All in all, I smell a horrible end for the Left Wing in British Politics.

What's the point of this? The point is, you won't find it in a comic. And that's a fucking disgrace. Comics have their roots in early political cartoons, turn of the century satires on leading figures of the time. The roots of comics are vicious, ugly things. Important things with something biting and relevant to say. But somewhere along the way, they've lost their teeth.

It's not like there isn't a market for this sort of thing. TRANSMETROPOLITAN garners praise left and right for being a social satire, and at one point, the British comic satire magazine Viz was bought by the same percentage of the population in the UK as buy the TV guide in the States. Hell, it outsold the TV guides over here. There's a market for this.

Even if TRANSMETROPOLITAN does get acclaim, does sell passably well, I have to wonder what percentage of it's readers realise that the Smiler bears a striking resemblance to Tony Blair. How many of it's audience know that half the disgusting and evil things that the various corrupt politicians in the book have done aren't actually fictions, but things that real politicians have done within the last ten years. Further, I have to wonder if it would see print if it made these things obvious. Because, as I said, comics have no bite any more.

When was the last time you read a comic that addressed today's politics? When was the last time you saw a presidential race being commented on in a comics? Are we really supposed to believe that these characters don't have political opinions? And here's a frightening thought: it's probably going to get worse. AOL own DC now. I've heard people say that AOL don't give a monkey's toss for DC. This is probably right. Then I remember that this is AOL, the people notorious for software that would forbid mentions of the places like Scunthorpe. Alright, that was a programming cock-up, rather than a desire to blot out all traces of the existence of a small town in the North of England. Still, the fact remains, they are a notoriously censorious company. Maybe they won't censor DC's output on purpose, but I'd be willing to bet that there will be some repercussions.

So why are we in such shit state?

One of the first things that de-clawed the great mass of the medium was the comics code. The Comics Code enforced an essentially unrealistic morality on almost all the output of both Marvel and DC for many years (and still does, with Marvel, to an extent). The morality of the superhero, good versus evil. And naturally enough, the governments of the Western World were Good, and the Asians and Arabs and Communists were bad. Simplistic? Of course. Remember, the comics code was introduced because the industry was too goddamned spineless, too afraid to stand up, to even chance having to stand up to the American government. Of course it was going to toe the government line.

Then, in the eighties, we began to recover, just a little, lead in part by the influx of younger writers into the industry. These were writers who had cut their teeth on magazines like the British 2000AD, a comic who's leading character was conceived (at least in part) as a satire on the (perceived) state of the police force in Britain at the time. People who weren't afraid to say something. And for a while there in the eighties, things looked like they might improve. MARSHALL LAW. HELLBLAZER. Works like THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS. It's no co-incidence that it was around the time when comics were turning their back on their traditional mainstay, the superhero, that they got a bit of their bite back. Suddenly, the comics code was something that could be ignored.

But look at us now. Marvel's house policy is that they don't produce anything that's not for kids, that's not superhero fare. It's alright to get paid by the government to use superheroes to push a "moral" agenda, but it's not alright to use those same superheroes to hold those same politicians to task. I know I'm not the only one that thinks that there's something up with that. DC refuse to publish stories that they deem to controversial (something that can only get worse now that they've been taken over by AOL...). For god's sake, look at Hellblazer! This is the comic that once openly said that Maggie Thatcher had cut a deal with Hell, in order to get elected, and that Satan sat in the White House! Now what element of British politics there was left to it has been neatly excised, as John winds up in an American prison. (I'm being unfair on two counts here: I don't know that this is going to be the permanent state of the book during Azzarello's tenure, and I don't know that he's not planning on some ringing indictment of the American prison system. Still, I feel cheated as a reader that a comic I read in part because of it's British social fiction element appears to have abandoned it.)

It doesn't help that most of the industry is making superhero books. It's quite hard to talk credibly about the dreadful lack of proper health care in most of the world when you're dressed in skin-tight spandex. And if heroes are going to go around being political, then excuses have to be found for why they've not done something about it, which is far too much like work.

A closing note: I am given to understand that Mark Millar's Authority will address a political audience, as they go about the world, genuinely making it a better place. I look forward to this with interest, but suspect it's still not going to be anything like as biting, anywhere near as damning of the real world as a political comic ought to be. Maybe I'm being unfair. Maybe I'm just plain wrong. But the comic industry has given me no reason to suppose I am.