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Revere: Tarot card XII
In 1991 Revere was good news if you wanted 2000AD to look over the Channel at slick painted European things like Métal Hurlant and less great if you wanted something dirty and subversive. But since the door had been found it would have been dim not to go through it. From 30 years further down the time tunnel the lake of overused acrylics in which this road petered out can be seen in the distance, but Revere has the fire of an early adopter, John Smith and Simon Harrison calling for revolution in a Britain rebuilt as a Tory machine for so long that the whole edifice was cracking. All Revere’s LSD and Tarot business is like Alejandro Jodorowsky coming down a crackly phone line, although I was surprised to find that it’s still considered in some quarters to be beyond the WTF threshold. It’s not that hard to see what’s going on: Smith is thinking about standard esoteric history and Steve Ditko comics and Harrison is thinking about modernity and Salvador Dalí among others.
The modernity now is in the publishing plan since Rebellion is putting out Revere as digital-only, which might be a zero-sum game. Decoding Harrison’s art on an iPad screen, rather than on paper after a printing mechanism has done its best to reproduce the images properly with smoke rising from the cogs, can only be a shortcut to the intended enlightenment. And they never work.
I reviewed the digital re-release of Revere for the Tripwire web site.
The Avenging World: global storming
Steve Ditko’s fingerprints are all over Revere once the character sets off on self-improvement, and doubly so after reading Zack Kruse’s new book on the artist Mysterious Travelers—cunning title, Fellow Travellers being a phrase from the opposite end of the political Earth to Ditko. Proving that I was completely wrong after Ditko’s death to think that the existing biographies would be mostly unmodified, but completely right that lazy political labels stuck on an artist have to be addressed for their accuracy at some point, Kruse grapples with how Ditko’s mind materialised in the art, in the figures and plots and pen lines themselves. Which means defining what that mind actually thought and not just repeating what everyone always says it thought. After carefully claiming the word Liberal for one aspect of Ditko’s position rather than any label from further over to the right, Kruse lowers himself into the Ditko mines on a rope.
Kruse’s book goes on my shelves next to ones by Marc Singer and Brannon Costello as accessible books by scholars about comics which not only set sail into culture and politics too, but gently call for higher standards in comics criticism (not so gently in Singer’s case - it’s the whole book). This isn’t the only reason to think film criticism could do with a few comparable holistic and critical texts right now, books suggesting that some things about criticism have to stay measurably objectively valuable to people outside rather than unmeasurably subjectively good for self-expression or a formerly paying trade will become an unpaid pastime. But it is a pretty big one.
Lipstick Traces is on that shelf too, a book about punk and music and artists kicking the doors in at regular intervals like a sunspot cycle. A dimension in which Steve Ditko and Guy Debord overlapped would be more explosive than any cosmic punch-up Ditko drew, but there’s the Avenging World against scraps of newsprint and pulp, looking like something cobbled together with paper mache backstage at Cabaret Voltaire, Spiegelgasse 1, before being thrown out as too easy to understand.
