02 August 2022

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. 


28 July 2022

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

27 July 2022

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.


14 January 2022

Bill Watterson: A Few Thoughts on Krazy Kat


BILL WATERSON:
(from"The Komplete Kolor Krazy Kat", Kitchen Sink Press, 1990)
As a cartoonist, I read Krazy Kat with awe and wonder. Krazy Kat is such a pure and completely realized personal vision that the strip's inner mechanism is ultimately as unknowable as George Herriman. Nevertheless, I marvel at how this fanciful world could be so forcefully imagined and brought to paper with such immediacy. THIS is how good a comic strip can be.

Interestingly, Krazy Kat gains its momentum less from the personalities of its characters than from their obsessions. Ignatz Mouse demonstrates his contempt for Krazy by throwing bricks at her; Krazy reinterprets the bricks as signs of love; and Offissa Pupp is obliged by duty (and regard for Krazy) to thwart and punish Ignatz's "sin," thereby interfering with a process that's satisfying to everyone for all the wrong reasons. Some 30 years of strips were wrung out of that amalgam of cross-purposes. The action can be read as a metaphor for love or politics, or just enjoyed for its lunatic inner logic and physical comedy.

Despite the predictability of the characters' proclivities, the strip never sinks into formula or routine. Often the actual brick tossing is only anticipated. The simple plot is endlessly renewed through constant innovation, pace manipulations, unexpected results, and most of all, the quiet charm of each story's presentation. The magic of the strip is not so much in what it says, but in how it says it. It's a more subtle kind of cartooning than we have today.

To the bewilderment of many readers, there are few endings in Krazy Kat that qualify as "punchlines." Instead, it's the temperament of the writing and drawing throughout the strip that is the joke. If you don't think it's funny that a strip should have an intermission drawing, or that a character would refer to his tail as a "caudal appendage," you're reading the wrong strip, and it's your loss.

Quirky, individual, and uncompromised, Krazy Kat is one of the very few comic strips that takes full advantage of its medium. There are some things a comic strip can do that no other medium, not even animation, can touch, and Krazy Kat is a virtual essay on comic strip essence.

In their headlong rush for the "gag", most cartoonists run right past the countless treasures Herriman uncovered simply by taking his time to explore the freedom of his medium. The self-consciously baroque narrations and monologues ("From the kwaint konfines of the kalabozo del kondado de Kokonino -- Officer 'Pup' gives answer") show that words can be funny in themselves, just as drawings can. The sky turns from black to white to zigzags and plaids simply because, in a comic strip, it CAN. No other cartoonist ever approached his blank sheet of paper with so much affection for all its possibilities.

The scratchy drawings delight me no end. They have the honesty and directness of sketches. So many of today's strips are slick and polished, the inevitable result of assistants trying to develop a mechanical style that can be continued indefinitely. The drawings in Krazy Kat are whimsical, idiosyncratic, and filled with personality. The bold design of the Sunday strips neatly compliments the flat expanses of color or black, and the wonderful hatching brings character to the otherwise posterish approach.

Nothing in Krazy Kat had a supporting role, least of all the Arizona desert setting. Mountains are striped. Mesas are spotted. Trees grow in pots. The horizon is a low wall that characters climb over. Panels are framed by theater curtains and stage spotlights. Monument Valley monoliths are drawn to look more like their names. The moon is a melon wedge, suspended upside down. And virtually every panel features a different landscape, even if the characters don't move. The land is more than a backdrop. It is a character in the story, and the strip is "about" that landscape as much as it is about the animals who populate it.

As the artwork is poetic, so is the writing. With the possible exception of Pogo, no other strip derives so much of its charm from its verbiage. Krazy Kat's unique "texture" comes in large part through the conglomeration of peculiar spellings and punctuations, dialects, interminglings of Spanish, phonetic renderings, and alliterations. Krazy Kat's Coconino County not only had a look; it had a sound as well. Slightly foreign, but uncontrived, it was an extraordinary and full world.

Darn few comic strips challenge their readers anymore. The comics have become big business, and they play it safe. They shamelessly pander to the results of reader surveys, and are produced by virtual factories, ready-made for the inevitable t-shirts, dolls, greeting cards, and television specials. Licensing is where the money is, and we seem to have forgotten that a comic strip can be something more than a launchpad for a glut of derivative products. When the comic strip is not exploited, the medium can be a vehicle for beautiful artwork and serious, intelligent expression.

Krazy Kat was drawn well over half a century ago, and yet it's a much more sophisticated use of the comic strip medium than anything we cartoonists are doing today. Of course, a 1930s Sunday Krazy filled the entire newspaper page, whereas editors today usually cram at least four strips in the same amount of space. This reduction of size greatly limits what can be drawn and written and still remain legible, and it goes a long way toward explaining the comics' devolution.

Even so, the whiteness of paper is still vast, uncharted territory, ripe for exploration. There are plenty of exotic lands for a cartoonist to map, if he or she will leave the well-worn paths and strike off for the wilds of the imagination. Krazy Kat is like no other comic strip before or after it. We are richer for Herriman's integrity and vision.

Krazy Kat was not very successful as a commercial venture, but it was something better. It was art.

Bill Watterson is a cartoonist and created Calvin & HobbesFantagraphics Books have reprinted George Herriman's complete Krazy Kat Sunday pages (1916-1944), which belong in any serious comics reader's collection.

 

 

07 January 2022

Chris Reynolds: An Appreciation by Seth

The New World: Comics From Mauretania
(New York Review Books, 2018)

SETH:
(This article first appeared in The Comics Journal #265, 2005)
Chris Reynolds is the most underrated cartoonist of the last 20 years. The fact that a large number of you reading this article are probably unaware of him is some indication of the truth of this statement. In the short period that he was actively cartooning he produced a rich body of work that continues to engage me even after many repeated readings.

I first came across the work of Mr Reynolds back in the late 1980s when I was an artist working at Vortex Comics. One day, while avoiding work, I was flipping through the slush pile (unsolicited submissions) when I came across a graphically appealing two-page submission titled "The Lighted Cities". I can’t recall if Vortex used this strip or not, but the work stuck in my mind. Those two pages managed to create an evocative world that seemed fully formed yet offered very few details. Something was going on - but what? It was obviously the work of a talented artist and it also clearly hinted that it was a small piece of a larger whole. Later I came across his work again in Escape magazine... or possibly it was in a lone copy of Mauretania Comics that somehow found its way across the ocean. I can’t remember which. Either way, this second encounter set me on the job of trying to track down all of his work. This was not an easy task. Finding back issues of Mauretania Comics here in North America is next to impossible. Even finding them in Britain seems like a difficult process. In fact, I doubt I could have ever completed the collection without the help of the author himself. Still, it was a task well worth the effort.

You might be wondering, “If it is so difficult to find these comics, then why are you bothering to tell me about them?” The good news is that Kingly Books of England has just released a collection of selected works from Mr. Reynolds titled The Dial and Other Stories. It has been 14 years since Penguin books published his brilliant graphic novel Mauretania (not to be confused with his series Mauretania Comics) and this new publication corrects a grave oversight that has kept his work out of the limelight for so long. It’s a cause for celebration. It also gives me an excuse to do something I have wanted to do for quite some time - write an appreciation of him and try to help bring his fascinating comics some of the attention they have sorely lacked. Chris Reynolds is a name you should know.

From the above paragraphs, I hardly need to mention that Chris Reynolds is an English cartoonist. He was part of that brief burst of cartooning energy that emerged in England in the mid to late ‘80s - mostly centered around Escape magazine — that included artists such as Glenn Dakin, Ed Pinsent, John Bagnall, Eddie Campbell and Phil Elliott. He self-published 16 issues of Mauretania Comics beginning in 1986 and in 1991 Penguin books published his graphic novel Mauretania. After that his appearances have been few and far between. This is a genuine shame. Being a cartoonist myself, I can only assume that he grew dissatisfied with the lack of obvious reward for such hard labor. Either that, or he just lost the passion for cartooning. Whatever the cause, I often regret that I don’t have ten more years of his work to add to the pile.

The very first issue of Mauretania Comics contains the subtitle "Mysterious stories about times and places" and no description could be more apt for the kind of stories that Mr. Reynolds tells. Times and places are certainly among his most important themes - but it is the word “mysterious” that best describes his comics. They are subtle, layered, and often oddly moving, but they are also deeply perplexing. This is not to imply that they are in some way overly obtuse in the way of so much modern gallery work. It is often the strategy of artists to present their ideas in a manner that is deliberately impenetrable to the audience in an attempt to cut off any criticism about the depth of its meaning. You can’t criticize something if you can’t grasp it. Reynolds is not afraid to put his ideas in the forefront of the story. He simply understands that a good mystery loses all of its power once it is solved. He masterfully manages to retain large enough gaps in its details to keep us wondering just what the big picture is. He is smart enough to have never filled in those gaps.

That said, Reynolds’ focus, as an artist is still clearly that of a world-builder. Even with all the gaps he’s purposely left he still manages to etch a striking portrait of a unique world. It is a place very much like our own - and yet not quite. It’s a parallel world, a slightly askew version of post-war Britain, perhaps. Certainly, it is very English in character The trappings of this parallel world turn out to be unexpected as the series goes along. For one thing there seems to have been some sort of war in outer space. And there are “aliens” walking around - particularly in the mining industry. There are strange organizations with names like the A.U.S., or "Rational Control'. One main character is possibly from another world - he definitely appears to have owned a spaceship at some point. Robots pop up occasionally and characters have returned from the dead once or twice. The setting could be 1950, or 1980, or possibly 2080. It’s a bit confusing.

This certainly doesn’t sound promising, does it? It’s almost a slight against Mr. Reynolds to bring up these details because they are so misleading. Reynolds smartly leaves these elements vague and unexplained. He hints at them but leaves us guessing. I’m sure he knows exactly the nature of his world’s history but I’m also sure he knows that to drag these things out into the light of day would expose them as trite, clichĂ©d, and dull as ditchwater. By holding them back he recasts them into odd, surreal touches. The stories are never about these things anyway. They’re never about “things” at all. The stories are about feelings - especially those associated with specific places and specific moments. Mr. Reynolds’ characters are extremely sensitive to their own inner worlds. The science fiction elements are red herrings, simply there to muddy the waters.

Few comics place such an emphasis on the setting as Mauretania Comics. Often the stories are actually about the setting and if it isn’t the main focus, you can be sure that it is a crucial element. His very style of storytelling is dependent on the impression given by lingering shots of buildings or landscapes. Occasionally whole pages will be given over to architectural scenes or clouds moving across the sky. The attention paid to these shots of building facades is just as important to the storytelling as the panels devoted to the characters. In many instances they supply the subtler details not given by the dialogue or narration. Sometimes they offer a counterpoint to what is being said.

The characters themselves are creatures of intuition. They follow their impulses more than their logical minds - even his detectives (mockingly labeled "Cinema Detectives") fit this template. In his graphic novel, Mauretania, he makes a clear statement favoring intuition over “Rational control.” Much of the characters’ intuition is linked to the feelings that places evoke. Mr. Reynolds seems very much in touch with the environment - especially the man-made environment. Like Edward Hopper, his places have a “charged” quality. Also like Hopper, he manages to convey the actual feeling of "being there". There is a rare sensitivity in the understanding of place that makes his comics a rich reading experience. They have a marvelous authenticity of place for a world that is so broadly etched.

Similarly interesting is his use of time. Time has a strange fluidity in his stories - past, present and future are not entirely separate. The stories do generally follow a linear path, but I detect an undercurrent in them: There is a cumulative effect that hints at a cyclical nature to the narratives. No one seems to ever leave the past fully behind. It’s not as though they are trapped by their pasts — nor is it purely nostalgia — it has more to do with the perceived feeling that the “past” exists somewhere as solidly as the events that are happening in the “present.” Perhaps it is memory that is lingering more than time. In Reynolds’ “Cinema Detectives” strips, the character Rosa inexplicably returns from the dead for no more reason than that she is willed back from the past. “Back by popular demand,” the narrator states. Mr. Ranger from “The Golden Age” stories appears to exist in several different time periods at once, as does another character from that series, Robert. None of the characters' relationships seem based on events that are occurring in the present. Their connections are always from an earlier period. Often stories focus around characters that are offstage — friends from long ago or people that are being sought. The odd thing about their absence is that one never has the impression that they are merely somewhere else — they always feel as if they are entirely absent from the world, as if they have ceased to exist in whatever time the story is set in. This is obviously my own personal impression and may have nothing to do with the intentions of the author.

I don’t want to give the impression that Mr. Reynolds never takes a misstep. Occasionally a story will spell out a little too much about his world and subsequently flatten the mystery a bit. Sometimes, he will push an idea too far into the absurd and have it become uncomfortably humorous. There is a lot of humor in his work, but in the best stories it keeps on the right side of absurd. Too much absurdity leads to conflict with the otherworldliness of his stories. Too far out and we lose the connection with our own world and, consequentially, our identification with the characters.

When it comes to the visual elements of the strips Mr. Reynolds’ work is of a very high order. He works in an idiosyncratic style reminiscent of woodcut artists — especially Masereel. Unlike other artists, who are trying for this look, with Mr. Reynolds it is merely a side effect of his heavy use of black shapes, his thick line work and his wide panel borders. It may have something to do with his uniform panel arrangement too.

Compositionally, his panels are beautifully put together. His understanding of shapes and their relationships within the panel (and the page) are very accomplished. His inking style, on the other hand, is eccentric. Lines are inked in with a bold thick line that often obscures detail — mouths and noses become blobs, small visual elements blur together. In cold type this sounds rather unappetizing but on the comic page it works surprisingly well — adding a freedom and fluidity to what could be very rigid compositions. He is quite fond of silhouettes and characters appear as black shapes for pages at a time. In general, the tone of the artwork is dark — even in bright sunlight the preponderance of shadow makes for a moody page design. He is a good designer. Several of the covers from Mauretania Comics are small masterpieces. At times, his hatching tends to be a bit fussy for my tastes and I tend to favor his strips that have a cleaner look. The artwork reached maturity by issue #2 and while there are peaks and valleys over the remaining issues, the actual evolution of the style is negligible. He reached a high mark early and remained pretty consistent overall. The Mauretania graphic novel is artistically a real high point though. The quality of the artwork generally depends on the effort (or interest) he showed in a particular story.

His storytelling style was also strikingly consistent. He unsparingly used a nine-panel grid and his narrative style always favored narration over dialogue. Again, these choices seem like drawbacks. Today’s cartoonists usually favor a more varied approach to storytelling and narration currently seems to be frowned upon in the “show don’t tell” school. Chris Reynolds is the exception to the rule because neither of these rigid sounding choices hurt his work in any way. His stories read very effortlessly and the staccato rhythm of his unflinching grid is perfectly wedded to his content. The stories seem made for it — which, I suppose, they were. The consistent use of narration blocks also add a natural distance between the reader and the character which is just the right choice if what you are trying to do is keep the character distant from the reader.

In the next few pages I intend to briefly discuss four wonderful short stories from the Mauretania Comics series and his masterpiece, the Mauretania graphic novel.

MONITOR’S HUMAN REWARD

This story appears in the second issue of Mauretania Comics and it just may be my favorite of all Mr. Reynolds’ stories. One of the first things that struck me about this strip is the jump in quality that occurred between issues one and two. Looking back at the run of Mauretania, the first issue is interesting but formative — it feels like early work. The second issue is instantly recognizable as mature work, a big creative jump.

This story is also the first appearance of Reynolds’ central character, Monitor. This character needs some explaining. In appearance, Monitor is a rather odd figure especially since the settings he appears in are so clearly a mundane, everyday world not much different from our own. Monitor is a slight figure, boyish really, dressed in a sort of spaceman’s uniform. It’s almost a child’s conception of a spacesuit. He wears a large round helmet and visor (with an “M” written on the side) that conceals his features (save for his nose and mouth), and on his back he sports a little backpack (rocket pack? schoolbag?). His costume is completely at odds with the other characters in his world. Still, the other characters rarely take notice or mention his odd attire. I have wondered if Monitor isn't possibly a character Mr. Reynolds created as a child (in a different context, of course) and cleverly transported into his adult work. Monitor’s name is a mystery in itself. Just what is he monitoring? By all indications he seems most intent on monitoring his own inner life.

The story, like all of Mr. Reynolds’ plots, appears simple at first. Monitor is on his way to the cafĂ© where he works. He had taken the job on a lark — almost bullying the kind old lady who runs the place into hiring him, but now he’s grown disinterested with the work. This morning he had received an unexpected letter and he sits, on the steps of the house opposite the cafĂ©, to read it. The letter informs him that he has just inherited a house. The house, it turns out, is she very one whose steps he’s sitting on.

He vaguely recalls some childhood connection to the place. He should report to work, but his desire to explore his new acquisition wins out. The door is not locked and when he enters the house he is surprised to find it is not the mundane place he expected.

On the surface, nothing much happens in this short story, but, like all good comics, it is in the telling that it comes to life. Reynolds sustains a wonderful calm throughout and the sense of place is palpable. As we move through the story we share Monitor’s gentle mood shifts as he experiences each new inner state of being. From the dissatisfaction of his job, to the perplexity of the unexpected inheritance, to his sense of wonder at exploring his new home, to, finally, his detached transformation into a new life. All in eight pages.

In many ways, this story sets up the blueprint for most of the stories to come. His most evident themes all take a short turn on the stage: a fascination with the sense of place; the persistence and mystery of memory; a concern with the effects of design; the potency of intuition; and some form of transformation (usually spiritual). A little bit of study shows that the first four themes add up to induce the final one — transformation.

In this case, the transformation begins when Monitor considers exploring his new house. His sense of responsibility to the old lady doesn’t have a chance against the excitement of that unknown building — “a mysterious world,” in Monitor’s own words. From the outside the house is a typical mid-century row house and that’s just what Monitor anticipates he will find inside, but he’s genuinely astonished upon entering to find a short hallway that immediately opens up into a large open-air space. A stone garden path leads up to a strange, crystal-domed structure (not much larger than a cabin). He goes in and finds the place warm (“like a summer house”) and looking through the clear walls he sees it has a spectacular view of the surrounding landscape. He’s also surprised to discover that the area around the house is more industrial than expected. A floating, windowless train is observed making it’s way down the river.

It is in these moments that Monitor is transformed. It is a subtle transformation — a simple and sudden shift in perspective. In a burst of intuitive insight he recognizes that he need never go to the cafĂ© again. He will have to apologize to the old lady but she will forgive him. He will live the rest of his life in this house on the hill. This information is presented in a deadpan, matter-of-fact manner, and the reader is never misled into thinking that these are merely Monitor’s plans for the future. This is clearly information that has been intuited to him (from somewhere) by his presence in the house. This is the nature of personal transformation in Mr. Reynolds’ world. It comes about, most often, from a combination of time and place — not from circumstance or action.

THE SMALL MINES

From Mauretania Comics #5, another Monitor story. Monitor, it turns out, is actually a rather good character to “drop” into stories. He’s something of a cipher — a passive everyman. In this case, he’s taken a job as a mine agent. Monitor isn’t any clearer on what a “mine agent” is than I am. Nevertheless, he makes the best of it, moving into a shack down by the new mines. (What has become of Monitor’s home is anyone’s guess. Like I said, things tend to be somewhat fluid in these stories.) Given little actual job instruction, Monitor decides to show some initiative and draw a map of all the mine locations. He tours the various mines and meets some of their owners. At one location, over a ridge, he discovers some mysterious aliens running a mine. He watches their methods with interest. Monitor’s boss is pleased with his work. Some friends visit. The mines suffer hardship and then close up. Monitor takes on a new job and then some years later he pays a sentimental trip back to the area.

Mr. Reynolds relates this mundane story with such a quiet beauty that it is pure poetry. That famous “sense of place” that I keep harping on about is so clear and visceral in this strip that you have the impression that you’ve actually visited the area. As we follow Monitor on his various rounds we are treated to a virtuoso display of drawing and design as Reynolds produces some of his most potent use of landscape. His combination of gentle narrative and slow pacing creates a sustained mood that can only be compared to actual experience. If you’ve ever spent any time away from home wandering an unfamiliar town or city you will surely recognize the fascinated, yet slightly sad, feeling this experience inevitably creates.

In the middle of the story, Reynolds gives us a short talk on the relativity of place and feeling. Specifically, how a place becomes meaningful when you live there but also how difficult it is to impart that meaning to outsiders. This section particularly spoke to me. I’m sure, at some time or other, you’ve tried to show a visitor the charms of where you live — the places that are just so interesting to you — only to feel the feigned interest, or downright indifference, of your guest. Or perhaps you’ve been on the other side of this scenario — being shown the local sights by some host and feeling little about them. This is Monitor’s circumstance, exactly, when two friends visit him. In Reynolds’ own words: “Monitor had been looking forward to this visit by his friends for a long time but for some reason he didn’t think they appreciated the area very much when he showed them things. But that was alright, he supposed, because they had their own lives.”

That’s the key line: “because they had their own lives.” In it, Mr. Reynolds acknowledges that these places resonate for Monitor because they are his places — his life. Back home, these friends have their own places. It’s typically sensitive of Reynolds to recognize this condition and to draw our attention to it in a story where he is trying so earnestly to make us care about Monitor’s adopted countryside.

There are many such sharp human asides in this little seven-page story, and they are told with lovely understatement. The final page, where Monitor returns years later, has such a vivid melancholy to it and the ending trails off so sublimely that I hesitate to kill it by describing it here.

THE GOLDEN AGE

By this point it seems silly to mention that each issue of Mauretania Comics is made up of a variety of short stories — that must be self-evident. However, what I’ve neglected to make clear is that many of these short stories are part of individual series that have their own series-titles. These separate series are all interconnected but star different characters. There are the Monitor stories, the “Cinema Detectives” (starring Rosa), and the “Golden Age” stories (starring Robert). All of the Golden Age stories are identically titled “The Golden Age.” This particular one is from Mauretania Comics #8. It is the only “Golden Age” story from the series not reprinted in the current Kingly book.

These “Golden Age” strips usually begin with the words “years ago.” Evidently, they take place in the past. Further proof of this is the fact that Robert (a young boy) is one of Monitor’s school chums from when Monitor was a boy. Of all Mr. Reynolds’ work, these stories are the most baffling. Rational explanation is rarely offered for the events that occur and the reader quickly ceases to look for simple answers. The thought processes are those of a dream.

I’m not all that sure what Reynolds is trying to communicate in some of these stories. There is a quality of surrealist “automatic writing” about them. They can be very absurd. The timeline of this series-within-a-series (and they do follow some sort of an arc) appears to be, at least partly, cyclical. They certainly make a very interesting narrative puzzle. The “Golden Age” story I’m discussing here is the least absurd and most linear of them all. This one is actually pretty straightforward — that’s probably why it’s my favorite of the bunch.

The story: Robert is on summer vacation. He visits a local miniature railway, now in decline. He takes a ride but it ends abruptly when the train comes to a halt at the edge of a canal. This new canal has been built right through the middle of the rail line. Robert can see the continuation of the rails across the shimmering canal. Rails he will never ride. Summer passes and at the end of the holidays Robert pays a return visit. The miniature railway has closed down for good. Robert decides to re-join the severed rails. He gathers the materials from nearby sheds and builds a bridge across the canal. Robert stokes the engine of the miniature train and prepares for his ride. Just then, Mr. Ranger, Robert’s schoolteacher, arrives and informs him that school has begun. He then drags Robert away. The end.

There are several very interesting things about this strip, the first being how clearly it is a precursor to the Mauretania graphic novel (but more about that later). Another is the use of the train — or more properly, the rails. Trains often appear in Mr. Reynolds’ stories and I think he uses them because they are convenient symbols for “connectedness.” Rails, like wires, can be conduits for delivering things. In this case, the rails have been severed and whatever “message” they carried can no longer be transmitted. Because of this severed artery the railway dies. Robert understands this on an intuitive level and tries to reconnect them. Much like Monitor and his house, you anticipate that when Robert rides the train over the canal the message will be transmitted and Robert will be transformed. But unlike Monitor, Robert doesn’t receive his transformation — Mr. Ranger prevents it. This is interesting too. In later stories we get to know Mr. Ranger and he’s a rather unlikable character — stodgy, suspicious, and always after Robert (and his headmistress). Eventually, he joins the new Police Force named “Rational Control,” one of Reynolds’ few instances of rationality squelching intuition.

WHISPER IN THE SHADOWS

This is one of the “Cinema Detectives” strips. It’s the one where Rosa dies. Earlier, if you recall, I mentioned that Rosa returns from the dead in a later story. Her death is actually sad and when she does return there is a genuine desire (as a reader) to have things return to normal and for her happy life to pick up where it left off. Reynolds resists this urge and her return actually makes things awkward. Her family and friends have moved on and she doesn’t have a clear place in their lives anymore. Her husband, Jeff, has remarried. It deliberately fails to fulfil the reader’s emotional wants.

But back to her death. Rosa has been wounded while investigating a case and is holed up in the Doolan Hotel. Her young son, Jimmy, is caring for her. While he is out buying bandages, a man slips into the room. We cut to the funeral and then again to Rosa’s husband quickly remarrying (Sandra). Jimmy had met Monitor at the funeral and starts to imitate him by wearing a similar helmet. The only difference is that instead of the “M” that is on Monitor’s helmet, Jimmy paints a “II.” “I’m going to be Monitor Two,” Jimmy says. A year passes and Jimmy has persuaded Jeff and Sandra to take him back to the area around the Doolan Hotel. They visit a large hill nearby that he and his mother had visited shortly before her death. Jimmy takes off, running wildly, down the hill in an attempt to get back into the past. He fails. That night, back at the Doolan hotel, he cries as he finally faces his mother’s death.

On the surface, this story seems to be about a boy coming to terms with the death of his mother. Without reading further “episodes” I’d have to agree with that assessment. But knowing of Rosa's return and Jimmy’s role in the Mauretania graphic novel casts the story in a different light. It’s another transformation story. “Jimmy” is transformed from a sad little boy into one of Reynolds’ intuitive beings. The moment of transformation occurs when Jimmy puts on the helmet and symbolically becomes Monitor’s son. In the graphic novel we see that Jimmy is the character most able to receive “messages” that are coming from somewhere else. Intuition doesn't just come from inside (in this universe) — it is a way to connect to some mysterious source of information.

Jimmy’s actions on the top of the hill give us a hint to how it works. While standing there, he hears his father say the word “nowadays” in a sentence. This word, instantly picked up on by Jimmy, acts as a trigger: He sees it as a key to open the doorway to the past. This is the moment when he races down the hill, repeating the word over and over (like a mantra) as he runs. Like in other stories, Jimmy is invoking the power of time and place. He’s returned to the spot of previous happiness and sparked by the key word “nowadays,” he has guessed this is the moment. It sounds odd when written down, but within the context of the stories these actions don’t seem out of place. When he reaches the bottom of the hill, he closes his eyes and thinks: “Now I’m back!” Upon opening his eyes, we see (from his perspective behind the visor) his mother standing there. In the next panel he is alone. Still, he yells up the hill — “You’ll have to go now, Sandra.” Jimmy expects his old life to resume. It doesn’t and back at the Doolan hotel Jimmy realizes that he’ll “never be able to go places and change things like he’d thought Monitor could do.” This is an interesting statement in itself. Jimmy sees Monitor as a catalyst for change in the world. I’m not sure if that is Monitor’s role — but it certainly foreshadows Jimmy’s.

In the very last panel Jimmy (in bed, presumably all cried-out) hears (or maybe not — he may be asleep) a whisper in the shadows — it’s Rosa’s voice. When I first read this story I assumed this whisper to be a dream, or a ghost, or even a sad little boy’s longings. Knowing the rest of the stories, it reads like the first hint of Rosa’s return to the world. I must assume that Jimmy’s frantic run has actually worked. He’s brought back the past.

MAURETANIA

Finally, we come to the graphic novel. This, in my opinion, is Mr. Reynolds’ masterpiece. This is also the one publication you might easily be able to track down. In fact, at the time of this writing there are 14 copies available at www.abebooks.com. It’s a rich work but I’m going to try and keep this brief. A lot could be said about the book, as it definitely rewards repeated readings, however I’m going to focus on the story and its main theme. It’s safe to say that this is a distillation of the work that has come before. Mr. Reynolds has refined the details of his theme and presented it here in its purest form. The book is (as you’d expect, by this point) entirely about the conflict between rationality and intuition. It was only while working on this article that I also came to understand that this story brings a conclusion to the earlier works and an end to the Mauretania world.

The book opens with a factory closing. Fern Inc. has shut down and Susan, one of its employees, has just turned down the offer of a lift into town by her ex-boss, Alf, so that she can explore a “mysterious” little stream that she has watched from her office window every day. Susan follows the little stream through the gathering dusk until she spies a helmeted man sitting alone in a car silently watching the closed factory. The fact that Susan has finally given in to her whim to explore the stream says a lot about her as a Reynolds character. She’s making a shift from everyday reality into the world of more mysterious information. That the stream leads her to Jimmy confirms this. In many ways, Susan is Reynolds’ most fully realized character. She’s written in broad strokes and we certainly don’t get a lot of information about her beyond the essentials — but she does have a feeling of authenticity to her. She feels like a real person and unusually (for a Reynolds story) we share her inner thoughts. We relate to her and her problems — her lost job, her failed romance, the unwanted sense of intimacy with Alf, her overly concerned mother. She is someone from our world.

Quickly after Fern Inc.’s closing, Susan unexpectedly gets a job offer from Reynal Industries (a name which is surely some kind of word play — though I can’t figure it out). Sure enough, Alf has been hired too. The work at Reynal is suspiciously vague and her new boss, Tony, is unnaturally interested in Fern and its closing. It's all he really wants to talk about. With minimal sleuthing on Susan’s part she discovers that Reynal is a front for “Rational Control — the trendy new police force.” Susan immediately goes to Tony and spills the beans. Here, the tone of the story changes.

Now that Reynal’s front is exposed, Rational Control comes clean. It turns out that they are watching Jimmy. They’ve hired the ex-employees of recently closed factories because Jimmy has somehow been involved in their failing and they’re poking around for information. Rational Control is at a loss to explain how Jimmy’s done it. They’ve even managed to get ahold of one of Jimmy’s helmets but “There was no receiving device — nothing.”

Susan is drafted into their plan to find out more. They send her across the street (Jimmy’s office is just across the way) to apply for a job. Jimmy and Susan meet. Jimmy has grown up now, he’s not a child any longer, but he still wears his helmet with the II on the side. He is still symbolically Monitor’s child. He appears to have fulfilled his wish to “go places and change things.” Jimmy and Susan have an odd yet open conversation. She asks what Jimmy’s company does. Jimmy replies: “Well, it’s unusual work. We close down factories that are ‘harmful’ and that sort of thing. We do a few more positive things but that’s what we’ve been doing lately. That’s why I closed Fern down. I mean, it wasn’t anything personal or anything, and I’m sorry I had to do it, in a way. You know, quite a good looking building even.” Then Jimmy points across the street and lets Susan know that he is aware that Rational Control is watching him. “They’re not ready to close me down yet, though,” he says.

Later, Rational Control, still utterly baffled, sends Susan back across for more information. In a beautiful five-page sequence Susan silently crosses the street (carefully showing us the details of the streetscape) and enters Jimmy’s office. Not finding him there, she explores the dark back office (in a terrible state of decay) until she finally emerges into what looks like a prison yard (high walls and barbed wire) where Jimmy is sitting at a patio table. For a mysterious figure, Jimmy is amusingly unthreatening. Like Monitor, he is a slight figure, and with his big round helmet he is rather absurd-looking. His greeting doesn’t exactly inspire awe either: “Hi Susan — its a nice day.” Over the next eight pages of conversation (interspersed with scenes of moving clouds) we learn what Jimmy is doing. In halting dialogue between the two we come to understand that Jimmy’s conception of why the factories are “harmful” is not as commonplace as something like environmental damage — it’s somehow vaguer yet more important. Although what it is we do not learn. We do, however, discover his methods for closing them.

Jimmy tells Susan that there are special “points” that affect things and “you have to do things at the right time.” For example, this morning all he had to do was buy some children a kite. Susan asks him how he knows when to do these things? Jimmy replies: “Well, I don’t really.” It’s a telling statement. Jimmy doesn’t know — he feels. It’s hard not to view Jimmy as a kind of Zen figure and his effect on Susan is certainly like a master provoking her into an enlightened experience. In fact, in the very next sequence when Susan leaves Jimmy and re-emerges into the street we are treated to a marvelously understated scene that undoubtedly shows that Susan has been transformed. She steps into the street, and mirroring her walk across the street 20 pages earlier, she stops to observe the streetscape. In four brilliant panel transitions (each showing Susan standing and looking) we shift from a dead-on shot, to a worm’s-eye view, then, Susan hesitatingly turning back towards Jimmy’s office and then back to the original dead-on shot. Simply, Susan has experienced a change in perspective. She sees the world in different terms. From this point in the story, she is on Jimmy’s side.

While Susan was with Jimmy she noticed something odd about his movements. When Jimmy walked somewhere he always retraced his steps exactly in coming back, touching again every object that he had touched before. Later, Rational Control raids Jimmy’s office, rounding up his employees (though not catching Jimmy). One of his employees comments on this queer aspect of Jimmy’s behavior: “It’s as if, recently, Jimmy had some sort of imaginary wire behind him. If he went somewhere he always had to come back exactly the same way.” This isn’t the first overt mention of wires. Just pages earlier, Rational Control had become quite excited upon discovering an overhead wire between their building and Jimmy’s office. A red herring. It was just a normal electrical wire — nothing important.

But wires are important. It’s the central image of the book. It’s right on the cover. Like the stream Susan follows to Jimmy, wires contain currents — perhaps “undercurrents” is a more precise term here. These undercurrents in the world are the sources of Jimmy’s mysterious information. He’s the receiver at the end of the wire. Back at Rational Control one of the officer’s suggests that perhaps Jimmy’s information is from a spiritual source. For a moment Rational Control considers it: “In that case, there’s nothing we can do! If it’s God telling him what to do, and it works, then there’s nothing anyone can do.” They quickly retreat from this position — preferring to see Jimmy as a con man. Suddenly, during all this discussion at Rational Control, the power goes out. Even the phones are dead. Confusion sets in and everyone disperses. Susan finds herself alone in the street. Sensing that the power failure was one of Jimmy’s “points” she feels that Jimmy must surely be behind it and so she makes her way to the power station. Inevitably, she finds him there. Jimmy and Susan notice that one of the telephones is different from the rest and, sure enough, it’s still working. They follow its long wire out the door and far into the countryside where for 10 silent pages they trace its source. In the end it turns out to be nothing more than an experimental portable phone being tested by a field truck. Rational Control shows up, having also deducted that the power station was important.

In what seems like an anticlimax, everyone ends up on the hill overlooking the power plant, just standing around. Then a call on the portable phone reveals that the power failure was caused by some kids playing with a kite. The meaning is lost on Rational Control but, of course, we understand. Just then, Susan thinks of something: “Are you going to follow the wire all the way back this time Jimmy?”

This is the real climax of the story. Jimmy intuits that it’s time to cut the wires — to sever the umbilical cord between himself and the mysterious information source. “I have to go across there — without going back the way I came along the wire — that'll be the last thing I have to do.” Jimmy tells Rational Control, “You just have to let me go. Really I think it will change the world.” So Jimmy runs back across the field in a series of brilliantly crude drawings (which perfectly convey the look of a shimmering light on a hot summer day) and the world changes. The wires vanish. Literally.

Just how the world changes we never know. Honestly, what concrete details could Mr. Reynolds supply that would satisfy the reader? One thing we do learn though is that Rational Control is out of business. We see them packing up their files and we overhear Tony say: “Now that the world is perfect they don’t need us anymore.” So clearly, Mr. Reynolds’ perfect world is not formed through rational thought. Another humorous detail is the proliferation of wireless phones. The book ends on a happy scene between Jimmy and Susan.

It's a marvelous book and it brings a resolution to the world of Mauretania that is unexpected, absurd, funny and satisfying. In that “Golden Age” story from a few pages back we see the echoes of this one. There, Robert tries to connect the rails (wires) toward some mysterious end, but he’s stopped by rationality. Here, Jimmy manages to change the world by severing them. Rationality fails to stop it this time. And if there is one point I’ve failed at — it’s in conveying what an enjoyable read these stories are. The graphic novel is a positive page-turner. In the end, it turns out that Mr. Reynolds (or his characters, at least) have a deep belief in feeling over thought as a positive force in the world. I’m not sure I share that viewpoint, but within the context of his universe it’s a convincing idea. However, I must say, the deck is stacked. The characters who represent rationality are a boring group of old sticks-in-the-mud — not very likeable. Your sympathies always lie with the intuitive types. While writing this article, I came to a new appreciation of just how well thought out and consistent Reynolds’ work is. What appears to be, upon first reading, a world of odd, disjointed events turns out to be an internally coherent worldview.

It was genuinely difficult to keep to these five stories. The series contained many worthy strips that I was tempted to talk about. “Soft Return” from the final issue was particularly hard to leave out — a beautiful strip. I’ve deliberately omitted “The Dial” because I want to let you experience it yourself in the Kingly book. It’s an important story in Mr. Reynolds’ universe — a highly complex work open to a wide range of interpretations. I can’t emphasize enough that you should go and buy that book. Hopefully, if it is successful, further books will appear collecting the rest of Chris Reynolds’ work. He’s a cartoonist of the first rank. Unique. Remember his name.

Seth is a cartoonist living in Ontario, Canada. His works include the graphic novels It’s a Good life if You Don’t Weaken, Clyde Fans and George Sprott which are available from Drawn & Quarterly.


FURTHER READING:


03 January 2022

Neil Gaiman: Bowie by Michael Allred


IF WE CAN SPARKLE HE MAY LAND TONIGHT
by Neil Gaiman
(from the foreword to Bowie by Michael Allred, Insight Editions, 2020)

I read about David Bowie in a newspaper before I ever heard his music. I was eleven. The article in a daily newspaper was about Bowie saying he was bisexual, a term I had never previously encountered. The people who wrote the article seemed more shocked that he wore makeup. A man wearing makeup. Had you ever heard of such a thing?

Not long after that, I heard a song on the radio about a spaceman leaving his capsule on a space walk; it was being played in the school's hobby room, where the kids were allowed to go and make balsa wood airplanes. I didn't really get pop music at that age. I loved Gilbert and Sullivan; I loved songs that were stories, and most rock and pop wasn't. "Space Oddity" was a story, even if it left its ending wrapped in ambiguity, and it was science fiction, and I loved and understood science fiction.

And really, it was the science fiction that was the fishhook in my cheek and dragged me in, as much as the music. Perhaps more than the music. I would listen to music that I didn't love, to tease out the ideas, and play it enough that I loved every beat and bar of it. For me, it was the thread that linked The Man Who Sold The World - "The Supermen" and "The Man" himself - with Hunky Dory - which gave me "Changes" and Quicksand" - and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, a sci-fi journey. It started with a heartbeat that told us that we only had five years until the end of the world and took us to a room where a kid my age was listening to a Starman sending in music from outer space. The other side of the record was the story of Ziggy Startdust and his journey from fame to zombie obscurity, and I was certain that Ziggy was an alien, come to bring us music. The Starman had descended into a world that was ending in five years, and he would finish his life wandering dully, insulated from from all feeling, like Thomas Jerome Newton drinking himself into painlessness.

I was twelve when Aladdin Saine came out, and I was bedazzled and confused, and I wanted to know who the strange ones in the dome were and why Aladdin Saine was going to fight in the Third World War, and I held on to the conviction that this was science fiction. I was thirteen when Diamond Dogs hit, and I was so much in love I went to the school library and took out George Orwell's 1984 and build huge sapphire-coloured post apocalyptic sages in my head out of the rest of it.

At fifteen, I bluffed my way into a showing of The Man Who Fell To Earth, acting old enough to be allowed in, and I bunked a day off school to go to Victoria Station for Bowie's arrival there (I didn't see him, but I met people who were different Bowies at different periods, and I saw copies of Station To Station flung over the wall they had put up to stop us from seeing him, and I felt like I was touching magic). 

The incarnations of Bowie were, in themselves, science fictional. All I was missing was a Bowie comic, and, missing it, I would draw bad Bowie comics myself.

I met Mike Allred around 1989, at (I think) a Forbidden Planet signing. He gave me some of his art, and I loved it. I sent it to Karen Berger, my editor on Sandman, who had him do a tryout page and told him he wasn't quite ready yet. I continued to love his art and was proud that the world rapidly discovered how good he was and that, together, we would bring back the character Prez in the pages of The Sandman: World's End. Later, we would make one of my favourite comics I had any part of: the Metamorpho story in Wednesday Comics, complete with a 1963-style periodic table. There was a cleanness to his lines, a joy in the image and in the construction of each page, aided and abetted by Laura Allred's precise and delightful colouring.

There was a brief moment in the early 1990s when rock-and-roll biography comics were the next big thing. It didn't last very long. None of them were like this. This is pure delight, a book made by fans who were also artists, for fans who are dreamers.

This is a book filled with visual allusions (my favourite is the Hunky Dory "Quicksand" first Spider's gig page). The people in these pages aren't people. They are icons - larger-than-life versions of themselves, filled with resonance. It's Bowie's life as parables and imaginary histories, a beautifully researched re-creation of something that might be better than documentary footage. It's an imaginary reconstruction of the time and lives of an imaginary figure, inspired by the life of the actor, one David Jones, formerly of Bromley and originally of Brixton. 


FURTHER READING:
AAA Pop
Insight Editions
Michael Allred: Conversations (UPM, 2015)


22 December 2021

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



18 December 2021

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