Category: Cartooning Classics

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Star Hawks volume 1


By Ron Goulart & Gil Kane, & various (Hermes Press)
ISBN: 978-163140-397-2 (HB)

This book includes Discriminatory Content produced in less enlightened times.

During the later 20th century, comic book publishers worked long and hard to import their colourful wares to the more popular and commercially viable shelves of bookshops, until eventual acceptance came via the hybrid form we know now as graphic novels. Newspaper strips (and periodical humour/satire magazines like Mad) had, of course, been regular fare for these sales points since the 1950s.

By dint of more accessible themes and subjects, simpler page layouts and just plain bigger core readerships, comedy and action newspaper serials easily translated to digest-sized book formats and sold by the bucketload to a broad base of consumers. Because of this, the likes of Peanuts, B.C., Broom Hilda, Flash Gordon, Mandrake and so many others were an entertainment staple for cartoon-loving, joy-deficient kids and adults from the 1960s to the 1990s. In the final accounting comedies and gag books far outweighed dramas. By the TV-saturated 1970s the grand era of newspaper adventure strips was all but over, although some few dynamic holdouts persevered. There were even some new gems still to come.

One such was this astonishingly addictive space opera/police procedural which debuted on October 3rd 1977. The strip was created by novelist, comics scripter and strip historian Ron Goulart slightly in advance of science fiction’s revival and resurgence which culminated in the release of Star Wars (and later continued by the legendary Archie Goodwin who all-but-sewed up the sci-fi strip genre at that time by also simultaneously authoring the Star Wars newspaper serial which premiered in 1979)…

Star Hawks was graced by the dazzlingly dynamic art of Gil Kane and blessed with an innovative format for such fare: a daily double-tier layout allowing far bigger, bolder graphics and panel compositions than a traditional single bank of three or four frames.

The core premise was also magically simple: in our future, humanity has spread throughout the galaxy and inhabits many worlds, moons and satellites… and wherever man goes there’s crime and a desperate need for policemen and peacekeepers…

As revealed in his picture- & photo-packed Introduction ‘In at the Creation’, Goulart began with working title “Space Cops”, which was eventually editorially overruled and superseded with the more dashingly euphonious and commercially vibrant Star Hawks. He goes on to describe resistance the strip suffered from its own syndicate, delays that meant it only launched after Star Wars set the world on fire and how he was ultimately edged out of the creative process altogether…

A brace of mass-market digest paperbacks were released whilst the strip was still running, and at the end of the 1980s, 4 comic book-sized album collections came from Blackthorne Publishing, but these are all now out-of-print and hard to acquire, so let’s be thankful for this first sturdy hardback archival edition…

Printed in landscape format with each instalment fitting neatly onto a page (and almost original publication size), this stirring tome of clean, crisp monochrome art is tight and taut: steaming straight in with the premiere episode. Here we meet villainous Raker and his sultry, sinister boss: child-of-privilege Ilka. They are scouring the slums and ruins of alien world Esmeralda for a desperate girl plagued by dark, dangerous visions…

Enter Rex Jaxan and burly Latino lothario Chavez: two-fisted law-enforcing police officers on the lookout for trouble, and who promptly save the lost lass from slavers only to become embroiled in a dastardly plot to overthrow the local Emperor by scurrilous arms merchants. Also debuting in that initial tale is the officers’ boss Alice K. Benyon – far more than just a sexy romantic foil for He-Hunk Jaxan, and an early example of a competent woman actually In Charge (even if she does it in slinky form-hugging outfits)…

The debuting standbys also include awesome space station “Hoosegow” and Sniffer, the snarkiest, sulkiest, snappiest robo-dog in the galaxy. This mechanical mutt gets all the best lines…

Barely pausing for breath, the star-born Starsky and Hutch (that’s Goulart’s take on them, not mine) are in pursuit of an appalling new weapons system developed to topple the military dictatorship of Empire 13: the “Dustman” process (beginning on November 15th 1977). Before long, searches for the illegal and appalling WMD develop into a full-on involvement in what should have stayed a local matter; and inevitably civil war…

The next sequence (March 17th to June 19th 1978) opens with the jubilant boys investigating stupendous resort satellite Hotel Maximus, with Alice K. along to bolster their undercover image. On Maximus, every floor holds a different daring delight, from dancing to dinosaur wrangling to Alpine adventure – but the return of malevolent Raker heralds a whole new kind of chaos as he is revealed as an agent of pan-galactic criminal cartel The Brotherhood.

Moreover, the Maximus is the site of their greatest coup – a plot to mass mind-control the universe’s richest and most powerful citizens. So pernicious are these villains that the Brotherhood can even infiltrate and assault Hoosegow itself…

Foiling the raiders, Jaxan & Chavez quickly go on the offensive, hunting the organisation as a new epic begins on June 20th (which frustratingly leaves this initial collection paused on a tense cliffhanger). The investigation takes them to pesthole planet Selva: a degraded world of warring tribes and monstrous mutations, where ambitiously dogged new recruit Kass seeks to distinguish himself, even as on Hoosegow the Brotherhood is deadly and persistent with new leader Master Jigsaw executing his plan to destroy the Star Hawks from within…

Wrapping up the starry-eyed wonderment is the first part of Daniel Herman’s biographical assessment ‘Gil Kane: Bringing a Comic Book Sensibility to Comic Strips’…

The Star Hawks strip ran until 1981, garnering a huge and devoted audience, critical acclaim and a National Cartoonists Society Award for Kane (1977 Story Comic Strip Award). It is quite simply one of the most visually exciting, rip-roaring and all-out fabulous sci-fi sagas in comics history and should be part of every action fan’s permanent collection. These tales are a “must-have” item for every thrill-seeking child of the stars and fan of the classic space age…
© 1977, 1978, 2017 United Features Syndicate, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Mac Raboy’s Flash Gordon volume 3


By Mac Raboy & Don Moore (Dark Horse Books)
ISBN: 978-1569719787 (TPB)

This book includes Discriminatory Content produced during less enlightened times.

By almost every metric, Flash Gordon is the most influential comic strip in the world. When the hero debuted on Sunday January 7th 1934 (with equally superb Jungle Jim running as a supplementary “topper” strip), it was a slick, sophisticated answer to Philip Nolan & Dick Calkins’ revolutionary, ideas-packed, inspirational, but quirkily clunky Buck Rogers (which had also launched on January 7th – albeit in 1929), with two fresh elements added to the wonderment: Classical Lyricism and Poetic Dynamism. The newcomer became a weekly invitation to stunningly exotic glamour and astonishing beauty.

Where Buck merged traditional adventure with groundbreaking science concepts, Flash reinterpreted fairy tales, hero epics and mythology, draping them in the spectacular trappings of contemporary futurism, with the varying “rays”, “engines” and “motors” of modern pulp sci fi substituting for trusty swords and lances. There were also plenty of those too – and exotic craft and contraptions stood in for galleons, chariots and magic carpets. Look closely, though, and you’ll see cowboys, gangsters and of course, flying saucer fetishes adding contemporary flourish to the fanciful fables. The narrative trick made the far-fetched satisfactorily familiar – and was continued with contemporary trends and innovations by Austin Briggs and Don Moore before Mac Raboy, (with Moore and Robert Rogers) took over the Sunday strips in a tenure lasting from 1948 to 1967.

The sheer artistic talent of Raymond, his compositional skills, fine linework, eye for clean, concise detail and just plain genius for drawing beautiful people and things, swiftly made this the strip that all young artists swiped from literally all over the world. When original material comic books began a few years later, many talented kids used Gordon as their model and ticket to future success in the field of adventure strips. Almost all the others went with Raymond’s stylistic polar opposite: emulating Milton Caniff’s expressionist masterwork Terry and the Pirates (and to see one of his better disciples check out Beyond Mars, limned by wonderful Lee Elias).

Flash Gordon began on present-day Earth (which was 1934, remember?) with a wandering world about to smash into our planet. As global panic ensued, polo player Flash and fellow passenger Dale Arden narrowly escaped disaster when a meteor fragment downed their airliner. They landed on the estate of tormented genius Dr. Zarkov, who imprisoned them in the rocket-ship he had built. His plan? To fly the ship directly at the astral invader and deflect it from Earth by crashing into it!

Thus began a decade of sheer escapist magic in a Ruritanian Neverland: a blend of Camelot, Oz and a hundred other fantasy realms promising paradise yet concealing vipers, ogres and demons, all cloaked in a glimmering sheen of sleek scientific speculation. Worthy adversaries such as utterly evil yet magnetic Ming, emperor of the fantastic wandering planet; myriad exotic races and shattering conflicts offered a fantastic alternative to drab and dangerous reality for millions of avid readers around the world.

With Moore handling the majority of the scripting, Alex Raymond’s ‘On the Planet Mongo’ ran every Sunday until 1944, when the artist joined the Marines. On his return, he forsook wild imaginings for sober reality: creating gentleman-detective Rip Kirby. The public’s unmissable weekly appointment with wonderment perforce continued under the artistic auspices of Austin Briggs – who had drawn the monochrome daily instalments since 1940.

In 1948, eight years after beginning his career drawing for the Harry A. Chesler production “shop”, comic book artist Emmanuel “Mac” Raboy took over illustrating the Sunday page. Moore remained as scripter and began co-writing with the new artist.

Raboy’s sleek, fine-line brush style – heavily influenced by his idol Raymond – had made his work on Captain Marvel Jr., Kid Eternity and especially Green Lama a pinnacle of artistic quality in the early days of the proliferating superhero genre. His seemingly inevitable assumption of Flash Gordon’s extraordinary exploits led to a renaissance of the strip and in a rapidly evolving post-war world, it became once more a benchmark of timeless, hyper-realistic quality escapism which only Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant could match. This third 260-page paperback volume – produced in landscape format, printed in stark monochrome and still criminally out-of-print and long overdue for a fresh edition – opens after a gripping and informative appraisal of Raboy in Bruce (Incredible Hulk, Arena, Silverheels, Ka-Zar the Savage) Jones’ Introduction ‘The Body Aerodynamic’. Then it’s blast-off time. again…

Sequence 68 ‘Missiles from Neptune’ began on January 19th 1958 and closed the previous cliffhanging volume barely weeks in. It resumes here with the episode for February 30th and carries on until March 9th, revealing how the oppressive Tyrant of Neptune seeks to impress and cow into submission his already-captive populace by testing deadly new Weapons of Interplanetary Destruction against hapless planet Earth.

The callous campaign prompts Flash to go and discourage him, but after superbly succeeding the conquering hero is lost in the interplanetary void and forced to build a survival nest inside an asteroid. His ingenuity as a ‘Robinson Crusoe in Space’ (16th March – 27th April) once more demonstrates the compelling power of straight, hard science storytelling (especially at a time when America was locked in a space race of its own), but it’s back to fantastic empires and extragalactic terror for his next exploit as Earth is menaced by ‘The Z Bomb Cloud’ (4th May – 15th June).

Long after a far-distant civilisation destroys itself, the deadly fallout of its doomsday weapon drifts into Earth orbit, threatening all terrestrial life. When Zarkov’s desperate plan to intercept the cloud goes wrong, someone must sacrifice themself to save us all…

Obviously, just this once it isn’t Flash, but the potent drama peaks with appropriate tragedy and sentiment anyway, before sequence S071 taps into the sheer burgeoning wonderment of the era as Flash and Dale help big game hunter Brian Farr prove the existence of uncanny unseen cryptids he calls ‘Stratosphere Beasts’ (22nd June – 17th August). These invisible beasts apparently dwell far above Earth’s highest mountain tops, so the endeavour takes the humans to the top of Everest where the unknown isn’t the only trial they face…

From 24th August to October 12th S072 told how the ace space pilot was embroiled in a commercial show-race to the outer planets. However, the ‘Rocket Derby’ is apparently less about proving whose ship is best and more about rich, spoiled obsessive competitors Morgan Bates and Babara “Bobcat” Kathryns realising how close hate is to love…

Along the way, Dale is dragged into the competition after hearing macho males telling Bobcat that space is no place for women, even as hired gun Flash suffers numerous sabotage attempts. It’s almost like there’s an unknown fifth element acting on their own agenda…

It’s back to dramatic basics for ‘Moon Wreck’ (S073, running from 19th October to December 14th) wherein Gordon attempts to rescue an arrogant playboy and his latest dalliance from a self-inflicted crash and subsequent marooning on Luna. The pilot’s every valiant effort is hampered by the autocrat’s privilege, greed, stupidity and cowardice, vain starlet’s Elyse Elan’s venality, and the deadly environment they both refuse to take seriously…

Gordon’s piloting skills land him in more trouble in ‘The Ship of Gold’ (S074: December 21st 1958 to January 2nd 1959) when he captains a transport of mining machinery and tons of cash to Mars, only to have the ship stolen out from under him with Dale trapped aboard. The evil mastermind is old college colleague Nicky Hamilton, but when the boastful villain abandons current girlfriend Jet in a ruthless attempt to loose Flash in the airless wastes of Titan, he seals his own fate and accidentally exposes a major threat to Earth in succeeding saga ‘The Skorpi’ (February 8th – April 5th)…

Left for dead, Flash and Dale fall through Titan’s surface to discover an insectoid alien invasion force. Skorpi can become copies of humans and are well advanced in a plot to infiltrate Earth, but aren’t quick enough to outwit Flash, especially once he befriends captive telepathic ET Brunn. His gigantic kind are Gorgins and with their allies The Dhreen have been battling Skorpi for 30,000 years. Together, the new pals whip up a plan to defeats this particular incursion…

Brunn then adapts a ship to Faster-Than-Light drive and accompanies Flash on a ‘Flight for Help’ (S076: April 12th – June 7th), beseeching Dhreen’s Council of Elders for military aid. Instead, the embassage is covertly targeted by their other client vassals – like Brunn’s own Gorgin race – who fear their share of aid will be diminished if the benign overlords help yet another endangered species…

Plots become assassination attempts, but only accidentally expose Skorpi infiltration, leading Brunn and Gordon to further corruption, exile and ultimately capture by a hidden race who dwell unsuspected in a ‘City of Glass’ (S077: June 14th to August 23rd). Condemned to death for breaking the metropolis’ sacrosanct isolation, the wanderers are only saved by lovely, sympathetic Flara, who aids the human’s escape back to the Solar system but keeps adorable Brunn by her side…

The Earthman only makes it as far as the second rock from the Sun and S078 (August 30th – November 1st) radically changes pace for a ‘Venus Mystery’ wherein human colonists face disaster as their Bajo crop is targeted by “swamp devils”. In an early lesson in green land management, crash-landed Flash aids ecologist Dirk Van Meer in proving to the furious farmers how badly wrong they have got things, what is actually to blame for all the chaos and carnage and how to fix it…

Immediate emergency over, Flash finally reaches Earth to find Zarkov impatiently waiting. Before he can catch his breath the steadfast starman is dragooned into a dangerous new experiment with cyberneticist Dr. Else Neilson having him ride along as a fallback option as she “road-tests” her ‘Robot Spaceship’ (S079: November 8th 1959 to 17th 1960). Fully automated – and what we’d call AI – the ship has human safety as its core drive, but of course, human and mechanical opinions on what exactly that means differ extensively…

Thanks in large part to Flash Gordon, spaceship technology has rapidly advanced and he is selected to pilot the first human-built FTL drive ship. The Columbus will ferry ‘The Star Miners’ (S080: January 24th – March 27th) to another star system, reap mineral wealth and set up a colony. However, the directives of chief advisor Dr. Zarkov are constantly challenged and ultimately overruled by gang-boss Mr. Birk, who can only think of glory and a big fat bonus promised for prompt completion and delivery…

Arriving on unexplored planet Karst, Zarkov again urges patience and caution, but is first sidelined and then arrested once Flash undertakes his secondary mission of exploration. By the time the hero returns the entire expedition is close to extinction and only drastic measures can save them all…

On returning to Earth, welcome shore-leave ends in catastrophe when Flash is shanghaied by “entrepreneurs” Roni and Captain Graz: kidnapped into space and ordered to pilot their ship or die. They need someone able to deliver potentially ‘Deadly Cargo’ (S081: April 3rd to June 12th) and navigate through the asteroid belt to mineral-rich big rock Juno, where a huge diamond strike has created urgent demand for explosives. It’s also a race setting competitive old rivals at each other’s throats and costs plenty of nefarious lives before Gordon gets ramshackle freighter Pollux down (relatively) safely…

Subsequent attempts to get off Juno turn wild and dangerous in ‘The Soil Divers’ (S082: June 19th – August 28th) when Flash is suckered into an ongoing resource war on the mining asteroid. Scientist Ben Corelli has devised a means of passing through solid matter, but fallen under the spell of avaricious faithless Roni and her new heavy Snapper Kaye, sparking violent conflict amongst those desperate diggers stuck using old methods of extracting mineral wealth. Soon, the attempts to seize Corelli’s breakthrough tech leads to murder and worse…

A self-aggrandising, fame-hungry documentary filmmaker obsessed with his legacy makes trouble for Dale – and therefore Flash – next. Charles Q. Charlston brings ‘Dead Worlds’ (S083: September 4th to November 20th) and lost civilisations to the masses, but has no qualms or scruples about breaking all the rules of space conduct: cheating, lying, stealing and even killing to ensure his own glory… until Gordon steps up. He and Dale are then called to the ringed planet and a reunion and to assist Brian Farr, now ‘Game Warden on Saturn’ (S084: November 27th 1960 to February 19th 1961)…

His job is currently complicated by the system’s most successful poacher – cunning sadist Von Brandt – who seeks the joy of hunting and intends making millions selling the skins of a rare indigenous lifeform. He’s also happy to excise interfering busybodies for free…

A maritime tang and epic approach flavours ‘The Trail of Orpheus’ (S085: February 26th – May 28th) when Flash joins oceanologists Henry and Veronica Weeks on a submarine to map the unique and spectacular “Devils Spring” environmental phenomenon making the watery world so hazardous to rocket ships. Their undersea voyage reveals fantastic truths about the past rulers of the planet and changes the solar system forever…

It’s a welcome return to space opera and pulp overtones as S086 sees an orbital agriculture satellite accidentally invaded by space gremlins and transformed into a ‘Death Farm in Space’ (June 4th to September 3rd) until Zarkov and Flash investigate and act, all followed by comedic whimsy as a band of backward-looking human bandits revolt against ecological progress in ‘Desert Prince’ (S087: September 10th to December 10th)…

When Earth loses the final dusty miles of once-barren Sahara to water reclamation projects, reactionary tribal chieftain Al Maarri refuses to take up farming and instead leads his raiders on a wave of sorties. The campaign of resistance culminates in his stealing a rocket ship to carry his entire bandit horde and their families to Mars where civilisation is scarce, law is poorly enforced and beautiful sandy wastes are abundant. Soon, armed with modern weapons, he’s making life difficult for genuine colonists, forcing under-resourced Flash to solve the problem creatively. That means infiltrating the tribe with the assistance of the long-suffering wives, children and oldsters the rowdy raiders forcibly dragged along with them…

Law & order was the theme of the next tale as readers gained insights into future traffic management solutions in the crowded orbital paths above Earth. The revelations came thanks to Flash visiting old pal “Ape” Rice, an officer of the ‘Spaceways Patrol’ (S088: December 17th 1961 to April 1st 1962).

Sadly, it’s not a friendly visit: Gordon works for the World Space Patrol and is on an official inspection of the Police satellite. Silly cultural satire – observing how dumb the private citizens “driving” in space are – quickly gives way to taut drama when recently-ousted national despot Generalissimo Sanre and his entourage seize the station through subterfuge, planning to blackmail the world with its arsenal of atomic weapons…

With only Flash and Ape free to act, tragedy inevitably follows the deadly fight that ensues before the planet is free from the threat of global tyranny…

The same blend of expansive wonder and human frailty permeates the saga of a blonde, blue-eyed hero found in a block of arctic ice – a tale told in full in S089, spanning April 8th through July 15th 1962. Incidentally, The Avengers #4 was released on January 3rd 1964, reintroducing Captain America to the world. I’m just saying…

Here, the ‘Living Fossil’ is found by researchers testing magnetic fields in Greenland and only involves Flash when defrosted berserker Ragnor goes on a rampage that brings him to the airfield Gordon is trying to land on. A renewed assault traps the Viking aboard (with Flash and a crew that includes handy Scandinavian scholar Eva) on a flight to Venus: a world far more in keeping with the barbarian’s culture of warriors, trolls, goblins, dwarves… and dragons…

This third astounding visit to a historical future closes with another technological nightmare and disaster-movie precursor spanning July 22nd to October 14th 1962. ‘Falling Moon’ (S090) reveals how massive artificial satellite Deepspace-One – jumping-off point for all outgoing Earth space travel – is struck by a meteor. Deflected and doomed, it slowly falls, leaving Flash only five hours to evacuate its resort contingent and find a way to save Earth from impact and atomic fallout…

As the adventures never ended, we close the collection with the opening of another exploit and pause on a moment of cliffhanging suspense. ‘Sons of Saturn’ (S091: in its original entirety running from October 21st 1962 to January 20th 1963) stops here with the December 9th episode. Prior to that point, a hitherto unsuspected super-civilisation thriving in the clouds of the Sixth Planet is revealed when an Earth probe provokes the current dictator to determine human nature and resource by sending super-criminal outcast Baldr to plague, punish and test them. That results in the indestructible giant breaking into Flash’s ship and going on a rampage…

To Be Continued…

Each week as he toiled on the strip, Raboy produced ever-more expansive artwork filled with distressed damsels, deadly monsters, incredible civilisations, increasingly authentic space hardware and locales, and all sorts of outrageous adventure that continued until the illustrator’s untimely death in 1967. Perhaps it was a kindness. He was the last great Golden Age romanticist illustrator and his lushly lavish, freely-flowing adoration of perfected human form was beginning to stale in popular taste. The Daily feature had already switched to the solid, chunky, He-Manly burly realism of Dan Barry and Frank Frazetta, but here at least the last outpost of ethereally beautiful heroism and pretty perils still prevailed: a dream realm you can visit as easily and often as Flash, Dale & Zarkov popped between planets, just by tracking down this book and the one which follows…
© 2003 King Features Syndicate Inc. ™ & © Hearst Holdings, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Leonard & Larry 3: Extracts From the Ring Cycle at Royal Albert Hall


By Tim Barela (Palliard Press)
ISBN: 978-1-88456-805-3 (Album PB)

We live in an era where Pride events are world-wide and commonplace: where acceptance of LGBTQIA+ citizens is a given… at least in all the civilised countries where dog-whistle politicians, populist “hard men” totalitarian dictators (I’m laughing at a private dirty joke right now) and sundry organised religions are kept in their generally law-abiding places by their hunger for profitable acceptance and desperation to stay tax-exempt, scandal-free, rich and powerful.

There’s still too many places where it’s not so good to be Gay but at least Queer themes and scenes are no longer universally illegal and can be ubiquitously seen in entertainment media of all types and age ranges… and even on the streets of most cities. For all the injustices and oppressions, we’ve still come a long, long way and it’s and simply No Big Deal anymore. Let’s affirm that victory and all work harder to keep it that way…

Such was not always the case and, to be honest, the other team (with religions proudly egging them on and backing them up) are fighting hard and dirty to reclaim all the intolerant high ground they’ve lost thus far.

Incredibly, all that change and counteraction happened within the span of living memory (mine, in this case). For English-language comics, the shift from illicit pornography to homosexual inclusion in all drama, comedy, adventure and other genres started as late as the 1970s and matured in the 1980s – despite resistance from most western governments – thanks to the efforts of editors like Robert Triptow and Andy Mangels and cartoonists like Howard Cruse, Vaughn Bode, Trina Robbins, Lee Marrs. Gerard P. Donelan, Roberta Gregory, Touko Valio Laaksonen/“Tom of Finland” and Tim Barela.

A native of Los Angeles, Barela was born in 1954, and became a fundamentalist Christian in High School. He loved motorbikes and had dreams of becoming a cartoonist. He was also a gay kid struggling to come to terms with what was still judged illegal, wilfully mind-altering psychosis and perversion – if not actual genetic deviancy – and an appalling sin by his theological peers and close family…

In 1976, Barela began an untitled comic strip about working in a bike shop for Cycle News. Some characters then reappeared in later efforts Just Puttin (Biker, 1977-1978); Short Strokes (Cycle World, 1977-1979); Hard Tale (Choppers, 1978-1979) plus The Adventures of Rickie Racer, and cooking strip (!) The Puttin Gourmet… America’s Favorite Low-Life Epicurean in Biker Lifestyle and FTW News. Four years later, the cartoonist unsuccessfully pitched a domestic (AKA “family”) strip called Ozone to LGBTQA news periodical The Advocate. Among its proposed quotidian cast were literal and metaphorical straight man Rodger and openly gay Leonard Goldman… who had a “roommate” named Larry Evans…

Gay Comix was an irregularly published anthology, edited at that time by Underground star Robert Triptow (Strip AIDs U.S.A.; Class Photo). He advised Barela to ditch the restrictive newspaper strip format in favour of longer complete episodes, and printed the first of these in Gay Comix #5 in 1984. The remodelled new feature was a huge success, included in many successive issues and became the solo star of Gay Comix Special #1 in 1992.

Leonard & Larry also showed up in prestigious benefit comic Strip AIDs U.S.A. before triumphantly relocating to The Advocate in 1988, and – from 1990 – to its rival publication Frontiers. The lads even moved into live drama in 1994: adapted by Theatre Rhinoceros of San Francisco as part of stage show Out of the Inkwell. In the 1990s their episodic exploits were gathered in a quartet of wonderfully oversized (220 x 280 mm) monochrome albums which gained a modicum of international stardom and some glittering prizes. This third compendium compiled by Palliard Press between 1996 -2000, follows Domesticity Isn’t Pretty and Kurt Cobain & Mozart Are Both Dead, whilst paving the way for last volume (to date) How Real Men Do It.

As previously stated, as well as featuring a multi-generational cast, Leonard & Larry is a strip that progressed in real time, with characters all aging and developing accordingly. The strips are not and never have been about sex – except in that the subject is a constant generator of hilarious jokes and outrageously embarrassing situations. Triumphantly skewering hypocrisy and rebuking ignorance with dry wit and superb drawing, episodes cover various couples’ home and work lives, constant parties, physical deterioration, social gaffes, rows, family revelations, holidays and even events like earthquakes and fanciful prognostications.

Following an Introduction from Animation historian Charles Solomon and Lief Wauters potted history of the strip ‘The Life and Times of Leonard & Larry’, a ‘Leonard & Larry Timeline’ provides a crucial curated recap in copious detail, including reintroducing the vast Byzantine, deftly interwoven cast, with past highlights and low points and reminds readers that this strip passes in real time and the players are aging just like we are…

Star couple Leonard Goldman and Larry Evans live together despite vast family circles and friend groups all apparently at odds with each other. The feature also prominently and increasing plays with fantasy as dream manifestations – or are they actual ghosts? – of composers Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky and his bitter frenemy Johannes Brahms plague cast members: acting as a vanguard for even odder occurrences to come…

This family saga is primarily a comedy of manners, played out against social prejudices and grudging gradual popular acceptances, but it also has shocking moments of drama and tension and whole bunches of heartwarming sentiment set in and around West Hollywood.

The extensive Leonard & Larry clan comprise the former’s formidable unaccepting mother Esther – who still ambushes him with blind dates and nice Jewish girls – and the latter’s ex-wife Sharon and the sons of their 18-yeat marriage Richard and David. Teenaged Richard recently knocked up and wed equally school-aged Debbie, making the scrappy couple unwilling grandparents years (decades even!) before they were ready. The oldsters adore baby Lauren but didn’t need to relive all that aging trauma when Debbie announced there would soon be an older sister…

Maternal grandparents Phil and Barbra Dunbarton are ultra conservative and stridently Christian, spending a lot of time fretting over Debbie and Lauren’s souls and their own social standing. They’re particularly concerned over role models and what horrors she and her brother Michael are being exposed to whenever the gay guys babysit. Their appearances are always some of funniest and most satisfying as the deviant clan expands exponentially in this volume…

David Evans is as Queer as his dad, and works in Larry’s leather/fetish boutique store on Melrose Avenue. That iconic venue provides loads of quick, easy laughs and many edgy moments thanks to local developer/predatory expansionist Lillian Lynch who still wants the store at any cost. It’s also the meeting point for many other couples in Leonard & Larry’s eccentric orbit. Their friends/clients enjoy greater roles this time, offering other perspectives on LA life.

Flamboyant former aerospace engineer Frank Freeman lives with acclaimed concert pianist Bob Mendez and is saddled with an compulsive yen for uniforms. It comes in handy again when Bob’s sex-crazed celebrity stalker Fiona Birkenstock breaks jail to re-kidnap him – at least until she switches affection to a certain celebrity judge sentencing her…

Larry’s other employee is Jim Buchanan whose alarming dating history stabilised when he met a genuine cowboy at one of L & L’s parties. Merle Oberon was a newly “out” Texan trucker who added romance and stability to Jim’s lonely life. Sadly, it got complicated in other ways once Merle became a Hollywood soap star and his agents, managers and co-star convinced him his career needed Oberon back in that closet…

Jim, by the way, is the original and central focus of the overly-critical dead composers’ puckish visits…

Also catching attention this time are heated discussions on the supernatural as the ghost composers graduate from dream-based plot device to active participants, playing pranks on many more of the minor cast members. Their games re balanced with ever-kvetching aging-averse Larry painfully adapting to being a doting grandad/perennial babysitter. Jim and Merle meanwhile engage a psychic to exorcise their haunt housemates, blithely unaware that she’s an undercover tabloid hack looking for a juicy exposé…

Younger players take centre stage, offering the author opportunity to spike not just anti-gay bigots but take on good old-fashioned racism too, even delivering a gleefully potent poke at American fundamentalism when the “Christian Coalition” relentlessly pursues good old white, Texan celebrity Merle to be the face of their next “decency campaign” and just won’t take no for an answer…

A surprisingly hard-hitting – if deviously velvet-gloved – storyline sees Jim discovering he was adopted: in fact the child of an unwed catholic girl exploited by the Irish Church’s baby-selling scandal (you really should look up Ireland’s Mother & Baby Homes). Reeling and despondent, his downward spiral is resolved by Merle who secretly arranges a trip to Ireland and a family reunion no-one wanted but everyone benefitted from…

David is Larry’s gay son and not expected to cause chaos and consternation, but that ends when he and his bestie Collin help their lesbian roommate Nat get pregnant and our freaked out oldster contemplates becoming a grandfather yet again…

That hilariously potent arc is compounded when ex-wife Sharon attends one of their frequent dinner parties and gets off with the still-sore former spouse’s only straight acquaintance (classical violinist Gene Slatkin). The liaison sparks incomprehensible jealousy and primeval macho ownership behaviour in Larry, but it’s so much worse when he learns the result is geriatric pregnancy and his becoming an unpaid baby sitter for another family addition…

Extended saga ‘The Baby Shower’ finds the entire conflicted and in many parts intolerant extended family in one room and scoring points As first Sharon and then Nat go into labour it sparks fourth wall shenanigans as Larry again has a meltdown and flees from the hospital, archenemy Mike the midwife, all semblance of parental responsibility and general biological “ickiness”.

The feature provides plenty of moments of wild abandon too, such as when Larry loses a friend’s beloved dog and finds an enormous python with a very full stomach, fun with tarantulas and a startling dream sequence wherein grandkids (7-year-old Lauren and 3-year-old Michael) take over “creating” strip a few times, ultimately confirming grampy’s crazed conviction that he’s nothing but a character in a comic strip crafted by a sadist. Further hallucinogenic riffs – including cowboy antics and a rebellion of Barbie dolls – leads finally to a major emotional growth spurt and Larry’s return to the hospital just in time to join the happy events…

Leonard & Larry is a traditionally domestic marital sitcom/soap opera with Lucille Ball & Desi Arnaz – or more aptly, Dick Van Dyke & Mary Tyler Moore – replaced by a hulking bearded “bear” with biker, cowboy and leather fetishes and a stylishly moustachioed, no-nonsense fashion photographer. Taken in total, it’s a love story about growing old together, but not gracefully or with any dignity. Populated by adorable, appetising fully fleshed out characters, Leonard & Larry was always about finding and then being yourself and remains an irresistible slice of gentle whimsy to nourish the spirit and beguile the jaded. If you feel like taking a Walk on the Mild Side now this tome is still at large through internet vendors. So why don’t you?
Excerpts from the Ring Cycle in Royal Albert Hall © 2000 Palliard Press. All artwork and strips © 2000 Tim Barela. All rights reserved The Life and Times of Leonard & Larry © 2000 Lief Wauters.

After decades of waiting, the entire ensemble is available again courtesy of Rattling Good Yarns Press. Sublimely hefty hardback uber-compilation Finally! The Complete Leonard & Larry Collection was released in 2021, reprinting the entire saga – including rare as hens’ teats last book How Real Men Do It (978-1955826051). It’s a little smaller in page dimensions (216 x280mm) and far harder to lift, but it’s Out There if you want it…

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Spain: Rock, Roll, Rumbles, Rebels & Revolution

Version 1.0.0

By Manuel “Spain” Rodriguez (Burchfield Penney Art Center/Last Gasp)
ISBN: 978-0-86719-782-2 (TPB)

Manuel Rodriguez was one of the most bombastic and well-known pioneering lights of America’s transformative Underground Commix movement: a mainstay of the counterculture which subversively reshaped the nation’s psyche in the 1960s and 1970s. However, although always a left-leaning radical, infamous for his raucously hyper-violent, audaciously sexual urban vigilante Trashman, Spain was also a quietly dedicated craftsman, historian, educationalist and graphic biographer.

Born in Buffalo, New York state in 1940, the Hispanic kid spent a lot of time with notorious biker gang The Road Vultures and these experiences, as much as his political upbringing and formal education at the Silvermine Guild Art School in New Canaan, Connecticut (1957-1960), moulded and informed his entire creative career.

In the 1960s he became a regular contributor to landmark alternative magazine the East Village Other, which not only utilised his burgeoning talents as illustrator and designer but also commissioned, in 1968, his groundbreaking tabloid comic book Zodiac Mindwarp. That insert proved so successful that EVO subsequently sponsored a regular anthology publication. Gothic Blimp Works was a turning point and clarion call in the evolution of underground publishing.

However, the excessive exploits of Trashman – “Agent of the 6th International” – against a repressive dystopian American super-state were only the tip of the creative iceberg. Ardent left-winger Spain founded the trade organisation the United Cartoon Workers of America whilst contributing to many of the independent comics and magazines which exploded out of the burgeoning counterculture movement across the world. Manuel Rodriguez was also an erudite and questioning writer/artist with a lifelong interest in history – especially political struggle and major battlefield clashes, and much of his other work revealed a stunning ability to bring these subjects to vibrant life.

The breadth, depth and sheer variety of Spain’s work – from gritty urban autobiography (American Splendor, Cruisin’ with the Hound: the Life and Times of Fred Toote) to psycho-sexual sci fi (Zap Comix, Skull, Mean Bitch Thrills) is a testament to his incredible talent but the restless artist also found time to produce a wealth of other cartooning classics.

Amongst his dauntingly broad canon of comics are literary adaptations (Edgar Allen Poe, Sherlock Holmes’ Strangest Cases), historical treatises (War: The Human Cost) and biographies (Ché [Guevara]:a Graphic Biography, Devil Dog: the Amazing True Story of the Man who Saved America [Marine Major General Smedley Darlington Butler]) as well as educational and design works such as You Are a Spiritual Being Having a Human Experience and Nothing in This Book Is True, But It’s Exactly How Things Are (both with Bob Frissell).

He also produced the ongoing comics serial The Dark Hotel for American current affairs, politics and media news aggregation website Salon.

In 2012 Spain finally lost a six-year battle against cancer and this superb book – actually the Exhibition catalogue for a career retrospective at the prestigious Burchfield Penney Art Center at Buffalo State College – celebrates his tumultuous life and spectacular contribution to the art form of graphic narrative with a compelling series of essays as well as a superb selection of the great man’s best pieces including some little known lost treasures.

The appreciation begins with ‘Stand Up’ by Anthony Bannon (Executive Director, BPAC), before the biographical ‘Grease, Grit and Graphic Truth’ by Edmund Cardoni (Executive Director, Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center) explores Spain’s past, whilst ‘Keep the Flames of Buffalo Burning’ by Don Metz examines his lasting effect on comics and society.

However, the true value of this chronicle is in the 60+ covers, designs, story-pages, roughs, panel excerpts and strips both vintage and recent, monochrome and full-colour which demonstrate the sheer talent and drive to communicate that fuelled Spain for his entire life.

The Partial Spain Bibliography 1969-2012 and Selected Spain Exhibitions only hint at the incredible depth and lasting legacy of his career and I’m praying that some enlightened publisher like Fantagraphics or Last Gasp is already toiling on a comprehensive series of “Complete Works of…” volumes…

Stark, shocking and always relevant, the communicative power of Spain is something no true lover of comics can afford to miss….
© 2012 Burchfield Penney Art Center. All rights reserved.

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Ken Reid’s Creepy Creations


By Ken Reid, with Reg Parlett, Robert Nixon & various (Rebellion Studios)
ISBN: 978-1-78108-660-5 (HB/Digital edition)

If you know British Comics, you’ll know Ken Reid. He was one of a select and singular pantheon of rebellious, youthful artistic prodigies who – largely unsung – went about transforming British Comics, entertaining millions and inspiring hundreds of those readers to become cartoonists too.

Reid was born in Manchester in 1919 and drew from the moment he could hold an implement. Aged nine, he was confined to bed for six months with a tubercular hip, and occupied himself by constantly scribbling and sketching. He left school before his fourteenth birthday and won a scholarship to Salford Art School, but never graduated. He was, by all accounts, expelled for cutting classes to hang about in cafes. Undaunted, he set up as a commercial artist, but floundered until his dad began acting as his agent.

Ken’s big break was a blagger’s triumph. Accompanied by his unbelievably supportive and astute father, Ken talked his way into an interview with the Art Editor of the Manchester Evening News and came away with a commission for a strip for its new Children’s Section. The Adventures of Fudge the Elf launched in 1938 and ran until 1963 with only a single, albeit lengthy, hiatus from 1941 to 1946 when Reid served in the armed forces.

From the late 1940s onwards, Reid dallied with the resurgent comics periodicals: with work (Super Sam, Billy Boffin, Foxy) published in Comic Cuts and submissions to The Eagle, before a fortuitous family connection (Dandy illustrator Bill Holroyd was Reid’s brother-in-law) brought DC Thomson managing editor R.D. Low to his door with a cast-iron offer of work. On April 18th 1953, Roger the Dodger debuted in The Beano. Reid drew the feature until 1959 whilst creating many more, including the fabulously mordant doomed mariner Jonah, Ali Ha-Ha and the 40 Thieves, Grandpa and Jinx amongst many more.

In 1964, Reid and equally under-appreciated co-superstar Leo Baxendale jumped ship to work for DCT’s arch-rival Odhams Press. This gave Ken greater license to explore his ghoulish side: concentrating on comic horror yarns and grotesque situations in strips like Frankie Stein, and The Nervs for Wham! And Smash! as well as more visually wholesome but still strikingly surreal fare as Queen of the Seas and Dare-a-Day Davy.

In 1971 Reid devised Face Ache – arguably his career masterpiece – for new title Jet. The hilariously horrific strip was popular enough to survive the comic’s demise – after a paltry 22 weeks – and was carried over in a merger with stalwart periodical Buster where it thrived until 1987. During that time, Reid continued innovating and creating through a horde of new strips such as Harry Hammertoe the Soccer Spook, Wanted Posters, Martha’s Monster Makeup, Tom’s Horror World and a dozen others. One of those – and the worthy subject of this splendid collection – is Creepy Creations. Gathered here are all 79 full colour portraits from Shiver & Shake: episodes spanning March 10th 1973 to October 5th 1974 as well as related works from contemporaneous Christmas annuals.

After the initial suggestion and 8 original designs by Reid, Creepy Creations featured carefully crafted comedic horrors and mirthful monsters inspired by submissions from readers, who got their names in print plus the-then princely sum of One Pound (£1!) Sterling for their successful efforts. The mechanics and details of the process are all covered in a wealth of preliminary articles beginning with ‘Creepy Creation Spotter’s Guide’ listing the geographical locations so crucial to the feature’s popularity and is backed up by a fond – if somewhat frightful – family reminiscence from Anthony J. Reid (Ken’s son) in ‘The Erupting Pressure Cooker of Preston Brook’.

The convoluted history of Ken’s feature (which came and went by way of 1960s cult icon Power Comics, Mad magazine, Topps Trading Cards and even stranger stops), originally intended to save him having to draw the same old characters every day, is detailed in an engrossing historical overview by Irmantas Povilaika dubbed ‘Plus a “Funny Monsters” Competition with These Fantastic Prizes’ before the true wonderment ensues.

Astounding popular from beginning to end, Creepy Creations offered a ghastly, giggle-infused grotesque every week: a string of macabre graphic snapshots (some, apparently, too horrific to be published at the time!) beloved by kids who adore being grossed out.

Seen here are ratified Reid-beasts like ‘The One-Eyed Wonk of Wigan,’, ‘The Chip Chomping Tater Terror of Tring’ and the ‘The Boggle-Eyed Butty-Biter of Sandwich’, his stunning kid collaborations on arcane animals like ‘The Gruesome Ghoul from Goole’ or ‘Nelly, the Kneecap-Nipping Telly from Newcastle’, and – due to the staggering demands of weekly deadlines – also offers cartoon contributions from UK comics star Reg Parlett & Robert Nixon.

Supplementing and completing the eldritch, emetic experience are a selection of Creepy Creations Extras, comprising images and frontispieces from Christmas Annuals, the entire ‘Creepy Creations Calendar for 1975’, 4-pages of ‘Mini Monsters’ and the entire zany zodiac of ‘Your HORRORscope’…

Piling up even more comedy gold, this tome also includes tantalising excepts from the Leo Baxendale Sweeny Toddler compilation and Reid’s magnificent World-Wide Wonders collections.

Ken Reid died in 1987 from complications of a stroke he’d suffered on February 2nd. He was at his drawing board, putting the finishing touches to a Face Ache strip. On his passing, the strip was taken over by Frank Diarmid who drew until its cancellation in October 1988.

This astoundingly absorbing comedy classic is another perfect example of resolutely British humorous sensibilities – absurdist, anarchic and gleefully grotesque – and these cartoon capers are amongst the most memorable and re-readable exploits in all of British comics history: painfully funny, beautifully rendered and ridiculously unforgettable. This a treasure-trove of laughs to span generations which demands to be in every family bookcase.
© 1973, 1974, & 2018 Rebellion Publishing Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

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Ruins (Paperback Edition)


By Peter Kuper (SelfMadeHero)
ISBN: 978-1-914224-18-8 (TPB/Digital edition)

Multi award-winning artist, storyteller, illustrator, educator and activist Peter Kuper was born in Summit, New Jersey in 1958, before the family moved to Cleveland, Ohio when he was six. Growing up there he (briefly) met iconic Underground Commix pioneer R. Crumb and at school befriended fellow comics fan Seth Tobocman (Disaster and Resistance: Comics and Landscapes for the 21st Century, War in the Neighborhood, You Don’t Have to Fuck People Over to Survive).

As they progressed through the school system together, Kuper & Tobocman caught the bug for self-publishing. They then attended Kent State University together. Upon graduation in 1979, both moved to New York and whilst studying at Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute and The Art Students League created – with painter Christof Kohlhofer – landmark political art/comics magazine World War 3 Illustrated. Separately and in conjunction, in comics, illustration and via art events, Kuper & Tobocman continued championing social causes, highlighting judicial and cultural inequities and spearheading the use of narrative art as a tool of activism.

Although a noted and true son of the Big Apple now and despite brushing with the comics mainstream as Howard Chaykin’s assistant at Upstart Associates, most of Kuper’s singularly impressive works are considered “Alternative” in nature, deriving from his regular far-flung travels and political leanings. Moreover, although being about how people are, much of his oeuvre employs cityscapes and the natural environment as bit players or star attractions.

When not binding his own “Life Lived in Interesting Times” into experimental narratives – such as with 2007’s fictively-cloaked Stop Forgetting To Remember: The Autobiography of Walter Kurtz – or bold yarns like Sticks and Stones (2005), Kuper created The New York Times’ first continuing strip (1993’s Eye of the Beholder) and regularly adapts to strip form literary classics like Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1991), Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (2019), Kafka’s short stories  Give It Up! (1995) and Kafkaesque (2018) as well as longer works like The Metamorphosis (2003), all while creating his own unique canon of intriguing graphic novels and visual memoirs.

Amongst the so many strings to his bow – and certainly the most high-profile – was a brilliant stewardship of Mad Magazine’s beloved Spy Vs. Spy strip, which he inherited from creator Antonio Prohias in 1997, and he also chases whimsy in children’s books like 2006’s Theo and the Blue Note or experimental exercise The Last Cat Book (1984: illustrating an essay by Robert E Howard). Whenever he travelled – which was often – he made visual books such as 1992’s Peter Kuper’s Comics Trips – A Journal of Travels through Africa and Southeast Asia. Three years later he undertook a bold creative challenge for DC’s Vertigo Verité imprint: crafting mute, fantastically expressive thriller/swingeing social commentary The System.

Kuper’s later comics – all equally ambitious and groundbreaking – had to make room for his other interests as he became a successful commercial illustrator (Newsweek, Time, The Nation, Businessweek, The Progressive, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, Entertainment Weekly and more), lecturer in Graphic Novels at Harvard, a teacher at Parsons School of Design and The School of Visual Arts and – since 1988 – co-Art Director of political action group INX International Ink Company. Translated into many languages, he has built a thriving occupation as a gallery artist exhibiting globally and scored a whole bunch of prestigious Fellowships and Educational residencies as a result.

He still finds time to pursue his key interests – such as contributing to benefit anthology Comics for Ukraine: Sunflower Seeds and cultivates a lifelong passion for entomology. This hobby infused 2015’s fictionalized autobiographical episode Ruins: an Eisner Award winning tome now available again in an enthralling trade paperback edition.

A passionate multilayered tale of crisis, confrontation and renewal infused by his ecological concerns, political leanings, rage against authoritarianism and love of Mexico, it draws from the same deep well as 2009’s Diario De Oaxaca: A Sketchbook Journal of Two Years in Mexico. Between 2006 and 2008, Kuper, his wife and young daughter lived in Oaxaca, absorbing astounding historical and cultural riches, beguiling natural wonders, hearty warmth and nonjudgemental friendliness. They also witnessed how a teacher’s strike was brutally and bloodily suppressed by local governor/dictator Ulises Ruiz Ortiz – AKA “URO” – in a series of events with a still heavily disputed death toll scarring the region and citizens to this day.

Part travelogue, part natural history call to arms and paean to the culture of Oaxaca, Kuper’s tale details a marriage in crisis played out against a disintegrating crisis of governance. Recently unemployed, socially withdrawn and emotionally stunted museum illustrator/bug lover George finally capitulates and voyages to the Mexican dreamland his wife Samantha has been pining for since before they met. Under the aegis of a sabbatical year taken to write a book on pre-conquest Mexico, she has dragged him out of ennui and churlish career doldrums to a place where he can indulge his abiding love of insects, if not her…

For Samantha, it’s a return to a paradisical place and magical time, albeit one where she loved and lost her first husband. That’s not the sole cause of growing friction between the increasingly at odds couple. The lengthy trip’s overt intention of reuniting them falters as she is drawn deeply into stories of how the Conquistadors destroyed Mesoamerican cultures they found and highlights parallels to her own plight. There are other earthier distractions she just can’t shake off too…

Slowly, George’s intransigence melts as he meets people willing to tolerate his ways, see beyond his shell, and share the history, geology, geography and serenely easy-going culture that eventually penetrates his crusty exterior. All manner of distracting temptations – like the infinite variety of cool bugs! – are endless and constant as he makes friends and finds healthier ways to express himself. He even tries to renew his constrained relationship with Samantha, but there will always be one impossible, impassable barrier to their future happiness…

… And then they’re caught up in the Teachers’ strike and extra-judicial methods Governor URO employs to end it even as George achieves the milestone life goal he never thought possible and visits the Michoacan forest where Monarchs come to breed and die.

… And finds it expiring from human intrusion…

Acting as thematic spine and tonal indicator for the unfolding story, each chapter follows – with snapshot scenes of changing, degrading landscapes – the epic flight of a lone Monarch butterfly, from its start in Canada, across America to the forest’s lepidopteran devotee George ostensibly left his comfort zone home to see.

With overtones of Peter Weir’s film The Year of Living Dangerously (and Christopher Koch’s novel too), Ruins layers metaphor upon allegory, distilling political, ecological and personal confrontation into a powerfully evocative account of people at a crossroads. Inspirationally visualised in a wealth of styles by a true master of pictorial narrative and classic drama, this new paperback edition also includes an ‘Afterwords’ where the author adds context to the still ongoing saga of the civil war crime underpinning his story.

Clever, charming, chilling and compulsively engrossing, this delicious exercise in interconnectivity is a brilliant example of how smart and powerful comics can and should be.
© Peter Kuper 2015. All rights reserved.

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Persepolis – The Story of a Childhood & Persepolis 2 – The Story of a Return


By Marjane Satrapi, translated by Anjali Singh (Jonathan Cape/Vintage)
ISBN: 978-0-22406-440-8 (v1 HB) 978-0-22407-440-7 (v2 HB) 978-0-09952-399-4 (TPB)

With Marjane Satrapi’s new book – Woman, Life, Freedom – due for publication next week, let’s take another look at the landmark cartoon biography that started her impressive career as a political commentator, activist and feminist icon before her appraisal of the changes (and not) of the current Iranian Revolution make her a target all over again…

No comics celebration/retrospective of women in our art form could be complete without acknowledging Marjane Satrapi’s astounding breakout memoirs, so let’s revisit both her Persepolis books (also available in a complete edition released to coincide with the animated movie adaptation) before you are inescapably compelled to graduate to later forays like The Sigh, Monsters are Afraid of the Moon, Chicken With Plums or Embroideries.

The imagery of a child, their unrefined stylings and shaded remembrances all possess captivating power to enthral adults. As the author grew up during the Fundamentalist revolution that toppled the Shah of Iran and replaced him with an Islamic theocracy, her recollections and comic interpretations of that time are particularly powerful, moving and – regrettably – more relevant than ever two decades later…

Originally released in France by L’Association between 2000 and 2003 as a quartet of annual volumes of cartoon reminiscence, in Persepolis – The Story of a Childhood Satrapi curated and related key incidents from her life with starkly primitivistic and forthright drawings depicting a sharp, unmoderated voice channelling perceptions of the young girl she was. That simple reportage owes as much to Anne Frank’s diary as Art Spiegelman’s Maus as Satrapi shares incidents that shaped her life and identity as a free-thinking “female” in a society increasingly frowning upon that sort of thing…

By focusing on content of the message and decrying or at best ignoring the technical skill and craft of the medium that conveys it, Persepolis became the kind of graphic novel casual and intellectual readers loved – as did kids everywhere but Chicago in 2013. Here the Public Schools CEO – apparently immune to irony – ruled years after translated publication that the books contained “graphic language and images that are not appropriate for general use” and banned them from “her” classrooms and high schools: a decision quickly reversed when students organised demonstrations and massed at public libraries to read them anyway…

However, graphic narrative is as much an art form of craft and thought as it is the dustbin of sophomoric genre stereotypes that many critics relegate it to. Satrapi created a work that is powerful and engaging, but in a sorry twist of reality, it is one that comics fans, and not the general public, still have to be convinced to read.

In the sequel Persepolis – The Story of a Return, the child-centric reminiscences of a girl whose childhood spanned the fall of the Shah and the rise of Iran’s Fundamentalist theocracy, Satrapi delved deeper into her personal history, concentrating more fully on the little girl becoming an autonomous, independent woman.

This idiosyncratic maturation unfortunately somewhat diminishes the power of pure, unvarnished observation that is such a devastating lens into the political iniquities moulding her life, but does transform the author into a fully concretised person, as many experiences more closely mirror those of an audience which hasn’t grown up under a cloud of physical, political, spiritual and sexual oppression.

The story recommences in 1984 where 15-year old Marjane is sent to Vienna to (ostensibly) pursue an education. In distressingly short order, the all-but-asylum-seeker is rapidly bounced from home to home: billeted with Nuns, distanced acquaintances of her family. a bed-sit in the house of an apparent madwoman. Eventually, in a catastrophic spiral of decline she is reduced to living on the streets before returning to Iran four years later. It is 1988…

Her observations on the admittedly outré counterculture of European students, and her own actions as Marjane grows to adulthood seem to indicate that even the most excessive and extreme past experience can still offer a dangerously seductive nostalgia when faced with the bizarre concept of too much freedom far too soon.

When she returns to her homeland, her adult life under the regime of The (first) Ayatollah is still a surprisingly less-than-total condemnation than we westerners and our agenda-slanted news media would probably expect. The book concludes with a decision to move permanently to Europe in 1994…

The field of autobiographical graphic novels is a proven and invaluable outreach resource for an art form and industry desperately seeking to entice fresh audiences for our product. As long as subject matter doesn’t overpower content and style, and we can offer examples such as Persepolis to seekers, we should be making real headway, any day now.
© Marjane Satrapi 2004. Translation © 2004 Anjali Singh.

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The Misadventures of Jane


By Norman Pett & J.H.G. “Don” Freeman & various (Titan Books)
ISBN: 978-1-84856-167-0 (HB)

For the longest time, Jane was arguably the most important and well-regarded comic strip in British, if not World, history. The feature panel debuted on December 5th 1932 as Jane’s Journal: or The Diary of a Bright Young Thing: a frothy, frivolous gag-a-day strip in The Daily Mirror, created by freelance cartoonist Norman Pett.

Originally a nonsensical comedic vehicle, it consisted of a series of panels with embedded cursive script to simulate a diary page. The feature switched to more formal strip frames and balloons in late 1938, when scripter Don Freeman came on board whilst Mirror Group supremo Harry Guy Bartholomew was looking to renovate the serial for a more adventure- and escape-hungry audience. It was also felt that a second continuity feature – like Freeman’s other strip Pip, Squeak and Wilfred – would keep readers coming back: as if Jane’s inevitable – if usually unplanned – bouts of near-nudity wouldn’t…

Jane’s secret was skin. Even before war broke out there were torn skirts and lost blouses aplenty, but once the shooting started and Jane became a special operative of British Intelligence, her clothes came off with terrifying regularity and machine gun rapidity. She infamously went topless when the Blitz was at its worst.

Pett drew the strip with verve and style, imparting a uniquely English family feel: a joyous lewdness-free innocence and total lack of tawdriness. The illustrator worked from models and life, famously using first his wife, his secretary Betty Burton, and editorial assistant Doris Keay, but most famously actress and model Chrystabel Leighton-Porter – until May 1948 when Pett left for another newspaper and another clothing-challenged comic star…

From then his art assistant Michael Hubbard assumed full control of the feature (prior to that he had drawn backgrounds and mere male characters), and carried the series – increasingly a safe, flesh-free soap-opera and less a racy glamour strip – to its end on October 10th 1959.

This Titan Books collection added the saucy secret weapon to their arsenal of classic British comics and strips in 2009 and paid Jane the respect she deserved with a snappy black and white hardcover collection, augmented by colour inserts.

Following a fascinating and informative article from Canadian paper The Maple Leaf (which disseminated her exploits to returning ANZAC servicemen), Jane’s last two war stories (running from May 1944 to June 1945) are reprinted in their entirety, beginning with ‘N.A.A.F.I, Say Die!’, as the hapless but ever-so-effective intelligence agent is posted to a British Army base where someone’s wagging tongue is letting pre-D-Day secrets out. Naturally (very au naturally) only Jane and sidekick/best friend Dinah Tate can stop the rot…

This is promptly followed by ‘Behind the Front’ wherein Jane & Dinah invade the continent, tracking down spies, collaborators and boyfriends in Paris before joining an ENSA (Entertainments National Service Association) concert party, and accidentally invading Germany just as the Russians arrive…

As you’d expect, the comedy stems from classic Music Hall fundamentals, with plenty of drama and action right out of the patriotic and comedy cinema of the day – but if you’ve ever seen Will Hay, Alistair Sim or Arthur Askey at their peak, you’ll know that’s no bad thing – and this bombastic book also contains loads of rare contemporaneous goodies to drool over.

Jane was so popular that there were three glamour style-books – called Jane’s Journal – for which Pett produced many full-colour pin-ups and paintings as well as general cheese-cake illustrations. From those lost gems, this tome includes ‘The Perfect Model’, a strip feature “revealing” how the artist first met his muse Chrystabel Leighton-Porter; ‘Caravanseraglio!’ – an 8-page strip starring Jane and erring, recurring boyfriend Georgie Porgie – plus 15 pages of the very best partially- and un-draped Jane pin-ups.

Jane’s war record is frankly astounding. As a morale booster she was reckoned to have been worth more than divisions of infantry, and her exploits were regularly cited in Parliament and discussed with complete seriousness by Eisenhower and Churchill. Legend has it that The Daily Mirror‘s Editor was among the few who knew the date of D-Day so as to co-ordinate her exploits and fullest exposures with the Normandy landings…

In 1944, on the day she went full frontal, American Service newspaper Roundup (distributed to US soldiers) went with the headline “JANE GIVES ALL” and subheading “YOU CAN ALL GO HOME NOW”. Chrystabel Leighton-Porter toured as Jane in a services revue – she stripped for “the lads” – during the war and ultimately in 1949 starred in her own feature film The Adventures of Jane.

Although a product of simpler, far-less enlightened, indubitably more hazardous times, the naively charming, cosily thrilling, innocently saucy adventures of Jane, her patiently steadfast beau Georgie Porgie and especially her intrepid Dachshund Count Fritz Von Pumpernickel are incontestable landmarks of the art form, not simply for their impact but also for the plain and simple reason that they are superbly drawn and huge fun to read if you can suspend or hold in abeyance the truly gratuitous nudity.

Don’t waste the opportunity to keep such a historical icon in our lives. You should find this book, buy your friends this book, and most importantly, agitate to have her entire splendid run reprinted in more books like this one. Do your duty, citizens…
Jane © 2009 MGN Ltd/Mirrorpix. All Rights Reserved.

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Pucky, Prince of Bacon – A Breaking Cat News Adventure


By Georgia Dunn (Andrews McMeel)
ISBN: 978-1-5248-7128-4 (PB) eISBN: 978-1-5248-8295-2

There’s a burgeoning trend amongst certain men – mostly hiding on the internet – to think their threat of replacing women they can’t “get” with sex-bots that don’t exist is in some way a deterrent to being turned down by people they don’t have the ability to ask nicely in the first place. These uncouth, mis-evolved oafs also warn that if the “females” don’t wise up and lower their standards they will be stuck with living with cats…

Guys, wise up yourselves. Neither of those propositions are unwelcome outcomes. Cats already rule the world and you just can’t compete.

On any level.

In 2016, illustrator and cartoonist Georgia Dunn found a way to make her hairy housemates (the ones with more than two feet) earn their keep after watching them converge on a domestic accident and inquisitively, interminably poke their little snouts into the mess. That incident led to Breaking Cat News as a hilariously beguiling webcomic strip detailing how her forthright felines operate their own on-the-spot news-team, with studio anchor Lupin, and field reporters Elvis (investigative) and Puck (commentary) delivering around-the-clock reports on the events that really resonate with cats – because, after all, who else matters?

On March 27th 2017, a suitably modified (for which read fully redrawn and recoloured) version began newspaper syndication, alternating with new material designed expressly for print consumption. As the strip and cast grew, print publication led to books like these – also a far more enticing prospect than any night out with the boys…

If you’re a returning customer or already follow the strip, you’re au fait with the constantly expanding cast and its ceaselessly surreal absurdity, but this stuff is so welcoming even the merest neophyte can jump right in with no confusion other than that which is intentional…

Be warned though, Dunn is a master of emotional manipulation and never afraid to tug heartstrings. Always keep hankies close. You too, lads…

In this volume the cast return to episodic riffs as the Dunn’s toddler – under the guidance of the scoop-starved kitties – becomes mobile and adventurous. Moreover, the strips slowly and gleefully trace the events leading to the addition of his new baby sister, with the news team in the moment and in the wrong every step of the way.

You will see here said literal manchild learning to negotiate potential problems like toilets, sudden onset “sleepies”, furniture, The Man’s new job and interview attire, cat hair tagging and big family events like Christmas, New Years, Easter and The Woman’s sister coming to stay. When a fad for new year’s resolutions grips the cats, the kid is there to watch the fallout…

As always Rolling News episodes revisit favourite themes like things that don’t need to be on shelves, climbing into bags, the right packaging to play with (packing peanuts or tissue paper), helping The People exercise, getting more kibble, rainbows in the kitchen and whether mailmen exist, although new crises erupt and are covered in depth as they occur.

Of particular importance are how slow The Man is at cleaning the litter box and extended reports covering a cat war with the vacuum cleaner only ending when diligent feline investigations uncover maternal instinct behind the roaring beast’s increased rampages…

Breaking events are backed up by In-Depth packages and segments on whiskers, boxes for napping, crinkly candy wrappers, the quickest way to wake The People, new house plants (edible or not?), string & floss, how much The Woman sleeps, is sick or watches British cosy mysteries about crime-solving clerics.  In other news, an inherited cuckoo clock, a sustained campaign known as “Operation Second Breakfast”, and sudden leak of Elvis’ baby pictures from when he was adopted offer once in a lifetime opportunities for mockery and teasing…

When not reporting, our moggy mob – and outdoors cat Tommy – are happy to advise and comment on removing spiders, drying out phones, talking to skunks, cuteness, bathing, baby food, sweeping up, cat portraits, bad food, “booping” superglue, BCW (Best Cat Wrestling), Wet Food Wednesday, toys, spiffy moustaches, tuna water (proper cat persons call it “fishy-ssoise”),  books for sleeping in, snow and spring planting, and girl guide cookies. …And then everything changes with a new tiny People and the cats need to adapt – and report…

We pause our programme here with another Christmas and the explanation for why this book is called what it is…

Outrageous, alarming, occasionally courageous and always charming – and probably far too autobiographical for comfort – the romps, riffs and occasional sad bits about a fully integrated multi-species family is a growing necessity of life for many folk – just like men simply Are Not. Smart, witty, imaginative and deliciously whimsical, Breaking Cat News is fabulously funny infinitely re-readable feel-good fun rendered with artistic elan and a light and breezy touch to delight not just us irredeemable cat-addicts but also anyone in need of a good laugh.
Pucky, Prince of Bacon © 2022 Georgia Dunn. All rights reserved.

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The Cabbie volume 1


By Marti, with an introduction by Art Spiegelman (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-60699-4504 (HB/Fantagraphics) 978-0874160420 (Album PB Catalan Communications)

Although out of print since 1987, in 2011 Fantagraphics rescued from relative obscurity one of the darkest yet most grimly illuminating classics of European cartooning in this remastered and augmented reissue of The Cabbie: a stylish, nightmarish psycho-sexual noir thriller that has as much seedy kick now as it had when first translated by Catalan Communications…

Now as the macabre maestro has died, my conscience prompts me to pay for neglecting such wonderful comics and it’s only right we should pause to revisit his greatest achievement. Maybe some publisher will endeavour to bring some of his other dark wonders – like Doctor Vertigo, Propaganda Moderna, crime fantasy-thriller Calvario Hills, Cien dibujos por la libertad de Prensa or Terrorista – to a wider international audience.

Marti Riera Ferrer (1955 – 19th January 2024) was born in Barcelona during the heyday of fascist rule. He studied at the Massana School of Arts and Crafts where his efforts coincided with the Generalissimo’s death, and from 1975 to 1979 a liberalisation saw “Marti” creating comics for alterative magazines like Rock COMIC and Star.

From its launch in 1979 he also began contributing to apocalyptic iconoclast El Vibora: short stories and series such as Tony Nuevaola and – with Rodolfo – Lola Lista contra los Nada. These efforts brought international interest and Marti began appearing in Raw and Drawn & Quarterly. Il Taxista – The Cabbie – began in 1982 and he episodically added to the canon over succeeding years, and although semi-retired from the early Nineties he continued generating other material at his own pace for the magazine Makoki and Tobalina. These tales varied from erotic fiction to general illustrated fare.

Dick Tracy is one of the most well-known strips on Earth and the super-cop’s contributions to the art form are many and indisputable. They occurred over many decades and the medium of graphic narrative grew up with it. Imagine the effect instant exposure – or overexposure – to such an uncompromising, bombastic, iconic property on the artists of a nation where free-expression and creative autonomy was suppressed for generations. That’s what happened when the death of General Franco (who had held Spain in a fascistic time-warp from his victory in April 1939 until his death in November 1975) opened up and liberalised all aspects of Spanish life. When Marti saw the strip he was changed for life…

As Art Spiegelman says in his introduction, “decades of political and social repression gave way to a glorious eruption of creativity that allowed a full-fledged counterculture to come to life at just about the same time that America’s “Love Generation” gave way to what Tom Wolfe labelled the “Me Generation.””

How odd yet fitting then that an American symbol of “The Establishment” so enchanted and captivated young cartoonist Marti Riera that he assimilated every line and nuance to create a bleak, stripped-down and extremely angry homage detailing the tribulations of a seedy, desperate taxi-driver trapped in an abruptly vanished past and prey to a world at once free and dangerous, ungoverned and chaotic…

Driving around the seediest part of town our hero picks up a high-rolling gambler who’s just won big, but the driver’s night goes horribly wrong when a knife-wielding thief hijacks the cab and robs his passenger. Luckily, the Cabbie can handle himself and he quickly, brutally subdues the thug.

Our protagonist is a decent, hard-working man who lives with his ailing mother, humouring her talk of a mysterious inheritance, and allowing her to keep the embalmed cadaver of his father in the spare bedroom, but he’s tragically unaware that his citizen’s arrest will have terrible repercussions for them both. When the son of the thief he captured is released from prison, the ingrate immediately begins a grim campaign of retribution against the Cabbie that creates a maelstrom of tragedy, degradation and despair.

This is a harsh, uncompromising tale of escalating crime and uncaring punishments: blackly cynical, existentially scary and populated with a cast of battered, desolate characters of increasingly degenerate desperation. Even the monsters are victims, but for all that The Cabbie is an incredibly compelling drama with strong allegorical overtones and brutally mesmerizing visuals.

Any mature devotee of comics should be conversant with Marti’s superb work, and with a second volume out there and the hope of digital editions (One bloody Day!), hopefully we soon all will be…
The Cabbie (Taxista) © 2011 Marti. Introduction © 2011 Art Spiegelman. This edition © 2011 Fantagraphics Books.