Device
© Grant Morrison 2003
Nowadays, when people can barely make sense of words at all and wouldn't know Surface-to-Art Combat if they saw it written down in front of them, it's very esy to be cynical about the value of sending young artists skyward to die incandescent deaths at the melting Ferrari-red controls of massive Colour Saturation Bombers, blue-grey SuperStylus Fighters and all the other gleaming Frank Lloyd Wright-meets-Gerry Anderson myth-machines of the old Fleet. High altitude verbal combat looks easy from the ground but try sketching an amusing 'Astronut'-style lampoon of the inevitable North Vietnamese surrender to capitalism while a Soviet NIB hunter/killer scrawls up hard on your tail, then talk to me and 'the Shaft' about the 'easy' life. Try a death tango in the upper levels of the stratosphere with smoky Cyrillic logos wrapped your fuselage and raw Letraset moire crackling away in the rearview and then maybe you'll earn my respect the way Rian Hughes earned my respect long ago.
We were the hand picked elite of the nation's most progressive Airborne Art and Design schools, it's true. Even without Rian's incredible innovations and developments, Squadron technology was always at the very forefront of what would now be called 'state-of-the-art'. Back then, that meant hi-impact side-mounted diffuser nozzles, six Rolls Royce compressor engines with scalpel brackets, T-square control bars and droop quill. Ejector seat. Font Bay dump doors with Serif tips for fine detail work. Nothing like the SuperStylus Fighter had ever been seen in the sky and it's sleek line became the envy of every grey-flanneled young boy in the land. For a brief golden time all eyes were turned upward to read the messages and logos we printed in the air above their reach, thousands of feet beyond human reach.
And then the pre-digital world was over. The beautiful ink-spattered machines rusted in their hangers and the world moved on. Computers were easier to fly and had fewer wings to worry about. Anyone who still remembers 'Squiggles of the Squadron' from that wonderful old boy's weekly paper 'The Ripper' will no doubt have fond memories of the analogue adventures of those unforgettable superheroic skywriters.
But I was there.
Grant Morrison
Collaborator on Dare, Doom Patrol, Really and Truly, Invisibles.
This all goes back to a time when the Warsaw Pact and NATO were locked in a mad race to stay ahead of new developments in Global Graphic Design. We were all young lads ourselves then; daredevil types who fought and died to keep the home skies clear of enemy propoganda and other aerial graffitti attacks in the difficult-to-understand days between the deaths of Hitler and Diana.
Back at the fleet HQ, Hughes was always seen as a bit of a maverick but he became something of a schoolboy hero for a while after transforming 1,000 square mles of irrigated plain into a wry homage to Mondrian during the Chinese Cultural Revolution; Chairman Mao was partcularly infuiated by Hughes' cheeky eau-de-Nil and peach combinations. These were 'anti-Socialist' colours which the Chinese leader hated to see together on the grounds that 'they violate my ethics, like the sound of old John Foxx records do.' Rian had the dashing good looks for all tat press stuff and he was equally well known for his superhuman understanding of the colour theory which gave British Skywriters the edge over sensitive men like Mao.
Today's youngsters probably won't remember the halcyon days of Wing Commmander Rian 'Shaft' Hughes and Her Majesty's Royal Skywriting Squadron but ask your dad or grandad about the infamously square-jawed 'Art Pilot of Tomorrow' and maybe the old man will have a few stories up his sleeves. For a while I thought we old duffers of the RSS had been completely forgotten in the race to replace te sky with the computer screen in the fight for the hearts and minds of the visually aware.
Adventure Potholing
Originally published in Device by Rian Hughes (Die Gestlten Verlag, 2003) Foreward
