Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files 12 by John Wagner, Alan Grant & lots of artists

Ah, we reach the all-colour eps, and the collections go to colour (including the colour spreads of the earlier stories). I'm not fussed about colour mostly, though for the painted ones they'd be intolerably muddy in B&W. Trouble is, the price has jumped too. Still, I've rarely read a Dredd story I didn't like at all, and I enjoy lots of them. There are a few extremely strong ones here - Full Mental Jacket, Bloodlines (despite some very flawed art). The transition to colour is also utterly inspired - you would have to read it. The art here varies - a few poor artists, but some excellent work by John Ridgway, Colin MacNeil, Ian Gibson and Glenn Fabry.

There's also spectacular colouring on one story, with art by Brendan McCarthy, by my much-missed dear friend Steve Whitaker, who died a year ago tomorrow. I'm joining several of his other friends for a memorial pub crawl around some of his favourite pubs in a favourite old home area of his tomorrow.

Watchmen by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

I'd not read this in years, but not much seemed at all unfamiliar. It's still an immensely impressive work in a lot of ways. I've still seen nothing else in the superhero genre that's as intelligently coherent, in terms of story, structure and motif. It also has a willingness to deal with moral complexities of a depth and scale rarely seen in the genre.

( quite a bit more... )

Another catch-up post...

Four days ago I got a call telling me my mother had died. I've had quite a few calls since, particularly from family, consoling me and making arrangements for getting to the funeral next Friday and so on. The phone went last night, and my assumption was that it was probably another of these. In fact it was one of my best and oldest friends, telling me that another of my best friends, the one I have known second longest, had died earlier - coincidentally on the way to hospital, as my mother had.

Some people on my flist were among Steve's and my best friends. The three here who spring first to mind were all introduced to me by Steve, just over 25 years ago. I met most of my best friends through that circle, and I simply can't imagine my life without them. Most of the people I know here on LJ came through ILX, which came through giddyoldgoat pointing me at that message board - and giddyoldgoat was one of that trio that Steve introduced me to. Steve was on LJ himself, under the name stickismyfriend. He used it to put up his art.

Some of you will know his work to some small degree - a fine if unproductive comic artist (he drew a comic for me when I was a pro editor, and the last volume of the Judge Dredd Case Files ends with some of his work with Brendan McCarthy), and a tremendous colourist (best known for V For Vendetta). He contributed to my old comics magazine in various ways too. I remember our interviewing Will Eisner together. His GN The Dreamer had just come out, a tale of his early life with all the names changed. Steve was checking a couple of identities with him, and Eisner's jaw literally dropped. "How can you even have heard of that man? How can you know that? I thought I was the only person in the world who would know that was." I have never met anyone who knew more about comics than Steve, no one to compare to him at identifying artists. I remember getting together after comic marts, and someone would have bought something like some random romance comic from the '50s - most of us would never have so much as heard of the publisher or title. The art was uncredited and looked rather anonymous, generic. We'd hand it to Steve and almost always he would take one look, and tell us penciller and inker, where they worked, who they worked with...

But that's all what he did. The main point is that Steve was one of my best friends through virtually my whole adult life. I learned a vast amount from him and I loved him and will miss him enormously. I can't believe I'll never see him again. Maybe it's that it comes on top of my mother dying, before her funeral even, but this has hit me even harder than her death - maybe it's that I have had a lousy relationship with my mother, and never had anything but a good one with Steve, and even since he moved out of London to take care of his dad I saw him far more frequently than my mother - he's been an important part of my life, and I expected that to continue, where my mother was really part (albeit a huge one) of my past.