Monster Multimedia: Metalzoic

The last time I wrote about something in the orbit of UK comics writer Pat Mills, it was the seventies sharksterpiece Hook Jaw, and he wasn’t even the writer on that (although if you know anything about British comics of that time, you’d know that the editor could still be very, very hands on with the writing)—and there’s still plenty to mine from Mills’ own credited work inside and outside 2000 AD, the comic that he helped define. He has had an incredibly varied career in fifty-plus years, but his genre work specifically has a number of idiosyncrasies that give them a genuinely unique blend of unabashed over-the-top absurdity and thinly-veiled ideology. Comics like ABC Warriors and Nemesis The Warlock are sci-fi action stories that are also heavily anarchist in nature, contemptuous of authority and sympathetic towards the lower classes of society, but also feature morally ambiguous anti-heroes; there is also a strain of Mills’ work based on the conflict between nature and humanity where the story’s sympathies lie almost entirely with nature, as seen in the series Flesh, Shako, and of course, Hook Jaw. To Mills, the true nature of the animal world is sheer brutality, but that’s also what makes it fascinating, and also a fun subject to base comics around.

Mills’ comics also benefit from his close friendship with some of the UK’s best artists, particularly Kevin O’Neill, whose combination of baroque design and cartoon expressiveness/exaggeration makes him perfect for stories about robots and monsters, both subjects that Mills returns to quite frequently. After co-creating ABC Warriors and Nemesis (O’Neill would cede regular art duties on both after a while), the two produced the comic Metalzoic, originally published in 1986 as part of DC Comics’ original graphic novels line and reprinted as a serial in 2000 AD after that (it is currently out of print, as DC apparently nixed a reprint several years ago.) Metalzoic feels like a dedicated vehicle for O’Neill’s knowingly ridiculous design sensibility and Mills’ pet themes about nature (and his general disregard for actual science): here is a story where the machinery created by man is left to fill an ecological void, artificial life taking over for the biological kind in the most direct way possible—and it is very clearly a world that we are supposed to like on some level.

The Angry Red Planet (1959)

Let’s do some retroactive projection: The Angry Red Planet was released in November 1959, making it the very last Sci-Fi monster movie of the fifties, the decade where the form flourished. There would be more films approximating that style made in the sixties, but the space age obsessions that animated them, both the exaggerated optimism and the equally exaggerated fears, would be gradually replaced with new ones as the genre film business moved on. Completely unintentionally, this movie serves as a sort of denouement for the decade’s monster movies—so, now that we’ve put The Angry Red Planet in the hot seat, what does it have to say about the whole mess? As it turns out, it’s a lot of the same things these movies had been saying since the beginning of the decade.