The Town That Didn’t Exist


By Enki Bilal & Pierre Christin, translated by Tom Leighton (Titan Books & Humanoids Publishing)
ISBN: 978-1-85286-147-6 (1989)      978-1-93065-237-8 (2003)

Here’s a masterpiece of subtle moody comics storytelling criminally out of print and long overdue for rediscovery in the frankly incomprehensible modern English language comics marketplace.

Enes Bilalović AKA Enki Bilal was born in Belgrade in 1951 and broke into French comics in 1972 with Le Bal Maudit for Pilote. Throughout the 1970s he grew in skill and fame, and achieved English-language celebrity once his work began appearing in America’s Heavy Metal magazine.

Although best known for his self-scripted Nikopol Trilogy (Gods in Chaos, The Woman Trap and Cold Equator) this bleakly contemplative anti-capitalist fable always felt like a tale the socially-concerned and intellectually aware Serbian would like to be best remembered for; again scripted by old comrade Christin, and arguably Bilal’s most evocative and plaintive work.

In recent years Bilal returned to contemporary political themes with his much-lauded, self-penned Hatzfeld Tetralogy…

As if writing one of the most successful and significant comics series in the world (the groundbreaking and influential Valérian and Laureline series) was not enough, full-time Academician Pierre Christin has still found time over the years to script science-fiction novels, screenplays and a broad selection of comics, beginning in 1966 with Le Rhum du Punch with Valérian co-creator Jean-Claude Mézières.

The truly prolific Christin has produced stellar graphic stories with such artistic luminaries as Jacques Tardi, Raymond Poïvet, Annie Goetzinger, François Boucq, Jijé and many others, but whenever he collaborated with the brilliant Bilal, beginning in 1975 with their exotic and surreal Légendes d’Aujourd’hui or in other classic tales such as The Hunting Party or The Black Order Brigade, the results have never been less than stunning.

In this captivating, slyly polemical parable, aspiration, disdain, idealism and human nature have never been more coldly and clearly depicted…

Beginning and ending with a dream of something better, The Town That Didn’t Exist focuses on the recent past and the country’s depressed industrial North, where a strike at the cement works has prompted the death of the aged oligarch who has ruled the town and district of Jadencourt like a feudal baron for decades.

Generations of Hannard have run the web of businesses that put food on the table of the workers, but now that their first ever industrial action has killed the old man, tensions, passions, opinions and rumours are running wild…

With Hannard’s cronies and yes-men equally unsure of their futures, the Board of Directors gathers to determine who will lead the company in the trying times ahead and are compelled to accept that the old man’s solitary, long-sequestered invalid granddaughter has to take the helm – even if in name only…

With workers terrified of losing even their meagre subsistence livelihood and the comfortably installed fat-cats fearing the surrender of so very much more, the pallid, ethereal Madeleine Hannard is dragged from the bleak, rugged and lonely beach and house which have been her refuge for seven years and moves into the morass of boiling cauldrons, bubbling and brewing amidst the closed and grimy alleys of Jadencourt…

She soon proves to be as powerful a personality as her grandfather and by charm, duplicity and force of will manages to unite the perpetually warring and self-serving sides on management and labour in an incredible, groundbreaking, benignly doctrinaire project.

Ignoring cries to rationalise the companies, lay off workers and reorganise the corporation, Madeleine counters with an insane proposal: expansion, full employment and a retasking of every commercial and design resource into the construction of a fantastic, enclosed and self-perpetuating City under a dome – a utopian paradise where everybody will live in perfect harmony forever free from want and need…

The hardest people to convince are the downtrodden workers who have the most to gain, but once they are aboard the plan proceeds apace. Within a year Jadencourt is gone and an utterly unique paradise under glass is filled with the once hopeless and aspiration-deprived citizenry…

However, some people cannot be satisfied even when they have everything they ever dreamed of…

A telling and effective portrayal of greed, self-interest, disillusionment and the innate snobbery plaguing every class of modern society, this lyrically uncompromising examination of the failure of even the most benign tyranny is a mesmerising, beguiling and chilling parable which methodically skins the hide from an idealistic dream and spills the dark hot guts of guilt, arrogance and the pursuit of power in a sublime example of graphic narrative’s unique facility to tell a story on a number of levels.

In 1989 Titan Books released The Town That Didn’t Exist in a captivating softcover album as part of their push to popularise European comics classics, and in 2003  Humanoids Publishing published a sturdy oversized (315x 238mm) hardback edition for the US market, either of which will delight any fan in search of a more mature and thought-provoking reading experience.
© 1989 Dargaud Editeur, Paris by Christin & Bilal. English language edition © 1990 Titan Books. All Rights Reserved.

Fallen Words


By Yoshihiro Tatsumi, translated by Jocelyne Allen (Drawn & Quarterly)
ISBN: 978-1-77046-074-4

After half a century of virtual obscurity, crafting brilliantly incisive and powerfully personal tales of modern humanity on the margins and on the edge, Yoshihiro Tatsumi found “overnight success” with his glorious autobiographical work A Drifting Life in 2009.

To describe his dark, bleak vignettes of raw real life, Tatsumi devised the term Gekiga or “dramatic pictures”, practically if not actually inventing the genre of adult, realistic, socially aware and literary comics stories in Japan. He began his career at a time when sequential narratives or “manga” literally meant “Irresponsible” or “Foolish Pictures”; a flashy and fanciful form of cheap, escapist entertainment targeted specifically at children – and the simple-minded – in the years immediately following the cessation of hostilities.

His tales have continued, in a never-ending progression, to detail the minutiae and moment of Japanese popular culture and, with his star assured in the manga firmament, have turned to a far older aspect of his country’s artistic heritage for this project.

The traditional performance art of Rakugo seems to combine many elements British observers would quickly recognise: reverentially combining familiar tales told many times over such as morality or mystery plays with instructive fables and especially shaggy dog stories and, just like Christmas pantomimes, the art derives from how the story is revamped, retold and expressed – but the ending is sacrosanct and must always be delivered in its purest, untrammelled form…

Developing out of the far older Karukuchi and Kobanashi shows, Rakugo first appeared as a discrete performance style accessible to the lower classes around 1780 during the Edo Period, establishing itself as a popular entertainment which still thrives today, regarded as a type of intimate comedy drama act in Vaudeville theatres.

As with all Japanese art-forms and disciplines Rakuga is highly structured, strictured and codified, with many off-shoots and sub-genres abounding, but basically it’s a one-man show where a storyteller (Rakugoka or Hanashika) relates a broad and widely embellished tale of Old Japan, acting all the parts from a sitting position, with only a paper fan (Sensu) and hand-cloth (Tenegui).

Equal parts humorous monologue, sitcom and stand-up act (or more accurately “kneel-down comedy”, since the Rakugoka never rises from the formal Seiza position) the crucial element is always the delivery of the traditional ochi or punch-line; inviolate, eagerly anticipated and already deeply ingrained in all audience members…

As is only fitting these tales are presented in the traditional back to front, right to left Japanese format with a copious section of notes and commentary, plus an ‘Afterword’ from Mr. Tatsumi, and I’d be doing potential readers an immense disservice by being too detailed in my plot descriptions, so I’ll be both brief and vague from now on…

‘The Innkeeper’s Fortune’ relates the salutary events following the arrival of an immensely rich man at a lowly hostel, and what happens after, against his express desires, he wins a paltry 1000 ryo in a lottery whilst the ‘New Year Festival’ only serves to remind one reluctant father what a noisome burden his rowdy ungrateful son is…

An itinerant young artist can’t pay his inn bill and, as a promissory note, paints a screen with birds so lifelike they fly off the paper every morning. The populace are willing to pay good money to see the daily ‘Escape of the Sparrows’, more than the bill ever came to. And then one day another far more experienced artist wishes to see the screen…

When a dutiful merchant succumbs to the temptations of his trade and engages a mistress she soon consumes all his attention, leading to his neglected wife trying to kill the home-wrecker with sorcery. Soon both women are dead and the merchant is plagued by their ‘Fiery Spirits’, whilst ‘Making the Rounds’ details one night in a brothel where four clients are becoming increasingly impatient and incensed by the non-appearance of the woman they’ve already paid for…

‘The Rooster Crows’ details the fate of a proud and puritanical young man tricked into visiting a brothel by his friends whilst a poor and untrained man becomes an infallible doctor after entering into a bargain with ‘The God of Death’ and this superb book of fables concludes with the sorry story of a lazy fishmonger who loved to drink, but whose life changed when he found a wallet full of money whilst fishing on ‘Shibahama’ beach

– or was it just a dream?

With these “Eight Moral Comedies” Tatsumi has succeeded – at least to my naive Western eyes – in translating an phenomenon where the plot is so familiar as to be an inconvenience but where an individual performance on the night is paramount into a beguiling, charming and yes, funny paean to a uniquely egalitarian entertainment, proving himself to be a true and responsible guardian of Japanese culture, ancient or modern …

Art and stories © 2009, 2012 Yoshihiro Tatsumi. This edition © 2012 Drawn & Quarterly. All rights reserved.

Stinz: Horsebrush and Other Tails


By Donna Barr(Eclipse Books)
ISBN: 1-56060-069-1

Donna Barr is one of the comic world’s most unique talents. She has constructed a fully realised fantasyscape to tell her stories and tells them through a style and voice that are definitely one-of-a-kind. Her most well known creations are The Desert Peach, which features the poignantly humorous adventures of Field Marshal Erwin Rommell’s homosexual brother in the deserts of World War II Africa, and the star of this particular show, the Half-Horse Steinheld “Stinz” Löwhard.

Using an idealised Bavarian agricultural landscape as her starting point, Barr has been taking good-natured pot-shots at humanity with an affable centaur soldier-turned-farmer and his family since 1986 when she adapted characters from her own book into the lead strip in Eclipse Comics’ fantasy anthology The Dreamery. The contents of this out of print but happily easy-to-find online collection gathers the equine bits of issues #1, 3 and 5-13 of that much-missed fantasy anthology and includes four new Stinz sagas to sweeten the graphic narrative pot.

The stunning black and white comic tales are set in the idyllic Geisel Valley, a rustic, idealised 19th century Germanic state that includes ingredients from grim reality and fantastic mythical creatures. Stinz’s world is a full-blown tapestry of drama, politics, war and wild adventure, redolent with mythic old-world charm and brilliantly engaging, earthily accommodating characters and settings.

After an effusive introduction from Kim Thompson, the charm offensive begins with Chapter One: Young Stinz and a quartet of intriguing glimpses into the young colt’s formative years beginning with ‘The Last Horselaugh’ wherein the rambunctious teen centaur and his equally obnoxious cronies try to play a trick on a bad-tempered old farmer and quickly rue the consequences, after which ‘A Breathing Spill’ agonisingly describes the lad’s first attempts at impressing a fair maid…

‘Animal Attraction’ hilariously recounts the problems of being a young colt in love for a species that can’t wear trousers and addresses the tensions between the rural half-horse people and the ubiquitous human “two-leggers” before the early adventures end with ‘The Proving Ground’ as the disgraced but hot-tempered Stinz finds true love and parental approval when the deep snows bring wolves to harry the valley’s herds and flocks…

Safely married to Brüna Dämmling and returned from a human war, the troublesome teen grew into a pillar of the community and a parent himself so Chapter Two: Stinz & Son, concentrates on Löwhard’s relationship with his own lad, beginning with the delightful ‘Andri’s Christmas Shoes’ wherein the little guy applies pester-power to the problem of getting his first set of big-boy iron hoof-coverings and almost pays a fatal price, whilst father and son’s disastrous attempts to catch ‘The Carp of Easter’ shows that the old man’s talent for finding – and dealing with – trouble had not faded…

When a band of dissolute, de-mobbed two-legger soldiers start picking on little Andri they discover that sad fact to their painful cost in ‘Nothing Like Gone’ whilst the spooky bed-time legend of ‘Sprunghack Hans’ proves as frightening to the teller as the listener when told under a cold, pale outdoors moon and ‘Blooming Affections’ reveals little Andri is every bit his father’s colt when it comes to the eligible young ladies of the valley…

Chapter Three: Stinz opens with another folktale as Löwhard and his farrier friend share the cautionary tale of a satanic rooster in ‘Chicken’ whilst the luckless human mercenaries return to again incur Stinz’s wrath by poaching in ‘Not My Problem’ after which the centaur meets his match in the form of a rampant equine whole-horse in ‘Horsebrush’…

The last section Chapter Four: the Wolves begins with ‘Smoked Out’ as Stinz’s uncle Rauchl Schorsche supplements his charcoal-burning business with a spot of moonshine-making and inadvertently makes the ever-hungry and never too far away wolf-pack his bosom buddies: a hilarious situation exacerbated in ‘Hair of the Wolf’ when the tipsy canines invite a werewolf to play and this fabulous bestiary ends on a high note with ‘Pack Ice’ as part-time Lupine Ulli learns to deal with his human and centaur neighbours under the full moon and his pack-mates during daylight hours…

The warmth and surreptitious venom of Barr’s sallies against contemporary society are still in evidence here, but, as always the sly commentary is stiletto tip not battle axe. Barr’s work is clever, warm, distinctive and honest but oddly not to everybody’s taste, which is a shame as she has lots to say and a truly astounding way of saying it.

Illustrated in her fluidly seductive wood-cut and loose-line style, this book is a must-have for any wonder-loving, devotee of wit, slapstick, period romance and belly-laughs. This is a tome no whole-hearted fantasist should be without.

Story and art © 1986, 1988, 1990 Donna Barr. All rights reserved.

NeMo Balkanski’s FIB Chronicles


By Nemanja Moravic Balkanski & various (the Publishing Eye)
ISBN: 978-0-9868440-0-3

Some creators seduce and beguile but others choose to inform and affect with confrontational shock tactics…

The most wonderful thing about the comics medium is the limitless ways stories and art can be combined to educate, elucidate and entertain. For every Hergé there’s a Harvey Pekar, for every Alfred Bestall a Johnny Ryan (and John Ryan too) and so on, and there are comic strips to suit literally every age and temperament.

Some of the most evocative and addictively uncompromising efforts that I’ve seen in quite a while appear in this collection from Belgrade émigré Nemanja Moravic Balkanski, whose stunningly disturbing spoofs and edgy cultural pastiches have been gathered into a magnificent oversized full-colour hardback FIB Chronicles.

Balkanski was born in Belgrade in 1975 and, after mastering a multitude of artistic disciplines from comics to graphic design, theatre arts to film-making, and poetry to performance, emigrated to Vancouver 2007. Much of this vintage material contained here (also available as an app) come from his Balkan days, represented in this disquietingly substantial and blackly comic tome under the guiding conceit that the individual escapades of a nightmarish cast of distressing ne’er-do-wells and uncanny outcasts have been gathered into a damning dossier thanks to the scurrilous non-efforts of the far-from-intrepid clandestine agents of the Fabulous Investigation Bureau.

The result is a selection of their most atypical observations – presumably leaked here as a wake-up call to unwitting and complacent humanity…

The iconoclastic strips gathered here date from 1998-2005 and, supplemented by new bridging material in a staggering variety of artistic styles, describe a dark and disturbing underworld of barely perceived and unwisely ignored peril and surreal threat wrapped up in careful pastiche and savage parody…

US cop dramas come under the cosh when corruptly hip detective Cash Money experiences ‘Hair Fear’ and tackles feminist terror in ‘W.T.N. Griffit’ whilst tragic, plucky waif Boy Lyndo gets his shot at a happy ever after in ‘The Final Episode’ and the bizarre habits of a cult of Mel Gibson impersonators is exposed in ‘Gipsons vs Graduates’ after which gay lovers walk hand-in-hand down the wrong street in the weird war story ‘Jelly & Butter’ – a yarn conceived by Balkanski’s long-time collaborator Vladimir Protic.

A theatrical slasher-killer appears in ‘Space (the Final Frontier)’ and scatological stoner anthropomorph ‘Bud Bunny’ plays not-so-nice games with the other animals before fashion-plate Eau de Cologne falls foul of the harpy-ish harridans known as the BigDos in ‘Trigger’ and we are exposed to ‘Johnny McWire Getting the Beating of his Life’ and ‘Mr. Friday Night’ goes home alone yet again…

Booze and Balkan warriors come under the microscope one more in ‘Galactica, the Space Bottlesip’ (based on Branimir “JohnnyÅ tulićs poem “Sons of Bitches”) after which the file devotes a lot of crazed and crucial pages to cybernetic dreamer Digital Standstill‘s climactic confrontation with ‘BigDo’s’ before we observe a salutary encounter with the ‘Psycho from 134th Street’ (scripted by Protic).

The battle against creeping communism is examined in the uplifting tale of ‘Little Mexico: El Dentista’, the nature of modern relationships in ‘It is My Friend’ and the value of introspection in ‘Sam Lr. Stag: His Life was a Drag’ before the life of a fascist monster is dissected in ‘Shalken Rösse’ and we are treated, in conclusion, to the meteoric rise and political acumen of the transcendent of ‘Melon Pig’, courtesy of Protic and Balkanski…

With additional articles, ‘Declassification Files’, a glossary of new words and expressions and even a few game-pages for the strong-stomached, this tainted love-affair with life’s moist and fetid underbelly is a dank graphic delight that not even every mature and cosmopolitan reader will enjoy: but for those with just the right blend of world-weary insouciance and malignant, undemanding innocence the words and pictures married together here will strike an unforgettable chord.

Strident, cruel, sardonically whimsical, overwhelmingly clever and bleakly hilarious in a Kafka meets Steven Wright channelling Bill Hicks kind of way, this absurdist, hauntingly affecting and astonishingly illustrated book is a uniquely entertaining read the brave and bold and reasonably old won’t dare to miss…
All comics © 2011 Nemanja Moravic Balkanski. Everything else All comics © 2011 Nemanja Moravic Balkanski and The Publishing Eye. All rights reserved.

The Drowned Girl


By Jon Hammer (Piranha Press/DC)
No ISBN:

During the anything goes 1980s the field of comics publishing expanded exponentially with new companies offering a vast range of fresh titles and ideas. To combat this upstart expansion, Marvel and DC also instigated and created innovative material for those freshly growing markets with the latter cartoon colossus especially targeting readers for whom old-fashioned comicbooks were anathema …or at least a long-abandoned dalliance.

DC created a number of new, more mature-oriented imprints such as Vertigo and Helix, but some of the most intriguing projects came out of their Piranha Press sub-division, formed in 1989 and re-designated Paradox Press in 1993.

When DC founded this adult special projects imprint, the resulting publications and reader’s reaction to them were mixed. It had long been a Holy Grail of the business to produce comics for people who don’t read comics and, despite the inherent logical flaw, that’s a pretty sound and sensible plan.

However, the delivery of such is always problematic. Is the problem resistance to the medium?

Then try radical art and narrative styles, unusual typography and talent from outside the medium to tell your stories: you get some intriguing results but risk still not reaching a new audience whilst alienating the readers already on board…

This eclectic and overwhelmingly effective tome was one of the best and simultaneously one of the least appreciated…

Dick Shamus lives in New York City. Not necessarily the one you know but one equally composed of snippets of books, flickers of films and TV titbits all filtered through the fried brains of an incorrigible addict who’s been off his prescription Lithium for far too long now…

Dick Shamus is a Private Eye. If he says so then it’s got to be true, right?

On one night so much like every other, Dick, bombed out of his gourd on his tipple of choice – embalmers’ formaldehyde with a chocolate drink chaser – picks up a useful tip about a Nazi weight-lifting club from one of his usual sources: few of them credible and none of them real…

The drink might be the secret CIA vaccine to prevent AIDS but it sure plays hob with the deductive faculties…

The side of the city only he can see tells the weary, ravaged gumshoe that there’s a connection between the Fascist health fanatics, India and the Drowned Girl – whoever she is – and as his personal reality intercepts and continually collides with the equally outrageous consensus reality the rest of us are stuck with, Dick is carried by events to a tragic and disturbing rendezvous.

If only he could recall who the client was…

Raw and savagely beguiling, the one night’s odyssey of the perceptually challenged Shamus as he weaves between rich bastards, gutter-scum, gullible art-trendoids, yuppie-gentrifiers and armchair anarchists, affable protester-bashing cops and a hundred other “normal” folks in search of his dimly perceived targets…

This disturbing, hard-luck pilgrim’s progress is as truly thought-provoking, hard-bitten, revelatory and socially castigating as the works of Dashiell Hammett, William Burroughs, Hunter S. Thompson, Raymond Chandler or Gabriel García Márquez, whilst the brutally unrefined and intoxicatingly vibrant painting of author Jon Hammer makes this perhaps the very best psycho-detective graphic novel you’ve never read.

But all that could change if and when you too track down The Drowned Girl…
© 1990 Jon Hammer. All rights reserved.

Mike Baron’s The Group LaRue: the Ultimate Gaming Adventure


By Mike Baron, David Campiti, Paul Curtis, Faye Perozich, Andy Kuhn & Chris Tsuda (Innovation)
No ISBN:

Once upon a time Dungeons & Dragons style role playing games were the most compelling and obsessive things kids could do. All over the civilised world bands of youngsters would gather in furtive secrecy to play at being wizards, thieves and heroes with dice and bits of paper. How spoiled modern children must be with their electronic paraphernalia and tolerant parents, but at least it’s not like my distant school days when we just stood in the pouring rain, rolling hoops, hitting each other in the face with 24lb leather footballs and imagined ourselves as heroes by hitting each other with sticks whilst chain-smoking, beer-swilling teachers gazed on uncaringly…

But I digress: the late 1980s were a fertile time for American comics-creators. An entire new industry had been born with the growth of the Direct Sales market and its dedicated specialist retail outlets; new companies were experimenting with format and content, and punters even had a bit of spare cash to play with.

Moreover much of the “kid’s stuff” stigma had finally abated and the country was catching up to the rest of the world in acknowledging that sequential narrative might just be a for-real actual art-form…

Consequently many young start-up companies began competing for the attention and cash of punters who had grown resigned to getting their on-going picture stories from DC, Marvel, Archie and/or Harvey Comics. European and Japanese material had been creeping in and by 1983 a host of young companies such as WaRP Graphics, Pacific, Eclipse, Capital, Now, Comico, Dark Horse, First and many others had established themselves and were making impressive inroads.

New talent, established stars and fresh ideas all found a thriving forum to try something a little different both in terms of content and format. Even smaller companies had a fair shot at the big time and a lot of great material came – and too often, quickly went – without getting the attention or success it warranted.

One of the last to emerge as a contender was Innovation Publishing, founded by David Campiti in 1988, which added canny reprints collections like Bill Ward’s Torchy, Larry Harmon’s Bozo, the World’s Most Famous Clown and Walt Kelly’s Santa Claus Adventures and a judicious accumulation of acquired ongoing titles such as The Maze Agency and Hero Alliance to its deftly imaginative run of original titles like Scarlet Kiss, Cyberpunk, Legends of the Star Grazers, Scaramouch, Straw Men and many others.

The company’s true strength lay in a vibrant specialisation in adapted fantasy properties ranging from Lost in Space, Quantum Leap, Dark Shadows, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Beauty and the Beast and other media sensations to popular literary works such as Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic, Piers Anthony’s Incarnations of Immortality, Gene Wolf’s The Shadow of the Torturer and a welter of blood-drenched vampire epics based on the horror works of Anne Rice.

At its height Innovation ranked fourth in market share behind Marvel, DC and Dark Horse Comics but intriguingly, one of their earliest failures – a troubled series devoted to the magic of RPG – was, in retrospect, amongst the best yarns in their canon…

Devised and scripted by Nexus and Badger creator Mike Baron the short and sweet saga of the Group LaRue told the tale of five role-playing kids who suddenly realised it wasn’t just a game anymore…

This slim full-colour collection gathers the three issue tale beginning with ‘Enter: the Group LaRue!’ by Baron and illustrators Andy Kuhn & Chris Tsuda, as five Minneapolis kids sneaked into an old deserted mansion to play their weekly game only to be interrupted by a real wizard.

When he was killed by a gigantic spear his magic gem exploded and the play-actors suddenly transformed into the characters they were channelling: a psychic Precog, superheroes Spark and Lead Plate, super-genius Scrambler and a flying Werewolf.

This last was Gil La Rue – whose illusionist grandfather built the abandoned mansion years ago, before suddenly vanishing.

The boy took charge when the villains in their planned game scenario manifest and deadly giant bug-men attack the bewildered kids…

Escaping with their lives the disbelieving players regrouped outside the mansion only to discover that Gil’s house had burned down and his whole family were gone…

Staying with best friend Manny Rhodes AKA Lead Plate, Gil deduced that whatever forces they unwittingly unleashed might well be hunting them all…

And that’s when estate executor Bob Whitney arrived, offering to reveal the secrets and reasons for their uncanny transformations. Apparently the elder La Rue belonged to a cult which covertly guards humanity against supernatural invasion, but now only Gil and his friends are left to carry on the interrupted mission…

Baron was gone by the second issue ‘Thrown for a Loup!’ but scripters Campiti & Paul Curtis carried on the saga with Kuhn & Tsuda faithfully continuing the art chores as the kids reluctantly explored the subterranean netherworld beneath La Rue mansion, battling more bug-things and seeking out the evil sorcerer who controlled them, but it’s soon clear that there was far more to good old Bob than met the eye…

The yarn came to an abrupt end with ‘Bug Out!’ (written by Campiti & Faye Perozich) as the team, still trapped in some otherworldly underground dimension learned the kind of man Bob was and a few basic home-truths such as not all monsters look scary, ugly doesn’t mean evil and especially “there’s no place like home”…

Clever, funny, thrilling and gloriously cathartic in a wholesome all-ages way, this old-fashioned adventure fantasy with a thoroughly modern “happy ever after” was fabulously fun and definitely deserved a longer run and a steady creative team behind it.

Even with the action long over there’s still plenty of enjoyment for modern readers and magic loving fans to discover if they can track down this buried treasure
™ and © 1989 Michael Baron. Product package © 1989 Innovative Corp. Part #1 story © 1989 Michael Baron. Part #2-3 story © 1989 Innovative Corp. Artwork © 1989 Andy Kuhn. All rights reserved.

Elementals: The Natural Order


By Bill Willingham (Comico)
ISBN: 978-0-93896-508-4

Long before he achieved universal acclaim with his sublime adult fantasy series Fables, writer/artist Bill Willingham first turned comic fans’ heads with a post-modern re-evaluation of the superhero in a series entitled Elementals which took many Fights ‘n’ Tights traditions and turned them on their heads with telling and most pervasive effect.

The team debuted as a back-up tale in the one-shot Justice Machine Annual published by Texas Comics in 1983 and was picked up a year later by new publisher Comico, one of the front-runners in an explosion of new companies which grew out of the 1980s rise of the Direct Sales market and dedicated comics retail outlets.

This enchanting and enthusiastic volume collects that initial introduction and the subsequent first five innovative issues of their own title and opens with ‘The Shape of Things to Come’ by Willingham & Bill Anderson, as master villain Lord Saker demands a situation report from his trusted aide Shapeshifter. She describes how four recently deceased individuals have all inexplicably resurrected, each with the powers and attributes of one of the ancient alchemical elements.

Police officer Jeanette Crane revived with the ability to wield flame and heat and goes by the codename Morningstar, helicopter pilot and Vietnam vet Jeff Murphy has flight, speed and wind-based powers and answers to Vortex, whilst wealthy trust-fund brat Rebecca Golden has become a web-footed green sea-sprite dubbed Fathom.

The last resurrectee is 14 year old Tommy Czuchra: a disturbingly brilliant, adult and coldly rational boy-genius who can transform at will into a colossal Monolith of soil and rock.

Each of the quartet died in accidents directly related to their new conditions as avatars of Fire, Air, Water and Earth.

Saker is apprehensive: his centuries-old mystic master-plan is nearing fruition and now these supernatural agents have inconveniently manifested. When he dispatched his personal metahuman hit-squad, the Elementals easily routed them. Only Shapeshifter survived to report the bad news…

The series proper began with ‘The Spontaneous Generation’ (Willingham & Michelle Wolff Anderson) as the unlikely and reluctant heroes consult with Rebecca’s dad – a major league New York lawyer – about their situation. In this highly realistic and rational world, superpowers have only ever been the stuff of comicbooks, but now here they are alive again with incredible abilities, having just fought human chameleons, dragons and monsters…

Moreover, they each oppressively remember the pain and horror of dying but have no idea how or why they have returned…

And that’s when FBI spook Porter Scott turns up…

Meanwhile Saker’s remaining superhuman resources (Shapeshifter, Behemoth, Ratman, Electrocutioner, Annihiliator and Chrysalis) attack; ambushing the team during a lunch in the Seattle Space Needle, oblivious to the hundreds of civilian lives endangered in the assault. Once again outmatched the bad guys retreat, taking Fathom’s dad hostage…

After a ‘Destroyers’ pin-up by Willingham and Neil Vokes the drama resumes in ‘Angel of Light’ as some time later the Federal authorities – in the forms of Major General Benjamin Franklin Richter and NSA Special Agent William Lyons – discuss the National Crisis that has developed since the Elementals surrendered themselves to save David Golden.

Simultaneously, over the villain’s hidden citadel Nacht Island, the Elementals have broken free and are again devastating Saker’s Destroyers as well as his large army of fundamentalist soldiers: all willing zealots to his arcane cause.

Although the battle goes well in ‘Birds of Prey’ (inked by Rankin) the heroes are unprepared for the wizard to draw more power from his apparently infernal patrons and blithely unaware that Vortex has been killed and partially consumed by Ratman…

Even so the Elementals are clearly winning and look likely to end the affair quickly until Saker himself intervenes…

A year passes.

In ‘The Mean Seasons’ (Willingham, Herman & Rankin with added assistance from Dave Johnson, Mike Leeke & Bill Cucinotta) the Alchemical Allies have been prisoners all that time and Saker is close to his endgame, activating his agents in the Federal Government and readying himself to unleash the horrifying Shadowspear. As the sorcerer readies himself to destroy the world Jeff has almost fully recovered and his revenant comrades are also preparing for one last sally…

Saker has discerned that the Elementals do not age and cannot be killed by any means he can devise, but has unwisely formed an intellectual relationship with Tommy: foolishly disclosing his tragic and painfully unjust biblical origins and the reason he wants to see God’s creation unmade.

The Mage’s biggest mistake was believing that the seemingly broken foursome had given up and the cataclysmic Saves-the-Day climax of ‘Riders of the Storm’ (Willingham, Herman & Rankin) is both stunningly epic and superbly chilling…

Although the characters are not themselves particularly innovative the hard-headed, cynical and ruthlessly pragmatic manner in which Willingham and later author Jack Herman used them was a landmark breakthrough. As much as Alan Moore’s take on Marvelman, the Elementals always seemed to work in the most plausible and perhaps only possible manner our world could operate if men became modern gods and monsters.

The Natural Order is one of the very best superhero yarns of the era and still holds up incredibly well: slick, savvy, distressingly mature and savagely cynical.

If you want Adult Fights ‘n’ Tights thrills hunt down this magical masterpiece and enjoy the End of the World as we know it.
© 1983, 1985, 1986, 1988 William T. Willingham. All right reserved.

The Names of Magic


By Dylan Horrocks & Richard Case (Vertigo)
ISBN: 978-1-56389-888-4

Way back when Neil Gaiman was just making a name for himself at DC he was asked to consolidate and rationalise the role of magic in that expansive shared universe. Over the course of four Prestige Format editions a quartet of mystical champions (thereinafter known as “the Trenchcoat Brigade”) took a London schoolboy on a Cook’s Tour of Time, Space and Infinite Dimensions in preparation for his becoming the most powerful wizard of the 21st Century, and an overwhelming force for Light or Darkness.

Shy, bespectacled Timothy Hunter (co-created by John Bolton) was an ordinary lad unaware of his incredible potential: a natural but untutored magical prodigy (and yes, I know who he looks like but the series came out eight years before anybody had ever heard of Hogwarts, so get over it).

In an attempt to keep him righteous the self-appointed mystic guides provided him with a full tutorial in the history and state of play regarding The Unseen Art and its major practitioners and adepts. However, although the four guardians were not united in their plans and hopes for the boy, the “other side” certainly had no doubts. If Hunter could not be turned to the Dark he had to die

The Books of Magic spawned a 75 issue run of issues under the Vertigo imprint plus attendant annuals, mini-series and spin-offs as the neophyte sorcerer struggled to find his way and learn the craft, aided and/or hindered by sort-of girlfriend Molly and a hidden personal history akin to a colossal, convoluted cosmic onion skin. His enigmatic lineage and true origins remained a crushing, crippling but crucially important mystery – especially since all the mystic powers of this world and many others either wanted him dead or enslaved…

By 2001 and the advent of this excellent tome (collecting the five-part Names of Magic miniseries) Hunter is a lonely, isolated fourteen year old runaway with no past, roaming the streets of London. His loving family have been exposed as fakes and surrogates, he’s lost or been abandoned by all his human associates and the final reeling shock was finding out that his real mother was Titania, Queen of Faerie and his sire her mortal falconer and plaything Tamlin…

However when he is simultaneously attacked by a raiding party of the Theena Sidhe from the Higher Realms and a politically influential mortal magician’s cult in ‘Invocation’, Tim is rescued by a sword-wielding stranger and old mentor Dr. Occult and his life is once again collapsing around his ears…

The stranger is Ash; a Walker and one of a hidden human brotherhood who police the ancient magical places of Earth, charged with taking the unwilling boy on a pilgrimage down those venerable lost paths to save his life and find his calling.

The Rosicrucian sages of The Cold Flame of the Golden Lotus, who want to co-opt Hunter’s power or negate his threat potential, have been embedded in the fabric of British Society for centuries and soon have their media tools and pet coppers on the trail whilst the rival Faerie stalkers – supposedly under a truce to leave Tim alone – rely on their own arcane methods to relentlessly pursue the fugitives…

When man and boy rendezvous with the “Trenchcoat Brigade” in Cornwall it is decided to closet the lad at the puissant magical college known as the White School where he can be safely trained in the use of his incredible powers.

Of course, there’s a snag: to enter a student must simply utter their True Name but when Tim tries he discovers that even his own identity is a lie…

Reeling in shock at the School gate, Tim and Ash narrowly escape a police ambush in ‘Trust’ and the boy almost succumbs to a beguiling spell from Lotus master Mr. Lily before stumbling into another Faerie trap. It appears that one clan of Fair Folk has made a pact with the eternal enemy of The Unseelie Court to destroy Tim, but the fugitives turn the tables on their hunters and Tim saves one of them from death, binding her into an unbreakable debt that she must repay twice-over…

‘Secrets’ sees Tim and Ash recruit modern Pagan “Bearclaw” Clarke to their Spirit Quest. However the Cold Flame close in and a police raid disrupts the astral journey before any secrets can be uncovered. Ruthlessly shooting their way out, the trio take ‘Flight’, daringly hiding deep inside the Faerie Kingdoms.

On Earth Mr. Lily turns his attention to Tim’s lost love Molly in his attempts to trap the young mage whilst, after a climactic struggle in Elfland, the seekers are captured and dragged before High King Auberon who denies all knowledge of Tim’s troubles. The Faerie Lord swears to ferret out the renegades working with the Seelie Court, and Tim finally learns his True Name, just before Iolanthe, eager to expend her onerous debt, warns him that he’s walked into another trap…

Battling free, the fugitive four head back to Earthly Cornwall where they wait helplessly for their following foes – both Faerie and Cold Flame – to converge for a final assault. With their backs to the sea and sure death approaching on all sides Tim and crew take refuge in tourist trap Merlin’s Cave, where as the various factions slaughter each other to get to him, the boy finds a hidden door and discovers the whole and unexpurgated ‘Truth’…

Although a series with a lot of highs and lows and one which never really lived up to its promise, Books of Magic was a popular early foray into mature comic publishing for Vertigo and subsequent returns to the characters have proved quite impressive.

Here Dylan Horrocks and illustrator Richard Case – augmented by cover artist Bolton – have recapitulated and reconfigured the past whilst crafting a compelling and enjoyable fantasy yarn that reads well, looks great and stands solid enough on it own to easily serve as an introduction to the saga of Tim Hunter.
© 2001 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

Freaks!


By Nik Perring, Caroline Smailes & Darren Kraske (The Friday Project/HarperCollins)
ISBN: 978-0-00-744289-8

We’ve all been in the know for years, us comics fans, but it’s only recently that the big wide world got into the whole mind-boggling realm of superpowers and scary monsters. With such self-aware and crafty shows as Misfits, Being Human, No Heroics and even US imports like as No Ordinary Family, Alphas, The Cape and numerous others, the concept of powers and abilities which take us above and beyond the norm have become as much part of common parlance as “Beam me up Scotty” and “These are not the droids you’re looking for” – and remember when grown-ups and your dad had no idea what those meant either?

Freaks! is a stunning collection of themed prose pieces ranging from compulsively brief vignettes to devastatingly effective epigrams which examine the concept of having a super-power, from the broadly literal such as ‘The Photocopier’ wherein the daughter of a lady who can duplicate herself waits impatiently for her own gift to develop, or ‘Statuesque’ wherein a passionate woman gradually petrifies herself, to far more cerebral and metaphysical forays into the weird world like the bittersweet ‘Clipped Wings’, heartrending ‘Invisible’ or piteous ‘Fifty Per Cent’…

Some are just plain creepy like ‘In her Basket’ and ‘Faulty Baby’ or gut-wrenchingly horrific as with ‘The Boner’ or ‘Damaged’…

Sometimes you can only stop and wonder if the abilities are real at all or just in your head…

Or theirs…

Blending paranormal paranoia with self-delusion and pitting incisive, instinctive intuition against genuine contemplative otherworldliness, these yarns by Carol Smailes and Nik Perring (working individually and in tandem) describe ordinary folk with uncanny gifts and extraordinary people who have mastered the mundane horrors of the world.

These 47 individual slices of kitchen sink fantasy are written with scathing wit, measured surreality, biting venom and shattering poignancy, all graced and augmented with lavish and plentiful monochrome illustrations by author/artist Darren Kraske.

If you’re looking for alien invasions or flamboyant punch-ups you’ll be left wanting, but if you fancy some exceedingly adult and mostly mature laughs and tears, a few chills and a lot of clever, thought-provoking entertainment then Freaks! is definitely the book for you.
© 2012 Caroline Smailes and Nik Perring. Illustrations © 2012 Darren Kraske. All rights reserved.

This book is part of publisher HarperCollins’ experimental Friday Project where the traditional modes of book creation are augmented by concentration on new digital technology and disciplines as well as innovative methods of acquiring, publishing, selling and promoting their product. For more details you should check out http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/about-harpercollins/Imprints/the-friday-project/Pages/The-Friday-Project.aspx
To learn more about the creators please go to http://www.carolinesmailes.co.uk/
http://nikperring.com/ and http://theargonautsalmanac.blogspot.com/
Freaks! is scheduled for release on April 12th 2012.

Legends of the Stargrazers Book 1


By Cynthy J. Wood & David Campiti, Matt Thompson, Tom Yeates & various (Innovation)
No ISBN:

It’s hard to deny or justify, and sometimes a little embarrassing to explain these days, but for a goodly proportion of readers, comics have always been a source of low-level, innocent titillation.

In the far-off days when comicbooks were expressly for kids, scantily clad, perfectly sculpted exemplars of the human form – female and male – were perhaps the first introduction to innocent psyches of the turbulent world of sex and relationships and sex and hormones and sex, so it’s not surprising that there’s a whole fan sub-culture dedicated to Cheesecake (also, to be fair and to a lesser extent, Beefcake) collectively known as Good Girl Art.

From the late 1980s onward with internet porn and far more explicit (photographic) publications readily accessible to youngsters, you would have thought that the simple allure of drawn hotties and totties would have waned but you’d be wrong. Some folk just seem to prefer illustrated hormonal icons to “real” (albeit implausibly airbrushed or photoshopped) ones…

Artists skilled in delineating these impossibly perfect visions number amongst our most celebrated but the stories generally took a back-seat as the characters posed and strutted in beguiling, distracting and generally improbable fashions and stances, so it’s nice to be able to cite a rare occasion when plot and dialogue were as well developed as the stars’ physical characteristics…

The Legends of the Stargrazers was created by Cynthy J. Wood and Innovation publisher David Campiti as a light-hearted space-opera in 1989, running six issues and almost immediately collected as two of the industry’s earliest trade-paperback graphic novels.

The premise is both simple and enchantingly beguiling: in the future humanity has spread throughout the galaxy, bringing commerce and advancement to many races: and of all the independent traders plying the space winds the strictly female crews of vessels calling themselves Stargrazers are the most successful.

This initial volume opens with ‘Here be Dragons’ by Wood & Campiti, drawn by Matt Thompson and inked by Randy Elliott & Nestor Redondo, which introduced Captain Rachel Lacey, Sherree Rhys-Holm, Karry Vistaas and Carla Withers; the all-girl crew of Stargrazer merchant ship Crock of Gold, plying their trade across the galaxy and dreading the arrival of their latest recruit-replacement.

It’s a cut throat, hand-to-mouth life of boom and bust for the traders and the last thing they need is to be breaking in another star-struck newbie. Even after the appropriate winnowing process the successful candidate seems painfully typical: cute, perky, hyper-enthusiastic…

However apprentice trader Julie Green is a girl with an astonishing secret…

During her first voyage, after a fairly typical piece of business which ended up in the usual fire-fight and frantic flight, Julie witnesses an incredible sight – the first appearance in decades of the almost-mystical sun-feeding space dragons from which the Stargrazers took their name.

Enthralled she learned the voyagers’ secret history and the cosmic connection between the fantastic creatures and the fleets of star-wanderers who will do anything to protect the fabulous saurians from unscrupulous planet-dwellers…

‘The Smithfield Incident’ holds a story within a story as the crew rescue imperial super-spy Smithfield Cobb from certain death in deep space only to slowly fall under the sway of his irresistible manly charm and artificially-enhanced pheromone count. Cobb is the Empress’ secret weapon in an ongoing war against rebel forces and this tale is little more than a framing sequence for his solo story ‘Libretto’ (by Campiti, Tom Yeates & Rick Bryant, and looking suspiciously like a tale left over when early Indy pioneer Pacific Comics went bankrupt).

Rendered in the manner of classic Al Williamson’s EC sci fi thrillers, the flashback saga of Cobb’s clash with rebel agents and love affair with the soul of a planet adds a hint of stabilising tragedy to the flash-and-dazzle light-heartedness of the Stargrazers’ exploits, as he drags the neutral merchant maids into conflict with Rebellion forces. However his philandering tactics backfire and Cobb learns a salutary lesson when the girls switch his prized info tape for Julie’s diary… without her knowledge or permission…

‘Ghost Ship’ finds the girls enjoying a rare shore-leave when Lacey is framed for illegal trading, piracy and slave-taking. The furious Captain immediately takes off in pursuit of impostors using her name and discovers not only the secret of the mythic phantom star-trader Vanderdecken but also uncovers a race of men like angels who have an unsuspected connection to Julie…

This first collection concludes with ‘Gossamer’ as the origins of the winged men are revealed and the history of humanity’s expansion into space is disclosed.

To Be Continued…

Although certainly designed and intended as captivating but cheesy eye-candy, the broad scope of this fantasy saga and the light touch of authors Wood and Campiti, packing their scripts with wry humour and sci fi in-jokes, elevates Legends of the Stargrazers far above the usual “look, don’t think” level of Good Girl material and it’s a genuine pity the series died so young.
™ and © 1989 Cynthy J. Wood & Innovative Corp. Main story artwork © 1989 Matt Thompson. “Libretto” art © 1989 Tom Yeates. All rights reserved.