Main Menu

Looking back

Started by JohnW, 14 October, 2022, 12:49:13 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

JayzusB.Christ

Quote from: JWare on 25 October, 2022, 10:23:53 AM

(...But seriously, what is it with the murder of Citizen Lorien Speck? Ninja knuckle technique or invisible garotte? Firm answers or wild speculation welcome.)



Well, I never noticed that before.  Surely a touch of the famous white-out brush?  There's no way that couldn't have started life as a garotting scene.

Really enjoying your progstalgia posts, JWare.  Keep them coming!
"Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest"

JohnW

Quote from: JayzusB.Christ on 06 November, 2022, 01:00:17 PM
Really enjoying your progstalgia posts, JWare.  Keep them coming!

My pleasure, JayzusB.
Intensely examining long-ago things of little matter is what I'm all about.
Why can't everybody just, y'know, be friends and everything? ... and uh ... And love each other!

JayzusB.Christ

Quote from: JWare on 06 November, 2022, 01:51:47 PM
Quote from: JayzusB.Christ on 06 November, 2022, 01:00:17 PM
Really enjoying your progstalgia posts, JWare.  Keep them coming!

My pleasure, JayzusB.
Intensely examining long-ago things of little matter is what I'm all about.

Which is why I love your posts, and Jim Moon's Hypnogoria podcast.
"Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest"

JohnW

'A hellish setting for numberless tales of heroism and despair'

If I'd known I'd be carrying on to this extent, I'd have given this thread a better name than 'Looking Back'. 'First Impressions' sounds pretty lame too, but it's nearer the mark.


My own first impressions don't come much firstier than Rogue Trooper, who made his debut on the cover of the first prog I ever paid for with my own money. I had to. I'd managed to miss not only the finales of both Meltdown Man and The Gronk Affair, but also Episode 4 of Judge Death Lives when my best mate – my usual supplier – went on holidays or something. Can you imagine spending years knowing the 'Gaze into the fist of Dredd' scene only by hearsay? So yeah, I reached into my own pocket for Prog 228.
So there's Rogue on the cover. Excellent cover, by the way, but not what I was here for. I wanted Nemesis or the Dark Judges. I wanted Nick Stone or Johnny Alpha. I hadn't been asking for any novelties. Not that I was turning my nose up at this Rogue Trooper, mind. Having gone so far as to part with twenty-one Irish pence, I was prepared to give the new thrill the benefit of the doubt.

So what have we got?
Perfect scene-setting in both art and script. Everything is made clear in a few panels. Distant planet: check. Devastated by war: gotcha.
And it's a war-is-hell kind of war. Meet the poor bloody infantry, about to launch their sci-fi version of the Battle of the Somme. These might be the good guys, but they're doomed to die in a pointless fight, victims of their own indifferent high command as much as enemy action.
And here's the enemy. No both-sidesism in this story. They're faceless, jack-booted, nazi-commie types with lightning-bolt insignia, and they've got a death-ray that mercilessly fries the attacking Southers.*
But here comes our hero!
Good character design here. Human but not too human. Uncanny but potentially sympathetic. Rippling muscle combined with hi-tech gear in the finest tradition of science fantasy art.**
Good bit of showing and telling going on too. The reader – even the ten-year-old me – is given everything needed to follow the plot. Our guy is agile, mobile, and hostile. He was bred for war. He's got his biochipped buddies with him, and he's getting stuck into the Norts before the exposition is half over.
The action scene is pure boys' comics stuff, with all sorts of contrivances crammed in to show off this Rogue Trooper's specialised skill set.  He gets the drop on a couple of sentries, shoots one, but then, instead of shooting the other, gets him in a head lock and rips off his gas mask with his bare hands. Then, bred for war or not, he loses his rifle when he falls into the gun pit. The Norts can't take advantage of this and shoot him (because evidently this great big death-ray installation in the middle of a battlefield can't stand up to a little small arms fire) so they go in with futuristic edged weapons (these are fiendish 'vibro-dags' – mechanical daggers fiendishly set to 'vibrate' – the first in a long succession of batshit-wonderful Rogue Trooper weapons designs). So what does Rogue do? The knife strapped to his leg a minute ago has inexplicably disappeared (it'll reappear when things are safe). There's a hatchet on his belt, but this just doesn't feel like hatchet time. So he unslings his pack in an instant and wallops his assailants with it. In future episodes it will be revealed that Bagman's got a department store's worth of lethal stuff stashed inside, but here he is employed just for his sharp corners.
Don't question, just admire.
(Next week we'd see Helm being used in much the same fashion. Bagman had all sorts of things going for him, but Helm? Helm was just good for bopping a Nort backstabber and incidentally showing us that Rogue had an Airborne haircut.)

So anyway, the fight is won, the exposition is rounded up, and our guy strides impassively off into the chem clouds, leaving the survivors and the readers to ponder the question, 'Who was that masked man?'***
The answer would be satisfactorily drip-fed to us in the coming weeks: fine effective story-telling, no doubt about it.

And so this Lone Trooper, the Rogue Ranger, shot straight to second place in the readers' popularity charts and stayed there. For myself, I never quite cared for the character. The setting, on the other hand, was a winner – an unending war in a scorched and poisoned land. I was a reader of Battle at the time, and Rogue's adventures were just a sci-fi take on the repetitive two-fisted WW2 antics I was beginning to get bored with. But Nu-Earth itself? Nu-Earth possessed the monstrous bleakness that only existed in 2000AD. Here was a limitless stage for who knew what kind of god-awfulness. It was the story's greatest strength.
In later years Jaegir would remember this.
Rogue Trooper, unfortunately, would forget.


*Question from 1981. Were they Sowthers or Suthers? My peer group went with Suthers, because the spelling was close to 'southern', but there was no one to lay down the law for us.

**Question from 1986/87. Hands up – how many people here, who on first reading Watchmen, saw a Dave Gibbons-illustrated, blank-eyed, blue-skinned guy with his wedding tackle swinging free, and said to themselves, 'Rogue's taken the bare-chested look a step too far.'?

***Look at Rogue's eyes ringed in black. Now put a red bandanna around that blue neck. Seem familiar yet? There you go. Now it's just a small step to turn Helm into a white stetson, Bagman into an Indian sidekick, and have Gunnar shooting silver bullets.

Why can't everybody just, y'know, be friends and everything? ... and uh ... And love each other!

Richard


JohnW

Why can't everybody just, y'know, be friends and everything? ... and uh ... And love each other!

JayzusB.Christ

Great stuff as always.

I always said 'Suther' in my head but I think I made an effort to change it to 'Sow-ther' on Eamonn's podcast when we discussed Cinnabar.  Someone on this board pointed out that a 'souther', pronounced the latter way, is a type of wind.
"Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest"

JohnW

The scripts of Alan Who?

I was reading Alan Moore before he was Alan Moore.
We didn't have superstar writers in my young day, so Moore – if we even noticed him – was just the guy who gave us some pretty good Future Shocks.
And it wasn't as if they were all uniformly brilliant. Look at, say, 'Return of the Thing' from Prog 265, or 'The Wild Frontier' from Prog 269 (and I didn't have to hunt very long at all before I came up with those two). Cover up Moore's name and see just how much they wow you now.
Yeah, thought so.
The name cut no ice with us back then, and when he was finally given his own series, the name certainly wasn't big enough to appear above the title.

I liked Skizz. but as far as I was concerned what made it great could mostly be filed under 'Things that went over your head'.
I recognised that it was a sort of mash-up of ET and Boys from the Black Stuff, but I'd never seen either, and I think I disapproved of the writer not trying to be more original.
I was a 12-year-old boy so I was hardly going to identify with a 15-year-old girl, and I wasn't living in Thatcher's Britain, so the plight of the unemployed working man wasn't likely to resonate with me.

Reading Skizz now, the scene that really gets me is where Roxy goes to the pub and tries to convince Loz and Cornelius to help spring her alien friend. It's a piece of scriptwriting that wouldn't be out of place on the stage, or in some kitchen-sink television drama. But I didn't go to the theatre or care much for tortured social commentary, so that sort of thing in Skizz was all too mature for me. And that's on Moore, not on me. I was the target audience, dammit.

The story was better when it sped up. My favourite scene there (and probably everyone's) is the apotheosis of Cornelius Cardew, smashing his way out of his wrecked Transit van. I didn't recognise it then, but that pipe wrench rising through the shattered windscreen is the Excalibur of the downtrodden.
'I've got my pride,' indeed.
To me it was just a bloody good action scene, and this writer guy should maybe have given us more stuff like that.
And he was just the writer guy. If I took note of his name it didn't stick long in my mind.

Art was different. After having looked at his art every week for 23 episodes, I could have recognised Jim Baikie's style in the dark, but I don't think I appreciated that writers had styles. That meant that the arrival of Moore's next series the following summer meant little enough to me.
I wasn't paying much attention when Halo Jones first appeared, and what I might have skimmed over in the newsagent's certainly didn't tempt me to jump back in.
Most likely I looked at the art and thought to myself, 'Ian Gibson doing girly stuff again? Wasn't The Amazing Maze Dumoir enough?'





Why can't everybody just, y'know, be friends and everything? ... and uh ... And love each other!

JohnW

Never going to give you up

You know what I appreciated about 2000AD? It's permanence. Through the early eighties I drifted in and out, but it was always there and I could always come back to the good old prog, its chrome logo greeting me from the same newsagent's shelf.
And then in 1987 it changed. The paper stock changed. The size changed. Before the year was out the very logo would change. And where were the thrills of yore? Where were the artists and writers who'd delighted me in the past? Not that I was planning on forsaking the Galaxy's Greatest just then. Far from it. I had been born again when Halo Jones 3 had appeared the previous year. I was one of the unquestioning faithful now, and if anything, a new flavour to the comic intrigued and excited me. But after the hoopla of the tenth anniversary prog had died down, a slump set in.
I have to confess that much of this was me and not the comic. June of that year got eaten up by  exams, and the dreariness they engendered persisted through the summer. It was just a blah teenage time. Oh yeah – and the music in the charts was shite.
But 2000AD wasn't helping. The good stories fell away, leaving things like the Mean Team sequel behind. The Dredd story Revolution got me all gingered up, but what I expected to be a mini-epic ran for only three episodes.
And then this new thing arrived, written by one of those new writers and drawn by one of the new artists.
Grant Morrison? Did he maybe do a Future Shock or something? Steve Yeowell? Who's he?
Well from now on they'd only need one credential. Yeowell and Morrison were the guys who did Zenith.

After a prologue giving us a bit of dark alternate history followed by an occult Cold War vibe (so far so good), the title role makes his appearance.
SKKRRRAASH! goes the sound effect.
I think the word I'm looking for here is 'immediacy'.
Sure, we'd all seen superheroes before and dramatic entrances were the genre's stock-in-trade, but this was real-world. This was the eighties.*
It happens in an ordinary London flat. That was Yeowell's strength: presenting the utterly ordinary.  You can believe in the flat, and the copy of the Sun, and the teacups, and so you can believe in the man who crashes into it. The character was designed by Brendan McCarthy, and Yeowell doesn't change a thing, but he does make it look like a real person wearing a McCarthy-designed suit. Look at the treads on Zenith's boots. And look at the lad's hair. In 1987 I saw that hair and I recognised it. Didn't I say that the charts were rubbish that summer? Well Stock, Aitken and Waterman had just given us a certain Rick Astley – who had almost the very same hair! How contemporary was that? The Comic of the Future had arrived in the present.
Zenith was a world of breakfast television and Conservative MPs and manufactured pop acts and superhero Nazi dark gods, and we could buy right into it. It was all so Right Now. 2000AD had never done a real superhero story before, but to hell with tradition. Try wit instead. The hip new creators were giving us a superhero – one that made the caped and costumed Americans look laughably stodgy.
Yes, Zenith wears a mask. Yes, he flies. Yes, he makes his entrance with a splash panel. But he's pissed, and not in the American sense.
Here he is, the Tooth's first superhero. Compare his drunken entrance to that of the preposterous Marvel poseurs. Zenith is as big a dickhead as any of them, but Morrison, with that particular brand of up-to-the-minute cleverness that he might as well trademark**, makes it clear that there's no pretending otherwise. And like Yeowell's art, we unhesitatingly accept it. Why? Because Zenith is just like any 19-year-old would be if he had superpowers and a number one single. He's a self-centred tosser.

The golden-age artists and writers might have gone, but 2000AD could still deliver the goods.
And look! – it could even be cool and knowing, just like I wanted to be.
I'd be staying.




*Don't tell me what Frank Miller was doing with Daredevil or what have you. I wasn't reading American comics. And besides, all that was in the States – a place that only existed in fiction anyway.

**The young Morrison being so aptly described on this forum recently as 'brilliant but kind of full of shit'.
Why can't everybody just, y'know, be friends and everything? ... and uh ... And love each other!

Dash Decent

Quote from: JayzusB.Christ on 12 November, 2022, 10:53:53 AM
I always said 'Suther' in my head but I think I made an effort to change it to 'Sow-ther' on Eamonn's podcast when we discussed Cinnabar.  Someone on this board pointed out that a 'souther', pronounced the latter way, is a type of wind.

I still say "Suther" as it seems more correct (like 'Southern' or 'Southerly', shorn of the extra letters), not to mention better - "South-er" is a car crash in the mouth.  It sounds like some of those American pronunciations you hear, where they haven't twigged how to change the emphasis on different syllables as you add to a word.  e.g. "Super-lative" rather than "su-perlative".  And I have no trouble that it's also a type of wind.  The dictionary is full of examples of words with different meanings.
- By Appointment -
Hero to Michael Carroll

"... rank amateurism and bad jokes." - JohnW.

JohnW

A small bloodstained notebook, found at the scene of a brutal battle...
Prog 494 gave us a promo: Join Them In Prog 500!
A sci-fi Boris Karloff packing heat. A band of assorted oddballs and hard cases.



Dunno about this.
It's hard to do a convincing story with an ensemble cast. Was this going to be an oversized A-Team? The ugly one, the crazy one, the one with the catchphrases, and the one with the with the dog brain?
And a war story by Ewins and McCarthy? I liked the overall aesthetic, but I wanted an element of realism in my war stories. I wanted machinery designed by the likes of Cam Kennedy. Instead we've got Kano's rifle with the oddest ammunition feed you ever saw.
And the title? Was that a sort-of pun or was it Bad as in Michael Jackson Bad – a misguided attempt to be 'with it'?
I was pleased when that one was cleared up on the page immediately preceding the grand opening. We had none other than the well-beloved and much-missed DR & Quinch to usher in the new thrill, and if they were there to do the drum roll (or chainsaw in this case) then I would indulge this new thrill and give it my fullest attention.
That said, I gave everything in the prog my fullest attention back then and, sad to say, this Bad Company left the socks still on my feet. I didn't recognise it as Darkie's Mob in space, but I do remember thinking that we'd seen this sort of thing before. And what about that group pose on the last page of the first episode? What was this? A superhero team-up? Everyone getting lost in the general 'Look at me! Look how special I am!'
There was even a guy with a top hat, for chrissake. These characters were trying too hard.



I gave it a chance. It kept on getting better. The art turned out to be perfectly suited to the hallucinatory tone of the story.
For me, the whole of Bad Company would be summed up in the cover of Prog 548, with Kano standing there between the corpses and the alien sky all sickly green and migraine purple.
'Once was a bad dream ... Now comes the nightmare!'
Less like a reworking of one of Battle's stalwarts and more like a dose of the DTs.

But that was in the future. For the present, the story was steadily gathering pace before barrelling towards a thunderous climax.
The story's beginning didn't dazzle me. But the conclusion? Let me paraphrase Pete Milligan's script:
How did Bad Company end?
Perfectly.




Great news for all our readers
I've been writing this stuff to avoid writing other stuff, but now I should really knuckle down to the other stuff. No doubt I'll once again find myself musing on progs gone by, and then I'll indulge in another bout of remember whenning, but for the time being that's it.
My 2000AD ran from 1981 to 1993, and I'm all eightied out right now, but if anyone wants to have a go at the nineties, or whatever those decades that came next were called, please knock yourself out.
Why can't everybody just, y'know, be friends and everything? ... and uh ... And love each other!

Richard

Thank you for a great thread so far!

Trooper McFad

Great look back JWare - Kano is on my wish list of figures to create
Citizens are Perps who haven't been caught ... yet!

JayzusB.Christ

Quote from: Richard on 28 November, 2022, 10:43:58 PM
Thank you for a great thread so far!

Ditto. Thanks,  J 'best newcomer' Ware, it's been brilliant
"Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest"

JohnW

What is this sensation deep in my core?
Could it be what humans call... "love"?
Why can't everybody just, y'know, be friends and everything? ... and uh ... And love each other!