Showing posts with label massimo belardinelli. Show all posts
Showing posts with label massimo belardinelli. Show all posts

Thursday, July 26, 2012

175. Speaking Sick of the Dead

May 2007: On the front cover of Meg 259, Clint Langley brings vivid, weird computerized color to John Hicklenton's pen and inks, and a truly vile and nasty villain is brought to life. He's called, alternately, Lord Omega or X-Face, and he's the antagonist in the controversial and very weird "Blood of Satanus III," in which, well, heck, I don't know. This is a story that absolutely defies conventional description or a simple recounting of the plot, because it is more dense, more weird, and more challenging than just about anything that Pat Mills has ever written, and that includes Requiem. There are no mild reactions to it. A few people embrace it for its gauntlet-throwing spectacle; many, many more loathe it utterly for gobbing in the eyes of comics, but, in the wake of Hicklenton's sad end a couple of years later, denying the multiple sclerosis that was ravaging his body any more success by kicking the disease in the head and ending his life prematurely at the Dignitas center in Switzerland, the skeptics took a kinder view, and said no more about it.

I do recall reading Hicklenton's first work in 2000 AD, 1986's "You're Never Alone With a Phone" - written by Neil Gaiman, it was - when it was first published. The second, 1987's "Invisible Etchings of Salvador Dali" - that's right, he started his professional career by illustrating first Gaiman and then Grant Morrison - eluded me for quite some time, owing to erratic distribution in the US. His artwork on the "Phone" story struck me as weird and wonderful from the start. There's a panel depicting the smell-a-vision phone, where the person, repulsed by her correspondant's garlicky meal before calling, turns her head in such a way that it looks like her nose and mouth are trying to crawl away from her face.

And then there was Book Seven of Nemesis the Warlock. I remember seeing episode one of that beast and lingering over how dense and full the panels were, how it looked like Hicklenton spent more time on each individual drawing than I had spent over the previous seven years of trying to think I was learning to draw on stacks and stacks of notebook paper. Nemesis himself didn't show up until the final panel, and if Hicklenton's depiction of him didn't make your eyes pop out of your head the first time you saw him, then you were not paying attention. Hicklenton's Nemesis was all visceral and organic, with the real curvature of nature's ugliest animals, a hideous mating of a water buffalo, a giraffe and some undersea beast - a very far cry from Bryan Talbot's superhero with a funny head and knees. Just that one panel - Purity Brown reinvisioned as a nose-broken, plain, anti-heroine and Nemesis, beady eyes atop a curving stalk of a neck - demanded the arrival of episode two immediately, in a way that the usual cliffhanger, dependent on a plot twist, never can. The writing threw no surprise at the reader - Nem and Purity were in 16th-Century Spain along with their enemy Torquemada - but we had to see the next episode to see more of the artwork.

Nemesis Book Seven is more packed with powerful, unforgettable images like that than just about any other storyline that has ever appeared in the comic. Torquemada having his feet oiled. Torquemada in that torture chair. His namesake smiling pleasantly, encouraging his future self to tell him more. Nemesis throwing his arms back and filling the air with flies. Torquemada spitting on his chainsword, the reflection of Thoth running from him. Thoth bidding farewell to Satanus in the Cretaceous Period - "it was the end of an era." Oh, and that utterly horrific, final shot of Thoth, his small body cruelly and savagely... yeesh. If you read this story just one time, you recall every one of those images.

Hicklenton certainly came up with memorable work after that - nobody's going to forget those fatties hitting the ground in that episode of Heavy Metal Dredd, ever - but that was, to my mind, his crowning glory. Nothing that he ever did matched Nemesis Book Seven for detail and imagination. Certainly we can forgive "Blood of Satanus III" for lacking the intricacy of his early work, because just holding a pen in 2007 caused him incredible discomfort, but over the course of his career, Hicklenton set out to challenge readers and break the rules.

His panel compositions and breakdowns started getting very obtuse on both Heavy Metal Dredd and, most thunderously, in a 1995 serial called Pandora, which is just so damn weird that I'm not convinced that Hicklenton wasn't deliberately trying to alienate everybody who wanted to read it. It's something like thirty-six pages without a single transition or establishing shot, where a solid third of the panels don't seem to depict anything from the script whatever. Having found his specialty in depictions of brutality and ugliness, he was unhappy doing anything conventional.

"Blood of Satanus III" is certainly not easy to follow either, and it's not easy on the eye, but what hurts the most is looking at the parade of nasty imagery and demonic nightmares and knowing that the artist was less able to depict them than he was twenty years previously. Only the sickest of minds could come up with a design like the living mountain of shifting, fluid fat, or the politicians with two mouths, but Hicklenton's weak body simply couldn't draw it with the intensity that you just know that he wanted. The inks are solid blacks and thin lines, with none of the splatters of detail that marked his early work.

As for the story's plot, I don't think that it really matters. It's something to do with a portal to another dimension, and hellish beasts who've been influencing all of humanity's bad behavior getting the chance to act overtly and do horrible things, and Dredd spearheading a mission into the circular world from which they came to strike back. But what it really is, bluntly, is a good opportunity for Hicklenton to unleash his freakish, nightmarish and brutal imagination one last time. We can all wish that maybe it would have hung together as a story a little better and been a bit more comprehensible, but we got a long, last, ugly, ugly look at Hicklenton's demons before he left us. That's a good thing.

This issue of the Megazine also features a tribute, written by Michael Molcher, to the late, great Massimo Belardinelli, who had passed away a couple of months previously. Here was an artist who I only came to appreciate after some time. The first I remember seeing of Belardinelli's work was likely a one-off (a Future Shock without the Future Shock masthead) called "Bad Vibrations" from the early 400s, and an Ace Trucking Company story, "The Nightlight Flight," that I could barely understand because the writing was so incredibly weird. (What was with this author? Grant Grover? Did this guy just not speak English or something? I caught on eventually...) Oh, and Mean Team, which was hopeless. He seemed like an ordinary and nondescript artist stuck with the crummiest and lousiest scripts, when, of course, Massimo was very, very far from ordinary.

Belardinelli's best work was behind him when I discovered him, although he still had some occasional terrific things to come, like 1987's The Dead. I just caught him in a mid-career lull, a short break in a spectacle of hyper-quality. Had I been following 2000 AD from the beginning, and seen his amazing work on Dan Dare, on Inferno, on Meltdown Man, on the first fantastic run of Ace Trucking, alternating with Mike McMahon on the first thirty-something episodes of Slaine, then I would have been a fan much earlier on.

He never seemed to be driven by nightmares in quite the way Hicklenton was, but there was often something ethereal, dreamlike, and really uncanny about his alien worlds and landscapes. Ace Trucking let him design dozens of freaky aliens doing weird stuff in the background, but it was a thoughtful and surprising and often very funny sort of weird, and not a nauseating one. He was never as imaginative or powerful in his designs for human characters, or the force and impact that they brought to the page, but when it came to aliens or technology or humanoid animals leaping out of the page, he was in a class by himself. That whole sequence on the frozen lake in Meltdown Man, where the evil, mind-controlling snake makes a break for it, is simply one of the most frantic and exciting sequences in the comic's history. You couldn't film it and make it more thrilling!

Mills has eulogized both of these artists, and been extraordinarily gracious and complimentary to the work they did his scripts. He's recently called for Rebellion to negotiate with the owners of Dan Dare's copyright to get the 2000 AD version reprinted. Some of it was, in the lousy American format in the late eighties, but only starting with Dave Gibbons' run. Those first six months, with Belardinelli in charge and Dan fighting the Biogs, have never been reprinted anywhere, meaning only the hardcore collectors have seen just how inventive and fun it was. He's also said that, until Simon Bisley painted the Slaine epic "The Horned God," nobody but Belardinelli had depicted the hero's warp-spasm right. Mills has often been very, very gracious to his artists for doing such great work on his scripts. They weren't always to my liking, but we were, honestly, really lucky to have so much great work from these two.

Stories from this issue have been reprinted in the following collected editions:
Judge Dredd: "Street Fighting Man" in Lenny Zero & the Perps of Mega-City One (Amazon USA)

Next time, hey, speaking of Mills, you wait around for ages for a new Pat Mills creation, and then two come at once: Defoe and Greysuit. See you in seven!

Thursday, December 10, 2009

120. Tucker Truckin'

Welcome back to Thrillpowered Thursday! This week, a little change of pace, as the Hipster Daughter shows off Tharg's impressive little promotional gimmick this year, a 48-page minicomic that was given away to the crowds at the San Diego Comic-Con this summer, and mailed out for free to subscribers of the Galaxy's Greatest. My buddy "Proudhuff" was good enough to send me a copy for my collection, and I thought I would share it with you. It's a real shame that Rebellion had given away the full print run at SDCC; I had inquired whether there were any promotional giveaways available for the GMX panel I did in Nashville a couple of months ago and I think a couple of dozen of these would have been great for that crowd!

The comic features eight strips from a host of 2000 AD's better-known talents, from older classics to some of the newer series. It's a really nice introduction to Tharg's world, featuring a one-off Judge Dredd ("Finger of Suspicion" by John Wagner and Cam Kennedy), a classic Future Shock by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons and "Reefer Madness" by Gordon Rennie and Frazer Irving, along with the first episodes of the Dredd classic "Judge Death" by Wagner and Brian Bolland, Kingdom by Dan Abnett and Richard Elson, Zombo by Al Ewing and Henry Flint, and the Slaine epic "The Horned God" by Pat Mills and Simon Bisley.



Each episode ends with a teeny blurb explaining where readers can go next to follow the story or the creators, and while the small size may not be ideal for the artwork - Bisley's in particular suffers - it's a terrific little promo. The last time something like this was tried, it was DC's US-comic-sized freebie, which most comic shops (at least in the Atlanta area) didn't bother to order, since retailers had to pay for them, and they got burned when the similar giveaway Humanoids comic didn't net any new sales for shops. (More about this when we come to that graphic novel line in a future installment!)

I've been saying for years that 2000 AD should participate in the annual Free Comic Book Day which Diamond sponsors each summer. A little reprint of this, with the booth information replaced by a suggestion to ask retailers to order graphic novels and get more of the story, would be a truly great thing indeed. Then again, Rebellion is quite tight-lipped about the business end of the comic, and for all I know, something even better is in the works. Fingers crossed anyway!

One problem about Rebellion's business that we do know about is that they're forced to work with a deeply inept distributor called Diamond to get their product into American comic shops and, earlier in the year, Diamond elected to cancel quite a few already-solicited books in a cost-cutting measure. Among those impacted: the second volume of Ace Trucking Company, a demented, wild comedy by John Wagner, Alan Grant and the late Massimo Belardinelli which originally ran for five years in the eighties. Fortunately, the collection is available through British bookstores and eBay sellers, and from the 2000 AD online shop, so I eventually landed a copy and was very pleased to reread these lunatic adventures.

Ace Trucking is a barely-profitable shipping company run by a motormouth called Ace Garp, who's just one dirty get-rich quick scheme away from either the big time or a very long prison sentence. In fact, he starts this book in jail, a couple of years after he and his crew were put away at the end of the first collected edition. It's set in a very weird future where few humans can be found. This gave Belardinelli the chance to design a completely alien environment and huge casts full of freaky, comical aliens, strange architecture, bizarre spaceships powering through asteroid belts and gangly-limbed space pirates whose T-shirts smoke pipes.

Belardinelli drew all but two of the sixty-odd episodes reprinted in this mammoth book. While he was recuperating from an illness, an anonymous member of the Giolitti art agency, who represented him in England, stepped in for him. Otherwise, this book is all him, and you've not had the pleasure of enjoying Belardinelli before, you should really rectify that. Almost every page looks like he was really having a ball designing this series, and just laughing himself silly with the in-jokes and weird aliens eating each other. Admittedly, towards the end it gets a little dry. The final epic serial in the book was clearly one where the writers were running out of ideas, and Belardinelli wasn't finding very much inspiration as our heroes endlessly searched across the planet Hollywood and through one parody after another in search of some treasure. Before it started its downhill slide, though, Ace Trucking really was something great.

So the entire series is available in two omnibus editions. Obviously, the first is the more consistent of the two, but the second is still full of essential moments, including Ace's recurring enemy Evil Blood, parallel universes, chicken gangsters, labor unrest, sacred worms, porcine royalty, cargo holds full of space fertilizer and contraband beetles which, when ingested, blow your mind so far out that your eyeballs play table tennis against each other. It also contains the strip's spectacular farewell epilogue, in which Ace learns just how unnecessary he actually is to his company's fortunes. You won't find this book at an American comic shop, but I highly recommend that you track down a copy from England.

Next time, we resume the reread in 2003, with the return of Slaine! See you in seven!

Thursday, December 18, 2008

79. Downlode Downtime

Thrillpowered Thursday is a weekly look at the world of 2000 AD. I'm rereading my collection of 2000 AD and the Judge Dredd Megazine, one issue an evening, and once each week for the foreseeable future, I'll see what I'm inspired to write.

As 1999 comes to an end, and all the big epic storylines from the last several weeks start wrapping things up, I see that I have been a little lax in mentioning the big developments in the two better-known semi-regular series from the period. I've mentioned in passing that there's a terrific epic going on in the pages of Nikolai Dante but haven't paused to let you know what it was. As of November 1999 (prog 1170, represented here by this funny Jason Brashill Devlin Waugh cover), our hero is about two-thirds of the way through the epic "Courtship of Jena Makarov" story. This brilliant story represents the close of the first of Dante's four storytelling phases, and was reprinted by Rebellion in the third Dante collection. Here, the mighty houses of Romanov and Makarov finally find an excuse to go to all-out war with each other, as Jena is abducted by a third party. Her supposed suitor Mikhail Deriabin plans to manouver himself into a position of power alongside whichever house wins the war. That it will decimate Russia is irrelevant to anybody involved; it never matters to the people with power. Not even family matters to them.

For fans of the series, the heartbreaking way that things play out really elevate this storyline into something both special and compelling. It features Simon Fraser's best art yet, and several of the Romanovs get screen time. But what really makes this story so memorable is that while Dante races desperately against time to rescue Jena before the empires start their war, writer Robbie Morrison has been putting all the pieces in play to make sure that it's going to happen regardless of whether Dante comes through. Most tragically, the spy that Dante and Konstantin conscripted some months previously does her part, and, in a heartbreakingly grisly cliffhanger ending to this week's episode, Konstantin shows up to murder Jena's sister.



Meanwhile, Downlode Tales, the follow-up to Sinister Dexter in which the protagonists have been working opposite sides of the law to track down the conspiracy which brought an end to Demi Octavo's empire, wrapped up in prog 1168 after the better part of five months. It's been quite a bloodbath, but the villain Telemachus Gore has been ferreted out, exposed and killed. The body count includes about half of the supporting cast: Nervous Rex, Steampunk Willy and Agent Bunkum are all dead, along with pretty much all the "Ass Kickers" and the "Whack Pack" assembled for the job.

The last part of Downlode Tales sees the duo in the hospital, having crashed a helicopter while hunting down Gore. It's less of a grand finale than a "what next" moment, and they'll be returning under the Sinister Dexter title in a few weeks.

Sinister Dexter Bullet Count: Adding to their previous totals, Finnigan and Ramone each take one more confirmed hit storming Gore's headquarters. This gives us a total of 10 for Sinister and three for Dexter.

That's really all I have time to discuss today, but please enjoy the following gorgeous picture of Nemesis from the Pat Mills-Henry Flint storyline which I discussed last week, and also this review of a new graphic novel.








I'm a firm fan of the "satisfying chunk" school of bookshelf collections. I'll take a slight downtick in paper quality if it means more bang for my buck. And that is certainly the case with the recent Ace Trucking Company collection. Rebellion's great big trade, the first of two, covers a whopping sixty episodes of the early '80s comedy series, plus a text story from an old annual.

Almost all of Ace Trucking was drawn by the late Massimo Belardinelli, and I think it's his finest work. Completely full of bizarre aliens, mechanical marvels and weird landscapes, he always found new ways to pace the action by way of strange angles and dramatic positioning of his characters. And they're a downright weird bunch, too. The grapevine says that the editorial team was rarely satisfied with Belardinelli's ability to draw tough guys at the time, so John Wagner and Alan Grant developed a strip with exactly one human being in it, and he was one of the loudmouthed bad guys. The hero was an absurdly skinny alien with a pointy head and enormous feet, and the supporting cast included an eight-foot tall dude with blank eyes and a mane of hair, and a half-naked midget with a skull for a head. Constantly screaming at each other in a parody of the palare used by CB radio nuts, it was one hairbrained get-rich-quick scheme after another for years, until the series was finally felt to have run its course in 1986.

Time's been kind to Ace Trucking. It's clearly a period piece - anything with "Breaker, breaker!" in a word balloon will be - but its comedy is timeless thanks to the likeable characters and escalating disasters of its situations. Belardinelli's work would eventually lose a little luster and he'd fall out of favor with subsequent editors, so it's likely you might not have seen very much of it before now. Also, his work, like Jesus Redondo's and Carlos Ezquerra's, was not favored by the editors at Titan Books, who originally compiled much of the 2000 AD reprints in the 1980s, and in many ways set the stage for what had been considered "classic" or not. Many of these episodes are only now seeing their first reprint, and it's great to see so much of this lovely art under one set of covers. This comes highly recommended, and I hope you check it out.

Next week, it's Prog 2000! Tharg promises the best issue yet - can he deliver?

(Originally posted 12/18/08 at hipsterdad's LiveJournal.)