The Atlantean Publishing Website

Comic Reviews, Part Six,

By Cardinal Cox

A WORD IN YOUR EYE
By Steve Sneyd, Published By Hilltop Press

This 40 page booklet is subtitled An Introduction To Graphic Poems, and, as the advert says, it does what it says on the tin. This is a look at comic interpretations of poetry and, along the way, pushes the boundaries of that definition in every direction.

In researching the history, Steve includes Elizabethan pattern poems, the work of an 18th century Khan of the Crimea, and Futurists from the 1920s and '30s.

The examples included range from the last frames of the Max And Moritz strip of 1865 by Wilhelm Busch (a cross between Shockheaded Peter and Rupert the Bear with its cautionary tale of young scallywags getting their come-uppance); to the Ballad of Johnny Tumbleweed from 1995 by Noel K. Hannan and Derek Gray; as well as a dozen others. A favourite amongst these is Symbiosis for Space-Dwellers Explained, words by Steve Sneyd and art from a name that should be familiar to all members of the BFS :  Dallas Goffin.

The Bibliography admits to being only a preliminary listing and I'm sure that we can all make suggestions of titles missed. Somewhere, I know, I've got a copy of Classics Illustrated's The Raven.

Okay, this treatise isn't going to appeal to many comics' fans, but, if you have an interest in the underground end of the media, this should make an essential addition to your reference library!

Reprinted from Prism 25.4, July/August 2001

THE BROTHERHOOD
Written by X and illustrated by diverse hands, Published by Marvel Comics.          www.marvel.com

What I know of the Marvel Universe is based on memories from the '80s, and the dilution of criticism I've read. The last regular comic I read was Kevin Smith's Daredevil; before the insanity of Skull Kill Crew. As I understand it, there is a seething backstory of humanity's fear/misunderstanding of the mutants. Previous looks at the non-heroic (as opposed to the villainous) mutants were glimpses of the Morlock Society. In this new comic, the focus is on a terrorist/freedom fighter group, The Brotherhood, headed by the mysterious X. They regard the X-Men as potentially dangerous to the mutant cause as fear-mongering media pundit Dr Ludlum.

The Brotherhood engages in acts of violence to further their aims, blowing up a Moscow nightclub and attacking American vigilantes. So, while it might be a problem that the characters are so morally ambiguous - at one point, after killing some youths who were preparing a school massacre, Mari says, "Put the right uniform on me, and they'd be calling me a hero." - I fear that after September  11th in New York, Marvel will pull the plug on this brave attempt.

The Bill Sienkowicz cover on issue 1 proclaimed Revolution, Not Evolution. I wonder if this series will prove either. Events beyond the editors' and publishers' control have cursed this title...

Reprinted from Prism, Autum 2002.

KIMOTA! THE MIRACLEMAN COMPANION
By George Khoury, Twomorrow's Publishing                                               www.twomorrows.com

Warrior comic in the early '80s - happy memories as a reader. I'd never been a 2000AD buyer, just wasn't. However, with V For Vendetta, Marvelman and the rest, Warrior was for me.

Now, almost twenty years on, with Miracleman about to appear in Image Comics, we have this wonderful collection of interviews and exclusive art that details the tangled history of a character that eventually lead to The Watchmen and a whole slew of realistic superheroes (if you'll excuse that oxymoron).

So, with almost twenty years of backstabbing, name-calling and threats of litigation between writers, publishers and fans, we finally get a chance for almost everyone to have their say. I say almost, as Todd McFarlane isn't here - but, everyone else is :  Mick Angelo on the '50s original; Alan Moore, Dez Skinn, etc, from Warrior; Neil Gaiman, Cat Yronwode, etc, from the Eclipse era. plus, a previously unseen strip from Moore and Jon Totleben, and the Mark Buckingham artwork from an unpublished Gaiman issue of Miracleman.

This isn't just a nostalgia fest - this is an important document every fan of superhero comics should own. Though, as Dave in my local comics shop (House on the Borderland) said, we'll need another volume allowing everyone a chance to reply to the accusations contained within.

Reprinted from Prism,  Autumn 2002.

 Reviews By DJ Tyrer

Scars :  A Lost Novel of Earthdawn
By Caroline Spector

If you don't know what Earthdawn is, you might want to Google it for a more detailed explanation, but in brief it is a fantasy roleplaying game inspired by the Shadowrun game, but set in the ancient past in a world of magic and myth. It was supposed to be a different sort of fantasy, darker and more flavoursome, but it found itself caught between the inability of writers to provide something different to the generic format and the incomprehension of gamers who wondered at the way in which it shook off old stereotypes. As a result, sales were poor and the novel line, for which Scars was intended, failed. In fact, Scars was part one of a trilogy of which only the third and final part, a Shadowrun novel called Worlds Without End, was published. But now, at last, fans have the chance to read the rest of it (part two, Little Treasures, should be out soon).

Scars is a difficult novel to appraise. Obviously, if you are a fan, you must buy it to finally sate that curiosity which has burning within you. But, would anyone else want to read it? I suppose that's not an important question to the publishers, as it is aimed squarely at the fans, but others of you, reading this review, might be curious.

It certainly has its good points, generally avoiding falling into the pitfalls that can afflict the average fantasy novel. Caroline Spector is a pretty good writer and the setting is strong and different enough that many will find it interesting to read the tale of the elf Aina who survived the horrors of the Scourge only to suffer the personal attention of one Horror in particular over the centuries. Unfortunately, non-fans will probably not find it as interesting as fans, lacking the ties to the games that inspired - fans will be interested to see the name Aithne Oakforest but anyone else will have no idea who he is. I'm not too sure that the average fantasy reader would find it that entertaining - and that's a real shame as it has a lot of potential. Still, if you did Google Earthdawn and were intrigued, you might want to see if you can still find this on Amazon...

The Belgariad
By David Eddings

I was a bit surprised to see The Belgariad being slagged off in the pages of Knights of the Dinner Table magazine recently. Alright, not everybody has the same tastes and it was a salutary lesson in 'get to know the reviewer' before applying their views to your reading habits, but it was definitely one of those moments when you wonder if you have been reading the same author. I had to give him a little benefit of the doubt as, although David Eddings is one of my favourite authors, I mainly knew him through his later novels - I'm sure I must have read The Belgariad before, a few bits seemed familiar, but it was only recently that I sat down and read through all five volumes - and it confirmed what I already knew, David Eddings is a good writer. Although there is probably a degree of cliche in the series (beyond the fantasy trope of young boy grows up to be hero which is at its heart), they did not jump out at me and probably have less to do with him being derivative than with the fact that it has been around for over twenty years and likely the subject of some plagiarism. Or, perhaps, it is the fact that I do not read as much in terms of fantasy fiction as hardcore fans of the genre. Either way, it did not strike me as cliched - in fact, I found it to be the opposite, a breath of fresh air :  the characters are believable and not cardboard cutouts as in some novels, the world (while a little naive - eg everyone seems to speak the same language!) manages to be an interesting place whilst tending to draw inspiration from stereotypes (perhaps because many of them are subverted) and it has a good deal of humour. Despite the rather large number of pages in total, I found myself rushing through it, eager to find out what happened next and only relinquishing it from my hold when I literally became too tired to hold it. I read a lot of fiction books and there are not that many authors who can keep my attention like this (others would be the likes of JK Rowling and Clive Cussler). It's not necessarily 'deep', but if you are looking for a good fantasy series that will capture your imagination, then you could do worse than trying The Belgariad. And, if you like it as much as I did, then there is The Mallorean for when you finish! Wonderful!

These days, everything is focused upon novelty, upon change, upon THE NEW. Stuff the old-fashioned, we've got something new - and new means bigger and better (or should that be smaller and more sophisticated?). Western culture is obsessed with novelty - and that obsession is blinding people to the fact that a lot of what is 'new' is actually not much cop. In fact, most of it is not even very new - even the obsession with novelty is as old as the human race!

Of course, there's nothing wrong with replacing something that doesn't work with something new that does - that's entirely sensible! The problem is that people assume something must be better because it is new and thus, obviously, more advanced. Now, that's not true in itself - but it is an even greater fallacy when one actually examines these 'new' trends and finds they are not actually original...

As an example, let us consider just a handful of the more controversial 'new' ideas that are in the news at the moment :  Evolution, Paganism, Metrification, US Global Hegemony, Democracy and the EU. All five of these are things that rely upon their novelty to argue their relevance (you know the arguments, Evolution is true because it is modern science not discredited superstition, Paganism is good because it is not evil ol' Christianity, Metrification is good because it is more logical than old fashioned Imperial, the US knows what is right for the world because it is out to create a 'New World Order' of freemarket Capitalism to replace the old ways, and the EU is good because it will end the old fashioned pan-European warfare).

As none is no more worthy of attacking than the others, let's look at them in the order I typed them up... so, Evolution first. Yup, got to be true as it's brand shiny new science and light of logic banishing away the shadows of ignorance. Um, not really. If you really want novelty, try Van Daniken or Intelligent Design. Evolution is nearly a century and a half old in Darwinian terms (Origin of Species, 1859) - from an era when most people believed that heavier-than-air-flight was impossible. And, if you get down to basic theory, it goes all the way back to Aristotle - that means it's older than Christianity!

Paganism's novelty is a strange beast - on the one hand it is the new way of understanding the world and it loves nothing better than to attack Christianity for the alleged excesses of Dark Age and Medieval Catholics, but on the other hand it claims to be the rediscovery of the ORIGINAL, pre-Christian religions - minus, of course, such dubious aspects as human sacrifice (can't bully the Catholics if you have to admit to once having filleted virgins, I guess...) . So, whilst capitalising on novelty, the faith is based solely on a claim to great age. Of course, they really DO possess novelty, as very few have even a passing resemblance to anything likely to have been practised in antiquity (just as the majority of Churches would be unrecognisable to Jesus, John , Peter or the rest of them if they took a pew today). We could also drag in Buddhism here, except that true Buddhists have never tried to claim novelty for their religion, only ignorant Westerners expecting some Oriental miracle-cure.

Metrification :  a wonderful conceit. This relies on being more logical than Imperial (except that base-6 is at least as useful for calculations as base-10, if not more so), easier to remember (ie it is good because imbeciles can do it - in that case illiteracy is superior to literacy!), it is global (except Imperial was once almost as global and nobody insisted we all go with it then) and, well, modern. Alright, in a vague sense, Imperial measurements have been around for millennia - but in real terms they were defined and standardised in about the late Middle Ages with refinements going on for several centuries, so they are not much older than Metric which has its origins in Gabriel Mouton's decimal measurements of 1670, being refined into modern Metric in 1790 and made compulsory in France in 1840. The closest it gets to novelty is the occasional redefinition (in microscopic terms) of the metre - maybe we could redefine the yard by a 1/16th of an inch every now and then to make it 'happening' or something? If we've really got to change how we measure things, couldn't we at least come up with something better than the insipid nonsense that is the Metric System?

The US believes that, because it is a young nation without all that bothersome history, they can somehow be a global power without being an evil Empire. Unfortunately, it's all that history that generally made the old Empires somewhat better at running their evil Empires than the USA. You can shout all you want about freedom and democracy but, when you plant your flag in another nation's soil and make it do what you want at the barrel of a gun, then it is Imperialism - and that's not a novel idea...

I think we can gloss over Democracy -  everyone ought to know that it dates back to ancient Greece (and, before anyone points out that it wasn't 'true' democracy because slaves, poor people and women couldn't vote - ask yourself whether the poor and disenfranchised have any real say in the modern version...).

The EU is not much of a novelty, either - even its current form is fifty years old and so dating slightly. Every lunatic with an army (whether of German stormtroopers or Belgian bureaucrats) and located somewhere in Europe has dreamed of creating their own European Union. It even existed once - it was called the Roman Empire and it did not bring peace to Europe (more the opposite - the Pax Romana was waaaay overrated...).

An old book says 'there's nothing new under the sun' and that's true, even if it's not very new. The problem with the search for novelty is that progress dies. Rather than searching for truth or trying to make things work better, people spend their time for the next 'buzz' and all-too-often find themselves being shortchanged and bamboozled with old ideas wrapped up in new packaging. Rather than just accepting that something must be wonderful because it's supposed to be new, you need to start using your mind to think about things and decide for yourself. If you don't, the next novelty experience you encounter might just be another old favourite - totalitarianism...