Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

Frank Millers tinfoil hat seems to be malfunctioning...

Until today I'd thought it a myth. But, browsing the shelves in Forbidden Planet, what should I discover but Planetary Volume 4. With four glorious English pounds sterling off its recommended price.

Excelsior!

After a brief pause — oh, alright, three years — I'm rereading Mike Carey's Lucifer. Since I've already mentioned the first three trades, I'm going to resume with the fourth, The Divine Comedy.

Inverting Dante's structure, the volume opens with Paradiso, which finds Lucifer opening the gates of his new cosmos to those who want to leave God's creation on condition that they renounce the habit of worship. Unfortunately, the devil's enemies — the Basanos, the living tarot deck he encountered in Hamburg, and Susanoo, the Japanese god of storms — are maneuvering against him, finally enacting their long ago laid plans.

Struck down in his pride, Purgatorio finds Lucifer helpless and near death, with only the ambivalence of the angel Melios for help. After a cameo appearance from Death of the Endless and some help from Elaine Belloc, Lucifer is able to put enough of himself back together to join forces with the Lilim-in-Exile and drive out the invaders. But this good, which comes coupled with Mazikeen's return, has come at the loss of Elaine.

In addition to the two main story arcs, the volume also contains two short stories. The Writing on the Wall is the touching tale of a young and proud centaur who, after dreaming of Lucifer's defeat at the hands of the Basanos, travels to earth to warn him only to find that a lifetime has passed in Lucifer's cosmos and her home has been lost to her. Living a second life and attempting to correct her mistakes, she finds herself old and uninterested in intervening in present events when her dreams finally become reality.

The second story, Breaking and Entering, follows the fallen cherbim, Gaudium and Spera, as they break into the House of the Sleeper to recover a mummified corpse that grants wishes, in the hope that they might be able to use it to help Elaine. After experiencing various disasters — unbreakable thread breaking, bringing the wrong sort of bird with them, that sort of thing — they're eventually rescued by the archangel Michael, apparently in return for a cup of tea...

A good, if initially rather tense, lunch at the Red Lion in Hunningham. The decor was particularly good: instead of pictures, they'd framed up hundreds of comics. The inevitable sortilegy of seating meant that I ended up sitting next to a copy of Fables fifteen, with Snow White and Bigby Wolf on the cover. Surely a sign, if ever there was one. But a sign of what? I'm not sure...

In honour of the US elections, I've decided to re-read Transmetropolitan, Warren Ellis and Darick Robinson's masterpiece of politics, journalism, futurology, filth and fury, starting with Back on the Street.

Threatened with a lawsuit by his publishers, Spider Jerusalem reluctantly decides to come down from the Mountain and return to the City, the only place where he can write. In order to cover himself while he works on the two books his contract demands — one on politics, one on a subject of his choice — he finesses a job as a columnist out of his old friend Royce, who just happens to have risen to the dizzying heights of city editor for The Word.

While casting around for a subject for his first column, Spider learns of a plan by the human-alien hybrid Transient community to declare independence for the Angels 8 district. Trading on an old relationship with Transient leader Fred Christ — a former band manager turned alien love messiah — Spider pokes around and asks questions, concluding that the Transients aren't serious about their demands and will back down when the City authorities gets fed up and threaten violence.

When the City launches a crackdown on Angels 8, Spider smells a rat and rushes down to the district to document the police brutality. As the only journalist able to make it into the district, he takes up residence on the roof of a strip club and beams his text back to Royce at the The Word ready for the next edition. Never one to miss a trick, Royce arranges for Spider's word to be distributed out live throughout the City, triggering enough outrage to force Civic Centre to recall the police and returns Spider Jerusalem to peak of his journalistic fame.

Even if it isn't the best book in the sequence — I prefer the stories that concentrate on spat with the Smiler — Back on the Street launches the series rather well and gives a good feel for the weird future world of the City. A place where you can decide to hybridise your DNA with an alien. Where your semi-intelligent household appliances can be supplied by the mafia. And on drugs. And where two headed gecko eating cats are a possibility. Where you can buy Ebola Cola, the soft drink that eats you, and where monkey burgers and caribou eyes are the take out food of choice. And where the written word has power and a journalist can be worshiped as a God.

Like I said: weird.

And all of which weirdness Robertson manages to capture almost perfectly. From the squalor of Spider's mountain home — is it just me or does the exiled Jerusalem look like an untidy version of Alan Moore? — to the chaos of the streets, the art really goes the extra mile to pull in the strange details of life in crazed future where vast gaps exist between the rich and poor, and where almost anything is possible.

The book also does a decent job of setting up Spider as a character. We learn that for all his cynicism and casual violence, he really does care about people and particularly what happens to those who've been excluded and marginalised; his people, the New Scum, as the Smiler latter calls them. And while he's better with his filthy assistants to act as Watsonian foils to his crazed and rambling Holmes, he still pretty good fun on his own, baying out his fury like some sort of albino shouting gorilla. Except with less hair. And more tattoos.

I've just finished Whys and Wherefores, the last trade in Brian K Vaughan's consistently excellent Y: The Last Man series. For obvious reasons, I'm not going to say too much about what actually transpires, but I think I've got room to make a few points without giving too much away.

The resolutions of the various plot lines seemed to me to be very much in keeping with the spirit of the rest of the story. There were no cheap attempts to force characters into strange poses; no dei ex machina to pull things back into shape, to resurrect all the dead men or to create a perfect (almost) completely female utopia; none of the hard decisions were ducked. But the underlying message of the series — something probably best summed up in Polonius' advice to Laertes: to thine own self be true — shone through it all.

For it seems to me that Y: The Last Man could be read as an argument in favour of the authentic life. Consider the main characters and their initial behaviour at the start of the plague. By living according to the rules imposed on them by society and by outside pressures, they're all living inauthentic and unhappy lives. Yorick is a slacker who feels like he's failing to live up to his family's expectations; Dr Mann is frantically trying to create a clone in a frantic attempt to excel her father; while 355 seems to have rejected her humanity in favour of her duties to the Culper Ring. Following the plague and the consequent removal of expectations, the character are free to grow and to become the people they truly are. Think of the metaphor of 355's scarf. The growth of the scarf is akin to the growth of 355's authentic self, with the unpicking and reknitting of sections akin to the slow process of self-perfection and self-understanding.

Anyway, that's my existential take on it and I'm sticking to it. Plus, I thought the bald Yorick Brown looked so like drspleen it was scary...

Today's Guardian featured an interesting piece on the increasing numbers of women interested in comics. There were a few digs at the old school, with its tendency to treat women as victims or sex objects — the former detailed in Gail Simone's Women in Refrigerators list and the latter summed up by Mike Carey's comment about superhero art:

...a good friend of mine who's a comic book artist once told me that when you draw a woman in a superhero book, you basically draw her naked and then put the clothes on.

Which all goes to explain the general appeal of stuff like Sandman, where the hero is kind of nerdy (and when he's not nerdy, he's a cat!) and all the characters, both male and female, have genuine personalities and the women don't spend all their time waiting to die or waiting to indulge in gratuitous nudity.

Alan Moore is one of the cleverest writers around. Don't let anyone tell you that, just because he writes comic books, he's not every bit as well informed and exquisitely well read as Umberto Eco. Take the latest — and last? — installment in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series.

It opens with Mina Murray drinking in a British pub, immediately after the fall of Big Brother's IngSoc society. After a brief run-in with a spy called Jimmy — Bond, presumably — she and the newly youthful Alan Quatermain snarf a copy of the eponymous Black Dossier. In it, they find details of their own histories and those of the previous incarnations of the league. These include:

• The lost Shakespeare play, Faerie's Fortunes Founded.
• Some 18th century pornography in the form of The New Adventures of Fanny Hill
• A history of the first Murray League by Campion Bond
• An account of Bertie Wooster's encounter with an squamous, eldrich horror from beyond the words
• And much, much more...

The references come thick and fast. There are throwaway nods to writers as diverse as Charles Chilton and E.T.A Hoffman, to works of art as disparate as Tannhauser and The Beano, and so on. Even the background characters, perfectly executed by Kevin O'Neill, refer to fictional characters from the period.

A joy from start to finish.

Thanks to the flakiness of the HSM, I've managed to clock up enough overtime in the last week to cover the costs of a copy of Absolute Sandman Volume 2 and two new pairs of glasses to read it with. Three cheers for buggy software!

Colleen Doran has posted a comparison of the original art for A Game of You and the new, improved version she prepped for Absolute Sandman Vol. 2.

Wow. Yet another reason to follow on from last year's indulgence and pick up Volume 2.