Alan Grant (1) (1949–2022)

The first page of this volume brought back memories of one of my great childhood disappointments. I loved the Doomlord fumettis; they were genuinely terrifying for my nine year old self. A powerful alien who could take anyone’s place, who could disintegrate you with a flick of his finger, to whom death was a mere inconvenience and who let the only human who knew about him live out of pure amusement. The photographic nature of the strip chilled, taking away that small remove of unrealism show more that artwork gives. I stopped buying the Eagle when their budget meant they couldn’t support fumettis anymore and went to an all artwork comic on lower quality paper. I didn’t mind their strips (The Tower King, The House of Daemon and even the resurrected Dan Dare remain cherished memories) but there was something about Doomlord that meant it lost the charm it had for me when it moved to an artwork strip. It might also be that it was moving from the visceral SF horror thrills of that first story.

This collection gives a precis of the three stories presented as fumettis; setting up the background story before introducing the arc presented here. The story is a relatively simple one; after Vek has killed his fellow Servitor Zom to prevent him from destroying mankind the Dread Council of Nox send the Deathlords to assassinate Vek and destroy mankind. It’s therefore a simple on the run narrative with our continued existence as the prize. Any further details had faded over thirty plus years though. Would that childhood disappointment remain?

It wasn’t the epic wonder the fumettis had been but that childhood pique meant I’d missed out on a smart, funny strip. Alan Grant takes the opportunity offered by an all art strip to push Doomlord’s abilities and the scale of the story he can tell. Doomlord can now levitate, teleport and even transform into animals (the latter becoming a key plot point, including a deliciously absurd moment). The story includes motorway pile-ups, mass slaughter of dogs and people in a town encased in a force field and a plane crashing into a bridge on top of the usual deaths of people having their identity stolen – Vek’s the ostensible hero but his utilitarian philosophy with regard to individuals is singularly unappealing. All that’s leavened with a humour though – Doomlord gets to dress up as Father Christmas and pleads for the life of his human landlady with the merits of their wanting to take him to Butlin’s. This isn’t by any means a lost classic – the art is fine but not greatly memorable or expressive – but it’s a fine exercise in weekly episodic storytelling and indicates that the lack of reprints of British comics such as the revived Eagle (particularly compared to the US cultivation of its comics history) is not a quality issue. Indeed, with the number of creators moving to Marvel and DC from the early 1980s onward there’s a case that as a whole they’re essential to an understanding of modern comics. show less

I've never given a half-star review to any book I've reviewed so far on Library Thing. I have done several one-star reviews, certainly. At least those one-star books had an interesting idea or two, or they were, at times, somewhat enjoyable, or it tried to do something interesting, even if it did fail. This book, however, has no redeeming feature that I could find. It's written solely to be brought by people who are fans of Lobo or Batman, and I suspect those readers will find nothing to show more enjoy here, either.

Lobo, an intergalactic mercenary, has been hired by The Scarecrow, a Gotham mob boss, to kill The Joker. Upon Lobo confronting the Joker, the Joker convinces Lobo to take a job, for ten million dollars, before Lobo completes the hit - go annoy Batman, then kill him. Or something like that. Lobo proceeds to dress up as Batman, terrorises Gotham City, kill several people that Batman is close to, and then Lobo squares off against both Batman and the Joker. Pretty much a typical week in Gotham City, then.

The ending is absolutely awful, too. Batman finds out that the Joker is really the long-lost brother of Batman. The Joker, in spite of having amnesia from the moment of his accident, accepts Batman's word without argument. They then both fight Lobo, and Batman hits Lobo with a gas canister that holds gas that makes people compliant. Lobo flies away into space, singing. If there's a worse ending to a book than that, I haven't yet read it.

The graphic novel is really a series of plot inconsistencies and gross stupidity, glued together with senseless violence. How does a mob boss in Gotham City contact an intergalactic mercenary? It might as well have been by smoke signals, because that would make as much sense as the rest of the book. The idea of someone masquerading as a superhero has been done elsewhere, and done far better than this, too. Would an intergalactic villian really care about earning American currency so much that he would spend a week on Earth? And why, why, why does a near-invincible villian, susceptible to toxic gasses, not even bother to wear a gas mask?

I can't even compliment the graphics of the novel. They're messily-done. I suspect the artist cared about the graphic novel about as much as I did.

There's not one thing that I would single out of this book as being enjoyable. It is only a pity that I can't give a book a zero rating. show less

It's 1998 and the Batman writers have noticed The X-Files is really popular. So Bats gets abducted while out for a drive and spends the rest of the book trying to work out if aliens are real.

Alan Grant never quite squares that with the fact Batman has met tons of aliens (not least Superman), but I don't care: for this story, Batman needs to be a sceptic and so a sceptic he will be. The DC Comics universe has always been pretty plastic anyway.

I love it when Batman gets shoved into some faddy show more new format, whether it's Predator crossovers, kung fu action, or UFO conspiracy thrillers. There's something endlessly appealing about grumpy old Batman, whose ambition is to take down crime in Gotham City, getting dragged into these gimmicky fun adventures against his will. You wanna be a hero? Well you're gonna have to have some fun, boy!

And in the 90s that meant getting a probe up your bum (fun fact: reports of alien abductees being anally probed only became common after colonoscopies were introduced in the 1960s). This was the same year Lara Croft went to Area 51 and climbed aboard an alien spaceship. As well as The X-Files there was the famous 'alien autopsy' video in 1995, Men in Black in 1997, and any number of indulgent documentaries. (The UFO fever seems to have petered out after 9/11 gave the conspiracy theorists something else to worry about – though not before the 39 members of the Heaven's Gate cult tragically committed group suicide in the belief their souls would board a passing alien spacecraft.)

Anyway, there were a lot of people getting very worried about this stuff in 1998. As Batman proudly tells Alfred: "According to what I've accessed on the internet [sic] the UFO phenomenon appears to have been with us for virtually all recorded history!" Presumably he also found out a lot about the Grateful Dead and some pretty lo-res pornography. (I hope he doesn't still try and solve all threats to Gotham by just googling them...)

But I love it. I love the po-faced, zeitgeist-riding madness of it. I love it slightly less when it goes a bit psychedelic around the midway point and a floating hippie begins throwing illusory Bruce Lees at the Caped Crusader, but it did remind me of Batman: Arkham City – and I love that. show less

I see this as almost an alternate reality artifact wherein Neil Gaiman was a fairly decent comic book superhero writer laboring in the shadow of Alan Moore instead of the major fantasy writer he showed himself to be through Sandman and his subsequent novels. Thank goodness this material is just a footnote and not the road taken.