Triple A: Secret Origins

Stegron the dinosaur man, Chris Claremont's penis, and the resistible allure of DARK KNIGHT RETURNS - all this and much more is vaguely alluded to in our round table discussion.
11 June 2001

In Triple A the Ninth Art editorial board - Andrew Wheeler, Antony Johnston and Alasdair Watson - gather around a pub table to discuss comics. In this first instalment, they discuss how they came to be comic readers. As we join the discussion, however, they are talking about continuity...

ALASDAIR: People carp on about DC doing their reboots and their Crises and their Zero Hour and all the rest of it, but Marvel do the daft big events anyway and don't have the sense to use them to reboot their timeline.

ANDREW: To an extent I think it's justifiable. I used to balk, when I was a Marvel zombie, at the idea of things being updated without reference, but actually I've come around to the idea that you just always keep it current, and you don't have to live in the past. Just be aware of the history without going into the detail.

ANTONY: The Marvel way of doing it might actually be better than the DC way of doing it, because they don't make an event of it. It's just updated.

ANDREW: Because, let's face it, you shouldn't be reading that comic for 200 issues. You should have come into it and then come out again by then. If you read them for 200 issues, you must reach an age where you've got some common sense. Though not too much, or you wouldn't be reading it at all...

ALASDAIR: How many issues of X-MEN do you own, Andrew?

ANDREW: Did I claim I had common sense?

ALASDAIR: Just thought I'd make the point, for the record.

ANDREW: I have been reading X-MEN for... it must be almost fifteen years now.

ANTONY: Oh my God. I didn't even read 2000AD for that long. I stopped reading 2000AD around '92, '93, which would have been about ten or eleven years, and bear in mind that's a lot of different stories, not just one story.

ANDREW: I started reading comics around the time SECRET WARS was out. I started reading X-MEN not long after.

ALASDAIR: The longest period I've spent with any one title was probably PREACHER. I never read SANDMAN when the issues were coming out. Even my X-MEN habit, I started when I was 16 and stopped when I was 19. Granted I've got a shitload of comics from that period, because I bought all of them, and that was during the big 'we will publish everything with an X' period.

ANDREW: If I hadn't been reading X-MEN all that time, good or bad, I probably wouldn't be reading comics now. If it hadn't carried me through my pre-teen, teen and post-teen years, I would never, when I went to university, have diversified into reading other comics. The only reason I've stuck with X-MEN since is because by that stage I'd already been reading for about ten years.

ALASDAIR: So you think if you'd stopped reading X-MEN before you went to university, you wouldn't have been reading any other comics?

ANDREW: Yeah, I think that's probably true.

ALASDAIR: The thing is, when Andrew started reading the X-MEN comics - and though I may mock Chris Claremont, and will - his comics were, at the time, better than they are today.

ANDREW: He was a very good writer.

ALASDAIR: Apart from his dialogue. His dialogue was appalling.

ANDREW: It wasn't appalling. It had a charm.

ALASDAIR: "The sum totality of my psychic powers"!

ANDREW: It had... weaknesses. But it had a certain charm and rhythm to it; when you got into it you understood it. There are a lot of writers who are allowed to do that in prose, so why shouldn't comic writers occasionally take liberties with their style?

ALASDAIR: To be fair, you've always made the comparison between Claremont and Ellis, and Ellis' dialogue rings with Ellis. It's just funnier.

ANDREW: Yeah. Claremont was the Warren Ellis of his day. Only less cantankerous and less prone to flashing his penis around.

ALASDAIR: I don't know. Claremont is apparently prone to flashing his penis about. I hear he used to be big in New York Thelmic circles.

ANDREW: Velmic? As in Velma?

ANTONY: Yikes, Scoob!

ANDREW: And Claremont would have gotten away with it if it weren't for those pesky kids.

ALASDAIR: What, the ones who grew up and realised his comics weren't as good as they thought?

ANDREW: Yes, those pesky kids.

ANTONY: So, was X-MEN comics to you, then? You make it sound like X-MEN was the only thing you read.

ANDREW: What it was... When I started reading, I was reading Marvel comics. SECRET WARS was the first comic I really picked up, and I really enjoyed it. Then I picked up this Marvel Annual in the late 80s, and I really enjoyed it. Then I found a comic shop, sort of stumbled across it one day, and thought, oh well, I'll go and have a look, and I started off reading all kinds of Marvel comics. I was reading X-MEN, AVENGERS, SPIDER-MAN, anything that was Marvel, because I didn't have the money to follow two universes. Then, when the X-MEN titles got bigger in number, I couldn't afford the rest of that universe. I used to read X-MEN and SPIDER-MAN both as religiously as each other, but I had to let one go. I liked the X-MEN characters more, so I let SPIDER-MAN go.

ALASDAIR: And by that stage the X-MEN were a bit more modern.

ANDREW: I used to always be able to buy old SPIDER-MAN annuals - the big hardcover British Christmas annuals - at bring-and-buy sales and things like that. I would find one any time I went to a sale like that, and I liked those stories more. Stegron the Dinosaur Man, and the mad computer that tried to take over the world.

ALASDAIR: The one that zapped beams from its forehead?

ANDREW: Yes. Great stories. Really charmingly nutty stories. I preferred that to the modern SPIDER-MAN stuff, so it was easy to drop SPIDER-MAN. I didn't have a job, so it was too much to afford all the X-MEN comics, but I still had to read them. Eventually it came to the point where I could have given it all up because all I was reading was X-MEN, and although it was several comics, it was only really one story, or one concept. If it hadn't been for my mum telling me to give it up, I might well have given up. If I hadn't been reading X-MEN for all that time, if that hadn't been my single lifeline, I probably wouldn't have gone on to all that other stuff. I owe my comics existence to X-MEN.

ALASDAIR: You poor, damaged man. In my case, I read TRANSFORMERS and other things when I was a kid, the equivalent of Antony's 2000AD, and then I stopped reading comics until I was about 16 or 17. It was during my Games Workshop days. There was a comic shop just over the road from Games Workshop. Oh, I briefly came back to comics when I was eleven, when the Batman movie came out.

ANTONY: You were eleven when the Batman movie came out?

ALASDAIR: Feel old?

ANTONY: Fuck. I was in sixth form.

ALASDAIR: I was briefly back into comics, which is why I own a copy of DARK KNIGHT RETURNS, that sort of thing, and I continued to be aware of them but wasn't buying them, until my Games Workshop period. One of my mates, an artist, Alex, was very into Jim Lee's stuff. Whatever else you may say about Jim Lee, his art did look good. He dragged me into the shop, and I actually bought some Ghost Riders! Because they looked cool.

ANDREW: Was it Howard Mackie?

ALASDAIR: One was Howard Mackie. Issue one. Then it was the original Ghost Rider Rides Again, which I still keep because they're the mark of me getting back into comics.

ANTONY: You read DARK KNIGHT at about the age of twelve, and didn't get back into comics?

ALASDAIR: Yup.

ANTONY: That's quite astounding.

ALASDAIR: I really liked it, but I never went to a comic shop. My parents never took me to a comic shop, and there was no local comic shop. The shop in question was one in Croydon, and at the age of twelve my parents were not comfortable with me going into Croydon on my own. The shop was Dynamic Comics. I remember when it moved places, I won a spot prize. This was during the big comics boom, when shop owners were rolling in money, and because it was their opening day they were doing random spot prizes. I came up to the till with a Batman poster book - I used to have Batman posters all over my walls despite the fact I didn't buy any comics - and they foisted on me a copy of BATMAN: ATTACK OF THE MANBAT.

ANTONY: I've got that! That was one of the ones they released on the back of the success of things like DARK KNIGHT and the movie. It was fucking awful. Don't you dare try and tell me otherwise. It was written by Denny O'Neil and drawn by Neal Adams.

ANDREW: That should have been alright.

ANTONY: Precisely what everybody told me, and it was dreadful. It biased me against Neal Adams for the rest of eternity.

ANDREW: The comic shop I grew up with back home, it wasn't a comic shop, it was a second-hand bookshop. People would bring in their old paperbacks - tacky novellas and spy stories - and they would sell them back or trade them and he would sell them on. It also sold porn under the counter. It was a porn shop, a second-hand bookshop, and it happened to have comics. It was a swarthy and unpleasant place, but it was the only place that sold comics in all of Hastings, and it fed my addiction for years and years.

ANTONY: I used to read anything at all. I even went through a phase of reading football comics. BEANO got me into comics, but once 2000AD got me hooked on the idea of decent comics, I would read just about anything. LODERUNNER, for Christ's sake.

ALASDAIR: The only Loderunner I know was a dodgy Spectrum computer game.

ANTONY: This was the comic-book of that game. Written by Pat Mills, as I recall.

ANDREW: You didn't have access to any American comics?

ANTONY: It's not that I didn't have access. The only way to get American comics was in places like WH Smiths and the local post office, and what they did there was the time honoured British tradition of putting them all in a pile in the corner, on the assumption that any old comic would do. If you wanted some comics, you would just pick the top ones and be happy with them. The concept of saying "well actually, I don't want all of them, I just want a few of them" didn't really get through to them.

ANDREW: So what was your first American comic?

ANTONY: Good question. The first six issues of the Claremont/Jim Lee X-MEN relaunch, back in... 91, was it? Six issues before I dropped it in disgust. And ... SANDMAN. Thinking about it, SANDMAN would qualify as the first.

ALASDAIR: I believe we point and laugh and scream 'goth' at this point.

ANTONY: I never stopped reading comics. I read stuff like 2000AD, then all the other British comics like SCREAM and EAGLE died, and 2000AD went right down hill, but CRISIS and DEADLINE were still going, so I was reading those. Then I picked up the trade of DOLLS HOUSE in WH Smiths on a whim, because the cover was great. This was the original cover, a harlequin face made up of shards. Brilliant cover. That got me into SANDMAN, and I started reading CEREBUS as well. By the time I'd read stuff like WATCHMEN and DARK KNIGHT, the last thing I wanted to do was read mainstream US stuff. I dropped 2000AD, CRISIS finished, DEADLINE went shit, and for a period of three or four years, SANDMAN and CEREBUS were the only comics I was buying. I saw a couple of issues of Dillon's HELLBLAZER, and I was astounded he would work on HELLBLAZER because I did not think he would suit it at all, and I still don't. Being underwhelmed by HELLBLAZER, and thinking PREACHER was a traditional 19th century Western, I wasn't really interested.

ANDREW: This may sound like an odd thing to say, but I thought PREACHER would have a more religious bent.

ALASDAIR: It had a viciously religious bent.

ANDREW: That's why it sounds like an odd thing to say. I expected something a bit more sickly and old fashioned.

ALASDAIR: Did you not look at the covers?

ANTONY: No.

ANDREW: No.

ALASDAIR: One of the covers was a man in a bondage mask!

ANDREW: I don't like Glenn Fabry's covers. I used to block them out.

ANTONY: Finally I heard a couple of things about it that made it sound more interesting. One of my girlfriends was mad about it, and made me think, well, maybe it is all right then. I bought GONE TO TEXAS about two years ago. That and LUST FOR LIFE were the two comics that got me back into reading. They were the comics that convinced me modern comics weren't actually all shit.

Wheeler, Johnston and Watson are the Ninth Art editorial board.

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