I, Robot - part 5: Catch That Rabbit

What makes these stories such brilliant science fiction is not so much the speculative elements, but the way the protagonists approach the problems in their path. Each story establishes a limited setting to contain all the elements of the plot. This ensures that the central problem is very tightly focused, something inherent in the characters (usually the robot) and the setting itself – Mercury, a space station orbiting the sun, a mining station on an asteroid.

It also eliminates ‘call the cavalry’ solutions and allows Asimov to limit the tools that Powell and Donovan (it’s them again) can bring to bear on the problem. It mostly comes down to their powers of deduction and rational approach and I think this is one of the big reasons these stories appeal most to sci fi fans in their deepest pubescence.

Harry Harrison is dead!



 I have always considered The Stainless Steel Rat as the book that moved me from kiddy fair to 'grown-up' books when I read it 10 years old. It was a revelation to me in its witty approach and amoral universe. To Asimov, Bradbury, Moorcock, Dick and beyond, it all started with Slippery Jim Di Griz.

The voice of Harrison's fiction - in particular his more comical output - and the tight conceptual frameworks that he works within - like in Deathword or The Captive Universe - have been huge influences on my own writing. Panoptica definitely reflects that same snide, uncommitted satirical voice that's inclined to believe that everyone's an idiot.

A couple of years afterwards I wrote a letter to 2000AD (my one and only time) suggesting they could adapt classic sci fi novels, and suggesting The Stainless Steel Rat. Six or eight months later, guess what? I've never been able to find out if there was a connection between my letter and this adaptation (let's face it, probably not), but I flatter myself that I had a small hand in this.

I had the great good fortune to meet the great man at a party for (IIRC) Gollancz sometime at the end of the 90s, where I was intorduced by (name drop name drop!) Kim Newman. I burbled about the huge influence he had on me and the role he played in my development as a reader and writer. He was kind enough to listen benevolently, chat amiable and then wish me well.

He left some wonderful, timeless books and had a good long life, so I suppose we shouldn't be too sad. We only get one life and it's up to us to use it for the bast. Harry Harrison did that. I'll be raising a glass to him tonight.

Posts of Note!

I thought it might be interesting to take a look at the stats generated by hits here. I don't know why I thought that, and even as I type those words I wonder at the wasted time that has gone into this!

Still if there were blog regulators they would make you file an annual report like this one, and so I am getting in ahead of the New World Order crypto-fascists before they shut me down. Take a look if you are a connoisseur of boring crap about me.

You can read it right here on the Posts of Note page.

The pile, she grows.

Something I try and avoid is piling up too many books in the "too read" pile. I am basically a childish type, who bristles under the yoke of authority: that's why I never got on with the idea of canon - regardless of any politically tinged rhetoric about dead white men and critical shibboleths, it's more of a matter of "fuck you, I won't do what you tell me".

With The Pile, the "you" in that statement becomes me. I become my own oppressor! How ironic!

So, here's the pile, as it stands:

The problem is that there are just too many books I want to read and they are too readily available. Everywhere I go I seem to be falling over good books begging to be acquired! Where do they all come from? Well, for some classic "boring crap about me", hit the link!

2000AD Part Three: Savage and Defoe

I keep saying this about different people, but if there's one guy who really embodies the values of 2000AD, it's Pat Mills. He was, of course, one of the motive forces behind establishing the title back in the seventies, and over the years he's never been far away. You could say the same about John Wagner and Alan grant, of course, who were similarly involved in 2000AD's earliest days, but it seems to me that no one quite expresses the conflicting impulses of 2000AD quite like Mr Mills.

While I've been reading the reprint volumes (you can find the reviews by clicking the 2000AD tag, an Harlem Heroes is awaiting review, NB) I think it's his stories that I have – so far – enjoyed the most. I don't think I'll be going back for more Robo-Hunter or Rogue Trooper, but I am hungry to get to ABC Warriors and to read more Nemesis. His stories have a restlessness about them, an impatience that expresses itself in a wilful, almost destructive desire to make us face up to the darkness that the stories are built on. It's right there at the start of Dredd (and Mills wrote a lot of the early classic strips, including the entirety of the Cursed Earth series, which contains a lot of intriguing morality plays), and in Ro-Busters, which starts as an amusing and enjoyable Thunderbirds-style adventure story and develops to combine elements of animal cruelty (via some very explicit references to Black Beauty) and – more obviously – slavery. It's almost as if Mills can't bring himself to write this stuff any more, as if he feels this massive moral obligation to a bunch of comedy boys' comic robots, to take them seriously and address their concerns.

2000AD Part 2: Strontium Dog and Judge Dredd

Having discussed my personal history with 2000AD in part 1, let's take a look the most recent progs in my possession, progs 1689 to 1702.

That's 13 progs, three-month's worth. It's amazing how quickly they pile up! I only make it to the comics shop once a month or so (Gosh in London, by the way, and consider this a plug for the friendliest friendly comics shop in London) and so I've been reading them in a slightly different way to how I read it in the past. Instead of three or four page bites, I've been reading the stories in longer stretches. Some of them, I've been hoarding up and reading all in one go, and some of them I've gone through and re-read again for the purposes of this review.
 
This is more like how I've been reading the reprint volumes I've been reviewing than how I used to read progs in the old days, and it's thrown up a few contrasts between then and now, but I'm probably going to hold on to these until the end of the series. Howzabout that then, suspense fans? In the meantime, though I'm going to look at each story in some detail (some more than others), starting with two of 2000AD's most enduring characters, Judge Dredd and Johnny Alpha.

2000AD Part 1: I Remember the Good Old Days

It must have been the summer of 1977 to 1978. This is New Zealand, of course, where summer straddles the New Year, and it was probably after Christmas, so that means 1978. I remember particularly because we were on holiday around the North Island, one of those touring holidays we used to go on, all packed into Dad's old Fiat 128, Mum riding shot gun, three in the back and one lucky child in the coveted space in the boot lounging on duvets (don't worry, it was a hatch back). No seat belts, no car seats, Dad smoking like a chimney the whole time – this was the 70s, and life, among other things, was cheap.

I remember the day itself very well. We were staying in a motel, somewhere in Rotorua, somewhere far from the centre. It was a blazing hot, sunny day, that intense piercing sun you get in New Zealand that you can feel cooking your skin through your t-shirt. I don't remember the circumstances exactly, but all of us got a few coins to spend at the local shop. I don't remember what my brothers and sisters bought, but I bought a comic.

Rogue Trooper: Tales of Nu Earth 01

Rogue in action - brilliant work from Dave Gibbons.



War was a staple of boys' comics when I was growing up. In those days, I guess some of the older guys working on the comics could well have actually fought in the war. Certainly, guys of our Dad's generation were steeped in WW2, having grown up with it as a background to their own childhood. I guess the comics had to pass muster with the parents as well as the kids, so this stuff still sold. Even so, many of my contemporaries, not to mention my own older brothers, were intensely interested in World War 2, and all those Airfix kits and 1/32 scale model soldiers were a huge part of my childhood.

 In the dark days before 2000AD, when my brothers were reading comics like Valiant and Hotspur, and later Commando comics, WW2 stories were really common. While I was kind of interested in the violent action and tales of heroism, I found the historical context pretty boring. I'd be looking for the space or futuristic stories, but they were few and far between. That's why I fell on 2000AD with such enthusiasm as a kid: it seemed to be a comic made just for me, with all the boring crap cut out and just the futuristic and space strips.

Mark Millar's CLiNT

Sometimes I hate being a man. It seems churlish to complain too much, of course: being a straight white man in the west is pretty much like winning the birth lottery and I have done pretty well by it, despite being lazy, stupid, ugly and unfriendly. I'm not conflicted by it, I'm cool with having a penis and a beard and a beer belly and all that, and I manage the psychic balancing act of having deep respect and admiration for my female friends and colleagues while maintaining an appreciation of a fine set of tits without too much inner strife.

No, the one big downside of being a man is other men. Other men are, by and large, a pack of colossal wankers. It's been pretty clear to me since I was old enough to notice that 99% of men are stupid, close-minded bullies, with narrow interests and little of interest to say. In the interests of fairness, it's worth pointing out that I don't necessarily have a lot of respect for most women either - I'm an equal opportunity misanthrope in most regards - but if you want to find the source of most everything that's toxic and horrible in western culture, you just have to take a look at men's magazines.

Robo-Hunter: The Droid Files Vol 1

Robo Hunter is another series I remember well from when I was a kid. I knew Ian Gibson's art from some early Judge Dredd stories (I think he did the Mutie the Pig/Rico stories, which were the first Dredd stories I ever read) and this was the first time I'd seen him in full flight. Just as Ezquerra – in my eyes – “owned” Strontium Dog, Ian Gibson seemed to me to “own” Robo Hunter. I see now that the strip was written by “T B Grover”, being a nom de plume for John Wagner and Alan Grant, with Grant and Wagner working occasionally alone, nut for me it was entirely Ian Gibson's strip.

This has a much lighter tone than the series I've reviewed here so far. The others I've reviewed here have taken an at least partly serious look at some of the thematic implications of their settings. Ro-Busters addresses issues of slavery, Nemesis and Strontium Dog both address issues surrounding racism and prejudice, albeit in the context of space wizards and inter-stellar bounty hunters, respectively. Robo Hunter also has a satirical message, but the whole thing is treated without the gravity and pathos that you occasionally get in the other series and played strictly - and brilliantly - for laughs.

READ MORE AFTER THE JUMP!

Back soon!

Well, August is nearly over and the summer holidays draw to a close. Writing time has been very disrupted for me, thanks to various holidays and summer events eating into to my time. Just to complicate things, after a week away I discover my desktop has mysteriously given up the ghost. So I've had to dust off the spare laptop and rely on that, wonky keyboard and all.

I've also wasted a good proportion of the day trying to get the old desktop working, and thus didn't get done get half of what I wanted to do today, including much needed updates here. I've had a pretty frustrating couple of months, productivity wise, and that's why I took this official break, to try and catch up with all the chores and re-focus what I wanted to do... God, it never frigging ends does it!

Ah well, I still plan to get cracking again in the beginning of September and there's all sorts of treats ahead, assuming I can get them out of the hard drive of my old PC. I've got a review of Robo Hunter Vol 1 coming up as part of my series of retro-reviews of 2000AD, plus I've started buying new progs again and I'll be casting my world-weary eye over them.

Book-related OCD is satisfied!

I've been busy buying and reading books, and you can expect reviews soon. My formal review of The Quantum Thief is live on the Zone, so you can check that out, and I may or may not provide some further commentary. There's more I wanted to say about the hype surrounding this one that didn't fit in the review (and I think it's unfair to criticise the book based on my dislike of hype), but is increasingly relevant, I think, in today's hyped up world.

I've also found a cool, second hand bookshop while I was away (in Much Wenlock) and will have a couple of reviews of the obscure treasures i found there. One treasure was a Coronet edition of The Brave Free Men by Jack Vance, to match with the vols one and two of the Durdane series I already owned. I can now chuck away the ugly Ballantine edition I've had to make do with  up to now and have lovely matching spines on the book shelf. Hooray!

So, come on back on 1 September when Pointless Philosophical Asides will ride out of the wildnerness and back into action... if the wobbly internet connection on this shitty laptop will allow. Grrr!

The Complete Nemesis the Warlock Volume 1: Books 1-4

Credo!

 The big questions for a long-time 2000AD fan are this: when did 2000AD change, and what did it change from and to?

I think it's clear that it started out as a fairly traditional boys comics, updated for the post-sixties era, taking in some of the creative lessons learned from Action and giving them a sci fi twist. Early thrills were pretty much boys' comics staples – Invasion! and M.A.C.H. One were old fashioned tough guys; Flesh was a twist on the exotic jungle great white hunter story, with Old One Eye at its heart as a kind of animal anti-hero like in those Jack London novels; Harlem Heroes was a sports strip; and Dan Dare was a very clear indication that they were aiming for that core “boy” audience, probably with an average age of about twelve and a long tail going back to six year olds and petering out quickly after about fourteen.

Judge Dredd – which only began in prog 2, remember! - was an early indication of the direction the comic would take, with social satire and black humour similar to the types of sci fi movies we saw in the late sixties and early seventies – Silent Running, Logan's Run and especially the triumvirate of Charlton Heston apocalypse movies, Planet of the Apes, The Omega Man and Soylent Green. This was definitely something new in a boys comic – I'd seen the space adventure comics that had been brought out by the Commando comics people, for example, and they were much more trad space adventures than really engaged sci fi in the way of Judge Dredd.

Well, maybe we'll get to Dredd one day, but today I want to take a look at a story that signalled a similarly profound break from boys' comics that had gone before and was one of the clearest antecedents for the way the comic is today, Nemesis the Warlock.

Strontium Dog: Search/Destory Agency Files Vol 01

It's one of those things that I just accept that 2000AD isn't what it was. Well, nothing is, is it? But in 2000AD's case, the feeling is particularly acute because what it was was so special. It's hard to articulate fully what 2000AD meant to those of us that found it at the right time, I guess the aphoristic “Golden Age” of science fiction, which is to say about the age of 12.

The first issue I remember buying was prog twenty-nine or thirty, picked up one summer holiday in Rotorua. It was immediately obvious to me that this was something special. I was already keen on comics, and had read plenty of Superman and Marvel stuff, but British comics had never really appealed to me before – too much football and World War 2, two topics that I found utterly boring. Not only was 2000AD not like that, it wasn't like the Marvel or Superman comics either. It just didn't look like the stiff muscle men I was used to, and the jolly good chaps of Battle or the silly cartoons of Beano or Whizzer & Chips where nothing like this.

You can argue about which artist is most responsible for this, but one of the top contenders has got to be Carlos Ezquerra. He did, after all design Judge Dredd and the look of his world, which have probably done more than anything to sketch out the 2000AD territory. However, I think that just as influential as his work on Judge Dredd is one of 2000AD's other great thrills, Strontium Dog.

Johnny Alpha: Strontium Dog

Fungus the Bogeyman

While thinking about something else entirely, I happened across this interesting academic article about Fungus the Bogeyman from the Australian Journal of Comedy (hilarious wisecracks on a post-card to the usual address, please).

Fungus the Bogeyman is probably the book I remember most fondly from my childhood. I got for my eleventh or twelfth birthday, having seen it in a bookshop and known immediately that I had to have it. I think I was already familiar with Brigg's witty Father Christmas books, and so was primed to love this flowering of his deliciously subversive sense of humour.

It still resonates with me, thirty years later and I still find Fungus's search for meaning incredibly moving. As Andrew Casson says here:

"In its highly inventive and disrespectful way, it is one of the few books that takes children seriously by refusing to accept the conventional image of the child, by highlighting with its gentle satire our most strange society, and by treating the most serious issues of tolerance and, ultimately, the meaning of life with the humour they deserve and need if they are to be taken seriously."

Briggs's work fit precisely in the same irreverent space as 2000AD, which was then just entering its classic period. Interestingly, I remember catching an arts documentary about him in the 80s which showed him working with some of his art school students, discussing pieces for an exhibition: it was Brett Ewins!

Less happily, it was turned into an utterly repulsive TV show in the 2000s. The problems are amply demonstrated by comparing the cover image above with this publicity still from the show:

Why the hell is that Bogey smiling!?!?

Here is another great link, an appreciation by illustrator Joanna Carey.

Grant Morrison on Batman and writing comics

For a long time I had a pretty ambivalent opinion of Grant Morrison. While I liked Zenith a lot, I felt that on the whole his influence on 2000AD led to a disastrous decline in quality (Big Dave, ffs!). I appreciated his work he on Doom Patrol and Animal Man, but I felt there was a lot of acting up in those books that was less to do with a commitment to a fictional vision than about freaking the nerdy comics norms. I thought that The Invisibles looked like pretentious crap (I only lasted a few issues before chucking it in).

Recently, however, I've been re-assessing him. I think it started with reading his Kid Eternity update for The Zone a few years back. I remember rolling my eyes at it when it came out and giving it a swerve, but reading it for the first time at a couple of decades remove, I was struck by what a solid piece of work it is. There was a still a bit "ooooh edgy!" going on, but to be honest that looks more prescient than wilfuly obnoxious now.

What really impressed me was his control of the fractured narrative - he'd broken it apart in a way that was a little hard to follow, but, with due attention paid, made rock-solid sense. He wasn't just showing off, he knew exactly what he was doing!

At about this time, I was getting back into supers comics after a period away from the genre and one day in the comic shop my kid asked for Batman comic. I ended up getting him one of the Morrison issues (it was the latest one out at the time - about 650, IIRC). I'm not really a fan of Batman as a character, but I read it and was really impressed by it. It was a cool and interesting story (ending in the revelation of Damien Wayne) and I checked the writer - yep, Grant Morrison.

Now, I'm not really big on the DC characters, for various reasons, but I've been following Morrison's work at DC every since. I thought 52 was fantastic and Final Crisis was genuinely brilliant. I bought up the Seven Soldiers trades and loved them to bits.

I've been reading his Batman regularly since the Batman RIP storyline offered a nice hopping on point, and his work on Batman & Robin is first-rate. It doesn't matter that I don't like Batman much, as Batman's not really what it's about - it's all pure Morrison mind mess and crazy super-hero fun.

This little puff piece on i09 makes a couple of interesting points about the Batman character, but also about Morrison's approach. I particularly liked this:

Comics can do a lot of things that movies can't do, and vice versa. It's a shame when so many comics are storyboard-style, low-budget pitches for movies. Let me see the weird stuff.

This is why Grant Morrison is a brilliant comics writer: he loves the medium and he understands it. That's all any writer really needs.

(NB: I thought this little critical piece on Morrison from i09 a couple of weeks back was also pretty interesting, but I don't have much to add.)

The Complete Ro-Busters

I rarely buy books new, and then hardly ever from a bricks and mortar bookshop, but sometimes need and opportunity coincide to such a degree that I find myself plonking my money down. When I saw The Complete Ro-Busters in Waterstones at Canary Wharf, I knew I was going to buy it, even if it took me a couple of days to convince myself to do it. Fifteen quid is not a small amount for a book, especially one I've already read (technically speaking), and so I can only conclude that the psychological impulses at work were particularly acute in this case.

I could try and pick them apart, but I'm pretty sure they're tied up with a mid-life crisis that's brewing or, perhaps, right now in full swing. After all mad people don't realise they're acting wierd, do they? It all seems totally normal at the time with careful rationales and comprehensible, if dotty, reasoning. I suppose I should be grateful that my insanity is expressing itself through the purchase of slightly expensive nostalgia rather than, say, massacering my work colleagues with a pair of scissors.

Anyway, Ro-Busters is particularly resonant to me of youthful ambitions. It came at a time in 2000AD's history when it was just beginning to move from playful subversion of boys comics cliches to making real breakthroughs in the types of art and story possible for British mainstream comics. At the same time, I was in my early teens and moving from kid's books to the adolescent world of golden age sci fi, and 2000AD seemed to be growing up alongside me. While much has been said about the developing satirical sophistication of Judge Dredd during the 1980s and 1990s (probably too much, IMO, although that's maybe an issue I will address when an increasingly desperate desire to recapture my youth drives me to buy the multi-volume Judge Dredd files) and Mills's ABC Warriors/Nemesis stories (also definite candidates for volumes to be found next to me in the car with the hose pipe going from the exhaust to the window) are considered benchmarks here, but I think the whole development is contained very nicely within the pages of this volume.

Ro-Busters starts with its "robot Thunderbirds" concept very clearly stated, but right from the start the heroism with a strongly cynical undercurrent. Howard Quartz, Mr 10 Per Cent, is no John Tracy: he doesn't care much for the people he saves and even less for the robots that save them. Bought as scrap, they are treated as machines but have all the personality and characteristics of human beings. They do what they're told and act with honour and bravery that all the humans seemingly lack. It's a classic kids fiction scenario, with the robots standing in for the feeling of powerlessness and naive clear-sightedness of children.


Do you think we're the bad guys?

When the thrill moved to 2000AD, it takes this children's eye view of the underdogs world and gives it a very political twist. Ro-Jaws's life story is clearly based on the children's classic Black Beauty, but when you replace the real-life horses of Anna Sewell's day with intelligent robots, the story takes on a more overtly political context. The obvious parallel is slavery, and the Fall & Rise of Ro-Jaws and Hammer-Stein story line draws these parallels very clearly, but it also has a more topical resonance in Britain in the eighties, with hardworking and naive workers being harassed by a police in league with their capitalist exploiters. The Robot Interception Patrol - RIP - take wicked delight in kicking and bashing robots and are uniformed in the same kind of nazi deaths-head nazi regalia Mitchell & Webb joked about.

Overt political messages stay just the right side of universal. The story of Charlie, the gigantic robot ships pilot who works at the docks in "Northpool", a generic Northern sea port sees salt-of-the-Earth workers led by a fiery preist do battle with wicked developers to save their jobs. Ro-Jaws and Hammer-Stein don't appear in this story, and in fact Ro-Busters are really the bad guys here: the developers have hired the Ro-Busters "Terra-Meks" to destory the city and lay tarmac over the land for a new space port. It was first published in 1979, but the theme of redveloping docklands and images of workers men fighting with police for their jobs looks very prescient now.

I remember loving this one at the time, but I don't recall getting the political context. To be fair, I was a twelve yeard old living in Titahi Bay New Zealand, I was a million miles away from this. I just loved the romantic heroic tale. It's brilliantly told by Mills and Gibbons, combining superb dynamic mega-machine wrestling with a stirring story of heroism and sacrifice.


Dave Gibbons and Pat Mills cheering on Charlie the robot dock worker nearly killed by Thatcher


It's not very subtle, but it synchronised exactly with changes in what I was reading and the way I was reading, drawing in particular on Asimov's robot stories, which I was discovering for the first time back then. 2000AD in its classic period had the same unconstrained quality that I used to enjoy in golden age SF. No one's too bothered if the world building doesn't make much sense, and the story makes more of an emotional impact on the themes of inequality and exploitation rather than being a speculative piece about the limits and consequences of artificial intelligence.

Part of that quailty comes down to the art, of course, and here we can see a handful of the great 2000AD artists reaching their prime. The fantastic character designs are by Kevin O'Neil, and fan favourites Dave Gibbons and Mike MaMahon both provide fantastic work here. The lesser known artists who take on the Ro-Busters also provide great work, notably Mike Dorey and Carlos Pino, who drew their early strips and set the tone for much of what followed with terrific page layouts that emphasise the big-screen drama of the disaster stories. O'Neil, McMahon and Dorey really pull out all the stops for the final Fall & Rise of Ro-Jaws & Hammer-Stein story, providing art that's loaded with wit and pathos.


Robots tying one on - terrific character design from Kevin O'Neil

I'm really pleased I gave into the bad chemicals that compelled me to buy this. It's a terrific reminder of where I started and to the aesthetic foundations of my own character and writing. Ro-Busters raises serious points within the parameters of broad satiric comedy. It's a story told with sympathy and emotion and brilliant visual flair. 2000AD really didn't get much better than this.