August 2013 - Power Socket 8: "My, it's cramped in here, isn't it?!"

In August we went to Edinburgh, but this isn't a post about Edinbrugh.* 

And we went to Rye - where I learnt there was once a smuggler called "Nastyface" - but this isn't a post about Rye, either.** 

No. To properly clear out August, I must finally post this: the unfinished, eighth and last ever issue of...

Sad times. Here's where it all went dark and then stopped. The obsession over detail, the cross-hatching, the bricks, all those tentacles. In 1987 there was so much for comics fan to suddenly take in - From Alan Moore alone there were collected volumes of Watchmen, Swamp Thing, V for Vendetta - As I said before, there was too much to copy. I've unearthed a few more unfinished projects from that same year, so let Operation: Fang then inaugurate the tag "Unfinished in '87".

* This is.
** No, but this is.

Power Socket 7: "Aw, sneck!"

This issue must have taken me ages. I was heavily into 2000AD by now, and who can blame me? My imagination had been pretty traumatised by a sudden move to public school at the age of nine, starved suddenly of mythology, baffled by "catalytic cracking" and "the ablative" and the absence of girls, sectioned by separate desks for every boy and separate teachers for every subject, sustained only by the scraps afforded by Mad Magazine and Oink. But then, in 1985, for just 24 pence a week, it found its salvation.

The late Massimo Belardinelli, just doin' his thing.

In fact it was struggling now to keep up. My hatred of that school had become so bad that I persuaded my parents to send me to a therapist, and of the one session I finally received the only detail I can remember now is me confessing my frustration that my imagination seemed so tiny compared to these guys'. How did they do it? Where - as Alan Moore was often asked, and possible went on to suffer a nervous breakdown trying to find out - do you get your ideas from? And it wasn't just the Alan Moore's stuff. There were the richly researched and nightmarishly illuminated worlds of Pat Mills, the surrealist panache of Peter Milligan's teen-friendly metaphysics, the aspirational shopping-mall dystopia of John Wagner's Mega-City One which teemed with poor, beaming, fad-chasing bastards seeking their fix of fun even in the cannon's mouth, and all of this served with wit - with jokes even - and monsters! So many monsters.

 

"Get off my back, Father!" Some Kevin O'Neill

There were no supermen, or at least none I was interested in. There were wanderers, terrorists, deserters, smugglers and surfers, very few of whom looked recognisably human. Everything 2000AD was teaching me was stuff I wanted to learn, and to this day I'm still playing catch-up as a writer. (The scifi pilot I've been hawking around, subtitled "Prog 1", has perhaps as a consequence been deemed "too dense" for Radio 4. Which it is, but that's another post.) Yet for some reason Issue 7 of Power Socket was to be the last I completed. I'm not sure if I gave up, or decided to wait until I was better at it, or maybe I just started enjoying school a bit more. I suspect the truth is - and my "visual notebooksW back this up - that there was just so much out there now to copy, why bother sticking with a super-hero serial? In the Autumn of 1986 Dad suggested we take Power Socket Issue 7 along to show to my new heroes at a signing. I did. "What do you think?" he asked. Alan Moore said "Um, I'm more of a writer," and was lovely. Kev O'Neil (responsible for the image above) said "Do you lay it out first? You should try laying it out." And Pat Mills, to my surprise, turned out not be a woman. I can't remember what he said. Or John Wagner. But I've got the signatures. And all have remained my heroes.
And one day I hope I'll get to show them what I've made since.

Power Socket 6: A true account of the fates of Ortlay, Sendado and Offaldien

There is a skill to making up a name. Clearly I hadn't learnt it by the time I was eleven. Who knew the Wombles were named after places?
And so begins the second, never-completed adventure for our useless heroes in which we find out not only what a soul looks like, but what happens if you accidentally fall into one. The symbol on the Vulture's forehead, chest and earrings of course firs appeared to Sgt. Lonnie Zamora, painted in red on a large silver egg-shaped object which landed in Socorro, New Mexico back in 1964...

 

In case you were wondering where you'd seen it before. I loved that symbol. Enjoy, Earth-things.

Power Socket 5 "Who let him at the laser cannon?"

Here it is then, 1985's action-packed conclusion to the Black-Shark arc. With arks. I like the robots in this, and the signage, and the signage on the robots. I hope everyone's keeping cool. Ka-bluey!

"Parlour"?

Power Socket 4 "Oxygen Percentage: Normal"

Today's dose of slobbering, massive-jawed-beast-encountering sees our stiff heroes finally eschew the random violence of earlier issues for the safety of rubber-tipped arrows, while our villain comes into his own now as – in my opinion anyway – something genuinely entertaining. I love Black Shark's scenes in this. The main influence was, of course, American International's "At The Earth's Core", which I was quite surprised recently to discover is an actual film with a beginning, middle, end and a finite running time, and not – as it had seemed in 1985 – just an endlessly self-replicating series of randomly-generated sugar hallucinations muscling their way into the schedules with the unheralded regularity of pages from Ceefax. 

 

I think it was this film that first taught me that adults sweat. 

I wish I could still rip off ideas this easily. Natchtka!

Power Socket 3 "Gollup Gollup"

Tomorrow sees me back in the Ring - and the murk and the leg brace - for a week at the BAC again before a short run in Edinburgh. Do come along, although the durned thing keeps selling out - I know - so I will understand. Appropriately enough though, today's Power Socket also explores our darkest imaginings. (Is that how you spell imaginings? It looks silly.) I pull no punches. Ipso facto: not only does the baddie have a hood and a scythe, he has a horn.* You have been warned. Yes you have.

Did Fang go out for Chinese because they were so nasty about his cooking in Issue 1? I'd like to think so. Anyway, yes, exciting.

* And his hood has a clitoris. Okay, I'd only just noticed.

Power Socket 2 "Your gondola's ready"

Computor sweat.
Reading this again I'm less sure now about Agamemnon's credentials as a Reed Richards-style brainiac, but I must have given him those grey streaks for a reason. Maybe he was supposed to be more of a gung-ho Hannibal Smith-type, but with a small tank instead of legs. Is that a tank? Also I seem to remember Changeling was supposed to be the suave one, yet here he is biting the head off a dinosaur. "It looks like an old bottle cap..." It's true, Digi-toc looks like the nipple of a water bottle, but I don't remember water bottles having nipples in the eighties, so who knows what the Mongrol means by this? And who knows what the accomplice was intended to accomplish, or how Digi-toc brought the weapons, or how they got from their converted toilet/bar thing in Sloane Square to the Pacific in a speedboat, or if Neanderthal is just this guy they let tag along with them or what? One thing I do know though is I really enjoy drawing the intermediary stages of a morphing. 

"Your death will be a slow one. You will rot in my cells." Ahhh, life... the slowest of all the deaths.
Be sure to join us next issue for that other never-fails standby, the "scare them to insanity" plan, still only 10p!

Sockets

While I sort out my dongles, and since the scanner's working, here's the first of seven and a half issues of a comic I tried selling at school in the mid-eighties over a period of probably two years or so. I'd seen someone in the year above do something similar and was clearly both impressed and inspired, a rare combination of emotions for me then as now - I think I'm more likely to be inspired by seeing someone else do something wrong. I know that by issue Power Socket's  seventh issue I was heavily into 2000AD, because that was the issue my Dad persuaded me to take along to the 1987 Annual signing to show Alan Moore, Kev O'Neil, Pat Mills and the like, which is a hell of a memory - but looking at these early issues which appear to be inspired more by Saturday Morning Cartoons, I'm willing to bet they came out a while before I was a friend of Tharg. I was, maybe, ten when I wrote issue 1, and never really into Superhero comics but I knew from the cartoons that you should have a robot, a tough cookie who says "sucker", a brainy leader, and beyond that my characterisation skills clearly faltered. These are scanned from photo-copies. The originals were rescued from the house fire but are a little crumbly. The signature "ZANY" is not something I stuck with. And Agamemnon was meant to be called Armageddon, but I rather fortuitously misspelt him. Let's go.

 Stay tuned!