I stepped through some eleven dimensional portal as I exited the train at Leeds station on a misty morning in November. I entered a world where comics were loved as much by man and woman. 15-odd years in to the future or an alternative reality where Fregredo was charging 40 quid a sketch (and drawing Mignola’s HellBoy!), Dougie Braithwaite was calling himself ‘Doug’ and kicking out stainless steel chunks of pencil work at the same time. Old Knockabout was still slicing his sardonicism, cutting his “just buy one of everything, then”.
Al ‘Astral Gypsy’ Davison was still doing his warm workshops nurturing embryonic artists, albeit with a slightly grander, greyer beard . Paul Gravett had become the Chargé d’affaires de Comics. ‘Comics’, I overheard in the darker corners, re-labelled ‘Sequential Art’, by these Old Street Acid Jazz guys called ‘Nobrow’. Scott McCloud smashed down doors with these two-words and pictures. But the ‘Graphic Novels’ were still always books…Comic Books.
Miracleman #15 hawked for £200 as was Issue #1 of Spiderman, the Todd McFarlane one, yes! That one-in-the-polybag-one they printed a gazillion copies of just a couple of weeks ago in my old world. £200 now! Two hundred pounds! The comics that I picked up just last week from Enigma in Croydon for a quid and still have stashed away in my loft for my children to discover. And what? This is Twenty Eleven – John Byrne’s finished Next Men!
Tables were manned (and womaned too) by young arriviste sophisticate comic book hipsters hawking their tight art wares, channelling the Clowes and Hernandez. Thick glasses frames and friendly faces…was this even the same planet? Surely not, when small press used to be a handful of scrappy photocopies hidden on the bottom shelf in the corner, round the back, on pink paper if you were lucky, (Jone-zee with his letra-tone’d be proud) in their place were cool-ass full colour perfect bound shiz. Stax-o-books, queues and this new thing: ‘Cosplay’, people channelling fiction- Batman beer drinking at the bar and Spider Grrrl with her visible pantie-line and pink bag stuffed with comic books.
This new species grown out of the start of a new comics fin de siècle. Brighter. Smarter. Sharper. “Manga schooled a whole new generation” remarked Kenny Penman of Blank Slate Books in a brief but hearty exchange. Giving ‘the kids’ the chops to grow in to the big-stuff. The new-gen: Leah Moore all growed-up, extending 19th century legends with Monsiuer Reppion, lover of zombie fare and husband of the aforementioned. Manga preacher, Emma Vieceli, her paw prints on all the cool breaking stuff (and My Little Pony too).
Too many things to mention and not enough money to buy everything. And I would have. How long has this party been going on without me?
Claiming the words ‘comic books’. Comic Books. Say it again. Take the words, (steel them) and scrape them from the juvenile stigmata. Comic Books! The sweaty dready air of the stuffy comic convention a distant distant synesthesia’d memory, did I dream it? The future of Comic Books smells so good. If this is how it is in this ‘What if?’ reality, I’m taking up residence.
Thought Bubble’s blown from a fresh smelling soap, shiny chrome spheres of magic, speed-balling out of the cultural subconscious, blowing the doors away.