Am I back in the country yet? Hopefully I have just
touched down with a satchel full of manga, a head full of hazy sake memories
and a bank balance wiped out due to terrible conversion rates. Writing from the
past is a terrible curse, where things that should have come to pass may well
not have, thanks, largely I presume, to Jetstar and the sanity of my AirBNB
hosts. We shall see. If I am hacked up in a tiny Tokyo bathtub, tell my dog
Beatrix that I love her.
There’s a lot of totally bonkers comics in the column
this week (not sure how that happened, I’m guessing sleep deprivation and
subconscious fear of freakish death). So let’s go!
COMIC OF THE WEEK : ELEKTRA: ASSASSIN
Frank Miller & Bill Sienkiewicz
Epic Comics
I’m pretty sure I first bought a second printing of the
collected Elektra: Assassin back in 1989. It was a time when trade paperbacks
were largely undesirable objects, a sign that you’d somehow failed as a fan to
pick the original, serialised, highly-fetishised issues. My, how comics culture
has changed. I do remember that it felt somehow proper to teenage me, having
this madness contained in a thick, single volume. It felt fitting somehow,
grown up, and was, in many ways, an eye-opener for me in terms of not only
accepting the TPB as somehow “legit” (which is weird on so many levels
especially since my formative years were filled with European volumes) but also
in terms of comics content. Anyway, enough about me.
Elektra: Assassin was and still is, I’m happy to report
after re-reading it for the first time in probably fifteen years, one of my
favourite Marvel comics ever. A bizarre, about-to-go-off-the-rails-at-any
moment epic and an unashamedly loud (my edition has a bright pink back cover
with no copy at all) piece of pure comics expressionism. It’s an early look at
just how far you can nudge characters that are ostensibly superheroes into
unknown territory when editorial bigwigs either trust their talent or simply
can’t hold it back.
Of course, it didn’t hurt that Elektra: Assassin’s talent
was Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz and the editorial bigwigs were Archie
Goodwin and Jo Duffy, who hung up her editorial pen after this particular gig
as she felt it could never be topped.
Published by Marvel’s now sadly long-dead “mature
readers” line, Epic Comics over eight issues in 1986, Elektra: Assassin still
feels risky as of today when I closed its covers yet again. A campy ‘60s spy
narrative soaked in equal quantities of bad trip visuals, cold war paranoia and
pitch black satire, this comic is, even more than the rigid formalism (however
ground-breaking) of Watchmen, perhaps the classic example of the mainstream
comic being autopsied to reveal the insanity lying at the heart of your all
favourite superheroes.
Like the plot from The Omen gone Marvel, The Beast (as in
the devil, not the X-Man) stands poised to rise through politics and destroy
the world. Daredevil’s long-time foes, the evil ninja clan, The Hand, seek to
actively expedite annihilation. Having tussled with the mighty demonic powers
of The Beast before, Elektra barely survived with her sanity but is determined
to destroy The Beast once and for all even as he stands posed to attain the
Presidency in the form of Senator Ken Wind.
Sienkiewicz is gleefully all over the shop, with wonky,
angular perspectives and mixed media from pencil to water colour to God knows
what to sticking literally doilies on his pages. He successfully pulls off more
distinctive art styles in a single work than most comics artists manage in a
career. His Elektra is a stringbean, a perfectly long-limbed and wiry
death-dealer with rosy cheeks and piercing blue eyes. His villain, the demonic
Ken Wind, has the same JFK-esque face copied and pasted onto his body over and
over and over again – indicating the artifice of politics and demonstrating the
blankness behind the manufactured charisma of those who work within it. He’s a
shill, Ken Wind, a robot spouting party lines and pre-prepared speeches, a
glorious caricature of a real politician who has become more and more prevalent
over the years.
Miller has never been one for subtlety, for better or
worse, and just bludgeons his readers with his cynicism here. But this is a
Marvel Comic, remember? Since when does subtlety have much of a presence? The
facile, straight-forward points he drives home make perfect sense here in this
bombastic comic about Daredevil’s ex blowing things up and chopping off the
heads of satanic dwarves.
Every character in Elektra: Assassin is awful, unlikable,
disgusting, bigoted, evil and psychologically damaged. Its authority figures
are cartoonish and cruel, plastic and brain-damaged, particularly its
aforementioned politicians who are mercilessly lampooned versions of the fake
electioneerers we are sadly all too desensitised to in 2015. Wind is the
charismatic yet “faceless” Democratic Presidential Candidate, spouting
hilariously pat, scripted soundbites. The Republican President is a visual
cocktail of Reagan and Nixon by way of Hunter S Thompson’s artistic
collaborator, Ralph Steadman; the embodiment of a power-hungry troll whose
sense of being rests solely on the fact that he has not only the might to
trigger Armageddon but also the madness to constantly hover his finger over that
red button.
Elektra, the hero amongst this parade of psychopaths,
killers and monsters enabled either by magic or technology, is a murdering,
mind-controlling ninja who brainwashes Agent Garrett, an already repellent and
criminally inclined agent of SHIELD with a hilarious toupee and cybernetic
parts, into essentially being her sex slave. Again – this is not subtle,
there’s a splash page evoking their relationship, as Garrett perceives it, with
Elektra as dominatrix astride him, choking him as he yet begs for more. But this
is all somehow done with such biting humour – a scene where Garrett tries to undo
his brainwashing by trying not to think of Elektra bathing in the very next
room but finding nothing but porn on the TV, the ridiculous “caper” feel to its
assassination attempt, the hilarious yet still super-cool technology blasting
the absurdity of comics yet looking pretty rad as it does so.
Groucho Marx masks are used as disguises, along with
nun’s habits, clearly mocking the silliness of spy movie conventions. The
mighty SHIELD, now a staple of American popular culture, is mocked for being a
militaristic weapons factory, a nightmare of experimental weaponry. With
Quasimodo-like dwarves acting as sanctioned torturers, it’s the
military-industrial complex writ large and in watercolour. War hero Nick Fury
at one point has an arrow pointing downwards to his genitals and tests guns of
such massiveness that they somehow mock the work of Rob Liefeld a good five or
six years before X-Force even existed.
To this very day, Elektra: Assassin remains a stunningly
realised risk from Marvel. It’s massive in scope, madness, experimentation and
density. It’s nasty, beautiful and oh so surreal and it certainly will not be
fifteen years until I read it yet again.
WEBCOMIC OF THE WEEK : NEMESIS ENFORCER: BAD CITY
By Dennis Macheras & Casey Silver
Dennis Macheras and Casey Silver blaze through their character introductions, throwing onto the page a menagerie of combatants that look as though they’d fit quite at home in a Mortal Kombat game whipped up in a frenzy by Rob Liefeld. Clearly, these two care not a whit about anything other than making things look as crazed and kinetic and, frankly, ludicrous as humanly possible.
Characters named 8 Bit Assassin, Slater and Radika rub spiked shoulders and fists with all manner of unnamed warriors in a manner that doesn’t care whether you can follow along as it skips through time like an severely ADD kid with a TV remote or Grant Morrison at his most indulgent (Sorry, I still love you, Grant!).
All this sounds rather negative, I know, but the thing is these guys are totally aware of what they’re doing. I think. They have to be, right? The aesthetic of this comic is just way too cultivated to be some random act of accidental osmosis. See, Nemesis Enforcer: Bad City is actually awesome. “Awesome” is a word I hate being used in reviews as it’s the laziest, most indistinct of superlatives. But there it is, I just popped it in there proudly because Bad City is a bit like Prison Pit for ageing gamers who still have copies of Brigade locked away in Mylar bags. You try and find a more fitting word than “awesome” to describe that.
So what the hell is happening here? Who cares. Is there going to be more of this? Who knows.
All I know is that something called the Nexus Lens is collapsing and the future, with its character dissections, crumbling realities and... uh...pierced dimensional membranes (or whatever the hell that is happening in that last panel), is likely worse than even a place called Bad City can possibly bear.
Hopefully, having created this piece of action comics chaos, the creators just drop their pens and walk away high-fiving, the clap of their unclean hands unleashing a cloud of residual amphetamine from their clammy palms into the air. That’s how it plays out in my head, anyway...
COUNTDOWN TO MOZ METAL: HEAVY METAL DECEMBER 1977
Sixty pages of Phillipe Druillet are contained with HM
12/77, a tantalising prospect, making it the first time that a complete “epic”
was told start to finish in this magazine. That’s not the only titbit of trivia
you can arm yourselves with from his issue, however, as an except from the
novelisation of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind is also herein, written by
some novice novelist named Steven Spielberg. Yes, Spielberg himself novelised
his own film (well, allegedly) and I had no idea…did you? Oh, and Howard
Chaykin is in this issue too. Based on that line up, you’d expect Christmas
1977 to be pretty merry indeed.
It was not. There are lumps of coal here, doled out in
prettily patterned wrapping.
But before we move on, it’s worth noting that the
editorial suggests that this particular issue was poised to reach 250,000
readers. If that’s a serious figure,
just take a moment to contemplate it:
250,000 readers.
Compare that figure for this monthly magazine which
featured some incredibly strange, incredibly sophisticated, mainly European
material and compare it to the highest selling comics of today. The mind
boggles more so than it does when faced with the cosmic existentialism found so
frequently within Heavy Metal’s finest pages.
So, anyway, just how are the prose chops of Mr Spielberg?
Well, judging from Chapter Eleven of his novelisation, the only chapter
included here, he’s a functional and polished enough writer, if given to the
sort of clipped, muscular, straight-ahead writing of much of mainstream
contemporary fiction, which likely means this book sold in the boatloads. A
sample for you, fine reader:
“The tropical twilight was now night. Damp blackness had
descended upon them all. And, even though they could no longer see their sadhu,
the many thousands continued their chant, forcing it to grow to an almost
unbearable intensity.”
Yeah. Not bad.
Chaykin’s work comes in the form of illustrations to
accompany an SF-pirate poem told in rhyming couplets by none other than
Wolverine’s dad himself, Len Wein. Chaykin’s full colour murals depict
exploding spaceships, floating aliens and a grimacing, militaristic man named
Ezekial Nash. It’s excellent, purely ‘70s, artwork and does a good job of
salvaging Wein’s frankly rather silly poem:
“Aye, pay heed and I’ll tell ye a story,
Of a prize worth more than a jewel,
Of Ezekial Nash, mourned in glory,
And his ship, the poor, doomed…Fortune’s Fool!”
Hmm.
Druillet’s “Vuzz” is told in his looser, scratchier
style, which I pretty much unkindly ripped into a few weeks back. Look, even
here at his laziest he draws far better than I ever could and I’m not disputing
his genius, but you don’t see Moebius slacking with his irreverent material, do
you?
Even Richard Corben’s “Den” going all kung-fu and
roundhouse kicking fools does little to raise my spirits about this issue and
although there are some other glimmers of good stuff within, December 1977 ends
the first calendar year of Heavy Metal in largely disappointing fashion when
held up to the standards it has set up to this point.
Ah, well. Roll on January 1978, which we shall visit next
week and, cheekily peering ahead to next issue’s contents page, I’m confident
this psychedelic warship shall be righted once more before the inevitable
downslide of the ‘80s arrives to capsize Heavy Metal’s quality for some time to
come. Here’s hoping for your sake and mostly mine that Moz Metal arrives well
before that.
COMICS VIDEOS(& MUSIC!) OF THE WEEK : BAMBI AND HER PINK GUN, GABA KING SONG NO.2& SHOT THE
PINK GUN
Truly, it is a crime against the comics nation state that
the work of Atsushi Kaneko is not available in English outside of dodgy
scanlations or whatever they’re called.
Kaneko’s manga is widely available in French, so I’m a little unsure as
to why an artist with such European leanings to his style has been ignored by
American comics companies. His work is
fast-paced, quirky, violent and highly-detailed. Sure, some other know-it-all
will point out that the first two volumes of his first long-form work Bambi
were published, in English, by DMP but the project was cancelled after just
those first two, never to be reprinted. His subsequent works Soil, Wet Moon and
Deathco, remain Englishless in an era where any and all American comics
companies with a chequebook have snapped up all manner of manga of much
inferior visual qualities and pacing.
It was a guy named Nikolai, a fellow conversational
English teacher from Sydney, who turned me on to Kaneko’s work at a 2004 Yeah
Yeah Yeahs gig in Osaka. Nikolai dug Paul Pope and Jon Spencer Blues Explosion,
which shows pretty rad taste, so off I went on a book hunt. The seven volumes of Bambi were the first
things I made sure I packed when I left the country in 2006.
Anyway, here’s a video some guy made of those first two
DMP volumes of Bambi and Her Pink Gun all cut up and spliced back together. As
an added treat, I’ve also included two more videos, the first a Kaneko-approved
song allegedly sung by Gaba King, the story’s main villain; a corpulent
vampiric Elvis who unleashes a parade of grotesque assassins after Bambi in
order to retrieve the brattish toddler she’s travelling with. It really does
sound like a fat vampiric Elvis singing evilly in Japanese.
Yes, it’s that
good.
The third is “Shot The Pink Gun,” a selection of songs inspired by the
manga. With bands like Analers (best band name ever), 54 Nude Honeys, Kenzi and
The Trips, and Bullshit (second best band name ever), you surely must have 35
minutes to spare to check this out.
Raishu o aishi, anata no manga ga daisuke….Oops, I should
be home: See you next week. Love your
comics.
Cameron Ashley spends a lot of time writing comics and other things you’ll likely never read. He’s the chief editor and co-publisher of Crime Factory (www.thecrimefactory.com). You can reach him @cjamesashley on Twitter.
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ReplyDeleteGABBA KING other song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4A-h-CGn-8
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