What a lovely coincidence! I just reread both ’The New Adventures Of Hitler’ and ’Bible John’ the other day.
TNAOH was supposedly based on Hitler’s sister-in-law’s claim that he had stayed with her and her husband in Liverpool for about a year on the eve of WW I. It is, among other things, an interesting take on the genesis of ideological and political concepts and features lovely art by Steve Yeowell. The concept of a Black Grail in the form of a toilet bowl makes an early appearance.
The strip was first printed in b&w in Scotland’s CUT magazine where it caused quite a scandal at the time as some people supposedly quit working for CUT out of protest (although Grant claimed in some interview they had simply been offered better paying jobs elsewhere!). It was reprinted (in a coloured version) in CRISIS #46-49. Definitely worth reading if you can find it. Some of the ideas could have been straight out of Doom Patrol. Just imagine Mr. Hitler being followed by a trolleybus full of people wearing chairs instead of shoes. Or Morrissey and John Lennon giving live performances in Hitler’s wardrobe.
As for Bible John, I would go as far as to say I consider it one of Grant’s masterpieces. The painted artwork by his friend Daniel Vallely and seen in CRISIS #56-61 is simply breathtaking.
It was subtitled ’A Forensic Meditation’ which is quite a good way of describing it. When Grant was about 8 years old a serial killer murdered three young Glaswegian women. The man had picked up the women in a discotheque, and the third victim’s sister described him as a young man named John who was quite well-versed with the Scriptures, thus the media dubbed him Bible John. The police took some unusual steps in their hunt, e.g. using (for the first time in a Scottish murder case) an identikit picture and having an artist paint a portrait of the wanted man. They even made use of the famous clairvoyant Croiset. Morrison and his friends tried to support the police hunt by looking for men fitting the description but the murderer was never found.
‘Bible John’ features large stream-of-consciousness parts that contain truly effective and disturbing passages. As a part of his preparation Grant and friends had a séance where some really stunning things were transmitted resulting in frenzied research with some unexpected findings. But in the end all dissolves before it really condenses into coherent meaning. But be warned: reading this thing in the right mood can really freak you out! Very rewarding, though.
Yikes, I just realized that here we have Grant using magical operations in trying to hunt down a multiple murderer the police could not catch and that sounds exactly like something which is proposed over in one of the sniper threads!
By the way, we should all beg Grant to put ’The Entropy Concerto’ up on his website. In an early interview he calls it his best Gideon Stargrave story ever and the only two panels I could find in an early interview look very promising. |
