By Ken Macklin with Raymond E. Feist, Toren Smith, Lela Dowling, LX Ltd & various (Eclipse Books)
ISBN: 978-0-91303-585-6 (album PB)
There’s a new time-travelling doctor about to debut. It’s not this one…
Before becoming a successful games artist for LucasArts graphic adventure games (I don’t actually grok push-button fun but I gather that Maniac Mansion, Loom, the second and third Monkey Island confoundations and the character Bubsy the bobcat number among his digital hits), Ken Macklin started as an underground/small press creator who delighted in cleverly whimsical and witty funny animal strips during the late 1970s in indie publications like Quack! He also made wonderful trading cards and box cover art. You may still have some in your person-cave…
Married to equally talented anthropomorphic raconteur Lela Dowling, he assisted and contributed to her marvellously manic Weasel Patrol tales, which were published in the lost and long-lamented sci-fi anthology Fusion whilst producing his own diabolically wonderful one-shot space opera romp Contractors and the stimulating vignettes from lost history gathered here. As well as a talented designer and illustrator Macklin is a gifted painter and slyly devious writer. In 1982 he began selling brief, luxurious mini-epics starring an astonishingly brilliant but outrageous innocent multi-discipline savant named Dr. Watchstop to Epic Illustrated and Fusion: high quality graphic fantasy magazines aimed at older readers. In an era where science fiction was synonymous with and indistinguishable from cops and cowboys with honking great space-blasters, Watchstop’s antics were contemplative, sillily slapstick, wickedly ironic: eyes wide-open wonderments that only saw the ridiculous side of technology and the future cosmos…
Still available if you look really hard, this album-proportioned compilation gathers all those marvellously intellectual, winningly funny spoofs and japes, opening in glorious painted colour with ‘Dr. Watchstop Faces the Future’ (Epic #10 February 1982), possibly the last word in time paradox tales. It’s followed by amoebic dalliance ‘One Cell at a Time’ before demonstrating the downside of ancient alien artifacts in ‘Time Bomb’ (Epic #14 and #17 respectively). If possible, Macklin’s art is even better as monochrome tone-washes, as perfectly illustrated in the EVA Suit-wettingly hilarious ‘Unique Specimen’ (Fusion #1, January 1987), life-through-a-lens fable ‘Modern Culture’ (Fusion #3) and natural history segments ‘Right Stuff’ (Fusion #7) and ‘Bugs’ (Fusion #5). ‘Relic’ (Fusion #2) is pure Future Shock whilst full-colour ‘The Single Electron Proof’ from Epic #21 (September 1983, and with the timely assistance of Toren Smith) will stretch the higher mathematics prodigies amongst us with a little metaphysical tomfoolery…
Epic #29 provided a first home for ‘In Search of Ancient Myths’, as #33 did for both ‘Reaching Out’ and ‘Beating the Heat’, whilst the last colour cosmic conundrum ‘Wasting Time’ launched in #34. The remainder of this must-have, can’t-get collection features more black & white antics from Fusion, beginning with the vaudevillian ‘Gone Fishing’ (#4), prior to moving adroitly into ‘Xlerg’s Fossil Emporium’ (#8) and anarchically culminating in a riotous Weasel Patrol collaboration enigmatically entitled ‘The Weasels Fill In’ from Fusion #9 (May 1988)…
Sheer artistic ability and incisive comedy for smart people is never going to be out of style and this stellar compilation will be a constant joy for any fan smart enough to unearth it as long as some bright better-evolved spark publishes it…
© 1989 Ken Macklin, and where appropriate Raymond E. Feist, Toren Smith, Lela Dowling and LX Ltd. All rights reserved.