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Underground > Comic Books >

New Statesmen

  
 
miss wonderstarr
09:02 / 17.04.04
I read all this series in Crisis back in 88-89 or whenever, and last week bought the US 5-issue collected reprints to read them all again.

Anyone else remember or familiar with this John Smith and (mostly) Jim Baikie miniseries? It also introduced Sean Phillips and Duncan Fegredo.

I have mixed feelings about it, which I will happily share if anyone else has an interest.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
10:45 / 17.04.04
I absolutely loved it, but then I haven't read it in years. I was always a big Smith fan, and just wish he'd written more stuff.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
11:10 / 17.04.04
Gosh, yes. I remember being terribly excited by crisis when it came out - in fact, rather more excited than the quality of the stories probably merited - on the grounds that it was being touted as handling more mature themes than traditional British comics, while retaining a British cast of creators. Its many permutations, and its descent into an anthology mag, along with the death of Deadline, Revolver and ultimately Crisis itself is one of the sad tales of my middle youth...

Ah well. That's a nother thread in the making, perhaps.

New Statesmen I remember being very impressed with at the time, but then it was the first time I'd encountered John Smith. I'm fond of him, but he does tend to use the same stylistic devices all the time, and I think a lot depends on his artist - I think my favourite Smith story is probably "Killing Time", because he and Chris Weston work very well together.

Conversely, although some of the more statuesque elements of Jim Baikie's style went well - Dalton rising from the rubble, that sort of thing - in the end I was sort of underwhelmed by what I felt as an absence of expression in his characters and storytelling in his layouts. And, given that it was about 200 pages long, the sheer number of fill-in artists made the story significantly less enjoyable for me... especially as some of the stand-in art is *dreadful*.

On the whole, tohugh, I enjoyed NS a lot - I was impressed by the attempts to create a complete and coherent world, although admittedly the mechanisms used, with hindsight, were shamelessly nicked from Watchmen. The attempt to use superheroes in a political conspiracy thriller also engaged me (I daresay another lift - Smith seems to aggregate rather than create). In a way, it seemed a bit sad that it ended up with a bunch of superhumans knocking each other through walls...
 
 
VonKobra,Scuttling&Slithering
11:20 / 17.04.04
NS was wonderful. I loved Baikie's art...I remember reading NS, Watchmen and V in a period of about a year...and thinking superheroes had finally come of age. It was a really great era for UK Comix in general...Zenith was happening too. And the Nemesis strip in which the alternate reality they were in was a lot like a Mosley/Thatcherite English Nightmare.

But...

I DO remember that when reading Crisis, I would work my way through Third World War which I enjoyed more for its content and polemic, and then I would have the blood, guts and beautifully clean lines (and relatively easier on the mind/conscience) of NS at the end.
 
 
miss wonderstarr
11:26 / 17.04.04
Thanks for replying to my 1st ever Babyliss thread!

I will try to order my thoughts.

When this came out I was like 18 and ramped up on Watchmen, DKR, Zenith and all the reworked superhero vibe. John Smith was, I think (sickeningly) some 3 years older than me and clearly buzzing on the same spirit.

It's the most obvious example of a "post-Watchmen" revisionist superhero strip I can think of -- prose endpapers expanding the universe thru simulated articles and journalism, racy stuff about fetish and crimebusting costume, repeated visual motifs gathering sinister meanings, political and religious groups debating the role of the superhero. Even the fashions, with those pixie boots matching the color of the characters' trousers, recall Moore and Gibbons' fictional 1985. Even the frigging title is an homage, for God's sake.

The worst aspect of this clear influence is that the villain is so blatantly obvious right from page one that they might as well have put an announcement on the cover. How anyone could read Watchmen, then New Statesmen, and not immediately know that the blond, muscular, morally-upright media darling is the mastermind behind all the small-scale killings is beyond me.

So the plot, which is actually quite complex, becomes totally redundant because of its almost absurd similarity to Watchmen. It's practically a pastiche. Golden boy arranges killings of other heroes. Slightly edgy group of masks who used to be a team start to investigate, tracing the connections by interrogating petty thugs. My God, it all leads to the blond guy who looks like a Nazi ubermensch. And in the final episodes, they all run up against him one by one, getting wiped out until a last showdown where they psyke a spike ito his head and turn him into the "burning man" who's been resonating through the text for the past 10 episodes.

O, but that's not nicked off Watchmen. No...because it's teefed from fucking Zenith Phase I! A psi-trigger into someone's head, cued with a bunch of Wm Blake tigger tigger imagery? My fuck it's been done before.

Uh, having said that. And also having pointed out that a lot of the cut-up and paste plot is just unnecessarily, showily clever-clever...I still got a kick out of this comic. Baikie's art is really appealing when he takes time over it; his figures aren't "realistic" but they have a kind of elegance and poise. Sean Phillips does horrific fill-in work but finds his feet in the epilogue. Fegredo turns in a scratchy, electric interlude.

Maybe it's partly because of the 80s nostalgia this induced, but I wasn't sorry I bought it.
 
 
Scrambled Password Bogus Email
12:23 / 21.04.05
Wow, for some reason I was thinking about this yesterday, and here's a thread saying everything I was just gassing together in my tiny head for a thread.

Thanks, chaps, saved me no end of valuable time I really should be doing something far more productive in.

I still quite like it, though.
 
 
Benny the Ball
16:10 / 21.04.05
I remember liking it, but at the same time getting very bored by it, maybe for the reasons listed above. It was a little clunky in parts, which seemed odd for a story which was in the 5-6 page a fortnight (I think) format, but there was something that was good about the core idea that made me stick with it. I re-read it recently, in the collected book, and found it a lot better, but as a youngster, I was often conflicted over whether or not I liked it.

Always have been more of a V for Vendetta fan than Watchmen and NS and DKR though, so maybe that has something to do with it.
 
  
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