Influenca: KILL THE ENEMY: war comics

This is the cover of the first war comic I ever bought. I would have been about nine or ten. Mum ridiculed the title but that's what made me pick it out at the newsagent. The cover and the title formed a kind of concentrate. My first war comic had to be full flavoured and lasting. This one promised magnificent violence and in machine-like hatred. Win!

I think it's particularly apt, then to begin this subseries of posts about direct influences over the look, feel and content of The Monsoons with what was a huge formative influence o'er my life for about three years, either side of eleven.

The story of Kill the Enemy, in fact, was about a soldier twisted with a personal hatred. Fuelled by vendetta and propaganda, he was ready to go out in a blaze as long as he took a few beastly boche with him. Eventually, he was brought around by his fellow soldiers because it's all bad and puts everyone's life in danger when they could fight more coldly and kill a whole host more of the deadly hun. Well, not quite, there was in fact a quite effective anti-war message to this which I grew to quite enjoy. No contradiction here, I liked the war story and liked being invited to join in and condemn war: I take one in and get to feel superior (yea, verily unto myself). Then everything rebooted for the next one.

This was a War Picture Library comic. It was British. The other British war comic to get was Commando. These were black and white, mostly without tones and varied little but noticeably in style. They had to move quickly and be very authentic with their military hardware and landscape. Something I always noticed about the stories set in the desert campaigns was that they captured the effect of glare through very sparse use of line. You could put tones galore on the North Sea,the roof of New Guinea or the beaches of Normandy but the desert was all line, thin line against white that looked blisteringly hot.

The American war comics were coloured and heroic but it was easier to get the antiwar messages from them. If you didn't notice that the circle drawn around the words THE END in the last panel of each story itself contained a phrase like MAKE WAR NO MORE then you were choosing not to look. Sgt. Rock was chief among these (it was the one with the end messages) had some intriguing stories, sometimes verging on the kind of sci fi nazi of eighties cult cinema. They'd also tack on shorter stories from different eras of warfare. One was set during a Roman campaign. Blood flowed from the title panel and poured into a centurion's cup as red wine. That really zapped me.

The UK ones never went anywhere near there. They were the solid universe replaying over and over as I reread and reread them until the pulpy beige pages disintegrated in my hands. However, as a reader the two strands, fantastical and adventuresome, I conflated them into a World War II of clean lines and phantasmagoria. War movies, by contrast were always drab by comparison, either too jolly and heroic or as everyday as the war machines I could see just by looking up at the sound of a jet engine in my town of soldiers, sailors and flyboys.

The stark line of the desert comics is the same as the one I'm using for the piercing glare of the tropics in The Monsoons. The esoterica (well, near enough) of Sgt. Rock weaves in between the hard edged line and the wandering white of the Commando blaze. I cannot stress too strongly the effect that these comics had on me. It was to the cost of any super hero fare and even horror pieces that my elder siblings left in their wardrobes under their old paisley jackets and cadet's slouch hats.

Perhaps they also fired, I doubt it not, the young imagination of Magnetic Island's most infamous or famous son, Julian Assange (will I put him in?) who, at the age of eight during the The Monsoon's timeline, would, just like me and all of us, have looked up at the sound of a jet engine to see the hardware of the state, a Mirage or a Phantom fighter, tearing at the clouds, or gaze into the waves in case he saw not stingers, nor sharks, but an Oberon Class submarine rise huge and awesome from the jade green waves of Cleveland Bay. That's what I was looking for.

That Incredible Summer: what The Monsoons isn't

I hate coming of age stories. Too negative? Alright, the ones I like, the exceptions, are the ones that know how much damage life's lessons can bring. No better? Ok, my problem with coming-of-agers is that they sentimentalise the process. However honestly they might treat the issues the notion that the crises of the young are just passing trifles annoys me. Some trifles are forever. Some of them slowly poison.

Also, the assumption that life lessons are taken on board and nourish the young receptor is rubbish. An adolescent ego will do everything it can to resist any information that dares to challenge it. It's in the job description. Initial sexual experiences, for example, are poor teachers. Almost all first times are nasty. It's like assuming a natural virtuosity on a musical instrument and then producing nothing but room-emptying noise once you touch the real thing. That stops no one. Biology is a party animal.

Coming of age, if such there is, is only knowable in maturity and cannot be depicted during adolescence without a lot of spin. By that stage it's a sentimental and time-consuming waste of thought. My point in depicting these characters at seventeen is that it means that they are between adolesence and adulthood by decree of the laws of their tribe, something so distant and abstract it may as well be a set of runes.

The spectre of imposed adulthood is what haunts these characters: responsibilities that only the dull are ready for, the imperative to escape that wrestles with the pleasure of being loved and fed which has been good enough so far no matter how bratty we've been. Who among them is going to care if they've come of age?

The other thing that The Monsoons isn't is nostalgic. You'll hear tell of a few cultural and historical points here and there but the setting is as it is for reasons mentioned in earlier posts (the plainer language of the teens at that time which was adopted in reaction to the cool talk of the previous generation/the change of decade/me writing about a time that I lived through at that age/etc) and that it can be easily transported to now.

Also, almost in opposition to that, there are facts of contemporary technology that would sink plot points in the 70s before I got to them. They're on an island. No blog, no phones, no Facebook friends, not a single luxury. Of course I could contrive plot points to eradicate these but then I'd have to write contemporary teenagers and I'm not going to intrude on them with a lot of goof talk. So, it's 1979.

So, it's 1979, that incredible summer when I saw for the first time that even the strongest of us could cry and that love could turn with an evil face, when I tasted the first drops of the nectar of ... Actually that's the kind of blerg I used to write in the name of free verse (ie poetry for those who can't tell the difference between literary discpline and bullying). Now, I'm not damning nostalgia. It plays a vital role in our self esteem and capability to grasp life. I just don't like it when it is the purpose rather than the paint box of a story.

The holiday I had just after school on Magnetic Island was brief (less than a week for me) and was fun. A couple of things I noticed gave me the idea that I should record them. One thing really sent shivers and not  good ones.

There were about five of us at the house for that time but plenty of people dropped in.They were a real mix. One girl had boyfriend drama and seethed at the point of implosion all day long. A sporty thug who banged on the door and forced us to come with him and either (if female) join him in his speedboat or on the skis it dragged or (if male) watch. There were others and a lot of them were like this and hurtled into their fun with the sense that school had been good and never had to end even if there were no teachers 'n' stuff. They didn't just remember nicknames and dead reputations, they enforced them with an almost audible scream of terror under every breath.

I really liked my schooldays but more and more I had been enjoying the life I led outside it, the gigs and uni student parties etc. When it ended I felt relief. I suppose that means I coped well with rather than liked my schooldays but I'll take that over the ticking bomb of denial that some of these people were hosting. No, it wasn't just youthful fervour, it was a wish that everything they had won in the classroom, quad, refectory and oval was theirs for life and they demanded a kind of cultural superannuation whereas we who had struggled with less driven hatred would be condemned to a kind of young age pension and a life of slowburning derision ... kind of worked out that way for a fair few, actually. Anyway... It chilled me to see this walling off of the future but it warmed me to hear one acquaintance who had been an inveterate bully tell me he wanted a career in customs to fight fauna smuggling. I don't know if he got that. Hope so.

The other thing I felt was fear. My own of course, but that of everyone else as well. Current models can stay at home without shame until their thirties, claiming research. At that time everyone wanted to get out of the family home as soon as possible and live like grown ups. Yes, that phrasing does suggest a kind of paradox but the feeling was there and it was accompanied by the gut-clearing fear as constant as the ring of tinnitus, that they'd leap from the nest and fall to the ground and break their wings and be eaten by a ... uh ... cat.

Tearing to get out and terrified of what was outside. The big black Oceanic night thickened outside the window. You could see it through the flyscreens. There was nothing and everything in it. Black the lack. Black the most popular hue in the cosmos. Out among the canetoad choruses, the rain and on dry, moonless nights the lost-soul whistling of curlews. All the worst fantasms we made in the dark when Nana told us bedtime stories came back. We thought we'd controlled them all that time. We thought again.

As for me I remember one thing before anything else. It's a horror and it has no shape.

I'm standing in front of the artificial waterfall on the strand. I've just parted company with Fiona, a friend who had already started to struggle and was patching up all the flaky bits with commercial measures of hedonism. We'd met for a drink, I think. No one met for coffee in a tropical summer.

Anyway, I'm looking up at the waterfall which has been switched off and don't feel like going back home yet. It's January and nothing's happened the way I wanted. I light a cigarette but can't take the first drag because something bad is happening. Suddenly, I'm feeling a kind of swelling nausea. It starts in my stomach and expands pushing in every direction. I drop my cigarette and can do nothing but stare at the waterfall. I don't know if I'll be able to keep standing. I think I'm going to die. I'm wearing sunglasses but the glare is eating through them. It's well over 30 degrees Celsius but I feel ice spreading from my centre outwards. I have the feeling that nothing I can do can change this. Nothing I am or could be can change this. This is how the end of the world will feel. This is how it does feel. This is it.

A beat later, I scrape the cigarette butt into the gravel and light another one. I head off to my bus stop and wonder if anyone's called while I've been out.

To this day I have no idea what did this. Some bad things were happening but really they were mostly exaggerated annoyances which I'd forget about as soon as something else happened. This was a depth of fear I had never known before, scarier as it seemed to have no cause. I have a nagging feeling that there was something that triggered it but I've never been able to work it out. That leads to even scarier thoughts that I've been keeping something nasty behind a screen. It's still there when I remember. The details fade but the feeling is unforgettable. It doesn't lurk but I can't shake the fact that even for only a few seconds I was possessed by it.

I didn't approach it with any courage in the written version of The Monsoons. Too close in time. But as soon as I started drawing the comic version of the opening chapter where Gail is waiting on the PIcnic Bay Jetty for the boat, I saw what I'd been trying to put there. I felt it come back. And then I had the real monster.