Anàlisis del context

The mid–1980s marked a watershed for American comics. Alternately dubbed “an unprecedented renaissance,” “the third movement,” or the start of “the revisionary superhero,” there is little doubt that something changed in the mindset of the comics industry that suggested that the old rules of what was allowed and disallowed, the boundaries of creativity and content, changed (McCue and Bloom 3; Klock 2f ). One indication of the shift was the increas-ing willincreas-ingness of big publishers to release titles without prior submission to the comics code, which had been the main shackle to conformity, severely constraining creators. Other factors for change were the increasing experimen-tation with different styles or the acknowledgement of the market for older readers who remained invested in their favorite characters and their comics collections well into their 20s and 30s.

The comics that came out of this period drew on a wide range of influ-ences both inside and outside of mainstream American comic books. The underground comics of the 1960s and 1970s and their descendants in the inde-pendent comics of the 1980s are one source of inspiration, as are the design sensibilities of Japanese manga (notable in Frank Miller’s work). French science fiction, particularly in the repackaged form of Heavy Metal magazine, offered a different range of ideas and styles. Yet the most significant influence on Amer-ican comics were the large number of creators that left the UK to work on many of the titles that have come to be considered the defining works of the period. In some respects the 1980s saw not simply a progression to a new stage in the history of American comics, but a merger of two national traditions.

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The emergence of the field of Anglo-American comics is what will be explained and contextualized here through a look at 2000AD, the weekly UK magazine that launched the careers of many of the creators in question. This will then be brought into focus through a close look at the trope of poverty in Alan Moore and Ian Gibson’s The Ballad of Halo Jones.

The influx of British talent to U.S. comics publishers paved the way for a fertile exchange of ideas, techniques and approaches that went beyond a sim-ple notion of national influences. Moreover many of these creators continue to work for U.S. publishers to this day and have been followed by a second generation of British talent. Richard Pells states that the process of cultural intermingling between Europe and America is intricate:

Americans are as affected by European products and fashions as Europeans are influenced by American technology and mass entertainment. The result is a complex interaction between different and increasingly heterogeneous cultures and societies [Pells xv].

The British-American relationship, however, is closer and more nuanced than that between the U.S. and the rest of Europe. While this can initially be attributed to a shared language and colonial history, it grew even closer with the political convergence that occurred during the 1980s under the steward-ships of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Richard Dumbrell argues that the personal and political closeness between the two “was intense, and unprecedented in recent history” (89). He goes on to argue that, by the time Alan Moore was writing comics for U.S. publishers, “by some measures the US and Britain [...] seem[ed] to constitute a distinct ‘culture area’” (32).

The “discovery” of British comics creators in the United States repre-sents a similar phenomenon to the impact that British artists had on Ameri-can pop music in the 1960s, following the success of the Beatles, both in terms of their popular appeal and their comparative radicalism:

The Beatles managed to be avant-garde and commercial at the same time. After their spectacular tour of the United States in 1964, the directors of America’s record companies realized that Britain was a hotbed of musical innovation.

Producers signed any British group they could find to a recording contract.

American radio programs featured the latest British music. American singer-composers like Simon and Garfunkel tried to emulate the artistry of the Beatles.

Soon, American and British groups sounded indistinguishable. By the 1970s, a transatlantic style had emerged, combining elements of British and American popular music [Pells 319].

To demonstrate the strength of this parallel we can make a short list of some of the British talent who had or were continuing to work with American pub-lishers by 1995: John Wagner, Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, Alan Grant, Eddie

Campbell, Grant Morrison, Warren Ellis, Garth Ennis, Steve Dillon, Neil Gaiman, Dave McKean, Kevin O’Neill, Bryan Talbot, Ian Gibson, Brian Bolland and many more. In the same way as the British music scene of the 1960s developed out of exposure to, and reinterpretation of, American pop-ular music, so the changes that occurred in comics in the 1980s cannot be seen as a simple case of one group of creators influencing another. British comics had changed in the late 1940s and early 1950s, inspired by an influx of American publications imported for GIs stationed in the UK.* Moreover, the British creators involved in 2000AD had been immediately influenced by both the American mainstream and underground U.S. artists such as Robert Crumb, Jaxon, Gilbert Shelton et al. In fact, many of the 2000AD writers and artists had been involved in the British underground comics scene largely inspired by its American counterpart (cf. Sabin 55). Thus, over time, the process has been one of reciprocal influence and innovation, so that by the mid–1980s we can talk of the emergence of a transatlantic Anglophone comics culture. One way this convergence has been described is as the “darkening”

of the comics industry, as the tone of many comics became more cynical, and favorite characters more sinister. What will be suggested here is that far from being a purely stylistic shift, creators were taking their medium more seri-ously and were, with due concern, responding to the significant political and social changes occurring on both sides of the ocean in their work.

Until the mid–1980s, American comics were imported to Britain or reprinted in special British editions (for instance, under the auspices of Mar-vel UK — which also produced original material) without a corresponding export of UK comics back to the United States. In this way, the importance of the work done in the UK prior to the emergence of this joint culture has largely been ignored, marketed under the auspices of a “genius” creator such as Alan Moore, or considered irrelevant in commentaries of the period.^† Con-sider how Alan Moore’s starting work on Swamp Thing is described in the corresponding Wikipedia article: “Moore, then relatively unknown, had at that time only written several stories for 2000AD, Warrior and Marvel UK ” (my emphasis). Moore’s Swamp Thing is significant because it represents the

*Cf. Pumphrey 12, 13. Since 1950 the old-established comics have been joined by many new ones.

Undoubtedly the most interesting newcomers are those produced by Hulton Press —Eagle, Girl, Robin and Swift. These comics were planned by Marcus Morris, a clerg yman, who, although new to the busi-ness, induced the Hulton Press (also new to comics publishing ) to produce Eagle. These new comics have been enormously successful. They are interesting because they use a technique new to British comics.

It is the technique of the American comic, which makes the picture tell the story. Captions are reduced to a minimum and are placed in balloons that emerge from the characters’ mouths. The traditional British comic has captions under the pictures and some balloons. The new technique integrates the pic-tures, making the story develop from frame to frame.

†The exception here is Roger Sabin’s excellent Adult Comics: An Introduction, which demonstrates the historical importance of 2000AD and the “Britpack.”

first mainstream comic for decades to consistently not be submitted for approval to the industry regulator: the Comics Code. To suggest that this rejection of the censors in American publishing would come from an unknown, untested and relatively inexperienced comics creator understates the professionalism and market awareness of the editors at DC Comics. It was because of the quality and sophistication of Moore’s early work that DC were prepared to take such a step.

In fact industry insiders acknowledge that comics such as 2000AD in the UK were radically ahead of the United States at the time, yet fail to under-stand the landscape from which they emerged. Tom DeFalco, editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics from 1987 to 1994, suggests that the maturity of European comics was precisely due to their lack of a comics code:

In Europe, they never had the McCarthy era that we had. They never had that 1950s era. Consequently, their publications never twisted toward just the chil-dren’s medium. Consequently they have a whole adult comic-book industry over there and there are regular monthly and weekly comic books, for adults [McCue and Bloom 94].

DeFalco clearly is misinformed. Comics on both sides of the Atlantic have experienced censorship in the post-war years and onward. John A. Lent indi-cates that censorship in the 1950s was a very international affair with at least 20 countries engaging in their own version of the campaign against American horror comics (9). In Britain and France the censorship of the 1950s mani-fested itself at a governmental level, rather than through industry self-regu-lation, with laws passed in both countries specifically limiting the content of children’s comic books. British censors were at least as severe, if not more so, than their American equivalents, especially seeing as Britain lacks constitu-tional first amendment guarantees. Censorship in Britain continued into the late 1990s, one example being the consistent attacks under obscenity charges suffered by Manchester publishing house Savoy for their Lord Haw Haw and Meng and Ecker comics (cf. Mitchell).

However, British creators’ response to limitation of the content of their work was distinct enough to those in the United States to bring about the changes that led DeFalco to call comics such as 2000AD “adult material.”

Led by Pat Mills and John Wagner, British comics excelled at finding ways to bring out serious issues under a guise seemingly flippant enough to slip past the conservative guardians of public taste. The learning experience of the boys weekly Action, which collapsed under pressure from censors in 1976, had been a catalyst for the less directly controversial approach of 2000AD (Barker 1989, 3). The significant difference was the insistence of 2000AD editors and writers, Mills and Wagner, to produce material that was political, instead of

simply more “realistic,” and their vehicle was children’s comics even if their audience ended up being much older.

To understand 2000AD, however, we must first understand how its pred-ecessor Action failed. Martin Barker states that “[Action] stood at the edge of a very radical politics — and that couldn’t be allowed” (Barker 1990, 49). It ruffled the feathers of a status quo that was quick to challenge dissidence wherever possible (the non-art status of comics making them an easy target).

Action showed contemporary youth getting into scrapes with malevolent authority figures and coming out on top. It put what would now be seen as antisocial behavior into the context of the protagonists’ lives. Barker states that

[Action ran afoul of ] the renewal in the 1970s of the activities of moral pressure groups such as Mary Whitehouse’s National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, and the Responsible Society[...]. These two groups were the most vociferous, representing the kind of new moralism associated by many with the rise to power of Margaret Thatcher [1990, 7].

Action was violent, subversive and, more importantly (according to Steve Mac-Manus, editor of 2000AD in the 1980s), “the first working class comic” (Barker 1990, 6). The moral pressure groups backed up by the right-wing press didn’t know what to make of it, and the calls for censorship were initially matched by a grudging respect for Action’s commercial success.

This respect, however, evaporated in what Barker identifies as the key moment in the campaign against the comic. In the story “Look out for Lefty,”

the footballer protagonist’s punk girlfriend Angie just happened to throw a coke bottle from the terraces at another player at a particularly inopportune moment:

This all happened at a time when football violence was once again hitting the news headlines, culminating in a riot at a “friendly” between Aston Villa and Glasgow Rangers. Seizing the opportunity, the critics went for the throat. The football league and leading officials were primed to complain: “World Cup ref-eree Jack Taylor denounces comic!” [Barker 1990, 7].

Yet it was not that the comic simply showed football violence; it was a girl’s involvement that caused the real controversy. Thatcherite social rheto-ric and the rise of the moral pressure groups were about preserving the tra-ditional role of the family in a changing society. Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques state that this included the “centrality of women’s domestic role” (Hall and Jacques 14). Angie challenged not only this idea of the domestic role of women, but also the basic concepts of femininity that such an idea is founded on. Angie was as tough, as foul-mouthed and aggressive as any of the men in the strip and had a relationship with the protagonist, Lefty, that worked on

an equal basis. If any one character was the step too far for Action, it was Angie, and it would not be until Evey in Moore and Lloyd’s V for Vendetta and Moore and Gibson’s Halo Jones that a female character with such vim would feature in the pages of British comics.

Angie is a profoundly political character and marks the shift in politi-cal terrain that was going on throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The historipoliti-cal framing of politics around questions of class, which was so central to Action, was subtly changing to a new radicalism that embraced at its heart questions of gender, race and anti-authoritarianism. These tropes, which would become established political touchstones in 2000AD and filter into American comics, are one of the significant changes in comics of the 1980s. Yet in mid–1970s Britain, Angie was too much, too soon for an establishment that still saw boys comics in the mode of the 1950s comic Eagle, which emphasized traditional Christian values and militaristic virtues.*

Nevertheless, Action paved the way for its influential successor. 2000AD exceeded the political vigor of its precursor without attracting the same kind of criticism.^†When something is censored, it is brought materially into the political sphere, but it must then change its approach. As Gershon Legman describes the process,

The censor’s unequivocal “You must not!” is seldom answered with an uncom-promising “I will!” Ashamed to oppose the censor’s morality, and afraid to con-travene his authority, the writer’s first reaction is to evade the censorship, to see what can be sneaked through, what can be gotten away with, what can be dis-guised just enough to pass the censor but not so much as to escape the audi-ence[...]. [But] having buffooned to the end of the censorship tether — and it is short — the only recourse for both artist and audience is transvaluation, dis-placement, the siphoning off of the suppressible urge for expression elsewhere [Barker 1984, 75].

2000AD was the response of British creators to the politicization of their medium. Its success rests upon its ability to manage issues of censorship, bring in an older readership and consistently question the authoritarianism and values of the new status quo, particularly as it moved into the 1980s. This was achieved through three main changes from Action.

Firstly, as a commercial response to its growing popularity in film, 2000AD tapped into a long tradition of political science fiction. This is

Leg-*Interestingly, Dan Dare, the main character in Eagle, featured in 2000AD, yet was too conservative for the tone of the magazine and was eventually dropped.

†This is not to say 2000AD did not attract any censorship or media criticism. The Guardian news-paper was initially particularly harsh in its criticism. Moreover, having learned lessons on Action, the senior management were far more cautious about strips that could attract controversy. A famous exam-ple is a strip featuring a war between McDonald’s and Burger King that was dropped due to fears of a lawsuit.

man’s “transvaluation” and “displacement”: the movement of content into the fantastic in order to deprive the censors of a direct line of attack. Within 20th-century literature we can identify a clear chain of such literary practice that leads from Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We through George Orwell, Aldous Hux-ley, Philip K. Dick, Ursula LeGuin and through the 1980s up to the present with writers like William Gibson and Neal Stephenson. In 2000AD that merger of politics and science fiction made its way into the comics medium.

The magazine’s writers and artists used the paradigm of the future to play out current concerns and possible teleologies of contemporary social practices. As Adam Roberts puts it: “SF does not project us into the future: it relates to us stories about our present” (Roberts 35).

2000AD’s politics was always at the forefront of the writers’ and artists’

minds. In a recent interview for the BBC online magazine, writer Alan Grant makes this explicit:

Many of the stories we wrote were taken from the headlines of the newspapers.

We just put a futuristic spin on them. There were genuine social problems, par-ticularly from the Thatcher days. It was obvious to us that Britain and the whole world was turning into a right-wing society [qtd. after Roher].

Science fiction stories were less offensive to the critics on the right who could not see just how political they were. They failed to credit comics with enough sophistication to see that the fantastical environments were allegories for the changing society of the 1980s.* Pat Mills explains this:

On one level 2000AD was almost a retreat, because I’d been so badly mauled on Action, it was like, ok, let’s go into science fiction. We can say they’re all robots, mutants and it’s all in the future, so it doesn’t actually matter and that’s what we did [Resonance FM].

Thus science fiction in 2000AD can be seen as secondary to the political con-tent: it was a vehicle to avoid censorship as much as an end in itself.

The second key difference between Action and 2000AD was the latter magazine’s mode of address. Barbara Wall’s distinctions between single address (targeted specifically at an audience of either children or adults), double address (at children or adults at different times throughout the text) and dual address (at children and adults at the same time) are very useful to help make sense of this here (cf. Wall). One of the key changes in 2000AD was its increas-ing adoption of the dual address mode. Unlike Action, which despite its polit-ical awareness was very much focused on its target demographic, 2000AD started to engage in narratives that, while internally logical to any ten-year-old reader, would be peppered with references that make sense only to a far

*Ironically it then attracted criticism from the left, most notably from the Guardian newspaper, who

*Ironically it then attracted criticism from the left, most notably from the Guardian newspaper, who