Author: Now Read This

By Terry Pratchett & Graham Higgins (VG Graphics/Gollancz)
ISBN: 0-575-05699-1

Us old codgers have always maintained that a good comic needs a good artist and this superb adaptation of Terry Pratchett’s fourth Discworld novel proves that point. The Discworld is a flat planet supported on the backs of four elephants standing on the back of a giant turtle swimming across the universe. Magic works there and the people are much too much like us. This, of course, makes it an ideal location for spleen-venting, satire, slapstick and social commentary…

Scripted by the author and brilliantly illustrated by Graham Higgins it tells a complex and darkly witty tale of Death (big grim chap, carries a scythe) and the hapless, literal-minded, sort-of-useless young goof Mort, whom he hires as his apprentice.

Of course that’s not all there is to it, with sub-plots including an orphaned princess and her dangerously ambitious guardian, Death’s vacation, the daughter he adopted and the mystery of his most peculiar servant Albert to season a very impressive spin on a very familiar myth.

Higgin’s light, dry touch adds volumes of texture to the mix and the leaden slavishness of the first graphic adaptation (The Colour of Magic – ISBN: 0-552-13945-9) is utterly forgotten in a superb mix of Pratchett’s acerbic dialogue and the artist’s deft sense of timing and comedy pacing, which is most reminiscent of Hunt Emerson.

If you have to have adaptations of great novels this is how it should be done.

Text © 1994 Terry and Lyn Pratchett. Illustrations © 1994 Graham Higgins. All Rights

By Noel Sickles (Nostalgia Press)
ISBN: 0-87897-029-0

Noel Sickles had a very short and barely acknowledged career as a newspaper cartoonist. He worked as a jobbing illustrator in the features department of the Associated Press – an organisation that provided cheap high-quality filler material such as cartoons, ads, comic strips, recipes, horoscopes, puzzles: All the pages that local newspapers needed but couldn’t afford to produce themselves.

In 1934 he took over the inexplicably popular aviation strip Scorchy Smith from John Terry, who had contracted a terminal illness. The publisher’s required him to emulate Terry’s style, which he did until the artist’s death, when he was invited to make the strip his own. A driven experimenter, he replaced the scratchy cross-hatched and feathered method of Terry with a moody impressionism that used volume, solid blacks and a careful manipulation of light sources to tell his tales. He also made backgrounds and scenery an integral part of the story-telling process.

A very straight adventure series, Smith is a stout hearted, valiant Knight of the Skies, complete with trusty sidekick, ‘Heinie’, flying about and Doing Good. That’s it.

Sickles famously never worked to a plan when writing the strip, he just made it up as he went along to avoid boring himself. (For an extended exploration of his process read R C Harvey’s Meanwhile… a superb biography of Sickles’s friend and studio-mate Milton Caniff published by Fantagraphics Books ISBN: 978-1-56097-782-7).

Stories abound that the two collaborated often. Certainly Caniff admitted to helping out with deadlines and story-polishing but the bold visuals were always the product of a driven and dedicated seeker of artistic truths. The Chiaroscurist style developed by Sickles was adopted by Caniff, although he largely eschewed the lavish use of photo-mechanical dot-screens that Sickles used to create a different flavour of Black in his monochrome masterpieces.

Reprinted in this slim tome are three of the thrillers from that brief period. ‘Lafarge’s Gold’ (10th October 1935-January 30th 1936), ‘New York, N. Y.’ (January 31st 1936-March 18th 1936) and ‘Desert Escape’ (March 19th 1936- August 14th 1936) come from the very end of Sickles’s strip career, with a pretty girl swindled out of a goldmine, big-city conmen, and Tuaregs and the Foreign Legion providing the admittedly lacklustre narrative maguffins. But the bravura vivacity and artistic flair employed by Sickles to tell the tales elevate these B-Movie plots into breathtaking high art drama by the sheer magnificence of the drawing and design.

Noel Sickles left the restricted and drudge-work world of newspaper strips in 1936 for the greater challenge of higher education and eventually settled into the more appreciative and challenging magazine illustration field, making new fans in the Saturday Evening Post, Life and Readers Digest. His few months in narrative story-telling changed our entire industry, not so much with what he did but by the way he did it and who he shared his discoveries with. He is an unsung immortal, and his brief output deserves a commemorative, retrospective collection more than any other creator that I can think of. Until then lost gems like this will have to suffice.

© 1936 The A. P.

By Wostok & Grabowski, translation edited by Chris Watson (Slab-O-Concrete)
ISBN: -1-899866-10-9

In the last decade of the last century independent, alternative and international cartooning really took off in the UK. It’s not that it suddenly got good, it’s simply that due to the efforts of a few dedicated missionaries the rest of the country finally noticed what Europe had known for years. Graphic narrative is as much about the art and the individual as it is about the money.

A superb case in point is this slim and eccentric tome produced in English by that much-missed Slab-O-Concrete outfit. Daddy is So Far Away… is the surreal and absorbing account of two-year old Poposhak and her faithful dog Flowers. The sad little lass stands at her mother’s grave and wonders where her father is. She sees the tip of his beard sticking out of the front door and rushes towards it despite wise Flowers’ words of caution.

She will not stop, but follows the beard, through rooms, down tunnels, across plains, under oceans and even across the Milky Way itself, finding friends and escaping monsters throughout time and space. Always that long white beard unfurls ahead of them, an enigma and a promise…

An eerie yet comforting blend of fable, bedtime story, shaggy dog tale, and vision-quest, this is a compulsive and brilliantly drawn epic more rollercoaster than narrative and encompassing the very best storytelling techniques of Eastern European animation.

Wostok and Grabowski, from the north Serbian town of VrÅ¡ac have worked together since 1992; both in the incredibly fertile Eastern European market but also internationally, and as is usually the case are criminally unfamiliar to the average comic punter. I hope you can find their work without too much trouble, because it’s well worth the effort.

© 1995-1998 Wostok, Lola & Grabowski. All Rights Reserved.

By Mike Grell (DC Comics)
ISBN: 1-56389-024-0

During the troubled 1970s the American comics industry suffered one of its periodic downturns and publishers cast about for other genres to bolster the flagging sales of superhero comics. By revising their self-imposed industry code of practice (administered by the Comics Code Authority) to allow supernatural and horror comics, the publishers tapped into the global revival of interest in spiritualism and the supernatural, and as a by-product opened their doors to Sword-and-Sorcery as a viable genre, with Roy Thomas and Barry Smith’s adaptation of R. E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian an early exemplar.

DC launched a host of titles into that budding market but although individually interesting (especially the fascinating Stalker, illustrated by Steve Ditko and Wally Wood) nothing seemed to catch the public’s eye until number #8 of the try-out title First Issue Special.

In that comic superhero artist Mike Grell launched his pastiche and tribute to Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Pellucidar – At the Earth’s Core, which after a rather shaky start went on to become, for a time, DC’s most popular title.

In 1969 Colonel Travis Morgan, a U2 spy-pilot is shot down whilst filming a secret Soviet base, although he manages to fly his plane over the North Pole before ditching. Expecting to land on frozen Tundra or pack-ice he finds himself inside the Earth, in a lush tropical Jungle populated by creatures from every era of history and many that never made it into the science books. There are also cavemen, savages, mythical beasts, barbaric kingdoms and fabulous women.

Time does not seem to exist in this Savage Paradise and as Grell’s stated goal was to produce a perfect environment for yarn-spinning, not a science project, the picky pedant would be well advised to stay away. These are pure escapist tales of action and adventure, light on plot and angst but aggressively and enthusiastically jam-packed with fun and thrills. There is a basic plot-thread to hang the stories on, but you’ll thank me for not sharing it as the real joy of these tales (reprinting that try-out and issues #1-10 and #12) is in the reading. This is a total-immersion comic experience to be felt, not considered. Go for it!

© 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1991 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.