Showing posts with label peter hogan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label peter hogan. Show all posts

Thursday, May 23, 2013

202. Other People's Heroes

August 2010: The summer of 2010 saw several major series underway, and two that I wanted to look at just a little more closely are a pair written by 2000 AD veterans Pat Mills and John Wagner. They are both revisionist looks at much older series. Savage, of course, has been giving 'em both barrels for several years now. "Crims" is Book Six of the series, written as always by Mills and drawn by Patrick Goddard. It sees Bill Savage, now using another undercover identity, getting help from several of London's criminal gangs to get the manpower and resources to infiltrate a Volgan command center. The Volgs have countered the Allies' super sci-fi robots with teleportation, and somebody needs to get in there and shut them down. As it is, Allied robots have already been pushed back out of Wales...

"Crims" is just beautifully drawn by Goddard, who piles on the detail and the ink. It is, surprisingly, a little longer than the usual Pat Mills story of late. For the previous six or seven years, Mills had been working in blocks of 60 pages broken down into ten episodes. When episode ten of this story didn't end the book -it continues for another 30 pages and wraps with part fifteen - it really surprised readers who'd become used to Mills' tropes. But the really splendid part comes with an interlude in the middle of the story.

Some of the dialogue is a little labored when Mills introduces the surviving player of a '60s rock band who, like Syd Barrett, retired into hermitage after a short time in the spotlight. Only this fellow kept his considerable record royalties to live in some peace and quiet on Eel Pie Island. He was happy to let the world think that he was another acid casualty; it was actually his girlfriend, a hippie chick who'd been linked with Brian Jones and all the big names back in the day, who had lost her mind. He retreated from the limelight and spent the next few decades engaged in research into the sort of sci-fi physics that would come in handy fighting the Volgans' teleporters. So it's a little contrived, but the human elements to the story are incredibly effective, and Goddard's artwork is just amazing. It is some of the best black and white artwork that 2000 AD has seen in years.

But the thing that really demands comment this time out is the first chunk of "The Life and Death of Johnny Alpha." It's an interesting case of Wagner aping Mills' technique, and using the style that Mills had designed for his Slaine and ABC Warriors stories many years before. When this story concludes in 2014, it will be at least 40 episodes long, a huge epic that sees Johnny Alpha's revival and the second war between mutants and humanity. But before we get to that point, there's the major and controversial business of Wagner killing off the character of Feral.

Okay, so there are two things to explain before getting into this, both the factual and the fictional background of what has happened previously. I'll try to keep this reasonably simple. Feral is a character who was introduced by Alan Grant in his final Strontium Dog serial in 1990. That story concluded with Johnny Alpha's death, and Feral was one of a number of supporting players who made their way into a sequel series, Strontium Dogs, which was helmed by Garth Ennis from 1991-93, and then by Peter Hogan until its cancellation in 1996. This coincided with then-editor David Bishop letting Hogan know that his services were no longer required at 2000 AD and finishing off Hogan's final scripts for the series with the pseudonym "Alan Smithee."

Now, depending on who you ask, Strontium Dogs was either a long-winded bore of subplots that never went anywhere, whose main cast were characters not strong enough to anchor a strip of their own, dropped irregularly into the lineup as space filler until the next launch prog, or, alternately, it was one of the few things during the dark days of the early 1990s that held any promise and was written with a sense of maturity and intelligence, especially when half or more of every issue was written by Mark Millar in "explodo-vision." I say this, respectfully, because the Ennis-Hogan Strontium Dogs certainly has its fans, many of whom came to the comic during this bleak years and have stuck around. I may not be among them, but there are certainly more readers who remember Dogs fondly than there are who liked, say, Bix Barton as I did.

But one thing seems clear: John Wagner didn't seem to think much of Peter Hogan's work. He puts his opinion in mean black and white about halfway through the story. "The Life and Death of Johnny Alpha" is structured as though it's excerpts from an academic history of situations famous enough to warrant multiple, competing, biographies. What we're about to learn about Feral is very much at odds with the reports from previous chroniclers, and Wagner flatly dismisses the earlier work by "the notorious fantasist Ho Gan." Ouch. This won't be good.

While Ennis and Hogan's Feral was a tough, scared kid dealing with an increasingly bizarre mutation and slowly gaining the maturity and insight to become a leader, Wagner reveals him to be a coward and a bungler, who wanted to do the right thing from time to time but lacked the spine to do it. The story opens with longtime supporting player Middenface McNulty teamed with newcomer Precious Matson, who has heard from reliable sources that Johnny Alpha's skeleton was not left behind in the other dimension as depicted in "Final Solution," but rather, his body was returned to Earth by Feral. The trail eventually leads them to Feral, who is a condemned man awaiting execution on the planet of Garn.


Garn is one of those planets that really only makes sense in the context of Strontium Dog. It's a perfect mix of an oddball culture and black-as-coal comedy. The Garnians do not have noses, and consider any species that does have noses to be ungodly. They allow McNulty and Matson to visit the condemned, in deference to the renowned hero Johnny Alpha, but while they're in public, they have to wear masks that cover their offensive honkers. Feral is sentenced to die here for an act of small-scale sabotage to cover his escape from a spacecraft, but there was an accident and dozens were killed. Capital punishment on Garn is carried out by immolation: Feral is to be burned at the stake. Worse, they're fattening him up so that he'll burn cleaner. When our heroes meet him, he weighs at least three hundred pounds.

Feral is a very bitter and ugly man, not at all the person who starred in the Ennis and Hogan stories. He is willing to confirm what McNulty and Matson have already learned: he brought Johnny's body back, where it remained in some state of preservation, not decaying at all, and spread the lie that the beast that we saw in the last episode of "Final Solution" left him nothing but broken bones. Beyond that, he won't say a thing, including where Johnny's corpse is now, until McNulty and Matson spring him. The following episode sees our heroes doing exactly that, because this is an action-adventure melodrama, and we expect that sort of thing.

So Feral goes on to explain that he took Johnny's corpse to the mysterious planet Zen, where the land is in a constant state of flux and where bizarre, towering Stone Wizards - great big pillars of animated rock - are said to have the power to revive the dead or reverse the effects of evil sorcery like what killed Johnny. Feral eventually finds the Wizards, who are unimpressed with the work of the Lyran magic. They agree to revive him, but only in return for Feral's life. He declines, buries Johnny in a forest, and makes his way into the troubled life that seemed to end almost ten years later at Garn until McNulty and Matson rescued him.

And then we get the blunt stick of reality. McNulty is an alcoholic has-been and Matson is a journalist. They didn't rescue him. Of course they didn't. They staged the abduction with the assistance of the Garnian authorities to persuade Feral to talk. The execution is going on as scheduled. Ouch.


I'm not saying that Feral's fans are legion or anything, but this just plain ticked off a few people. Over the course of about four episodes, Wagner and Ezquerra completely demolished the character of Feral, declaring his earlier heroics to be unreal fictions and giving him an ignominious and pathetic end. Myself, I always thought that Feral was cut from far too close a cloth as what was trendy and kewl in American funnybooks. He was all claws and spikes and everything that every Wolverine wannabe was like in the early 90s. Still, it's a heck of a bad way to go out.

Sometimes, heroes don't get to go out either in a blaze of glory or down the happy path of retirement. Feral screwed up, often, and lots of people died, and his execution - preceded by the ritual slicing-off of his nose as one final indignity before death - is ugly and horrible. It kind of goes without saying that it is unlikely that any American superhero book would be so bold. Can you imagine a character like Hawkeye or Aquaman meeting a final fate so ugly and demeaning? Heck, you can't even imagine a character like Hawkeye or Aquaman meeting a final fate, period. They get resurrected as quickly as a new writer can flick the reset button.

Actually, the nearest thing that I can think of was a stunning 1997 issue of Starman by James Robinson and Dusty Abell, in which the criminal the Mist killed off at least four DC Comics D-listers: Crimson Fox, Ice, Amazing Man, and Blue Devil. At least one of those four seems to have stayed dead.

And on that note, we'll come back to Johnny's very controversial resurrection when the second chunk of this lengthy epic appears. More on that in chapter 212.

In the next chapter, however, 2000 AD gets its first really memorable female lead in quite some time with the debut of Rowan Morrigan in Age of the Wolf See you in seven!

Thursday, December 27, 2007

34. Simon Davis Saves the Day

May 1996: Prog 993 sports a fun little cover by the great Sean Phillips, well known among current comic readers for his work on Criminal with Ed Brubaker. That feller on the front is Middenface McNulty, one of 2000 AD's most popular second bananas, heralding the return inside of Strontium Dogs. This series is a follow-up to the original run of Strontium Dog, which concluded five years previously, and continues the stories of the supporting cast in the wake of Johnny Alpha's death. Garth Ennis wrote a few series before moving on to work for US publishers. This left the writer Peter Hogan to take up his plot threads, and he divided the characters into two separate series: the Strontium Dogs strips dealt with the Gronk, Bullmoose, Feral and a gang of mad professors, while Durham Red and Frinton Fuzz took their story into the separate Durham Red run.

The problem was, as was common during the Burton / McKenzie regimes, it was ages between stories in the weekly. A new story would arrive after being absent for five months, run for four weeks, advance its subplots a little, and vanish again. Read in one go, they aren't bad at all, but spread out over years, it was pretty tedious. Reading this run with the benefit of hindsight, we know that the next four months are going to give us a good solid run of the two series at last, this time with the S/D art chores taken up by Trevor Hairsine, but there's a remarkable giveaway of a clue in this credit box about how much more we'll be seeing of Strontium Dogs in the future:



Alan Smithee, huh? That can't be good. Indeed, as with R.A.M. Raiders, which we saw in the previous entry, an appropriate level of hype and attention, including an intro page with art by Henry Flint, is being paid to a strip which will not be returning. It's always touchy to mention a couple of creators you enjoy and respect having a professional disagreement, but you know how last time I was saying how a number of creators begin moving on from 2000 AD during this period, as David Bishop declines to commission new material from them? Peter Hogan would be one of those.

Bishop is very forthcoming in Thrill-Power Overload about how he did not handle this decision as delicately as he might have done, but his decision means the end of the road for both Hogan's Robo-Hunter, which only has a single episode left in the can at this stage, and Strontium Dogs, while Durham Red will be given to Dan Abnett. Hogan's final episodes go out under the Alan Smithee pseudonym, and that's the last we see of the Gronk and Feral, and of Durham's ongoing war against the criminal Gothking.

Hogan really didn't get the chance to contribute to 2000 AD as much as I'd have liked. His subsequent work in comics has been sporadic, but he's highly regarded for some work with Alan Moore on the Terra Obscura series for ABC/Wildstorm. Hairsine, of course, has a number of projects for the House of Tharg still to come over the next few years. Most recently, he worked with Paul Cornell for Marvel Comics on a Pete Wisdom miniseries.

This sounds like a bit of a bummer of an entry, but the weekly is still very strong right now. Judge Dredd's epic "The Pit" continues. John Wagner is still scripting; art in this week's episode is by Alex Ronald and Alan Craddock. Vector 13 offers a ghost story by Brian Williamson and John Burns, and the final series of Finn continues, by Pat Mills, Tony Skinner and Paul Staples.

But then there is Sinister Dexter, and what has started as a pretty good, entertaining series has suddenly become unmissably fantastic, because Simon Davis has joined the art team:



Geez, that's beautiful. I love his work; Davis is among my five favorite comic artists. And here's the crazy thing: I imagine Davis will be quick to say that his painting looks the best when he's got a great deal of time to work on the pages, but his first two Sin Dex episodes were done under a pretty hellish deadline, and they look great.

In an earlier entry, I explained that five more episodes of Sin Dex were commissioned with very little lead time - about two months from the order until the comics went to the printer. So two episodes went to Charlie Gillespie, who'd done three of the first eight installments, one went to Henry Flint, who had just wrapped up some Rogue Trooper stories, and the other two went to Davis. Bishop had used Davis a few times as an artist for Missionary Man while he was editor of the Megazine, and knew that Davis could be counted on to make a tough deadline.

And he makes it look effortless. Over time, quite a few artists will be tackling Sinister Dexter, but Davis will get the first two of the important, long stories, "Gunshark Vacation" and "Murder 101," in 1997. These will cement Sin Dex's popularity to the point that it will become a semi-regular feature. But more on that another time!

Oh, one other note: I half-joked on the message board this week that I should keep a running Sinister Dexter bullet count. Turns out, across the first fourteen episodes, they each only take one confirmed hit apiece, in part two of "The Eleventh Commandment." Since Anthony Williams, at this time, was filling the negative space of his panels with as many shell casings as he can reasonably draw in them, I am amazed that our heroes only take two bullets across all of these installments. (In "Family Man," Henry Flint draws Ramone clutching his forearm as if to imply he'd been hit in just one panel, but there's nothing in the script to confirm it. Isn't this a great hobby?)

Next week, I'm not sure... probably a word or two about Finn and Slaine. Take care!

(Originally published 12/27/07 at LiveJournal.)

Thursday, October 11, 2007

25. Chin to Chin

It's October 1995, and, if you can figure out what that big orangey-brown thing on the cover is, it's time for a truly odd little four-part story in which Pat Mills, Tony Skinner and Jason Brashill look into what the heck Hammerstein was doing in the Judge Dredd movie. The real answer is that artist Kevin Walker, around the time he was painting the "Khronicles of Khaos" storyline for The ABC Warriors, was contracted to do some design work for the Dredd film. Since the script called for a old war robot to do the baddie's bidding, he just reused the Hammerstein design. Brashill paints Hammerstein with an enormous helmet; I think this cover would work a lot better if he wasn't wearing it; then you'd have Dredd chin-to-chin with Hammerstein's angular, robotic jaw, and not that big ugly expanse of curved muddy orange.

The fictional answer is that Mills figured it would be a good idea to have the crazy robot tank from the later parts of "The Cursed Earth" be one of the ABC Warriors' commanders, and that at some point that does not really make a lot of sense, General Blood n' Guts led a battalion of Hammersteins against the judges during the big civil war in the late 21st century that led to the creation of the Mega-Cities. Well, of course.



One thing I like about 2000 AD is that it usually does not go out of its way to reconcile odd backstories or tie together threads into one continuity. It remains a favorite hobby of some fans, but, mercifully, understanding how one series may be set in the same universe as another is never required to figure out what the heck is going on in the comic. Also, this is the first time that the character of Hammerstein is described as being one of many; previously, in Ro-Busters and the original ABC Warriors storyline, it was implied that most war droids were these sort of anonymous C-3PO-looking guys. The concept of a battalion full of Hammerstein droids has resurfaced in the current "Volgan War" story by Mills and Clint Langley.

Mills would later start playing with different versions of the same storyline. The ABC Warriors and Ro-Busters are set in an outlandish, sci-fi world where the Volgan invasion of Britain led to the immediate development of armies of robots. Savage, which picks up the themes from the original Invasion! storyline, is set in the modern world, in a present we'd find ourselves in had England really been invaded in 1999. So it doesn't stretch things too much to have another version where ABC War vets were fighting the judges after the Volgans surrendered. (If you don't know what a Volgan is, recall that the longest river in Europe is the Volga, and that the comic's publishers didn't wish to offend anybody at the Russian Embassy, even if the comic's writers, in 1977, didn't mind who they offended.)

Also running in this prog is a really great, terrific Dredd story by Wagner and John Burns called "The Cal Files." This introduces another recurring nemesis for Dredd in the form of Judge Edgar, the power-hungry head of Justice Department's Public Surveillance Unit. Edgar's quiet manipulation of politics makes her a fascinating moral and ethical opponent for Dredd. Also appearing in the issue are the continuing stories of Luke Kirby (Alan McKenzie & Simon Parkhouse), Maniac 5 (Mark Millar & Steve Yeowell) and Slaine (Mills & Langley), along with the first episode of "Deals," a new Durham Red four-parter by Peter Hogan and Mark Harrison. Unfortunately, the story starts off with one of the most bizarre printing errors ever seen in the comic:



Well, they got the lettering right, anyway...

(Originally published 10/11/07 on LiveJournal.)

Thursday, June 21, 2007

12. Hughes on Slade

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.

It's October 1994 and 2000 AD is continuing stories from its most recent jump-on issue in prog 910. You've got more with Judge Dredd in "Wilderlands" by John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra, Button Man by Wagner and Arthur Ranson, ABC Warriors by Pat Mills, Tony Skinner and Kevin Walker and Robo-Hunter by Peter Hogan and Rian Hughes. That's four excellent strips; unfortunately they share space this week with Red Razors, another "I'm the toughest there is!" beat-em-up by Mark Millar and poor old Nigel Dobbyn, who has to draw this nonsense.

But speaking of drawing, isn't that a great cover? Heaven knows I've seen it enough times. For about a year, 2000 AD was not available in the US. I ordered progs 875-899 from Forbidden Planet, and then shelled out for a subscription. Wow, what a nightmare that was.

I must point out that 2000 AD was later acquired by their present owners Rebellion, and their subscription department is said to be so darn good that many readers are incredibly happy with the service.

Sadly, this was not the case in 1994, although I still wouldn't recommend surface mail for anybody, regardless of the customer service. Until American distribution resumed around prog 930, I was stuck with banged up, beat up, mangled, torn up copies, kicked around at the bottom of a cargo ship with two tons of tractor equipment on top of them. About six never showed up. Only about four of the remaining 25 issues were in anything like good condition. I was so aggravated by how badly prog 910, with this beautiful Rian Hughes cover, was damaged that I wrote a letter and asked for a replacement copy. It too was beat all to hell. When I next visited London, in the spring of 1995, I visited Gosh!, one of England's best comic shops, and replaced most of my surface mail copies.



Rian Hughes has picked up a little press lately, since a collection of his comics work called Yesterday's Tomorrows is coming out this summer. It includes an adaptation of Raymond Chandler's Goldfish and two collaborations with Grant Morrison: Dare, which originally appeared in 2000 AD's sister books Revolver and Crisis, and Really & Truly, from 2000 AD progs 842-849.

That Hughes illustrated an adaptation of Chandler is striking, because he also got to play with Robo-Hunter for 13 episodes. They're not highly regarded by the fan base, because they're done without the participation of Sam Slade's creators, John Wagner and Ian Gibson, or his other regular scribe, Alan Grant. They also came at a time when fandom was reacting with quite justifiable derision to Mark Millar's take on the character, and the overwhelming feeling was that Robo-Hunter needed to go. It didn't warrant being retooled in the hands of new creators, it needed to be axed.

That I enjoy Peter Hogan and Rian Hughes' take occasionally surprises people, because it's well documented that the original run is categorically my all-time favorite comic series, and because I'm well-known to be Samantha Slade's biggest defender. Surely, then, I'd pay respect to the creators by not praising what's nothing more than a stop-gap trademark defense?



Well, the thing to remember about the Hogan / Hughes time is that it's past. It happened. We can't go back and change it. It's not an ongoing slap in Wagner, Grant and Gibson's faces, and so it can be judged on its own merits, apart from the politics of the day that surrounded it. But the thing I would like to believe is that when Alan McKenzie inherited the editor's chair and the Rosette of Sirius from Richard Burton, he recognized that there was something very wrong with Robo-Hunter under Mark Millar's tenure, and it really was slapping the original creators in the face.

While understanding, respecting, and often agreeing with those who believe in creators' rights, I also see the need for 2000 AD to keep a bank of regular series to maintain reader interest. Yeah, McKenzie might well have done better to have axed Robo-Hunter outright, but instead, he gave it to the new team and said "Make this good again."

And they did.

That Rian Hughes is a complete genius is obvious. His design and layout skills are amazing, and he's the perfect choice to give Slade's New York a style and life of its own. The world has elements of classic noir filtered through 1950s advertising mascots and dated space-age zap guns. His pacing is note-perfect, the strange designs of the robots are consistent, and everything works without a flaw. Sam Slade's world, in these stories, is a solid, believable universe, and each of the four stories he illustrated is set in the same, unique, world. As the Millar stories were handled by several artists with different visions and opinions, they never looked like the same place twice.

But the scripts work too! Peter Hogan got to write five stories in all (one, illustrated by Simon Jacob, was in a Sci-Fi Special that I don't own), and he nailed the character of Sam Slade. Whenever I write about Robo-Hunter, I keep coming back to Chandler's famous essay, where he explains that the key to understanding detective fiction is to understand that the man who walks the mean streets is not himself mean. Millar's version of Sam Slade was; that's what made those episodes so appalling, even before you got to everything else that was wrong with them. They turned your old pal Sam into a violent boor. Peter Hogan fixed that. His Sam was everything that Slade should be; exasperated, put-upon, broke, down on his luck, but an absolute charmer on every page. Sam has to have a heart of gold even if he tries to project an aura of distance; it's why we love the big loser when everything goes wrong.

I will concede that the construction of the stories is not quite like the classic run. Hogan's tales are more conventional mysteries, but lighthearted and whimsical. There's a love of wordplay and puns not present in the original series. But they are incredibly clever, and they begin developing a nice supporting cast beyond Slade and his assistants.



As I've mentioned before in this column, McKenzie has unfortunately elected to not go on the record about his time on the comic during this period outside of his own site. It has not been updated to this period. I suggest, without any solid evidence, that as his time as editor wound down - John Tomlinson was the next Tharg, starting in 1995 - Robo-Hunter got sidelined in favor of some of the newer strips. As Tomlinson, and later David Bishop, began considering series, they had to consider the considerable fan outcry against Millar's Robo-Hunter, and the unfortunate, baffling, lack of popularity of Rian Hughes, and quietly shelved the strip. (Bishop and Hogan had a falling out as well, which certainly tabled any new work from this team.)

In 2004, Robo-Hunter returned in new tales of Sam's granddaughter Samantha. An early episode briefly dismissed the full 90s run as being incidents that happened to a robot masquerading as Slade, thus consigning 2000 AD's one and only quasi-official "non-canon" stamp to a series. Grant and Gibson were certainly well within their rights to dump anything they didn't like, but I think that it's a shame that they, and most of the readers, didn't like Hogan and Hughes' tales. I think they're deeply misread and horribly underrated, and if they had appeared under the name Standish Archer, Droid Detective, they'd probably rate a little higher in the fan polling.

It should not surprise you to learn that the four Hogan/Hughes stories have not been reprinted, but Yesterday's Tomorrows will be in stores in mid-July. Peter Hogan's done some scripting with Alan Moore on the America's Best line; Hughes has mainly been working in commercial illustration and design, which probably pays a lot better.

Also this week: Tharg gives the new Fantastic Four film a thumbs-down.

Back in seven, but for what, I couldn't say yet!

(Originally published 6/21/07 at LiveJournal.)