Endings

Three major TV series ended within a few days of each other here in the UK: Ashes to Ashes, The Prisoner and Lost. I followed all three with intense interest and eagerly the final episodes of each. I expected mysteries to be solved and plotlines to be resolved, but only Ashes to Ashes delivered these, as far as I am concerned. The ending to The Prisoner was barely understandable, and only then if you're willing to accept vague statements and use your own guesswork as to what anything might mean. There again, I only wasted 6 hours of my life on the programme, so it's not a huge loss.

But, well, there was the ending to Lost. Time and money and effort and patience was willingly drained from it viewers over 6 damned seasons. We loved the programme and put a huge amount of emotional investment into watching it. The ending delivered some resolutions, but nowhere near enough as far I'm concerned.

I know that some people will argue that the ending is artistic, open to individual interpretation, sophisiticated blah blah blah but I feel cheated. There are mysteries that will now never be explained: the significance of Hurley's numbers, for example. They've thrown intriguing puzzles at us through our TV set and now won't help us clear up their confused mess. It's thoughless, untidy and leaves us dissatisfied.

Give me a good piece of popular fiction with a proper resolution that means something, that is clear and easy to grasp. Give me the ending to something like Watchmen (the comic, not the film for god's sake) where mystery and intrigue and suspense are finely crafted and brought to an astounding, clear resolution (despite the squid, which I really love by the way).

Endings should resolve things and leave us satisfied. What do you think?

Greenwoods Encyclopedia of Comic and Graphic Novels

I contributed four entries (Horror, Science Fiction, Seaguy, Lost Girls) and participated on the editorial board for this new publication. My copy arrived today and very nice it is too!

More info can be found here

Studies in Comics

The first issue of Studies In Comics is now out.

The whole first issue of this new journal is available as free PDFs. It includes my review of Douglas Wolk's Reading Comics: How They Work and What They Mean.

Early Alan Moore work

Here's a link to a presentation I gave online at the Met@Morph online conference in 2008, looking at Alan Moore's earliest comics work:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/30903051@N05/

Oxford Clay

Check out this great webcomic!

http://oxfordclay.com/

It's written and drawn by Dan Berry, Lecturer on the BA Illustration for Graphic Novels degree at Glyndwr University.

Recent Reads

I've been working on articles and the Swamp Thing book, which has left little time for blogging, but here are a couple of books that have grabbed my attention recently:


I love Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics (and the sequels), but I'd never read any of his fiction, until now. This book reprints the black and white issues of his 1980s series Zot! This is a refeshing take on superheroes that recaptures much of the lost innocence of this post-Watchmen/Dark Knight genre. The storylines are emotionally engaging and McCloud's clear-line style is attractive. I'm hunting down the original colour issues which preceed this, and looking forward to him finishing his current work-in-progress, which is a return to fiction.

This was an unexpected pleasure. Despite being a fan of some of Millar's work (Ultimates and Red Son particularly), I've never really taken to Wolverine as a character (he's just too dark and violent for me) and so I didn't hold out much hope for this volume.

I was wrong. It's excellent. It's heavily informed by a western vibe, and the idea of a pacifist Wolverine is one that really engaged my attention through the whole book.

More posts will follow soon!

Hitler and Comics

It’s interesting to come across old comics that are so obviously products of a certain time in history. The effect produced in a modern reader is often completely divorced from their original intent.

I’ve been browsing through a book called Christmas Comic Posters (Blossom Books, 1991) by Denis Gifford.

For those of you who don’t know of Gifford, he was a writer who covered various areas of pop culture including horror, film and comics, producing many books in the process. He drew comics for a time as well, and he also produced a wonderful book called The International Book of Comics in the 1980s, which my parents bought for me years ago (for Christmas, coincidentally).

As I looked through the book I came across a fascinating front page, which I’ll reproduce here:


It seems so incongruous to modern eyes, having Hitler appear in a children’s comic, and it really illustrates the difference between how wartime and modern readers’ would react to this strip. It’s propaganda, of course, in its attempt to ridicule and belittle Hitler, poking fun at his appearance and salute. The main difference for us as modern readers is that we have much more detailed knowledge of the twisted legacy Hitler has left. He is probably the most monstrous personality of the twentieth century, if not the whole of history.

For this strip, the original context is no longer relevant and the original intention is no longer appropriate for a modern reader. Hitler can never be depicted as a figure to ridicule again: only to despise and hate. We can only try and put ourselves in the place of a wartime child to try and imagine the intended effect of the strip.

Gifford’s book briefly mentions another strip called 'Addie and Hermy the Nasty Nazis'. Here is an example that I found:

(Click picture to enlarge)

I think this strip is utterly bizarre. It’s certainly much different to how US mainstream comics handled the Nazis at this time. In titles like Captain America Comics, Hitler and the Nazis were depicted as serious threats and treated like dangerous enemies to be defeated, which they were on a regular basis through the war years. It’s a dramatic portrayal which seemed to embody a particular type of American confidence that they wanted to project, both in reality and in their comics. Characters like Captain America could always solve Nazi threats with a well aimed sock to the jaw.

In the UK, however, humour comics dominated the newsagents’ shelves, not only through the war years but for much of the last century. In our own quiet way we Brits poked fun at our enemies through the creation of surreal, distorted doppelgangers who spoke in phrases peppered with “der” and mangled English – “We must hurry to der home, mine leader”. Perhaps it was our nation’s way of dealing with the fear of what they represented. Such comics certainly helped to negate Nazi threats and psychological tactics, and reduced their perpetrators to the roles of buffoons or clowns. It’s an approach that was also adopted by Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator (released October 1940). The film predated America’s entry into the war (as did the creation of Captain America. Chaplin mericilessly attacks Nazism and Hitler through ridicule and parody, and he adopted the role of Adenoid Hynkel (a Hitler-like figure) to help achieve this goal.

Chaplin, UK born and bred, would no doubt have understood the appeal of these wartime UK comics, which shared his sense of absurdity, comedy and morality.