Ant-Man: Second Chance Man


By Nick Spencer, Ramon Rosanas & various (Marvel)
ISBN: 978-0-7851-9387-6

Scott Lang was an electronics engineer who turned, more out of boredom than necessity, to crime. Caught and imprisoned he diligently served his time and on release the ex-convict joined Stark Industries as a determinedly reformed character. Everything was fine until his daughter Cassie developed a heart condition which wiped out his savings and compelled Scott to look to old solutions to save her.

He was desperate to find the wherewithal to hire experimental cardiac surgeon Dr. Erica Sondheim and began casing likely money-spinning prospects, but in the meantime she was abducted by merciless industrialist Darren Cross who was currently using all the resources of his mega-corporation Cross Technological Enterprises to keep himself alive…

Now even more frantic for cash just to broach the impenetrable CTE complex, Lang went back to Plan A and burgled the lab of retired superhero Henry Pym, where he discovered the scientist/superhero’s old Ant-Man gear and size-changing gases. In a moment of madness Lang decided not to sell the stolen tech but instead used the outfit to break in to Cross’ citadel and rescue Sondheim…

That plan wasn’t so great either as the dying billionaire, in a desperate attempt to stay alive, had been harvesting the hearts of homeless people to power an experimental device which subsequently mutated him into a monstrous brute. Scott eventually triumphed; unaware until the very last that Pym (in his guise as Avenger Yellowjacket) had allowed him to swipe the suit and was backstopping him every inch of the way. With Cassie saved, Pym then invited Lang to carry on as the new Ant-Man…

After long and creditable stints with the Avengers and Fantastic Four – during which time he died and returned (even giving Doctor Doom the most comprehensive defeat of his entire evil life) – Lang eventually found himself just another victim of the economic downturn and went looking for a job with a former employer…

Scripted by Nick Spencer and illustrated by Ramon Rosanas (with colours from Jordan Boyd) Second-Chance Man collects the 5-issue Ant-Man volume 2 from March to July 2015 and opens with the down-on-his-luck Lang joining a cattle call of super-types auditioning to be Tony Stark’s new security chief…

The application process was a set-up but against all odds Lang persevered, proved Stark wrong and ultimately succeeded. He had to: his ex-wife had shown up whilst he was dead and won custody of Cassie…

Just when his life seemed to be going right for once, the former Mrs. Peggy Lang played her meanest trump card. Without warning she moved back to the family’s old home in Miami, removing Cassie from Scott’s superhero idiocies and fatherly influence. Without missing a beat Scott chucked his plush new Stark job and followed…

The second chapter finds our little hero targeted by failed super-villain the Grizzly, who has tracked him to Florida seeking revenge. Unfortunately, the Ant-Man he has a beef with is the third one (Eric O’Grady) and it takes all Scott’s fast-talking and ingenuity to escape getting squished.

When tempers cool Grizzly is truly apologetic and Scott simply takes it in stride. He has bigger problems, such as trying to set up a small business as a security consultant. Banks don’t like lending to ex-cons – especially ones who have been declared legally dead – and he still has the worst luck in the world…

At one bank a stunt he pulls to prove his hacking abilities results in a WWII robot stored in its vault running amok. Still, when Lang finds out where the bank got its own start-up funds from, he “leverages” them into extending him that business loan…

Flushed with success and revelling in Cassie’s approval, he then proves his sound business acumen by hiring Grizzly to be the muscle for Ant-Man Security Solutions, tragically unaware that the closest thing he has to an arch-enemy is already targeting him for destruction…

Erica Sondheim meanwhile has moved on since her clash with CTE and is less than ecstatic when the company again kidnaps her. Although Darren Cross is long dead, his deeply disturbed son Augustine is determined to resolve his daddy issues by resurrecting the old man. Now that he has the cardiac surgeon he only requires one more thing: the one-of-a-kind heart she fitted for young Cassie Lang.

…And the first Scott learns of it is after the deadly Taskmaster attacks him for old times’ sake…

By the time Ant-Man can act it’s too late. Cassie has been spirited away by billionaire Augustine’s super-villain uncle Crossfire and prepped for surgery. At his wits end, Lang listens to Grizzly’s half-baked suggestion and hires another villain – the biology-hating living data-store dubbed Machinesmith – to get him inside Cross’ Miami factory. When the blistering three-pronged attack finally gets the unlikely rescuers inside, the damage has been done: the blockbusting Darren Cross is back from the dead and hungry for revenge.

Sadly for the resurrected rogue, everybody has overestimated Erica Sondheim’s ingenuity and the lengths a frustrated, pissed-off desperate Ant-Man will go to when his kid is threatened…

Fast, furious, action-packed and astonishingly funny when it isn’t moving or scary, Second-Chance Man is a delicious confection perfectly designed to relaunch Marvel’s latest movie sensation and this slim full-colour compilation comes with a covers and variant gallery by Mark Brooks, Jason Pearson, Skottie Young, Phil Noto & Cliff Chiang.
© 2005 2008 Marvel. All rights reserved.

Dick Tracy: The Collins Casefiles volume 1


By Max Allan Collins and Rick Fletcher (Checker Books)
ISBN: 978-0-97416-642-1

All in all comics have a pretty good track record on creating household names. We could play the game of picking the most well-known fictional characters on Earth (usually topped by Sherlock Holmes, Mickey Mouse, Superman and Tarzan) and in that list you’ll also find Batman, Popeye, Blondie, Charlie Brown, Tintin, Spider-Man, Garfield, and – not so much now, but once definitely – Dick Tracy…

At the height of the Great Depression cartoonist Chester Gould was looking for strip ideas. The story goes that as a decent guy incensed by the exploits of gangsters like Al Capone – who monopolised the front pages of contemporary newspapers – he settled upon the only way a normal man could fight thugs: Passion and Public Opinion.

Raised in Oklahoma, Gould was a Chicago resident and hated seeing his home town in the grip of such wicked men, with too many honest citizens beguiled by the gangsters’ charisma. He decided to pictorially get it off his chest with a procedural crime thriller that championed the ordinary cops who protected civilisation.

He took his proposal – “Plainclothes Tracy” – to legendary newspaperman and strips Svengali Captain Joseph Patterson, whose golden touch had already blessed such strips as Gasoline Alley, The Gumps, Little Orphan Annie, Winnie Winkle, Smilin’ Jack, Moon Mullins and Terry and the Pirates among others. Casting his gifted eye on the work, Patterson renamed the hero Dick Tracy and revised his love interest into steady girlfriend Tess Truehart.

The series launched on October 4th 1931 through Patterson’s Chicago Tribune Syndicate and quickly grew into a monumental hit, with all the attendant media and merchandising hoopla that follows. Amidst the toys, games, movies, serials, animated features, TV shows et al, the strip soldiered on, influencing generations of creators and entertaining millions of fans. Gould unfailingly wrote and drew the strip for decades until his retirement in 1977.

The legendary lawman was a landmark creation who influenced all American popular fiction, not simply comics. Its signature use of baroque villains, outrageous crimes and fiendish death-traps have pollinated the work of numerous strips (most notably Batman), shows and movies since then, whilst the indomitable Tracy’s studied, measured use – and startlingly accurate predictions – of crime fighting technology and techniques gave the world a taste of cop thrillers, police procedurals and forensic mysteries such as CSI decades before our current fascination took hold.

As with many creators in it for the long haul the revolutionary 1960s were a harsh time for established cartoonists. Along with Milton Caniff’s Steve Canyon, Gould’s grizzled gangbuster especially foundered in a social climate of radical change where the popular slogans included “Never trust anybody over 21” and “Smash the Establishment”. The strip’s momentum faltered, perhaps as much from the move towards science fiction (Tracy moved into space and the character Moon Maid was introduced) and improbable, Bond-movie style villains as any perceived “old-fashioned” attitudes. Even the introduction of more minority and women characters and hippie cop Groovy Groove couldn’t stop the rot but the feature soldiered on regardless…

Max Allen Collins is a prolific and best-selling author of both graphic novels (Road to Perdition, CSI, Mike Mist, Ms. Tree) and prose thriller series featuring his crime-creations Nathan Heller, Quarry, Nolan, Mallory and a veritable pantheon of others. When Gould retired from the Tracy strip, the young author (nearly thirty!) won the prestigious role as scripter, promptly taking the series back to its roots for a breathtaking 11-year run, ably assisted by Gould as consultant even as his chief artistic assistant Rick Fletcher was promoted to full illustrator.

This splendidly enthralling monochrome paperback compilation opens with publisher Mark Thompson’s informative Introduction ‘Flatfoot’ and offers a frankly startling ‘Dick Tracy Timeline’ listing the series achievements and innovations from 1931 to 1988 before the captivating Cops-&-Robbers clashes recommence with Collin’s inaugural adventure ‘Angeltop’s Last Stand’ (3rd January – March 12th 1978) which rapidly sidelined all the fantastical science fiction trappings (Tracy’s adopted son Junior had married lunar princess Moon Maid) and returned to grittily ultra-violent suspense as old friend Vitamin Flintheart is targeted for assassination.

With the senior detectives assistants Sam Catchem and Lizz Worthington on the case it is soon clear that the assault is part of a plan to make Tracy suffer. Solid investigation soon turns up two suspects, relatives of old – and expired – enemies Flattop Jones and The Brow and familial revenge is revealed as the motive…

Sadly not all the Police Department’s resources are enough to prevent aggrieved daughter Angeltop Jones and the new Brow from abducting Tracy. Tragically for the vengeful felons, the grizzled crimebuster might be old but he’s still inventive and indomitable and a cataclysmic confrontation leads to a fatal conflagration at the place of Flattop’s demise…

The next tale featured an original Gould villain making a surprise comeback in the ‘Return of Haf-and-Haf’ (March 13th – June 11th) as maniac murderer Tulza Tuzon – whose left profile had been hideously scarred with acid – was released from the asylum, rehabilitated by modern psychology and groundbreaking plastic surgery…

Of course only his face was fixed and the fiend quickly tried to murder ex-fiancée Zelda who had betrayed him to the cops a decade previously. Tracy was on hand to save her life but unable to prevent her from enacting grisly retribution on her attacker, leaving Tuzon frantically in need of fresh cosmetic repair.

Sadly the unscrupulous surgeon who fixed him on the State’s dime wanted a huge amount of clandestine cash to repeat the procedure and the stage was soon set for doom and tragedy on a Shakespearean scale…

This first Collins collection concludes with an epic minor classic that harked back to Tracy’s first published case. ‘Big Boy’s Revenge’ (also known as ‘Big Boy’s Open Contract’ ran from 12th June 1978 to January 2nd 1979) and saw the unexpected return of the thinly disguised Al Capone analogue Tracy had sent to prison at the very start of his career.

Decades later Big Boy, still a member of the crime syndicate known as The Apparatus, has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and wants to take the cop who brought him down with him.

Ignoring and indeed eventually warring with the other Apparatus chiefs, the dying Don puts an open contract for $1,000,000 on Tracy’s head and lies back to watch the fireworks as a horde of hit-men and -women zero in on the blithely unaware Senior Detective…

The resulting collateral damage costs the hero one of his nearest and dearest, removes most of the strip’s accumulated sci fi trappings and firmly resets the series in the grim and gritty world of contemporary crime. The Good Guys triumph in the end but the cost is shockingly high for a family strip…

Dick Tracy has always been a fantastically readable feature and this potent return to first principles is a terrific way to ease yourself into his stark, no-nonsense, Tough-Love, Hard Justice world.

Comics just don’t get better than this…
© Checker Book Publishing Group 2003, an authorized collection of works © Tribune Media Services, 1978, 1979. All characters and distinctive likenesses thereof are trademarks of Tribune Media Services. All rights reserved.

If You Steal


By Jason (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-854-0

Christmas Gift Recommendation: A comics lover’s dream made real… 9/10

Jason is secretly John Arne Saeterrøy: born in Molde, Norway in 1965 and an overnight international cartoon superstar since 1995 when his first graphic novel Lomma full ay regn (Pocket Full of Rain) won that year’s Sproing Award (Norway’s biggest comics prize). He won another Sproing in 2001 for the series Mjau Mjau and in 2002 turned almost exclusively to producing graphic novels.

A global star among the cartoon cognoscenti, he has won many major awards from all over the planet. Jason’s work always jumps directly into the reader’s brain and heart, utilising the beastly and unnatural to gently pose eternal questions about basic human needs in a soft but relentless quest for answers. That you don’t ever notice the deep stuff because of the clever gags and safe, familiar “funny-animal” characters should indicate just how good a cartoonist he is…

The stylised artwork is delivered in formalised page layouts rendered in a minimalist evolution of Hergé’s Claire Ligne style, solid blacks, thick outlines and settings of seductive simplicity – augmented by a deft and subtle use of flat colour which enhances his hard, moody, suspenseful and utterly engrossing Cinema-inspired world.

The superbly understated art acts in concert with his dead-on, deadpan pastiche repertoire of scenarios which dredge deep from our shared experience of old film noir classics, horror and sci fi B-movies and other visual motifs which transcend time and culture, and the result is narrative dynamite.

This latest hardback compilation collects eleven new short yarns and opens with the eponymous and eerie ‘If You Steal’, wherein cheap thug Paul perpetually risks everything and the one person who keeps him feeling alive in search of quick cash, only to lose it all in the end after which ‘Karma Chameleon’ finds a small desert community dealing with the discovery of a giant, carnivorous and extremely predatory lizard which nobody seems able to see. Good thing masturbation-obsessed boffin Dr. Howard Jones and his long-suffering daughter Julia are in town…

The deliciously wry and whimsically absurdist Samuel Beckett spoof ‘Waiting for Bardot’ then segues neatly into a dashing mystery of masked derring-do as ‘Lorena Velazquez’ eventually tires of waiting for her ideal man to finish off a necessarily interminable and horrific army of villains prior to doling out a maiden’s traditional rewards whilst a fugitive murderer narrates his own paranoia-fuelled downfall after his ‘New Face’ briefly tempts him with love and the never-to-be-achieved promise of peace and safety…

A series of six faux horror comics covers combines to relate the trials of chilling romances in ‘Moondance’ and the classic fear theme extends into a rip-roaring battle against the undead in ‘Night of the Vampire Hunter’ and ‘Polly Wants a Cracker’ follows the other unique career path of artistic legend/assassin-for-hire Frida Kahlo whilst a junkie musician pushes his luck against some very bad guys because ‘The Thrill is Gone’ before ‘Ask Not’ takes a trawl through history from Stonehenge in 2583 BC to Salon de Provence in 1554 AD (courtesy of Nostradamus) to 1960s Cuba, revealing the truth behind the assassination of JFK and Abraham Lincoln and what parts Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby actually played in that millennial plot: a parallel worlds yarn like no other…

The book ends with a stunning, deeply moving graphic examination of dementia which is both chilling and oddly-heart-warming as aging Emma deals with the scary creatures who keep taking away the names of things in ‘Nothing’, proving once more that behind the innocuous-seeming cartoons and contemporary fairy tale trappings Jason’s work is loaded with potent questions…

If You Steal resonates with Jason’s favourite themes and shines with his visual dexterity, and skewed sensibilities. disclosing a decidedly different slant on secrets and obsessions. Primal art supplemented by sparse and spartan “Private Eye” dialogue, enhanced to a macabre degree by solid cartooning and skilled use of silence and moment, all utilised with devastating economy, affords the same quality of cold, bleak yet perfectly harnessed stillness which makes Scandinavian crime dramas such compelling, addictive fare.

These comic tales are strictly for adults yet allow us all to look at the world through wide-open young eyes. They never, however, sugar-coat what’s there to see…
If You Steal is © 2015 Jason. All rights reserved.

The Bozz Chronicles


By David Michelinie & Bret Blevins, with John Ridgway and various (Dover Comics & Graphic Novels)
ISBN: 978-0-486-79851-6

Thanks to unseasonably chilly weather and a total plethora of astoundingly great graphic tracts in my reviews tray I’ve decided to brave the wrath of the readership by bring up the dreaded “C” word almost a month earlier than usual. I make no apologies. This is a book everybody will have on their wants list…

Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: A timeless, captivating delight… 9/10

During the 1980s the American comics scene experienced an astounding proliferation of new titles and companies in the wake of the creation of the Direct Sales Market. With publishers now able to firm-sale straight to specialised, dedicated-retail outlets rather than overprint and accept returned copies from general magazine vendors, the industry was able to risk and support less generic titles whilst authors, artists and publishers could experiment without losing their shirts.

In response to a wave of upstart innovators, Marvel developed a line of creator-owned properties at the height of the subsequent publishing explosion, launching a number of idiosyncratic, impressive series in a variety of formats under the watchful, benevolent and exceptionally canny eye of Editor Archie Goodwin. The delightfully disparate line was dubbed Epic Comics and the results reshaped the industry.

One of the most significant hits was a winsomely engaging blend of fantasy, criminology and urban myth with a beautifully simple core concept: “Sherlock Holmes from Outer Space”. Even that painfully broad pitch-line does the series it became an unforgivable disservice: The Bozz Chronicles was – and is – so much more. It became one of Epic’s earliest sensations and the reasons it never continued beyond its initial 6-issue run (spanning December 1985-November 1986) had nothing to do with poor sales…

The mesmerising mix of Victoriana, super-science and sorcery might even be considered as an early precursor if not progenitor of the visual form of the literary genre K. W. Jeter dubbed “steampunk” in 1987…

Preceded with a Foreword from Brandon Graham, Dave Michelinie’s self-deprecating Introduction ‘Blame it on Spielberg’ plus fond reminiscences from originating illustrator Bret Blevins, an amazing moment in comics history repeats itself as ‘The Bozz Chronicles’ opens on Mandy Flynn, a fiercely independent young woman plying her trade – frequently described as the World’s Oldest – in the sooty, sordid environs of London during the latter quarter of the 19th century.

Saucy, sassy, sensitive and lovely, she is bringing her latest client up to her attic abode when the incipient physical transaction is suddenly curtailed by the discovery of a strange-looking foreigner trying to commit suicide in her rooms…

As her toff flees in terror, Mandy tries to talk down the intruder and realises just how strange he truly is: eight feet tall, pale yellow in complexion, with a hairless, pointy head. He is also gentle, exceptionally well-spoken, has a long tail and can fly…

Six months later Mandy and the creature she calls Bozz are doing exceptionally well. He still claims to be from another world and certainly acts like no human she has ever met: he cannot tell lies, communicates with animals, constantly wanders around naked and absorbs like a sponge every scrap of knowledge she can provide for him through books and papers.

Bozz misses his home: a far-distant world of benevolent intelligences he has no chance of ever returning to. So much so that he was going to kill himself as much through boredom as loneliness and Mandy’s brilliant idea to keep him alive was to engage his prodigious intellect in puzzles. She set them up as consulting detectives based in the less than fashionable Maracot Road, using the profits to better her own hand-to-mouth existence in the process.

The only problem is that when no challenging cases manifest, Bozz’s thoughts instantly return to ending it all…

Thankfully, just as she is preparing to hide all the sharp objects again, a truly unique mystery knocks on the door and the secretary of Lord Giles Morgan requests their help. According to the Press, her employer – and prospective Prime Minister – recently escaped an assassination attempt. She however was with him when it happened and claims he did not survive. In fact, after having made further discreet inquiries she found her master had in fact been dead for some three years prior to the attack…

As Bozz excitedly accepts the commission Mandy is convinced they are dealing with a madwoman, but when their client is destroyed by a bolt of lightning as soon as she leaves their office the retired demimondaine is forced to think again…

The first step is naturally to interview Lord Giles and, although the shady politician proves no help at all, Bozz gleans much useful information from the caged bird in Morgan’s study and is soon on the trail of an aristocratic secret society utilising vast funds and weird science to resurrect the dead in pursuit of a deadly and regressive political and economic agenda…

Sadly even the alien outcast’s uncanny powers prove less than enough to stop the plotters, but Mandy has gifts of her own and beguiles a rowdy American ex-prize-fighter she found in a bar to assist in the climactic final confrontation…

Besotted, punch-drunk Salem Hawkshaw then joins the detectives to handle any future physical exigencies that might occur, but despite everything he sees is never convinced his big, bemused boss is anything other than a crazy circus freak.

The new comrades are all utterly aware that their sudden success has brought them to the attention of Scotland Yard’s most privileged operative and the trio have barely caught their breath before Inspector Colin Fitzroy comes calling, deviously offering them a case the police have no interest in.

Apparently a drunk had seen demons in Park Lane…

As the shamefully-employed scion of Britain’s richest family continues trying to impress the ravishing Miss Flynn, further arcane incidents are occurring, ‘Raising Hell’ in the capital’s swankiest district and before long the Private Inquiry agents have found troubled Samantha Townes whose husband has fallen foul of the vilest black magic and his own gullibility…

Wealthy Inspector Fitzroy has his own, more pressing problems. A rash of exceedingly orderly murders has turned up odd artefacts which defy explanation by any expert Scotland Yard can muster: things that cannot possibly have been built by any craftsman on Earth…

In ‘The Tomorrow Man’ (inked by Al Williamson) a trip to the funfair does little to alleviate Bozz’s boredom but does lead to the gently gullible giant being gulled and lured away by a wily pack of street children who use his powers and naivety to go on a crime spree.

Later, when the shady Fair-owner tries to kidnap Bozz for his freak show, the ultimately unsuccessful attack leaves the alien blind and kids’ ringleader Oliver brings him to underworld surgeon Dr. Paine, who runs a subterranean clinic as a sideline to pay for his researches into time travel. He sees in the alien a perfect opportunity to advance the causes of science…

Redeemed by Bozz’s unflagging trust, Oliver at last realises the enormity of his betrayal and fetches Mandy and Salem to effect a rescue, but by the time they arrive, chronal chaos is erupting everywhere…

As engaging and enthusiastic as the tales have been until this point, ‘Were-Town!’ is (at least for history-buffs and especially Londoners) a truly stand-out moment in the series as the ineffably marvellous John Ridgway stepped in to illustrate a pithy, punchy deep midwinter tale disclosing something of Mandy’s past whilst introducing her reprehensible absentee father Egan Thorpe.

We’ve always whined in Britain about how Us and Ours are represented in American productions and, despite the obviously strenuous and diligent researches Michelinie & Blevins undertook, frequently the tone of their Bozz Chronicles often smacks more of Hollywood than Cricklewood. It’s not something that non-Brits will even notice, but for us aging “Cockney Sparrers” the differences are there to be seen.

Such is not the case (as gratefully acknowledged by the creators themselves in their respective, respectful Introductions) when Ridgway applied his meticulous line and copious pictorial acumen – gleaned from decades drawing a variety of British strips for everything from Commando Picture Library to Warrior to 2000AD to The Famous Five – to a genuinely spooky and photographically authentic tale of deranged artists, dastardly squires and infernal paintings which come to unholy life in the snow-drenched rural wilds of Southeast England…

Michelinie & Blevins reunited for ‘The Cobblestone Jungle’ as Inspector Fitzroy again called upon the Consulting Detectives; impelled as much by his lusty fascination with Amanda as the demands of an African king who needed the assistance of the British Empire if he was to guarantee a steady flow of diamonds from his equatorial realm…

Apparently a white man had stolen the tribe’s sacred jewel and brought it to his hidden jungle playground in London. Thanks to some canny legwork from little Oliver the detective trio are able to track the bounder, but nobody expected the filched jewel to be capable of emitting destructive death-rays…

After a spectacular battle high above the city Bozz was able to end the threat, but his biggest surprise came when the grateful king asked to thank him personally and revealed a millennia-old connection to Bozz’s extraterrestrial race…

It all culminated in a desperate voyage to the Dark Continent for Mandy, Bozz, Salem and Fitzroy in search of ‘King Solomon’s Spaceship’ and the achievement of the marooned alien’s most fervent desires… unless of course, a gang of German raiders or Mandy’s own selfish self-interest somehow ruined everything…

Rounded out by a superb ‘Bonus Artwork and Cover Gallery’ from Blevins and closing with an effusive ‘Afterword by John Ridgway’, this is a long-overdue collection of a magnificent moment in comics collaboration which will now hopefully reclaim its place at the forefront of fantasy fables.

The Bozz Chronicles © 1985, 1986, 2015 David Michelinie. Introduction © 2015 David Michelinie. Foreword © 2015 Brandon Graham. Afterword © 2015 John Ridgway. All rights reserved.

The Bozz Chronicles will be in stores from September 16th 2015 and is available for pre-order now. Check out www.doverpublications.com, your internet retailer or local comic shop.

The Erotic Adventures of Space Babe 113


By John Maybury (Soaring Penguin Press)
ISBN: 978-1-908030-16-0

I have to declare an interest before I review this splendid and long-awaited collection. John Maybury is, as well as a fellow survivor of the Comic Creators Guild and my editor on the Guild’s Annuals (still available at most Unicorn Fairs and any Galifreyan used-stuff emporium), one of many people I have taught in more than twenty-five years as a tutor of comic skills at various organisations ranging from the London College of Printing, through the London Cartoon Centre to the Cartoon Art Trust.

I think it’s only fair to state, however, looking at how few of those hundreds, if not thousands, of students have gone on to produce outstanding comic work, that we’d be deluding ourselves in assuming I had any effect whatsoever.

I’ve known John for decades both professionally, socially and on occasion alcoholically and feel the Convent-school-inculcated need to admit this long association. Of course you might say it’s no fault of mine if extremely talented and dedicated people congregate around me like shining planets around a dying sun contemplating becoming a big black hole…

Confession over, and so to work…

The Erotic Adventures of Space Babe 113 is a remarkably original and ferociously addictive landmark of comedic science fiction from a creator not content to simply tell stories, but determined also to constantly challenge himself in the process. Redolent with overtones of Barbarella (Jean Claude Forest’s comic more than the Jane Fonda movie), The Ballad of Halo Jones, Red Dwarf, Little Annie Fanny and a dozen other things I could cite to show off, this is the intoxicating tale of a sexy ingénue on a five-year commercial mission to the stars with a motley mob of misfits on the claustrophobic and muddled European Union ship Marco Polo.

Although nominally the ship’s Catering Officer, Space always seems to get the tackiest jobs – such as testing the fetishistic Off World Battle Garb – during a mercilessly mercantile mission to sign up new trading partners.

Perhaps it’s because she’s a bit of a “looker”, not that academically accomplished and reputedly far from chaste? Whatever the actual reason, the Earth-based overseer of this particular mission – Media Director 667 – has already increased company revenue streams by forward-selling the “adults-only” Ship’s Logs to broadcast franchises and so most of Space’s shipboard duties tend to end with her undraped and panting.

Regrettably for all the cunning entrepreneurs, although free, healthy and over 21, SB 113 has faithfully promised her boyfriend to stay exclusive until they’re reunited, even though that tends to make her a little short on patience and quite ready to stroppily protest the stream of strange orders perpetually foisted upon her by immediate superiors Lesbian Sex Officer Mrrf M’n’cha and Marketing & Sales Officer Star 406…

At least she can share her woes with Laundry Officer Rince Cycle 335 – whose sympathetic ear almost makes up for his permanently sneering at her for being a glorified microwave-oven operator…

Not long into the mission the first crisis occurs after cosmic rays mutate the female crew-members’ underwear and only after a valiant struggle are the rampaging killer-skivvies ejected from the ship. Sadly, it does mean that the women might be stuck in Scottish Engineer‘s hastily cobbled-together titanium-steel knickers or reduced to going commando, and further danger lurks since not all the deadly drawers have been banished…

Eventually stability returns in time for the planned rendezvous with the fabled ‘Lirka’ and on Marco Polo assorted crewpersons prepare for their first trade conference with the asexual Aardvarks. Tensions are high but at least all are confident that there will be no further assaults from treacherous or homicidal underwear.

Unbeknownst to most of the Terran delegation, however, lead negotiator Star 406 has been secretly instructed to use any means necessary to compel the Lirka to purchase human porn. She regretfully realises that in such an impossible situation she will need every possible advantage and that means the always-aggravating Space Babe 113.

Can two such widely differing species find some common ground to build upon? In the strangest, stickiest manner imaginable the answer is categorically “yes”, but sometimes getting what you want isn’t really a good thing, as can be seen when the conference devolves into a wild, narcotically-deranged strip-poker party…

Barely surviving the catastrophic aftermath of the all-too successful trade-conference with the androgynous ant-eaters, Space crashes a hastily procured escape pod onto a desolate jungle world dubbed ‘Foliage’ where she must eke out a lonely existence and pray for rescue. She has her snarkily sarcastic and judgemental new AI knickers to talk to, but other than them, is she truly alone?

At last convinced that something on the lush planetoid is trying to communicate with her, she undertakes an epic quest and falls for the oldest line in interstellar seduction. Is she the last hope for a dying race to return from the very edge of extinction, or is it just that Earth Girls really are Easy?

At least she’s still kept her promise, if you only count humans…

Rince had also ditched on the green world and before too long he and Space were rescued by U.S. starship George Dubya: a straight-laced, traditional exploration vessel which only releases “Family Viewing” Mission Logs. ‘Stones’ finds Media Director 667 – terrified of lost sales or shared profits – frantically informing his superiors of the disaster before determining to get his star back or get rid of her before the Yanks get all the cash and glory.

He discloses that Space’s knickers have an illegal patch and are operating without the curbs of the Three Laws of Lingerie: if necessary they can be manipulated and compelled to self-destruct…

Things are pretty desperate already aboard the US starship: Space has met the bosom-heavingly gorgeous archaeologist Dr. Standing Stones and, despite a complete lack of qualifications, has claimed to be one herself, ready and so-very-willing to join his expedition to the ancient world of ‘Sand’ spinning beneath them. She is hot, bothered and blithely unaware of EU Commands’ murderous plan, busily losing another ill-tempered battle with her surly underwear which cruelly claims it is no longer her size…

She is plagued by hot, sweaty dreams as ‘Mud’ then sees the history-hunters encountering one of the most powerful and ancient species in existence. Tragically the puissant Grand T’Kleep of Tyracus III understandably takes great umbrage at being used in a most unseemly manner for a moment of urgently needed libidic relief by the soft, curvy one and decides to put her entire race on trial. As the representative of humanity SB 113 must defeat the mighty Bolboi champion in a sacred duel which looks remarkably like mud-wrestling or her entire species will excised from existence 35,000 years before they began annoying proper civilised beings.

Good thing Space was Academy Champion three years running…

Meanwhile on the George Dubya the Americans have cracked the murderous coded message from MD 667 and begin countermeasures…

Chapter 7 slightly diverts to offer an ‘Origin’ revealing how a simple wannabe fashion designer encountered the wrong Careers Bot and ended up an unwilling astronaut Catering Officer, as well as her hidden history with the frustrated creature who became Media Director 667 before ‘Jet’ finds Star 406 fanatically attempting to complete the explosive sabotage mission even as MD 667 – under orders from his own boss – reluctantly leads a rescue mission to pick up his out-of-control minions as a fantastic, millennia-old plan of cosmic fiddling slowly, teasingly unfolds…

With star ships and space stations in imminent danger of destruction the explosive climax sees Space forced into extremely rash behaviour as she tussles with Star to save Dr. Stones and perhaps all of us thanks to ‘Wings’, common sense, good luck and sheer guts…

Raunchy, hilarious, surreal and astoundingly clever, but still deftly striding the right side of the line between charm and prurience, Space Babe 113 is not only great saucy smut and potent parody but also solid, big sky science fiction treated with all the irreverence it deserves and I for one can’t wait for her snooty talking pants to spin off into their own mini-series. Until that moment however this splendid, long overdue chronicle concludes with a few delicious shorts including ‘Space Babe’s Handy Guide to Lesbian Sex for Single Girls’ and ‘The Space Probe: an investigation of the Seamier Side of Sequential Art’.

There is a long tradition of sexy spacewomen in comics, films, TV and even novels and this gently racy, technically torrid tale ranks among the highest in those arenas. The humour is both broad and gentle, with much more of the Carry On movie rather than Emmanuelle about it, although many subversive side-splitters do sneak in, and there are oodles of deep-genre, comic book and computer techie in-jokes for those in the know.

Remember I said he liked to challenge himself? Although able to draw fabulously well in a variety of representational styles, John has sweetened the pot for us all by setting himself a daunting task. This is a glamour book which has successfully abandoned pseudo or mega-pneumatic realism in favour of reductionist abstraction which has echoes of Vaughn Bodé, Alex Niño and graffiti street art. It is to his credit that his diligence has incontrovertibly succeeded. She may just be large blobs of thick black and white, but she is certainly a tasty little minx.

Well-rounded, captivating and impossible to put down. Buy it and decide if I mean her or it, why don’t you?
© 2015 John Maybury. All rights reserved.

Sacred Heart


By Liz Suburbia (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-841-0

What would have happened when you were a teenager and your parents went away for the weekend?

What if they didn’t come back for four years? And what if the same thing happened to every household in your little town at the same time?

Visually, elements of Charles Burns and Johnny Ryan crackle beside graphic echoes of the Hernandez Brothers in a stunning graphic novel debut which tackles that conundrum with perspicacity, near-feral insight, righteous anger and a great deal of sentiment-free warmth in Sacred Heart.

As much mystery thriller as “Having Come of Age” tale, the mesmerising story opens in little everytown Alexandria which at first glance seems to have gotten a little rowdy of late, but for all the late-night drinking, hot-rodding, incessant partying, lewd behaviour and hijinks is carrying on as best it can.

The older teens are looking after the little kids, school is still attended, the local store still carries provisions and life goes on pretty much as before, even though there hasn’t been a responsible adult in situ for years…

Ben Schiller cares for her rapidly maturing – and consequently increasingly difficult – little sister Empathy; her life-long nerdy punk friend Otto still works part-time at the video store – when he’s not stealing girls’ panties – and he and she still watch weird movies most evenings, trading gossip and stories about who they’re currently seeing…

Elsewhere in their unique community, local garage-band The Crotchmen are the only good thing to see of an evening and Erica‘s baby still hasn’t come.

Jocks still act like meatheads and the pretty girls still chase them whilst standoffish Ben remains involved but apart. She isn’t ignored or reviled these days as she’s devised a method of tattooing which makes her a vital component of the new society…

Recently though, some of the little kids have been acting a little weird: descending into mysticism and fortune telling whilst default storekeeper Jack Brown is claiming that soon he won’t be able to get any more booze or gas for the town’s remaining functional cars, but of course the real downer is how many of the older teens have been found murdered in the last few weeks…

The kids all seem to accept the growing “Dead Kids Club” as a part of life in their little town, but as the summer of excess rolls on towards Fall, things start to change. Firstly Ben and Otto endanger the perfect friendship by bringing sex into the equation, after which an actual adult is seen in town but escapes and Crotchmen’s lead singer joins the casualty list and is replaced with a girl.

Hulking drummer Hugo starts planning how to take his little charges and break out to freedom as the kindergarten seers all predict the end of everything is coming, but worst of all, as colossal storm clouds gather, when Ben discovers who the serial killer is, she can do nothing about it…

Compiled and cunningly rearranged from her webcomic, Liz Suburbia’s Sacred Heart is a potent, uncompromising yet measuredly (proportionately??) hopeful glimpse at the teenagers who terrify all us old farts: dealing with a dangerous world not by crumbling as we assume they will, but by rising to the challenge and accepting the responsibilities we probably wouldn’t.

Gripping, compelling, rewarding and astoundingly readable, this is book to exult in from an author to watch.
Sacred Heart © 2015, Liz Surburbia. This edition © 2015 Fantagraphics Books, Inc.

Bright-Eyed at Midnight


By Leslie Stein (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-838-0

After graduating from the New York School of Visual Arts Leslie Stein began producing astoundingly addictive cartoon strips in her self-published ‘zine Yeah, It Is. With a Xeric Grant for her efforts, she started the even-better comicbook Eye of the Majestic Creature, seamlessly blending autobiographical self-discovery, surreal free-association, philosophical ruminations, nostalgic reminiscences and devastatingly dry wit to describe life filtered through a seductively meta-fictional interior landscape. This lady laconically tans under truly different suns and the results are both enchanting and entrancing.

Here she bravely offers a further intimate peek inside a unique head via a gloriously off-kilter selection of full-colour diary-strips: all created in the wee small hours as she juggled incessant insomnia and the skewed demands and commitments of being a bartender working night shifts, performing in a band and battling an obsessive urge to draw stories…

“Beginning at the stroke of Midnight…” from the first moments of 2014 and every evening/slash morning thereafter, regardless of her location, physical condition and state of weariness or inebriation, Stein crafted a comic – one per night in a free-ranging variety of styles encompassing watercolour, line-work, collage, found imagery and even sheer abstractions – only ending her self-appointed task on January 1st 2015.

Now the very best of those pictorial therapies – sweet, incisive, charming, obscure, self-destructive, self-incriminating, nostalgic, hopeful, delusional, revelatory and just plain indefinable – populate the pages of a lavish hardback chronicle which is utterly intoxicating.

Day-trippers and interested parties can share her realised thoughts on creating stories, memories of the 1980s, school, junk food, Summer Camp, bar lives, New York in the early hours, boys, men, rehearsals, colours, lettering, pets, Jimi Hendrix, romance, regular customers, gigs, European travel, hero-worship, fruit, fans and all the other minutiae and major events which make up one year in a life, seen here partitioned into ‘Winter’, ‘Spring’, ‘Summer’, ‘Fall (& Winter Again)’, a sweetly painful biographical examination of ‘Four Christmases’ all wrapped up with an uplifting ‘Epilogue’…

The journal glyphs are all delivered in a smoothly raw, primitive yet deliciously engaging, self-deprecating manner utterly impossible to resist and if you’ve ever drunk-dialled and regretted it, imagine the increased horror of drawing and posting an entire comic strip before you wake up, sober up and realise just what you’ve done…

A mesmerising, absurdist, whimsically seductive and pictorially gratifying invitation into a singularly creative existence and fabulously rewarding cartoon experience: one no serious fan can afford to miss.
© 2015 Leslie Stein. All rights reserved.

Nanjing: the Burning City


By Ethan Young (Dark Horse)
ISBN: 978-1-61655-752-2

Ethan Young comes from New York City, born the youngest of three boys to Chinese immigrant parents. Following studies at the School of Visual Arts he began work as a commercial illustrator, supplementing that with his debut graphic novel Tails: Life in Progress which won Best Graphic Novel award at the 2007 Independent Publisher Book Awards.

It lives on as a webcomic, as does his other ongoing all-ages project A Piggy’s Tale: the Adventures of a 3-Legged Super-Pup (created and written by Tod Emko). His latest work however, is a far cry from those themes. Nanjing: the Burning City is a stunning and excoriating anti-war parable, detailing one incomprehensibly dark night of horror in a war most of the world has conveniently forgotten about.

Whilst many Japanese – such as Keiji Nakazawa (author of the astounding Barefoot Gen and a tireless anti-war campaigner for most of his life) – are fully prepared and able to acknowledge and “own” Japan’s horrific excesses throughout World War II (and the colonial expansion into China – noncommittally dubbed The Second Sino-Japanese War – which preceded it), far too many survivors of the original conflicts and, more disturbingly, modern apologists and revisionists find it easier and more comfortable to excuse, obfuscate or even deny Japan’s role.

Sadly, I suspect today’s China is just as keen to systematically refute the excesses of the Maoist years and beyond…

Every nation that’s fought a war has committed atrocities, but no country or government has the right to dodge shame or excise blame by conveniently rewriting history for expediency or political gain; not Britain, not the USA, not Russia and never, ever those barbaric “Axis Powers” who tormented mankind between 1933 and 1945.

Delivered in stark, stunning yet understated black-&-white in a sturdy hardback edition, Young’s tale reveals the callous brutality – without resorting to “us-and-them”, “good guys vs. bad guys” polemic, by simply focusing on one night and three very different military men caught up in the ghastly events.

The Second Sino-Japanese War began on July 7th 1937 when the aggressively expansionist Empire of Japan invaded Shanghai. The well-equipped force moved swiftly inland towards Nanking, capital of Kuomintang Generalissimo Chang Kai-Shek’s newly established Republic of China.

The unstoppably modernised Imperial army reached the city on December 12th whereupon Nanking’s military and civil leaders fled in panic, leaving hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiery and citizens to bear the brunt of a savage, bestial assault described by author Iris Chang as The Rape of Nanking.

The Republican officers didn’t even issue orders for the soldiers they abandoned to retreat…

Over the next six weeks more than 300,000 died in a campaign of organised torture and massacre. Uncountable numbers of women and children were raped and brutalised. Before the Japanese military chiefs surrendered in 1945, they had all records of the taking of Nanking destroyed. The never-to-be-properly-accounted dead are rightly known as the Forgotten Ones…

An event almost completely overlooked for decades by western – and Japanese – historians, the torment began with a night of appalling, unparallelled atrocity with Young concentrating his tale on the efforts of a nameless Captain and his sole surviving subordinate as they make their way through the shredded remnants of the metropolis. The betrayed, beaten warriors harbour a fanciful hope of sanctuary in the enclave occupied by European diplomats, businessmen, missionaries and their servants: the sacrosanct “Safety Zone” where white people go about their business largely untouched by strictly Asian “local politics”…

It’s only a few kilometres to salvation and the Zone indeed houses many sympathetic foreign souls who will risk their lives for humanitarian reasons, but to get to them the soldiers must avoid the hordes of prowling, drunken, blood-crazed conquerors and deny their own burning desire to strike back at the invaders – even if it costs their lives…

As they slowly scramble through the hellish ruins they are doggedly pursued by a Japanese colonel who apparently has no stomach for the gleeful bloody debaucheries of his soldiers but rather carries out his duties with a specialised zeal and for a different kind of reward…

Whilst the weary Kuomintang survivors make their way to the Safety Zone however a far more deadly hazard constantly arises: crushed, beaten, desperate fellow Chinese begging them to stop and help…

This is a gripping story with no happy ending and is supplemented by a large Sketchbook and Commentary section by Young, offering character, studies, developmental insights and rejected cover roughs, as well as a formidable Bibliography for further reading…

Nanjing: the Burning City is a beautiful, haunting book designed to make you angry and curious and in that it succeeds with staggering effect. It’s not intended as a history lesson but rather a signpost for the unaware, offering directions to further research and greater knowledge, if not understanding; a provocative lesson from history we should all see and learn from.
© 2015 Ethan Young. All rights reserved.

Hip Hop Family Tree Book 3: 1983-1984


By Ed Piskor (Fantagraphics)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-848-9

Another year gone and at long last another spectacularly barnstorming, award-winning comicstrip history lesson from proudly self-confessed Hip Hop Nerd and cyber-geek Ed Piskor is here, detailing more secrets about the world’s most explosive musical discipline.

In astounding detail and with a positively chillin’ attention to the art styles of the period, Piskor resumes his astoundingly engaging exploration of the rise of the rhyme-&-rhythm musical art form – all whilst paying equal attention to the symbiotic and parallel growth of graffiti and street art – with wit, charm and astonishing clarity.

Kicking off with a crucial ‘Rogues Gallery’ of the 80 movers and shakers involved, this latest blockbuster-sized volume begins in 1983 after Hip Hop at last makes the leap from local parks and parties to the club scene and onto vinyl. It also sees the street wisdom that Rap doesn’t work on albums finally disproved forever…

Of course now that the strange noise and weirdly evocative dance moves are a proven commodity, the establishment business sharks begin to circle the pioneering proponents and all their hundreds of hungry wannabe, would-be stars…

‘The Freaks Come Out at Night of the Living Bassheads’ closely studies that inexorable rise, following a few key behind-the scenes-personalities like in-at-the-start devotee Russell “Rush” Simmons, fanatical white-boy Rick Rubin and miracle-working Swiss opportunist Charlie Stettler whose tireless efforts are slowly eclipsed as the movement goes global, tracking the tenuous migration to television via shows such as Graffiti Rock and documentaries Style Wars and Breakin’ and Enterin’ until even whites Rock-only MTV finally capitulates …

Filled with feuds, mash-ups and team-ups of the new talents, highlighting Rubin and Simmons unification as Def Jam and focussing closely on British support from landmark books such as Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant’s Street Art, this titanic tome covers the start of the careers of Whodini, The Fat Boys, Slick Rick, LL Cool J and Doug E Fresh, sees The Beastie Boys adopt rap as their metier and follows Run DMC‘s unstoppable rise.

As always the technical and stylistic innovations, musical struggles and physical battles, management shenanigans and recording landmarks are all encyclopaedically yet engaging revealed as Piskor connects a bewildering number of strands and weaves them into the coolest of tapestries …

To Be Continued…

Produced in the tone and style of those halcyon, grimily urban times and manufactured to look just like an old Marvel Treasury Edition (a tabloid sized 334 x 234 mm -reprint format from the 1970s which offered classic tales on huge and mouth-wateringly enticing pulp-paper pages), this compelling confection also includes a copious and erudite ‘Bibliography’, ‘Reference’ and ‘Funky Index’, a fun-filled Author Bio and another blazing collection of ‘Pin Ups’ with spectacular images from guest illustrators including TLC by Natalie Andrewson, Biz Markie by Miss Lasko Gross, Kool Moe Dee by Jonny Negron, Kool DJ Red Alert by Toby Cypress, Blowfly by Johnny Ryan, Jay Z by Jim Rugg, Wu Tang Clan by Benjamin Marra, Mantronix by Dean Haspiel, Dr. Dre by Jenny Goldstick, MC Hammer by Robert Crumb and Digital Underground by Skottie Young to get your pulses racing, if not your toes tapping…

Informative and irresistible, Hip Hop Family Tree is wild fun and deliciously addictive – and only a year until the next one…
This edition © 2015 Fantagraphics Books. All Hip Hop comic strips by Ed Piskor © 2015 Ed Piskor. Pin ups and other material © 2015 their respective artists. All rights reserved.

Barefoot Gen volume 9: Breaking Down Borders


By Keiji Nakazawa (Last Gasp)
ISBN: 978-0-86719-600-9

I first found the Educomics magazine I Saw It! in 1982; initially seduced by a garish cover and the Chester Gould-like illustrations. There was precious little translated manga around then and the magazine was lumped in with the wild, wacky and often salaciously outrageous “Underground Comix” on the racks of my regular comics shop, across the road from Goldsmith’s College from where I had just graduated before starting as tea-boy on iconic Warrior magazine.

I was cocky, big-headed and, I thought, extremely well versed in all aspects of comics but still utterly gobsmacked after I read it…

In England we’ve had educational comics for decades, but this was something completely new to me. There was no tasteful distancing here; just an outraged scream of defiance and a direct plea to make things right. This was history and politics and it was deadly serious, not played for laughs or to make points as British cartooning traditionally did.

Constantly revised and refined by its creator and publishers around the world, I Saw It! became Barefoot Gen, and now the entire epic semi-autobiographical saga has being remastered as an unabridged and uncompromising 10-volume English-language translation by Last Gasp under the auspices of Project Gen, a multinational organisation dedicated to peace and the abolition of nuclear weapons.

Hadashi no Gen was first seen in Japan began in 1973, serialised in Shūkan Shōnen Jampu (Weekly Boys Jump) following an occasional 1972 series of stand-alone stories in various magazines which included Kuroi Ame ni Utarete (Struck by Black Rain) and Aru Hi Totsuzen, (One Day, Suddenly).

These eventually led Shonen’s editor Tadasu Nagano to commission the 45-page Ore wa Mita (I Saw It) for a Monthly Jump special devoted to autobiographical works. Nagano clearly recognised that the author – an actual survivor of the word’s first atomic atrocity – had much more to say which readers needed to see and commissioned the serial which has grown into this stunning landmark epic.

The tale was always controversial in a country which still often prefers to ignore rather than confront its mistakes and indiscretions and, after 18 months, Hadashi no Gen was removed from Jump, transferred first to Shimin (Citizen), then Bunka Hyōron (Cultural Criticism), and Kyōiku Hyōron (Educational Criticism).

Like his indomitable hero, Keiji Nakazawa never gave up and his persistence led to a first Japanese book collection in 1975, translated by the original Project Gen team into Russian, English and then other languages including Norwegian, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish, Finnish, Indonesian, Tagalog and Esperanto.

The author at long last completed his story in 1985 and his telling testament of survival has since been adapted into live-action and anime films, operas, musicals and live-action television dramas.

Undoubtedly mirroring Nakazawa’s own creative journey, this penultimate volume shares the moment it all changed for a hardy, forward-looking and indomitable idealist and individualist who finally found a way to express his anger and effectively fight back against the idiocies and injustices of a world which had let Atom bombs fall, and at last challenge those pedagogues and self-seekers who chose to keep the bad old ways alive even after their people suffered the most hideous of consequences…

Possibly the most inspirational volume of Keiji Nakazawa’s graphic masterpiece, Barefoot Gen: Breaking Down Barriers begins following ‘Some Thoughts About Keiji Nakazawa’ by Project Gen Editor Alan Gleason, who has been with the grand design since 1977 – practically from inception – and offers here telling insights and historical perspective. The other end of this monochrome paperback balances the essay with a biography of the author and invaluable data ‘About Project Gen’…

This stunning graphic manifesto resumes with an ancient history lesson as fearful peasants are told their precious rice paddies are to be destroyed by the local military in order to make a road for troop movements. As one bold serf dares to protest and suffers grievously for it, Gen awakes in the communal shack he and his friends cobbled together out of rubble and scavenged debris of Hiroshima. He shares it with other “bomb-orphans” and, until this morning, his last surviving family member.

Now however older brother Koji Nakaoka is moving out to get married, but at least rambunctious Ryuta and quietly stolid Musubi are staying put. The former reform school kids have become super-salesmen, selling dresses made by radiation-scarred outcasts Natsue and Katsuko on Hiroshima’s gradually restored and rebuilt street corners. The long-term goal is typically ambitious: the girls will sew and the boys will sell until they have saved enough money to open their own shop.

Today however Ryuta is in an excitable state. He’s the most devoted follower of the city’s woefully sub-par baseball team the Hiroshima Carp and is sharing his hopes and fears for the new season with any highly amused passer-by he can corral…

By the time the hapless sports fan returns to uncharacteristically gloomy Gen at the shack another crisis has arisen: a horde of military types are besieging the hovel intent on tearing it down to make way for a proposed “Peace Memorial City” and they don’t care that the kids have lived there for years and have nowhere else to go.

Gen and Ryuta’s vigorous, violent and initially successful “Dirty Protest” defence of their home is savage and disgusting but ultimately doomed to failure…

When the little war is finally lost Gen is painfully marked for life and carries another burden of stored anger, but at least ailing Natsue is not present to see the loss of their home. She is in the mountains, completing a ceramic urn to contain her ashes after she dies…

Gen has known her since the earliest aftermath of the bomb: a young dance student he twice saved from her own fatalistic intent, but recently she has been physically failing. Never quite recovering from appendix surgery, she is now convinced her remaining days are few and is preparing for the end…

Forcibly relocated to a tiny riverside shack, the disparate band gather to celebrate surviving another day, but when exhausted Natsue finally joins them and proudly shows off her beautiful funerary urn Gen “accidentally” shatters it. Next morning, increasingly furious Ryuta attacks his best friend for his clumsiness and apparent lack of remorse in upsetting Natsue and learns the true depth of Gen’s compassion. As their brutal clash accidentally envelopes and infuriates a haughty street fortune teller, Gen reveals he acted deliberately to shock Natsue out of her pervasive death-spiral, believing he can keep her alive by sheer anger. Eying the enraged seer screaming at them, he then concocts an even bolder plan to reinvigorate her vanished will to live…

When Ryuta later leads the entire gang past a heavily-bearded prognosticator-for-hire, the oracle predicts long life and a fabulous future for the fatally-depressed girl but can’t resist also having a hilarious pop at her mouthy Carp-loving companion. The session works splendidly however and Natsue agrees to return to hospital for doctors to treat her still unhealed surgical wounds. Sadly not even unflagging optimism and Gen’s guile can fix everything…

In the tragic aftermath fresh horror emerges as two pious gentlemen intrude upon the youngsters’ grief, offering to arrange a splendid funeral for Natsue. Gen however is not fooled and realises they are simply clever “Vultures” working for the Americans…

In occupied Japan news media was absolutely forbidden from discussing or reporting the effects of atom bombs and the populace had no knowledge of exactly what had happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Indeed, amidst the rubble of the destroyed cities, most of the 300,000 terrified, bewildered survivors had no idea what was happening to their bodies – or that they were not unique or even isolated cases – but were consoled by the seemingly-benign and tireless humanitarian efforts of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission.

These were officials employed by the US Occupation forces, tasked with acquiring – even often buying – bodies of recently deceased bomb survivors for scientists to examine. The bomb-makers were hungry for information on the after-effects of their hell-weapons and apparently did not see victims as human. They simply dissected bodies, harvested organs and collated facts: always hungry for more data. Gen had dealt with them before, when they stole the fresh corpse of his little sister Kimie…

The ABCC even pay for teams to go into schools to regularly examine the health of children, working to a hidden agenda aided by local Japanese doctors bribed to send everyone they could to the Americans. For each referral they were rewarded with fancy drugs, many sold for profit to the black market. No one with bomb-related symptoms was treated or cured; just tested and catalogued.

Now with the knowledge enflaming him, Gen responds with brutal violence, beating and driving off the Vultures before he and his friends steal Natsue’s body…

She had died on the 6-month anniversary of the beginning of the Korean War just as General Douglas MacArthur (Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers and de facto Emperor of Japan) convinced US President Truman to announce the deployment of atomic weapons for that conflict too. Thankfully, concerted global outcry convinced them to withdraw the threat…

In January 1951, Gen, Ryuta, Musubi and Katsuko are on a pilgrimage to inter their lost friend’s ashes above the city on Mount Hiji, but are thwarted by the discovery that the ABCC have built a vast complex on the once-beautiful site. After displaying their disdain in the approved scatological manner, the weary mourners decide to place the urn Gen worked so long and hard to reconstruct within the Nakaoka family grave, but as they trudge to the cemetery their precious cargo is stolen by a street urchin.

Giving ferocious chase they corner the little thief and administer the customary beating, leading to a confrontation with an old man who would change Gen’s life forever…

At first artist Seiga Amano cannot believe his grandson Tatsuro would stoop so low, but when he realises why the boy has turned to thievery, his proud heart almost breaks…

Eventually everybody calms down and Gen gives the old painter art materials he has stored ever since an old, dying man briefly stayed at their shack, sharing with the grateful painter the knowledge that his own father was also an artist before the bomb. Their riverside conversation inspires a life-changing aspiration within the lad that turns his life to a new path. Gen begs the elder to teach him everything he knows so that he can prove his new, all-consuming mantra “Art Has No Borders”…

The next lucky happenstance occurs when Gen stumbles onto a sign painter producing a cinema poster for a Kurosawa Double Feature. Toro Otsuki boasts he is the greatest exponent of his craft in Hiroshima, a claim brutally backed up by his thuggish assistant Kurosaki who foolishly attacks the loud-mouthed young gawker only to be soundly trounced for his temerity.

Sadly in the melee the painting is wrecked and honourable, guilt-struck Gen swears to make amends to the artist and his sadistic boss Nakao; an unrepentant former-soldier now bullying his way into civilian life…

When Seiga Amano and grandson Tatsuro pass by and see Gen enduring savage abuse in his attempts to atone, another fight begins and Otsuki breaks an arm, compelling Amano to step in and complete the poster. The rapidly-completed masterpiece instantly mollifies the militant Nakao who sees another business opportunity…

The constant stream the Boss provides is the making of Gen who serves as assistant and willing, eager student to Seiga, rapidly learning the basics of a discipline which will change his life.

As spring arrives more change is in the air. General MacArthur is summoned home and older conservative citizens begin to panic as their surrogate Emperor deserts them. Ryuta is typically scathing of the nervous old farts and isn’t there when a band of thugs target Gen, seeking to chop off his arm. The plucky little scrapper quickly ends their threat and knows jealous Kurosaki is behind the scheme, but after taking a measure of vengeance Gen surprises himself by getting to know his enemy and learning the horrific story of the abuse his fellow bomb orphan suffered at the hands of priests who were supposed to be protecting the lost children of Hiroshima…

With a deeper understanding but no real resolution to their stalled conflict, Gen returns to his diligent studies but his peace of mind will soon be shaken by the return of an old enemy…

Militaristic elements of Japan were deftly re-establishing themselves as the city grew again: attempting to whitewash their pasts for the New Japan. When ardent – and genuine – anti-war protestor Gen sees a poster announcing Denjiro Samejima, running for political office, claiming he opposed the war and was a “soldier for Peace”, Gen boils over at the villain’s hypocrisy and reacts with his usual earthy passion…

During the war that wily demagogue was a secret Black Marketeer who denounced Gen’s father – a genuine anti-war dissident – and led a hate-campaign that tormented the entire Nakaoka family. Now the rogue is profiting by stealing and feigning his beloved father’s ideals and dreams, just like so many other criminals who would deny history and the truth in search of self-advancement…

The scathing insights into the sordid character of political opportunists are potent reminders of why society never changes, reminiscent of George Orwell’s polemics, and by seemingly moving slightly off-message Nakazawa actually drives home his points with far greater force. Barefoot Gen is positively Reithian in its ability to Educate, Inform and Entertain and its legacy will be as pervasive and long-lasting…

And yet even at its most bleak and traumatic Keiji Nakazawa’s magnum opus never forgets to be funny, compelling and enjoyably Human. The broad cartoon style of Keiji Nakazawa’s art has often been the subject of heated discussion; the Disney-esque, simplified rendering felt by some to be at odds with the subject matter, and perhaps diluting the impact of the message. I’d like to categorically refute that.

Mister Nakazawa’s style springs from his earliest influence, Osamu Tezuka, Father of Animé and God of Manga who began his career in 1946 and whose works – Shin Takarajima (New Treasure Island), Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro Boy) and so many more – eased some of the grim realities of being a bomb survivor, providing escape, hope and even a career path to the young boy.

As such the clear line, solid black forms and abstracted visual motifs act as tolerable symbols for much of the horror in this parable. The art defuses, but never dilutes, the terrible facts and scenes of the tragedy and its aftermath. The reader has to be brought through the tale to receive the message and for that purpose the drawings are accurate, simplified and effective. The intent is not to repel (and to be honest, even as they are they’re still pretty hard to take) but to inform, to warn.

So now you’ve been warned, buy this series. Better yet, agitate your local library to get a few sets in as well. Barefoot Gen is a world classic and should be available to absolutely everyone…
© 2009 Keiji Nakazawa. All rights reserved.