By Jim Alexander & Mike Perkins with Will Pickering (Planet Jimbot)
No ISBN:
The wonderful thing about comics is the fact that you can readily utilise huge casts, vast exotic locales and even the most intimate of inner landscapes with the simplest tools.
In fact very often the more limited the resources the greater the result in terms of creativity, innovation and quality. It’s like a law of inverse proportions affecting imagination…
A superb example of that dictum is independent comics publisher Planet Jimbot (canny fellows Jim Alexander and Jim Campbell) whose ongoing series Wolf Country will star in our next Small Press Sunday feature. The Little Company That Could numbers many intriguing projects in its burgeoning portfolio, with this slim monochrome trade paperback compilation being one of its best: a cerebral science fiction saga that challenges your mind, heart and soul… and there’s not a robot or fishbowl-helmeted bikini-babe in sight…
Writer Alexander’s prodigious back catalogue includes Calhab Justice and other strips for 2000 AD, Star Trek the Manga, GoodCopBadCop, many features for The Dandy and work for DC, Marvel, Metal Hurlant, and loads of other places whilst illustrator Mike Perkins has gone on to co-create Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and draw Ruse, Astonishing X-Men, Superman vs Terminator, Carver Hale, Captain America, Stephen King’s The Stand and a host of other major properties.
If I remember aright Amongst the Stars was first serialised in much-missed Caliber Comics anthology Negative Burn back in the 1990s, and like so many great fantasy concoctions it takes a hoary cliché and stands it on its head with immense style and total conviction.
The wonderment begins with ‘Naturally Occurring Reactions’ as all over Earth individuals go about their lives unaware that they are sharing them. Incomprehensible distances away a unified collective of alien called the Tchailungians have reached psionically out to make contact with us and been trapped en masse inside our angry/sad/hungry/terrified, chaotically helter-skelter minds…
From ‘The Fullness of Space’ their benign pacific unity is being irrevocably shredded and shattered by everything that makes us human, but perhaps some spark of hope remains in rediscovering individual action through the cosmic ruminations of a brilliant British physicist trapped inside his body by motor-neurone disease…
‘Contact: How Tchailung came across the Regressive Planet and all of this started’ details the extent of the stellar paragons’ greatest mistake and how one bold constituent – either less paralysed or more contaminated than the rest – begins fighting back against the all-encompassing mental malady even as that earthly shut-in ponders the myth of ‘Icarus’ and the tragic ‘Marker Point’ which divided the collective gestalt and now spurs the dying Tchailung to embrace radical action.
Moreover, on Earth at least one fragile example of the seething masses is becoming acutely aware that he has ailing passengers in his head whilst events on two worlds spiral towards a shocking revelation in ‘The Eagle’s Nest’…
The cosmic cogitation and eerie awe of the lurking unknown is supplemented and counterpointed by a grand paranoia-drenched vignette dedicated to the other end of the “They Lurk Amongst Us†literary spectrum. ‘Growing Pains’ by Alexander & Will Pickering takes us to an anonymous Scottish housing estate where the police are warily employing a very unlikely negotiations-specialist to counter the rarest – yet by no means unheard of – domestic violence situations.
Unfortunately no matter how experienced an alienist pretty Officer McGuinness might be, there’s always the possibility of overconfidence leading to deadly human error…
Light, bright, bold, beguilingly presented, confidently challenging and beautifully realised, Amongst the Stars is a delight for those who need some intellectual meat in their reading matter, so dig in now.
Amongst the Stars © 2015 Jim Alexander (story) and Mike Perkins (art). Growing Pains © 2015 Jim Alexander (story) and Will Pickering (art).
Amongst the Stars is available at the Planet Jimbot shop for a special SICBA price of £5.50 plus P&P, so go to: https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/PlanetJimbot
Amongst the Stars has made the Scottish Independent Comic Book Alliance (SICBA) shortlist for Best Graphic Novel 2015. Why not get a copy and then vote for it? For relevant details check out the official SICBA site: http://www.sicba.org.uk/
The winners will be announced in Glasgow on the 4th of July so best get cracking…
Barring that, those generous Jimbot denizens have put together a PDF sampler which features 5 pages of the story, absolutely free to everybody, so please feel free to publish/share/comment on as you wish. Just head for: https://www.dropbox.com/s/1mcab4gr8utanu7/ATS_SICBA_Sampler.pdf?dl=0