Not-quite-IT, but lovable

Starlord looking not at all embarrassed by his outfit

Unsustainable editorial conceit

Editorial conceits have been big in comics ever since Superman recommended a book list, which included Joseph Conrad, to his tiny chums. One immediately imagines Superman working his way through ‘Typhoon and the Shadow line’ in between adventures.
My first encounter with the editorial conceit was Stan Lee and the Bullpen, a mythical place where I thought Stan, Jack Kirby, Gene Colan and every other Marvel artist and writer lived chummily together, in a big friendly room called ‘the Bullpen’, producing superhero comics and going for non-gay walks in the park. I’m pretty sure they were drawn, if not walking in the park, at least looking on as Spiderman and the Human Torch crashed through walls.

2000AD’s Tharg is an egotistical green alien, prone to self promotion, wry responses to letters and asides about the stupidity of humanity and the foibles of his extended green family. His background is pretty simple. Tharg arrived here in 1977 and decided to produce a comic. He does so with the help of editorial droids, clumsy, grumpy robots who look a bit like the various writers.
Tharg is mainly present on earth via the letters page which was one of the first things I noticed about 2000AD – I’ve written about it before, but can’t resist adding the time they printed an email complete with the ‘Wandsworth library takes no responsibility for emails sent out under its name’ disclaimer. Tharg responded “that’s okay Wandsworth library. We liked it just fine’.
I digress, but there is the occasional short story in which the emerald done fights off thrill suckers or tells his alien nephews a story and of course, he was replaced completely for a spell by the men from Vector 13 (an X-files/Men In Black knockoff was used to introduce spooky stories).
I no longer think that Stan the Man Lee lives with the very corporate Marvel team, from whom chummy bullpen notices are about as convincing as they would be from Goldman Sachs. However there’s nothing wrong with a good editorial conceit and as far as I’m concerned Tharg can go on forever, adding bits of alien slang, changing his look and replying waspishly to letters.

Starlord’s editorial conceit is that a high-cheekboned ponce called, oddly enough, Starlord, has come to earth to protect us from an alien invasion and is producing a comic as a way of training 10 – 15 year old Poms (and me, far too late) to resist it. The Starlord-ites were encouraged to form special squads; skateboard squad, weapons squad etc and to “watch the stars”.
By the way, the letters Starlord gets from various handicapped and/or geeky kids who’ve formed Star Squads are real tearjerkers. I had the same feeling of ‘aww the poor little mite’ that we’re supposed to get from Little Nell, reading a missive from a kid who didn’t get out much and who had formed a skateboard squad with his only friend Neville.
I can imagine the thinking process behind Starlord. It must have gone something like this: “We need an editor the kids can write to. 2000AD has an alien. Starlord can have an alien. He’s here to ummm, protect us from alien invasion. Right, when’s tea?”
The trouble is that the editor has to justify everything in the face of impending alien invasion and there’s only so long something can impend before people get bored. There are even lame attempts to sell the various stories in the comic in terms of training-for-an-alien-invasion value. Tharg and Stan-the-man just have to tell us that the comic we are about to read is the most thrilltastic ever and that we need to upgrade our thrill-buffers (Tharg, every other week) or get set for Marvel action the way you demand it, True Believe (Stan). Starlord has the same problem that the Seventh Day Adventists used to have; if you keep telling people something is imminent, there will come a time when the thing has to actually show up or you look like a bit of a ninny.
Hence a mildly funny story has to be introduced by Starlord telling us that even Star Troopers need rest, while all the stories that involve robots, spaceships and/or guns are there to give us vital training for the day of the invasion. If you’re like me and plan to sit out the alien invasion while our armed forces do what they’re paid for, this is distracting. Eventually Starlord’s premise gave him a reason for buzzing off when the comic was amalgamated with 2000AD – ‘the aliens have decided not to annihilate earth, so I’m off’ was the gist.

Stories that just drag on

Comic premises can be sustainable or not. Judge Dredd’s world is infinitely elastic. He fights crime, new countries appear, new superfiends attack and we hardly ever think ‘that’s enough’ although it often occurs to me that I’d rather live in one of the MegaCities where Dredd isn’t.
Starlord kicks off with ‘Mind Wars’ in which a boy and girl have been set up with awesome telepathic powers by some aliens in order to help the aliens defeat the earth federation (as in many other futures, everything is federated and everyone is white). Mind Wars follows the kids as their mental powers get progressively more awesome, and as the girl looks progressively more pert and scantily clad (mental powers do that to you). The story is overshadowed by the hugeness of the mental powers – we know it’s got to finish catastrophically sometime, and sure enough it does, albeit long after I’ve lost interest in wondering how huge the girl’s mental powers will be next week. Never trust stories with a Deus ex machine built in.
Also annoying is TimeQuake, in which a chippy tough Brit is forced to join a team of ‘time control’ agents. Their mission is to protect all time from the Droon, a group of poorly drawn frogs who have four arms and pointy fangs. Timequake suffers from too much backing and forthing and ‘it never happened after all’ endings to stories, as well as from jokes that aren’t funny on any level (sample; the Chinese princess has just spent twenty years pretending to be Lenin so that history won’t change, unlike her face. She changes back and the other time controllers congratulate her on being ‘the most powerful woman in history’ with chuckles all round. I re-read that panel five times before working out that I hadn’t missed anything; it just wasn’t funny at all.
Planet of the Damned is by Pat Mills and at least has a little of his powers of invention. An airliner crashes on an alien planet, thanks to flying through the Bermuda triangle. The survivors of the crash try to get home and to survive a planet populated by monsters that spit acid, Nazis, crackerjack World War II soldiers and trees that eat people. Just by piling up that list I’ve made it sound much more fun that it actually is. Here again the closed nature of the story is a problem. We know they’ve got to either all die or get home eventually and the various perils that populate the planet have the feeling of being there because Pat is scratching his head and thinking “Oh earth Goddess, what’ll I do this week?” Probably that’s what the people who write Judge Dredd think all the time. The difference is that in stories which work, like Dredd, the extra perils feel as thought they’re there before we open the magazine.
Holocaust answers the question of closely you can rip off Invasion of the Body Snatchers without getting caught? From this story I learned that plucky American private eyes are indestructible and that there are less boring things than learning about ‘a’ ‘an’ and ‘the’.

Having read this far, you’re probably wondering if the whole ‘Starlord’ experience is an exercise in masochism that I tried because I’m too shy to hire women in black rubber to spank me. Not so! Putting the women in black rubber to one side for a moment, there are several stories in Starlord that are absolute gold. These were both transferred to 2000AD after Starlord announced that the alien invasion was not going to happen after all and that he’d, errr, just be off then.

Candidate One is ‘Ro-Busters’.
This story is one of Pat Mills’ greatest contributions to human happiness. Not only did it run entertainingly for ages in Starlord and 2000AD, it also morphed into the A.B.C Warriors, which is about as much fun as Mills can be apart from in the first Marshall Law book. This is how to do it.
The premise is that a cheapskate businessman has bought up some second hand robots to do jobs which are too dirty or dangerous for humans to do. The businessman is practically a robot himself, having encased his brain in a robot body (a chubby businessman like body with several phones built into the chest). The robot stars are Hammerstein, a retired rather stuffy military robot and Ro-Jaws, a rude cheerful cockney sewer cleaning robot. They rescue human beings from various Thunderbirds-type scrapes (crashed trains, plummeting airliners, that kind of thing) and snipe at each other all the time. The humans they rescue are usually pretty awful and one gets the feeling that Mills is building up to some climactic ‘day of the robots’ confrontation. Thankfully this never happens, as it would have been out completely against the style of the series, but it’s good to sense the angry Mills intelligence beneath the chucklesome stuff. My favourite Ro-busters involves Ro-Jaws and Hammerstein deciding who will die when they come to rescue a group of humans from a trapped subway train and find they’ve only bought enough oxygen to keep all but one of the humans alive. They have to decide who will die. Before they make their choice, they meet the humans’ servant robots including one with the finest body work from Rolls Royce. The other robots all gather around to admire his finish while the humans call out indignantly “oi, while you lot are admiring each other, we’re dying here”. Well, it doesn’t sound funny here, but it is.

Starlord keeping the best characters up the front

Of course the real gold of Starlord is ‘Strontium Dog’. Does anyone out there not know about this series? Apparently it was invented to give Starlord a Judge Dredd equivalent. John Wagner came up with Johnny Alpha, a mutant bounty hunter. The series resembles Dredd in three ways. The main character is a bit grim. He wears and a helmet a lot. Thirdly, it’s completely brilliant and open-ended. Dredd’s world is filling up a bit, but it’s still a big bad planet, while Alpha has the whole galaxy to play with. Alpha is now dead, but there is a steady trickle of ‘back when they were alive’ stories being put out by 2000AD. If you haven’t read any of the SD stories, I urge you to do so right away.

Well, that’s all for this week. Next up I dunno what. All requests are welcome.

Yours, off to do more hard-core grammar work.