Category: Feminism & Sexual Politics

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Last Gender: When We Are Nameless volume 1 (of 3)


By Rei Taki translated by Rose Padgett (Vertical/Kodansha)
ISBN: 978-1-6472191-4 (Vertical tank?bon PB) Digital edition 978-1-68491-721-1

A woman goes into a bar.

That’s usually shocking enough for Japanese fiction, but in Rei (Tada Ooki na Neko ni Naritai, Love-Kyo: Kateikyoushi ga xx Sugite Benkyou Dokoro ja Nai) Taki’s deft exploration of sexual diversity, it’s merely the start of a well-intentioned, honest appraisal of what infinite variety in human experience and being actually means. The tale is especially extraordinary as it comes from a country and culture currently involved in a (very polite and restrained) war of past and future and tradition vs. change, where gender and gender roles have always been cast in stone and a hot button topic…

After a short stand-alone try-out tale was reworked and developed (which is included at the end of this edition), Last Gender: Nani Mono demo nai Watashi-tachi debuted in 2022. Its brief interlocking vignettes eventually filled three volumes, employing a picaresque format – in many ways thematically similar to US sitcom Cheers – to peruse those people who generally inhabit the margins of society… either through choice or more often than not due to fear and shame.

In such a strictly formalised society those judgements are most likely to be self-inflicted and imagined, and painfully concrete and condemnatory, as we will see…

Chapter 1 opens with one person’s candid ruminations on what is gender before ‘Welcome to BAR California’ finds nasty, preachy gossip and media scandalmongering hanging in the air as assistant manager Yo prepares to open up for the evening. Checking bottles are full, glasses clean, rooms ready and restocked and all lube, fresh underwear and condom dispensers are full, they are soon distracted by a nervous and curious young woman. She has come in to the venue where “all are welcome” carrying her husband’s membership card and very much wanting to know what it exactly entitles her spouse to…

An explanation of facilities, by-laws, responsibilities, duties and potential rewards – further clarified by a new friend – results in Manami addressing her prior pre- and mis-conceptions, and signing up to discover lots more she didn’t know about herself…

With frequent subtle reminders, asides and dissertations on what staff and patrons consider constitutes gender, sexualities statuses, consent and suitable behaviour, the vignettes continue with ‘An Orchid Blooming in the Fog’. Transgender bisexual Ran shares with Yo early unhappy encounters (incidentally providing us with mindboggling factual detail on insurance cover and finance for gender affirmation surgery in Japan), and happy-go-lucky, persistently pally pansexual Mao adds his own unique perspective and past moments. Ultimately his benign attentions and upbeat manner manifest more revelations of his own unsettled life and its pressures…

The forces of expectation and tradition shaping Mao are more closely monitored in ‘Family of Mannequins’ even as stolid salaryman Sawada Masanori and college girl Amiru debut with their own individual flavours of difference. It’s a risky road to travel but bigender Sawada will only really be content once his wife and child can understand how and why he is also Marie and that will only happen if they can affirm their ‘True Love’, whilst the student still struggles to accept that any boundaries exist…

Amiru steps into the spotlight for closing episode ‘Aromantic Fairy Tale’ delving deeper into her innate belief that sex and love have nothing to do with each other and explaining how all the stories society train us with need to be re-examined if not revoked. Of course, nothing has worked yet to stop her yearning for “the one”, and some of the test candidates have been a bit extreme to say the least. Just look at Yukihiro, with his odd provisos and props… and just what is the secret he shares with only Yo?

To Be Continued…

Filling up this initial tome are ‘Translation Notes’, house ads, a featurette on sex bars and how the clientele adopts aliases in ‘BAR California’s Back Yard #1’ as well as an afterword from Rei Taki, prior to that aforementioned ‘Prototype Story: A Self For All Seasons’ showing how the initial explorations of spousal abuse and similar reasons for such sex bar venues was dialled down for a more subtle and forensic investigation of the people who need them…

There are – even by manga standards – fairly explicit and frequent sex scenes amidst all the character interplay, and the occasionally blunt yet potent evaluations, clarifications and reiterations of gender issues, minorities and status through the lens of Japanese frankness can be a bit breathtaking if we westerners aren’t braced. Nonetheless, Last Gender: When We Are Nameless is a compelling and intriguing foray into gender & sexual diversity, pansexuality, propensities, individuality and autonomy that needs to be seen by anyone still breathing and still dating. Over to you then…
© 2021 Rei Taki. English translation © 2022 Rei Taki. All rights reserved.

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Anarchy Comics – The Complete Collection


By Jay Kinney, Paul Mavrides, Clifford Harper, Gerhard Seyfried, Spain Rodriguez, Melinda Gebbie, Gilbert Shelton, Épistolier, Volny, Michel Troblin, John R. Burnham, Ruby Ray, Steve Stiles, Sharon Rudahl, Peter Pontiac, Guy Colwell, Matt Feazell, Gary Panter, Donald Rooum, Albo Helm, Adam Cornford, Norman Dog, Greg Irons, Steve Lafler, David Lester, brooke Lydbrooke, Pepe Moreno, Harry S. Robins, R. Diggs, S. Zorca, Byron Werner, & various, compiled and edited by Kinney (PM Press)
ISBN: 978-1-60486-531-8 (TPB/Digital edition)

During the “anything goes” 1960s and early1970s issues of personal freedom, sexual liberation, mind-altering self-exploration, questioning of authority and a general rejection of the old ways gripped the young and terrified the establishment. Artists and cartoonists especially began creating the kind of comics and art they wanted and an “Underground Commix movement” became the forefront for “radicalisation” (that’s “The Man’s” terms not mine) of many young intellectuals in America and throughout the world. It consequently led to the rise of and acceptance of comics narrative for adults.

Whenever anybody discusses the history and influence of the Underground and Counter-Culture movements, focus is generally on the exuberant and often racially or sexually offensive expressions of comedic or violent excess – especially in regard to sex and drugs – but that’s a rather cruel and biased oversimplification. The whole phenomenon stemmed from rebellion and the exercise of new-found freedoms. Equally apparent was a striving for new ways of living one’s life – and that’s Politics, Baby, pure and simple…

By 1978 that unchecked artistic flourishing had died back in every sphere – especially the wholesale creation of comics – and the mainstream world, having assimilated what it liked of the explosively fresh thought and deeds, appropriated or adopted some of the tone and tenets of the movement before getting back to making money and suppressing masses in a “new normal”…

However, once creative passions have been aroused and stoked they are hard to suppress. There is no more powerful medium of expression or tool of social change than graphic narrative – although music and poetry come close – and some kids found it harder to surrender their ideals than others. In 1977, as Disco, indolence, hedonism and the pursuit of money increasingly obsessed media and populace, a bunch of left-leaning liberal intellectual cartoonists got together in San Francisco. They wanted to create a comics anthology dedicated to propounding ideals of willing co-operation, personal responsibility and a rejection of unwanted oppressive authority – governmental, religious or corporate. By entertaining and educating through cartoons they intended to highlight issues of inequality and iniquity: in short, they went to bat for Anarchy…

Just as the global Punk movement began to take hold in a new generation of angry, powerless and disenfranchised Youth, West Coast cartoonist, satirist designer, editor and socialist political activist Jay Kinney – who had co-created the seminal underground title Young Lust (and yes that was a pun; so sue me!) – reached out to like-minded old associates like Paul Mavrides with the intention of creating an international comic book to promulgate their world view.

Kinney had been corresponding with British Anarchist artist Clifford Harper (Class War Comics) and had similarly-inclined West German cartoonist Gerhard Seyfried kipping on his floor at that time, so the idea of a forum for graphic expression of political ideas must have seemed like a no-brainer…

Of course, there’s no such thing as slavish doctrinaire consensus in Anarchist idealism – that’s pretty much the whole point – and the comic was envisioned more as a platform to present wide-ranging Left-Libertarian ideas through satire and historical reportage as a basis for further debate.

How the project developed from there and its ultimate effects and influence is fully described in author/historian Paul Buhle’s ‘Anarchy Comics Revisited’ and Kinney’s own expansive, evocative ‘Introduction’ before the entire 4-issue, 9-year run is re-presented in all its monochrome glory. beginning with Anarchy Comics #1 from 1978. It sports a witty cover by Kinney and deliciously wry intro page Inside Cover by Kinney & Seyfried. The editor then opened the attack with ‘Too Real’: using collage images from comic book ads to spoof the American Dream of prosperity and suburban bliss, after which counterculture legend Spain Rodriguez recounts the story of ‘Nestor Makhno’ whose fight for independence led to his betrayal by his Soviet allies in the early days of their Revolution.

Kinney’s ‘Smarmy Comics’ presents a decade of strip spoofs dedicated to exposing ‘Fascism: the Power to Finance Capital Itself’, after which the amazing Melinda Gebbie constructs a strident feminist call to arms against female oppression in educational diatribe ‘The Quilting Bee’ before Spain returns with a brutal true tale of the Spanish Civil War ‘Blood and Sky’ and an Underground superstar offers a frightening prognostication in ‘Gilbert Shelton’s Advanced International Motoring Tips’…

For someone with no appreciable budget or resources, Kinney was astonishingly successful in securing international contributions. From France’s L’echo Des Savannes #29 came a translated tale of more Bolshevik perfidy in ‘Liberty Through the Ages: Kronstadt’ by Épistolier (Yves Frémion) & Volny (Françoise Dupuy) wherein a local dispute escalates into an horrific early instance of merciless repression in the People’s Paradise, before Bay area cartoonist John R. Burnham challenges the future with his polemical ‘What’s the Difference?’

True Brit Clifford Harper offers a moving and witty account of grass roots resistance in the tale of ‘Owd Nancy’s Petticoat’ (set in the aftermath of the Peterloo Massacre), after which Kinney delivers wry Comic Strip parodies ‘Safehouse’, ‘On Contradiction’ and ‘Today’s Rhetoric’ – complete with faux ad – before Mavrides hilariously attacks the utopian/dystopian debate with ‘Some Straight Talk about Anarchy’. The issue ends with a stylish ad for like-minded publications from Kinney & Seyfried, which last also crafted a humorous depiction of a mass anarchist demonstration in Tiananmen Square 11 years before the tragic, monstrous real thing…

Issue #2 didn’t appear until 1979 and opened with a photographic punk cover by Ruby Ray & Kinney, with the latter & Seyfried collaborating on another hilarious introductory page before the fireworks kicked off with Steve Stiles’ chilling account of his brush with Military Intelligence. Once the brass realised he might have had associations with turn-of-the-century Labour Movement The Industrial Workers of the World, the baffled soldier-boy found himself suspected of crimes he didn’t know existed. How the ‘Wobblies!’ could subvert a hapless GI in 1967 is still unclear to the author of this smart but scary tale…

‘Believe It!’ by Sharon Rudahl exposes true but crazy beliefs from history whilst

‘Kultur Dokuments’ (Kinney & Mavrides) brilliantly blends styles and metaphors to harangue the working world in a clever tale that starts as pictograms and ends as a vicious swipe at Archie Comics. Harper then adapts “Bert” Brecht’s grim ballad ‘The Black Freighter’ (perhaps better known in English as “Pirate Jenny” via Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera), Spain details the life of Civil War freedom-fighter Buenaventura ‘Durruti’ and Dutch artist Peter Pontiac exposes sexual fantasy and other anti-spontaneity heresies in ‘Romantic! Anarchy’ before Kinney dryly restores order with spoof talk-show ‘Radical Reflections’.

Épistolier & Michel Trublin relate how radicals Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman changed the smugly complacent nature of Wall Street in ‘Liberty Through the Ages: The Yippies at the Exchange’ before Gebbie potently limns illustrated ‘Quotes from Red Emma’ (Goldman) after which ‘The Bizarre yet Familiar World of Commodity Fetishism!’ (Kinney) embellishes a Seyfried Inside back-cover ad with the glorious whole finished off in a painted Black Velvet portrait of Chairman Mao by Mavrides.

Anarchy Comics #3 arrived in 1981, sporting a traditional anarchic rampaging rogue by Pontiac & Guy Colwell and – after a clever introduction by Kinney & Mavrides – proceeds with the duo’s hilariously dark time-travel tale ‘No Exit’ showing how even the perfect future can’t please some activists. Next is Épistolier & Trublin’s trenchant examination of Church repression of workers in ‘Anarchy in the Alsace: The Revolt of the Rustauds’ and a welcome appearance for Donald Rooum’s iconic feline thought-experiment Wildcat.

Rooum was a spectacularly talented, gentle, fiercely pacifist freedom-fighter, educator and eternal knowledge seeker who contributed brilliant cartoons to British comics, magazines and the Anarchist press for over 60 years. His Wildcat cartoons have been collected continually and are a must have item whatever your political leaning…

The merriment continues in ‘The Act of Creation According to Bakunin’ by Dutch cartoonist Albo Helm, giving the genesis myth a thorough re-evaluation, after which Harper interprets French politician/philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s pointed ‘What is Government?’ with telling graphic savagery.

More of Kinney’s ‘Radical Reflections’ follow before Spain (with Adam Cornford & Kinney) examines the rise of the Red Brigade through Italian labour agitation and student unrest via ‘Roman Spring’, whilst Steve Laffler restores much-needed absurdity through deployment of rude, anti-Capitalist superhero the ‘Naked Avenger’.

Seyfried crafts a sharp display of police mentality in ‘Walkie Talkie’ before then relative newcomer Gary Panter plays with traditional bomb-throwing view of anarchists in his vicious comedy ‘Awake, Purox, Awake!’, whilst Gebbie & Cornford collaborate on a psychedelic tribute to ‘Benjamin Peret: Poet as Revolutionary and Rudahl supplies a slyly effective castigation of workers’ children-turned-capitalists in ‘The Treasure of Cabo Santiago’.

Comix iconoclast Greg Irons is represented here with moodily scary tale ‘Who’s in Charge Here?’ and Canadian cartoonist David Lester tackles sexual politics and the New Man in ‘Men Strips: Men March On’, ‘The Amazing Colossal Men’ and ‘The March of Men’ before Marian (now just brooke) Lydbrooke spoofs marital oppression in ‘At Home With…’ with Kinney exploring similar territory in ‘New Age Politics’.

Matt (Amazing Cynicalman) Feazell debuted here with an impressive bug-eyed view of class warfare and divisive manipulation by the bosses in the excellent ‘Pest Control’ before Kinney & Seyfried cobble together an inside back-cover ‘Bulletin Board’ and the garrulous German ends the issue with a classy spoof ad touting ‘New! Improved! Anarchy’ to end all our global pest woes…

After this issue Kinney’s time was increasingly taken up with other projects, and it wasn’t until 1987 that new editor Mavrides released Anarchy Comics #4, with both cover and introduction page products of his sublimely prolific satirist’s pen. He nonetheless joined with Kinney on apocalyptic parody on the End of Days ‘Armageddon Outahere! before the always challenging Harper contributes a terrifyingly true case regarding British poet Jimmy Heather-Hayes’ death in police custody at Ashford Prison, Kent ‘On the Night of March 3, 1982’.

Norman Dog creates a choose-your-own-ending role-playing strip in ‘You Rule the World!’ and Spain details the fall of Emperor Napoleon III, the entire Franco-Prussian War and the meteoric coming and going of the Communards in ‘1871’, after which Gebbie relates her own clash with British censorship in magically metaphoric fable ‘Public Enemy’.

‘Mr. Helpful’ is a more traditional cartoon quandary posed by Norman Dog whilst S. Zorca’s prose vignette ‘Executive Terrorism’ take a hefty swipe at Presidential Privilege and R. Diggs goes for the jugular in his logical extension of economic Darwinism ‘Korporate-Rex’.

The final issue closes with Harry S. Robins tapped into his Church of the SubGenius roots, addressing the apparent dichotomy of the philosophy in ‘Anarchy = Panarchy’ before Byron Werner’s ‘One-page strip’ suggests the only way we can rationally deal with intelligent extraterrestrial life, Mavrides & Kinney clashwith the Military-Industrial Complex in ‘Cover-up Lowdown’ and a final Back Cover offers a photo of Hiroshima after all the dust settled…

As you’d expect, this fabulous collection doesn’t stick to tradition, and after a standard section of contributing Cartoonist Biographies, and a sumptuous colour section including all covers, Outtakes, Sketches Roughs and a fulsome photographic Anarchy Comics Family Album, a New Comix addendum features a stunning new strip which would certainly have been in a fifth issue… if there had been one.

‘The Amazing Tale of Victoria Woodhull’ by Rudahl depicts the life of the most incredible woman you’ve never heard of: a libertine, suffragette, opportunist and crusader for women’s rights and female emancipation who started out as an American white trash huckster and died the wife of a British aristocrat.

This is followed by Sketchbook Drawings and Outtakes from Kinney, revealing abortive ideas and graphic dead ends such as Anarchy Chic, Shoot-Out at the Circle A Ranch, Revolt, Sectarianism, Marx my Words, spoof political mags, the Amazing Rhetoric Translator and the marvellous Oppressive Dichotomies – all strips that might well have found fans… if…

A stunning reminiscence of a time when we thought the world could still be changed and, hopefully, a stark example for the current generation who just won’t take it anymore, Anarchy Comics is still, funny, powerful, inspirational and out there.

And that’s not up for debate…
© 2013 Jay Kinney, Paul Mavrides and respective writers & artists. All rights reserved.

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George Sand: True Genius, True Woman


By Séverine Vidal & Kim Consigny, translated by Edward Gauvin (SelfMadeHero)
ISBN: 978-1-914224-20-1 (TPB/Digital edition)

It’s a sad but inescapable fact that throughout history men have constantly belittled, gaslit, constrained, oppressed, repressed and sabotaged women, presumably in some misguided, malign and apparently pointlessly dick-fuelled campaign to keep them in their place and at our beck and call. It’s also a wonderful truism that over and again, despite personal danger and inevitable pain of consequences endured, many remarkable women have found ways to escape the trap.

Quite a few have done it by guile: simply pretending to one of the guys…

One such was Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin de Francueil (1st July 1804 – 8th June 1876) who defied, dodged and practically avoided almost all the arbitrary constraints of being a rich, propertied heiress in a strictly codified society where women (just like minors, criminals and imbeciles) had no rights.

Employing her brains, innate diplomatic acumen and passion for storytelling, Aurore made her own way all her life: writing books, plays, articles, literary criticism, and memoires whilst employing her growing influence and ever-expanding net of contacts to fight for social equality – and generally scandalise Europe – as “George Sand”.

She was also bold a pioneer in Gender Expression, defiantly smoking in public and drinking, dressing and acting as a man – an actual legal offense from 1800 onwards, albeit one typically ignored by the Parisian intelligentsia. This wilful civil disobedience won Sand access to many venues expressly barring women, as she also flouted the nation’s ethical foundations with “libertine” behaviour: exploring true sexual liberation and parity through a reputed “host” of male and female partners…

Daughter of a flighty Bohemian, raised by her autocratic paternal grandmother and married off to an appallingly typical rich husband (Baron Casimir Dudevant), Aurore rebelled and lived her own way. She became a staunch proponent of radical ideas, especially women’s rights to full equality under law, and freedom to love as they chose. She even claimed everyone had a right to self-declare a preferred gender and railed against Church-sanctioned strictures of marriage and over tumultuous decades, publicly risked everything to champion social freedoms. She battled bourgeois reactionary governments and sought to elevate the lower classes during the most politically volatile time in France’s history.

Internationally revered and reviled, but – partially – insulated by wealth and position, Sand only wanted to tell stories and live free, but – because that right was universal – became a powerful social commentator, agitator, noteworthy journalistic gadfly. An effective player of power politics at a time when women were relegated to a decorative but always submissive role (generally a means of transferring property and wealth from one man to another) Sand was a tireless reformer who at heart just wanted to live an unshackled life.

Aurore ceaselessly challenged the system: using as example the way she lived; employing rabble-rousing tactics and direct action; instigating subtle intrigue and debate amongst her intellectual peers, and in any other way that came to her – all whilst living a s guilt-free, hedonistic existence. Meanwhile, a steady stream of groundbreaking books and plays confronted these issues and made converts one reader at a time…

First released in Europe as George Sand, fille du siècle in 2019 and as closely detailed and diligently depicted by author Séverine Vidal (A Tale Off the Top of My Head, Le Manteau, J’ai une maison) and illustrated by frequent collaborator Kim Consigny (Forte, À l’orée du monde, L’été de mes 17 ans), this compelling and charming monochrome biography reads far more like a sprawling generational dramatic saga in the manner of Wuthering Heights, Vanity Fair or Le Colonel Chabert rather than a dusty historical tract. Interleaved with excerpts from her own “tell-all” book Story of My Life: The Autobiography of George Sand, her books and other scholarly sources such as The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters, the epic chronologically traces her torrid life, agonising mistakes, family struggles, literary and political successes: a riches to rags to riches story arc peppered with a tantalising smattering of enemies made at a time when France struggled against cultural annihilation and civil chaos.

Along the way George Sand wrote 70 novels, 13 plays, and 50 volumes worth of collected writings and speeches that are more relevant today than ever…

What’s most significant here is just how contemporaneous and readable modern audiences will find this true story. The subject and narrative are a treat for fans of racy modern bodice ripper dramas like Bridgerton or Succession – with a healthy helping of Les Misérables seasoning the mix. Incidentally, Victor Hugo numbered amongst her many intellectual – if not amatory – conquests. Other “close friends” and/or foes guest starring in these pages include Chopin, Liszt, Delacroix, Balzac, Baudelaire, the Emperor Louis Napoleon, Jules Sandeau, Prosper Mérimée, Marie Dorval, Flaubert and more. However, amidst trauma and tragedy are many moments of lasting true love and rewarding contentment – such as George’s idyllic 15-year relationship with adored partner “Mancel” – which counter any notion of this being a moralistic warning tale.

Although Sand’s astounding life was filled with enough drama, setbacks, family feuding, skulduggery, glamour, global travel and sheer celebrity cachet to make her a proper modern icon, with the added allure of being absolutely true and shaped by iniquity, inequality, triumph and heartbreak, this is ultimately the history of a winner beating the system and whose uncompromising life was lived triumphantly on her own terms: confirming that life doesn’t have to be endured on any terms but your own…
© Editions Delcourt 2019. All rights reserved.

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Marble Cake


By Scott Jason Smith (Avery Hill Publishing)
ISBN: 978-1-910395-47-9 (TPB/Digital edition)

I read a lot of graphic novels. Some are awful, many are mediocre and the rest – great, good, noteworthy or just different from the mass, commercially-driven output of a global art form and industry – I share with you.

Some publishers have a proud policy of championing that last category (Top Shelf, Drawn & Quarterly, NBM, Oni Press, Fantagraphics and others) – even though there’s seldom any real money in it. My favourite of these bold pioneers at the moment is British-based Avery Hill Publishing. I truly have not yet seen a duff or homogenised release from them.

Scott Jason Smith hails from the seamy south side of London (as all the best folk do) and quickly forged a solid reputation with self-published comics and stories like ‘Blossom the tall old lady’ and in collaborations with mainstream-adjacent contemporaries in tomes such as 69 Love Songs Illustrated.

Scott is skilled in depicting people and mundane life and possesses a sharp sense of humour, honed by spending a lot of time listening to how ordinary folk talk. Knowing what we all have in common allows for an extremely deft use of dialogue to build character and construct scenarios at once drearily familiar and subtly tweaked and twisted. This all adds a potent veracity to this particular brand of everyday adventuring which here seamlessly slips from a soap-operatic drama of the mundane or “Commedia dell’plebia” to a suitably underplayed terror-scape mirroring the Theatre of the Absurd as envisioned by Samuel Beckett or Daniel Clowes…

Marble Cake was a debut novel-length tale, relating intersecting moments of a bunch of strangers and casual near-acquaintances who all interact with till girl Tracy at the local Smartmart store. Her job leaves plenty of time to fantasize about what “her” customers do when she’s not around, but she really has no idea of what’s really going on. In fact, no one does…

Life and death, joblessness and social standing, malice and sexual desire, intolerance and ennui, but especially hopelessness and general distrust tinge every real or imagined home-life that Tracy ponders – even her own. However, when genuine threat and mystery – such as a string of baffling disappearances – increasingly grip the community, no one has any idea how to respond…

This compelling, tale challenges notion of self-worth and universal rationality in a wryly acerbic manner that will intrigue and charm lovers of slice-of-life yarns as well as surreal storytelling, and who don’t mind doing a bit of the cerebral heavy lifting themselves.
© Scott Jason Smith 2019. All rights reserved.

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Wonder Woman – The Once and Future Story

Version 1.0.0

By Trina Robbins, Colleen Doran, Jackson Guice & various (DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-56389-373-5 (TPB)

Pioneering cartoonist, feminist, editor, author, activist, historian, seamstress/fashion designer and comics chronicler Trina Robbins died yesterday.

Born in Brooklyn on August 17th 1938, Trina Perlson was a daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants. Her father was a tailor, her mother a school teacher and their child was obsessed from the get-go with comics and strips. Little Trina first found favour with Brenda Starr, Patsy Walker, Millie the Model and especially Katy Keene: early influences which winningly resurfaced in later life to become a major part of her cartoon output in many titles and even as “fashion cut-out” comics series such as California Girls.

When her mother eventually urged Trina to move on from kids’ stuff, the creative dynamo transferred all that passion and energy to science fiction fandom, becoming an early mover & shaker in fanzines like Habakkuk. In 1962, Trina wed magazine editor Paul Jay Robbins but the marriage ended after four years, in which time she enlisted and quickly quit Queens College. In 1969, whilst running her own boutique, Trina created the original costume for comics star-in-waiting Vampirella for New York publisher Jim Warren, sci fi writer/pundit Forest J. Ackerman & artist Frank Frazetta – although her later comments on what the credited male creators did with it thereafter are not very comfortable or complimentary…

A year later she was living in California when the Counter-Culture emerged and fostered an era of self-published “Underground Commix” and she began her own comics revival: generating cartoons, ads and strips in The East Village Other and Gothic Blimp Works. Moving to San Francisco, Trina worked for periodical Good Times, hung out with Joni Mitchell, The Byrds and The Doors, and dressed Mama Cass, David Crosby, Donovan and other rock stars. She also co-founded the first comic book made exclusively by women – It Ain’t Me Babe Comix. She followed up with mature-reader erotic comic Wet Satin and 20 years helming landmark anthology Wimmen’s Commix whose debut issue heralded her strip ‘Sandy Comes Out’ – the first story in US comics starring an “Out and Proud” lesbian.

Always busy, Trina was seen in a host of titles and was an early crafter of what would become graphic novels like Mama! Dramas. She adapted classic prose tales such as Sax Rohmer’s Dope and Tanith Lee’s The Silver Metal Lover, before in 1984 becoming the first woman to officially draw DC’s Amazing Amazon in The Legend of Wonder Woman (albeit it written by mere male Kurt Busiek).

Passionately devoted to the concept of creative collaboration, over many decades Robbins contributed to countless anthology comics and projects like Strip AIDS U.S.A. (editor/ contributor), All Girl Thrills, Marvel’s Comix Book, Good Girls, Gay Comix, War News, Choices: A Pro-Choice Benefit Comic Anthology for the National Organization for Women, and more, eventually forming her own publishing imprint Angry Isis.

 In 1994 she co-founded Friends of Lulu, an advocacy group for female creators and readers dedicated to promoting comics consumption by and for women and girls. Throughout this creative bonanza Trina also sought – via a wealth of compelling non-fiction books – to liberate the lost legion of women who had worked in comics but had subsequently been “disappeared” by history.

These revelatory tomes included Women and the Comics (with Cat Yronwode), A Century of Women Cartoonists, The Great Women Superheroes, Great Women Cartoonists, From Girls to Grrrlz: A History of Women’s Comics from Teens to Zines (with Anne Timmons), Pretty in Ink: North American Women Cartoonists 1896 – 2013, Babes in Arms: Women in Comics During the Second World War, Flapper Queens: Women Cartoonists of the Jazz Age and many more chronicling a more generalised obscuring of women such as Wild Irish Roses: Tales of Brigits, Kathleens, and Warrior Queens, Eternally Bad: Goddesses with Attitude or Tender Murderers: Women Who Kill.

To learn more, I highly recommend Gavin Edwards’ obituary for her in The New York Times (April 11th 2024), her own memoir Last Girl Standing (2017): that glorious wealth of books about comics & strips by women creators, and of course, her remarkable canon of cartoon material, both independently created – like GoGirl! – and for mainstream corporate properties such as Wonder Woman, Marvel’s Barbie, Misty & Girl Comics, Honey West and The Phantom…

Until then though, there’s this wonderful epic that remains inexplicably out of print and digitally unavailable…

Every so often the earnest intention to do some good generates an above-average comics product, such as this stunning one-shot created to raise awareness of domestic violence. A hugely important but constantly ignored topic- and one far too many unfortunate children are cruelly aware of from an early age – it is also one of the oldest “social issues” of comic book history. Superman memorably dealt out rough justice to a “wife-beater” in his very first adventure (Action Comics #1, June 1938) – the actual origin and genesis of our genre. It’s a true shame that we’re still trying to address let alone fix this vile situation…

Less visceral – and far more even-handed regarding such a complex debate than I would have thought possible – The Once and Future Story is a beautiful and subtle tale-within-a-tale from Trina Robbins, as illustrated by Colleen Doran (A Distant Soil, Legion of Super-Heroes, Power Pack, Neil Gaiman’s Chivalry, Sandman, Mangaman, Gone to Amerikay) & Jackson “Butch” Guice (Superman/Action Comics, Supergirl, Micronauts, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Birds of Prey, Resurrection Man, The Flash, Ruse).

It opens as Wonder Woman is summoned to an archaeological dig in Ireland by a husband-&-wife research team who hope their guest can verify the findings hidden within a 3000-year-old tomb. It seemingly contains the body and burial trappings of a princess from the fabled island of Themyscira…

As Diana translates the scrolls – detailing the story of Princess Artemis of Ephesus, daughter of Queen Alcippe and learning how the maternal monarch was taken as a slave by legendary Greek hero Theseus – she soon realizes the animosity of Dig-boss James Kennealy is perhaps more than professional jealousy, and his wife’s Moira’s defensive attitude and constant apologies may be masking a dark secret.

Artemis’s brutal, painful quest to rescue her mother mirrors Moira’s journey to awareness as both women – separated by millennia – ultimately take control of their so different, tragically similar lives.

Challenging, powerful but still wonderfully entertaining, this is a tale both worthy and worthwhile, and one far too long overlooked. Now what does that remind me of?
© 1998 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

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Black Hole


By Charles Burns (Jonathan Cape)
ISBN: 978-0-37542-380-2 (HB) 978-0-22407-778-1 (TPB)

On this day in 2019, those happy Big Science people at the Event Horizon Telescope Project released the first picture of a black hole as located at the centre of galaxy M87. No one’s done a graphic novel of that yet but there’s this superb tome that seems to have slipped from common consciousness…

One of the most impressive and justifiably lauded graphic novels ever, Black Hole is a powerfully evocative allegorical horror story about sex, youth and transformation, but don’t let that deter you from reading it. It’s also a clever, moving, chilling and somehow uplifting tale displaying the bravura mastery of one of the greatest exponents of sequential narrative the English language has ever produced – even if he has found his spiritual and commercial home producing comics in Europe.

Originally released as a 12-issue limited series under the aegis of Kitchen Sink Press, the tale was rescued and completed through Fantagraphics when the pioneering Underground publisher folded in 1999. On completion, Black Hole was promptly released in book form by Pantheon Press in 2005, although many fans and critics despaired at the abridged version which left out many of Burns’ most potent full-page character studies of the deeply troubled cast “an error of economy” corrected in subsequent editions. It won eleven of the comic world’s most prestigious awards and I’m revisiting my battered Jonathan Cape UK edition because it’s still not available digitally

It’s the 1970s in Seattle, and there’s something very peculiar happening amongst local teens out in the safe secure suburbs. In ‘Biology 101’, Keith Pearson can’t concentrate on properly dissecting his frog because his lab partner is Chris Rhodes, the veritable and literal girl of his dreams.

Trying to keep cool only makes things worse and when he suddenly slips into a fantastic psychedelic daydream, the swirling images resolve into a horrific miasma of sex, torn flesh and a sucking void. Suddenly he’s regaining consciousness on the floor with the entire class standing over him. They’re all laughing at him… all except Chris.

‘Planet Xeno’ is a quiet patch of woodland adults don’t know about, where kids can kick back, drink, smoke, get stoned and just talk. The big topic among the guys is “the bug”: a sexually transmitted disease that causes bizarre, unpredictable mutations like uncontrolled growths, extra digits, pigmentation changes, and new orifices that don’t bleed…

As Keith and best buds Dee and Todd shoot the breeze and goof off, they discover an odd encampment, strewn with old toys and bottles and junk. Some of the sufferers of the “Teen Plague” have relocated here to the forest, founding a makeshift camp away from prying eyes and wagging tongues. When Keith finds a girl’s shed skin hanging from a bush, he fears creepy mutants are closing in and suffers a crazy disorienting premonition…

In ‘SSSSSSSSSS’ Chris is dreaming: a ghastly phantasmagoria involving naked swimming in pollution, a bunch of strange guys, monsters and that fainting kid Keith turning into a serpent. It all ends with her examining the new holes in her body before ripping off her old skin and leaving it hanging on a bush…

She’s drinking illicit beer by the lake in ‘Racing Towards Something’, remembering that wild party a week ago and what she did with the cool guy Rob Facincanni. As she came on to him he kept trying to tell her something but she was in no mood to listen. She just didn’t want to be the good girl anymore…

She recalls the moment of explosive climax and horror when she discovered a hideous second mouth in his neck… and the noises. It seemed to be speaking…

In the sordid guilty aftermath she felt awful but had no idea what that furtive, disappointing assignation had done to her.

Rob is still sleeping with Lisa. She’s accepted the cost of the curse and the ghastly changes in her body, but what she won’t take is him screwing around. She has heard Rob’s second mouth talking as they lay together and needs to know ‘Who’s Chris?’

Keith and his bros are getting stoned again when he hears some guys have just watched the so-virginal Chris skinny-dipping and seen her sex-caused mutation. The virgin queen isn’t any more…

In ‘Cut’ their teasing proves too much and he storms off into the scrub, accidentally spotting the object of his desire as she gets dressed again. Guiltily voyeuristic, he’s prompted to action when she steps on broken glass and cries out. Dashing to her rescue he bandages her foot, too ashamed to admit just how much of her he’s really seen. All Keith knows is that someday he will be with her. Fate was obviously on his side…

‘Bag Action’ finds him and Dee trying to buy weed from some skeevy college guys, but our frustrated romantic is utterly unable to get lascivious, furtive, distracting naked images of Chris out of his mind.

However, after sampling some of the dope in the Frat boys’ dilapidated house, he meets their housemate Eliza: an eccentric artist extremely high, nearly naked and very hungry. Just as baked, achingly horny and fascinated by her cute tail (not a euphemism), Keith almost has sex with her but is interrupted by his idiot pal at just the wrong moment…

Many of those infected by The Bug are camped out in the woods now and ‘Cook Out’ finds them having a desperate party around a roaring fire. Rob is there, bemoaning the fact Lisa has kicked him out, but he’s also acutely aware that the sex-warped kids are getting oddly wild, manic, even dangerous…

‘Seeing Double’ finds downcast, devastated Chris talking things over with Rob at the outcast encampment. The naive fool has just discovered what’s she got and what it means. Lost and disgusted, convinced she’s a dirty monster with a biological Scarlet Letter as part of her flesh, Chris drinks and talks and, eventually, finds comfort in her bad boy’s arms…

In ‘Windowpane’ Pearson, Dee and Todd drop their first tabs of acid and head for a party at Jill’s house. Increasingly morose and troubled Keith is feeling ever-more isolated and alienated and the LSD coursing through his system isn’t helping, When Dee and Jill start to make out, he leaves and finds her big sister crying outside. After she shouts at him he turns and, still tripping off his nut, heads into the woods.

Lost and confused, he sees horrific and bizarre things in the trees and bushes before stumbling into some of the infected kids around their fire. In a wave of expiation he begins to talk and keeps on going, slowly coming down amongst temporary friends. Keith has no suspicion that some of the things he saw were not imaginary at all…

‘Under Open Skies’ sees Chris and Rob playing hooky. Fully committed to each other now, they head to the coast and a perfect solitary day of love at the beach. They think it’s all going to be okay but the voice from Rob’s other mouth says otherwise…

Back home again, Chris’ recent good times are ruined by her parents’ reaction. Grounded, the former good girl makes up her mind and, gathering a few possessions, elopes with her lover to a new life in ‘The Woods’ where grotesquely bestial but kindly Dave Barnes takes them under his wing.

Although they have bonded, Rob cannot stay with Chris and returns to his home and High School. Although he spends as much time as possible at the encampment, Chris is too often alone and on one of her excursions into the wilds finds a bizarre and frightening shrine. Little does she know it’s one of the things the tripping Keith thought he’d hallucinated…

Summer grinds on and Pearson plucks up nerve to go back to the college guys’ house. ‘Lizard Queen’ Eliza is on the porch, drawing but obviously upset by something. Confused, scared and without knowing what they’re doing. they end up in bed consummating that long-postponed act of drug-fuelled passion…

Chris’ days of innocent passion end suddenly when Rob is brutally attacked by a lurking intruder in ‘I’m Sorry’. She descends into a stupor for days until spotting nice safe Keith at one of the camp’s evening bonfire parties. Soon, he’s arranged for her to move into an empty property he’s housesitting over ‘Summer Vacation’ but even though he’s attentive, kind, solicitous and so clearly wants to be with her, he’s just not Rob.

Chris has been going slowly crazy since her beloved boy vanished: reliving memories good and bad, feeling scared and abandoned, playing dangerously with the gun he left her “for protection”. Keith is still plagued by nightmares and X-rated thoughts of Eliza in ‘A Dream Girl’, but hopeful he now has a chance with Chris. That swiftly changes when he checks on her and discovers the house he’s supposed to be guarding has been trashed. There’s garbage everywhere, a bunch of her fellow outcasts have moved in and she’s clearly avoiding him, locked in a room, constantly “sleeping”…

Despondent, confused Pearson doesn’t know what to do. Chris is having some kind of breakdown and the house – his responsibility – is a wreck. The lovesick fool is trapped and crumbling when Eliza breezes back into his life. If only his own bug mutation wasn’t so hideous…

Heading back to the home once more he finds Chris has gone and the pigsty has become a charnel house. All summer there has been a frightening, oppressive presence in the woods and with the Fall coming the mood is beginning to darken. When Dave is barracked and abused whilst trying to buy takeout food, he snaps and pulls out Chris’ gun. Calmly taking his fried chicken from the crime-scene he walks back to the woods and the troubled soul known as ‘Rick the Dick’. It’s going to be their last meal…

Keith meanwhile has found his own happy ending, ‘Driving South’ with gloriously free spirited, undemanding Eliza, but is still gripped by what he found at the house. At least he and Eliza helped survivors get away, but now – happily content with his idyllic artist girl and after all the horrible secrets they’ve shared – he can’t help wondering what happened to Chris.

That mystery and how Dave got the gun are only revealed in the compulsively low key and wildly visual climax ‘The End’…

Complex, convoluted, utterly compelling, expressive, evocative and deeply, disturbingly phantasmagorical, Black Hole is a comics masterpiece of graphic genius and astoundingly utilised allegory and metaphor merged with the eternal dissatisfaction and alienation of youth. It explores and reexamines evolution and cultural ostracization as well as the verities of love, aspiration, jealousy and death to concoct a tale no other medium could (although perhaps Luis Buñuel, David Lynch or David Cronenberg might have made a good go of it in film).

If you are over 16 and haven’t read it, do – and soon.
© 2005 Charles Burns. All rights reserved.

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Showcase Presents Teen Titans volume 2


By Mike Friedrich, Bob Haney, Neal Adams, Marv Wolfman, Robert Kanigher, Steve Skeates, Gil Kane, Wally Wood, Nick Cardy, Sal Amendola, George Tuska, Carmine Infantino, Dick Dillin, Joe Giella, Jim Aparo & various (DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-84576-677-1 (TPB)

Hey, Super Kids! Happy 60th Anniversary!

It’s perhaps hard to grasp these days that once kid heroes were a rarity and at the beginning of the Silver Age, often considered a liability. Now the massive Teen Titans brand – with numerous comic book iterations, assorted TV shows, movies and even an award-winning early reading version (Aw, Yeaah! Tiny Titans!) their continuance as assured as anything in our biz. Nevertheless, during the tumultuous 1960s the series – never a top seller – courted controversy and actual teenage readers by confronting controversial issues head on.

I must have been just lucky, because these stories of lost youth searching for great truths and meaning were released just as I turned Teen. They resonated especially because they were talking directly to me. It didn’t hurt that they were brilliantly written, fantastically illustrated and staggeringly fresh and contemporary. I’m delighted to declare that age hasn’t diminished their quality or impact either, merely cemented their worth and importance.

The concept of underage hero-teams was not a new one when the Batman TV show fuelled DC’s move to entrust big heroes’ assorted sidekicks with their own regular comic as a hip and groovy ensemble as dedicated to helping kids as they were to stamping out insidious evil.

The biggest difference between wartime groups like The Young Allies, Boy Commandos or Newsboy Legion and such 1950s holdovers as The Little Wise Guys or Boys Ranch and the DC’s new team was quite simply the burgeoning phenomena of “The Teenager” as a discrete social and commercial power bloc. These were kids who could be allowed to do things themselves (within reason) without constant adult aid or supervision. As early as spring 1964, Brave and the Bold #54 had tested the waters in a gripping tale by Bob Haney & Bruno Premiani in which Kid Flash, Aqualad and Robin foiled a modern-day Pied Piper.

What had been a straight team-up was formalised a year later when the heroes reunited and included Wonder Girl in a proper super-group with a team-name: Teen Titans. With the stories in this second merely monochrome print-only relic of a collected volume of those early exploits the series had hit a creative peak, with spectacular, groundbreaking artwork and fresh, different stories that increasingly showed youngsters had opinions and attitudes of their own – and often that they could be at odds with those of their mystery-men mentors…

Spanning cover-dated January 1969 to December 1971 and collecting Teen Titans #19-36, and team-up appearances from Brave and the Bold #83 & 94 and World’s Finest Comics #205, these tales cover the most significant period of social and political unrest in American history and do it from the perspective of the underdogs, the seekers, the rebels…

The wonderment begins with a beautifully realised comedy-thriller as boy bowman Speedy enlists. ‘Teen Titans: Stepping Stones for a Giant Killer!’ (#19, January/February 1969), by Mike Friedrich, Gil Kane & Wally Wood, pitted the team against youthful evil mastermind Punch who planned to kill the Justice League of America and thought a trial run against the junior division a smart idea…

Brave and the Bold # 83 (April/May 1969) took a radical turn as the Titans (sans Aqualad, who was dropped from the squad to appear in Aquaman and because there just ain’t that much sub-sea skulduggery) tried to save Bruce Wayne’s latest foster-son from his own inner demons in a tense thriller about trust and betrayal in the Haney & Neal Adams epic ‘Punish Not my Evil Son!’. TT #20 took a long running plot-thread about extra-dimensional invaders and gave it a counterculture twist in ‘Titans Fit the Battle of Jericho’, a rollicking romp written by Neal Adams, pencilled by him & Sal Amendola and inked by brush-maestro Nick Cardy – one of the all-out prettiest illustration jobs of that decade.

Exemplars of the era/symbolic super-teens Hawk and Dove join proceedings for #21’s ‘Citadel of Fear’ (Adams & Cardy): chasing smugglers, finding aliens and ramping up the surly teen rebellion quotient whilst moving the invaders story-arc towards its stunning conclusion. ‘Halfway to Holocaust’ is only half of #22, the abduction of Kid Flash & Robin leading to a cross-planar climax as Wonder Girl, Speedy and a radical new ally quash the invasion threat forever, but still leaving enough room for a long overdue makeover in ‘The Origin of Wonder Girl’ by Marv Wolfman, Kane & Cardy. For years the series – and DC editors in general – had fudged the fact the younger Amazon Princess was not actually human, a sidekick, or even a person, but rather an incarnation of Wonder Woman as a child. As continuity backwriting strengthened its stranglehold on the industry, it was finally felt that the team’s distaff member needed a fuller background of her own.

This moving tale revealed she was in fact a human foundling rescued by Princess Diana and raised on Paradise Island where super-science gave her all the powers of a true Amazon. They even found her a name – Donna Troy – and an apartment, complete with hot roommate. All Donna had to do was sew herself a glitzy new figure-hugging costume…

Now thoroughly grounded, the team jetted south in #23’s fast-paced yarn ‘The Rock ‘n’ Roll Rogue’ (by Haney, Kane & Cardy), trying to rescue musical rebel Sammy Soul from his grasping family and – by extension – his lost dad from Amazonian headhunters. ‘Skis of Death!’ (#24, November/December) by the same creative crew has the quartet holidaying in the mountains and uncovering a scam to defraud Native Americans of their lands. It was a terrific old-style tale, but with the next issue the most radical change in DC’s cautious publishing history made Teen Titans a comic which had thrown out the rulebook…

For a series which spoke so directly to young people, it’s remarkable to think that ‘The Titans Kill a Saint?’ and its radical departure from traditional superhero stories was crafted by Bob Kanigher & Nick Cardy – two of the most senior creators in the business. The emotion-charged thriller set the scene for a different type of human-scaled adventures that were truly gripping and bravely innovative. For the relatively short time the experiment continued, readers had no idea what might happen next…

While on a night out in their civilian identities, Robin, Kid Flash, Speedy, Wonder Girl, Hawk and Dove meet telepathic go-go dancer Lilith who warns them of impending trouble. Cassandra-like, they ignore her warnings and a direct result a globally revered Nobel Laureate is gunned down. Coming so soon after the deaths of John F. and Robert Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, this was stunning stuff and in traumatised response all but Robin abandon their costumed personas and – with the help of mysterious millionaire philanthropist and mentor Mr. Jupiter – dedicate their unique abilities to exploring humanity’s flaws and graces: seeking fundamentally human ways to atone and make a difference in the world…

With Lilith beside them, they undertake different sorts of missions, beginning with ‘A Penny For a Black Star’ in which they attempt to live in a poverty-wracked inner city ghetto, where they find Mal Duncan, a street kid who becomes the first African-American in space…although it’s a one-way trip.

TT #27 reintroduced eerie elements of fantasy as ‘Nightmare in Space’ (Kanigher, George Tuska, Carmine Infantino & Cardy) sees the Titans en route to the Moon to rescue Mal, before encountering something far beyond the ken of mortal imagining. Meanwhile on Earth, Donna’s roommate Sharon stumbles upon an alien incursion. ‘Blindspot’ by Steve Skeates & Cardy was tangentially linked to another innovative saga then playing out in Aquaman’s comic book. You’ll need to see Aquaman: The Search For Mera and Aquaman: Deadly Waters for that extended delight. Both were edited by fresh-faced Dick Giordano, who was at this time responsible for the majority of innovative new material coming out of DC, even whilst proving himself one of the best inkers in the field.

Suffice to say that the Sea King’s foe Ocean Master had allied himself with aliens and Sharon became involved just as Aqualad returned looking for help. Unable to understand the Titan’s reluctance to get involved, Garth tries to go it alone but hits a snag only the original team can fix, which they do in Skeates & Cardy’s concluding chapter ‘Captives!’ However, once the alien threat is thwarted our heroes once more lay down their powers and costumes, but they have much to ponder after seeing what benefits their unique gifts can bring…

Teen Titans #30 featured three short tales, written by Skeates. Illustrated by Cardy, ‘Greed… Kills!’ is a cunning mystery exploring street and white-collar crime, whereas ‘Whirlwind’ is a Kid Flash prose novelette with art by Amendola before ‘Some Call it Noise’ (Infantino & Cardy) delivers an Aqualad solo tale in which his girlfriend Tula – AKA Aquagirl – takes a near-fatal wrong turn at a surface world rock concert.

Student politics took centre-stage in #31’s lead feature ‘To Order is to Destroy’ (Skeates, Tuska & Cardy) as the young heroes investigate a totally trouble-free campus where unhappy or difficult scholars are given a small brain operation to help them “concentrate”, whilst Hawk & Dove solo strip ‘From One to Twenty’ pits quarrelsome Don and Hank Hall against a band of murderous counterfeiters in a deft crime-caper from Skeates, Tuska & Cardy.

The creators then open up the fantasy element again with a time-travelling, parallel universe epic beginning in #32 with ‘A Mystical Realm, A World Gone Mad’ as Mal and Kid Flash accidentally change the past, turning Earth into a magical mad-scape. However, undoing their error results in a Neanderthal teenager being trapped in our time, presenting the group with their greatest challenge: educating a savage primitive and making him into a civilised modern man. Illustrated by Tuska & Cardy, ‘Less Than Human’ signalled the return of Bob Haney as main writer and triggered a gradual return of powers and costumes as the author picked up the pace of Jupiter’s grand experiment, restating it in terms that looked less harshly on comics’ bread & butter fights ‘n’ tights scenarios.

Brave and the Bold #94 (February-March 1971, by Haney & Cardy) offered potent counter-culture thrills as the team infiltrate an inner city commune to negate a nuclear bomb-plot in ‘Rebels in the Streets’, before the exigencies of publishing moved the series into the world of the supernatural as costumed heroes temporarily faded away in favour of tales of mystery and imagination. Haney, Tuska & Cardy’s ‘The Demon of Dog Island’ sees the team – including Robin who had quietly rejoined during the civilisation of cave-boy Gnarrk – desperately battling to prevent Wonder Girl’s possession by a gypsy ghost.

Skeates, Dick Dillin & Joe Giella crated ‘The Computer That Captured a Town’ in World’s Finest Comics #205 (September 1971), slyly examining racism and sexism as Superman finds the Titans trapped in a small town that had mysteriously re-adopted the values of the 1890s – a lot like middle America today but with culprits a lot easier to punch in the face…

Teen Titans #35 reiterated supernatural themes as the team travels to Verona in ‘Intruders of the Forbidden Crypt’ (Haney, Tuska & Cardy) wherein Lilith and the son of Mr. Jupiter’s business rival are drawn into a mesmerising web of tragedy: compelled to relive the doomed love of Romeo and Juliet despite all the rationalisations of modern science and the best efforts of the young heroes…

By the same creators, ‘A Titan is Born’ is a rite of passage for Mal as the everyman “token black guy” faces and defeats the murderous Gargoyle alone and unaided, before the reincarnation tragedy concludes with fate foiled in ‘The Tomb Be their Destiny’: the cover feature of #36. Filling out that issue and this book are two brief vignettes: Aqualad 3-page teaser ‘The Girl of the Shadows’ by Skeates & Jim Aparo and Haney & Cardy’s beguiling opening episode in the origin of Lilith ‘The Teen-Ager From Nowhere’. This showed a 10-year-old orphan’s first prescient exploit and the distrust it engendered, promising much more to come: a perfect place to end this second monochrome masterpiece of graphic literature.

Although perhaps dated in delivery now, these tales were a liberating experience for kids when first released. They truly betokened new empathy with independent youth and tried to address problems that were more relevant to and generated by that specific audience. That they are so captivating in execution is a wonderful bonus. This is absolute escapism and absolutely delightful and demand a fresh edition as soon as possible.
© 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 2007 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

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The Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia


By Mary M Talbot & Bryan Talbot (Jonathan Cape/Dark Horse)
ISBN: 978-0-22410-234-6 (HB Cape) eISBN: 978-1-63008-697-8 (DH)

The power of comics to resurrect historical figures and tap into their lives whilst potently and convincingly extrapolating their deeds and even characters has been a recent revelation that has completely revitalised graphic narratives. One of the most telling and compelling of these narratives was crafted by British National Treasure Bryan Talbot and his even more impressive wife.

Academic, educator, linguist, social theoretician, author and specialist in Critical Discourse Analysis, in 2012 Dr. Mary M. Talbot added graphic novelist to her achievements: collaborating with her husband on the first of many terrific comics tales. Award-winning memoir/biography of Lucia Joyce Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes was followed by Sally Heathcote: Suffragette (drawn by Kate Charlesworth), today’s recommendation, Rain and Armed With Madness: supplementing an educational career and academic publications such as Language and Gender: an Introduction and Fictions at Work: language and social practise in fiction. Dr. Talbot is particularly drawn to true stories of gender bias and social injustice…

Bryan has been a fixture of the British comics scene since the late 1960s, moving from Tolkien-fandom to college strips, self-published underground classics like Brainstorm Comix (starring Chester P. Hackenbush – the Psychedelic Alchemist!), prototypical Luther Arkwright and Frank Fazakerly, Space Ace of the Future to paid pro status with Nemesis The Warlock, Judge Dredd, Sláine, Ro-Busters and more in 2000 AD. Inevitably headhunted by America, he worked on key mature-reading titles for DC Comics (Hellblazer, Shade the Changing Man, The Nazz, Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight, Fables, The Dead Boy Detectives and The Sandman) and was a key creative cog in short-lived shared-world project Tekno Comix, before settling into global acclaim via steady relationships with Dark Horse Comics and Jonathan Cape. These unions generated breakthrough masterpieces like The Tale of One Bad Rat and a remastered Adventures of Luther Arkwright.

Since then he’s been an independent Force To Be Reckoned With, doing just what he wants, promoting the art form in general and crafting a variety of fascinating and compelling works, from Alice in Sunderland o Cherubs! (with Mark Stafford), to Metronome (as Véronique Tanaka) and his fabulously wry, beguiling and gallic-ly anthropomorphic Grandville sequence, as well as his mostly biographical/historical collaborations with Dr. Mary…

In the interest of propriety, I must disclose that I’ve known him since the 1980s, but other than that shameful lack of taste and judgement on his part, have no vested interest in confidently stating that he’s probably Britain’s greatest living graphic novelist…

Here their vast talents combine to capture and expose the life of a woman who arguably reshaped the history of the whole world, but one largely lost to history…

On May 29th 1830, Louise Michel was born out of wedlock to a serving maid at the Château de Vroncourt in Northeastern France. Her father was the son of the house and his ashamed parents gave their unwelcome granddaughter a liberal education and set her up as teacher. In 1865 she opened her own progressive school in Paris, whilst corresponding with social and political thinkers such as Victor Hugo and Théophile Ferré. Embracing radical ideas, Michel co-founded the Société pour la Revendication des Droits Civils de la Femme (Society for the Demand of Civil Rights for Women) and forged links to Société Coopérative des Ouvriers et Ouvrières (Cooperative Society of Men and Women Workers) and when revolution came again to France was amongst the first to man the barricades of the Paris Commune. She fought for The National Guard and was known as “the Red Virgin of Montmartre”…

Michel loved the notion of science and fairness building a better world, and spent much time discussing utopias with scientists and engineers. She was an author, poet, orator, anarchist, educator, rabble rouser and revolutionary whose activities as a Communard saw her exiled to New Caledonia in 1873. Once there, she befriended the subjugated Kanak people, acting as a teacher and healer, and participated in their abortive fight for liberation. Surviving the French colonisers’ reprisals she was returned to France after seven years as part of a general amnesty for Communards. She had become a political celebrity, and began touring the world and lecturing – especially to groups seeking change such as the Pankhurst family’s suffrage followers and adherents. Apparently tireless, the Red Virgin began campaigning for an amnesty for Algerian rebels…

Leading a poverty demonstration of French unemployed, she coined the slogan “Bread, work or lead” and adopted the black flag which remains to this day the symbol of the anarchist movement. The act earned her six years in solitary confinement, imprisoned with political visionaries like Peter Kropotkin, but when she was released she went right back to work…

Over her lifetime she wrote dozens of books and tracts, with another five published posthumously: all entreating people to be better and rulers to be fair and just. At least she died – in January 1905 – before her beloved ideology and trust in technological advancement were seen to be corrupted by the old ruling forces that manufactured the Great War…

Under the Talbots’ curated guidance what is seen in The Red Virgin and the Vision of Utopia is not dry polemic or radical hagiography, but a wryly witty examination – via flashbacks and clever character interplay – of an indomitable force for change with a marvellously human face. Depicted in monochrome and judicious splashes of reds. pinks and scarlets, the tale unfolds from a time of Michel’s latter triumphs, as seen through the eyes and conversations of admirers and converts. These are mainly other women seeking to change society working against a backdrop of scientific breakthroughs that the would-be emancipator was convinced would elevate everyone together…

Also included here are a copious list of ‘Sources’, and extensive personal commentary, photos, maps and historical context in ‘Annotations’.

Gripping, infuriating and utterly compelling, this is a tale of achievement and frustration that is still unfolding but which confirms that all change starts with someone extraordinary saying “I have a vision”…
© 2016 by Mary Talbot & Bryan Talbot. All rights reserved.

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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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Walking Distance


By Lizzy Stewart (Avery Hill Publishing)
ISBN:978-1-910395-50-9 (HB)

Assuming you do still think, where do you go and what do you do to get in touch with yourself? I only ask because, in these days of a million and one ways to chemically, digitally functionally and emotionally sedate the mind, one the most effective ways to process information is still a good long walk…

Lizzy Stewart lives in London and Shanks’ Pony is not only how she manages city life but is also a restorative physical act which seemingly obsesses her. She even keeps a list of favourite movie walks by a host of female stars that fit all her personal criteria for moments of perfection…

Walking Distance is a coping mechanism: a meandering meditation on Right Here, Right Now, utilising a stunning sequence of painted views of what she sees on her various perambulations – a beguiling travelogue of London literally at ground level and a healthy pace – wedded to small tracts of text graciously sharing her innermost, scattershot thoughts and deliberations on notions that trouble women (and perhaps the odd man or two) these days.

All the bugbears trot along with her (and, by extension, us): getting by, success and failure, body issues, direction and achievement, growing up and growing old, family pressures, exactly what comprises norms of behaviour, unfair expectations, balances of power in gender relationships and what the future holds in store…

Naturally – and shamefully for us men – a large proportion of that menu includes deep and ever-growing concerns over personal safety and the right to privacy and agency in public. There’s isn’t a woman anywhere who hasn’t had a walk marred at some moment after apprehensively anticipating what a complete stranger in the vicinity might abruptly say or do.

Happily, the grim is balanced by the delightful: ponderings on art and work, a sense of home space and just the sheer joy of observing the fresh and new as well as the comfortingly familiar. There’s even room for intimate views of personal history and opinion, yet overall the progression is always hopeful, tending towards examination rather than hasty judgements or solutions and always in the direction the walker chooses…

This beguiling stroll offers a blend of philosophy, anxiety and anticipation, all brainstormed as she – and you, if you can keep up – strides ever onward. Clearly, walks do anything but clear your head, but can result in beautiful visual ruminations like this one: no glib sound-bite responses, no roles modelled and no solutions, but you can consider this a privileged personal chat while she walks and you don’t.
© Lizzy Stewart, 2019. All rights reserved.