Marvel Premiere #43 featuring Paladin (1978)

   One day soon I’ll put together a timeline of my comics reading history through the 70s and early 80s. Most of it was black and white Marvel reprints interspersed with some altogether more anarchic British weeklies.  It was all just good entertaining fun at the time but on reflection a lot of it has proven to have been incredibly formative.  And as such, it’s interesting to occasionally dip back into the wellspring and taste the waters again.

   One that I’ve bought again recently, although it’s been on my mind to do so for a very long time now, is Marvel Premiere #43 featuring Paladin.  I only ever picked up a handful of the American size, all colour Marvel comics back in the late 70s because they were generally more expensive than the UK reprints and just not as readily available. If there were specialist comic book shops around back then, none of them were near me.  However, there was one newsagent in a local town that kept a well-stocked spinner and on an occasional Saturday morning shopping trip, I would treat myself to something new and lurid.

   The real highlights from that Newsagent’s comic rack were The Torpedo, Jack of Hearts, and Deathlok the Demolisher. After that it was Paladin.  Paladin - “Super Soldier of Fortune” - was easily the more obscure of those and who, to the best of my knowledge, has never had his name in the title of another comic book since.  I didn’t encounter him again until a guest appearance in a Punisher Graphic novel well over a decade later, and he wasn’t handled the best as I recall but that Premiere meeting stayed with me.

   Rereading that comic again a couple of times in the last week, was fascinating and I can fully understand why it left an impression on me then.

   

   On the surface it’s your traditional struggle between a hero and a villain with an attractive woman’s life as the stakes.  It’s also pretty much one long fights scene over two consecutive nights.  The dialogue is a touch verbose in style, which was very much the house style back then, but beyond all of that, there is actually something a little more unusual about the book.

   For starters if he has any special powers they aren’t really shown off to any great degree in this story and in actual fact, he seems to get rescued by the woman he’s trying to keep alive, almost as many times as he saves her.  And then when he thinks he has failed to do that, he goes out for blind revenge on her supposed killer, and still keeps getting his arsed kicked until some good luck and couple of well-placed bullets draw the battle to a premature close. Which isn’t to say Paladin is rubbish at what he does but he’s certainly flawed and emotional and he’s up against someone with far more power and crazies than himself.

   Writer Don McGregor gives the conversational exchanges between the three main characters a heavy air of fatalism.  If there is any peace to be had at the end of it all, it feels like it will be short lived.  All three of them seem self-destructive and the story’s happy ending, if that is what it is, feels like just a snatched moment that wont last beyond the rest of the night.

   On top of that, there is a real neon noir feel to the art with a moody pallet of colours that never lets you forget that its nighttime in the city.  And I’m not sure if its me buying into it more than I should but I could really hear the bullets and broken glass and the sound of the wind whipping around the top of the skyscrapers.

   Now I wouldn’t necessarily have been able to pull all of that apart and name it back when I was ten years old, but I would have felt it and recognised it as a far more potent brew than my previous regular visits to the Marvel universe via black and white reprints of The Hulk and Spider-Man.

   I don’t think Paladin is one of Marvels finest creations or that comic fans were robbed by him never getting his own book.  I’m not even sure that everything that is great about that one issue could have even been sustained over a longer ongoing run. But it spoke to me and illustrated my leanings to the darker side of Marvel Comics.  I’m not sure I ever fully bought into the heroic hero, the one with the great powers that does the right thing because it’s the right thing to do but I’ve a lot of time for morally ambiguous and flawed characters that stumble and fall towards their own versions of redemption and truth.  I learned that from reading comics like this and then I went looking for it in films, TV and books.

   Marvel Premiere #43 feels like its even more important a comic to me than I first thought, and I won’t be letting it go quite so easily again.  One for the reliquary, I think.

Steve

Agroland by Daniel Arthur Smith (2014)

Agroland

Daniel Arthur Smith

Publisher - Holt Smith Ltd - 2014

Paperback - £3.73

  This is an interesting book and for quite contradictory reasons.  And to be clear, I do mean the book and not the story.

   I'm reading multiple things at the moment for which blog posts are already half drafted.  I'm also listening to lots of interesting things which are similarly up for future pondering.  Along with these explorations is the realisation that my tastes are linked by sympathetic threads and synchronicities.  Pulling on those to see how far back they go or where they might lead is not only interesting but possibly one of the main reasons for this blog existing.

   That said, every once in a while its nice to pick up something random, on a whim as it were, just to see how it feels and fits against everything else.  Argoland is one such selection.

   I first came to it because the cover image had flashed up on my Facebook feed, one of many such adverts for books that I get, although at first I had thought it was for a film or new TV show.  It reads like it could be.

In a desolate desert, members of an isolated agricultural station discover a stranger, dehydrated, delirious, and near death from exposure. His weak frame is thin, desiccated. His blistered flesh is wooden, and in his madness a faint, raspy chant slips from his near lipless mouth: "So many, not enough. So many, not enough."

  What I read sounded interesting enough to get me onto Amazon with the thought that it might make a distracting weekend listen if the audio book was cheap enough.  And it was... but the paperback was even cheaper still!  So at only £3.73, I was happy to take a gamble and at least then I would still have something I could pass on to a charity shop if it failed to earn its place on my bookshelf.

   Now I really like that its very easy to get your book out in this day and age and that you are not at the mercy of a handful of large publishing houses that dictate to readers what they will be enjoying this season.  The down side to this is that the quality of the writing and story telling can be sadly lacking, although the lack of an editorial second-eye can be absolutely disastrous.  For those reasons I'm always interested but very rarely pull the trigger on a sale.  Agroland somehow got past my predispositions.

   What I liked about it was that it was a quick read and divided into very small chapters which really suits how I dip in and out of fiction books in between other tasks.  Its not flabby with overindulgent prose or redundant scenes.  And the basic premise is intriguing as well and it's actually been written really well with some great lines and a good forward momentum. Danial Arthur Smith knows what he's doing and he does it well.

   What didn't work so well for me is that although it's set up to be a good old fashioned video nasty sort of a horror story, with a powerful supernatural villain and a large cast of victims in a trapped environment, it generally wimps out of showing us 99% of most of the kills, avoiding really getting into the blood and gore of it all.  Now that might be a deliberate style choice of the authors and out of good taste but for one disturbing exception. And its disturbing because it is the exception, but the very descriptive nature of the breast mutilation scene plus a lack of any real logic as to why that would be the creature's sweetmeat of choice made me ponder the author's psyche a little more at that moment than that of the antagonist.  I make no judgement on the morality, I desperately wanted the whole book to be much more visceral and gory, but it did make me raise a quizzical eyebrow and snap me out of the book when it happened.

   So on one level it worked, I don't feel robbed and I read a book over the weekend.  The writing was good and it restored my faith to see that it actually had an editor. And I was really inspired by the actual hard copy product that technology dropped into my hand so efficiently.  On the downside I'm left wondering what the point of it was, for the author, I mean.  Nothing new was added to the genre, and it wasn't even shooting to be the bloodiest version of this type of thing.  It might as well have been one of those horror films made for a small budget that pops up on the Horror Channel.  Handy for a writer and director breaking into the industry; an hour thirty of product to fill a gap in the schedule but to what greater purpose?  Is that a problem?  Well if you are begging money to make a film and have to get your script past a lot of gate keepers who want it to be what they paid for, then no.  If however you are living in an age where you can pretty much self publish what you want without too much, if any intervention from others, then whats the point of doing such a familiar dance that doesn't even have the courage of really going for it.

   I don't know but it leaves me feeling a little empty and thinking of words like: Content and Product when I should be using; Story.

Steve