Stupid comics are a dime a dozen (Just ask Mister Kitty) and most are not really worth discussing. But when it’s a comic created by the Neal Adams, it’s a different matter.

Neal Adams is of course best known for his gorgeous work on Batman, where together with Denny O’Neil as the writer, he dragged the Caped Crusader out of his late sixties camp era. His was a more grim, realistic Batman, better suited to the time. With O’Neil he also the classic ‘relevant’ era of Green Lantern/Green Arrow in which social justice topics rather than space aliens were fought. Working for Marvel, his biggest story ironically was all about those space aliens, doing the art for Roy Thomas’ Kree/Skrull War in Avengers, while also doing some of his best work on X-Men before that was cancelled. Then there was Deadman, one of his signature characters at DC as well as the horror work he did at Warren at the same time. By the early seventies he waa arguably the most well loved comics artist in the business, a perennial fan favourite.

By the late seventies however he’d largely stopped doing work for mainstream comics, having started his own company, Continuity, which did a lot of illustration work and the like outside of comics, while also working as packager, where they created comics for other people to publish. A huge number of artists would come up through the Continuity studios throughout the decade. At the same time he was also active in securing creative rights for cartoonists, being e.g involved in an attempt to unionise the industry as well as the fight to get Siegel and Shuster recognised as the creators of Superman.

Not surprising then that in the eighties, with the establishment of the direct market, he started thinking about creating and publishing new titles with his own characters. For Pacific Comics he would created two titles this way: Ms Mystic and Skateman. A few years later, after Pacific Comics had gone bankrupt, he would turn Continuity in its own publisher, which would exist from 1987 to 1994, dying during the great superhero glut of the mid-nineties. You’d expect a company based on Adams art and creativity would have a good reputation, but little of what Continuity produced was good and all of it suffered from bad editing and production issues.

Some of these problems are already present in Skateman. The plot is a mishmash of cliches: a Vietnam vet and live long martial arts user gets into roller derby but has to quit when he accidentally causes the death of his best friend. When his girlfriend is senselessly murdered, something snaps and he becomes a vigilante, using his martial arts and roller skating prowess to become Skateman, dressed up in white shorts, a red t-shirt and mask. Most of this is told in a long flashback after a fight against some motor cycle thugs, which end with him being badly wounded. Then his new girlfriend gets kidnapped and he uses the local skaters to get her back and the end.

Adams’ art is serviceable but noticeably worse than his earlier work. It’s not helped by the atrocious colouring, something that would be a trademark of any Continuity series. In all, there’s just no joy in any of this. no sense that Adams felt any pride in his creation. It could’ve survived the story being meh if the art was any good, but it isn’t really. The whole concept of a roller skating superhero as some sort of urban vigilante just doesn’t work. Even reading this to make fun of is a chore.

Is it good if your comic has to start with a disclaimer that the characters in it are at least eighteen years old?

We briefly met Bettie Page when talking about Starslauyer and Rocketeer, but Dave Stevens use of her is not the end of comics obsession with her. If you don’t know her, she became famous as the “Queen of Bondage” for her pinup work in the fifties. Not because it was all that extreme but mainly because of, well, her smile. She had a charm to her that elevated her beyond the tawdry material she appeared in. The sort of innocent, vulnerable sexuality that maladjusted asocial comics nerds can just about handle. It’s an obsession I never quite understood but it has provided many a mediocre comics artist with a bit of pocket money drawing her.

Betty in Bondage Annual 2 is a case in point. What we have here is a comic that chronicles “Betty” making a photo set in which she pretends to be after a ring of white slavers. Most of the ‘plot’ such as it is consists of various bondage scenes in which she either tortures another girl or is tortured instead. This torture mostly consist of being tied up and then mildly whipped or spanked. I’m sure it appeals to fetishists but it’s all fairly tame for something that comes with that disclaimer. The art by Teo Jonelli is decent but nothing spectacular. Nevertheless there were three annuals of this stuff and the publisher, Shunga Comics, had two other series starring “Betty”. Somebody must’ve liked it.

I’m not sure when or why I bought this myself, but it must’ve been as some random cheap back issue bought at a con or something. If you like this sort of stuff, Eric Stanton is much better and has some actual artistic merit.

Though we may not like that, sometimes good art is created by bad people or rather, people with bad worldviews. Cerebus: High Society is one example. Do you still read it?

Cerebus started off in the late seventies, part of a wave of creator owned self published titles made possible by the rise of the direct market. At the time it was a simple Conan the Barbarian parody, with an Aardvark as stand in for Conan as the joke. But as Dave Sim went on he became more ambitious, his stories more complex and interesting and eventually he created a single, five hundred page story told over twenty issues: High Society. Nobody else had done this at the time and Sim went even further and decided that from then on Cerebus would be one continuous story, one that would end with issue 300 and the Aardvark dying alone and unmourned.

Gone were the simple adventure stories and parodies, instead Cerebus went for cerebral plots revolving around political intrigue and religion and all that good stuff, the next two storylines continuing where High Society had started. As Cerebus evolved and Sim’s own interests changed, the series shifted further, into a more personal as well as more philosophical story. Which is where the trouble began. Because in issue 186 Sim set out his personal philosophy, his view of the world, through the text pages that had been part of Reads, the then running storyline which were written by his alter ego “Viktor Davis”. This positioned a creative, rational “Male Light” versus an irrational, emotional and devouring “Female Void”. As The comics Journal put it in issue 174:

A justification of — even, call for — misogyny as a philosophical stance, “Reads” comes on like a combination of a bitter post-breakup barrooom rant, biologic conspiracy, and bizarre male Objectivism (in the Ayn Rand sense of the term).

Things didn’t get better from there and Cerebus from Reads is dominated by Sim working out the ramifications of this philosophy. This, for most readers, did not make for a more interesting or entertaining series, regardless of the revulsion they might have felt for this stance in the first place. Though Sim did succeed in reaching issue 300 and Cerebus’ Demise, right on schedule in March 2004, the bloom had gone of it. What had once been seen as one of American comics’ greatest achievements was now an embarrassment. But what about the bits that, like the curate’s egg, were still good, not tainted by this misogyny? What about High Society?

For me, High Society was the first Cerebus I read, when I came across the phonebook version in my then regular comics shop. I knew about it, but had never read it or even seen an issue, so when I came across it I couldn’t help but read it then and there. I started buying the other then released collections, up until Melmoth. This was sometime in the late nineties, when the controversy had already erupted. I must’ve seen it discussed online, in the Usenet comics groups or the comix-L mailing list I was subscribed to. But at that point I knew too little of it to let it stop me from reading Cerebus. But looking at it twenty years after the series was finished, knowing Sim was and is still serious about this, it’s hard not to feel reluctant to reread even the good bits of Cerebus.

For me, this is not a case like that of a Neil Gaiman or Warren Ellis, who have had creditable accusations of sexual harassment brought against them. Those I find easy: regardless of how much these writers mattered to me (Ellis more than Gaiman), they won’t get my money anymore, nor am I inclined to reread or discuss what I’ve already bought from them. But Sim, to his credit, is ‘just’ a misogynist philosopher with as far as I know no such accusations brought against him. while his philosophy is revolting, he lacks the influence to be dangerous in the way an influencer like Andrew Tate is. Cerebus is just too impenetrable, too obscure outside a smallish circle of comics nerds to be dangerous.

And that’s due entirely to the fact that most people did stop buying Cerebus after this all came out. Cerebus may have reached its end as planned but by that time nobody cared anymore. Two decades on from that I personally don’t feel the need to continue this boycott anymore. (Confession time: I did actually buy the entire series in ebook form when it came up on Humble Bundle.) I think it is possible to read and examine the entirety of Cerebus again, something Tom Ewing has been doing recently. I don’t feel guilty for having High Society or any other Sim work in my collection, even if it is irredeemably tainted now.

Everything I know about the American Civil War I learned through reading the big nose adventure humour series Les Tuniques Bleues.

Has there actually been any American comics series about the Civil War? I can’t think of any off the top of my head. Usually when it comes up it’s to give some antihero like Jonah Hex his background, preferably as some traitor who failed to defend slavery and now is sad the South lost the war or something. Not so much here. As you may expect from something called Les Tuniques Bleues (“the Bluecoats”) its protagonists are on the right side, the Northern side. Though that doesn’t stop it from taking the mickey out of war in general or the stupidity of the Northern commanders either.

Created by artist Louis Salvérius and writer Raoul Cauvin in 1970, the former sadly died a few albums in and he was replaced by Lampil,w ho has done the art ever since. Cauvin himself died in 2021 but the series has continued with new writers. Les Tuniques Bleues stars the hopelessly naive sergeant Chesterfield, proud to be a soldier and a true believer in his cause and government. He’s partnered with corporal Blutch, much more cynical, much smarter and not intending to sacrifice his own life for any cause, no matter how noble. It’s a classic combination you see a lot in Franco-Belgian humorous adventure comics like this. The series actually started as a more generic western comic, with Chesterfield and Blutch part of that famed institution that always arrives too late to be useful in other western comics: the cavalry. It’s only in the second album they move back east to the war.

As a child I loved this series, one of my favourites along with Asterix and Tintin. We even played Civil War soldier with my younger brothers and such. Most of the stories were set in a more or less generic Civil War scenario, but a lot also took place during actual historical events, as you should be able to guess from the title of this particular one, telling the story of 1st Bull Run. Along the way Blutch and Chesterfield also participated in the battle of the monitors, had to escape the Andersonville prison camp and witnessed the siege of Vicksburg.

Not that you could pass a history test by just reading this series, but it did mean that I could recognise various events when I came across them reading James M. McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era…