Bulletproof Coffin Disinterred OR Hine & Kane made me cut up my comics!

The first Bulletproof Coffin series, by David Hine and Shaky Kane, was a lurid, Silver Age infused, psychedelic tale of a man obsessed with comic books and childhood nostalgia...and the places that his nostalgia takes him. The first series blurred the lines between fiction and reality as you were never sure (or at least i wasn't, i'll get caveat out the way early on) whether the protagonist was really jumping between real and fictional words or if he was, as professional head doctors say, a bit of a mental!

So just to confuse things even more i'm going to be taking a close-up look at all six issues of the follow on from Bulletproof Coffin, the appropriatley entitled Bullproof Coffin Disinterred.

But first, an English lesson:

Disinterred: Verb:

1. Dig Up (something that has been buried esp. a corpse)

                      2. Discover (something that is well hidden)

seriously, hold on to your hats...

Issue 1 immediately links up to the very last panel in this series, I feel pretty confident that I can say that with out ruining this series. A naked man tunnels away from the 'toxic wastelands' he grew up in only to have his head vaporised by The Coffin Fly the possibly fictional character from the first series who is being dug up by his similarly, possibly fictional ally; The Unforgiving Eye.

Add caption

As the headless cadaver falls into an empty grave the tone suddenly shifts from the bright, brash world that Coffin Fly and Unforgiving inhabit to a thoroughly different kind of beast. We suddenly join Johnny P Sartre, hard-boiled, world-weary detective. Satre is investigating the Full Moon Killer, anticipating the next murder Johnny becomes more and more uptight, complaining to his buxom partner, Ginger, that:

'something is out of whack, ginger'

Something IS out of whack, Johnny and Ginger are moonlighting as The Shield and Lady Justice, at least in Johnny's head they do. In Johnny's fantasy he and Ginger cruise the streets dishing out justice to hordes of Commies and lay down on the floor of their secret base and make love. Reality is a lot more grim for poor old Johnny, The Full Moon Murder is leaving a trail of mutilated corpses and only Johnny has the chops to solve the case.

'dame' - classy!

Johnny remarks that he 'still I can't shake the feeling there's a bigger picture here, something I'm missing'. Its almost as if Johnny feels the lines blurring between fiction and reality! Could it be something to do with the weird, irradiated, Swastika ring, lighter and necklace Johnny has hidden in a cigar box? 

I think if your boss would be annoyed about shit you keep in a cigar box, you need to get rid of the cigar box..

The weird, glowing Nazi paraphernalia seems to be making Johnny freak out, by the end of the issue Johnny has gone full on crazy and killed his partner and made his own The Shield costume.

Fuckin' Commies!

It feels like there is something just lurking out of view throughout this issue. The moon looms over this issue (and the rest of the series) in a big way. When attempting to track down the killer the moon is describes as looking down on the scene like a 'pockmarked skull'. Johnny then mentions 'space, deep space, the hate that comes from…' a theme that is explored further into this series.

The feeling of escalating panic and paranoia that we feel through Johnny's impending breakdown almost bleeds off the page and seeps in through our skin, the radiation of the Nazi artefacts adding to our delirium. 

We enter this issue seeing a man emerging from a tunnel into a new world, as readers we are crawling through tunnels too, hopping between the fictional and the real....but which is which? is The Shield even real or is it just an extension of Johnny's increasing mental instability? 

With that we move onto issue 2, opening the cover of this issue immediately reveals another cover for Tales From The Haunted Jazz Club (issue 17, only 10 cents!) and again, another shift in tone. Join me in the jazz club, baby!

Rather than continue the narrative thread directly in issue 2, we join Johnny in a Beat poetry club, complete with host Edgar Landru, who announces 'if you want fiction, go back to the funny papers'

are there any clubs like this still around? i wanna go to a club like this!

Johnny is present in the bar of the beat club and he doesn't look too good, a sweaty, drunken mess. But Johnny is not why we are here. We are here to hear a trio of freaky tales presented to us by folk in the bar getting up on stage and retelling these tales. I won't spoil them as they really are gold, especially the chillingly freaky 'Fixing Suzi'.

Each of the freaky tales is presented as a narrative of it's own. Each tale is particularly grim and  often involves blood, vomiting hair, amateur brain surgery again all illustrated with Kane's signature Silver age heft and sickly, vibrant colour palate.

its that creepy necklace again!

One narrative thread from the previous issue is the the glowing artefacts (you remember! the thing's Johnny kept hidden in a cigar box!) This time it appears in the form of a single jewel sometimes present in a piece of jewellery, sometimes in an old stone idol but still casting the same sickly light and causing unseen trouble just out of view! A character in one tale explains the jewel was 'fashioned from an asteroid....a gift from the stars!', this links nicely back to Johnny's 'hate from outer space' comment last issue! 

It's clear by now that Hine and Kane are leaving clues or dropping little pieces in to the other stories in this series. It reminds me of how when reading Watchmen you pick up on little details and hidden things each time you read it. We almost become like johnny our selves, trying to piece together fragments of narrative into a story. 

The moon features again at the end of issue two, still hanging there like a 'pock marked skull'. An interesting conversation occurs between Johnny and Landru, the moon silently looking down at them from above in the lurid pink sky. Landru is revealed as The Red Wraith, also a superhero from the first Bulletproof Coffin series. A 'lunar flare' bursts from the surface of the moon, Johnny remarking 'signs and portents, pal', implying that there is something just lurking around the corner, or maybe just off panel? by turning the pages of a comic we lead the heroes to their ultimate goal, conflict! That's when you realise at just what level Hine and Kane are working at here.....just how many tunnels are we going to be crawling through during this rest of this series?

The lid well and truly blows off this series with issue 3. The first three pages entirely play out the first three pages of the first issue (you know, when Unforgiving Eye digs up Coffin Fly and vaporises the head off of the guy who tunnelled out of his house in the nude), only in issue 3 it is all being played out by a small kid called Timmy. 

Timmy is called inside by his mum and it is revealed that he is Johnny's nephew, Johnny is always 'coming along with inappropriate presents' like Unforgiving Eye and Coffin Fly action figures, monster truck toys, communist soldiers and.....a weird lighter with an eerie glowing jewel in it!!!!

There is a wonderful moment when Timmy starts playing with his toys and Coffin Fly is crammed into the drivers seat of the monster truck and you turn the page and you see this:

yeah, mother fucker!

The next five pages are Timmy playing, but presented as a gung-ho, sci-fi adventure. The Red Menace and his Kommunist Kill Kadre have captured 8 of Americas most famous monuments and turned it into a giant kill-bot......ON THE MOON! A fight ensues which looks like this:

FUCKING AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!

The climax of this battle causes a large explosion not unlike the 'lunar flare' in issue 2, so where does this leave us now?

Well, the line between 'reality' (Timmy's home life) and 'fiction' (Timmy playing with his toys) is clear but it only serves to further twist my mind as elements of his playing appeared in the previous issue, is Timmy acting out the scene on the moon actually making it happen in the 'real world'?

just stare into the void, maaaaaaaan!

Issue 4 removes narrative as you would normally expect to find it (though at this point we are all well aware that this series is far from normal), instead this issue is comprised of 84 panels arranged randomly, this comic instructs us to ‘immerse yourself in this comic book…. beginning at the page of your choice and progressing in any order or direction through the image'

I chopped up all 84  panels and had a play around with them, I was going to write about what I discovered but I swiftly realised that there was no real point writing about it, the idea of this cut up technique is for a new narrative to emerge through chance. The panels are already arranged randomly. So by cutting up the panels and re-arranging them you are doubling the random nature.

Red Wraith being tortured by some kids, Commies on the moon...

Granted there are themes and there are certainly panels that I feel could be placed sequentially but why would I want to do that?  The idea of cut up technique is to 'alter reality' and to reveal 'the true meaning of a text' (these are William Burroughs quotes, check this link), I found it much more fun to examine each panel individually and line them up at random.

This issue feels like a David Lynch film or a Murakami novel. The pieces are there but the order is not important. I was given advice when I first saw a Lynch film (Mullholland Drive, fact fans!) to 'just take everything in and let it piece itself together in your mind…like a dream'. Just let your mind absorb the pictures.....

again, trippy shit!

I've never seen a comic like this issue before, after reading issue 3 I was really anticipating a further criss crossing of narrative thread to twist my mind round like a Mobius strip, issue 4 was like having a grenade into my mind. There are nods to the three previous issues, in one panel an asteroid is seen falling to the surface of the earth, in another we see the headless corpse laying headless in the grave. But the majority of these 84 panels is a mixture of freaky, Jack Kirby acid-trip visuals and it is SO engaging, I found myself pawing back and forth through this issue, revelling in the psychedelia of it all! 

And then we get to issue 5....

shit just got real...

Issue 5 pushes us right through the deepest darkest tunnel of all, a tunnel trough which we are made to claw through fists of damp earth emerging in the Mekong Delta....in the world of The Hateful Dead!

This issue is entirely comprised of a recreation of a set of  Hateful Dead trading cards referenced in the first series (the cards themselves are published by the fictional Golden Nugget Publications). Basically a gruesome (and very awesome) picture and a piece of text telling the story of how these zombie soldiers came to be...yeah! zombie soldiers, its very, very cool:

yeah!

The Hateful Dead were created by chunks of a planet that was 'so consumed by hatred and violence that the very surface of the planet  was transformed into the physical aspect of death' that exploded apart after centuries of war and travelled to our planet as asteroids…..asteroids that have been falling throughout the series in the other issues. Another link to the previous Bulletproof Coffin series is the Hateful Dead escaping through a portal to 'earth's future' where we briefly encounter them in the first series.

i want a Hateful Dead tattoo...

This whole issue feels like the line between the fictional world(s) in Bulletproof Coffin and the world we inhabit (which may or may not be either of the worlds within the comic) are totally erased…we feel like johnny, holding on to his fantasy of being a masked hero and we feel like Timmy gleefully immersing ourselves in the vivid, gory world of these images. When I turn the pages of this comic I feel like I am there in the sweaty humid Mekong Delta watching my squad buddies being torn apart by blood thirsty reanimated corpses.

And just because this issue abandons a traditional comics format (panels, speech bubbles etc) don't think there aren't callbacks to things from the previous issues. The cause of the zombie infestation is revealed to be a part of a planet that has been destroyed by war and hate that has crashed to Earth as a meteor, could this be the source of the weird items Johnny has? 

terrifying....

We emerge from the final tunnel at issue 6 only to be presented by another tunnel. The original tunnel from the first issue. Only here, at the end of the series, we find the beginning of the tunnel in a boy called Deacon's bedroom. 

However the issue starts with a creepy dream sequence in which a woman and her daughter a trapped in some sort of world populated by evil looking children's toys (like a darker version of Timmy's play time). The fantasy world is soon replaced by the grim reality. Amelia is a chronically over weight woman, she shares a house with her abusive husband. Amelia is obsessed with Kiss the Clown, a lascivious children's entertainer. She ends up breaking into Kiss's house. What's interesting is a panel near the end where Amelia's husband seems to be writing the events that are happening to Amelia, he even ends up saving Amelia from Kiss' sex dungeon (where an eerie glowing rock is present, expelling a sick glow)

really creepy

This issue seems to take us full circle….or circles by this point I don’t know how many circles there are, like one of those tricks a magician does where rings are linked together and pulled apart and it seems easy…that’s what this series is like narratives, universes, fiction and reality overlapping and moving closer and further away from you and each other. Sometimes you are standing right in it all (The Hateful Dead issue) sometimes you feel acutely distanced from the chaos (84 the cut up issue). The only thing I can recommend is you read this series, the trade will be out soon or just buy the individual issues, HELL! I’ll even lend you them myself. You just need to see this series, I’ve never been so baffled but at the same time excited by a comic. Its brash, vivid and confusing in massively positive ways..

I'm going to be thinking about this comic for a long time, it's not that I didn't get anything from it.... I really did, it made my brain fire up in a different way to reading a standard superhero tale. It challenged me and forced me to approach each issue differently. No, i'll be thinking about it because I want to, like Johnny at the start of the series, solve the mystery...even if there is no mystery to solve. I'll keep digging up the same coffin and keep crawling through the tunnels...

CYBERTRON LEGACY - Transformers: Regeneration One

NOTHING brings me back to my childhood more than pawing over the few issues of Marvel UK's Transformers comic which remain in my possession. Each one triggers a particular memory, especially the later issues of 1991-92, a time I remember quite vividly. Simon Furman's final stories for the comic remain imprinted in my brain, not least for the way they ended, not with a bang, but with a whimper. Issue #332 arrived on my doorstep one Saturday morning in January 1992 the week before my ninth birthday, the cover image dramatically announcing 'THE FINAL CUT!' alongside an image of Bludgeon approaching a near victory, with an ominous shadow behind. Feverishly, I turned the page, to read the crushing words on page 2: "Sadly, contrary to earlier news, issue 333 will not materialise!"

Of course, being only nine years old, I wasn't aware that the 11-or so pages of story I got in my TF weekly came, for the most part, from a monthly comic book published by Marvel in the US, which had already ended by this point with its eightieth issue. Originally intended as a four-issue limited series commissioned at the height of the cartoon's popularity, the (initially bi-monthly) US title ran from 1984 to 1991, and followed an entirely self-contained continuity unrelated to the TV cartoon and theatrical movie. In tandem, the US stories were reprinted in the UK comic, with 'fill-in' stories plugging the gaps in the publication schedule - thus establishing a second continuity for the UK comics, carefully constructed so as not to undermine the US stories.NB some of these stories have been reprinted in various collections, the best of which are the 'Target: 2006' and 'Time Wars' sagas, which intertwined complex stories into the US continuity, notably introducing Galvatron from the movie continuity into a time travel paradox mind-boggler of epic proportions.



Simon Furman was one of the most accomplished and prolific writers on the UK comic, so it made complete sense when he took on writing duties for the US title from issue 56. Free to focus on only one continuity, he was able to bring some more complex ideas to the narrative and build mythologies which not only expanded the universe(s) of the Transformers but also developed the robots as real characters with their own personalities, conflicts and ambitions. The final, gripping stages of the book, centred on the genesis of the Transformers as a race, positioning their creator Primus as an age-old force of good against his counterpart, the demi-god Unicron. Autobots and Decepticons create an uneasy truce as Primus' children to defeat Unicron in issue 75, in an epic carnage-fest called 'On the Edge of Extinction'.



The battle is won by the ultimate sacrifice of Optimus Prime, who reclaims the matrix of leadership (which had been stolen by Darkwing and tainted by evil) to destroy Unicron, and sadly, himself. Following this, however, the truce between the Autobots and Decepticons breaks down, and the war begins anew. Eventually, the remaining warriors do battle on the remote planet of Klo, where it looks like all is lost until...


You see, Optimus was revived by an entity called THE LAST AUTOBOT, a gigantic Transformer and final guardian of Cybertron, created by Primus, who slept deep within the planet until a 'chosen one' appeared in the form of Optimus' human counterpart Hi-Q, whom the Last Autobot uses to rebuild the fallen hero. With Prime back in control, the battle is swiftly won, and it's revealed that the Last Autobot has renewed Cybertron to its former glories, and everyone can return home in peace.

A bit rushed? Yes - because the series was cancelled abruptly, Furman was never given the chance to give his vision of the saga  true ending. That only comes now, 21 years later, as IDW unleash 'Regeneration One' - which obviously I could not be more excited about!!!



Issue #80.5 was published as part of Free Comic Book Day earlier this year, and as well as a catch up not dissimilar to the one above (but probably way more new-reader friendly, sorry) it featured the big bombshell - the death of the Last Autobot at the hands of the Decepticons! 21 years after their defeat on Klo, the Decepticons have returned to reclaim Cybertron and take out the Autobots once and for all... and so the conflict begins again. Immediately in #80.5 and 81, I was drawn back into the same world I left many years ago. The characters feel like the ones I knew, and while the art feels different - modern colouring techniques do set the book apart - reading the books for me is like stepping back in time. If you're a new reader, however, don't let that stop you either. Join the best possible version of the TF universe for one last time!!!