Government Girl vs. The Truther (A webcomic about the deliberate suppression of truth)

Bigfoot vs. ISIS (A Free webcomic about an angry Sasquatch)

Comic review: Grant Morrison’s 18 Days #2- The Art of War

Script: Grant Morrison, Gotham Chopra & Sharad Devarajan
Art: Jeevan J. Kang
Publisher: Graphic India
Released: 12th August 2015



Comic book reviewers shouldn’t really rave over this comic, and if they do so, you need to be very suspicious about their motivations (cough, re-tweets).

That doesn’t mean that it’s a bad comic though, because it isn’t. What it is, is a comic that is establishing what is to come next in the narrative. It’s a comic that is doing the boring work before the big battle kicks off. It’s a comic book about political intrigue, motivations, and the heroes of the upcoming war playing a strategic game of chess in order to set up their enemies for their inevitable defeat.

18 Days #2 features people putting down their arms and armour, and talking about tradition, honour, oaths and fate. The villains have lots of rule about who and when they will, or will not fight. They are all related, and have long histories and grievances against each other. The heroes are exploiting all of this, as they talk to the different people, playing them off against each other, and strategize for the upcoming battle.

The message of course is that success comes from effective strategising, from brains over brawn. The strongest, bravest, fastest, most powerful warrior doesn’t always win, the smartest warrior wins. War is manipulation, about playing sides off against each other.

A modern example of the art of war and deception would be how the US (and EU) is currently using ISIS to destroy Syria, whilst simultaneously using the terrorist group (largely funded through US allies in the Middle East) to justify a Police state back home. The strategy of the US using ISIS as a proxy army allows them to destabilise Syria and to blame it on somebody else. When the country is a complete mess they can then send in their own ground troops to finish them off, murder all of the leaders, install a puppet government, and steal the countries resources, just like they did in Libya.

That’s how you strategise in war. That’s how you use your enemy to defeat a greater enemy, just as the US used the Taliban in Afghanistan to bog down the Russians in an unwinnable war that helped to destabilise the entire Soviet Union. Sure, the Taliban led to Al Qaeda, 9/11, 7/7, Iraq, the NSA and all of the other ‘problems’ in the world right now, but the bottom line is that the strategy worked. The Soviet Union collapsed, and the western banks and corporations that control western governments now have the perfect, permanent enemy in Islamic terrorism. This manufactured, and controlled enemy can now be sent around the world to bomb and maim, thus justifying less freedom in the west, and more western corporate imperialism and hegemony abroad, whilst claiming it’s all about human rights, freedom and democracy. Yeah, the US might be invading your country, but they are only there to protect you from ISIS/Al Qaeda. It’s true, yet it’s a lie at the same time. That’s the art of war, and that’s how you get things done.

The mainstream corporate media sell war as good versus evil, as neo-liberal democracy versus anything that dares to challenge it. They do so because they need to justify the corporate/statist/fascist status quo, and to portray their side as the heroes, and the other side as the villains. Contemporary superheroes play the role of soldier heroes, fighting against democracy hating dictator villains, fighting for freedom, whilst supporting indentured servitude to the corporate state.

Grant Morrison’s 18 Days #2 is a bit more complex than an average neo-liberal comic book. That’s partly due to Morrison himself, but largely because the book comes from ancient Indian wisdom (the Mahabharata) and so it has a bit more substance than the ignorant idiocy that is fed to us today.

Get the book if you want to explore Indian mythology and culture, but get it if you want to expand your horizons, and understand the complexities behind the art of war.

War is not about dictators and the illusion of freedom that is western style neo-liberal democracy. It’s not what you read in contemporary comic books, see on your television sets, and read about in your corporate newspapers. War is more complicated than what you see on the surface, and that is what 18 Days #2 is exploring.

It’s a book about war strategy, about what to do before the battle, and how to manipulate and weaken the enemy before a shot is fired. It’s about preparing for victory through proactive intelligence, using the most powerful weapon that we, as human beings, possess, that being the power of the mind.

Brains over brawn baby, it wins every single time, and that’s why the US isn’t bombing ISIS into oblivion right now. They could, but what would that achieve? ISIS are there to get rid of President Assad first (he’s an evil dictator, didn’t you know?) and then, who knows how they could be used next? Iran, Russia, something back home if the people start to question government authority perhaps? So many options, but that’s the game of war. We need to understand how it is being played, not for us, but against us, as right now, those in control, the evil people that control the world, are dividing, conquering, and walking over every single last one of us.


Rating: 7/10 (To divide and conquer, it’s the art of war)

Comic review: Martian Manhunter #1- Event Quality ‘Threat’ Book

Writer: Rob Williams
Artist: Eddy Barrows
Publisher: DC Comics
Released: 17th June 2015



I enjoyed this book. It had a very professional structure to it, screenplay quality, like it was pitching for a television series. The art was very good as well, top end event quality good, and the main protagonist was shown to be a man in a moral quandary, fighting against his programming, fighting against what he is supposed to do, knowing that what he is supposed to do is wrong.

I love this guy.

All top quality comic book stuff, so you can’t complain too much about it, as even if you dislike it, you have to acknowledge that this is a very competent and well put together product. The narrative though at it’s core is a threat based story, so although it might seem complex at first, it really isn’t, and the solutions to the threat are the same as they always are in superhero comics. Normal people are helpless victims, they need outside agencies to protect and save them, and that’s where the superheroes come in.

That’s the one assumption that bothers me the most about superhero comics, the idea that people are always victims, that they need saving, and that they can’t save themselves. The idea is insidious mind control, and it’s pushed by all spectrums of political control, from monarchy to communism to democracy. It’s all pretty much the same thing, and based on the same assumptions. You don’t need your own farm. That’s what supermarkets are for. You don’t need your own education. That’s what schools are for. You don’t need your own guns to protect yourself. That’s what the cops are for.  You don’t need anything of your own at all. That’s what government is for.

Do you see how it works?

So when people read comic book after comic book with superheroes saving helpless victims from various disasters (it’s unspecified ‘terrorists’ in this book) it plays into the cultural programming of learnt helplessness. The idea being that we don’t have to do anything for ourselves, that there’s always going to be some government sponsored agency that will take care of us, to protect us from all of the threats in the world that we are so helpless to protect ourselves from.

It’s not a great mind-set you know, and this is not my opinion. Democide is defined as, ‘Murder by government.’ In the past century our various forms of government have started to excel in murdering their own people. So continuing to rely on governments, or the outside agencies that work for them (as represented by superhero characters) in 2015? That’s probably not a good idea.

‘Democide is a term revived and redefined by the political scientist R. J. Rummel as "the murder of any person or people by their government, including genocide, politicide and mass murder." Rummel created the term as an extended concept to include forms of government murder that are not covered by the term genocide, and it has become accepted among other scholars. According to Rummel, democide passed war as the leading cause of non-natural death in the 20th century.’ (The Wikipedia definition of ‘Democide.’)

How many of their own people have governments murdered over the past century?

‘Let's start with a number: 262 MILLION. That's the number of unarmed people the late Prof. R. J. Rummel estimated governments murdered in mass killings he termed "democide" during the 20th century. "This democide murdered 6 times more people than died in combat in all the foreign and internal wars of the century," he wrote.’ (reason.com)

The superhero genre is fun, but it’s dangerous, especially when it portrays those in positions of authority as protectors of civilians, when the truth is very often the opposite. Those in positions of authority do not serve the people, they serve their masters, and their masters are government.

Perhaps that’s the one change that comic books need to make before they move forward and evolve the paradigm of dependence upon government authority that is currently caging humanity, and stopping any genuine hope, change or progression?

Martian Manhunter #1 is a fine comic book. It feels big-time, and that surprised me. It read like a Geoff John’s Justice League book, and it looked like one as well. That’s a huge compliment by the way. Everything was there, in place as it should be. Great art, interesting characters, a moral dilemma for the main protagonist and a cleverly constructed script. It was all very good, but that one problem remains. The problem being the idea that humanity is weak, helpless and needs to be saved.

Is it a structural problem, a problem that cannot be resolved without completely tearing apart the entire superhero genre itself? I don’t think so. All we need is less saving the world ‘threat’ plots, less dependence on outside forces, and an acknowledgement that human beings are not as weak and powerless as governments want them to be.

Mainstream corporate comic books buy into the lies of our time. They ignore truth, and promote the authority of government. They promote the lie that we are free people because we have a corrupted version of corporate democracy, a pathetic sham of freedom and choice owned and controlled by corporate/banking interests and protected by their career obsessed friends in the mainstream media.

It’s so easy to ignore truth. It’s so easy to buy a comic book, to enjoy the cool, and to not think about it any deeper than that. People need to stop with the adoration of the cool, they need to get beyond the deliberate ignorance and they need to get with reality. You can’t hide from reality forever. Sorry, did you think that life was just fun and games, that you can do whatever you like, just as long as you are doing what you are told? Sorry, but the laws of the universe don’t let us get away with that kind of behaviour. Sooner or later it’s payback time. You might ignore truth, but truth will not ignore you.

But how to change, what needs to be done? If you care, and most people don’t, read on.

Real change starts with a no, and a refusal to follow immoral orders. Soldiers and cops and other servants of the state unquestioningly follow orders, they are not good people, as morality plays no part in their decision making process. They are ordered, they obey, like a dog obeys. This is a truth that people don’t want to hear, and it is a truth that is born out by the facts on democide that I have included above.

We need to recognise real heroism. Real heroism is refusing orders when you know that they are morally wrong. America has real heroes. It has whistleblowers like Bradley Manning, but when was the last time that Bradley Manning was even referenced within the pages of a mainstream comic book? Do you know why he isn’t mentioned? He isn’t mentioned because he was a US soldier who told the truth, he saw that what was happening was wrong, and he spoke up about it. That is true heroism, speaking truth even when it is not in your best interests to do so.

“When the persecution of an individual (Bradley Manning) who has exposed an evil is pursued so ruthlessly and yet the evil itself is studiedly ignored, all of us know that there is something very wrong with the way that our society is conducting itself. And if we do not protest in the strongest terms about what is being done in our name, then we become complicit.” (Alan Moore)

Humanity needs to wake up to truth, and it needs to look at itself in the mirror, however uncomfortable that might be. Comic books play their role. Governments need threats, just like comic book narratives need threats. In comic books an outside threat is used to push the narrative, to create tension, excitement, drama and action. Threats are used in our own world in order to justify wars, a restriction on freedoms and all kinds of totalitarian, Orwelian new world order government policies.

Where did you think ISIS came from?  Why are they running around in US vehicles and using US weapons? Why are they being promoted in the mainstream media, and given free publicity like they have the best PR people in the world? Threats legitimate state control, and that is why states will always manufacture new threats in order to justify their positions of authority, or domination over our lives.

As superheroes characters are often little more than stand-ins for government order followers, the parallel should be perfectly clear. Both entities (comics and governments) are dependent upon permanent new threats, and both entities are more than willing and able to create their own threats to push their individual narratives. What they have more in common though is the idea that these threats cannot be handled by normal people, that people in positions of authority need ‘special powers’ in order to deal with these threats. In comic books it’s superheroes who save you. In the real world, it’s a gang of murderers, liars and thieves called government.

Real change is not going to be easy. You are not going to be able to watch your television and vote for it. It’s time to demolish false heroes, and to recognise uncomfortable truth. Superheroes will continue to work as stand-ins for government control, and the corpses will continue to pile up, just as before, as long as we ignore truth, ignore reality and pretend that comic books are just a bit of fun that we don’t really have to think too much about. Threats can be real, but who is creating the threat, and why have they created it in the first place? That’s a good place to start, and a good place to end as well, and that’s where I will finish off this review.


Rating: 8/10 (Fine book, but it’s just another threat narrative that portrays humans as helpless victims, in need of rescue by government sponsored heroes)

Review: 2000AD PROG 1924: SPRING 2015 STARTS HERE

Writers and authors: Numerous
Publisher: Rebellion
Released: 1st April 2015


It’s worth getting this issue of 2000AD for the simple reason that it’s the perfect entry point for new readers. New arcs are beginning here, and there are helpful ‘catch-up’ pages before each story. So get the book, try it out, see if you like it, because this is the perfect opportunity to see if 2000AD in 2015 is the comic book for you.

Here’s what I made of it, and I’m not going to talk about it in massive amounts of detail, I’ll just briefly scan the stories, and let you know what has potential, and what I personally think is going to be the highpoint of 2000AD in these coming Spring months.

First story is good old statist control freak, Judge Dredd. The beginning of this story introduces a prison planet and a bog standard (in Judge Dredd stories) mad crazy serial killer, dog on his head type person. The crazy bloke is easily sorted out, so don’t worry about him. He was just there to be beaten up whilst introducing readers to the setting for this new Dredd story. The art looked a bit rough, but the story is just beginning, so I’ll give it a few weeks before I pass any sort of judgement on it. It was a brief intro with a fight scene, and it worked well.

Second story this week was Slaine. Everything about it screams awesome, from the art, the ancient British mythology, to the talk of how death isn’t really death at all, just the end of the body meat suit, as the soul is immortal. I loved it, and can’t wait for next week to see how the story is going to progress.

Third story ‘Grey Area’ has an interesting premise, with the narrative focussing on an alien holding pen, reminiscent of quarantine for animals, designed to protect earth from horrible intergalactic diseases. The art was a bit dull and messy, but the idea is good, and it intrigues me.

Fourth story ‘Orlok’ has a great idea with a Pre-Cog artist who can predict the future through his paintings. This artist is interested in freedom and democracy (I hope it’s real democracy, and not the fake two party democracy currently enslaving the west) so he’s an obvious threat to the state. That’s a great idea and the art is very good as well. This story could be a good one.

Last story of the week ‘Strontium Dog’ has flat art, but the story interests me. It has elements of real world 2015 concerns in it, with the protagonist working against his will as an agent of a totalitarian future state, so pretty much like any blackmailed person working for our own totalitarian (new world order) state in 2015 really. He even has the orange jump suit, so beloved of the US and their proxy army buddies in ISIS. What did I just say? That those loonies in ISIS are working for the west? Yep, they sure are.

The west (plus Saudi Arabia and all of the other Sunni totalitarian states) are using ISIS as a proxy army to fight against the Shia states supported by Russia. Syria has been going on for a while, and now it’s happening in Yemen. ISIS are not a threat to the west, they are allies to the west. Western governments need ISIS to carry out their unpopular foreign policy objectives and to give them a reason for establishing a Police state back home. That is why they allow them to behead people on the Internet without doing a damn thing to stop them. That’s a tough truth, but it’s truth nonetheless.

Real life is just as interesting (or mad) as any comic book, so when real world elements come up in the books I’m not going to shy away from talking about them. If I don’t do it then who else is going to? Don’t expect any other comic book reviewers on the Internet to stick their heads up and talk about these issues. It’s a sad fact, but they don’t care about these issues at all. All they want to do is to bury their heads in the sand, raise their asses in the air and be willingly raped by the real world authoritarian maniacs of our times.

The vast majority of comic book reviewers on the Internet care only about re-tweets from writers/artists and future career opportunities where they can write boring reviews for boring websites. Truth be damned. They would rather talk about panel layouts, narrative flow and how 'cool' everything is than bring up anything that has real world relevance, the bloody cowards. If they were reviewing comic books in Nazi Germany they wouldn’t care less about what was going on around them there either. That’s their mentality, and that’s why they completely and utterly suck. Rant over, sorry about that, back to 2000AD.

Looking back at what I have just written (not the angry rant, just the 2000AD bits) I have to conclude that this jumping-on point issue of 2000AD has been a great success. Five new stories and none of them are bad. One of them has amazing art (Slaine) but all of them have a lot of potential to be very interesting indeed. I’m so happy. My comic book reading week has began on an up, and my 2000AD reading in Spring 2015 is looking very promising indeed.



Overall rating: 9/10 (If you want to check out 2000AD you won’t get a better opportunity than this)

Best story: Slaine- 10/10 (Awesome sauce)

Worst story: None of them. At this early stage all five stories intrigue me.

Comic Book Review: Sinestro #3- Sinestro is President Assad of Syria

Writer: Cullen Bunn
Artist: Dale Eaglesham & Rags Morales
Publisher: DC Comics
Released: 2nd July 2014 (Release date for the UK. Book was released on 25th June in the US)

Comic book fans won’t notice this, but that’s to be expected. Comic book fans don’t really notice anything. They like comics, so reality isn’t exactly their strong point. They think that the important issues of our times are highlighted by the corrupt and dying corporate mainstream media, so you have to expect a certain level of ignorance from the group as a whole. The title of this review is ‘Sinestro is President Assad of Syria,’ because that’s exactly what is happening in this book. What writer Cullen Bunn has done here is to take a real world, contemporary situation, change the names, stick it in space, and see if anybody will notice. They won’t notice Cullen, but I did.

Sinestro is a brutal dictator who was massively unpopular with his own people, so he left. But now that he has left his people desperately need him back. Why? Because a group of religious zealots are rampaging through space, slaughtering the helpless ‘Korugians,’ and selling them into slavery, all in the name of their bloodthirsty religious dogma. Does that sound familiar to you?

We are talking I.S.I.S here, aren’t we? And we are talking the Middle East. Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, and Bashar al-Assad. Iraq, Libya and Syria.Three countries ruled by dictators. Well, they used to be until our leaders decided to bomb the crap out of them and fund and train the terrorists who are currently turning their countries into Hell on Earth.

Three countries destroyed by the New World Order. Three countries where the surviving people are being slaughtered by Sunni Islamic terrorists funded from Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar and the US. Last week the liberal saviour President Obama revealed that he was going to give a further $500 million to these maniacs, but because he’s ‘liberal’ I guess that’s okay, right?

Comic books will not, in any way shape or form, criticise Islam. But whilst political correctness dictates that you can’t even give the merest hint that it’s Islam we’re talking about here, it’s perfectly acceptable to attack Christianity. So instead of references to a caliphate, suicide bombings, jihad and other familiar terms you get allusions to Christianity with words like ‘Inquisition, ‘Congregation’ and ‘Bishops.’ That’s understandable. Cullen Bunn has to wrap it up in Christianity. If he didn’t then he’d be in big trouble with the thought Police and his career in comic books would be over. But for those paying attention, we know what this is all about, and it’s not what happened in Spain in the late 1400’s.

I want to end this review by congratulating writer Cullen Bunn. He’s demonstrated that you can explore contemporary issues and concerns in modern, feminist liberal comic books, as long as you are clever with it. You have to dodge the politically correct land mines, but it can be done. Most of the readers of this book won’t see any connection between what is happening in the Middle East and Sinestro’s adventures in space, but that’s okay. Cullen Bunn has done some clever writing here, and he’s done it in such a way that he won’t get criticised for it. If anybody points out what that his themes seem strangely familiar and contemporary, he can just smile and tell them not to be so daft. After all, it’s just a silly comic book about a bad guy in space, isn’t it?
Rating: 10/10