They Came From Inner Space

1978

Toy Story

How Toys Become Real

I've Never Seen Star Wars

Source Criticism

Tales From The Galaxy

Micronauts #1 Homeworld

Micronauts #1 (continued)

Micronauts #2 & #3 Earth / Death Duel at Daytona Beach

Micronauts #4 & #5 Death Duel at Daytona Beach / The Prometheus Pit

Micronauts #6 & #7 The Great Escape / Adventure Into Fear

Micronauts #7: Backstory

Micronauts #8 Earth Wars

Micronauts #9 & #10 Home is Where the Heart Is / Defeat 

Andrew, Why Are You Wasting Your Headspace On All This Shit?

Micronauts #11 The Enigma Force

Micronauts #11 continued

Source Criticism

I was going to give this series of essays an academic sounding title. A Case Study In the Reception History Of Star Wars, perhaps. Defamiliarizng Lucas: Star Wars Observed Through a Mantlovian Lens. Or if that was too pretentious maybe Micronauts Considered As  Fan Fiction. Or something blunter. What Star Wars Looked Like In 1978. 

That was the excuse for dusting off these very old comics. I wanted to celebrate the best bad comic book I have ever read: but I also wanted to revisit that forgotten world when Star Wars was just one movie; when Darth Vader was not Luke's daddy and it wasn't squicky for Leia and Luke to go all kissy-kissy. When Steve Gerber looked at Star Wars, he saw silly hats and silly names. When Terry Nation looked at Star Wars he saw terrorists fighting fascists. When some advertising creative for a confectionary company saw Star Wars, he saw temples and cod-mysticism. What did Bill Mantlo see? And why did his version resonate with me in a way that Battlestar Galactica and even the Empire Strikes Back never quite did? 

But this plan collides with a very inconvenient fact. Bill Mantlo, like Terry Nation and Eddie Large, had never seen Star Wars. In a 1979 interview he is quite clear on this point:

"Star Wars too, had some effect, but not much. I saw the movie well after I conceived the Micronauts, and was surprised at how closely the two meshed."

Well: maybe so. But if Mantlo had an eleven year old son, he could hardly fail to have been aware of Star Wars  -- to know, at the very least that the idea of Space Fantasy had come back into the zeitgeist. And as a jobbing employee of the Marvel Bullpen, he must have known that there was a comic book adaptation of a block-buster movie in the works. 

His preview essay in FOOM magazine presents the initial five characters -- Rann, Acroyear, Bug, Time Traveller and Marionette -- very much as an incoming superhero team not entirely unlike the Fantastic Four. Only when Mego sent him a complete set of Micronauts figures did he become aware of  Microtron, Biotron and Baron Karza, and only at that point did his story become inescapably like Star Wars. And whichever Mego employee designed the Karza figure must have been well aware of George Lucas's big-bad. So even if Mantlo really hadn't seen Star Wars his comic book character was inspired by a toy that was inspired by the movie. Vader once removed.

Did Bill pass the toys on to his son, we ask ourselves? Did Adam Mantlo become the only kid in America with as good a collection of Micronauts as the lad in the telly adverts? And did Bill Mantlo, like A.A Milne, watch him play with the figures and borrow themes for his stories?

But if Star Wars was only an indirect influence on Micronauts, Mantlo happily lays claim to two more illustrious predecessors:

Kirby's 'Fourth World' was incredibly inspirational, though, I always felt, erratic and confusing, spread over five or more books....I guess (Micronauts) closest parallels are again Kirby's 'Fourth World' and the Thor comic stuff he and Stan did back in the mid-sixties. Yeah, a lot of Thor. 

The Fourth World was, of course, the interlinked series of mythological super-hero comics which Jack Kirby created for DC after he flounced out of Marvel in 1970. (It consists of The New Gods, The Forever People, Mister Miracle and sometimes Jimmy Olsen -- which doesn't add up to five or more.) A civil war between good and evil deities spills onto the earth. The leader of the evil gods is Darkseid, pronounced Dark Side. The hero, Orion, is Dark Side's son. He wears a helmet to conceal his evil face. There is a non-specific theological power called the Source. 

When Kirby's acolyte Mark Evanier saw Star Wars, he instantly declared it Kirbyesque. Mantlo says that Star Wars was "derivative of a lot of Stan Lee's work." Both claims are probably overstated: Lucas, after all, was drawing on the movie serials and pulp science fiction which Stan and Jack had grown up with. Certainly no-one envisages George Lucas waking up one morning and saying "I have it -- since I can't get the rights to Darkseid, I will disguise him as Darth Vader, in the same way I disguised Flash Gordon as Luke Skywalker." But it is hard not to think that Darkseid is one ingredient in the literary soup from which Darth Vader was drawn. Stan Lee's Doctor Doom was clearly another component. So if Mantlo's villain was based on an action figure that was based on Darth Vader; he was also based on one of the comic book villains who Darth Vader was based on.

Thanos was rampaging around the back pages of Star Wars Weekly at about the same time as Baron Karza, and Thanos is about as transparent a copy of Darkseid as it is possible to imagine. 

Astonishingly, when Mantlo first pitched the idea of Micronauts to Stan Lee and Jim Shooter, they seriously entertained the possibility of asking Jack Kirby himself to draw it. Which makes for a pretty depressing counter-factual. After his acrimonious split with Stan Lee, Kirby takes his great mythological epic to DC. It meets with an ecstatic critical reception and mediocre sales, and is cancelled after only a dozen issues. After working on some other, lacklustre titles, he returns to Marvel with his cosmic tail between his legs, and has another shot at his magnum opus in the form of the Eternals. Marvel kill that off after only nineteen issues. He works on the widely derided Devil Dinosaur and the mildly diverting Machine Man -- and is offered the chance to illustrate a self-confessed rip-off of his masterpiece, written by a self-confessed Stan Lee impersonator, and based on a series of toys. 

In the event, Kirby went to Ruby-Spears animation and did storyboards for Thundarr the Barbarian (with a similarly disgruntled Steve Gerber) which is only slightly less depressing. He did end up illustrating a line of toys, Superpowers, for DC, but that was a decade later, as a kind of favour when he needed the money. But the Kirby who didn't illustrate Micronauts was still J*A*C*K K*I*R*B*Y. He would not have quite been at the height of his powers, but he still had at least Captain Victory and Hunger Dogs inside him. It's unlikely he would have really agreed to work with a writer. 

Astonishingly, a few issues of Micronauts were pencilled by Steve Ditko. They weren't very good.

It is pretty weird, in 2022, to hear Bill Mantlo talking of Kirby as a fellow-creator, and criticising New Gods for being incoherent. I can't help thinking about Ernie Wise improving Romeo and Juliet: "Shakespeare did it very well; but I am going to do it just that little bit better." But in 1977, Stan Lee was an editor, not an icon; and Jack Kirby was an artist, not a martyr. Star Wars was only a movie.

Vader looked like Darkseid. Karza looked like Vader. Vader looked like Doom. Darkseid looked like Thanos. Perhaps that's to say no more than that Lee and Kirby and Lucas and Mantlo and Jim Starlin and someone at the Mego corp were working within a genre, a genre in which villains have black capes and disfigured faces and metal masks and estranged sons. Perhaps Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung were right all along and if you try to imagine Ultimate Evil you come up with Darth Vader because that's what Ultimate Evil looks like.

What did Star Wars look like in 1977?  Like a tube of sweets. Like a man with a bucket over his head. Like Muffit the space dog. You don't have to have seen a movie to be under its influence. The Beatles influenced thousands of people who had never been to a Beatles concert. Northern colloquialisms. Sexual freedom. Bright colours. Psychedelia. Meditation. Even the straights who hated those things were affected by the prevailing atmosphere. "In Minnesota, even the atheists are Lutheran. It's the Lutheran God they don't believe in." Something in the atmosphere seeped from a comic to a movie to some toys and back again. 

A space-traveller who is also a god. Ancient prophecy. Priests. The Enigma Force. A Dark Lord. A rebellion. Robots. Swords. Mantlo may not have seen Star Wars, but he grokked the idea of science fantasy. Alone of all the Star Wars wannabees, Micronauts had The Fizz.

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.

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I've Never Seen Star Wars

Tuesday 27 December 1978: Star Wars opens in the UK. 

Monday 2nd Jan 1978: The BBC transmits the first episode of a new TV show. It is about a group of rebels, resisting and trying to overthrow an evil empire. I'm sorry: an evil Federation. There are ray guns and robots and pursuit ships and a hidden computer at the center of the universe. And there's a villain with a disfigured face and black mask and a bionic hand who says things like "I am your death!" at the good guy. Terry Nation swore that when he created Blake's 7, he hadn't seen Star Wars. And indeed, the tone could hardly have been more different. It went out at 7pm on Monday nights, a slot otherwise occupied by Angels (a medical soap) and The Rockford Files (a detective show). The adult slot meant that it came in for quite a lot of ridicule: thanks to Terry Wogan and Rowan Atkinson, Blake's 7 is a by-word for "terrible TV" in some circles to this day. Nation's previous series, Survivors, about a pandemic wiping out 99% of the population of England, was very dark, very adult, and shown after the kids had gone to bed. The crew of Blake's 7 are unambiguously terrorists. Good guys die with some regularity. The first episode shows the hero being brainwashed and framed for pedophilia. And yet: watch Travis's big fascist boots march into Servalan's office and try not to think of Darth Vader.

We sometimes call naughty children "menaces". And "menace" rhymes with Dennis. So there is no reason on earth that an English cartoonist and an American cartoonist should not have independently created a character called Dennis the Menace. What is slightly surprising is that they both did so in March 1961. 

There is no reason on earth why a very well established British TV writer and a hot young US film director should not have independently come up with the idea of a space-opera series in which the Empire were the baddies and the Rebels were the goodies. There is equally no reason why Terry Nation could not have heard someone talking in a bar about a new American movie and found himself musing about what he would do with a similar premise.

But perhaps it was Steam Engine Time. Perhaps society had grown tired of Captain Kirk and Dan Dare patronising everyone; perhaps we no longer imagined Space as the continuation of the British Commonwealth by other means. George Lucas started Star Wars with Vietnam in his mind, and Terry Nation's thoughts were never far away from World War II. Perhaps it was just the right time to tell stories about rebellions. If it hadn't been Star Wars and Blake's 7 it would have been something else.

April 1978: The legendary Steve Gerber dropped a two-issue Star Wars parody into his Cerebus-inspiring Howard the Duck comic-book series. Howard is pulled out of the main storyline into what looks a little like a dream sequence, making one suspect that Marvel had demanded or advised that Gerber incorporate the parody. The bad guy wants to fill the universe with bland shopping centres. He is completely without humour, and Howard has to learn to channel "The Farce" to defeat him. (The baddies are overcome by "their inability to accept the ultimate ridiculousness of themselves and the cosmos.") He befriends two robots, one of whom (2-2-2-2, or TuTu, for short) looks like a trash-can. He borrows a spaceship called the Epoch Weasel, and destroys the evil Emporium with double-entry bookkeeping. The first episode is called Star Waargh; the second, May The Farce Be With You. (A sequel, back in naturalistic mode, is more promisingly called "The Night After You Saved The Universe".)

Steve Gerber was incapable of being unfunny; and the speech beginning  “Within hours, as bees reckon time, we shall bulldoze the universe and build on its ruins a shopping centre unrivalled in its crassness” made me laugh out loud. But it is striking that he has nothing whatsoever to say about Star Wars. A few issues previously, when Howard the Duck learns the ancient art of Quack-Fu, Gerber makes serious points about cultural appropriation and the sanitisation of violence. But when he looks at Star Wars, he sees only trash-can and gas-masks. 

Saturday 8th July, 1978:  Two second division comedians, Syd Little and Eddie Large, do a turn on BBC variety show called Seaside Special, alongside the Brotherhood of Man, Sacha Distell and Schwaddywaddy. (The show happens in a tent. By the seaside. In the summer.) 

Syd and Eddie's act consists of a nerdy little man trying to sing a song or give a talk, and a silly fat man interrupting him with corny jokes and bad impressions. This is what passed for entertainment before YouTube. In this particular skit, poor Syd was trying to tell the audience about a new film called Star Wars; while Eddie appears dressed in a dustbin, and then with a bucket on his head. At one point he appeared wielding one of those off-brand lightsabers you could buy in toy shops.

"It is called a Force Wand."

"Why?"

"Wait til you see where I am going to force it."

A representative cross-section of Seaside Special viewers around the age of twelve disapproved of the skit. Supersonic Syd described Star Wars as a film about "a big planet that wants to destroy a little planet", and claimed that Artoo Deetoo was the true star. The sample was offended. They were daring to to parody the sacred text, but they had obviously never seen it. 

Monday 23rd October 1978: The penultimate Season of the Tomorrow People. Human beings are being eaten by alien life-forms disguised as anoraks. Or possibly a cursed drum was calling an alien Hitler back to earth. Recollections, as the Queen said, may vary. But there must have been some special reason that a middle-class geek was watching ITV. 

The advert break includes a now legendary advertisement for Trebor Refreshers. Trebor Refreshers are little sherbet candies, a bit like love-hearts, but without the love. I think you can still get them. The advert featured an elderly actor (Derek Farr) doing what was, in fairness, a pitch-perfect impersonation of Alec Guiness. He tells a young lad that "the time has come for you to learn about...the Fizz." He hands the younger actor a tube of sweeties, which ignite into a light sabre, or possibly even a Fizz Beam. "When will I get a chance to use it?" asks the young initiate, whereupon a heavy-breathing silhouetted bad-guy appears, also with a glowing swordy thing. "Now would seem as good a time as any." End of advert.

Fair play to which ever creative spotted that a tube of sweets feels quite satisfying in a kid's hand, and tried to set up a subconscious connection between the sweeties and the iconic weapon. Or perhaps they just wanted an excuse to use "May The Fizz be With You" as a slogan. They normally went with The Fizz That Gives You Whizz which we assume was not one of Salman's. Badges with the slogan May The Fizz Be With You are now sought after collectors items. 

A representative cross-section of eleven year olds who had been annoyed by Little and Large approved of the Trebor advert, to the extent of supplying Refreshers to meetings of the East Barnet Lower School Jedi Knights Club. It had a quality that I can only describe as Jedi Vibes. Someone had watched Star Wars, and spotted one of the things which was awesome about it, and gently turned it into a joke which the fans could share. 

The advert appears to take place in some kind of Temple; and the Obi-Wan figure is on a throne. This is how I still imagine Real Jedi to be. I am still vaguely disappointed that neither The Phantom Menace nor The High Republic capture the magic of the Trebor Refreshers advertisements.

What do you see when you see Star Wars? Rebels fighting fascists? Silly shiny robots with silly shiny names? Dustbins and buckets? Or a vaguely eastern confection of mentors, mysticism and shadows?

The Chrome? Or the Fizz?

Dec 1977: Star Wars

Sep 1978: First Issue of Micronauts

Nov 1978: Lord of the Rings

Dec 1978: Superman: The Movie

Apr 1979: Battlestar Galactica 

July 1979: Arabian Adventure

Sep 1979: Alien

Dec 1979:  Star Trek: The Motion Picture

Aug 1980: Buck Rogers 

Dec 1980: Hawk the Slayer

Feb 1981:  Battle Beyond the Stars

Apr 1981: Excalibur

Jun 1981: Dragonslayer

Jul 1981: Clash of Titans 

Apr 1982: Conan the Barbarian

Aug 1982: Beastmaster

June 1982: Blade Runner

July 1982: Tron

Dec 1982 Dark Crystal

June 1983: Return of the Jedi

May 1984: Final Bill Mantlo issue of Micronauts

In that great blank space between Star Wars and the Empire Strikes Back, many things were offered as The Next Star Wars. None of them were. I recall a very dated attempt to revive the Sinbad/Arabian Nights genre optimistically writing "Like Star Wars, but with Flying Carpets" across the posters. Things like Alien and Star Trek: The Motion Picture had been in production for years, but still seemed to be riding the Star Wars wave. The Black Hole and Buck Rogers were clearly created partially with Star Wars in mind. Close Encounters of the Third Kind arrived in the UK before Star Wars, and are somehow part of the same moment. People at the time talked about Star-Wars-and-Close-Encounters-Of-The-Third-Kind as if they were a thing, which makes about as much sense as talking about Casablanca-and-Bambi. I suppose to a muggle, they were equally part of that crazy impenetrable thing called science friction. 

I remember a school-friend's very rich elder brother took us all to see Battlestar Galactica in a big London cinema. I dutifully enjoyed the little red space-ships and shiny bad guys, but even then I knew that little red space ships and shiny bad guys weren't what Star Wars was about. (The ultra-low-wave surround sound gimmick, which was supposed to make the theatre physically shake, was distinctly underwhelming.) The Black Hole had spaceships and a cute robot and went mystical at the end, but was merely boring. Buck Rogers had space ships and a cute robot but was mostly silly. 2001: A Space Odyssey got a big screen re-release. That had space ships, mysticism and classical music, but on the whole I preferred the original Jack Kirby version (//Irony//) When Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers emerged on UK TV, I couldn't quite be bothered to watch them. 

Hollywood did, eventually, try to get beneath the chrome and serve up some fizz: but they largely identified "fizz" with the Hero's journey. There was a glut of fantasy quest movies; some very good; some very not good. Swords and shards glinted. Prophets prophesied and chosen ones got chosen. Dark Lords fell like nine-pins. There were princesses, comical companions, clockwork owls and English actors who's shoulders had been tapped by the Queen. Star Wars is a myth set in space, they said, so let's go one better and sell the punters a myth not set in space. 

And indeed, Star Wars with no space ships is a much better proposition than space ships with no Star Wars. It is much more a fantasy story which happens to be set in space than a space-story which happens to have fantasy elements. But it turns out that, without the chrome, the fizz goes flat pretty quickly. The biggest lie that Joseph Campbell sold the world is that the Hero's Journey has power in and of itself, as opposed to being a hook on which a powerful story can sometimes be hung. And the joke is that Lucas himself moved on: when the Empire Strikes Back arrived, the one thing it did not do is serve up the magic of Star Wars all over again. A good movie? Definitely. A better movie than Star Wars? Very many people think so. But I have never been quite convinced that it fizzed. 

Still, we were young and computer games hadn't quite been invented and we were only just getting into Dungeons & Dragons and we would take what we could get. If there's a sword and a mentor and a quest and a dragon, we'll throw ourselves at it wholeheartedly for ninety minutes, and build a better film in our head for the next few years. C.S Lewis said that on first looking into Homer's Homer he was thrilled because it reminded him of Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum. I think the reason I adored Boorman's Excalibur; and the Arthur stories more generally was that Arthur's sword (like Narsil and even Nothung) reminded me of Force Beams and Trebor Refreshers. 

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.) 

 Pledge £1 for each essay.

How Toys Become Real

All stories are true. 

This is the story which Bill Mantlo tells about the creation of the Micronauts.

It's Christmas 1978: Bill Mantlo is watching his son open his presents. Santa must have been in a pretty generous mood that year, because the lad got quite a haul of Micronauts toys. His Dad looked at the toys, and started to imagine personalities for them. Time Traveller looked mystical; Space Glider had the look of Reed Richards about him; Galactic Warrior looked insectoid; Acroyear looked like a space version of a medieval knight. As the young lad played with his toys, a story formed in the grown-up's head. He liked it so much that he persuaded Marvel to get the licence from Mego so he could put it in a comic book. [See Note]

It's a cute story. It reminds me of another story, about another father and son and another collection of toys. You only have to look at that stuffed donkey, said Dad, to see that it has to be gloomy: you only have to look at that pig to see that it has to be squeaky and nervous; you only have to look at that tiger to see that it has to bounce.

And perhaps that is how all good toys work. They inspire a particular kind of play-personality. I have heard mime artists say that certain masks have certain personas regardless of who is wearing them. But perhaps, on the other paw, a good toy is a blank canvass on which you can project whatever you were going to project in any case. If what you wanted to do was host tea-parties, then the guests might as well be Mr Bear, Miss Bunny, and Lord Penguin. But if you were planning a jaunt around the Spanish Main, then Captain Bear can perfectly well have First Mate Penguin and Bunny the Bosun. I have absolutely no idea what a Bosun does, but there's always one on a pirate ship.

The toys don't look very much like the comic book characters, which was convenient for Marvel when the copyright lapsed. Space Glider is some kind of alien android; very like Time Traveller but opaque and with a silly winged jet-pack. Like Time Traveller, he has a chrome head that seems to belong on a different body. The Galactic Warrior is the same again, but this time with some kind of space-cannon arrangement on his back, which fired plastic tipped darts. But when Bill Mantlo looked at Space Glider he saw Commander Arcturus Rann and when he looked at Galactic Warrior he saw the Bug; because Commander Arcturus Rann and the Bug were already in his head. Anyone who has read A.A Milne's essays knows that Winnie-the-Pooh was in the writer's head long before little Christopher acquired his first teddy. 

But perhaps, once you have projected Winnie the Pooh onto this Steiff bear and Captain Arcturus Rann onto that action figure, the two are indelibly connected. Perhaps you can only tell the story about that particular confection of fabric and sawdust and that particular lump of plastic. Perhaps the inanimate object has been ensouled, or at any rate enstoried.  

Many of us find it difficult to part with our childhood toys, even though we are not seriously going to play with them again. I don't think this is just sentimentalism. We used to think of them as people: we can't now treat them as inanimate objects. It would be too much like eating a dead pet. It's one thing to keep a cow or a pig with the intention of slaughtering it; it's another to give it a name, enter into a quasi-social relationship with it, and then turn it into sausages. C.S Lewis was on the right track when he buried his toys in a mock funeral; but it is too late for that now. 

There are good arguments for not eating animals at all, but I don't propose to go into them today.

The name Arcturus is probably meant to make us think of King Arthur. It's also the name of a star. The strange, surreal 1920s science fiction novel which so inspired C.S Lewis was called A Voyage to Arcturus. But it is surely not a coincidence that Bill Mantlo's toy-themed fantasy story has a hero who's name means "bear".

Bill Mantlo says that he saw his sons action figures at Christmas 1978. The comic has a January 1979 date, which means it was published in September 1978. So he must really be thinking about the previous year, December 1977, when Adam would have been eleven. 

And that makes a difference. Because Bill looked at Adam's haul of toys and saw Hero; a Princess; Two Comedic Robots and a Space Knight. But at that some moment, on that particular Yulechild, all over the world, other children were opening their presents. And they too were finding action figures. A Hero. A Princess. Two Comedic Robots. And a Space Knight. 

Mickey Mouse watches; Shirley Temple dolls; Davey Crockett hats: as long as there have been movies there has been movie merchandise. But your Aristocats plushies or your Jaws t-shirts were primarily promotional items: a means of getting kids inside the cinema, or at least, to get a few extra quid from their parents on the way out. George Lucas was one of the first to realise that the movie ought to be driving the sales of the merchandise, not vice versa. He retained a greater financial interest in toy sales than was standard in the industry at the time, and his profits financed two sequels. It may not be entirely fair to say that the Star Wars saga exists primarily as an extended advert for action figures, but it is certainly true that Lucasfilms is built on plastic rather than celluloid. For many of us, that black-and-silver card mount evokes the spirit of 1977 as surely as Peter Blake's album artwork embodies the Summer of Love.

All stories are true. Here is a different story.

It is the summer of 1977. A boy is playing on the lawn; and discovers some lost toys: a space hero, a space knight, a space princess, some space robots, a space ship. But looking more closely he discovers they are not toys at all. They are actual heroes from another universe; a universe in which everyone happens to be about three inches tall. There are evil toys, as well, and they have also found their way into his garden. The good toys and the evil toys are engaged in a real, serious epic war. Before long, Good Space Knights are fighting duels with Evil Space Knights; and Good Toy Spaceships are chasing Evil Toy Spaceships around the shopping mall. 

Toys. But not toys. Actual space heroes. But still, somehow, toys. 

This is not the plot of the Micronauts. But it is, I think, the myth on which Mantlo built his epic. And it is the story you need to keep in your mind when you are reading those first twelve issues. 

The idea of the Microverse had been knocking around Marvel since Kirby's time. It's a venerable science fiction trope: if you could get small enough, individual atoms might turn out to be planetary systems, harbouring microscopic life and microscopic civilisations. Reed Richards had a shrinking device which allowed him to literally see a world in a grain of sand. The Micronauts come from one of these Microversal planets, imaginatively named Homeworld. When they cross to Planet Earth, they are only a few inches tall. When humans fall into the Microverse, they are vast colossi. This doesn't make a great deal of sense: is it somehow possible to increase one's size by a hundred billion percent, but increasing it by a hundred billion and one per cent is just a bit too difficult? 

But the Microverse is functionally an alien dimension, a parallel universe, accessed through the Space Wall in one direction and the Prometheus Pit in the other. Ninety percent of the setting is a direct lift from Star Wars; the other ninety per cent is taken from Kirby's New Gods. (The rest is lovingly ripped off from Flash Gordon.) But it is first and foremost a gigantic hand-wave, a humungous plot device which allows the action-figures-come-to-life fantasy to make rational sense. If a Good Toy Space Knight and a Bad Toy Space Knight are going to have a battle, they need to have a home planet, with politics, and a long standing feud. And the more monumentally epic that feud can be, the better. Princes who have lost their thrones to evil brothers? Sentient planets which can be channelled by the royal family? Characters who literally say "You fiend, you are a traitor to the entire universe?" Scaled down to three point five inches high and fought out on the bedroom rug. 

When people talk about the Micronauts, and I hope they still do, they frequently say that the Microverse stuff was great fun; but the earth-based stuff was dull. And certainly, once you have three and a half inch heroes knocking around a five foot ten universe, you are into Land of the Giants territory. Our heroes  spend an inordinate amount of time being menaced by gigantic pussy cats and climbing insurmountable kitchen utensils. Mantlo himself said he found those bits wearing.

Some readers, indeed, were offended by the whole toy-connection. We now live in a world where Transformers, Smurfs and even Emojis can be turned into high budget movie franchises -- where Lego Star Wars is its own thing, and a pirate theme park ride has spawned five pirate movies, or at any rate, the same pirate movie five times. So it is hard to remember how strange it seemed to be reading a comic based on some toys (as opposed to playing with some toys based on a comic.) Fans felt a sense of lese majestie. It seemed too much like product placement. It punctured our adolescent pride. See? Comics are just for kids after all.

Not too long after Micronauts; Mantlo wrote Rom: Space Knight, based around an electronic action figure. Shogun Warriors (toy robots) and eventually Transformers and GI Joe followed suit. DC did a He-Man comic for a while, although the He-Man toys came pre-loaded with a back story in a way that Micronauts did not. On each occasion, the fan reaction became proverbial: "When I heard you had made a comic book about a series of kid's plastic toys I really thought you guys had flipped."

But I think it is an indelible part of the magic of the comic, at least for the first dozen issues. The story was bigger because the heroes were smaller. Christopher Milne says that he believed, at some level, that the stuffed bear on the edge of his bed was the same bear that had tried to steal the bees' honey and got stuck down the rabbit hole. Nothing could capture the spirit of '77 better than the idea that your Luke Skywalker action figure was actually -- through some sacramental alchemy -- Luke Skywalker himself. I certainly believed my action figures were both models somehow at the same time real beings. Each time Cyborg kills Muton, the universe is really being saved all over again.

Ritual and magic and drama and play are part of the same continuum. What if your toy heroes were real heroes and your toy space ships were real spaceships? And what, incidentally, if your Dad became a superhero?

I only saw Toy Story quite recently. It's a very good film indeed. It works at multiple levels: as an odd-couple adventure; as a comedy; as a very good action movie, and as a piece of wish fulfilment in which toys come to life. Like Star Wars, it doesn't feel like a kids movie that adults can watch, so much as a movie that kids and adults can watch together. 

Screen-writer Pete Docter said that every kid believes that their toys come to life when they are not looking at them. (Since every kid also believes that there are monsters under the bed and in the cupboard, that became the basis for the Monsters Inc franchise.) But Toy Story wouldn't work if Woody and Buzz were not just very good toys; the kind of toys you would like to have had when you were a kid; and indeed, the kind of toy you would be tempted to buy for yourself as an adult. (Adult collectors who buy toys but do not play with them aren't treated very well in the story.)

The film is very perceptive about how toys work. The string-pull voice-box of the toy cowboy is a lot more cool than the gimmick laden electronic space figure. We know, watching Toy Story, that no real-world Buzz Lightyear could possibly be as fun as the one in the movie. Electronic toys run out of batteries and stop working, and flashing lights are never as much fun as they seem. The Rom: Space Knight comic ran for years, but the toy flopped. A silver robot that goes "bleep" when you push the button isn't that much fun to play with. 

A toy cowboy and a toy spaceman can be a lot more fun than any particular cowboy film or science fiction film can ever be: in the same way that those cheap ray-guns were more like ray-guns than any ray-gun in any actual story. Woody represents the whole idea of cowboys; and Buzz the whole idea of space, in a way that the Lone Ranger and Flash Gordon simply can't. Buster Crabbe and Clayton Moore are one particular hero: Woody and Buzz are potentially every possible hero. It was probably a mis-step to reveal that Woody was originally a piece of merchandising for a not-terribly-good TV show. 

I have on two occasions seen graffiti in a gentlemans' public toilet that says "Toy Story 2 Was Alright." 

Bill Mantlo looked at Space Glider and saw an astronaut -- a micronaut -- who had travelled to the edge of the universe with a faithful robot companion. A micronaut who returned to a home world called Homeworld to find he was remembered as a legendary saviour whose return had long been prophesied. And his old science teacher and mentor had become an armoured figure of pure evil. Who sometimes turned into a horse. 

In the right light, you could mistake Arcturus Rann for Buzz Lightyear.

[NOTE] According to the Innerspace website, the first wave of toys, released in 1977, included Time Traveller, Space Glider, Galactic Warrior and Acroyear, who are the characters that Mantlo refers to. A second wave, including Baron Karza and Force Commander, were released in 1978, when Mantlo would have already been working on the comic. Karza, who became central to the story, can't have been part of the original flash of inspiration.

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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.

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Toy Story

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.

They were pretty generic space-toys, actually. "Microtron" looked a lot like a dozen other clockwork or battery powered robots. "Biotron" was another undistinguished automaton, albeit with an incongruous silver humanoid face. The spaceships were equally un-noteworthy, all pointy cockpits and delta-wings. 

But still, there was a certain ambience. The default action-figure -- the Micronaut -- is a gold headed robotic humanoid with a transparent plastic body. I think his head, with a retro-future rock n' roll quiff, was the same head as Biotron's. 

He was called Time Traveller. I don't know if he travelled in time. He looked a lot like my beloved Cyborg, the transparent robot Jesus who saved the Earth from a plastic purple Satan called Muton. Cyborg wasn't actually a cyborg, but he had an enemy named Android who was definitely an android. 

There turns out to have been a family resemblance. There had been a series of Japanese action figures called Henshin Cyborg; they were transparent and had robot innards and came in different colours. The UK market re-named them Cyborg and Muton and gave them a needlessly messianic backstory. But there was also a smaller, more accessorisable version of Henshin Cyborg called Micronman. Microman became Time Traveller for the US and UK markets. 

Interestingly enough, Henshin Cyborg had originally been based on GI Joe and GI Joe had been based on the British Action Man. So Micronauts was begotten of Microman, which was begotten of Cyborg, which was begotten of GI Joe, which was begotten of Action Man, the Hero With a Thousand costumes. 

Sandman has a library of books that were never written. Perhaps somewhere he also has a dusty trunk of toys that you never owned. I certainly never owned a Micronaut. I don't think I ever even handled one. But I saw the adverts on children's TV and on the back page of Star Wars weekly. I saw a big display underneath Santa's Grotto in Selfridges. I remember how they tasted. The robotic Time Travellers operating Science machines and piloting Science vehicles. There was a bad-guy in black armour who had a black horse and a good guy with white armour who had a white horse. Horse and rider sold separately. Being interchangeable, both of them could be configured as centaurs. I have always been a sucker for stories in which the villain is an exact mirror image of the hero.

I remember one particular morning on the way to school a space-centaur jumped into my head; half-man half-horse; with stormtrooper armour, leaping into the air firing laser beams from his eyes. I don't know if he had a flaming sword. I expect he had a flaming sword. The image had no context. I don't know if it was before or after I had seen the Micronauts figurines. I don't know if it was before or after Star Wars. But it made me jump for joy. If C.S Lewis is right joy is precisely what it made me jump for. 

"You're pretty young. A fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn't think he would remember."

I don't know if I really need to say this, but I will. 

In 1978, homosexuality was still not fully legal in England. The BBC still showed black-face minstrel shows. Teachers were positively encouraged to hit pupils. Nuclear war seemed not only possible, but probable. We were just moving into the Winter of Discontent. We had the Falkands War, the Miners Strike, AIDS, Section 28 and Ronald Reagan still to look forward to. To think about the popular culture of a particular era does not imply that you think that that the era was necessarily a great time to be alive. If comic books and RPGs were truly better in the olden days it does not follow that everything else was better too. To look with fondness on your own childhood and adolescence is not necessarily to look with fondness on the past in general. The Golden Age of comics was not itself a golden age. It may, in fact, be that they invented rock and roll in the 1950s because the 1950s were so awful; and that they invented punk in the 1970s because the 1970s were so awful. It may be that romantic poetry is the opposite of the industrial revolution. It may be that I ran away to the microverse because I was just basically unhappy. 

I don't know if I really needed to say any of that, but I have. 

A toy is not an object but an idea. A cheap ray gun selling for 50p in a market stall is not a lump of plastic designed for some knock-off company by a lazy designer who hasn't heard of Prince Wayfarer or Adam Warlock and wouldn't care about them if he had. It isn't even a marvellous toy that goes zip when it moves and whir when it stops, at least until the friction drive wears out. It is an artefact from an implicit science fiction universe. It is you transformed into a space cadet or a cowboy in an alien bar. You don't need to own it. You are probably too old to play, in that sense, with toys (and too young to be a collector). But the spell lasts for the whole bus-ride home.

"But if you want to play at being a space cadet, you can as well play at being a space cadet with a ray gun made from a toilet roll tube and some silver foil as with a cheap lump of Hong Kong garbage which will break inside a week."  Parents don't get this stuff. 

Don't sell the sausage, sell the sizzle, salesmen are told. When uber-hack Bill Mantlo turned the Micronauts into a Marvel Comic, what he emphatically sold was the sizzle.

Bill Mantlo gets a footnote in comic book history because he created Rocket Racoon. Rocket Racoon has become something of a cult since Guardians of the Galaxy became a movie. He was a guest star in an episode of the incredible Hulk. He helped the Hulk retrieve Gideon's Bible from a bad guy. The story was called Somewhere Near the Black Holes of Sirius There Lived a Young Boy Named Rocket Racoon. Bill Mantlo really liked the White Album. 

Hulk #271 was not, in fact, the first appearance of Rocket Racoon. We will come back to this point eventually, and you will be mildly surprised. 

Bill Mantlo has a bit of a bum rap as a Marvel Comics "company man". And it's true that any run of any Marvel comics series from the late 70s or early 80s will periodically be interrupted by a low-quality out-of-sequence episode written by Mantlo. It's quite disconcerting to be reading through Don McGregor's art-house Kilraven, or Doug Moench's proto-cyberpunk Deathlock and suddenly find the main story paused in favour of by a by-numbers Mantlo episode, often with an inappropriate guest star. 

There's a reason for this. One of Mantlo's first gigs was to write a notional Marvel Fill In Comic, one issue a month, so the company could stockpile a backlog of material which could then be printed when a writer or an artist missed their deadline. That happened quite often in the bad old days. Prior to Mantlo, when an artist got called up for jury service or a writer got food poisoning Marvel would reprint a previous issue and pretend it was a flashback. It was the comic book equivalent of a clip show. 

Mantlo didn't always respect his predecessor's work. He took over Alpha Flight (the Canadian Avengers) from John Byrne and took exactly one issue to excise every single idea which had made Byrne's comic feel like a breath of slightly fresher than usual air. When Steve Gerber lost control of his highly personal Howard the Duck, it was Bill Mantlo who stepped forward to write an instantly forgettable conclusion. Some people have never quite forgiven him for that.

And yet. 

When fans of a certain age start to wax nostalgic about the seventies and the eighties it is quite likely to be a Mantlo title -- Rom: Spaceknight, Jack of Hearts, Cloak and Dagger -- that they'll be talking about. There's a very thin line between the derivative and the archetypal. Rom, the alien in power armour who falls from the sky to fight shape shifting aliens who have secretly conquered the earth without anyone noticing feels like a "these you have loved" tribute to every old-fashioned superhero comic and every science fiction B-movie. And it ends with a multi-hero crossover before such things were fashionable. 

Dammit, I remember the fill-in issue in which Tony Stark recalls that day in the 'Nam when he renounced the arms trade; and the fill-in issue in which Peter Parker places a very old microscope on the grave of Uncle Ben better than I remember some of the deathless classics of the era. The reason is not hard to see: Mantlo had taken every issue of Iron Man and every issue of Spider-Man, chewed them up, and spat them back at us. Perhaps because he was not himself a fan (he really wanted to be a lawyer) he could see the characters with fresh eyes. The fan favourites of the era, Panther's Rage and Master of Kung Fu and what-not can seem a little worthy and pretentious by comparison. 

So. The Micronauts. Call it pastiche, homage, blatant rip-off. It was all of those things. But sometimes it feels more like Star Wars than Star Wars itself. 

*

In 1992 Bill Mantlo was involved in a catastrophic road accident, suffering brain damage from which he has never recovered. It is said that he has seen Guardian of the Galaxy, and was able to recognise Rocket Racoon.

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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.

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1978

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. 

If the second poster had had a sound track, it would have been the Twentieth Century Fox fanfare, or perhaps  the Imperial March Track 15, the Last Battle. It is safe and familiar, a group of comrades on an adventure. Where the first was static, this one is full of action. There is a cast of thousands, including recognisable stars like Alec Guiness and Peter Cushing. The hero and the heroine are identifiable as Hamill and Fisher, and they are fully clothed. 

Luke, at the front, points his blaster directly at us; Leia, behind him, is in an active combat pose. Han is behind her, firing a blaster in the other direction. The first poster was neatly split in three by Luke's mysterious flaming sword; this one is split by blaster bolts, zapping out of the frame at jaunty angles. The X-Wings have go faster rockets blasting out of their rears; they are chased by overwhelming numbers of TIE fighters. The other poster was located on Tatooine; this shows the characters suspended in space, against a starry backdrop. 

Darth Vader again dominates the picture; but he's no longer a disembodied face. He stands behind the main group, towering above them. He is holding a sword like weapon. The beam is much like the beams from the hero's ray-guns. We may not yet know that the tool hanging between Luke's legs is called a lightsaber but we can hardly fail to spot its phallic significance. But it's that intriguing laser sword which dominates the picture. The bad guy is a knight from an older world: the hero is a contemporary space cowboy. 

Most of us knew Star Wars as a comic before we had seen the film. Howard Chaykin's cover has the same vibe as the second poster. A dynamic group of heroic figures, facing the reader. An abstract image which doesn't represent anything which happens in the story -- Leia and Ben are never in the same room -- but which incapsulates the movie.

Luke is still facing the reader, but he now has a lightsaber, not a gun. Ben is now behind him, and it's his lightsaber beam which shoots out of the right of the fame. Han is still on Luke's left, firing his blaster. Leia is behind them, weirdly aloof. Two X-Wings are flying towards us; they could even be threatening the group. 

Where the two film posters showed a very small Death Star in the top left hand corner, the comic book makes it dominate the picture, framing the group. Either we see it in the moment of its destruction, or else it is supposed to be eclipsing the sun. (The darkness blocking out the light: the movies didn't get to that symbolism until the Force Awakens.) 

And behind the four heroes, again, is an enlarged face of Darth Vader shaded, bizarrely, in green. Green is an easier colour to deal with in cheap four colour printing that black and white. Just ask the Hulk. 

Now: fast forward to September 1978. 

Star Wars is a very long time in the past; the Empire Strikes Back is a very long time in the future. Time passed slowly in the 1970s. Battlestar Galactica has just started on TV, if you are that desperate. 

Run your eyes along the "spinner" at your "drug store", or the import section in the basement of Dark They Were And Golden Eyed. Marvel has launched a new comic book. (They've been trailing it for several months.) Have a look at the cover. And experience a brief, agreeable moment of deja-vu?

An heroic, musclebound figure in a blue jump suit. A generic Marvel tough guy. Paint a skull on his chest and he could pass for the Punisher. But he's firing a ray gun out of the panel: like Luke Skywalker. Stan Lee doesn't wholly approve of ray-guns, but since Star Wars arguably saved the company from bankruptcy, his attitude has softened.

Behind him, fanned out at roughly 45 degrees; are three other characters. A girl, in a colourful, sprayed on bikini, also with a ray gun. An alien, wielding something which could be a spear. And a medieval knight, red and white armour, with a sword. It's a metal sword, not a lightsaber, but it glows with some kind of energy. The girl hides behind the hero; the alien hides behind the girl. The knight stands behind the hero, but he's clearly advancing. 

The group are surrounded by motion lines: there is a small outbreak of Kirby Krackle at their feet. 

And behind them all, in a black helmet, horned like the Devil, a figure in black. His mouth, covered by something which could be a grate or a portcullis; as if his face were a piece of gothic architecture. His hands, held up, detached from his body as if grabbing the heroes. A venerable comic book motif, this. Kriby used it on the cover of Fantastic Four #49. Chris Achilléos did a homage on the cover of the novelisation of The Three Doctors. We don't know who he is, but he's clearly not a goodie.  

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

I've been planning to write about Micronauts for several years, and I hope I have said most of what I wanted to say. 

As ever: I am trying to make part of my living writing niche stuff which interests me, and if you think it is worth reading, it would be incredibly cool if you either subscribed to my Patreon (pledging $1 per short article) or bought me a metaphorical cup of coffee on Ko-Fi.

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Episode VI + VII

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

"either a comic arts metaphysics pentagram intended to encompass the new born Alex Raymond or a nearly unimaginably intricate five fold metaphysical foreshadowing coincidence"

A message from Sim to his Patreon supporters, explaining why The Strange Death of Alex Raymond will never be published, is part of the text: correspondence between him and publisher Sean Michael Robinson, encouraging him to carry on with it, are part of the afterword. The final correspondence talks in terms of a second volume that Dave is still working on. So although we get a fair idea of what Sim is driving at, we are a long way from having heard the whole theory. If everything connects to everything else, the whole theory is probably unachievable, in any case. If we get another 300 pages of this kind of material in five years time, I shall certainly read it, but I don't know if I will be particularly sad if it never happens. (I'd rather get more Beanworld.) 

It's all nonsense; in the same way that Objectivism is nonsense and the theory that the world ended in CE 70 and we are living in a divine hologrqm is nonsense. In the same way that talking to a sock-puppet snake or eating the body and blood of a dead Jewish hippy is nonsense. Sim thinks that the connections are so overwhelming as to rule out coincidence. I suppose that we could refute him by using the "look elsewhere" argument: are car crashes and the name Margaret more common 1949 comic books than at any other time? Is Margaret more common as a woman's name in those issues than anywhere else? Could we take a sample of comic books from some other date and find proof of some other metaphysical event: say, that Noddy is dead or that Paul McCartney is the son of God? 

But that's probably orthogonal to what Sim is doing. Proving that coincidences aren't statistically significant doesn't prove, to the true believer, that Things are not all fundamentally interconnected. Richard Dawkins says that things which people pray for don't happen with any more statistical frequency than things which people don't; that Queen Elizabeth II, who everyone in England had to pray for by law, didn't live any longer than lots of old ladies for whom no one was petitioning the almighty. I think a lot of fair minded people read that and say "You may be right; but I think you may have missed the point of prayer."

I read Watchmen and Promethea and From Hell and I feel that the Universe is a huge and complex web of symbols; even, if I don't in fact believe it. I am inside Alan Moore's head, and its an interesting place to visit even though I wouldn't want to live there. One of the reasons that C.S Lewis is so loved and so hated is that anyone reading about the death of Aslan feels (experiences, lives) the Christian doctrine of the Atonement. All I feel reading the Strange Death of Alex Raymond is that I am being bludgeoned over the head by an overwhelming quantity of facts. 

VII

Stephen Medcalf was one of the English tutors when I was at Sussex University. He had been a pupil of Hugo (fuck-not-an-elf) Dyson: I wish I had known that at the time. (Why, says Sim elsewhere, do we get so quick old and so slow smart?) One cold February he found a baby girl abandoned in a telephone box. If he had not been passing, the baby would certainly have died; I think he became her godfather. He later described how incredibly unlikely it was that he should have gone for a walk on that particular day, and taken that particular route, and even noticed that there was something in the phone booth. 

"I do, as it happens" he said "Think the event was providential. I do not mean that if I did not already believe in providence this event would have made me do so, but that, since I have that belief, the event fits readily to it."

Flash, I love you: but we only have eighteen hours to save the earth. 

Contents

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.) 

 Pledge £1 for each essay.

My extended Essay on Cerebus the Aardvark is available from Lulu press. 

When Did You Stop Reading Cerebus?

Episode V

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.

Raymond's death was so significant that it sent out "tendrils" forwards and backwards through time, leaving traces and connections that can be discovered by anyone who looks for them. Another historical road crash, or a comic strip depicting a road crash, can be said to have been caused by, or caused, the one which killed the creator of Flash Gordon. Sim plays with the idea of cause and effect: a particular comic is significant because Ward Green "will write it..he always wrote it..always had written it. It affects events in his past, which is...his present, and which is simultaneously...his future." (Alan Moore did a similar thing around Doctor Manhattan in Watchmen.) 

Further, characters in real life "incarnate" themselves in texts: sometimes because a real person has been depicted in a comic book; but sometimes because a comic book character happens to resemble a real person.

These connections can be very obscure indeed. The main character in a Joe Simon/ Jack Kirby romance comic called "I was a pick up" somewhat resembles a character called Pagan Lee who appears in Alex Raymond's Rip Kirby. This character somewhat resembles Margaret Mitchell. Sim sees this as highly significant. 

"The comic arts metaphysic of Ward Green's fictionalisation in Rip Kirby of the March Hare Tea Shop Margaret Mitchell as Pagan Lee (the leeward side of Mitchell's intrinsically pagan self) seems to cause the March Hare Tea Shop Margaret Mitchell to...sprout elsewhere in other comic art as well."

Ward Green was the head of King Features Syndicate which published Flash Gordon; he wrote the scripts for Rip Kirby. The March Hare Tea Shop was a speakeasy that Margaret Mitchell frequented.

Now, this kind of pattern formation can be creatively fruitful. It is pretty much the whole basis of Watchmen. Moore believes that magic and creative writing both draw connections between disparate things: connections which did not exist before the magus or poet made them, but which are thereafter real. 

I have referred before to Sim's theory that the secret history of Christianity is encoded in the history of nineteen sixties pop music. James (Paul McCartney) and John (Lennon) kick Peter (Best) out of the band; the apostle Peter vacillated between two rival Christs (like a Rolling Stone); once Jesus has died, what you are left with is Peter, Paul and Mary. There is a genuine wit and cleverness to that: we can enjoy watching Dave Sim extract rabbits from hats. (Who is the Jesus analogue in the Beatles? The Jewish man in charge of the whole group?? Well, didn't George Harrison sink a lot of money into a film about an imposter-Messiah entitled Life of...Brian???) And those of us who managed to get right through Promethea may have some knowledge-by-acquaintance of Moore's deeply held believe that everything is a symbol of everything else. But it is also a story, with a plot and characterisation and narrative development and all the stuff you expect there to be a in a story. It may not convert us to ritual magic and path-working, but it stands as a worthwhile, if pretty obscure, work of art. An artefact as well as a statement: a thing made as well as a thing said. (The Middle English word for Poet was "maker".) 

I have argued at too much length that I think that Cerebus the Aardvark, despite its obscurity, difficulty and increasingly toxic ideology, stands as an astonishing work of art. 

The Strange Death of Alex Raymond? Not so much.

The purpose of the Strange Death of Alex Raymond is to tell us about this thing called Comic Book Metaphysics. Sim truly thinks that if he tells us about all the connections he has made -- and he honestly thinks that these connections are real and undeniable and that once they have been pointed out no-one will deny them or put them down to coincidence -- we will understand how the artist died and believe that this is how the universe works. 

Tell, at massive length: don't show.

I don't know whether he thinks that every death is at the center of an equally complex metaphysical web, or if Alex Raymond is a unique world historical figure. Probably the latter. The whole universe revolving around a single artist of genius. You can see why Dave Sim would be attracted to that idea.

I am not sure if I should reveal Alex Raymond's significance. It is an odd thing to be writing spoiler warnings for what is essentially an extended essay: but my jaw did genuinely drop when we came to The Point. In the same way my jaw dropped when Dave said that Cerebus was going to finish on issue 200, rather than 300; in the same way it dropped when Cerebus turned inside out and we were in Dave's studio, and Cerebus was a comic within a comic.

Maybe if you are the sort of person who thinks you might read this sort of thing you should skip the rest of my meta-essay? (Disclaimers apply. Do not feed the troll.)

Perhaps as much as a third of the comic is spent talking about Margaret Mitchell, the author (Sim insists on saying authoress) of Gone With the Wind. She also died in a car accident, five years before Raymond, and lots of comics around the time of her death seem to depict car crashes, near car crashes, characters called Margaret, characters with the initials MM and characters who resemble Margaret Mitchell or have affinities with her life. On page 244-247 Sim departs from his normal hand written lettering to show us a series of huge, headline like frontispieces, about a woman from eighteenth century Ireland who was prosecuted for witchcraft. (She is sometimes called The Last Witch in Ireland. She wasn't executed, but she was put in the stocks every day for a year while Irish people threw hard-boiled eggs at her.) Her name, of course, was Margaret Mitchell.

"Had Margaret Mitchell just been a contemporary iteration of an infernal presence in our world that dates back to the eighteenth century? Is that what had caused the weird outbreak of Margaret Mitchell analogues in comic books cover dated August-September 1949? Or was the motivating force behind these otherwise inexplicable manifestations Ward Green's obsessive and magnified focus on Margaret Mitchell?"

Why is the story of the woman who wrote Gone With The Wind of relevance to the story of the man who drew Flash Gordon? Because (apparently) Ward Green, had tried to come to an arrangement to adapt Gone With the Wind as a comic book. (Mitchell did, in fact, write the first few episodes of a comic book soap opera which was illustrated by Stan Drake: the only fiction she wrote after her famous novel.) Gone With the Wind was a massively successful book that had been turned into a massively successful movie; so the pairing of Mitchell with the massively successful artist Alex Raymond would have been a very big deal.

However, Ward Green was (it says here) an unreconstructed racist, and possibly an occult dabbler as well, so a Ward adaptation of Gone With the Wind would probably have been a thorough going Confederate apologia, rather than merely an exercise in Southern Nostalgia. If such a famous artist had illustrated such a work -- with a readership amounting to practically every adult in America....

SPOILER SPOLIER SPOILIER

.....it would have resulted in a Confederate Revival and a new civil war in the 20th century. 

SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER

Next Section

Contents

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.

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My extended Essay on Cerebus the Aardvark is available from Lulu press. 

When Did You Stop Reading Cerebus?