Category: Art Books

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The British Invasion


By Hervé Bourhis, translated by James Hogan (NBM)
ISBN: 978-1681123424 (HB/Digital edition)

Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: Pourquoi pas, non?… 9/10

Despite a thousand years of “not getting on”, Britain and France are neighbours who have bathed and basked in the glow of each other’s culture, arts, achievements… and failures… with remarkable constancy and consistency. For as long as each nation has existed, this peculiarly dysfunctional relationship has periodically cross-fertilised the lives and adventures and judgements of all of us. We love their stuff and apparently they’re pretty cool about ours. The strange state of affairs (oh tee hee!) has also baffled countless observers from other countries and probably always will. C’est la vie, innit?

Now and here, music writer, graphic novelist, culture vulture and avowed anglophile Hervé Bourhis (The Little Book of Rock) has encapsulated his – possibly forbidden – love for les anglaise and all their works in a fabulously eclectic years-by-year catalogue of events, achievements, style-&-fashion forays, music-&-movie moments, and less definable landmarks. Beginning in 1962, and meandering all the way to 2022, the best, worst, weirdest, and wildest pub talking points, quiz question fodder and modern minutia of pop culture have been assiduously counted and crafted into a dossier of our innate spiffiness.

These are all graphically combined with listicles, celebrity call-outs, name checks, scandals, disasters, tragic passing (and a few who are probably still feeling someone’s boots dancing on their tombs, even through six feet of well-packed Albion dirt) and all the kinds of True Brit bewilderments that provoke our always astonished amis to doff their berets, scratch their pomaded bonces and mutter “sacred blue et focquinelle”…

Joking, japing and jesting aside, this is a superbly astute, stunning researched and wittily wrought dose of weaponised memorabilia, stuffed with fun facts captivating drawn and even offers the best index I have ever seen in its ‘Britbook Playlist’ section. This is something so many boomers deserve in their wrinkled gabardine (or latex: live and let live sez me) stocking this year.

I’ve been around – if not always awake – for all of the stuff cited here, and while I can’t say it was all as much fun as what’s on show on these crisp, fab-hued pages, it does stir memories, bouts of quiet pride and an odd urge to mumble “been there, did that, gottit, mum threw it away,” and “where are they now?”

Gosh, I say! Do you think the Germans could be induced to commit their thoughts on how terrific we’ve been to paper too?
Le Britbook, © DARGUAD 2023, by Hervé Bourhis, All rights reserved. © 2024 NBM for the English translation.

The British Invasion is published on November 12th 2024 and is available for pre-order now.
Most NBM books are also available in digital formats so for more information and other great reads see http://www.nbmpub.com/

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Struwwelpeter – in English Translation


By Heinrich Hoffman, translated by (Dover Publications)
ISBN: 978-0-486-28469-9 (TPB/Digital edition)

Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: Forever Fearsome and Eternally Disturbing …8/10

This book includes Discriminatory Content produced in less enlightened times.

It might not have occurred to you, but it looks like most of our ancestors were real scary callous bastards. Once upon a time we weren’t afraid to scare the bejeezus out of our kids, and look just how much quieter everything was. It was a philosophy that held hard for decades. In Britain during the 1960s and 1970s, Public Information Films all knew the value of terrorising kids and free-thinking potential troublemakers, presumably with the intention of keeping us silent and quite, quite still until we reached the age of 21. If the films were right, though, I assume many of us never did…

For horror writers and especially comic creators, Struwwelpeter may well be the most influential book of all time, regardless of what age they first encountered it. Even now, it’s hard to come away from the text and pictures and – remembering that this was bought by millions of parents as an entertainment and/or instructional gospel – without screaming out loud “what was wrong with you people!!!?”

The be-all-&-end-all of cautionary tales for the instruction and correction of wayward youth was crafted and initially self-published by German physician (and later psychiatrist) Heinrich Hoffman in January 1845. Lustige Geschichten und drollige Bilder mit 15 schön kolorierten Tafeln für Kinder von 3–6 Jahren or “Funny stories and droll pictures with 15 beautifully coloured panels for children of 3-6 years” offered illustrated rhymes (all snazzy, full-colour lithographic plates) and looked awfully like the comics of a later era. The printed collation, attributed to “Hoffmann Kinderslieb”, apparently evolved from family bedtime tales, and only reached proper publishers thanks to the Frankfurt literary club the Tutti Frutti Society (Gesellschaft der Tutti-Frutti).

From there perspicacious go-getter Zacharias Löwenthal, co-founder of publishing house Literarische Anstalt, unleashed a commercial edition that just kept going back to the presses. It was of course, bootlegged across the world by dozens more printers and publishers. Shock-headed Peter was translated into English by the author and just kept on going. Its imagery and concepts struck a perennial chord with the parental public everywhere, eventually permeating stage, books, film, musicals, comics, criticism, and all manner of mass entertainment. The book’s style and content even became propaganda tools in a few Anglo-Germanic wars along the way…

This Dover edition from 2013 heavily refences the 328th (!) edition and includes in its bonus section, the ‘Anniversary Page for the Hundredth Edition’ – as well as the ‘Original German Text’ and a biographical ‘Afterword’ on the author’s life.

All jocularity aside, this is a masterpiece and landmark of graphic narrative, one that all cognoscenti don’t have to like but really should be aware of. In deference to changing times and attitudes, and the latterday argument that Hoffman might have been using his book as a therapeutic tool for mental disorders of the young, I’m just going to run a couple of the least spooky/offensive pages, list the individual yarns in order and simply say no more.

In a constant mind-bending flow, brace yourselves for titular triumph ‘Shock-Headed Peter’, ‘The Story of Cruel Frederick’, ‘The Dreadful Story About Harriet and the Matches’, ‘The Story of the Inky Boys’ (as racist a tale as you’ll ever find in these enlightened days!), ‘The Story of the Man that Went Out Shooting’, ‘The Story of Little Suck-A-Thumb’, ‘The Story of Augustus Who Would Not Have Any Soup’, ‘The Story of Fidgett Philip’ and ‘The Story of Johnny Head-In-Air’ before innocuously closing with ‘The Story of Flying Robert’…

Short, surprising and unquestionably unmissable; read with caution, please, children.
© 1995 by Dover Publications, Inc. all rights reserved.

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The A-Z of Marvel Monsters


By Jack Kirby, Dick Ayers, Stan Lee, Larry Lieber & various (Marvel)
ISBN: 978-1-3029-0863-8 (HB/Digital edition)

Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: Fan Smash! … 9/10

This book includes Discriminatory Content produced in less enlightened times.

To dyed-in-the-wool comic book fanboys there’s a much beloved period in history when a frankly daft and woefully formulaic trend produced utter, joyous magic. We look back on it now and see only the magnificent art, or talk with loving derision of the crazy (and frequently onomatopoeic) names, but deep down we can’t shake the exuberant thrill inside or the frisson of emotion that occurs when we see or even think of them.

Before Jack Kirby & Stan Lee brought superheroes back to Marvel Comics, the company was on its last legs. Locked into a woefully disadvantageous distribution deal, the company’s output was limited to some sixteen genre titles. But there was hope…

The outside, mainstream, world was currently gripped in an atomic B-movie monster craze, so Lee, Kirby and Steve Ditko dutifully capitalised on it in their anthology mystery titles Journey into Mystery, Strange Tales, Tales to Astonish and Tales of Suspense. In an unending procession of brief inspirational novelettes, dauntless or canny or just plain outsider humans outsmarted a succession of bizarre aliens, mad scientists, an occasional ghost or sorcerer (this was, after all, the heyday of the Comics Code Authority when any depiction of the supernatural was BAD) and a horde of outrageous beasties in a torrent of wonders best described by the catchphrase “monsters-in-underpants.”

Simplistic, moralistic, visually experimental yet reassuringly predictable in narrative, these Outer Limits-style yarns were – and still are – the epitome of sheer unrelenting fun with no redeeming social context required. Marvel have increasingly celebrated that fact in recent years (even folding most of the yarns into their modern multiversal continuity) and – over the course of one month – commissioned a line of 26 “Kirby Monster” variant covers for their periodical releases, all lovingly crafted by a number of top names to highlight the treasured contribution of beasties, things and what-nots…

This volume gathers those images in a handy hardcover primer (and eBook edition) whilst gloriously gilding the lily with a splendid selection of a few of the original mini-epics as created from those pre-Marvel Age masterpieces. The short sharp surprise is suitably augmented by ‘Jack Kirby, Atlas Comics & Monsters!’: a 1994 Introduction from the King himself.

The next bit’s another shopping-list moment, so if you want to skip ahead a little, I shouldn’t be at all surprised…

Augmented by the original cover of each diabolical debut, the worshipful A to Z art-section opens with Erica Henderson’s reinterpretation of ‘The Awesome Android!’ (as first seen in Fantastic Four #15) and rapidly follows up ‘The Blip!’ by Simon Bisley, and ‘The Crawling Creature!’, delineated by Maguerite Sauvage. An extreme late entry in the Kirby-Kritter Circus, ‘Devil Dinosaur!’ launched in his own title in 1978 and his moody reprise from Matthew Wilson is followed by Jeff Lemire’s take on ‘Elektro!’ and ‘Fin Fang Foom!’ – first seen in Strange Tales #89, and rendered here by Walter Simonson & Laura Martin.

Michael & Laura Allred depict latter-day cellulose celluloid star ‘Groot!’ (originating in Tales to Astonish #13), before Francesco Francavilla highlights ‘The Hypno-Creature!’, Paolo Rivera revisits Fantastic Four #24’s weird menace ‘The Infant Terrible!’ and Glenn Fabry regales us with an Asgardian god battling ‘The Jinni Devil!’ in a scene that didn’t make it into 1967’s Thor #137…

Dave Johnson details a key point in the life of ‘Kraa the Unhuman!’ before John Cassaday & Matthew Wilson illuminate the depredations of ‘Lo-Karr, Bringer of Doom!’, after which Geof Darrow whisks us back to Thor #154 to meet again amalgamated atrocity ‘Mangog!’

Kirby’s astounding 1976 Eternals series produced many incredible images, with Paul Pope & Shay Plummer selecting 2,000 feet tall Space God ‘Nezarr the Calculator!’ to set the pulses racing, whilst Mike del Mundo plumps for Strange Tales #90’s ‘Orrgo!’ and James Stokoe recalls Strange Tales of the Unusual #1 (December 1956)’s forgotten fiend ‘Poker Face!’

Recurring FF foe ‘The Quonian!’ first appeared in Fantastic Four #97 and wows again here thanks to Christian Ward, after which Eric Powell previews ‘Rommbu!’ and Tradd Moore pits Ant-Man against Tales to Astonish #39 terror ‘The Scarlet Beetle!’ before Chris Bachalo & Tim Townsend show us the power of ‘Thorr!’ Chris Samnee & Wilson expose the fervent ferocity of Journey into Mystery #63’s undersea goliath ‘Ulvar!’ and Arthur Adams & Chris Sotomayor hark back to Tales to Astonish #17 to focus on ‘Vandoom’s Monster’ after which one last FF antagonist features as Cliff Chiang reveals ‘The Wrecker’s Robot!’ as seen in Fantastic Four #12.

Wrapping up this astounding alphabet are Dan Brereton’s rendition of ‘Xemnu!’ and Phil Noto’s depiction of ‘The Yeti!’ who battled Kirby’s Black Panther in #5 before Tony Moore & John Rauch hilariously conclude the countdown with alien outlaw ‘Zetora’.

Okay. Maybe a few of those spooky stalwarts might have been from a later era and star in superhero sagas, but the influence and intent was clearly seen throughout and just sets the tone for the Kirby-crafted fearsome fantasy-fest that follow…

The family-friendly monster mash – featuring scripts by Lee and Larry Lieber with Dick Ayers inking – opens with ‘I Learned the Dread Secret of The Blip!’ (Tales to Astonish #15, January 1961) wherein an openminded radar operator attempts to assist a stranded alien energy being. ‘I Dared to Battle the Crawling Creature!’ comes from TtA #22 (August 1961) as a scrawny High School nerd travels into the bowels of the Earth to face a primitive predator, whilst an aging electronicist creates and eventually counters would-be computerised conqueror ‘Elektro! He Held the World in his Iron Grip!’ (Tales of Suspense #19, January 1961).

The hideous Hypno-Creature harried a very human hero in extra-dimensional invasion epic ‘I Entered the Dimension of Doom!’ (ToS #23, November 1961) whilst facing hulking atomic victim ‘Kraa the Unhuman!’ (ToS #18, June 1961) proves the making of a timid American teacher…

A sunken stone head on a Pacific Island proved to be big trouble when explorers awakened ancient alien invaders in ‘Here Comes… Thorr the Unbelievable’ (Tales to Astonish #16, February 1961) and the origins of Defenders villain Xemnu the Titan are exposed in ‘I Was a Slave of the Living Hulk!’ (Journey into Mystery #62, November 1960) whilst one hapless human proves to be the perfect hideout for extraterrestrial fugitive Zetora in ‘The Martian Who Stole My Body!’, as seen in JiM #57 (March 1960).

Foolish, fabulous, thrill-packed, utterly intoxicating and unforgettable, these are fun-filled tales no puny human could possibly resist.
© 1956-1961, 2017 Marvel Characters Inc. All rights reserved.

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The Dangerous Journey


By Tove Jansson, translated by Sophie  Hannah (Drawn & Quarterly/Enfant)
ISBN: 978-1-77046- (HB) eISBN: 978-1-77046-638-8

Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: Warm Storytelling for the Darkest Nights… 10/10

Tove Jansson was one of the greatest literary innovators and narrative pioneers of the 20th century: equally inspired in shaping words and making images to create whole worlds of wonder. She was especially expressive with basic components like pen and ink, manipulating slim economical lines and patterns to realise sublime realms of fascination, whilst her dexterity made simple forms into incredibly expressive and potent symbols and as this collection shows, so was her brother…

Tove Marika Jansson was born into an artistic, intellectual and rather bohemian Swedish family in Helsinki, Finland on August 9th 1914. Patriarch Viktor was a sculptor and mother Signe Hammarsten-Jansson a successful illustrator, graphic designer and commercial artist. Tove’s brothers Lars – AKA “Lasse” – and Per Olov became – respectively – an author/, cartoonist and art photographer. The family and its close intellectual, eccentric circle of friends seems to have been cast rather than born, with a witty play or challenging sitcom as the piece they were all destined to inhabit.

After extensive and intensive study (from 1930-1938 at the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design, Stockholm, the Graphic School of the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts and L’Ecole d’Adrien Holy and L’Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris), Tove became a successful exhibiting artist through the troubled period of the Second World War. Brilliantly creative across many fields, she published the first fantastic Moomins adventure in 1945. Småtrollen och den stora översvämningen (The Little Trolls and the Great Flood or latterly and more euphoniously The Moomins and the Great Flood) was a whimsical epic of gently inclusive, acceptingly understanding, bohemian misfit trolls and their rather odd friends…

A youthful over-achiever, from 1930-1953 Tove had worked as an illustrator and cartoonist for the Swedish satirical magazine Garm: achieving some measure of notoriety with an infamous political sketch of Hitler in nappies that lampooned the Appeasement policies of European leaders in the build-up to WWII. She was also an in-demand illustrator for many magazines and children’s books, and had started selling comic strips as early as 1929.

Moomintroll was her signature character. Literally.

The lumpy, gently adventurous big-eyed romantic goof began life as a spindly sigil next to her name in her political works. She called him “Snork” and claimed she had designed him in a fit of pique as a child – the ugliest thing a precocious little girl could imagine – as a response to losing an argument with her brother about Immanuel Kant.

The term “Moomin” came from her maternal uncle Einar Hammarsten who attempted to stop her pilfering food when she visited, warning her that a Moomintroll guarded the kitchen, creeping up on trespassers and breathing cold air down their necks. Snork/Moomin filled out, became timidly nicer – if a little clingy and insecure – acting as a placid therapy-tool to counteract the grimness of the post-war world.

The Moomins and the Great Flood didn’t make much of an initial impact but Jansson persisted, probably as much for her own edification as any other reason, and in 1946 second book Kometjakten (Comet in Moominland) was published. Many commentators believe the terrifying tale a skilfully compelling allegory of Nuclear Armageddon. You should read it now… while you still can. When it and third illustrated novel Trollkarlens hatt (1948, Finn Family Moomintroll or sometimes The Happy Moomins) were translated into English in 1952 to great acclaim, it prompted British publishing giant Associated Press to commission a newspaper strip about her seductively sweet and sensibly surreal creations.

Jansson had no misgivings or prejudices about strip cartoons and had already adapted Comet in Moominland for Swedish/Finnish paper Ny Tid. Mumintrollet och jordens undergäng – Moomintrolls and the End of the World – was a popular feature so Jansson readily accepted the chance to extend her eclectic family across the world. In 1953, The London Evening News began the first of 21 Moomin strip sagas which promptly captivated readers of all ages. Jansson’s involvement in the cartoon feature ended in 1959, a casualty of its own success and a punishing publication schedule. So great was the strain that towards the end she recruited brother Lars to help. He took over, continuing the feature until its end in 1975.

Liberated from the strip’s pressures, Tove returned to painting, writing and other creative pursuits: generating plays, murals, public art, stage designs, costumes for dramas and ballets, a Moomin opera and 9 more Moomin-related picture-books and novels, as well as 13 books and short-story collections strictly for grown-ups.

Tove Jansson died on June 27th 2001. Her awards are too numerous to mention, but just think: how many artists get their faces on the national currency?

Whenever such a creative force passes on, the greatest tragedy is that there will be no more marvels and masterpieces. Happily, so tirelessly prolific was Tove that her apparently endless bounty left plenty of material for later creators and collaborators to pick over. One such example is this stunning children’s rhyming picture book, part of a series using her characters.

In a wonderfully peaceful place, there’s a girl called Susanna and a cat. Life is pretty idyllic but the brooding human wants action, not contentment…

When she makes an unwise move near the napping moggy, it precipitates a strange event, and a lengthy, laborious trek by many modes of transport through strange lands, supplying all the adventure a girl could ask for. Thankfully, there are some oddly familiar and exceedingly helpful characters heading in the same approximate direction…

Finished in 1970, this metaphysically moody and marvellous allegorical meandering was Jansson’s last picture book for kids, as she graduated to even darker themes addressing mature issues. As a narrative it is utterly compelling, and, for an example of kids’ doggerel, translator Sophie Hannah keeps the rhythm and rationale rolling along with exemplary invention.

Witty, thrilling and disturbingly lovely in dark ways The Dangerous Journey is every youngster’s perfect introduction to sequential narratives, and a beguiling reminder to oldsters why we love them…

Entire contents © Tove Jansson, 1970 Moomin Characters™. Translation © 2010, 2018 Sophie Hannah. All rights reserved.

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Ghosts and Ruins


By Ben Catmull (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-678-2 (HB/Digital edition)

If you know the works of Sidney Sime and Edward Gorey, the horror comics of Bernie Wrightson and Michael Kaluta or simply love to peep through your interlocked fingers at the films of Tim Burton or the creepy backgrounds in Charles Addams’ creations, you’re clearly an aficionado of silly, spooky business and know mordant fantasy plays best when played for laughs.

With that in mind, you might be interested in this macabrely monochrome inconceivably un-famous coffee-table art book from cartoonist Ben Catmull (Monster Parade, Paper Theater). It classily celebrates the stuff of nauseating, stomach-churning terror and sinister, creeping suspense in a series of eerie illustrated plates crafted in scratchboard on Masonite – for extra-spooky darkness!

All that audaciously arcane art is wedded to epigrammatic prose snippets to comprise tantalising skeletons of stories best left untold and consequences safely ajudged as unimaginable…

The engrossing landscape hardback (268 x 222mm but digital views may vary!) combines gloomy gothic imagery with wry & witty updates on uncanny situations in a procession of locations best left well enough alone, commencing with six views of the dank domicile of diabolical ‘Drowned Shelley’ and a single ghastly glimpse of ‘The Buried House’.

A queasy quartet then divulges the doings of the ‘The Disgusting Garden’, after which one sight of ‘The Secluded House’ leads inexorably to a triptych revealing ‘The Woman Outside the Window’…

Four frightful frames of ‘Wandering Smoke’ miasmically meander towards ‘The Order of the Shadowy Finger’ – five in full – before giving way to three glimpses of ‘The Lighthouse’; a visit to a domicile all ‘Hair and Earwigs’ and thence to numerous views of the monstrous masterpieces hewn by horrific revenant ‘The Sculptor’…

On view is the ‘Labyrinth of Junk’ once concocted by a demonic carpenter, but that is as nothing compared to the sheer terror of ‘The Crawling House’ and the ghastly practises of a ‘Lonely Old Spinster’…

Mordantly blending bleak, spectral dread and anxious anticipation with timeless scary scenarios, this terrifying tease – a kind of IKEA Fall Catalogue of the Damned – is a sheer delight no lover of Dark Art could conceivably resist…
© 2013 Ben Catmull. This edition © 2013 Fantagraphics. All rights reserved.

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Dracula: A Symphony in Moonlight and Nightmares


By John J Muth (NBM/Marvel-Epic)
ISBN: 978-1-56163-060-8 (HB) (Marvel Graphic Novel #25: 978-0-87135-171-5)

This book includes Discriminatory Content produced in less enlightened times.

As part of an adventurous foray into the then-budding world of graphic albums, the Marvel Graphic Novel line combined experimental projects and storytelling alongside glorified giant comic books. This particularly arty package from came from gallery guy/award winning children’s book illustrator Jon J. Muth.

Born in Cincinnati, Ohio on July 28th 1960, he is much travelled, and studied sculpture and shodō (brush calligraphy) in Japan, and in England mastered painting, drawing and printmaking. For a brief moment, years ago, he was a new force in sequential art, scoring much attention on Sandman: The Wake, Lucifer: Nirvana, Swamp Thing: Roots, and The Mystery Play, after turning heads at Marvel and Epic with Moonshadow and Havok and Wolverine: Meltdown.

Also a writer, in 1986 Muth appropriated and accommodated elements of Bram Stoker’s classic novel, reweaving them as the framework for a painterly tour-de-force of gothic set-pieces and moving, intimate images. Familiarity with the original’s plot is not essential – if not actually ill-advised – as mood rather than narrative is favoured in Dracula: A Symphony in Moonlight and Nightmares, and the pictures are of paramount interest even if, jarringly and inexplicably, Muth’s narrative mixes first-hand accounts from protagonists Lucy Seward and her father, prose and “newspaper excerpts”, with faux film-script pages into this dark tale of bloody obsession.

For all these problems, it was picked up by NBM in 1992 and re-issued as a gloriously enlarged upscale hardcover album (with eventually a paperback edition) which particularly enhanced those extended sections where Muth’s paintings were allowed to carry the story without the distraction of text.

Although this is so much more “Graphic” than “Novel” and not quite as clever as first seems – all beautiful surface with no depth at all – it is staggeringly pretty, and a delight for any fan with an appreciation of the visual arts and dark delights.
© 1986, 1992 John J Muth. All rights reserved.

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Ugly Mug #8


By many and various aligned to The House of Harley, including Denny Derbyshire, Ed Pinsent, Julian Geek, Alberto Monteiro, John Bagnall, & various (House of Harley)
ISBN: N/A (A4 softcover)

Comics may be a billion dollar business these days, but thankfully it remains at its heart and soul all about doing something creative and waiting for people to react. Hopefully, they’ll be appreciative and give you lots of money… or at least try to swindle you out of your rights. That latter one’s not actually that bad, as it does mean you’re doing something others want…

What I want – and at last have – is the latest annual extravaganza from artistic iconoclasterers The House of Harley; one more supercharged in your face-area assemblage of stories, thoughts and even continued serials from people who don’t care if pastors complain, social workers worry or the Telegraph pitches a disingenuous, profit-seeking hissy-fit….

At this fertile, dynamic pictorial coalface are folk who would draw strips and cartoons even if the act carried the threat of exile or death penalty: concocting and unleashing the kind of word-wedded images the industry and art form continually renews and reinvents itself with.

Every year The House of Harley unleashes an annual (well duh!) anthology of short stories, posterworks, tableaux, diagrammatic diatribes – even further continued characters and serials, and also invites international guests to get what’s needful off their artistic chests, and it’s well past time you indulged their splendid efforts.

This year’s industrial strength model proudly lurks behind a wraparound cover from  John Bagnall and boasts much “modern machinery invented by returning Ugly Mug contributors” beginning with a polemical parade through hidden depths in ‘Sound of the Underground’, before Jack of all Trades helpfully shares the way to handle wasps nests and Ed Pinsent details the repercussions upon R.S.D. Laing, Record Collector after ‘He travels back in time to get a rare LP!’…

Half page hilarity ensues as ‘Mark E. Smith: Music Teacher’ goes that extra mile for a young violinist whilst nudist larks abound in ‘Life with Freda Nipple’ with a second outing for each at the far end of surreal and epic historical fable ‘Bearskin’ by Denny Derbyshire, whereafter apish anarchy is astoundingly unleashed in Julian Geeks ‘Jungle Ruck’.

The savage outbursts are followed by the eighth arcane instalment of Pinsent’s beguiling ‘Windy Wilberforce’ serial The Saga of the Scroll (fear not, back issues of Ugly Mug are available to all with the wherewithal), and we conclude with some more brief bits featuring Mark E. and Freda, before being escorted off the premises by an assortment of ‘Big backsides’ as depicted by Brazilian guest creator Alberto Monteiro.

Proudly proffering “vinyl mania, whirling microphones, stuffed tigers, cable inspections, terrible mistakes, old mining railways, time travel on the cheap, floating ziggurats, tree portals, strange clouds, hand-cranked cars, mating season orgies, smoking spoil-heaps and a Tunnock’s shortage” here is more racy fare than any British X-mas Annual of yore. These cunning creations teem with turbulent narrative force and visual clout, and come packed to the gills with wry and witty visual oomph, an ideal example of the compulsion to leave our marks wherever we can.

Buy one. Read one. Do one yourself.

You know you want to…
All contents © their respective creators.

Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: Wild Fun and the Epitome of Sheer Creativity Perfection… 8/10

For all this and much more please check out houseofharley.net/shop

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The Eyes of the Cat


By Moebius & Jodorowsky (Humanoids)
ISBN: 978-1-59465-032-1 (HB/Digital edition) ISBN: 978-1-59465-042-0 (Yellow Edition)

This book includes Discriminatory Content produced in less enlightened times.

Many of the world’s greatest comics exponents are cruelly neglected these days. It’s not because they are out of vogue or forgotten, it’s simply that so much of their greatest material lies out of print. This little gem is one of them…

Born in Tocopilla, Chile in 1929, Alejandro Jodorowsky Prullansky has been a filmmaker, playwright, actor, author, world traveller, philosopher, spiritual guru and comics writer. The controversial creative polymath is known for such films as Fando y Lis, El Topo, The Holy Mountain, Sante Sangre, The Rainbow Thief, The Dance of Reality and others, plus a vast and influential comics output, including Anibal 5 (created whilst living in Mexico), Le Lama blanc, Aliot, The Meta-Barons, Borgia, Madwoman of the Sacred Heart, The Son of El Topo, Showman Killer, Knights of Heliopolis and so many more, created with some of South America and Europe’s greatest artists. His decade-long collaboration with Moebius on Tarot-inspired Sci Fi epic The Incal (1981-1989) utterly redefined and reinvented what comics could aspire to and achieve…

Most widely regarded for his violently surreal avant-garde films, loaded with highly-charged, inspired imagery – blending mysticism and what he terms “religious provocation” – and his spiritually-informed fantasy and science fiction comics tales, Jodorowsky is also fascinated by humanity’s inner realms and has devised his own doctrine of therapeutic healing: Psychomagic, Psychogenealogy and Initiatic massage. He still remains fully engaged and active in all these creative areas to this day and has never stopped creating. Most of his lifelong themes and obsessions are seamlessly wedded together in this glorious re-release of his very first comics collaboration with the creator most inextricably associated with him.

Jean Henri Gaston Giraud was born in the suburbs of Paris on May 8th 1938 and raised by his grandparents after his mother and father divorced in 1941. In 1955, he attended the Institut des Arts Appliqués where he became friends with Jean-Claude Mézières who, at 17, was already selling strips and illustrations to magazines like Coeurs Valliants, Fripounet et Marisette and Le Journal de Spirou. Giraud, apparently, spent most of his college time drawing cowboy comics and left after a year…

In 1956, he visited Mexico, staying with his mother for eight months before returning to France and a full-time career drawing comics. These were mostly westerns such as Frank et Jeremie for Far West and King of the Buffalo, A Giant with the Hurons and others for Coeurs Valliants, all in a style based on French comics legend Joseph Gillain AKA Jijé. Giraud spent his National Service in Algeria in 1959-1960, where he worked on military service magazine 5/5 Forces Françaises and, on returning to civilian life, became Jijé’s assistant in 1961, working on the master’s long-running (1954-1977) Western epic Jerry Spring.

A year later, Giraud and Belgian writer Jean-Michel Charlier launched the serial Fort Navajo in Pilote #210. Remarkably quickly its disreputable, antihero lead character Lieutenant Blueberry became one of the most popular European strips of modern times. From 1963 to 1964, Giraud produced a number of strips for satire periodical Hara-Kiri and – keen to distinguish and separate the material from his serious day job – first coined his penname “Moebius”…

He didn’t use it again until 1975 when he joined Bernard Farkas, Jean-Pierre Dionnet and Philippe Druillet – all inspired science fiction fans as the founding fathers of a revolution in narrative graphic arts as created by “Les Humanoides Associes”. Their groundbreaking adult fantasy magazine Métal Hurlant utterly enraptured the comics-buying public and Giraud again sought a discreet creative persona for the lyrical, experimental, soul-searching material he was increasingly driven to produce: series such as The Airtight Garage, The Incal and the mystical, dreamy flights of sheer fantasy contained in Arzach…

To further separate his creative twins, Giraud worked inks with a brush whilst the futurist Moebius rendered with pens…

After a truly stellar career which saw him become a household name, both Giraud and Moebius passed away in March 2012.

As explained in Jodorowsky’s Foreword, this magnificently macabre minimalist monument to imagination came about as brief tale in a free, promotional premium “Mistral Edition” of Métal Hurlant constituted their very first collaboration – outside the creative furnace that was the pre-production phase of doomed & aborted movie Dune, where they first met. Also included in that imaginative movie production dream-team was Dan O’Bannon, Douglas Trumbull, H.R. Giger and Chris Foss, and some secrets of that time are also shared here.

Les Yeux du chat was realised between 1977 and 1979: a dark fable that is sheer beauty and pure nightmare rendered in stark monochrome and florid expansive grey-tones. Text is spartan and understated: more poetic goad than descriptive excess or expositional in-filling.

There’s a city, a boy at a window, an eagle and a cat. When their lives intersect, shock and horror are the inescapable result…

Available in a number of formats since 2011, this is a visual masterpiece no connoisseur of comics can afford to miss.
© 2013 Humanoids, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Adrift on a Painted Sea


By Sue Bird and Tim Bird (Avery Hill Publishing)
ISBN: 978-1-910395-82-0 (TPB)

A child – every child’s – late life obsession to understand their parents and find similarities and differences in the lives each generation has led. What we remember and how we frame such recollections afflicts all of us. It also becomes increasingly important as we get older, a truism that washes all through this elegiac and ruminatory collation where comics storyteller Tim Bird details his response to finding the lost (more actually forgotten and mis-recalled) paintings of his recently deceased mother Sue.

Contemporary found facts just don’t jibe with his own childhood memories and he cannot resist finding what the truth actually is…

What Tim irrefutably knows is that when not running a house, being a wife and rearing two kids, Sue Bird was a talented and compulsive artist, who from childhood created for the sheer joy of it. She loved the sea, shores and marine life, nature studies and still life painting. As a kid she even won competitions and her artworks toured in shows.

Or did they?

Mum created passionately and privately, and never tried to sell her work. After her death during the Covid pandemic, Tim uncovers some paintings and drawings – and a few scraps of newspapers squirreled away. Whilst still coming to terms with the awful restrictions that made her passing so cruel and unfair, he is increasingly gripped with his own passion: a hunger to know what’s what and what happened…

Using the recovered bounty of her dozens of paintings and by talking to anyone still alive who knew her, Tim reevaluates his own past and relationship with Sue Bird, using her artworks as markers and chapter posts for a new sort of artistic statement. Moreover, as he seeks to unravel and reconfigure his fudged and muddy impressions of their times together, other shared milestone moments re-emerge: Northumberland beaches no one else enjoyed, listening to the Shipping Forecast and just sharing a drive to make things…

Using his comics as a skeleton and her paintings as meat on those bones, Bird applies his reshaped consciousness to the past and as his quest brings him closer to his own young family, engineers those feelings and discoveries into a visual eulogy to her and the power of memory, loss, and – always and forever – family.
© Tim Bird 2024.

Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: Because Some Cannot Be Forgotten… 9/10

Adrift on a Painted Sea is published on 1st October 2024 and is available for pre-order now.

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Pirate Stew


By Neil Gaiman, illustrated by Chris Riddell OBE (Bloomsbury Children’s Books)
ISBN: 978-1-5266-1472-8 (HB) eISBN: 978-1-5266-1470-4

Ha-haarrrr! Tempests toss, the world turns summore and once again ‘tis time to Internationally Talk Like a Pirate!

Happily, it’s never too soon to begin practicing your piracy, and with that in mind here’s a pretty sharp kids’ picture book by certain someones with a lot of not-so-deeply buried treasures to their names getting in on the game, and producing a pretty and potent primer – if not route map – to a venerable profession and therapeutic briny waves…

Delivered as a flotilla of pictorial spreads peppered with blocks of rhyming text, this is the story of that night when Mum and Dad caught dinner and a show and hired ship’s cook Long John McRon to watch and feed their kids…

Before long the house was packed with pirates and before much longer, both brother and sister were acutely aware that if you ate pirate stew, strange things began to happen…

Equally prolific and far-ranging, both Gaiman and illustrator, author, political cartoonist and former UK Children’s Laureate Riddell have done way more stuff than I have time to cite, and it’s all top quality too, so after scoping it all out you should circle back to this wild ride: one guaranteed to deliver all the thrills and frills any adventure-starved tyke or tyro might expect.

Go on, get stuck in and heave ho ho, me hearties…
Text © Neil Gaiman, 2020. Illustrations © Chris Riddell, 2020. All rights reserved.