Return to the mart!

So, the mart then. It's been a while since I went. I've missed it.

Arrived nice and early for my return to the fetid fray, largely because I was meeting Tam who had very kindly offered to donate me a full set of Paul Jenkins' run on Hellblazer. Top score. Thank you sir.

Anyway, picked up huge plasi bag of Hellblazer comics and watched as the early arrivals filed into The National. No fucking about for me as I headed straight for the 25p bins in search of gold. Didn't find any, but I did dig up plenty of nice tat, including Dazzler and Power Pack number ones, a bunch of Iron Man Armor Wars issues, a couple of very beat up silver age comics and a terrible issue of The Flash which features a villain called Ubermensch. Ubermensch is a sort of Hank Pymesque figure who knocks his missus about...

She leaves him for The Flash (yes really)...

so he injects himself with shitloads of steroids...

and dons a special suit to become a super-powered wife-beater...

On the way to The Flash's house he kills a horse...

and runs into a wall by mistake....

What an utter loon.

When he eventually gets into The Flash's gaffe, he's completely blown out his eyes smashing into stuff, but he still manages to grab his missus from Flash's bed and jumps out of the window; at which point The Flash delivers this immortal bit of dialogue...

I don't have the next issue. I don't want it. This is the perfect end to the story.

Apart from that I got the first three issues of Warlock, the 80s Fighting Fantasy magazine. I bought these as they were coming out and this was a purely nostalgic purchase for me. They were a bit pricey (£4 for number 1 and £3 for the other two) but they will keep me warm in my old age. Ah.

Afraid the speculator in me took over when I spotted this in mint condition for £2...

I know, it's worth fuck all, but I did see other stalls at the mart knocking it out for a tenner, and you can sometimes get a fiver for it on ebay, so errm, you know.

For the same price I also scored issue #12 of Super-Villain Team-Up. I've gone on at length about my love of this series. Although I own the reprints, issue #12 is the one where Doctor Doom fights Red Skull and his flying Nazi cock gun on the moon...

and this was a beautiful cents edition for £2! So I had to have it.

From there I scored four very tatty copies of early 2000AD issues and wandered around idly looking at freaks before my eyes fell on the day's big prize - a complete run of the 1980s DC Who's Who + the updates for £11! Not in the best of nick, but what a treat - 31 issues of encyclopedic goodness. Less scholarly than the Marvel equivalent (which I also love) but even crazier and suffused with a sort of disco colored light that gives them a trippy camp vibe. Magical stuff.

I remember reading Who's Who as a lad and loving the entry for War Wheel. Obviously it was the first entry I flipped to in my newly acquired set. Still a thing of glory, so it is. I was going to write about its wonderfulness, but someone has already beaten me to it and frankly there's no way I can do better than this.

Genius.

So happy was I to have found that War Wheel entry after all these years that I wittered on a lot about it to John, Tam and Nell in the shit pub outside The Royal National. They listened politely. We had a nice chat. Good times.

Later on, as John and I finished our last drink and watched the depressed dealers packing longboxes of unsold tat into their vans, King Stinker (who I have mentioned before at the end of this mart report) loped into the pub. His T-shirt was stained yellow by months worth of sweat and he was hauling a heavy sports bag of comics behind him like a ball and chain. As he moved from table to table drinking the dregs of leftover pints and eating bits of food from long since abandoned plates, it became clear just what a terrible state he was in - utterly mad, mired in squalor, a deranged tramp. I felt momentarily awful for taking his photo all those months ago. Let's face it, I've taken the piss out of this tragic fellah. Not nice. Not nice at all.

As I was experiencing this rush of guilt, two lads got up from their table and started snapping pics of him. They laughed and I felt even worse.The guilt didn't last. See, I'm still a cuntish teenager at heart, so I'll go on taking photos of him and the rest of the oddballs who attend this strange get together. I really am fascinated by them. Morbidly so. They'll be gone soon. The marts will be gone soon. Someone has to record them in all their stinking glory. Might as well be me.

A couple of quick reviews

Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne #1

Time travelling Batman fights cavemen. Best comic I've read in yonks! I love it so much, I've read it three times. It's perfect. Bruce Wayne as some bare-chested Charlton Heston type figure. The nods to Kubrik's 2001. Vandal Savage as pimped up caveman sloping off to his wigwam with a couple of neanderthal hos. Stone age Robin! This is Grant Morrison on top, top pop-culture-referencing form. It's Chris Sprouse laying down the fine-lined chiseled jaws and heaving pecs. It's fat sequential beats and beautiful splash pages. It's GOLD I tell you, GOLD!

The Flash #2

Geoff Johns and Scott Kollins' run on The Flash is one of my all-time favourites, so it pleases me to say that, two issues into this newly numbered book, the ingredients that made that run so good all seem to be in place here. I'd probably have been happier if Wally West had kept the costume, but the return of Barry Allen isn't that much of a drag. At the end of the day, you get a geezer bombing about in the red suit fighting baddies and saving people from collapsing buildings and you get it in a cartoony, kinetically charged style that suits the character down to the ground. Credit to Francis Manapaul for that, he's a very different artist to Kollins, but he shares the ability to put movement and energy down on the page. That's something that was clearly missing from the turgid over-rendered art that we got in Flash: Rebirth. I don't dislike Ethan van Sciver's stuff, but I didn't like what he did on Rebirth, it was just too grand, too static. The same could be said for the writing. I had no idea what was going on in Rebirth. With this new series, everything seems to have been boiled down to basics: Flash running about fighting The Rogues. KERCHINNG! It's great.

Two more from the stack

The missus and nipper have gone to see the mother-in-law for a few days, leaving me in London on my Jack. Marv. Obviously I have all sorts of grand plans to hack my way through the vast swathes of unread comics that clog up my life, but to date have managed to a) sleep in 'til 1pm b) listen to a bit of Velvet Underground on Spotify and c) realise that it's really about time I thought about going to work. Oh well, perhaps tomorrow, eh?

 

Actually I did read a couple of comics last night - Mark Waid's Irredeemable, which was fun, but at $3.99 one of those comics which is frankly too expensive for the 15 minutes it takes to read. Still, I enjoyed it enough to return for more. Basically, you've got a superhero who's gone bad and is killing everyone. Yay! I'm sure it'll end up being more complicated than that, but yeah, that's what it is at its most basic level, and basic levels are OK by me. I'm seeing Miracleman and Authority influences in issue #1, which is nice.

Also read Flash Rebirth #1, which was perfectly enjoyable fare. As ever, it's going to make absolutely no sense to anyone new to the DC Universe, but hey that's Geoff Johns for you isn't it? The man's an unashamed DCU slut who revels in dredging up stuff that gives fanboys the horn but leaves the casual reader scratching their heads. 

The Ethan Van Sciver art is ridiculously detailed. He must be a very focused man (for focused, read obsessional). There's a nice interview with him on Word Balloon at the mo. It's warts and all stuff from a fellah who isn't altogether likable, but who I do find compelling. He does have an arrogance about him, but it's been a long time since I laughed as hard as I did when he launched into a rant about what a ridiculous concept the Flash museum is: "I know, lets build a museum and fill it with waxworks of infamous mass murderers!" Brilliant. 

He still wants to think harder about what he calls his next sketchbook though.