The Hacker Files issue 4

The Hacker Files
by Lewis Shiner (story) and Tom Sutton (art)
issue 4
DC Comics, November 1992

In this, the fourth and concluding installment of the 'Soft War' four-issue arc, Jack Marshall investigates the Pentagon's PC network; brings Fear to the Military Industrial Complex; and learns that being a hero sometimes brings with it a descent into depression.........

Star Slammers

Star Slammers
by Walter Simonson
Marvel graphic Novel No. 6, 1983

Walter Simonson began working on his own sci-fi comic as a college student in the early 70s, producing a self-assembled, black-and-white version of 'Star Slammers' in 1974. Nine years later, Simonson arranged with Marvel to publish a color version of the book, as Marvel Graphic Novel No. 6.

Succeeding issues of the series appeared in the mid-to-late 1990s under Malibu Comics and Dark Horse. 

In 2014, indie publisher IDW released all of the Star Slammers comics as 'remastered' issues, and in 2015, plans to publish a trade paperback compiling all of this material.

So.....how is the inaugural graphic novel, looking on it more than 30 years after it first appeared ?

As the novel opens, three Star Slammers - Jalaia, Ethon, and Sphere - are finishing up an assignment on warring planet; it transpires that the Slammers are the toughest, most effective mercenaries in the galaxy.

The inhabitants of the planet Orion see themselves as 'hunters', destined to hunt other humans for sport, part of a grand design by Providence to remove the more savage and violent races from known space.

Senator Krellik of Orion is an ardent Hunter, and a psychopath, to boot. A long-ago hunting expedition on Homeworld, the remote home planet of the Slammers, has left him with a desire for vengeance - a fixation calling for the deaths of not just a few Slammers, but their entire race. 

As Ethon, Jalaia, and Sphere travel back to Homeworld, they discover that they have been betrayed.....and that Homeworld is the target of a massive attack by the Orion fleet. The only hope for the Slammers is to learn how to leverage their innate telepathic abilities to form the 'Silvermind', a type of instantaneous gestalt consciousness among all the Slammers.

Can Ethon, Jalaia, and Sphere make it back to Homeworld to warn its inhabitants of the approaching Orion fleet ? And even if they can, will the Slammers be able to summon the Silvermind in time to unite their forces against overwhelming odds ?

Reading 'Star Slammers' brought a mixed reaction. Simonson's artwork for the book certainly has the distinctive style that he brought to his work on franchise properties for DC and Marvel. Many of the pages of 'Slammers' reflect his ability to simultaneously render myriad action sequences within a network of large and small panels, giving these action sequences a unique sort of visual energy.

Where 'Slammers' is a bit less impressive is in its writing. Although the Marvel Graphic Novel format was a maximum of only 64 pages, Simonson tries to fit too many sub-plots and flashback sequences into his storyline, and, when combined with the lack of any sort of external narration, it gives the overall narrative an awkward, disjointed quality. I found I had to read 'Slammers' twice in order to fully understand what, exactly, was going on.

Summing up, if you're a die-hard Simonson fan, then getting a copy of this graphic novel - copies of which are reasonably priced - is worthwhile. However, fans of sf comics in general are probably not going to find 'Star Slammers' to be a must-have.

Book Review: Rule of Night

Book Review: 'Rule of Night' by Trevor Hoyle

5 / 5 Stars

‘Rule of Night’ first was published in paperback in the UK in 1975. This Pomona Books reissue (220 pp) was published in 2003, and features an Afterward by the author.

‘Rule’ takes place in the northern England city of Rochdale, in Greater Manchester, ca. 1974. Nowadays Rochdale is notorious for having one of the largest populations of ‘asylum-seekers’ in the U.K., but in the early 70s, it was primarily white and working class, with Pakistani immigrants making up the biggest nonwhite ethnic group.

By the early 70s, the cotton mills that had made Rochdale prosperous in the 19th century had been shut down, and the city was fast decaying into another decrepit factory town.

The protagonist of ‘Rule’ is one Kenny Seddon, sixteen, no longer in school (in the UK you can drop out of school legally at 16), drifting from job to job, and of a sullen and truculent disposition. Along with his younger sister, mother, and father, Kenny lives in an apartment in the 'Ashfield Valley Estate', a public housing complex designed in a dehumanizing, Modernist style reminiscent of the French architect Le Corbusier. 

Kenny is straight out of the 1973 Elton John song ‘Saturday Night’s Alright (for Fighting’):

I'm a juvenile product of the working class
Whose best friend floats in the bottom of a glass

For Kenny and his mates - Andy, Skush, Crabby, and Fester – life is all about slogging through low-wage jobs during the week, and drinking it all away in the pubs on the weekends. Perhaps with a fight against Greasers, or Droogs, thrown in, too. 

Or petty crime. 

Or rolling a Paki.

Kenny is a ‘bovver boy’, a sub-species of skinhead. When out on the town, Kenny wears his hair cut short, jeans hemmed above the ankles, suspenders, and red work boots. This type of style is so utterly different from that of English society at large in 1974, that ‘regular’ people instinctively regard the bovver boy with alarm and apprehension. 

bovver boys 

Kenny and his friends listen to American Soul records, and Slade.

(The Punk Movement is still nearly two years in the future: in 1974, John Lydon is teaching woodwork to kids at Finsbury Park; Joe Strummer is busking on the streets of London; and the JoBoxers are in Secondary School [i.e., roughly equivalent to junior high school in the US]). 

Slade, mid-70s 

A break in the routine for Kenny and his mates is attending Spotland Stadium, home of The Dales, the local football team. If there is an opportunity for a bit of the Aggro, that’s all for the better:

We hate Nottingham Forest
We hate Liverpool too
We hate Man United
But Rochdale we love you !

‘Rule of Night’ relates the adventures of Kenny Seddon over a six-month interval, starting with the drizzle and chill of late Fall, through the snow and darkness of Winter, and the coming of early Spring.

Author Hoyle relates these adventures - many of which are calculated acts of violence -  in a simple, declarative prose style that makes ‘Rule’ a fast, and very engaging, read. Little of the narrative is devoted to deep analysis of Alienated Youth, Social Distortion, or the Plight of the Working Class. Hoyle does provide brief interludes in which the reader is given glimpses into the mind of Kenny Seddon and his dawning awareness that he is destined to be yet another semi-alcoholic member of the Lumpen Proletariat, and nothing more. But these introspective moments are not over-used and support, rather than distract, the narrative.

American readers are going to need to have Google at hand to translate some of the British idioms, slang, and figures of speech; but these of course lend authenticity to the novel and many are amusing as well as informative – for example, juvenile prison inmates from Liverspool use a language (‘Scouse’) that is unintelligible to other Brits…..but one is to be very careful of offending any inmate from Liverpool…..such offence can lead, in turn, to an unpleasant Prison Shower encounter…….. 

‘Rule of Night’ is a notable work of realistic fiction, and joins its American counterparts, such as Richard Price’s The Wanderers, Kem Nunn’s Tapping the Source, Warren Miller’s Cool World, and Hubert Selby Jr.’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, as a classic representative of the genre. 

For anyone fond of realistic fiction, or wanting to understand working-class life in the UK of the 70s, getting a copy of 'Rule of Night' is essential.

May is British hooligans month

That's right ! For May, the PorPor Books Blog will be taking a brief vacation from covering the sf and fantasy genres. Instead, we'll be focusing on books - fiction and nonfiction- and comics devoted to that era in the 70s and 80s in UK history when hooligans were a pop culture phenomenon. 

Rioting Tottenham Hotspur fans tear down a section of iron railings in a bid to reach the Chelsea supporters before a Division One game at London’s Stamford Bridge ground, November 18, 1978

From the early 70s, with skinheads and droogs, moving on to the Bovver Boys, and then the arrival of the 80s and the 'Terrace Casuals' and the rise of the Firms, the mayhem and depravity will be in full force.

So.....get your boiled peas, your Chelsea jersey, your batteries, your cycle chain, and join the lads for the punch-up !

A great way to get in the mood for a bit of 'aggro' is to read the notorious 'Kids Rule OK' story in the September 18th, 1976 issue of the British comic book Action.

Action was an attempt by publisher IPC to produce a weekly comic book that was free of Comics Code-type restrictions on content. By featuring healthy doses of gore and violence, Action became an instant hit upon the release of the first issue in February 1976, but ultimately expired in October, after an intense lobbying campaign by the media, and a watchdog organization called the 'National Viewers' and Listeners' Association' who saw Action as contributing to a nationwide epidemic of juvenile delinquency and violence.

The 'Kids Rule OK' episodes were set in a near-future UK in which all adults have been eliminated by a plague, leaving the youngsters to their own devices. These resourceful youth weren't overly reliant on firearms to deal out the ultra-violence; as this panel shows, they were quite willing and able to not only use American implements, but American figures of speech as well !

The entire run of 'Kids Rule OK' comics is available here. Enjoy !

Crisalida

Crisalida
by Maroto
from the April, 1983 issue of Heavy Metal magazine

The cheesecake element obviously rules here, but still, an entertaining little strip for all that........