NOT Popular Culture: A Top 10

I'll tell you something I've not talked about in yonks. Comics. Considering 40 years of my life - two-thirds of it - have been immersed in it, it isn't really something I talk about outside of specific people on Facebook and anyone who might unknowingly and dangerously wander into that territory when talking to me...

I always hoped that people would see the irony and humour in calling my comic memoirs My Monthly Curse, because the comics I was into were usually published monthly and for many years of my life I was tied to this cycle - with the fourth week always the worst. I've toyed with the idea of rewriting it - ten years on and with a lot less anger and much more compassion inside me, I kind of think it might be a slightly different beast, except for certain parts of it, which can't ever change, however much I mellow with old age.

For a quarter of my working life I worked in comics, made a living from them and was awarded an honour for doing it. I know bugger all about them now, because by 2004 and despite bringing out an award-winning magazine, I hated them with several passions and a few borrowed ones. Comics were my anathema and regardless of the many friends I still have associated with them, I've had far too many bad experiences for me to view comics as anything but an abusive relationship and one I'm unbelievably happy to be away from.

The thing is it's like an addiction, like many hobbies, once you get into it you go one of two ways - back out of it again or into it for life; whether you hide away from it or not there will always be something that grabs your attention. When comics get mentioned on TV or the radio my ears prick up and I listen; sometimes I turn off very quickly, but other times I can feel the desire to comment rising in me like some appropriate metaphor for something. 

It's sometimes a happy place. Comics have given me a shitload of enjoyment and obsession for 50 years of my life, give or take a couple of barren years. Whether it's comics or TV or the last 20 years of superhero cinema, essentially I'm still a bit of a nerd. So when I saw this article in The Guardian recently ranking the ten funniest comics - the opinion of the writer, obviously - and I didn't recognise one of them I felt compelled to do something. I gathered that most of the comics listed were of the last 20 years or so and extremely indie - the kind of thing that sells more in a book shop than it does in a comic shop. Reading the synopses and reviews, I was hard-pressed to see where the word 'comedy' featured in some and while every one of them might be comedic genius there was this lack of realisation from the author that funny comics is how the entire comics thing pretty much started and there have been some very funny comics over the last 60 years, a few published by major publishers. I felt the writer of the piece probably thought comics started in 2000 and that most comics are for kids.

It got me thinking about something. I couldn't put together my top 10 funny comics because while I enjoyed them I wasn't a fan of them by any stretch of the imagination - I like comical comics, but as a break from the more overwrought kind. Oddly enough, some of the remaining comics in my collection are humorous/funny, but that's more to do with them being good rather than funny. I then realised that my tiny collection of comics was in fact, pretty much, my top ten favourite comics. There are a couple of things on my list which I kind of wish I'd kept but, who knows, maybe one day I'll hunt down collected trade paperbacks of them or maybe even treat myself to the comics (but that's unlikely if they're more than 10p).

This is a list of things which might be my favourites, but are also books which I would recommend to others as one of the reasons all comics should be valued as highly as other genres of the arts. In no specific order until the end three.

* If there was a set of comics I'd wished I'd kept hold of when I sold most of everything I had about 20 years ago, it would probably be Daredevil #250 thru #282 (excluding #264). It was the Ann Nocenti and John Romita Jr run on the comic and not, as some would expect, any of the Frank Miller spells. This covered a period between 1988 and 1990, when Marvel hit a rich vein of quality comics and this emerged as the cult book to throw your weight behind. The best was the opening 16-part story starting with issue #250 - Boom! - and culminating in one of the single greatest superhero comics of all time, #266 - A Beer With the Devil. The latter was one of a handful of comics I gave to superhero sceptics and it never failed to impress them. Without giving too much away, DD spends most of the first 15 issues getting his arse handed to him on a plate and then it culminates in a bar. It was unorthodox superhero storytelling at its finest and so much more... more believable than anything Miller got lauded for.

* One of the excellent things about the Marvel Cinematic Universe is how they've 'borrowed' heavily from the mind of Jim Starlin, one of the greatest talents to emerge from the 1970s. Most of the Thanos/Infinity Saga story comes from his original comics and the two major problems I have with these modern adaptations was the MCU's failure to somehow include Adam Warlock in the story, given how important he was to the entire cosmic storyline originally and the fact they didn't introduce us to the original Captain Marvel and subsequently this... The Death of Captain Marvel - an astounding work of brilliance for its time.
Spoiler warning: he dies of cancer and while there is an ensemble of heroes, villains and everything in-between, it is the fact this [original] Captain Marvel or Mar-Vell is fighting something that none of the greatest minds in the universe can defeat. It even has a brilliant cameo appearance by Thanos, who was Mar-Vell's main antagonist. Superheroes had never died forever until this happened and he still hadn't been resurrected when I stopped regularly reading comics in the early 2000s. 

[To be fair, I've re-read this since writing this and while it isn't as good as I remember it still conveys an incredibly powerful message - it doesn't matter who you are there are some things you can't defeat.]

* If I had to stick my neck out and name the creator who probably had the biggest effect on me in my formative years of comics reading, I could give you a shortlist, but the truth is it probably would be the aforementioned Jim Starlin. I loved his quirky art style which was dynamic but also cartoonish; his ideas were straight out of a LSD trip and he wasn't frightened to push the envelope in mainstream comics. Sometimes teenage me would just marvel at comics like Warlock, which I struggled to fully understand but I knew I was looking at comics that would regarded as future classics. [However, since writing this I have re-read all of the Warlock series by Starlin and have concluded that it's all a load of pretentious wank and probably why Starlin's run on the book would never make my top 100 let alone my top 10.]

I could probably pull out a dozen examples of Starlin's '70s brilliance, but very few surpass The Hulk & The Thing in The Big Change drawn by the legendary Bernie Wrightson. This would have made an excellent film as it stands. This is from a time when Ben Grimm and the dumb, slightly savage Hulk were often able to get along without trying to bash each other's brains in and Starlin takes them on a totally cosmic journey that seems to revolve around the Hulk's hunger. It has adorable laugh out loud moments, including the scene where they're fighting baddies for so long they all stop and sleep before carrying on. There is a lot of genuine Pythonesque humour in places and some very weird aliens. It's a 'graphic novel', one of Marvel's first (the very first was the entry above - The Death of Captain Marvel) and it probably costs a lot of money now.  [Checks Google: only about $25 for the first edition, so it doesn't cost a lot of money even now and reprints are as cheap as $5.95]

* Amazing Adventures #34. If ever there was a curiosity among my eclectic mix it's probably this. It's a Killraven: Warrior of the Worlds story - it works as a standalone, but actually it's part of an ongoing storyline - and it was called A Death in the Family. 

The reason this has always been a weird inclusion into my comics list was because I didn't really like the comic, despite it having a Class A creative team, this was always one of the last in my stack of monthlies that I got around to reading and sometimes I didn't even bother. Like the aforementioned Daredevil story 'A Beer With the Devil' it had a profound effect on me. I only read it because we were at a family wedding and I was bored, went to a local shop, bought a handful of Marvel comics and read it while adults partied.

Released in late 1975 (with a Jan 76 cover date) and with the creative team of Don McGregor and P. Craig Russell, this story was set in 2019 and was the first time I'd seen an actual death in a comic. Like The Death of Captain Marvel there was a finality about this issue as two members of the supporting cast bite the big one and despite destroying their killer it is the most hollow and bitter of victories as Killraven realises the futility of the task ahead of him. It has the added value of you not really needing to know much about the story or the characters as there's an adequate recap at the beginning. It's just an extremely powerful, poignant and unforgiving story.

* Also in 1975 and from Marvel's un-coded black and white magazine line was one of best single stories I ever read. Written by my friend Tony Isabella and drawn by the late great George Perez with inks by Rico Rival, War Toy was the ultimate anti-war story. 

Given that Terminator came out less than a decade later, I always thought this would have made the perfect film, except it would probably flop dismally because it has the most tragic unhappy ending I can remember in any form of literature - the despair and hopelessness conveyed was enormous for my 13 year old self. The magazine is Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction #2 - an anthology title and none of the other stories are that good, but War Toy will always stick with me.

* Steve Moncuse's The Fish Police - or more specifically Fish Police: Hairballs - the recoloured introductory trade paperback/graphic novel collection of the first four issues of the self-published eponymous title has dated worse than I would have hoped, but is still a sharp, satirical load of surreal nonsense as it was when it first appeared.

Essentially a comedy about a real-life detective who wakes up in a world that has changed into the underwater domain of talking fish and despite the garish colours it's about as noir as you could imagine. It's reverential, has sublime in-jokes, makes reference to the impossibility and improbability of the situation and helped usher in a new era of funny comic books that weren't just disposable once you'd read them.

The comics eventually became far to overblown and wrapped up in its own in-joke, mainly because Moncuse appeared to change the intent of the story to try and improve sales. Then I had to watch Marvel initially buy the reprint rights and then turn it into a homogenised children's animated series that lost all the wit and verve that brought the comic to these people's attentions in the first place. A tragic end after a truly dazzling start. 

A special mention for the Fish Police Special which followed the reissued graphic novel and featured two of the funniest jokes the series ever had; the first involves stairs and why fish would need them and the second involves beer and how one drinks it when underwater...

* The Tale of One Bad Rat by Bryan Talbot is something quite extraordinary. I remember when it came out; very few people expected it to be as successful as it was, despite the fact that most people saw the sheer brilliance in this allegorical tale on child abuse and dealing with the consequences.

I'm surprised it has never been adapted for film or TV, but, then again, I can totally understand why, it isn't a subject that is often dealt with by the arts. It is one of the earliest forms of magic realism graphic novel (although it was actually four comics collected together) and probably single-handedly furthered the cause of comics as a serious medium than anything prior to it. Bryan is an old friend of mine and this book allowed him to become one of the UK's greatest comics creators.

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An aside - what didn't make this list? Crisis on Infinite Earths, The Rocketeer by Dave Stevens, Peter David's run on The Incredible Hulk, The Griffin, Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson's 10 issues of Swamp Thing, and Coventry - the ill-fated three-issue series from Bill Willingham. Also 566 Frames which I published in the UK and a few others...

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Now, what I regard as my three favourite comics - one of the original 'graphic novels', a single-issue special and a weekly ongoing series which broke more ground than probably anything else...

* A Contract With God by Will Eisner or to give it its proper title - A Contract With God and Other Tenement Stories - was one of the first non-superhero [comic] books I ever bought and I've never been completely sure why I did it - maybe to feel as though I fitted in with my more high-profile comics friends? Who can say?
First published in 1978 - of which my copy is the same one I bought all those years ago - it represented many things and highlighted one major factor in the grand scheme of comics: I was into the likes of Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and other Silver Age A list comicbook legends and they were like gods to me and many of my peer group, but Will Eisner was AAA List; he was up there with a select few creators who seemed to understand comics long before it was fashionable to do so.

Lest we forget, Eisner also invented The Spirit a kind of pulp action hero who changed the way 'detective comics' were done and inspired a new generation of artists who felt the panels per page edict was worth breaking and Eisner did so in a way that other, trendier artists of the 1970s would initially get the credit for.

A Contract With God is a bleak, realistic and risqué collection of stories from New York's tenement side, depicting a desperate USA caught in the thrall of a depression and war. It is groundbreaking because it was such a risky thing to put out at a time when independent comics and books had little way of being seen outside of a few specialist retailers and traders.

I remember buying it and thinking it was one of the most poignant and distressing bunch of stories I'd ever read and I often went back to it because it had such a profound effect. There were two follow ups, but I never bought them, mainly because the first collection was nigh on perfect. 

* Gumby's Winter Fun Special is probably the funniest thing I've ever read and I've read plenty of things that have made me Laugh Out Loud. I initially bought it because of the artist, a guy called Art Adams, who had spent a few years drawing the X-Men and all kinds of monsters; he was making a name for himself as one of the rising stars of the comics. I bought it because it looked pretty, it ended up making me chuckle like no other comic ever.

Not only does it look exquisite, it reads like the surreal drug-induced nightmare of a young child given far too much cheese before bed time and that really floats my boat. Apparently, I was a big fan of Gumby (Art Clokey's version) back in the 1960s, but I can't really remember that, apart from the fact that I was familiar with the lead characters - Gumby and Pokey. Perhaps this was why I embraced this so heartily, because it reignited that sense of wonder I had when I first discovered any form of comic book. 

This is a simple tale of Santa Claus versus the Devil with the little gum boy and his horse friend getting in the way and is literally packed to the rafters with in-jokes, innuendo, double entendres and all the things that made The Simpsons such a funny TV show for many years - lots of different levels...

There was also a Gumby's Summer Fun but it was never quite as mad, funny or stunning to look at; it's good and in some worlds it might have made my list, but it pales into insignificance with this classic gem from a now defunct comicbook publisher.

And at the top of my list...

* I find it quite ironic that someone who grew out of British comics very quickly would end up thinking the best comic of all time was serialised in an array of British Marvel comics, but Captain Britain: The Jasper's Warp is the probably the greatest superhero story ever told..

When the UK's answer to Captain America first appeared it was difficult to imagine that nearly 10 years down the line from Chris Claremont and Herb Trimpe's original strips that it would go down the darkest, scariest and altogether weirdest paths any comic has ever taken. Brian Braddock - the man behind the mask and sceptre - wasn't exactly a brilliant addition to Marvel's pantheon of heroes, in fact by the time his original run ended, he'd moved across a number of Marvel weekly titles in the UK and was being written and drawn by two Americans, Gary Friedrich and John Buscema who probably knew very little about the UK when they came on board and people suggested it simply became Captain America with a Dick Van Dyke accent and they weren't far wrong. Ending the comic was a blessed release.

Then in the early 1980s Marvel UK decided to bring the character back, this time as a supporting character in a Black Knight story and out of costume for much of it. By 1984, he spun out of that into his new adventures, initially written by Dave Thorpe (from Leicester) and drawn by upcoming British artist Alan Davis (from Corby). However, it was clear after a couple of weeks that the revamp looked okay but didn't really have any coherent story to back it up, so editor Paul Neary approached another burgeoning Brit, Alan Moore, and asked him to take over from Thorpe and do something radical with the character. 

That's exactly what happened... Over the next couple of years, Moore and Davis introduced new characters and rebuilt Braddock's origin tying it back into Arthurian legend more so than ever before and making him a pawn of Merlin - who was actually a cosmic being of immense power. Moore took Thorpe's original ideas and ran with them, chucking some ideas out as quickly as he could and introducing a mythos that would soon be the basis of what is now Marvel's [MCU] Multiverse.

Merlin sends Captain Britain and his sidekick Jackdaw to an alternative earth, to witness the start of The Jasper's Warp - something so deadly it would eventually cross the entire multiverse. The story really kicked in towards the end of the first part when we are treated to almost an entire week's instalment introducing a new bunch of alternative Earth's heroes  who then all die at the hand of possibly the greatest antagonist ever created in comics - the Fury. This new villain, a kind of alternate Earth Sentinel but biomechanical rather than robotic is eventually turned on Brian and ultimately kills him.

Merlin resurrects Braddock again - which was becoming something of a habit for the hero, this being his third - and he returns to Braddock Manor and it, in turn, becomes the de facto HQ for survivors of the Jasper's Warp - which had now infiltrated the Marvel universe.

The strip did a good job (in the limited space it had) of furthering the idea that the earth of Captain Britain was one of many earths and contained many incarnations of the Captain - who were all Merlin's self-appointed protectors of the multiverse - and how everything was similar but also very different. However, it didn't matter how many protectors there were the Jasper's Warp was now spreading and there is a suggestion - but only in the UK comic - that all of Earth's heroes may have fallen.

Mad Jim Jaspers who in another reality creates the Fury ends up being defeated by his own creation and Brian fails to beat this unstoppable foe and looks like he is about to die again; that's when alternative Earth's Captain UK steps up to the plate and... wow does she step up - it's a couple of pages of vicious destruction from a woman haunted and crushed by the events in her reality. It ends in a way that even though 'we' won, the damage inflicted on reality was clear to see and the main characters playing this out finished the story considerably more broken than they started it.

I could wax lyrically about this story for pages and pages; it ticks every single box you can conceive and you have to remember, this was delivered in 7 page chunks, weekly and at least a page of it was taken up with recaps, yet we met new heroes and villains, dubious characters with their own agendas, omnipotent organisations, double-crossing, death and taxes. An incredible cosmic landscape was created and mapped out and given 'life' and all in much less time than comics usually allowed for, even then. 

However, reading it again to write this, it suffers from plot devices - probably a necessity to try and tie the old with the new and there's a haphazard approach to the timeline, which might be explained but doesn't really reflect how we go from a disparate band of heroes in Braddock Manor to Armageddon. I also hypothesised a while back about how this story would have been a far better 'film'  to have made to kick off the entire multiverse saga, I've since changed my mind, not because of the story - which IMHO is incomparable - but more because of Disney and their reluctance to be extreme. For a start, the entire story is so very dark, at times extremely violent, and it's crammed full of characters who really won't ever be regulars in the grand scheme of all things MCU (except maybe Betsy Braddock) and they aren't following the same path in terms of direction. It would make a brilliant film all the same.

There have been a couple of reprints collecting all the comics together, either of those will give you the entire story from start to end and considering when it was written, how fabulous it looks and how it hasn't really dated as much as you'd expect, you might start to understand why I think this is the greatest [superhero] comic [series] ever produced. I don't think anything has rivalled it and I don't it will ever be bettered. It's a shame because I actually think Alan Moore is a bit of a prick.

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A personal aside - I've re-read and re-written large parts of this because like so many of my other comic book blogs and scribblings it was full of awful grammar and English. Now, I'm not suggesting my other blogs are Shakespearean but I do seem to lose the ability to write coherently when I write about comics. I'd like to think it's a psychological throwback to when I worked for that old worthless cunt who now lives in Brighton, who spent so much time bullying me over the smallest most insignificant mistakes that whenever I write about comics now I revert to this nervous sack of shit frightened to allow my ability to shine because I know he'd find fault in it. I really hope I outlive him, because going to Brighton to piss on his grave would be one reason I'd gladly go back to England.