Music and Comics: Totally (Curt) Vile and the Death Planet Commandos

In the days before MTV and the internet weekly Music Newspapers were the only way to find information about your favourite bands and the latest releases and reviews. In the 1970’s and early 1980’s‘ the UK produced several excellent weekly Music Newspapers including (to name a few) the Melody Maker , New Musical Express, Record Mirror, Disc and Sounds . Each of these papers largely focused on their own type of music with Melody Maker” being the more arty (pretentious?) of these papers looking at prog rock and jazz ,while Disc and “Record Mirror” concentrated on chart singles. The New Musical Express (NME) championed Punk and Indie Music and Sounds focused mostly on heavy rock. So what has this to do with comics?, well as it happens some of these papers also featured some pretty cool (for the times) comic strips. Amongst my favourites were cartoonist J Edward Oliver’s weekly strips for Disc/ Record Mirror (more on this at a later date) and a strip called “The Stars My Degradation” written and drawn by the then unknown comic creator Alan Moore (under the pseudonym Curt Vile), for the weekly Sounds newspaper from 1980 to 1983.

The Stars My Degradation strip focused on the space adventures of Dempster Dingbunger and was a satirical take on Alfred Bester’s classic “The Stars My Destination” novel (also known as “Tiger, Tiger.”). Moore’s parody featured such characters as Three-Eyes McGurk and his Death Planet Commandos (who originally appeared in the rock magazine “Dark Star”) and the deadly galactic female assassin Laser Eraser. However the stand out character from the strip was Axel Pressbutton, an exceptionally over the top violent cyborg who first appeared in a series of strips written and drawn by Steve Moore (who created the character) under the name of Pedro Hendry in the aforementioned rock music magazine “Dark Star” . Both Laser Eraser and Axel Pressbutton would go on to find commercial success and some notoriety a few years later when they appeared in Warrior magazine (1982) and then in the US in their own title published by Eclipse comics.

While some commentators on the The Stars My Degradation (and his earlier strip for Sounds “ Rosco Moscow”) seem to focus on the counterculture aspects of Moore’s stories, for me they weren’t that deep and although there is no doubt both strips had elements of this with some well-placed and thought out comments on Thatcherism etc, to my mind as a 19 year old just looking for some escapism, it was simply a fun albeit violent and totally OTT strip more akin ( but not on the same level) to an adult version of the work carried out from the anarchic minds of comic book geniuses Ken Reid and Leo Baxendale. To date I don’t think that “The Stars My Degradation” (or “Roscoe Moscow”) have ever been collected which is a shame as they are a fun read and an excellent barometer of the times. Sadly all the weekly music papers mentioned above are no longer published with only the NME surviving as an online version, a pity as these publications were a great vehicle for a different type of comic strip and for nurturing talents like Alan Moore - yet another casualty in the continued decline of printed publications.