Raven wrote:So after all that ... did you like the comics?
It's taken me since Saturday to read them!
Some briefly scribbled-down notes (since I don't actually have the comics to hand at the moment):
The Pirates of Pangaea certainly seems to be billed as the flagship strip, although I'd debate whether it lives up to the hype. It's not that it's not an OK strip - I've personally never had much time for adventure comics, particularly of the "rip-roaring" variety, but it kept my interest - but I think there's other stuff in the same comic which is superior.
Bunny Versus Monkey was surprisingly disappointing. It's pretty good simply by virtue of being a Jamie Smart strip, but when compared to some of his other work, such as Pre-Skool Prime Minister, My Own Genie and Corporate Skull, it seems somehow lacking. I have heard
(link one) (link two) that it's starting off slowly deliberately, so hopefully if I stick with it then it'll get more exciting.
The real highlight of the comic was Long Gone Don. Three pages of beautiful art, beautiful writing and complete silliness. The only other Etherington Bros. work I'm familiar with is Yore, which was restricted to one page, and its long-form story frequently seemed to be suffering for it - but here the script is allowed to develop and flow at its own pace, with few or no sacrifices made simply in the interests of the tyranny of a weekly quota. This is a perfect example of why the fixed, rigid page layouts of the Dandy and Beano are a bad thing. This strip only gets better as it goes on, and it was good to start off with.
The last all-text story in a children's periodical ran in the 1950s, and I can't help but think that there was a very good reason behind that decision. Tale Feathers is easily the most time-consuming part of the comic. Sometimes, if it's a good story, it increases the value for time - but if it's boring, which is easier if there aren't pictures to appease the eye, it can seem very much like artificial longevity. Of the three I've read so far, I'd only call the third worthy of publication (which was also a page longer than the other two, proving that it really is about quality, not length). The first was just dull, with barely anything happening in the interests of a book promotion. The second wasn't much better, and smacked of the dumbing down which is so prevalent in children's literature; I swear the most complex word on the entire spread was the author's surname. But the third really illustrated how to do it.
It wasn't eventful (even less happened than in the first, and it was damned proud of it), it wasn't pretentious (the average number of syllables per word was about that in the second) and it didn't have an even mildly complex plot - but it was well written, it was amusing, it was deftly structured, and it successfully held my attention even through the most mundane of non-happenings. Unlike the first two, it wasn't an endless, dreary procession of paragraphs reading "X did blah and then Y did blah and then Z did blah", but it seemed like a story which the creator had genuinely put his heart into, and not just written until he'd reached his target word count. The minimalist concept is proof that you can make anything exciting if you're good enough - and the second issue was proof that it's equally possible to make an eventful tale boring if you're bad enough. I hope there's more of similar quality in the future, rather than the cynical filler that the feature risks becoming, but I'm not hopeful about the prospect of Theseus and the Minotaur - only 4,000 years too late to be "exclusive".
What Happened Next? is actually one of my favourites. It seems not everybody likes it, but I enjoyed reading - well, looking at - it a lot, and I rather suspect that any doubters are the same people who think that the limit of fun in a Where's Wally? book is in methodically scanning the page for a certain character, as opposed to relaxing and appreciating all the jokes which have been crammed in.
Corpse Talk seems to have come in for the most flak. I thought it was an OK strip - not edge-of-your-seat excitement, but worth the page rate. Bizarrely, I found the interview with the most to say - Shackleton - to be the dullest, which is another illustration of how the storytelling ability matters much more than the story. Mary Ann Bonny was the best, although Tesla was almost as interesting.
Of the three one-off stories so far, I liked both Ghost Ant and The Princess and the Peanut Butter Sandwiches, the former slightly more. I did not, on the other hand, like the first one, about the phoenix feather. If they wanted to launch the comic with a story about a phoenix, surely they could have come up with something more interesting than that? Complete waste of four pages.
If Long Gone Don was the best strip in the comic, then Star Cat was a very, very close second best. Where Don had silliness and intrigue, Star Cat simply had double silliness, and it worked beautifully. The concept and the stories would be good enough even before you take the standard of writing into account, but it's been embellished with a whole load of groans and one-liners as well.
I'm not a puzzler in general, so Von Doogan held little interest for me. The terminating cartoon "Elsewhere" (hmm, where have I heard
that name before?) is more surreal than actually funny, although the first one with the cats was pretty good. The "How to Make Awesome Comics" feature looks promising, and even though I've seen many of its ilk, it seems to be one of the better ones. (One thing which does irk me is the credit text. The first sheet contains the line, "Good art is just the icing on the cake." Up the side we have, "Professor Panels and Art Monkey would like to thank cake-icing assistant Neill Cameron." That's good, it's clever and it works. Substituting "cake-icing" with "ballet-dancing" does
not work. I fear he's failed to follow a rather important bit of advice when making comics, which is that at least half of making a good joke is about knowing when to stop.)
That just leaves the editorial pages, and I must say, I didn't like the precedent set by the first page of the first issue introducing a fictional team of animals. It's been a long-running canard in comics that their readers are simply unwilling to countenance the notion that their favourite publications might be put together by real people, with real names and real faces, with real jobs in real offices, doing real work. It was only in 2004 that the Dandy introduced "Dermot", "Nacho", "Ro" and "Spanner" to stand in for Morris Heggie and the rest of the real editorial team, for no apparent reason other than obfuscation and an only grudging acceptance of the way the wind was blowing. Just six years later, the real editor got his name on the inside back cover, swiftly followed by a comic showdown (by Jamie Smart, no less) between cartoon portrayals of the genuine Dandy and Beano editors, both of whom were named. The Beano website has also recently sprouted a sideline in
editorial communications, from the actual editor (as opposed to the "office boy", the "secretary", the pet monkey, or one of the comic's characters themselves), although he still hasn't been named yet.
Basically, the point I'm making is that even DC Thomson, a company famed for much of the twentieth century for the ferocity with which it defended its pages from the subversive hazard of artists' signatures, and still won't credit its writers, has given up on the concept of a fictional editorial team. That, more than anything else (even Tale Feathers), lends the comic a distinct aura of being stuck in the past, and caring more for nostalgia than what actually sells. Sure, there's a line between reckless over-commercialism and keeping your principles (of which DCT have recently staggered back over to the right side), but there's also a line between keeping your principles and ignoring the wishes of your target market.
I also wasn't very impressed with either the Big News or the Little News. Editorial chat pages, done right, can add to the comic experience, but in this case both pages felt utterly redundant, and even a rude interruption from the excellence of most of the comic strips themselves. All the comics, I felt, by and large, struck exactly the right tone - suitable for children, without sacrificing the excitement and a desire to see what happened next, and crucially never talking down to the reader. All that went out of the window in the News.
The other editorial page was the "Fanfare", which is much as you might expect. I'm sure these pages are a necessary evil, but it won't make me like them, and at least the Phoenix's seems to be less awful than most. The two published so far fulfil a lot of well-worn tropes, but the letters section is a breath of fresh air, particularly in that its contents don't appear to be selected on the basis of how closely they resemble a certain 'reader recommendation' template provided by the advertising department. Also, "Fanfare" is a much better name than "Treehouse".
In conclusion, the Phoenix is a good comic, but I'd recommend that you bought it on the basis of its contents, not how they're presented. The strips are good despite, not because of, the environment in which they sit, and the editorial policy of the magazine as a whole. It's not difficult to imagine Long Gone Don heroically struggling against the baleful influence of the Little News, or Ghost Ant throwing off the shackles of the more formulaic stories in Tale Feathers. I hope, as the Dandy eventually did, that the Phoenix eventually decides that maybe the tone set in the in-house elements was a little wide of the mark after all, so as to really allow the high quality of the comics to shine. It's not perfect, and it's bloody expensive, and it's stupidly difficult to get hold of, but it's well worth a read - and in the end, in a publication founded to help get children excited about reading again, that's got to be the highest compliment one could give it.
