Pylon porn & mysterious alignments (comics n stuff)

Ducked into GOSH comics at lunchtime while passing through Soho on a mission to feed my sons’ insatiable and financially destabilising manga habit.

At the top of the stairs into the basement I was caught between the eyes by a copy of Tim Bird’s Grey Area Issue 2 – The Old Straight Track. I’ve always been a sucker for a bit of Alfred Watkins and I’m currently reading Graham Robb’s engrossing Ancient Paths – so I couldn’t resist a quick flick.

It’s “a tribute to the Great British Motorway System”, one panel showing an alignment between megalithic monuments and a glorious ribbon of pylons stretching across the landscape. Realising I’d been sidetracked I placed it back on the shelf and slid into the basement to pick up the goods for the kids, which happened to be out of stock.

So while at the info counter I dipped into the cardboard boxes of old copies of 2000AD. I collected every issue from around 1979 till 1986 which when I went away to Poly my mother thoughtfully gave to our next-door neighbour never to be seen again. Over the years I pick up a copy, mournfully remembering the mighty stacks that filled every cupboard and shelf in my childhood bedroom.

I walked away with a May 1990 edition of Crisis – “Pol Tax” – sealed in a cellophane wrap.

I broke it open on the tube home digging straight into the first strip – Killing Us Softly 2 about a group of Eco Terrorists in Brixton plotting attacks on the infrastructure of the power system. One devilish plot involved taking down a long procession of pylons mainlining electricity into a brightly lit city (also beautifully illustrated two pages over from the image below).

Crisis pylons-edit

Art – Glyn Dillon. Story – Pat Mills & Alan Mitchell

As the pylons are toppled the panel reads:

The country is the placenta that feeds the tiny child – the City…. An over-demanding foetus, draining her blood .. A gross, middle-aged baby, too frightened, too stupid to be born. It’s time to cut the umbilical”Pat Mills & Alan Mitchell Crisis #44

It seems there’s no escaping the pylons.

Eastern (London) mysteries

Strange goings on out east of Leytonstone – in that mysterious hinterland around Epping Forest before you emerge into the bosom of Essex proper. Two bulletins from this eldritch zone appeared in my reading today.

First this:

“Maybe it’s time I cleared up some misconceptions and actually allowed some genuine facts about what I’ve done come to light,” Stefan Jaworzyn announces, from deep within his inner sanctum in Chingford, on the outskirts of East London”Wire magazine, Feb 2014

The ‘noise guitarist, improviser and extreme film connoisseur’ had apparently been holed up in Chingford for 17 years in ‘self-imposed solitude’. After ending a recent forest yomp myself in Chingford one Sunday evening it appears to be the perfect place to look inwardly – or even to further an appreciation of ‘video nasties’ and ‘transgressive art’  as Jaworzyn has done from what I can glean from the first two pages of Edwin Pouncey’s enlightening article.

Possibly more alarming though is this vision of the future prophesized in last week’s edition of 2000AD. These panels in Strontium Dog lept out at me.

2000adOngar

artwork – Carlos Ezquerra, script – John Wagner. 2000AD prog 1865

The future neo-Nazi Brotherhood planning a slaughter of mutants “south of Ongar”. Luckily Johnny Alpha successfully rumbles this genocidal scheme and hopefully in this week’s comic we’ll see the mutant army kick some future neo-Nazi butt in a battle Royale at Ongar.

Ongar was for a long while the eastern terminus of the Central Line till its station closed in 1994. According to wikipedia the Navy codenamed a top secret torpedo ‘Project Ongar’ as they thought it would be ‘the end of the line for torpedo development’. Let’s hope that at the end of the 22nd Century, Ongar is the end of the line for the nazi Brotherhood.