Hi,
I'm Andrew.
I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.
If you have enjoyed this essay, please consider backing me on Patreon (pledging £1 each time I publish an article.)
Hi,
I'm Andrew.
I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.
If you have enjoyed this essay, please consider backing me on Patreon (pledging £1 each time I publish an article.)
The Micronauts was an American repackaging of a line of Japanese toys and action figures. It was never a construction system like Lego, but the figures had joints and connections of a consistent size, so any robot or spaceship could be disassembled and put back together in a different configuration. Spaceships could become cities and cities could become robots. "The Interchangable World of the Micronauts", they called it.
Hi,
I'm Andrew.
I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.
If you have enjoyed this essay, please consider backing me on Patreon (pledging £1 each time I publish an article.)
That first poster was strangely static. A bare-chested male hero, holding some kind of shining light or torch above his head; a woman, with one leg provocatively unclothed, below him. She has a ray gun, but it is hanging flaccidly at her side; the hero is holding his weapon or wand or magic lamp aloft, dividing the frame into quarters.
They aren't identifiable as the film characters: either Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher hadn't been cast when it was painted, or else the artist (one Tom Jung) didn't have reference material to hand.
They are standing on a sandbank. It could be Tatooine, but Leia doesn't go to Tatooine in the film. And apart from a brief training sequence on the Falcon, Luke never actually wields his lightsaber. (And anyway a lightsaber is a short coloured beam, not a silvery beacon that reaches up to the sky.) The droids and the cloud of X-Wing fighters -- far more than appear in the film -- are small and indistinct.
Behind everything an imposing, ethereal face. It could be a man in a helmet; it could be a robot. His blackness merges with the blackness of the stars. There is no clue as to who he is; but he dominates the frame: at some level, he is what this movie is about.
The poster is selling us a film which is alien and Other; wistful and slightly exotic. It's a science fiction film -- there are robots and spaceships and ray guns and some kind of space station -- but they are part of the background; not the selling point. We are focussed on a hero and a heroine who look as if they came off a Frank Frazetta sword-and-sorcery paperback cover.
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. We are intrigued, rather than thrilled. If the poster had a soundtrack, it would be Leia's theme or the Stravinsky-inspired Tusken music.
A hero.
A space-knight.
A princess.
An alien.
Blaster swords.
Laser fire.
And behind it all, a dark lord.
It was very, very clear what was on offer.
I have been saying for some time that I would talk about Bill Mantlo and the Micronauts.
So this is Andrew Rilstone, talking about Bill Mantlo and the Micronauts.
The Micronauts: best and most blatant and shameless of all Star Wars rip-offs.
The Micronauts: the best bad comic book I have ever read.
continues
The Strange Death of Alex Raymond is, in complicated ways, unfinished. Sim sustained an apparently unexplained wrist injury which means he can no longer draw. The final pages of the comic are blue-tinted, to indicate that a second contributor, Carson Grubaugh, has taken over from Sim. (He isn't a believer in Sim's theories, but thinks there is something to them. Skeptical but spooked, he says.) Grubaugh is working from Sim's layouts -- big double page spreads (very reminiscent of parts of J.H Williams 's work on Promethea) -- mapping the swirling influences of the metaphysical wassissname across history. It turns out that George Herriman launched five unsuccessful comic strips before Krazy Kat (which some people consider to be the greatest comic of all time). These five strips came out around the time of Alex Raymond's birth. This is
Hi,
I'm Andrew.
I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.
If you have enjoyed this essay, please consider backing me on Patreon (pledging £1 each time I publish an article.)
My extended Essay on Cerebus the Aardvark is available from Lulu press.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
The Strange Death of Alex Raymond is subtitled "a metaphysical history of comics photorealism".
The term "metaphysical" keeps cropping up. Alex Raymond is "the first human being to methodically and purposefully shatter the metaphysical realism barrier", apparently.
In philosophy, metaphysics means questions about what is really, really, real -- as opposed to epistemology, which answers questions about how we know what we know, and ethics, which is about, well, ethics. Sim seems to be using the word to mean something like "underlying reality" -- what Douglas Adams called "the fundamental interconnectedness" of things. Dirk Gently, you will remember, saw the solution to each problem as being detectable in the pattern and web of the whole.
Does one historical person share a name with another historical person? They may have a "metaphysical enactment relationship". Does a character in a comic strip resemble a real person? It can be said to be a "metaphysical comic art portrayal of them."
The back cover blurb talks about "meta-textual resonances". A meta-text is a text which talks about itself; very often a book which knows that it is a book. One of the things which distinguishes human language from mere signalling is that you can use language to talk about language; where you can't -- say -- use road signs to talk about road signs. (I suppose a sign which said Important Sign In Half A Mile might be meta-sign. )
I do wonder if the two words -- metaphysics and metatext -- have become connected or confused in the writer's mind.
Hi,
I'm Andrew.
I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.
If you have enjoyed this essay, please consider backing me on Patreon (pledging £1 each time I publish an article.)
My extended Essay on Cerebus the Aardvark is available from Lulu press.
The Strange Death of Alex Raymond is more like an extended essay than a graphic novel. The text, sometimes in captions and sometimes in balloons, reads a lot like one of Sim's editorials or back-of-the-book text-pieces from the days of Cerebus. Some people will find that more off-putting than I did: I have always found Sim's prose style readable and engaging and indeed powerful. The Viktor Davies material directly prior to the explosive Tangents essay was an astonishing piece of prose by anyone's standards. (Disclaimers. Troll.)
Hi,
I'm Andrew.
I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.
If you have enjoyed this essay, please consider backing me on Patreon (pledging £1 each time I publish an article.)
My extended Essay on Cerebus the Aardvark is available from Lulu press.
Hi,
I'm Andrew.
I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.
If you have enjoyed this essay, please consider backing me on Patreon (pledging £1 each time I publish an article.)
My extended Essay on Cerebus the Aardvark is available from Lulu press.