nixsight

The Mighty #1 – Peter Tomasi, Keith Champagne & Peter Snejberg.

The Mighty is one of those alternate-timeline what-if-the-superman-paradigm-had-played-out-differently books that have proliferated and persisted since twenty minutes before Alan Moore wrote Miracle Man, and show no signs of stopping any time soon.

It feels like we’ve seen most possible iterations of this type of story by now – though apparently not so much that I won’t still check them out.

However, Tomasi, Champagne and Snejberg do such a good job of painting their particular scenario, with it’s sincerely written human viewpoint, a believeable and interesting wider political and corporate context, the suggestions of intrigue or conspiracy, and enough questions asked and left unanswered about the central character’s backstory that you certainly want to see where the next issue takes the story.

However, I don’t know if I’d have been so intrigued by the book, if it wasn’t for Snejberg’s solidly drafted and workmanlike art, which was in contrast to some of the showy but weak art I’ve seen in the last couple of weeks.

Hotwire: Requiem For The Dead #1 – Steve Pugh

None of that weak art is present in the first issue of “Hotwire – Requiem For The Dead”, a new comic from Steve Pugh, published by Radical.

The cover smartly gives Warren Ellis’ name equal space with Pugh’s, though this seems like a bit of a smart marketing ploy, rather than any real indication of input – as I understand it, the book is based on story ideas that the two were kicking around a while back, and this book is written and drawn by Pugh on his own.

The comic, set in a London of the future which is both dystopic and not entirely unfamiliar, follows it’s hero, the pale-skinned and impudent Alice Hotwire, an exorcist detective chasing down incidents of Blue Light. Blue Light is a term used by the establishment of this future to describe ghost activity – because apparently all of the traditional words for it sounded too spooky.

The comic gets straight into the action, with us finding Alice in the middle of a dramatic – but apparently not that unusual – mission. However, the character soon discovers what she believes may be evidence of a sinister shift in the status-quo, and finding herself at odds with her fellow police officers, she has to look in some unusual places for help.

I’ve been a fan of Steve Pugh’s art since he fully rendered the Strontium Dog: Feral strip in wax crayons, in 2000AD. It was a lot more awesome than that makes it sound.

That strip was written by Garth Ennis. Since then, he has worked with a pedigree of writers that includes Warren Ellis, Brian Wood, Jamie Delano and Grant Morrison, as well as working again and again with Ennis.

Either something has rubbed off on him, or he was already a naturally gifted writer, because this comic is a cracking good read. I’ve never read anything written by Pugh before, but his ear for dialogue and the clarity of his plotting is extremely slick and punchy.

Though the whole book is infused with a very old-school Ellis aesthetic, Pugh’s approach to the book makes for a refreshing change from other books on the market – including many of Ellis’ own current output – it’s clear that Pugh is having fun with this book, and he approaches the writing with an eye to the craft that’s lacking in a lot of artist-turned-writer/artists.

At the same time, Pugh manages to pull off something rare with the book’s art. There’s a lot of digital work on the pages, but the art is still consistently gorgeous, though that isn’t the unusual thing about it. What’s unusual is that this beautiful art never works against the storytelling, which is pretty much clear and has a sense of structure and composition throughout.

In fact, in some ways, Pugh’s painterly approach here looks more like his work on 2000AD than the linework I’m more used to seeing from him. And that’s an interesting thing about this comic – it feels like the sort of artifact that many of the strips in 2000AD in the last two decades have aimed for – with their fully rendered digital art and their pseudo cyberpunk settings – but have more often than not faltered and failed to master, because of either a lack of clarity in the art, or a lack of sheer invention in the writing.

Which isn’t to say that “Hotwire” is a particularly groundbreaking book – it wears it’s influences from cover to guts, and though it’s a pretty fresh concept, the genre and narrative are familiar – but it is impressive enough to stand out in a sea of pretty run-of-the-mill, joyless comic releases.

XTNCT: CM ND HV G F Y THNK YR HRD NGH – Paul Cornell & D’israeli

… And it’s interesting that “Hotwire” would make for such a good 2000AD action strip, because “XTNCT” is pretty much the other 2000AD ideal – a truly unusual raw science-fiction concept, with utterly alien characters, but one that actually works.

Written with invention and passion by Paul Cornell, and with frenetic and distinctive art by D’israeli – who it’s fairly obvious I’ve got a bit of a comic fan crush on – “XTNCT” is the far-future story of a squad of genetically engineered dinosaurs, created by the last few humans to war on each other. It was originally published in the Megazine – 2000AD’s more mature, younger sister – and it is pure, distilled comic awesome.

Cornell is on some kind of fierce mission with this strip, and it shines through. Each chapter takes a different one of the dino-soldier’s viewpoints, and each has a unique voice – which allows for some smart narrative trickery – and despite their alien nature, the story, and their mission, follows a natural and satisfying path.

It only slightly falters in the final chapter, and only then because there are so many ideas crammed in before the end that they almost aren’t given enough room to breathe.

D’israeli’s art works perfectly with Cornell’s script. The artist likes to change up his style with each new project, and here he has opted for a clear and thick line, and almost cartoony production design. It complements the often comic and always outlandish nature of the protagonists perfectly – the character designs, incidentally, are just superb.

The soldier that acts as the id for the team, Raptor, has a peculiar, vowel-free speech pattern – the name of the series is a Raptor-ism – which allowed the writer to use more bad-swears than would normally be politic for the magazine, and the bold shapes and black-and-white bluntness of the art allows similar latitude with the violence, which is extreme, but never looks gratuitious.

I’m not playing it particularly cool, I realise – it’s obvious I loved the book, from it’s beautiful hard-cover production through Cornell’s thoughtful and provocative introduction to the books slow build to a hard and decisive conclusion. This was especially pleasing, because it wasn’t one of those books that I was expecting great things of – it’s purchase was the result of itchy Amazon fingers and D’israeli’s name on the cover.

I hoped, at most, for an average but pretty slice of daft science-fiction, and instead I got something that felt a little bit like that fizzy feeling I got when reading “The Ballad Of Halo Jones” for the first time – that enervating feeling that you literally couldn’t have imagined some of the stuff you were seeing for yourself.

For clarity’s sake:- “XTNCT” isn’t anything like “Halo Jones” genre-wise – it’s just full of that same sense of unfettered imagination and a conscious creative heart.