Too Busy Thinking About My Comics II

“The blind leading the blind. It’s the democratic way.”

 Henry Miller

“It’s amazing how ideas start out, isn’t it?”

 Nigel Farage

“It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.”

Churchill

(Panel by John Wagner, Steve Dillon et al, from 2000AD #706)

Flyer for a Summer 1982 comic mart in London, which, as you see, featured an amazing array of British comics talent. The flyer was tucked into a fanzine I bought last week. Though hardly an important example of memorabilia, of course, I can’t help but wonder how many of these throwaway handouts can possibly have survived? (And what can I possibly have been doing on Saturday June 5th 1982 that was more interesting than this, considering that I lived just 40 minutes away from Westminster at the time?)

  

“To give you some idea of the enormity of the problem that faces us, consider that there are at least 2 million psychopaths in North America; the citizens of New York City have as many as 100,000 psychopaths among them.  And these are conservative estimates.  Far from being an esoteric, isolated problem that affects only a few people, psychopathy touches virtually every one of us.”

Dr Robert Hare

 (Panel by Garth Ennis, Steve Dillon et al, from The Punisher #12, 2001)

“But what is Freedom? Rightly understood,

A universal license to be good.”

Hartley Coleridge

(Page by Steve Dillon, Garth Ennis et al, from The Punisher #1, 2000)

“Nowadays men often feel that their private lives are a series of traps.  They sense that within their everyday worlds, they cannot overcome their troubles, and in this feeling, they are often quite correct:  What ordinary men are directly aware of and what they try to do are bounded by the private orbits in which they live; their visions and their powers are limited to the close-up scenes of job, family, neighborhood; in other milieux, they move vicariously and remain spectators.  And the more aware they become, however vaguely, of ambitions and of threats which transcend their immediate locales, the more trapped they seem to feel.What they need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be happening within themselves.”

C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, 1959

(From John Wagner & Steve Dillon’s “Nightmares Part 5”, 2000AD #706, 1990)