A while back I spent the weekend at my parents and I took the opportunity to pick some of the several thousands individual comics –floppies– I still have stashed away there. It’s been well over a decade since I last bought a new comic in this format, back when I was still a serious collector. Back then I was all about the floppies, buying everything that looked interesting and cheap, but not having been a comics collector for the better part of the last decade has cured me off that. The big disadvantage of the classic comic being that they’re relatively hard to store and, well, look a bit naff when left out in your living room.

It was Tom Spurgeon’s recent post about which comics you read during the eighties and which you regretted missing out on that got me thinking about floppies again. I started seriously buying comics at the tail end of the eighties, spending much of the nineties combing through back issue boxes looking for interesting series I’d read about. That was really the only way you could get your hands on many classic series back then; the internet was too slow for pirating comics, while the great reprint programmes only got started at the turn of the millennium. Even quite recent Marvel or DC stories and titles were only to be had in back issue form, let alone series done by now defunct publishers.

The end result was that I built up a collection full of holes and odds and sods, a couple of issues here or there of series I saw advertised in Comics Interview, half a run of something praised in Amazing Comics, loads of comics that looked familiar and were cheap enough to take a chance at, but very rarely complete runs. Spelunking through comics boxes at shows or obscure comics shop was fun, but readers never had it so good as now, when so much is available at the click of a mouse at Amazon (other online retailers are also available).

The appeal of buying single issues as opposed to trade paperbacks or collections has long faded, but getting these comics out has gotten me a bit nostalgic nonetheless. With floppies you have so much more of a connection to comics as a wider field, through house ads, letter pages and editorials, not to mention having that weekly Thursday evening ritual of trekking to the local comic shop and picking up the latest issues. You don’t really have that buying a Peanuts collection from a bookstore.

(Pictured above, complete runs of, clockwise from the top: Hawk and Dove, Barbara & Karl Kesel, Greg Guler, War of the Gods, George Perez and Russell Braun, the Perez/Ralph Macchio Black Widow four parter from Marvel Fanfare, Kurt Busiek’s and Perez (notice a pattern?) run on The Avengers, followed by the Perez drawn crossover series Infinity Gauntlet (with Jim Starlin) and Crisis on Infinite Earths (Marv Wolfman), Elaine Lee and Kaluta’s Starstruck, Steve Gerber and Phil Winslade’s Nevada, Strikeforce Morituri, the first 20 issues by Peter B. Gilis and Brent Anderson, the Goodwin/Simonson Manhunter, Howard Chaykin’s Black Kiss and finally perhaps Mark Gruenwald’s finest hour on Captain America, #357 to 370, with Kieron Dwyer and Ron Lim. )

Novel Winner: Among Others, Jo Walton (Tor)

Other Nominees

• Embassytown, China Miéville (Macmillan UK; Del Rey; Subterranean Press)
• Firebird, Jack McDevitt (Ace Books)
• God’s War, Kameron Hurley (Night Shade Books)
• Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, Genevieve Valentine (Prime Books)
• The Kingdom of Gods, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit US; Orbit UK)

Unlike this year’s Hugo Awards, which were disappointing to say the least, that Nebula shortlist is fairly strong, with only the Jack McDevitt –who has never written anything not bland and workmanlike– out of place. It was also nicely diversive, with five out of six nominees being women and at least one person of colour (N. K. Jemisin) on it. In a genre where all too often award shortlists are filled with legacy white male candidates, more voted for due to their name than their books, this is a good thing.

Among Others was one of the best novels I read last year and I’m glad it got the recognition it deserved.

I’m not a child. I don’t pinky swear. I don’t do patronizing sing-song voices. I don’t like to be touched by strangers and I don’t like strangers trying to force me to look at their faces, touch them, or promise them anything. And I don’t like being called a shithead for not responding to these things or looking terrified by these things. That goes double if you said shithead in the same light-hearted, patronizing way you would to a cat who just put their teeth on you for petting them too long. So don’t think that “I was just joking” would change my mind.

That this woman might mean well is of course no defense of her actions or her inability to understand that you can’t treat grown ass people like troublesome pets, but I can see how easily genuine concern could slide into patronising or worse. It’s the sort of thing I struggled with during Sandra’s illness, to keep treating her like the adult she was, to not let her illness get in the way of her.

You want to know what I find really depressing these days? The Marvel superheroes used to be figures of the counterculture. I don’t want to press on this point to hard, because it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that Stan Lee pushed the characters as being part of the sixties counterculture when he saw that he could leverage a small but enthusiastic readership of college-aged kids into cultural cache.

Which is something I’ve been thinking about as well. Marvel always used to be, if not a leftist, at least a liberal leaning company. Most of its heroes were always either being distrusted by the proper authorities, or were in active conflict with them in some way or another. In fact, the whole Marvel Universe was founded in an act of rebellion, with the Fantastic Four sneaking off on their ill fated rocket flight against the orders of the military. Then there was the Hulk, in which a scientist working for the military industrial complex gets irradiated by his own weapon and turns into a monster. Not to mention Spider-Man, or the X-Men, both hated and feared by a world they repeatedly saved, etc. etc.

It’s all a far cry from the espionage/black ops/governmental superhero death squads of the modern Marvel Universe, where Captain America is no longer a Roosevelt Democrat turned into the symbol of the American dream, but just another Republican thug. Which is one reason why I no longer read many Marvel comics, as even the good ones are drenched in this fascistoid atmosphere.

Donna Summer, dead at 63. Seriously, fuck cancer.

There’s an interesting discussion about “Lola” on Andrew Hickey’s blog, mainly about whether or not it’s problematic in its depiction of trans people:

I’ve dreaded writing about this song, because it’s witty, clever, and one of the catchiest things Ray Davies ever wrote, but it also perpetuates some negative stereotypes about trans people. However, it also shows more respect to trans people than any other pop song I could think of

Which might just be laying too much weight on what’s largely an ironic song gently mocking a young boy having his first encounter with what I always thought was a male transvestite, what with the last line of the song being “But I know what I am I’m glad I’m a man and so is Lola”. It’s the old story of boy meets girl, boy discovers girl is also a boy, boy discovers he couldn’t care less: well, nobody’s perfect.

If you look at it unfavourably, I guess you could say that it enacts that hoary old homo and transphobic fear of straight men being “tricked” into having sex with somebody who’s “really” a man, something that used to be a staple of bad American raunch comedies (or even the Police Academy series).

But I think that’s completely missing the point of “Lola”, which is really about love conquering all, gender not mattering and becoming fluid anyway (“Girls will be boys and boys will be girls, It’s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world except for Lola”). It’s all done with a wink and a smile, but at its heart it is accepting of trans people more than you could say it is damaging.

To be honest I wasn’t sure he was still alive, but Tom Spurgeon has just reported his death last Saturday, with a very nice obituary in which he called Paape “one of the last remaining ties to the initial heyday of 20th Century French-language comics publishing”. You might best compare him to somebody like Don Heck, an artist with decades of good, solid work under his belt, never quite in the first rank of cartoonists perhaps, but with his own charm nonetheless.

Paape had worked on both Spirou and Tintin weekly comics magazines, the Marvel and DC of Belgian-Franco comics, with Tintin being slightly stuffier and a little bit more respectable. While Paape got his start at Spirou, it was Tintin were he left his mark, starting in the mid-sixties when Greg, the Belgian Stan Lee, took over the magazine as editor/writer and revamped it with more adventure stories, modish and stylish, of which his and Paape’s Luc Orient was one.

Luc Orient has the traditional three man band structure of many European adventure comics, with Luc Orient as the smart, strong, straight but slightly bland leading man, professor Hugo Kala as the brain and occasional comic relief, less physical than Orient but still a man of action and finally Lora, Kala’s secretary and Luc’s friend/love interest, feisty, independent and not nearly as often kidnap bait than e.g. Sue Storm used to be. All three work for Eurocrystal, the leading European science laboratory, in which capacity they go on strange adventures. What sets it apart is that from the start the series was orientated (sorry) towards science fiction, as well as running multiple album storylines at a time when most European series solely dealt with standalone stories.

I discovered Luc Orient in the same way I read most comics as a child: through the local library, together with series like Valerian and Les naufragés du temps. Of those three Luc Orient was the easiest to get into, thanks in no small part to Paape’s artwork. At first sight it looks slightly flat, a bit stilted in its composition and with stiff figures, but if you give it a change you’ll find out that this is a deliberate stylistic choices and that it works well in giving an grounding of realism to these science fictional stories. He was great at drawing technology, real or imagined, some of his design sense surely influencing later science fiction series.

Luc Orient was and is one of my favourite science fiction comic series and I still love the look of Paape’s artwork. For me, Paape was one of the cartoonists who defined what modern Franco-Belgian comics from the late sixties would look like.

Nicholls does go on to say that “it is as if, for a handful of SF writers, Victorian London has come to stand for one of those turning points in history where things can go one way or the other, a turning point peculiarly relevant to SF itself.” It could indeed be argued that, while not all Steampunk or Steampunk-influenced novels are set in Victorian London, the city, to a large extent, dominates these narratives: “a city,” Nicholls observes, where “the modern world was being born.”

But if steampunk is indeed a mulligan on the industrial revolution, a do-ocer to get all the cool toys we didn’t get in the real world (brass computers! armoured zeppelins! cogs on shoes!) as Kip Manley has it, than London surely is the wrong city to use. The industrial revolution happened up ‘orth, in the Midlands, in Lancastershire and Yorkshire, not in the capital, but in the grimy horrible industrial towns and cities Pete Wylie lists here.

Not that London didn’t have industry of course; just that the schwerpunkt of the industrial revolution was never there. Which makes the central role it plays in steampunk imagination all the more strange, until you realise most steampunk writers are as much influenced by Sherlock Holmes as real history. London fits the middle class conciets of steampunk, the desire to have an industrial revolution without the industrial classes. In that regard, London was indeed the city where the future was being born.

Going back home to my parents always means an opportunity to look at the secondhand bookstore there (singular, as there can be only one). This weekend was a good one. I found a nice stack of comics, as well as some other neat books.

What I found were fifteen or so Douwe Dabbert strips, an old serio-comic adventure series written by Donald Duck editor Thom Roep and drawn by Piet Wijn, one of the old grand masters of Marten Toonder’s animation and comic studio. These stories were serialised in the Donald Duck weekly magazine, which always included a non-Disney strip like this, aimed at slightly older readers, in its back pages.

On top of those is a January Jones album, barely visible under the big Goscinny/Uderzo Oumpah-pah omnibus. The latter is sort of a prequel strip to Asterix only set amongst “Red Indians” in French North America. January Jones on the other hand is a retro-adventure ligne claire strip that ran in Sjors en Sjimmie in the early nineties, drawn by Eric Heuvel and written by Martin Lodewijk, one of the Netherlands best scenario writers, who also worked on the Don Lawrence Storm series, the last issues I still needed to get I also found this weekend.

Finally, on top of those there’s a Gerrit de Jager cartoon collection of the strips he did for a newspaper about the economic recession and some normal books: Jane Jacobs The Economy of Cities, David Pearce’s Occupied City and Foch: Man of Orleans by B. H. Liddel Hart.

The box behind all this is a short comics box filled with a mere fraction of the collection of floppies I still have stashed at my parents. I spent an hour on Friday digging through my longboxed and taking out some favourite series and sequences, things I knew I wanted to keep. One of these days all of them need to be moved here, or gotten rid off. The dillemma of every aging comics collector: what do I want to keep, what can I live without.