March 1998: A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that Sinister Dexter was being forced into double-duty to accomodate a tough schedule with not enough series in the drawer and some weeks to go before some new material was ready to go. Prog 1086 saw this reach a real extreme, with over half the comic given over to the Gunsharks for a three-part story called "Lyrical Bollards" by Dan Abnett and Simon Davis. Other stories this week include Durham Red by Abnett and Mark Harrison, and Judge Dredd by John Wagner, Cliff Robinson and Alan Craddock, with a cover painted by Jason Brashill.In a very odd coincidence, I'm writing this shortly after Simon Davis was awarded the runner-up prize in a competition by the National Portrait Gallery for his piece Portrait of Amanda Smith at Vincent Avenue. But it isn't the acclaim and congratulations that Davis is due that makes this blog particularly well-timed, though he is surely due both. It's because "Lyrical Bollards," with its delightful snaps at the critical establishment of the highbrow art world, perfectly anticipated a rather strident piece by the writer Brian Sewell in the Evening Standard on the 13th.
For many years, I've considered what the purpose of criticism is, and how best to draw the line of appropriate commentary. I think that generally, these days, I really only want to talk about things that I enjoyed because I wish to recommend them to my friends, which does not make me an honest critic in the academic sense, but then again, nobody is employing me in such a way either. When I was being paid by a newspaper to review records, I was still ensuring the things I enjoyed made it into the paper, but also the things I really didn't like, because those were the most fun to write. I often get the feeling that readers' eyes pass right over words and phrases that indicate pleasure, in favor of ones that deconstruct. Face it, more people probably took the time to read that demolishing I gave Justice League of America: The Lightning Saga a few weeks ago than any given collection of old newspaper strips I've championed lately.
Sewell's essay (available, at the time of writing, here) is useful in explaining the backstory behind the NPG's annual competition, and I suppose he's due a little thanks for the brief history lesson. Sewell and the Standard chose paintings by Davis, Tim Okamura, Tom Phillips and Nigel Wood to illustrate the piece, and they're all wonderful pieces, full of energy, expression and talent.
Not to hear Sewell tell it, however. Here are some sample words from his essay about the quality of this year's entrants: "entirely devoid of quality," "beastly thing," "slipshod," "impoverished," "ghastly formless face," "vile," "vulgar," "crassly amateur" and "crude to the point of incompetent caricature." For the most part, Davis escapes the inferno of ugliness, but while I appreciate a well-written tirade against bad art more, perhaps, than most people, and was incredibly pleased with bon mots such as "Robert O'Brien's portrait of his grandmother has something painterly about it," I was sad to see such devastatingly well-worded criticism being applied to something so ill-deserving.
Admittedly, I only saw the pieces used to illustrate the article and not the full exhibition, but even with Tom Phillips' piece, which attracted the bulk of the vitriol, I think Sewell's completely mistaken anyway. Fine art isn't like films or albums or even comics, where there should be several levels of editorial input between artist and audience. (You might argue that in some cases, be they recent Star Wars movies or Grant Morrison comics, the finished product might have been a good deal better had an editor been assigned to tell the artist how pureile or incoherent their work has become, but I digress.) Frankly, what I see, and what the National Portrait Gallery seems to have assembled, are a number of genuinely wonderful pieces which really reflect the artists' viewpoints and emotions - perhaps with a stronger influence from photography than Sewell would prefer, true - painted by artists much more talented than me. Wood's self-portrait is especially vivid and moving, two adjectives you can't generally apply to Star Wars films, Final Crisis comics or, say, Hilary Duff records, and this is especially striking as, if I understand correctly, it was prepared in a variety of techniques over a sixteen-year period.
It's certainly true that, to paraphrase a passage in a collection of Roger Ebert essays, there's nothing quite as fun as reading a really good critic tee off on a really bad movie, but Sewell's elegant dissembling of these artists was every bit as ill-advised as Ebert's tirade against David Lynch's Blue Velvet in that book. That's not to imply I'm getting defensive over art that I enjoy being savaged by some meanie of a critic, as some of the very best critical essays I've read, most memorably Jon Wilde's intensely negative review of Secrets of the Beehive, one of my favorite David Sylvian albums, force fans to reconsider the art from a different perspective. Unfortunately, Sewell's point, presumably that the National Portrait Gallery should exercise tougher guidelines in selecting pieces worthy of their shortlist, is lost within the ball he's having kicking those painters around.
I mean, "vulgar"? Really? I've seen Johnny Ryan comics and I've seen Tom Phillips' painting, and the one that's vulgar ain't the one hanging in the National Portrait Gallery.
Anyway, that worked for a change of pace mental health break, I think, but I'm afraid that, with this installment, we'll have to begin an abbreviated schedule for a few weeks. I'm rereading along with my children, and they'll be visiting relations in Tennessee next week, returning the next, then spending two weeks in Kentucky with their mother, and then spending a week at summer camp in Alabama. So we'll be back on the tenth in time for Dredd to match wits with the serial killer the Angel of Death, and then take a short summer vacation. Until next time, then!
February 1998: While 2000 AD enjoys a face lift and some great stories including the first outing for the new-look Durham Red, along with guest artists Steve Yeowell on Sinister Dexter and Henry Flint on Nikolai Dante, the Mighty Megazine is undergoing the most radical, thus far, of its many reinventions. You may recall that the comic has had to accomodate some reprints along with new strips in order to continue, and that much of 1996-97 featured a rather fractious, combative relationship with its readers. The lengthy reprint of the Dredd adventure "Necropolis" had come to an end in vol. 3 # 35. For the next three issues, much of the page count was taken up with the three-part Predator vs. Judge Dredd, which was also published simultaneously as a three-part miniseries from Dark Horse. This proved to be among the weaker intercompany crossovers that featured Dredd, with uninspiring art by Enrique Alcatena and a surprisingly tame, beginners-level script by John Wagner. At one point early on, a perp whom Dredd has arrested protests that he has the right to a jury trial, to which Dredd has a snappy comeback. That might be considered a reasonable introduction to the judge system to those readers of Dark Horse's Predator comics who don't know the character or the concept, but honestly, the notion of anyone in Dredd's universe making such a protest when jury trials had been abolished at least thirty years previously is a bit weak.
January 1998: When we last saw the sexy bloodsucking mutant bountyhunter named Durham Red, it was amid a cloud of rewrites, pseudonyms and a truncated storyline from progs 1000-1007. In the last part of that run, Dan Abnett took the writing duties, but it would be more than a year before Red returned to action. So prog 1078 spotlights her return in a lengthy storyline called "The Scarlet Cantos." The first two episodes are run together this week as a double-length "episode one," and she'll have a twelve-week residency. The plot involves Red being awakened from cryosleep more than a thousand years in her future, when mankind and mutantkind's war has escalated and devolved into a conflict of religious psychopaths. An ugly scenario has gotten even uglier, but there are big, wonderful, behind-the-scenes changes for both 2000 AD and the Meg at this time and while the story has some ugly elements, the finished product has never looked so gorgeous. Well, the changes to the Meg might or might not be wonderful, more on that next week. But the previous week's 2000 AD introduced new paper stock, and the artwork never looked so good.
December 1997: Prog 1075 features Sinister Dexter on the cover. The art's by Siku and this week, it's the first double-dose of the gun sharks. The story, "Whack the Dinosaur" is written, as always, by Dan Abnett, and it's quite clearly a two-part episode, with a cliffhanger on page five and an oversized panel on page six, where the credits would normally go. This is going to become standard procedure through the spring of '98 as the editor deals with a temporary shortage of strips ready to go.