Did SF Writer Poul Anderson Invent the Gaia Concept Before James Lovelock?

Here’s another instance where you wonder if an SF writer got there first in creating a scientific or philosophical concept before the people who are usually associated or credited with it. One of the stories collected in the SF anthology Born of the Sun is ‘Garden in the Asteroids’, published by Poul Anderson in 1952. In this story, a team of husband and wife prospectors land on an asteroid that, amazingly, has plant life growing on its surface, exposed to space. Landing on the tiny worldlet, they examine the plants and meet their gardener, another prospector, who has been marooned there for 20 years. Although they’re of different individual types and varieties, the plants have established a symbiotic relationship with each other and so act as a single organism. Gronauer, the castaway, has himself become part of this ecology through caring for the plants. In exchange for his help, they supply him with food and oxygen. Vines not only trail up and across his spacesuit, but they also wrap themselves around his body, feeding on his blood and providing him with vitamins in return.

This sounds more than a little similar to the Gaia hypothesis proposed by James Lovelock. This holds that the Earth as a planet is alive as it and the creatures that inhabit it are a huge, self-regulating system and so form a kind of superorganism. It has been particularly influential in the New Age milieu in the 1980s and ’90s, quite apart from being discussed in the science literature. It did contribute to the wave of interest in earth mother, ecofeminist spirituality. I also remember that it also inspired one of the earliest New X-Men stories, in which the mutant superheroes had to fight against an island that achieved such group consciousness due to the radiation from a nuclear blast.

Obviously there are differences between Anderson’s story and Lovelock’s theory. In Anderson’s story, the asteroid is exceptional and its plants may even have come from outside the solar system. It is definitely not Earth. I don’t know when Lovelock proposed the Gaia hypothesis, but I think it might have been later than Anderson’s story by a few decades. And so this might be another instance where an SF author through up an idea independently of later writers, or it could be that Lovelock took an idea that was already around and simply applied it to Earth.

Cartoonist Kayfabe Look at the Art and Career of ‘American Hero’ Steve Ditko

More comics stuff, and a rather longer video than usual at 1hr 9minutes, but the subject deserves it. Steve Ditko is one of the great, legendary figures of American comics. He’s probably best known for creating Spiderman and the occult hero Dr. Strange with Stan ‘the Man’ Lee for Marvel. But as this video shows, Ditko worked for many other American comics companies – DC, Charlton, Dale and EC among them as well as self-publishing his personal works. In the video, the Kayfabers Ed Piskor and Jim Rugg go through the volume Ditko Unleashed: An American Hero, which accompanied an exhibition of the great man’s work. The book’s bilingual in English and Spanish, which suggests that the exhibition may have been in Spain. The volume not only describes Ditko’s career, but gives plentiful illustrations of his art.

Ditko, like Kirby, came from a blue-collar, working class background. He went into art school to study cartooning, as he wanted to be a comics artist. His career was uneven, working for a number of different publishers and in a variety of different genres – monster, science fiction, horror as well as the superheroes for which is he is best known. He also worked with some of the great names in American comics. At times he inked the awesome Jack Kirby, at other times he was inked by Frank Miller, the artist and writer chiefly responsible for turning Daredevil into one of Marvel’s leading heroes. I think he may also have been inked by John Byrne, one of the major artists behind the New X-Men. He was admired by many of these new artists. The epic Jim Starlin, in one edition of his Warlock comic, ‘One Thousand Clowns’, dedicated it to Ditko for showing us a new reality. Starlin’s art was rather more naturalistic, but he also used the same floating paths and mystic portals in his work. He also went through several hard times in his career. At one point he moved away to New York to recover from tuberculosis, then, as in Britain, a major killer. There were also years when he struggled, as many others did, to get work. He also worked on a number of merchandising tie-ins, like Micronauts and Rom: the SpaceKnight, which were intended to promote toy figures. I read the comics, which were excellent without having any interest in buying the toys, which might indicate they were too successful. Like the adverts for Cinzano Bianco wine with Leonard Rossiter and Joan Collins. Everyone enjoyed them and they’re still fondly remembered by peeps of a certain vintage, but the people watching the ads couldn’t remember the brand of booze and so didn’t buy it. Ditko, like Kirby, broke off from Marvel for a time, before he returned, working on the above tie-ins along with the robotic superhero Machine Man.

Ditko, Politics and Morality

Unlike Stan Lee, who was a liberal, Ditko was very Conservative, a follower of Objectivism, the philosophy of supercapitalist ideologue Ayn Rand. He also had very black and white views on morality, which were expressed in his personal creations, Mr. A and The Question. He believed that heroes should be heroes, their morals pure and uncompromised. True to his ideals, he turned down work when the characters he was being asked to depict didn’t live up to them. A few years ago Jonathan Ross made a documentary for BBC 4 or one of the other channels searching for Ditko. One of those interviewed was Brit comics titan Alan Moore, who described meeting Ditko at Ditko’s home. He says that Ditko had a very narrow, inflexible view of morality, telling Moore, like one of his characters, that there were only two ways, a right way and a wrong way. Ditko’s politics are very definitely not mine, and I’m very much aware that in the real world, things are very often never a case of black and white but more shades or grey and motives can be less pure than we’d like. But after the comics industry went through a phase in which they tried to make their heroes darker – Batman: The Killing Joke is one of the foremost – and it was difficult telling the heroes from the villains, it’s refreshing to have someone who believes in old fashioned heroics.

The Kayfabers believe that if he were working today, Ditko would be cancelled or at least severely annoy and alienate 50 per cent of his audience. I think the first is certainly true. There has always been a left-wing message in American comics and an awareness of social issues. In the late 1960s into the 1970s both Marvel and DC tackled issues like racism and the rise of the feminist movement. As a response to the latter, Marvel created the Valkyrie, original a woman scientist who revolted against the patriarchy after having the credit for her discoveries stolen by her male colleagues. The Hulk comic also questioned American militarism, while Captain America, in disgust at Watergate and the contemporary corruption of American politics, renounced his patriotic monicker to become Nomad. Of course it wasn’t long before he rediscovered his faith in the rightness of the American way and put his uniform back on. However, Lee has also said in an interview that he was careful not to make the message too shrill so that it alienated readers that didn’t share his politics. Now many Conservative and moderate left comics creators and fans believe that in many strips, the political message has become too overt at the expense of traditional qualities like plotting, characterisation, dialogue and sheer fantasy. This was the motive behind Comicsgate a few years ago, when a number of comics creators, like Ethan van Sciver, broke away from the main comics companies of DC and Marvel to set up on their own.

Heroism and Its Absence in Modern Genre Film and Literature

One of the problems Az of Heels vs. Babyface and The Critical Drinker is that many of today’s pop culture heroes actually don’t act like heroes. For example, in one episode of Batwoman reviewed by Az, he comments critically on the way Batwoman treats the villain, a woman who has murdered several innocents. When Batwoman confronts her, she tells Batwoman that she’s killed so many people out of rage at her persecution as a lesbian. As a result, Batwoman, a lesbian herself, lets her go. This is simply immoral. The persecution of otherwise perfectly decent people because they’re attracted to the opposite sex is wrong, but it doesn’t justify the murder of innocents. Whatever political views real policemen and women have, they still have to act impartially and arrest those, who break the law and especially those who commit terrible crimes like mass murder.

The Critical Drinker put up a whole video about the failure of contemporary SF heroes to live up to the standards of true heroism with the latest Star Trek iterations as a case in point. He contrasted these were the high standards of professionalism demanded of the captain and crew in the classic Star Trek: The Next Generation. In that series, the characters knew the importance of duty and respecting the command hierarchy even if they disagreed with it. At the same time, Picard and the other senior officers demanded and got the best from their crew. Several of the episodes involved leading characters learning the difficulties of command. There is one episode where one of the characters is training for promotion. Part this training involves trying to find ways to prevent a warp core breach that will destroy the Enterprise. The problem is insolvable until nearly every option has been tried except the one the prospective leader has been consciously trying to avoid: they have to send Jordi into the warp core to fix it, a command which will result in his death. But it’s unavoidable, and both characters know their duty is to their ship. The would-be commander has to give the order, which Jordi calmly accepts. And a hard lesson is learned. Instead, the crew of the new Trek franchises are grossly unprofessional. They bicker over there personal relationships in front of a superior officer, react badly to the stressful conditions they should, as crew aboard a quasi-military spacecraft, be trained to deal with and try to undermine their superior officers. Case in point: one sequence where Kirk and Spock attempt to beat the living daylights out of each other. Yeah, I’m aware that it happened in an episode or two of the original Trek, like the classic ‘Amok Time’, but there were extenuating circumstances. I like Star Trek and have got a couple of the recent Trek films on DVD. But I think the Drinker has a point, even if it comes from a jaundiced, booze-soaked mind. I think we need a few more heroes who are genuinely heroic in the old fashioned sense, even if the social views they hold may be those of the left.

Stylistic Strong Points

But Ditko’s own career also had its contradictions. At one point he was working on BDSM/ fetish comics, and there were certainly questions raised about the spectacular and surreal effects in several of his strips. Many of his characters, like Dr Strange, enter strange realms in which roads float apparently in mid-air, and doors and portals appear leading to elsewhere, like the mobile holes in many a cartoon strip. Strange shoots beams of light and conjures up strange geometrical figures in his incantations. These effects resemble the entoptic imagery seen when people start to hallucinate after using mind-altering drugs. Which led to the obvious question: was Ditko also on ’em. Ditko was too straitlaced to use recreational chemicals, and answered ‘No’. It all came from within, from his own unaided imagination. Which says to me that Ditko had an awesome imagination on his own, and that the really great, creative people don’t need drugs.

I can’t say that I was ever a fan of Ditko, as his artistic style with Marvel seemed rather too simple. I really admired those artists who were rather less stylised and more detailed and naturalistic. Nevertheless, this video shows that Ditko was a master of his art. The Kayfabers point out that he’s great at cityscapes and portraying fluid action sequences in which the characters are constantly in motion. In some of the strips, Ditko also used colour washes to enhance his line art, and the result is stunning. There are also a couple of strips where Ditko’s inkers were beginning to use computers to add inks and colour to his pencils, which are also very striking.

The Kayfabers also think that some of the pictures come from the private collections of people who acquired them less than legally. There is a black market in comics art, and Ditko was a victim along with many others. They won’t name names, of course, because they don’t want to get writs from m’learned friends. But they also state they’re just glad that someone, somewhere has preserved these pictures that would otherwise have been lost. Ditko also suffered into inadvertently giving people his autograph, thus cheating himself of money. He didn’t give autographs. However, if someone wrote to him asking for his autograph, they’d get a polite reply for Ditko saying ‘No’. Which he’d sign. People cottoned on to this, and exploited it.

Comics and Other Genre Artists True Artistic Innovators Deserving Academic Respect

The Kayfabers also lament that Ditko and that other American comics legend, Jack Kirby, weren’t more articulate. If they had been able to use the kind of language critics and intellectuals use about art, they could easily have been up there with Warhol and the Factory. But they were working artists, who had to grind out their strips to make a buck, and so didn’t have time to mix with people in art galleries. I completely agree. It’s been my opinion for a very long time that the truly great, innovative art exploring new visions, directions and tools is that of the space, science fiction and fantasy artists, including book illustrators and comics artists. And there are others who feel the same. I can remember watching one video about comics, in which one of the speakers said he felt angry seeing the work of artists hung in art galleries, who had based their work on comic artists. He felt that the original comics artists should have got the money and their work hung instead. Way back in the ’90s I tried to get one of the art magazines to accept an article in which I argued this point, and showed the stylistic similarities between respect fine artists like H.R. Giger and those of the Soviet austere school and such comics greats as Kirby and the British master of aliens, robots and the grotesque, Kevin O’Neil. Unfortunately, it was turned down because it would have been too expensive to run. But the point remains. And it'[s shown in Ditko’s art. There’s a panel in which the exhibition shows a clear influence on one of Ditko’s weird geometrical designs in a portal in Dr. Strange with a painting from the Russian avant-garde artist Vassily Kandinsky. The two debate whether there is a genuine influence there, before concluding that their probably is. I can easily believe it. Many comics artists have their own heroes and influences in fine art as well as other great illustrators of the past. Way back at the comics festival UKCAC ’90 I remember going to a talk by Charles Vess, who talked about the great artists and illustrators he admired. I can well believe that Ditko absorbed and incorporated ideas from fine art as well as cartooning and illustration, and that his own work pushed these ideas forward into new directions.

The book goes up to 2016, nearly the end of Ditko’s life. He died only a few years ago. Wossy in his quest to find the great man managed to track him down to an advertising agency in the Big Apple. Ditko agreed to meet Woss and the other host, but it all had to be off-camera. The programme concluded with Wossy stating that when they met Ditko he was very sweet, gave them lots of copies of his work, but they couldn’t repeat what he said to them. And so walked off into the New York crowd.

Well, RIP Steve Ditko, one of the greats of American founders. The book and the video by the Kayfabers are a great overview of one of the creators of some of the most iconic modern American superheroes.

Rioting and Looting Hurts Black People and their Businesses

It shouldn’t need to be said that rioting and looting hurts people, regardless of their colour. But the point that it also harms Blacks as well as Whites seems to have been lost on some people over the other side of the Pond. So far in Britain the Black Lives Matter protests seem to have been largely peaceful with the exception of those at the weekend at Downing Street, where there seem to have been attacks on the police. I say ‘seem’, because although the footage of the attacks look convincing, like many other people I remember the way the Beeb reversed the footage of the attack on the miners by the police at Orgreave colliery during the miner’s strike in order to make it look like the miners were attacking them. The reality was that it was the other way round. I hope this hasn’t happened this time, but the Beeb is so riddled with Tory bias and the blatant falsification of the news that you can’t be sure.

In America it’s been rather different. Some of the protests over there have descended into riots and people’s businesses have been trashed and looted. And they have included those belonging to Black people. ‘Young Rippa’ is a Black American Conservative, who has a channel on YouTube. The other day he put up a long video of about 20 minutes fiercely attacking the looting and rioting. His piece included a short video posted by a middle-aged Black lady. She was part-owner of a small business, working alongside seven other people. As he points out, that’s not unusual for small businesses. It had been broken into and trashed. She was there standing in some of the broken glass and other wreckage with what looked like her employees and co-workers. She angrily asked the viewer the rhetorical question ‘Do you think that’s got anything to do with Black Lives Matter?’ It’s a good question. It doesn’t seem to have absolutely anything to do with saving Black lives, or protesting poverty and despair to me. It looks far more like opportunistic criminals helping themselves at the expense of the law-abiding.

But weirdly some people have got it into their head that looters are some kind of anti-racist heroes. ‘Mr H Reviews’ is another YouTube channel, which reviews SF, Fantasy and Horror films and television shows. Again, it seems to come from a broadly conservative perspective, but that doesn’t disqualify it from being worth watching. Nearly a week ago, on June 3rd, ‘Mr H’ put up a piece about the X-Men actor Evan Peters being accused of racism and forced to make an apology after he had a tweeted his approval of a piece of footage of the LA police arresting a suspected looter. This was another case of the ‘cancel culture’ in which extreme left-wing activists to try to stop their opponents being heard. I am very much aware that same cancel culture exists on the right, and that Conservative activists and media monitoring groups are also doing their level best to make sure that only Conservative voices are heard. But on this occasion, assuming that the situation was as Mr H describes, he’s right to attack it.

Rioters and looters don’t help Black people, and it is not racist to condemn them.

I was talking to a Black friend a few years ago, whose business was also trashed during riots. He had had a small business near the centre of Bristol. But it had been hit and looted during the 2012 riots. As a result, he packed up and moved out. Now those riots weren’t about race, but the effect was the same: a Black entrepreneur trying to better himself had his livelihood trashed and destroyed. I don’t know if he employed anyone, but small businesses obviously help the economy and wider community. When they make a profit, it allows them to employ other people and purchase others’ goods and services. Moreover, the small grocers, butchers, fishmongers, greengrocers and so on are actually better for the community than the big supermarkets. They’re less efficient, but employ more people. Which means that those people have work, money, and so are able to buy others’ goods and services. And so everyone in the community benefits from small, local businesses.

The Black Lives Matter protests are all about improving Black people’s lives. It’s not just about police violence, but also about the racism that are holding Black people back and achieving equality.

But they can’t do this if criminals smash and destroy their businesses and livelihoods.

Let’s support peaceful protest, and condemn any violence and looting, regardless of the colour of those doing it.

Here are the two videos I mentioned. I haven’t watched Young Rippa’s all the way through as it’s long and a bit repetitive, and so can’t comment on all of it. I don’t share his political Conservatism, but absolutely support his condemnation of those just trying to stop ordinary Black people making a decent living for themselves and their families.

 

Disgusted by Mike’s Kangroo Court Trial

Yesterday Mike had his hearing before a Labour party tribunal in Wales to decide the charge against him of being an anti-Semite. As is clear to anyone who reads anything Mike has actually written, rather than lies put out by a corrupt, mendacious press and the Israel lobby, an anti-Semite is the very last thing Mike is. He isn’t at all racist or prejudiced, as a gay friend of his tried to make clear to three men, who suspiciously approached him last week wanting to talk to him about the charge. Mike found that encounter extremely suspicious. They knew him by name, though he’d never met them, and claimed that they’d read about him in the papers, although as Mike wrote on his blog, he only featured in them in May last year, 2017. That’s a long time ago. It could all have been perfectly innocuous, but Mike wondered if they weren’t there to intimidate him in the last few days before he defended himself. It’s quite possible. It also wouldn’t have surprised me if they weren’t private detectives hired by someone to see if they couldn’t dig any dirt on him. It’d be odd, but it’s not unknown.

And then there was the trial itself. As Mike has said in detail in his blog, it was a complete kangaroo court. They had no evidence against him whatsoever. None. Zip. Nada, nichts, and nitchevo. But it didn’t matter. They were obviously determined to find him guilty. I have absolutely no doubt Mike defended himself to the very best of his ability, and that, were it a properly constituted court of law, he would have won the case. Either that, or even now his lawyers would be filing objections to a miscarriage of justice. But this is the Labour party witch hunt against Corbynites, so truth didn’t matter.

What apparently did matter was how his comments appeared, especially to the ‘Jewish community’. As the numerous left-wing Jewish bloggers on the internet have said with great clarity, there is no monolithic Jewish community. Judaism has always been a community of different opinions and views, as shown by the old Jewish adage, ‘Two Jews, three opinions’. The group the press have chosen to present as Britain’s Jewish community are the official, Jewish Zionist establishment, the Chief Rabbi and Board of Deputies of British Jews. Which basically represents the United Synagogue and no-one else. They don’t represent the secular Jewish community, nor Orthodox Jews. The Board of Deputies of British Jews is solidly Zionist, as defined by their constitution. So they don’t represent non- or anti-Zionist Jews. Tony Greenstein has also cited proper sociological studies from respected scholars, which show that British Jews are almost wholly upper middle class. This doesn’t mean that British Jews are all Conservatives by any means, but those making the smears of anti-Semitism certainly are, as you can see from the political bias of the Jewish Chronicle. It’s a Conservative, business-oriented, religious establishment using anti-Semitism as a tool for smearing its opponents because they threaten them as Socialists seeking to empower ordinary people – which includes Jews – and support the Palestinians in their desperate search for justice against Israeli oppression. And this Conservative, Zionist Jewish establishment is closely interwoven with the Blairites in the Labour party. Blair’s followers are a minority, and always were. But they control the party bureaucracy, or at least key positions in it.

And in that position, they behave as the Stalinists they revile Corbyn’s supporters of being. Before Stalin came to power, the position of General Secretary in the Communist party was a relatively minor post. The secretary was there basically to make sure that only those of good character were party members. Which is incredible, I know, given the bloody history of the Russian Communist party and its satellites in eastern Europe. They gave it to Stalin, because everybody thought he was thick, and would be satisfied with the post. His job would be to throw out the drunks and seducers. Instead, Stalin used his position to purge the party of his opponents, and cram it with his supporters. As the old butcher said, ‘It’s not who votes that counts, it’s who counts the votes.’

And this has been the strategy the Blairites and their allies, the Israel lobby, have adopted in attacking genuine, Socialist Labour party members. They’ve launched a purge of the party, using anti-Semitism and other, equally vague charges as the pretext to get rid of awkward members. And so they have smeared decent, anti-racist men and women. Not just Mike, but also Marc Wadsworth and Jackie Walker, two people of colour, who have been dedicated anti-racists that have consistently battled bigotry and Fascism. Just like Ken Livingstone, who is also no anti-Semite, as is shown very clearly in his book, Livingstone’s Labour. Like Tony Greenstein, a Jewish member of the party, like Walker, and like her and Wadsworth, also an ardent opponent of Fascism. And there are so many people like them. As I’ve pointed out, ad nauseam, the decent people they’ve smeared as anti-Semites and worse include self-respecting Jews, people who have suffered real anti-Semitism, including assault. People who lost family members in the Shoah, or whose parents were lucky enough to survive the horrors of the camps. People, who should never be insulted with such smears.

And some of the charges are risible. One man was accused of being an anti-Semite, because he posted a photo-shopped image of a jobcentre sign saying, ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’. This was the slogan above the gates of Auschwitz and the other concentration camps. It means roughly ‘Work Makes You Free’. Which is the attitude of the Tory party. One of them even wrote a newspaper article using the phrase, until someone spotted it and realized that quoting Nazi slogans against those they persecuted wasn’t going to go down too well with the British public, and the offending paragraphs were removed. And the concentration camps didn’t just contain Jews. They held others the Nazis considered politically or biologically undesirable, like Socialists, trade unionists, Communists, prostitutes, recidivist criminals, the mentally ill, Russian prisoners of war and other slave workers from the Slav peoples, and Romanies. The charge against this fellow was so weak it could have been blown over in a light wind. But nevertheless, he was accused and convicted by people, who had already decided the answer.

It’s also very clear from Mike’s article that they didn’t like him refuting their attacks on other party members in public. This was bringing the party into disrepute. In fact they did that the moment they made their false accusations. The overwhelming concern here, it seems, was to preserve the reputation of the people further up the party, who made the accusations. It’s a very, very authoritarian attitude. Important people have spoken – don’t contradict them! And, to quote the Japanese proverb, the nail that stands up must be hammered down. Blair and his cronies always were authoritarian, centralizing power around them and making it very clear that dissent from Old Labour would very definitely not be tolerated. And so they were determined not to let their superiors be embarrassed by having the public shown the facts.

And it was clear from their choice of chair that Mike was never going to get a fair hearing. The person is charge was Maggie Cousins, who has form in these matters. From what I gather, this is what she does. She presides over these kangaroo courts as a kind of corporate hatchetwoman.

This was, ultimately, a PR stunt to reassure a Zionist Jewish establishment, that will never tolerate a Labour government under Jeremy Corbyn, no matter what concessions are made to it, and a wider, Tory media that is seizing on any and every possible opportunity to misrepresent the Labour party as a threat to society.

I’m very impressed by Mike’s speech to them, citing Stan ‘the Man’ Lee, the creator of Marvel Comic’s superheroes with ‘Jolly’ Jack Kirby. Lee, Kirby and the majority of the creators of America’s comics industry were Jews. Lee’s real name was Stanley Martin Leiber. Kirby’s was Jake Kurzberg. There was little specifically Jewish in the comics, except that occasionally there was the odd Yiddish word or two. But there was a concern for the marginalized, and racially persecuted. This was shown in metaphorical form in the X-Men, an underground of young mutants, feared and persecuted for their special powers by outside society, and in more overt forms when Blaxsploitation emerged in the ’70s, and Marvel gave us heroes like Powerman, alias Luke Cage, hero for hire, the Black Panther, Brother Voodoo and more. And as I’ve described before, the tales did show very clearly how the Nazis regarded and treated Jews, albeit in science fictional form. These strips together preached an anti-racist message, which could sometimes be overt, as when the Black Panther went up against the Klan, or when an Adolf Hitler clone took the guise of the Hatemonger to turn Americans against each other. These were the comics Mike and I read as kids, and which definitely influenced us. They taught racial tolerance, respect and co-operation, and that bigotry, racism and oppression must be fought and defeated, at all times, everywhere. And Stan and his fellow inmates of the merry Marvel madhouse spread that vital message through the medium of popular literature – the comics. They aren’t great literature, although there’s some truly great writing and superb art in a medium that has often been critically reviled and disparaged. But they were read and enjoyed by millions, and in their way helped to make Anglophone society more tolerant. That’s Stan’s legacy to the world, which Mike duly paid tribute to in his speech at the end.

RIP, Stan Lee, a true titan of the four-colour funny papers.

It’s disgusting that Mike, and so many others have been treated this way by a party that should be defending people like him and the others against a predatory, Conservative establishment. Rather than propping up it up with lies, smears and derisory pretence at justice, presided over by faceless bureaucrats and cynical, moral cowards.

Mike’s made it very clear that he will fight on to clear his name and redress this gross injustice. I wish him all the best, as I do everyone else, who has been smeared by these bullying moral vacuities.

Mike Smeared Again by Fake Anti-Semitism Accusers for Comic Strip

The Blairites and the Israel lobby must be getting the jitters about Mike and his forthcoming hearing to clear his name in the Labour party. And it looks like they’re absolutely terrified that he’ll get the money he needs to sue the newspapers and individuals that started the smears for libel. So they’ve decided to smear him again.

In a piece he put up on Thursday, Mike explains how he was told by a friend through email that a bunch of clowns calling themselves JVLWatch were on twitter. They were targeting those, who had contributed to his crowdfunding campaign to raise money for his libel case by misrepresenting a strip Mike created and wrote for his small press comic, Violent. Violent was Mike’s tribute to Action, the 1970s comic that drew outrage for its violent, gory content and ended up being banned. Its creators then went on to produce the mighty 2000AD. The strip JVLWatch cited as proof that Mike’s a Nazi is his satirical strip, ‘Hardboiled Hitler’. In this strip, Der Fuehrer is given superpowers similar to those of captain America. But while Cap’s powers are acquired decently, Hitler instead steals the syringe containing the supersoldier serum, and injects it into himself in a disgusting toilet.

Mike makes the point that he wrote the strip to satirise Adolf and Nazism, and to warn people about the dangers of their return. The Sun and the Sunday Times also tried to use the strip to show that Mike was a Nazi, and their case was dismissed out of hand by IPSO. As for Hitler punching through gas clouds to justify Aryan supremacy and the extermination of Jews, as JVLWatch claim, this is nothing of the sort. Yes, the strip shows Hitler surrounded by clouds of poisonous gas, but it’s the type coming from the Fuehrer’s bottom. Hitler suffered from meteorism – chronic flatulence. Apparently when he was in full rant, the noises from his rear end sounded off like cannonades. This is obviously not the image the Nazis want to present of their Aryan messiah. And so it is definitely one of the images Mike was determined to show in the strip, to present him as a kind of Fascist ‘Barry Fartpants’. And so Mike included in his piece about the accusation this image:

The caption for it on Mike’s blog is:

—Extreme flatulence: According to JVLWatch, this is a sign that Hitler is being portrayed as a superhero. How many superheroes do YOU know who have the farts?

Well, there is one: Mr. Methane, a man who turns up in superhero costume and makes his living breaking wind in supposedly funny and amusing ways. Like the original Le Petomane in 19th century France, who could fart the tune of the Marseillaise, ending with the fall of the Bastille. But he’s the only one.

For further information, go see Mike’s blog, where you can read the defence he gave to IPSO, and a story from the strip to show this mocks Hitler as a clumsy, posturing clown.

See: https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2018/11/01/fake-anti-semitism-accusers-are-fabricating-hate-to-turn-opinion-against-the-innocent/

Now I’ve some interest in the ‘Hardboiled Hitler’ strip, because I studied the rise of Fascist and Communist regimes as part of my history degree at College in the 1980s. Mike asked me for bits of historical information about Hitler and his squalid, murderous band.

And I confirm that Mike’s intention was always to satirise and humiliate the Nazi leader. He very definitely had no intention whatsoever of making him appear glamorous, or glorifying the Nazi regime.

And the literary style Mike is using to satirise Hitler is called ‘mock heroic’. It’s been used in British literature since at least the 18th century. In it, you give the objects of your ire a heroic treatment in order to show up their failings and paltry character. Which Mike has done here admirably.

I can also remember talking to Mike about the serious issues of the Nazi regime. At that stage, I don’t think Mike had any firm ideas regarding the story, but he was determined that if it did cover issues like the Death Camps, these would be presented absolutely straight. They would be written as grim as possible, with every sympathy going to the Nazis’ victims. Because the systematic slaughter of innocents, Jews, Blacks, or anyone else, is never, ever a laughing matter. He made it very clear to me that if he did show that aspect of the Nazi regime, it would be to shock readers with the terrible reality, to make the point that Nazism, although a suitable subject for satire and comedy, was also absolutely horrific. To make the point that the Nazis deserve to be sneered and laughed at, but the danger they represent should never be underestimated.

I should also point out here that the British comics milieu, as it is now, is very definitely not racist. Certainly not the parts I’ve seen. Mike and I grew up reading Marvel Comics, enjoying the creations of Stan ‘the Man’ Lee, ‘Jolly’ Jack Kirby and others. The American comics industry was the creation of American Jews, as shown in the book about the origins of the superhero strip, Men of Tomorrow. The creators of Superman, for example, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, were both Jewish. As is Stan, and Jack Kirby. The Jewish background of Superman’s creators may explain why the Nazis hated the Man of Steel. They attacked him as a Jewish plot to destroy Aryan culture. The last thing Hitler wanted was a guy with superpowers, devised by two Jewish blokes, flying around defending Truth, Justice and the American Way, and particularly not Democracy. If you want to see something of the background in which many of the creators of the American comics industry grew up, try Will Eisner’s A Contract with God and Other Tenement Tales.

American comics often explicitly dealt with racism and prejudice. In one episode of the Superman radio series, the Man of Tomorrow went into action against the Klan. The episode was praised by civil rights and Jewish groups, including the NAACP – National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People. In the 1970s both DC and Marvel characters went out, exploring the contemporary racial issues around them. New, Black characters were created. In Marvel, these were the Falcon, Brother Voodoo, Powerman, alias Luke Cage, hero for hire, and the X-Men’s Storm. In fact the X-Men can be read as a reflection of the position of racial and sexual minorities in America. They’re a persecuted underground of people, set apart from normal society, like people from ethnic minorities and gays.

And these stories would deal explicitly with the horrors the Nazis perpetrated against the Jews, and would still like to do. I can remember reading one comic, in which the transhuman Nazi villains Armin Zola and his buddies were trying to create the Cosmic Cube. This was an object that gave its possessor godlike powers over the entire cosmos. They were using humans, wired up into a computer, to perform the calculations needed to create the artifact. However, the calculations were so difficult, they burned out the brains of the unwilling human components, leaving them mindless, drooling idiots. And so the people they were using in this grotesque experiment were Jews. The strip featured the attempts of the story’s heroine to save to her lover, Yusuf Tov, from this fate. And tragically, she’s unsuccessful.

I’m very much aware that this is a science fictional treatment of the Nazis, and that objects like the Cosmic Cube don’t exist. And Nazis themselves don’t look like Arnim Zola, who had upgraded himself through high technology so that he was now a TV with arms, legs and an aerial where his head should be. But it made the point that the Nazis had absolute contempt for human life, and regarded Jews as worthy only of exploitation and murder.

And on this side of the Atlantic, there was Pat Mills and the recidivists of 2000AD, the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic. Many of the strips there had a very definite anti-racist content. ‘Strontium Dog’ was set in a future Britain devastated by nuclear war. The Strontium Dogs of the title were mutant bounty hunters, named after Strontium 90, one of the products of nuclear fallout. These were deformed men and women, who were forced to live in ghettos. By law, bounty hunting was the only job they could do. And when they travelled anywhere around the galaxy, it was very definitely in steerage. The strip’s hero was Johnny Alpha, his norm partner Wulf, and their alien friend, the Gronk. One story in the 1980s was about the attempts by Nelson Bunker Kreelman, Alpha’s father, to exterminate Britain’s mutants while trying to hide the fact that his son was one of them. It’s definitely not hard to see that the strip was an anti-racist metaphor.

As was ‘Nemesis the Warlock’, set in a far future where Earth was under the control of the Terminators, a Klan-like outfit led by their Grandmaster, Tomas de Torquemada. They were a pseudo-religious order, who had led humanity into a new Dark Age, and were rabidly against all forms of alien life. Their leader took his name from his own hero, the head of the Spanish Inquisition in the 15th century.

Mike was given considerable assistance with Violent by many professional comics writers and artists, many of whom have worked for the mighty 2000AD. They’re great people, immensely talented, and if they had thought for a single minute that Mike’s strip was a genuine glorification of the Nazis, they wouldn’t have touched it or him with a bargepole.

As for the group which made these despicable allegations, their name reveals what they’re really terrified of: left-wing, Israel-critical Jews, and Jewish Corbyn supporters. Like Jewish Voice for Labour. And here we get into real racism and anti-Semitism. As I’ve also blogged about ad nauseam, the Israel lobby hate with a venomous passion self-respecting Torah-observant and secular Jews, who criticize Israel and support Corbyn. Because they give the lie to their propaganda that Zionism, Israel and Jewry are identical. And so they do everything they can to smear them as self-hating, anti-Semitic and use foul language against them, including wishing that they had died in the Holocaust. Tony Greenstein has made the point that Zionism is a Jewish form of anti-Semitism, because it holds that gentiles and Jews are fundamentally incompatible and that gentiles will always hate Jews. Hence their contempt for diaspora Jews, who wish to remain in their parents’ homelands, and who regard Israel with contempt for its colonialist maltreatment of the indigenous Arabs.

It is not Mike and his fellow comics professionals who are at fault here. It is the shabby people of JVLWatch, who had behind internet anonymity to smear and revile decent, anti-racist people and their campaign for a better, more inclusive, tolerant Britain.

Pat Mills and Anti-Racism and Anti-Nazism in British and American Comics

This week I’ve put up a number of articles about a couple of interviews I’ve found on YouTube with the long-time British comics creator, Pat Mills. Mills was one of the recidivist offenders, who revitalized a moribund British comics industry in the 1970s with a succession of groundbreaking new magazines the war comic, Battle, Action, and, of course, the mighty 2000AD. Mills is of Irish heritage and distinctly left-wing, so that his sympathies are always with the poor and the persecuted against the establishment, and there was more than a little element of subversion in his strips. Judge Dredd from the first was meant to be a symbol of the Fascistic elements in modern American policing, and J.D. is as much villain as he is hero. The mutant heroes of the Strontium Dog strip are second-class citizens in a future Britain which barely tolerates them. They can only live in ghettoes, and the only work they can do by law is bounty hunting. It’s an explicit comment on racism and anti-Semitism. Nemesis the Warlock was a similar attack on religious bigotry, set as it was in a devastated Earth of the far future, ruled by Tomas de Torquemada and his terminators. They were a military order of warriors, who had whipped up fear and hatred of intelligent aliens and embarked on a series of holy wars to exterminate them across the Galaxy. This was partly based on the medieval inquisition in Roman Catholic Europe, with elements of modern Fascism. For example, the robes adopted by the Terminators recalled Ku Klux Klan costumes.

Comics at the time were increasingly focused on the issue of racism and persecution, particularly in the case of Marvel Comic’s X-Men. The mutants in this strip, like those of Johnny Alpha’s nuclear-scarred Britain, were also persecuted. One of the recurring villains in the strip were the Sentinels, a race of giant robots created to hunt down and kill robots by the stock mad scientist in the belief that this would preserve humanity from the threat to their survival the super-powered mutants – Homo Superior – represented. Another of Mighty Marvel’s villains was the Hate Monger, dedicated to whipping up bigotry and strife. This character also wore a costume based on the Klan, and was revealed as Hitler, or a clone of him.

The American comics industry was founded by German Jews, who brought with them their former homeland’s tradition of telling a story through a series of pictures derived from Wilhelm Busch. I think many of them had also seen combat fighting against Nazism in the army during the War. It’s therefore not hard to see in strips such as the X-Men a metaphorical treatment of the persecution of the Jewish people, as well as other outsider groups. As well as being a metaphor for racism, the X-Men also had an large following of gay young people, possibly because the social hostility shown in the strips towards its mutant heroes mirrored their own experiences as marginalized outsiders.

And concerns over the threat of Fascism were also seen in other British comics. The British version of the Captain Britain strip, written by Dave Thorpe and then Alan Moore, was set in an alternative Britain in which a deranged, mutant aristocrat, Mad Jim Jaspers, had created a biomechanical creature to hunt down and exterminate all mutants. At the same time, he had encouraged a Fascist dictatorship to seize power, which then began the process of persecuting and exterminating mutants.

This was succeeded by Moore’s V for Vendetta in the adult comic, Warrior, which featured an anonymous guerilla, V, fighting a personal war against the Fascist authorities of a near-future Britain. It was filmed with Hugo Weaving as ‘V’, Natalie Portman as his companion, Evie, with Stephen Fry as a gay TV host and John Hurt as the dictator. Moore himself dislikes the movie, partly because the contract he signed with the studio meant that the character is now their property. But it is a powerful film, which accurately shows certain aspects of Nazism, such as the use of concentration camp inmates for medical experimentation.

Pat Mills also says in the interviews I posted about earlier this week that the strip Charley’s War was subversive in that it was anti-war strip in a war comic. Mills is disappointed by the way the strip wasn’t included in an exhibition on comics and subversion, and notes that in this, the centenary years of the First World War, there seems to be a deliberate policy amongst the British broadcasters of not showing anything with an anti-war content, such as Blackadder Goes Forth. Radio 4 have made shows about the great stage play and film, Oh, What a Lovely War!, but it wasn’t that long ago that Michael Gove, the Tory minister for education, opened his mouth to say that children were getting an entirely wrong view of the War based on Blackadder. Mike naturally wrote a very sharp reply to that piece of nonsense.

But there were other strips in Battle, which also rose out of the mass of the usual gung-ho stories of courageous British squaddies winning against brutal and stupid Germans, and which did shock with their realism. Darkie’s Mob, which was about a mysterious commander, who takes over a failing British unit trapped behind Japanese lines in Burma was one of these. Another I remember which particularly shocked me was a short piece in Battle, in which British soldiers are fighting their way through Germany. I think it was a stand-alone strip, rather than part of a continuing storyline. The story ended when the squaddies reach a group of emaciated figures standing behind barbed wire, the inmates of one of the death camps. This was clearly about the Holocaust, and what it was really like, rather than the usual glamorous war stories, and I remember being shocked by the starved bodies of the inmates. As I doubtless was supposed to.

Battle, Action, 2000AD and Warrior were part of a trend that had emerged in American comics in the late 1960s, when they turned from simple escapism to dealing with real issues – such as racism and feminism. British comics up to the launch of Battle and Action had tended to avoid explicit politics, and in some cases had actually been very racist. And this tradition of commenting and attacking racism and bigotry continues in American comics today, and in 2000AD, now sadly nearly all that’s remaining of the British comics industry.

These are the type of strips, which Mike and I grew up reading, along with so many others of our age group. And they reflected the very real anxieties of the time. Left-wingers were worried about the rise of Maggie Thatcher, her links to the hard right and the violence and political threat posed by the BNP/NF. In the original comic strip version of V for Vendetta, the Fascists seize power in Britain after devastating nuclear war between America and the Soviet Union over the crisis in Poland. To many of us, the threat of nuclear annihilation in Maggie’s and Reagan’s New Cold War was only too real.

In his talk to the Socialist Workers’ Party, Mills reads out a letter he received from the CEO of a school, a former punk, who states that everything he learned about Fascism, he got from Judge Dredd; everything about racism, from Strontium Dog, and everything about feminism from Halo Jones. And he now considered it the most subversive thing he could do was to help produce open-minded, critical young people. And it isn’t just racism. When Thatcher tried to criminalise positive teaching of homosexuality in school – that it is perfectly natural – the British comics industry responded with the anti-homophobia anthology AWRGH!, whose initials stood for Artists and Writers Against Rampant Government Homophobia. Comics in the 1980s and ’90s sold much more than they do now, and so they made a very large number of young people aware and alert to these issues. It partly explains why British society has broadly become more tolerant, despite continuing bigotry in some areas. Like the right-wing of the Tories and UKIP.

This is also why I found Mills’ story of how the Board of Deputies of British Jews complained about a story in Crisis utterly amazing. Crisis was another adult comic, which dealt explicitly with contemporary issues of western imperialism, the power of the multinationals and the exploitation of the Developing World. The comic had featured a story about the beating of a Palestinian protester in Gaza, based on a real event told to Mills by a Palestinian. The Board complained because the lad’s broken body, left lying in the road, looked to them a bit like a swastika. As Mills himself said, it wasn’t there because comics creators aren’t that clever. But I was left amazed at the thought that anybody could accuse anyone in mainstream British comics at the time of racism or anti-Semitism, given how radical and anti-racist so many of them were.

It’s also why the accusation by the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism earlier this year against Mike is so outrageous. I’ve blogged before in Mike’s defence pointing out that he very definitely is not racist and not anti-Semitic, having both Black and Jewish friends and participating at College in a performance commemorating the victims of the Shoah. Mike read these comics, with the anti-racist and anti-bigotry message which they strove to impart to their readers. I realize that no doubt there were many people who read them, without really taking the anti-racist, anti-bigotry subtext onboard, but even so many people in the comics milieu were and are liberal in their attitudes towards tolerance of minority and marginalized groups.

But the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and the rest of the Zionist lobby have no qualms about smearing genuine anti-racists, and people who have written about and denounced anti-Semitism and other forms of racism and persecution, like Jackie Walker, Ken Livingstone and Tony Greenstein. And there is the real danger that by doing so, not only will they libel and smear decent people, but trivialize real anti-Semitism in doing so.

I’ve blogged earlier this evening about the fine job Richard Coughlan did in producing his videos debunking Holocaust denial. But British and American comics and their creators, like Pat Mills, Alan Moore and Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the creators of the X-Men, and that strip’s writers and artists since, have also contributed greatly to attacking racism and bigotry in the strips they produced.

Videos from the Protests Against the DSEI Arms Fair in London

Hat tip to Michelle for sending me these.

This week there’s been a massive international arms fair in London, in which the international ‘defence and security’ industry, otherwise known as the merchants of death, have been trying to flog their murderous wares to a range of governments, from the democratic through the autocratic to the just plain despotic. The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, said he’d like to stop them, but has no powers to. The arms fair is conducted with the full support of Britain’s MOD and the intelligence services, who have and will step in to stop anything that looks like it might prevent Britain’s arms manufactures from selling their products to just about every evil butcher around the world, including the Saudis.

As the local authorities are unable to stop the fair, so ordinary people have stepped in to make their feelings about it known and raise awareness of its horrors. There has been a protest staged against the fair outside it for the past week. And they’ve produced several videos about the protests, and some of the issues surrounding the fair and the general arms industry.

War, the Pentagon and Hollywood Propaganda

The short video below, titled ‘Art and Militarism’ on YouTube, talks about the way the Pentagon has worked with Hollywood on blockbuster movies to promote the American military and the arms industry. These films have included the James Bond epics, Zero Dark 30, and X-Men. As part of this process of collaboration, the Pentagon is able to check and alter the scripts. With many of these movies the military’s aim has been to show off their equipment, and encourage recruitment. Top Gun was made with the collaboration of the American Navy, who saw it very much as a recruiting video. And it worked. There was a massive surge of young men wishing to fly combat aircraft, but they went into the USAF rather than the navy.

Art and Supervillains against the Arms Fair

This is another short video, which shows some of the artists, scholars and ordinary protesters in costume. One of the speakers makes the point that academics don’t usually get out of their classrooms much, but this time they have come down to make their voices heard. He also talks about the way the artists have also supported the protest with some of their works attacking the arms industry.

The video also includes some of the demonstrators marching in costume, including men dressed as Donald Trump and Tony Blair. There is also a young guy in a Dalek, flanked by another bloke dressed as a cyberman. This chap has a sign satirizing the whole fair by pretending to be about the loss of Dalek jobs. The arms industry and its agents and officials are making Daleks unemployed by killing men, women and children themselves. Later on in the video you see the man inside the Dalek costume forced by the rozzers to come out of it. And as this is the 21st century surveillance state, the police are also recording the proceedings.

Trailer for Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant

Looking through YouTube on Christmas Day, I found a trailer for the next instalment in the Alien franchise, Alien: Covenant. Directed by Ridley Scott, this follows on from his not-quite Alien prequel, Prometheus, which came out in four years ago in 2012. The blurb for this runs

Ridley Scott returns to the universe he created, with ALIEN: COVENANT, a new chapter in his groundbreaking ALIEN franchise. The crew of the colony ship Covenant, bound for a remote planet on the far side of the galaxy, discovers what they think is an uncharted paradise, but is actually a dark, dangerous world. When they uncover a threat beyond their imagination, they must attempt a harrowing escape.

Directed by Ridley Scott

Starring Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride, Demián Bichir, Carmen Ejogo, Amy Seimetz, Jussie Smollet, Callie Hernandez, Nathaniel Dean, Alexander England, Benjamin Rigby.

The trailer shows the Covenant landing, and a scene with one of the David robots, played by Michael Fassbender. On landing, one of the crew steps on a bizarre set of bulbs, which releases some kind of spore. There is also a proper Alien egg hatching, ready to birth a facehugger. The sequence begins with one of the female characters refusing to let one of the other women out of room with a man, who is clearly in the agonies of some kind of transformation, or the eruption of an Alien from their body. It ends with two lovers in a shower having their tender moment interrupted by an Alien attack.

According to the YouTube page, it opens on May 19th.

This is another movie that I’m looking forward to, along with the sequel to another of Scott’s SF masterpieces, Blade Runner 2049.

The Alien has now become one of the classic Hollywood monsters, alongside the Predator, and older creatures like the Mummy, Frankenstein’s Monster and the Wolfman. Several critics have pointed out that Alien was basically a ‘B’ movie, but treated like a Hollywood main feature. I’d say that this was a fair statement. The basic story – alien gets on board spaceship to run amok killing the crew – was the storyline of another, very definite ‘B’ movie of the 1950s or ’60s. The same critic remarked that it could have – and very nearly did – come from Roger Corman, the great director responsible for churning out any number of them. Fortunately, Dan O’Bannon, the script writer, objected and the studio found Ridley Scott instead. What elevated the movie far above it’s ‘B’ movie plot were its stylish direction by Scott, its superb special effects and the way its script broke a number of conventions and gender stereotypes. It was one of the first SF movies to have a strong female lead in Ripley. Another critic has pointed out that as well as breaking gender stereotypes, Ripley also broke another Hollywood convention in that she was basically a hard, by-the-book character. These types usually die before the end of the movie, but not before they perform some noble gesture that shows they’re OK really. Ripley goes by the book, and doesn’t want to let Kane in to infect the ship with whatever attacked him. She’s right, but it’s a hard attitude, and she’s overridden by Ash, who appears to be acting from simple compassion. The reality is otherwise, and, as everyone whose watched or heard of the film knows, carnage ensues. But Ripley survives to the end, and finally beats the monster.

And, of course, what really made the monster one of the classics was its unique quality and the dark beauty of its realization by Swiss Surrealist H.R. Giger. The Alien’s two-stage life cycle – facehugger and then the monster itself, is genuinely alien. It isn’t like anything on Earth. Its gestation inside humans is based on the ichneumon moth, which lays its eggs in captive caterpillars. These serve as living larders as the developing larvae hatch and eat their host from the inside. It plays on the fear of parasitism, and was intended by the writer and director to make the men in the audience afraid of rape and a malign pregnancy, rather than women.

And when it finally emerges and develops, the monster itself does not look like anything on Earth. The film was before CGI and a little before animatronics, so it really was another ‘man in a rubber suit’. However, it’s design was so unique that it didn’t look like one. It was both cadaverously thin, like a spindly, distorted human corpse, but with an insect carapace. It also had a tongue with its own mouth and set of teeth, and appeared to lack any kind of external sense organs. There are no eyes or ears that you can see. Finally, there are the strange tubes emerging from its back.

Stylistically, it was one of the biomechanical creatures that formed Giger’s oeuvre. These were a disturbing mixture of the biological and mechanical, so that organically derived shapes had the shapes of, and acted like, machines. The Alien was so uniquely strange and disturbing, that it’s influenced the design of other malignant beings from space since then. The aliens in Independence Day show Giger’s influence, as did the ‘Sleazoids’ in an X-Men storyline of about the same time, and the Cythrons and their armour in the Slaine strip in 2000 AD, for those comic fans of a certain age.

There’s also supposed to be an Alien 5 in production, which will apparently see the return of Ripley, Newt and the surviving Space Marine from James Cameron’s Aliens. I don’t know much about this, however.

The Alien franchise is now 3 1/2 decades old, and like Hammer Horror’s Dracula, or Star Wars, doesn’t seem to show any signs of stopping. From the trailer it looks like the latest instalment could be well worth going to, if you’re a fan of what Mark Kermode has called ‘gribbly monsters.’

Alan Moore’s ‘The Stars My Degredation’

Yesterday I put up a piece reporting the sad death of British comics legend Steve Dillon, along with his obituary from the I newspaper, and a link to the Nick Fury strip he drew for Hulk comic right at the very beginning of his professional career in comics, which can be read over at the Bronze Age Blog. Amongst the other gems from the Bronze Age of Comics – the 70s and 80s is one of the strips Alan Moore created for the music newspaper, Sounds. Written and drawn by Moore under the monicker, Curt Vile, this was The Stars My Degradation, and ran in the magazine from 1980 to 1983. This was about the space adventures of Dempster Dingbunger, and featured such characters as Three-Eyes McGurk and his Death Planet Commandos, Nekriline, who was literally dead, Laser Eraser, the deadly galactic female assassin, and the psychotic cyborg, Axel Pressbutton. Laser Eraser and Pressbutton were later to get their own strip in the British adult comic, Warrior. The strip there, if I remember correctly, was drawn by Steve Moore, no relation to Alan, under the pseudonym Pedro Henry. Moore was another stalwart of the British comics industry, and closely involved with the Fortean Times, the magazine of the weird and bizarre.

The strip’s title, The Stars My Degradation, seems to me to be a satirical nod to Alfred Bester’s classic, The Stars My Destination, also known as Tiger, Tiger. It was one of the pieces Moore created very early in his career, just before he broke into mainstream comics and became the massive legend he is today with V For Vendetta and Watchmen. Pete Dorree notes that the strip was nihilistic and satirical. In the example he gives, Moore spoofs the New X-Men, created by Chris Claremont and Johnny Byrne. Here’s the link. Enjoy!

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