These I Have Loved - Part Three: Six Shooting!

By Regie Rigby

Ah, nostalgia.

You might remember that a few weeks ago I started what promised to be a short series on comics nostalgia. All those comics we used to enjoy which vanished from the shelves because they were economically unviable or just too damn weird.

Well, my age is catching up with me, and it’s nostalgia time again!

You see the trouble with really good innovative comics is that most people tend not to read them. I suppose this shouldn’t come as a huge surprise to me – the fact that when I eat out I go to one of two favourite restaurants and I always order the same thing when I get there should tell me something. Hell, at one of them they know me and my wife so well now that they usually have our drinks order ready before we even reach the bar! Basically people like to stick with what they know – whether we’re talking about restaurants or reading matter.

This of course is one of the factors that keeps non-comics readers in their sadly unenlightened state. Comics (particularly those aimed at adults – the likes of Transmetropolitan would be a cult phenomenon in any media after all) are unfamiliar, so if people read anything, it will be the prose they learned to read at school.

But this same attitude also prevents many comics fans from trying something new. After all, if you know you like superheroes, and you have a limited budget (and who doesn’t) why would you risk your hard earned cash on a book you might not like when you can buy more of the stuff you know you love?

Sadly this kind of logic, inescapable as it may be is often the death of comics that deserved to continue into their old age. One such is Revolver, an adult oriented anthology which hit the newsagents in July 1990 and stayed for a mere seven issues before slipping back into Lucien’s library of dreams.

Revolver was a sister publication to the well-established 2000AD launched at least in part on the back of the initial success of the more well known (and indeed longer lasting) CRISIS!. But while CRISIS! tended toward the political, and even to the Politically Correct, Revolver was pure fantasy.

Issue #1, for example brought amongst other things the Grant Morrison take on Dan Dare, the quintessential British Sci-Fi hero (and I have to say that the take was not dissimilar to that used by Ellis in Ministry of Space), a comics biography of the great Jimmy Hendrix which was steeped in a trippy kind of surrealism and Rogan Gosh, an equally surreal hero, steeped in (or perhaps more accurately “inspired by”) Hindu mythology.

Revolver was, in the words of its creators “a bit of this, a bit of that, possibly even a bit of the other.” As befits any work aimed at an intelligent thinking audience Revolver did contain politics – Morrison’s Dan Dare in particular was at least in part a pretty harsh satire on the Thatcher era (which at that time had only just ended) which left the reader in no doubt at all as to the writers assessment of the Iron Lady’s contribution to British life.

Where Revolver scored over CRISIS! (with me at least) was in its approach. Many of the writers, artists and editorial staff on Revolver also worked on CRISIS!, but unlike its disquietingly sanctimonious sister publication, Revolver never preached. It had an opinion sure, but it didn’t feel the need to ram that opinion down your throat and then denounce you as a “counter revolutionary running dog lackey of the evil global capitalist military industrial complex” if you didn’t instantly agree to join it on the barricades. The early incarnation of CRISIS! on the other hand often gave you the distinct impression that it was seriously considering convening a revolutionary court for precisely that purpose.

It is though perhaps a little unfair to compare the two comics against each other. They both hailed from the 2000AD stable, but they were in markedly different traditions. In its early days CRISIS! seems to have been deliberately designed as an overtly political publication – Pat Mills’ and Carlos Ezquerra’s Third World War, the titles original headline strip was particularly overt about why capitalism and multinational corporations were killing the world.

Revolver on the other hand was a more laid back “arty” affair. It was if anything an adult version of 2000AD, and had more in common with the long defunct but also much missed Warrior (the black and white anthology which launched Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta and Marvel/Miracleman into the world, but faltered through lack of finance and sales.)

Ultimately, Revolver was to suffer the same fate, and for pretty much the same reasons. Both books contained groundbreaking stories from talent who would go on to forge stellar careers on the other side of the Atlantic. Both books were challenging, and even shocking on occasion. While neither could be described as truly alternative they were both nevertheless a little ahead of the mainstream and the mass audience was unwilling to give either the chance they really deserved.

Having said that some things, like 2000AD’s swashbuckling Nicoli Dante are “Too Cool to Kill” and although Revolver itself is, in the words of the editor’s final message currently residing in “hotel oblivion, where Strange Days and Warrior are already propping up the bar” the spirit that made Revolver so special is still very much with us.

When editors Peter Hogan and Frank Wynne signed off back in January 1991, they stated clearly that “comics are capable of almost anything, if they’re giving the chance”, and that “If our most public face is a juvenile one, that’s how we will be judged.”

Personally I can’t argue with that, and am happy to be able to say that over a decade later there are many publishers on both sides of the Atlantic (and indeed elsewhere in the world) which hold to the same view. Indeed, it could be argued that Revolver is still with us in the shape of its no longer juvenile parent comic 2000AD.

While dear old “Tooth” doesn’t often strive to “break the shackles of fantasy and adventure, and of genre in general” it is nevertheless the adult version of the comic it used to be. Even in the early nineties 2000AD was aimed at the teen market. These days the average reader is 24 or so, and getting older (although not necessarily more mature) as the years pass by.

So I don’t mourn for Revolver. I miss it, but I cherish the hope that if 2000AD continues on its current course the old six shooter will never be too far away.