Of all the mythical creatures to have stalked our nightmares over the past few thousand years, witches are perhaps the most troubling. Orcs, ogres and goblins are scary, if you like that sort of thing, but witches are the only ones to have stepped out of our imaginations and into the real world. An idea taken … Continue reading
As he workedt on his Luther Arkwright epic, Bryan Talbot wasn’t the only one conducting comic book experiments with steampunk. Over at 2000 AD (home of Judge Dredd) the daddy of modern British comics Pat Mills had begun a strip called Nemesis the Warlock, a collaboration with artist Kev O’Neill. It was an experiment in … Continue reading
Written between 1978 and 1989 Luther Arkwright can lay claim to being one of the very first, fully realised Steampunk novels. The retro futurist genre can be seen everywhere nowadays, in children’s books like Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines books and comic book franchises like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but Talbot rarely receives much credit … Continue reading
Reading it again today I can see exactly what attracted me to this story. Tintin drags the increasingly eccentric Captain Haddock out of his family home on a mission down the Amazon and up the Peruvian Andes, where he hopes to to lift the Inca’s curse. Prisoners of the Sun is the perfect Tintin adventure, with a string of amazing action sequences and dramatic set pieces. Continue reading
I sometimes ask my children when they sit reading the Beano of a Saturday morning, faces as straight as if they were contemplating the FTSE 100, whether they find the venerable comic funny? ‘Oh yes,’ they reply in all seriousness, ‘very funny.’ Yet no laughs are ever forthcoming. Keen to feed their interest in this … Continue reading
It all started in 1986. Having finally outgrown the Beano, tired of game books and read all the scant titles available for teenagers, my eye was caught by something remarkable at the newsagents. ‘Zip it creep,’ said a woman who looked like Debbie Harry surrounded by hell’s own army, with her gun aimed right at … Continue reading
It’s been twenty years since Philip Pullman published Northern Lights, the first part of the His Dark Materials trilogy. Since then the books have become classics and are responsible for kickstarting the current boom in children’s publishing. Northern Lights has also spawned a movie adaptation, stage play and a two further novellas set in the … Continue reading
Christmas and comic book sci-fi don’t always go together that well. It’s there at the kitschier ends of the genre – ‘Happy Christmas Superdog. And thank you Wonder Woman, you’ve done a neat job turning my Fortress of Solitude into a winter wonderland.’ Or ‘Holy immaculate conception Batman.’ That sort of thing. There’s one notable … Continue reading
One of the current Batman storylines has seen the Dark Knight travelling the world in search of his son’s corpse. The former Robin, Damian Wayne has been murdered by his clone brother and dug up by his evil grandfather and is being dunked in every life restoring Lazarus pit from Gotham to Timbuktu. But a … Continue reading
‘Tell me something, are you one of those people who is prevented from doing great art because they draw comic strips?’ In 1978 Tove Jansson published a short story called The Cartoonist. It deals with a young artist who gets a job at a newspaper drawing a long running comic strip about a round, blue … Continue reading
In 2007 Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill published The Black Dossier, the third volume in their comic book series ‘The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen‘. Spanning an alternative 20th Century the League are a group of government agents based on characters from Victorian genre fiction. In The Black Dossier the league square up to a very unreconstructed spy called ‘Jimmy Bond’. But they’re aided by an even more controversial figure. Continue reading
Now I love the old superheroes as much as the next nerd, with their utility belts, S&M gear and fascistic tendencies. But with Bats and many of his super friends now in their eighth decade isn’t it time for what Entertainment Weekly would call ‘A new generation of superhero’, or even better a ‘new science … Continue reading
I’ve been properly obsessed with Pippi Longstocking since the first volume of comic book adaptations was released last year. First produced for the Swedish children’s magazine Humpty Dumpty by the original creative team Astrid Lindgren and Ingrid Vang Nyman in the late 50s, it’s the first time they’ve appeared in English. As I was counting … Continue reading
Before Watchmen came The Ballad of Halo Jones, Alan Moore’s earlier attempt at subverting the comic book action template. It contained everything that was unlikely to appeal to the average reader of its home 2000AD. It was about girls, shopping, isolation and mourning, but worst of all featured virtually no violence. Halo is not an … Continue reading
The trouble with Robin is that he’s dead. If you’d bothered to read part one of my history of Batman’s perky teenage pal then you’d already know that this is nothing new. Back in the 1980s DC comics held a phone vote to decide whether troublesome Jason Todd (Robin #2) should die at the hands … Continue reading
This graphic memoir (comic book to you and I) begins this very day, February 2nd – James Joyce’s birthday. It’s the jumping off point for a narrative that weaves the young lives of Mary Talbot and Lucia, daughter of James Joyce. The two were born generations apart, but had in common their ‘cold, mad, feery fathers’ – Mary’s dad James had been a Joycean scholar. Continue reading
Part one of the troubled and painfully prolonged adolescence of the Boy Wonder. The past 72 years haven’t been kind to Robin. During that time he’s made some terrible fashion choices and been dogged by persistent rumours over his sexuality. He became a girl for a while. His parents keep getting murdered. He died, was … Continue reading
I’m not a big fan of the Christopher Nolan Batman films, they were just way too serious for my tastes. Heath Ledger’s amazing turn as the Joker aside, they missed what for me is the main attraction of Batman – his innate freakiness. Tim Burton got the character far better – and in fact Adam … Continue reading
First a warning: The latest comic book from Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill is definitely not for children. Unless you consider a story featuring an antichrist Harry Potter who keeps his wand hidden in his pants to be kiddie fare. And if you do, I’ll see you in family therapy. Welcome back The League of … Continue reading
