Category: Humour

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Trog-Shots: A Cartoonerama


By Trog AKA Wally Fawkes (Patrick Hardy Books)
ISBN: 978-0-7444-0049-6 (Landscape PB)

Our last lost giant was someone who drew a beloved all-ages politically-barbed satirical children’s strip for decades and had a second cartoon career as a rapier-witted rottweiler going after society’s true devils.

I’m holding off discussing Flook until I have a decent collection to recommend without pauperising anyone, but until then here’s a collection of Trogs’s other other line of work to celebrate his genius and mourn his loss…  

The one thing I really don’t miss about the 1970s and 1980s is just how many truly ruthless bastards and utter swine were out, proud and loudly ruling us, America and all the other morally bankrupt countries. No matter how bad our current crop of greedy, shallow, inept, self-serving plutocrats might be, they are pitiful pikers when compared to the vicious, callous and ethically challenged rulers of our forefathers. Those guys were actually good at what they did and appreciated a good cover-up too…

That still didn’t keep them out of the sights of a legion of cartoonists like Ralph Steadman, Gerald Scarfe, Steve Bell and Wally Fawkes – who perpetrated his personal acts of socio-political vigilantism under the alias “Trog”. The nom de plume stems from “troglodyte”, but its derivation is hotly disputed to this day…

Born Walter Ernest Pearsall (June 24th 1924 – March 1st 2023) in Vancouver, Canada, Fawkes took his stepfather’s surname after  moving to Britain when he was seven. He taught himself to play clarinet and was never happier than when playing Jazz. His first pro gigs came in 1944 with George Webb, before joining Humphrey Lyttelton in the 1950s. Wally clearly enjoyed his three careers (which he termed “minority pursuits”), and was apparently beyond compare in all of them. I’m not qualified to comment on his jazz playing: I only ever saw him twice but certainly had a great time on each occasion…

If anything was less financially rewarding than playing music it was drawing cartoons, so Wally started doing that too. After reaching England in 1931, he had grown up in South London and – aged 14 – won a scholarship to study at Sidcup Art School. The lifelong comics fan studied there until the money ran out and then plunged into the world of work. When war came, pleurisy kept him out of the armed forces and he contributed to the home front effort by painting camouflage on factories and mapping mines for the British Coal Commission.

In 1942, Fawkes won a cartoon competition held by The Daily Mail, and the judge (the paper’s illustrious chief cartoonist Leslie Illingworth) found him a position at advertising agency Clement Davies. Three years later – on Wally’s 21st birthday – Illingworth hired him as a junior cartoonist. In 1949, Wally’s unique blend of luck and perseverance scored a huge hit when he began his whimsical fantasy masterpiece Flook.

Newspaper owner Lord Rothermere had just come back from America where he had seen Crockett Johnson’s strip Barnaby. When he got home, the magnate wanted something similar but British for The Daily Mail and asked young Fawkes if he could handle it…

Co-scripted by a Who’s Who of media stars (including Sir Compton Mackenzie, Humphrey Lyttelton, George Melly, Barry Norman, Barry Took, Keith Waterhouse and others) it ran in the increasingly ultra-conservative Daily Mail until 1984. A true fish out of water feature, Flook told the increasingly Bohemian, left-leaning and liberal tales of a fuzzy, carrot-nosed, shapeshifting alien innocent and his naive little Earth boy pal Rufus.

Eventually the strip escaped its Right Wing captivity and moved into working class organ The Daily Mirror/Sunday Mirror, before being killed by print tyrant Robert Maxwell.

That didn’t stop Fawkes, though. He still had his clarinet, ideals, imagination, innate unshakeable sense of injustice and a third job as one of the country’s greatest caricaturists and satirists…

From its earliest inception cartooning has been used to sell: initially ideas or values but eventually actual products too. In newspapers, magazines and especially comic books the sheer power of narrative with its ability to create emotional affinities is linked to unforgettable images and characters. When those stories affect the daily lives of generations of readers, the force they can apply in a commercial or social arena is almost irresistible.

In Britain, the cartoonist has held a bizarrely precarious position of power for centuries: deftly designed bombastic broadsides or savagely surgical satirical slices instantly inflicting ridicule, exposing and deflating the powerfully elevated and seemingly untouchable with shaped-charges of scandalous wit and crushingly clear, universally understandable visual metaphor.

For this kind of concept transmission, literacy and lack of education are no barrier. As the Catholic Church proved centuries ago with the Stations of the Cross, stained glass windows and idealised saints, a picture is absolutely worth a thousand words. Moreover, even more than work, sport, religion, fighting or sex, politics has is the very grist that feeds a pictorial gadfly’s mill…

Having for decades contributed regularly to The Spectator, New Statesman, Observer, Guardian, Sunday Telegraph, The Week, Today, London Daily News, plus venerable anti-establishment periodicals Punch and Private Eye (all whilst freelancing as a book illustrator), Fawkes simply carried on lambasting politicians of all stripes and persuasions and caustically commenting on a declining global civilisation until 2005, when failing eyesight finally silenced his excoriating commentaries. One year earlier he had added “Political Cartoonist Of The Year” to his horde of tributes and awards…

Trog died on March 1st 2023, from simple, well-earned old age.

There are still no definitive collections of Flook or Trog’s highly influential (just ask devoted fans Nicholas Garland, Malky McCormick, Barry Fantoni, Steve Bell or Raymond Briggs) stabs at iniquity and hypocrisy, but this collection from 1984 is both representative of the man and his mirth and readily available.

Preceded by a telling, deconstructive and revelatory Foreword by bandmate and Flook co-writer Melly, Trog-Shots: A Cartoonerama re-presents 57 late 1970s/early 1980s art sallies and includes many gags from his regular “Mini-Trog” feature: a general social commentary comedy residency in The Observer.

Culled – as should have been so many of his unsavoury targets – from a time when Monetarism and Reagan took over the USA; Soviet leaders were dropping like flies and Apartheid had just started being rejected by the world, here is a rogues gallery of putrid politicians, scurrilous scandals, and social shout-outs. Here you’ll see the worst of political indifference impacting shoppers, the National Health Service, workers and miners. Here also be monstrous economic mismanagement, revolting journalists, feuding Royals, racist policemen acting beyond the law, sporting skulduggery and Cold War crises. There are starring roles for all the old lags from Jim Callaghan, Michael Foot & Neil Kinnock to Ted Heath, Thatcher, Howe, Tebbitt, Whitelaw, Lawson and all their malign ilk, plus lesser lights like Jeremy Thorpe, Arthur Scargill, and Davids Steele & Owen are soundly skewered and taken to task for what they had – and hadn’t – done…

Awash with astounding images, fascinating lost ephemera and mouth-watering art no fan could resist, this compact compendium is a beautiful fragment of cartoon history that will delight and tantalise, and forms a fitting tribute to a self-effacing master craftsman whose departure has left us all so much poorer. Hopefully, we will at least soon see his legacy back in print…
Collection © 1984 by Wally Fawkes. Foreword © 1984 by George Melly. All rights reserved.

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The Fosdyke Saga volume 1


By Bill Tidy (Wolfe Publishing)
ISBN: 72340499-2/978-0-72340-499-6 (Landscape PB)

The world became a far less smart and infinitely grimmer place over the last weeks, due to the loss of three cartooning giants many of you have probably never heard of.

As so little of their superb output is readily accessible to digital-age readers, I’m celebrating their amazing achievements and acknowledging my personal debt to them here with items that can still be easily sourced and the heartfelt advice that if you like to laugh and have a surreal bent, these are comedy craftsmen you need to know.

Today, let’s plunge full-on into a lost world of sheerly startling shoddy grandeur…

William Edward “Bill” Tidy (MBE) was born on the 9th of October 1933 and died on March 11th 2023. For most of those 89 years he charmed people and made them laugh. Happily, many of his books are available digitally, although incomprehensibly not his sublimely daft (and that’s “Daffft” as in daffodil not “Darhhhhhhhhhhft” as in Dalek or Darling) 14 volume “magnificent octopus” The Fosdyke Saga.

But first, a few words about amusing folk…

Nothing is universally funny, but other people’s idiosyncrasies come pretty close. Comedy is cruel and can be mean-spirited at its core: it all depends on who’s saying what and how. Bill Tidy’s Fosdyke Saga is a grand exemplar: combining a smart, painfully self-aware surreal blend of parody, insular localised legend and working-class aspiration with sheer surrealism.

It is therefore utterly inexplicable to the young or the “Johnny Foreigner” of our Empire Days. In this case that also includes people of other utterly alien cultures – like Americans or Millennials – but also probably incorporates anyone British from further south than bucolic Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire, or Buckinghamshire’s austere Aston Clinton and hoity-toity Tring.

Indeed, rumour has it that until recently, travellers using the Grand Union Canal – grizzled, gruff and grubby bargees hauling coal and rubbing liniment down to the sunlit uplands whilst posh snobs pleasure-boating as disaster tourists trekked a little way into the grim north – had to have their passports checked and stamped at the Apsley/Kings Langley buffer quay…

Seriously though, once upon a time British humour was fiercely and proudly local, regional and factional: cherishing warring accents and nurturing civic rivalries, ancient prejudices (still got plenty of them, though, Ta Very Much!!) and generational grudges. Midlands comedians weren’t funny in Glasgow and Manchester mirth-makers stayed the heck out of Liverpool. But then, after the war – the second one – we began homogenising aspects of life.

In the world of laughter, everything now had a manic, off-kilter skew. Random madcappery abounded where once only genteel wit grazed. The Goon Show and its bastard offspring Do Not Adjust Your Set and Monty Python’s Flying Circus challenged the rational senses whilst racism, sexism, jingoism, wife/mother-in-law jokes, illicit sex, smut, double entendres, “my doctor said” and sporting jibes could no longer securely address all our giggling needs.

Over in a corner somewhere, the bigger picture, establishment inertia and adamantine class structures were still being poked at by a dying cadre of satirists. Then, suddenly, it were 1971 and cartoonist Bill Tidy had a splendidly wicked idea…

He was born in Tranmere, Cheshire and proudly embraced his Northern working-class heritage in everything he did. Raised and educated in Liverpool, his first published work was a cartoon in his school magazine.

Bill joined the Royal Engineers in 1952 and made his first professional cartoon sale three years later whilst posted in Japan. Demobbed and back in Blighty, Tidy joined a Liverpool art agency, creating small ads and doing illustrations for various magazines, and sold his cartoons wherever he could.

Regular clients soon included The Daily Mirror and Daily Sketch so he moved down to London. Time passed and he met other freelancers and in 1966 co-founded a workers club – The British Cartoonists Association. A true wit and natural raconteur, he was mesmerising to listen to and even more so if you were lucky enough to chat with him over a pint…

Although a master of done-in-one single image gags – such as the immortal “Is There Any news of the Iceberg?” (look it up – both the cartoon itself and the illustrated autobiography it now fronts), Tidy inevitably told big stories. He cherished strong narratives powering the engines of his work, and his tales were delivered in a loose flowing, hyper-energetic style perfectly carrying the machine-gun rapidity of his ideas and whacky wordplay.

In April 1967 he created The Cloggies – an Everyday Saga in the Life of Clog Dancing Folk – which ran in Private Eye until 1981 and thereafter The Listener until 1986. He had a few comic residencies: weird/evil science spoof Grimbledon Down (1970-1994 in New Scientist), Dr. Whittle (1970-2001 in General Practitioner) and – from 1974 – imbibers strip Kegbusters in the Campaign for Real Ale’s periodical What’s Brewing? Other regular venues included Classic FM Magazine, The Oldie, The Mail on Sunday, The Yorkshire Post and Punch. When that last venerable humour institution (1841-2002) went bust, Tidy unsuccessfully tried to buy it and keep it going…

Tidy also authored 20 books and illustrated 70 more. If you’re interested, my favourites are The Bedside Book of Final Words and Disgraceful Archaeology: or Things You Shouldn’t Know About the History of Mankind…

From cartooning and dedicated charity work with the Lords Taverners, he latterly drifted into radio and TV presentation, appearing on or hosting shows such as I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, Draw Me, Countdown, Watercolour Challenge, Blankety Blank and Countryfile. There will never be another like him.

The best way to remember him is through his work: most notably the multi-volume Fosdyke Saga as gathered in collections from the 1970s and 1980s (but not so much the 2016 compilation).

Perhaps a little context is appropriate. In 1906, author John Galsworthy began in The Man of Property a sequence of novels detailing the lives of an English upper-middle class “new money” family. Spanning half a century (1886-1936) and augmented by In Chancery and To Let, the generational tale was formally repackaged as The Forsyte Saga in 1922. From then onwards, the societal epic has been adapted regularly as movies, immense radio plays and – in 1967 – a groundbreaking BBC television serial. Galsworthy wrote two more trilogies of novels plus spin-off “interludes” – like Indian Summer of a Forsyte and Awakening – cumulatively known as the Forsyte Chronicles. The effort won him 1932’s Nobel Prize for Literature.

Generally, it all showed how even posh folk don’t get to be secure or content and remains a powerful literary presence. The saga was revived in 1994 in a new novel by Suleika Dawson.

The British truly love their television and the BBC especially have produced numerous game changing dramas – everything from the Quatermass stories to I, Claudius. However, their 26-part Forsyte Saga adaptation utterly captivated viewers in a whole new way, so in regard to what’s we’re reviewing here, a little further clarification is required.

The Galsworthy adaptation had originally run from January 7th to July 1st 1967, in BBC 1’s prestigious prime Saturday slot. It was augmented by repeat showings three days later on BBC 2, and the entire series was re-screened on Sundays from September 8th 1968 with the final episode in 1969 seen by 18 million viewers. Overseas sales were staggering (it was the first BBC product sold to the Soviet Union!) and worldwide viewing figures topped in excess of 160 million. All this in the era before home recordings were available. If you missed an episode of anything, all you could was endure other people’s smug gloating…

The TV sensation inspired much imitation, such as ITV’s Upstairs Downstairs, which ran on Sundays from October 10th 1971 to December 21st 1975… just as Bill Tidy’s delirious spoof was hitting its baggy-trousered stride…

I mention this simply because Upstairs Downstairs also highlighted disparities, similarities and interactions of upper-class toffs and working people in a weekly accessible form, but explored the same Edwardian and Georgian eras as Tidy’s wickedly whacky wonders. It ensured the cartoon’s strong historical underpinnings were familiar to the hoi-polloi Daily Mirror readership who might have slept through school, but avidly paid attention to the goggle box…

Just like its inspiration, The Fosdyke Saga is no stranger to media adaptations: spawning a TV series, a play co-written by Alan Plater, two radio series and latterday sequels…

Describing itself as “a classic tale of Struggle, Power, Personalities and Tripe” the story follows Josiah Fosdyke and his family, who in 1900 emigrate from Lancashire mining town Griddlesbury to cosmopolitan Manchester. The move follows another near-death experience “down pit” as the aspiration scab labourer crosses picket lines and nearly ends up another casualty of “King Coal”…

Resolved that this is no way to get ahead, Jos, wife Rebecca, daughter Victoria and sons Tom, Albert and newborn Tim eschew aid from Becky’s wealthy brother and head for Manchester – “where streets are studded wi’ meat pies!”…

A chance meeting with old Ben Ditchley – the Lancashire Tripe King – sets them on the path to prosperity. As Jos repeatedly impresses the self-made millionaire with his cunning and ruthless work ethic, Ditchley’s dissolute son Roger dishonours and debauches Vicky and ultimately is disinherited in Fosdyke’s favour. The end result is by-blow Sylvia Fosdyke, Victoria’s radicalisation and eternal involvement with the paramilitary wing of the Women’s Suffrage Movement and Roger’s lifelong vendetta to crush the family who cost him his inheritance…

The Fosdyke Saga ran from March 1971 to February 1985 and was purportedly personally killed by unctuous, sleazily gentrifying corporate bandit Robert Maxwell after he acquired Mirror Group Newspapers in 1984. This volume is a severely edited compilation of the first few years of the sublime bizarre strip, packed with gags about fierce powerful women (many with full beards and steel toecap boots), privation, music halls, and new inventions. It’s populated by rogues, scoundrels, wastrels and gobsmacked bystanders, and stuffed with shocking foodstuffs like pigs trotters, cowheels, tripe and assorted offal, pigs ears and pickled cabbage, Bavarian Death’s Head Infantry Sausage, Sauerkraut und Schweinwurst and Tinned Tripe for the Troops, all of which act as milestones tracing Fosdyke fortunes in war and peace…

After inheriting old Ben’s business, Jos imaginatively expands and diversifies, but family troubles and Roger’s machinations constantly confound his plans for repast supremacy. Sub-plots reference contemporary turning points like the Titanic’s launch, the Salvation Army movement, suffragettes and the King’s horse, poverty, depression and the day-by day-absurdist drama of the Great War at home, at the Front and everywhere in between…

We see how Tom converts from staunch Conscientious Objector to trench infantryman/POW (with Jos naturally seeking to corner the white feather trade), and Albert’s astounding duel of wills and imagination with Red Baron Von Richthoven and sordid French air ace Marcel Waive, as well as Tom’s thriving prison camp restaurant trade.

The tripeworks is sabotaged and bombed by zeppelins and Jos is accused of being the Salford Ripper, before being blackmailed by Roger for colluding with the enemy, but always the Fosdykes soldier on…

High points for young Ditchley include sending aviator Albert on countless suicide missions, fomenting the Manchester Tripe Wars, seducing a quasi-mystical Tripe Inspector, and hiring the murderous O’Malley Sisters to crush Jos’ trade. When Ditchley’s scheme is quashed by Vicky’s suffragette comrades, the cad enlists “Legendary Lancashire Lothario” T. Edgar Shufflebottom to seduce them in job lots, before being foiled by a simple twist of fate…

When straightforward murder fails too, Roger blackmails “Russian Nightingale” Nadine Buzom into compromising Jos just as little Tim ships out as a cabin boy and is lost at sea…

With the war ended, attacks on the factory resume, Albert is lost in an air race that lands him and Albion’s adored aviatrix the Hon. Cynthia Spofforth at the mercy of a lusty and frustrated Arab sheik and Tom heads west to America’s ease Prohibition woes with Fosdyke’s latest innovation. Sadly, Ditchley is already there, getting rich in Chicago with whisky-soaked offal in his illicit Tripe-Easy…

As Tom joins Elliot Ness and the Untouchables, the volume ends with Jos’s hunger to expand his markets landing him in big trouble: held captive by a Soviet Commissar who just wanted a million tons of free tripe for her starving people… until the elder Fosdyke’s devastatingly manly demeanour turns her Red head…

A forgotten treat for us oldsters and a potential new delight for smart youngsters, Bill Tidy’s surreal tour de force is a delicious treat just waiting to be rediscovered. Over to you…
© Daily Mirror Newspapers Limited 1972.

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Totally Mad – 60 Years of Humor, Satire, Stupidity and Stupidity


By “The Usual Gang of Idiots” & edited by John Ficarra (Time Home Entertainment)
ISBN: 978-1-61893-030-9 (HB)

The world has become a measurably less smart and infinitely less funny place over the last month or so, due to the loss of three cartooning giants many of you have probably never heard of.

As it’s unforgivably crass to bundle them all up together – especially because so little of their incredible output is readily accessible to modern readers – I’m celebrating their amazing achievements and acknowledging my personal debt to them over the next few days with items that can still be easily sourced and the heartfelt advice that if you like to laugh and have a surreal bent, these are comedy craftsmen you need to know.

We’re kicking off with the unsung god of cunningly contrived chortles…

Eldest of 4 sons, Abraham Jaffee was born in Savannah, Georgia on March 13th 1921. A successfully transplanted New Yorker, he died in the Big Apple on April 10th 2023, after three years of retirement. For 74 years – 65 of them as an invaluable and unmissable regular contributor to Mad Magazine – he had been paid to make people laugh and think…

Jaffee garnered many awards, inspired millions – including Steven Colbert, John Stewart and generations of other satirists like Gary Larson, Matt Groening and Ted Rall – and he holds the Guinness World Record for longest career as a comics artist. The writer/artist officially retired in 2020 aged 99, and between April 1964 and April 2013 appeared in all but one issue of Mad. And that’s only consecutively – he also joined earlier than you think and carried on after he quit.

Those facts barely scrape the surface of an incredible career…

Jaffee’s early life was troubled: a succession of brief stays in Savannah, Far Rockaway, Queens and Zarasai, Lithuania, resulted from his mother arbitrarily and repeatedly returning to the Old Country with her sons. Eventually he and they at last escaped domestic turmoil to settle in New York.

For escape, he read comic strips (primarily those by Harold Foster, Milton Caniff, Noel Sickles, Otto Soglow, Alex Raymond and Rube Goldberg) and devised ingenious little contraptions from rubbish and junk – a habit that served him well during his later Mad days on the long running Crazy Inventions feature…

During the 1930s, he studied at the NYC High School of Music and Art. That institution also tutored his troubled brother/lifelong assistant Harry Jaffee and future co-workers Harvey Kurtzman, Will Elder, John Severin and Al Feldstein…

Abraham was a brilliantly innovative writer and gifted, multi-disciplined artist who officially started work in late 1942: acting as an illustrator for Timely’s Joker Comics. Soon he was an editor too, all whilst creating features such as Super Rabbit and Ziggy Pig and Silly Seal – originally two singles who became a knockout double act.

In truth, Jaffee had begun selling comedy a year earlier: working for a “Studio Shop” and inventing spoof hero Inferior Man, who debuted in Quality Comics’ Military Comics #7 (cover-dated February 1942 and on sale from December 10th 1941). When his own call-up time came, Jaffee’s war service involved working at the Pentagon as a military draughtsman. He found his first wife there and used the Service’s name-change facility to become Allan “Al” Jaffee…

Returned to civvy street in 1946, he hooked up with Stan Lee again at Timely/Atlas, and became editor of the hugely popular teen division headlined by Patsy Walker Comics.

Al was apparently tireless, freelancing all over even whilst in his ascendancy at Mad. He first worked there in 1955, on the second issue after conversion from colour comic book to monochrome magazine). His school pal Kurtzman was editor then and quit three months later in a fractious dispute with owner Bill Gaines. Al went with him and worked on Kurtzman’s retaliatory rival satire magazines Trump and Humbug. Only when the later closed in 1958 did Jaffee head back to Mad to formally become one of “The Usual Gang of Idiots”.

Between 1957-1963, he wrote and drew 2200 episodes of internationally syndicated strip Tall Tales for the New York Herald Tribune, before ghosting Frank Bolle’s soap opera melodrama Debbie Deere from 1966-1969 and Jason between 1971-1974. From 1984 Jaffee produced kids strip The Shpy for The Moshiac Times. He was an illustrator for Boy’s Life for 25 years and a stalwart of World’s Best Science Fiction (1977) and Ghoulish Book of Weird Records (1979).

Between 1963-1964, Al co-ghosted Kurtzman & Elder’s legendary adult satire Little Annie Fanny for Playboy: a tenure that surely inspired his most memorable Mad creation – the “Fold-In”. Hugh Hefner’s men’s magazine was infamous for its nude “fold-outs”, revealing even more pulchritudinous flesh than other skin mags, so what could be more potent and fitting than a graphic creation that exposed an uncomfortable truth by covering up an innocuous image?

Jaffee’s first fold-in appeared in Mad #86 (April 1964) and became one its most popular and immortal features. Other Jaffee landmarks include Vietnam-war era strip Hawks and Doves, Don’t You Hate…, Scenes We’d Like to See, Mad Inventions, Crazy Gadgets and Fake Ads, assorted covers, movie and TV parodies and utterly irresistible Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions. Many of these have been seen in countless Mad Paperback collections released since the mid-Sixties…

I’ll hopefully get around to his Tall Tales strip collection soon, or maybe some of his Mad paperbacks or even 4-volume HB Boxed set The Mad Fold-In Collection: 1964-2010, but don’t wait for me: buy them if you see them…

For now, however, here’s a great big compendium jam-packed with Jaffe goodness showing him amongst his kind and playing in his natural environment… the world’s greatest humourists…

 

Totally Mad – 60 Years of Humor, Satire, Stupidity and Stupidity

EC Comics began in 1944 when comicbook pioneer Max Gaines sold the superhero properties of his All-American Comics company to half-sister National/DC, retaining only Picture Stories from the Bible. His plan was to produce a line of Educational Comics with schools and church groups as the major target market.

Gaines augmented this core title with Picture Stories from American History, Picture Stories from Science and Picture Stories from World History, but the so-worthy notion was already struggling when he died in a boating accident in 1947. With disaster looming, son William was dragged into the family business and with much support and encouragement from unsung hero Sol Cohen – who held the company together until the initially unwilling Bill Gaines abandoned his dreams of a career in chemistry – transformed the ailing enterprise into Entertaining Comics…

After a few tentative false starts and abortive experiments, Gaines and his multi-talented associate Al Feldstein settled into a bold, fresh publishing strategy, utilising the most gifted illustrators in the field to tell a “New Trend” of stories aimed at an older and more discerning readership. From 1950 to 1954 EC was the most innovative, influential publisher in America, dominating the genres of crime, horror, war and science fiction, spawning a host of cash-in imitations and, under the auspices of writer, artist and editor Harvey Kurtzman, the inventor of an entirely new beast: the satirical comic book…

Mad also inspired dozens of knock-offs and even a controversial sister publication, Panic.

Kurtzman was a cartoon genius and probably the most important cartoonist of the last half of the 20th century. His early triumphs in the fledgling field of comicbooks (Mad, Two-Fisted Tales, Frontline Combat) would be enough for most creators to lean back on, but Kurtzman was a force in newspaper strips (See Flash Gordon Complete Daily Strips 1951-1953) and a restless innovator, a commentator and social explorer who kept on looking at folk and their doings: a man with exacting standards who just couldn’t stop creating.

By inventing a whole new format he gave the USA Populist Satire: transforming highly distasteful, disgraceful, highly successful colour comic Mad into a mainstream monochrome magazine, safely distancing the outrageously comedic publication from fall-out caused by the 1950s socio-political witch-hunt that eventually killed all EC’s other titles, and bringing the now more socially acceptable publication to a far wider, broader audience. Kurtzman wasn’t around for long…

He then pursued his unique brand of thoughtfully outré comedy and social satire in Trump, Humbug and Help!, all the while conceiving challenging and powerfully effective humour strips like Little Annie Fannie (in Playboy), The Jungle Book, Nutz, Goodman Beaver, and Betsy and her Buddies. Seemingly tireless, he inspired a new generation through his creations on Sesame Street and by teaching cartooning at the School of Visual Arts in New York. He died far too early in 1993.

… And he was just one of the astonishingly gifted creators who made Mad an international franchise, a staggeringly influential cultural phenomenon and a global brand in the years that followed…

Totally Mad -and we’re long overdue for an updated edition, y’all – reviews the rise and rise of the magazine, with tantalising snippets of gags and features accompanied by big excerpts and illustrations from many brilliant creators to have contributed to its success.

Be Warned: this is not a “best of” collection – it would be impossible to choose, and there are hundreds of reprint compilations and websites for that. This is a joyous celebration of past glories and a compulsive taster for further exploration, albeit with few complete stories…

At 256 pages, this luxuriously huge (312x235mm) compendium is regrettably only on sale in physical form but does include historical articles, amazingly funny art and cleverly barbed observations, all divided by decade and augmented by many full-colour, iconic cover reproductions. The minimal text references favourite features such as Spy vs Spy (both by originator Antonio Prohias and successor Peter Kuper), Dave Berg’s The Lighter Side of…, Mad Mini-Posters, Film and TV parodies including ‘Gunsmoked’, ‘My Fair Ad-Man’, ‘East Side Story’, ‘Flawrence of Arabia’, ‘Star Blecch’, ‘Jaw’d’, ‘Saturday Night Feeble’, ‘LA Lewd’, ‘Dorky Dancing’, and assorted mega-movie franchises ad infinitum as well as sterling examples of Jaffee’s uniquely barbed ‘Mad Fold-Ins, ‘Scenes We’d Like to See’ and ‘Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions’.

Whatever your period, and whichever is your most dearly revered, it’s probably sampled and trammelled here…

Following an eccentric and loving Introduction from Stephen Colbert and Eric Drysdale -ably illustrated by Sam Viviano – veteran contributor Frank Jacobs provides a photo-packed profile of Mad’s unique father-figure by asking – and answering – ‘Who Was Bill Gaines?’ after which ‘Mad in the 1950s’ recalls the Kurtzman era with brightly-hued extracts from giant ape spoof ‘Ping Pong!’, ‘Superduperman!’, ‘Lone Stranger Rides Again!’, ‘Sound Effects!’, ‘Melvin of the Apes!’, ‘Mad Reader!’, ‘Bringing Back Father!’ and ‘Starchie’. These highlight the talents of Will Elder, Wallace Wood, Jack Davis, John Severin, Basil Wolverton & Bernie Krigstein before moving into the magazine phase via spoof advertising and popular pastimes such as ‘Readers Disgust’, ‘What Makes a Glass of Beer Taste so Good?’ and more.

Arch-caricaturist Mort Drucker began a stellar run at this time, as did mildly maniacal Don Martin, whilst comics legends Joe Orlando, Wood, Davis and George Woodbridge reached astonishing peaks of artistic excellence as seen via a parade of stunning covers and end-pages with additional contributions by Kurtzman, Kelly Freas, Norman Mingo and others…

In ‘Who is Alfred E. Neuman?’, Jacobs recounts the twisted, turbulent origins of the iconic gap-toothed-idiot company mascot, after which ‘Mad in the 1960s’ highlights the rise of Television and the counter-culture before ‘Was Mad Ever Sued?’ sees Jacobs testify to some truly daft and troubling moments in the mag’s life…

Many of the very best bits of ‘Mad in the 1970s’ is followed by the conclusion of ‘Who Was Bill Gaines?’ prior to Davis, Dick DeBartolo & Jacobs’ iconic ‘Raiders of the Lost Art skit heralding ‘Mad in the 1980s’ wherein patriotism, movie blockbusters, Hip-hop and computer games seized the public’s collective imagination…

‘What Were the Mad Trips?’ explores a grand tradition of company holidays, after which ‘Mad in the 1990s’ covers Rap music, the rise of celeb culture and the magazine’s frenzied forays into a rapidly changing world. Then comes ‘Mad After Gaines’, detailing internal adjustments necessitated by the death of its hands-on, larger-than life publisher in 1992. ‘Mad in the 2000s’ details the brand’s shift into the digital world, with exemplars from creators old and new spoofing medicines, newspaper strips, elections, religion, dead phrases, celebrity causes, cell-phones, man-boobs, war in Iraq, obesity, satirical competitor ‘The Bunion’, contemporary Racism and media sensations Donald Trump (Who He?): all accompanied by parodies including ‘Bored of the Rings’, ‘Sluts in the City’, ‘Spider-Sham’, and more…

Editor John Ficarra offers his Afterword and this magnificent tome also includes a poster pack of a dozen of the very best covers from Mad’s epochal run.

Most of you can happily stop now, but if you’re into shopping lists, here’s a small portion of other contributing “idiots” making Mad a national institution… like graft, perjury, prison and pimples:

Sergio Aragonés is represented throughout with Mad Marginals and many masterful cartoons and pastiches, whilst guest writers include Vic Cohen, Tom Koch, Larry Siegel, Nick Meglin, Earl Doud, Lou Silverstone, Jacobs, DeBartolo, Arnie Kogen, Chevy Chase, Max Brandel, Stan Hart, Marylyn Ippolito, Billy Doherty, Barry Liebman, Desmond Devlin, Russ Cooper, Joe Raiola, Charlie Kadau, Robert Bramble, Michael Gallagher, and Butch D’Ambrosio.

All-rounders both scripting and scribbling include Berg, Aragonés, Martin, Kuper, John Caldwell, Drew Friedman, Paul Peter Porges, Don “Duck” Edwing, Tom Cheney, Feggo, Christopher Baldwin and the incomparable Mister Jaffee.

There are also star artists making a rare splash amongst these venerable veterans. These include Frank Frazetta, John Cullen Murphy, Angelo Torres, Bill Wray, Mark Frederickson, Bob Clarke, Gary Belkin, Paul Coker Jr., Mutz, Jack Rickard, Irving Schild, Gerry Gersten, Rick Tulka, Harry North, Richard Williams, Tom Bunk, Steve Brodner, Mark Stutzman, Tom Richmond, and Gary Hallgren… Heck! – the list is nigh endless.

Wrist-wreckingly huge, eye-poppingly great and mind-bogglingly fun, this is one to treasure and pore through… and probably fight over…
© 2012 E.C. Publications, Inc. All rights reserved.

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Gomer Goof volume 6: Gomer: Gofer, Loafer


By Franquin, with Michel, translated by Jerome Saincantin (Cinebook)
ISBN: 978-1-84918-535-6 (PB Album/Digital edition)

Like so much in Franco-Belgian comics, it all started with Le Journal de Spirou, which debuted on April 2nd 1938, with its iconic lead strip created by François Robert Velter AKA Rob-Vel. In 1943, publisher Dupuis purchased all rights to the comic and its titular star, and comic-strip prodigy Joseph Gillain (Jijé) took the helm for the redheaded kid’s further exploits as the magazine gradually became a cornerstone of European culture.

In 1946, Jijé’s assistant André Franquin was handed creative control. Slowly moving from gag vignettes to extended adventure serials, Franquin introduced a broad and engaging supporting cast of regulars as well as phenomenally popular wonder beast The Marsupilami. Debuting in 1952 (in Spirou et les héritiers) that critter eventually became a spin-off star of screen, plush toys, console games and albums in his own right.

Franquin crafted increasingly fantastic and absorbing Spirou sagas until a final resignation in 1969. Over two decades he had enlarged the feature’s scope and horizons, until it became purely his own. In almost every episode, fans met startling and memorable new characters like comrade/rival Fantasio, crackpot inventor Count of Champignac and even supervillains. Spirou & Fantasio evolved into globetrotting journalists visiting exotic places, exposing crimes, exploring the incredible and clashing with bizarre and exotic arch-enemies.

Throughout it all, Fantasio remained a full-fledged – albeit fictional – Le Journal de Spirou reporter who had to pop into the office between cases. Sadly, lurking there was an accident-prone, big-headed junior in charge of minor jobs and dogs-bodying. He was Gaston Lagaffe – Franquin’s other immortal creation…

There’s a long tradition of comics personalising fictitiously mysterious creatives and the arcane processes they indulge in, whether it’s the Marvel Bullpen or DC Thomson’s lugubrious Editor and underlings at The Beano and Dandy – it’s a truly international practise.

Occasional asides on text pages featured well-meaning foul-up/office gofer “Gaston” (who debuted in #985, February 28th 1957). He grew to be one of the most popular and perennial components of the comic, whether as a guest in Spirou’s cases or his own short illustrated strips and faux editorial reports on the editorial pages.

In terms of actual schtick and delivery, older readers will recognise favourite beats and timeless elements of well-intentioned self-delusion as seen in Benny Hill and Jacques Tati and recognise recurring situations from Some Mothers Do Have ’Em or Mr Bean. It’s slapstick, paralysing puns, infernal ingenuity and invention, pomposity lampooned and no good deed going noticed, rewarded or unpunished…

As previously stated, Gaston/Gomer draws a regular pay check (let’s not dignify or mis-categorise what he does as “work”) from Spirou’s editorial offices: reporting to journalist Fantasio, or complicating the lives of office manager Léon Prunelle and other, more diligent staffers, all whilst effectively ignoring those minor jobs he’s paid to handle. These include page paste-up, posting (initially fragile) packages and editing readers’ letters… and that’s the official reason why fans’ requests and suggestions are never answered…

Gomer is lazy, peckish, opinionated, ever-ravenous, impetuous, underfed, forgetful and eternally hungry, with his most manic moments all stemming from cutting work corners and stashing or illicitly consuming contraband food in the office…

This leads to constant clashes with police officer Longsnoot and fireman Captain Morwater, yet our office oaf remains eternally easy-going and incorrigible. Only three questions are really important here: why everyone keeps giving him one last chance, what can gentle, lovelorn Miss Jeanne possible see in the self-opinionated idiot and will angry capitalist/ever-outraged financier De Mesmaeker ever get his perennial, pestiferous contracts signed?

From a reformatted edition of earlier strips that were remastered in 1987, Gaston – Le repos du Gaffeur becomes Cinebook’s sixth translated compilation: again focussing on non-stop all-Franquin comics gags in single-page bursts.

Here our well-meaning, overly helpful know-it-all/office hindrance invents more stuff that makes life unnecessarily dangerous (such as super-sticky plastic floor wax, “handchairs”, hyper-elastic paddleball bats, an anti-burglary system or his own Marsupilami onesie) and proves that even when he actually does his job – like tidying the office or bringing papers – the gods and his own ill-fortune ensure the result is chaos and calamity…

There are further catastrophic developments in the evolution of his Instrument of Musical Destruction – the truly terrifying Brontosaurophone/Goofophone. In celebration of the magazine’s 600th issue it is electrified and “improved” by modern amplifiers and features ponderously in the boy’s new band – with shocking consequences. Other G-phone inclusions vex the military and pauperise anyone with windows, watches or glasses…

We experience first-hand the appalling fallout of Gomer’s new hobby, as enraged and often wounded beachgoers are caught in the blast radius of his kite-flying, leading to the return of opposite number Jules-from-Smith’s-across-the-street.

This office junior is a like-minded soul and born accomplice, always eager to slope off for a chat: a confirmed devotee of Gomer’s methods of passing the time whilst at work. He even collaborates on any retaliations Gomer inflicts on officer Longsnoot, but here regrets becoming a guinea pig for his inventive pal’s anti-moth deterrent. Moreover, at least one bug spray delivery system finds greater purpose as a means of aerial transportation…

As summer progresses towards Christmas, there are many holiday moments, but Gomer spends most of them tinkering with his infernal congestion-powered pride-&-joy. Many strips feature his doomed love affair with and manic efforts to modify and mollify the accursed motorised atrocity he calls his car. Sadly, the decrepit, dilapidated Fiat 509 is more in need of a merciful execution than his many desperately well-meant engineering interventions to counter its lethal road pollution and failure to function…

The remainder of the volume’s picture strip pandemonium encapsulates the imbecile’s numerous clashes with a bowling ball that clearly despises him; office culinary near-misses (dubbed by lucky survivor Lebrac as “horror-cuisine”) ranging from arson-in-the-raw to political assassination attempts, as well as dabbling with radio-controlled model planes, attempts at getting rid of minor illnesses, ailments and new office innovations.

The lad does try a few moonlighting jobs, but security guard in a China shop, musical backing vocalist and personal plumber are never going to work out, whilst attempts to save and replace the Christmas turkey with crepes are equally ambitious-but-doomed…

In the recurrent saga of office and interpersonal politics, the Goof finds himself the target of increasingly arcane and ingenious pranks, and naturally retaliates in good spirit. Of course, it all gets out of hand when Lebrac introduces termites to the Goofophone and they reject it in favour of tastier fare …like bricks and mortar.

Benighted industrialist De Mesmaeker learns a hard lesson when he foolishly invests in a goof gadget and Gomer increasingly shows his softer side by adopting new pets to keep his goldfish company. Of course, wild mice, a surly blacked-headed gull and the feral cat from behind the building wouldn’t be most people’s first choices, but as they settle in the office staff quickly learn to steer clear of them…

Far better enjoyed than précised or described, these strips allowed Franquin and occasional co-scenarists Michel, Yvan Delporte & Jidéhem (AKA Jean De Mesmaeker – just one of many in-joke analogues who populate the strip) to flex their whimsical muscles and even subversively sneak in some satirical support for their beliefs in pacifism, environmentalism and animal rights. These gags remain supreme examples of all-ages comedy: wholesome, barbed, daft and incrementally funnier with every re-reading.

Why haven’t you Goofed off yet?
© Dupuis, Dargaud-Lombard s.a. 2009 by Franquin. All rights reserved. English translation © 2020 Cinebook Ltd.

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Yakari volume 20: The Cloud Maker


By Derib & Job, coloured by Dominique and translated by Jerome Saincantin (Cinebook)
ISBN: 978-1-80044-074-6 (Album PB/Digital edition)

In 1964 children’s magazine Le Crapaud à lunettes was founded by Swiss journalist André Jobin, who then wrote for it under the pseudonym Job. Three years later he hired fellow French-Swiss artist Claude de Ribaupierre AKA “Derib”. The illustrator had launched his own career as an assistant at Studio Peyo (home of Les Schtroumpfs): working on The Smurfs strips for venerable weekly Le Journal de Spirou.

Thereafter, together they created the splendid Adventures of the Owl Pythagore before striking pure comics gold a few years later with their next collaboration. Derib – equally au fait with enticing, comically dynamic “Marcinelle” cartoon style yarns and devastatingly compelling meta-realistic action illustrated action epics – went on to become one of the Continent’s most prolific and revered creators. It’s a crime that groundbreaking strips such as Buddy Longway, Celui-qui-est-nà-deux-fois, Jo (first comic to deal with AIDS), Pour toi, Sandra and La Grande Saga Indienne) haven’t been translated into English yet, but we still patiently wait in hope and anticipation…

Over the decades, much of Derib’s stunning works have featured his beloved Western themes: magnificent geographical backdrops and epic landscapes. Yakari is considered by fans and critics to be the strip which led him to his deserved mega-stardom.

Debuting in 1969, it traces the eventful, nomadic life of a young Oglala Lakota boy on the Great Plains – according to this tale, in the vicinity of the Great Lakes Basin. The stories are set sometime after the introduction of horses by the Conquistadores, but before the coming of modern Europeans.

The series – which also generated two separate animated TV series and a movie – is up to 42 albums thus far: a testament to its evergreen vitality and brilliance of its creators, even though originator Job moved on and Frenchman Joris Chamblain took on the writing in 2016.

Overflowing with gentle whimsy and heady compassion, little Yakari enjoys a largely bucolic existence: at one with nature and generally free from privation or strife. For the sake of our delectation, however, the ever-changing seasons are punctuated with the odd crisis, generally resolved without fuss, fame or fanfare by a little lad who is smart and brave – and can, thanks to a boon of his totem guide the Great Eagle, converse with all animals…

In 1995, Le souffleur de nuages was the 21st European album, but – as always with the best books – the content and set-up are both stunningly simple and sublimely accessible, affording new readers total enjoyment with a minimum of familiarity or foreknowledge required…

Here and now it is painfully topical as Yakari’s wandering people are stranded as springtime rains inundate the entire region. When the downpour finally stops, the land is devasted by flooding and the little wonder and his valiant pony decide to check on all their animal pals. Happily, Little Thunder is an excellent swimmer…

They don’t go far before meeting beaver patriarch Thousand-Mouths, whose frantic efforts to rally the clan for a major repair job to the lodge and dams is being hampered by bone idle slacker Wooden Bed. Just like any teenager, he just wants to sleep…

Water is everywhere, and the landscape is a sea broken by tiny islands. The prairie dog colony are marooned on one, waiting until it all recedes so they can clear out their great burrow. They are also nervously contemplating the ominously cloud-filled sky…

Pressing on, the horse and his boy reach a flooded forest and find raccoon Black Mask and his kin fractiously sharing a tree with grumpy owl. Nobody is happy, but all are resigned to waiting out the weather…

That night, back in camp and very much appreciating being warm and dry, Yakari has one of his special, prophetic dreams. It shows him more rains washing away his tipi (tent) until it is washed up onto a big white cloud…

Happily, morning brings better news. The waters have clearly receded, but – still perplexed by his vision – Yakari rides Little Thunder back along yesterday’s route just to check. Everywhere, industrious animals are clearing up and making good, and with so much to see and beasts to check on, the pair are far from home when the sun sets.

Bedding down under a large rock, they are later awakened by an odd cry coming from the river. Closer examination in the morning reveals the disturbance came from a pond linked to the swiftly flowing waters. Oddly, a small cloud is escaping from the turbulence. When Yakari dives in for a closer look, he is abruptly raised up into the air by a giant white fish surfacing under him!

The incredible snow-white monster turns out to be a chatty and gregarious beast calling itself a “white whale”. The curious Beluga had travelled along the swollen river from the “Great Water” Yakari had seen when travelling with spirit creature Nanabozho. Soon they are all trading life stories…

The boy names his new chum Peeleepee because of the cry it constantly utters, and discovers that despite living in the ocean, the newcomer needs air to live, water to support his weight and makes clouds from the top of his head…

In a remarkably short time they are all great friends and have learned lots of each other’s worlds. The boy and the beluga even trade tricks and acrobatic games, but the idyl is rudely shattered when a passing toad points out that, while they’ve been romping, the waters have further evaporated. The great white wonder is now trapped in an isolated pond far from the river it needs to live or get home by…

Snotty but smart, the amphibian then suggests a possible solution, but it takes all of Yakari’s friends working together, sheer luck, applied physics and the boy’s considerable negotiating skills to ensure the safety of the stranded newcomer before this ending turns out happy…

Yakari is one of the most unfailingly absorbing all-ages strips ever conceived and should be in every home, right beside Tintin, Uncle Scrooge, Asterix and The Moomins. It’s never too late to start reading something wonderful, so why not get back to nature as soon as you can?
Original edition © Derib + Job – Editions du Lombard (Dargaud – Lombard s. a.) – 2000. All rights reserved. English translation 2022 © Cinebook Ltd.

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Bizarro Comics! – The Deluxe Edition


By a big bunch of very funny people AKA Jessica Abel, Todd Alcott, Rick Altergott, Peter Bagge, Kyle Baker, Gregory Benton, Charles Berberian, Aaron Bergeron, Nick Bertozzi, Ariel Bordeaux, Rand & David Borden, Ivan Brunetti, Eddie Campbell, Jim Campbell, Dave Cooper, Leela Corman, Mark Crilley, Jef Czekaj, Farel Dalrymple, Brian David-Marshall, Paul Dini, Paul Di Filippo, D’Israeli, Evan Dorkin, Mike Doughty, Eric Drysdale, Ben Dunn, Philippe Dupuy, Sarah Dyer, Phil Elliott, Hunt Emerson, Maggie Estep, Bob Fingerman, Abe Foreu, Ellen Forney, Liz Glass, Paul Grist, Matt Groening, Tom Hart, Dean Haglund, Tomer & Asaf Hanuka, Dean Haspiel, Danny Hellman, Sam Henderson, Gilbert Hernandez, Jaime Hernandez, Matt Hollingsworth, Paul Hornschemeier, Dylan Horrocks, Nathan Kane, John Kerschbaum, Chip Kidd, Derek Kirk Kim, James Kochalka, John Krewson, Michael Kupperbaum, Tim Lane, Roger Langridge, Carol Lay, Jason Little, Lee Loughridge, Matt Madden, Tom McCraw, Pat McEown, Andy Merrill, Scott Morse, Peter Murrietta, Tony Millionaire, Jason Paulos, Harvey Pekar, Will Pfeifer, Paul Pope, Patton Oswalt, Brian Ralph, Dave Roman, Johnny Ryan, Alvin Schwartz, Marie Severin, R. Sikoryak, Don Simpson, Jeff Smith, Jay Stephens, Rick Taylor, Raina Telgermeier, Craig Thompson, Jill Thompson, M. Wartella, Andi Watson, Steven Weissman, Mo Willems, Kurt Wolfgang, Bill Wray, Jason Yungbluth, & various (DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-7795-1012-9 (HB/Digital)

Here am big, dull shopping list of top-ranking cartoonists from beginning of twenty-oneth century. Bunch of names not very entertaining, but what they draw and write am, especially when taking loving pot-shots at beloved DC Comics icons and moments…

I’ll happily go on record and say that practically all of the fun and true creativity in comics has come out of the ‘alternative’ or non-mainstream writers and artists these days. To prove my point I’d list a bunch of things, and very near the top of that list would be this book -actually two older, smaller books sensibly nailed together in 2021.

In its near 90 years of comics publishing, DC Comics has produced many of the most memorable, most engaging and most peculiar comic characters and concepts you could imagine. For all that, they also managed to stir echoes and forge a deep and abiding affection in the hearts and minds of some of the most creative people on the planet.

As I’ve already said, the material in this titanic tome of titters (sorry, apparently I’m channelling my inner Frankie Howerd today) first emerged in a brace of cartoon anthology volumes: Bizarro Comics and Bizarro World in 2001 and 2005, disrespectively.

They delivered fast and furious skits, sketches and gags by profoundly engaged – often deeply disturbed – fans turned pros. There was a heavy dependence on small-press and self-published creators all used to having complete control of their work…

It was all meant to make you laugh and feel longing for simpler whackier times, and the Introduction by Kyle Baker should be all you need to steer you through what follows.

If I were you, I’d stop here and just buy the book, but just in case you’re a stubborn holdout, I’m going to add to my editor and proof-reader’s many woes by listing exactly who is in the thing, what they did and even add a few critical comments, just to earn my keep.

Then I’ll make my poor staff read the book too, just to cheer them up after all my word salad…

Following Matt Groening’s Bizarro Comics cover (which you get here for free) lurks a hilarious framing sequence, as a monstrous unbeatable creature attempts to conquer Mr Mxyzptlk’s 5th dimensional home. Chris Duffy & Stephen DeStefano – aided by legendary cartoonist and colourist Marie Severin – tell a weird and wonderful tale of outlandish failed Superman clone Bizarro that begins in ‘Bizarre Wars Part One’ and diverges into a wonderland of individual battles against cosmic games player A.

As the appointed defender of the entire endangered dimension, Bizarro resorts to a heretofore unsuspected ultimate power: producing comic strips featuring unfamiliar adventures of DC’s most recognizable heroes that come to life …ish.

Cue a veritable Who’s Who of the cool and wonderful of modern comics creating a plethora of wacky, dreamy, funny, wistful and just plain un-put-downable strips that would delight any kid who read comics but then accidentally grew up.

In rapid rollercoaster fashion and Fighting the Goof Fight for reality come ‘Bizarro-X-Ray One’ by Gregory Benton, Bizarro-X-Ray Two’ by John Kerschbaum and Bizarro-X-Ray Three’ by Gilbert Hernandez – all coloured by Tom McCraw. Sam Henderson & Bob Fingerman reconvene the ‘Super-Pets’ whilst Duffy & Craig Thompson expose Green Lantern in ‘The Afterthoughts’. Chip Kidd & Tony Millionaire revisit early days of ‘The Bat-Man’ in stylish monochrome before Henderson, Dean Haspiel, Bill Oakley & Matt Madden recount the silly charm-packed saga of ‘Captain Marvel and the Sham Shazam’…

Baker & Elizabeth Glass test the mettle of ‘Letitia Lerner, Superman’s Babysitter!’ and Aquaman endures double trouble as Evan Dorkin, Brian David-Marshall, Bill Wray & Matt Hollingsworth draw attention to ‘Silence of the Fishes’ before Andy Merrill & Jason Little douse the Sea King in ‘Porcine Panic!’

Fingerman, Pat McEown, Oakley & Hollingsworth inflict ‘The Tinnocchio Syndrome’ on The Metal Men before Andi Watson, Mark Crilley & Lee Loughridge orchestrate ‘Wonder Girl vs Wonder Tot’ and James Kochalka, Dylan Horrocks & Abe Foreau pit Hawkman against ‘The Egg-Napper!’, even as ‘The GL Corps: The Few, The Proud’ glean more story glory courtesy due to Will Pfeifer, Jill Thompson, Clem Robins, Rick Taylor & Digital Chameleon.

Horrocks, Jessica Abel & Madden then see Supergirl and Mary Marvel have a moment in ‘The Clubhouse of Solitude’ whilst Nick Bertozzi & Tom Hart tune in to ‘Kamandi: The Last Band on Earth!’ before Jeff Smith, Paul Pope & Loughridge depict Bizarro demanding ‘Help! Superman!’ as Jef Czekaj & Brian Ralph confront Aquaman with ‘The Man Who Cried Fish!’ in advance of Wonder Woman pondering ‘One-Piece, Two-Piece, Red-Piece, Blue-Piece’ on a shopping trip organised by Fingerman & Dave Cooper.

Ellen Forney, Ariel Bordeaux & Madden probe a young girl’s ‘Bats Out of Heck’ and Eddie Campbell, Hunt Emerson, Rick Taylor & Digital Chameleon went full-on Batmaniacal in ‘Who Erased the Eraser’ before Crilley & Watson negotiate a shocking ‘First Contact’ with The Atom, after which The Batman invites us ‘Inside the Batcave’ with Pope & Jay Stephens as tour guides.

Dorkin, D’Israeli & Digital Chameleon expose ‘Solomon Grundy: Bored on a Monday’ before Alvin Schwartz, Roger Langridge & Loughridge debut ‘The Most Bizarre Bizarro of All’ and Ivan Brunetti, Dorkin & Sarah Dyer reveal ‘That’s Really Super, Superman!’ to The World’s Finest Team whilst Dorkin, Carol Lay, Tom McCraw & Digital Chameleon invite everyone to ‘The J’onn J’onzz Celebrity Roast’ before Bordeaux, Forney & Madden share ‘Wonder Woman’s Day Off’…

The initial volume and that framing Mxyzptlk yarn are coming to a close as Dorkin, Wray, John Costanza & Hollingsworth craft ‘Unknown Challenges of the Challengers of the Unknown’ and Dorkin, Steven Weissman & Dyer go to bat for all the forgotten creature sidekicks in ‘Without You, I’m Nothing’ before Duffy, DeStefano, Phil Felix, Severin & Digital C reunite for the climactic conclusion of ‘Bizarre Wars – Part Two’…

If you haven’t heard of anybody on that overwhelming list then get Googling. Then get this book and get enjoying.

No? that’s okay… There’s More…

The turn of this century was a particularly fraught time – aren’t they always? – and one of the best ways to combat the impending travail was to make people laugh. A follow up to the remarkably successful Bizarro Comics again invited a coterie of alternative comics creators (and guests!) to make sport of various hallowed DC icons. Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and all the lesser gods were dragooned into more tales humorous, dolorous and just plain peculiar, drawn in an eye-wrenching range of styles. Many of those involved continued to display a disturbing knowledge of, if not respect for, the DC continuity of the 1960s whilst others seem to centre on the TV and Movie interpretations, but the fondness for times gone by was readily apparent throughout.

Behind a Bizarro World cover from Jaime Hernandez, Rian Hughes & Coco Shinomiya is unsurprisingly story ‘Bizarro World’ by Duffy, Scott Morse, Rob Leigh & Dave Stewart as a couple of unwary kids fall into a universe stuffed to overflowing with everyday super people…

Answers come from a crusty reporter with extensive files and notes from many stringers…

Kidd, Millionaire & Jim Campbell review ‘Batman with Robin the Boy Wonder’ and Merrill, Langridge & Madden get seasonally silly in ‘Jing Kal-El’, whilst Mo Willems, Forney & Madden reveal ‘The Wonder of it All’ for the youthful feminist before Foreu, Kochalka & Madden have shapeshifter Chameleon Boy ask ‘Where’s Proty?’

Nostalgia and childish wish-fulfilment masterfully merge in pants-wettingly funny ‘Batman Smells’ by American National Treasures Patton Oswalt, Fingerman & Stewart, whilst Duffy & Craig Thompson channel ‘The Spectre’ and Jasons Yungbluth & Paulos confirm with Hal Jordan that ‘It’s Not Easy Being Green’ even as Aaron Bergeron & Kerschbaum revel in ‘The Power of Positive Batman’…

Mike Doughty & Danny Hellman’s Fish-out-of-water ‘Aquaman’ segues into another true Stand Out story: ‘Batman: Upgrade 5.0’ by Dean Haglund & Peter Murrieta, illustrated by Don Simpson, before comics bad boy John Ryan joins Dave Cooper to explore being ‘Super-Dumped’ via the sad story of Clark and Diana…

Elsewhere, Dorkin & M. Wartella retroactively introduce Batman to ‘Monkey, the Monkey Wonder’ whilst comics verité legends Harvey Pekar & Dean Haspiel declare ‘Bizarro Shmizarro’ just as Dylan Horrocks, Farel Dalrymple & Paul Hornschemeier proposition ‘Dear Superman’ on behalf of a youngster with a secret…

‘The Red Bee Returns’ courtesy of Peter Bagge, Gilbert Hernandez & Madden, after which Eric Drysdale, Tim Lane, Oakley & Madden organise ‘The Break’ for the JLA. Dorkin & Watson then find The Legion of Super-Heroes ‘Out with the In Crowd’ just as Todd Alcott, Michael Kupperman & Ken Lopez detail the ‘Ultimate Crisis of the Justice League’…

Tomer & Asaf Hanuka join Lopez & Campbell to define ‘Batman’ whilst Paul Dini & Carol Lay have the very last word on ‘Krypto the Superdog’ and Ariel Bordeaux & Rick Altergott unwisely launch ‘Legion.com’ before mercurial Harvey Dent enjoys a ‘Dinner for Two’ thanks to Dorkin & Iva Brunetti…

Maggie Estep & Horrocks take on ‘Supergirl’ and her horsey history before Leela Corman & Tom Hart steer a ‘Power Trip’ for Batgirl, Wonder Woman and the Girl of Steel, whilst Eddie Campbell, Paul Grist & Phil Elliott schedule ‘A Day in the Life in the Flash’ before hilariously reprising their manic madness via ‘The Batman Operetta’…

Bizarro returns in an activity page from his ‘Daily Htrae’ – by Dorkin & R. Sikoryak – and the GL Corps turn Japanese in ‘Lantern Sentai’ from Rand & David Borden of Studio Kaiju, manifested by multi-talented Benn Dunn. Philippe Dupuy & Charles Berberian then offer a continental touch in ‘Batman of Paris’, Kurt Wolfgang & Brian Ralph have fun with ‘The Demon’ and John Krewson, Dorkin & Dyer expose ‘Kamandi, The Laziest Boy on Earth’.

Despite all the craziness, the best has wisely been left until last and end begins with The Justice League of America regretting ‘Take Your Kids to Work Day’ (by Dave Roman & Raina Telgemeier) whilst ultimate manservant Alfred Pennyworth conducts his master’s business as a “Personal Shopper” thanks to Kyle Baker & Elizabeth Glass, before we finish with Deadman who learns with horror – from Paul Di Filippo & Derek Kirk Kim – that ‘Good Girls Go to Heaven. Bad Girls Go Everywhere’…

What do you get if you give a whole bunch of vets and alternative comics creators carte blanche and a broad brief? You should get this.
© 2001, 2005, 2021 DC Comics. All rights reserved.

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Barbarella volume 1 & Barbarella and the Wrath of the Minute Eater (volume 2)


By Jean-Claude Forest, adapted by Kelly Sue DeConnick (Humanoids)
ISBN: 978-1-59465-533-3 (HB/Digital edition vol. 1) 978-1-59465-104-5 (HB/Digital edition vol. 2): 978-1-64337-883-1 (TPB combined 2 vols)

Europe’s post-war fascination with science fiction and baroque space opera arguably all stems from the innocently raunchy antics of a starry-eyed gamin holding forthright, ultra-modern views on sexual politics. Jean-Claude Forest’s Barbarella stimulated public acceptance of socially-inclusive futuristic themes in an era of Cold War and Atomic Anxiety: one that coincided with a highly publicised “sexual revolution” that was simultaneously beloved of and excoriated by screaming pundits and headline writers.

…And it all occurred just as France was locked into a momentary but absolute obsession with “sex kitten” Brigitte Bardot…

France’s love affair with speculative fiction actually goes back – at least – to the works of Jules Verne and maybe even as far as Cyrano de Bergerac’s posthumously published fantasy stories L’Autre Monde: ou les États et Empires de la Lune (The Other World: or the States and Empires of the Moon) and Les États et Empires du Soleil (The States and Empires of the Sun). They were first released in 1657 and 1662.

Happily for us, European comic iterations have always been groundbreaking, superbly realised and deeply enjoyable…

Proudly Parisian Forest (1930-1998) was a graduate of the Paris School of Design who began selling strips while still a student. His Fleche Noire (Black Arrow) feature opened a career illustrating for newspapers and magazines like France-Soir, Les Nouvelles Littéraires and Fiction throughout the 1950s. This was whilst producing Charlie Chaplin-inspired comic series Charlot and being chief artist for Hachette’s sci fi imprint Le Rayon Fantastique.

For this last client, Forest also produced illustrations and covers for translations of imported authors A. E. Van Vogt, Jack Williamson, and others.

Thus in 1962, with headlines trumpeting liberation and armageddon in the home and for the family, Forrest created Barbarella in V-Magazine. The innocently super-charged sex icon quickly took country and world by storm, generating an explosion of like-minded SF Bandes Dessinées features. Her first collected album was released by Editions Eric Losfeld in 1964, with further tales released until 1982. Those later stories were illustrated by Daniel Billon and the entire canon has never been out of print for long.

Forest never looked back, subsequently creating Baby Cyanide and more serious fare like Hypocrite; the Verne-inspired Mysterious Planet; La Jonque fantôme Vue de l’Orchestre and Enfants, c’est l’Hydragon qui Passe. He also found time to script for other artists: Les Naufrages du Temps (translated as Castaways in Time or Lost in Time) with Paul Gillon in 1964; Ici Meme for Jacques Tardi, and occult detective series Leonid Beaudragon for Didier Savard. These have been inexplicably all-but-ignored by English language publishers since the 1980s. If you read French, however, all are available in print and digitally…

The First Lady of Space sparked a Franco-Belgian fantasy mini-boom – classic series like Méziéres & Christin’s Valérian, Greg & Eddy Paape’s Luc Orient and Philippe Druillet’s Lone Sloane among so many others – thereby triggering the creation of dedicated periodical touchstone Métal hurlant in 1974.

At that time Forest was still finding new worlds for Barbarella to conquer, even though outside the Continent the concept was pretty much hijacked by Roger Vadim’s 1968 movie adaptation.

Here, however, we’re concentrating on Forest’s comics, as re-adapted and translated by Kelly Sue DeConnick (Bitch Planet, Pretty Deadly, Captain Marvel, Wonder Woman, Castle, Avengers). The stories then and now are very much in the manner of every British newspaper strip leading lady since Jane (so, see also Axa, Danielle, Amanda, Scarth, George and Lynn, et al) and follow the plot of classic Flash Gordon strips…

Barbarella volume 1 finds a free, independent young woman, self-willed and over 21, curiously and confidently wandering away from Earth: taking to space to find a new lover, having had more than enough of her old one…

Now she’s having guilt-free relations with any rational and consensual creature, mechanism or being she wants to, but abruptly finds her travels interrupted when her ship breaks up over planet Lothion. The world is divided into a number of autonomous city states where her ever-intimate introduction procedure for new cultures provides moments of baffled bewilderment and deadly danger…

Tumbling into a war between exploitative horticultural aristocrats and their too-slowly expiring, no-longer required serfs, she finds a solution to the crisis and escapes to clash with a cosmic desert jellyfish, before leading space-crash survivors to relative safety before an eerie encounter with deadly beautiful Medusa…

Attrition takes its toll, and ultimately, only Barbarella and hunky stud Dildano make a desert crossing to a bizarre underground forest, where the feudal Olopiades harvest sunlight to battle underground terrors and a hunting-obsessed madmen regards everyone else as potential trophies…

More subterrine voyaging – beside untrustworthy Martian companion Klill – deposits her in Yesteryear, where history-besotted minor royalty take an instant dislike to the free-spirited Earthling libertine – who is almost murdered by spoiled princesses…

Frantic flight brings them to the outskirts of wicked city Sogo, where aging Earth scientist Durand (originally Durand Durand pop trivia fans!) acquaints them with the perils of its lethal defensive labyrinth. Here bizarre outcasts huddle to escape the dread perversion of the vile Black Queen who rules all and courts utter chaos…

Allied to blind angel Pygar and other noncommittal rebels, Barbarella’s innate innocence is key to deposing the debauched tyrannical sovereign and ending her paranoid reign of terror…

 

Second volume Barbarella and the Wrath of the Minute Eater began as 1974’s Les Colères du Mange-Minutes which finds the cosmic nomad voyaging across the void as owner/manager of a travelling show of bizarre beasts and beings: Circus Delirium.

Amongst her exotic menagerie of exhibits is cunning water-breathing humanoid Narval whose revelations regarding a time and space warping device masks his sinister secret agenda.

Despite protestations of faithful clown Bill, Narval’s sly manipulations gradually convince Barbarella to traverse cosmic barriers and take their “astronef” vessel to the interface between the normal cosmos and a region of reality where time itself runs differently. In the heart of that weird destination lies chronally adrift planet Spectra…

It is another world of vastly disparate sectors, where Barbarella makes more friends and lovers, constantly becomes embroiled in political and revolutionary strife, experiences the inexplicable and indescribable and generally wrecks another planet’s cultural identity, replacing it with something new.

Supreme amongst them is Narval himself, who seeks to mutate into a more superior form and subsequently conquer many planets…

On this occasion, sleeping with the enemy is a tactic that finally fails our peace-loving wonder and in the end Barbarella fails her own philosophy, by taking the abhorrent but necessary steps to stop him…

Unquestionably a comics landmark, yet expounding a few questionable swinging Sixties attitudes us folk from the future might take exception to, these wild voyages reshaped our fictions if not our consensual reality, and are a canon of celestial wonders everyone should see at least once.

In 2020, Humanoids released a trade paperback edition combining both albums in one single commemorative volume.

© 2014, 2015, 2022 Humanoids’, Inc., Los Angeles (USA). All rights reserved.

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Sophie’s World – A Graphic Novel About the History of Philosophy: Volume 1: From Socrates to Galileo


By Jostein Gaarder, adapted by Vincent Zabus & Nicoby, colours by Philippe Ory with Bruno Tatti; translated by Edward Gauvin (SelfMadeHero)
ISBN: ?978-1-91422-411-9 (TPB/Digital edition)

It has long been a truism of the creative arts that the most effective, efficient and economical method of instruction and informational training is the comic strip. If you simply consider the medium’s value as a historical recording and narrative system, the process encompasses cave paintings, hieroglyphs, pictograms, oriental prints, Stations of the Cross, the Bayeux Tapestry and so much more: and pretty succinctly covers the history of humanity…

For well over a century and a half, advertising mavens exploited the easy impact of words wedded to evocative pictures, whilst public information materials frequently used sequential narrative to get hard messages over quickly and simply. In a surprisingly short time, the internet and social media restored and enhanced the full universal might of image narratives to transcend language. Who doesn’t “speak” emoji?

Since World War II, carefully crafted strips have been used as training materials for every aspect of adult life from school careers advice to various disciplines of military service – utilising the talents of comics giants as varied as Milton Caniff, Will Eisner (who spent decades producing reams of comic manuals for the US army and other government departments), Kurt Schaffenberger and Neil Adams. The educational value and merit of comics is a given.

The magnificent Larry Gonick in particular uses the strip medium to stuff learning and entertainment in equal amounts into weary brains of jaded students with his webcomic Raw Materials and such seasoned tomes as The Cartoon History of the Universe, The Cartoon History of the United States and The Cartoon Guide to… series (Genetics, Sex, The Environment et al). That’s not even including his crusading satirical strip Commoners for Common Ground, and educational features Science Classics, Kokopelli & Company and pioneering cartoon work with the National Science Foundation…

For decades Japan has employed manga textbooks in schools and universities and has even released government reports and business prospectuses as comic books to get around the public’s apathy towards reading large dreary volumes of public information. So do we and everybody else. I’ve even produced the occasional multi-panel teaching-tract myself. The method has also been frequently used to sublimely and elegantly tackle the greatest and most all-consuming preoccupation and creation of the mind of Man…

Like organised religion, the conceptual discipline dubbed Philosophy has had a tough time relating to modern folk and – just like innumerable vicars in pulpits everywhere – its proponents and followers have sought fresh ways to make eternal questions and subjective verities understandable and palatable to us hoi-polloi and average simpletons.

In 1991 Norwegian teacher Jostein Gaarder found one that became a global sensation. Oslo-born in 1952, he taught Philosophy and the History of Ideas in Bergen until he retired to write a modern prose masterpiece of allegory and symbolism in the guise of a fantastic mystery and quest saga.

In an assortment of languages, Sofies verden became an award-winning bestseller in Europe, before being translated into English in 1994 and – as Sophie’s World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy – metamorphosed into the top-selling book on Earth a year later.

Translated into 59 languages with sales far in excess of forty million copies, it enjoys regular anniversary rereleases, and has been adapted to the large and small screen in many countries, as well as PC and board games, and all the usual merchandising instances of a global sensation…

In 2022, playwright/comics scribe Vincent Zabus (Le Journal de Spirou, Les Ombres, Incroyable!) and prolific, wide-ranging Bande Dessinée illustrator Nicolas Bidet AKA “Nicoby” and “Korkydü” (Ouessantines, Le Manuel de la Jungle, Belle-Île en père, Sang de Sein, Tête de gondola, Poète à Djibouti, C’est la guerre – journal d’une famille confine) joined forces to translate the philosophical phenomenon into words and pictures: deftly embracing the magically realist underpinnings of the tale by fully exploring and exploiting the self-imposed fourth wall (and floors and ceilings) of the “ninth art”…

Big, bold and embracing wonderment head-on, Sophie’s World – A Graphic Novel About the History of Philosophy: Volume 1: From Socrates to Galileo seductively adapts the first half of Gaarder’s masterpiece as 14-year-old Sophie Amundsen and her best friend Colleen anticipate their first protest event. They are fired up about the planet’s imminent demise and ready to fight for its life, but Sophie’s scattershot passions are suddenly derailed and her curiosity enflamed after receiving an anonymous package asking the somehow compulsively significant question ‘Who Are You?’…

The Who and Why of this enigmatic pen pal transaction completely obsess her after the unseen arrival of follow-up question “Where does the world come from”, and as she ponders, she is lured into the first of some frankly weird if not supernatural proceedings…

As Sophie determinedly seeks answers on a range of conceptual levels, further inquiring despatches literally take her on a journey through all of human development, guided at first remotely, but eventually in the shadow and company of a seemingly benign tutor with an agenda all his own.

…And at every moment and juncture – no matter how wild, impossible or magical – the girl learns and grows…

This initial comics session encompasses cunningly targeted and curated visits, affording up-close-&-personal experiences, via the entirety of the evolution of Western history and culture…

However, as bewildering engagements (or at least gripping, interactive syntheses thereof) unfold in ‘Myths and Natural Philosophers’, ‘Atom and Fate’, ‘Athens and Socrates’, ‘Plato’, ‘Aristotle’, ‘Hellenism’, ‘Two Cultures’, ‘St. Augustine, Averroes, St. Thomas’, ‘The Renaissance’, there’s a turning point in ‘The Baroque’ that unlocks and expands Sophie’s understanding whilst addressing a secret tragedy that unconsciously drives her.

Ultimately, the avid teen discovers other forces in play and unknown actors participating in her lessons, as glimpsed in ‘The Dream of Hilde’ and rebellious phase/phrase ‘A Woman is a Man’s Equal’, and before long the seeker is ready to chart her own course…

Completing the educational brief, this opening discourse includes ‘Author Biographies’ of ‘Nicoby’, ‘Vincent Zabus’ and ‘Jostein Gaarder’ and is absolutely To Be Continued…

Rendered in bright, cheerfully inviting colours in the welcoming manner of a children’s book, this vibrant voyage of discovery is mesmerising in its gently mischievous intensity: an outrageously joyous, entertaining rundown of humanity’s evolution and fundamental principles of thought, cunningly disguised as a superb conundrum to rival any detective yarn. Moreover, the seeds have all been laid for a monumental “Big Reveal” in the next volume…
© 2022 Albin Michel. Based on & © Jostein Gaarder’s novel Sophie’s World. English translation © 2022 SelfMadeHero. All rights reserved.

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Tamsin and the Deep


By Neill Cameron & Kate Brown (David Fickling Books)
ISBN: 978-1-910200-77-3 (TPB)

In January 2012 Oxford-based David Fickling Books launched a traditional anthology comics weekly aimed at under-12s which revelled in reviving the good old days of picture-story entertainment intent whilst embracing the full force of modernity in style and content.

Each issue features humour, adventure, quizzes, puzzles and educational material in a joyous parade of cartoon fun and fantasy. Since that launch, The Phoenix has gone from strength to strength, winning praise from the Great and the Good, child literacy experts and the only people who really count – the astoundingly engaged kids and parents who read it…

Like the golden age of The Beano and The Dandy, the magazine is equally at home to boys and girls, mastering the magical trick of mixing hilarious humour strips with potently powerful adventure serials such as this one.

Here a wondrous seaside sorcerous saga with intriguing overtones of The Little Mermaid, by way of the darker works of Alan Garner, sails under the general title of Tamsin and the Days and leaves all the coping and crusading to a brilliantly capable lass who’s a match for any boy…

Written by Neill Cameron (Mega Robo Bros, Freddy, How to Make Awesome Comics, Pirates of Pangea) and beguilingly illustrated by Kate Brown (Manga Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Young Avengers, Fish + Chocolate), our fishy tale opens with a ‘Prologue’ on the Cornish coast as a young girl berates her older brother Morgan.

He promised to teach her how to surf, but is just messing about with his mates, so – fed up and disappointed again – she leaves her dog Pengersek on the sands, swipes a bodyboard and paddles out alone. After all, how hard can it be?

When the big wave hits and she goes down for the final time, she’s sure she feels a grip on her foot and sees a green fishy face…

The story proper starts after ‘Tamsin’ – coughing and gasping – drags herself ashore. Somehow she’s drifted miles down the coast, and with nobody there to help has to make her own way home. Her leg hurts and the bus driver won’t let her on (she’s soaking wet and without cash) but at least she’s still got that old stick to lean on even if she can’t quite recall where she picked it up…

There are more surprises when she finally staggers home. Mum goes absolutely crazy and Morgan is clearly scared. Maybe it’s because their dad was lost at sea nine years ago, but it’s probably the fact that Tamsin vanished a month ago and has been officially declared dead and drowned…

The police have loads of questions she can’t answer, but as far as Tamsin knows she was only gone a few minutes. Eventually life settles back into a normal routine – apart from Morgan acting oddly and her own increasingly nasty dreams.

Things get bad again a few nights later. Awakening from a particularly vivid nightmare, Tamsin discovers she’s clutching that stick and riding a surfboard… hundreds of feet above the town! Moreover, from her shocking vantage point, she can see Morgan. He’s slowly walking into the sea…

Instantly, she zooms into the roaring brine to yank the sleepwalker out, blithely unaware that hostile, piscatorial eyes are angrily watching…

Morgan is shattered. He’s been having nightmares too, and the sleepwalking is not a new phenomenon. It’s probably from guilt but every time he wakes up he’s been heading for the sea…

‘A Nice Day Out’ sees Tamsin taking a little “me time”. Finding a secluded spot to practise flying with the aid of what is clearly a magic stick, she revels in her new gifts, but from high above she notices that Morgan is still unsettled. He’s sworn not to go near the water and has even quit the local surfing competition; and is clearly scared of something. Later, to cheer up her kids, Mum drags them to the beachside amusements where Morgan meets an enigmatic girl. She easily convinces him to re-enter the event…

Tamsin meanwhile has had another strange encounter. After having her ice cream stolen by a pixie thing, she meets a cocky Blackbird (he says he’s a Chough) who snidely and loquaciously tells her the newcomer was an Undine …before warning her to keep Morgan well away from water.

She’s almost too late: Morgan has wiped out in the contest’s early heats and is now being pulled under by a gloating mermaid. Tamsin blasts into the depths on her board, explosively ripping him free of her clawed clutches, and hurling them both high into the sky before landing in a terrified heap on the beach…

With the sorcerous she-wight fuming below the waves and scheming further mischief, in the sunshine Tamsin shares her secret with traumatised big brother before discovering a little ‘Family Mythology’ after that smug bird returns…

Deeper knowledge comes at a steep price, however, and her learning curve involves an awful lot of fighting against many more awful creatures before Tamsin is ready to save Morgan from a dread destiny and horrible fate hundreds of years in the making…

Apprised of a fantastic family heritage and now fully prepared to combat a generational curse that has seen all the males of her line swallowed by ‘The Deep’, Tamsin prepares herself for fantastic battle against a finned demon, but the foe is impatient: launching her own monstrous invasion of the surface-world which quickly reduces the entire town to panic and uproar…

Once the foam settles, triumphant Tamsin tries to ease back into a normal routine but that ill-omened bird returns for an ‘Epilogue’, explaining that she now has a mission for life – protecting Cornwall from all mystic threats – and that the next crisis has already begun…

This yarn is a fabulous blend of scary and fabulous, introducing a splendid new champion for kids of all ages to cheer on, with the certain promise of more to come, beginning with second mission Tamsin and the Dark…

Boisterous, bold and bombastically engaging, this is a rollicking supernatural romp of pure, bright and breezy thrills just the way kids love them, leavened with brash humour and straightforward sentiment to entertain the entire family.
Text © Neill Cameron 2016. Illustrations © Kate Brown 2016.

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Corpse Talk: Groundbreaking Women


By Adam & Lisa Murphy (David Fickling Books)
ISBN: 978-1-910989-60-9(Digest PB)

The educational power of comic strips has been long understood and acknowledged: if you can make the material memorably enjoyable, there is nothing that can’t be better taught with pictures. The obverse is also true: comics can make any topic or subject come alive… or at least – as in this delightful almanac of inspiration – outrageously, informatively undead…

The comical conceit at play in Corpse Talk is that your scribbling, cartooning host Adam Murphy (ably abetted off-camera by Lisa Murphy) digs up famous personages from the past: all serially exhumed for a chatty, cheeky This Was Your Life talk-show interview that – in Reithian terms – simultaneously “elucidates, educates and entertains”. It also often grosses one out, which is no bad thing for either a kids’ comic or a learning experience…

Another splendid release culled from the annals of British modern wonder The Phoenix (courtesy of those fine saviours of weekly comics at David Fickling Books) this collection -regrettably still unavailable in digital editions – quizzes a selection of famous, infamous and “why-aren’t-they-household names?” women from history, in what would probably be their own – post-mortem – words…

Be warned, as you absorb these hysterical histories, you may say to yourself again and again “but… that’s not FAIR…” over and over again.

Catching up in order of date of demise, our fact-loving host opens these candid cartoon conferences by digging the dirt with ‘Hatshepsut: Pharaoh 1507-1458 BCE’, tracing her reign and achievements …and why her name and face were literally erased from history for millennia.

As ever, each balmy biography is accompanied by a side feature examining some crucial aspect of their lives, such as here where ‘Temple Complex’ diligently details the controversial pharaoh’s astounding and colossal “Holy of Holies”: the Djeser-Djeseru Mortuary Temple of Hatshepsut.

‘Hypatia of Alexandria: Mathematician & Philosopher 360s-415’ sketches out the incredible accomplishments, appalling treatment and tragic fate of a brilliant teacher and number-cruncher, supplemented here by a smart lesson in the almost-mystical concept of ‘The Golden Ratio’.

Throughout all civilisations, (mostly male) historians have painted powerful women with extremely unsavoury reputations and nasty natures. Just this once, however, the facts seem to confirm that ‘Irene of Athens: Empress of Byzantium 752-803’ was every bit as bad as detractors described her. Her atrocious acts against friends, foes and her own son Constantine are offset in the attendant fact-feature ‘Spin Class’, revealing how Irene employed religious industrial espionage to break China’s millennial monopoly on silk production, and comes complete with a detailed breakdown of how the Byzantine silk trade worked…

Every comic reader or fantasy fan is familiar with the idea of women warriors, but a real-life prototype for them all was the great-granddaughter of Genghis Khan. ‘Khutulun: Wrestling Princess 1260-1300s’ refused to be married off unless a suitor could defeat her in the Mongolian grappling martial art Bökh. So effective a fighter, archer and strategist was she, that the Khan appointed her his Chief Military Advisor and even nominated her his successor on his deathbed – an honour and can of worms she wisely sidestepped to become a power behind the throne.

Her incredible account is backed-up by an in-depth peek into the ferocious wrestling style she dominated in ‘Mongolian Moves’, after which ‘Joan of Arc: Saint 1412-1431’ explains how it all went wrong for her in asks-&-answers feature ‘How Do You Become a Saint?’

On more traditional and familiar ground, ‘Elizabeth I: Queen of England 1533-1603’ recounts her glorious reign and explains the how and why of her power dressing signature appearance in ‘A Killer Look!’ whilst transplanted near-contemporary ‘Pocahontas: Powhattan Princess 1596-1617’ shares the true story of her life before ‘Sad Ending, Continued…’ discloses the ultimate fate of her tribe at the hands of English Settlers.

Another astonishing character you’ve presumably never heard of is ‘Julie D’Aubigny: Swashbuckler 1670-1707’. She was a hell-raising social misfit who scandalised and terrorised the hidebound French Aristocracy. Daughter of a fencing teacher, she fought duels, broke laws, travelled wherever she wanted to, enjoyed many lovers – male and female – and even sang with the Paris Opera (now that’s a movie biopic I want to see!). What else could she offer as a sidebar but a lesson on duelling for beginners in ‘Question of Honour’?

‘Granny Nanny: Resistance Fighter 1686-1755’ started life as an Ashanti Princess, taken to Jamaica as a slave. However, once there she organised the ragtag runaways known as Maroons into an army of liberation. The workings of her rainforest citadel Nanny Town (now Moore Town) are explored in ‘Fortresses of Freedom’ after which a more sedate battle against oppression is undertaken with the interrogation of ‘Jane Austen: Novelist 1775-1817’, complete with cartoon precis of her subversive masterpiece ‘Pride & Prejudice (The Corpse Talk Version)’…

‘Ching Shih: Pirate Queen 1775-1844’ tells of another woman who beat all the odds but has since faded from male memory: a young girl kidnapped by China Seas pirates who rose to become their leader. Ravaging the Imperial coast, the corsair created an unshakable pirate code that benefitted the poor, outsmarted the Chinese Emperor and ultimately negotiated a pardon for herself and all her men to live happily ever after!

That salty sea saga is accompanied by the lowdown and technical specs on ‘Punks in Junks’ and followed by another bad girl with a good reputation.

‘Princess Caraboo: Con-Artist 1791-1864’ was never the Malayan royal refugee British High Society was captivated by, but rather a Devonshire serving maid who made the most of outrageous fortune via her quick wits. Her story is backed up by a delightful opportunity to forge your own faux identity with ‘Caraboo’s Character Creation Course!’…

Far more potent and worthy exemplars, ‘Harriet Tubman: Abolitionist 1822-1913’ ferried more than 300 of her fellow slaves from Southern oppression to freedom in northern American states and what we now call Canada: supplemented here by a detailed breakdown of ‘The Underground Railway’ before emancipation martyr ‘Emily Wilding Davison: Suffragette 1872-1913’ shares her brief, troubled life and struggle to win women the right to vote and participatory roles in society. The history is backed up by an absolutely unmissable graphic synopsis of the long struggle in ‘A Brief History of Women’s Rights’…

Someone who made every use of those hard-won concessions was ‘Nellie Bly: Journalist 1864-1922’, whose sensational journalistic feats and headline-grabbing stunts made her as newsworthy as her many, many scoops. One of the most impressive was beating Jules Verne’s fictional miracle of modernity by voyaging for ‘72 Days Around the World’ – as seen in the gripping sidebar spread – whereas the career of ‘Amy Johnston: Aviator 1903-1941’ was cut tragically short by bad luck and male intractability. Her flying triumphs are celebrated through a fascinating tutorial on her preferred sky-chariot. The ‘De Havilland Gypsy Moth’.

The short, tragic life of ‘Anne Frank: Journalist 1864-1922’ follows, accompanied by a detailed breakdown of the secret hideout and necessary tactics employed to conceal Anne, her family and friends in ‘The Secret Annex’.

Closing on an emotional high note, the rags to riches/riches to rags to riches account of dancer, comedian, freedom fighter and social activist ‘Josephine Baker: Entertainer 1906-1975’ details the double rollercoaster life of a true star and ends this book on a big finish with her teaching the secrets of how to ‘Dance the Charleston’.

Clever, moving, irreverently funny and formidably factual throughout, Corpse Talk: Ground-Breaking Women cleverly yet unflinchingly handles history’s more tendentious moments: personalising the great, the grim and the good in ways certain to be unforgettable. It is also a fabulously fun read no parent or kid could possibly resist.

Don’t take my word for it though, just ask any reader, spiritualist or dearly departed go-getter…
Text and illustrations © Adam & Lisa Murphy 2018. All rights reserved.