The Aztecs: Conquest and Glory

Last week Jamas and I checked out the last week of Te Papa's exhibition of the above name; and you can read his thoughts here! Good stuff - we started by getting in on concessions (a quiet midweek day, school holidays all but over, working in our favour)and I had approximately an hour to dash round the exhibits before my own personal Cortez arrived in the form of the end of my lunch break.

Aztec culture interests me, albeit from the distance of too little learning - I haven't even seen the Doctor Who story in question. Most of its appeal to me is simply visual - I can't get my brain around some of the gods' names, let alone my tongue, and on the whole I find their culture equally fascinating and baffling. But their visual aesthetic is simply remarkable, from their codices and their literal version of sequential narrative (almost a comic strip with blank speech balloons) to their carved linear, geometric motifs combining animal and human forms to realise their beliefs in highly un-naturalised mirrors of nature.


Pop culture would have us believe that the Aztecs were a sophisticated society who almost revered death to the point of savagery, usually involving bloody sacrifice to one or more of their pantheon. The exhibition did little to dispel that notion, although to its credit places ritualised death in a reasonably natural context; that is to say, it stresses enough that beyond the spectacle (and boy was there spectacle in those sacrifices) the ritual was 'normalised' to meet a specific, regular calendar of harvest and god appeasement. Yes, having one's heart torn beating from out from under your ribcage is brutal, but this took place within an ordered society extremely close to nature, where wild animals, disease, famine and enemies could provide as awful an end, and without the questionable lead-in of a year's adoration by your butchers and heavy drugging on the day. Were the Romans any better in the days of the gladiatorial arena? We've come a long way in the west from such concerns, and such a degree of contextualising - death has become more abstract, more personalised, less a community reality; and sacrifice is something we reserve for the heroic, and those who might choose it for themselves, not those preordained by a deity. In short, it made me think a lot about death in ways I hadn't appreciated.

I wasn't expecting to see so much of an emphasis on death, though. Astonishing to see masks made from bone, a replica temple to Mictlantecuhtli, the actual sacrificial stones which topped their great pyramids. Having said that, though, my perusing companion was keen to point out Te Papa's own models of an Aztec community market and farm - and they were indeed lovely models, and served to balance things out pretty well.

Of course we know the end, or can piece it together among the fragments and the stories. Cortez, the fall of Moctezuma, and real slaughter, senseless sacrifice, and the erasing of a culture out of greed and conquest. I prefer an exhibition that flows chronologically, but there's no getting around the very final full stop that the appearance of Conquistador armour, with its crow helmet and interlocking metal plates, swift and merciless sword and, later, the transformation of offering bowl to cross-emblazoned baptismal font signifies. Death might have been at the heart of Aztec society which desensitised and normalised it, but the godless death those invading swords brought must have been beyond understanding to the mind of those people. Skirmishes between villages with equivalent weaponry - not to dismiss those ruthless looking obsidian blades, is one thing, but Cortez brought a war machine, with weapons and swift beasts (horses not being evident in Aztec culture) to mow down whole villages in a day.

In short, a really interesting, and thought-provoking exhibition. Glad I went.

Sov Blok Judges (1)

The Sochi Winter Games have begun – play nicely, everyone. For now and for this blog, though, it’s an opportunity for me to unveil a picture of the ‘modern’ Sov Blok Judge.

The Sov Judges have a long and interesting history in the Judge Dredd strip, appearing for the first time during (fittingly) an Olympic event – in point of fact, the Lunar Olympics. I’ll leave the detail on that for a later post, as the judge here is not one of those grim and threatening Cold War baddies, but the post-Glasnost styled ‘friendly’ Sov Judge. The former Sov Blok, like Sino Cit and the US Mega Cities also lost a principal city to nuclear detonation, so this judge is an East Meg 2 street judge, with uniform reinterpreted (a look going back to the Apocalypse War story) by the great Carlos Ezquerra; the style has been pretty well adhered to since, save for the odd variance in cloaks and knee pads. As uniforms go it’s pretty good – distinctive without straying too far from the style set down by Ezquerra for Dredd and his fellow American judges, but with enough points of difference (a duller palette, more bullet-shaped helmet) to distinguish it. Being an Ezquerra design there’s also a sense of utilitarianism about it, too, which I like.

Other than that, there’s not much to say about the modern Sov judges. They’ve appeared in several stories, both as heroes and as enemies, as brutes, comedy fodder (the late Supreme Judge Traktorfaktori couldn’t be anything else with a name like that) and as sympathetic love interests. In the Nineties they were almost single-handedly adopted by Garth Ennis for his time penning Dredd, and his touch was light - his letterers adopt a mock-Cyrillic font for their speech balloons, and on the whole Ennis turned the former baddies into likeable semi-regular guest spots, creating the aforementioned Traktorfaktori and Judge Brylkreem (ho ho) as well, before offing both in separate stories.  So as judges go they’ve been pretty well served by Dredd’s creators and later contributors. And it would be rather cool to see them on the big screen!

New Land, Old Spirits

"He iwi kotahi tatou: now we are one people."

It's Waitangi Day today, a day which observes not only the creation of modern New Zealand via the medium of contentious documentation, but also the coming together of two cultures, Victoria Regina's British Europeans and the various Maori iwi of Aotearoa. Just as the debate continues today (literally) over what Te Tiriti means and what nationhood represents to us 174 years on, so too does the meeting of cultures continue in every sense.

I'm not a deeply spiritual person, and I'm pretty sure I don't believe in ghosts, although Mrs Simian and I, like some of our student friends, lived in a flat in Dunedin that seemed to have its own set of occasional unexplained footfalls in its hallway. I'm sure most people could relate something similar, or knows of someone who can. I do like ghosts stories though, and I think they're culturally more important than the superficial spookiness we easily rate them by.

Grant Shanks and Tahu Potiki's series of New Zealand supernatural anecdotes are collected in two books, Where No Birds Sing and When the Wind Calls Your Name, a series of true stories which concern not just ghosts and restless spirits but many tales peculiar to a local sense of the supernatural. Echoes of abandoned sites of burial, slaughter and suicide, the persistence of tapu and reverence of pounamu and taonga like patu and hei-tiki, totem animals like dogs, birds and eels, and the enduring image of deceased ancestors among the living and in the landscape.

Belief in the spiritual and supernatural brings landscapes alive and adds meaning to places and names. It's worth observing that a lot of the book's stories, formulaic as they seem, concern actual encounters between the physical European world and some spiritual manifestation from the world of Maori. In many cases the story's protagonist is pakeha or perhaps sits on the fringes of traditional belief, and the encounter provides them with an explanation not only of the uncanny, but of the place where they met it. In a way the question of whether the phenomenon was real or imagined is beside the point; the story is given colour by it, but the kernel of each tale is the discovery of a history that offers some context; a story within a story connecting a spiritual sensation with an actual event. So ghost stories endure.

Stories unite people and shape their own histories in their telling. These collected stories are best described as 'eerie' - there aren't many which could be said to be actually frightening, though there are some which are deeply creepy: 'The Walkers', with its spectral drowned fishermen making their journey home across a beach and through giant driftwood stumps; not to mention Shanks' account of the titular story, an area of dead bush in a Fiordland valley featuring an encounter with an eighteen-point stag that recalls (to me at least) some key imagery of Grendel's Mere in Beowulf. The tales have a local and a universal element; Shanks' approach is as a confessed European among Maori. He compares his encounter and some of those mentioned in the book to a personal impression at a site from his own ancestry, the battlefield of Culloden, equating the same sense of awe and unease, what he describes as "the point before understanding". These are modest, personal stories, and believe them or not, they each carry a similar sense of questioning one's place in a world which is both physical and spiritual. Sometimes they are profound experiences; although at least one ('A Hand of Poker') is a wonderful shaggy dog story and a fitting end to an entertaining, thought-provoking and sometimes chilling collection.

I'm currently reading Shanks and Potiki's follow-up, loaned to me by Al who is blogging it right now. Yes, we've synchronised blogs! Head on over to Phasmatodea to read his account of When the Wind Calls Your Name.

Sino-Cit Judges

Chinese New Year is well underway, so to mark the occasion, here’s Judge Dredd’s judicial counterpart from the future Chinese megalopolis, Sino-Cit 2.

Yes, Sino-Cit 2 – the first and, presumably, largest of the Sino-Cities was overrun by zombies and nuked to prevent their spread, as were a few mega cities in the early Nineties ‘epic’ Judgement Day.

Anyway, what to say of Sino-Cit and its judges? Well, they’ve been seen twice in Dredd stories, and both fleetingly – once in a drug-induced hallucination of Dredd’s in a one-off story called War Games, which established their look as drawn by Paul Marshall. And written by Mark Millar, so don’t expect too much nuance to their cameo, they’re there just to have their bottoms handed to them by a scoobied Dredd. Nevertheless, the uniform design is there in all its briefly thrilling but ultimately unimaginative state – helmet, shoulder pads, belt pouches, mascot animal on the right shoulder (a rather un-Oriental looking dragon this time). Marshall’s original shoulder pads had a ribbed, bamboo look to them (sigh), but this disappeared by the time of the Sino Judges’ next Dredd appearance then rendered by Inako Miranda for Gordon Rennie’s Regime Change in the Judge Dredd Megazine. Ostensiby there to skulk about in a fleet of would be invading ships over Ciudad Barranquilla, they turned tail when Dredd got on the air and metaphorically handed their bottoms to them.

Depressingly, that’s all we have for Sino Cit in Dredd’s world to date, outside of Gordon Rennie’s martial arts detective pastiche Jonny Woo, set partially in the joint-Sino-Brit Cit territory of Hong Tong. I don’t have any of those strips, so my judge is based on the models provided by Marshall and Miranda.

In all, the Sino judges I think have been given the rough deal of being a little too close to the Hondo City versions (which is a tad racist, but then the Dreddverse certainly has form there) in silhouette and exoticness, and too close to the Soviet judges of the Sov Blok politically. Interestingly, it’s believed that Millar’s tale, combined with a second-tier arc about the rebuild of the (also zombie-nuked) west coast Mega City Two by – it depends on who’s telling the story, either Hondo or Sino Cities (see? Nobody even remembers the story well enough to tell the difference!) was intended to usher in a future ‘epic’ in which the Sino territories launch an attack on Mega City One. A change of editors at 2000AD put paid to that, and Millar left the comic for a lucrative career in thinly-realised hero thug stories in comics and film elsewhere and the rest is unknown.

These days I can’t see either 2000AD or the Megazine daring to go with that sort of storyline, and so perhaps for  everyone’s sake, the brief appearances of the Sino Cit judges are best left alone.

Lead Time Lords: The Cinema Doctor

The harder the pushin’ the softer the Cushing, as Spinal Tap nearly sang.

After the slog of painting the Fifth Doctor’s trousers (a literal flannelling, I must say), I gave myself a breather and chose a Doctor figure I was especially looking forward to.

In fact, I started quite a few Doctors, include the even-trickier Sixth Doctor and his coat of many colours. But this is the one I finished, and it’s the one with which I am the most content.

Like the Eighth Doctor figure, Harlequin’s Peter Cushing cinema Doctor is not a frequent attendee in painting galleries, probably because he’s not generally regarded as part of the TV series continuity. Many fans have tried to fit him into their ‘canon’, but few have done it in a way that draws crowds – even Steven Moffat couldn’t manage it for the 50th Anniversary and gave up before filming. Fair enough, but we miss a treat when we overlook Cushing’s Dr Who, star of two glorious technicolour outings in the 60s, and an unsuccessful punt at a third (again, the fan community has had fun with the notion, and some even rate Cushing and Doug McClure’s At the Earth’s Core as a squint-and-it-fits follow-up). The human Dr Who of the two movies is innocent, gentle, impish and paternal, and Cushing is every bit his charming self in the role.

I’ve tried to find touches of that charm and the technicolour (a stark contrast to the TV series at the time, of course) in this figure. I believe I read on An Evil Giraffe’s blog that the Cushing Doctor’s mould is beginning to show signs of age, and that the castings have suffered as a result. Possibly this is why my figure has a slightly pinched-looking face, with heavy hands which look like Dr Who was carrying a lead snowball in each (I filed away as much as I could.) Beyond that, however, the figure’s pretty clean, with only some filing of Harlequin’s infamous paddle feet needed to help things along. The colour palette I’ve chosen is closer to that of Cushing’s second movie, Daleks - Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D, with grey trousers instead of the Dr Who and the Daleks ochre-brown version. The sculpt’s moustache is a little fuller and droopier than the real thing (making him look a little like Rene Auberjonois' Clayton from Benson), but I’ve not touched it, as I don’t think I could do any better with green stuff. In fact, for the adventurous modeller, there's possibly room here to add a green stuff scarf and fob chain to match the film version - however, at this stage I am not an adventurous modeller!

Finally, the base: very nearly a ruined street in keeping with the Earth invasion storyline of the second movie, I instead wanted to use something that would compliment the costumes colours and not match the grey of the trousers too much; so a lurid Skarosian turquoise and green it is, and I’m really happy with the result. Perhaps it lacks some specific detail or points of interest, but colour-wise I like it.

And now, that side-step having been made, it’s back to the TV Doctors…

Oz Justice

It's Australia Day today. Happy Birthday, modern Australia.

Like New Zealand, Australia's day of celebration is a complicated thing indeed - there's the celebration of a young nation's good fortune and existence, and then there's the question of nationhood itself, and the need to acknowledge that national identity carries a hell of a lot of baggage with it, as any ex-colony might with an intact indigenous population, not to mention generations of recent immigrants creating greater diversity, more questions.

I did two illustrations of Judge Zemiro for this post, but have left the alternative one (where she's soundly thrashing a Cronulla-style flag-draped, KFC-helmeted yobbo) off. It wouldn't be right. And I got her feet wrong again, anyway.

Judge Zemiro's my creation, although Australian ("Oz") Judges exist in the Judge Dredd world, wearing the uniform depicted here. I'm not sure we've seen a female Oz Judge yet, much less one who isn't obviously Anglo-Saxon. Wait. I do remember one - I think he was supposed to be Aborigine, and like all Oz Judges he was depicted with a beer can in his hand. Classy, guys.

I have a love/hate attitude towards Oz Judges and their depiction, really. On the one hand they're portrayed as being carefree, less hung-up than Dredd and his Mega City compatriots, and in general their justice system seems heavily weighed along the lines of 'fair go to all', which is as good as you'll get in Dredd's world (or as bad, if you're Dredd of course). On the other hand, the Oz Judges are viewed through the lens as the other world judges, that of the strip's British creators. This means that the Judges of Oz nod heavily towards exported Australian culture - particularly that of the 80s, when thanks to Neighbours, Kylie Minogue and Crocodle Dundee, Australia was, for a time, huge. And it's all so bloody twee!

It could be worse, of course. Oz could have got the "so-sollee" treatment Japan/Hondo City got in its introduction to the series, or the Pan Andes Conurbs with its lazy, corrupt judges, or Murphyville with its happy-go-lucky, loikes-a-drink Ju- oh, I see. So, yes, Australia gets off lightly, but then the touch is light as well. As I mentioned above, its Judges tend to be a little bit unimaginative (a clue: the first Oz Judge co star in a Dredd strip is "Judge Bruce")for such a fascinating country, and three outings its Judges haven't strayed far at all from the Paul Hogan boiler plate they all seem to be based on, which to my mind says a lot more about the strip's writers than the future Australia. File under: Mostly Harmless, and not that interesting.

Interesting, though, is how I'd describe the very angular Oz Judge uniform. Board shorts aside, it's a lot more practical than the shoulder-heavy northern hemisphere Judge uniforms, and one assumes it's in a fabric which is both durable and breathes really really well, because there's a lot of black there, missus. Brendan McCarthy seems to have designed it again and there are some notable touches - a badge which appears to reference the Sydney Opera House (turn it the other way around and flatten its base and you almost get the shape of Australia!), and there's not a lot of green on it, despite it being one of Australia's noted national colours. This actually works in its favour because not only should yellow and green never be seen, but it removes the costume from the usual accusation critics lay at the Dredd world international judges of them being based too much on national costumes, flags (Ireland, Scotland, Japan) or just novelty hats. McCarthy did well, really, and debuted the design some months before the Dredd epic Oz actually brought in the Judges themselves. I'm not sure if he was living in Australia at the time (as he did for a while, working design on one of George Miller's aborted Mad Max sequels), but I'd mark it a success. It also has a great profile

Like Australia itself, really. Great place. Interesting country, nice people, beautiful landscape, and not bad neighbours to have at all. Happy Australia Day!

Jose Ortiz

On 23rd of December 2013 the world of graphic novels lost Jose Ortiz Moya.

Hombre

 Ortiz was one of the old school of European artists working in Fleetway’s stable in the 70s and through to the 80s, although he did far more than those familiar comics, and even worked with some bigger names, in particular Vampirella and the celebrated post-Apocalyptic series Hombre. A talent for portraying the macabre and desolated landscapes would serve him well, however, with what Fleetway had in mind for him.

Tower King

My introduction to Ortiz’ work was through Eagle and the- yes, post-Apocalyptic Tower King. Set in a modern London after the entire planet has had its electrical power ripped away by a rogue satellite, The Tower King nodded its way to Mad Max and his predecessors, but unlike, say, Damnation Alley or A Boy and his Dog stayed entirely within the city, sensibly taking up the opportunities its slow decay could offer visually – Ortiz’ sketchy style seems perfect for reducing such landmarks as Big Ben’s tower and, of course the Tower of London itself to dusty, matchstick ruin. I love the look of it, and Ortiz renders his hero Mick Tempest like his other leading men - weathered and drawn, sketchy and leathery, toughened by the challenging landscape around them.  Similarly, his turn on companion strip The House of Daemon drew on Ortiz’ skill with horror to produce a truly phantasmagorical strip that, in black and white simple ink, held its own impressively among the comic’s louder photo strips. I relished both Tower King and Daemon, and stuck with them until their equally satisfying conclusions (reliably, scripted by John Wagner and Alan Grant), but as I’ve described earlier on this blog, I didn’t linger with Eagle; my loss, in a way, because it meant that I missed out on the comic’s devouring of ill-fated horror mag Scream and the much-celebrated Thirteenth Floor series, a horror based around a sentient elevator which reunited Ortiz with Grant and Wagner.

House of Daemon

I’d moved to 2000AD, as the story goes, but Ortiz moved with me, providing the initial episode of a Dredd world strip I still harbour a soft spot for, Helltrekkers (Wagner and Grant again, testing the waters early for the Judge Dredd Megazine) and more ambitiously, a stint on Rogue Trooper, which moved the blue-skinned genetic infantryman from Nu Earth to the even more alien world of Horst. Ortiz’s turn (and the larger Horst storyline) isn’t recalled fondly, following as it does such a strong run by the likes of Cam Kennedy and an at-his-peak Brett Ewins, yet Horst’s weird, bestial soldiers based around the forms of bats, lizards and (to a suspiciously Gigeresque end) horseshoe crabs came out the better for being rendered by Jose, I think.

Rogue Trooper

So Ortiz, for an old-school artist, proved an effective bridging artist between my Eagle days and my 2000AD future. His work didn’t have the immediate crazy thrill of a Mick McMahon, Kev O’Neill or Ian Gibson piece (alongside whom he’d feature), nor the clean lines of Brian Bolland and his detractors, but instead alongside other Euro artists like Ezquerra, Massimo Belardinelli and Jesus Redondo, he’d bring in a fluid style that for a while complemented 2000AD’s woozy, weird and ravaged worlds.

It's a style which I miss already.