Author: NowReadThis

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Marvel Graphic Novel vol 18: The Sensational She-Hulk


By John Byrne, Kim DeMulder, Petra Scotese, Janice Chiang & various (Marvel)
ISBN10: 0-87135-084-X (Album TPB/Digital edition)

A persistent story goes that in the faraway days when trademarks and copyrights were really, really important, comic publishers worried that rivals would be able to impinge on their sales an so produced distaff versions of their characters. Thus the House of Ideas launched Ms. Marvel, so that nobody else could.

Redundant bit player Carol Danvers was retooled as a superhero (now called Captain Marvel whilst Pakistani-American teen Kamala Khan has inherited her first codename). The Captain debuted in her own title (cover-dated January 1977) and was soon joined by rush-released Spider-Woman (in Marvel Spotlight #32 ,February 1977 – before securing her own title 15 months later) and She-Hulk. There was apparently a second and most specific reason…

At this time both the male Hulk and Spider-Man had successfully made the jump to live-action television, and the publishing powers were terrified because their licensing contracts had a potentially disastrous loophole: there was nothing to prevent those scurrilous TV types spinning off their own (sexy, televisual, not-owned-by-Marvel) characters, as had almost happened with Batgirl in the 1960s “Batmania” era…

To be fair, Marvel had been constantly seeking to expand their female character pool for years before intellectual property necessity forged a path for them. They found the right mix as the Seventies closed, and even added new concept stars at the right time. The music-biz-inspired and sponsored Dazzler premiered in February 1980’s Uncanny X-Men #130 – before getting her own title: the same month copyright-shielding Savage She-Hulk #1 came out…

Whereas that seems a bit convoluted and may be rather hard to believe, I must admit that the original 25-issue run of Bruce Banner’s tragedy-magnet cousin Jennifer Walters was by no means the company’s finest moment. Creators struggled for quite a while to get a handle on the Girly Green Goliath. After her series was cancelled, She-Hulk did the guest-star thing and served with distinction in both The Avengers and Fantastic Four, before John Byrne finally developed a suitably original niche and spin for her in the Marvel Universe.

Since then, constant experimentation and deft handling has made her one of Marvel’s most readable properties – and most entertaining screen stars – but that revolution all started with this thoroughly enjoyable, if clearly transitional tome…

At the time of its creation, the lady lawyer had replaced The Thing in the Fantastic Four and could change between her human and Gamma-enhanced forms at will, whilst retaining her intellect in both forms. All the fourth-world hi-jinks of her second comics series and television incarnation was yet to come…

Against the slow-building, horror-story backdrop of a sentient cockroach invasion and infiltration, the story involves the shady higher-ups who oversee high-tech espionage agency S.H.I.E.L.D. ordering the rendition of She-Hulk for unspecified “National Security” purposes. When tough but fair Nick Fury refuses to comply, the mission goes ahead without him, leading to a major battle in the streets of New York and the eventual capture of not only our heroine but also a large number of passers-by.

Trapped aboard the spooks’ flying helicarrier, She-Hulk is subjected to numerous indignities and abuses whilst her boyfriend Wyatt Wingfoot and the other civilians are treated as hostages for her good behaviour. Unfortunately, one of those ordinary mortals is a zombie vehicle for those cockroaches I mentioned earlier, and they want to drop the floating fortress on the city below as a declaration of war against humanity…

Inked by Kim DeMulder -with colours by Petra Scotese & lettering from Janice Chiang – Byrne’s writing and illustration deliver spectacular action, tinged with horror yarn overtones. The art deftly utilises the (European-style) expanded-page format of Marvel’s Original Graphic Novel line, and combines with sharp scripting to elevate an old plot to new heights. I personally find the coy prurience of some of the semi-nude scenes a little juvenile, but that’s not enough to spoil the fun in a what’s otherwise a highly effective disaster thriller: one which set the tone of She-Hulk adventures for years thereafter…
© 1985, 2018 Marvel Characters Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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Primer

By Jennifer Muro & Thomas Krajewski, illustrated by Gretel Lusky (DC Comics)

ISBN: 978-1-4012-9657-5 (TPB/Digital edition)

In recent years DC opened up its interlinked superhero multiverse to generate Original Graphic Novels featuring its stars and new characters in stand-alone(ish) adventures for the demographic clumsily dubbed Young Adult.

They’ve been especially scrupulous producing material catering to girls and other previously neglected comics minorities, and to date results have been rather hit or miss. However, when they’re good, they are very good indeed. One such triumph is Primer, which taps into the communal history and mystique of the DCU to introduce a sparkling new character who encapsulates every aspect of youthful rebellion channelled into doing good in the traditional cape and cowl manner…

Written by animation scripters Jennifer Muro (Critical Role: The Legend of Vox Machina; Spider-Man; Star Wars: Forces of Destiny; Justice League Action; Lego DC Super Hero Girls) & Thomas Krajewski (Buddy Thunderstruck; Fairly OddParents; Scooby-Doo and Guess Who?; Penguins of Madagascar; Looney Tunes; Iron Man; Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) this origin adventure crackles with pace and thrills whilst basking in superbly effective dialogue and sharp one-liners.

Making the pictures sparkle and shine is 2-D visual developer, animation/games character designer and jobbing illustrator Gretel Lusky. Primer is her first comics project and augurs a long and fruitful career ahead as the artist seems able to effortlessly mix drama, pathos, spectacular action and sheer glee for maximum impact.

Lettered throughout by Wes Abbott, the wonderment first unfolds in ‘Primary Colors’ as a crashing airliner is plucked from the sky over Washington DC. Suddenly, everyone is saved by what appears to be a paint-spattered, super-powered thirteen year old girl…

Flashing back three weeks, we meet troubled Ashley Rayburn, who – after another bout of nightmares about her dad – escapes from the State group home to go tagging walls with her personal brand of street art. The cops who arrest and return her are pretty sympathetic – for cops. They realise it must be tough having a major crook for a father… even if he is currently in jail.

Ashley is basically a good kid acting out, and home supervisor Mrs. Boyd is trying her best to be understanding, but after regular graffiti incidents with cops involved, and being swiftly returned by five sets of prospective foster parents, the child is becoming a real problem with diminishing chances of a normal life…

If Ash doesn’t gel with latest prospects Mr & Mrs Nolan, she might be stuck in the system for her entire teen years. Thankfully, these adults are pretty cool. Kitch is a laid back art teacher with a wicked sense of fun/mischief, whilst his partner Yuka is a brilliant scientist: a geneticist who’s as obsessed with football as Ashley is.

Within a week, they’re all happily settling in together …so that’s when things start going wrong after the kid inadvertently overhears her new mom fretting about having made a mistake that will ruin their lives…

When there’s an accident in the kitchen, Ash overreacts and relapses into old behaviours: running away to paint walls again. This time, Kitch follows and they bond over her unleashed creativity. Soon he’s giving her art lessons and inviting her to share his studio. The first class is how to use brushes and canvas like she uses spray cans and other people’s walls…

Everything seems cool at home too now, but they don’t know what Yuka has done and can’t imagine how their lives are going to change…

Answers come as Ashley starts Middle School in ‘No Paint, No Gain’, but her resolution to make no new enemies only lasts until she stops bullies picking on a little kid. At least Luke – who’s being harassed for being small and a future star hairstylist – is now her ally against the rest of the jocks and jerks…

What Yuka’s actually fretting over is revealed as her employers Zecromax Labs are occupied by a client – the US Army in the forms of Major General Temple and his extremely menacing assistant Cal Strack. The science facility had been undertaking Project Warpaint for them, before Dr. Nolan secretly destroyed all the files and removed the only samples of their experiments.

These are gel solutions enhanced with the DNA of superheroes and villains. They look like body paints and can temporarily endow specific powers – 33 different ones – in whoever absorbs them through skin contact.

By the time the warmongers come to claim them, Yuka has acted for the good of humanity and – she thought – completely covered her tracks…

Sadly, she’s new to parenting and doesn’t realise that acting suspicious and conspicuously hiding a flashy briefcase is the best way to get a teenager about to celebrate a birthday to poke around where she shouldn’t. Before long, Ash and Luke have uncovered the paint tubes and are playing with borrowed superpowers…

From there on, things get exponentially complicated pretty quickly, as the military mavericks hunt their missing miracle weapon, even as Ashley’s real dad reaches out from the maximum security penitentiary he’s locked in to play his old mind games and remind her that deep down she’s just like he is. The pressured girl reacts by creating her own new alter ego and fighting super-criminals (albeit not particularly effective ones) on the streets of DC in ‘Red, White, and Bruised’.

Restricting the personal crusade of “Primer” because she’s afraid of being caught by Yuka, Ashley has no idea Temple and Strack are hunting the mystery thieves of Project Warpaint, and already on the Nolan’s trail, though the Major General has no idea that his deputy – and personal guinea pig – has his own ambitions involving the superpower supply…

The flashback reaches real time as Ashley finally rejects her dad’s mind games to save the falling plane and go public. Unfortunately, her televised debut enables a lot of people to recognise her and leads to the Nolans’ abduction by Strack and a gaudy gladiatorial clash as the power-crazed maniac attempts to capture all the paints and discovers, to his shock, Primer’s ‘True Colors’…

Even with the drama satisfactorily concluded, there’s an added inducement: an introductory section from Grace Ellis & Brittney Williams’ DC OGN Lois Lane and the Friendship Challenge offering a light and airy sneak peek at the formative years of the ace reporter and another splendidly welcome tale aimed at inspiring younger female readers.

A fabulously gripping tale about origins, exploring the process of finding yourself and being your best, smartly cloaked in the bombastic trappings of costumed heroics, and the search for belonging and taking control of your life, Primer is a compelling romp to warm the heart, stir the pulse and light up your life. Sequel ASAP and series soon, Please!

© 2020 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

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Clifton volume 8: Sir Jason


By De Groot & Turk, translated by Mark Bence (Cinebook)
ISBN: 978-1-84918-407-6 (Album PB/digital edition)

For some inexplicable reason and despite our recent obnoxiously ungrateful behaviour, most of Europe’s comics cognoscenti – most especially French and Belgians – seem fascinated with us Brits. Maybe it’s our shared heritage of Empires lost and cultures in transition? An earlier age might well have claimed it’s simply a case of “Know your Enemy”…

Whether we look at urban guttersnipes Basil and Victoria, indomitable adventurers Blake and Mortimer, the Machiavellian machinations of Green Manor or even the further travails of Long John Silver, so many serried stalwarts of our Scepter’d Isles cut a dashing swathe through the pages of the Continent’s assorted magazines and albums, it’s like Europe is our second home.

…And then there’s Clifton…

As originally devised for iconic comic Le Journal de Tintin by strip genius Raymond Macherot (Chaminou, Les croquillards, Chlorophylle, Sibylline), this doughty True Brit troubleshooter first appeared in December 1959. After three albums worth of material – compiled and released in 1959 and 1960 – Macherot quit Tintin for arch-rival Le Journal de Spirou, leaving the eccentric crime-fighter to flounder until LJdT revived him at the height of the Swinging London scene. This was courtesy of Jo-El Azaza & Greg (Michel Régnier), and those strips were subsequently collected as Les lutins diaboliques in French and De duivelse dwergen for Dutch-speakers in 1969.

It was back to retirement for a few years until the early 1970s saw writer Bob De Groot & artist Philippe “Turk” Liégeois revive Clifton for the long haul: producing 10 tales of which this – Sir Jason (from 1976) – was their seventh collaboration.

Son of a cabinet maker, Turk was born in Durbuy, Belgium on July 8th 1947. His wonderful mother ran a boarding house and didn’t seem to mind that her dreamy, lazy lad spent his days taking things apart or redrawing (“improving”) his favourite comics – usually ones by Peyo and Franquin.

In fact, in 1963, when Phillipe was just 16, she sent a bunch of those upgrades to Le Journal de Spirou where editor Yvan Delporte promptly arranged for the kid to become an office apprentice, learning the profession under celebrated cartoonist Maurice Rosy (Jerry Spring; Spirou et Fantasio; Tif et Tondu; Max the Explorer; Boule et Bill/Billy & Buddy).

Young Liégeois worked for two years at Dupuis’ Brussels studio, and his first professional sale – to LJdS – came in 1967. It was the year he first met Bob De Groot as they collaborated as artists on a strip scripted by “Fred” (AKA Frédéric Othon Théodore Aristidès) to appear in Pilote. The casual alliance became a life-long association in such series as Archimède; Robin Dubois; Léonard and more. The price of success is increased workload and they were convinced to add Macherot’s moribund spy saga to their schedules…

Those comic escapades all ran in parallel with Turk’s other projects such as Les Club des “Peur-de-rien”; La Plus Grande Image du Monde; Docteur Bonheur and more.

Bob de Groot was born in Brussels in 1941, to French and Dutch parents. He was art assistant to Maurice Tillieux on Félix before creating his own short works for Pilote. A rising star in the 1960s, he was drawing 4 × 8 = 32 L’Agent Caméléon when he met Philippe Liégeois. They hit it off and as established a team with De Groot beginning a slow transition from artist to writer on Clifton and 1989’s Digitaline – devised with Jacques Landrain and a strong contender for the first comic created entirely on a computer. He kept busy, working with legendary creator Morris on both Lucky Luke and its canine comedy spin-off Rantanplan whilst co-creating Des villes et des femmes with Philippe Francq; Doggyguard with Michel Rodrigue, Pére Noël & Fils (Bercovici art) and Le Bar des acariens (with Godi) and so much more.

The association with Clifton is perennial however and even after their first tour of duty ended they stayed in touch. From 1984 on, artist Bernard Dumont – AKA Bédu – limned De Groot’s scripts: eventually assuming the writing role as well, persevering until the series ended in 1995. In keeping with its rather haphazard nature and typically undying nature, the Clifton experience resumed once again in 2003, crafted by De Groot & Rodrigue for four further adventures: a grand total of twenty album length tales and as many shorter exploits.

In 2016 the old comrades even co-operated on more Clifton cases with Zidrou scripting…. and one day we’ll see English editions of Clifton et les gauchers contraries (Clifton and the Upset Left-Handers???) and 2017’s Just Married…

So what’s the Sit Rep?

The scenario is deliciously simple: pompous and irascible Colonel Sir Harold Wilberforce Clifton, ex-RAF, former Metropolitan Police Constabulary and recently retired from MI5, has a great deal of difficulty dealing with being put out to pasture in rurally bucolic Puddington. He thus takes every opportunity to get back in the saddle, occasionally assisting the Government or needy individuals as an amateur sleuth.

Sadly for Clifton – as with that other underappreciated national treasure Captain George Mainwaring in TV landmark Dad’s Army – he is convinced that he is the only truly competent man in a world full of blithering idiots. Of course, he’s generally proved correct in that assumption…

In this translated album from 2018, the Gentleman Detective is again enduring the mixed blessing of a holiday in England when he is outrageously dragged out of his permanent dudgeon and unwanted retirement by his old spymaster handlers who need him to attend to a tricky problem only someone of his vast experience and discretion could handle…

It begins in the sleepy hamlet of Dormhouse, where the vacationing surly sod livens up his day by furiously debating the correct surface temperature of toast, annoying village “bobby” Constable Walrus and failing to fish in idyllic streams. That changes in an absurdly fraught instant when old associate Captain Twincam ambushes him…

The government operative is in a bit of a pickle and needs the old Clifton finesse…

Twincam’s partner is Sir Jason: a strapping Adonis of a young man with generations of pedigree and privilege behind him. His family – the highly-entitled clan Macassock -have always produced sons who became spies or clergymen, and despite this lad’s heartfelt desire to be a jazz musician, he will do his duty and follow family tradition…

The minor noble has finished training and is – on paper at least – a superbly-schooled, hyper-fit, lethally capable super-agent in waiting. There’s only one small snag: this aristocratic boy wonder freezes at the merest hint of actual action…

With the future of the whole hidebound spycraft system under threat, the Secret Service need someone to teach the lad how to use what he knows for the good of the nation. No expense spared, carte blanche in methods used and the promise of some much-missed excitement finally induce old warhorse Clifton to agree, and no sooner does he accept the mission than fate smiles on them as mentor and apprentice stumble into an armed robbery and indulge in a spectacular high speed chase through the verdant countryside…

It’s an utter disaster and the Colonel realises he has his work cut out for him if he’s to unleash the tiger buried deep, deep, deep inside the spy scion…

After a short stopover in his own house in bucolic Puddington  and a fractious reunion with Housekeeper Miss Partridge, it’s off to London for Clifton and his protégé. Unbeknownst to Sir Jason (as most things seem to be), the wily old spy has hired some of his seedier acquaintances to jump the lad as a kind of live fire test. Confidant that in the crunch, superb training, heroic heritage and elevated lineage will kick in, the old soldier lets himself get beaten up and witnesses some truly shameful acts of cowardice before giving up…

They are down by the Embankment cleaning up when Clifton sees two frogmen riding a minisub emerge from the waters. He knows true evil in play when he sees it but is barely able to stop these really capable villains killing them both to keep whatever they’re up to secret…

Now mentor and terrified apprentice are on the run with relentless, ruthless hunters chasing them all over the landscape. Jason gains plenty of on-the-job experience but no appreciable increase in confidence, gumption or backbone. Cut off from all possible assistance, the veteran warrior has no choice but to go after the killers’ boss himself, using his partner’s failings to his advantage and hoping they all make it out alive and relatively unscathed…

Visually spoofing 1970’s London and eternally staid and stuffy English Manners with wicked effect, these comfy thrillers are big on laughs but also pack loads of consequence-free action into their eclectic mix. Delightfully surreal, instantly accessible and doused with daft slapstick in the manner of Jacques Tati and humoresque intrigue like Margaret Rutherford as Miss Marple, this wild ride rattles along in the grand comedic manner of Will Hay, Terry-Thomas and Alistair Sim (maybe Wallace and Gromit or Johnny English if you’re of a later generation) by channelling classic crime series like The Sweeney or The Professionals – offering splendid fun and timeless laughs for all.
Original edition © Les Editions du Lombard (Dargaud-Lombard S. A.) 2001 by Turk & De Groot. English translation © 2018 Cinebook Ltd.

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Warlock Marvel Masterworks volume 1


By Roy Thomas, Mike Friedrich, Gerry Conway, Ron Goulart, Tony Isabella, Gil Kane, Bob Brown, Herb Trimpe, John Buscema, Tom Sutton & various (Marvel)
ISBN: 978-0-7851-2411-5 (HB) 978-0-7851-8858-2 (TPB/Digital edition)

During the 1970s in America and Britain (the latter of which deemed newspaper cartoons and strips worthy of adult appreciation for centuries whilst fervently denying similar appreciation and potential for comics), the first inklings of wider public respect for the medium of graphic narratives began to blossom. This followed teen response to such pioneering series as Stan Lee & John Buscema’s biblically allegorical Silver Surfer and Roy Thomas’ ecologically strident antihero Sub-Mariner, a procession of thoughtfully-delivered attacks on drugs in many titles and constant use of positive racial role models everywhere on four-colour pages.

Comics were inexorably developing into a vibrant forum of debate (a situation also seen in Europe and Japan), engaging youngsters in real world issues relevant to them. As 1972 dawned, Thomas took the next logical step, transubstantiating an old Lee & Jack Kirby Fantastic Four throwaway foe into a potent political and religious metaphor.

Debuting in FF #66 (September 1967) dread mystery menace Him was re-imagined by Thomas and Gil Kane as a modern interpretation of the Christ myth: stationed on an alternate Earth far more like our own than that of Marvel’s unique universe.

Re-presenting Marvel Premiere #1-2, Warlock #1-8 and Incredible Hulk #176-178 – collectively spanning the tumultuous time between April 1972 and August 1974, this epic adventure also offers a context-soaked Introduction from originator Thomas.

It all began with April cover-dated Marvel Premiere #1, which boldly proclaimed on its cover The Power of… Warlock. Inside, the stunning fable – by Thomas, Kane & Dan Adkins – declared ‘And Men Shall Call Him… Warlock’: swiftly recapitulating the artificial man’s origins as a lab experiment concocted by rogue geneticists eager to create a superman they could control for conquest.

After facing the Fantastic Four, the manufactured man had subsequently escaped to the stars, later initiating a naive clash with Asgardian Thor over the rights to a mate before returning to an all-encompassing cosmic cocoon to evolve a little more…

Now the all-encompassing shell is plucked from the interplanetary void thanks to the moon-sized ship of self-created god The High Evolutionary. Having artificially ascended to godhood, he is wrapped up in a bold new experiment…

Establishing contact with Him as he basks in his cocoon, the Evolutionary explains that he is constructing from space rubble a duplicate planet Earth on the opposite side of the sun. Here he replays the development of life, intending that humanity on Counter Earth will evolve without the taint of cruelty and greed and deprived of the lust to kill…

It’s a magnificent scheme that might well have worked, but as the Evolutionary wearies, his greatest mistake intervenes. The Man-Beast was hyper-evolved from a wolf and gained mighty powers, but also ferocious savagery and ruthless wickedness. Now he invades the satellite, despoiling humanity’s rise and ensuring the new world’s development exactly mirror’s True-Earth’s. The only exception is the meticulous exclusion of enhanced individuals. This beleaguered planet has all mankind’s woes but no superheroes to save or inspire them.

A helpless witness to the desecration, the golden being furiously crashes free of his cocoon to save the High Evolutionary and rout the Man-Beast and his bestial cronies (all similarly evolved animal-humanoids called “New-Men”).

When the despondent and enraged science god recovers, he makes to erase his failed experiment but is stopped by his rescuer. As a powerless observer, Him saw the potential and value of embattled humanity. Despite all its flaws, he believes he can save them from the imminent doom caused by their own unthinking actions, wars and intolerance. His pleas at last convince the Evolutionary to give this mankind one last chance, and the wanderer is hurled down to Counter-Earth, equipped with a strange gem to focus his powers, a mission to find the best in the fallen and a name of his own… Adam Warlock…

Marvel Premiere #2 (July) sees the golden man-god crash to Earth in America and immediately win over a small group of disciples: a quartet of disenchanted teen runaways fleeing The Man, The Establishment and their oppressive families. His nativity and transformation leave him briefly amnesiac, and as Warlock’s followers seek to help, all are unaware that Man-Beast has moved quickly, insinuating himself and his bestial servants into the USA’s political hierarchy and Military/Industrial complex.

This devil knows the High Evolutionary is watching and breaks cover to introduce unnatural forces on a world previously devoid of superbeings and aliens. The result is an all-out attack by rat mutate Rhodan, who pounces on his prey at the very moment Colonel Barney Roberts, uber-capitalist Josiah Grey and Senator Nathan Carter track their missing kids to the desolate Southern Californian farm where they have been nursing the golden angel…

Men of power and influence, they realise their world has changed forever after seeing Warlock destroy the monstrous beast and ‘The Hounds of Helios!’

Doctor Strange was revived to fill the space in MP #3, as the gleaming saviour catapulted into his own August cover-dated title. Inked by Tom Sutton, Warlock #1 decreed ‘The Day of the Prophet!’: recapping key events and seeing the High Evolutionary safeguard his failing project by masking Counter-Earth from the rest of the solar system behind a vibratory screen.

With his mistake securely isolated from further contamination, HE asks Adam if he’s had enough of this pointless mission, and is disappointed to see Warlock’s resolve is unshaken. That assessment is questioned when the disciples take the spaceman to his first human city. Senses reeling, Warlock is drawn to bombastic street preacher and his psychic sister Astrella who are seemingly targeted by the Man-Beast. Of course, all is not as it seems…

Thomas’s plot is scripted by Mike Friedrich and John Buscema joins Sutton in illuminating ‘Count-Down for Counter-Earth!’: taking the biblical allegory even further as Warlock is captured by his vile foes and tempted with power in partnership with evil, even as his erstwhile disciples are attacked and deny him. Counter-Earth has never been closer to damnation and doom, but once more the saviour’s determination overcomes the odds…

The epic continues with Friedrich in the hot seat and Kane & Sutton reunited to steer the redeemer’s path. ‘The Apollo Eclipse’ begins with Adam and his apostles harassed by the increasingly impatient High Evolutionary following a breaching of his vibratory barrier by the Incredible Hulk and the Rhino (in Hulk #158 and reprinted in many volumes …but not this one). That episode is soon forgotten after they are targeted by another Man-Beast crony, hiding his revolting origins and unstable psyche behind a pretty façade.

The brute attacks a rocket base where Adam seeks to reconcile his youthful followers with their parents, but the subsequent clash turns into tragedy in #4’s ‘Come Sing a Searing Song of Vengeance!’ as the exposed monster takes the children hostage. Astrella senses that visiting Presidential candidate Rex Carpenter holds the key to the stalemate, but when he intervenes at her urging, unbridled escalation, death and disaster follow…

Although super-beings were excised from the world’s evolution, extraordinary beings still exist. Warlock #5 (April 1973) sees Ron Goulart write the aftermath as the doubt-riddled redeemer emerges from another sojourn in a recuperative cocoon. In the intervening months Carpenter has become President and ordered an increase in weapons testing to combat the incredible new dangers he personally witness.

Tragically, he also ignores warnings from government scientist Victor Von Doom, and when one military manoeuvre sparks ‘The Day of the Death-Birds!’ Adam is there to help when a dam is wrecked. His might is sufficient to stop the automated launch of swarms of robotic drones programmed to strafe ground-based beings, but cannot stop the grateful citizenry turning on him when President Carter declares him a menace to society…

Friedrich scripts Goulart & Thomas’ plot and Bob Brown joins the team as penciller in #6 as Warlock battles the army and Doom contacts fellow genius Reed Richards for help. However, the Latverian is unaware of a shocking change in his oldest friend who is now ‘The Brute!’: a mutated cosmic horror enthralled by the malign thing running the White House and now ordered to ambush Warlock as Astrella brings him to truce talks…

It’s all a pack of lies and a trap. As the Golden Gladiator defeats Richards, enraged mobs egged on by the President move on Warlock’s growing band of supporters. Now, though, the alien’s very public life-saving heroics have swayed fickle opinion and Carter is compelled to reverse his stance and exonerate Warlock. Even this is a ploy, allowing him to set the energy-absorbing Brute on the redeemer in ‘Doom: at the Earth’s Core!’

Beyond all control, Richards’ rampage threatens to explode Counter-Earth, and only the supreme sacrifice of one of Adams’s constantly dwinling band of supporters saves the planet…

Warlock’s rocky road paused with the next issue. Cancelled with #8, Friedrich, Brown & Sutton dutifully detailed ‘Confrontation’ in Washington DC as the supposed saviour’s supporters clashed with incensed cops. Intent on stopping a riot, Warlock finds his work magnified when Man-Beast’s New-Men minions join the battle. The saga then ends on an eternal cliffhanger as Warlock finally exposes what Carpenter is… before vanishing from sight for 8 months…

The aforementioned Hulk #158 had seen the Jade Giant dispatched to the far side of the Sun to clash on Counter-Earth with the messiahs enemies. Although excluded here, the 3-issue sequel it spawned was concocted after the Golden Godling’s series ended.

When the feature returned the tone, like the times had comprehensively changed. All the hopeful positivity and naivety had, post-Vietnam and Watergate, turned to world-weary cynicism in the manner of Moorcock’s doomed hero Elric. Maybe that was a harbinger of things to come…?

The cosmic codicil closing this initial collection came after the Hulk’s typically short-tempered encounter with the Uncanny Inhumans and devastating duel with silent super-monarch Black Bolt. Following the usual collateral carnage, the bout ended with the Gamma Goliath hurtling in a rocket-ship to the far side of the sun for a date with allegory, if not destiny.

The troubled globe codified Counter-Earth had seen messianic Adam Warlock futilely battle Satan-analogue Man-Beast: a struggle the Jade Juggernaut learned of on his previous visit. Now he crashed there again to complete the cruelly truncated metaphorical epic, beginning in ‘Crisis on Counter-Earth!’ (Incredible Hulk #176, June 1974) by Gerry Conway, Herb Trimpe & Jack Abel.

Since the Hulk’s last visit Man-Beast and his animalistic flunkies had become America’s President and Cabinet. Moving deceptively but decisively, they had finally captured Warlock and led humanity to the brink of extinction, leaving the would-be messiah’s disciples in utter confusion.

With the nation reeling, Hulk’s shattering return gives Warlock’s faithful flock opportunity to save their saviour in ‘Peril of the Plural Planet!’ but the foray badly misfires and Adam is captured. Publicly crucified, humanity’s last hope perishes…

The quasi-religious experience concludes with ‘Triumph on Terra-Two’ (Conway, Tony Isabella, Trimpe & Abel, Incredible Hulk #178). Whilst Hulk furiously battles Man-Beast, the expired redeemer resurrects in time to deliver a karmic coup de grace before ascending from Counter-Earth to the beckoning stars…

Adding temptation at the end is a gallery of Kane pencil page layouts and a half dozen inked pages plus the Marvel Bullpen Bulletins page that first announced Warlock’s debut.

Ambitious and beautiful to behold, the early Warlock adventures are very much a product of their tempestuous, socially divisive times. For many, they proved how mature comics might become, but for others they were simply pretty pictures and epic fights with little lasting relevance. What they unquestionably remain is a series of crucial stepping stones to greater epics and unmissable appetisers to Marvel Magic at its finest.
© 2020 MARVEL

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Gone With the Goof – Gomer Goof volume 3


By Franquin, Jidéhem & Delporte, translated by Jerome Saincantin (Cinebook)
ISBN: 978-1-84918-409-0 (PB Album/Digital edition)

Like so much in Franco-Belgian comics, it started with Le Journal de Spirou. The magazine had debuted on April 2nd 1938, with its engaging lead strip created by Rob-Vel (François Robert Velter). In 1943, publishing house Dupuis purchased all rights to the comic and its titular star, after which comic-strip prodigy Joseph Gillain (Jijé) took the helm for the redheaded kid’s exploits.

In 1946 Jijé’s assistant André Franquin was handed creative control. He gradually abandoned short gag vignettes in favour of extended adventure serials. Franquin introduced a broad, engaging cast of regulars and created phenomenally popular magical beast the Marsupilami. Debuting in 1952 (Spirou et les héritiers) the critter eventually became a spin-off star of screen, plush toy stores, console games and albums in his own right. Franquin continued crafting increasingly fantastic tales and absorbing Spirou sagas until his resignation in 1969.

Franquin was born in Etterbeek, Belgium on January 3rd 1924. Drawing from an early age, the lad only began formal art training at École Saint-Luc in 1943. When the war forced the school’s closure a year later, he found work at Compagnie Belge d’Animation in Brussels and met Maurice de Bévére (AKA Lucky Luke creator “Morris”), Pierre Culliford (Peyo, creator of The Smurfs and Benny Breakiron) and Eddy Paape (Valhardi, Luc Orient).

In 1945 all but Peyo signed on with Dupuis, and Franquin began his career as a jobbing cartoonist and illustrator, producing covers for Le Moustique and scouting magazine Plein Jeu. During those early days, Franquin and Morris were being tutored by Jijé, who was the main illustrator at LJdS. He turned the youngsters – and fellow neophyte Willy Maltaite (AKA “Will” – Tif et Tondu, Isabelle, Le jardin des désirs) – into a smoothly functioning creative bullpen known as La bande des quatre or “Gang of Four”. They would ultimately reshape and revolutionise Belgian comics with their prolific and engaging “Marcinelle school” style of graphic storytelling…

Jijé handed Franquin all responsibilities for the flagship strip part-way through Spirou et la maison préfabriqué (#427, June 20th 1946). He ran with it for two decades; enlarging the scope and horizons of the feature until it became purely his own. Almost every week fans would meet startling new characters such as comrade/rival Fantasio or crackpot inventor and Merlin of mushroom mechanics the Count of Champignac.

Spirou &Fantasio became globetrotting journalists, visiting exotic places, exposing crimes, exploring the fantastic and clashing with a coterie of bizarre and exotic arch-enemies. Throughout it all, Fantasio was still a full-fledged reporter for Le Journal de Spirou and had to pop into the office all the time. Sadly, lurking there was an accident-prone, smugly big-headed junior in charge of minor jobs and dogs-bodying. He was called Gaston Lagaffe…

There’s a long history of fictitiously personalising the mysterious creatives and all those arcane processes they indulge in to make our favourite comics, whether its Stan Lee’s Marvel Bullpen or DC Thomson’s lugubrious Editor and underlings at The Beano and Dandy. Let me assure you that it’s a truly international practise and the occasional asides on text pages featuring well-meaning foul-up/office gofer Gaston – who debuted in #985, February 28th 1957 – grew to be one of the most popular and perennial components of the comic, whether as short illustrated strips or in faux editorial reports in text form.

On a strictly personal note, I still think current designation Gomer Goof (this name comes from an earlier, abortive attempt to introduce the character to American audiences) is unwarranted. The quintessentially Franco-Belgian tone and humour doesn’t translate particularly well (la gaffe translates as “blunder” not “idiot”) and the connotation contributes nothing here. When he surprisingly appeared in a 1970s UK Thunderbirds annual as part of an earlier syndication attempt, Gaston was rechristened Cranky Franky. Perhaps they should have kept that one or even his original designation…

In terms of actual schtick and delivery, older readers will recognise favourite beats of Benny Hill and Jacques Tati timeless elements of well-meaning self-delusion, whilst Britons will recognise recurring situations from Some Mothers Do Have ‘Em or Mr Bean. It’s slapstick, paralysing puns, infernal ingenuity and invention, pomposity lampooned and no good deed going noticed, rewarded or unpunished…

As previously stated, Gomer is employed (let’s not dignify or mis-categorise what he does as “work”) at the Spirou editorial offices: reporting to go-getting journalist Fantasio and generally ignoring the minor design jobs like paste-up he’s paid to handle. There’s also editing readers’ letters… the official reason why fans requests and suggestions are never answered…

Gomer is lazy, peckish, opinionated, ever-ravenous, impetuous, underfed, forgetful and eternally hungry, with his most manic moments all stemming from cutting work corners and stashing or illicitly consuming contraband food in the office…

This leads to constant clashes with police officer Longsnoot and fireman Captain Morwater, yet the office oaf remains eternally easy-going and incorrigible. Only two questions are really important here: why does Fantasio keep giving him one last chance, and what can gentle, lovelorn Miss Jeanne possible see in the self-opinionated idiot?

Originally released in 1987 as Gaston – Rafales de gaffes, this third compilation eschews longer cartoon tales and comedic text “reports” from the comic’s editorial page to deliver non-stop all-Franquin comics gags in single-page bursts. Here the office hindrance – as ever – invents stuff that makes life harder for everyone; sets driving records no one can believe; breaks laws physicists consider sacrosanct, upsets cops, firemen and clients and always, in all ways, lets down his colleagues and employers…

Many strips involve his manic efforts to modify the motorised atrocity he calls his car: an appallingly decrepit and dilapidated Fiat 509 auto(barely)mobile desperately in need of his many well-meant attempts to counter its lethal road pollution…

The remainder of the volume’s picture strip pandemonium encapsulates the imbecile’s attempts at getting rid of minor illnesses, ailments and new office innovations. Much is made of his latest  musical invention in the recurrent saga of his truly terrifying Brontosaurophone/ Goofophone as well the woes of automotive engineering Good Samaritanism; a distinctly novel approach to babysitting and work crèches; new lows in animal husbandry; an approach to cookery bordering on criminal perversity and fresh – if somewhat illegal – methods of advertising the magazine…

Far better enjoyed than précised or described, these strips allowed Franquin and occasional co-scenarists Yvan Delporte & Jidéhem (in reality, Jean De Mesmaeker: his analogue is a regular in the strips as an explosively irate and unfortunate foil for the Goof) to flex their whimsical muscles and even subversively sneak in some satirical support for their beliefs in pacifism and environmentalism. However, at their core the gags remain supreme examples of all-ages comedy: wholesome, barbed, daft and incrementally funnier with every re-reading.

Why aren’t you Goofing off yet?
© Dupuis, Dargaud-Lombard s.a. 2009 by Franquin. All rights reserved. English translation © 2018 Cinebook Ltd.

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Spider-Man: India


By Jeevan J. Kang & Gotham Studios Asia, Suresh Seetharaman & Sharad Devarajan & various (MARVEL)
ISBN: 978-0-7851-1640-0 (TPB/Digital edition)

It’s a small world these days and petty hindrances like geography, culture and social preference are no longer a barrier to brand expansion for major properties. Sherlock Holmes and Mickey Mouse are universal, DC and Marvel heroes have long generated locally-sourced adventures on other continents and countless other fictional stars have been tailored to suit relatively closed markets.

That’s what happened in 2004 when Marvel’s most recognisable property was reinvented for the South East Asian region and its burgeoning comics industry. The instigator was Indian entrepreneur, film producer, educator, publisher and computer game impresario Sharad Devajaran whose subsequent experience includes digital entertainment platform Virgin Comics/Liquid Comics, and Graphic India. In 2013, he and Stan Lee co-created Indian superhero Chakra the Invincible…

Before all that, Devajaran was co-founder, president and CEO of South East Asia’s leading comic book publisher Gotham Entertainment Group: spearheading the official introduction of Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, Cartoon Network and Warner Brothers properties like X-Men, The Hulk, Batman and Superman to a vast and vibrant new market. That naturally led to closer collaboration and in 2004 Marvel sanctioned a new iteration of the wondrous webspinner specifically tailored to the Indian market and broadly based on the first Toby Maguire Spider-Man movie from 2002. The result of South East meets West was dubbed the first comics “trans-creation”…

The idea was not new. Translated US comics had been syndicated across the world since before WWII and Japan especially had pioneered reworkings of top brands for conservative national readerships with the 1966-1967 “Battoman” – derived from the US Batman TV series, freely adapted by Jiro Kuwata – and Ryoichi Ikegami’s Spider-Man: The Manga (1970-1971) placing remastered wallcrawler Yu Komori in a Japanese setting s seen in Monthly Shonen Magazine.

Devised by Jeevan J. Kang, Suresh Seetharaman & Sharad Devarajan and illustrated by Kang & Gotham Studios Asia, it was released as a 4-issue miniseries for India: massaging the timeless legend in a way that eventually and inevitably became a part of the larger Marvel Multiverse…

This English language collection from 2005 was lettered by Virtual Calligraphy’s Dave Sharpe: a cross cultural collaboration that opens with a mysterious mystic foretelling in nightmares a shocking future for poor but brilliant teenager Pavitr Prabhakar. Recently moved to Mumbai with his guardians Uncle Bhim and Aunt Maya to take up a school scholarship, the boy has been marked for tragedy, loss and a great but dangerous life…

His low standing and status – he comes from a distant provincial village – make Pavitr a target for the rich kids in school, but for some reason the amazing and popular Meera Jain defends and befriends him…

Across the city, crime lord and sinister industrialist Nalin Oberoi is content. His Corporation thugs have razed an entire village, and the amulet he wants so badly is his. Now after an unholy ceremony he attains incredible power at an ungodly cost: transformed into a fire-spitting green devil. He does not yet realise that he is now a living gateway for an army of demons to invade the human plane…

Another bad at school ends with Pavitr again chased by vicious bullies. He’s saved by an old yogi who looks very familiar, and declares the boy has a great destiny. In a time when the gods have no avatars to set in humanity’s defence, the world must depend on a good person empowered by the forces of the intangible Web of Life. Filled with the Spider’s power clad in bold raiment, the boy is told to fulfil his karma…

Giddy with a sense of power, Spider-Man cavorts over the city and ignores the desperate cries of those in dire need, even as, far below, Uncle Bhim gives his life to save a woman from molesters. Pavitr is too late to save him but learns an immutable life lesson and thereafter dedicates himself to living with great responsibility…

Thus begins the saga of India’s Spider-Man, with a devil-driven analogues of Doctor Octopus and Venom also debuting as Oberoi kidnaps Maya and Meera Jain. The green rakshasa’s scheme to manifest Hell on Earth culminates in a monumental clash at a refinery as the boy hero deploys the divine magic amulet, and seeks to sever the debased villains’ connection to his demonic masters with courage, the power of the web of life and his innate purity…

Most Marvel US readers recognise Pavitr Prabhakar from assorted mainstream events like Secret Wars and Spider-Verse and their fallout spin-offs, where his uniqueness is rather lost and definitely downplayed. However, this initial outing offers a truly different spin on the webspinner and if you require a fresh taste or something a little different, this is well worth a visit.
© 2021 MARVEL.

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One Beautiful Spring Day


By Jim Woodring (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-68396-555-8 (TPB/Digital edition) 978-1-68396-588-6 (slipcased HB)

There have always been uniquely gifted, driven comics creators who defy categorisation… or even description. My picks for that elite pantheon of artisans includes Kirby, Ditko, Segar, Hergé, Herriman, Will Eisner, Osamu Tezuka, Robert Crumb, Daniel Clowes, Franquin, Frank Bellamy, Basil Wolverton, Mort Meskin, Kim Deitch, Joe Kubert, Carmine Infantino, Eric Bradbury, Frank Hampson, Tony Millionaire, Alex Niño, Neal Adams, Richard Corben, Wally Wood and a few others who all brought something utterly personal and universally influential to their work just beyond the reviewer’s skills (mine certainly) to elucidate, encapsulate or convey.

They are all perfect in their own way and so emphatically wonderful that no collection of praise or analysis can do them justice. You just have to read their stuff for yourself.

Arguably at the top of that distinguished heap of graphic glitterati sits Jim Woodring. It’s a position he has maintained for years and appears capable of holding for generations to come.

Woodring’s work has always been challenging, funny, spiritual, grotesque, philosophical, heartbreaking, beautiful and extremely scary. Moreover, even after reading and believing that sentence you will still be absolutely unprepared for what awaits the first time you encounter any of his books – and even more so if you’ve already seen everything he’s created.

Celebrated as a cartoonist, animator, fine artist, toy-maker and artistic Renaissance man, Woodring’s eccentric output has delighted far too small and select an audience since 1980 and his official mini-comics forays. Born in Los Angeles in 1952, Woodring suffered delusions and hallucinations as a child and regularly believed his parents wanted to kill him.

These traumas seemingly sensitized and attuned him to symbolism and pictorial expression as well as opening him to assorted philosophies and belief systems. The young lad managed his “apparitions” by drawing them as strips in the waking world where he had control of them. Overcoming problems with school, drugs and alcohol, Woodring was eventually diagnosed with autism and prosopagnosia, but by then he had a discovered the power of Art.

He turned his life around through his own determination and by the inspiration of comics masters like Kirby, Ernie Bushmiller, Gil Kane and Crumb, classical fantasists such as Pieter Brueghel, Hieronymus Bosch and particularly Salvador Dali, and the animations of the Fleischer Brothers, Tex Avery and Walt Disney.

Woodring found surcease from a lifetime of punishing dreams by pictorializing nightmares and through following Buddhism, Taoism and the Hindu philosophy of Vedanta. After working as a farm labourer, garbageman and TV cartoon animator – with occasional comics side jobs like colouring the Roy Thomas/Gil Kane adaptation of the Ring of the Nibelungs, illustrating 1997’s Smokey the Bear, Friend of the Forest, and scripting stints on Aliens and Star Wars – Woodring began fully sharing the messages from his subconscious. He had begun self-publishing his autobiographical, “autojournal” comics in 1980, and seven years later was picked up by Fantagraphics Comics and thereafter all of us…

Readers who avidly adored his groundbreaking, oneirically autobiographical magazine Jim and its notional spin-off series Frank (with graphic novel Weathercraft winning The Stranger 2010 Genius Award for Literature) were joined by fans of Tantalizing Stories, Seeing Things or more mainstream features like his Star Wars and Aliens tales for Dark Horse Comics but, always, there was the promise of greater surprises in his next story…

An accomplished storytelling technician these days, Woodring grows rather than constructs solidly surreal, abstractly authentic, wildly rational, primal cartoon universes, wherein his meticulous, clean-lined, sturdily ethereal, mannered blend of woodblock prints, R. Crumb landscapes, expressionist dreamscapes, religious art and monstrous phantasmagoria all live and play …and far too often, eat each other.

His stories follow a logical, progressional proto-narrative – often a surging, non-stop chase from one insane invention to the next – layered with multiple levels of meaning yet totally devoid of speech or words, boldly assuming the intense involvement of the reader will complete the creative circuit.

This compelling collection is available digitally but works best as the spiffy vellum-cased archival paperback or limited edition boxed hardback: each iteration a superbly recomposed compilation combining earlier segments of his constantly unfolding and refolding saga, now justifiably treated as a treasured artefact… and ideal gift…

Gathered – or maybe corralled – here are the previously-published contents of Congress of the Animals, Fran and Poochytown, all deftly rearranged and supplemented by a hundred pages of new and previously unseen material.

Set in the general environs of Woodring’s wickedly warped other place – “The Unifactor” – here is a wild, weird and welcome return to a land of constant change and intense self-examination, where all motives are suspect and all rewards should be regarded as a trap. And here cheerfully upbeat Frank goes for another exceptionally eventful walk in the sunshine…

Laminating this vertiginous vehicle with an even crueller patina is lovelorn tragedy and loss as Fran adds to the ongoing tribulations of dog-faced Frank: her own perilous perambulations of innocence lost displays pride, arrogance, casual self-deceit, smug self-absorption and inflated ego as big as her former beau’s and leads to a shattering downfall just as punishing.

Put bluntly, Fran was Frank’s wonderful girlfriend and through mishap, misunderstanding, anger and intolerance he lost her. Now, no matter what he does or wheresoever he wanders with his faithful sidekicks at his side, poor Frank just can’t make things right and perfect and good again. Through madcap chases, introspective exploration and the inevitable direly dreadful meetings and menacings in innumerable alternate dimensions, True Love takes a kicking …and all without a single word of dialogue or description.

Here, the drawn image is always king, even if the queen has gone forever – or is it just a day?

Many Woodring regulars return, as both Krazy Kat-like ingénues work things out on the run through a myriad of strange uncanny places. There are absolute mountains of bizarre, devilish household appliances, writhy clawing things, toothy tentacle things and the unspeakable Thingy-things inhabiting the distressingly logical traumic universe.

Jim Woodring’s work is not to everyone’s taste or sensibilities – otherwise why would I need to plug his work so earnestly? – and, as ever, these drawings have the perilous propensity to repeat like cucumber and make one jump long after the book has been put away, but he is an undisputed master of graphic narrative and affirmed innovator, always making new art to challenge us and himself. His is a dreamscape of affable terror and he is can make us love it and leave us hungry for more.

Are you feeling peckish yet…?
© 2022 Jim Woodring. This edition © 2022 Fantagraphics Books. All rights reserved.

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Rogan Gosh: Star of the East


By Pete Milligan & Brendan McCarthy with Tom Frame (Vertigo/Little, Brown & Co)
ISBN: 978-1-56389-143-4 (Vertigo TPB) 1-85386-253-3 (Little, Brown PB)

It feels like a cop-out and total dereliction of duty, but none the less true that some graphic novels simply defy categorisation and defeat the reviewers’ dark arts: they just have to be read, experienced and judged on a personal basis. We could stop there and it’s over to you…

However, should you require more…

Rogan Gosh is a short serial by Pete (Skin; John Constantine, Hellblazer; Strange Days; The Human Target; Batman; Red Lanterns; Shade, the Changing Man; Enigma; The Extremist; X-Statix; Johnny Nemo, Bad Company) Milligan and Brendan (Dream Gang; Mad Max: Road Fury; Judge Dredd; Spider-Man: Fever; ReBoot; Zaucer of Zilk; Skin; Swimini Purpose; Strange Days; Sometime Stories) McCarthy with notable contributions from letterer/colourist Tom Frame.

It first appeared in short-lived, controversial, cutting edge, experimental British comic magazine Revolver – specifically issues #1-6 spanning July-December of the Fleetway Publication. It was later collected into a graphic album by DC/Vertigo in 1994. I’m pretty sure there was also a Fleetway collection, but if so, it’s nigh impossible to find now, and that was a lifetime ago, so I might be dreaming of another reality…

Like companion/precursor title Crisis, Revolver’s brief was to make comics for people who had outgrown funny picture stories and adults who claimed to have never read them. It was supposed to be political, fashionable, contemporary and contentious, and it succeeded over and over again, in strips like Dare, Purple Days, Happenstance and Kismet, God’s Little Acre, Pinhead Nation and Plug Into Jesus.

For many, the jewel in the crown was a bizarre and beautiful, sardonically surreal saga incorporating English curry houses, karmic renewal and exploration, science fiction iconography, cultural commentary and (in)appropriation, ferociously irreverent satirical comedy, and – apparently – concealed creator autobiography. It referenced Indian philosophy and religions, British colonial history and modern urban street life in an onrushing miasma of visual and ideological concepts that blew the mind and generated outrageous belly laughs. There were loads of guns and rockets and tons of sex too…

Like many Milligan & McCarthy creations the strip is often described as “post-modern psychedelia”, evolving from channelled childhood experiences of two white art school kids who had grown up amidst the burgeoning fallout of the Desi Diaspora. That’s when families from the countries of the Asian sub-continent – specifically Pakistan, Bangladesh and India – migrated to western countries like Britain, bringing new thought, music, fashions, scents and especially food to broaden and enrich an evolving multiculture. There were even comics unlike any we’d ever seen before when cruising the streets of Southall or Brick Lane…

Proud products of such an environment and rising superstars thanks to 2000AD, writer Milligan and co-plotter/illustrator McCarthy had planned to deliver a kind of “Bollywood Blade Runner”, but the story sort of got away from them… as is often the case with passion projects…

I’m feeling truly redundant trying to precis the plot, but for the sake of form, try this…

The universe exists on many levels and at all times. In Raj-era India Rudyard Kipling has shamed himself with a native houseboy and now roams the streets of Lahore, seeking a holy man to save his sanity and reputation by putting him in touch with the fabled Karmanauts.

His quest succeeds and the author is – via drugs and magic and ancient wisdom – elevated to a state where he witnesses a future where laddish London oaf Dean Cripps escapes stroppy girlfriend Mary Jane to go for a curry at the magnificent Star of the East in Stoke Newington.

When Dean feels a frisson of connection with beautiful waiter Raju Dhawan, the energy unleashes time-travelling wonder warrior Rogan Gosh just in time to defend enlightenment and all realities from the clandestine attacks of destructive Kali and her malign vampiric agent the Soma Swami…

It all gets a bit strange after that, what with audacious experimental love, devastation and recreation, Karma Kops, and that pest monkey god Hanuman, but rest assured that by the end, what you presume to be the regulation natural universe is back near where it belongs…

Although the story and events might bewilder, what is beyond question is the astounding art by Brendan McCarthy: utilising a blend of pen, paint and early digital technology to create a lush and vibrant homage to the startlingly bright colours of the subcontinent and plush décor of favourite London curry houses and tapping the wellsprings of a fevered and sublimely seasoned imagination to beguile the eyes. This stuff is just so damn pretty…

Hard to find in its original form, the entire trip is reprinted in 2013 anthology The Best of Milligan & McCarthy beside lots of other great stuff like Freakwave, Paradax! and Skin. The collection (which is on my to-do list…) is also available in digital format so there’s no need to wait.

Your destiny awaits, you only have to choose to embrace it…
™ & © 1990, 1994, 2013 Peter Milligan & Brendan McCarthy. All rights reserved.

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Glorious Summers volume 1: Southbound! (1973)


By Zidrou & Jordi Lafebre, with additional colour by Mado Peña translated by Lara Vergnaud (Europe Comics)
No ISBN: Digital edition only

Until comparatively recently, comics in the English-speaking world mostly comprised comedic or various adventure sub-genres (crime, superhero, horror, sci fi), with only a small but vital niche of “mundane world” ventures, usually depicted via graphic biographies and autobiographies such as They Called Us Enemy, Coma, Death Threat, Love on the Isle of Dogs, Wage Slaves or Sour Pickles offering a different feel and flavour. Even historical sagas were treated as extraordinary moments with larger-than-life characters whenever possible.

What we have never had – and still largely don’t enjoy – is a comics equivalent to general fiction, drama and melodrama. That’s not so in Japan and Europe, where a literal “anything goes” attitude has always accommodated human-scaled, slice of life stories depicting ordinary people in quiet as well as extraordinary moments.

Surely it can’t be that hard to tell engaging stories in pedestrian, recognisably ordinary settings? Medical traumas, love stories, school tales and family tragedies about common folk seem to play well on various-sized screens around the world, so why not in English-“speaking” comics? The closest we seem to get are comedy series like John Allison’s brilliantly superb Giant Days (which I really must review soon)…

People being people is more than enough for our European neighbours. They apparently have an insatiable appetite for everyday events aimed at properly “mature readers”, all joyfully sans vampires, aliens or men in tights. These even have sub-genres of their own. For example, there’s a wealth of superb material just about going on holiday…

So, since our own Government-in-Absentia have ensured that it’s now all-but-impossible for any UK-based citizens to pop across and have une petite vacances in Europe, let’s at least stare covetously at them having a good time. After all, over there holidays are an inalienable right, and they have some simply fabulous tales about a simple break. This is probably the best you’ll ever read…

One of the absolute best examples of fantasy vacations made real, Glorious Summers: Southbound! (1973) is a nostalgia-drenched confection by Zidrou and frequent collaborator Jordi Lafebre: a sublime example of idyllic group memory transformed into graphic sorcery and an everyday account utterly unafraid to temper humorous sweetness and light with some real-world tragedy and suspense…

Perhaps a little context is in order. Summer holidays – “Midi” – are a big deal in France and Belgium. The French even divide into two tribes over the annual rest period, which generally lasts an entire month.

Juilletistes only vacation in July and wield dogma and facts like rapiers to prove why it’s the only way to take a break. They are eternally opposed, heart, soul, and suntan lotion, by majority faction the Aoûtiens, who recharge their batteries in August whilst fully reciprocating the suspicion, disdain and baffled scorn of the early-leavers.

Many European sociologists claim the greatest social division today is not race, religion, gender, political affiliation or whether to open boiled eggs from the top or the bottom, but when summer holidays begin and end…

Les Beaux Étés 1: Cap au Sud! is the first of a string of family visits that began in 2015 courtesy of scripter Zidrou (Benoît Drousie) and illustrator Jordi Lafebre. Drousie is Belgian, born in Brussels in 1962 and a school teacher prior to quitting marking books in 1990 to begin making them. His main successes are school dunce series L’Elève Ducobu, Petit Dagobert, Scott Zombi, La Ribambelle, Le Montreur d’histoires, African Trilogy, Léonardo, the revival of Ric Hochet, Shi and many more. His most celebrated and beloved stories are this sequence and 2010’s Lydie, both illustrated by Spanish artist Jordi Lafebre.

The sublimely gifted, empathically sensitive illustrator and art teacher was born in Barcelona in 1979 and has created comics professionally since 2001, first for magazines like Mister K, where he limned Toni Font’s El Mundo de Judy. He soon found regular work at Le Journal de Spirou, creating the romance Always Never and collaborating with Zidrou on La vieille dame qui n’avait jamais joué au tennis et autres nouvelles qui font du bien, Lydie, and La Mondaine.

A combination of feel-good fable and powerful comedy drama, Southbound! begins “now”, as an aging couple sit on deftly-assembled camping seats in their beloved regular holiday spot. Gazing outwards and back, they remember how all their shared yesterdays almost died unborn during that difficult time in 1973…

It’s August then and Maddie Faldérault tries to amuse her four impatiently waiting kids as their father Pierre frantically puts the finishing touches to his latest comic strip. He has to: the publisher has stationed a gofer at his side to deliver the pages directly to the printer the moment the drawing stops.

The pages were due last Wednesday – as was the start of the annual Faldérault escape from gloomy Brussels for a month in sun-drenched France. That sun has long set, but such is the life of a minor star of the Belgian comics industry. Once the job is despatched, dad and long-suffering Maddie bundle the fractious kids into the car that’s been packed for days, heading for the border and some long anticipated R & R.

The kids are immune to bedtimes and wrapped up in time-honoured holiday rituals like shouting, fighting and singing odd songs. Shy lad Louis reads Lucky Luke to his invisible friend “Beekoo”, self-conscious oldest girl Jolly-Julie spars constantly with Nicole – cruelly picking on her weight – and hyperactive toddler Paulette (Peaches to you and her) bounces everywhere seeking attention and “fench fries an’ maynaze”…

They have no idea that it will be the last family holiday. The parents are planning to separate after the break and  have fooled themselves into thinking the odd atmosphere and strained behaviour will be put down to Aunt Liliane being sick with the cancer…

However, as they make their way south, clocking up priceless, inconsequential memories and acting like fools and bandits in overnight camps and rest stops, the strain starts to hit the beleaguered family in ways none will forget…

This tale is a beautifully rendered and realised series of memories stitched seamlessly together. It’s funny and charming and delivers painful blows you never see coming. There aren’t any spectacular events and shocking crises and that’s the point: awful events can happen to any of us… sudden death, job insecurity, funerals, demands for divorce, an abrupt change of mind…

If you’re British – and old enough – this series (six translated albums thus far, plus a French omnibus edition) will stir deep-seated memories of family sitcoms like Bless This House or Butterflies and generational ads starring the “Oxo Family”. If that description doesn’t fit you, I pity your browsing history if you look up any of that…

The rest of you in need of an opening (but unfair comparator) could break out the Calvin and Hobbes collections and re-examine the bits with his embattled parents when the kid’s out of the picture…

Lyrical, laconic, engagingly demure, and debilitatingly nostalgic, this holiday romance is sheer visual perfection wrapped in sharp dialogue and a superbly anarchic sense of mischief.

Vacations are built of moments and might-have-beens, channelled here in compelling clips that make the mundane. This is an irresistible tale of woe, wonder and second starts; all the more perfect because of it.
© 2018 -DARGAUD BENELUX (Dargaud-Lombard s.a.) – ZIDROU & LEFEBRE, LLC.

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The Once and Future Queen volume 1: Opening Moves


By Adam P. Knave & D. J. Kirkbride, Nick Brokenshire, Frank Cvetkovic & various (Dark Horse Books)
ISBN: 978-1-50670-250-6 (TPB) eISBN: 978-1-63008-793-7

Critics and creative writing lecturers would have you believe all of drama can be reduced to Seven Basic Plots, and all else is mere garnish. Having, in my far-too-long and not-quite-sedentary-enough life, been both (teacher and critic, not edible decoration), I can only say “I can neither deny nor confirm…”

What does happen – a lot! – is that vastly popular and memorable myths, stories and legends are continually reinterpreted and remodelled for new generations. Go reread or see Gilgamesh, Beowulf and Person of Interest or the biblical story of David, Cinderella, Jayne Eyre, Tiger! Tiger!/The Stars My Destination or Slumdog Millionaire… then go play some more on your own. We have pressing business here…

One of the most comforting and potent of these recurring themes is that of a great king or hero waiting to return and redeem us. We probably see it most often in riffs on King Arthur, which are everywhere. If you like such works as Alan Garner’s Brisingamen trilogy (The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, The Moon of Gomrath and Boneland). newspaper strip Buck Rogers, TV’s Adam Adamant and even Camelot 3000, you’ll probably also love this wry, witty and sublimely inclusive spin on the old standard.

Crafted by writers Adam P. Knave & D. J. Kirkbride and illustrated by Nick Brokenshire (the team behind the magical Amelia Cole adventures), The Once and Future Queen features a mixed race (multi-ethnic?), bisexual (or is it non-binary?) girl revealed as destiny’s child and rightful sovereign of England as well as foreordained saviour of the world. No pressure, then…

It begins in Portland Oregon, where youthful chess prodigy Rani Arturus is panicking over her imminent flight to Cornwall for an important tournament. For her dad William, it’s a trip to the “old country” and mum Durga is American by way of India, so it counts as her and her daughter’s roots, too. Rani has no idea how incredibly accurate and life-changing that assessment is…

The tournament is a disaster. All her planning and strategizing go out the window when Rani is distracted by – and fatally attracted to – a pretty blonde girl in the audience. It’s not just her clearly reciprocated attentions: the chess master is convinced she somehow knows her …

Rani doesn’t make it past the first round, and ashamed and furious at the waste of time, money, failure and her own previously unsuspected feelings, walks a scenic Cornish clifftop when a misstep sends her over the edge and into a hidden cave…

Meanwhile, on the clifftop she just disastrously vacated, the subject of Rani’s ruminations is absentmindedly tracing her footsteps. Gwen was irresistibly fascinated by the American contestant, but is used to having instant crushes on girls by now. What is new is how familiar this one seemed, so when she spots the object of her desires entering a cave with glowing light coming from it, she follows…

Rani is beguiled. The cave is an obvious tourist trap and contains a sword stuck in a stone anvil, but she finds herself compelled to tug on it anyhow. As Gwen watches, a flash of light transforms the American into an armoured vision and an old geezer in a space suit appears…

Merlin is time adrift and pretty confusing, but adamantly insists Rani is the long-awaited “Arthur foretold”: the Once and Future Queen (Ruler?) destined to unite the world.

It’s just in time too, as long-exiled magical monster race the Fae are running out of room and resources and are ready eager to return and conquer Earth…

Rani is not convinced. She knows all the stories about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, and knows what a hero should be. However, according to the wizard, lots of things got lost in translation and that guy was simply a well-meaning fraud: a place holder dragged in to cope with a momentary crisis in lieu of the big event kicking off just about now…

Gwen has already impetuously left for Portland by the time Rani’s incredulous parents are brought up to speed and when the girls finally meet in a park, they head for a diner to get to know each other, only to discover their server Lance went to school with Rani and, like Gwen, is also part of the magic revival. In a corner booth sits world-renowned and beloved fantasy author Morgan Pari: also a key actor in the replaying saga, but before the celebrity-struck kids can get near her, a squad of War Fae materialise and savage battle for Earth is joined…

Merlin’s magic has made Excalibur and Rani’s armour instantly accessible and also imparts warrior skills to the Queen. Shockingly, the same is true for Gwen and Lance who at last realise they are physical echoes of past legendary beings too…

Having survived their trials by combat, the heroes reborn are whisked away by Merlin who tells them the true story of the human history and the war against the  malign King in Shadow to prepare them for the forthcoming greatest fight in human history…

Sadly, as they train and repeatedly skirmish with the Fae, what’s also inescapably repeating is the romantic triangle that destroyed the Camelot they all draw their preconceptions from…

Not all is written in stone. As the heroes move their already-targeted loved ones to a safe space, and strategize their next moves, a key component of the Fae army goes off-script, splitting the enemy’s forces and resolve, but also sparking a brutal, highly public clash that serves to put blinkered humanity on terrified high alert…

Now, with everything to play for, the endgame has become utterly new territory and all the reborn champions can do is ready themselves for anything…

To Be Continued…

Fast-paced, action-packed, bright, breezy and slyly funny, The Once and Future Queen: Opening Moves is a delight to read, with this opening chapter augmented by extras including a design sketchbook with commentary from all concerned; cover concept roughs; selections from the minicomic used to pitch the series to Dark Horse; colour palette roughs and an alternate ending. If you’re in the mood for something familiar that enticingly fresh and new, your quest ends and begins here…
The Once and Future Queen™ & © 2017 Adam P. Knave, D. J. Kirkbride & Nick Brokenshire. All rights reserved.