Category: Historical

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The Wolf of Baghdad


By Carol Isaacs/The Surreal McCoy (Myriad Editions)
ISBN: 978-1-912408-55-9 (TPB) eISBN: 978-1-912408-71-9

Contemporary history is a priceless resource in creating modern narratives. It has the benefits of immediacy and relevance – even if only on a generational level – whilst combining notional familiarity (could you tell the difference between a stone axe and a rock?) with a sense of distance and exoticism. In comics, we’re currently blessed with a wealth of superb material exploring the recent past and none better than this enchanting trawl through a tragic time most of us never knew of…

A successful musician who has worked with The Indigo Girls, Sinead O’Connor and the London Klezmer Quartet (which she co-founded) Carol Isaacs – as The Surreal McCoy – is also a cartoonist whose graphic gifts are regularly seen in The New Yorker, The Spectator, Private Eye, Sunday Times and The Inking Woman: 250 Years of Women Cartoon and Comic Artists in Britain. Some while ago she found great inspiration in a 2000-year old secret history that’s she been party to for most of her life.

British-born of Iraqi-Jewish parents, Isaacs grew up hearing tales of her ancestors’ lives in Baghdad: part of a thriving multicultural society which had welcomed – or at least peacefully tolerated – Jews in Persia since 597 BCE. How 150,000 Hebraic Baghdadians (a third of the city’s population in 1940) was reduced by 2016 to just 5 is revealed and eulogised in this potently evocative memoir, told in lyrical pictures and the curated words of her own family and their émigré friends, as related to Carol over her developing years in their comfortably suburban London home.

Those quotes and portraits sparked an elegiac dream-state excursion to the wrecked, abandoned sites and places of a socially integrated, vibrantly cohesive metropolis she knows intimately and pines for ferociously, even though she has never set a single foot there…

As well as this enthralling pictorial experience, the art and narrative were incorporated into a melancholy motion comic (slideshow with original musical accompaniment). That moving experience is supplemented by an Afterword comprising illustrate text piece ‘Deep Home’ (first seen in ‘Origin Stories’ from anthology Strumpet) which details those childhood sessions listening to the remembrances of adult guests and family elders, and is followed by ‘The Making of The Wolf of Baghdad’ explaining not only the book and show’s origins, but also clarifies the thematic premise of ‘The Wolf Myth’ that permeates the city’s intermingled cultures.

‘Other Iraqis’ then reveals some interactions with interested parties culled from Isaacs’ blog whilst crafting this book, whilst a comprehensive ‘Timeline of the Jews in Iraq’ outlines the little-known history of Persian Jews and how and why it all changed, before ‘A Carpet’s Story’ details 1950’s Operations Ezra and Nehemiah which saw 120,000 Jews airlifted to Israel. Wrapping up the show is a page of Acknowledgements and Suggested Reading.

Simultaneously timeless and topical, The Wolf of Baghdad is less a history lesson than a lament for a lost homeland and way of life: a wistful deliberation on why bad things happen and on how words pictures and music can turn back the years and make the longed-for momentarily real and true.
© Carol Isaacs (The Surreal McCoy) 2020. All rights reserved.

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Baggywrinkles – A Lubber’s Guide to Life at Sea


By Lucy Bellwood with Joey Weiser, Michele Chidester & various (Toonhound Studios)
ISBN: 978-0-9882202-9-4 (TPB/Digital edition)

Everybody needs an abiding passion in their lives, and born storyteller Lucy Bellwood seems blessed with two, as this superb compilation of her comics about tall ships and the history of sailing delightfully proves.

In her Introduction Bellwood describes how at seventeen she fell under the spell of rigging, sheets and wind after spending some life-changing weeks crewing aboard Lady Washington – a fully functional replica of a 1790s Brig. How that inspired her to produce a succession of strips detailing her time afloat and many of the things she learned (then and since) make up first seafaring snippet ‘The Call of the Running Tide’: a funny, fact-packed evocation of the immortal allure of sea and stars. Following that is an utterly absorbing data page deftly describing and exactly explaining ‘What is a Baggywrinkle?’ I now know; so does my wife and one of our cats, but I’m not telling you because it’s truly cool and I’m not going to spoil the surprise…

‘Sea of Ink’ details with captivating charm and sheer poetic gusto ‘The Baggywrinkles Official Guide to Nautical Tattoos’ covering history, development and specific significance of the most popular symbols worn by mariners across the centuries. It’s followed by a definitive ‘Fathom Fact’ and account of Bellwood’s first days at sea traversing ‘Parts Unknown’ whilst nailing down the very basics of the ancient profession. It’s backed up by the nitty-gritty of seaman’s staple ‘Hard Tack’…

‘The Plank’ outrageously, wittily and saucily debunks accumulated misleading mythology surrounding pirates’ most infamous human resources solution, counterbalanced by an evocative look at the first Lady Washington’s forgotten place in history before ‘Pacific Passages’ reveals how, in 1791, the Boston trader and accompanying sloop Grace deviated slightly from a voyage to Shanghai and discovered Japan by anchoring in Oshima Bay. A tale of remarkable restraint and mutual respect which ended happily for all concerned, whereas  the real trouble started 63 years later when Commodore Matthew Perry showed up and forced isolationist Japan to open her doors to foreign trade…

That salutary tale is bolstered by a ‘Glossary’ of Japanese/English terms, and followed by a superbly succinct history of the greatest scourge ever to afflict nautical travellers. ‘Scurvy Dogs’ relates the effects, causes and raft (not sorry!) of solutions postulated and attempted by every stripe of learned man in the quest to end the debilitating condition’s toll of attrition. It’s followed by ‘Scurvy Afterword’: an engrossing essay by Eriq Nelson relating how we’re not out of the woods yet and why Scurvy still blights the modern world from individual picky eaters to millions suffering in refugee camps.

Wrapping up this magnificently beguiling treat is ‘The Scurvy Rogues’: an outrageously enticing and informative ‘Guest Art Gallery’ with strips and pin-ups from fellow cartoon voyagers Lissa Treiman, Betsy Peterschmidt, Adam T. Murphy, Kevin Cannon, Ben Towle, Steve LeCouilliard, Isabella Rotman, Dylan Meconis & Beccy David.

…And while we’re at it let’s not forget to applaud the colouring contributions of Joey Weiser & Michele Chidester.

Meticulously researched, potently processed into gloriously accessible and unforgettable cartoon capsule communications, the salty sea-stories shared in Baggywrinkles are brimming with verve and passion: a true treat for all lovers of seas, wild experiences, comfy chairs, good company and perfect yarn-spinning.
© 2010-2016 Lucy Bellwood. All Rights Reserved.

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The Misadventures of Jane


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Calamity Jane: The Calamitous Life of Martha Jane Cannary, 1852-1903


By Christian Perrissin & Matthieu Blanchin, translated by Diana Schutz & Brandon Kander (IDW Publishing)
ISBN: 978-1-63140-869-4 (HB/Digital edition)

Other people’s lives are fascinating. Just see any TV schedule to affirm that watching what neighbours or strangers have done, are doing or want to do is a major drive for us nosy hairless apes. It’s even more enticing if we’re allowed a smidgen of comparison and an ounce of judgement, too. However, the problem with famous dead people is that we’re forced to make our assessments at a remove because they’re dead and we only have records or, worse, myths and legends to construct our portrait from. Thankfully, we’re pretty imaginative monkeys too, and have drama to help us fill in the gaps and flesh out the characters.

These gifts proved immensely valuable to author Christian Perrissin and illustrator Matthieu Blanchin in the creation of a 3-volume graphic biography demythologising one of the Wild West’s most enigmatic icons. The award-winning result was Martha Jane Cannary: La vie aventureuse de celle que l’on nommait Calamity Jane.

Perrissin studied Fine and Applied Arts before moving into Bande dessinée, and from 1987 to 1990 apprenticed with Yves Lavandier before going solo. He has since scripted TV shows and film, written epic sagas such as El Niño and Cape Horn and inherited the scripting of venerable comics classic Redbeard.

Co-creator Blanchin started out as a storyboard artist and illustrator at the turn of the century, before moving into comics, producing work for a host of companies and titles. Eventually he moved into historical and autobiographical material such as Blanche, Bonjour… and Le Val des ânes. In 2002 he was hospitalised by a brain tumour and languished in a coma for 10 days. After convalescence and relapse he ultimately (in 2015) turned the experience into the hugely influential and celebrated Quand vous pensiez que j’étais mort: Mon quotidien dans le coma (When You Thought I was Dead: My Daily Life in a Coma).

This monochrome, duo-toned translation offers their epic collaboration in one titanic tome, blending often-sordid facts of outrageous adventures, unflagging spirit and astonishing determination into an entrancing tapestry showing the underbelly of the American dream. With great warmth and humour, they construct a true masterpiece of the very real and strong woman behind all the stories – many concocted by Martha Jane herself – as she overcame and survived impossible odds, doing whatever was necessary to survive and protect her family.

The tale begins with a graphic note from the creators, citing sources and contextualising her life and times in ‘The Mormon Trail…’, before the unforgettable life story begins in an overcrowded cabin in the desolate prairie region of Utah. In her life, Martha Jane Cannary worked hard for little reward, met scoundrels and scalawags, gunslingers and heroes, lived on her wits and determination and was forced far too often to compromise her principles to preserve others as well as herself. She knew many famous men in many infamous places but I’m not naming them. This is her book, not theirs.

Calamity Jane was present throughout many of the most infamous moments of American history in its most iconic locations. She had far more enemies than friends and was most often despised and ostracised rather than honoured, but she always carried on, living her life her way. It was often tainted by tragedy, but she also scored her share of triumphs and experienced joy and love – always on her terms.

This is a compelling and utterly mesmerising chronicle of authentic western principles and achievement to enthuse and enthral anyone with a love of history and appreciation of human strength and weakness.
Calamity Jane: The Calamitous Life of Martha Jane Cannary, 1852-1903 Translation and Art © 2017 IDW Publishing. Story © 2017 Futuropolis. All rights reserved.

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Harlem


By Mikaël, translated by Tom Imber (NBM)
ISBN: 978-1-68112-328-8 (HB) eISBN: 978-1-68112-329-5

Certain eras and locales perennially resonate with both entertainment consumers and story makers. The Wild West, Victorian London, the trenches of the Somme, and so many more quasi-mythological locales instantly evoke images of drama and tension, and prompt tales just begging to be told. In these modern times of environmental doom, global brush wars and economic privation, one of the most evocative is Depression-era America’s “Big City”.

Perhaps because it feels so tantalisingly within living memory, or maybe thanks to its cachet as the purported land of promises and untapped opportunity, America has always fascinated storytellers – especially comics creators – from the “Old World” of Europe. This inclination has birthed many potent and rewarding stories, and none more so than this continentally-published yarn from multi-disciplinary, multi-award-winning French-born, Quebeçois auteur and autodidact Mikaël (Giant; Bootblack, Junior l’Aventurier; Rapa Nui, Promise), who has been creating comics wonders since 2001.

First published in Europe in 2018, Giant told linked stories of little people – many of them newcomers to America – who built the Empire State Building in 1932, lensed through the interplay between immigrants and the underworld that offered so many their only chance to survive and thrive. Mikaël returned to the milieu with Bootblack, which originated as twin albums before being released as a brace of English-language digital tomes courtesy of Europe Comics. It finally found a worthy home as an oversized (229 x 305mm) resoundingly resilient hardback edition from NBM that got the entire story done-in-one. Now designated “The New York Trilogy”, the evocative venture concludes in a powerful fictionalised account of a minor but ferociously real celebrity of that faraway era…

Originally released au Continent as two tomes in January 2022 and August 2023, Harlem unfolds as a complex sequence of overlapping flashbacks, telling (part of) the story of crime boss, shady entrepreneur and unlikely civil rights crusader Stéphanie St. Clair (December 24th 1897 – December 1969). Regarded as a French migrant, she was actually born in Martinique (West Indies) before becoming a domestic servant in Quebec and moving to New York in 1912. From then she went by many names but most notably Queenie…

By 1931 the infamous elegant mobster, popularly adored social climber and “richest black woman in the country” had instituted and was running Harlem’s numbers racket. Other people’s penny bets made her rich, lifting her above and beyond alleys and gutters via a meticulously organised, savagely administered – by poet turned enforcer/lover Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson and slick white lawyer Mr. Mahoney – (generally) harmless gambling enterprise that provided work for hundreds of poor black residents…

As the drama shows, Queenie has a man who supports her every decision and a close circle of women friends who enable her to occasionally drop her austere and steely public façade. Cushioning glamourous notoriety allows her to live away from sordid poverty in a posh enclave of wealthy and influential “negro intelligentsia” – at 409 Edgecomb Avenue: the palatial apartment building on “Sugar Hill”…

Everything starts to collapse when her activities increasingly chafe with cops who take her bribes whilst despising her skin colour, intelligence and “uppity” attitudes, just as ruthless outsiders Lucky Luciano and Dutch Schultz – deprived of their former revenue streams by the repeal of Prohibition – turn envious eyes on the district north of 110th Street – the no-go region for decent folk commonly called Harlem…

The actual trigger is well-meaning white reporter Robert Bishop whose love for the glitz of the Harlem Renaissance and a “miscegenating” dalliance with Queenie’s pal Tillie Douglas brings him to a jazz nightclub on the night “The Dutchman” tries to seize Queenie’s territory by force, only to be humiliatingly faced down by the proud celebrity. Outraged by her usual treatment from Irish cops led by corrupt racist Captain McCann, Madame St Claire starts writing opinion pieces denouncing police corruption and Mafia encroachment, also advocating militant change and offering legal advice for the disenfranchised. These she forces local paper New York Amsterdam News to publish. She soon hires Bishop to proofread and edit them, but when his close access turns into his subsequent articles in support of black advancement in white newspapers, it augurs disaster and the beginning of the end…

As a battle for turf collides with the deepening Great Depression, socialist agitation in the streets, an influx of Mafia drug pushers and murder pushes the district into chaos. With Shultz and McCann closing in and Queenie’s old allies and even friends turning against her, St Claire makes a bold and unpredictable move, retaliating in the only way she can…

Intercut with nightmarish scenes of her childhood, island life and gradual move to America, Queenie’s rise and fall occurs in a cultural melting pot of oppressed peoples just starting to feel the faint stirrings of equal treatment. Everything about this stylish drama is potently mythic and tragically foredoomed in a sincerely Shakespearean manner as it completes the auteur’s epic and ambitious New York Trilogy. Packed with period detail and skilfully tapping into the abundance of powerful, socially-aware novels, plays and movies which immortalised pre-WWII America, this tale is all the more enticing for what it doesn’t reveal… the truly remarkable turns Stéphanie St. Clair’s life took after this story ends. Hopefully there’s someone ready to translate the latterday activist’s exploits after WWII into graphic immortality…

This book includes poems by Langston Hughes – Harlem and I, Too – and dozens of stunning pencil studies of key locations and characters at the back. Moreover, if you’re sharp, you can find the Easter eggs throughout the text where this tale intersects with and overlaps the previous parts of the trilogy…

Harlem is moving, memorable and momentous, a graphic narrative triumph you must not miss.
Harlem volumes 1 & 2 © DARGAUD BENELUX (DARGAUD-LOMBARD S.A.) 2022 – 2033 by Mikaël.

Harlem is scheduled for UK release 16th April 2024 and available for pre-order now.

Most NBM books are also available in digital formats. For more information and other great reads go to NBM Publishing at nbmpub.com.

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Mata Hari


By Emma Beeby, Ariela Kristantina, with Pat Masioni & Sal Cipriano (Berger Books/ Dark Horse)
ISBN: 987-1-50670-561-3(TPB) eISBN: 987-1-50670-590-3

Until relatively recently (some would argue that should read “hopefully soon”), History has never really treated women well or even factually or fairly. When not obscured, sidelined or just written out, they have been cruelly misunderstood and misrepresented. Moreover, as we’re all painfully aware these days, a bold lie or convenient fabrication has far more veracity than simple, muddled, messy truth.

Margaretha Geertruida “Margreet” MacLeod (nee Zelle) was born on August 7th 1876 in Leeuwarden (in the Dutch Netherlands) to milliner and later industrialist Adam Zelle. She was the eldest of four children raised in wealth… until her father lost it all. Margreet’s life became more troubled and remarkable after that, before she died on 15th October 1917 in front of a French firing squad.

In between, she had married, lived in the East Indies, had children she never really knew and artfully remade herself as a rather scandalous dancer and performer. Margreet adopted a stage name – Mata Hari (which means “eye of the dawn” in Malay) – and her gifts, drive and determination led to her becoming a successful courtesan in the highest circles of privileged society, with princes, ambassadors, tycoons and generals all clamouring for her attention. She was also courted by some countries – including France and Great Britain – to act as an operative in the dangerous world of espionage.

After a chequered life during a volatile period when European society seemingly embraced and welcomed strong independent women, she was accused on meagre evidence of spying for the Germans during the Great War, and rapidly convicted. Deemed to have caused the death of 50,000 men, and the moral ruination of countless others, Mata Hari became and remains the purest and most enduring symbol of the deadly, cunning femme fatale…

However, in the last few decades, serious historical investigation has cast a rather different, and far fairer complexion on the mythical spy in film, song, ballet, books, musicals and all arenas of popular culture. Among the most compelling was an imaginative 5-issue miniseries from Dark Horse’s Berger Books imprint: a collaboration of writer Emma Beeby (Judge Dredd, Doctor Who, Judge Anderson), artist Ariela Kristantina (Wolverine: The Logan Legacy, Deep State, Insexts), colourist Pat Masioni and letterer Sal Cipriano.

Blending hard fact with emotive supposition and informed extrapolation, the sorry episode unfolds in the flashbacks and daydreams of a prisoner held at the Saint-Lazare Prison for Prostitutes in Paris in October 1917. Opening chapter ‘Bare Faced’ introduces Margreet as she strives and struggles to complete a book that will tell her story in her own words…

Against a backdrop of political and military manipulation resolved to make an example of her, ‘Bare Breast’ details her disastrous, life changing marriage and its terrible consequences whilst ‘Bare Heart’ relates her fight back to independence and notoriety after which ‘Bare Teeth’ moves on to the war and great love for a Russian soldier that led to her downfall in ‘Bare All’…

Real life doesn’t work the way narrative would like and the people there aren’t actors. Packed with documentary photos, this contemplative fable carefully acknowledges all that frustrating complexity in an account scrupulously devoid of heroes and outright villains whilst exposing centuries of institutionalised injustice in an extremely entertaining manner. It closes with a series of textual Codas (offering even more intimate photos of the woman and her times) with ‘Mata Hari’s Conviction’, relating oddities and strange events regarding the disposal of her body plus an authorial opinion by Beeby in ‘Was Mata Hari a Martyr?’…

In both word and imagery, Mata Hari is a potently beguiling, evocatively uncompromising retelling of a murky and long-misconceived moment in history any student of the past and lover of comics will adore.
Mata Hari text and illustrations © 2019 Emma Beeby and Ariela Kristantina. All rights reserved.

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Horizontal Collaboration


By Navie & Carole Maurel, translated by Margaret Morrison (Korero Press)
ISBN: 978-1-91274-001-7 (HB)

With its world-shaking reordering of society and all the consequent, still-felt repercussions World War II remains very much in people’s minds. This translated European tale is a potent counterpoint to the usual commemorative bombast, devoting much-delayed attention to the ever-dwindling last of “The Few”. Here, as well as the valiant men, we see acknowledgment of the nigh-universally disregarded contributions of women caught up in the conflict, not to mention unsung heroes of all nations who were drawn into the horror.

Horizontal Collaboration is not about heroes. It deals with people: civilians and fugitives, women and invading occupiers: the ones who are seldom celebrated but who also confronted the triumph of global darkness, all in their own small, unnoticed way…

France was taken by the Nazi war machine in 1940: occupied and partitioned on June 22nd, with the Germans holding the industrial north and central regions whilst Marshal Philippe Pétain’s puppet protectorate Régime de Vichy was allowed to govern the south and pacified colonies such as Algeria. When France was liberated in September 1944, a wave of retaliation began against those who “cooperated” with the conquerors in all ways great and small.

A sordid time of scores (real, imagined or fabricated) settled and cruel abuses arbitrarily inflicted on guilty and innocent alike plagued France for years afterwards. The most telling indignities were perpetrated upon women – wives, mothers, sisters or strangers – accused of fraternising with or giving comfort to the enemy. Such liaisons were called “Collaboration Horizontale” and even the most nebulous or unfounded accusation carried a heavy and immediate price…

Just about now, a grandmother listens to her granddaughter unload about her current amour and her mind drifts back to the war and a secret she has never shared with anyone…

In 1942, a large apartment house on Passage de la Bonne-Graine is filled with families, all dealing with the German conquerors in their own way. Despite the change in their fortunes, they have not found any way to overcome the petty grudges and ingrained social difficulties that have always kept them at odds with each other… even before war broke out.

Surly aged crone Madame Flament is rude to everyone. She spends all her time complaining or disappearing into the cellars to feed her cats. What secret is she really hiding?

Old Camille is deemed the man of the house, but he is gentle, ineffectual and blind: blithely letting life go on around him and apparently noticing nothing. His wife is the building’s concierge. Brusque matron Martine Andrae is a snooping busybody loudly championing decency and family values, but her home life is nothing to envy and her sharp tongue scores points off family, friends and foes indiscriminately. She despises the younger women and their families in the building, especially pretty Joséphine Borgeon who makes ends meet through her theatre act. Surely, everybody knows what she really does to survive?

Also viewed with suspicion is young mother Rose. Her husband Raymond has been taken away to work for the Nazis, so his friend and neighbour Leon – a gendarme – has been keeping a “friendly” eye on her, even though his own pregnant wife Judith keeps clumsily falling and hurting herself and certainly needs proper supervision…

Strangely boyish artist Simone keeps to herself as much as she can and – originally – there was also a Jewess called Sarah Ansburg and her little son. They somehow disappeared before the Germans could find them. That must be the reason Abwehr intelligence officer Mark Dinklebauer spends so much time in the building. It couldn’t possibly be that he has fallen in love with one of the occupants, or that this most forbidden of passions is dangerously, illegally reciprocated, can it?

Crafted with deft incisiveness by media writer and historian (Mademoiselle) Navie and rendered in a beguiling style (powerfully reminiscent of Will Eisner in his later years) by seasoned illustrator/author Carole Maurel (Luisa: Now & Then, Waves, L’apocalypse selon Magda), this is a meditative but uncompromising glance at ordinary lives under relentless pressure: an ensemble piece of human drama taking as its heart and centre point an unlikely flowering of true but doomed love…

Moving, beguiling and evocatively rewarding, Horizontal Collaboration is a beautiful tragedy and potent reminder that love takes no prisoners while enslaving all it touches.
© Editions Delcourt – 2017. All rights reserved.

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Marie Curie – The Radium Fairy


By Chantal Montellier & Renaud Huynh translated by Lara Vergnaud (Europe Comics)
No ISBN: digital-only publication

I’ve waited ages (well, since March 2017, but I’m old and joyless and my days are clearly pretty limited now) for this superb book to be picked up by a print publisher, but now I’m just going to plug it again it anyway and assume that as you’re reading this on a computer, you can make the leap to seeing comics that way too.

And yes, I know all about the smell and feel of proper books. I feel that way too, but we’re killing more trees than we need to. Just think of it as portable fun you can’t crumple or rip…

Originally released across Europe in 2011, Marie Curie La Fée du Radium was produced in collaboration with the Curie Museum and the Cité des sciences et del ’industrie (part of Universcience), with educator, illustrator and bande dessinée creator Chantal Montellier (Odile et les crocodiles, Les Damnés de Nantes).

The book summarises and dramatizes via graphic narrative a most astounding life, prior to research scientist, educator and museum curator Renaud Huynh’s (La fantastique histoire du radium) extensive and copious Timeline which traces the triumphs, tribulations and legacy of Marie Sklodowska-Curie (1867-1934): thus far the only woman to win two Nobel Prizes.

The critical comics component kicks off in Stockholm on September 4th as aging Marie Curie works on a speech; preparing to receive that second cherished accolade. Thinking back, she pictures her departed husband Pierre Curie. Their joint isolation of the element they named Polonium after her place of birth was a grand achievement but doesn’t make up for her years of struggle for acceptance or his tragic accidental death so early in their marriage…

And so, briefly, concisely and sans fanfare unfolds a true tale of brilliance applied, adversity overcome and persistence rewarded. Today, Curie is credited with adding two elements to the Periodic Table – Radium was the other one – and venerated for her unceasing researches. She was also the first woman allowed to teach at the prestigious Sorbonne, but for much of her life had to overcome entrenched patriarchal attitudes and oppression whilst being vilified in the media and by wider society for her “scandalous” personal life… and generally just for being an uppity female who didn’t know her place.

Isn’t it great how much everything has changed since then? (I am of course waiting for my own Nobel for the isolation of Sarcastium…)

This small but powerful digital-only tome concludes with that large and detailed Timeline. Huynh’s pictorial essay is packed with photographic illustrations, cartoons and clippings combining to encapsulate and clarify Curie’s life and achievements. It is all deconstructed and précised in chapters entitled ‘1867/1895 Warsaw-Paris’, ‘1896/1905 A Scientific Dream’, ‘1906/1911 Hardships and Success’, ‘1912/1921 The Radium Institute’ and ‘1922/1934: An International Figure’, before concluding with an ‘Epilogue’ revealing how 60 years after her death, Marie Curie’s ashes were transferred to the Pantheon (resting place of the nation’s greatest citizens). She was the first woman to be accorded this honour based solely on her own merits…

Making learning fun, Marie Curie – The Radium Fairy is a potent and powerful inspiration, venerating one of history’s most dedicated scientists: one every youngster of any age should know.
© 2016 – DUPUIS – Chantal Montellier & Renaud Huynh. All rights reserved.

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The Cabbie volume 1


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Lincoln Brigade


By Pablo Durá, Carles Esquembre & Ester Salguero, translated/edited by Andrea Lorenzo Molinari (Caliber Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-63529-822-2 (TPB/Digital edition)

I’m glad my parents are dead.

Their generation thought that they had dealt with fascism so their children wouldn’t have to, but every day it looks like that kind of intolerance is hardwired in some of us and never goes away. Maybe we simply need to be as ruthless and unforgiving as the foe if we want the insanity to finally end.

At least there are still plenty of people willing to fight and keen to share warnings from the past in books like this digital clarion call.

Preceded by an contextualising Introduction by Josephine Nelson – Commander of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and daughter of Abraham Lincoln Brigade leader Steve Nelson – The Lincoln Brigade is a brief but powerful account ruminating on what 3,015 mostly white, largely second-generation European American, passionately Communist volunteers of the 17th (latterly 58th) battalion of the XV International Brigade experienced during the heroic but doomed struggle to defend Republican Spain from Franco and his Nazi allies in the Spanish Civil War (17th July 1936 -1st April 1939). That skilfully managed proxy conflict is now considered by many historians as a test run for World War II: something certain Russian asshats know very well…

The struggle is seen through the eyes of Oliver Law – one of the few black comrades of the “Lincoln Brigade”. Texas born Law (October 23rd 1900 – July 9th 1937) served in the 24th Infantry Regiment, US Army: a professional soldier in a “coloured unit” stationed on the Mexican border. He served efficiently and with honour from 1919-1925 and on mustering out moved gradually north via Indiana and Chicago, finding jobs as a cement worker, taxi driver, restaurateur and dock worker.

Law’s experiences led to him becoming a labour organiser and member of the American Communist Party. As the Great Depression progressed, he was a member of the International Labor Defense movement employed by the Works Project Administration. Moments of early activism are observed as he meets legendary, inspirational African American freedoms fighter Harry Haywood (February 4th 1898 – January 4th 1985) and faces strike-breaking cops beside equally fervent allies of all colours.

In 1936, Benito Mussolini ordered an invasion of Ethiopia in one of the first overt acts of fascist expansionist colonialism and Law realised – as did so many others across the world – that he would have to fight the rise of a tyranny even greater than that he and his kind faced at home. When Spain erupted into chaos with Generalissimo Francisco Franco Bahamonde leading the army (supported by Nazi/Italian National Fascist Parties) in revolt against the democratically elected government, Law and thousands like him volunteered to fight for the embattled Republic.

In this fictionalised account of events by Pablo Durá (Original Sins, Tales of Rogues) illustrated by Carles Esquembre (Lorca – un poeta en Neueva York) and colourist Esther Salguero we see how Law – like so many others – had to sneak across neutral Europe into Spain by pretending to be a tourist or else face arrest by his own government. Like most nations the USA and Britain had signed a non-intervention treaty Italy and Germany were happy to flout…

What comes next is grim, tragic, stupid and shameful as the daily grind of driven idealists betrayed by their own supposed allies and cut down as much by indifference and ineptitude as enemy action lead to Law’s swift rise as a soldier and untimely death. In the course of his duties the Texan advances to Commander of the Machine Gun Company and before his death was for a brief moment the official Commander of the whole Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Of the approximately 3000 Americans he so briefly led, 681 were killed in action or died of wounds or sickness…

Oliver Law commanded the first fully-integrated unit of American soldiers in combat 10 years before white and black US soldiers were in 1948 forcibly made to serve together by Presidential decree of Harry S. Truman…

It’s all here for you to see and you really should, as it’s delivered with coldly emphatic understatement and clinically clear authenticity: blurring fact with myth and history with extrapolation in the same compelling, upsetting manner as Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, or in graphic novels like Paco Roca, Rodrigo Terrasa & Astiberri’s El abismo del olvido (The Abyss of Forgetting), Mónica Montanés’ Different: A Story of the Spanish Civil War Picture Book or Vittorio Giardino’s epic No Pasaran! trilogy.

Like all those, this too is a book anyone unhappy with the way things are should peruse and ponder upon.
© 2020 Pablo Durá and Carles Esquembre. All Rights Reserved.