Re: Re[2]: "Comic Books"

From: Mark Grant (mark@unicorn.com)
Date: Fri Jul 25 1997 - 02:56:32 MDT


On Wed, 23 Jul 1997, Guru George wrote:

> These are indeed both excellent graphic novels, some of the best in
> the field.

Personally I loved 'V for Vendetta', at least as a work of art and
political propaganda; I wasn't as impressed with the story itself. V never
really had any problems to solve, he/she/it could do just about anything
they wanted to. And am I the only one on the planet who thought that
'Watchmen' was so-so with an ending ripped straight out of an Arthur C
Clarke essay?

With some reservations, I really liked the British version of 'The
Adventures of Luther Arkwright'; the US printing screwed up a lot of the
art and the comic suffered from an average publication rate of one issue a
year so the later issues are far more impressive than the early ones.

> But I think you'll find that those who wrote them (Alan Moore, David
> Gibbons, and the Scotsman whose name I've forgotten who writes the
> 'Invisibles', another more recent good comic) are pretty solidly
> left-wing.

Yes, but left-wing in the Iain Banks sense; more like anarcho-socialists
than authoritarian socialists. I think I have far more in common with them
than with, say, the avowedly capitalist Tory party.

> Not stupid, knee-jerk lefties, mind you, (I mean, I have no
> doubt that they've probably given libertarian and extropian ideas some
> serious consideration) but leftists nonetheless - I'm pretty sure of this
> because they come from the 2000AD stable, which was a*very* left-oriented
> UK comic all through the 80s, and had a few offshoots (e.g. a comic
> called 'Crisis') which were as red as they come. So unless they've
> changed an*awful* lot since then ...

2000AD left wing? Some of the 80s stories certainly leant that way,
particularly those by the authors in question, but I'd have a hard time
seeing Judge Dredd as left-wing (though I suspect he'd have loved to work
in Stalinist Russia...)

        Mark

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