I was today years old when I learned the dancer in the music video for Kate Bush’s Running up that Hill, Misha Hervieu, is a trans woman.
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How can you be anything if you can’t be yourself?
If you have ten spare minutes, this extract from the 1977 queer documentary Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives featuring theatrical actress Pat Bond is well worth watching:
Pat Bond tells about how she joined the army during World War II because she was in love with a girl who wouldn’t fall in love with her, how widespread gay and lesbian soldiers actually were at the time, semi-tolerated when the army still needed them. She also talks about what happened when they weren’t needed anymore, the witch hunts that kicked everybody suspected of being queer out with a dishonourable discharge. She also tells about having to fit into a certain role even as a lesbian, that you had to be either butch or femme and how that was both a comfort (as long as you knew the rules you could act the part) and how she never felt herself fitting in her role. Slightly nostalgic as well for when being lesbian meant being part of an incrowd, different from the norm, something she felt had disappeared with the greater openness of the seventies. But she wouldn’t go back: “how can you be anything if you can’t be yourself”?
Prescient too in worrying that the new tolerance might not last. With the twin disasters of the AIDS epidemic and the Reagan presidency only few years away, it’s hard not to look at her worries as prophetic. The eighties really did saw a backlash against queer rights.
‘A Poxy Little Motoring show’
The end of Top Gear / The Grand Tour after twentytwo years did hit me harder than I expected.
By far the most rightwing media I regularly enjoyed, knowning full well that Clarkson especially is a reactionary knobhead and despite having no interest whatsoever in cars, for years Top Gear was the highlight of Sunday night television viewing. It was one of the things that both Sandra and I liked, even if she had even less interest in motoring than I had. The Grand Tour was never quite the same but was good fun as well, though you could feel the end was near once they stopped doing regular shows. The specials were still good, but also without the leavings of the normal shows, a bit like eating only your pudding and not the meat.
Still, watching this last episode and especially the last scene it was a reminder of everything that made the Top Gear trio so great together. Despite everything I’ll miss it.
2000AD: a personal history
Discourse 2000 is a new project started by Tom Ewing, looking at the history of 2000AD. He explains why and how in its first installment:
I’ve wanted to write about 2000AD for years. It means a lot to me. It means a lot to most British comics readers of my age and a fair spread of years around that, I’d guess. A lot of my aesthetic sensibilities, in comics and frankly beyond them, are rooted in what 2000AD did to me at a tender age. Acquire a taste for thrill-power when your brain is young and open and it never really leaves. This blog is my attempt to do right by the comic.
Its format is simple. I’m not a historian in the archival, dates and interviews and reconciling sources sense. This is a critical history of 2000AD, in that I’m arranging its entries so they tell a roughly chronological story – but the emphasis is on criticism, which means I’m more interested in what appeared in the Prog than the details of how it got there.
But I’m interested in everything that appeared. Each entry will look at a different strip; each strip will get its own entry. I’m taking 2000AD a year at a time, aiming to cover the first 10 years at least, and long-running features with multiple stories (most obviously Judge Dredd) will get an entry for each year. But something like Inferno, which starts in 1977 and runs into 1978, will only get the one write-up. Sometimes the entries will stick closely to a discussion of the strip; sometimes they’ll range more widely. Britain in the late 70s and early 80s was a volatile, exciting place, even as it was also tacky, venal, and nasty. There’s a lot going on.
I didn’t get to 2000AD myself until a decade later, my entry point being, as it was for so many, Judge Dredd. Dredd had had a shortlived comics series in the Netherlands and I had gotten into superhero comics and he was close enough to one, right? That particular series ran for less than ten issues but did the Brian Bolland Cursed Earth saga which was mindblowing to a fourteen year old. Maybe even more important for a young metal head, Dredd had been namechecked in the liner notes for Anthrax’s Among the Living album, alongside such other late eighties comics like TMNT, The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen, Byrne’s Fantastic Four, Miller’s Daredevil, Boris the Bear and D.R. and Quinch, with Bolland, John Wagner, Ron Smith and Carlos Ezquerra also mentioned. The Anthrax boys were serious comics fans it seems and rare, knew their 2000AD. And what really fried my eighties nerdy teenage brain was this:
Anthrax wasn’t the only rock band to be inspired by Dredd of course; The Human League of all bands did their own version of I Am the Law. For me, it came at exactly the right time to drag me further into the comics rabbit hole. If a band as cool as them liked comics, liked Dredd, than comics must be cool too.
2000AD itself remained elusive to me however: it was only in 1990 or so that the local comic shop started carrying it, starting with prog 700. That was the first one I ever bought and I would continue buying it up until prog 824. In hindsight, this was one of the zine’s golden ages, with excellent new Dredd and Psi Judge Anderson stories and an influx of new talent like Garth Ennis, Philip Bond, Jamie Hewlett, Peter Milligan and John Smith. There was also the return of Grant Morrison and Zenith, one of those strips I’d only ever read about rather than had read. Reading this weekly was great, even if not every story or comic was to my liking. Every prog would have at least something interesting.
Over the decades since, 2000AD has only been an intermittent interest to me, to be sure. I haven’t read the zine since, but rather have bought the occassional collection of classic series, like Halo Jones or Strontium Dog. But at Worldcon this year I got curious again about that period in UK comics, roughly from 1988 to 1993 or so when it seemed that 2000AD might’ve brought into being a new sort of adult comics zine in Britain: Revolver, Crisis, Toxic, Blast. All sorts of earnest, mature monthly titles suddenly sprung up and seemed to have created a new market for a more grownup version of the 2000AD. Alas, all of them were gone in a year or two and it remained a pipedream, but seeing those on sale at the one comics dealer at Worldcon piqued my interest again. A lot of interesting ideas and comics were tried out in those years and much of it was first nurtured by 2000AD.
Tom Ewing’s new project therefore comes at the perfect time for me and judging by its first four released chapters, should be required reading for anybody curious about 2000AD.
Seeing far beyond his time — John Berger’s Way of Seeing (1972)
If you have two hours to spare, spend them watching Ways of Seeing, a four part documentary by John Berger from 1972, ostensibly on how photography has changed the way in which we see art, but moving beyond that to examining the European tradition of oil painting, what its purpose was and how it’s reflected in modern day publicity.
For something itself now fiftytwo years old, from a time when colour television was still a novelty and no such thing as personal computers let alone mobile phones and social media existed, it’s still incredibly relevant. Just that first episode alone, looking at how a painting was changed from a still, silent image rooted to one unique location to something that can be chopped up, moved about, re-contextualised through the ability to photograph and reproduce it, is a revelation. Then in the second episode he takes a punt at how nudes, female nudes, are represented in oil painting: how these are not naked, truthful images of the women they supposedly portray but passive pictures to be consumed by the male owner of the painting. The female figure as a possession to be displayed. And then, echoing what he said in the first episode, that he too uses these painting to send his own messages, he acknowledges the absurdity of his the sole voice on the subject and hands over to a round table of women to discuss this further.
Episode three than looks at the real purpose of the oil painting as a medium, not the lofty ideals ascribed to it, and argues that it is about showing off your possessions as the owner/displayer. That in turn leads to the fourth episode where it juxtapositions publicity and advertisements with the oil painting tradition as a sort of mirror image. If paintings shows the things you already own and you in control of them, ads feed the dream of owning them, the aspiration.
A very heady mix of ideas here and no wonder it had such an impact. It is an interesting rebuttal to the far more traditional view of Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation (1969), to which this was in response. Art as a mystical, uplifting activity versus art as a capitalist tool that needs democratisation as much as any other such tool. In this context, the most interesting idea of all may have come from the end of the first episode, after he has argued that images are like words, but:
The images may be like words but there is no dialogue yet. You cannot reply to me. FOR THAT TO BECOME POSSIBLE IN THE MODERN MEDIA OF COMMUNICATION ACCESS TO TELEVISION MUST BE EXTENDED BEYOND IT’S PRESENT NARROW LIMITS.
Fifty years on we got this through social media; now we know that this democratizing dialogue has broken our modern elites’ minds.