Toby Finch reads far too many comics and justifies this with the belief that you will in some way care about what hethinks of them. Please humour him.

24th March 2008.

Ah, the good old days. Back then, all you had to be to get your own comic book was a comic book character.

But no longer. Nowadays a comic is usually just one more shard of shrapnel from the detonation of the latest multi-media entertainment event, hurtling out into the iconosphere alongside such other tie-in debris as the movie, the video game, the t-shirt, and those little plastic thingies that you get free with your breakfast cereal. Now, fair enough, one or more of the above mentioned merchandise might have actually been the original explosive (with the possible exception of the cereal box thingies, but it’s only a matter of time) but it’s getting increasingly difficult these days to track down the fuse of any given marketing boom. And this is a problem that’s even worse in the world of comics, because licenser's mostly look down their collective noses at the medium, and so - secure in the knowledge that nobody will really know or care what happens – will heedlessly toss the rights to their latest cash-cow to anybody in the trade to do with as they wish, with exactly the sort of scatter-shot results you’d expect.

This doesn’t always happen. Some creators (hello George Lucas and Star Wars) keep a very short leash on what happens to their splurgings of their over-active imaginations, and whilst this isn’t always a safeguard against crap, it does at the very minimum ensure crap that’s at least concordant with all the other crap, and frequently gives rise to quality work (hello Dark Horse comics and Star Wars). But all too often things are little more lax. Licenses are sometimes granted to publishers to produce new work based on certain films but not necessarily the larger franchises they belong to. So imagine a story that sequelizes Terminator 2 but can’t mention Terminator 3. That’d be the Sarah Conner Chronicles right? Yes, but it’d also be the Terminator Infinity comic (amongst others) which, just to make things even more complex, can’t acknowledge the television show either. For me, it sounds some alarm bells when the various documentations of these narratives actually give rise to more brain-buggering paradoxes than the exploits of the time-travelling killer cyborgs they portray. But that’s the way of the market these days. Everything gets a comic. Then everything that’s got a comic meets up with everything else that’s got a comic in yet another comic. Long before they formed the most lamentable on-screen pairings since the Olsen Twins, Alien met Predator. Then they met Superman, who in turn went on to meet the Terminator, who then ran afoul of Robocop (no doubt in a contest to see which of them possessed the most disturbingly prominent lips). Now, Freddy met Jason in the movie. Then Freddy and Jason met Ash from the Evil Dead, right after Ash met the Marvel Zombies and before he met Xena: Warrior Princess, and in due course they all meet, I imagine, Abbot and Costello.

In fact, I shall not be surprised if this upcoming remake of ‘The Thing’ will result in not just sequels, prequels and sidequels¹ to itself but also to the John Carpenter version, the Howard Hawks original, and the even John Campbell short story that inspired them. Then the eye-blisteringly ugly tumour-beast from one will meet the ambulatory carrot and metamorphic space commie from the others in an orgy of violence if we’re lucky, and an orgy of the other kind if we’re not.

There’s a word for this sort of thing: metatextuallity. - But here’s another, more accurate word: mess.

I imagine the old masters of the horror crossover, Dracula, Frankenstein and Wolf Man must be looking on in despair. It’s enough to drive them to drink, and according to our next comic, it does. Because in ‘Screamland’ Frankenstein’s Monster is a washed-up Hollywood has-been looking back on his Universal Pictures heyday through a mist of alcohol-tinged sourness. This comic belongs to a very small and very select category of literature; things which are great to read when hungover. There’s a wonderful alchemy at work here of the wistfulness, regret, grumpiness and sheer tiredness that follow having partied just that little to bit too hard the night before that parallels the post-glory limbo of Franks modern life. Now he shuns the glare of L.A. sunshine more than he ever did the peasant’s torches, and it’s thepounding hangover that elicits his guttural groans. It’s a great concept for a story in any medium (and that’s even before Ed Wood shows up) and well executed to boot. And whilst we’re on the subject of stories that work in any media but are currently doing gangbusters in comics form, let me recommend to you the further adventures of one Elizabeth Summers, formerly of Sunnydale, California.

It has to be said that this feels less like a piece of merchandise related to a now-defunct show and more like one of the periodic changes of medium that this particular franchise goes through. It was originally a movie, then a television show, now it’s a comic. Every character is not only present but correct, drawn and written so well that you blasphemously begin to wonder just why they needed actors to bring them to life in the first place. Buffy herself is just as cutely iron-fist-in-the-velvet-glove tough with herself and everyone around her as she ever was, and her brand new big bad enemy is just as wilfully mysterious, manifestly unbeatable, occasionally humorous and thematically apposite as any of his predecessors were, if not more so.

It is, in short, the real deal. It, in shorter, works. And therein lays both its strength and weakness. For there’s something a little unbelievable about a bunch of people who met in high school still living in each other’s pockets after all this time, even if the content of their lives (and, one assumes, their pockets) is extraordinary. The writers are not unaware of this. They have recognized the need for a ‘growing up and moving on’ story – and of course that story was ‘Angel’. To see this set of characters not designed for the task half attempting and wholly failing to do likewise is a faintly discomforting, especially since Angel and co are inhabitants of the same fictional world. And especially since Angel also has his own comic continuation, although Buffy is slightly revenged here by the fact that her title is far superior. It may be going down an inconclusive road, but the ride is more than enough fun to make up for it. Angel, on the other hand, whilst having a more purposeful plot (i.e. just what the literal hell happened after the series finale) suffers from the inverse of the above problem – whilst the story compels, the storytelling doesn’t. Joss’s name is above the title, but he’s a light touch on the tiller it seems.

In fact, Dark Horse editor Scott Allie apologized in the pages of Buffy for allowing Angel to a wind up at competitor company IDW. At least at IDW, Angel’s got some friends from tellyland to hang out with, since they’ve picked up the rights to The Ghostwhisper and have already published two issues of the first states-side Doctor Who comic in many a long year; about which I have some divided feelings. The comic has an agreeably family-friendly feel to it (which is rare and thusly very welcome in a modern comic) with crisp, clean art and barrels along with pace enough from beginning to end, leaving only in the middle for a short and clumsy detour. Way back when writer Gary Russell used to script Doctor Who mini-strips for the Radio Times and so should know a thing or two about economic storytelling, but in each of these last two efforts there’s a big fat info dump that stops the plot dead for a couple of pages so it can deliver even more explanation than the story actually needs. Nevertheless, if this doesn’t take up its rightful place on the shelf at WHSmith next to the other Whoanalia there will have been a right old injustice. You’ll have to forgive me. I’m such a total sucker for all things Time Lord themed. Hell, I even collected those little cardboard things that came free with Weetabix in the Seventies.

Ah, they had proper innocent and carefree cynical cash-grabbing marketing explosions in those days…

TOBY.

No, I did not just make that word up. Lord knows I’ve been responsible for some ghastly neologisms in my time, (see the above ‘iconosphere’; a pun on ionosphere meaning the realm of ideas and images in the cultural consciousness) but there’s no way I’m taking the rap for this one.

By the way, did you see how seamless that segue was? Which is more than you can say for Frankenstein himself*.

Okay, that was definitely a less smooth segue. But what do you want? It’s not like you’re paying for this or anything…

Yes, this is a footnote to a footnote, but if you’ve read on this far I’m sure you’ll indulge me a little further as I rant on about peculiarly American perceptions about these characters. Just as our friends across the pond seem to have hardly noticed that Drac and Frank et all got out and about quite a bit after the black and white days – All Hail Hammer! – so too do they seem to forget that they had their origins not in celluloid but in Gothic literature. So how about raiding the genre for a few more iconic titans of terror? What about Varney the Vampyre and Uncle Silas meet Melmouth the Wanderer? It’s got hit written all over it!…

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