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Asterix and Obelix's Birthday: The Golden Book - Albert Uderzo
by Jake Speed Asterix and Obelix's Birthday: The Golden Book is the thirty-fourth book in the famous French comic book Asterix series and was published in 2009. This is not a traditional Asterix volume but a collection of twelve short stories that are presented here to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the character. The book is constructed around ... Asterix and Obelix about to celebrate their birthday and the Gaul village planning a big banquet of honour for them at which there will be many special guests from previous Asterix volumes. Will Cleopatra and Julius Caesar turn up in the end? You'll have to read the book to find out. The guests come with a multitude of special gifts and around this impending party we get many diversions and tangents by Uderzo - rather in the same fashion as the other short story collection Asterix and the Class Act. Despite the usual lovely art and the invention (the classical parodies by Uderzo are wonderful) one can't help but feel that there is a faint whiff of quick commercial opportunism about the book and that a more traditional Asterix adventure (had it been possible) would have been more a satisfying way to celebrate the special anniversary. Given how terrible the previous book Asterix and the Falling Sky was (and Uderzo even addresses this in the preface) it might have nice to have got at least one classic Asterix adventure instead rather than a retrospective that juxtaposes the old with some hastily cobbled together new linking material. Still, if you are an Asterix fan and love the cosy clear line art of Uderzo you'll certainly want to buy this for completist purposes and it's almost worth buying alone for the wonderful splash panel of countless of the characters all seated together at the banquet. It's fun to see how many you can spot and recognise and reminded me of a great Asterix frieze I used to have growing up which could be unfolded and pinned on the wall. The story starts in the year 1 AD, fifty years on from the usual date Asterix books are set in. We see the characters as older people which is sort of fun although we've already had an inverse of this with Asterix and the Class Act. Uderzo makes a cameo in the story here and gets a biff from Obelix for his trouble as Obelix doesn't appreciate being made to look fifty years older! I suppose it's a decent piece of postmodernism and quite good fun to see Uderzo horsing around a bit with his formula and famous characters. You can see here what the characters would look like if they had remained perpetually young too and you also get to see Asterix in a baseball cap. I enjoyed the way Uderzo presented Asterix in different art styles in Asterix and the Class Act and this is the same sort of thing again I suppose although not as clever. Then we go back to 50 BC where the village and characters we know so well are all their usual ages again (or at least the ones we are used to). The further diversions here include birthday greetings from Edifis, Panacea and the Barbe Rouge inspired pirates who are always having their ship sunk or scuttled, and a comical fashion show where Obelix somehow finds himself becoming involved. The humour is never really that sharp though and the book comes off as pleasant and mildly novel rather than terribly funny or inspired. Sadly, writer Rene Goscinny died in the late seventies and while the (sometimes terrible) books produced by Uderzo alone had their amusing moments it was clear that the golden age of Asterix was over. Uderzo's art was still great but he was not quite Goscinny when it came to conjuring up Asterix plots and jokes. I always feel like Goscinny could come up with clever plots from which humour flowed as a natural consequence whereas Uderzo always seems to be straining somewhat to insert his puns. His solo efforts are amusing but just not as often as in the vintage years and one always gets the impression that it's much harder work for him to be funny. Other bits and pieces include the pirates in the Titanix, and Edifis presenting the works of Leaningtowerofpisis. Edifis was the architect in Asterix and Cleopatra - the "best architect in Alexandria." Asterix and Obelix's Birthday: The Golden Book riffs a lot on our knowledge of the series and the numerous characters who have inhabited the world of Asterix and so knowledge and a love of the books is probably a prerequisite here. The pièce de résistance of this uneven bauble is Uderzo's version of Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People - the latest in a long line of clever and striking classical art pastiches in the series. Here, Impedimenta, the Gaul village chief's wife, is depicted as Marianne leading the revolution with a rolling pin! It's a wonderful piece of art by Uderzo with great depictions of Asterix and Obelix too within the portrait. I also liked the reality television style music show where Cacophonix is looking for aspiring bards. Cacofonix is the truly awful singer who thinks he's a genius and - in a funny recurring joke - is always shown tied up and gagged at the big celebration banquet under star strewn skies coda that ends each volume so that he can't possibly sing. The many cameos and appearances by recurring and one-off characters in the book are enjoyable and there are far too many to mention. Anticlimax, Bicarbonatofsoda, Boneywasawarriorwayayix, Clovogarlix, Dogmatix, Edifis, Ekonomikrisis, Felix Platypus, Fulliautomatix, Gluteus Maximus, Huevos y Bacon, Justforkix, Metric, Obelix, Olaf Timandahaf, Pegleg, Pirate Lookout, Psychoanalytix, Redbeard, Squareonthehypothenus, Valueaddedtax, etc. Asterix and Obelix's Birthday: The Golden Book is certainly enjoyable to flip through and has some wonderful illustrations and moments but I never really feel that the short story format serves these books very well (although mercifully it's only been done a couple of times). Asterix books are only about fifty-five pages in duration anyway so you've barely started on some of these individual vignettes when they abruptly come to a close. The end result is always a mild dissatisfaction that you haven't been given a bona fide Asterix book to read and enjoy. This is definitely not the book to start with if you are new to Asterix and only really recommended for those that have many of the books already and can therefore pick up the numerous references and riffs aimed at previous volumes and the attention we've been paying to the series as a whole. This is a nice addition to the Asterix library but ultimately not much more than that and definitely one for completists much more than anyone else. Asterix and Obelix's Birthday: The Golden Book runs to 56 pages and at the time of writing is available to buy for under five pounds. Read the complete review |
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James Bond: The History Of The Illustrated 007 - Alan J. Porter
by Jake Speed The History of the Illustrated 007 was compiled by Alan J Porter in 2008 and is a coffee table style book that takes a look at the comic strip and graphic novel incarnations of the famous fictional spy through the decades. Everything from the Daily Express strips in the sixties through to more weird and wonderful oddities like Manga ... James Bond and Bond comic adaptations in countries as diverse as Chile and Hungry. I was a little disappointed to be honest that this book wasn't more colourful and far out in terms of its design and one does wish there had been more text and essays perhaps rather than the spare guide format here (with a page or cover from something and then some basic factual information and a synopsis beside it). If nothing else though it serves as an interesting (part) visual check list and enables you to gain a sneak peek at many comics you might not have discovered or read yet. The cover is excellent. An unused piece of Bond art by Bob Peak, probably for the 1989 Timothy Dalton film Licence To Kill. Unbelievable really that Peak's striking art was rejected for some vastly inferior posters. The book begins with the Express strips in the fifties and then goes up to the nineties. I have practically all of the Express compilations (I think) so this was unavoidably the least interesting part of the book for me as there was nothing much new. One thing the book does do is chart the course of the comics alongside the film series and the novels (in this case it's the often terrible continuation novels as Fleming had stopped writing books by the time the Bond comic industry got into full swing). The Express were certainly ahead of the game when it came to latching onto the popularity and potential of the novels and began adapting them before the film series had even started. As we see here from the comparisons, the Express incarnations of James Bond might well have influenced the casting of Sean Connery as he looked rather like the illustrated Bond and had something of a comic book look in his younger years when he was all spiffed up in Terance Young selected clobber and a toupee. The newspaper strips began by adapting Fleming's novels and short stories and when they ran out of source material they began making up their own titles and stories (just as the film series had to do). The later newspaper strips were often enjoyably bizarre with some titles that Fleming would have been proud of like Polestar and Death Wing. These strips actually lasted into the eighties which is pretty amazing when you consider how long they had been running. The first American comic to feature James Bond was a DC licenced 1962 adaptation of Dr No which I wasn't familiar with at all and so curious to learn more about here. Fleming's dated and borderline racist dialogue was apparently completely cleaned up and even skin colour was deleted in the comic so that no possible offence could be gleaned by anyone. There was some very surprising Bond related comic stuff in the sixties like Takao Saito's adaptations of four James Bond novels in Japan. The series was ended by the Bond publishers after a couple of years but it's interesting to take a brief look at this work. His manga take on Bond was very action packed and although the art is too cartoonish for my tastes the covers were excellent. Another thing that was new to me was the Zig Zag James Bond comics in Chile that ran for a few years in the late sixties. I first read about these in one of the Titan compilations not so long ago. The comics were pretty solid and just drew Bond to look exactly like Sean Connery. They came to an abrupt halt when a new Marxist regime took over and branded James Bond as western imperialist propaganda. I think this book could maybe have done with more examples of panels or pages from the comics at times but they are fun when they appear and the covers we see add a welcome splash of colour to the text and a nice retro feel to the guide. You get the Marvel specials too, basically comic adaptations of films. I don't know if Marvel still do this much but I know they adapted some of the Star Trek films back in the day. There is the For Your Eyes Only special here (which I own somewhere) and also the Octopussy one too. It's interesting that there was such a long gap between US comic adaptations of Bond films. The theory suggested is that Bond wasn't a very big deal in the early seventies in the United States (in all likelyhood a consequence of Connery walking away again at the start of the decade after making Diamonds Are Forever) but attracted more attention again with The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker in the latter half of the seventies. These were big grand scale fantastical bonkers films full of spectacle and bombast and much more geared to the North American market than something like The Man with the Golden Gun. To be honest, I think that Roger Moore karate chopping someone in a navy blue blazer and a pair of cream flares and then adjusting his tie after a well timed quip is cinematic Bond with the sound turned up to eleven. You can keep craggy old Daniel Craig looking miserable and putting someone's head through a wall. I think the foreign Bond comics are the ones that will probably be of most interest here as many are so rare and little known. In Scandinavia they reprinted the Express strips and then started doing their own and Argentinean publisher Editora Columba actually did a comic version of the renegade (in other words it wasn't produced by the Broccoli dynasty) 1983 Sean Connery film Never Say Never Again. I had no idea this even existed. It was only really in the late eighties that James Bond - despite his appearances in comics and strips - started to feature in some bona fide graphic novels. Strange really given the enduring fame of the character and the fact that you can do virtually anything with him. Mike Grell's Permission to Die, the far out and very enjoyable Serpent's Tooth by Doug Moench, Shattered Helix by Simon Jowett, The Quasimodo Gambit by someone who escapes me just now. There seems to be some sort of jinx on good James Bond graphic in that there are hardly any of them around and they often never get finished. I enjoyed trawling through these even though I have most of them. One interesting nugget here is that a three part comic adaptation of the Pierce Brosnan film GoldenEye was commissioned in 1995 but they took so long to get approval for the risque cover art to the first issue that they never got around to printing parts two and three! Everything is here (including the comics based on the forgettable James Bond Jr cartoon). The History of the Illustrated 007 is an interesting and enjoyable book to flip through but you might be slightly disappointed that's it basically a glorified guide rather than a big fully illustrated pop culture celebration of the world of James Bond comics through the decades. I personally would have liked a few more interviews and articles to read. This is still not a bad volume for completists although I don't think I would be willing to pay too much for it. The History of the Illustrated 007 runs to 240 pages and at the time of writing is available to buy for around £9. Read the complete review |
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League of Extraordinary Gentleman: Century 2009 - Alan Moore
by Jake Speed The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen Century 2009 is the third and final part of the Volume III Century trilogy in Alan Moore's acclaimed comic book series. This comic is set in an alternate reality where famous characters from the world of fiction are real and inhabit the same universe. The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a secret ... organisation/superhero team formed to protect Britain's interests and has existed for centuries. Volume III concerns the League's attempt to prevent cult leader Oliver Haddo (Aleister Crowley type character from Somerset Maugham's The Magician) from creating a Moonchild or anti-Christ and ushering in a dreadful new aeon. The problem is that the League is now down to only three members and when we last saw them in 1969 things were not looking very good for our now immortal and perpetually young heroes. Mina Murray (from Bram Stoker's Dracula) had a bad acid trip during a concert in Hyde Park and encountered Haddo on the astral plane, the entire experience and hallucinations of bats (which given her history were understandably terrifying) sending her insane to be carted off in an ambulance. Meanwhile, Virginia Woolf's gender bending Orlando (keeps changing from a man to a woman and wields the sword known as Excalibur) and Allan Quatermain (the legendary adventurer from H Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines) are suddenly lost and directionless without Mina as the sixties slides away and the punk era dawns. Allan falls back into very old habits and becomes a drug addict and down and out while Orlando decides that as she is turning into a man again she might as well join the army and make herself useful. She has been a warrior for thousands of years afterall. So, Orlando fights for the British Army in the war raging in the middle-eastern country of Q'mar but soon goes bonkers and is involved in a "friendly fire" incident. Orlando was in Q'mar during the time of flying carpets and Sinbad and thousands of years of conflict around the world have taken their toll. He is shipped back to London where he becomes a woman again and takes up lonely residence at the League's funky secret headquarters in a London underground station. After an unexpected visit by Prospero from the "Blazing World" demanding to know why the remaining League members have apparently gone their separate ways, given up on their mission and failed to stop the birth of the anti-christ ("Find your confederates and fabled blade! Find me the Moonchild that the stars foretell lest all the world be ruinously unmade to join thee and thy colleague Faust in Hell!"), Orlando must now somehow locate Mina - who they haven't seen for forty years - and Allan and then confront the terrifying Moonchild. She will have to make a familiar face from a previous volume an offer she can't refuse to get the information on Mina's whereabouts and a trip to a "school of magic" on a very unusual train from a very unusual station awaits. Yes, it appears that the anti-christ was none other than Harry Potter! This is possibly my favourite comic series of all time and it's always wonderful to get hold of a new volume for the first time and immerse yourself once again in the fantastic art by Kevin O'Neill. With the numerous famous cameos and jokes by Moore one has to dwell on each panel carefully to make sure you don't miss anything. The armoured flying vehicle that picks up Orlando at the start in Q'mar is Thunderbirds 10. Back in London, he steps out of the bus station with a Tesco shopping bag that reads "We control every aspect of your lives" and Sid the Sexist and Roger Mellie from Viz can be seen walking past. And so on throughout the book. My favourite in-joke panel featured George Cole and Denis Waterman as Arthur and Terry from Minder. Terry was beating up someone who looked like Shane Ritchie (doubtless as punishment for the terrible Minder spin-off show Ritchie was involved in). The two things that Moore riffs on the most are James Bond and Harry Potter. When Orlando visits the headquarters of the British Secret Service she finds that the new M is someone they met back in 1958 in The Black Dossier. I won't reveal who the new M is but let's just say they are a lot older now and have a picture of John Steed on their desk. Orlando is met by two agents who are identified as JB3 and JB6. One looks like Roger Moore and one looks like Daniel Craig. O'Neil's rendering of Moore is excellent. It's a sort of Octopussy era Moore. Bit older but suave, looking permanently amused at something as Moore always tended to. He captures the Boris Karloff profile and pudding-bowl haircut of Daniel Craig quite well too in a couple of panels and I thought it was clever the way that Moore's JB3 is friendly and courteous while Craig's JB6 was business like, monosyllabic and miserable. Just like the films! The conceit here of course is that James Bond (a name they don't use in the book for fear of legal action) is a codename passed onto different agents. The original Bond was such a national institution in the fifties that the British government felt his name should be passed on for propaganda purposes. We learn that the original Bond (this supposed to be Fleming's literary Bond I suppose) is 90 years-old and paying the price for his less than healthy lifestyle but that M is keeping him alive as punishment for being such a swine. You also get Connery, Lazenby, Brosnan, and Timothy Dalton in the Vauxhall panels and Dalton is the only one that O'Neil seems to fumble (he makes him look like Tony Parsons for some reason). There are - as ever - far too many cameos in the panels to mention and I'm sure many passed me by. There are cameos by characters from The Fast Show and Little Britain, that Japanese bloke who kept trying to stop time in Heroes, the William Hartnell and Matt Smith incarnations of Dr Who. What I liked about the cameos by the two Dr Whos is the way they look directly at us as if they know what is going on but have decided they can't be involved. Moore seems to riff more than once here on the work of Armando Iannucci with Orlando's television showing a series inspired by Time Trumpet, Iannucci's spoof of those tiresome retro "I Love..." talking heads shows. Also an interview with the foul-mouthed spin doctor Malcom Tucker conducted by Jon Snow. Spying all of these cameos, references and jokes is fun and even if you do feel they sometimes become too much of a distracting gimmick (I've never really felt this way myself) they seemed to be slightly less prevalent to me in this concluding chapter of Volume III anyway. Despite the fact that the League is now in the present day (well, 2009), Moore is not exactly on firm footing when it comes to contemporary popular culture and doesn't really seek to present a very detailed or realistic interpretation of Britain as it is now. He makes it clear that that he thinks the modern world is pretty awful ("How did culture fall apart in barely a hundred years?" asks Mina when she surveys the empty homes of recession hit London) and constantly infuses the story with a more mystical and magical bent. The riffs on Harry Potter give the story some impetus as Orlando and Mina must head for an "invisible college" of magic (a thinly disguised Hogwarts) by means of Kings Cross Station (the centre of all fiction) where their trip through a wall leads to a most gruesome discovery. You don't need to be a genius to work out that Alan Moore doesn't seem to like Harry Potter much. Our wizard anti-christ massacres all of his friends, fellow students and teachers and razes everything to the ground, including the surrounding village. Some good surreal art here by O'Neill. "This whole environment seems artificial," says Mina as they near the school of magic. "As if it's been constructed out of reassuring imagery from the 1940s." Alan Moore is actually a magician himself I think so something about Potter and JK Rowling has obviously got his goat. I must admit that I've only seen half of the first Potter film and never read any of the books so I'm sure some characters and references passed me by here. Maybe Moore wraps things up a bit too conveniently at the end but his surprise guest deus ex machina is conveyed by some fantastic art and the coda is touching. I think the strength of this comic is that it very rarely deluges the reader with action and is all about the characters and how much they have come to rely on one another. When Orlando rescues Mina from Rosa Coote's Disciplinary Psychiatric Ward (nice joke if you've read the first volume), there are three pages of Orlando putting her to bed, preparing a breakfast and then combing the knots out of her hair. It's quiet moments like this that make this comic special, especially if you've been following it all the way along and feel like you've come to know the characters. The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen Century 2009 is a solid end to Volume III and of course now allows the reader to enjoy all three parts as a continuous trilogy. Highly recommended to any fans of Alan Moore and at the time of writing you can buy this for £6. Hopefully we won't have to wait too long for the adventures of the League to continue again. Read the complete review |
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1 review Author: Alan Moore, Kevin O'Neill / Comic Book / Hardcover / 56 Pages / Book is published 2013-03-05 by KNOCKABOUT |
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1 review Genre: Graphic Novels / Comic Book / Comics / Author: Alan Moore, Kevin O'Neill / Paperback / 80 Pages / Book is published 2012-06-04 by Knockabout |
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1 review Genre: Graphic Novels / Comic Book / Comics / Author: Alan J. Porter / Paperback / Publication Date: 2008 / Publisher: Hermes Press |
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Genre: Graphic Novels / Comic Book / Comics / Author: Alan Grant, Arthur Ranson / Paperback / 192 Pages / Book is published 2011-11-10 by Rebellion |
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1 review Genre: Graphic Novels / Comic Book / Comics / Author: Albert Uderzo, Rene Goscinny / Paperback / 56 Pages / Book is published 2010-10-07 by Asterix |
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1 review Genre: Graphic Novels / Comic Book / Comics / Author: Arthur Conan Doyle / Paperback / 128 Pages / Book is published 2009-05-28 by SelfMadeHero |
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1 review Genre: Graphic Novels / Comic Book / Comics / Author: Albert Uderzo (text and illustrations) / Edition: TRADE PAPERBACK / Paperback / 48 Pages / Book is published 2002-04-18 by Asterix |
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1 review Genre: Graphic Novels / Comic Book / Comics / Author: Albert Uderzo (text and illustrations) / Edition: New Ed / Paperback / 48 Pages / Book is published 2003-04-17 by Asterix |
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1 review Genre: Graphic Novels / Comic Book / Comics / Author: Albert Uderzo (text and illustrations) / Edition: New Ed / Hardcover / 48 Pages / Book is published 2002-03-21 by Asterix |
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1 review Genre: Graphic Novels / Comic Book / Comics / Author: Anthony Horowitz, Antony Johnston / Paperback / 144 Pages / Book is published 2007-09-03 by Walker Books Ltd |
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