Those missing our 30-days series will be pleased to hear that Christian Mock took up the challenge and has just finished posting a full 30 entries of his own over on his blog, Stay on Target. And, to be honest, he managed to get things a bit closer to the original intention for the meme, which was to highlight individual issues (due to our reading habits, Seb and I quickly fell back on highlighting collections and graphic novels).

You can read them all by following this link, which goes directly to the “30 Days of Comics” tag on his site, and if you’d like to have a go yourself, you can find the master list of entries (pick 30 out of a possible 40) in our post here. Just remember to let us know so we can link to you!

With my birthday having fallen somewhere around the middle of doing this meme (and the whole thing taking place in the build-up to Christmas), it seemed somewhat inevitable that the “last comic I’d read” by the time I got to day 30 would be something that someone had bought me as a present. And so it’s proved – and while I haven’t yet finished the Kyle/Yost X-Force trade that flatmate Julian got me for Christmas, I have now read the entirety of The New York Four, a gift from fellow Alternate Coverer James.

Already aware that I was a fan of Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly’s excellent Local – in fact, he was the person who first recommended it to me back when it was running – it naturally also fell to James to educate me further in the ways of one of his favourite writers. So then to this, a digest-sized book released as part of DC’s short-lived Minx imprint of comics aimed at young female readers – which showed up around the same time as Local, and which might have provided a good Wood/Kelly fix during the delays between issues of their much-heralded Oni series had I only been aware of it at the time.

The New York Four isn’t anywhere near as strong as Local, certainly – but then, it’s significantly shorter in format, and not so deliberately telling a deep and involving narrative that stretches out over the course of twelve years, so it’s not as if a comparative lack of depth or character development can really be held against it. Ostensibly the story of four friends in their first year at NYU, the lack of page space means that the book is instead forced to focus more on a single character – Riley, a native New Yorker with an addiction to texting, a lead on a shared apartment and an estranged big sister to reconnect with. In and of itself, Riley’s story is fine – there’s a big old twist two thirds of the way through that changes the complexion of the entire thing, and makes the book somewhat more akin to Local in the sense of showing a young girl learning a life lesson through her own mistakes. But it’s to the comic’s detriment that it seems determined to set up possible plot strands for the other three characters, yet never finds the time to explore them in detail. I’d imagine that the intent for any planned sequels would be to shift the focus over to each one in turn, but it means that reading this volume in isolation feels frustratingly incomplete.

One thing that certainly isn’t different when held alongside Local, however, is the quality of Ryan Kelly’s art – in fact, reading this reminded me of just how bloody good he was on the other series, and how much I’d like to see more of his work. It’s a damning indictment of comics when an artist has to be praised for drawing four female characters (five, if you include Riley’s sister) and actually having them look like entirely different people (and not just down to hair colour), but it’s something Kelly does extremely well. Even though his style often veers towards the cartoonier side (albeit not when it comes to painstakingly detailed recreations of NYC locations), his characters and expressions are always realistic and believable – and it makes for a comic that’s very easy to open up and engage with.

I’m certainly pleased to have been given the chance to read the book, even though it’s not necessarily something I would have rushed out to buy – and although I’m still a long way from becoming a reader of manga, this format is one that I’m starting to enjoy reading comics in, and before long I may even end up experimenting with moving away from the Western books (Scott Pilgrim, Empowered et al) that make use of it and towards the Japanese works that begat it. As for New York Four itself, I’m certainly interested enough in the characters and setup to want to follow them over to the sequel that’s planned for early next year. Once again, then, James’ work is done.

And then there was Sandman.

I don’t just mean in terms of all the comics discussed in this meme, either. I mean that there were all the other comics in the world… and then there was Sandman. My comics reading history divides neatly into Before Sandman and After Sandman, as clear and obvious a watershed moment as you could ever find. After all, if I weren’t the comics fan that I am, my life would be very different; and I wouldn’t be the comics fan that I am if it weren’t for Sandman.

I was dimly aware of it long before reading it, of course. And I suppose there must have been an inkling that it was meant to be something special by virtue of the fact that, when my Dad sold his somewhat epic comics collection some time when I was too young to have yet read the likes of Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns and all the other “best bits”, he held on to his first edition Sandman trades (although he did flog whatever single issues he’d accumulated before switching to buying it in that form). So the books were always kicking around, waiting to be read – and indeed, I’d dipped my toe into it on occasion, having at some point at an earlier age read both the “Dream of a Thousand Cats” and “August” stories. But by the time I was 15, I knew enough about comics to know that I really should be reading the series in full. I figured I was old enough and intelligent enough – and without much ceremony, I dug out my dad’s copy of Preludes & Nocturnes and started reading.

The impact on me was immediate and profound. I pretty much wouldn’t talk about anything else for the next year or so. Gaiman became, instantly and without question, my favourite writer across all and any media (and despite some iffy comics work since, his novels and short stories are enough to keep him in that place for me). I started wearing black more, not because I was a goth or a mosher or anything, but because he did and his characters did. I called myself “Somniator” – having worked out that it was Latin for “Dreamer” – on my early forays into the internet (“Morpheus” would have been simpler, but The Matrix had just come out, and I didn’t want people to think I was naming myself after that). I brought the trade paperbacks into school, making my English teacher read “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and my Latin teacher read “August”. And most crucially, from that point on, I was lost – I was irrevocably and forever an evangelistic Comics Reader.

I’ve since re-read the series so many times I can recite it almost beat-for-beat, and yet it still offers a fresh thrill whenever I go back to it every year or so. It was the series that taught me exactly what comics were capable of; that they really could be astonishing works of searing literary merit – a point I’d return to in essays both at A-Level and later for an Oxford thesis. It broadened my awareness of a vast array of visual styles, with The Kindly Ones in particular teaching me that the most brilliant art didn’t necessarily have to be the most perfectly realistic. It led me to an entire new world of comics to explore – from direct spinoffs, to other characters (such as John Constantine) who happened to show up in its pages, to series that were simply inspired by what Sandman had done with the form, and which owed their very existence to its success. It is simply the greatest and most brilliantly-told story in comics – and, further, in just about any form of literature for a very long time. It’s funny, sad, scary, profound, educational, perceptive, literary, moving, warm, chilling, epic, and utterly without peer.

For me at least, Sandman is the comic that stood up and shouted “This, this is what comics are supposed to be for”. It’s fair to say that I doubt any other comic I read will ever actually live up to the standard it set, and so perhaps in that way its strength is also a weakness (when you’ve read it, can anything else compete?) But even so, I can’t hold that against it – comics is a great medium and a great artform, perhaps the one I love more than any other; and it’s because of reading Sandman that I was able to make that wonderful discovery.

Do we need to write about Phonogram any more on this site? Probably not. Should we let that stop us? Probably not. This meme is all about personal experiences, after all, and there are few comics that could define that phrase for me more than Phonogram has over the last few years. Both for its content and for its existence as an object, it’s an especially significant comic to me, and probably always will be; and undoubtedly, there are multiple ways in which it’s influenced and inspired me and my life.

First of all, devoid of any extraneous context, Phonogram is inspirational simply as a piece of art. It’s an expression of sensations and emotions that have never really been voiced in quite so specific a way before – its central metaphor, of music as a powerful magic, is so compelling that it really is staggering that it wasn’t hackneyed and well-trodden ground by the beginning of the twenty-first century. In its first series, it was simply nice to see somebody writing a comic in which the likes of Damon Albarn and Luke Haines could make appearances. I grew up with Britpop, but not in the sense of it being a “scene” that I was part of – I’d sit in my bedroom listening to my battered Parklife and Great Escape tapes over and over, or debate Jarvis’ lyrics with friends in school, or tune in eagerly to hear Lamacq play the first single off a new Blur album for the first time. As it was largely enjoyed alone, it was a special feeling to meet someone who felt the same way – even when that music was topping the charts and it seemed everyone felt the same way – and Rue Britannia reawakened that feeling. “These guys are on my wavelength,” I thought. “They’re writing a comic for me.” Even though they quite clearly weren’t.

But with The Singles Club, the sensation became more universal, Gillen and McKelvie putting into words and shapes and pictures the sort of things that music – in all its forms – and, hell, art in all its forms, makes every one of us feel at particular times. I never really spoke about it in detail at the time – even as I was writing far, far too many words about the issue – but when issue #2 came out, I was not long out of the breakup of a long relationship – and still in that phase where just about any record I’d listened to in the preceding year (although there were one or two particular ones that especially did it – ones that I really liked, too) would be entirely off-limits, as they couldn’t help but take me mentally back to the time and place I’d been in in the time leading up to said breakup. I never had a word or phrase for that feeling, though – until Gillen showed up with the concept of the “curse song”. Bang. It’s like one of those concepts the Germans always have snappy words for, and you wonder why we don’t have one ourselves – because it’s so universal. Everybody has them, and everybody will always continue to have them. And that’s why Phonogram, purely as a comic in and of itself, is inspirational – if that’s the right word – for its ability to beautifully and succinctly express the purest and most universal of human feelings.

But there’s more to it than that. I can’t ignore the significance of Phonogram the comic-as-object, either, for what it’s represented to me over the last few years. I’ve had the honour of knowing both Kieron and Jamie on a personal level for a while now, having first met them when Phonogram was an under-heralded indie comic, loved by everyone who read it but not read by anything like enough people. Of course, it was never read by anything like enough people in the end, but it will now forever represent the point at which two significant creators made their entry proper into the field. It’s been an absolute pleasure to see the pair’s individual rises through comics, to the point where Kieron is writing Uncanny X-Men and Jamie is being personally tapped by Brian Bendis to draw Ultimate Spider-Man – and none of it would have happened without Phonogram. It’s about the most inspirational industry story you can find – an object lesson in the fact that if you create something really fucking good, even if it doesn’t seem like a success at the time, even if you have all manner of struggles just to get by while you’re making the thing happen, talent will out and you can make something truly great of yourself.

And there’s a final meaning of “inspired”, to boot, although perhaps “influenced” would be the better term in this instance. As I’ve already said, I have these barmy notions towards being A Writer Of Some Kind myself, and I’d be lying if I said reading Phonogram hasn’t directly influenced my own work over recent years. This has, of course, most obviously manifested itself in getting the chance to write a direct Phonogram tribute story for the …vs the Fans fanzine – my own little attempt to take one of those universal feelings that music can engender and express it in a piece of sequential art. At the time I wrote it, I thought I was quite neatly taking Kieron’s core philosophy and applying it to an area (the feeling you get when DJing) he hadn’t covered yet; of course, it was only a short while afterwards that issue #4, in which he did it better, was published. Nevertheless, it was a chapter in my own growth and evolution as a writer, and I’m sure that going forward the series will have an influential and inspirational effect in other (less obviously rip-offy) ways as well.

So that’s just some of why I love Phonogram. Why I’ve been inspired to write almost ten thousand words about it on this here blog. Why I’ll always look at two people who in other ways I can consider social peers and friends with just that tiny bit of awe. Why I repeatedly buy copies of it for friends and families’ birthdays, and jabber on about why they have to read it. And why it’s a comic that I’ll never, ever forget.

I’m treating these two comics/days as one entry, as they’re essentially two sides of the same coin – and I find it legitimately interesting that I seem to hold opinions diametrically opposed to the prevailing critical opinion on both sides of it. (Plus, I’m a little behind schedule anyway – I’d originally intended only to use one “day” on this post, but since I’ve ended up writing about twice as much as usual in this post, I may as well allow myself to use two.) So here goes – my controversial opinions on Frank Miller’s two Dark Knight comics.

First of all: Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. While my opinion on it has undoubtedly softened over the years – or, perhaps more accurately, gone from liking it as much as everyone else back when I first read it, to gradually developing a distaste for it in subsequent years, to then softening – the point still stands that I simply wouldn’t agree with vast swathes of comics fandom/criticdom in describing it as the greatest Batman story of all time. I wouldn’t even class it as the greatest Frank Miller Batman story (that honour would go to the pretty much faultless Year One – although even then the brilliance of that is largely down to the fact that it should really be called Jim Gordon: Year One).

It’s true that there’s plenty about DKR that’s great – at the time it was a genuinely original and challenging comic, and although the narrative style of much of it (tiny panels, using TV news to relay exposition) has been aped endlessly in the years since, you can’t hold its innovation against it. Carrie Kelley is a great character, and there are terrific moments – notably the final culmination of the Joker/Batman relationship, in which Bruce still can’t bring himself to break his “no killing” rule… so the Joker does it for him. But there’s also a lot about it that just makes me uncomfortable. Perhaps it’s largely just being a Supeman fan, and thus having little truck with the way Miller treats the character – as a joke, basically – but there’s also the nature of the book’s politics, something I’ve never been able to fully reconcile. On the one hand, there seems to be a distinct jab at the then-current US government, and Reagan in particular – something which is also transposed to Superman, the lapdog of the government frequently drawn to look like its ageing leader – and yet at the same time, if anything the book is espousing an even more right-wing view (although it’s frequently heralded by supporters as doing the opposite, that just doesn’t come across in my reading). It turns Batman into a man who wants to stamp out crime in a near-totalitarian fashion by any means necessary – and that, to me, just isn’t the essence of the character.

Still, despite the Superman fanboy in me disliking the book, I can see the good aspects of it – as a self-contained story, it’s great, I just think it perpetuates a false perception of what Batman is and what Batman stories need to be. But if I’m going slightly against the critical tide in having my doubts about the lasting quality of DKR, then I’m actively fighting it in expressing my opinion of its 2001 sequel, The Dark Knight Strikes Again. Because, well… I actually kind of quite like it.

I don’t actually remember doing so hugely at the time – although there must have been enough in it that I felt it worth spending $7.95 an issue on it even after reading the first one – but certainly, as time’s gone on and the book has continued to be regarded as one of the most spectacular flops in the history of comics, I’ve held a sneaking regard for it that’s only grown as it’s become more apparent exactly what it was trying to do. Simply put – Dark Knight Returns was a comic that (among other things) appealed to people who didn’t necessarily already like comics. DK2 was a comic that could only ever appeal to people who did.

Not that it appealed to all of them, of course. Far from it. But look in more detail at what initially appears to be a garbled, confused, poorly-drawn, piss-taking mess, and there’s a lot more going on than initially seems. And looking at it from one perspective in particular, it becomes apparent why I have this slight affection for it – it’s Miller attempting to be Morrisonian. It’s not as good as a Morrison comic, of course – but it’s definitely coming from a place far nearer to the likes of Flex Mentallo, All-Star Superman and Batman & Robin than it is to Dark Knight Returns or even All-Star Batman & Robin (although the latter series, I think, was Miller trying to further expand upon the same “fun” ludicrousness but with far more devastatingly awful results).

What immediately sets DK2 apart from its predecessor, for one thing, is that it’s far more obviously a DC book than a Batman book – characters not even mentioned in the original series dominate its pages, while Batman himself is often shunted into the background. Again, this is undoubtedly a reason why many fans of the original disliked it – but for me, it works well, as Miller is taking characters he’s never written about before and applying a deliberately skewed perspective to them. But it’s the perspective of someone who clearly knows far more about classic comics than we might ever have given him credit for – he’s throwing a range of different eras into the mix, from Silver Age Justice League stories, to the ’60s Batman TV series, to Kingdom Come, to the Max Fleischer Superman cartoons. If anything, rather than taking the “Dark Knight” part of its predecessor’s name, as a sequel it should probably be called something like The Justice League Returns – as one of the things it concerns itself the most with is an explanation as to just why there weren’t many other heroes around during the original series, before setting about rectifying that fact.

Crucially, it’s fun, and this is something I feel Batman comics generally need to be; people too often miss the point that Batman is inherently ludicrous in character, conceit and surrounding world. If you can’t admit that that’s the case right from the name downwards, then you need a reality check. You can do “dark” stories with him, and do them well, but they shouldn’t be the be-all and end-all. The Adam West series shouldn’t be the be-all and end-all either, of course, but there’s absolutely no foul in drawing upon the myriad different interpretations and levels of seriousness, so long as you do it well (and, crucially, so long as you never step into outright parody – a mistake the reprehensible Batman & Robin film made). So what Miller is doing in DK2, having done arguably the definitive “dark” Batman story, is cutting loose  and having fun in the garish superhero world the character spent some of his best decades inhabiting.

Of course, if there’s an element of DK2 that attracts even more flak and ire than the story, it’s the art. But again, in this instance I actually think Miller’s getting the short end of the stick based on people’s pre-existing expectations. And I speak as someone who, unlike many, isn’t normally a huge fan of the guy. It could be better-executed, there’s no question – it does feel rushed at times, and so frequently replacing backgrounds with colour washes is only forgiveable if you spend as much time drawing the foreground characters as, say, Frank Quitely does. But for all that, the visuals do deserve more credit than they’re often given – Lynn Varley’s colours are often astonishing, and even if you can’t always give top marks to the composition, you have to appreciate that the style is absolutely suited to the story Miller is telling. After all, the style employed in DKR would be as unsuited to DK2 as the other way around.

All of this is not to say the book is anything like flawless – about the kindest you can say is that it’s a failed experiment. But it’s a failed experiment that I actually enjoy reading, and unlike a vast proportion of Miller’s work (I’m just not usually fan of his style, subject matter or tone) I can say I’m pretty onboard with what he was trying to do. There are some truly standout ideas and moments – the government’s use for Barry Allen (and on that note, I find it amusing that Miller was criticised at the time for ignoring the fact that Allen and Hal Jordan weren’t the “present” incumbents of their roles and so shouldn’t be treated as the “future” versions either – it’s only taken seven or eight years for history to prove him right on that one), the death (and precognition) of J’onn J’onnz, writing the Question with Rorschach’s voice, just about all the Lex Luthor stuff, and of course every time Catgirl appears. Look past its nominal status as a DKR sequel and it’s actually a pretty darned entertaining comic – and certainly one that’s overdue a reappraisal.

Or maybe it’s just that I appreciate him actually treating Superman a bit better the second time.

I’ve had a long-standing soft spot for the Ultimate Universe. In the main, that’s due to my affection for Ultimate Spider-Man, the most consistently great superhero book of the last ten years. But between 2001-2008 (or thereabouts), I was a fan of pretty much all the other titles, too – I was a bit slower getting onboard with Ultimate X-Men, really disliking the early Millar issues but enjoying the latter part of his run immensely, but I lapped up Ultimates 1 & 2 along with everyone else in comics, bought just about all of the Ultimate Something miniseries, and even stuck with Ultimate Fantastic Four past its initially stuttering beginning.

Those early issues had struggled to make an impression, with Bendis and Millar’s writing styles never really clicking together (something that doesn’t give me great confidence for their upcoming Death of Ultimate Spider-Man arc or whatever it’s called) and the very creation of the characters giving rise to all sorts of internal continuity issues within a universe that at the time was less than five years old. But things took a dramatic upswing with the arrival of Warren Ellis – at the time, a huge surprise, as it was arguably the first time Ellis that had shown that he was more than capable of writing entertaining stories with the mainstream superheroes that (so the common perception went) he so despised. His two arcs on the book were nothing short of terrific – energetic, loaded with his trademark tech-idea-splurges (and thus a perfect fit for exactly what a modern-day FF book should be), and at times downright hilarious (the riffing on “Fantasti-car” in Doom, or the reveal of Johnny’s name for the shuttle in N-Zone); plus, although the second arc suffers from having lacklustre art from Adam Kubert, the first has got Stuart Immonen at his most sprightly.

After just those two arcs, though, Ellis was gone – and after a two-part fill-in from Mike Carey, original co-writer Mark Millar was brought back to try and inject interest back into the series. His first arc, a three-parter called Crossover, hinged on a pretty neat idea – teasing a potential crossover with the 616 universe for the first time – but quickly lost interest when it turned out to be a universe of undead zombies instead (and yes, if you didn’t know, it was this one humble little storyline that led to the existence of the entire relentless Marvel Zombies thing. So, yeah, thanks for that). But aside from providing an anticlimactic end to an intriguing build-up, there was something far more dangerous threatening my continued buying of the series – as joining Millar on the book as artist was the one, the only, Greg Land.

The name didn’t mean much to me when he arrived on the book – I didn’t really have pre-existing knowledge of just what he was capable of – but it didn’t take long to find out. There’s enough ranting about Land art on the internet already, of course, so I don’t need to go into great detail about just why I immediately found the book so unappealing visually – but two immediately obvious reasons would be the ever-changing hairstyles of Johnny Storm (depending on whom the traced image happened to be of at any given time), and the turning of Sue into Pamela Anderson (coupled with an immediate, erm, trimming of her usual wardrobe). It’s just tasteless, classless, soulless craftless nonsense – surface gloss without any sort of character, storytelling or depth behind it. It can be overlooked if the writing is good – but while Millar is capable of great comics from time to time, this was just him on autopilot.

The tipping point came, finally, with issue #24. Part one of “Tomb of Namor”, a story about… well, about Namor. And there are few characters in the entirety of both the DC and Marvel universes that interest me less than Namor. And few tedious, overblown, pointless stories that interest me less than the love triangle between him, Sue and Reed. Seeing the story redone yet again in the Ultimate Universe, with art by Greg Land to boot (“A story set underwater!” he must have thought. “I won’t even have to paint over the bikinis from Sports Illustrated this time!”), was simply too much. I gave the first issue of the arc ago, but it did nothing to inspire – and even, in what may just be one of the greatest meta-jokes of all time, gave Land the excuse to draw a panel showing a website called “Cheerleaders Gone Wild”. From that point, I was out – #24 would be the last issue I’d buy, and by the time Millar left a short while afterwards, even his replacement by Mike Carey wasn’t enough to tempt me back. When the team were ripped apart by Ultimatum a few years later,  I had a twinge of regret for Reed – killed off before anyone had really managed to do anything with the vague potential shown by his character early on – but the end of the series as a whole was hardly something I mourned.