The Midlands Cuckoos

The Bojeffries Saga by Alan Moore and Steve Parkhouse

"Where do we go when we die?"  "Vhe Gho to Blutty Hyingland!!"

- Uncle Festus Zlutodny 

After months of seeing this on the shelves at the local library and not knowing much about the title, I finally borrowed it-  this beauty born from two trusted creators. So glad I did.

The Bojeffries Saga, a stuttering but undefeated epic spanning the pages of Warrior, Dalgoda, A1 and eventually its own full collection by Top Shelf Productions. Jobremus Bojeffries lives in Northampton with his children Reth and Ginda (a man-frightening giantess with subatomic powers), brothers/uncles Fester (vampire) and Raoul (werewolf with the smell of and taste for dog), grandfather (on the brink of onmipotent protoplasm) and the baby - which is nuclear. Their terrace home is dimensionally precocious and equipped with a curiosity dampener to keep mere earthlings out (but, alas, not rent collectors.)  And with all of this awesome potential, what do the Bojeffries family intend with the world of man? Well, simply to live in it. And be left well alone.

His monsters aspiring to living small, circular daily lives. Moore specialises in pulling the spandex pants of goshcrikey comicking down to reveal the everyday absurdity. He doesn't necessarily mock the format; it's too useful, and he clearly loves it and speaks its language.  His co-conspirator in this endeavour is similarly fluent. Parkhouse is a comics powerhouse, a writer, script editor and formidable artist in a caricature style. We have Parkhouse to thank for the early Stockbridge and Voyager cycles in Doctor Who Weekly, as well as the later Luke Kirby stories in 2000AD, not to mention the comic's early Nineties bete noir Big Dave, which may well share some of its DNA with Bojeffries.

There’s hay to be made in the satirical approach to comics; take a successful formula from other media, skew it with a local variant or a ‘what if?’ Question in the time-honoured style of Alan Moore adherents like Mark Millar and Grant Morrison, remove the adolescent power fantasy nonsense, and with luck you get what Alan Moore and Steve Parkhouse do so well. The truly bizarre - skewed so much further it’s hilariously familiar. And so Bojeffries is as much a salute to England's working class, Moore and Parkhouse's "Jerusalem", though the title may well be ironic, ostensibly set in the Eighties, and then the Nineties and beyond. It is more or less timeless; weirdness locked in its own suburban eddy.

Each member of the family gets their own story - some more than one if you include the 24-page epilogue which brings the family up to date (as of 2014) and includes a good number of pop culture cameos and a torturous phonetic narration (with occasional insight by a similarly phonetic Gok Wan) Each story is a cracker, helped immensely by the characterisations of the family - near-ultimate power combined with ineptitude and bathos. Parkhouse renders them with an expert hand, and is unafraid to use a lighter pen for thinner strokes - just a hint of holding line around the edges of characters, but otherwise as true and ephemeral as Lowry's matchstick men. 

 And ephemeral is what Bokeffries may well be described as, too. Bits and pieces pulled together by the universe into an improbable creation, shuffling through "Hyingland"'s pot-holed streets on the way to the bingo. I love it, and will probably buy it. And I haven't even mentioned the musical episode yet.



 

Jim Baikie

As mentioned elsewhere, my entry point into 2000AD prog-wise was the early 300s, and in those initial issues a short-lived strip was begining to wind down.

Skizz, by Alan Moore, was the story of an alien interpreter from Tau Ceti crashing to Earth and evading the Authorities with the help of a local kid. It was E.T, I knew, but I also recognised that Moore had other things to throw into the mix: this wasn't the autumnal suburban hills of California that Interpreter Zhcchz was dragged into, but central Birmingham amid the bleak early 80s winter of Thatcherism, record unemployment and bleak opportunity Its human protagonist is Roxy, a girl - still a newish thing for 2000AD and in retrospect predicting Moore's realisation of the same in Halo Jones.  In short, it's E.T meets Boys from the Blackstuff by way of a little bit of contemporary TV (Philip Sandifer nods towards the likes of Minder and Grange Hill, but therese are minor influences at best), and while the clash of realism and fantasy would recur in the years that followed in the comic, this was the first roll off the slipway, and one of the best-remembered.

Key to me is Moore's script alongside the art of Jim Baikie, whose time at 2000AD was just beginning, Baikie had come from a variety of UK illustration jobs, often working on various licensed products and titles (Monkees, Star Trek, Hammer House of Horror, Look In and Countdown, for which he provided some Doctor Who art) plus forays into TV spin-offs such as Charlie's Angels, The Fall Guy, and more recently, Terrahawks. Like Moore he had a previous association with Warrior magazine, and was imported into Tharg's team from there. Baikie has a pen-based apporach, with  nice heavy brush on shading anfd a flowing approach to his linework. I can see a lot of contemporaries in his work - Jim Burns and Steve Parkhouse in particular. He likely co-created the look of the kangaroo-like Skizz with Moore, but he could do fantasy well enough - although it's the realism in his work which sells Skizz and becomes a recognisable trait in his work. Baikie's humans arent the elongated strips of sinew that Mick McMahon rendered the likes of Dredd and Slaine, nor the beefcake slabs of muscle under Bisley's tenure, but realistic, unexaggerated forms. His Dredd looks harder for this, and importantly for Skizz, his Lol,Roxy, and tragic no-hoper Clarence Cardew look as though they've come off a Birmingham high street - their fates accrus a pathos because of their recognisability.

Outside of Skizz Baikie also turned his hand to Dredd, helping out with the mega epic Oz, and providing some memorable shot stories and one-shots - in particular the three-part Hitman with its loathsome, toad-like human assassin, and the classic In the Bath which features early 90s cranky Joe Dredd doing what he does best... well,that would be telling.

Baikie went beyond the parent comic to work on spin-off Crisis, where he collaborated with John Smith on the action-oriented New Statesman, as well as turning up Stateside for a brief run on Star Wars. The relaunched Eagle magazine saw him team up with fellow Scot John Wagner for their dinosaur romp Bloodfang, which I look forward to covering in a future instalment of Where Eagles Dare.

In the early Nineties he returned to Skizz for the second series as an artist-writer, giving the story a more satirical edge, but the first story remains the superior, and I'd say so because of its more worldly elements. 'Reliable' is an epithet I apply to a lot of artists who turn in just that sort of work - consistent, faithful, relatable, and it's no dismissal agaist the likes of innovative artists like those above. Blaikie's work remained no less recognisable and was always faithful to its subject. Those first few encounters with his work in Skizz made a big impression on me, and no doubt will remain for some time.

Rest in peace, sir.

Jim Baikie 28 February 1940 – 29 December 2017

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century 2009

"London is a country coming down from its trip. We are sixty days from the end of this decade and there's gonna be a lot of refugees. They'll be going round the town shoutin' 'Bring Out Your Dead'."

Rounding out Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's most recent LoEG series is the final chapter in the Century trilogy, set a mere four years ago in our time, a more recognisable world in parts, and that's a problem for me. But first, a recap. When last we encountered the core surviving League (Alan Quatermain, Mina Murray, Orlando), it was 1969, and the above prophecy of Withnail and I's fried hippy Danny (not featured in that strip - boo) has rapidly and unexpectedly taken form. Oliver Haddo's Moonchild is slipped into the world, and the League is once again rendered impotent and separate from one another for thirty quite years.

So, apparently, nothing of import ever happened to the ex-members of the League in the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties? Which is interesting. Mina by the opening of 2009 is, as she was left at the end of 1969, in a sanitarium, Alan completes his League circle and retreats to a vagrant, narcotic denial of his existence, and Orlando continues his/her doomed existential holding pattern, signing up to fight for Queen and country in far-off places. Only when Moore analogue Prospero intrudes to literally push the narrative into second gear does Orlando find her purpose and the rags of the League reassemble themselves.

I have to say that to me 2009 is the most frustrating of the series, particularly for its references which play either as being outside of my familiar zone (I haven't, to my shame, yet watched The Wire or The Thick Of It, but apparently neither has Moore) or too far into them; once you've seen one fanfic where the current Doctor and companion turn up in the background then you've really seen the lot. I've a British friend who is to this day unable to bring himself to critically assess Britpop because for him 1994-1997 is still too recent history. I feel much the same with 2009 - it's playing Where's Wally with contemporary culture, and in the age of the Internet and fan fiction, DeviantArt and the like, it's not novel.here more than anywhere else Moore's magpie tendancies show the master up - his recent griping about a small screen adaptation of the original League series (yes, it will most likely miss the point and be awful, but then again it might not

There's less of an element of literary discovery this time around because of that overfamiliarity, so I found it less fun. I also feel some sadness at the easy surrender Moore seems to have made to Twentieth-century media - heroes and villains of literature in this trilogy have been usurped by those of cinema and TV, meaning Kev O'Neill's previously imaginative recreations of the formerly described now becomes a duty of caricature. It's a role he fills like a pro, of course, but he's also better than this.  It's disappointing also to see Moore, whose version of the Doctor in the Doctor Who Weekly strips had such a profound impact on the modern era of the show, reduce the character's role of that of a walk-on. Add Torchwood and Ashes to Ashes and the box-ticking seems all the more obvious.  By the time we get to the inevitable reveal of the Antichr- sorry, Moonchild himself the novelty is sort of spent - a twisted vision of a boy magician ubiquitous in books, films and all manner of visual merchandising? It's painting one's self into a corner. The two highlights I took from 2009 were returns to already-established or covered characters - the various Jimmy Bonds and Andrew Norton. I will concede the final Deus Ex Machina is fantastic, however - almost matching Black Dossier's WTF Golliwog moment for bravado and genuine surprise. But getting there was not half as much fun. League's immortals have long become burned-out monsters, with only one expendable member remaining to meet their demise here. If this is the last we'll see of the current League then perhaps it's for the best.

I did wonder while reading 2009 what the point of an aside to Janni Nemo and her terrorist offspring might have been, given they have no significant role in the main story. Fortunately there's a spin-off recently out, Nemo - Heart of Ice, which is filling in some pieces rather neatly.

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century 1969

The beat goes on...or does it?

By 1969 (Century's second volume) the events of interim adventure The Black Dossier have already played out, Mina and Allan are fugitives from the Government and working for Prospero, Shakespeare’s exiled Duke of Milan now ruling over The Blazing World. Pointedly here is now no ‘League’ as such, all Imperial obligations having been tossed aside with the surviving members near-fugitives themselves and only the Dossier’s eternal wastrel Orlando hanging on, dropping names and changing genders with deliberately tedious regularity. In fact, tedium and the tedium of immortality appear to be a running theme in this trilogy, the three League survivors now being themselves, effectively, immortal and in pursuit of an immortal enemy, Alan Moore’s adopted Aleister Crowley analogue Oliver Haddo, who collects new identities and earthly vessels almost as regularly as Orlando replaces his. The two crucial 'new' allies of the League, Orlando (an immortal and ultimately impotent wreck, deliberately drawn, I'd say) and ‘prisoner of London’ Andrew Norton, (another immortal and cryptic Greek chorus - pointedly also not able to directly intervene in the story) lend another disturbing themes to the Century storyline – impotence. The League are, it would appear, designed to never win, or never achieve a victory that isn't itself Pyrrhic.

And so to Moore’s alternative pulp literature London the league drift, transported by Nemo’s daughter Janni aboard the Nautilus; however as much as stepping off the submarine Mina, Allan and Orlando are also stepping away from the series’ past and the kernel of Moore’s conceit. We’ve already had one out-of-sequence story in The Black Dossier (itself a format-challenging collection of multimedia in-jokes – a 45 rpm record, a Tijuana Bible, Orlando’s randy and bloodthirsty story told as a series of Look and Learn picture stories), now it seems the added conceit (admittedly Moore’s strongest suit in this series) – recreating the world of the past through fictional analogues, has beaten Century’s plotline to near impotence itself. It’s very clever, of course, and Kevin O’Neill’s witty artwork does wonders to mollify the loss of intrigue, but I came away from Century 1969 feeling like I’d read less and merely traipsed along with Mina, Allan and Orlando through a literary Where’s Wally? Which was much of the fun of the original series of course, but by 1969 popular culture is everywhere, more recognisable (I can – only just – say it’s outside my own lifetime) and with its familiarity less exotic. Where in the past there was an intrigue to the inclusion and rubbing of shoulders between Conan Doyle’s Moriarty, Fu Man Chu, Verne’s Nemo and Wells’ Professor Cavor, there’s less surprise and novelty in seeing Thunderbirds’ Parker filling up on a motorway lay-by while Michael Caine’s Jack Carter provides voiceover. Even more, the cameo of Patrick Troughton’s Second Doctor passed me by, and I can’t decide whether it’s because he’s already too familiar a face to me as a Doctor Who fan, or because on reflection the brief appearance of a Sixties time traveler in a story about literal time travelers is just not that interesting.

That said, 1969 does at least push the major story line forward in a way, teasing out the series finale by way of another thinly-veiled franchise-bothering character (“My first name’s Tom, my middle name’s a marvel and my last name’s a conundrum.”) Once you’ve reached that point you’ve perused appearances from all James Bonds (a lovely scene, really), Nicholas Roeg’s Performance (every Rutles needs a Stones analogue, naturally), and crucially, a denouement borrowing heavily from the Hyde Park memorial concert for Brian Jones, deftly tying three plot strands together, but stranding the hapless League all the more. It’s a downbeat ending to an important chapter, but I cared less this time around. Where to from here?

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century 1910

(In Which your humble blogger races through the final stages of a once-beloved series)

Call me shallow and undiscerning, but when news of the first series of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was released I was genuinely intrigued and excited. At the time the conceit - a superhero army of Victorian fictional heroes and antiheroes, villains and an 'honourary gentleman' in Ms Mina Murray seemed quite audacious - although I knew that if anyone could pull it off and add even more into the mix, Alan Moore was that man. And so he did. League's first series is a riot of intertextuality, and not only spawned a host of imitators (including Marvel's own reinterpretation of their cast in Seventeenth Century guise) but, an earnestly-cast but poorly written movie adaptation and the impressive scholarly career of Mr Jess Nevins, the League's unofficial official annotator.

Despite this and a campy approach to the genre itself, it seemed as though Moore was at pains to play down his heroes. Individually they were all damaged souls, and collectively they barely worked together - the most sympathetic being a monster only just kept in check, the most human being a recovering addict. If Watchmen wasn't Moore's final word on the matter of the super hero (Reader, it wasn't), his subsequent musing on the genre clearly haven't restored his faith in heroes super or otherwise. he's distressingly humanist, reliably defeatist, and as you read further into the series the grumpy old bugger's voice becomes clearer still. League's second serial faced this head-on by eschewing a central villain for the threat of internal collapse - and sure enough, 'Mina's League' as it was later known, was finished by the end of the book. years passed, and Mina and her lover Allan returned League-less, but exploring more of Moore's invented Land of Fiction, the 'Blazing World' in the dense multimedia Black Dossier. Ostensibly a chase through the Fifties, this collection is a marked departure, and is the series at its most frustratingly episodic: once more there's no Moriarty figure, just a sadistic analogue of today's cinematic hero of the hour, and two intriguing additions: a priapic and baritone Golliwog with a language all of his own (whom I came to adore, despite my initial reservations), and Moore's newest import and clear current favourite, Virginia Woolf's Orlando. Time, I feel, has been kind to Black Dossier, but I also fear that never have Nevins' annotations been more voraciously consulted.


Which brings us to the star attraction, now complete and mercifully available at my local library. Weaving its way between the aftermath of League's second series and Dossier, before leading to two post-Dossier volumes, Century  presents in this strip at least a final attempt at a cohesive League with the brief addition of occult detective Carnacki and 'gentleman thief' A J Raffles, plus something of a shadowy nemesis in Oliver Haddo, Moore's appropriated analogue to Aleister Crowley. I have to admit I quite liked the twitchy, somewhat hapless coupling of Carnacki and Raffles, as ineffectual as they are they're really no worse than the old League, in fact they're more than mostly harmless if way out of their depth. The trouble with the new League of course, once more, is their creator's determination to render them impotent. Orlando, who received much adoring attention in the Dossier is revealed to be even more of his/her direct existential self, constantly switching between two self-confessed specialist states - female/male, "f*cking and fighting." S/he is, however, all talk and very little trousers. Which would have worked, had Century's first volume, 1910, stuck to that story. Instead, Moore, swept up in the lyrics of The Threepenny Opera, draws his League into a neat but nasty collision with Brecht's musical melodrama, giving us a new captain to Nemo's Nautilus, and another failure of the League, leading inevitably to a rematch...

To sum up: The first of three volumes is a scene-setter, and less of a re-arranger. There are few seeds sown for the later story here, really, although the fate of Nemo's progeny is a neat inclusion, and the story's setting is novel in itself, not to my mind greatly explored either in SF or speculative fiction.

The Doctor is in

Among a few entertaining coincidences in my reading and listening of late is the appearance of a figure from English history whom I intend to read a little more about, er, at some point soon.

Dr John Dee was royal astrologer to Elizabeth I, and her sister Mary before his skill and persuasion found better favour with the Virgin Queen. Dee seems to have been cut from similar cloth to the genii of his era and the later Renaissance; he was a scholar, cartographer, Hermeticist, military strategist, an astronomer and a mathematician. By forecasting the potential death of Mary he courted his own demise, yet in setting an auspicious date for Elizabeth’s coronation almost certainly retained his station as one of her most trusted advisors. His feats were humanist, yet remarkable – he owned the largest library in England and conceived the idea of a national library in the interest of the preservation of knowledge (Mary wasn’t keen), and for Elizabeth he presented the notion (and thus coined the epithet) of a British Empire. By predicting the approaching tempests off the Dover coast he encouraged his Queen to spare her navy the perilous and precipitous defence against the approaching Spanish Armada, and instead they watched nature perform the task from the safety of land. Alongside the Queen’s ‘spymaster’ Sir Francis Walshingham he pioneered the use of espionage and was literally through his own codename the original “007.”

As befalls one who straddles history and mysticism, Dee finds his way into the canon of Iron Maiden songs, with The Alchemist from The Final Frontier:


Dee’s pursuit of mysticism and the occult is presumably what endears him to Maiden, and has helped to ensure the longevity of his name today. He has been described variously as the inspiration for Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Shakespeare’s Prospero; Alan Moore surely also had him in mind in his conception of the latter character for the closing of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier, yet it’s curious too that this somewhat late pursuit of his life turns him into an utterly human figure as well. Taking up with mystic John Kelly, an aging Dee and his young wife travelled Europe with Kelly in their pursuit of the supernatural. Communing with angels, Kelly claimed that he had instructions from the diving agents to share a bed with Dee’s wife; Dee reluctantly submitted, and returned to England alone, never seeing Kelly again.

This year’s Manchester Festival of the Arts saw the debut of Damon Albarn’s Dr Dee: An English Opera, from which the following song Apple Carts is taken. Albarn originally was to have worked on the opera with Alan Moore, but the would-be modern polymath and postmodern magician parted company early on, the cause apparently being frustration on Moore’s part rather than the intervention of alleged angels. I love the song; it’s so much that Maiden’s galloping biography simultaneously isn’t, humanist and spiritual, it suggests a twofold narrative, of Dee ordering a new Empire built on the mystical landmarks of England’s past (Silbury Hill), and later returning to “the kingdom of the broken heart”, much beaten and seeking solace beneath its stones, the same man who returned from Europe to a ravaged and looted library and ended his days in poverty, the new monarch James I being the antithesis of his aunt in a morbid distrust of the supernatural.



It’s Dee’s fate to have become one of popular literature’s playthings, portrayed as a spy, a wizard, a necromantic villain or a mystical guru. This side of the story interests me less than his falling in and out with Kelly, of whom the jury is itself still undecided – was it carnal interests that led him to turn Dee into a cuckold, or was his growing fame as an alchemist leading him to some drastic action to divorce himself of a man on the wane? It might depend on what book I eventually read…

Reissue, Repackage - The Meknificent Seven

And now, for a change, something I actually DID throw out. Well okay, I replaced it, and the story goes a little something like this:

Here is the earliest edition of the collected strips of 2000AD's original series of ABC Warriors, bringing together the escapades of this rag-tag™ unit of war robots on Mars, created and written by Pat Mills and illustrated by a slavering roster of future heavyweights of the UK scene - I'm talking Gibbons, O'Neill, Ezquerra, Brendan McCarthy and of course Mick McMahon, who provided the gorgeous cover illustration for this imprint by early 200AD licencees Titan. Inside are all of the Mars stories written by Mills, plus an introductory strip by Mills and Kevin O'Neill, like the cover, produced exclusively for this collection. Years passed and this imprint was discontinued. I saw it as recently as a couple of years ago in Graphic in Cuba Street - shame I didn't pick it up then.

After Rebellion purchased 2000AD they went into their own reprinting venture, and started things off modestly. The reproductions are pretty good, although suffer from some downscaling due to the original comic's page dimensions not being A4 compatible. This (left) is the cover of their initial run of The Meknificent Seven. The cover is by future ABC art droid Kev Walker in a post-Simon Bisley painterly style. Walker produced vibrant and consistent work during his long tenure on the strip, but the choice of illustration - itself a very post Black Hole era design, is Awl Rong. It's ABC leader Hammerstein, which is fine, but it's a nineties redesign of the robot, doesn't sell the crucial image of the ABCs as a team, and it seems like an afterthought to provide some sort of continuity with the later reprints of the colour strips. I wonder whether the original reprint was a Titan-owned piece, which might explain its absence along with the dedicated introductory strip? Apart from setting the template for future ABC reprints, this is the least-collectable version, and it's the one I replaced as soon as I could (sorry Dave, to whom I gave it to). Moving on…

Here is Rebellion's second stab at the reprint, produced last year. It's a gorgeous cover - not the McMahon commission of course, but it is a reproduction of a contemporary 2000AD cover by the artist in question, and it's just what it should be - all seven Warriors in colour, retro-coloured to fit the Seventies era style. The contents are a step up too - the Titan strips have been included, Pat does a foreword (this aligns the volume with the others in the series published between editions), and as volume two, the aforementioned The Black Hole by Mills and Bisley/SMS is also in black and white, the first recap chapter of that strip is included as a taster. I was deid chuffed when I got this and didn't regret my purchase. The only way it could have been better to my mind would have been reprinting the original gatefold pages from 2000AD in colour, and perhaps included the Steve 'Preacher' Dillon-inked 1985 Annual story Red Planet Blues. As this wasn't written by Mills but by some guy called Alan Moore however, I could understand why Rebellion might have omitted it.

It's now 2010 and Rebellion are keen to have another poke at the US market. Onward to a new edition of The Meknificent Seven! Spine-wise this ties in with the existing collection, although the cover is a radical redesign - a pretty slick composite of a panel of Gibbon's work within, and it looks cool, but not as cool as the Titan original. Inside what do we have? An introduction by Pat, the Titan strip plus single-page strips for the core five Warriors used in their 80s return, the Black Hole teaser is back in its own volume where it belongs and in colour… Red Planet Blues.

I think I know what they might select for the next reprint now.

…

Mongrol smush greedy publishers!!!