Tag Archives: Britain

Spare Them Our Good Intentions

Posted on by

This first appeared in edited form in the Chicago Reader.
_______

We tend to think of imperialism as motivated by greed and racism, but the truth is that it is just as often actuated by altruism. Whether it’s Rudyard Kipling urging the U.S. to take up the white man’s burden and colonize the Philippines or Christopher Hitchens urging the U.S. to take up the white man’s burden and occupy Iraq, humanitarian concerns and foreign adventure are inseparable. As counterintuitive as it may seem, in case after case, “empathy” turns out to be another word for “invasion.”

Of course, many anti-imperialists like to argue that the conflation of empathy and invasion is simply cynical spin. From this perspective, talk of democracy is just to cover up a real obsession with (or example) oil. Imperial altruism becomes, then, a kind of complicated conspiracy theory. It is this conspiracy theory which Richard Huzzey meticulously dismantles in his new book Freedom Burning.

Freedom Burning focuses on British anti-slavery in the years following the abolition of the slave trade in 1833. Though the topic is fascinating, and certainly relevant to our own imperial moment, Huzzey is not an especially engaging writer. His book is a dry read, as it winds its way through a maze of Foreign Office policy, Parliamentary politics and long-past controversies. In many cases, Huzzey seems to go out of his way to avoid telling a good story; he references the British Niger expedition of 1841 as a disastrous result of anti-slavery ideology, but he repeatedly eschews the opportunity to explain even the outlines of that disaster, in which more than a third of the 159 Europeans died from disease.

But Huzzey’s bland delivery only emphasizes the bitterness of his conclusion — which is that anti-slavery was not a cover-up for British imperialism. On the contrary, it was a central engine of expansion, and the coherent consensus which made that expansion possible.   British determination to search all shipping on the high-seas, for example, was motivated in large part by the desire to prevent the transportation of slaves. When the British torched a West African settlement on the Gallinas River in 1845, they were not enslaving the people, but fighting for emancipation by punishing local leaders who had allegedly had dealings with slave traders. They were, sincerely, burning the village in order to save the people. (18-19)

Anti-slavery, then, became not just the excuse, but the motive for extending and exercising British power. As Huzzey says, “anti-slavery was the popular aspect of imperial expansion,” and “Anti-slavery ideologies were one of the principal ways that commercial, spiritual, and moral objectives could be combined.” (190) This didn’t mean, or didn’t just mean, that politicians couched their policies in anti-slavery terms in order to appeal to the public. It also meant, as Huzzey shows, that politicians, like their constituents, thought about, and conceived of, foreign policy against the background of an anti-slavery consensus to which virtually everyone, politicians and public, had to conform. Huzzey notes that it was basically impossible “to be taken seriously in public debates if an author defended slavery.” (46)   Thus, for example, some Brits advocated against the naval suppression of the slave trade. But they did so on solidly anti-slavery grounds, arguing that forcing the trade underground could worsen conditions for transported slaves, and even caused slavers to throw their cargo overboard when a British ship approached. (133)

Anti-slavery ideology was so flexible that it could even exist alongside open and vicious racism. Indeed, as Huzzey depressingly chronicles, anti-slavery actually provided white Britons with a strong rationale for hating their black countrymen. In the first place, the prevalence of slavery in African nations, and the complicity of African leaders in the slave trade, were attributed by white Europeans to black racial inferiority and immorality. (192)

Even more damaging, though, was the coalescence of anti-slavery and racism in the West Indies. There, freed British slaves were reluctant to return to the plantation system, preferring instead to work for themselves. This understandable desire for autonomy and self-respect was interpreted by white Britons as laziness and backwardness, and solidified racist stereotypes of black people. Even the anti-slavery argument that slavery was catastrophically dehumanizing was turned against black people. If blacks were dehumanized, then they shouldn’t be treated as human, the reasoning went — and so anti-slavery provided the foundation for coercive laws forcing black people back into virtual slavery on the plantations. (192)

An ideology of freedom, then, did not lead to an ideology of equality. On the contrary, a belief in freedom ended up justifying and enforcing inequity. Not only did British anti-slavery ideology encourage racism — it arguably encouraged slave-trading. Even as the British boarded the ships of other nations in search of slaves, their own vessels carried hundred of thousands of Indian laborers across the empire. These Indians were not technically “slaves,” but were instead indentured servants or people working under debt bondage or contract. There was some outcry against the treatment of these workers, who were certainly coerced in many cases. However, this coercion was not necessarily seen as incompatible with anti-slavery. On the contrary, since ex-slaves were viewed as lazy and irresponsible, it was generally thought that some form of forced labor was needed to secure a stable post-slavery economy. East Indians were brought to the West Indies to make blacks work without slavery. Thus, again, anti-slavery required (wage or contract) slavery. (201-202)

Huzzey points out that one of the main contributions of anti-slavery to imperialism is simple attention. The suppression of the slave trade provided much early interest in Africa where otherwise there would have been little or none.” (191) Thus, the very energy and focus that had allowed for the abolition of slavery within Britain flowed naturally, once that slavery was abolished, into a continued focus on, and meddling in, Africa, with devastating long-term consequences.

Were those consequences worth the abolition of slavery? If slavery had been abandoned earlier, might there have been a more thorough and rapacious imperial presence in Africa? If slavery had been allowed to continue for longer — say, till after the American Civil War — would Africa have been subject to shorter and less crippling European colonization?

Huzzey raises these questions, but is too careful to attempt to answer them. Still, I wish every would-be do-gooder, whether of left, right, or center, would read his book — and not just because turning pages might briefly distract them from their violent schemes of world-betterment.   Huzzey’s book suggests not just that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but that the road to hell is paved specifically with our good intentions. Freedom, democracy, empathy, even equality — all America’s ideals are WMDs waiting to be armed and detonated wherever our attention happens to alight, whether it’s in Africa, Kosovo, or Iran. U.S. humanitarian efforts throughout the world are, of course, laudable, and do enormous good. But even so, it’s hard to read Freedom Burning without wondering whether it might be better for everyone else if we cared about them a little less, and minded our own business a little more.
______

Freedom-Burning-cover-magnum

Harry Potter, Race, and British Multiculturalism

Posted on by

 

harry-potter-and-the-order-of-the-phoenix-image

 
Hagrid’s half-Giant identity is a plot arc in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, so too are the House Elves and Hermione’s crusading, if not paternalistic, attempts to free them from oppression. In the Deathly Hallows the penultimate “other” becomes the mudblood, a term we first hear in Chamber of Secrets. The final book, too, revolves around non-wizarding creatures of, as the Ministry of Magic and Dolores Umbridge put it, “near human intelligence,” and Harry is labelled as a very odd, special, and different wizard by Griphook the Goblin because he treats non-humans with courtesy and respect. The books are dedicated to highlighting the fallacy of “the other” but, and file this under uncomfortable truths, all the human characters of colour are relegated to the sidelines.

JK Rowling has called her books “very British” in a number of interviews, and has even stated that they are a “prolonged argument for tolerance.” However, I can’t help but draw parallels (note: I’m drawing parallels, not determining causality) from her treatment of race and “otherness” in the books to the conversations about multiculturalism and race theory that have occurred throughout British history and continue today.

Rowling has been very explicit about the connection between Pure Blood Wizarding ideology and the Nazism that led to the holocaust. But race theory, the belief that attributes and abilities could be determined by the socially constructed notion of race, was equally dominant in the United Kingdom. Weeding out “undesirables” wasn’t particular to Nazi ideology and was common across Europe.

British identity was partially constructed using internal colonization, where Welsh, Scottish and Irish minorities were subsumed into Britishness, an identity which still remains ambivalent and dynamic. Britishness was also constructed in opposition to a number of external European threats and was only reinforced through colonialism, which was justified by applying race theory.

Even after the Second World War, Great Britain restricted entry to Jewish refugees while simultaneously citing its own tolerance. Jewish bodies were and continue to be racialized, but even though Rowling has been explicit with her works’ connection to the Holocaust, racism is constructed as pureblood witches and wizards versus muggles, mudbloods, and magical creatures.

I’m not the first person to note that the fantasy genre has a history of replacing PoCs with monsters and magical creatures. Writing for Fantasy Book Review, author Lane Heymont states:

…[I]t feels like white authors have an easier time, or are more comfortable, writing from the perspective of  dragons, ghosts, elves, Minotaurs, and other non-humans than another human being. Seems ironically odd, don’t you think? And the writing suffers for it, as does the cause.

I target fantasy specifically because I know that Rowling has the ability to write from a PoC’s perspective as evidenced in The Casual Vacancy, but her fantasy works imitate most of the genre: There’s a brilliant ability to create non-human cultures and magic systems, but fantasy novels with people of colour as main characters are sadly rare.

If these books are “very British” and the quintessential “others” in British society are racialized minorities, than why has race been rendered invisible? Whether intentionally or not, side-lining characters of colour matches the British multicultural model that defines racial integration as near invisibility.

Racialiazing “otherness” has been part of the British experience, and Rowling, with her progressive roots, seems to be reacting towards this kind of cruelty by dedicating seven books and several years of her life to combatting it, only to create works that replicate the systemic exclusion of minorities. To clear up any confusion, I’m not saying that Rowling had to talk about how it feels like to be black at Hogwarts, but what it feels like to be Dean Thomas at Hogwarts. (Incidentally, I was disappointed that while Thomas’ backstory was potentially up for inclusion in the official cannon, it eventually had to be axed due to editorial limitations. I look forward to reading more about him in Pottermore.)

As a series that practically begs the reader to take it personally and that has birthed devoted communities and fan conventions, issues of representation and inclusion become incredibly important: fans want to know that they’re allowed in, and if you’re aiming for an emotional reader response, then this is a reaction that should be taken seriously. Further, the exclusion of active people of colour in fiction constitutes a form of erasure that undervalues their construction of and contributions to both fictional and real societies.

As it stands, we know that Hogwarts plays host to a variety of people of colour (Cho Chang, the Patel sisters, Dean Thomas, Blaise Zabini, Kinglsey Shacklebolt etc.) but they are, in a sense, rendered invisible. Their races are so invisible, in fact, that they’ve become model minorities; their races do not detract from their Britishness.

The idea of integration as a key to a successful multicultural policy stems back to the Second World War. British politicians knew, especially after Kristallnacht, what Germany’s Jews were facing, but still worked actively to limit the number of entries into the country. In 1965, Roy Hattersley, a Labour politician argued that “without integration, limitation is inexcusable, without limitation, integration is impossible,” the idea being that immigration should be restricted because it might rile the emotions of British citizens, the same rational for restricting entry to Jewish refugees. Minorities became responsible for the resentment directed towards them.

The subtle casuistry of this linkage of a commitment to “harmonious community relations” to necessary restriction on immigration and immigrants has continued to be employed by successive British governments. It has a wonderfully corrupt, but popularly acceptable rhetorical formula which argues that:

  • as decent and tolerant people we are naturally opposed to any form of racism or discrimination.
  • simultaneously, we are committed to a harmonious society.
  • however; immigrants and ethnic minorities have a capacity to generate racial hostility and discrimination from the majority population.
  • consequently: in order to guarantee harmonious community relations we must rigorously control immigration.
    –Charles Husband, Doing Good by Stealth, Whilst Flirting with Racism: Some Contradictory   Dynamics of British Multiculturalism

More recently, government officials stated that the reason the London Bombers carried out the 2005 train attacks was because they were insufficiently integrated into British culture, even though the evidence pointed otherwise, thus starting a firm government push to ensure that Britain’s Muslims were also “well-integrated.”

In 2003, in response to the Labour government’s proposed legislation on asylum seekers, British tabloids exploded with accusations that immigrants were abusing the system and dirtying the country with AIDS, Hepatitis B, and TB. These accusations don’t seem so far off from the hearings held in the Ministry of Magic, where we saw a witch being accused of stealing a wand (stealing from the system) and not being sufficiently magical (British.) While Rowling’s stories may have been inspired by the holocaust, they still play out in Great Britain today. They are indeed “very British” books; Rowling is both prescient and astute when she highlights government and media sanctioned oppression and she’s at her strongest when she writes these scenes.

Only last week The Guardian published a piece by David Goodhart, who accused liberals of favouring a highly-individualistic identity that transcended the boundaries created by the nation state, roughly defining certain liberals as being pro-immigration and therefore anti-community.

This individualistic view of society makes it hard for modern liberals to understand why people object to their communities being changed too rapidly by mass immigration – and what is not understood is easily painted as irrational or racist…If society is just a random collection of individuals, what is there to integrate into? In liberal societies, of course, immigrants do not have to completely abandon their own traditions, but there is such a thing as society, and if newcomers do not make some effort to join in it is harder for existing citizens to see them as part of the “imagined community”. When that happens it weakens the bonds of solidarity and in the long run erodes the “emotional citizenship” required to sustain welfare states.

According to Goodhart, the very presence of immigrants destabilizes allegedly harmonious British communities with resentment (a romanticized fallacy, especially when looking at Britain’s long history of class warfare), their bodies becoming symbols of chaos that disrupt a cohesive national identity. To be a racialized minority is to have people assume that you are unwilling to emotionally integrate into British identity and society. Some conservatives argue that under multiculturalism people will abdicate working together towards a common collective goal known as nation-building; however, the examples above show that Britain’s ideal form of multiculturalism has always been assimilationist.

Rowling is progressive, clearly pro-immigration, and the Harry Potter series illustrate a typical liberal approach to race blindness. Her works still presuppose that integration is synonymous with invisibility, but she also argues for the potential success of Britain’s multicultural model.  Their well-integrated and invisible races ensure that Cho Chang, Dean Thomas, and the Patel sisters can be British without disrupting British identity with their racialized bodies. While I appreciated that Cho Chang became a sobbing mess in Order of the Phoenix without her emotional deterioration being tied to her ethnicity, I can’t separate issues of representation from the larger systemic trend found within the fantasy genre. (Cho is the character of colour with the most screen time. One chapter is dedicated to her character in Order of the Phoenix, where she spends most of the time crying, and she receives a few sentences here and there from books 4 to 7. When we meet her, in book 3, she doesn’t say much of anything.)  That characters of colour are in the background allow the reader to know that Hogwarts is Very Diverse, but their importance to the plot is minimal. As the very worst possibility, they act as ornaments to Hogwarts’ status as a Very Progressive School.

This integration-as-invisibility approach is distinctly different from the movie adaptations, where the characters of colour wore clothing representative of their ethnic backgrounds to the Yule Ball, whereas the same characters in the books wore dress robes like everyone else. Except…children of immigrants don’t uniformly wear clothing from their parents’ home country. While the Potter books erase ethnic difference, the movies champion essentialism which, to her credit, Rowling can’t be accused of doing.

Rowling spends seven books opining about the importance of diversity, while replicating the systemic sidelining of characters of colour. The characters in the Harry Potters books are proof of multiculturalism’s success, but the structure of the books imitate systematic issues concerning racial representation. There’s tension in this approach: on one hand, it becomes exhausting to have one’s entire identity defined by ethnic background (something we can’t choose) and being able to choose one’s identity through acquired membership (identity markers we can choose, eg. being part of an SF/F fandom) can be a highly liberating experience. On the other hand, if Rowling believes in anti-otherizing, then why isn’t the quintessential British “other” given more screen time, not to discuss race, but to simply be? While a British progressive may envision a rainbow utopia of immigrants and new citizens, we know that their invisibility exists to comfort us while we pat ourselves on the back for being progressive. When it comes to screen time for characters of colour, their stories are still marginalized. The Harry Potter books are in no way the worst offenders in the genre—and I still remain a loyal fan—but there’s a serious cognitive dissonance that needs to be analyzed when a book series extolling the virtues of diversity are not particularly diverse themselves.

Strange Windows:Keeping Up with the Goonses (part 7)

Posted on by
This is part seven of our look at comics, cartoons and language– today focussing on Britain

Art by Heath Robinson

Britain has a long, rich tradition of cartooning second to no other land’s. And, as we saw for American English, cartoons have contributed to the country’s popular language.

Continue reading →

Strange Windows: I Was A Teenage Cartoonist

Posted on by

Bliss was it to be alive in that dawn,

But to be young was very heaven!

—Wordsworth

A house in Launceston Place, Kensington, London; we were a couple of doors down.

In 1969, my family moved to London; in December of that year, I turned 15.

London– 1969– 15 years old?

Yesss!!!!

“Swinging London” was still very much roaring along. Behold Carnaby Street, luv:

I’d come from a deeply repressive Swiss all-boy Jesuit school the year before, where tracts against masturbation were solemnly handed out, and attending a party featuring ‘impure’ pop music was grounds for expulsion.

And here– just in time for my puberty– was I introduced to this carnival, this opportunity to blossom!

Soon I’d ditched my staid flannel tartans and chino trousers for paisley scarves, ruffled pink shirts, and bell-bottom pants…

That’s me, age sixteen, literally rising above my peers at school.

The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix (who died in the hospital next door to our first house — for some reason that spooked me at the time), The Mothers of Invention, The Rolling Stones…they furnished the soundtrack to my life.

Ah, but this is a column about comics, is it not? So what was the scene like at the dawn of the ’70s?

It was glorious.

Current wisdom holds that comics of the ’70’s were in a particularly dire patch of their history; but this sad state of affairs came about essentially after 1973, and there were bright spots even so until the end of the decade.

The  comics Underground was at the apex of its short history; Crumb, Shelton, Deitch and co. Their comics were hard, but not impossible, to find in London; generally in the funkier record shops like Cheapo Cheapo Records off  Picadilly, or in the patchouli-scented head shops.

Mostly, though, they were reprinted in underground newspapers like the International Times (IT):

click image to enlarge

The British Underground comics scene was pretty underdeveloped, though there were promising exceptions. Here, from IT, is Michael Moorcock‘s Jerry Cornelius, as rendered by Mal Dean:

click image to enlarge

An all-comics offshoot of IT was Nasty Tales, edited by the musician Mick Farren. More Crumb than you can shake a stick at:

… and it was a Crumb spread of an orgy that caused the publisher to be prosecuted in the sensationalised trial that set a precedent for freedom of the press. A benefit comic was published, with early work by Dave Gibbon:

Meanwhile, across the Channel, French comics were enjoying something of a golden age; magazines such as Pilote and Charlie were moving to more adult content.

That 1969 Christmas, my father gave me a book that was a touchstone for an entire generation of fans: The Penguin Book of Comics, by George Perry and Alan Aldridge:

My collecting centered mostly on the American mainstream: Marvel, DC, Warren.

At first, American comics were distributed in the UK in a very haphazard manner.

They were mostly unsold copies from the USA that were shipped across the Atlantic as ballast. You never knew what you’d find: that ensured the thrill of the hunt all collectors know.

It was a rich period in the mainstream. The old-guard cartoonists– Kirby, Adams,Wood, Severin, Kubert, Heath, Kane and so on– were at the top of their powers, and were joined by a crew of young Turks of remarkable talent– Barry Smith, Mike Kaluta, Berni Wrightson, Frank Brunner, Ralph Reese, Howard Chaykin.

Popular genres other than the super-hero were still flourishing: war, mystery/horror, romance, fantasy. There was still a plethora of humor books.

And an innovation that foretold the future of comics as we know it was coming into being: the comics shop.

click image to enlarge

When I first opened the door of ‘Dark They Were and Golden-Eyed’, Britain’s first comics store, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. A shop given over entirely to comics? Was it possible? Was it even legal? It was indeed.

Derek ‘Bram’ Stokes and Diane Lister…for ten years the priests of London’s comics temple

And for the first time, I was meeting other comics lovers there: I had discovered fandom. And with fandom, fan publishing.

In those pre-Internet days the main medium of communication for comics lovers was the fanzine. Britain had its fair share of ‘zines, such as Rich Burton’s Comic Media News or Frank Dobson’s and Dez Skinn’s Fantasy Advertiser.

Yes, breathes there a fan with soul so dead that to himself has never said, ‘I think I’ll start a little fanzine’?

And indeed that was my thinking when, aged sixteen, I started drawing a comic strip with the alliterative title ‘King Krag.’

Now, printing options were fairly limited in those days. Mimeograph was still widespread; photocopies were becoming available, but they couldn’t reproduce solid blacks and needed a special paper. Offset printing was expensive.

This last limitation, though, was swept away by a new business model.  The Instantprint chain offered printing in small runs at a reasonable price. Not free, though, and I struggled to get together the twenty-five pounds needed for a print run of 200 fifteen-page pamphlets.

I took a decision that I regretted deeply at the time: I sold most of my comics collection.

In retrospect, I’m very glad I did. It broke the anally-retentive hold collecting had on me: thenceforth I would buy to read only. I would no longer obsess about completing runs of series and throw away money on stuff I didn’t even like to close gaps in my collection.

I teamed up with my friend Ahmed Sehrawry, who took the impressive title of Managing Editor; really, I just wanted someone to talk to– I did all the actual work. Another friend, Chris Lomax, provided the strange back-up strip ‘Milkman.’

I drew the strip same-sized (A5). Never again. You don’t save any time. In fact, the six pages took me over a year to finish.

I remember bringing the package of printed pages back to my school — the French Lycée in London — to the art department, where my art teacher gave me a room and a bunch of tables: yes, we were collating and stapling by hand– we couldn’t afford machine collation or binding. No worries, my friends and I had a good time; a collation party is much like a corn-shucking bee, an undemanding communal activity, interrupted by the odd tea break.

(Tea is one addiction I picked up in England.)

By God, the first time you see your work in mass reproduction is a trip and a half! And the first copy of a finished work…does that feel good in your hands.

I was seventeen and a publisher.

Now, I will beg your indulgence for the artwork shown. It was produced by an immature young fellow who wore his influences all too prominently; I’m harder on that boy than you could ever be. Still, as an artifact of a past 38 years gone, it repays arm-length study. Here is the cover of Bizarro #1:

What strikes the 55-year-old me about the seventeen-year-old me’s drawing above is the level of violence. True, the culture was moving that way; this was the age of films like The Wild Bunch, Straw Dogs and A Clockwork Orange. But looking at that cover, I can only ask in dismay: was I that full of incoherent rage? More than another typical teenager? Apparently, yes.

Influences are embarrassingly obvious: Frank Frazetta, Barry Smith. A less obvious influence is Géricault‘s Le Radeau de la Méduse:

…which explains why so many of the figures therein rudely turn their back on the reader.

Also irritating are the visual tics picked up from Berni Wrightson: the ‘saliva ropes’ in the shouting character’s mouth, the ‘twisty hair’ on his forearms.

Note the patterned background: I had just discovered Letratone, and like so many neophytes was inclined to abuse it, as the luckless readers of this blog shall soon confirm.

On the plus side, the composition holds together fairly well (you can’t go far wrong with triangles) and there’s a real sense of depth.

But that sloppy logo is unforgiveable.

On to the strip. It’s a nightmare of incompetence.

Note on this splash page how I avoided heavy blacks: at that time, I was intending to produce this via photocopy.

Apparently, in the year 2025, for some reason they revived flintlock muskets…

It’s the standard post-apocalyptic fun future, inspired by Roger Zelazney‘s novel Damnation Alley and, oddly, Jack Kirby’s early Jimmy Olson comics. A bit over-tidy for after the apocalypse

I’m surprised to see how competent the perspective is: I don’t recall having studied perspective at that age (16), but I guess I had.

 

I’m afraid lousy dialogue and worse lettering are the hallmarks of my writing here. I was a nice white middle-class boy, so of course I tried to talk tough. Guns are by definition cool at that age.

Not the fishbowl-lens perspective on the guy’s hand in panel two. I was probably imitating Neal Adams.

The fussy, unnecessarily confusing odd panel shape was a disease of the time. I guess I was following in the footsteps of Jim Steranko and of Neal Adams. Note the last panel: you won’t see another woman in this macho world for macho men.

More weird layouts, odd angles, arbitrary cropping. The guy walking downstairs looks like he’s about to fall on his hairy face. I learnt that the real challenge in drawing isn’t in detailing giant space armadas– it’s in showing someone walking downstairs or opening a door.

So endeth chapter one.

There followed a mimeographed page of messages from the editor. I’m relieved to note that neither Ahmed nor I took himself very seriously. It was typewritten: word processors didn’t exist, and typesetting was expensive.

 

Rounding out the book was Chris Lomax’s ‘Milkman’. Its primitivism and absurdity have stood the test of time better than my overblown strip. Chris went on to be a successful stage and set designer in Paris, working on films such as Betty Blue.

 

 

We return to the horrors of mimeograph. Bram at ‘Dark they Were and Golden-Eyed’ let us drop off some copies on consignment if we’d run a free ad for his shop.

Well, Bram, you get what you pay for. And this is what ‘free’ pays for:

 

Ahmed took fifty copies to sell at his school; I took the remaining hundred and fifty to sell in mine. I recruited my brothers Philippe and Gérard, as well as friends like fellow comics- fan Sanjit, to spread out through the school and tout my inky baby.

We sold out within 24 hours.

It seems that publishing a comic in high school is like giving a rock concert in the gym or acting in the school play. The kids’ll support you just because you’re one of them. (Our principal was something of an arsehole about it, as I hadn’t asked for his permission; fuggim, I was out of there anyway.)

Issue 2 came out over a year and a half later. Now I’m a terribly slow artist, but this was ridiculous.

I had gone to Paris to study art at the Faculté des Arts Plastiques et des Sciences de l’Art of the Sorbonne. I was studying electro-acoustic music under Yannis Xenakis, screenwriting under Eric Rohmer, conceptual art under Journiac, comics under Jean-Claude Mézières.

I had outgrown my adolescent strip. It frankly embarrassed me.

Why didn’t I just give it up, then? A misplaced puritanism– I had vowed to break my bad habit of starting projects and not ending them; and I didn’t want to let Ahmed down.

The second issue boasted another odd cover, replete with clichés taken from Frazetta, Ploog, and Gustave Doré. I like the poor sap in the foreground’s expression. “I gotta turn around…but I really don’t wanna turn around…but I gotta…”:

 

 

Page one– more arbitrary panel noodling, fatuous captions, and peasants dutifully giving us an “infodump”: a massive exposition of stuff they already know and shouldn’t be repeating.

 

God, the inflation of those speech balloons.

More gratuitous violence follows. (I give myself some credit for actually researching hot-air balloons.)

From here to the end, you’ll note that the panel-per-page ratio goes up, to as much as fifteen. Was this innovative structuring for more intense beats? No, it was bad planning. I leave the rest of the story to the masochistic blogreader. It depresses me to read it myself.

 

 

For the second issue I had simply mailed the pages to Ahmed in London and let him do it all himself. A bit cowardly of me.

Ahmed found a 15-year-old artist named Marcelo Anciano to fill out the rest of the book:

 

When I finally met Marcelo the next summer, I remarked how his characters’ weapons were such blatant phallic symbols (see above). He nearly died laughing.

(Marcelo is now a film director and producer, working with Quentin Tarantino and other luminaries.)

 

Note in Marcelo’s back cover how he spells ‘Bizzaro’ for ‘Bizarro’. We were all over quality control, weren’t we?

The second issue was a sales disaster, as it probably deserved to be. I didn’t care; I’d purposefully disengaged myself from it, which was unfair and a betrayal to Ahmed and to Marcelo.

Today, Ahmed is known as Ahmed Shawki, the editor of the International Socialist Review. I wonder if our failed little business venture soured him on capitalism? He’s certainly grown since this first foray in the publishing business.

(One 13-year-old fan, an architect’s son, who used to come to Ahmed’s place where we’d discuss comics, was definitely not a business failure. He went on to found the Forbidden Planet chain of bookstores, the dominant direct-market distributor in Britain, and Titan Books. His name was Nick Landau.)

For years after, though, I’d take copies of issue 2 to the comics marts off Tottenham Court Road and vainly try to flog’em. This led to an embarrassing incident (and a good lesson.)

After one mart in 1975 I was hanging around while the organisers dismantled the set-up. A fellow dropped by the table where I sat and asked to see some of my purchases; we got to talking. It was Dave Gibbons, then known to me as a very prolific fan artist. He said he was working on superhero comics for an African publisher and was about to do ‘Dan Dare’ for an upcoming IPC mag called 2000 AD.

I passed him a copy of my issue 2 and awaited his opinion.

Now, Mr Gibbons is a gentleman, and I’m sure he didn’t wish to hurt my feelings. He pointed to one panel and said: “I like this one”:

As it happens, that panel is the only swipe I’ve ever done– stolen from Swamp Thing # 4.

” God sees the truth, but waits” goes the old Russian proverb.

So does Dave Gibbons! I’ve never swiped a drawing since. Never.

(“What, never?”

“No, never!”

“What, neverrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr….?”

“Well…

…hardly everrrrrrrrrrrrrrr…!!!

W.S.Gilbert, ‘HMS Pinafore’)

1973 was a watershed year for comics. And not in a good way.

The Underground smashed into a brick wall: anti-obscenity Supreme Court decisions, anti-paraphernalia laws that destroyed headshops, a general change in the culture away from perceived ‘hippie dippie’ values, all nearly killed this once-vibrant sector.

The great paper shortage of 1973 and the oil embargo of that same year put crippling pressure on the mainstream comics companies.

They also were losing quickly their traditional retail outlets, and the nascent direct market wasn’t yet strong enough to take up the slack.

Britain headed into a decade-long economic slump, putting paid to ‘swinging London’ (and birthing Punk.) ‘Dark they Were and Golden-Eyed’ went out of business in 1981.

promotional button by Hunt Emerson

Still, in those old crude fanzines of Britain’s early seventies are the seeds of future accomplishment. It was here that the young Dave Gibbons, Brian Bolland, Kevin O’Neill and so many others took their first stumbling steps.

Bram, Diane, Rob, Des– I just want you to know that the whiny, loud, obnoxious fanboy 15-year-old you knew as Alex is now a whiny, loud, obnoxious fanboy 56-year-old, and he’d like to buy you all a jar so we can lament how comics have gone to the dogs since our day. ‘When I were a lad…”

As for me, I never published again, and remain a dilettante in comics. Looking back, I regret that I didn’t pursue an entirely different talent I had for caricature; it would’ve borne more interesting fruit.

Ah, nostalgia just ain’t what it used to be…mais où sont les neiges d’antan? Where are the snows of yesteryear?

Below is a recent bit of foolery, done for an online ‘exquisite corpse’ jam comic:

That’s about the limit for me nowadays.

Yet, hard as I’ve been on my adolescent self — still I’d give up everything I have to relive those days, those golden years gone forever, when I was teenage cartoonist.

****************************************************************************************************

For a good overview of the British fanzine movement, check out
Dez Skinn’s entertaining take.
An incredible resource:
the International Times archive.
Lastly, that jam I contributed to:
Good fun, check it out