Reality Cat & SJW Girl in 'The Blair Rich Project' (A Webcomic about the legendary fortune of Tony Blair)

Reality Cat in- A Short History of the White Poppy

The Paybacks #1 (Plus a rant about the general state of contemporary comic books)

Writers: Donny Cates & Eliot Rahal
Art: Geoff Shaw
Publisher: Dark Horse Comics
Release Date: 16th September 2015



I had a big list of new comic books to check out this week, but that’s going to have to wait now. Post office delivery issues mean that my weekly supply of comics is going to be a day late,  and as I’m not going to go into any comic book store without buying at least one book, I now have a copy of’ The Paybacks #1’ to review.

The Paybacks #1 follows a team of superhero debt collectors as they repossess super-powered gadgets from broke superheroes. The team are daft, their target (A character ripped off from Grant Morrisson’s Batman & Robin arc) is ridiculous, and the narrative proceeds with knowing ‘geek’ jokes and lots of silliness. The art is very cute, cuddly and colourful. It suits the tone of the narrative, that tone is ‘Let’s all have a laugh at the absurdity that is the comic book superhero genre.’

I read the previews, so I knew what I would be getting. I expected a daft superhero mickey-take, something inconsequential, but fun, and that’s exactly what I got.

Here are the questions:

- Was it riotously funny?
- Should I have picked it up when it first came out?
- Does it contain anything within the narrative that resonates with real world concerns?
- And lastly, will I be purchasing issue #2?

And the answers to those questions:

- It’s funny, not riotously so, but it’s trying to be silly, and it achieves that.
- No, I don’t regret not picking it up when it first came out.
- There is nothing in the book that has any relevance to the real world of 2015.
- No, I won’t be purchasing issue #2.

I picked up ‘The Paybacks #1’ after looking at lots of comic books on the shelves and coming to the sad realisation that I had zero interest in any of them. That’s a depressing situation. I’m a long time comic book reader, in a comic book store, and I’m struggling to find ANYTHING that I’m interested in. What happened? I used to have lists of the books that I wanted to read, but today that list has dwindled away to nothing.

Here’s what I found on the shelves during my long search for a book that I could read whilst having a sandwich and cup of coffee.

I started off by flicking through the ‘independent’ section, and noticed that a lot of the writers were mainstream names such as Matt Fraction and Ed Brubaker. These writers have been producing unit shifter superhero books for as long as I can remember. I’ve read their work before, and I no longer have any faith in their ability, or willingness to connect with, or reflect the world as it is today. They might write ‘clever’ stories with competent structures, but are they actually going to say anything? They haven’t said anything before, so why should I expect them to say something now?

Having rejected the ‘independent’ books I moved on to the DC and Marvel sections, only to find book after book that was coming from a ‘progressive’ point of view and dealing with issues related to identity politics and political correctness. Oh look, a young girl protagonist, oh another one, and another one, and another one.

Look, I’m a bloke in his forties, so why the hell would I want to read about state agent teenage girls in daft costumes? Answer, I don’t. I find this comic book obsession with young girl protagonists to be creepy and weird, and I don’t want to read about their daft adventures in PC never-never land.

This agenda of ‘empowering’ women is getting ridiculous. Women in the west don’t need any more empowerment. Our entire western society has been structured around the needs and demands of women for over fifty years now. The Muslim world is where you want to go if you are advocating for women’s rights, not the west, but no, comic books won’t mention that, will they?

This pushing of so-called ‘progressive’ identity politics bull**** is corporate and cowardly and it backs up the status quo of human enslavement to a combination of state and corporate power elites. I find it to be insulting and dumb, and targeting the young. The sad thing about it is that this relentless onslaught of third wave feminism is telling young men that there’s something wrong with them, just because they are men.

What are they trying to do here? They do realise that there are inherent genetic differences between men and women, don’t they? They do realise that men and women have had clearly defined roles for thousands of years, and that these roles have helped humanity survive and prosper for all of human history, don’t they? Oh God, I don’t think that they do. They think that there’s no such thing as gender, don’t they? They are insane, they really are, and they don’t even know it. They are writing about imaginary crazy villains, but the craziest people are the writers themselves. They are real world crazy. The kind of crazy where you don’t even realise that you are crazy in the first place.

These crazy comic book writers obsess over race, gender and sexuality, thinking that having a young girl kicking somebody in the face is an empowering thing to write, and they do this whilst ignoring all of the real issues that dominate the every day lives of their readers. Issues like unrepresentative democracy, the violent coercion that is statism, media manipulation, wars based on lies, fought by the poor, and keeping the 1% in their positions of power where they dominate the world like a comic book villain on reality steroids.

It’s 2015 and I don’t need race, gender and sexuality politics shoved down my throat like it’s 1982 and I’m in a student dormitory with a big bloody picture of Che Guevara on the wall. Comic books need to get with the times, as at the moment they are doing an absolutely terrible job of it.

The US comic book industry of today reminds me of the UK Labour party with their ‘new’ grey-haired leader straight out of the 1970’s. Unable to deal with anything that’s happening now, they go back to the past in the hope that they’ll find something useful that will reconnect them with the issues and concerns of the neo-liberal consensus world of today.

Here’s a spoiler, it won’t.

If comic books keep down this progressive path of wilful ignorance they’ll end up in the same rubbish bin of history that is currently reserved for Jeremy Corbyn and his completely out of touch Labour party.

All I am saying is wake up, look at the calendar, and start talking about the world as it is today. Is it really that difficult? It isn’t 1926. Women have all of the rights of men. There is no 'Patriarchy' there is no 'rape culture,’ nobody cares if you are gay and nobody cares if you are a black or white, or a girl or a boy.

Comic book writers need to get with reality and pull their thumbs out of their regressive progressive, communist collective a*** holes. They need to do it now, because at the moment they are becoming an absolute joke with this identity politics nonsense.

Okay, rant over, I feel better now. Back to the book that I’m supposed to be writing about…

I purchased ‘The Paybacks #1’ not because I thought that it would be any different to the neo-liberal ‘progressive’ norm, but because I knew that if nothing else, it would be a bit of a laugh.

I did laugh, a bit, but there’s nothing of substance here. It’s a one joke book. Superheroes go broke, and it takes other superheroes to repossess their stuff. That’s all there is to this one, and even though the final panel recognises that weakness, hinting at a ‘darker’ tone as the series progresses, there’s not enough here to make me want to stick around to see if it has anything more to offer than occasionally amusing, but really quite tame, superhero genre jokes. It doesn’t get too bogged down in the identity politics quicksand of the Marvel and DC universes, but you have to offer me more than an occasional chuckle if you want to have me coming back for more.


Rating: 5/10 (Offers the occasionally laugh, but it’s not particularly clever or insightful)

Comic review: 2000AD- PROG 1944- It’s Time for Anarchy, it’s time to be Free

Writers and artists: Various
Publisher: Rebellion

Released: 19th August 2015

Green alien editor Tharg introduces PROG 1944 with the following threat/warning:

‘So much Thrill-power in one week- it’s reality threatening, Earthlets!’

I’ll give him some credit. The old 70’s punk alien is true to his word, as there’s no connection WHATSOVER to reality in this week’s edition of 2000AD.

It starts with Dredd. The art is good, but the story is just our heroic judges shooting at monsters in space. Next story please.

Helium has a couple of moody girls bossing men about. The men are wimps or order followers, and the girls are large, and in charge. Ho-hum.

The third story (The Alienist) is very old fashioned, with a group of people spending a night in a haunted house in order to prove the existence of ghosts and win a prize from a newspaper. It’s set safely in the past (1908) so nothing of any contemporary relevance, insight or controversy will occur. The story is not particularly new or original, but it looks great. The art is black and white, and features the heavy inking style that you used to get in old horror comics. If you like old-fashioned horror then you should like it, but let’s be honest, nothing new is going to happen in this one.

Next story is the end of Outlier, and it’s a bit, uneventful. The main villain walks off, the end. That’s not very satisfying, is it?

PROG 1944 of 2000AD concludes with Jaegir, a story about soldiers. I didn’t care at the beginning, and I don’t care now. I don’t want to read about order followers. Order followers are not good, moral people. They are evil, and they make the world what it is today.

‘There is no such thing as any possible moral following of orders, the two terms are contradictory.’ (Mark Passio)

You can follow an order that leads to good, but that does not make you a good person. It makes you an order follower doing what s/he is told, that is all. Hence, the truism, that the good moral order follower CANNOT exist. Following orders is immoral because you are giving away your own moral sovereignty. That act alone makes you a bad person.

That’s a truth that people don’t want to acknowledge, and until we do, nothing changes. What does this have to do with Jaegir? Everything, as Jaegir is lying to readers, trying to convince them that you can wear the uniform of a soldier and be a good person. No, you cannot.

Order followers are not good people, they can never be good people. This message needs to be repeated, over and over again until people finally begin to recognise it for the truth that it is. The lie of the good order follower is reinforced every week in Judge Dredd, as it is in Jaegir. This is not how a society progresses. It’s how a society dies. Accepting lies, and making excuses for them is the main reason why humanity is enslaved. Think you’re not a slave? Try not paying your council tax, come back to me, and let me know how that goes for you.

Last week’s 2000AD featured some reality in ‘Future Shocks- Cloud Nine.’ That story was about human slavery to a centralised control system, a system that takes through the threat of violence, and gives nothing in return. This week’s 2000AD takes a break from reality completely, as was threatened by Tharg in his introduction.

Some readers will enjoy it, because reality in the UK today kind of sucks. We have the Tories as slave-masters, with their austerity for the poor, and their devotion to international finance and never ending war. The supposed ‘opposition,’ are the Iraq war Labour party. They are dying, unable to find a coherent lie to sell to the enslaved masses. All they can do is go back to the 1970’s in an effort to find meaning, to find something, anything to believe in and offer as an alternative to the neoliberal consensus of our times.

Yes, I understand why UK comic book readers might want to hide from reality in 2015, but as for me, I’d rather not hide. I prefer to shout and scream, and moan and complain and tell everybody who comes into contact with me that they are living in a giant bloody prison, and that the more they bury their heads in the sand, the more difficult it will be to break out, and be truly free people.

Have kids, have a career, have slavery, isn’t it fun? Buy PROG 1944 of 2000AD if you want to hide from difficult, uncomfortable, painful reality. Buy it if you don’t care about the world around you. Buy it if you prefer pretty drawings to meaning in your life. Buy it if you want to hide.

I don’t want to hide. I want to fight. I’m out here, talking about things that people ignore, shouting about the uncomfortable lies that we pay our taxes for. I’m a weird man. I live for meaning, not money or social status. I don’t care about material success and I don’t care about groups. I look at the world, and I see slavery to the state. I see cowardly, apathetic indifference to reality. I see the scared masses hiding within a wave of Darwinian selfishness that blinds us all.

I see humanity farmed as cattle, dumbed down by the media and schooling systems, programmed to obey, and programmed to worship the centralised control system that enslaves us all. I don’t like it. I don’t like how we are treated like cattle, and I don’t like comic books that ignore it, that think that human slavery and following orders is just, well, it’s just what humans do, isn’t it? No, it’s not. It’s what we have always done in the past, and that is why we are in the mess that we are in today. It’s time to change things up a bit, it’s time to break free, it’s time to reject the uniforms of the state and to go our own way, Yeah, it’s crazy time, it’s time to be free.

Rating: 3/10 (For the art in Alienist)

Comic Review: 2000AD PROG 1919- Feeding on the souls of the alienated, television entranced masses.

Writers and artists: Various
Publisher: Rebellion
Released: 25th February 2015


Last week I reviewed PROG 1918 of 2000AD to discover whether or not it’s narrative content resonated with a 2014 UK that has been hit by a cross party consensus of neo-liberal austerity policies. The review was a little longer than I would have liked, but I feel like I managed to make at least a few interesting points along the way.

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Because I enjoyed writing that review, and also because I feel that it’s worthwhile me doing so, I’ll now be reviewing 2000AD on a weekly basis.  My goal is to monitor whether or not the writers are dealing with issues that resonate with what is happening in the UK today. That is the only reason for the review, and I’ll leave discussion of narrative and artwork to others. So with that intention in mind here’s what I made of PROG No 1919 of 2000AD.

Judge Dredd ‘Dark Justice’ is a narrative with zero complexity. The state (as represented by the Judges) is protecting defenceless civilians from villains. The Judges are the law, the court, the jury and executioner. Villains talk about the unfairness of this, but are attacked with violence and eventually subdued. The message of the piece is that you must obey those in positions of authority. You will obey, the Judges are the law, and if you disagree then that makes you the villain. It’s always been this way with Judge Dredd, and that’s probably why I instinctually disliked him as a twelve year old boy reading this comic. To love Judge Dredd is to love the state, and to love the state is to love slavery. That’s why I dislike him, and even when the artwork is as beautiful as it is here, I still feel great unease when reading a tale in which he and his order following, uniform wearing authoritarian gang members are portrayed as the heroes. Cops are not heroes like the television would have you believe. That is why whenever a country goes into tyranny it’s referred to as a ‘Police’ state. Don’t let the programming fool you. The Police are there to protect and serve, but it’s not you or your family who they are protecting or serving, it’s the state. It is their job to maintain the status quo and to protect the rich and powerful. That is their role, always has been and always will be.

‘Survival Geeks- ‘SteamPunk’d’ is the comedy relief strip in 2000AD. The characters are dorks, and girls are not interested in them, but you know that eventually they’ll get the girl, and unlike real life (girls are repelled by men who lack confidence and hide in geek culture) they’ll prove that being a geek is cool (it’s not) after all. This issue had a geek being rejected by a girl who very understandably (and real life convincingly) decided to procreate with a self-confident male instead. It didn’t make me crack a smile, but perhaps that’s just me.

‘Station to Station’ had a great panel where contemporary city dwellers were referred to as ‘Alienated, disconnected people.’ It suggested that a people so alone, so controlled by mass media disinformation and so isolated from humanity would be easy to control and manipulate by an external alien threat. Indeed they are, and that is why the UK is in the mess it is today with the alienated masses busy watching football, soaps and celebrities rather than getting together to do something about the austerity policies that are destroying the lives of them all. It’s an excellent script, and it’s worth purchasing PROG 1919 of 2000AD just to read this one story alone.

‘The Order’ features a moment where Christians are telling the truth and trying to help people who are being deceived by a manipulative alien threat. What? Christians as the good guys in a contemporary comic book? Yes, and even though I’m not a Christian myself that’s such a refreshing thing to read, especially when I’m used to reading Christianity bashing on a weekly basis coming from my US comic books. I’ve read enough crazy Christian bigot and cult leader story lines to last ten lifetimes, so it’s nice to see Christianity portrayed in a heroic light for a change.

‘Savage-Grinders’ features a panel with a character stating that he is going to get revenge for all of the children abused in the UK ‘care’ system. That sounds very familiar to me, and if you don’t know what I’m talking about just spend five minutes on the Internet and read about the dozens of recent cases involving establishment level paedophile rings and cover-ups involving children in UK care homes. This is one of the biggest scandals of our times, and I’m very heartened to see it obliquely referenced to in this excellent comic strip.  By referencing it writer Pat Mills has shown that he is in touch with the growing wave of unease in the UK as the public wakes up to discover that their political ‘masters’ are nothing more than a criminal gang of psychopathic, immoral, perverts, thieves and murderers.

That’s another great week from 2000AD then, and out of the five stories there were positive messages in four of them. Police state indoctrination, male ‘geek’ culture emasculation, city alienation, Christian truth and care home abuse, that’s quite a bag of goodies for anybody to get their teeth into.

2000AD is celebrating ’38 Thrill-Powered Years’ this week, so get yourself a copy of this Thargtastic title and let’s keep them going for at least another 38 years, and long into what will hopefully be an austerity and neo-liberal free future. 


Best story: Station to Station- 9/10 (Alien parasites feed on the alienated, television watching masses)
Worst story: Judge Dredd- 3/10 (I always find myself cheering for the ‘villains’ in Dredd stories)
Special mention: Grinders 8/10 (Our hero is starting to question the morality of the state) 
Overall rating: 9/10 (You need to get this one)


* Tharg is the fictional (or not?) editor of 2000AD, and it’s his voice that introduces each week’s collection of stories. Thargtastic is (probably) not even a word, but I feel that it fits here.

Comic book analysis- 2000 AD PROG 1918- The State of 2000 AD in 2015 AD

Writers and artists: Various
Publisher: Rebellion
Released: 18th February 2015


2000AD is a weekly UK comic book that exists in a 2015 context of neo-liberal consensus politics where the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer and the middle-classes are being deliberately destroyed by ‘austerity’ policies that are coming straight from central bankers down to their puppet politicians and regurgitated by largely unquestioning mainstream journalists.

The official narrative is weird, and consists of Orwellian doublethink, that makes no sense whatsoever. It's a well known, and over-told tale, but I think it needs to be told again, so here goes:

The banks lost a lot of money due to their own dodgy activities. To keep them afloat our governments gave them billions in free cash. That money came from the public, from our taxes. Now the banks are back to making lots of money (for themselves), all subsidised by tax-payer money, and in order to help them continue to make lots of money (for themselves) everybody living in the UK has to suffer ‘austerity’ cuts.

That means cutting funding on vital things like health and education. What do the public get out of this? Nothing, that’s what they get, whilst the banks get to carry on business as usual, and if we don’t like it, well tough luck because ALL of the democratic parties in the UK have the same policies of supporting the banks and supporting austerity cuts.

That is the context of life in 2015 for the people living in the tax net known as the UK, so should 2000AD be reflecting it, or ignoring it? The later would happily please a lot of comic book fans, who would passionately argue that comic books are about ‘escapism’ and that they offer a brief respite from the harsh realities that they have to contend with in their every day lives.

My response to that kind of mindset is SOD OFF. How can anything change if cultural texts don’t even engage with the reality that surrounds them? Do comic book readers not want anything to change? Are they happy with their families living in poverty whilst they read books that tell them that political correctness is the most pressing concern of our times, rather than dealing with the actual things that impact their lives? Do you know what that kind of mindset is called? It’s called IGNORANCE. Deliberately ignoring the world around you because it’s painful and you’d rather not look at it.

Well keep on ignoring reality comic book fans. Keep ignoring the march of state enabled corporate fascism and you’ll wake up one morning either in a ditch or in a government camp. That’s not alarmist thinking, that’s historical thinking. If you keep on ignoring reality then one day reality will kick down your front door and smash your teeth down your throat, that’s what reality does, so stop ignoring it before it’s too late.

Here’s my question, my reason for doing this piece of textual analysis- Does 2000AD engage with the reality of austerity UK in 2015?

Here are my conclusions-

I’ve read this week’s issue of 2000AD (PROG 1918) and found it to be a combination of ignoring reality, statism, political correctness, feminism and (tentative) real world analysis. The magazine contains five stories, and I’ll review them here for signs of contemporary real world relevance.

Judge Dredd was pure statism and fear of freedom (anarchy). The Judges are there to protect poor innocent civilians from nasty villains who just want to see the world burn. It really was that simplistic, and in that sense it’s a perfect synthesis of the real world dynamic where people will happily give up their freedoms for the illusion of safety that is offered by government. This script reminded me that a lot of people live their lives based on fear, and will happily live in a cage, just as long as they have their iphones and television shows about serial-killers and zombies. That’s the mindset that every totalitarian state wants to keep it’s people in, the mindset of fear and paranoia, and it’s on perfect display here in this excellently drawn but horribly statist and cowardly comic book strip.

Survival Geeks is a new series in 2000AD and features a bunch of supposedly loveable loser geek types in a dimensional travelling house. The tone is light, the characters are silly, and I guess the reader is supposed to identify with the assorted loser protagonists of the tale. To me it read like fan fiction, or pandering to readers, and it had no relevance whatsoever with ANYTHING that is actually happening in the UK today. Pointless, weak, fluffy and silly, it’s a tale for the ignorant, a tale for those who want to close the curtains and hide from encroaching reality. Having said that, I recognise why it was included in this magazine. It’s comedy relief, and even though I disliked it, I can recognise that many other readers will see it as quick giggle in-between all of the other more serious minded stories, and thus will justify it’s conclusion. I’m not a fan of the emasculated ‘Geek’ culture, so I was never going to be a fan of something like this, and in that respect it’s a personal thing related to my own preferences, and not an indictment of the actual story itself.

The next tale was much better. ‘Station to Station’ was actively trying to engage with the issue of Syrian refugees begging on the streets of the UK in a contemporary context, so massive props to writer Eddie Robson for going there. It came from a predictably left wing perspective with all of their overblown fears of racism and sexism, but I can live with that, and the inclusion of a story that actually acknowledged reality in the UK was a (cliché alert) refreshing breath of fresh air in the comic. This particular story has a bucket load of potential, and I can’t wait to see where writer Eddie Robson goes with it. I particularly enjoyed the teasers that are given in the book that humanity is joined by a collective consciousness, as that is something that I have been looking into myself personally, and I feel that there is a great truth there that needs to be further examined.

The third story (The Order) also came from a feminist liberal perspective, but this time the heroic young girl protagonist (it’s always a heroic young girl in left-wing comics) was fighting worm villains in some kind of strange medieval/futuristic setting. She had your predictably statist Daddy issues to deal with, was taking on the masculine role (of course) but at least she appeared to acknowledge that she was messed up because of these issues, and it really shocked me to hear her admit that she would have liked to have children of her own. That’s quite a statement to make by any feminist hero, as that entire movement is so anti-man and anti-family that any talk about having a normal family life is quite a break from the norm. The story itself was in colour, and that’s quite a good way of describing the themes, as its not all black and white here, it was a lot cleverer than that. The feminist liberal stuff is looking weak, and there’s a hint that perhaps having all of the young women acting like young men isn’t really such a good thing after all.

The last story was the best, and that’s probably why it was kept to the end, giving the reader a good impression of the magazine as a whole as s/he concludes his/her weekly read. ‘Savage’ by Pat Mills, is about political deception and how not everything is as it appears to be. It’s set in an alternative parallel time to our own, a time where the UK has been invaded, taken over by an alien race, and now newly ‘liberated’ by the US and their drone technologies. The main protagonist is that rarity of rarities in these politically correct, neo-liberal, feminist times, a strong, independent, morally upright man who tries to do what is right rather than unquestioningly following government/corporate orders. Amazing, hey? I was starting to think that such a man didn’t exist in comic books anymore.  Deception is everywhere in this tale, and mercenaries controlled by US intelligence agencies (Hello ISIS) are carrying out assassinations, and corporate powers operate just behind the scenes, manipulating their political puppets to further their own agendas. It’s the UK in a parallel reality, but things there are not so different to how they actually operate here, outside of the mainstream media Decepticon narrative, obviously.

The first story was pure, unadulterated statism. The second was geek culture (comedy relief) irrelevance. The third used a real world scenario with a sympathetic feminist liberal character. The fourth had the same kind of empowered female protagonist but in a futuristic setting, and the final story dealt with political/corporate deception through the lens of a positive male protagonist.

That’s five stories, with four of them coming from a traditional Marxist/Feminist/ Neo-liberal view-point, and the fourth having a bit of testosterone about it by using a freedom loving bloke as the main protagonist. So, going back to my original question- Does 2000AD engage with the reality of austerity UK in 2015?

No, it doesn’t do that, but there are signs that reality is forcing its way into the narratives. A mention of Syria, a mention of drones, a mention of corporate complicity in staged ‘terrorist’ events. It’s there, lurking in the background, banging on the door, yet the geeks still have their headphones on. They are still happily asleep, convinced that reality won’t harm them, and all the time the corporate controllers thank them for their apathetic help in building a fascist, totalitarian, corporate new world order.

2000AD is still a bit sleepy, and the influence of cultural Marxist/Feminist indoctrination is all-too apparent, but we are coming close to a time where the writers will be hurt so much by reality that they will have to write it into their stories. Just like the readers, they can’t hide inside themselves forever. The day will come when they are forced to acknowledge what is going on in the world around them, and the only question is whether or not it will be too late when they finally do wake up.

I will keep on buying 2000AD, because I can sense that it is changing. Two stories out of five had contemporary relevance, and that’s a lot better than most of the US comic books that I read on a weekly basis. I understand that it’s trying to strike a balance between seriousness and humour, so I can skip over the ‘Geek Loser’ irrelevance, and enjoy the stories that are starting to get real and deal with the issues that have contemporary socio-economic- political relevance. There’s no austerity yet in 2000AD, but I see signs of reality lurking, so I’ll keep on checking it out for the near future at least.


Best story: Savage/Grinders- 8/10 (Looking at the dehumanisation caused by drone warfare)
Worst story: Judge Dredd- 4/10 (Gloriously graphic and brutal art, terrible story)
Special mention: Station to Station- 8/10 (More stories like this are needed in contemporary comics)
Overall rating: 8/10 (Worth buying)