I haven’t had such fun contemplating the loss of my soul since I don’t know when.  Drag Me To Hell is an absolute hoot:  Sam Raimi’s first horror film in a while is tremendous stuff, a chance for the director to let his hair down outside the constraints of the Spider-Man franchise and do what he does so well.

It’s a grisly comic of the old school, the EC ones that critics reckoned were such a pernicious influence on America’s youth and that probably formed part of the Raimi brothers’ reading material.  The brothers wrote the film together, and the story is pretty simple; it’d be a shame to overanalyse it in an attempt to make it more grown up…you’re missing the point if that’s where your thoughts are headed.

Alison Lohman plays a young woman who works at a bank, eager to get a promotion not just because of the money but because she’s overheard her boyfriend’s snooty mother be dismissive of her and that won’t do.  The opening sequence neatly depicts all this and leads to her turning down an old gypsy lady’s plea for mercy regarding being behind with her mortgage.  Well, I don’t know what it is they say about not messing with old gypsy ladies, but this particular one puts a curse on Lohman, that will result in her soul being gobbled up by a demon in a few days time.  Whoops.

You’d like to think that at a time like this, a woman can rely on her boyfriend.  But Lohman’s is a professor of psychology, who will have no truck with talk of gypsy curses and demons.  This he makes plain to the Indian psychic his beloved consults for advice about her predicament.  His fashionable rationalism is no use when it comes to matters of the heart or beyond the grave, and he ends up ponying up a hefty chunk of change for Lohman to return to the guru, this time backed up by a woman who has met the demon before and wants to take it down: this thing is personal.

It’s a straightforward enough tale, but delivered with panache in every respect.  The images and edits work a treat, everything timed to perfection to ensure that the shocks keep a-comin’.  And if it’s not visual unpleasantness like nosebleeds with the force of garden hoses, or eyeballs appearing in cakes, then it’s more conceptual stuff, as when our heroine has to despatch her beloved kitty in an attempt to throw the demon off her scent.

No such luck.  She offs the kitty and still the demon heads in her direction, even though the gypsy woman who pointed it at her is by now dead.  And Mrs Ganush’s death provides what Lohman hopes is a get-out clause in her relationship with the thing from the pit.  Only, this being the sort of tale it is, things don’t work out the way she had in mind…

It’s brilliantly executed stuff that brings to mind Spielberg for the way it delivers thrills and spills with cleverly thought through visual storytelling.  The whole is more than capably delivered, and if it feels somewhat insubstantial then…well, just deal with it ok?  Not every story has to have a message.  And this one probably does, even if it’s a fairly straightforward one about not foreclosing on property deals with women who clearly dabble in the dark arts.  As morality tales go, it might not have the depth of Sophie’s Choice, but it’s got a certain something.

How much do you need to know about a character before you can write about them?  A lot of books on writing urge that you develop detailed biographies of your characters, covering everything from the first time they went to the dentist to the state of their bowels. 

I’m not convinced.  What matters isn’t the quantity of what you know, but the quality.  And most of all, how your character will react to the events that you put them through in your story.  Which makes sense: a person’s choices determine their character, rather than it being a Platonic absolute.

Besides, who could honestly say that they can separate out character from story?  The two are entwined in writing, or at any rate should be.  If not, then you’re in danger either of reeling out heaps of backstory that changes the present situation not a jot, or losing sight of what the story is about by unrolling plot complexities.

Neither of those extremes is to be welcomed.  Think how little you can get away with: Lee Marvin in Point Blank is defined totally by his need to put things right in his eyes.  Never mind the odds, he’s going to see that he gets his dues.   And that stance defines every choice that follows.  It’s not sophisticated, but it’s hugely effective.  Same goes for the characters Mifune plays in Kurosawa’s films: we don’t know a great deal about their backgrounds, but their actions right here right now speak volumes.  And that’s what counts onscreen.

The need for extensive character background is symptomatic of the influence of psychoanalytic theory on writers.  English students have to put up with more Freud than psychology ones do, for the most part.  And it’s in many ways a pernicious influence.  This is before we get into the kind of stuff peddled by Kristeva and other French theorists, arguments against academic tenure if ever I came across them. 

I can, I guarantee you, come up with a half dozen or more explanations for why anyone does anything.  Doesn’t mean that any one of them is true.  Let alone that I believe any of them, save the most unlikely, which at least I’d have some fondness for on the basis that its unlikeliness makes me less inclined to take it seriously.

Besides, stories work at their best when characters behave in unexpected ways.  Someone who zigs when you’re expecting them to zag is interesting.  And all of this is in the remit of that most basic of the brain’s functions; pattern detection. 

You don’t need polysyllables, reference to dimly understood science, or echoes of long dead poets to tickle the brain; just present it with things that don’t fit whatever models it may have been encouraged to develop over time.  That way lies stimulation, which an audience will like you for.  And which your own brain will like you for coming up with, for that matter.

That said, not everything should be a surprise.  That way lies overload, as anyone who’s tackled Finnegans Wake can testify: not even the individual words can be trusted there.  Some of David Lynch’s work has a similar effect on me: there comes a point when you’ve been dazzled so much that it becomes old hat.

Notably, both Joyce and Lynch go so far in their experiments that they effectively abandon story, or go meta to it or something equally clever.  Which there’s a time and place for, but not one that I’m especially interested in as someone intent on making films that audiences will relish. 

The bottom line where screenplays are concerned is establishing some fixed points for the audience, and not turning over too many of them.  Ration out your surprises: The Crying Game’s works brilliantly, and wouldn’t be assisted by the reveal that one of the characters is from another world. 

And all of this brings us back to where we started: with character.  A friend who enters into a polyamorous relationship is one thing.  If they do so at the same time as standing for election as a BNP candidate it might be a bit too much to take in.   One rule of thumb I picked up from writer Michael Eaton is that the protagonist of your story is the one who the biggest change happens to.  Figure that out, and odds are you’ll be writing the story an audience wants to know about.

These days, I’m not really sure what Marvel’s Nick Fury is up to.  The superspy boss of S.H.I.E.L.D was given a dramatic new look by Mark Millar, more notable for his promotional skills than his writing for the most part.  That new look?  Well, if you’ve seen Samuel L. Jackson you’re picturing exactly the actor that Millar wants to play Fury, and may indeed do so in one of Marvel’s forthcoming films.

Now, I’m not particularly a fan of the spy genre.  Kind of liked James Bond when I was younger, but by then Dr Who already had a hold on my imagination.  And where books were concerned I preferred the seedy world of Len Deighton; Funeral in Berlin, The Ipcress File, etc.

It’s only as my appreciation of seminal comics artist Jack Kirby has grown that I’ve become interested in the work of Jim Steranko and his particular take on the adventures of Nick Fury and his chums.  Steranko was a one-off, a musician who was also a close-up magician and escapologist, who also happened to be a dynamic artist with an advertising background.

Steranko took over Fury’s stories, initially over breakdowns supplied by Jack Kirby, who pretty much defined the look of Marvel’s comics.  But in short order, Steranko was trusted to create the stories entirely on his own, writing and colouring the adventures of the superspy as well as drawing them.  As you can see from these pages, Steranko thought in terms of the overall design of the page in more sophisticated ways than his contemporaries.  He built on Kirby’s innovations, using collage and photo-montage, and took them further still with influences from the likes of Dali and rock concert posters of the era.  No doubt about it, Steranko was pushing the boundaries of what comic art was at the time.

It was clear that Nick Fury had been created by grown-ups for an audience of youngsters: the agent’s hair was already greying in his sixties appearances, Fury having earned his reputation in World War Two.  Presumably Stan Lee was wary of identifying him with a war where good and bad were less cut and dried; Korea was far too ambiguous, let alone Vietnam.  And his cronies, most famously bowler hatted ‘Dum Dum’ Dugan, were of similar vintage.

Steranko’s approach was to make Fury a slimmer and sexier figure, influenced by the filmic versions of James Bond, and to similarly make his world one of amazing gadgets, gorgeous women, fast cars and deadly enemies.  And it works a treat: if you were 13 at the time it would have been amazing stuff.  Now, it holds up because of the quality of what Steranko brought to the page; energy, pace, and in particular design sensibilities.

Make no mistake, Nick Fury comics are nonsense, but nonsense of a high order.  If you’ve ever enjoyed Our Man Flint, The Prisoner, or Connery-era Bond, you’ll hopefully warm to these improbable yarns of two-fisted agents battling the sinister squadrons of HYDRA, each side keeping abreast of the other’s latest developments through a network of moles.  Which gives me a story idea, come to think: what if HYDRA and S.H.I.E.L.D. are actually the same organisation, pushing technology forward by trying to outsmart the other?

Being an innovator and a perfectionist, Steranko was never going to match Kirby’s relentless pace, and to make money the more entrepreneurially inclined Steranko set up his own publishing operation.  Kirby remembered him in the form of Mister Miracle, superhero escape artist, in his powerful run on New Gods for DC having escaped Marvel’s shackles in the early 70s.  But for me, to really remember Jim Steranko, you only have to look through the pages of his work on Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Like many of Hitchcock’s films, 1958’s Vertigo has elements of a thriller.  But what the director is really interested in is the psychology of its troubled stars.  James Stewart has an uncharacteristically dark role as a detective hired by an old college chum to follow said chum’s wife around.  She, Kim Novak, is prone to wandering off in a trance, and seems to believe that she may be the reincarnation of her grandmother.  Hubby is concerned about this, so wants Stewart to provide the sort of information that will help her get suitable psychiatric treatment.

So far, straightforward enough.  But why does the husband knowingly hire Stewart, who’s been retired from the police force owing to his vertigo?  Especially since the action takes place in San Francisco, which is made out of steep surfaces: Stewart’s going to come a cropper sooner or later.  And that’s precisely what happens, when Novak falls from a belltower and he’s unable to come to her aid.  Oops.

By this time, Stewart is gaga over Novak and understandably upset by her death.  But that’s just the start of the story…

Novak’s wealthy husband set the whole situation up using a lookalike for his wife, also played by Novak, to plant the idea that she was already suicidal as well as doolally (technical term).  And Stewart comes across the lookalike and decides she’s going to replace the dead woman in his affections.

As you might imagine, there’s a good dose of old school psychoanalytical guff going on around all this.  Stewart’s attraction to Novak #1 is based in part on her flimsy attachment to reality: she is a flighty thing obsessed by her resemblance to an ancestor in a painting, and hardly seems to be a creature of this earth at all, needing a man’s shoulders and lips to ground her.  Novak #2 is very much grounded, complicit as she is in duping Stewart, and surprised to find that he’s obessesed with making her into Novak #1 after the latter’s death.

It’s this kind of business, full of projection in other words, that makes the film tick.  And it’s very good on the mechanisms of attraction, getting into the headspace where love is all around: Novak is first encountered in pulsating reds after an opening that mainly features drab washed out tones.  No wonder she makes such an impact on Stewart, and all seems well enough at first.  But his obsessiveness in turning Novak #2 into Novak #1 is majorly creepy, as he sits in on her dress fittings, commands her to get her hair done just so, and otherwise turns her into what Cliff Richard called in his similarly distressing fashion a living doll.

As a look at Hitchcock’s own obsessions with women it’s a fine piece of work, brave and honest about the way men and women can be with each other when at least one party is not as stable as they could be.  It can’t help but bring up the notion of the man or woman who has a particular ‘type’ and seems to go for them time and again, and which we’ll have seen friends do if we’re not guilty of it ourselves.  How much of this is in the novel that Vertigo began life as, D’Entre Les Morts by Perre Bouleau and Thomas Narcijac, and how much Hitchcock goaded out of adaptors Alec Coppel and Samuel Taylor, I couldn’t tell you.

Personally though, I’d have liked a few more thriller beats, and the genius filmmaking that Hitchcock brings to the genre.  Only, on this occasion he was wanting to do something more grown-up (in his eyes at least), which accounts for Vertigo being overlooked on its initial release, and it taking a while to unveil its pleasures to later audiences, who’ve gone on to feature it in cinema Top Ten lists pretty regularly.  For me, no way does it rate that highly, but it’s without doubt a fascinating film that will leave your head swimming with questions afterwards.

The times, it seems, are a-changing.  Supposedly staid, our nation of shopkeepers is hot under the collar about fraudulent MPs.  And quite right too.  Personally, I’m hoping the outcome of this sentiment is a wave of people standing as independent candidates at the next general election.  As for the upcoming June 4 elections, I do have some concern that the UKIP and BNP numpties will make an impression — but am confident that the subsequent behaviour of their representatives will make voters realise they’ve made a mistake not to be repeated.  One thing you can rely on fascists for, train timetables notwithstanding, is knuckleheadedness.

The preceding is by way of indicating that sometimes public mood can be sensed, and right now the sense of injustice is palpable.  And it is, perhaps inevitably, fanned by people with an agenda: The Daily Telegraph, no fan of the Labour party but rightly vexed with the way that Tories too are nose-deep in the public trough.

All of which of says that playing with the mood of crowds is an interesting business.  And if you want to see it done well, watch Britain’s Got Talent.  Seriously.  That show plays with emotions like Hendrix played a guitar, taking audiences at home and in the studio from agony to ecstasy and back again in virtuoso fashion.

What can be learned from this?  Well, it shows for one thing that there’s a tremendous appetite for emotional experience.  Which, at its root, is what storytelling can provide.  But can drama hope to equal the raw emotion generated by a show like BGT?  The elements involved are straightforward enough: contestants who have the look and feel of reality about them, all with some or other gift for performance that they hope the public will like.  A studio audience, whose cheers and boos have more impact on performers mostly unused to large audiences than old hands would be.  And a panel of judges headed up by Simon Cowell, whose shrewd assessments come with either a seal of approval or withering dismissal.

Put all these ingredients together and it’s no wonder that BGT has captured the public imagination.  It presses buttons in people, triggering first one emotion then its opposite and back again in rapid succession.  In hypnosis, that technique is called fractionation: you induce a particular state in someone, then do something else, then reaccess that state, and so on, the effect being to heighten that state when it is experienced again.  Which isn’t to say that the programme makers are knowingly using mesmerism, just that such devices can be found should you recognise what you’re experiencing.

The social dynamics of the show are as interesting as its psychology.  One tremendously popular act is Stavros Flatley, a 40 year old Cypriot dad and his 12 year old son who simply loon around parodying yer Riverdance man with a genuinely funny act that makes abundantly clear the strength of the relationship between the two.  It’s a delight to see, when the media is full of stuff about deadbeat dads and the Child Support Agency.  Similarly, dance troupe Diversity are a glorious counterblast to the notion that young people, black ones in particular, are a danger to society at large.  And that’s important.

Back in the world of television drama, there still aren’t enough examples of Britain today visible in the cast and in storylines.  There are still tired tales of arranged marriages whenever an Asian family moves into a soap street, and there has to be so much more than that: I know there is, because an Asian taxi driver I got a ride with today got talking about a true life story that comes from his family and he would love to be able to find an audience for.

Is it any wonder that YouTube is so popular?  If people can’t see themselves represented in all their fullness in mainstream drama, they’ll start to look elsewhere for reflections of their lives.  That applies to different aspects of cultural diversity, but also to emotional range: the clips that people urge me to view on YouTube are largely ones which inspire empathy, and through that connection humour, hope, or whatever else the subjects of homemade clips are experiencing.  And we as writers have to offer connections just as strong in the work that we create.

The title for this piece comes from an early Frank Zappa track, pretty much at the time when an album he released was subject to a curiously American form of censorship: the words ‘War means work for all’ were printed in grayscale rather than solid black, making it easier for them to blend into the background.

It was around that time, when I was exploring Zappa’s back catalogue, that I spent a summer in the States.  I met some lovely people doing all kinds of amazing things, many of them for progressive lobby groups around the country, work that I was involved in as a door to door canvasser.

One particular guy I stayed in touch with: we had various geekeries in common, not least a shared enthusiasm for the Church of the SubGenius.  He was living in a small community, and went out and put ‘cancel’ signs over posters for Republican candidates in a local election.  Harmless anarcho-pranking…that took on a whole new dimension when you realised the reality of what he was doing: going out in a vehicle, with a ladder and a stencil, to graffiti over propaganda — in a town where he was seen as a freak, and where the cops wore guns.  You could call his actions juvenile, but don’t call them unconsidered: he knew exactly what risks he was taking.

But of course, I’m being alarmist.  No way in 21st century America do citizens have to fear what that oddball did, right?  Well, it’d be nice to think so.  And then I heard about Christopher Handley.  A fan of Japanese manga and anime living in a small town received a package of same which the local postmaster deemed obscene.  The police picked Handley up when he came to collect the package, and then seized his entire collection of comics, DVDs, and books.

Now, I’m no fan of the majority of manga I’ve come across.  And I do believe that a considerable chunk of it depicts women in such a way that they’re fetishised and infantilised.  But I also believe that the same applies to the way women are portrayed in the mainstream American media: Britney Spears and Paris Hilton register for me in the same way as a panty-dispensing machine on the Tokyo subway.

Besides, the images in question are drawn.  Ink from the imagination, not pixels depicting actual flesh.  And to be clear, no child porn was found — just 150-300 images deemed to be obscene…about the same as I’d experience if I watched MTV for a morning and had lunch at Hooters.  And never mind thinking you’re safe to look at what you want in your own home: the judge in this case has decided that an individual “has no right to possess obscene materials that have been moved in interstate commerce“. Hmm: so you could look at the same pics online and be fine, but not in hard form as delivered to your door?  I smell bullshit.

Handley, as a result of this unwholesome business, is now being tested for drug use on a regular basis, and has been ordered to have counselling.  Which brings us back to today’s headline: Handley is guilty of thought crime, and could be sentenced to twenty years for possessing the same kind of drawings that teenage boys pass round in dull geography lessons.

What can we do about this?  The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund exists to protect people against specious court cases.  They’re good people.  Check them out: I’ve just signed up for the basic $25 membership.  Let’s see if we can get a few people reading this blog to sign up too.  Remember: first they came for the manga fans, but I did not worry because I was no fan of manga.  Then they came for the people with ironic Cthulhu novelties…

What is it that makes a given story mythic, and why should that matter?  It’s a question I come back to time and again, and it cropped up this morning in a script doctoring session with a director who’s soon to be shooting his next short, and wants to feel that he’s nailed the script.

I won’t go into the details for reasons of confidentiality, but what it boils down to is getting a key scene right, in which the protagonist is manipulated into doing something by a twisted father figure.  It’s good stuff, with plenty of dramatic juice, but another reader the director had consulted had suggested that the story is too redolent of the work of Shane Meadows. 

Viewed one way at least, there was validity in that perspective.  But only if you overlooked the director’s intention, which was a dark world away from the majority of what Meadows does.  How to establish the distinction in ways that will come across in the finished film?  That’s where we ended up taking a stroll into myth.

The first notion I had was that the scene is a twisted Arthurian legend, only Arthur is corrupt, and his knight is too simple minded to see through the ruses that his king uses him to do his bidding.  That perception worked for us both, especially since it gave us a useful take on other characters in the story as rival knights.

Next up, I took the notion that the senior figure is effectively offering his henchman the Devil’s bargain, and cast the former as Satan and the latter as Adam in the Garden.  Again, just a notion.  But for the actors to be given the concept that they’re playing Arthurian or Biblical archetypes enables them to bring something to the scene that you certainly wouldn’t get in Shane’s work.  Instead, they start to inhabit the same space as characters in Kurosawa say, where they are emblematic of a type as well as being characters in themselves.

The trick with this kind of stuff is not laying it on too thick.  It’s all very well being redolent of Shakespeare if that’s what you’re performing, quite another thing if you’re shoehorning it into a by-the-numbers genre tale.  There’s a balance to be struck between genre-appropriate beats and moments which elevate the whole into something greater than the sum of its parts.  

Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead does this masterfully in the world of the thriller, primal family issues etched into the DNA of the story.  And you’ve got to admire the way George Lucas makes movie magic from mythic ingredients in Star Wars, while maintaining B-movie pace.  Even Blades of Glory has a touch of the epic about it amid the knowing nonsense, that makes the jollity all the more genuine.

Acknowledging the mythic is the ‘how’ of how to make your story universal.  Most audiences couldn’t care less that your aunt and uncle ran a sweet shop and that you want to write a story inspired by your memories of working there.  Bring in elements of first love and an adolescent’s realisation that aunt and uncle lead a life as troubled as mum and dad, and you’re raising a mirror to the experiences of audiences at large, whether or not their experience includes sweet shops, whether or not it was their aunt and uncle that taught them life lessons their parents couldn’t.

It’s that notion of the mirror, the chance to see and feel our own lives reflected in the fiction we choose, that allows prosaic material to be shaped into something archetypal.  And yes, that is another word for cliche at times: there’s a reason some stereotypes have power, and in the quest for novelty it’s too easy to ignore something with mythic resonance.  Novelty has its place, yes, but it’s that mythic quality audiences respond to, and if you can find it in your work, polish it until it becomes a mirror that people can see their own lives in.  They’ll thank you for it.

Bottom line is that I’m a content provider.  The word ‘writer’ is more evocative, but what it’s all about is filling time.  And there’s so much of it to fill.  With the proliferation of tv channels, ever more inventive ways of occupying peoples’ attention are required.  And it’s worth keeping tabs on what’s out there, not just on the mainstream channels but off piste.

In this case, I’ve chanced on a show called UK Border Force on Sky 3.  And it’s fascinating stuff.  Pretty William Gibson in fact, inasmuch as science fiction often provides us with a glimpse of the unexpected present.  The protagonists work for the Home Office in exploring immigration cases, and with an esimated million people in the UK unlawfully there’s plenty to keep them busy.

One way to find suspects is to lurk around London’s tube stations.  The brief is to look for people who look distressed in response to the presence of these uniformed officials, and that includes upstanding citizens who see no reason for such work to be performed in public or at all.  Does that entitle the powers that be to handcuff people objecting to the exercise of their duties?

That’s an interesting question, and implicitly political: I can see the appeal of this show to BNP supporters, but the programme and the stories it portrays are more nuanced than single brain celled organisms could cope with.  Sure, a Jamaican guy is held and found to have 96 packs of cocaine inside him — a chance for us to see the modified toilet facilities used to examine what he expels.  Yay, one yardie busted!  But a Canadian man who’s come to stay with a girlfriend he’s met online, only the girlfriend is a bloke, which he felt too complicated to explain…is indeed allowed in.  Not the sort of result a fascist would approve of.

The biggest story is about a raid on a spring onion farm where illegal labourers are working — that tale results in the company providing the labour being given a hefty fine, which is one in the eye for the free market.  In all then, this is interesting stuff if you have any kind of curiosity about how the mechanisms of the state function with regard to enforcing migration laws.

Plus, there are some laughs to be had along the way.  When a Nigerian man proves curiously unable to produce his date of birth, the sardonic response from the enforcer is ‘It’s the day you get all them cards’.  And the whole business with the Canadian and his lover is kind of cute, even if it does point to government having jurisdiction over matters of the heart that could have gone another way with a less open minded interviewer.

Policing reflects the concerns a society has, though whether those fears are sincere or distorted and heightened by the media is a valid question.  And I’d rather that policing of all sorts is open to being seen on tv than being secret.  Problem there being that there’s a kind of of rough and ready unlawfulness that’s of immediate fascination to cameras, while more subtle white collar crime is effectively invisible.  And the bigger stories that may be involved in some stories to do with immigration would need considerably more work to convey onscreen than the kind of voyeurism that UK Border Force traffics in.

It started with an email from my friend Pip, who is doing a writing course: ‘need recommendations for the best ever graphic novels… thought you might have an idea or two?’.  What follows are the two emails I sent her, late last night and first thing this morning, which I thought might be worth other people having a look at too.

Well, everyone’s favourite Watchmen has got to be there, for its formal complexity and way with symbols plus its whole take on what had been a
juvenile form, Alan Moore’s writing singlehandedly dragging it through adolescence and into adulthood with the assistance of artist Dave Gibbons.  And you really do need to check out more of Alan Moore, a truly stunning writer at times.  V for Vendetta is also very fine, a dystopic tale with art by David Lloyd.  Many reckon Moore’s triumph is From Hell, a Ripper tale with sublime Eddie Campbell art.

Not a graphic novel as such, but a truly beautiful artwork loved by Joyce among others, George Herriman’s Krazy Kat shows masterful abilities at creating moments on the page that couldn’t happen in prose.  Everything is done by Herriman, from the character designs to the lettering, and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts: and this from a newspaper strip that started in the 1920s.

Contemporary creators who deserve a look very definitely include Scottish writer Grant Morrison.  He’s done heaps of work for Marvel and DC, much of which is very good.  Perhaps his best work is We3, an amazing creation about animals that have been modified with experiments for use by the military: beautifully illustrated by Frank Quitely, in a tale that’s as touching as it is inventive.  His long-running series The Invisibles is a flawed gem, riffing on themes done in prose by Robert Anton Wilson among others, with a long list of artists.  It’s a startling kaleidoscopic experience, and remarkable that it was published by a DC imprint.

Thrillers are undergoing something of a renaissance in comics.  Ed Brubaker’s Sleeper is a stunning example, set in a world where some people
have powers, and one of them is undercover in an organisation of bad guys — the only person to know his real identity is now in a coma.  It’s bleak and brilliant stuff, wonderfully illustrated by Sean Phillips.  And then there’s Scalped, the ongoing tale of an American Indian reservation where the construction of a casino is the focal point for the energies of corrupt elders who used to be part of a more radical generation — writer Jason Aaron is brilliant, as is R.M Guera’s art.

Brian K Vaughan’s Y: The Last Man, illustrated by Pia Guerra, is a long tale about the last man on the planet, and his interactions with groups of women searching for new ways of life as he travels to find his fiance in Australia. Also doing some wandering, in a version of the American frontier that owes as much to myth as history, is Wolverine McAlistaire, the protagonist of writer and artist William Messner Loeb’s Journey, a curiosity recently republished in two volumes by IDW.

Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg is a stunning satirical science fiction yarn created by writer and artist Howard Chaykin, whose design sense and intelligence shine through: this book is just as significant as Watchmen in terms of comics reaching some kind of maturity in the 80s.  Now, the best science fiction title is Finder, written and drawn by Carla Speed McNeil, who I interviewed and is a fabulous woman: she calls her approach ‘aboriginal sf’ and it’s a delight.

Warren Ellis is a hit or miss writer, and one of his hits is a superb graphic novella called Aetheric Mechanics.  It’s a tale of an alternative
steampunk world, and I shall say no more for fear of spoiling what happens within its black and white pages.  Art by Gianluca Pagliarani.  Fell is an excellent tale about a detective who is posted to a creepy place called Snowtown, darkly evoked by the impressionist art of Ben Templesmith.

Steve Gerber is the man who showed that even Marvel comics could be grown up.  In Howard the Duck he created a misanthropic mallard ‘trapped in a world he never made’, with a mix of satire and emotional credibility that made the best issues truly distinctive — Gerber’s work in the seventies influenced those who came after, not least Alan Moore.  Howard had several artists, but is most associated with Gene Colan, whose ability to capture convincing people helped bring the concept to off-kilter life.  Gerber’s unfinished Omega the Unknown series was recently revisited by novelist Jonathan Lethem and indie artist Farel Dalrymple.

Cerebus is noteworthy if only because its 300 issues were delivered by a team of two.  David Sim conceived the aardvark hero, and wrote, drew and published his adventures alone for a while before being joined by Gerhard on backgrounds.  It started off as an unsubtle send-up of the likes of Conan, but soon grew into a sophisticated tale encompassing commentary on religion and politics that experimented with storytelling and art techniques to good effect.  Sadly, the series lost steam after around issue 200, as Sim became increasingly prone to incorporating his bizarre real world views — he is a monotheist with a sexist outlook — into the series.  Still, there are a few collected volumes: Jaka’s Story, Church & State, High Society and maybe more — which really do show comics at its finest as an artform.

Another ardent self-publisher is Kyle Baker, whose Nat Turner is a superb account of a man instrumental in giving a voice to slaves in America.  It’s a virtuoso piece of cartooning, using few words to tell a tale with devastating impact.  In a lighter mood, Baker’s take on Plastic Man for DC
is pretty much definitive funnybook stuff, endlessly inventive and very very funny.

Eddie Campbell is a good writer as well as a striking artist, and I particularly recommend his autobiographical works.  They start with the Alec
tales, which have the feel of life about them, but when Campbell moves to Australia his biographical work takes on a new more inventive form, seen at its strongest in Graffiti Kitchen.  They’re about to be reprinted in new collections by Top Shelf, so I’d wait until they’re ready before investing in any.  Campbell has also done a remarkable job at adapting spoken word pieces by Alan Moore into graphic form: rather than Moore scripting what happens, Campbell has done amazing multi-media interpretations which enrich Moore’s tales of psychogeographical and personal exploration: see The Birth Caul and Snakes & Ladders.

Newer to the game is Jason Lutes, whose Berlin is now two chunky volumes complete, with one to go.  It’s a tale of the titular city before World War Two, a rich and rewarding multi-stranded tale about Europe on the cusp of war.  The artwork is deceptively simple and in a minimal style, and the whole is compelling and involving.

Going back to the forties, Will Eisner’s character The Spirit was a yarn about a detective whose enemies thought he was dead.  Storywise it’s decent pulp, but the art elevates it into something else: Eisner (and his anonymous studio hands) did amazing things with the structure of a comics page that continue to influence artists today.  More recently, Darwyn Cooke has reinvented The Spirit, and his superb old school cartooning is vibrant and beautifully designed.  His take on the origins of DC’s Justice League in the form of The New Frontier is stunning adventure fiction, as is his work on Batman: Ego.

Peter Bagge is an angry middle aged man now, but twenty years ago his work savagely chronicled American family life in the form of the series Hate, before following eldest son Buddy Bradley in his adventures as a young man in Seattle during the grunge era.  Two fat volumes collect the entire sequence, which is vitriolic, convincing, and deeply funny.

Pete Milligan is perhaps the most overlooked of the British writers of his generation.  And arguably the best.  Check out Human Target (various
artists) for a sequence of thrillers that ask powerful questions about identity, featuring a protagonist who impersonates others and is unsure of
who he actually is.  And the first two thirds of Shade the Changing Man, also for DC, are fascinating: a road movie through America’s psyche with art by Chris Bachalo, first reprint volume available and others to follow.  For Marvel, his X-Statix (later X Force) is a biting satire about celebrity, with some potent ideas running through it and iconic art by Mike Allred.

Frank Miller is now known as a film director, for Sin City.  But his comics work has the stroke of genius about it at times.  His take on Batman, The
Dark Knight Returns, is seminal stuff, jointly responsible with Watchmen for bringing comics to the attention of the media back in the late 80s.  Ronin, from the same period, is well worth looking at too, overlooked at the time because it brought unfamiliar Japanese influences to a market that wasn’t prepared for them.  But perhaps my favourite Miller outing is his Batman: Year One, which he wrote and was drawn with stark elegance by David Mazzuchelli.  The latter is also responsible for an amazing adaptation of Paul Auster’s City of Glass that realises the book in another medium in a bold and adventurous fashion.

So, there we go.  The list is slanted to Anglophone material and features precious few women, but it’s nevertheless an accurate account of what I believe the best comics work to be.  Please dispute my conclusions if you wish…

The world of Star Trek has been tractor-beaming audiences from whatever else they’re doing and holding them in their chairs for four decades.  The charm of the show is its endless faith in humanity’s ability to come to harmonious solutions to the problems it encounters out there in the galaxy.  Many of the shows from the first classic series are parables, tales about how to do the right thing in a universe where things get pretty darn strange at times.  Though not so strange that Kirk can’t sort them out with a biff or a snog, more often than not.

Later series depart from that set-up, and tend to suffer for it, though some of the individual episodes are gems.  And in some ways the newer series have aged worse than the classic show: Next Generation was never far from a tiresome homily about parents and children, and the fact that the crew included a touchy-feely empath rather than a logical Vulcan signalled that we’d entered the age of the inner child and the meaningful hug.  Ick.

The show’s film spin-offs have been a mixed bag too.  True fans can argue the details, but common sense has it that for non-addicts pretty much the only tolerable one is the fourth, featuring the Enterprise crew coming back to contemporary Earth, lured by whalesong.  The others are pretty much for devotees only.

And now we have a new film, helmed by Lost creator JJ Abrams, and the good news is it’s a doozy.  Abrams has chosen to set the story way back when our heroes — the proper ones that is, Kirk and Spock and Scotty and Bones etc — were at the start of their careers.  Well, before that even, as the wonderful sequence with a pre-adolescent Kirk at the wheel of a sportscar demonstrates.  It’s a bold move, but it works a treat: the old icons are back, but this time they’re played by considerably better actors than those whose shoes they’re stepping into.

If you’ve got any affection for the show at all — and I mean as a regular viewer and not a Trek obsessive — you’ll find this a hugely enjoyable spectacle.  The story rightly belongs to Kirk and Spock, finding their feet in their own lives and with regard to one another, and all the others get appropriate look-ins for good measure.  It’s good-humoured stuff, and moves like shit off a shovel, Abrams realising that a contemporary audience for a science fiction film is not going to take kindly to soliloquies about temporal paradoxes unless they’re accompanied by cool action sequences and interesting camerawork.  All of which it delivers in abundance.

The film ticks off every box it needs to, and I don’t mean that in a cynical fashion.  When you’re re-presenting characters that an audience has real fondness for, do so by showing respect to the icons.  Let them say the lines you know people are waiting to hear, and then by all means add a twist, whether a moment of comedy, or a new spin on old material: Uhuru and Spock being in a relationship is a cool new touch.  There’s also a clever use of a classic Trek trope, when Kirk is abandoned on a planet of ice, and encounters first a fearsome beast, then its even scarier predator, before meeting an old friend…a very old friend.

The look and feel of the film is terrific.  Rather than the anaemic future often postulated in Trek, this one is visceral and convincing.  When the Enterprise hits warp speed it’s like a bullet from a gun.  Similarly, the interiors are credible — the engine rooms have a scale they’ve not had before, which makes Scotty’s job all the more demanding as he runs round them trying to eek out another few mph out of the dilithium crystals — and the digital effects are seamlessly integrated into the whole, rather than looking like dodgy airbrushing.

If 60s Trek was all about American foreign policy in outer space, and by the 90s it had become about a ship of therapy victims resolving their issues, the new Star Trek film is very much a product of the Obama presidency: full of promise, and wearing the lessons of the past lightly while treading towards an uncertain future.  I for one will be sticking around for any sequels.