Comic Stuff...

I'm slowly wending my way back into the world of comics and, thanks to a very long train journey to and from Scotland, I finally got round to catching up with a few things I've not got round to digesting...

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns Parts I & II
The animated movies of the seminal Frank Miller comic books are, quite simply, pretty brilliant. They're incredibly faithful to the comics, the animation is wonderfully done and the voice artists, such as Pete Weller as Bruce Wayne/Batman and Michael Emerson as Joker, are excellent. Much as I enjoyed the flawed epic that was the most recent Batman film trilogy, directed by Christopher Nolan, the amalgamated film stories weren't a patch on these animated versions of the Miller tales. DC superhero movies generally suck but these two animated films were great. 

Moon Knight 
I'm a long-term fan of comic and novella writer Warren Ellis, and I'm loving the opening five comic books in this new series, with Declan Shalvey and Jordie Bellaire doing the artwork. So far, each book is a separate, self-contained tale and it's taking a 'B' list Marvel version of Batman as both superhero and detective and giving him real depth and a genuine sense of intrigue. Loving it. 

The Boys 
I'm a very late convert to this Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson series of graphic novels about an of-the-books team whose job it is to police the superhero community. It's foul-mouthed, it's dirty and it rips into characters and teams from both the Marvel and the DC universes. If you liked Preacher, you'll love this.

London Comic Con 2014

I attended London Comic Con at Earls Court at the weekend with the Boy. It very much a nostalgia trip for me, offering the chance to spend some time with the Boy over a shared love of all things comic and superhero-based. The time with the Boy was lovely but the event itself was a bit chaotic. 

For a start, they'd shut the online box office more than two weeks before the event opened, so if you missed the ticket-buying window you had to queue on the day. And the queues were huge. I met the Boy at about 8am and we were in the queue for early-bird tickets, meaning entry before 11am about 10 minutes later. We got in at 10.15am.

But queues for pretty much anything were the order of the day. And as the place became more and more rammed in the main hall, you could barely stop at any of the stands as the mass of shambling people tended to move you along in their direction. 

The second hall with the creators was a more sedate affair, but the main hall housed the dealers and the talks and this was crazy. In short, it was too busy, too hot and and there were far too many people. It was mayhem. 

On the plus side, however, most of the people there were lovely. One bloke even gave us two spare tickets for free, which was good because I'd have been pretty furious if I'd have paid £15 per person to essentially get entrance into an over-busy marketplace. 

Some of the cos-play was also brilliant. There were many young and slender Harley Quinns looking demure in tight-fitting costumes, although my favourite Harley was the larger woman who obviously thought 'The fact I'm not a size 10 isn't going to stop me going for this!' There was also a very good Kingpin, plus a woman dressed as Tippi Hedren from The Birds with many attacking birds attached. 

I love most comic fans because they buy into the culture and the cosplay stuff is brilliant. Nowhere else would an overweight man dressed in a home-made X-wing fighter pilot suit be considered sane. But the likes of him, the large Harley and the Kingpin man were essentially demi-gods for the day. And rightly so. I salute them. And I salute all my geek brethren and brethrenesses. 

Of course, there were a few twats. But you get this everywhere. As the Boy stated in a  discussion about something else:
'If there's one thing I've learnt in my 23 years on this planet, it's that some times, some people are cunts.'

Wise words. My parental pride positively glowed...

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns...

I've been a big comics fan since the late 1970s and, while many of my comics-reading friends adored The Uncanny X-men, I was always drawn to a second-string character called Daredevil.

Fortunately in 1979 this title was taken over, first as an artist then as a writer-artist, by Frank Miller and he slowly transformed the character from a poor man's Spider-man into a part-hero and part-vigilante, who protected his patch of New York thanks to a martial arts background and a determined will to overcome anybody who threatened his Hell's Kitchen home or those he loved. 

Miller’s run on Daredevil featured assassins, crime lords, drug dealers and ancient martial arts warriors. The new characters he introduced were fascinating, such as assassin-for-hire Elektra, while his take on established characters like assassin-for-hire Bullseye and crime lord the Kingpin evolved them from slightly pantomime villains into truly frightening foes.

It was gritty noir story-telling at its best, which would later bear more fruit in one of Miller's other landmark titles, Sin City. 

But it was his run on Batman that truly established Miller as one of the premier forces in comics and his four-issue story The Dark Knight Returns, alongside Alan Moore's seminal The Watchmen, remain the two books that are always cited as changing the comics landscape for good. These were the books that helped the comics industry grow up.

So with all the excitement surrounding the concluding part of the Christopher Nolan Batman film trilogy, I decided I'd go back and reread the Miller Batman to see if it was still as exciting. And it utterly is. 

Set in a dystopian future where all superheroes have been outlawed, Bruce Wayne is introduced as a danger-seeking nutcase who longs to again don the cowl and tackle Gotham’s increasingly violent present.

And when old foes come to the fore, so does the Batman.

But times have changed and his return prompts a debate and he’s branded an outlaw, even though he’s sorting out the mess the police force can’t. And when the outlaw then becomes a political liability, he eventually faces a final battle with Superman, now a stooge employed by the government and sent on missions by an increasingly deranged Ronald Reagan.

The Dark Knight Returns is, quite simply, a superior piece of comics writing and art and no potted summary can adequately summarise the scope of its ideas on personal and public freedoms, crime and punishment, obsession, global and local politics, and justice.

It’s an utterly stunning piece of work and, alongside Love In The Time Of Cholera and 100 Years Of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and King Lear by Shakespeare, it remains one of the few things I go back to and reread every decade or so.

And, like those literary masterpieces, it also never disappoints. 

Kapow!

Today I enjoyed a day out with the Boy at Kapow! Comic Convention.

I was a major comics geek through my pre-teens to mid-teens and then again in my late twenties to mid-thirties. And this was a love that was passed on to and encouraged in the Boy. Consequently some of our regular bonding sessions (insert rude but slightly sick incest gag in here) involved trips to London to tour the comic shops.

So the fact the two of us were going here after a few years away from this sort of shenanigans was part deja vu and part I-may-be-getting-back-into-this-again. I've always fancied a go at comic writing and I certainly know enough about the medium to give it a good go.

We had a fab day and the Boy guided me around, which was quite cool.

I also saw two very good panel discussions/QandA affairs. The first was with some of the head honchos from Marvel who talked about their own experiences of getting into the comics industry. The main advice was: make your own opportunities because talent and persistence equals success.

The second was with Warren Ellis, one of my favourite writers of the past two decades. He sounded quite disillusioned with the whole comics industry, citing the fact it seems pretty much in thrall to the movie industry. One story he told about this concerned a mini series I bought about Nick Fury.

The series essentially pitted old spy and Cold War warhouse Fury against the new bright young things running Shield who viewed him as something of an anachronism, a relic of a past era when wars were fought with guns and not hi-tech spyware and surgical strikes. Then a banana republic in South-East Asia erupts and Fury is needed. The series was very good and had a lot to say about global politics and was refreshingly politically incorrect in its world view. It was a very good comic book that was well written and beautifully drawn.

But Warren Ellis said this series essentially got one established and very good comics editor the sack because it affected a deal about a Nick Fury movie linked to George Clooney. A case of the movie tail now wagging the comics dog if ever there was one.

Two artists I saw who also really impressed me doing sketches for fans were Craig Wilson and Becky Cloonan. Both were really nice with people and made time for everyone who came to their tables. I'll certainly buy their work and give it a chance in the future on the back of seeing them in action.

A very good day with the Boy. And I even bought a few more things to read. Which is good if I'm going to write one this year...