russia) is portrayed as a severe downshot, looking straight down from near the ceiling of an elegant bathroom at the woman sprawled upon the floor like a stringless puppet, hard lines of black ink radiating from her slashed wrists and trickling off across the white tiles. And the final images are perfect: The narrative caption boxes relate how, during his final years, Stalin would travel by car along highways built for his solitary personal use across Russia. Wherever he stopped along the way there would be a room waiting for him specially constructed so as to be an exact duplicate of his room in the Kremlin, right down to the book lying open on the bedside table. While this is sinking in, we see three pictures, showing a simple side elevation of a sparsely furnished, neat-looking bedroom. Each picture is identical to the others except that they get progressively smaller. In effect, we get the impression of an endless series of identical rooms stretching away into the empty distance, proving an unnerving glimpse into the mind of someone who once controlled half of the world.

JUSTIN GREEN:

Another high-point of Arcade was Justin Green's Classics Crucified series, in which Green, the undisputed Nabob of Neuroticism and creator of the remarkable Binky Brown Meets The Holy Virgin Mary, took the concept behind Classics Illustrated to its logical and bloody extreme. Whereas Classics Illustrated somehow managed to maintain an air of false dignity all the time it was sawing Captain Ahab's other leg off in an attempt to fit Moby Dick into a comic-book, Green pulled out all the stops and deliberately vulgarised works of classic literature with all the delicacy of a PCP-crazed dog-sodomist. The best example is probably his three page reworking of Dostoevsky's Crime & Punishment in issue 3 of Arcade. I won't go into detail, but the final panel should adequately describe the reverence with which this greatest of Russian novelists has been approached. After tortured protagonist Raskolnikov has reached the point of self-revelation that has eluded him throughout this massive novel ("Oh God! I just realised... I'm a shitty murderer and a terrible person!") his persecutor, Inspector Porfiry Petrovich, strikes up a relationship with Raskolnikov's loved one, Sonia. In the last panel, Green summarises Dostoevsky's notion that the torture of one individual is somehow redeemed in the elevation of others to loving harmony, most adequately as Inspector Petrovich poignantly remarks, "Just think... if those two bimbos wasn't knocked off, I never woulda met Sonia!" Sonia gazes at him adoringly and says, "He is my Sugar-Father." End of strip. For my part I thought it was better than the original.

KIM DEITCH:

Then there was Kim Deitch's recountings of the stories upon his own pet theme: Famous Frauds. Filtered through Deitch's Fleischer-esque sensibilities, the stories of such notable tricksters as Don Carlos Balmo-I, who was actually a woman, and the chess-playing robot Ajeeb took on a new and surreal dimension. Ajeeb was particularly interesting: a huge and hollow ‘automaton' concealing a small human operative, Ajeeb outlasted several operators – one of whom turned to drink and went mad after spending his entire working life sitting in the cramped interior of the stuffy and lightless pseudo-robot – before finally suffering the humiliation of defeat at the hands of an 11 year old boy. The boy won a box of cigars, and that was Bobby Fischer's very first chess prize. The stories are simply told and fascinating, and therein lies a lot of the appeal, both of Deitch's work in particular and of Arcade in general: the stuff was well written and well constructed. It hung together well and it had a point. Would that there were four books like that around today.

Arcade #4

Cover art by Robert Crumb

OTHER CONTRIBUTORS:

Most issues had a text feature written by some contemporary notable and illustrated by one of the Arcade crew. The idea worked well, the three page text features broke up the otherwise acres of comic strip and set off the work to its best effect by contrast. The better pieces in this category included two inspiring pairings: Charles Bukowski and Robert Crumb; and S. Clay Wilson and William Burroughs. Crumb's rubbery Terrytoon lines perfectly evoked the seamy nostalgia of Bukowski's prose, while in Burroughs S. Clay Wilson seemed to have found a match for his own abnormally horrid imagination.

Jim Hoberman also contributed a text column, Space Age Confidential by name. Variously illustrated by Deitch, Robert Williams and Art Spiegelman, Space Age Confidential talked enthrallingly about such American icons as Coca-Cola, Disneyworld and President Calvin Coolidge. In doing so it underlined another prominent strand running through Arcade, a sort of determination to expose the dark and bizarre side of contemporary pop culture, starting with the comic strip and working outwards.

Despite the heavy whiff of Dadaism in the material, Arcade displayed nothing but the greatest respect for the medium it was working within. Great moments in the medium's past were recalled and re-examined in a feature called Arcade Archives. While at the moment we have an exemplary publication like Nemo to help us find out about strips of the past, in 1975 Arcade Archive's four or five pages a quarter were the best thing on offer. It was here that I first discovered such glittering geniuses as Harrison Cady, and became convinced that a familiar name like H.M. Bateman might be worth a deeper examination.

This concern for the past of the medium was matched with a concern for its future that was best reflected in a feature known as Arcade Sideshow, which rounded out the magazine. Sideshow consisted of numerous half-page strips by new artists, or occasionally by an older hand who simply wanted to experiment with the interesting restrictions of the half-page format. Aline Kominsky, Mark Beyer, Sally Cruikshank, Rory Hayes - I encountered them all for the first time in the sawdust and popcorn atmosphere of the Sideshow. The title seemed especially adequate in light of the freakishness of some of the art-styles on display. It was my first exposure to the idea of primitivism in comic art, and after my initial conditioned repulsion had worn off – about three months – I found myself approaching the work of people like the late Rory Hayes with a real and almost inexplicable pleasure. This is the edge of the underground that most comic fans balk at. When confronted by the painful amateurishness of an Aline Kominsky, the mind conditioned to Neal Adams and Mike Golden will probably recoil in stark terror and vomit mauve bile. The root of the argument seems to be, "But she can't draw." In terms of standard comic art, this is perfectly true. John Byrne can draw and Aline Kominsky can't. What you have to realise however, is that the drawing ability of the artist is not what art is about. Not all the time. And I for one would love to see Aline Kominsky do an issue of the Fantastic Four.

All of the above is an attempt to list just the continuing features of Arcade,  and even so it is incomplete. I haven't mentioned Art Spiegelman's Real Dream spot, where readers were invited to send in dreams for Spiegelman to illustrate, or Yippie monument Paul Krassner's expose upon Timothy Leary and the grim facts behind the Lenny Bruce industry. This is largely because the most significant of Arcade's contributions to the medium were one-off pieces rather than continuing features. However astonishing the material listed above might actually be it was really only the setting for the various pieces de resistance that Arcade was to present over its seven issue lifespan.

There were so many good pieces, even in such a drastically curtailed run, that I can only hope to list a few in passing before tackling a couple of personal favourites in depth. There was Jay Kinney's wordless and ominous Midnight, executed entirely upon scaper-board; the late Willy Murphy's excellent Arnold Peck adventures, Diane Noomin's Sultana of schlock Didi Glitz in a series of vacuous vignettes, the stunning colour work adorning the back covers by Spiegelman, Moscoso, McMillan, Robert Williams, Kliban and others, and so on and so on in an endless shopping list of extraordinary talent gathered in one place at one time. Quite genuinely, this was the most perfectly conceived and executed comic publication since Harvey Kurtzman's MAD, and there has been nothing like it since.

Arcade #5

Cover art by Jay Lynch

I think that without a doubt the three most consistent creators working at Arcade were the magazines editors; Bill Griffith and Art Spiegelman; and that cranky old misogynist Robert Crumb himself.

ROBERT CRUMB:

Crumb's Arcade work, although it has perhaps been surpassed by some of the material he's contributed to Weirdo, was his best to date at that point. Apart from surprisingly lyrical covers, he contributed a healthy number of strips to the magazine's interior, including a two-page dissertation upon buttocks, a selection of unpublished drawings from his sketchbook that proved every bit a meticulous and fascinating as his comic work, and a stunning and bleak look at like in This Here Modern America that oozed despair. Indeed, after looking at the best two pieces that Crumb contributed to Arcade one might be forgiven for assuming that the Mid-Seventies were not a particularly happy time for the artist.

In Arcade #6, Crumb contributed something that looked very much like the last word in funny animal anthropomorphism at the time, and still does to a certain extent. Entitled Ain't It Nice and starring Those Cute Little Bearzy Wearzies, the strip portrayed a vision of inner urban life and love every bit as flatly and methodically as something like Last Exit To Brooklyn could achieve in the literary field. It was seven pages long, and each page had a grid containing twenty individual panels. The strip minutely chronicles a day in the life of two working class inner urban bears, Jippo and Boopsy, as they go through their day. Some moments are ugly, some are surprisingly touching, but by the end of the strip you feel a sort of pang of recognition, along with a sensation of having learned something. Crumb has used funny animals in the classic sense: By showing human foibles portrayed by animals an artist can sidestep all the obscuring preconceptions that people have about human behaviour and enable them to look at themselves dispassionately as if they were observing another species. The beauty of Crumb's concept here is that he has made the human behaviour being portrayed a lot more disturbingly naturalistic and near the knuckle than most of his predecessors. In doing so he also shows us how much of the animal there is in human behaviour by way of the rough physical preliminaries that the two-lovers go through before finally arriving at a sloppy and drunken sexual bout. There's a sort of inversion of the principals of anthropomorphism there that hasn't been attempted since Kurtzman/Elder Mickey Rodent strip in MAD.

Crumb's best piece, however, concerned real people. Appearing in Arcade #3 under the title That's Life, it chronicled the brief and unspectacular rise and fall of a black backwoods singer called Tommy Grady who cut one 78rpm record before being shot dead in 1931. The first three pages take us through Tommy Grady's last year of life. He fights with his wife and hits the road taking only a knapsack and a guitar. Picked up by friends on their way to Memphis to cut a record, he is persuaded to cut a tune himself as part of the then-current boom in Ethnic Music. Blowing his first pay-check on drink he picks up a woman and gets shot dead in a senseless argument with her boyfriend. The next two pages carry us through the depression of the thirties, when many of the small record labels went out of business and a large number of records deleted, Tommy Grady's amongst them. The final page brings us up to the seventies, where an avaricious blues collector looking suspiciously like Crumb himself, buys a solitary surviving copy of Tommy Grady's only record from an old black woman as part of a job lot. He takes it to his blues aficionado friends in L.A. who give it a public airing over their expensive hi-fi units. The last panel shows a crowd of rich white-American blues scholars smiling blissfully as Tommy Grady's voice drifts around the elegant apartment: "Po-o boy, lo-ong way f'um home... Po-o boy lo-ong way f'um home..." A lone caption reminds us of the title: "...And that's life!" Crumb at his manic-depressive zenith.

Arcade #6

Cover art by Robert Crumb

BILL GRIFFITH:

The fact that the two editors of Arcade, Griffith and Spiegelman, contributed so many of the most wilfully experimental pieces (as well as the best in many instances) leads me to suspect that they saw the experimental angle as one of Arcade's major reasons for existence, and individually they followed their convictions with a vengeance. Griffith contributed a number of truly memorable pieces including a number of half-page Griffiths Observatory strips for the Sideshow feature. The Rousseau piece mentioned earlier figured highly amongst the rest of his works, as do the Commedia Dell Zippy and the disturbing The Toad & The Madman in which Mr Toad and Alfred Jarry discourse upon the unspeakable truth. Also the strictly paced piece of film noir entitled Doll Boy should be given a mention if only for its style and control.

Griffith's best piece, at least in my mind, remains A Fools Paradise Revisited in Arcade #3. In this ten page strip, Griffith followed the passage of the ubiquitous Zippy The Pinhead through a lavish and classical Stately home. Each page is divided into four wide horizontal panels, stacked one on top of the other, creating a cinemascope effect (or Zippyscope, as the artist would have it). After a number a splendid sequences made more evocative by the panoramic nature of the visuals, we get a single deviation from this rigid page structure. One strip on the last page is broken into seven smaller panels, showing Zippy The Pinhead's progress as he drifts out to sea upon a chunk of ice-berg. Zippy's comment at this juncture, delivered with one word in each panel as the pitiful Pinhead drifts away towards the distant horizon, is revealing: "I Hate Everything That's Modern. Everything. That's. Modern. I Hate. It..." It's not until you've read it a few times that you realise that the sun is slowly rising in the background as night gives way to daytime, and that the magnificent microcephile has managed to string one sentence out over some three or four hours. Like Jarry's Pere Ubu, Zippy perpetrates a sort of comedy of the unconscious, stumbling through a half-understood landscape shattering time, logic and preconception as he goes. The bits that you laugh at loudest are always the bits that you least understand consciously, and at times the Zippy mystique manifests itself eerily beneath the veneer of slapstick – and nowhere more effectively than here.

ART SPIEGELMAN:
Griffith's co-editor, Art Spiegelman, is the last artist under discussion here. Of all the contributors to Arcade, Spiegelman remains the most creatively self-conscious in his use of the medium, and in consequence achieves many of the more penetrating insights. For the most part Spiegelman's work is as much about the comic-strip medium as whatever story he happens to be telling. While this is true to a lesser extent even of such recent work as Maus, the trend for self-examination was most apparent during Spiegelman's stint on Arcade.

In the first issue, Spiegelman contributed a piece entitled Cracking Jokes which manages to provide an accurate and scholarly dissertation upon humour while being in itself funny. By taking a simple four frame gag and examining it over and over again from every conceivable standpoint for three pages, Spiegelman actually manages to say something about humour itself at the same time as expanding one's notions of what the comic medium is capable of.

Other notable strips include Ace Hole Midget Detective, in which Spiegelman manages to weave a detective story in together with a few observations on Picasso and the relationship between comics and modern art; and As The Mind Reels, in which he successfully intercuts between a mundane soap-opera, a pasta advertisement, a bored housewife's telephone conversation and his own working notes for the strip, creating a sort of collage of everyday life punctuated by televisual inanity, contrasting the real-life of soap operas with the real-life of the everyday world.

My favourite Spiegelman piece, however, is a two page exercise included in Arcade #6, entitled The Malpractice Suite. What Spiegelman has done is to take panels from the Rex Morgan newspaper strip by Bradley and Edgington - head and shoulders shots for the most part – and then extend the lines of the image beyond the panel borders to form them into new shapes and contexts. As an example, we see a standard Rex Morgan panel with a woman up close in the foreground, turning away from us in a head and shoulders shot. She is starting to glance towards a man in a raincoat who has just come to the door, his feet invisible below the bottom panel borders, however we see that what Spiegelman has added to the original design has placed it into a disturbingly different and surreal context. The woman whose face we see in the foreground is given a crude and stumpy body beyond the frame borders, the blouse open to reveal naked and sagging breasts. The man in the background, it transpires is not in the background at all. He's about eight inches high and he's in the foreground. The bare-breasted woman is holding him up in one hand like a popsicle. The sudden change in he way that reality is perceived is disturbing, and suggests all of the subliminal tensions and currents that exist just beyond the panel borders of everyday life.

Arcade #7

Cover art by M.K. Brown

LEGACY:
Of course the most bewildering thing is exactly how they managed to fit all of the good material mentioned at wearying length above as well as all the worthy stuff I didn't mention – into a mere seven issues, although I for one am glad that they did. To me Arcade was an almost perfect culmination of the whole idea of Underground Comix. Granted, there have been worthy individual efforts by the various Arcade contributors since then, but somehow without the same flair. RAW is a splendid magazine, but it's intimidating. I can't bring myself to criticise anything that is that well printed and I find myself approaching RAW in almost the same way as I approach gallery art - coldly and from a polite distance. Crumb's Weirdo is similarly excellent, but I think that at least in terms of a magazine he needed someone to balance his consuming taste for artistic deviance with slightly less iconoclastic sensibilities.

Balance is what Arcade achieved, in a nutshell. It balanced Griffiths' metaphysical slapstick against Spiegelman's thirst for self-reverential comic material and ground their more explosive experiments with a solid anchor of Robert Crumb's simple and unadorned storytelling. It pushed the medium in all sorts of new directions, the vast majority of which still remain to be properly explored almost ten years later. Anyone seriously interested in seeing what directions comics might go in the future could do a lot worse than checking out just how far they've been in the not too distant past.

If the Mafia were really responsible for Arcade's demise then perhaps Joe Valachi was right to squeal on the bastards after all.

Alan Moore

This article is reprinted with the kind permission of the author. It originally appeared in the British fanzine Infinity #7-8 in 1984. Infinity resurfaced between 2012 and 2014 as a free-digital magazine and is well worth checking out.