Milligan & McCarthy collection due in September from Dark Horse

[Mardroid]

I'm tempted myself, particularly the bargain prices on Amazon. (£12.73* for a big hardback comic tome brimming with stuff? Yes please.)

I'd be taking quite a chance though as I'm not acquainted with the stories at all. I.e. what if I buy it and I dislike it? Not a big deal I guess, I'm sure I could sell it on and not lose that much.

I am particularly curious about Paradax as I read an article featuring a statement by Brendan McCarthy a little while back. (One Google later, here it is.)

I wasn't reading 2000 AD during the Zenith days, and so on reading comments concerning thatcharacter, I was curious and wanted to pick up the material. Cue the recent collections... which are outside my price range, but I'm hopeful a cheaper edition will be out at some point. Anyway, in the article mentioned above, McCarthy strongly suggests Grant lifted a lot of Zenith stuff from Paradax.

Whether that's true or not, I don't know. After all sometimes things just happen in parallel. I'm sure many creators have had ideas for things, then shortly after, see someone else had the idea and produced it. And also many stories can borrow from what's been before but then become their own thing.

Anyway, I'm still interested in reading Zenith, but I'm thinking it might be good to read Paradax first, particularly as it appeared first.


*A whole shiny penny cheaper if you go through the seller Wordery. Heh. Joking aside, I like to give these smaller companies a chance.

[Frank]

I am particularly curious about Paradax as I read an article featuring a statement by Brendan McCarthy a little while back. (One Google later, here it is.) McCarthy strongly suggests Grant lifted a lot of Zenith stuff from Paradax. Whether that's true or not, I don't know. After all sometimes things just happen in parallel. I'm sure many creators have had ideas for things, then shortly after, see someone else had the idea and produced it. And also many stories can borrow from what's been before but then become their own thing.

Zenith definitely falls into your category of becoming its own thing, and it's one of my very favourite 2000ad strips, but the debt Zenith owes to Brendan McCarthy is there for everyone to see. Morrison was constantly citing McCarthy's work and conversations they had at conventions as the springboard for his own creativity, and he's still recycling them today.

The most obvious example of that are his experiments with trying to create comics which can be enjoyed not just as linear narratives but entirely out of sequence and going backwards and forwards on themselves - something McCarthy was doing, and a philosophy and aesthetic he was articulating, as far back as Freakwave. As far as I can tell, McCarthy's not so much charging Morrison with plagiarism as he is frustrated by the lack of recognition of the origin of that creativity among readers and critics.

[Hawkmumbler]

Still need to order my copy. Looks stunning though.

[Mardroid]

As far as I can tell, McCarthy's not so much charging Morrison with plagiarism as he is frustrated by the lack of recognition of the origin of that creativity among readers and critics.

Yes, that's kind of the impression I got.

Do you think it's a good idea for new readers to Zenith to read Paradax first? I suppose it doesn't really matter from a story POV being separate continuities by separate authors, but maybe from an ideas/creation POV it is.

[ming]

As far as I can tell, McCarthy's not so much charging Morrison with plagiarism as he is frustrated by the lack of recognition of the origin of that creativity among readers and critics.

Yes, that's kind of the impression I got.

Do you think it's a good idea for new readers to Zenith to read Paradax first? I suppose it doesn't really matter from a story POV being separate continuities by separate authors, but maybe from an ideas/creation POV it is.

There's plenty been written about Brendan's influences on Grant Morrison and Grant's subsequent forgetfulness / airbrushing / autobiographical alterations when it comes to crediting some of the ideas and specific characters (see Doom Patrol's Danny the Street, for example) and there's little point me adding to it here.

As for the matter of whether you should read Paradax before Zenith: not really.  You can definitely enjoy each of these on their own terms without any knowledge of the other.  The basics of the character of Zenith owe a lot to Paradax but the story develops in it's own direction and clearly diverges from what Paradax sets out to achieve.

Paradax was all too short-lived and definitely did not outstay its welcome (the same can be said of all of M&M's work; arrives with a frenzy of ideas and visuals and vanishes as soon as it appears, never to be seen again).  As much as I love Zenith (and I do) there's just so much energy and fizzling creativity on display in those handful of Paradax pages that they're hard to beat.  Zenith ends but Paradax really left me wanting more.