Failure So Thorough ,Yet So Superb.

Trying to cram multiple boxes of comics from two flats into one this year has cast up some interesting re-reads. One series I'd essentially forgotten about was DC's Thriller, first published at the end of 1983.

As Marvel had moved into the comic shop market with titles like Moon Knight and Ka-Zar, DC followed suit with Omega Men, Vigilante ( two spin-offs from the phenomenon that was the Wolfman/Perez Titans and Frank Miller's dystopian sci-fi miniseries, Ronin - another comic I should revisit soon.


Thriller was another Baxter book: printed on the same glossy paper stock as  DC's popular team titles, such as New Teen Titans, LSH and Infinity Inc. It didn't have the superstar creative team nor the cachet of the torrid, gushy Titans plotlines. In fact, it was far more outré than George and Marv's cinema-inspired universe of tormented teens.

The premise of the comic is best described by author Robert Loren Fleming as a blend of Doc Savage and the X-Men. A putative fifty years into the future, a bizarre family of mysterious characters recruits a traumatised reporter to their world-saving band of operatives, the Seven Seconds. These agents are run by Angie Thriller, a benign, non-corporeal presence who is part-Madonna, part-Buddha. Among the most memorable of her Seconds are Beaker Parish, a giant priest and artificially created human being; Data, the corpulent son of a black US president and a gay man who lives in a car controlled by his own mind; and Salvo, a kind of Punisher-parody whose battle cry is " Only Flesh Wounds! Only Out Patients!  I won't kill a fly so don't ask me!"

The preoccupations of US pop culture are reflected in a reference to Lennon's Happiness is A Warm Gun while the first four issues explore Dan Grove's integration into this 80s melange of  the Fabulous Five and the Addams Family.  His brother's death at the hands of the executioner Scabbard, whose blade is sheathed in the skin of his back,  is horribly prescient of modern terrorist atrocities. There are stylised origin sequences for Salvo and Angie Thriller, which are about guilt and loss. But by now, the letters pages ( and they were so thoughtfully written and curated in those days!),  speak of "stylish" confusion and warn that experimental and oblique storytelling were detrimental to Englehart's Coyote ( yet another 80s series I should buy up!)

Issues five and six have a more playful but more inconsequential tone. It appears to be about the clone of Elvis staging a bank robbery as a publicity stunt while the real Elvis murdered the promoters who cloned him in the first place. It's certainly a romp with a dark heart. But the correspondents who write of the cinematic flow of the pencils and acknowledge that experimentation is necessary for the growth of comics still think Thriller is too "chimerical". Fleming says "I'll be writing Thriller until either the book dies or I do".


The next issue, number seven, is his last.


I'll continue this 80s retrospective next time with the strange, strange fate of Thriller. I'm going to Forres now, to buy some much-needed storage for Big Finish cds and Marvel movie dvds.


Coming soon; East Of Euthanasia


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