ComicScene Review: Comic Book Punks

I nearly didn’t buy ‘Comic Book Punks’ by Karl Stock but when I heard it was over 500 pages long I thought I couldn’t ignore it.

It is a brilliant book and reads like a love story to my own comic reading life. My only criticism, and I don’t think this comes down to the author but a realisation as I read it, is that a lot of the recent books largely ignore the quiet revolution of the UKs (Scotlands) DC Thomson whose workmanlike comic sales sometimes exceeded those comics mentioned here. Perhaps they aren’t ‘punk’ enough. Perhaps their lack of credits didn’t create personality comic creators. But you cannot simply mention the Beano and not refer to its web, licencing, media, literary, school community and comics success if you end the book talking about a comic with a quarter of the sales and some dodgy movies that spelt the death knell of comics. It just makes you look at the excesses and decadence of 80’s and 90’s comic making in another way!

Opening with the connection between Dave Gibbons and 1950’s Eagle there is a whistle stop tour of comics before my time which we can now enjoy again through the Brit Comics line.

It touches on Battle, Action and early 2000AD. No real revelations here if you’ve read books on comics from Steve McManus, Pat Mills and Thrill Power Overload but it’s good to see it all in a timeline. I must admit I’d jumped from the U.K. funnies to largely searching out DC Comics in obscure newsstands by this time but I was aware of the titles.

A dalliance with the Underground (nice to see Near Myths get a mention – probably as influential to many than Warrior) leads into Marvel U.K. I know a lot of you read and love their output (sorry, I was a DC guy who only liked a bit of Captain Britain).

By this time comic shops were coming a thing. This meant if you went around newsstands getting your American comics you could read them when they came out rather than three months later. That probably helped kill comics on newsstands. Wonderful shops for us comic fans but you can’t cultivate new readers if you can’t get the comics in everyday places.

A few chapters of how wonderful writer Alan Moore seems to fall out with everyone and has a seemingly run of bad luck when trying to finish a story, Ewins, McCarthy and Milligan indeed do party like it’s 99 but always seems to make a deadline and Neil Gaiman comes across as a very nice bloke at the right time, right place. It doesn’t pull its punches on the early work of Morrison and Miller but recognise their success learning their craft in the public eye. As a reader stories left unfinished, titles with no cohesion, stories that go into some drug fuelled nothingness or following comics with short shelf lives or that do not appear regularly just turns you off investing in the creators work or the comics they produced. I was there buying everything and although there are moments of genius you just thank god that hatch, match and dispatch made you tough to deal with such disappointments in your late teens and early twenties.

Indeed an industry that is costly and needs time to produce that aligns itself with popular culture (which in itself is fleeting – sometimes even just the equivalent of a summer fling) is doomed to failure and seem a little behind the curve. There is a plethora of ignoring what became successful which would have strengthened some titles over others. In the end the readers left – in droves. Not just because of their age but because the consistency of publishing a regular title and standard of work wasn’t there.

Perhaps that is the future? No regular 2000AD. Learning from the Best of 2000AD just four perfect bound books a year with your favourite 2000AD characters which can be sold at any time (learning from the ongoing success of Watchman, V For Vendetta, From Hell, Maus, Manga, Black Label, European books, Hilda, DogMan and HeartStopper) but available everywhere – newsagents, bookshops, comic shops, online etc. You can see it already, with Regened, but we haven’t shaken off the uniquely British U.K. anthology just yet!

However as we can already see in school projects the comic creator of tomorrow, learning from their first scratches with a pen and paper, will want to do the comic and protect their IP for the media they see as an extension of their creation for TV, film, audio adaptation, public appearances and game. Little Punks!

9/10