Category: Comedy

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Dr. Watchstop: Adventures in Time and Space


By Ken Macklin with Raymond E. Feist, Toren Smith, Lela Dowling, LX Ltd & various (Eclipse Books)
ISBN: 978-0-91303-585-6 (album PB)

There’s a new time-travelling doctor about to debut. It’s not this one…

Before becoming a successful games artist for LucasArts graphic adventure games (I don’t actually grok push-button fun but I gather that Maniac Mansion, Loom, the second and third Monkey Island confoundations and the character Bubsy the bobcat number among his digital hits), Ken Macklin started as an underground/small press creator who delighted in cleverly whimsical and witty funny animal strips during the late 1970s in indie publications like Quack! He also made wonderful trading cards and box cover art. You may still have some in your person-cave…

Married to equally talented anthropomorphic raconteur Lela Dowling, he assisted and contributed to her marvellously manic Weasel Patrol tales, which were published in the lost and long-lamented sci-fi anthology Fusion whilst producing his own diabolically wonderful one-shot space opera romp Contractors and the stimulating vignettes from lost history gathered here. As well as a talented designer and illustrator Macklin is a gifted painter and slyly devious writer. In 1982 he began selling brief, luxurious mini-epics starring an astonishingly brilliant but outrageous innocent multi-discipline savant named Dr. Watchstop to Epic Illustrated and Fusion: high quality graphic fantasy magazines aimed at older readers. In an era where science fiction was synonymous with and indistinguishable from cops and cowboys with honking great space-blasters, Watchstop’s antics were contemplative, sillily slapstick, wickedly ironic: eyes wide-open wonderments that only saw the ridiculous side of technology and the future cosmos…

Still available if you look really hard, this album-proportioned compilation gathers all those marvellously intellectual, winningly funny spoofs and japes, opening in glorious painted colour with ‘Dr. Watchstop Faces the Future’ (Epic #10 February 1982), possibly the last word in time paradox tales. It’s followed by amoebic dalliance ‘One Cell at a Time’ before demonstrating the downside of ancient alien artifacts in ‘Time Bomb’ (Epic #14 and #17 respectively). If possible, Macklin’s art is even better as monochrome tone-washes, as perfectly illustrated in the EVA Suit-wettingly hilarious ‘Unique Specimen’ (Fusion #1, January 1987), life-through-a-lens fable ‘Modern Culture’ (Fusion #3) and natural history segments ‘Right Stuff’ (Fusion #7) and ‘Bugs’ (Fusion #5). ‘Relic’ (Fusion #2) is pure Future Shock whilst full-colour ‘The Single Electron Proof’ from Epic #21 (September 1983, and with the timely assistance of Toren Smith) will stretch the higher mathematics prodigies amongst us with a little metaphysical tomfoolery…

Epic #29 provided a first home for ‘In Search of Ancient Myths’, as #33 did for both ‘Reaching Out’ and ‘Beating the Heat’, whilst the last colour cosmic conundrum ‘Wasting Time’ launched in #34. The remainder of this must-have, can’t-get collection features more black & white antics from Fusion, beginning with the vaudevillian ‘Gone Fishing’ (#4), prior to moving adroitly into ‘Xlerg’s Fossil Emporium’ (#8) and anarchically culminating in a riotous Weasel Patrol collaboration enigmatically entitled ‘The Weasels Fill In’ from Fusion #9 (May 1988)…

Sheer artistic ability and incisive comedy for smart people is never going to be out of style and this stellar compilation will be a constant joy for any fan smart enough to unearth it as long as some bright better-evolved spark publishes it…
© 1989 Ken Macklin, and where appropriate Raymond E. Feist, Toren Smith, Lela Dowling and LX Ltd. All rights reserved.

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Billy & Buddy volume 9: Symphony in Buddy Major


By Christophe Cazenove & Jean Bastide, in the style of Roba, coloured by Luc Perdriset & Bastide: translated by Jerome Saincantin (Cinebook)
ISBN: 978-1-80044-129-3 (Album PB/Digital)

Known as Boule et Bill in Europe (at least the French speaking bits – the Dutch and Flemish call them Bollie en Billie or perhaps Bas et Boef if readers first glimpsed them in legendary weekly Sjors), this evergreen, immensely popular cartoon saga of a dog and his boy first debuted at Christmas in 1959. Bon anniversaire 65th, mes braves!

The perennial family favourite resulted from Belgian writer-artist Jean Roba (Spirou et Fantasio, La Ribambelle) putting his head together with Maurice Rosy: the magazine’s Artistic Director/Ideas Man, who had also ghosted art and/or scripts on Jerry Spring, Tif et Tondu, Bobo and Attila during an astoundingly productive decades-long career at the periodical. Intended as an Old World answer to Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, Boule et Bill quickly went its own way, developing a unique style and personality to become Roba’s main occupation for the next 45 years. He had launched the feature as a mini-récit (32-page, half-sized freebie inserts) in the December 24th edition of Le Journal de Spirou.

Like Dennis the Menace in The Beano, the strip was a monster hit from the start, and for 25 years held the coveted and prestigious back-cover spot. It was even syndicated to competitor publishers and a popular feature in Le Journal de Mickey, rubbing shoulders with Walt Disney’s top stars. Older Brits might recognise the art as early episodes – retitled It’s a Dog’s Life – ran in Fleetway’s Valiant weekly from 1961 to 1965…

A cornerstone of European life, B&B has generated a live-action movie, four animated TV series, computer games, permanent art exhibitions, sculptures and even postage stamps. As with a select few immortalized Belgian comics creations, Bollie en Billie were awarded a commemorative plaque and have a street named after them in Brussels…

Large format album compilations began immediately, totalling 21 volumes throughout the 1960s & 1970s from publisher Dupuis. These were completely redesigned and re-released in 1985 when Roba moved to Dargaud and became his own editor. The standard albums (44 to date) are supplemented by a range of early-reader books for toddlers. Assorted collections are available in 15 languages, selling well in excess of 25 million copies.

Roba crafted over a thousand pages of gag-strips in his beguiling, idealised domestic comedy setting, all about a little lad and the exceedingly smart Cocker Spaniel he shared his endless days with. Long before his death in 2006, the auteur wisely appointed successors for the strip, which has thus continued to this day. He began by surrendering the art chores to his long-term assistant Laurent Verron in 2003, and the successor subsequently took on the scripting upon Roba’s passing. Verron was soon joined by gag-writers Veys, Corbeyran, Chric & Cucuel whilst this relatively recent tome (2017’s volume 38, Symphonie en Bill majeur) comes courtesy of Christophe Cazenove & Jean Bastide. In this collection Verron is again present as illustrator of the “cabochons”: illustrated icons at the top of each strip. They’re what old folks like us employed before emoticons…

Redesignated Billy and Buddy, the strip returned to British eyes in 2009: stars of enticing Cinebook compilations introducing 21st century readers to an endearingly bucolic sitcom-styled nuclear family set-up consisting of one bemused, long-suffering dad, a warmly compassionate but constantly wearied and distracted mum, a smart, mischievous son and a genius dog with a penchant for finding bones, puddles and trouble.

Primarily a selection of musically themed single gags, Symphony in Buddy Major opens preceded by a handy character catch-up chart offering briefings on Billy, Buddy, their close human associate Pat and sultry mysterious tortoise Caroline. Thereafter the old magic resumes in the approved manner, further exploring the evergreen relationship of a dog and his boy (and tortoise) via the usual mix of events comprising school, home, pals, play, parties and chores, each packed with visual puns, quips, slapstick and jolly jests and japes. These affirm the gradual socialisation and behaviour of little Billy measured in carefree romps with four-footed friends in an even split between parental judgements and getting away with murder…

Buddy is the perfect pet for our imaginative boy, although the manipulative mutt is overly fond of purloined or “found” food, buried bones (ownership frequently disputed), and – as seen often in this volume – sleeping where he really shouldn’t in a war that can only end one way. When not being the problem, Buddy’s ferociously protective of his boy, tortoise and ball but simply cannot understand why everyone wants to constantly plunge him into foul-tasting soapy water, but it’s just a sacrifice he’s prepared to make to be with Billy…

Buddy’s propensity for burying and digging up stuff remains paramount, as does his relationship with canine cohort Scamp, Brice and Chips. The mutt’s fondly platonic relationship with Caroline is refined and extended here but when Billy learns how dogs express affection that goes badly wrong…

Principally these episodes focus on Billy getting his first musical instrument (called a “flute” here but I’m not fooled – I know a thrice-bedamned recorder when I see one!) and early lessons in how to make pleasant sounds. Of course, Dad prides himself on his own musical youth and when he’s not frantically whittling instruments he’s regaling Billy with tales of his expertise on the provincial bagpipes of horror called a “bodèga”.

Nobody appreciates Buddy’s attempts to join the family chorus – even though he’s proficient (at least on his own terms) on drums, cymbals, maracas. the flute and vocals…

Happily, the pooch is adept at clearing off whenever Dad has one of his explosive emotional meltdowns, generally to coach Billy and Pat on how to talk to human girls like Celia and Hazel, but he draws the line at intervening whenever hostile neighbour Madame Stick and her evil cat Corporal are on the warpath. Buddy’s a pretty good life coach, and his grooming tips quickly make his human the most popular boy in school, but strangely, not on St Valentine’s day…

The revels end for the meanwhile with an extended vacation yarn that sees the family on a hiking tour where the biggest bone of contention is exactly what the definition of Hiking entails…

Roba was a master of this cartoon art form and under his successors the feature remains genially paced, packed with wry wit and potent sentiment: enchantingly funny episodes running the gamut from heart-warming to hilarious, silly to surreal and thrilling to just plain daft.

This collection is exactly what fans would expect and deserve: another charming tribute to and lasting argument for a child for every pet and vice versa. This is a supremely engaging family-oriented compendium of cool and clever comics no one keen on introducing youngsters to the medium should be without.

Original edition © Dargaud, 2017 by Cazenove & Bastide in the style of Roba. © Studio Boule & Bill 2017. English translation © 2023 Cinebook Ltd.

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Forever Nuts: Happy Hooligan


By Frederick Burr Opper (NBM)
ISBN: 978-1-56163-542-9 (HB)

Frederick Burr Opper was one of the first true giants of comic strips: a hugely imaginative, highly skilled, immensely well-regarded illustrator and political cartoonist who moved into the burgeoning field of newspaper cartooning just as that medium was born. His pictorial creations (even more so, his dialogue) have enriched western culture and the English language ever since.

Born in 1857 the son of Austrian immigrants, Opper grew up in Madison, Ohio, and aged 14 joined the Madison Gazette as a printer’s apprentice. Two years later he was in New York. Always drawing, he worked briefly in a store whilst studying at Cooper Union independent school before obtaining a position as student, and eventually assistant to illustration colossus Frank Beard. Opper sold his first cartoon to Wild Oats in 1876, swiftly following up with further sales to Phunny Phellow, Scribbner’s Monthly, Harper’s Weekly, The Century, St. Nicholas Magazine and Frank Leslie’s Weekly, before joining prestigious premier periodical Puck in 1880. Opper drew everything from spot illustrations, gags, political cartoons and many of the new, full-colour, Chromolithographic covers. He was also a book illustrator of major renown, an incisive humourist, poet and creator of children’s books.

Clearly forward-looking and perspicacious, he first dipped his toe in the burgeoning arena of newspaper strips with an abortive short-lived feature for the staid New York Herald in 1897, but after making few inroads he returned to magazine illustration.

Undeterred by failure and after 18 lucrative, influential and solid, steady years, Opper was finally lured away by William Randolph Hearst, joining his growing stable of bold comics pioneers in 1899. Starting on the New York Journal‘s Sunday Color Supplement, he devised a wealth of different features beginning with Happy Hooligan which debuted on 11th March 1900. Although not a regular feature at first – many cartoon strippers of the fledgling art form were given great leeway to experiment with a variety of ideas in those early days – before too long his efforts became simply too popular to miss and Opper settled into a stable tenure lasting until 1932 when failing eyesight led to his retirement and the tramp’s demise. Opper passed away at the end of August 1937.

The grand master never used assistants, but his imagination and unsurpassed creativity made Hooligan – and his other creations – household favourites around the world, appealing equally to Presidents and public alike. His next strip – Mister Henry Peck (1901) – was followed by the highly popular Alphonse and Gaston (1901-1904), Our Antediluvian Ancestors (1903-1904) and the astoundingly madcap Mule strip And Her Name was Maud which began in 1904. Maud continued intermittently for decades and, on May 23rd 1926, became the regular “topper” to Happy Hooligan, running above the strip until both concluded with the artist’s well-earned retirement on October 14th 1932.

Other strips included The Red Rig-a-Jigs (1906), Adolf from Hamburg (1906), King Jake (1907-1908), His Name is Ebenezer/His Name is Smith (1908), Ship Ahoy! (1908), Howsan Lott (1909-1914), Is Boggs Cheerful? He Is! (1908), Scuse Me, Mr. Johnson (1909), The Swift Work of Count DeGink (1916) and perennial trier The Dubb Family/Down on the Farm (1918-1919, 1921-1923, 1925-1927), but none had the appeal or phenomenal staying power of Happy or Maud and had perforce to be abandoned.

Happy Hooligan is an affable, well-meaning but painfully bumbling tramp who wears an old tin-can for a hat. Always ready and eager to assist and wishing nobody ill, this gentle vagrant is constantly made the inadvertent tool and plaything of far more fortunate folk who should know better, or cops a little too fond of the truncheon and nightstick, and – in general – a harsh, unforgiving cosmos of ill-fortune. It’s a strip brimming with invention, pathos, social commentary, delightful wordplay and broad, reckless slapstick. Many source cite Happy as having a profound influence on Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp in both content and tone…

This classy hardback (sadly still not available yet in any digital form I can find) presents a selection of strips from 1902-1913 in varying forms of colour (2, 3 & full colour depending presumably on budgets of the local papers these rare survivors were culled from). The tome is compiled and edited by Jeffrey Lindenblatt with a fascinating introduction and biography from Allan Holtz who, with collector Cole Johnson, provided the majority of strips herein.

These range from June 8th 1902 to September 7th 1913 and although by no means complete or comprehensive afford a tantalizing glimpse at this iconic, influential and groundbreaking feature. Many of the reprints come from the highly productive and hilarious “Grand Tour” years of 1904 and 1905 (see also Happy Hooligan 1904-1905), and follow the sedentary sad-sack around the States and, after many abortive, knockabout attempts, across the sea to England and then on to the unsuspecting continents of Europe and Africa before returning to America in 1906.

With brothers Montmorency and Gloomy Gus, plus a burgeoning family of nephews and hangers-on, this too-slim tome ends with some of the optimistic poltroon’s foredoomed attempts to woo Suzanne, the patient and amazingly egalitarian daughter of the Duke of Cabaret.  As always, these hysterical, rowdy escapades are often exacerbated by occasional visits from the ultra-polite Alphonse and Gaston, Opper’s legendary French gentlemen of extreme etiquette elitism…

Crossovers were not Opper’s only innovation. Happy Hooligan is considered the first American strip to depend on word balloons rather than supplemental text, and the humble, heartwarming hobo was the first strip character to jump to the Silver Screen in 6 movie shorts from 1900-1902. He was also probably the first mass-market merchandising comics star…

Sadly, Opper and his creations become less well-known with each passing year, but the quality of the work can never fail to amuse and inspire. Hopefully one day soon. superb graphic appetisers such as this will lead to further, more comprehensive collections (in print or electronically – I ain’t fussy), and as this book also contains a healthy selection of Opper’s other works from the early Wild Oats and Puck to the aforementioned genteel Gallic gadabouts and the mulish Maud, perhaps we can also look forward to compendia of his other seminal sketches and comedy classics…
Published in 2009 by NBM. No © invoked.

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Jamie Smart’s Looshkin: Honk If You See It!


By Jamie Smart with Sammy Borass & John Cullen (David Fickling Books)
ISBN: 978-1-78845-313-4 (TPB)

Since launching in 2012, The Phoenix has offered humour, adventure, quizzes, puzzles and educational material in a traditional-seeming weekly comics anthology for girls and boys. The vibrant parade of cartoon fun and fantasy has won praise from the Great and the Good, child literacy experts and the only people who really count – a dedicated, growing legion of totally engaged kids and parents who read it avidly…

Devised by Jamie Smart (Fish Head Steve!; Bunny vs. Monkey, Corporate Skull and bunches of other brilliant strips for The Beano and more) from what I assume is close-hand observation and meticulous documentation comes another outing for Looshkin – a brilliantly bonkers addition to that vast feline pantheon of horrifying hairballs infesting cartoondom – featuring further “adventures of the Maddest Cat in the World!!” This new magnum (sweet, dark, nutty, creamy and constantly making your fillings hurt) opus shares fresh nuggets in the life of a totally anarchic kitty just like yours: cute, innocently malign and able to twist the bounds of credibility and laws of physics whenever the whim takes hold…

Once upon a time Mrs Alice Johnson brought home a kitten from the pet shop. Not one of the adorable little beauties in the window though, but an odd, creepy, lonely little fuzzy hidden at the back of the store.

The Johnsons are not an average family – even for Croydon. Firstborn son Edwin watches too many horror films and keeps a book of spells in his room. Dad is a brilliant inventor who needs peace and quiet to complete his fart-powered jet-packs or potato-powered tractors. With a new cat now, those days are gone for good…

That sweet little daughter isn’t all she seems either: when kitten Looshkin attended her tea party in the garden, the toys all warned the cat of horrors in store. Making allies of teddy bear Bear and glove-puppet Mister Frogburt Looshkin was soon in his element and even escalated the carnage and chaos. He has found his natural home even though it’s surrounded by weirdoes like Great (and so very rich) Auntie Frank and her precious ultra-anxious prize-winning panic poodle Princess Trixibelle and neighbour/former TV host Sandra Rotund whose own cat Mister Buns is a force to be reckoned with.

Reality is notional at best around here, and many episodes adopt the conceit of being excerpts, articles or ads from magazines: frequently interspersed by hilarious pin-ups…

This outing spans a week – which is a long time in cat reality – and quite naturally begins with a recap/origin of sorts as ‘Looshkin: A Comprehensive Catalogue of His Rise to Infamy!!’ reminds the regulars and forewarns the new fools and curious what the feline is like via newspaper clippings from The Daily Pickles before ‘Beef’ sees kitty in full-annoy mode and testing the force of an unblinking stare, before triggering traffic conniptions, wedding woes, acting anarchy and another trip to the Society of Cat Brain Doctors…

Oddly, hypnotising the cat to think he’s a chicken is not the major therapeutic breakthrough everyone hopes it would be and results in a riot of farm vehicle spawned carnage…

With the media mad to find out ‘Who is Tractor Cat?’ neighbour Arnold Johnson is driven to distraction when Looshkin affixes ‘Fried Egg Wheels on my Bottom’ and plays kidnapper in ‘Family Ties’, after which a day dream of deadly ‘Danger Sausage!’ prompts the fuzzy blue fool to start ‘Piggy Piggle’ races and play ‘Hide n Seek’ with a 15 trillion year old dinosaur egg…

All intent to be good in his alternate ego of cosmic champion ‘Johnny Rad’ is doomed from the get-go, so the cat dials back and tries to help party performer Billy Crabs retrain for better jobs in ‘Tears of a Clown’. Shame about the guinea pigs though…

The dangers of Dress-Up-Like-Your-Favourite-Character-From-a-Book day manifest with a vengeance when Jonty-kins kits up like the krazy kitty in ‘Reluctant Reader’ before Frogburt announces ‘I hereby declare Looshkin to be an enemy of Frogtopia!!’ in a daring nautical tale before angry Arnold Johnson declares a poster war and more when Looshkin goes looking for his lost love ‘Sharon!’

More fabulously funny faux mag articles and ads segue swiftly into the cat and the bear auditioning a scatological skit in ‘Musical Number Two’ whilst time runs wild in ‘Eloh Kcalb Eht’ and a brief biography of ‘Bear – Treasure Hunter of the Sahara!’ broadcasts how to fight mummies, vampires and zombies with chicken nuggets and other party treats before feline goes fowl in ‘Metamorphoduck’…

When the cat goes missing we discover why one must ‘Honk if You See It!’ and discover more shocking stuff about pigs ‘In Which Looshkin Tries to do a Thing but it doesn’t work out and as ever Bear is the One Who Suffers’ after which Who is the Best Cat is determined by a ‘Big Race’ that doesn’t end well…

Massive amounts of money and power prove no hindrance or help to our cat and his family when they take a turn as ‘City Types’ before soap spoofery becomes Weird – and offensive – Science when the cat adopts some ‘Bum Angels’ prior to a little literary sabotage and cunning catfishing in maritime madcappery ‘The Old Man and Harold’…

Looshkin’s love of melody and his bear overcome him in ‘Sing Da Song’ before he dabbles with bodybuilding in ‘Bros!’ whilst Frogburt whips up nothing like ‘A Lovely Dinner’ and that sweet little girl goes one step beyond with the class bunny ‘Dongles’ even as Looshkin evolves into ‘The Gigantic Head in the Sky!!’

It all gets a bit cosmic on Sunday when the teddy reveals he’s actually ‘Bear X’ on a secret space mission before the cat spoofs Speed driving a hijacked passenger vehicle and doing ‘Bus Stuff’ after which you’ll learn nothing useful but embrace full daftness in ‘How a Looshkin Comic is Written – A step-by-step guide!’ and enjoy a fake excerpt from a book that doesn’t exist in ‘The Cat with a Light Shining out of its Bottom.’

The cat faces replacement media property ‘Marmalade!!’ as this tome terminates, fighting off corporate ineptitude and media manipulation with one last murder-mitten Halloween swipe at ‘Telly!’ and, Fun Done, surrenders to a selection of handy previews of other treats and wonders available in The Phoenix to wind us down from all that angsty satirical furore…

Utterly loony and inescapably addictive, Looshkin: Honk if you See It! is a fiendishly surreal glimpse at the insanity hardwired into certain cats and other critters (probably not yours, but still…) and another unruly, astoundingly ingenious romp from a modern master of that rebellious whimsy which is the very bedrock of British humour.
Text and illustrations © Fumboo Ltd. 2024. All rights reserved.

Looshkin: Honk if you See It! will be released on April 4th 2024 and is available for pre-order now.

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The Trials of Agrippina & Agrippina and the Ancestor


By Claire Bretécher, translated by Edward Gauvin (Europe Comics)
No ISBNs: digital only

Social satirist and cartoon cultural commentator Claire Bretécher (April 17th 1940 – February 10th 2020), was born in Nantes to a middle class Catholic family. Her heavy-handed father was a jurist whilst mother stayed home to run the house – even as she always encouraged her daughter to be free, autonomous, strong and independent. As a child, Claire read the usual children’s magazines girls were supposed to, but also (boys) comics such as Le Journal de Tintin and Le Journal de Spirou, and drew her own pages until abandoning the “inferior” discipline for abstract art when she began studies at Nantes’ Academy of Fine Arts. On graduation in 1959 she moved to Montmartre, Paris, supplementing with babysitting her main job as a high school drawing teacher, while seeking a proper career in journalism. When her drawings were published in Le Pèlerin, she began contributing to magazines and by the mid-1960s was regularly in publications from Bayard Presse, Larousse and Hatchette. She also worked in advertising as her early comics influences – Will, Hergé and Franquin – expanded to include American “scratchy-line” strip stars Brant Parker (Wizard of Id), Johnny Hart (B.C.), Charles M. Schulz (Peanuts) as well as satirists like James Thurber (The New Yorker, Walter Mitty) and Jules Feiffer (Sick, Sick, Sick, Explainers, Kill My Mother).

Her big bande dessinée break came in 1963 when René Goscinny asked her to illustrate his Le facteur Rhésus for humour magazine L’Os à moelle. Although short-lived, the prestigious partnership brought more work: cartoons, gags, illustration and Claire et Pétronille in Record, pantomimic exploits of adolescent troublemaker Hector in Le Journal de Tintin, Peanuts-derived comedy Les Gnangnan and Les Naufragés (with fellow star-in-waiting Raoul Caunin) at Spirou, and the first of her many medieval satire strips Baratine et Molgaga.

In 1969 at Pilote Bretécher debuted her first great strip character Cellulite (a barbed feminist, “un-beautiful” feudal princess, regarded as the first female antihero in Franco-Belgian comics). After an editorial change, the increasing socially aware-and-active auteur joined fellow creators Nikita Mandryka and Gotlib (Marcel Gottlieb) in quitting to publish their own short-lived but iconic magazine: L’Echo de Savanes which debuted in May 1972. When it folded, Bretécher escaped the comics ghetto and began working in left-leaning mainstream publications with features such as Les Amours Écologiques du Bolot Occidental in ecological monthly Le Sauvage (May 1973) and her second popular masterpiece Les Frustrés which launched in weekly Le Nouvel Observateur as anecdotal cartoon cultural commentary La Page des Frustrés from October 15th of that year. It ran in assorted forms and venues until 1981 by which time she was firmly established as a multi-award-winning author and self-publisher of dozens of books and hundreds of magazine features.

From 1987, she began primarily concentrating on the life of a Gen X French teenager in self-inflicted crisis mode during those difficult years spanning self-declared independence and becoming more or less mature. Simultaneously pompous, angry, spoiled, privileged, resentful, uncertain, intransigent, self-important, trend-seeking, bolshy and determined not to consider the future, Agrippine – or as here Agrippina – roared through dozens of strips that filled 8 albums between 1988 and 2009.

Think of it as a female teen version of Dennis the Menace (UK version) with swearing, scatology, unlovely and messy sex, constant arguments, staggering hilarious rudeness and hysteria and every shocking domestic non-crisis you can imagine… or worse yet remember…

She hates her life and her closest friends, loathes her younger brother and wishes her parents had divorced years ago when she could have got some mileage out of it…

The series always provides sharp and telling observations on generation gaps of every stripe and thus quite naturally made the leap to television for a 26-episode series in 2001.

Most of that unmissable comics cleverness is denied to English-only speakers and readers, but Europe Comics has culled some of the best bits into two albums which any parent would benefit from.

The Trials of Agrippina was first released in 2008 but hasn’t dated at all, serving as a primer with mostly 1-page strips detailing just how bad life can be ‘In the Spotlight’ for ‘Teens’ like ‘Me’, detailing the temptations of ‘Polaroid’ and ‘The Crisis’ of a self-adjudged ‘Success Story’…

Wry and pithy, episodes like ‘Complaints’, ‘Seeing Things’, ‘Blooper’, ‘We Are the Champions’, ‘Candid’ and ‘Myths and Legends’ generally leave our girl ‘Clueless’ and requiring emotional ‘Cleanup’, certain someone has ‘Eyes on You’. The ‘Outpouring’ of misery and bile about the latest ‘Fiasco’ to anyone who will care about being ‘Madly in Love’ is certainly a ‘Challenge’, leaving her ‘Taken for a ride’ at ‘The Beach’, waiting for ‘Miracles’…

Perennial questions confound her generation as they have all others. Quandaries of life like ‘Liver Failure’, ‘Love Letters’, and the eternal ‘Riddle’ of ‘Lurid Nights’, ‘Stars’, ‘The Oath’, being ‘Born Again’, feeling ‘The scream’, ‘The scoop’, or allure or ‘Deadly Arts’ and romantic ‘Strategy’ all show that although she’s always right, Agrippina can never really win…

Even when she finally finds a suitably cool boyfriend – in ghastly pretentious intellectual Morose Mince – it all turns out to be another monumental disappointment and drag from initial ‘Bonding’, through ‘Sweet Nothin’s’, ‘Othello’, with teen ‘High Treason’ hitting ‘The Last Nerve’ as ‘The Specialist’ provokes growing dissatisfaction and musical tastes no longer in ‘Harmony’, and a preference of condoms in ‘Gimmick’ leads to ‘Domestic Strife’, a paucity of ‘Prospects’ and the ‘End of the Line’…

At least mum and dad can now safely offer advice in ‘Aurores’…

Sharp and so very funny – unless you’re a teen reading it – The Trials of Agrippina is a masterpiece of observational comedy no parent can be without.

The absolute best seller in the series was fifth album Agrippine et l’Ancêtre first published in 1998 and which we can enjoy as Agrippina and the Ancestor. Here the tale is told in one long epic as our long-suffering lass is dragged into unsuspected maternal dramas when her grandmother – who hasn’t yet coughed up any birthday dough for Agrippina – has an emotional meltdown (and emergency face-lift) after learning her own estranged and despised mother has finally gone into a care home. Now grammy is feeling the weight of years and is after much pressure from daughter and grandchildren – even Agrippina’s vile little brother Byron who also scents guilt money in the air – is convinced to visit Great Grandma Zsa Zsa and reconcile…

Thus opens a manic domestic farce as Commie-hating fireball of prejudice Zsa Zsa runs roughshod over her reunited clan and everyone else in range in an escalating procession of bizarre escapades. These include feeding time at the home, the many downsides of the care professions and the old termagant’s introduction and rapid conquest of computers, virtual reality and robot dogs with her generations of offspring dragged along in her wake. At least studiously sanguine Agrippina gets to meet a kind-of dream lover in the process…

And of course, the teen’s many attempts at explaining the chaos and finding support amongst her own friends are no help at all…

Weird, wild and wonderfully fun, these adventures are pure joy and a lasting tribute to one of the most important women in comics history. Check them out and see for yourself.
© 2015, 2016 – DARGAUD-BENELUX (Dargaud-Lombard s.a.) – Bretécher. All rights reserved.

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Steed & Mrs Peel: Golden Game


By Grant Morrison, Anne Caulfield, Ian Gibson, Ellie De Ville & various (Boom Studios)
ISBN: 978-1-60886-285-6 (TPB/Digital edition)

The (British) Avengers was an astoundingly stylish, globally adored TV show glamorously blending espionage with arch comedy and deadly danger with technological extrapolation, running from the Swinging Sixties through to the end of the decade. A phenomenal cult hit, it and sequel The New Avengers still summons up pangs of Cool Britannia style, cheeky action-adventure, kinky quirkiness, mad gadgetry, dashing heroics, bizarrely British fetish attire, surreal suspense and the wholly appropriate descriptive phrase “Spy Fi”….

Enormously popular everywhere, the light-hearted show evolved from 1961’s gritty crime drama Police Surgeon into a paragon of witty, thrillingly sophisticated espionage adventure lampoonery with suavely urbane British Agent John Steed and dazzlingly talented amateur sleuth Mrs. Emma Peel battling spies, robots, criminals, secret societies, monsters and even “aliens” with tongues very much in cheeks and always under the strictest determination to remain calm, dashingly composed and exceedingly eccentric…

As played by Patrick Macnee, Steed was a nigh-effete dandy and wry caricature of an English Gentleman-spy, counterbalanced by a succession of prodigiously competent woman as partners and foils. The format was pure gold, with second sidekick Peel (as played by Dame Diana Rigg) becoming the most popular right from her October 1965 debut. Rigg was hired to replace Honor Blackman – landmark character Dr. Cathy Gale – the first full-on, smartly decisive fighting female on British Television.

Blackman left to play the female lead in Bond movie Goldfinger – allowing her replacement to take the TV show to even greater heights of global success – as she became a style icon of the era. Her trademark Op art “Emmapeeler” catsuits and miniskirts (designed by series costumiers John Bates and Alun Hughes) were sold across the country and the world…

Emma Peel’s connection with viewers cemented into communal consciousness and the world’s psyche the feminist archetype of a powerful, clever, competent and always-stylishly-clad woman: largely banishing screaming, eye-candy girly-victims to the dustbin of popular fiction. Rigg left in 1967 – also for an 007 role (Tracy Bond in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service) – and was followed by Linda Thorson as Tara King: another potent woman who carried the series to its demise in 1969. Continued popularity in more than 90 countries led to a revival in the late 1970s as The New Avengers saw posh glamor-puss Purdey (Joanna Lumley) and manly Gambit (Gareth Hunt) as assistants to the apparently ageless, debonair and deadly Steed…

The show remains an enduring cult icon, with all the spin-off that entails. During its run and beyond, The Avengers spawned toys, games, collector models, a pop single and stage show, radio series, audio adventures, posters, books, a modish line of “Avengerswear” fashion apparel for women and all the other myriad merchandising strands that inevitably accompany a media sensation.

The one we care most about is comics and, naturally, the popular British Television program was no stranger there either. Following an introductory strip starring Steed & Dr. Gale in listings magazines Look Westward and The Viewer – plus The Manchester Evening News – (September 1963 to the end of 1964), legendary children’s staple TV Comic launched its own Avengers strip in #720 (October 2nd 1965) with Emma Peel firmly ensconced as co-lead. This series ran until #771 (September 24th 1966) with the dashing duo also appearing in TV Comic Holiday Special, whilst a series of young Emma Peel adventures featured in June & Schoolfriend, before transferring to DC Thomson’s Diana until 1968 whereupon it returned to TV Comic from #877, depicting Steed and Tara King until 1972 and #1077.

In 1966 Mick Anglo Studios produced a one-off, large-sized UK comic book, and two years later America’s Gold Key’s Four-Color series published their own try-out book utilising recycled UK material. It was called John Steed/Emma Peel since some outfit called Marvel had secured an American trademark for comics called “The Avengers”. There were of course wonderful, sturdily steadfast hardback annuals for the British Festive Season trade, starting with 1962’s TV Crimebusters Annual and thereafter pertinent TV Comic Annuals before a run of solo editions graced Christmas stockings from 1967 to 1969: later supplemented by a brace of New Avengers editions for 1977 and 1978.

Between 1990 and 1992 Eclipse Comics/ACME Press produced a trans-Atlantic prestige comic book miniseries. Steed & Mrs. Peel was crafted by Grant Morrison & Ian Gibson with a second exploit scripted by Anne Caulfield, and that entire affair was reprinted in 2012 by media-savvy publishers Boom! Studios as a soft pilot for their own iteration which you’ll find reviewed here.

The original 90s comics tales are whimsically playful and diabolically clever but perhaps require a little backstory. When Emma Peel joined the TV show, she was a new bride, recent widow and old acquaintance of Steed’s. The motivation for bereaved martial artist/genius level chemist Emma Knight’s call to action was that her brand new husband (dashing test pilot Peter Peel) had been lost over the Amazon jungles and his loss impelled her into a life of (secret) service. The amateur adventurer’s second career ended in-world when hubby was found alive and she returned to him and the Amazonian Leopard-People he had discovered, leaving Steed to muddle along with fully trained professional British agent Tara King…

Here that marital reunion informs Morrison (Animal Man, Zenith) & Ian Gibson’s ‘The Golden Game’: a 4-act chapterplay serially comprising ‘Crown & Anchor’, ‘Hare & Hounds’, ‘Fox & Geese’ and concluding instalment ‘Hangman’. It opens six months later with Mrs Peel’s abrupt recall to duty after Miss King goes missing whilst investigating leaks at the Admiralty and suspicious doings at elite games fraternity The Palamedes Club.

When the disappearance is linked to the truly baroque murder of puzzle-obsessed founding member and key military strategist Admiral “Foggy” Fanshawe, Steed’s handler “Mother” insists he investigate but trust no one, which the super-agent imputes to mean no one currently active in the agency…

With willing and able Emma Peel back from South America, he traces a string of excessively imaginative card and boardgame-themed slayings to an old school chum who really can carry a grudge and knows how to implement stolen nuclear launch codes to a wild and weird climax with Peel ultimately saving the day and the world…

Anne Caulfield scripted fantasy-fuelled follow-up ‘Deadly Rainbow’ as Mr and Mrs Peel reunite in the scenic English village of Pringle-on-Sea – where they had their honeymoon – only to find the laws of science and nature being warped by what appear to be the Leopard People Peter had befriended in the Amazon…

With minds clouded, telepathy and prophecy running riot, zombies marching and entire bodies (not just heads) being shrunken amidst scenes of bucolic domesticity, Peter soon goes missing again. When exploitative American resource plunderers who have been deforesting the tribe’s hidden home, it’s not long before Steed comes to Emma’s call…

The breezy satire, edgy social commentary and especially the pure peril-embedded nonsense of the original shows is perfectly captured by much-missed, recently departed pioneering 2000 AD stalwart Ian (Ballad of Halo Jones, Robo-Hunter) Gibson (February 20th 1946 – December 11th 2023) who especially goes to town on the weird events of the second saga and also contributes a variant cover gallery featuring 11 playfully suspenseful images.

Emma Peel may have been a style icon of the sixties, but she was also (and still is) a fierce, potent, overwhelming example and role model for girls. Her cool intellect, varied skills and accomplishments and smooth confidence inspired – as much as action contemporary Modesty Blaise – a host of fictive imitators whilst opening up new vistas and career paths for suppressed millions of prospective and downhearted future underpaid secretaries, nurses, shopgirls and teachers and frustrated wives. Peel’s influence even briefly reshaped the most powerful symbol of female empowerment in the world as her crimebusting detective troubleshooter alternate lifestyle became the model for sales-impoverished Wonder Woman who in the late 1960s ditched powers and costumes for bullets and boutiques…

Thrilling, funny, and eternally fabulous, Emma Peel is a woman to be reckoned with and these are tales you need to read…
© 2012 StudioCanal S.A. All Rights Reserved. The Avengers and Steed & Mrs Peel are trademarks of StudioCanal S.A. All Rights Reserved.

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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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Krazy & Ignatz 1919-1921: The George Herriman Library volume 2


By George Herriman (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-68396-367-7 (HB/Digital edition)

In a field positively brimming with magnificent, eternally evergreen achievements, Krazy Kat is – for most cartoon cognoscenti – the pinnacle of pictorial narrative innovation. The canon comprises a singular and hugely influential body of work which shaped the early days of the comics industry whilst elevating itself to the level of a treasure of world literature, adored by the literary and entertainment elite whilst simultaneously bewildering and annoying millions who didn’t “get it”…

Krazy & Ignatz is a creation which must always be approached and appreciated on its own terms. Over decades the strip developed a unique language – simultaneously visual and verbal – to allegorically delineate the immeasurable variety of human experience, foibles and peccadilloes with unfaltering warmth and understanding… and without ever offending anybody. Baffled millions, certainly, but offended… Nope, nehvah.

It certainly went over the heads and around the hearts of many, but Krazy Kat was never a strip for dull, slow or unimaginative people: those who can’t or won’t accept complex, multilayered verbal and visual whimsy, absurdist philosophy or seamless blending of sardonic slapstick with arcane joshing. It is still the closest thing to pure poesy narrative art has ever produced. Think of Dylan Thomas and Edward Lear playing “I Spy” with James Joyce amongst beautifully harsh, barren cactus fields as Gabriel García Márquez types up shorthand notes and keeps score…

George Joseph Herriman (August 22, 1880-April 25, 1944) was already successful as a cartoonist and journalist in 1913 when a cat and mouse who’d been noodling about at the edges of his domestic comedy strip The Family Upstairs graduated to their own feature on October 28th 1913. As covered here in heavily illustrated introductory article ‘A Mouse by Any Other Name: Krazy & Ignatz’s Early Life Under the Boards’ Krazy Kat – instantly mildly intoxicating and gently scene-stealing – had first popped up on July 26th 1910 in that strip’s precursor The Dingbat Family: a 5-day-a-week monochrome comedy strip in William Randolph Hearst’s New York Evening Journal.

By sheer dint of that overbearing publishing magnate’s enrapt adoration and direct influence and interference, the cat ‘n’ mouse capers gradually and inexorably spread throughout his vast stable of papers. Although Hearst and contemporary artistic and literary intelligentsia (such as Frank Capra, e.e. Cummings, Willem de Kooning, H.L. Mencken and more) adored the strip, many local and regional editors did not: taking every potentially career-ending opportunity to drop it from those circulation-crucial comics sections designed to entice Joe Public and the general populace.

The feature eventually found its true home and sanctuary in the Arts and Drama section of Hearst’s papers, protected there by Hearst’s unshakable patronage. At last enhanced (in 1935) with the cachet of enticing colour, the Ket & Ko. flourished, freed from editorial interference or fleeting fashion. It ran mostly unmolested until Herriman’s death on April 25th 1944 from cirrhosis caused by Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Eschewing standard industry policy and finding a substitute creator, Hearst decreed Krazy Kat would die with its originator.

The premise is simple: Krazy is what we would call gender-fluid; an effeminate, dreamy, sensitive, romantic feline, hopelessly smitten with venal, toxically masculine Ignatz Mouse. A married, spouse-abusing delinquent father, he is rude, crude, brutal, mendacious and thoroughly scurrilous. Ignatz is a proudly unreconstructed male and early forerunner of the men’s rights movement: drinking, stealing, fighting, conniving, constantly neglecting his wife and many children and always responding to Krazy’s genteel advances of friendship (or more) by clobbering the Kat with a well-aimed brick. These he obtains singly or in bulk from local brick-maker Kolin Kelly. The smitten kitten misidentifies these gritty gifts as tokens of equally recondite affection, showered upon him/her/they in the manner of Cupid’s arrows. It’s not a response, except perhaps a conditioned one: the mouse spends the majority of his time, energy and ingenuity (when not indulging in crime or philandering) launching missiles at the mild moggy’s mug. He can’t help himself, and Krazy waits for it to happen with the day bleakly unfulfilled if the adored, anticipated assault fails to happen.

The final critical element completing an anthropomorphic emotional triangle is lawman Offissa Bull Pupp. He is utterly besotted with Krazy, professionally aware of the Mouse’s true nature, but hamstrung from permanently removing his devilish rival for the foolish feline’s affections by his own amorous timidity and sense of honour. Krazy is blithely oblivious to the perennially “Friend-Zoned” Pupp’s dolorous dilemma…

Peripherally populating the mutable stage are a large, ever-growing supporting cast of inspired bit players. These include new player and relentless deliverer of babies Joe Stork; Hispanic huckster Don Kiyoti, hobo Bum Bill Bee, self-aggrandizing Walter Cephus Austridge, inscrutable, barely intelligible (and outrageously unreconstructed by modern standards) Chinese mallard Mock Duck, portraitist Michael O’Kobalt, dozy Joe Turtil and snoopily sagacious fowl Mrs. Kwakk Wakk, augmented by a host of audacious animal crackers such as Krazy’s relations Katfish, Katbird and niece Katrina – all equally capable of stealing the limelight and supporting their own features…

The exotic, quixotic episodes occur mainly amidst the Painted Desert environs of Coconino (patterned on Herriman’s vacation retreat in Coconino County, Arizona) where surreal playfulness and the fluid ambiguity of flora and landscape are perhaps the most important member of the cast. The strips are a masterful mélange of unique experimental drawing, cunningly designed, wildly expressionistic (frequently referencing Navajo arts) whilst harnessing sheer unbridled imagination and delightfully evocative lettering and language. This last is most effective here: alliterative, phonetically, onomatopoeically joyous with a compellingly melodious musical force and delicious whimsy (“Ignatz Ainjil” or “I’m a heppy, heppy ket!”).

Yet for all our high-fallutin’ intellectualism, these comic adventures are poetic, satirical, timely, timeless, bittersweet, self-referential, fourth-wall bending, eerily idiosyncratic, outrageously hilarious escapades encompassing every aspect of humour from painfully punning shaggy dog stories to riotous, violent slapstick. Herriman was a master of action: indulging in dialogue-free escapades as captivating as any Keystone Kop or Charlie Chaplin 2-reeler. Kids of any age will delight in them as much as any pompous old oaf like me and you…

This cartoon wonderment is bulked up with a veritable treasure trove of unique artefacts: candid photos, correspondence, original strip art and examples of Herriman’s personalised gifts and commissions (gorgeous hand-coloured artworks featuring the cast and settings), supported by fascinating insights and crucial history. Bill Blackbeard’s essay ‘A Mouse by Any Other Name: Krazy & Ignatz’s Early Life Under the Boards’ continues detailing the circuitous path to Krazy in Coconino via Herriman’s earlier strips successes The Dingbat Family and The Family Upstairs.

This volume then reveals – mostly in monochrome – the strips from January 5th 1919 to December 25th 1921 in a reassuringly hefty atlas of another land and time, with the unending dramas playing out as before, but with some intriguing diversions. These include a wealth of snow and farming gags, recurring tributes to Kipling’s “Just So Stories” (such as learning how Kookoo Klocks work, why bananas are slippy and hang around in bunches and why Lightning Bugs light up). Early in the year occasional unwelcome guest Blind Pig (a sly salute to speakeasies in Prohibition days) debuts even as the regulars tirelessly test out their strange threesome relationship in a dazzling array of short painful trysts…

The peculiar proceedings are delivered – much like Joe Stork’s bundles of joy/responsibility – every seven days, with running gags on Ignatz being furless and Krazy philanthropically and clandestinely finding ways to buy or grow him a warm winter coat; odd vegetables taking root in the region’s unfeasibly fertile soil and plenty of scandal and gossip spawning mischief from the animal onlookers. A nod to an unstable post war world comes with strikes at Kelly’s brickworks and sundry other reasons why bricks suddenly become scarce, all forcing Ignatz to find replacement ammunition…

Even so, always our benighted star gets hit with something solid: many, variegated, heavy and forever evoking joyous, grateful raptures and transports of delight from the heartsore, hard-headed recipient, with Pupp helpless to thwart Ignatz or even understand why the Ket longs for his hate-filled assaults. Often Herriman simply let nature takes its odd course: draughting surreal slapstick chases, weird physics events and convoluted climate conditions to carry the action and confound the reader, but gradually an unshakeable character dynamic forms involving love and pain, crime and punishment and – always – forgiveness, redemption and another chance for all transgressors and malefactors…

Much time and effort is expended to have Joe deliver a longed-for heir to rich but dissatisfied tycoon Mr. T Vanwagg-Taylor even though each time fate intervenes and the anticipated offspring is left with other mothers. The Ket’s ancient Egyptian antecedents are exposed whilst in the present Krazy is put on trial for being crazy…

A Katnippery is opened and many strips concentrate on how the magic herb is kultivated and konsumed, whilst a fashion for hats and helmets leads to a period of brick imperviousness before the mouse adapts again. Krazy explores careers in music, dance, acting and pugilism as Herriman opens decades of subversive playing with line and shade carefully probing where black ink and white paper are metaphors for race and colour.

When not sleeping in the bath or giving shelter to migrant Mexican jumping beans and land-locked castaway clams, Krazy falls in love with motoring and racing, and also sets up an electrical power company based upon cat fur static, whilst malevolent Ignatz delves deep into the lore of bricks and dornicks, edging closer to having his own kiln and manufactory…

Sometimes there’s no logic in control, as when Krazy obtains the Pied Piper’s magical instrument and the result is not what you’d expect, or as assorted ailments afflict the town too, or it is assailed by reformers and bluestocking moralists…

And then it was Christmas and a new year and volume lay ahead…

Before closing, though, at the far end of the tome you can enjoy some full-colour archival illustration and another batch of erudite and instructional acclimation in ‘The Ignatz Mouse Debaffler’, with Blackbeard, Jeet Heer and Michael Tisserand providing pertinent facts, snippets of contextual history and necessary notes for the young and potentially perplexed.

Tisserand discusses language, race and (undisclosed creole “passing” as white) Herriman’s career as an artist via his character Musical Mose in ‘The Impussanations of Krazy Kat” before Blackbeard’s biographical essay ‘George Herriman: 1880-1944’.

Herriman’s epochal classic is a remarkable triumph: in all arenas of Art and Literature there has never been anything like these comic strips which shaped our industry and creators, inspired auteurs in fields as disparate as prose fiction, film, dance, animation and music whilst delivering delight and delectation to generations of wonder-starved fans with a story of cartoon romance gone awry. If, however, you are one of Them and not Us, or if you actually haven’t experienced the gleeful graphic assault on the sensorium, mental equilibrium and emotional lexicon carefully thrown together by George Herriman from the dawn of the 20th century until the dog days of World War II, this glorious compendium is the most accessible way to do so. Don’t waste the opportunity…

That was harsh. Not everybody gets it and some of them aren’t even stupid or soulless, just unfortunate. Still, for lovers of whimsy and whimsical lovers “There Is A Heppy Lend Furfur A-Waay” if only you accept where and how to look…

The George Herriman Library: Krazy & Ignatz 1919-1921 © 2020 Fantagraphics Books, Inc. All contents © 2020 Fantagraphics Books, Inc., unless otherwise noted. “A Mouse by Any Other Name: Krazy & Ignatz’s Early Life Under the Boards”, “The Ignatz Mouse Debaffler Page”, and Herriman biography © 2020 Bill Blackbeard. “The Impussanations of Krazy Kat” © 2020 Michael Tisserand. All other images and text © 2020 their respective copyright holders. All rights reserved.

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The Perishers Spectacolour


By Maurice Dodd & Dennis Collins (Mirror Books)
ISBN: 0-85939-169-8 (album PB)

I plug these little chaps – and the wonderful feature they starred in – every few years because the work is wonderful and quintessentially British. I so wish they were still around to take aim at today’s governments, autocrats, too-common people and general discommodiousness as well as helping us accommodate the impending end of the world with a smile…

Although written almost entirely by Maurice Dodd throughout its 48-year history, the buried National Treasure that is The Perishers almost began life in 1957 when artist Dennis Collins and writer Bill Witham (who went on to huge success with uniquely innocent everyman Useless Eustace) batted around an idea with cartoon editor Bill Herbert. Some daily exploits tribulations, ruminations and misadventures of a bunch of typical kids (circa the latter half of the 20th century at least) were first published in the Manchester edition of The Daily Mirror in February 1958. However, after only a few frankly mediocre months the wacky adventures of Maisie & Marlon were withdrawn and retooled.

Jack-of-all-trades, budding artist and advertising whiz-kid Maurice Dodd was then taken aside by his service comrade and drinking buddy Herbert (they had been paratroopers together) and offered a go at revising the strip. The freelance designer jumped at the chance to reinvent the characters for what would become a meandering but beautifully illustrated, all-ages feature simply stuffed with untapped potential.

Drawing on his own life (he would describe it as “shamelessly pilfering”), Dodd improvised a plethora of new characters – animal and human (although with this strip distinctions are loose and hard to defend). He also rescued and rehabilitated an early 1958 casualty of the original set-up in the unkempt and ill-maintained person of laconic orphan/philosophical dilettante Wellington. This bewildered and bemused overly-anxious symbol of the post-war era was a street urchin living on his wits but still attending school and enduring all the daily trials and indignities of British youth…

Relaunched in October 1959 (Happy 65th, lads, lasses, loons and assorted mildlife!) in London and national editions, revamped strip The Perishers quickly caught on, becoming a morning mainstay for generations of Brits (and assorted colonies), by blending slapstick and surreal comedy with naive charm. At its best it was a miniaturised modern romance melodrama liberally laced with sardonic cultural commentary – apparently and retroactively – set in the South London Borough of Croynge (an amalgam of Croydon and Penge) but still looking like any post-industrial northern city familiar to generations of kids…

Here Maisie loves Marlon, Marlon loves fashion and “inventing”, Wellington loves sausages and Boot, Boot loves sausages and more sausages but is caught in an autocratic duty of care for the little kid who cooks and cleans for him.

Particularly rewarding was a continuing and wonderfully twisted faux misperception of contemporary politics and the burgeoning influence of advertising and commercial media. From the start The Perishers was superbly illustrated, conjuring in a few judicious lines and cannily applied grey tones a communal urban wonderland we all knew as kids: a familiar if not ubiquitous post-war melange of shops and streets, building sites and overpasses, alleys and parks and fields where we could get on with our adventures and no adults could interfere or spoil the fun. The unsavoury old git in me still hungers in absentia on behalf of the youth of today who will never experience such freedom without being labelled “neglected”, “at risk” or possibly just “feral”…

The primary protagonists are Wellington and his old English Sheepdog Boot (actually the mutt is only “sort of a dog…” since the wily, chancer/shaggy raconteur considers himself a Manorial Milord “sufferin’ under the curse of a Gypsy Wench”). They are ably unsupported by the formidable Maisie, a thoroughly modern miss torn between the fashionable self-delusion that the boy of her dreams feels likewise… and sweets. This frail flower has an unsurpassed capacity for greed and inspirational violence, but it vies with a tremendous unslaked passion for the aforementioned Marlon, whom she thinks is what she wants. And sweets. But really the Romance. With sweets.

Cool, suave and debonair are just three of the many, many words Marlon doesn’t know the meaning of, but lots of girls at school fancy him anyway. If he grows up, he wants to be a brain surgeon or a bloke wot goes down sewers in great big gumboots…

Being on his own and fiercely independent, Wellington capitalises on every opportunity to support himself with sordid scavenging and shoddy schemes – usually involving selling poorly constructed carts and buggies to Marlon who has far more money than sense. To be honest, Marlon has more noses than sense…

Maisie is a shy beautiful maiden waiting for her true beloved to sweep her off her feet – and if he doesn’t, she gives him a thorough bashing up and nicks his sweets. Other unreasonable regulars include Baby Grumplin’ – Maisie’s toddler brother and a diabolical force of nature; Plain Jane – a girl who asks too many questions; and dapper Fiscal Yere: smugly complacent go-getting son of a millionaire and another occasional sucker for Wellington’s automotive in-expertise. Kids like him are what made today’s world what it is…

On the equally esoteric anthropomorphic animal front, extremely erudite Boot often contends with stroppy ducks, militant squirrels, socialist revolutionaries Fred the Beetle and his long-suffering wife Ethel, South Asian bloodhound/journalist B.H. Calcutta (Failed) and over-the-hill canine lady of leisure Tatty Oldbit (The Sailor’s Friend), militant teutonic tortoise Adolf Kilroy and a nicotine-addicted caterpillar who stunted his growth through old dog-ends and became Fred’s inseparable comrade/doctrinal competitor in the struggle against capitalistic and canine oppression. This little Trot is also an implacable rival for any food or other societal detritus the Bolshevistic bug might find…

Utterly English, fabulously fantastical and resoundingly working-class, the strip generated 30 collections between 1963-1990, 4 Big Little Books, 5 novels and 2 annuals as well as an audio record and – in 1979 – an immensely successful animated TV series. That last was the spark for this carefully curated album released in the same year to tie-in with the toned-down-for-TV frolics reprinting colourized strip and extended running gag sequences bunched into chapters for your delectation.

We start off gently with ‘Boot Rules – OK’ as Wellington struggles to keep them whilst the dog contributes nothing other than sardonic criticism, acts as straight man to the other bestial extroverts at large in the streets and plans his eventual takeover of the planet… once he overcomes that cursed lack of thumbs…

‘Car Sales’ delivers 16 strips on the eternal war between Wellington and Maise as the former seeks to foist off a succession of shoddy homemade soapbox vehicles on a lad whose real purpose in life is buying sweets for his ladylove. If only Marlon could be made to remember that…

The well-heeled simpleton has needs and desires of his own, primarily becoming a ‘Brain Surgeon’ – even though this section proves why that will never be so – and is followed by a sampling of bargain basement Antichrist Baby Grumplin’ turning the streets and houses upside down hunting for his latest appalling pet ‘The Tigerworm’ and encompassing asides with his young sibling “the New Baby” because ‘It’s Spring Again’, before back in the Wild Kingdoms ‘Tatty Makes Trouble’ for Boot and B.H. Calcutta (Failed).

Wellington’s best pal then faces ‘The Nazi Invasion’ as Adolf Kilroy acts like his totalitarian preincarnation and annexes Boot’s bowl and despatches an Axis of insects to occupy all the best food sources…

Total war is averted by the advent of protracted human manoeuvres intended to accomplish ‘Boot’s Bath’ and rapidly escalating to riots in the streets exacerbated by Maisie’s latest campaign to become ‘May Queen’: again deploying hulking harridan Beryl Bogey (the class “black belt, cross country netball champion”) to canvass votes with extreme menace…

For sheer carnage and chaos only one thing beats Baby Grumplin’ on his ‘Space Hopper’ and that’s what happens here when attempts by the infernal infant’s elders to confiscate said bouncing balloon lead to Boot being trapped on it and boinging about like a blockbuster blobby bomb. Largely unharmed, he soon retreats to a place of canine recuperation only to find his doggy brethren all seeking to pinch his objet d’amour in ‘A Bone to Pick’…

Because it was the past and we just didn’t value juvenile life as much as now, nobody thought anything amiss at a dog and four kids under ten going on an annual camping trip to the seaside: free for a fortnight from all adult supervision (oh, such innocent times!). Here ‘On Holiday’ sees the queasy quartet and Boot romping in the surf at their regular beach resort: playing tricks, scoring points indulging in mockery and even trying a ‘Swimming Lesson’ (for Boot), as well as indulging in the yearly habit of terrorising the denizens of a rockpool.

Every summer, the kids would encounter and endure sun, surf and the crabs who worship the uncannily canine ‘The Eyeballs in the Sky’ which perennially manifested in their isolated “Pooliverse”, auguring mayhem, madness and an unceasing procession of prophets, pundits and pestilential conmen crabs, before the real world would intrude again.

After reluctantly and hilariously ‘Striking Camp’, more time is happily wasted mucking about with an ‘I Speak Your Weight’ machine before finally staggering back to ‘Home, Sweet Home’, only to find the current campaign to remember a day of national importance has kicked off in ‘Happy Birthday, Wellington’ with the usual lukewarm loot results accounted for until ‘But on Monday…’ proves both boy and dog should be careful what they wish for, if what they wish for is a skateboard. Apparently there’s no brakes or steering wheel and they are magnetic if you’re riding a spacehopper coming the other way…

The manic buffoonery then concludes with short bursts of lunacy and largesse in strips all embracing a spirit of ‘Merry Christmas’…

Dennis Collins magnificently and hilariously illustrated the strip until his retirement in 1983, after which Dodd himself took up the pens and brushes. Eventually artist Bill Melvin took over the art chores whilst Dodd scripted until his death in 2006. Once the backlog of material was exhausted The Perishers finished on June 10th of that year. Soon after, The Mirror began reprinting classic sequences to the general approval of everyone, so perhaps it’s not too much to hope that eventually all those classic collections will be available to all…

Quite frankly, it’s what we need and what I deserve…
© 1973 Daily Mirror Newspapers Limited/Film Fair. © Mirror Books Ltd 1979.