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.

9th March 2008.

Do you remember a television show in the Eighties called Buck Rogers in the 25th Century? You don’t? Oh well, not a great loss. It was about this present-day astronaut that gets deep frozen in space only to return to earth (as the voice-over guy put it) Five! Hundred! Years! Later!

And what has any of this got to do with anything, you might ask?

Well, everything. Because that’s you, that is. You’re a film fan reading a blog at a film festival site, and so there’s a possibility that the last time you touched a comic was just before adolescent acne turned your face into a relief map of the moon. And from the moment you put that last comic down, just like our boy Buck, you were in suspended animation. Oh, you may have got on with all that fiddlesome and over rated ‘life’ stuff, but in comic book terms you were frozen solid.

But now, should your attitude thaw towards graphic storytelling, you will find a world every bit and strange and changed as that of the 25th century (and indeed just as crammed full of lycra-clad space babes).*

It can be confusing place. Hence, I shall not merely review comics in this comics reviewing blog, I shall be filling you in on what has changed in your absence.

Case in point; famous people. What’s up with them? No sooner does anyone gain the faintest glimmer of glamour than they start thinking they can do anything. George Clooney thinks he can start being a spokesman for the U.N. Angelina Jollie thinks she can start moving the entire child

population of the Third World to Beverly Hills. Paris Hilton thinks she’s all sorts of things; actress, model, singer, human being even.

And some famous people even think they can ‘do’ comics.

Of course, the ways in which they do this ‘do’ are many and varied. Jenna Jameson (who I am informed is some popular practitioner of the romantic arts or other) thinks she can do it by ‘starring’ in Virgin (oh the irony) Comic’s ShadowHunter, which is like Buffy the Vampire Slayer only without every last thing that ever made Buffy great.

Others do it by actually contributing a little more than just the contents of their bra. Such as the initial concept. That’s what John Woo, Jonathan Mostow and Guy Richie are doing with their Director’s Cut titles – again at Virgin.

It’s what Stephen King did at Marvel. However, his contribution was more than a fire-and-forget. He gave them the keys to the kingdom when he let them set original stories in his Dark Tower universe. Mind you, he put those keys into some pretty handy hands; Jae Lee, Robin Furth, Richard Isanove and of course Peter David – a gentleman who’s written everything in comics from The Hulk to the Little Mermaid, and all of them damn well. Seriously, if you’re a fan of the Dark Tower novels, you are doing yourself a genuine disservice by not checking these out. Do you really hate yourself that much? Look, it’s alright, there’s a new series; ‘The Long Road Home’ coming out in March, pick that up and perhaps you will find it in your heart to forgive yourself.

To be truthful, there are actually plenty of well-known novelists involved with comics these days, and most of them are even proud to be so. But the reason I singled King out in particular was because he leads us so very neatly into our inaugural review for this column.

Which would be ‘LOCKE & KEY’ by Joe Hill.

Now, most knowledgeable reader, I wouldn’t even begin to dream of patronizing you by pointing out that Joe Hill is of course Joseph Hillstrom King, Son of Stephen. You of course have read Ghost Stories and Heart-Shaped Box, but this (with the slight exception of a little something he wrote for Spider-Man a whiles ago) is his first effort in this field.

And what I want to know is; where the hell does Joe get off writing comics this good first time around the block?

Maybe I shouldn’t be quite so enamoured of this as I obviously am, but remember those novelists we touched upon earlier? Well, some of them don’t do so well in comics. They tend to think of it as just text with illustrations as opposed to an entirely different medium. And the results can be a little dull and slow, as they try to make characters live and breathe by words alone and without having to rely too much on all those silly pictures to tell you anything. I am of course far too decent to mention any names, but Orson Scott Card on Ultimate Iron Man is one example of somebody not wholly and shiningly exempt from this sort of thing.

But Joe Hill is, and how. He knows to build a story not just out of words but actions and images.

Now; that story. Disaffected teen Tyler Locke is on vacation with his family when a couple of his more psychotic acquaintances turn up. Hideousness ensues, and by the time the hatchet’s been buried (in someone’s head) the Lockes are down a family member.

In order to recover from the trauma they remove themselves to a mansion owned by the family in the dread-inducingly named Lovecraft, Massachusetts. However coming to this mysterious Keyhouse (which couldn’t look any creepier if it were the time-share holiday home of both the Munsters and the Addams Family) may very well be a case of leaving the frying pan for the fire, especially since one of their attackers may be about to pay them all a return call…

Of course, that’s not the whole story. There are shocks and twists and great little moments of character development and recurring imagery I’m wilfully denying you so that when you do the right thing and buy the damn thing they’ll still be shocks and twists and great little moments of character development and recurring imagery. So there.

But it’s in your own best interests that I do this, because this is a darkly gleaming gem of a book, and all the more so for being polished to a high lustre by Gabriel Rodriguez’s compellingly ugly/beautiful art, and it would look so good on you.

Anyway that’s quite enough of me haranguing you for now. Next time, we’ll be looking at what’s new in comics based on your favourite movies, shows, games, and, yes, even other comics!

*Look, if this whole Buck Rogers thing really is going over your head, just think of Futurama instead. It’s better than Buck anyway; the characters are less two-dimensional…

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