The Black Flame- Archives- #1 (comic review): Before this age of Matriarchal Fear & Isolation

Writer: Peter B. Gillis 

Artist: Tom Sutton

Publisher: 1FirstComics

Release Date: 22nd March 2017 (Originally released in 1983) 



‘The Black Flame’ exists as a time capsule from a very different age, and opening it now is a strange, telling, and rewarding experience. The story is very much of it's time. It could have only existed in the early 1980's and it does things that you just don't do today. Read on and I'll explain what I mean by that.

The narrative is centered on a young girl, called Susie Ingalls, who is kidnapped from her parent’s house by a strange man on a motorcycle, and taken away to a creepy looking ‘safe-house’ where a ‘poet’ gives her a drugged drink of hot chocolate and puts her to bed. The man on the motorcycle (the ‘Black Flame’ of the title) is a hero by the way, and the poet (Michael Robartes) is a good-guy as well. Yes, the two strange men responsible for the kidnapping of a young girl from her family home are the heroes of the tale.

What the hell is going on? It’s a fascinating question, and the answer can be found through a contextual analysis of the time period that the book was first released (1983) and in the literary source that inspired it’s creators.

The narrative in this weird comic book world drifts between two very different realms. There is everyday, motorcycle kidnapping reality, and a nightmarish realm of fearsome creatures that lurk in the closets of little girls who can’t get to sleep without having the light turned on. This nightmarish land of closet monsters, evil (scantily clad) ladies and monstrous beasts, is the world of H.P Lovecraft, a man who was a big deal in the 1980’s, in television, movies, books and the comic book genre. Lovecraft’s world is a world where madness, dreams and reality merge, and that is the realm that you are entering when you read this comic book.

‘Rescuing’ a little girl from the monsters of her dreams, putting her on the back of your motorcycle, and taking her to live with your poet mate in his creepy old house, is certainly not normal, but this is Lovecraftian territory.

Yes, it’s mad, but that’s what we are playing with here, dreams and madness. When you read the tale it flits in and out of reality, with the nightmarish dream world playing a far more significant role than the mundane reality of waking life. As the story progresses the little girl gets kidnapped (again) by the monstrous villains of the tale, and taken into the nightmare dream world, and it’s the job of our heroes to rescue her, and bring her back to reality.

It’s all very weird, and you are not going to find anything like it being written today. You couldn’t do it, you really couldn’t. If you did somehow manage to find a publisher who was okay with you writing a story where the child-kidnappers are the heroes then there would be so much controversy kicked up that issue #2 would never be released.

What needs to be taken (heavily) into account when reading ‘The Black Flame’ in 2017 is that it was first released in 1983, a time period very different to the one that we live in today. There are, of course, many technological differences between the time periods, but even bigger than that are the cultural differences.

In 1983 men were still, largely, the patriarchs of the western family unit. This was a time before the feminisation of western culture, the enlargement of the welfare state, the rise in single mother households, and the increase in paranoia that comes when females are more dependent upon state power than the security that comes with a husband provider/protector. It was a book released when men were still valued, and admired, when women preferred good men over the easy access to resources that comes from running into the controlling embrace of the all powerful welfare state.

When you read ‘The Black Flame’ you are getting a window into the world that existed before the present matriarchal society that we live in today. The culture in western democratic societies of 2017 is a feminised culture of fear, paranoia and anxiety, where everything is a threat, everybody is a potential predator, keep your kids indoors, never let them play unsupervised, danger is everywhere, always watch, always control. This feminised world of fear did not exist in the early 1980’s because men had yet to be marginalised by government, media (comic books included) and academia, and children were still allowed to roam their neighbourhoods and do what children are supposed to do. Men were seen as providers and protectors, not as threats, and so when you have masculine strangers protecting a young girl in a comic book it was not as unusual as it seems today.

Could you still write this narrative into a comic book of 2017? I don’t think so. It would be viewed as a bit odd, your motives would be questioned, and as a writer born into a matriarchal society would it even cross your mind to write about two strange men protecting a young girl anyway?

‘Black Flame’ then is an anachronistic book of a bygone age, and for that reason alone it is extremely interesting and worth reading. It is also very enjoyable to read, as it is fast paced, camp, a bit silly, a bit scary, a bit serious here and there, and very, very 1980’s old school cool. In this one issue you get FIVE chapters of the original story, and that means that you get some awesome cliffhangers and a story that is as fast paced as the Black Flame’s motorcycle itself. The art is 1980s style, totally awesome and with beautifully updated, bright as you like colouring. It's very cheesy, gloriously old fashioned, and bottom line, fun, fun, fun.

The challenge in 2017 will be to read through the narrative with your cynical (every ‘strange’ man is a potential pervert) radar turned off. If you can break through the oestrogen induced fear-fog of our times you’ll get a huge amount of enjoyment from the book. Please take into account that it was written during very different times. Those times have gone forever, and can never be reclaimed, but you can revisit them through the pages of this wonderfully weird and thoroughly enjoyable old school comic book. I personally recommend that you take the trip, because what you will find within the dark and murky corners of the very near past is authentically odd, malevolently masculine, and most assuredly not for those of delicate, modern, feminised, paranoiac sensibilities.


Rating: 9/10 (Worth purchasing for the weird factor alone)



* Pics on this review are from the original comic book. The 2017 version of the comic book has much superior, brighter colouring. BUY IT NOW. 

Comic review: Survivor’s Club #1- The new new is the old new

Writer: Lauren Beukes & Dale Halvorsen
Artist: Ryan Kelly
Publisher: Vertigo/DC
Released: 7th October 2015



The blurb on the front cover of this book (from Joe Hill, son of Stephen King) describes the book as, ‘a throwback to books like THE SANDMAN and HELLBLAZER.’

With that blurb you have a declaration of intent. The producers of the book are telling you that they intend to go back to the past, and use nostalgia to create the new ‘new.’ I wrote about that yesterday when I compared contemporary comic book writers to Jeremy Corbyn and the ‘new’ ‘new’ Labour party, which is actually the old Labour party from the 70’s/80’s.

What is it with writers working for mainstream entertainment corporations that stops them from getting with the NOW and doing something genuinely NEW rather than relying on dusty old ideas and ideologies of the past?

I’ll answer that question in a sentence:

Neoliberal consensus, collectivist, authoritarian political correctness, pushed by your local (state funded) university in gender studies/Marxism classes.

It’s everywhere now, you can’t escape it, and this new/new/old comic book is all on board and willing to do its bit for the progressive collectivist cause.

The narrative of Survivor’s Club #1 is focused on the ubiquitous champion of progressive ideology, the young, sexually appealing (but not overly sexualised) woman of colour. She is a leader, an engineer, a computer gamer (expert level, obviously ), and a survivor of the evil white racist regime that was apartheid South Africa.

Do you have your PC tick box ready? Here we go, tick off those politically correct brownie points.

- Young female.
- Not white.
- Victim of white racism.
- Engineer.
- Leader.
- Computer game player, and an expert one at that.

I want to make this very clear. I’m not complaining about any of this. All I am doing is pointing out the neoliberal corporate consensus agenda, an agenda that is being pushed right now in comic books.

There is a severe lack of diversity happening right now in the comic book genre. It’s dominated by progressivism, feminism and Marxist identity politics. That’s not my opinion, it’s just the way that it is. Pick up any contemporary comic book, have a look, and tell me that it’s not the case.

The new heroes (young females) are starting to look very similar, and the new villains (racist, right wing white males) are just as similar as well. If I didn’t know any better I’d suspect that there’s some sort of ideological consensus in contemporary comic books that people should be talking about, but perhaps I’m just another evil white man and I don’t know what I’m talking about?

I can feel the anger building up now. Am I really complaining that young women of colour are being portrayed as heroic protagonists in comic books? No, I'm not. What I'm complaining about is a lack of diversity. There are too many strong independent young women in comic books now. Book after book and the heroines all look and act the same. That's boring, really, really boring, and I'm starting to get really fed up with this lazy, self-congratulatory progressive/feminist agenda being shoved down my throat in all of my comic books.

I began this ‘review’ with a quote that described this book as a ‘throwback.’ Sorry, but that’s not true. This comic book might have a narrative based on 1980’s computer games, but it’s a book very much set in the identity politics obsessed mainstream comic book world of today. I read this book and it doesn’t remind me of Sandman or Hellblazer, it reminds me of just about every other comic book that I’m reading at the moment.

So what is it about? Did I mention that yet? Probably not, okay then, here we go. It’s about a computer game turning people into violent murderers, or something. Is that new? Does that sound ‘new’ to you? Do we really need to look at the link between computer games and violence again? Didn’t that debate end many, many, many years ago, and with the conclusion that no, computer games don’t make you violent?

The only difference in the debate about computer game violence in 2015 as compared to 1986 is that today it’s been taken up by the social justice warriors, whilst before it was pushed by right wing evangelical Christian types.

There’s nothing new here. Computer games are sexist, racist and violent, and they warp the minds of the young, blah, blah, blah. Do we really need a comic book to be talking about this tired old nonsense again?

I don’t care if this story is coming out on the side of computer games, and gamers, it doesn’t matter. The debate is old, irrelevant, and I don’t want to read about it. I have no interest in ‘Gamer-Gate’ because it’s bull****. The whole thing is bull****. The social identities of the authoritarian nut-cases might have changed, but the bull**** remains the same, and I don’t want to rehash old controversies that have been debunked decades ago and are not even worth wasting any time on in 2015.

‘Survivor’s Club #1’ is nothing. It’s just another new/new/old comic book that is pushing the same old agenda as all of the other new/new/old comic books that make up the US comic book industry in 2015. It’s not saying anything new, it’s not connecting with any cutting edge issues of today, and as a forty something year old guy who is getting increasingly fed up with young girl protagonists and white male guilt identity politics bull**** it has absolutely nothing to offer for me. I had high hopes for this one. I should have known better, what a fool I am.



Rating: 3/10 (Yet another in a long line of stuck in the past, yet obsessing over PC identity politics comic books from the progressive mind of the mainstream comic book collective)

Comic review- Miracleman #2: In this wasteland of the now

Story: Neil Gaiman
Art: Mark Buckingham
Publisher: Marvel
Released: 16th September 2015 


I’ve spent my morning with Neil Gaiman, and he’s led me down the path of yesterday, leaving me drenched in sweet, nostalgic sad, empty, hindsight regret.

Still waiting.....

There’s an initial pleasure to be gained in looking back, but when you get to deep you see yourself as you actually were. You see the stupid mistakes, the missed chances, the should have beens, the almosts, and the never weres. Regret rises to the surface and pleasure soon ebbs into a useless, longing feeling that things should have been better, but they weren’t, and there’s nothing that you can do about it now, because the past is gone, the people are gone, and you yourself, as you used to be, you are gone as well.

Miracleman #2 is split into three individual parts. The later two are probably connected, and are tied into the larger narrative, hinting of a return, of the villain.

The second part is school in the late 80’s/90’s, in England, as I remember it, personally. It’s behind the bike-shed, a pretty girl, spots, being cool, being detached, messing things up, being a silly boy, it’s the things that I remember, and I’m not sure if it will mean anything to kids in their twenties who are reading the book, but for a 80’s/90’s kid, Gaiman is a witness to how things actually were, he gets to the soul of it, and he takes me back to that time, that place of memory and regret, a school uniform and the wish, now, that things had turned out a bit better than they actually did.

The first story, the main story is equally as sad, but in a grown-up sense of deluded expectations, disappointment and waiting for something that isn’t there. The story is about a man holding out for physical perfection, stupidly, rejecting the possibility of love, rejecting reality, and waiting for the return of an impossible Goddess.  It’s a lonely tale, and it reminds me of 90’s libraries, reading Gaiman, walking home in the rain, alone, of course, but with Gaiman in my head, telling me that the world is sad, telling me that I shouldn’t give up, because who knows? Perhaps, some day, somebody will give a s***.

for the girl

Yes, it’s an emotional trip for me to spend time with Neil Gaiman on a September morning in 2015. I have emotional baggage with the dude, old memories, mostly crappy, but they would have been even worse without him. He’s a bloody good writer you know. He’s a craftsmen, and I do appreciate him, and I do admire his work, even the new (old) stuff, with the memories that come with it, stuck in my own past.

I should probably leave Neil Gaiman well alone from now on. I’m too old, and it’s making me painfully aware of my own useless past. I read his work today, and it’s good, very good, but there’s deep sadness there.

When I read Miracleman #2 I feel a sense of time, of wasting it, waiting, too much time waiting, only for nothing to happen and to wake up one day with nothing gained from the wait, just more waiting, more waiting. Reading Gaiman takes me back to the past, my own neglected graveyard, of dashed hopes and an almost tangible feeling of time slipping through my fingertips.

The world outside swirls and changes, and yesterday fades into memory, becoming further, and further away, as new memories fail to materialise, so all that is left, though not worth remembering, is all that there is, in this useless, silent, far too still, wasteland of the now.


Rating: 9/10 (Taking me back, as Gaiman always does)

Comic review: Miracleman #1- Neil Gaiman and the Perpetual 80’s

Writer: Neil Gaiman
Artist: Mark Buckingham
Publisher: Marvel Comics
Released: 2nd September 2015



I didn’t read Alan Moore’s Miracleman series when it was first released in 1982. I was around at the time, but doing something else, probably obsessed with American football, or just plain old football, I expect. I was reading 2000AD though, irregularly, and this new Miracleman #1 by Neil Gaiman very much reminds me of that time period in my life.

This new book has a narrative starting date of 1987. It’s a future parallel world 1987 with a God like superhero and a destroyed, then rebuilt London, but it’s a very familiar 1987. It’s a 1987 that is very, very 1980’s. It’s a 1987 that could have been written in 1985, at least, that’s how it reads.

Perhaps it’s just me, but whenever I read anything by Neil Gaiman it has that 1980’s feel about it. I get the sense that he doesn’t really care about the contemporary neoliberal world. His narrative universe is the late 1980’s, and so he is the perfect choice to be the writer on a book that is set in a parallel universe 1987. He doesn’t have to deal with anything that has actually happened in the real world for the past twenty eight or so years, he can build his cocoon in the late 80’s and he can go back to the past, a place where he very evidentially feels most at home.

The narrative itself in Miracleman #1 is instantly accessible. It’s easy to follow and brings the reader straight into the world, telling a story from the point of view of a man with hope, seeing him through a difficult journey, and concluding with a revelation of either hope realised, or hope destroyed. I won’t spoil it. The story is okay, it’s enjoyable, and I think that it’s worthwhile you getting the book to enjoy it for yourself.

The art has a bit of a Watchman feel about it, mixed with some of the recent stuff I’ve seen in Jeff Lemiere’s Trillium, and in the art by Matteo Scalera in Rick Remender’s Black Science. The faces are a bit sharp, very pointy noses and high cheekbones, and very blonde, and the colouring has an unreality to it that screams ‘sci-fi comic’ of the 1980’s, but in colour. I don’t have any problem with it. I’d term it as ‘old fashioned new’ if that makes any sense, and it’s perfect for this kind of book.

Let’s sum things up then. Do I have a problem with Neil Gaiman being stuck in a perpetual 1987 world? No, of course not. He’s a successful, talented man, and his work is always enjoyable.

However, I’m the self-appointed (self-important) post 9/11 false flag/ NWO/Neo-liberal/Globalist comic book reviewer. So what I am after is never going to come from somebody like Neil Gaiman who doesn’t want to get out of the late 80’s, well at least from what I’ve read of his work anyway.

That’s cool man.

Miracleman#1 is a good book. I enjoyed it. The very last part confused me a bit, but I’ll be back for issue #2, and hopefully it will make some sense there.

Get the book if you enjoy Neil Gaiman’s late 80’s worlds, and yes I know he’s just continuing a series left off in the 80’s, so he has a good excuse for doing it here. If all you’re after is a decent comic book with a 1980’s nostalgia feel about it, then this one is a lot better than most of the other mainstream junk that’s being pushed onto the masses today. Check it out, put on those old 80’s records, and go back to a time when the Internet didn’t exist, Thatcher was killing off all working-class resistance and the BBC still had an aura of truth and respectability about it.


Rating: 7/10 (Back to the late 80’s with Gaiman, and why not?)

Comic review: Convergence: The Atom #1- Good Old Fashioned Cheese on Toast

Writer: Tom Peyer
Artist: Steve Yeowell
Publisher: DC Comics
Released: 8th April 2015


I’m always complaining about contemporary comic books and their refusal to deal with real world, contemporary issues that are affecting the lives of their readers. But when a comic book is intentionally silly and doesn’t even pretend to have anything to do with the real world of 2015, I can relax, put my mental feet up and enjoy it, just like I did as a comic book obsessed kid back in the early 1980’s.

Convergence- the Atom #1 is one of those comics that I can relax with. It’s very silly, genuinely funny and it reminds me of the comic books I used to read as a kid. The Atom is a nutter, a loser, and an embarrassment to everybody who is unfortunate enough to know him. His super hero power is having one large hand. It’s laughable, children don’t want to be anywhere near him, and I don’t blame them either. He hears voices in his head. The voices tell him that he sucks, and I agree with them wholeheartedly, because he does indeed suck, big time.

His world isn’t our world of 2015. It’s a 1980’s brightly coloured world where kids still go out to play and get up to healthy mischief not Internet or twitter/twatter related. It’s the world that I grew up in, a world that no longer exists as paranoia has set in and children are locked up by their television and fear indoctrinated parents.

Here kids, have this ipad, or iphone. Look at the Internet all day and think about the adventures outside that you could be having. That sucks.

Far too many kids today are prisoners in their own homes, with the government and their parents spying on everything that they do. Let them out parents. Buy them a bloody bike and let them have some freedom before the chains of conventional adulthood tie them to the rat race Hell of careerism, debt slavery, statism, war, consumerism, capitalism and everything else that slowly sucks away our souls as we rot away our adult lives.

The Atom #1 reminds me of better days. This old colourful 1980’s comic book world has stupid villains in it, and the dialogue is naff, and the cheese levels are through the roof, but there’s something about it that I’m enjoying.

I like cheese, I do. I like it on toast, and I like it in my comic books as well, just don’t give me the fancy Dan cheese, don’t con me with the cheese, just give me something old fashioned, something reliably cheddary and I’m happy.

Atom #1 is good old-fashioned cheddar cheese on toast. It’s easy, tasty and it fills up your belly very nicely indeed.

I’m going to come back to this one. I’m going to forget everything that I know about this post 9/11 world of the new world order, put my feet up, get the cheddar ready and have a good old fashioned 1980’s comic book experience, just like I used to. It was good then, and it’s just as good today.

New World Order? What the Hell is that? Cheese on toast time, yum, yum, happy times are here again.


Rating: 8/10 (Good old fashioned, fun, daft, enjoyable 80’s comic book)

Punks the Comic #1: Somebody has been watching old episodes of The Young Ones

Story: Joshua Hale Fialkov
Art: Kody Chamberlain & Rob Guillory
Publisher: Image comics
Released: 8th October 2014 


Half-way through reading this book I was getting flashbacks to old episodes of The Young Ones and going to the Cub Scouts on my bike with it’s stupid light dynamo that slowed it down to a crawl. There was something very 1980’s about this book, with it’s references to Morrissey and Glenn Danzig, so I did what we all do now and looked it up on the Internet expecting the book to be a re-make of some old student project in 1986. I got one half of the equation right. It was an old student type of deal, but it was produced in 2004.

2004????????

What the Hell????????

How did something like this get any attention whatsoever in 2004?

Oh yeah, it didn’t. I never noticed it in 2004, and I was a pretty big fan of just about everything comic book related during that time. What were the writers doing in 2004? Did they have a DVD box-set of old Young Ones episodes, a limited budget, and so decided to put a collage based comic book together with references that were completely out of date and had no relevance to the world around them?

It looks like it.

So what is this book about then? It’s about some characters based on 1980’s English student stereotypes living together in a house where they are very bored and are not very successful with the ladies. The characters are physically and emotionally abusive to each other, but in a wacky, comedy way. Crazy things like Gnomes are involved. The dialogue is all one-liners that are trying to be arch, ironic, knowing and clever. It doesn’t work, instead it reads like smart arse witticisms that come from the mind of a Google kid, annoying as f*** douche bag. The narrative involves one of the characters bringing a girl home. All of the other characters are shocked. Before this mess of a book ends we are given some word searches (I’m not joking) and a reprint of the original book from waaaaay back in ye olden days of 2004. That book is just as bad as the 2014 incarnation.

Oh, the characters have fists, dogs and old President’s for heads.

Does that make it original then?

What do you think?

I’ll tell you what I think. I think that ‘Punks the Comic’ is a painfully unfunny student magazine based on an anarchic BBC sit-com of the early 1980’s. That show, as I mentioned in the first paragraph, is called ‘The Young Ones.’ It was great when it first came out. I know, because I was a kid who grew up with it, and compared to all of the other staid and conservative po-faced crap of the time (Blue Peter anybody?) it was the most exciting thing that I had ever seen. But I was about twelve years old, and that was decades and decades ago. If they released the same show today it wouldn’t have anywhere near the same impact, because the socio-political themes, anxieties and concerns would be decades out of date. Plus the humour, that was considered risky and edgy at the time, would now look a bit tame, silly, childish and dated.

Just like this comic.

How the Hell is this supposed to be a post 9/11 book? It’s not. It’s a 1980’s book, it just so happens to have been written in 2004/2014 by a writer who cannot get in touch with what is going on in the world today.

Leave your house for five minutes and have a look at the world mate. Please. Read a book. Watch a documentary. Get on the Alex Jones infowars website http://www.infowars.com/  for a day of research. PLEASE DO SOMETHING. Get with the bloody times.

Goddamn it, Goddamn it, Goddamn it.

This book says everything you need to know about the comic book industry as it is today. Backwards looking, irrelevant, out of touch and completely stuck up it’s own arse.

Rating: 1/10 (for the cover)